5/19/2024 ON THE GENERAL DISCUSSION DOCUMENT FOR THE CPUSA’S 2024 NATIONAL CONVENTION. PART FOUR: Lessons for Today. By: Thomas RigginsRead NowGDD 3 Part Three— Lessons for today [part one here, part 2 here, part 3 here] This section consists of four paragraphs: 1. The way to fight the fascist danger and secure Biden’s election as President is to mobilize masses of people to support these goals. There follows a brief history of progressive struggles waged in the past for peace and civil rights in which mass actions were responsible for pressuring the ruling class to make concessions which they did to prevent mass consciousness moving in the direction of system change. 2. A list of the concessions granted by the ruling class as a result of mass mobilization. An incorrect explanation is offered to explain why the right-wing was able to take over the government in the wake of these concessions. ‘’The center and left were divided over Civil Rights and the Vietnam War. Those divisions resulted in over a decade of right-wing rule, first with Richard Nixon and then (after Carter) Ronald Reagan.’’ It was not that the center and the left were divided, it was because the center and the right were united. The historical tendency of the center is to move to the right whenever the left begins to mobilize. Center-left or Left-center unity is a losing strategy thought up by the revisionists who reject revolutionary tactical maneuvering in principle [no more Bastilles]. The Left waters down its demands to accommodate the center and at the crucial moment of the struggle the center defects to the right. All those centrist Democrats in the Solid South who supported the New Deal defected to the ultra-right Republican Party when the Civil Rights Act was passed. 3. ‘’The demand for complete equality called for the completion of unfinished bourgeois-democratic business, not only from the founding of the Republic, but also by the betrayal of Reconstruction and segregation.’’ The founding of the Republic included the recognition of slavery and the right to own slaves was recognized in the constitution until after the Civil War— as far as bourgeois democratic business was concerned there was no problem at the time with ending Reconstruction and imposing segregation. The job of the bourgeois democratic revolution is NOT the demand for complete equality, nonsense from the bourgeois viewpoint, but to enshrine the bourgeoisie as the ruling class and the working class as the subject class— this has been accomplished. The Road to Socialism leads to the overthrow of bourgeois democracy by working class democracy and the greatest roadblock to that is the myth of center-left unity. [Actual praxis is a little more complicated but this is the theoretical essence of Marxism-Leninism.] 4. The CPUSA played an honorable role in the civil rights and peace movements but the major leadership roles came from the forces of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the NAACP, and other civil rights groups, such, CORE, SNCC and the Urban League. There were some overlaps between the civil rights and anti-war and peace movements featured by the rise of the Black Panthers and the most important youth movement SDS. This section ends as follows-- ‘’just as in the ’60s, the country is confronted by a triple threat: this time from Trump and fascism on the right, bipartisan support for war, and a many-sided class war on democracy and labor at home and abroad.’’ But it should be noted that the threat from fascism is not just from Trump and the right, but also from Biden and the ‘mainstream’ Democrats. Recently Biden signed the renewal of the FISA foreign surveillance act which allows the government to, without a warrant, spy on every American that has any electronic device, phone, TV set, radio, etc., and force anyone with such a device to spy on others and report the findings to the government. Senator Ron Wyden [ Dem. Oregon] said the bill was “one of the most dramatic and terrifying expansions of government surveillance authority in history.” This is just the type of fascist control bill the left would have expected from Trump but it is from Biden. This fascist part of the bill was originally added under Bush in 2008 and has been reauthorized by Biden. American fascism is a bipartisan enterprise— spying at home, genocide abroad. This is the real ‘’serious jeopardy.’’ The struggle for democracy This section consists of two paragraphs of mumbo jumbo about democracy and the working class in which class issues and bourgeois liberal issues are jumbled together to comprise something called the Communist ‘plus’, which turns out to be the revisionist interpretation of The Road to Socialism plus confusion twice confounded. Let’s see if we can clear up this mess of mixed up faux Marxism. The first paragraph opens by informing us we have to struggle to obtain victory (duh!) and the struggle ‘’includes the GOP assault on voting rights, abortion, trans, and immigrant rights, as well as support for genocidal wars abroad. The challenge is to link these struggles together, and connect them with the fight for a ceasefire.’’ Well, there are at least two ceasefires we need, Gaza and Ukraine. But we also need to get rid of the Cuba blockade, the Venezuela sanctions, the military buildup against China, etc., etc. All these struggles have their own dynamics and involve different sets of interests. Trying to connect abortion rights with voting rights and trans rights with say a Gaza ceasefire is really comparing apples and oranges. Anyway the Democrats are just as bad as the GOP with genocide and ceasefires. The common link here is the capitalist system— it is the class struggle led by the working class that must be the focus for a CP. All these struggles cross class lines, our job is not to ‘’connect them with the fight for a cease fire(sic)’’ but all of them, including the ceasefires, have to be connected to the class struggle. Class reductionist? Absolutely, that is what Marxists do. The paragraph discusses the party’s program and does point out it is working class power that is the key to getting concessions from the ruling class but the whole capitalism versus socialism issue is ignored. Marxists understand the importance of the unions and working class power but without raising the workers class consciousness to socialist consciousness working class power remains mired in the capitalist system and cannot transcend bourgeois democracy— and it’s the limits of bourgeois democracy that is the problem — it’s already given us Genocide Joe and is getting ready to serve up Trump. It is fantasy to think the people can free themselves from oppression by using the system of the ruling class. Let’s look at paragraph two where the issue of Socialism does make its appearance. ‘’Even if at the end of the day, efforts prove unsuccessful, all is not lost. It’s in these battles that deeper lessons are learned about the nature of capitalism. In fact, that’s where working-class experience intersects with revolutionary ideology; that’s where theory is developed. It’s where the Communist Party provides its “plus.” The party helps draw out and theorize experience by highlighting the capitalist causes of the crisis and the need for socialist solutions. Thus, the process of struggle is what leads workers to become conscious of themselves as a class force.’’ There is nothing generally objectionable with this passage. The problem is it does not reflect the actual praxis of the leadership. That praxis, in the press and the website, rarely puts forth a Marxist-Leninist analysis of current events and leans to a praxis oriented towards reformist support for the Democratic Party, at times even viewing the DP as part of its make believe all people’s front or center-left coalition. The Communist ‘plus’ is actually a ‘minus’ in practice. The emphasis on ‘democracy’ is minus as it constantly stresses the term ‘democracy’ indiscriminately and even links it with ‘’Bill of Rights” socialism giving the false impression that workers will not restrict the rights of the class enemy to organize and try to regain power if proletarian democracy comes to power. Class hegemony and a ‘’Bill of Rights’’ in any sense recognizable to Americans, is a contradictio in terminis. The bourgeois ruling class violates its own Bill of Rights at will as student protesters and union organizers find out on a daily basis. What’s New This is an optimistic GDD paragraph putting a spin on the last few years making it appear the progressive movement is riding high. The fact is the Democrats lost the Congress when the Republicans took over the House and the Democrats have spent billions on concocting a proxy war with Russia by aggressively advancing NATO to its borders and have supported a genocidal war in GAZA by financing the Zionist aggression, back tracked on climate change, immigration reform, student debt, and medicare for all. Unionization has seen some major advances, the peace movement has been revitalized, and finance capitalism has pretty much recovered from the losses due to covid. Neo-fascism has made electoral and social advances and Biden has managed to become more unpopular than Trump. The CP is a small party and while it has basically supported most all the right causes and condemned the bad ones it has been mostly an observer of events vicariously participating in victories and defeats organized by others. This will continue to be the case until a new non-revisionist leadership comes to the fore which rejects Webbism, not just verbally but in practice, and puts forth a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist platform that rejects reformist pussy footing with the Democrats and begins to field candidates (not just talk about it) either in its own name or as independents or in real, rather then imaginary, coalitions in which its participation is public knowledge. This will be a difficult challenge as long as top down bureaucratic centralism rather than Leninist democratic centralism (not its Stalinist variant which proved unsuccessful) remains the modus operandi of a self perpetuating Webbite leadership. A Class Struggle Moment This section has two paragraphs. 1. The first notes an uptick of militancy in the labor movement and makes generalized statements about how the workers are for the progressive things we support and against the things we don’t. The GDD doesn’t seem to realize that the working class is not of one mind on the issues discussed. Some 40% of unionized workers support MAGA and 90% of the working class isn’t even unionized. What the GDD calls ‘’a new class struggle’’ is actually just a return to normalcy after the covid lockdown and the fact that many union contracts are expiring and negotiations are getting underway. It is important to support all progressive union struggles and demands, as well all organizing efforts but these struggles are not qualitatively different from normal union activity under capitalism. 2. This paragraph notes some interesting statistics that can make us hopeful for the future of the labor movement but they only show modest beginnings. The percentage of pro union Americans has reached the level it had in 1965 when union membership was over 30% of the workforce. Popularity is one thing but actual political and economic clout is another. Recently THE ATLANTIC pointed out ‘’Despite all the headlines and good feeling, a mere 10 percent of American workers belong to unions. In the private sector, the share is just 6 percent. After years of intense media attention and dogged organizing efforts, workers at Amazon, Starbucks, and Trader Joe’s still don’t have a contract, or even the start of meaningful negotiations to get one.’’—4/18/2024 While it’s good that 500,000 workers were involved in strikes and walkouts in 2021, we should remember in the 1970s almost every year saw 2,000,000 such labor actions. All this just means we can’t be complacent — we have a long way to go to really radicalize the consciousness of the workers and when that happens you won’t find any Genocide Joe presidents posing as ‘friends’ of labor. ANTI-MONOPOLY CONSCIOUSNESS In discussing this section in a Marxist context, not a revisionist one, we must distinguish anti-MONOPOLY from anti-monopoly CAPITALISM. Many groups are opposed to monopoly but have no interest in replacing capitalism with socialism. The article opens by pointing out that a majority of the public have ‘a dim view’ of big business. This is based on a Gallup poll which also mentions that this doesn’t apply to youth between the ages of 18-29 and that the greatest drop in big business support comes from conservative Republicans (no doubt due to big business becoming so-called ‘woke.’) We are also informed the masses ‘’are opposed to a single business dominating any given market and antitrust laws are popular’’. This has been the case, by the way, since at least the Teddy Roosevelt era. This is supposed to be a ‘’new moment in the class struggle’’ but these sentiments are as old as the hills and fluctuate back and forth all the time. The next fairly long paragraph lets us know the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer and capitalism isn’t working out for millions of people. This is pretty much a description of ‘capitalism through the ages.’ It would be nice if it did, work out for all and sundry but what’s important for the system is the rich are getting richer part. The system is working very well when the capitalists are rolling in clover and the devil takes the hindmost. That’s pretty much the system today and when we have the choice to pick one of two genocidal maniacs to be the president you have been living in an alternate reality to be seeing either a ‘’socialist moment’’ or a Great Leap Forward in the class struggle. Here is the evidence for the alternative reality. 1. Only 40% of Afro-Americans view capitalism favorably. This is cited from an article entitled ‘’Black Americans view capitalism more negatively than positively but express hope in Black businesses.’’ But also 52% had a positive view of socialism. As far as a socialist moment is concerned, 62% didn’t expect any real change in the system during their lifetime. 2. The GDD also cites that only 48% of women are favorable to capitalism. This is from the article ‘’Modest Declines in Positive Views of ‘Socialism’ and ‘Capitalism’ in U.S.’’ This article concludes, ‘’The American public continues to express more positive opinions of “capitalism” than “socialism,” although the shares viewing each of the terms positively have declined modestly since 2019.’’ No moment here. Finally, once again an incorrect Marxist view must be corrected. With respect to the problems of discrimination and lack of justice for the working class and especially minorities, including wage differentials, the GDD points out,’’Institutionalized racism and misogyny are clearly hard at work. They remain capitalism’s Achilles’ heel.’’ The first sentence is totally correct, but not the second. As pointed out earlier, racism and misogyny are features of the superstructure conditioned by historical context and cannot be the Achilles heel of capitalism. That would be its inability to appropriate surplus value from labor power due to the irreparable loss of markets. We can conclude from this section of the GDD there is enough discontent to give the left an opening to increase its influence in the country. Left grouplets backing Biden based on imaginary coalitions will probably not be in a position to benefit from this opening. Crisis of governance This section points out that there is a widespread dissatisfaction with the way the government is functioning. It maintains this is largely due to GOP intransigence but the Pew Research Center report behind this section found ‘’no single focal point for the public’s dissatisfaction.’’ Rather it was across the board ‘’widespread criticism of the three branches of government, both political parties, as well as political leaders and candidates for office.’’ However, this didn’t prevent people from going out to vote and the last three general elections had record turnouts. It seems that faith in the system is still working. The section concludes with a portrait of the Republican Party which is accurate and grim. The majority of Republicans have become ultra-right proponents of conspiracy theories, believe the 2020 election was ‘stolen’ by Biden, their support of the neofascist Trump does not bode well for the future of bourgeois democracy. While it is true that ‘’white supremacy, along with extreme nationalism, are driving this brand of politics’’ it fails to mention the real cause which is fueling these traditional right-wing features of American democracy— the worsening economic conditions created by the capitalist system supported by both major parties. The Stock Market is booming but Main Street is debt ridden, inadequately insured, faced with inflation, eroding living standards and despondent regarding the future. Neither of the two major political parties has viable solutions to these problems. This is affording a neofascist such as Trump a shot at returning to the White House. Supporting Biden is hardly a sign of a ‘’socialist moment,’’ Democratic, anti-racist majorities The very first paragraph is very problematic. It begins by saying ‘’ the threads of equality and democracy run deep in the fabric of the United States’ body politic and culture.’’ It seems to be just the opposite. The society was based on slavery and after the Civil War by cut throat industrial capitalism which even today leaves 90% of working people without union protections, minority rights are restricted and have only recently seen some relief with civil rights legislation enacted in the LBJ era. Women’s rights are a joke with inability to get the ERA passed, wage parity, and the Supreme Court, in addition to negating minority voter registration protections, has abolished the constitutional right of abortion. We are now engaged in a great culture war over sexual rights, voter rights, immigration rights, and the threat of a Neo-fascist being elected president. The evidence given by the GDD of this fabricated deep thread is 1. The Black Lives Matter uprising, 2.protests for LGBTQ and immigrant rights, 3. 2020 election of Biden and 2022 election (in which the Republicans actually took over the House— it was a close defeat so a ‘victory.’ The fact that elemental human rights, elemental equality, are NOT provided by our society and have to be constantly fought for and some need an uprising to get heard (this uprising resulted in increased funding for the police) indicates the authors have no understanding of the nature of the society they live in. The basic deep threads in this society are woven on the loom of monopoly capitalism and they are anti real democracy and equality for the masses and for strengthening the rule of law enacted for the benefits of capitalist domination and imperialist expansion. These real threads periodically call forth protests but when the dust settles and a few reforms are in place the fabric of capitalist domination remains firmly in place. Thus, after around 50 years of preaching left-center unity, bill of rights socialism and lesser evil voting, fascism is poised to take power. The second paragraph of this section gives some justification for a progressive majoritarian reading of current public opinion on the following issues— 1. Majority support for affirmative action. This is based on an article from the Cato Institute which actually maintains ‘’Polls do not produce a clear picture of where Americans stand on the issue.’’ So, it’s unclear where the majority stands according to this source. It’s good to remember that pollsters word polls to get the results they want. 2.The majority supports specifically equal affirmative action for women. The Gallup Poll behind this found 72% of women and 61% of men agreed. 3. A supermajority of non LGBTQ Americans support equal rights for the LGBTQ community according to a study released by GLAAD – ‘’the world’s largest Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ) media advocacy organization.’’ The polls show these progressive trends but on the other hand, politically, they also show Trump leading Biden which indicates cognitive dissonance among the electorate, or the voters think Biden is a fake progressive. It is hard to think someone who backs, in fact enables, genocide and the cold blooded murder of over 14,000 children, is progressive or even fit to be president. The GDD is correct in maintaining these majoritarian progressive views are a good basis to build on to win over mass support. The rest of this paragraph just repeats what leftists have been saying over and over forever— victory depends on unity, we must support all the rightful demands of all oppressed groups, fight for peace, etc.,etc. It is certainly correct. It was correct in Deb's day and it still is. The GDD says this fight must be directed against the MAGA right and fascism. It says nothing in this section about socialism. Despite the fact that the Democratic Party leadership is supporting the GAZA genocide, starving our socialist comrades in Cuba, attacking every progressive anti-imperialist movement around the world, prolonging the proxy war against Russia, building up for a confrontation with China, and is the ruling party of the number one imperialist power in the world and the greatest enemy to the world’s oppressed masses, the GDD wants us to work with this child murdering genocidal party in what it calls ‘’the people’s front.’’ This to defeat the Republicans in 2024 and in the indefinite future. This is not Marxism-Leninism, siding with one group of imperialists to defeat another in a series of short term struggles marked by the bourgeois election cycle. Fighting fire with fire often results in bigger fires. Finally, the GDD asserts, ‘’Participation in it and helping activate the anti-fascist, anti-MAGA majority remains a top priority for the Communist Party in the coming period.’’ There may be other more important priorities. It is the Convention that is supposed to decide the top priorities but it has already been decided by the leadership what they will be. Our conventions have often been just show pieces for the leadership since by the use of slates and delegate selection their supporters always control the vast majority of votes and they remain in power regardless of the sentiments of the membership whose views, if too critical, are either censored or ignored. This is the way conventions were held in the Soviet Union and the former east European Socialist Countries, and one of the reasons they no longer exist. As long as the Webbite faction that controls the party continues this model for self perpetuation I fear our party will fail to gain a significant portion of influence on the left due a genuine Marxist-Leninist political formation. Well, who knows the future. I hope I am wrong and overly pessimistic and the party actually has a successful openly democratic convention and I wish the comrades the best in their deliberations. Sapere Aude! Toward a socialist moment 2.0 This is the last section of the GDD and it is not very clear as to what is meant by ‘socialism.’ What is the ‘’Bill of Rights socialist vision’’ that a working-class-led state will exemplify? The capitalist state already has a Bill of Rights. If we have a peaceful transfer of power it’s because the Bill of Rights of the capitalists helped us along. Are we going to change it or make a new one? Now it’s just a slogan we thought up to gain some attention and to assure people socialists won’t take away their rights. The KKK and the NAZI groups can still have rallies and marches ( or can they)? What does a working-class-led state imply— a transition to socialism and the abolition of the bourgeoisie as a class? That is what socialism means to Marxist-Leninists and if you are going to be honest about it the Bill of Rights won’t apply to the bourgeoisie. Sorry guys, it’s Bill of Rights SOCIALISM and one way or another you won’t be around. We are told how popular socialism is becoming ‘’close to a third of the U.S. people are open to the socialist idea.” What kind of socialism is that? It is ‘’Socialism as it’s understood in the popular imagination.” That’s Bernie Sanders socialism, e.g Denmark! The socialist tradition we historically represented is closer to East Germany. I doubt if one third of Americans are thinking of East Germany plus the Bill of Rights. This is where the 2.0 comes in. East Germany , the former Soviet bloc, Cuba, China and other socialist countries are 1.0 socialists.’’The socialist moment that emerged around the broad left in 2016 and 2020 must be built upon.’’ That is the tradition of the old Socialist Party of Norman Thomas, DSA and the eco-socialists of the Green Party and the movements coming out of the Bernie Sanders campaign. 1.0 is history and 2.0 is coming. The red caterpillar will become a multicolored butterfly (or perhaps a grey moth). The GDD says in effect, we have to build on the Bernie roots by applying Marxism-Leninism (this is a nod to party stalwarts who haven’t got with the program) creatively applied to U.S. conditions. This will become socialism 2.0. What we see is a program based on the ideas of Euro-communism and the evolutionary social democratic philosophy of the Second International as developed by Bernstein and, after 1914, Kautsky. This is the new dawn we are asked to embrace. I’m not saying it’s wrong or incorrect, it’s just not Marxism-Leninism and a party with this type of program may be the only way to press left for reforms in the U.S., but it should seriously consider changing its name as this is a program traditionally associated with the anti-communist left. Author Thomas Riggins is a retired philosophy teacher (NYU, The New School of Social Research, among others) who received a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center (1983). He has been active in the civil rights and peace movements since the 1960s when he was chairman of the Young People's Socialist League at Florida State University and also worked for CORE in voter registration in north Florida (Leon County). He has written for many online publications such as People's World and Political Affairs where he was an associate editor. He also served on the board of the Bertrand Russell Society and was president of the Corliss Lamont chapter in New York City of the American Humanist Association. Tom is the Counseling Director for the Midwestern Marx Institute. He is the author of Reading the Classical Texts of Marxism (2022), Eurocommunism: A Critical Reading of Santiago Carrillo and Eurocommunist Revisionism (2022), The Outcome of Classical German Philosophy: Friedrich Engels on G. W. F. Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach (2023), On Lenin's Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (2023), and Early Christianity and Marxism (2024) all of which can be purchased in the Midwestern Marx Institute book store HERE. Archives May 2024
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There are multiple differences between antiquity’s economic practices and those of the modern world, and these should be borne in mind when considering the changing context for enterprise through the centuries. Whereas modern business largely operates on credit, in archaic and classical times handicraft workshops were located on basically self-sufficient landed estates, including those of the large public institutions. Such industry was self-financed rather than operating on credit, which was extended mainly for long-distance and bulk trade. Furthermore, entrepreneurs in antiquity either headed wealthy families or sought fortunes by managing other people’s money, which typically was provided subject to a stipulated return. Regardless of the source of their capital, they coordinated a complex set of relationships whose institutional structure evolved throughout the second and first millennia BC. The Importance of Land From Babylonian times down through late Republican Rome, commercial income tended to be invested in land. But there was no price speculation on credit until the late first century BC in Rome. Land was the major savings vehicle and sign of status. The largest estate owners shifted subsistence land to growing cash crops, headed by olive oil and wine in the Mediterranean, and dates in the Near East, harvested increasingly by slaves. Lending Was Mainly for Commercial Trade Ventures We do not find banking intermediaries lending out people’s savings to entrepreneurial borrowers. Throughout the Near East, what have been called “banking families” such as the Egibi are best thought of as general entrepreneurs. They did hold deposits and make loans, but they paid the same rate of interest to depositors as they charged for their loans (normally 20 percent annually). There was no margin for arbitrage, and no credit superstructure to magnify the supply of monetary metal on hand.1 Promissory notes circulated only among closely knit groups of tamkaru, so a broad superstructure of credit was only incipient, and did not come to fruition until modern times with the development of fractional-reserve banking from the seventeenth century onward.2 Most lending was for commercial trade ventures—in which the creditor shared in the risk as well as the gain—or took the form of predatory agrarian loans or claims for arrears on taxes or other fees owed to royal or imperial collectors. Down to modern times, small-scale personal debt was viewed as the first step toward forfeiting one’s property, a danger to be entered into only unwillingly. The dominant ethic was to keep assets free of debt, especially land. Moneylending in classical Greece was mainly in the hands of outsiders, foreigners such as Pasion in Athens. In Rome the elite left banking to low-status individuals headed by slaves or freedmen, ex-slaves who “confine[d] their activities to bridging loans and the provision of working capital,” operating only “on the margins of trade and industry.”3 Ancient Entrepreneurs Were Not Independent Specialists Throughout antiquity entrepreneurs pursued a broad range of activities, organizing and managing voyages, fields, workshops, or other productive units. They rarely acted by themselves for just their own account but as part of a system. Traders and “merchants” tended to work via guilds, such as those organized by Assyrian traders early in the second millennium, and in the Syrian and “Phoenician” trade with Aegean and Mediterranean lands from the eighth century BC on. Wealthy “big men” such as Balmunamhe in Old Babylonian times, Assyrian traders in Asia Minor,4 the Egibi and Marushu in Neo-Babylonia, Cato and other Romans spread their capital over numerous sectors—long-distance and local trade, provisioning the palace or temples with food and raw materials, leasing fields and workshops, moneylending and (often as an outgrowth) real estate. As late as the second century BC when we begin to pick up reports of the Roman publicani, they had not yet begun to specialize. Despite the fact that collecting taxes and other public revenue must have required a different set of skills from furnishing supplies to the army and other public agencies, most publicani acted opportunistically on an ad hoc basis. “What the companies provided was capital and top management, based on general business experience,” observes Ernst Badian,5 probably with a small permanent staff of assistants and subordinates. An entrepreneur might run a ceramic workshop, a metal workshop, or the like, as well as dealing in slaves or renting them out. Richard Duncan-Jones6 concludes: “The term negotiator was widely interpreted, including not only merchants, shopkeepers and craftsmen but moneylenders and prostitutes.” Market Development and Patent Protection Were Alien Concepts There was no such thing as patent protection or “intellectual property” rights, and little thought of what today would be called market development. Artistic styles and new techniques were copied freely. Moses Finley7 cites the story, “repeated by a number of Roman writers, that a man—characteristically unnamed—invented unbreakable glass and demonstrated it to Tiberius in anticipation of a great reward. The emperor asked the inventor whether anyone shared his secret and was assured that there was no one else; whereupon his head was promptly removed, lest, said Tiberius, gold be reduced to the value of mud… neither the elder Pliny nor Petronius nor the historian Dio Cassius was troubled by the point that the inventor turned to the emperor for a reward, instead of turning to an investor for capital with which to put his invention into production.” Entrepreneurs Worked in a War-Oriented Environment Even when entrepreneurs played a nominally productive role, they worked in a war-oriented environment. A major source of fortunes was provisioning of the army, mainly with food but also with manufactured goods. Frank8 notes that during 150-80 BC “we hear of only one man… who gained wealth by manufacturing, and that was in public contracts for weapons during the Social War (Cicero, in Pis. 87-89).” On the retail level, Polanyi’s paradigmatic example of free price-making markets was the small-scale food sellers who followed Greek armies. Provisioning armies with food was indeed the main commercial activity, with the most economically aggressive being the public contractors who supplied Roman armies on the wholesale level. Contracts were set at auctions that became notoriously “fixed” by the first century BC. Enterprise Was Considered Déclassé There was a basic conflict between social ambition for high status and the aristocratic antipathy to engaging directly in business ventures. “Although Aristotle asserted that ‘unnatural’ chrematistike (money-making) knew no bounds,” Humphreys concludes, “the general impression given by our sources is that the majority of Athenians were quite ready to give up the effort to make money as soon as they could afford a comfortable rentier existence, and that even the few who continued to expand their operations could not pass on the same spirit to their sons. The result was small-scale, disconnected business ventures, assessed by the security of their returns rather than their potentiality for expansion.” The same was true in Ancient Rome. Reflecting the disdain in which active participation in money-seeking commerce was held by their aristocratic ethic, most of the shippers engaged in Rome’s maritime trade were foreigners or ex-slaves owning one or two small sailing vessels. Enterprise Was Tied to Long-Distance Trade The most typical form of enterprise was long-distance trade. Its organizational pattern changed little from the epoch when Mesopotamia’s temples and palaces provided merchants with commodities or money. Opportunities for making money evolved as a by-product of this mercantile role. In Old-Sumerian documents, Leemans9 notes, “damkara are only found as traders. But when private business began to flourish after the beginning of the Third Dynasty of Ur [2112-2004 BC], the tamkarum was the obvious person to assume the function of giver of credit.” By the time of Hammurabi’s Babylonian laws, in many cases “tamkarum cannot denote a traveling trader, but must be a money-lender.” Leemans concludes10: “The development from merchant into banker [that is, a moneylender or investor backing voyages and similar partnerships] is a natural one, and there is no essential difference between these two professions—surely not in Babylonia where in principle no distinction was made between silver (money in modern terms) and other marketable stuffs. In a society whose commerce is little developed, trade is only carried on by merchants, who buy and sell. But when commerce increases, the business of a merchant assumes larger proportions.” 1. Debt and Economic Renewal in the Ancient Near East by Michael Hudson and Marc Van De Mieroop (eds.), 2002, pp. 345-347. 2. Randall Wray, ed., 2004. Credit and State Theories of Money: The Contributions of A. Mitchell Innes by Randall Wray, 1995. See especially the articles by Ingham and Gardiner. 3. David Jones. 2006. The Bankers of Puteoli: Finance, Trade, and Industry in the Roman World by David Jones, 2006, p. 245. 4. Trade and Finance in Ancient Mesopotamia: Proceedings of the First MOS Symposium J. G. Dercksen, ed., 1999, p. 86. 5. Publicans and Sinners: Private Enterprise in the Service of the Roman Republic by Ernst Badian, 1972, p. 37. 6. The Economy of the Roman Empire: Quantitative Studies by Richard Duncan-Jones, 1974. 7. The Ancient Economy by Moses Finlay, 1973, pp. 147: 871. 8. An Economic Survey of Ancient Rome. Vol. 1, Rome and Italy of the Republic by Tenney Frank, ed., 1933, p. 291. 9. The Old-Babylonian Merchant: His Business and His Social Position by W.F. Leemans, 1950, p. 11. 10. The Old-Babylonian Merchant: His Business and His Social Position by W.F. Leemans, 1950, p. 22. Author Michael Hudson is an American economist, a professor of economics at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, and a researcher at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College. He is a former Wall Street analyst, political consultant, commentator, and journalist. You can read more of Hudson’s economic history on the Observatory. This article was produced by Human Bridges. Archives May 2024 5/10/2024 A Sad State of Affairs: The Decline of the Communist Party USA. By Noah KhrachvikRead NowThe Communist Party USA was once a serious and powerful political force in this country. This is the Party of W.E.B. Dubois we’re talking about, the father of American Marxism himself. The Party of William Z Foster, whose health was waning and still came out of retirement to fight against the revisionism and liquidationism of Earl Browder and his wild theories about imperialism being progressive. The first integrated political organization in the entire country; the Party that fought for the death penalty for lynching during Jim Crow and organized the defense of the Scottsboro Boys; who fought for the 8-hour workday, the end of child labor, and the weekend. The Party that built the CIO from nothing into the most powerful body of organized labor in the United States. The Party that struck such fear into the hearts of the ruling class that they arrested its leaders without a single crime being committed. And so it is with tremendous sadness that we see what it’s turned into now in 2024. At a time when it is needed more than ever, as revolutionary conditions come upon us with a rapidity that could make your head spin, the once mighty Communist Party USA seems to have degenerated into a chaotic and contradictory clique of social chauvinism, revisionism, anarchistic ultra-leftism, and right opportunism. The theoretical rigor of Herbert Aptheker, Henry Winston, and W.E.B. Dubois has lapsed into hollow sloganeering and obligatory mouthing of Marxist language, devoid of anything approaching the dialectical logic of Marxism. And this is an utter tragedy, in our opinion. It seems, however, that such things happen from time to time. J.V. Stalin himself explains a previous example of this same sort of degeneration in his seminal text, Foundations of Leninism (a book that is nowhere to be found within the educational curriculum of the modern “party”, which seems strange for an organization claiming to be guided by Marxist Leninism, to not have the text that introduces people to it), where he says: … The Second International was headed by "faithful" Marxists, by the "orthodox" Kautsky and others. Actually, however, the main work of the Second International followed the line of opportunism. The opportunists adapted themselves to the bourgeois because of their adaptive, petty-bourgeois nature; the "orthodox," in their turn, adapted themselves to the opportunists in order to "preserve unity" with them, in the interests of "peace within the party." Thus the link between the policy of the bourgeois and the policy of the "orthodox" was closed, and, as a result, opportunism reigned supreme. This was the period of the relatively peaceful development of capitalism, the pre-war period, so to speak, when the catastrophic contradictions of imperialism had not yet became so glaringly evident, when workers' economic strikes and trade unions were developing more or less "normally," when election campaigns and parliamentary groups yielded "dizzying" successes, when legal forms of struggle were lauded to the skies, and when it was thought that capitalism would be "killed" by legal means - in short, when the parties of the Second International were living in clover and had no inclination to think seriously about revolution, about the dictatorship of the proletariat, about the revolutionary education of the masses. Instead of an integral revolutionary theory, there were contradictory theoretical postulates and fragments of theory, which were divorced from the actual revolutionary struggle of the masses and had been turned into threadbare dogmas. For the sake of appearances, Marx's theory was mentioned, of course, but only to rob it of its living, revolutionary spirit. Instead of a revolutionary policy, there was flabby philistinism and sordid political bargaining, parliamentary diplomacy and parliamentary scheming. For the sake of appearances, of course, "revolutionary" resolutions and slogans were adopted, but only to be pigeonholed. Instead of the party being trained and taught correct revolutionary tactics on the basis of its own mistakes, there was a studied evasion of vexed questions, which were glossed over and veiled. For the sake of appearances, of course, there was no objection to talking about vexed questions, but only in order to wind up with some sort of "elastic" resolution. We have been silently watching this organization we have held in such high esteem become the thrift store version of Kautsky and the Second International over the last few years. Where they arose out of the period of the relatively peaceful development of capitalism, ours arises during the period of the middle classes. Where they were dizzy with success, we are dizzy with forgetting what success even looks like. Whereas Kautsky and his ilk believed they would need no revolution, our Kautskys have given up on the idea of revolution altogether. The effects are the same. The organization is completely divorced from the struggles of the working class, pathetically scraping and bowing to be included with institutions of the financial capitalists like the Democratic Party, repeating threadbare dogmas but using them in service of the precise roles the ruling class wants us to play. Liberals vs conservatives. For the sake of appearances, of course, they mention Marx and Lenin, mouth words they believe sound revolutionary, but only to rob Marxism of its dialectical and materialist, revolutionary spirit. Instead of the party being trained and taught correct revolutionary tactics on the basis of its own mistakes, its speeches and slogans are the same as those of thirty years before now, the same scraping and bowing before the Democratic Party, and those who would return to Marxist analysis and attempt to rectify such errors are black-balled, smeared, and campaigned against harder than the people responsible for currently funding a genocide in Palestine. In fact, they have even gone so far as to attack with the most heinous and disgusting of lies the most prominent Communist in the country, who is one of the leading voices in the Palestinian solidarity movement, Jackson Hinkle, along with us and the rest of the new Communist movement that is quickly forming in our new era of revolutionary potential. And in doing this, they are materially aligning themselves with the forces of that genocide and Zionism. And this is where we get to the meat and potatoes, my friends. Recently, the Party posted a rather telling article on its official website called “Against Patriotic Socialism”. Yes, you read that correctly. The article, part of the pre-convention discussions (or, really, we should put “convention” in scare quotes, and the National Board knows why - maybe they can explain to the various clubs why that is, before we have to do so), which can be found on the Party’s main website, maliciously, falsely, and childishly attacks the most prominent Communists in the entire country, who have done more for the cause of class struggle in a single year than the Party has managed in 20. Hinkle alone has exposed millions of people not only to a more positive view of Communism and fought Zionism and imperialism at every turn, but even gone so far as to do what these so-called “old heads” thought impossible, and gotten people to reconsider their views on J.V. Stalin, the most lied about Communist in history. The Infrared Collective has created new slogans that have gotten parts of the working class the Party gave up on long ago to begin getting interested in Communism, and its slogans are featured in mainstream media frequently. When was the last time anyone outside of the tiny little niche of professional activists in America spoke of the Communist Party? Unfortunately, one of the reasons for that may be that they seem to have allowed any old liberal who can’t tell a dialectic from a diuretic to pollute their organization and website with hollow sloganeering and buzzwords, advertise for bourgeois NGOs, and directly attack the Midwestern Marx Institute, the only educational institution for Marxism Leninism currently teaching the Marxist worldview in the entire country with the kind of childish and silly lies and rumor-mongering one comes to expect only of the worst type of Trotskyists and anarchists. Not a single word of it had been verified or fact checked. We’re not even sure the Party has cadre assigned to this. (To be fair, the Party got rid of the notion of cadre years and years ago, as it now believes a “mass party” to filter people into voting Democrat is somehow a better move than Lenin’s theories.) We’re not even sure its leadership is aware of the content it put up on its official website, and the libelous accusations it’s put out there, as it seems oblivious to the childish antics of its more ultra-left and petty rank and file most of the time. But we are here to do that, and we are done silently taking abuse. We would like to invite the members of the Communist Party USA, who we know are mostly good and dedicated people, to simply keep an open mind, and maybe think about why and how things always seem to end up in support of the forces funding a genocide in one country, and allied to doctrinaire Nazis in another. We do not mean to criticize all of the rank and file membership, but instead the fact that anti-communists are allowed to run wild, disgracing not only the organization that demands so much more respect than that, but the word “Communist” itself with their public antics. In doing this, we will be going point by point through the ridiculous sloganeering of the article linked in the footnote, explaining why it is not only against the historical position of the Communist Party when it was guided by Marxism Leninism, but self-contradictory, arriving from bourgeois theory and not Marxism, and amounts to nothing more than anti-Communist whining that brings everyone down to a level of such childishness that no one in their right mind would take the people involved in it seriously (which could be what its author intended; but who knows? The Communist Party doesn’t even bother vetting its members anymore. There is no probation period for recruits, people are kicked out on a whim, and their “education” program coming out of the so-called “Claudia Jones School”, which is not an actual school like the Party’s old “Jefferson School”[1] was, but instead simple branding for mostly liberal classes on some okay empirical facts, and specifically does not provide anything close to teaching new people the Marxist Leninist worldview). The article begins by immediately invoking one of the radlib buzzwords that came around last year. Strange how these things are nowhere, then suddenly everywhere overnight, isn’t it? It speaks of a phenomenon of so-called “PatSocs” or “patriotic socialists”. First and foremost, its author, a Mr. Elijah Jones, should look into the history of the Party he has joined, as he will find that patriotism has always been a very big part of Communists in the USA. Or he could look elsewhere in the world, maybe to Mao for advice, who said, “Can a Communist who is also an internationalist at the same time be a patriot? We hold not only that he can, but that he must.” Mao goes on to explain that the formal expression of patriotism is determined by particular conditions, as any Marxist with a basic grasp of the dialectic of form and content would. Or perhaps back home to Paul Robeson, who stood up at the HUAC and said that Communists were the most patriotic Americans he knew, and that it was the HUAC that were the anti-Americans, and the HUAC who were the anti-patriots, that they should be ashamed. Or possibly Lenin’s 1914 essay On the National Pride of the Great Russians, where he speaks of the essential content of patriotism. Or Georgi Dimitrov, who emphasizes the importance of giving socialist content a national form, especially in a period of emerging fascism, where the people’s heroes of the past have to be wrested away from the fascists. Or literally any Communist in history, who understands the importance of rejecting historical and national nihilism and embracing the best of their people’s traditions. Mr. Jones and the CPUSA website seem to be blinded by what Carlos L. Garrido calls a “liberal tinted American exceptionalism,” which holds that America is somehow an exception to the laws of development governing society, especially the form the class struggle must take in the bourgeois epoch. This is very childish ultra-leftism mixed with hollow sloganeering, devoid of Marxist analysis altogether. More similar to the falsifications and rants of “J Sakai” than anything else. Mr. Jones then absurdly claims that patriotism is “Browderism” and mentions that William Z. Foster fought against it. This is the extremely low level of theoretical understanding and historical knowledge that is all too common in the CP these days. “Browderism” was not patriotism at all. It refers instead to Earl Browder’s turn towards liquidationism (similar to that of Sam Webb) and his book that claimed imperialism still maintained some progressive aspects of industrial capitalism. Foster, of course, did argue against Browder, and saved the Party from liquidation. You can read about this in the book he wrote dedicated to it called Marxism Leninism Vs Revisionism, along with Jacques Duclos, Eugene Dennis and John Williamson. The book’s table of contents should tell anyone curious that patriotism is not so suspiciously absent from the text. Its foreword gives a general overview. Unfortunately, this is not common knowledge in the Party anymore, as the “PatSoc” and “Browderism” labels are filtered through the radlib rumor mill and the truth falls out somewhere along the way. To be clear, Mr. Jones and the CPUSA website want to use William Z. Foster to critique American patriotism, calling it Browderism. What does Foster himself say of patriotism, though? In a 1939 issue of The Communist, Foster writes: “On their own part, the progressive forces in the mass organizations have made considerable appeal to American patriotism and traditions for constructive ends. But this appeal has usually been weak, spasmodic, and ineffective. The workers, farmers, professionals, have not understood how to bring forth in their agitation the basically constructive role they have played historically in building American democracy. In this respect the revolutionary movement has been especially weak. From the foundation of the Socialist Labor Party in the 1870’s, down through the life of the Socialist Party and the IWW, and during the early years of the Communist Party, there was a dominant tendency to ignore and to scorn American tradition and love of country. This arose out of a narrow, sectarian conception of internationalism, and it did much to weaken the position of the revolutionaries in the organizations of the patriotically minded toiling masses. Here again, a better study of Marx and Lenin would have prevented this grievous error. Only during the past few years, notably since the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International and through the writings of Comrade Browder, is real progress being made by our Party in correcting this costly mistake and in basing itself upon a correct Leninist line. The cultivation of the democratic, revolutionary American traditions among the mass organizations is one of the most important tasks in the building of the democratic front. We must not permit the reactionaries to steal and distort the national traditions and aspirations of the people. The great democratic masses must be taught by constant reference to American history that it was their struggles in the past that built our republic, that the democratic front movement of today is the continuation of all the fights for liberty in the history of our own country; that in the achievement of the current demands of the masses lies the fruition of all that is progressive and glorious in American history; that socialism is the climax toward which the entire historic struggle of the democratic American people inevitably tends. So not only does Foster congratulate Browder when he was correct on the question of patriotism, but ruthlessly criticizes him when he was incorrect on the position of liquidationism. (Though, to be fair to Browder, he claimed until he died that Moscow had ordered him to act in such a way.) This is precisely the line of the prominent Communists of the USA, that it is the American toiling masses who are the revolutionary agent, and the material that makes up our country, that we have a deep and rich revolutionary tradition that these hollow sloganeers tarnish, along with the name Communism, with their ignorant bleating. It’s incredibly sad that such lies and silliness is published directly on the CP’s website. And we’re only getting started. The next group of lies is even more fun, calling this made up “movement” of “PatSocs”, quote, “transphobic, ableist, anti-Semitic, and anti-Indigenous.” It gives no actual proof of any of these lies, which is suspiciously similar to the tactics used by agent provocateurs all through the history of the Party - accuse, accuse, accuse. Whenever explanations or proof is demanded, they either make something up or throw disjointed things together (tin foil hat style) that won’t survive even slight prodding, or toss out another baseless accusation to distract from the previously questioned one. In the very same breath, its silliest of accusations is made, saying all of these dreaded “PatSocs” are inspired by Lyndon Larouche, an irrelevant name in 2024 if ever there was one. It supposedly connects this through the journalist Caleb Maupin, who has no connections to any of the other organizations or people it names as its supposed “PatSocs”. It does provide a nice link to the Midwestern Marx Institute featured in In These Times afterwards, which is fine, as we were featured there, and it talks about the following we’ve acquired, which is also fine, but linking us or the others with such things is downright silly and shows how out of touch with prominent Communists the Party has become. The next one, however, absolutely takes the cake. It is possibly the silliest and most absurdly childish and uninformed thing I’ve read in 42 years on this Earth. And that’s saying something, as I spend time on social media in order to help build up the Midwestern Marx Institute, so I see childish and uninformed things all day long. Let’s quote it verbatim, so there’s no mistaking what the Party has actually allowed on its website (almost certainly without knowing, as no one is this dumb other than terminally online college kids). “We have yet to call out ‘Patriotic Socialism’ for what it is, which is so-called ‘National Socialism’ in new garb.” Yes, you read that correctly. Your brain didn’t just melt, and your eyes still work. Mr. Jones has not only conflated standard Communist principles like patriotism based on the Marxist understanding of what constitutes a people and the form class struggle takes during the bourgeois epoch, but he then conflates THAT with nationalism, and then conflates THAT with Nazism. All in two paragraphs. It would be amazing if it weren’t so tragic and sad. So let’s explain why this is silly. In case you are living under a rock or something. Nationalism, or organization along a national basis, as Lenin and Stalin teach us, can be either progressive or reactionary, based on the conditions that give rise to it. A colonized country fighting against a foreign occupier, for example, can give rise to progressive nationalism, as it did the early KMT in China (though Lenin and Stalin both qualify this, saying not all of these struggles are necessarily progressive - they are only progressive when they bring society forwards, in whatever way, towards socialism). Organized within, say, an imperialist country, it is, instead, a call to work against class struggle in favor of preservation of national structures and unity between the classes. Which is not only impossible, but base reaction. It has very literally nothing to do with patriotism. The Nazis used the term “National socialism” because they used the word “socialism” the way everyone did back then, as a general category meaning a society serving a social end, rather than the way I’m assuming our friend Mr. Jones tries to use it after simply assuming things about language, as a form of new utopianism, ideas for future society pulled from his head and tried to force on society from without. The Nazis loathed Marxism and claimed we were all evil and tyrannical, and that our basic observation that the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles, is wrong. They said instead that the only way to arrive at this society serving a social end was for the classes to collaborate (nationalism in the bourgeois epoch), meaning that if you were a land-owning parasite, you owned your land, collected your rent, and served society. If you were an exploited proletarian, you went to work, sent your kids to work, and served society. This could only be done, they said, on a national basis (with an emphasis on antagonisms between nations - something Marxism proves is not essential to nations and peoples, but instead based on class relations). This is obviously a very silly idea, and it was clearly not socialism. But not for the childish reasons Mr. Jones and the CPUSA website tell us. After the absurd Nazi lie, Mr. Jones goes on with other various vague liberal sloganeering without mentioning the proletariat a single time, even shouting out the NDN Collective’s slogans, which makes sense once you begin looking into who participates in this bourgeois NGO that received over 12,000,000 dollars from none other than Jeff Bezos’s foundation, and pretends this is some mass movement of Native Americans. He then claims “PatSoc forces” stole documents from somewhere in New York City, and vaguely claims Jackson Hinkle is some kind of federal intelligence agent, saying, “And the possible federal connections, such as those with Jackson Hinkle, are also noteworthy,” while providing no actual evidence for such an absurd accusation. (Catching a pattern yet?) He suggests editing the Party’s program, which is supposed to be a concrete statement of plans and goals, to “call out” (a favorite buzz word of liberals) the scary MAGA Communists and “PatSocs”, and engages in the most ironic sentence in the entire thing, saying that “sloganeering” should be a grounds for expulsion from the Party, along with “explicit PatSoc talking points”, which he gives only one example of, a very obviously fake image that was made to look like Jackson Hinkle, who has met with the grandson of Nelson Mandela and all sorts of Pan-Africanists at the conference on Multipolarity, was quoting Hitler. (I don’t know if Mr. Jones is oblivious to the obvious fake, or not, but I can’t decide if knowing or not knowing it’s fake is worse. They’re both completely disgusting. Either he knew it was fake and did not care, or did not know, in which case he should be given much more training and education before being allowed to speak publicly as a representative of any organization). Which is, by the way, legally libel and we would recommend the Party immediately remove the libel from its website and issue an apology to everyone involved, especially Mr. Hinkle, before they are taken to court for it. Mr. Jones ends his piece by deciding it is his place to say what is the “okay” patriotism and what is not, telling Native Americans they are allowed to love their homes, but no one else is (and I’m sure they were dying to get his permission), and again conflates the word with nationalism. He says that waving the American flag, the flag waved by W.E.B. Dubois, William Z. Foster, Martin Luther King, and all great American revolutionaries, is actually “not okay”. He says that invoking “American symbology” is “not okay”. He begrudgingly says that saying Communist Party USA is “one thing”, meaning it’s mostly fine, but ONLY if it’s taken in the geographical sense (whatever that means), and then ends by invoking the names W.E.B. Dubois and Claudia Jones while completely ignoring everything they ever said and getting in one last weird lie about Jackson Hinkle. An utter tragedy. I want to make it clear that we did not want this fight. We’ve gone out of our way to reach out a hand to every single person who will aid the class struggle. Every time we’ve extended that hand to the Party, it’s been shoved aside and we’ve been told we think crazy things we’ve never remotely thought, and then scolded with dozens of liberal buzzwords that made it seem like we’d gotten in trouble on the jobsite and were in some kind of meeting with HR. Regardless, we still don’t want this fight. If this nonsense persists, however, the forces who are trying to wreck the new Communist movement will quickly find out that we will finish it. We are peaceful people, like all Communists, willing to live and let live. But we will not hesitate to finish a fight if you bring it to our doorstep. For those rank-and-file members of the party who are actually committed to Communism and not just to reiterating ultra left narratives stemming from the bourgeois academy, or right opportunist ones which come from the Webbite liquidationist period, we urge you to think long and hard about the tragic state of our once mighty party. Ask yourself: at a time when this country needs nothing more than a real Communist Party, when peoples’ living conditions are bad and getting worse, what are real Communists to do in the face of the pitiful condition our Party has fallen into? How can real Communists just stand by as the only force that can free our people from the strangling hold of capital is sequestered by servants of hegemony and the liberal wing of the ruling class? All things in this world are subject to change, this is a basic principle of dialectical materialism. Ask yourself: are you courageous enough to side with the rising forces of a new Communist movement, one that is driven by necessity and reaching the hearts and minds of millions of working class people? Or will you throw your lot in with the dogmatist distorters of Marxism, who always find a way to give support of hegemony a radical veneer, making excuses why this time we need to support capitalism, rather than fight it? It is this question which today separates the forces tying themselves to a fossilized past and those which seek to move our revolutionary tradition forward, helping the dissenting attitudes of our masses gain coherence and direction, showing our working people how we can make history together, and fulfill the promise of a society actually of, by, and for the people. This form of society has a name - Communism. “In the end communism will triumph. I want to help bring that day.” - W. E. B. Dubois (1961) Notes [1] We wonder why the ultra-left “Sakaiists” think of the fact that the Communist Party’s old school was named after Thomas Jefferson, as American revolutionary history is now to be ignored by members at the best of times and cancelled at the worst via bourgeois lifestyle politics and sloganeering. This is called “Browderism” which is an absurdity and a joke, but the letter itself gets to that. No need to put it in the footnote. Author Noah Khrachvik is a proud working-class member of the Communist Party USA and a Co-Director at the Midwestern Marx Institute. He is 42 years old, married to the most understanding and patient woman on planet Earth (who puts up with all his deep-theory rants when he wakes up at two in the morning and can't get back to sleep) and has a twelve-year-old son who is far too smart for his own good. When he isn't busy writing, organizing the working class, or fixing rich people's houses all day, he enjoys doing absolutely nothing on the couch, surrounded by his family and books by Gus Hall. He is the author of the forthcoming Reproletarianization: The Rise and Fall of the American Middle Class. Archives May 2024 In his early writings against censorship, Karl Marx proposed that it is insufficient to simply criticize censorship on the basis of how it depicts a limitation of our freedoms and rights. Far more important, he held, was the critical inquiry into the conditions for the possibility of censorship. Censorship, clearly, does not arrive out of thin air. It is produced by certain conditions which call it forth as a necessity for the dominant order. In our age, where censorship is the order of the day, and expresses itself in diverse forms, we too must ask – what are the conditions which make this censorship necessary? While it is, indeed, essential to call out the hypocrisy of the enunciated values of the capitalist ruling class and the violation of these in reality, simply doing this is insufficient to help us understand, explain, make sense of, why it is that that censorship is so prevalent in the first place. I think it is clear, when we observe the decaying trust in ruling institutions, in the media (which, for instance, only 11% of the population trusts), in politicians, etc., that the ruling elite have on their hands a crisis of legitimacy. Censorship is, then, a clear product of a failure of bourgeois ideology, a deterioration of their hegemonic control over the spontaneous worldviews of the mass of people. The narratives produced by the ruling institutions of the capitalist class are no longer uncritically and spontaneously accepted by the mass of people. Most regular Americans, especially the youth, intuitively understand that the media and other ideological apparatuses of the ruling class are not there to tell us the truth. Quite the opposite. Their whole purpose is to distort the world in such a way that it allows us to make sense of it through the narratives upheld by the ruling elite. To employ a technical term we use in the Marxist tradition, their whole purpose is to systematically reproduce a form of false consciousness – a consciousness which turns the world on its head on the basis of superficial one-sided facts, distortions, and lies. Somehow Israel is the victim, China the imperialist, and Cuba the state sponsor of terrorism. This is not simply a problem of epistemic hygiene, as the scholar Vannessa Wills has called it, but an objective social reality of the capitalist form of life. It is a system that, in order to reproduce itself and obtain the consent of the governed, requires that people understand the world in topsy-turvy ways. It is an order that requires a distorted refraction of itself in the realm of ideas, not an accurate, corresponsive reflection. Working class Americans, and even some dissidents from more privileged classes, are beginning to intuitively understand this reality – even if it is not, or at least not yet, comprehended with the concreteness and systematicity a Marxist worldview can provide. Nonetheless, even these spontaneous and often incoherent forms of dissent find themselves under the boot of censorship by a ruling elite too fragile to allow any form of dissent on the principal issues of empire. They much prefer, and frankly need, a compatible form of dissenters (whether from the right or left) who might criticize politicians, capitalism, ‘the matrix,’ etc. but who on issues of imperialism fall faithfully in line with the narratives of the ruling class. These issues of empire, corresponding to the Neo-imperialist stage of capitalism we find ourselves in, are the Achilles heel for the contemporary elite. The vast majority of those who have been censored over the last few years have been attacked and maligned precisely because of their challenges to the imperialist narratives. No one, that I know of, has been censored on the basis of calling for the raising of the minimum wage, for Medicare for all, or for loan forgiveness – important though these issues are for the vast majority of working-class Americans. The voices which are censored are those that have challenged the narratives of empire on key issues such as the proxy war against Russia, the New Cold War against China, the unilateral coercive measures against Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and others, and of course, the most pivotal issue of our day, the genocide of the Palestinians by the fascist state of Israel, the U.S.’s colonial outpost in West Asia. I speak today not as an outsider simply interested in issues of censorship, but as the director of an institute that has had to battle tooth and nail against censorship for the last few years. Three years ago, when the July 11 color revolution “protests” in Cuba were occurring, we used our institute’s TikTok to dispel the imperialist myths aimed, as always, at regime change. Our following at the time was nearing 300 thousand, and the videos we were making were reaching millions of people. Within a couple videos discussing the situation our account would get temporarily suspended, a reality we faced throughout the whole summer. As is often the case, because they could not beat us at the level of ideas, their only option was censorship. Within months the special military operations would occur, representing a new moment in the imperialist West’s battle against Russia. At the time, we used our Institute’s TikTok platform to push back against the NATO imperialist narratives painting Putin simply as a blood thirsty maniac. We contextualized the SMO in the long history of U.S./NATO expansion towards Russia, the war on the people of the Donbass since 2014, the expansion, backed by the West, of Nazi-Banderism and its incorporation into the Ukrainian state amongst other factors necessary to properly access the actions that occurred in February 2022 – all factors which in previous years the imperialist media, and various U.S. officials, themselves accepted. For exposing these truths, challenging to the imperialist narrative, our account (this time nearing 400 thousand followers) would be permanently banned. In the subsequent year we would create seven new accounts, a few which also surpassed the 100 thousand follower mark, only to be banned as soon as we once again were capable of reaching millions. As the investigative work of Alan Macleod showed, the year the censorship against the Institute started the Biden administration would force ByteDance (the Chinese company with the people-centered algorithms that allowed us to grow) to hand over management of their U.S. servers to the Texas-based company ORACLE, a company with intimate ties to the CIA. It was revealed in Macleod’s report that Oracle had hired a litany of former US State Department and Intelligence Operatives to manage the content for Tik Tok, as well as a few NATO executives for good measure. TikTok said that they deleted 320,000 “Russian accounts” which included many American socialist who have never been associated with Russia in any way, such as our Institute. The censorship we have faced, however, has been far from limited to TikTok (an app that, although managed by the state department, has been unable to fully control the dissenting attitudes to imperialism the youth put out – the real reason why they have been moving to ban the app, and why, even though we’ve been banned more than seven times, we’ve been able to rebuild a new account with well over 200 thousand followers and with millions of views on various videos). In the middle of February of this year, while we were covering the death of the West’s beloved far-right racist Navalny, we received news that our YouTube was demonetized. This was one of the central sources of revenue for the Institute – a place people would donate through and ask questions in our live broadcasts. This, of course, was a unique form of censorship – a targeting of the financial foundation which allows us to do the work we do. This is merely the tip of the iceberg of censoring attacks we, and many others like us, have faced when our ideas not only challenge the dominant narrative, but do so in a way that reaches hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions, of people. Social media has, as I have tried to outline in my recent writings, become one of the central ideological fields where the war of position, i.e., the war of ideas for the hearts and minds of people, has to be waged. It is an area people spend 3-4 hours a day surfing, and which is central to spontaneously developing the views people come to hold on relevant political issues. Despite its tubular character and the leakages of dissenting views that spring up here and there, it has become the most important apparatus of narrative control for the ruling class – a space where they can boost their narratives (sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly through bots) and shut down the dissenting ones (again, sometimes directly through bans, sometimes indirectly through demonetization, and sometimes more insidiously, through shadowbans, as has occurred to various other directors at our Institute). In the face of this censorship, it is the duty of Marxists to contextualize its emergence in the crisis of legitimacy and empire we have before us. It is also our duty, if we wish to win the war of positions, to use to our favor the gap between the lofty enunciated values of the ruling class (most of which are accepted in the common sense of our people) and the reality their order creates. The fact that, on one hand, the elite proclaim the right to free speech, media, etc., and that on the other, they censor all voices which challenge the dominant narrative (especially on issues of war and peace) is an objective contradiction we must explain to the American people, and exploit in our favor. We must help them achieve coherence in the dissenting attitudes they already hold – aid them in understanding why the ruling class and its institutions ought to be distrusted and challenged. Lenin’s question – freedom (or freedom of speech) for whom and to do what? – must always be asked. Freedom, of speech or of any other kind, is an abstraction that contains an obscured class content. Freedom of speech for the elite is the freedom of their speech, their freedom to distort reality and keep us ignorant cogs in a machine they own, profit off of, and hope to continue to keep running. Freedom of speech for us, the vast majority of people, is fundamentally rooted in the ability to speak truth to power, to challenge the narratives of those who cloak themselves under the auspices of ‘fighting misinformation’ while it is they who are the great liars, deceivers, and misinformers. This requires that we stand against censorship of all kinds, not just of those who already hold our Marxist worldview. Anyone challenging empire, regardless of how anachronistic their views might be, ought to have their rights to free speech and media protected. As Marxists, that is, as the ultimate enemies of the ruling order, we cannot stand in favor of the state’s cracking down of dissenting voices on issues of empire, even if, outside of those issues, we find some of these dissenters’ views abhorrent. In our era of blatant censorship, us Marxists ought to defend the right to free speech endowed to us in our bourgeois constitution – even if we are able to understand, and explain to others, the systematic reasons why the capitalist ruling class will always, in times of crisis, have to violate the democratic rights it enunciates with its emergence on the historical scene. Watch Full Panel Here: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 April 2024 Martin Heidegger is undoubtedly one of the most creative and influential philosophers of the 20th century. Virtually all areas of philosophy, along with many other disciplines as well, have had to tackle in one form or another the questions he poses, and the insights he provides. His work grasped the zeitgeist of the 1930s and 40s for most of continental philosophy. It is a tour de force Marxist philosophers must face head on. Simply calling it ‘bourgeois,’ ‘Nazi’, or the expression of the middle-class state of being in post WW1 Germany is not enough. While it is important to situate Heidegger in his proper historical and class context, and while it is essential to show the Nazism and antisemitism he was undoubtedly committed to for a significant period of his life, this is insufficient to defeat the thought of this giant. Other leftist scholars have already made tremendous inroads in this area. Since at least the publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, but especially now with the publication of Richard Wolin’s recent text, Heidegger in Ruins, the intimate connection between Heidegger and Nazism is indisputable – even though many, including those working within his Gesamtausgabe (collected works), have tried to paper over it. Certainly, to borrow an expression Domenico Losurdo uses to describe Nietzsche scholarship, there has pervaded a “hermeneutic of innocence” in Heideggerian scholarship which tries to divorce his work from the essentially political context that embeds it. Its political horizon, its class basis, its connection with Nazism, these are all things any Marxist discussion on Heidegger should include. But we must ask, is this enough to ‘defeat’ Heidegger? If he was simply a ‘Nazi,’ why hasn’t he, like Emmanual Faye suggests, been taken off philosophy shelves and put next to Goebbels?[1] Why have so many leftist scholars in the Global South and East, thinkers aware of Heidegger’s Nazism, turned in various parts of their work to Heidegger for insights? Unlike the tradition of Western Marxism, where the eclecticism is intimately connected to a politics that throws on the support of imperialism a radical veneer, a lot of these scholars are fervent critics of U.S. imperialism and have stood for decades on the side of socialist construction. Why does, for instance, the late Bolivian Marxist, Juan Jose Bautista Segales, find that he can incorporate insights from Heidegger’s critique of modernity into the process of understanding the dimensions of the indigenous struggle for socialism, a struggle that must, necessarily, tarry with the question of capitalist modernity? Why does the Brazilian theologian, Leonardo Boff, one of the founders of the radical, Christian Socialist liberation theology tendency, central to so many socialist and anti-imperialist struggles in Latin American, turn to Heidegger to discuss the question of care in ethics? In his Prison Notebooks Antonio Gramsci reminds us that: "A new science proves its efficacy and vitality when it demonstrates that it is capable of confronting the great champions of the tendencies opposed to it and when it either resolves by its own means the vital questions which they have posed or demonstrates, in peremptory fashion, that these questions are false problems."[2] Gramsci would go on to lambast Nikolai Bukharin, in part, for failing to address in his ‘Manual’ the critics of Marxism in their utmost coherence, i.e., for failing to deal with the best bourgeois philosophy and science had to offer, opting instead to obtaining the quick victories one gets when they challenge an opponent of a lower caliber. Gramsci says that while reading Bukharin’s text, “one has the impression of someone who cannot sleep for the moonlight and who struggles to massacre the fireflies in the belief that by so doing he will make the brightness lessen or disappear.”[3] Unfortunately, a similar fatal flaw can be observed in the traditional Marxist-Leninist critiques of Heidegger. Far from engaging with him honestly and comprehensively, we have opted for quick victories based on dismissals of his thought as petty-bourgeois, subjectivist, Nazi, etc. While components of this critique are certainly true, they are not enough – i.e., they are not worthy of proper Marxist-Leninist critique. Yes, Marx, Engels, and Lenin name-called their opponents and spoke of the class positions and subsequent political interests they often spoke from – but in conjunction with this was always a thorough demolishing of their arguments along the kind described by Gramsci previously. Additionally, how these thinkers expressed in their work and concerns a class position was something that was proved, i.e., there was a concrete study of the relationship between the base and superstructure, between the class the thinker represents and the ideas they enunciate. This refined analysis has often been missing in our tradition’s treatment of Heidegger. Far too often conclusions that have to be proven are accepted simply at face value. As R. T. De George, who did an umbrella study of Marxist-Leninist writing on Heidegger up until the mid-1960s, argued, "The failure of Marxist criticism of Heidegger, as well as of other Western philosophers, is not necessarily that it has been wrong; but rather that most of it has been shallow, polemical, beside the point, and poor Marxism. Marxist criticism is difficult. Marxist-Leninist criticism has become too easy. It would perhaps be too much to ask that Marxists follow Lenin's advice and criticize not in the manner of Feuerbach but in the manner of Hegel, i.e. not by merely rejecting views but by correcting them "deepening, generalizing, and extending them, showing the connection and transitions of each and every concept". But this presumably is what Marxist and Marxist Leninist philosophy should do."[4] De George is, of course, not a Marxist. But he is right to call us out on this shortcoming. In doing so he is being a good ideological enemy, an enemy that, to use an obscene American expression, wants us to get our shit together. In the 20th century, the best inroads into the Marxist-Leninist critique of Heidegger would be made by Georg Lukács, who situates him within the irrationalism of the imperialist period in his seminal Destruction of Reason. Here Lukács is correct about what it takes to carry forth this critique in a proper Marxist manner. He writes: "To reveal [a thinker’s] social genesis and function is of the greatest importance, but in itself by no means sufficient. Granted, the objectivity of progress will suffice correctly to condemn as reactionary an individual phenomenon or orientation. But a really Marxist-Leninist critique of reactionary philosophy cannot permit itself to stop at this. Rather it must show in real terms, in the philosophical material itself, the philosophical falsity and the distortion of basic philosophical questions, the negation of philosophy's achievements and so on… To this extent, an immanent critique is a justified and indeed indispensable element in the portrayal and exposure of reactionary tendencies in philosophy. The classic Marxist authors have constantly used it. Engels, for example, in his Anti-Duhring and Lenin in his Empirio-Criticism. To reject immanent criticism as one element in an overall survey also embracing social genesis and function, class characteristics, exploration of the true nature of society and so on is bound to lead to a philosophical sectarianism, to the attitude that everything which is axiomatic to a conscious Marxist-Leninist is also immediately obvious to his readers…[Therefore, while] the antithesis between the various bourgeois ideologies and the achievements of dialectical and historical materialism is the self-evident foundation of our treatment and critique of the subject-matter, [we must still] prove in factual, philosophical terms the inner incoherence, contradictoriness, etc., of the separate philosophies [as] also unavoidable if one wants to illustrate their reactionary character in a truly concrete way."[5] This is precisely the task that Lukács sets for himself in this monumental text. However, as he tells us, it is a task that cannot possibly be completed in one book, even an 800 page one. The Heidegger section, for instance, is a mere 25 pages. Even shorter is his treatment of Heidegger in Existentialism or Marxism, published a few years after. Nonetheless, it is on the basis of this limited work that a proper Marxist-Leninist critique of Heidegger can be developed. Lukács tells us that with Heidegger phenomenology “turned into the ideology of the agony of individualism in the imperialist period.”[6] He performed a “terminological camouflaging of subjective idealism,” a “transference of purely subjective-idealist positions into objective (i.e., pseudo-objective) ones.”[7] His “ontological materiality” and claims to concreteness “remained purely declarative,” dominated through and through by irrationalistic arbitrariness and an “epistemological hocus pocus.”[8] Even in the aspects of his thought that are ‘historical’, what is operative, Lukács argues, is the “transformation of real history into a mythified pseudo-history.”[9] In Heidegger the “Husserlian tendency towards a strictly scientific approach,” intuitivist and irrationalist though it might have been in its own right, had now “faded completely.”[10] Philosophy’s task was “to keep investigation open by means of questions.”[11] The discipline is turned into a big question rigamarole centered on a question of Being that had already been answered by the discipline more than a century prior in Hegel’ Science of Logic, where it was shown, in its indeterminacy, to be indistinguishable from nothing, impelling us to move beyond pure being into being as coming to be and seizing to be, being as becoming, determinate being, and all the subsequent categories unfolded out of these in the Logic. The context which situates the rise of Heidegger, Lukács writes, is akin to the post-1848 context which saw the rise of Soren Kierkegaard’s romantic individualist agony: “Kierkegaard's philosophy was aimed against the bourgeois idea of progress, against Hegel's idealist dialectics, whereas the renovators of existential philosophy [i.e., Heidegger and et. al.] were already principally at odds with Marxism, although this seldom found overt and direct expression in their writings.”[12] This mood of despair, for Lukács, produced like it had decades prior, an “ideology of the saddest philistinism, of fear and trembling, of anxiety” which “was precisely the socio-psychological reason for the influence of Heidegger and Jaspers” on the eve of Hitler’s seizure of power.[13] It was a “yearning to rescue naked existence from universal collapse.”[14] Philosophically it was marked by an attempt at ‘third ways’ beyond idealism and materialism and rationalism and irrationalism, but in each instance, idealism and irrationalism ultimately showed their dominance. While his phenomenology and ontology were, in Lukács’s words, little more than “abstractly mythicizing” a “vitalistic anthropology with an objectivistic mask,”[15]it nonetheless provided, he admits, an “often grippingly interesting description of intellectual philistinism during the crisis of the imperialist period.”[16] In his phenomenological description of the inauthenticity of everyday existence, pervaded by Verfallensein, a state of falling prey, we come under the “anonymous dominance of das Man” (the one or they).[17] Lukács argues that Heidegger’s detailed description of this fallen state “constitute the strongest and most suggestive part of Being and Time, and in all likelihood they formed the basis of the book’s broad and profound effect… [It is] here, with the tools of phenomenology, [that] Heidegger [gives] a series of interesting images taken from the inner life, from the worldview of the dissolute bourgeois mind of the post-war years.”[18] While he was fundamentally unable to understand the socio-historical causes that grounded such experience, Lukács holds that the value of his account is seen in the fact that it “provides – on the descriptive level – a genuine and true-to-life picture of those conscious reflexes which the reality of the post-war imperialist capitalism triggered off in those unable or unwilling to surpass what they experienced in their individual existence and to go further towards objectivity, i.e., towards exploring the socio-historical causes of their experiences.”[19] Here Heidegger follows to the T the tradition of irrationalism which preceded him and of which he becomes a central figure of in the 20th century. As Lukács writes in Existentialism or Marxism: "In times of the crisis of imperialism, when everything is unstable, everything is in disarray, when the bourgeois intelligentsia is forced to observe, as the next day refutes what seemed indestructible today, it is faced with a choice. It must admit either its own defeat or the defeat of reason. The first path means recognizing your inability to comprehend reality in thought. Here it would be the turn of reason, but it is from this rationality that bourgeois thinking must withdraw. It is impossible to recognize this defeat from a bourgeois standpoint, for that would mean a transition to the camp of socialism. Therefore, at the crossroads, the bourgeois intelligentsia must choose a different path; it must proclaim the collapse of reason."[20] While the scope of the work leads Lukács to sometimes move too quick in his critique of Heidegger, his situating of him in the tradition of irrationalism and its rejection of the enlightenment is a thread that must be picked up and developed by Marxist scholarship on Heidegger. The best place I have seen this done is in Domenico Losurdo’s Heidegger and the Ideology of War, published first in Italian in 1991, and in English a decade after. Here it is lucidly shown how Heidegger and the Nazis inherit the Kreigsideology (War ideology) of the post-WW1 period, rooted in a mythical Gemeinschaft (community) inhibited by an equally dubious notion of fate (Schicksal) and a fetish of death and its proximity as central to authentic life. Reason, which is tied to civilization and society (Gesellschaft), is lambasted for tearing communal bonds and breaking from the community’s destiny.[21] The enlightenment, the French Revolution, and Marxism, which takes the rational kernel of the former to their historical and logical conclusion, are necessarily condemned.[22] The rejection of modernity and the Enlightenment has been a fad in Western academia for decades. Heidegger alone is not to blame. But he is, as a fellow traveler of the tradition of irrationalism, a key voice in the anti-modernity and anti-Enlightenment discourse. The Enlightenment, although imperfect and filled with contradictions, brought with it the notion of a universal humanity that we all share in as rational creatures, that provides for us the ability to see and fight for progress in history. It represented the thought of the bourgeoisie in its most progressive moment, before it undeniably turns into a force of reaction after the 1848 revolutions. The universalist ideals of the enlightenment have been given concrete content through the various progressive struggles of the last three centuries – from the American revolution to the French to the Haitian and to the socialist and anti-colonial revolutions of the 20th century. Those who have stood against it have been the forces of reaction – those who deny our common humanity in favor of tribalism (usually of a hierarchical and supremacist kind). It has been the reactionary and conservative forces who have historically rejected the use of reason and the notion of progress, since both of these can provide challenges to the ruling order… an order which can become the object of critique through reason, and which can be shown, through an appeal to the progressive dialectical unfolding of history (or, in Martin Luther King Jr.’s words, through the arch of the moral universe that bends towards justice) to be just a moment in humanity’s development towards greater freedom. Central to any Marxist critique of Heidegger, then, is also considering how this foundational rejection of the enlightenment – necessary for bourgeois philosophical irrationalism and its turn towards indirect apologetics of the system – takes alternative forms after Heidegger. John Bellamy Foster has done important work in this area, showing how currents dominating contemporary social sciences in Academia like postmodernism, post-Marxism, post-colonialism, post-humanism, etc. all share a foundation in philosophical irrationalism and its indirect apologetics of the dominant order.[23] Although with certain downfalls, the work of Susan Neiman in Left is Not Woke also does a swell job in showing how the tribalism central to contemporary wokeism is fundamentally rooted in the reactionary, anti-modernist and anti-enlightenment tradition which Heidegger is a central figure of. For all the claims to being ‘woke’, this dominant ideology in the liberal wing of capital is deeply ignorant of the reactionary philosophical foundations underlaying their worldview – a worldview that serves to reinforce the dominant order under the delusion that it is waging an emancipatory attack on it. A Marxist critique of Heidegger, therefore, must also contain an awareness of how the tradition he works through has seeped into the Academic and activist left, often giving its deeply reactionary philosophical foundation a seemingly progressive gloss. For this we must also study the work of our colleague Gabriel Rockhill, who outlines the political economy of knowledge that has facilitated and promoted this eclecticism to counter the genuine communist left. In sum, while necessary, exposing Heidegger’s Nazism and his thought’s class basis is insufficient to defeating him. As Gramsci and Lukács have argued, we must also beat these monumental figures of contemporary bourgeois thought in the realm of ideas as well – showing how the problems they pose are baseless, or how the response they provide to real problems are insufficient. These are things that must be shown, not just taken axiomatically for granted simply because we understand the Marxist worldview to be the most advanced humanity has given rise to. If in questions of ethics or meta-historical narratives comrades of the left (like the two I previously mentioned) turn to Heidegger, it is not sufficient to just lambast them for taking partial insights from a problematic thinker. We must also inquire into what deficiency is there in our answering – or even asking – of the problem that led them to turn to Heidegger. How can the Marxist worldview extend itself to commenting concretely on every possible topic of intellectual inquiry such that the need to turn to Heidegger, or any other bourgeois thinker, is superfluous for those within our tradition. This requires an explicit turn away from the Western Marxism accepted in the Academy. This so called ‘Marxism’, imbued with postmodernist sensibilities, cringes at the description of Marxism as an all-encompassing worldview. They wish to limit Marxism to the sphere of history and social analysis, rejecting the dialectics of nature and the fruitful insights the dialectical materialist worldview can provide in any sphere of investigation. In China, where Marxism-Leninism has been able to develop relatively peacefully since at least 1949, the tendency is towards the contrary. The more fields the Marxist worldview can be present in the merrier. I would like to conclude with a quote from Cheng Enfu’s China’s Economic Dialectic, "Marxism is a telescope through which we can clearly see the trends according to which reality develops, and a microscope through which we can see its crucial details. It is a set of night-vision goggles through which we can see light and hope in the darkness, a set of diving goggles through which we can see things at a deeper level, a fluoroscope through which we can see into the nature of the matter beyond the level of appearance, and a megaloscope through which we can make sense of blurred images. Marxism is a reflector through which we can see the truth behind things, a polygonal mirror that enables us to see the diversity and unity of opposites, an asymptotic mirror that allows us to see things near and far with multiple focal points and a monster-revealing mirror in which, if we have sharp eyes, we can see mistakes clearly."[24] This should help to get us to see Marxism as an all-encompassing worldview. A worldview which, as Lenin told the Young Communists in 1921, absorbs and develops upon the “knowledge of all the treasures created by mankind.”[25] When we are successful in this task, the need for anyone in the camp of the genuine progressive forces to turn to Heidegger or any other bourgeois thinker would be superfluous, since they would find a much more concretely explicated account for their inquiry within the tradition itself… or, at the very least, the tools to do so themselves ready-to-hand (pun intended). Notes [1] Gregory Fried, “A Letter to Emmanuel Faye,” in Confronting Heidegger: A Critical Dialogue on Politics and Philosophy (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2020), 5 [2] Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 2014), 433. [3] Ibid. [4] R. T. De George, “Heidegger and the Marxists,” Studies in Soviet Thought, 5(4) (1965), 294. [5] Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason (New York: Verso, 2021), 5-6. [6] Ibid.,489. [7] Ibid., 496, 494. [8] Ibid., 495-6, 493. [9] Georg Lukács, “Heidegger Redivivus,” in Existentialismus oder Marxismus. Retrieved through Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/archive//lukacs/works/1951/heidegger.htm [10] Lukács, Destruction of Reason, 497. [11] Ibid. 498. [12] Ibid. 491. [13] Ibid. [14] Ibid., 493. [15] Ibid., 498, 497. [16] Ibid., 498. [17] Ibid., 498-9. [18] Ibid., 500. [19] Ibid. [20] Georg Lukács, “The Crisis of Bourgeois Philosophy,” in Existentialismus oder Marxismus. Retrieved through Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/1948/bourgeois-philosophy.htm [21] Domenico Losurdo, Heidegger and The Ideology of War: Community, Death, and the West (New York: Humanity Books, 2001), 15-40. [22] I am happy to see my friend, Colin Bodayle, recently take this task up. I have known no other Marxist who has studied Heidegger’s work as closely as he has (and in the original German). For more, see the series titled “Why the Left Should Reject Heidegger’s Thought,” published through the Midwestern Marx Institute for Marxist Theory and Political Analysis. Part one is here: https://www.midwesternmarx.com/articles/why-the-left-should-reject-heideggers-thought-part-one-the-question-of-being-by-colin-bodayle [23] John Bellamy Foster, “The New Irrationalism,” Monthly Review 74(9) (February 2023): https://monthlyreview.org/2023/02/01/the-new-irrationalism/ [24] Cheng Enfu, China’s Economic Dialectic: The Original Aspiration of Reform (New York: International Publishers, 2019), 20. [25] V. I. Lenin, “The Task of the Youth Leagues,” in Collected Works Vol. 31 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), 287. Watch the ‘Heidegger and the Left’ panel, hosted by the Critical Theory Workshop and the Midwestern Marx Institute, here: 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 April 2024 4/21/2024 Science and Freedom: Toward a New Revolutionary Epistemology. By: Sambarta Chatterjee and Purba ChatterjeeRead NowPaul Robeson, speaking of the scientific achievements of the West which have formed the bedrock of its claim to supremacy, posed a question for the 20th century: “having found the key, has Western man—Western bourgeois man—sufficient strength left to turn it in the lock?”1 Today, as we witness the spectacular and terrifying unraveling of the West, this question takes on a new urgency. Western epistemology, rooted in white supremacy and domination, has proved to be woefully inadequate at explaining the rapidly changing world, or answering the great moral and ideological questions of our time. Why is there unbridled poverty and homelessness in the richest nations? Why are Western democracies suffering the biggest crises of legitimacy in their history, with ordinary people utterly distrustful of experts in every field? Why has liberal democracy not made freedom real? What is the way forward for humanity, and for knowledge? Barely three decades have passed since Francis Fukuyama’s famous proclamation of the “End of History.” He was articulating the thesis of the triumphant post-Cold War Western ruling elite that the philosophical underpinnings of liberal democracy represented “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution.”2 Ironically, the U.S. imperialist state and its allies could only sustain this end point by waging endless wars and coups throughout Asia and Africa, in “defense” of Western standards of “freedom” and “democracy.” It is clear that the logic and assumptions of liberal democracy have failed miserably to explain the world, and the aspirations of the masses. The vast majority of the world’s people, weary of war and striving for a new path forward, will not respect or be controlled by these false standards any longer. They do not see Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, or Donald Trump as the enemy, nor Ukraine and Israel as bastions of democracy. However, the political decline of the West has not yet translated into a commensurate decline in the influence of Western science and academia, which shares and serves to perpetuate the logic and assumptions of the Western ruling class. The dominant view of science, which is the white view of science, is that science is the concern of a select few “experts,” who must pursue it as a disinterested activity, even as their careers secure their place among the ruling elite. The scientist, in choosing what he works on, must be neutral and unconcerned with moral questions, even as his research is funded by, and often aids, war. And the purpose which science must serve is rarely discussed, even as “academic freedom” is passionately defended as “the bedrock of the American university.” The question of how we know, or epistemology, is necessarily preceded and informed by the question of why we know, or the purpose of knowledge. As such, scientific inquiry has never been and can never be a purely rational and objective endeavor. It is dishonest to pretend that science can remain neutral in the face of war and the degradation of humanity. Whether it be the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, or the use today of Artificial Intelligence in ensuring the maximum civilian casualties in Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, the practice and use of science has always collided with the moral choice. The question facing us today is this: how can science, the vanguard of human knowledge and the method to know the truth, be freed from the confines of the compromised scientist? And in what way will humanity—on its path to a new stage in history—bring forth the next revolution in science? The question of how science relates to society is at least as old as the modern world, although it takes on qualitatively new forms in every epoch. A close look at the history of the philosophical debates that have shaped science as we know it today delineates two epistemological frameworks for science—one compatible with the striving for the broadest measure of freedom for the people, and another which seeks to free the individual scientist from their responsibility to society. Lenin, Materialism, and PositivismTen years before the October Revolution, Lenin argued that materialism, which is the philosophical framework rooted in the existence of an objective, material reality outside the human mind, was the basis for advancing human knowledge.3 Central to this framework is the historical lesson that human knowledge has always crossed hitherto unknown frontiers—frontiers never completely predicted by existing knowledge, but nevertheless anticipated. Of course, Lenin was defending not a mechanical understanding of a fixed external world, but a dialectical relationship between an evolving external world and human action. He saw knowledge as a prerequisite to human freedom, and his defense of materialism was a revolutionary step to further freedom. In order to make freedom real, epistemology had to be rooted in the historical lesson that human beings are capable of knowing the world and hence acting to change it. The materialist framework was opposed and attacked by adherents of the positivist school of philosophy. Positivism argues that Truth is subjective, and the totality of human knowledge is determined by what human beings can observe or sense alone. Positivism as a framework has developed over historical time. In the 18th century, Bishop George Berkeley argued that the idea that the external world exists independent of our perception, is a “manifest contradiction.” He argued, “what do we perceive besides our own ideas or sensations? And is it not plainly repugnant that any one of these [objects that we perceive], or any combination of them, should exist unperceived?” He revealed that his philosophical line was ultimately a defense of the Church as the sole arbiter of Truth, when he identified materialism as “the main pillar and support of Skepticism… Atheism and Irreligion.” More than 150 years later, Ernst Mach reinvented Berkelian categories to posit the external world as a “complex of sensations.” Instead of the material world, Mach argued that “sensations,” which lead to the external world, should be the object of scientific study. This was of course a reaction to the revolutionary science of his time, the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels, which sought to study and understand the concrete, changing world. Thus, although positivism had different manifestations in different epochs, its uniting essence could be found in its adverse relationship to revolutionary thought of the time. At every stage, positivism was revealed to be a reactionary philosophy that denies the existence of an objective world independent of human experience, thereby obviating the striving to understand the world in its movement. Lenin noted that from the positivist framework, “It inevitably follows that the whole world is but my idea. Starting from such a premise it is impossible to arrive at the existence of other people besides oneself: it is the purest solipsism.” Lenin’s argument helps explain the worldview from which Europe has historically related to the rest of the world. As long as the European idea of the world was the only one that mattered, Europe did not need to care about the existence of the rest of humanity, who could be enslaved, colonized, and written out of history. Einstein, Quantum Mechanics, and the Battle Over the Nature of Reality Albert Einstein, one of the greatest scientific minds of the 20th century, believed that in order to bring forth new scientific discoveries, the scientist cannot proceed “without considering critically a much more difficult problem, the problem of analyzing the nature of everyday thinking.”4 Science is then a specialized articulation of humanity’s striving to know itself and the world, reflecting and shaping everyday thinking. It was Einstein’s groundbreaking discovery of the wave-particle duality of light that ushered in one of the greatest scientific revolutions of the modern world. The quantum realm, having been discovered, necessitated new theoretical and epistemological formulations, because the laws of classical physics could no longer explain the physical world in its entirety. Following Einstein’s new theory of light, Niels Bohr had proposed a new model for subatomic particles, which disobeyed classical laws but verified patterns of light emitted by matter when heated. Erwin Schrodinger and Werner Heisenberg independently advanced two statistical theories to substantiate Bohr’s model, in which the electron existed at all times in a superposition of states. While the transition between states explained the statistical phenomenon of light emissions, these laws said nothing about direct measurement of the electron itself. Eventually, it was Max Born who proposed a physical world-picture emerging from these theories, in terms of probabilities of finding the electron in a given state. The trouble was, measurement always found the electron in a single state. Born’s interpretation of statistical laws as definitive ones, necessarily implied that the electron, and by extension material reality itself, was fundamentally indeterminate. This was the Copenhagen interpretation, which was eventually championed by Bohr, Heisenberg, and Born, despite their different formulations of the theory itself. Instead of investigating the inconclusive aspects of this new theory, the partial success of quantum mechanics was used to canonize it as the ultimate description of reality. It is only the act of measurement, or observation, that determines reality. An objective Truth does not exist independent of our observations. Thus once again, the debate over the nature of reality was invoked, and positivism found its new heroes in the defenders of this interpretation. Einstein categorically rejected this interpretation.5,6 He, like Lenin, believed in the existence of an objective world independent of the human mind, that could be known. Our understanding of the natural world surely depends on how we probe it, but the “curve of knowledge” bends towards the most accurate description of objective reality. He considered quantum mechanics to be an incomplete theory because even though it found “external confirmation,” it lacked an “inner perfection”—the harmony and beauty that he saw in the arc of natural science in its movement toward Truth. He refused to accept the Copenhagen interpretation because he saw in it “the end of physics as we know it.” For him, to accept that objective reality didn’t exist was to stop striving to know it. The Cold War Capture of Science The period after the Second World War was ripe with the possibility of solidifying the commitment of science to human freedom. The Soviet Union was admired by scientists the world over for its heroic role in the defeat of fascism and the call for planned scientific and technological development of society. The rising anti-colonial struggles in Asia and Africa further created conditions for a view of science that was concerned with the uplift of the masses from poverty and the immiseration of war. Scientists embraced their moral responsibility, flocking to the defense of Peace and global disarmament. At the same time, Soviet science made remarkable strides in working out the ramifications of the unresolved epistemological questions brought forth by quantum mechanics.7 This was also the period of the Cold War, and science did not escape the scourge of the anti-communist witch-hunt in America. A carefully planned propaganda campaign launched by the CIA breached all sections of intellectual activity, and a new view of science, separated from questions of politics and ideology, began to take shape in the Western academic establishment. The scientific framework of the Soviet Union was demonized and portrayed as the enemy of “academic freedom” of the individual scientist. With the fall of the Soviet Union, this view of science as a narrow technical pursuit was declared victorious. Peace and hunger were no longer worthy concerns of the scientist, who was encouraged to “shut up and calculate.” Theoretical physics in particular was completely cut off from the philosophical and moral questions that had thus far been instrumental in shaping its historic arc. With the passing of Albert Einstein, the epistemological battle over the interpretation of quantum mechanics was forgotten, its implications for the nature of reality remaining unresolved. The failure to address this question charted a trajectory for theoretical physics that sought to understand, not the concrete material world, but only an abstraction of it. This pathology is perhaps most starkly reflected today in the fate of String Theory. Based on the idea of replacing point-like elementary particles with one-dimensional objects called “strings,” this theory held out hope to unify quantum mechanics with the gravitational force, and thereby furnish a “theory of everything.” After decades of research however, no evidence supporting the existence of strings could be found, and string theorists concluded that four dimensional space-time was too narrow for a description of reality. Peter Woit, in his book Not Even Wrong, says that string theory “required postulating the existence of many extra unobserved dimensions, and by different choices of the properties of these extra dimensions, one could get just about anything one wanted.”8 Once more, one is reminded of Lenin’s assessment of positivism, that “the whole world is but my idea.” What was outstanding, however, was that the theory was not discarded despite the absence of experimental proof. Woit goes on to say, “the term ‘superstring theory’ really refers not to a well-defined theory, but to unrealised hopes that one might exist. As a result, this is a ‘theory’ that makes no predictions, not even wrong ones, and this very lack of falsifiability is what has allowed the whole subject to survive and flourish.” What does this view of science have to offer today, especially to the youth who must understand the world in all its complexity, as well as their place and role in it? It tells us that the world cannot be known in any useful way, and hence gives us no way to imagine a new future. It denies the possibility of the yet unknown, including the possibility of revolutionary change. Is science then to be altogether rejected in our search for the way forward? What happens to centuries of progress in human thought which Western science inherited, and yet lost its way? Science and the Human Being History is meaningful to the living if it can be used. The history that has shaped science makes one thing clear, that the current crisis in science is rooted in a crisis of epistemology. As such, it cannot be resolved purely within the domain of science. The deep philosophical and moral questions at its heart must be engaged with and answered. Returning to where we began, the question of how we know cannot be separate from the question of why we know, and for whom? Science is not separate from society, it assumes the values and contradictions of the society that produces it. W.E.B. Du Bois, the father of modern sociology and the first to scientifically study race in America, wrote, “Science is a great and worthy mistress, but there is one greater and that is Humanity which science serves; one thing there is greater than knowledge, and that [is] the Man who knows.”9 If it is the human being that science serves, then in order to address the crisis in science we must first investigate the relationship of the society that shapes science, to the human being. How is the human being regarded in American society? We are encouraged to keep him at a safe distance, and only see him through layers of abstraction, e.g. through categories of identity. The ordinary human being does not have the capacity to understand what the expert knows, and hence the expert must speak for him. However, in order to speak for him, it is enough for the scientist to “observe” him and his life-world from the lofty heights of the ivory towers of academia. He does not need to descend to the ground and get his “hands dirty.” Not equipped or even required to know the human being, the scientist is then free to cast doubt on the possibility of knowledge itself, and thereby abdicate his responsibility to the human being. This lies at the heart of postmodernism, which asserts that Truth is multiple and subjective—it belongs to and is shaped by an individual’s experience and identity, and thus cannot be known by the “other.” Postmodern theories are packaged as radical and progressive, claiming to serve the broadest measure of freedom to the individual in society. However, the freedom they offer is the freedom of the individual from society, and not of society itself. By separating people into increasingly narrow and mutually exclusive categories of experience, this worldview obliterates the possibility of unity, of people coming together to form a consensus about the Truth and social change. Postmodernism employs language and jargon to obscure the truth, and this tendency has become rather commonplace in science today. Woit, pointing out the similarity between how string theory research in physics and postmodern theories in the humanities are pursued, says, “In both cases, there are practitioners that revel in the difficulty and obscurity of their research, often being overly impressed with themselves because of this. The barriers to understanding that this kind of work entails make it very hard for any outsiders to evaluate what, if anything, has been achieved.” An illuminating example is the Sokal Affair. In 1996, the academic journal Social Text published physicist Alan Sokal’s “hoax” article attacking the legitimacy of science, which mimicked postmodern language and positionalities, but made no scientific contribution or even common sense. Sokal’s intent was "to bury postmodernism,” and the fact that one of the most prestigious postmodern journals in America could not tell his deception apart from a serious work of scholarship, proved the absurdity and obscurantism that pervades postmodern ideas and theories. Perhaps even worse than the conclusion that there is nothing more to know, is the assertion that it is the human being who doesn’t have the capacity to know. This was the premise of John Horgan’s The End of Science,10 a book which claims that all discoverable knowledge has been discovered, and the limitations on human cognitive ability preclude any further progress. He proposes the concept of an “ironic science” going forward, which cannot produce new knowledge, but takes inspiration from postmodernism “to invent new meanings, ones that challenge received wisdom and provoke further dialogue.” This same worldview forms the basis for the current craze about Artificial Intelligence (A.I.), which seeks to replace the human being with the machine, the former having served his limited purpose. The “A.I. revolution” is rooted in the pathetic and sinister hope that the machine can achieve what the human mind, inadequate and stagnated, cannot—produce new knowledge, and hence the next revolution in science. Now, machines may well be able to do a great many things that human beings cannot, but they cannot think for you. A.I. can at best interpret and consolidate the existing body of human knowledge, but it cannot produce anything new or revolutionary. That task still falls squarely on the shoulders of Man, if he can yet find the courage and tenacity to carry it. However, this requires serious philosophical work. It requires an assessment of the anti-human assumptions on which today’s intellectual activity is based, and the limitations they impose on the human capacity to know and change the world. It also requires the rejection of these assumptions in favor of a new epistemology rooted in the human being, that will realign the purpose of knowledge with the strivings of ordinary people. King and Baldwin: Towards a New Revolutionary Epistemology At this point, we will make a bold proposition. Perhaps there is something yet in the revolutionary history of this country that can show us the path forward. America, which declared “the end of history” when it emerged as the principal hegemon of the Western world at the turn of the 21st century, also produced a philosophical and epistemological tradition that may yet take history forward, and that is the Black Radical Tradition. It is in the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. and James Baldwin that the world of Man, and hence the world of science, may find the key to the future. What has King, a preacher and a Civil Rights leader, got to do with science, one may ask? Everything possibly, if the thesis that science and philosophy are tied at the hip holds muster. King was a philosopher and a revolutionary. Deeply troubled by the suffering and indignity of his people, he embarked on a scientific study of philosophy, seeking the basis for a method of social change. While moved by the best of the European tradition, it was in Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence that King found intellectual and moral satisfaction saying, “I came to feel that this was the only morally and practically sound method open to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom.”11 King’s touchstone for knowing the world, and the nature of reality, was the life-world of the Black working poor, whom he loved. It was this worldview, rooted in the condition of the human being, that led him to conclude that war was the biggest enemy of the poor, and that the struggle for racial justice in America could not be separated from the struggle for Peace in the world. He asserted that “there are moral laws of the universe just as abiding as the physical laws.”12 He saw clearly that scientific advance without concern for the moral progress of man had led to “guided missiles and misguided men.” For him, non-violence was a revolutionary framework that could forge a new kind of human being. This new human being, by refusing to conform to the standards of an unjust society, could compel society to transform in order to fit him. James Baldwin, similarly, must be regarded not just as a writer, but as a philosopher and a revolutionary. He explains that the American sense of reality, or lack thereof, is a pathology firmly rooted in the failure of white America to confront its history of slavery—“one of the most obscene adventures in the history of mankind.” Thus, what the white man does not know about the world and the human being, is precisely what he does not know about the Black man—having trapped himself into the necessity of denying the Black man’s humanity in order to justify his enslavement. Baldwin’s primary concern is the Human—man’s knowledge of himself leading to knowledge of the world, and how to act in it. His writings on the Civil Rights Movement can be read as a sociological study of human capacity—what produced figures like King, Rev. James Lawson, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, and Diane Nash? How is it that from the life-world of the descendants of slaves, a great revolution could emerge that threatened to fundamentally alter American society, and bring forth a New American People? Baldwin writes, “The rock against which the European notion of the nation-state has crashed is nothing more—and absolutely nothing less—than the question of identity: Who am I? And what am I doing here?”13 He finds the response to this universal question in the Blues, the only original music to ever be produced in America. The Blues are an articulation of a people’s striving to reclaim their captive humanity, to make of their despair and suffering a song, and to use their history and experience to create a unique identity and a personal authority, that rejects every standard of their captor. And this music “begins at the auction block.” Is it possible then, that at the auction block, which was “the demolition, by Europe, of all human standards,” was also forged a way to know the human being and the world that might be our salvation? Consider nonviolence, which the great civil rights leader Diane Nash called the greatest invention of the 20th century. Could nonviolence have been invented if Man had not been compelled, at great personal cost, to look white supremacy in the face, and see in its insistence on brute force and domination, the spiritual and moral undoing of Man? Can this not explain why Gandhi’s philosophy and method was forged in the crucible of apartheid South Africa, and why he was able to see that the true meaning of nonviolence would be revealed to the world by the Black Freedom Movement, a prophecy that King brought to fruition? If it can, then from this wellspring of thought and ideas can emerge a new revolutionary epistemology that articulates the strivings of today’s human being. Centered on the human being, this way of knowing the world will once again create the possibility of liberatory knowledge, and offer answers to the philosophical questions that confront science. However, this is a unique moment. One thing is certain, Asia and Africa will never again be colonized, enslaved and starved for the benefit of Asia’s peninsula, nor will neo-colonization and war be accepted by dark humanity as the birthright of the West for much longer. For the first time in history, the majority of the world’s peoples, and not just Europe, will have to work out the answer for all humanity. References:
Archives April 2024 4/21/2024 Totalitarianism: On Liberalism's Wrongful Equating of Stalin and Hitler. By: Marc-Antoine DupuisRead NowThe Soviet Union will be accused of many evils by the West. The author of "The Gulag Archipelago," Solzhenitsyn, even going as far as accusing the USSR of having killed 110 million people (Le Monde 1976). This is an exaggerated case but symptomatic of Cold War propaganda. One of the most well-known discourses stemming from the Cold War is the comparison between Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin: they are totalitarian twins. Popularized by Arendt (1907-1975), she identifies Nazi Germany and Stalin's USSR as the only two totalitarian regimes. More precisely, Germany after 1938, and the USSR in the 1930s (Arendt 2018 [1951]: 56-57). In "The Origins of Totalitarianism" (1951), Arendt describes the typology of totalitarianism. Her methodology is derived from Montesquieu (Ibid: 16 and 28.). The latter designates three types of regimes: the Republic, the Monarchy, and Despotism. Here is his definition of despotism: "(...) in despotic rule, one person, without law or rule, drives everything by his will and whims." (Montesquieu 2019 [1748]: 70). This regime is characterized notably by the imposition of terror, fear (Ibid: 51). For Arendt, the terms totalitarian and despotic are almost similar: "The proximity between totalitarian governments and despotic regimes is quite evident and extends to almost all areas." (Arendt 2018 [1951]: 48). The totalitarian regime differs from the despotic regime in that, while the despotic regime is without law or rule, the totalitarian regime obeys the great Laws of history and any opposition to progress, justified by these great laws (historical materialism, racism, etc.), will be eliminated. (Ibid 41-42). The aim here is not to debate whether, firstly, the term totalitarian is relevant to describe a political regime and whether, secondly, the USSR under Stalin was a totalitarian regime. In fact, the question is whether the comparison between Hitler and Stalin, made under the banner of totalitarianism, is pertinent. The thesis is that, as described by Arendt and as propagated during the Cold War, this comparison is not relevant. Among other reasons, because this term is biased by Cold War propaganda, the Nazi regime is, in many respects, much closer to the American and British regimes, Nazi extermination camps are far from comparable to Soviet gulags, and, far from being a homogeneous bloc, the Soviet Communist Party was a place of numerous heterogeneous debates and did not have the technical means to impose a totalitarian regime. The Cold War The use of the term totalitarianism does not specifically come from Arendt. Before her, authors like Horkheimer (1895-1973) and Adorno (1903-1969) speak of totalitarianism to draw parallels between the Third Reich and the extreme violence of Western capitalist countries towards colonies and the poorest within the metropolises (Losurdo 2004: 115-116). Simone Weil (1909-1943) will compare Nazi Germany to the USSR, but will draw more comparisons between the Third Reich and colonial empires (Ibid). According to Weil, the reign of Louis XIV (1643-1715) is already marked by a proto-totalitarianism, due to its "reckless and unscrupulous expansionism" (Ibid: 116). It is necessary to first understand that Arendt's typology of totalitarianism spans three works. In the first two volumes, she includes countries like France, due to its antisemitism, and England for its colonial empire, or denounces the totalitarian practices of Israel towards Arab populations in 1948 (Losurdo 2004: 118-119). It is only in the third volume that she draws a comparison between the USSR and Nazi Germany, published at the beginning of the Cold War. Thus, countries like Mussolini's fascist Italy (1922-1943), which even claimed to be totalitarian, will not be considered totalitarian regimes, nor will Franco's Spain (1936-1975) or Salazar's Portugal (1932-1968) (Ibid: 119). Two of these countries, Portugal under Salazar and Italy, will join NATO, whose main goal is to defend against the USSR. For Arendt, these regimes become "only" single-party dictatorships (Ibid: 124). As she indicates in "The Origins of Totalitarianism": "Neither Lenin nor Mussolini were totalitarian dictators, and they did not even know what totalitarianism really meant" (Arendt 2018 [1951]: 53). Thus, after 1951 and the beginning of the Cold War, criticisms of Western countries ceased, and the only "politically correct" thesis became the one that targeted only the Third Reich and the USSR (Losurdo 2004: 119). In essence, for Western leaders: "(...) the ideological goal was to equate Stalin and Hitler, even presenting them as 'twin monsters'." (Losurdo 2020: 156). In essence, far from being neutral, this narrative served well during the Cold War to equate Stalin and Hitler, rejecting any other regime that could have fit into the totalitarian category. The Hitlerian colonial project and the complicity of the West. In 1953, Arendt describes the world as "The struggle between the free world and the totalitarian world" [emphasis added] (Arendt 2018 [1953]: 87). But what exactly is the free world? Let's first recall that the United States still operates under apartheid, and France still holds a large number of colonies, and fights, or will fight, to keep them. This so-called "free" world actually has strong ties to Hitler's pre-war regime. Already in Mein Kampf, Hitler regards the United States, a country of white race with "unprecedented inner strength" (Losurdo 2010). In fact, Hitler's colonial project is rather simple, aiming to replicate in the East what the United States did in the West (Losurdo: 2004). The American Indians will be compared to the Slavs of Eastern Europe, a region which, for the Nazis, becomes the new Wild West (Ibid). And American colonization served as a motif to justify Nazi colonization in the East (Whitman 2017: 9). This comparison is evident from the establishment of the Nuremberg Laws. Indeed, for Hitler, the United States is a "healthily racist" country and serves as a model for the implementation of laws (Whitman 2017: 2). Nazi leaders visiting New York during the New Deal era saw it as a country of white supremacy (Ibid: 28). Many Americans traveled to Germany after 1933 on "study trips and ideological pilgrimages" (Losurdo 2004). More than just an ideological connection, there was even real complicity between the West and Nazi Germany. For the British, a division of spheres of influence between their empire and the Third Reich was considered a reasonable proposal (Shypley 2020: 155). British and Canadian interests encouraged Hitler's expansion project to the East, as long as it did not interfere with their affairs (Ibid: 156-157). When Liberal Prime Minister Mackenzie King (1926-1948) visited Hitler in 1937, he praised him, especially for his legal repression of communism (Ibid: 155). It is also worth noting that the British, French, Americans, and Japanese intervened in the USSR after the revolution, until 1922, to support the White Army. Thus, nearly 3000 Canadians were sent to counter the Bolsheviks (Ibid: 117). Anticommunism was therefore a common factor between fascism and liberal democracies. And as soon as these fascists came to power, they sabotaged labor rights and privatized many public enterprises, to the detriment of German and Italian workers (Parenti 1997: 7). In fact, it was to preserve capitalist interests that the British (and Canadians) fought against the Boers in South Africa, between 1899 and 1902 (Ibid: 110). As for the First World War, it was primarily a fight between colonial empires, to see who would take the largest share of the cake (Ibid: 115), at the expense of colonized peoples. It was for these same interests that Americans and Canadians supported right-wing coups in South America or Japanese fascism (Ibid: 132). During the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), Western countries simply turned a blind eye, hoping that the socialists would not take power (Ibid: 146-147). Thus: "We must reconcile with a difficult-to-digest fact: fascism was never ideologically far from the positions of the so-called Western democracies" (Shypley 2020: 149). The elimination of the individual for progress among the English and Americans. In Nazi Germany, Hitler would use the infamous death camps in his Final Solution as early as 1941. Among others, nearly six million Jews (including 1.3 million Soviet Jews), about six million Soviet civilians, and three million Soviet prisoners of war would be killed in this campaign [1]. The Eastern Front alone would see approximately 40 million casualties out of the 70 to 85 million deaths of the Second World War [2]. A colossal toll for what was essentially a colonial expansion project. For Arendt, a key element of totalitarianism is the elimination of the individual in favor of progress and the grand Laws of History: any hindrance must be crushed (Arendt 2018 [1951: 71-73). Thus, Stalin and Hitler are equated because both the Soviet leader and the führer used extermination methods to achieve their goals (Ibid: 41-42). However, thanks in part to archives, we know that the gulags have nothing to do with Nazi extermination camps, which have more in common with Western practices. Let's first examine the case of the United States and the British Empire. Firstly, if the concept of totalitarianism is to be adequate, it must be able to explain the use of concentration camps elsewhere than in Nazi Germany, such as those used by Europe in the colonies (Losurdo 2004: 142). Often it is non-Western researchers who have compared the treatment of colonial peoples to the genocidal practices of the Third Reich, rather than to the Soviet Union: for example, the deportation of indigenous peoples under Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt's attitude toward non-Whites, or England's treatment of the Irish, which will be similar to the treatment that indigenous peoples will undergo (Losurdo 2020: 156). Let's go back to the United States, which, as a reminder, is an inspiration for Hitler. For their expansion to the West, a recent estimate puts the number of deaths caused by the "American Holocaust" at 13 million (Smith 2017: 13). An expansion also marked by the annexation of part of Mexico, French and Russian possessions, and distant islands such as Hawaii, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines (where orders were given to kill all those over ten years old) (Chomsky and Prashad 2024: 15). After the Second World War, 2 million North Koreans, 3 million Vietnamese, nearly 500,000 Cambodians, 1.5 million Angolans, or 1 million Mozambicans would be killed by Americans (Parenti 1997: 25). It is also nearly 500,000 to 1 million communists killed in the Philippines between 1965 and 1966 by the regime supported by the CIA (Vann 2021). The wars against terrorism, after September 11, would cause nearly 4.5 million casualties (Berger 2023): unpopular wars and often without international support (Chomsky and Prashad 2024: 64). In fact, the United States acts as a godfather: "The United States cannot tolerate any country, regardless of its size, successfully challenging it." (Ibid: 65). Examples abound where the United States eliminates individuals for the advancement of its interests, yet it is not classified as a totalitarian regime. As for the British, one need only look at the horrors committed in India. Simply through Churchill's policies, in 1943, nearly 3 million Indians died in the Bengal famine (Safi 2019). Taking into account the excess mortality in India between 1820 and 1920, compared to its pre-colonial period, the number of victims rises to nearly 165 million people. (Sullivan and Heckel: 2023). In reality, even if this does not represent the number of direct deaths, which is rather estimated at tens of millions of people (Ibid), it is an interesting indicator. The British simply deindustrialized India and pillaged its wealth, regardless of the number of victims generated by this process, much like they imposed, at gunpoint, the opium trade in China (Chomsky and Prashad 2024: 69). They eliminated individuals for progress, but are not classified as totalitarian regimes. The USSR: the Gulags and the Purges Now let's move on to the Soviet Union, which is supposed to be equivalent to the Third Reich. Fundamentally, the Gulags and the Nazi extermination camps had nothing in common. The opening of archives after the fall of the USSR allows us to observe some important elements about the Gulags. At its peak, about 3 million people were incarcerated in the USSR, for a population of 164 million people. Approximately 1.5 million people died in these camps, more than half of them between 1941 and 1943 during the German invasion. In fact, during this invasion, the Soviet government created a special food fund for the Gulags, and the conditions of the prisoners improved as the war turned in favor of the Soviets. Far from being a tool to eliminate the bourgeoisie, the majority of detainees were there for non-political reasons and with sentences of less than five years. And in the Gulags, at least until 1937, most deaths occurred mainly due to malnutrition and poor organization: "(...) it was not the intention of homicide that horrors were caused: it is a significant example of how things can go wrong due to lack of adequate planning" (Losurdo 2020: 130). Unlike Nazi camps, there was no systematic extermination, no gas chambers or crematoriums, and the majority of prisoners were reintegrated into society. (Parenti 1997 : 79). However, these places remained prisons, with very difficult conditions and where numerous abuses against prisoners took place. It is important to place these camps, inherited from tsarist Russia, in their context. Unfortunately, Soviet Russia did not have the privilege of being a "normal" state: there was always a danger, a state of emergency. We have noted the Allied invasion, from 1918 to 1922, after the Revolution, in a country devastated by the First World War. There was also the war against the Kulaks, the threat from Japan and Germany from the 1930s, or the Trotskyist front which called for a Second revolution just before the Nazi invasion. The German threat should not be taken lightly: the Third Reich openly called for the "Germanization" of Eastern Europe and the enslavement of its millions of inhabitants, with the complicity of the Western powers. There was also the need to industrialize the country, under penalty of death. Joseph Stalin declared in 1931, ten years before the German invasion: "Lenin said on the eve of October: 'Either death or catching up with and surpassing the advanced capitalist countries.' We are 50 to 100 years behind the advanced countries. We must cover this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we will be crushed." Far from being a homogeneous bloc, the 1930s in the USSR and within the party were marked by immense chaos at the administrative level: "If the Soviet government was a dictatorship, or tried to be, it certainly was not totalitarian" (Getty 2009 [1985]: 198). At the local level, the authorities were marked by disastrous incompetence, and Moscow sought more to know "what exactly was happening" than to impose a totalitarian rule. Stalin's role was that of an executor: to intervene occasionally, to correct certain policies, to consult experts, etc. It is in this confused, chaotic Soviet Union, threatened from the outside, that the Moscow Trials took place, where 681,000 people were executed. These purges were not the result of Stalin's own planning, but the result of this chaotic bureaucracy, internal party rivalries, the incompetence of certain politicians, etc. (Getty 2009 [1985]: 205-206). Stalin "... was an executive and reality forced him to delegate most of the authority to subordinates, who had their own opinions, interests, and clienteles" (Ibid). This is an extremely large number of individuals, and the authoritarian character of the Soviet regime should not be dismissed. However, these facts call into question Arendt's narrative that Stalin succeeded in rising to power after a fierce struggle against the peasants, and then against his political opponents. If the elimination of these individuals constitutes a criterion for placing the USSR in the category of totalitarian regimes, then we must include the United States and the British Empire. *This article was translated from French by the author using Chat GPT. Monographs and periodical articles Arendt, H. (2018 [1951]. La nature du totalitarisme, dans Idem, La nature du totalitarisme : suivi de Religion et politique (11-84), Paris : Éditions Payot. Arendt, H. (2018 [1953]. Religion et politique, in , La nature du totalitarisme : suivi de Religion et politique (87-140), Paris : Éditions Payot. Chomsky, N. et Prashad, V. (2024). Le retrait : La fragilité de la puissance des États-Unis : Irak, Libye, Afghanistan. Montréal : Lux éditeur. Getty, J. A. (2009 [1985]). Origins of the Great Purges : The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938. Cambridge University Press. Getty, A. J, Rittersporn, G. T. et Zemskov, V. K. (1993). Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years : A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence. The American Historical Review, 98(4), 1017-1049. Losurdo, D. (2004). Pour une critique de la catégorie de totalitarisme, Actuel Marx, 1(35), 115-147. Losurdo, D. (2020). Stalin : The History and Critique of a Black Legend. Losurdo, D. (2010). The International Origins of Nazism. Montesquieu (2019 [1748]). De l’esprit des lois: Anthologie. Paris : Flammarion. Parenti, M. (1997). Blackshirts and Reds : Rational Fascism & the Overthrow of Communism. San Francisco : City Lights Books. SHIPLEY, Tyler A. (2020). Canada in the World. Settler Capitalism and the Colonial Imagination, Ottawa : Fernwood Publishing. Smith, D. M. (2017). Counting the Dead: Estimating the Loss of Life in the Indigenous Holocaust, 1492-Present. Sullivan, D. et Heckel, J. (2023). Capitalism and extreme poverty: A global analysis of real wages, human height, and mortality since the long 16th century. World Development 161(Janvier 2023). Whitman (2017). Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law New Jersey : Princeton University Press. Web pages American Heritage Museum. « Eastern Front » https://www.americanheritagemuseum.org/exhibits/world-war-ii/eastern-front/#. Berger, M. (15 may 2023). Post-9/11 wars have contributed to some 4.5 million deaths, report suggests. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/05/15/war-on-terror-911-deaths-afghanistan-iraq/ Encyclopédie multimédia de la Shoah. (16 may 2019). « DOCUMENTER LE NOMBRE DE VICTIMES DE L'HOLOCAUSTE ET DES PERSÉCUTIONS NAZIES ». https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/fr/article/documenting-numbers-of-victims-of-the-holocaust-and-nazi-persecution Le Monde. (23 march 1976). « Soljenitsyne estime que les Espagnols vivent dans la " liberté la plus absolue. ». https://www.lemonde.fr/archives/article/1976/03/23/soljenitsyne-estime-que-les-espagnols-vivent-dans-la-liberte-la-plus-absolue_2961304_1819218.html Neygebauer, J. (18 february 2023) «Rattraper et dépasser»: le rôle de l’Allemagne dans l’industrialisation soviétique des années 1930, Russia Beyond, https://fr.rbth.com/histoire/89324-industrialisation-urss-aide-allemagne Safi, M. (29 march 2019). Churchill's policies contributed to 1943 Bengal famine – study. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/29/winston-churchill-policies-contributed-to-1943-bengal-famine-study. Vann, M. G. (23 january 2021). The True Story of Indonesia’s US-Backed Anti-Communist Bloodbath. Jacobin. https://jacobin.com/2021/01/indonesia-anti-communist-mass-murder-genocide [1] Encyclopédie multimédia de la Shoah. (16 may 2019). « DOCUMENTER LE NOMBRE DE VICTIMES DE L'HOLOCAUSTE ET DES PERSÉCUTIONS NAZIES ». https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/fr/article/documenting-numbers-of-victims-of-the-holocaust-and-nazi-persecution [2] American Heritage Museum. « Eastern Front » https://www.americanheritagemuseum.org/exhibits/world-war-ii/eastern-front/#. Author Marc-Antoine Dupuis, political scientist at the University of Québec in Montréal, Canada. Archives April 2024 Traditional societies usually had restrictions to prevent self-support land from being alienated outside of the family or clan. By holding that the essence of private property is its ability to be sold or forfeited irreversibly, Roman law removed the archaic checks to foreclosure that prevented property from being concentrated in the hands of the few. This Roman concept of property is essentially creditor-oriented, and quickly became predatory. Roman land tenure was based increasingly on the appropriation of conquered territory, which was declared public land, the ager publicus populi. The normal practice was to settle war veterans on it, but the wealthiest and most aggressive families grabbed such land for themselves in violation of early law. Patricians Versus the Poor The die was cast in 486 BC. After Rome defeated the neighboring Hernici, a Latin tribe, and took two-thirds of their land, the consul Spurius Cassius proposed Rome’s first agrarian law. It called for giving half the conquered territory back to the Latins and half to needy Romans, who were also to receive public land that patricians had occupied. But the patricians accused Cassius of “building up a power dangerous to liberty” by seeking popular support and “endangering the security” of their land appropriation. After his annual term was over he was charged with treason and killed. His house was burned to the ground to eradicate memory of his land proposal. The fight over whether patricians or the needy poor would be the main recipients of public land dragged on for twelve years. In 474 the commoners’ tribune, Gnaeus Genucius, sought to bring the previous year’s consuls to trial for delaying the redistribution proposed by Cassius. He was blocked by that year’s two consuls, Lucius Furius and Gaius Manlius, who said that decrees of the Senate were not permanent law, “but measures designed to meet temporary needs and having validity for one year only.” The Senate could renege on any decree that had been passed. A century later, in 384, M. Manlius Capitolinus, a former consul (in 392) was murdered for defending debtors by trying to use tribute from the Gauls and to sell public land to redeem their debts, and for accusing senators of embezzlement and urging them to use their takings to redeem debtors. It took a generation of turmoil and poverty for Rome to resolve matters. In 367 the Licinio-Sextian law limited personal landholdings to 500 iugera (125 hectares, under half a square mile). Indebted landholders were permitted to deduct interest payments from the principal and pay off the balance over three years instead of all at once. Latifundia Most wealth throughout history has been obtained from the public domain, and that is how Rome’s latifundia were created. The most fateful early land grab occurred after Carthage was defeated in 204 BC. Two years earlier, when Rome's life and death struggle with Hannibal had depleted its treasury, the Senate had asked families to voluntarily contribute their jewelry or other precious belongings to help the war effort. Their gold and silver was melted down in the temple of Juno Moneta to strike the coins used to hire mercenaries. Upon the return to peace the aristocrats depicted these contributions as having been loans, and convinced the Senate to pay their claims in three installments. The first was paid in 204, and a second in 202. As the third and final installment was coming due in 200, the former contributors pointed out that Rome needed to keep its money to continue fighting abroad but had much public land available. In lieu of cash payment they asked the Senate to offer them land within fifty miles of Rome, and to tax it at only a nominal rate. A precedent for such privatization had been set in 205 when Rome sold valuable land in the Campania to provide Scipio with money to invade Africa. The recipients were promised that “when the people should become able to pay, if anyone chose to have his money rather than the land, he might restore the land to the state.” Nobody did, of course. “The private creditors accepted the terms with joy; and that land was called Trientabulum because it was given in lieu of the third part of their money.” Most of the Central Italian lowlands ended up as latifundia cultivated by slaves captured in the wars against Carthage and Macedonia and imported en masse after 198. This turned the region into predominantly a country of underpopulated slave-plantations as formerly free peoples were driven off the land into overpopulated industrial towns. In 194 and again in 177 the Senate organized a program of colonization that sent about 100,000 peasants, women and children from central Italy to more than twenty colonies, mainly in the far south and north of Italy. The Gracchi and the Land Commission In 133, Tiberius Gracchus advocated distributing ager publicus to the poor, pointing out that this would “increase the number of property holders liable to serve in the army.” He was killed by angry senators who wanted the public land for themselves. Nonetheless, a land commission was established in Italy in 128, “and apparently succeeded in distributing land to several thousand citizens” in a few colonies, but not any land taken from Rome’s own wealthy elite. The commission was abolished around 119 after Tiberius’s brother Gaius Gracchus was killed. Civil War and Landless Soldiers Appian describes the ensuing century of civil war as being fought over the land and debt crisis: “For the rich, getting possession of the greater part of the undistributed lands, and being emboldened by the lapse of time to believe that they would never be dispossessed, absorbing any adjacent strips and their poor neighbors’ allotments, partly by purchase under persuasion and partly by force, came to cultivate vast tracts instead of single estates, using slaves as laborers and herdsmen, lest free laborers should be drawn from agriculture into the army. At the same time the ownership of slaves brought them great gain from the multitude of their progeny, who increased because they were exempt from military service. Thus certain powerful men became extremely rich and the race of slaves multiplied throughout the country, while the Italian people dwindled in number and strength, being oppressed by penury, taxes and military service.” Dispossession of free labor from the land transformed the character of Rome’s army. Starting with Marius, landless soldiers became soldati, living on their pay and seeking the highest booty, loyal to the generals in charge of paying them. Command of an army brought economic and political power. When Sulla brought his troops back to Italy from Asia Minor in 82 and proclaimed himself Dictator, he tore down the walls of towns that had opposed him, and kept them in check by resettling 23 legions (some 80,000 to 100,000 men) in colonies on land confiscated from local populations in Italy. Sulla drew up proscription lists of enemies who could be killed with impunity, with their estates seized as booty. Their names were publicly posted throughout Italy in June 81, headed by the consuls for the years 83 and 82, and about 1,600 equites (wealthy publican investors). Thousands of names followed. Anyone on these lists could be killed at will, with the executioner receiving a portion of the dead man’s estate. The remainder was sold at public auctions, the proceeds being used to rebuild the depleted treasury. Most land was sold cheaply, giving opportunists a motive to kill not only those named by Sulla, but also their personal enemies, to acquire their estates. A major buyer of confiscated real estate was Crassus, who became one of the richest Romans through Sulla’s proscriptions. By giving his war veterans homesteads and funds from the proscriptions, Sulla won their support as a virtual army in reserve, along with their backing for his new oligarchic constitution. But they were not farmers, and ran into debt, in danger of losing their land. For his more aristocratic supporters, Sulla distributed the estates of his opponents from the Italian upper classes, especially in Campania, Etruria and Umbria. Caesar likewise promised to settle his army on land of their own. They followed him to Rome and enabled him to become Dictator in 49. After he was killed in 44, Brutus and Cassius vied with Octavian (later Augustus), each promising their armies land and booty. As Appian summarized: “The chiefs depended on the soldiers for the continuance of their government, while, for the possession of what they had received, the soldiers depend on the permanence of the government of those who had given it. Believing that they could not keep a firm hold unless the givers had a strong government, they fought for them, from necessity, with good-will.” After defeating the armies of Brutus, Cassius and Mark Antony, Octavian gave his indigent soldiers “land, the cities, the money, and the houses, and as the object of denunciation on the part of the despoiled, and as one who bore this contumely for the army’s sake.” Empire of Debt The concentration of land ownership intensified under the Empire. By the time Christianity became the Roman state religion, North Africa had become the main source of Roman wealth, based on “the massive landholdings of the emperor and of the nobility of Rome.” Its overseers kept the region’s inhabitants “underdeveloped by Roman standards. Their villages were denied any form of corporate existence and were frequently named after the estates on which the villagers worked, held to the land by various forms of bonded labor.” A Christian from Gaul named Salvian described the poverty and insecurity confronting most of the population ca. 440: “Faced by the weight of taxes, poor farmers found that they did not have the means to emigrate to the barbarians. Instead, they did what little they could do: they handed themselves over to the rich as clients in return for protection. The rich took over title to their lands under the pretext of saving the farmers from the land tax. The patron registered the farmer’s land on the tax rolls under his (the patron’s) own name. Within a few years, the poor farmers found themselves without land, although they were still hounded for personal taxes. Such patronage by the great, so Salvian claimed, turned free men into slaves as surely as the magic of Circe had turned humans into pigs.” The Church as a Corporate Power Church estates became islands in this sea of poverty. As deathbed confessions and donations of property to the Church became increasingly popular among wealthy Christians, the Church came to accept existing creditor and debtor relationships, land ownership, hereditary wealth and the political status quo. What mattered to the Church was how the ruling elites used their wealth; how they obtained it was not important as long as it was destined for the Church, whose priests were the paradigmatic “poor” deserving of aid and charity. The Church sought to absorb local oligarchies into its leadership, along with their wealth. Testamentary disposition undercut local fiscal balance. Land given to the Church was tax-exempt, obliging communities to raise taxes on their secular property in order to maintain their flow of public revenue. (Many heirs found themselves disinherited by such bequests, leading to a flourishing legal practice of contesting deathbed wills.) The Church became the major corporate body, a sector alongside the state. Its critique of personal wealth focused on personal egotism and self-indulgence, nothing like the socialist idea of public ownership of land, monopolies, and banking. In fact, the Crusades led the Church to sponsor Christendom’s major secular bankers to finance its wars against the Holy Roman Emperors, Moslems, and Byzantine Sicily. Author Michael Hudson is an American economist, a professor of economics at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, and a researcher at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College. He is a former Wall Street analyst, political consultant, commentator, and journalist. You can read more of Hudson’s economic history on the Observatory. This article was produced by Human Bridges. Archives April 2024 3/28/2024 ‘Too Soon to Tell’: The Dialectics of Time and Revolutionary Struggle. By: Carlos L. GarridoRead NowIt is said that Zhou Enlai once, when asked about the impact of the French Revolution, replied that it was still ‘too soon to tell’. We tend to assume that the revolutionary simply fights for the future. An abstract progressivism looks backwards and sees nothing but a has-been, a completion, a fact, or series of facts, which can be narrated and judged with precision. For some, history, at best, conditions our present. It creates the potential, the horizon, for what can be actualized in the future. But history is left there, in the background. For the ahistorical mind and for the abstract historicist the past is past… it is dead. History is, as we Americans say, a done deal. Like a chauffeur, it brought us to our destination, the ‘present’. For this we pay and go our way. From these frameworks, sharing in their judgement of history-as-dead, a has-been, Enlai’s response is baffling. Cannot the impact of the French Revolution be answered clearly and precisely through the immediate events it produced? How can it be too soon to tell the impact of the revolution which sought to “realize the promises of philosophy”? Enlai’s response is not a cheap diplomatic answer to the foreign questioner. It expresses a profound insight on the temporality of revolutionary struggles, one not limited to the French Revolution. We are, of course, able to speak about the influence revolutionary movements have had… so far. But, in the final instance, none of these discussions can be conclusive. The question cannot be answered with full concreteness, since the questioned phenomenon is still being disclosed. The ‘impact’ of, say, the French Revolution, is still unfolding. Its meaning is still being fought for. This gets us to the key insight implicit in Enlai’s response: Revolutions aren’t simply about winning a future, realizing a ‘concrete utopia,’ as Bloch would say. They are, equally, about redeeming the past… they concern themselves with the fulfillment of the goals and aspirations of our ancestors in the struggle. Our fight is for the future, but it is also for the past. It is a struggle which prevents previous struggles from having died in vain. “History is rewritten in various periods,” Adam Schaff writes, “not only because new sources become accessible, but also because the newly appearing effects of past events make possible a new appraisal of the past.” Our construction of a new future is, at the same time, a reconstruction of the past. It allows us to shed light, retrospectively, on new meanings of past events – meanings which were implicit, latent, and which have been actualized through the construction of the new. For the dialectical materialist, revolutionary temporality is comprehensive – it understands and acts conscious of the interconnected and contradictory character of time. The present is seen as a launching off point for the realization of that which is in-itself, implicit, potential, Not-Yet. It is, also, a launching off point for that which is wrongly treated as a has-been, but which, as we know, is still becoming. For us, then, the future, past, and present are dialectically interconnected and interdependent. The present and future are determined by the past, but equally so, the past is determined by the present and future. This is, of course, a temporal unity of opposites… an objective contradiction in life. The future is found, as implication, in the past, and the past is found, as realization, in the future. A one-sided, reifying outlook cannot capture this complexity. An outlook which fears contradictions will be left astray, forced to castrate the temporal dialectic of the world to fit the neat categories in their heads. It is theoretical brumotactillophobia, a deep-seated fear in the dialectical intermingling of categories one hopes to keep purely apart. Enlai, as a proficient dialectician, was correct in his assessment of the French Revolution. It is still ‘too soon to tell’ precisely because the rational kernel, the progressive demands, of the revolution have yet to be fully realized. These find themselves unactualizable within the bourgeois form of life. They find their realization in the communist form of life, which, for most of the world, exists only implicitly/in-itself, as a hope which drives us to realize its latent potential. We have a world to win. And when it is won, we’ll secure for ourselves not only the future, but also the past. 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. This article was republished from the author's Substack, Philosophy in Crisis. Archives March 2024 On February 29, 2024, the Israeli army deliberately ran over a Palestinian man in Gaza City’s Al-Zaytoun neighborhood after he was arrested. The man was harshly interrogated by Israeli soldiers, who tied his hands with plastic zip-tie handcuffs before running him over with a military vehicle from the legs up. In order to ensure that he was thoroughly crushed, Israeli soldiers laid him on asphalt instead of an adjacent sandy area. The man had his clothes removed, since he was seen wearing only his underpants. When one looks at the body, one is confronted with the absolute unidentifiability of the man that it previously constituted: the individuality of the human being has been flattened into scattered, disfigured organs and parts. Colonial Reality How do we think about the comprehensively destroyed body? In mainstream liberal thought, the evisceration of a human being can be regarded as a “moral” failing, as a loss of “lives” that has to be prevented. Palestinians here figure merely as “victims” of terror; their redemption, consequently, lies in the normative abstraction of “peace”. The body of the victim is sensationalized and marketed as a blot upon the fabric of humanity so that people can be convinced in favor of the cessation of hostilities. Politics is reduced to “outrage,” while collective action is postponed to the day when everyone’s moral conscience has awoken. When this spontaneous moral awakening doesn’t happen, a sense of helplessness pervades. All this while, the individual can pride themselves over their distance from the violence of Hamas, which is considered as a myopic outburst without any political vision. This is clear in renowned Marxist philosopher Etienne Balibar’s response to the Palestine crisis. He says that Hamas’ October 7 military operation can’t be justified because it was “accompanied by particularly odious crimes against the Israeli population: the murder of adults and children, torture, rape and kidnapping.” These “exterminist massacres…replicated the massacres perpetrated by the Jewish paramilitaries on Palestinian villages during the Naqba.” All the supposed atrocities committed by Hamas have been debunked as Zionist propaganda. Most of the 1,154 Israelis that the government claims were killed by Palestinians were actually killed by the Zionist state itself. This is the result of Israel’s Hannibal Directive, which authorizes the killing of Israeli soldiers if they fall into enemy hands. The story about the killing of babies was propagated without evidence, being based on the words of Major David Ben Zion – an extremist settler who has explicitly called for violence against Palestinians. Claims about rape were established through a fraudulent New York Times investigation, which was published even though not a single rape victim was found. Balibar’s willingness to accept the demonization of Palestinian resistance is rooted in the aforementioned logic of liberal peace, wherein clean, uncluttered thought is prioritized over the spiraling movement of anti-colonial resistance. Any counter-attack on Zionist settler-colonialism is said to be caught within the confines of the extant social reality. Palestinians and Israelis, then, become two sides of an overarching situation, continuously mirroring each other in terms of their deplorable violence. An exit from this situation can be conceived only in an external manner, as the intervention of a supervening agency. Thus, Balibar says that the only possible outcome consists in the intervention of the international community and its institutions, “demanding an immediate ceasefire, the release of the hostages, the prosecution of the war crimes committed by both sides, and the implementation of the countless UN resolutions that have gone unheeded.” But he himself adds that this desired resolution has no chance of happening because “institutions have been neutralized by the major or medium-sized imperialist powers, and the Jewish-Arab conflict has once again become an issue in the maneuvers they engage in to determine spheres of influence and networks of alliances, in a context of cold and hot wars.” Geopolitical and regional power dynamics “obliterate any effective international legality. We are in a circle of impotence and calculation from which there is no escape. The catastrophe will therefore carry to term, and we will suffer the consequences.” Impotence – this becomes the fate of a liberal-pacifist strategy that wants to separate the Palestinian question from any contaminating influence of concrete geopolitical and social actors. In order to build an alternative to Balibar’s (anti)politics of impotence, consider these words by him: “I see the massacre on October 7th involving various atrocities perpetrated against civilians as a pure terrorist action (also in the literal sense: meant to spread terror), which forces to confer a terrorist character upon the organization itself.” Instead of disavowing this characterization, I want to interpret it literally: yes, a war of national liberation does intend to spread terror among the settlers so that the sense of security enjoyed by the colonial system can be upended. Colonial society in its entirety should be woken out of its racist insularity by being forced to pay the price of occupation, just as the colonized pay the price for national oppression. Terror should be felt on both sides. When anti-colonial practice inflicts damage upon structures of brutality through the deployment of terror, the entire alliance of imperialist states comes together to contain the movement. Therefore, when Balibar says that a “terrorist character” should be conferred upon Hamas, he forgets that this has already been done through sanctions and terror lists created by states of the Global North. But these instruments of repression have had a counterproductive effect, introducing a form of delinking among the entities that are at the receiving end of imperialist strangulation. In the words of Max Ajl: “As political organizations were “maximally” coerced and quarantined, they made mutual linkages. Delinking led to a type of regional collective self-reliant security doctrine, architecture, and technological and military coordination. Imperialism built an inadvertent scaffolding for its opponents’ ideological and political goals.” Thus, anti-colonial terror lays bare the contours of confrontation, imposing upon us the stark divide of national liberation and imperialism. Operation Al-Aqsa Flood has heightened the antagonism between the colonizer and the colonized, with the entire globe feeling the reverberations of this binarized division. As the divide between national liberation and colonialism is sharpened, amplified, and simplified, one can’t say that both the sides are involved in a cycle of violence, wherein each mimes the other in the performance of cruelty. In order to say that the colonizer and the colonized are similar in terms of their violent acts, one has to compare this violence against a common standard of peace. But the peculiarity of colonialism consists in the fact that there is no unified notion of peace. Frantz Fanon elaborates: “The zone inhabited by the colonized is not complementary to the zone inhabited by the colonizers. The two zones confront each other, but not in the service of a higher unity. Governed by a purely Aristotelian logic, they follow the principle of mutual exclusion: There is no conciliation possible, one of the terms is superfluous”. Since Balibar wants to establish a similarity between the violence of Hamas and Israel, he has to acknowledge that he is comparing both these forms of violence from a higher standpoint of peace. And this is exactly what he does. He writes that the aim of Hamas’ October 7 attack was “to provoke a response of such violence that the war would enter a new, truly “exterminationist” phase, obliterating forever the possibilities of the two peoples living together.” Possibilities – this is a key word of liberal ideology, as it presupposes that the colonial situation always contains a reservoir of morality, a hope of reconciliation. However, colonialism is an irreconcilable struggle between two opposing forces. Even if Hamas had remained completely quiet, Israel would have maintained its genocide of Palestinians. Settler sovereignty can only be ensured through the perpetually enacted destruction of indigenous presence. The mere fact of Palestinian existence is a threat to Israel. Hamas’ military operations don’t determine the character of Israeli response. The response of Israel is ingrained in the structure of colonialism, which mandates the extermination of the native. That’s why Balibar is wrong to say that Operation Al-Aqsa Flood has erased the “possibilities” of peace. There never was such a possibility. In a colonial situation, possibilities are created by cracking open the shell of frozen impossibilities. This brings me back to the dismembered body of the Palestinian man. The colonial violence enacted upon this body can’t be judged against a higher notion of morality, as colonialism drives back all ethereal ideological words into the soil of struggle. In order to understand the crushed body, one has to analyze the concrete causes that have brought about this kind of death. Without these causes, we will end up in the fantasy world of liberal ethics, where everything is subordinated to the judgmental gaze of a contemplative observer. Here, it is instructive to read Nikolai Bukharin’s explanation of the materiality of the body: Now man is a very delicately organized creature. Destroy this organization, disorganize it, take it apart, cut it up, and the “mind” at once disappears. If men were able to put together this system again, to assemble the human organism, in other words, if it were possible to take a human body apart and put it together again just as one may do with the parts of a clock, consciousness would also at once return; once the clock has been reassembled it will operate and start to tick; put together the human organism, and it will start to think. Comparing a body to a clock – this seems offensive the sensibilities of liberal morality where “humanity” is constantly touted as an inviolable construct. However, a mechanical perspective is appropriate for the politics of anti-colonialism, where one mourns not the violation of the body’s humanity but its disorganization by specific actors. In politics, the disorganized body is reassembled through collective action, through the gathering of masses that preserves the desire for life through concrete practices of disobedience and construction. This organized mass targets the entity that is responsible for the disorganization of bodies, namely the Zionist state. If violence needs to be deployed in the struggle against colonialism, then it is fully justified. It is simply an instrument that assists in the reassembly of bodies through the disassembly of the colonial enemy. Strategies of Civility Balibar believes that violence is not a mere instrument. In his book Violence and Civility: On the Limits of Political Philosophy, he states that “political violence can never be completely controlled. One cannot simply use it as a means in the service of certain ends…without oneself feeling the ambivalent effects of its use, “deliberate” or not.” Violence, accordingly, can no longer be thought as “a means or an instrument employed to accomplish something else…It is, rather, the uncertain stakes of a confrontation with the element of irreducible alterity that it carries within itself.” This “irreducible alterity” refers to the fact that violence “exceeds the purposes guaranteeing it a permanent place in the economy of power and production.” It is never entirely functional, as it “exceeds the intentions and escapes the control of those exercising violence”. This dysfunctionality has been foregrounded through the defeat of the “ideologies of modernity” that believed in the “grand narrative of progress”. This grand narrative can be summarized in the thesis of the “convertibility” of violence: “the consequences of the most massive acts of destruction are ruins and mourning, but they cannot not be constructive (or reconstructive), even as they destroy.” The “historical optimism or faith in the meaning of history” has been lost with the defeat of revolutionary projects. These projects practiced counter-violence, which Balibar classifies as a simplistic “inversion” of ruling class violence. Socialist revolutions believed that they that they must reduplicate bourgeois violence if they are to properly “monopolize” it. This monopolization is “dangerous for the very people who wield and institute them”. Why? “[B]ecause they are nothing other, at the limit, than crystallized or stabilized violence and, in the final analysis, the relative stabilization, by groups and individuals in a given society, of their own violence – in the form of a distantiation and unequal distribution, a more or less permanent appropriation of the means of violence by some of them.” Balibar believes that the hierarchical foundation of revolutionary counter-violence – its status as an unequal distribution of force – was overlooked due to the construction of a grand narrative, namely class struggle as the “motor of history”. This narrative of history demarcated a new division between “revolutionary” violence and “counterrevolutionary” violence. The latter was excluded “from the meaning of history” as it was regarded as an obstacle to the revolution. Insofar as revolutionary projects dogmatically justified their violence through the construction of a facile grand history, they failed to engage with legitimate disagreements and antagonisms. Any dynamic that didn’t agree with state policy was classified as “counterrevolutionary”. This initiated a “truly suicidal process” of increasing repression. State institutions and police apparatuses in socialist societies came to replicate the hierarchical structure of the enemies against whom they were fighting. According to Balibar, globalization has operated a “practical refutation of the grand schemes of the intelligibility of politics”. Both bourgeois and post-revolutionary states depended upon the primacy of the nation, which functioned as a form of “collective subjectivity” integrating individuals “in the process of historical universality (patriotism, civic duty).” Insofar as globalization has diminished the significance of the nation, it has destroyed the myth of a unified history. Today, events no longer unfold as part of an evolving chain of meaningful collective action. Conflicts no longer oppose a “negative” to a “positive”. Rather, “the intrinsic complexity or order of multiplicity that characterizes conflict” introduces a new reality that can’t be captured by the binaries of revolutionary counter-violence. These binaries assumed that conflict would birth progress. However, progress has been replaced by the explosion of myriad forms of “extreme violence” (environmental catastrophe, ethnic wars, etc.) that don’t contribute to any grand narrative. This form of violence that is not part of the “universal meaning” of history is “inconvertible” violence i.e. violence that can’t be incorporated into a teleological narrative. Inconvertible violence shows that totalizing discourses will always fail in their attempt to convert all violence into social stability. An inconvertible remainder inevitably haunts the unity of grand narratives. As Balibar remarks, “the history of society or the field of politics is that of an excess or irreducible remainder of violence (if only latent violence) over the institutional, legal, or strategic forms for reducing and eliminating it.” Insofar as inconvertible violence lies outside the justificatory web of totalizing discourses, it directly attests to the entanglement of politics with antagonisms, the fact that politics is not a stable and absolute idea but a form of fragile power relation. This fragility is present in extreme violence, which is shorn of any larger narrative of progress. Consequently, extreme violence is faced with the abyss of indeterminacy, the inability of a justification to permanently ground politics. Instead of accepting the indeterminacy of politics, extreme violence aims to tear apart social bonds in order to generate security. That’s why it targets “the humanity in man, the very fact of inclusion in the human race,” an impossible task that needs to be repeated in order to guarantee a temporary sense of “omnipotence”. Extreme violence thus reveals an “incompressible minimum,” an excess that can’t be eliminated: “individuality is not a simple totality which could be circumscribed in a unique discourse, a unique way of life; there always remains an indefinite multiplicity of “parts,” relationships, and fluctuations which exceed such an imaginary project, and wind up subverting it.” Balibar asks us to accept the groundlessness of politics that is revealed in a perverse fashion by the anxieties of extreme violence. Instead of eliminating the threat of conflict (which extreme violence tends to do), we should accept the fundamental conflictuality of politics itself. Not all violence can be converted into the teleology of a social order. There always remains an inconvertible remainder that disturbs the stability of discourses. The ends for which we want to deploy violence are overpowered by an excess of violence that we wrongly relegate to mere means. Balibar writes: “violence can’t be simply the other of politics, unless we want to imagine a politics without powers, power relations, inequalities, conflicts, or interests, which would be tantamount to a politics without politics.” The acknowledgement of violence as a conflictual dynamic that can’t be suppressed points us towards the “precariousness” of politics, the fact that it can’t be guaranteed once and for all by a grand historical narrative. Instead, politics is constituted by an “infinite circularity”: a political action depends on its own movement of permanent negotiation, instead of being subordinated to an invariant foundation. When this circularity is ignored, we enter the realm of extreme violence where one engages in the impossible search for a metaphysical foundation. As Balibar puts it: [We need] to conceive of politics…as an absolute “fiction,” or an institution with no foundation that is necessarily and irremediably contingent…The sole “foundation” is a negative one, terror or extreme violence (or a combination of the forms of extreme violence, which is, precisely, terror). The alternative, it is the aleatory, purely practical possibility of avoiding terror, of deferring it more or less completely and for a relatively protracted period. The aleatory mode of politics leads to “civility,” wherein politics doesn’t renounce the imperative of liberatory violence but attempts to combat its “nihilism” through careful controls. This enables Balibar to contrast the nihilistic tendencies of revolutionary counter-violence to “anti-violence,” which denotes “resistance to the reactive violence that violence itself elicits when it is generalized”. Thus, the anti-violence of civility allows a mass movement to “take a distance from itself” and engage in self-critique. There always has to be a space where people can “reflect on the consequences and aftereffects of their own “social movements” when they confront a violent social order or a legal state of injustice”. In other words, civility is a second-order reflection that prevents mass movements from falling prey to unthinking “barbarity”. It is the practice that pits careful reflection against uninformed action. As Balibar notes, “we must take risks and know which risks we take”. My objection is that the notion of civility ontologizes politics by tying it to the “ultrapolitical” instance of contingency or groundlessness. This is evident when Balibar says that whenever progressive has succeeded in its objectives, “this has never happened in accordance with the logic of such politics alone. Rather, another politics, irreducible to any of these received political concepts, has always had to intervene in addition, or to provide politics with its underside, as it were: precisely the politics that I am hypothetically calling civility.” Even if we admit that politics is groundless, this doesn’t necessitate the transformation of this groundlessness into the “impolitic limit of politics”. On the contrary, the contingent nature of politics testifies to the fact that the effects of violence can’t be moderated by the reflective faculty of an enlightened intellect. When Balibar asks political militants to take risks while knowing which risks they are taking, he elides the collective character of politics, wherein decisions are outside the remit of knowledge. Knowledge presupposes a relation of correspondence between the knower and the object that is to be known. In politics, the risks that are to be known are outside of one’s grasp since their effects come into display only when they join the general field of social reality. Unless we take risks, we are never going to know their precise character. Balibar knows that politics is aleatory, that it can’t be provided with a permanent foundation. But he turns this very fact of contingency into a guiding principle that can be implemented by people when they undertake politics. This accords a transcendental authority to the power of abstract reflection, which swoops in from afar to judge if a specific political action is respecting the contingency of politics. In concrete cases, this leads to a vague democratic ideology that repeats anti-communist and pro-imperialist falsities. The Ideology of Bourgeois Democracy The ontologization of politics is visible in Balibar’s comments on the Russia-Ukraine war. He says that the rationale behind the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine was two-fold. First, Russia wanted to “rebuild the Empire that had been formed over centuries under the tsarist regime and sanctified by the messianic mission of “Holy Russia”, then secularized and expanded by Stalin under the name of communism, now resurrected with the help of a virulent nationalist ideology that counterposes an idealized traditional “Greater Russia” or “Eurasia” to the “degenerate” democratic West.” He never explains why Stalin’s rule represented a form of imperialism. He merely mentions the Holodomor – the 1932-33 famine that killed Ukrainian peasants. Balibar regards the Holodomor as part of the “greatest genocides of the 20th century,” putting it on par with the Holocaust. This interpretation takes part in an anti-communist model that attributes the Ukrainian famine to the evil intentions of Stalin. According to Mark B. Tauger, “the famine was not limited to Ukraine, but affected virtually the entire Soviet Union, and resulted first of all from a series of natural disasters in 1931–32 that diminished harvests drastically”. It is illogical to say that Stalin killed Ukrainian peasants, because “the Soviet regime depended for its survival on the peasantry and relied on the peasants to overcome the famine, which they did by producing a much larger harvest in 1933, despite the tragic famine conditions in which they worked.” This shows that “collectivization allowed the mobilization and distribution of resources, like tractors, seed aid, and food relief, to enable farmers to produce a large harvest during a serious famine, which was unprecedented in Russian history and almost so in Soviet history.” It is also important to remember that it was farm collectivization that strengthened the Soviet state against the Nazi army “by ensuring the priority of Red Army soldiers and war workers over peasants in the wartime allocation of food.” Without the defeat of Germany by the Soviets, Hitler would have achieved domination over continental Europe, possibly leading to Britain’s withdrawal from the conflict and hindering American support to Europe. Top of FormThus, when we look beyond the decontextualized invocation of the famine, we can observe how the Soviet Union pre-empted the spread of fascism and then brought about large-scale, revolutionizing changes in Ukrainian society. It turned a largely agricultural and illiterate country into a highly industrialized nation in the developed world. For instance, the first computer in the USSR was developed in Kyiv. With Soviet collapse, Ukraine’s industry suffered greatly due to open theft and deterioration. Ukraine couldn’t find any market for its industrial goods after the destruction of Soviet trade links. The absence of concrete analyses is also present in the equivalence that Balibar makes between the Holodomor and the Holocaust. Jaquelin Coulson notes that the Holodomor has functioned as a nationalist narrative in the building of Ukraine, mobilizing hatred not only against Russians (who are constructed as a foreign, invasive Other) but also against Jews. In wartime Soviet Ukraine, Nazi occupiers used public accounts of the famine to stoke anti-Semitic sentiments, blaming the Jews for committing genocide against Ukraine. Since its establishment in 1929, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) framed “Judeo-Bolshevism” as a powerful threat to Ukrainian nationalism, thus carrying out violent acts against Ukrainian Jews. This anti-Semitic worldview led to the belief that Jews had somehow caused, benefited from, or escaped the famine. Levko Lukyanenko, author of the Declaration of Independence of Ukraine, thought that the Jews were in control of the Soviet government when the supposed genocide took place. By not undertaking a historically grounded dissection of the Ukrainian famine, Balibar partakes in the politics of “competitive atrocity” wherein suffering is inflated as a unique, immoral event instead of being referred to its socio-structural contexts. Balibar says that the imperial ambitions of Russia are being reinvented through the dichotomy of a traditionalist “Greater Russia” or “Eurasia” and a “degenerate” democratic West. This is a purely culturalist analysis that overlooks the actuality of geo-economic politics. A Eurasian project is not about traditionalist and imperialist ideology but about the reduction of European countries’ dependence on the US-led unipolar world order through trade with Russia and China. Due to the war in Ukraine, Europe has reduced its use of Russian gas, thereby increasing its dependence on costlier US liquefied natural gas (LNG). The US has exploited this energy crisis by selling its LNG to Europe at high prices. This allows the US to exercise greater influence on European foreign policy. What Balibar characterizes as the traditionalism of present-day Russia is not the core component of the country’s reigning politics. Rather, Russian pragmatically operates according to multiple ideologies that can challenge the legitimacy of the US-led world order and thus, help combat imperialist attacks against Russia. Western observers have accused Russia of being traditionalist because they overemphasize the conservative and authoritarian elements that compose Putinism. What they overlook is the fact that these ideologies are said to be against the excessive liberalism and globalism of the West. Thus, what matters for Putin is a sovereigntist position against the West, one that uses patriotism against an interventionist Western liberal order. The 2023 report “Russia’s Policy Towards the World Majority,” published by the most influential foreign policy institutes of Russia, argues that US unipolarity is being challenged by a new coalition that is not “anti-West” but “non-West”: it is not ideologically hostile to the West but finds itself opposed to the objective interests of the Global North. This opposition manifests itself in support for a multipolar world order where nation-states are free from imperialist influence and thus more permeable to popular influence. As the report states: The extremist mutation of the liberal idea currently underway in the West should be classified as a specific product of Western civilization not subject to internationalization. There is a need for our own response – agreeable with the cultural and philosophical traditions of different civilizations – to the most acute challenges to human development ranging from environmental issues to ethical problems related to modern technologies. Blindly following the Western agenda is not just useless but is also harmful. The distinction between “anti-West” and “non-Western” is important because it highlights that Russia’s illiberal and traditionalist biases are not reflective of imperial ambitions. Instead, they are a subordinate component of a sovereigntist position that supports multipolarization. Insofar as multipolarization will democratize the world order, it needs to be critically welcomed even as we oppose the traditionalist streaks of Russian politics. Second, Balibar writes that the Russian invasion was a “preventive political war” aimed at crushing “the liberal-democratic orientation of the Ukrainian state” so that it didn’t inspire reformist changes in Russia itself. He says that the Maidan-Revolution of 2013-14 was a “democratic invention” despite all its weaknesses, like sectarianism, oligarchical manipulation, political corruption, and involvement of militias. For Balibar, the ultimately “democratic” character of the Maidan-Revolution lies in the fact that “it initiated…a collective move towards the official values of the Western European democratic systems (however “oligarchic” they can be themselves, but leaving room for political pluralism) and it could represent a model for the citizens of the Russian federation.” So, the “democratic” character of the Maidan revolution lies in its espousal of bourgeois-liberal democracy. It is hardly a foregone conclusion that the political pluralism of liberal democracy is superior to other regimes. Pluralist democracy can very well function as the most efficient means of authoritarianism. This is what happened in the Maidan revolution. The 2014 Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych tried to play Russia and the European Union (EU) off one another to get the best economic deal for Ukraine. Thus, he became the target of Western-backed business interests and Russophobic neo-Nazi groups. With US backing, the latter staged a coup and forced Yanukovych to flee to Moscow. The overthrow of the elected president came to be known as the Maidan Revolution, named after the Kiev square that hosted the protests. On February 6, 2014, an anonymous entity leaked a call between US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and US ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt. They could be heard saying that Arseniy Yatsenyuk is America’s choice to replace Yanukovych, which he did. The new government adopted pro-EU and pro-NATO policies. It imposed restrictions on the teaching of the Russian language in eastern Ukraine and Crimea, provoking resistance among the inhabitants. With the support of the majority of the population, expressed in a referendum, Putin joined Crimea to Russia. In the same year as Russia’s annexation of Crimea, separatist leaders supported by Moscow seized Donetsk and Luhansk – populated primarily by Russian ethnic minorities striving for independence – and declared the “People’s Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk”. These events angered ultra-nationalist Ukrainian forces; they declared war on the people that were opposing Yatsenyuk’s Euro-American posture. So, far from being an instance of “democratic invention,” the Maidan revolution was a maneuver through which Northern imperialist forces staged a coup, promoted neo-Nazi forces in the state apparatus, and launched a war against Russian ethnic minorities in the country. This liquidated the sovereignty of Ukraine and plunged it “into a simulated semicolonial situation without being directly occupied and divided but nevertheless reprogrammed to launch a war against itself and to point offensive weapons at neighboring Russia”. Instead of initiating a democratic resurgence, liberal democracy functioned as a framework for a NATO-Neo-Nazi axis that wanted to wage war against Russia without any concerns for the human cost. However, Balibar ignores all this by merely asserting that “there is a complete dissymmetry for a democratic country between the perspectives of being taken and swallowed again by a backward-looking autocratic empire, and the perspective of being incorporated into a federation which creates or perpetuates inequalities, but has set up rules for negotiating participation.” In the end, we get an Orientalist assertion that replaces a concrete examination of the Russian social formation with an unverified faith in the goodness of bourgeois, Western democracy. Given that Balibar’s politics of civility forgoes the confrontation of social forces in favor of the reflective power of bourgeois democracy, it is no surprise that his discussion of the global significance of the Palestinian movement is oriented towards the abstract goal of “justice”. He says that both Ukraine and Palestine are united their pursuit of “justice”: “not only the justice that refers to a position in war, on one side or the other of the divide between aggressor and victim, or oppressor and resistant, but the justice that can acquire a universal resonance, the justice that confers a universalistic dimension upon the claim of rights that some actors embody in the war.” Both Ukraine and Palestine “appear as incarnations of universal principles of self-determination and resistance to oppression, reason why, in different parts of the world, there are today activists who make valuable efforts to simultaneously support and articulate the two causes.” This universalist perspective of justice is different from the logic of “campism” which sees the current conflagrations either “in terms of a conflict between “democracies” and “totalitarian states”, or a conflict between the “Western imperialism” (under US hegemony, organized by NATO) and the “emerging peoples” with a tricontinental basis.” Balibar wants to repudiate both these campist perspectives by emphasizing “the specific history of each war, each people, each territory in its own local terms” and by describing “the modalities in which a war has developed out of conditions and choices that were made by their own actors: Russians, Ukrainians, Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, with all their internal divisions and their complete history.” What is relevant to note here is that Balibar wants to replace the actual reality of geopolitical camps with the philosophically concocted fantasy of struggles that transcend these camps and strive for “justice” and “liberty”. The American Empire controls, through NATO and other modalities, 74.3% of all military spending worldwide. This amounts to more than US$ 2 trillion. Thus, “the single most important aspect of state power – that is, military power – the absolute central danger to the working classes of all countries, especially to the darker nations of the world, lies in the US-Led Imperialist Camp.” The struggles for “justice” and “liberty” that Balibar imagines obscure the contradiction between the imperialism of the American Empire and the people of Global South. He says that this division, “while remaining real (and crucial), is also compounded by other “global” phenomena,” namely “global warming and the environmental catastrophe,” which subvert “all borders in the world”. But ecological degradation itself is differentially distributed according to the socio-economic gradations of the world-imperialist system. Countries of the Global South are disproportionately affected by climate change due to the fact that global warming hits the hotter, low latitude, tropical, and subtropical regions of the earth especially hard. These countries are also generally poor due to imperialist factors such as underdevelopment, mal-development, poverty, corruption, and inequality which amplify each extreme weather event into social tragedies as communities suffer displacement, hunger, and heightened precarity. Balibar sees contemporary conflicts not as a division between “camps” but as a “globalized,” “hybrid” war. This hybrid war supposedly subverts the boundary of those camps by unleashing a quest for “justice” and “liberty” that is not reducible to geopolitical and military conflicts. We can see here how the politics of civility ends up with an abstract, contemplative mindset that wants to attain justice not through the struggle of camps but through another ethereal struggle that floats above all concrete divisions. In the end, this ethereal level of justice becomes synonymous with the defense of bourgeois democracy, since it contains the appearance of pluralism. Civility becomes a pro-imperialist prejudice that constantly rails against the hordes of “uncivil” masses who are not trained in the kind of reflection that bourgeois democracy teaches. In the real world, by contrast, conflicts are resolved not through careful contemplation but through “uncivil” antagonisms. Today, the most important division is between imperialism and humanity. The Palestinian cause can’t be separated from the struggle against US domination, a fact that is well understood by the Axis of Resistance (Iran, Syria, Yemen, Hezbollah, Iraq). Popular democracy can be realized only through strengthened national sovereignty that is capable of waging defensive wars against USA’s policy of sanctions, invasions, encroachment, and destabilization. As Ajl writes: “Wars of national sovereignty against imperialism are pro-working class… the contemporary axis plays a limited but real liberatory role in staving off state collapse in the countries near and around Palestine and shielding populations’ social reproduction and popular well-being against the reaper of accumulation-through-development.” The same logic of anti-imperialism applies to Russia. The country witnessed more than 25 million deaths due to the invasion of European fascists when it was governed by communists. Today, Russia is again a target of imperialist forces. The US-NATO camp wants “to permanently destroy Russia’s nuclear military capacity and install a puppet regime in Moscow in order to dismember Russia in the long term and replace it with many smaller, permanently weakened vassal states of the West.” Thus, we have a campist struggle that no one can escape. Any new horizon has to be born from within these camps, amidst the uncontrollable, contingent materiality of struggles. Revolutionary Movement The present-day Palestinian movement is giving us indications of what an alternative revolutionary politics can look like by erecting a sharp divide between the democratic ideology of bourgeois intellectuals and the militancy of the masses. On the one hand, intellectuals like Balibar are worried that Hamas is reproducing the violent mentality of Zionism. This is based on the assumption that the October 7 attack was an irrational outburst of primitive sentiments without any political rationale. That’s why politics can only entrusted to the reflective scrutiny of democratic discussions. In Balibar’s theory, such reflective scrutiny is provided by civility, which is a form of politics that can touch the ultra-political contingency of politics itself. This ultra-political contingency is present as the inconvertible violence that forms the limit-point of every political action. If we hubristically suppose that all violence can be converted into reason, we will end up with the fantasy of omnipotence in which all resistance is eliminated in a cycle of nihilistic violence. That’s why Balibar’s politics of civility wants us to respect the contingency of politics without attempting to hide it beneath fantasies of omnipotence. Thus, even though politics is tragic – groundless and without guarantees – this “tragedy of politics can become a politics of tragedy on the basis of the “ethical” decision that the risk of the perversion of the revolt is not a sufficient reason not to revolt.” In the paradigm of civility, people will revolt with the full knowledge that they are intrinsically impotent and can’t wholly eliminate antagonism. Thus, we get a “politics of tragedy” sustained by ethical reflection upon the groundlessness of politics. On the other hand, we have the mass action of Palestinian anti-colonialism wherein the dilemmas of politics are answered not through the philosophical invocation of ultra-political contingency but through the confrontation of forces on the terrain of social reality. Balibar simplifies divisions by dissolving them into a transcendental level of civility wherein the political actor can treat antagonisms in a peaceful manner. Instead of trying to eliminate the enemy, the enlightened political actor focuses on how antagonism can never be entirely eliminated, or how politics can never attain full stability. This knowledge curbs violence against the enemy and cultivates a more civil attitude. One can’t fail to emphasize how Palestinians are constantly asked to demonstrate their civility; their language has to remain perpetually aware of the kind of effects that it may have on others. This leads to a hyper-moderation of Palestinian behavior, where anything that is disliked by Israeli oppressors is deemed “anti-Semitic”. Mohammad el-Kurd writes: We were instructed to ignore the Star of David on the Israeli flag, and to distinguish Jews from Zionists with surgical precision. It didn’t matter that their boots were on our necks, and that their bullets and batons bruised us. Our statelessness and homelessness were trivial. What mattered was how we spoke about our keepers, not the conditions they kept us under—blockaded, surrounded by colonies and military outposts—or the fact that they kept us at all. In this situation, “simple ignorance” becomes a “luxury” for Palestinians. If we keep focusing on how the oppressed should regulate themselves so that they don’t fall into barbarity, we will forget that no matter how they behave, they will never be perfect enough for a dialogue with the oppressors. Balibar thinks that by being the “perfect victims” the oppressed will convince the oppressors to negotiate their antagonisms with them in a thoughtful manner. But this is never going to happen. Antagonisms are irreconcilable as long as they are not fought out to their end. El-Kurd rightly asks us to “renew our commitment to the truth, to spitting the truth”. Spitting is a physical expression of disgust, or aggression. It is an open declaration of hostility instead of a solely cognitive exchange of knowledge. Cognition and reflection fail to initiate the flow of ideas since the sea of thinking remains trapped in spaces of colonialism, the bodily realities of colonized and colonizing subjectivity. The flow of ideas will happen once their spatial encasements are burst open. Antagonisms have to jump-started through the act of spitting the truth, through violence against the colonialist. Balibar, in contrast, subscribes to a cognitive schema because regards antagonisms as concrete representatives of an ultra-political antagonism, which he designates as the “precariousness” of politics that we have to constantly recognize. Such an ultra-political antagonism doesn’t exist; in social formations, we only have concretely situated groups with concrete interests. These interests can’t be removed through careful reflection and discussion. On the contrary, they are material structures whose rigidity needs to be broken down through a concrete struggle of forces. This is what anti-colonial violence does by eroding the sense of entitlement enjoyed by colonizers and exposing them to the popular power of the colonized. In the midst of struggle, only a detached philosopher can ask the oppressed to use violence in a way that preserves the openness of antagonisms. This openness or precariousness of politics is not an idea that can be theoretically pondered upon or a reservoir of morality that can be used to practice civility. Rather, it is an emergent reality formed through the destruction of the oppressors. That’s why inconvertible violence as such doesn’t exist. The inconvertibility of violence is determined conjuncturally when political procedures of conversion encounter certain impasses/obstacles. Instead of staring at the impasse and turning it into a philosophical principle of precariousness, we need to use the impasse to reconfigure our own political perspective and carry on the struggle. The groundlessness of politics is not a tragedy that we need to codify into an ethical principle but a material fact out of which we need to weave the dynamic of political action. Politics is indeterminate and without guarantees, but this doesn’t mean that indeterminacy has to become a moral horizon. Instead, indeterminacy functions as the motor that renders politics inexhaustible and confronts it with obstacles that demand specific responses. Far from conforming to the reflective carefulness of civility, politics is like the uncivil act of flooding unleashed by Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, wherein hierarchies are flooded with the deluge of popular energy, a deluge that listens to nothing but its own undulating waves. Author Yanis Iqbal is an independent researcher and freelance writer based in Aligarh, India and can be contacted at [email protected]. His articles have been published in the USA, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India and several countries of Latin America. Archives March 2024 This is a section from the introduction to the author's edited and introduced anthology, Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview: An Anthology of Classical Marxist Texts on Dialectical Materialism. Dialectical Materialist Ontology In his Dialectical Materialism, Henri Lefebvre uses Marx’s Capital and Engels’s Dialectics of Nature to say that “the laws of human reality cannot be entirely different from the laws of nature.”[1] A similar sentiment is expressed in the posthumously published A Defense of History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic, where Lukács says that it is “self-evident” that “the dialectic could not possibly be effective as an objective principle of development of society, if it were not already effective as a principle of development of nature before society.”[2] Precisely because of this universal character, argued Lefebvre, is that dialectical materialism “acquires the full dimension of a philosophy: it becomes a general conception of the world, a weltanschauung and hence a renewal of philosophy.”[3] In the last section we defended the treatment of Marxist philosophy (i.e., dialectical materialism) as a weltanschauung, now let us present its ontological basis. Objective dialectics, i.e., the dialectical materialist ontology, first and foremost holds that the world is dominated by change and interconnection, “nothing is eternal but eternally changing.”[4] It acknowledges that “movement is itself a contradiction,” and that “contradiction propels movement.”[5] These are the basic premises of dialectics pertaining to the ontological constitution of the world. It is important to note, however, that these central premises make it an ontology of becoming, not being. Insofar as being is understood as an unchanging, pure, universal substratum, it is rejected as an explanatory category. If being, however, is understood as a constant “coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be,” that is, if it is understood as becoming, then it can be sustained as a foundational category in a dialectical materialist ontology.[6] Nonetheless, as Hegel noted, although “the first truth is to be found in becoming,” this first concrete category is still an abstract first step which gives way to a more concrete understanding of the world.[7] If we stop here, then, we have merely achieved the position of Greek (more specifically Heraclitan) dialectics mentioned above. Although, as Engels said, “the new age begins with the return to the Greeks – negation of the negation,” this return is mediated by half a millennium of metaphysically framed scientific studies,[8] and therefore, it is not a return to the same Greek dialectic, but to a richer (more concrete) one.[9] Hence, what is required is not just the understanding that everything is in constant motion and interconnection, driven by internal contradictory forces, but a concrete understanding of the mechanisms and structures through which these changes occur. The dialectical materialist ontology, as an ontology of becoming, is concerned with the “most general laws” of human and natural “historical development” and “of thought itself.”[10] Marx and Engels both agreed that these laws had already been discovered by Hegel, but in a mystified form. For instance, Marx says in a letter to Dietzgen that “The true laws of dialectics are already contained in Hegel, though in a mystical form,” and Engels similarly repeats this by saying that “all three [laws of dialectics] are already developed by Hegel… [but] foisted on nature and history as laws of thought, and not deduced from them.”[11] These ‘laws’ are 1) the unity and struggle of opposites, 2) the transition from quantity into quality and vice versa, and 3) the negation of the negation. It is important to note that Hegel never referred to them as ‘laws’; in his Logic[s] they are merely categories, little different than the plethora of other categories his logical unfolding of the concept introduces. However, the reason behind Marx and Engels’ classification of these Hegelian categories as ‘laws’ lies in the fact they can be seen in every ‘moment’ of the movement of Hegel’s concept, and most importantly, because Marx and Engels ‘re-discover’ them in the movement and interconnection of nature and society and postulate their objective existence as the source for their reflective (subjective) existence in the mind. These three dialectical laws, by being the most universal forms in which change occurs, are also the most abstract, and hence, serve as the base upon which a more concrete understanding of change and interconnection in smaller or larger organic totalities can take place. It is here where the accusations of simplifying dialectics usually begin. Once these three laws are established, it becomes a game of examples, whoever can fit the schema of these laws on nature, human society, history, or thinking the most wins. In treating these laws as a “sum total of examples,” Lenin argued, “dialectics usually receives inadequate attention.”[12] For Lenin the architype for this was Plekhanov, although at times, he argued, “the same is true of Engels.”[13] To be clear, the problem is not the examples in themselves, but when dialectics is en toto reduced to a collection of examples. When this reduction takes place, Chris Arthur is right to say that dialectics turns into a “lifeless formalism” which proceeds by “applying abstract schemas adventitiously to contents arbitrarily forced into the required shape.”[14] However, one must not confuse this vulgarization of dialectics to mean that one cannot provide examples in nature, society, or thinking that confirm these laws. Like we saw in the previous section, one can hold onto Marxism as a weltanschauung and simultaneously reject vulgarizations of this weltanschauung. Similarly, one can reject the reduction of dialectics to a basket of artificially foisted examples but still use examples to understand objective dialectics. After all, the central difference between the Hegelian and Marxist dialectics is the latter’s materialist position that dialectics is the ontological condition of the world, and only when this world is concretely understood does dialectical thinking emerge. It is necessary, then, to use concrete examples from the world to understand the world itself, and hence, grasp objective dialectics subjectively. The materialist dialectic, therefore, must walk a thin line between two precipices into idealist dialectics: on the one hand, if no concrete examples are used, the ‘dialectic’ would be purely mental, and hence, idealist; on the other hand, if examples are artificially fabricated out of an apriorist dialectical schema foisted onto the world like a cookie cutter, then the ‘dialectic’ one is proposing replicates at its core the same mistake of Hegel’s demiurgos, except at a much more vulgarized level, lightyears away from the genius with which Hegel espoused his. The theoretical panacea and balancing pole necessary to avoid falling into the precipices of idealism is the dialectical method of going from the abstract to concrete. Only in the rigorous process of investigation required for this method can one be sure that their examples are actually in-the-world, and not foisted on it by an abstract dialectical schema. An exposition of this method will have to wait until the following section. It is this context in which Engels deduces the dialectical laws in his scientific studies, and Marx in his economic studies. The examples they provide are concrete, and (esp. in the case of Engels) usually include comments on how science already accepted (in certain fields) these ‘laws’ but under different names. For instance, in Engels’ letter to Friedrich Albert Lange, he argues that the “modern scientific doctrine of reciprocity of natural forces [is] just another expression or rather the positive proof of the Hegelian development on cause & effect, reciprocity, force, etc.”[15] Let me now provide a few concrete examples in which these most general laws of change and interconnection can be observed. Recall that by being the ‘most general’ they are also the most abstract, and hence, each example is in itself insufficiently understood if the only thing one says is how one or another of these dialectical laws is observed in it. To be concretely understood, each of these examples must take the structural appearance of the laws as a mere starting point to the investigation of the phenomenon. The laws work like the study of a townhouse community; by knowing how the outside of each townhouse looks, one has grasped the most general fact in the community. This ‘most general’ fact can then serve as the abstract starting point for the concrete study of the internal structural differences in each household. One cannot claim to know the community by simply knowing the ‘most general’ fact, and similarly, by only knowing the differences in each household one is blind to the ‘most general’ fact that the object of one’s study is not independent houses, but a townhouse community. The Three Ontological Laws of Dialectics in Political Economy “The most important aspect of dialectics,” Hegel argued, is the “grasping of opposites in their unity.”[16] Similarly, Marx would say in Capital Vol. I that the “Hegelian contradiction [is] the source of all dialectic.”[17] Lenin would repeat this by saying that “the division of a unity into two and the cognition of its contradictory parts is the essence of dialectics.”[18] It is thus, with the law of the unity and struggle of opposites that we must begin, for the “condition for the knowledge of all processes in the world in their ‘self-movement,’ in their spontaneous development, in their real life, is the knowledge of them as a unity of opposites.”[19] It is this law which allows the understanding of the other two, for not only does it “furnish the key to the ‘self-movement’ of everything that exists; it alone furnishes the key to the ‘leaps,’ to the ‘interruption of gradualness,’ to the ‘transformation into the opposite,’ to the destruction of the old and the emergence of the new.”[20] Let us now see how Marx observes the functioning of this law in the realm of political economy. The law of the unity and struggle of opposites can be seen from the dawn of Marx’s Capital with the commodity, the “cell-form of bourgeois society” and “germ of all contradictions.”[21] Commodities, as Marx says, have an “internal opposition inherent in them,” namely, they are “at once use-values and values.”[22] As Roslyn Wallach Bologh adds, “the commodity is this contradictory relation, a totality of opposing moments: production of exchange value which excludes use value and the realization of exchange value which requires use value.”[23] The commodity, the “simplest, most ordinary and fundamental, most common and everyday relation of bourgeois society,” presents us with a clear example of the law of the unity and struggle of opposites.[24] Since, as Lenin said, the commodity is the “germ of all the contradictions,” we can see similar examples in more ‘concrete’ categories in Marx’s Capital.[25] For instance, merchant’s capital, Marx argues, “presents… a unity of opposing phases, a movement that breaks up into two opposing actions – the purchase and the sale of commodities.”[26] This cell-form of bourgeois society, as the unity of the opposing forces of exchange and use value (and in its metamorphosis of commodity and money), is the “most abstract form of crisis,” and contains within it (implicitly or in itself) the general crisis of capitalist production, which, in its periodic actualizations, provides the “manifestation of all the contradictions of bourgeois economy.”[27] In all the contradictions of capitalist production as a whole we have lucid examples of the law of the unity and struggle of opposites, and, as Marx adds, “the most abstract forms are recurring and are contained in the more concrete forms.”[28] In regard to social class, for instance, the capitalist mode of life is marked by the contradiction between the working and the capitalist class. These two classes are both struggling amongst themselves and in unity under capitalism, that is, capitalism contains – not externally, but in itself – two opposing forces whose struggle shapes its development. As Lenin argued, once the understanding of the unity and struggle of opposites is grasped, we are ‘furnished’ with the keys to understand the other laws of movement. The law of the unity and struggle of opposites, or what is the same, the law of the universality of contradictions, would be enriched by Mao Tsetung’s 1937 essay “On Contradiction.” Here, Mao develops important categories relating to the particularity of contradictions, further concretizing the dialectical materialist ontology and its ability to understand the concrete concretely. The first important categorial development is the notion of principal and secondary contradictions. As Mao notes, “there are many contradictions in the process of development of a complex thing, and one of them is necessarily the principal contradiction whose existence and development determine or influence the existence and development of the other contradictions.”[29] It becomes an imperative, therefore, to “devote every effort to finding [the] principal contradiction” in whatever complex process one is studying, for “once this principal contradiction is grasped, all problems can be readily solved.”[30] Likewise, Mao notes that in any contradiction, i.e., in any unity of opposites, there is always one antipole which is dominant. This is what he calls the principal aspect of a contradiction, it refers to the “aspect which has gained the dominant position.”[31] This dominant position is not static, but always subject to change; what is the principal aspect in one moment may turn into the non-principal aspect in another. Additionally, Mao refines the law of the unity and struggle of opposite by recapturing a distinction Lenin had already noted between antagonisms and contradictions. Lenin argued that “antagonism and contradiction are not at all one and the same… under socialism, the first will disappear, the second will remain.”[32] Mao clarifies this by showing that “antagonism is one form, but not the only form, of the struggle of opposites.”[33] Class societies are bound, sooner or later, to develop “the form of open antagonism” which shifts the class struggle into a moment of revolution.[34] In Gramscian terms, these are the moments when the emphasis is switched from the war of position (the battle for hegemony) to the war of maneuver, where the opposites engage in direct frontal attacks. Sometimes non-antagonistic contradictions develop into antagonistic ones, and likewise, antagonistic contradictions develop into non-antagonistic ones.[35] Contradictions obtain an antagonistic form in moments of explosion, when “open conflict to resolves old contradictions” takes place and new things are produced.[36] Recognizing whether a contradiction is antagonistic or not is fundamental to the process of resolving it. For instance, the working and the capitalist class are in an irreconcilable antagonism, one which can only be solved through the working class’s revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist class. The utopian socialists, for example, did not see the antagonistic character of this contradiction, and therefore, their ‘resolutions’ involved the harmonizing of class distinctions through an appeal to the benevolence of the owners. History has shown that the incorrect assessment of the relationship between the antipoles of worker and capitalist has produced unsatisfactory resolutions which either became relics of the 19th century, or, in the case of similar strategies by the social democrats, sustained the dominance of capital over labor. On the other hand, the contradiction between the peasantry and the working class is not, on most occasions, an antagonistic one; therefore, the resolution must take (and has taken) a radically different form, one which unites the peasantry and the working class, under the leadership of the latter, in the struggle for socialism. After having grasped the law of the unity and struggle of opposites, and how this general law was concretized by Mao, we may examine the law of the transition from quantity to quality and vice-versa. In the transition from money into capital we have an example of the law of the transformation of quantity into quality. For money to be transformed into capital, that is, into something qualitatively new, surplus-value needs to be created. For this to happen, it is necessary for a specific amount of money to be turned “into commodities that serve as the material element of a new product,” and further, to “incorporate living labor” onto this “dead substance.”[37] If the labor-power incorporated creates only the value necessary for the laborer’s subsistence, i.e., if it produces an equivalent to the exchange value it was bought for, then no surplus could be realized. However, what “really influenced” the buyer [i.e., the capitalist] of labor-power was “the specific use-value which this commodity possesses of being a source not only of value, but of more value than it has itself.”[38] To create surplus value, and hence, materialize the use value for which the labor-power was bought (viz., to be a source of “more value than it has itself”), that labor power must be extended beyond the time it took it to produce the amount of value it was bought for.[39] As Marx says, “if we compare the two processes of producing value and of creating surplus-value, we see that the latter is nothing but the continuation of the former beyond a definite point.”[40] This “definite point” is what Hegel call “nodal points” in his Logic[s], it is the moment when “gradual [i.e., quantitative] increase… is interrupted” and the result is “a leap from quantitative into qualitative alteration.”[41] The quantitative extension of the working day beyond the time necessary to produce the value the labor-power was bought for is how surplus-value arises. A quantitative accumulation of working hours, at a ‘definite point’ [i.e., nodal point], produces a qualitative leap and surplus-value comes about. Quantitative change has resulted in a leap into something qualitatively different. This qualitative leap into surplus-value, “a process which is entirely confined to the sphere of production,” creates the conditions for the “metamorphosis of money into capital,” another qualitative leap effected by the transcendence of labor-power beyond this ‘nodal point.’[42] There is a plethora of other places where the law of the transition of quantity into quality can be observed in Capital. For instance, Marx says that “not every sum of money, or of value, is at pleasure transformable into capital;” a “certain minimum of money or of exchange-value must be pre-supposed in the hands of the individual possessor of money or commodities.”[43] This is because there is a nodal point at which the variable capital [i.e., labor-power] involved in production turns the owner into a capitalist proper. “The guilds of the middle ages,” Marx argued, “tried to prevent by force the transformation of the master of a trade into a capitalist, by limiting the number of labourers that could be employed by one master within a very small maximum.”[44] This fetter presented in the middle-ages prevented the development of the capitalist proper. Only when this fetter is broken can “the possessor of money or commodities actually turn into a capitalist.”[45] This transformation occurs “in such cases only where the minimum sum advanced for production greatly exceeds the maximum of the middle ages.”[46] Marx then explicitly says that “here, as in natural science, is shown the correctness of the law discovered by Hegel (in his “Logic”), that merely quantitative differences beyond a certain point pass into qualitative changes.”[47] These feudal fetters would be eroded as the barbarism of primitive accumulation evolved. As Marx says, “these fetters vanished with the dissolution of feudal society, with the expropriation and partial eviction of the country population.”[48] This “historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production” is the “fundamental condition” for the development of the capitalist mode of production.[49] Its history is written in the “annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.”[50] The history of this expropriation, of the usurpation and enclosure of the commons, is the “prelude to the history of capitalism,” and produces “the first negation of individual private property.”[51] This first negation establishes, as we saw previously, a qualitatively new mode of production – capitalism. “But,” Marx would go on to famously say, “capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of the negation.”[52] Capitalism immanently creates the conditions were, Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolise all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.[53] Here we have the clearest depiction, within the lens of universal history, of the law of the negation of the negation. Capitalist private property negates “self-earned private property.”[54] It socializes production and creates for the first time ever a “division of labour in the workshop.”[55] Its private “mode of appropriation” at a nodal point presents a fetter to the centralized and socialized means of production, immanently creating its own conditions for its sublation [i.e., negation of the negation].[56] This is a process which involves the “expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people,” and hence, is expected to be “incomparably [less] protracted, violent, and difficult” than the capitalist negation of feudalism.[57] As can be seen from the examples in political economy, these dialectical laws are interconnected. The internal contradiction in all things propels universal movement. At times – in the nodal points mentioned above – this movement breaks its quantitative gradualness and undergoes a qualitative leap. All qualitative leaps are negations of that which has undergone a qualitative transformation. These negations immanently create the conditions for their own negation and bring about, in certain nodal points, a negation of the negation. No negation fully annihilates that which it has negated, part of it is always preserved in the qualitatively new it has unfolded into. For instance, capitalism sustains feudal private property but cancels out feudal individualized production; socialism sustains the socialized production of capitalism but cancels out its privatized accumulation. These are, of course, simple examples; but they are nonetheless helpful pedagogical tools to understand the most general laws of movement and interconnection, and hence, to build the base necessary for knowing more concrete things concretely. Notes [1] Henri Lefebvre, Dialectical Materialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2009), 95. [2] Georg Lukács, A Defense of History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic (New York: Verso Books, 2000), 30. What is interesting about this affirmation is that for most Marxist scholars, the ‘break’ between ‘western’ and ‘soviet’ Marxism (and hence, the beginning of the ‘Engels debate’) occurs first in Georg Lukács’ famous sixth footnote of the first chapter in his 1923 History and Class Consciousness, where he says that “Engels–following Hegel’s mistaken lead–extended the [dialectical] method also to knowledge of nature.” Instead, argued Lukács, the dialectical method should be limited to “historical-social reality.” What those who have banked on this footnote forget, or are unaware of, is that Lukács comes to reject his own position to the point of “[launching] a campaign to prevent the reprints of his 1923 book.” Lukács had argued that his book was ‘outdated,’ ‘misleading,’ and ‘dangerous’ because “it was written in a ‘transition [period] from objective idealism to dialectical materialism.’” Additionally, he was quite explicit in arguing that “’[his] struggle against… the concept of dialectics in nature’ was one of the ‘central mistakes of [his] book.’” For more see my review of Friedrich Engels and the Dialectic of Nature cited above. [3] Lefebvre, Dialectical Materialism, 95-96. [4] Engels, Dialectics of Nature, 40. [5] Lefebvre, Dialectical Materialism, 28. [6] G. W. F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, translated by A. V. Miller (London: Allen and Unwin, 1969), § 187. [7] G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy (New York: Routledge and Kegan, 1968) 283. [8] I am using ‘metaphysics’ here in the way Engels and Marx do, as a way of analyzing things statically and isolated from the interconnections in which it exists. I must note, however, that this is not the same way metaphysics is defined in the history of philosophy. [9] Engels, Dialectics of Nature, 195. [10] Engels, Dialectics of Nature, 63. [11] Karl Marx, “Marx to Joseph Dietzgen,” May 9, 1868, In Marx-Engels Collected Works Vol 43 (New York: International Publishers, 1988), 31; Engels, Dialectics of Nature, 63. [12] Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 38, 357. [13] Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 38, 357. [14] Chris Arthur, The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital (London: Brill, 2004), 3. [15] Friedrich Engels, “Engels to Lange,” March 29, 1865. In Marx-Engels Collected Works Vol 42 (New York: International Publishers, 1987), 138. [16] Hegel, Science of Logic, §69. [17] Marx, Capital Vol. 1 (New York: International Publishers, 1974), 596. [18] Lenin, Collected Works Vol 38, 357. [19] Lenin, Collected Works Vol 38, 358. [20] Lenin, Collected Works Vol 38, 358. [21]Lenin, Collected Works Vol 38, 358-359. Lenin uses ‘cell,’ Marx uses ‘cell-form.’ [22] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 104. [23] Roslyn Wallach Bologh, Dialectical Phenomenology: Marx’s Method (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 64. [24]Lenin, Collected Works Vol 38, 358. [25] Lenin, Collected Works Vol 38, 359. [26] Karl Marx, Capital Vol. III (New York: International Publishers, 1974), 391. [27] Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value Vol. II (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975), 509, 507. [28] Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value Vol. II, 509. [29] Mao Tsetung, “On Contradiction,” In Five Essays on Philosophy (Peking: Foreign Language, 1977) 51. [30] Tsetung, “On Contradiction,” 53. [31] Tsetung, “On Contradiction,” 54. [32] V. I. Lenin, "Remarks on N. I. Bukharin's Economics of the Transitional Period" Selected Works, Russ. ed., Moscow-Leningrad, 1931, Vol. XI, p. 357. [33] Mao, “On Contradiction,” 68. [34] Tsetung, “On Contradiction,” 69. [35] Tsetung, “On Contradiction,” 70. [36] Tsetung, “On Contradiction,” 69. [37] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 195. [38] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 193. [39] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 193. [40] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 195. [41] G. W. F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, translated by George di Geovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 321-322. [42] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 194-195. This latter transformation requires the surplus-value produced in the moment of production to return to the moment of circulation and realize itself. As Marx says in Capital Vol. III, “industrial capitalist merely realises the previously produced surplus-value, or profit, in the process of circulation.” Marx, Capital Vol. III, 283. [43] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 307-308. This is the example Engels uses in his Anti-Dühring when discussing the law of the transformation of quantity into quality. [44] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 308-309. [45] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 309. [46] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 309. [47] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 309. [48] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 751. [49] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 714, 774. [50] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 715. [51] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 762-763. [52] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 763. [53] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 763. [54] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 774. [55] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 359. “Division of labour in the workshop, as practices by manufacture, is a special creation of the capitalist mode of production alone.” [56] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 763 [57] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 764. 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 March 2024 THERE is a paradox at the core of the efflorescence of science that has occurred over the last millennium. In essence this efflorescence has the potential to increase human freedom immensely. It increases the capacity of man within the man-nature dialectic; scientific practice aims to go beyond the “given” not just in a once-for-all sense but as a perpetual movement through incessant self-questioning, so that this practice is potentially a collective act of liberation. But this promise of freedom remains significantly unfulfilled; and while its potential has not been realised, this efflorescence of science has been utilised to a great extent for domination by some over other human beings and other societies. The paradox lies in the fact that scientific practice that has the potential to increase human freedom has been utilised to increase domination, that is, to attenuate human freedom. The roots of this paradox lie in the fact that the unleashing of scientific advance required an overthrow of the stranglehold over society of the church (which, it may be recalled, had forced Galileo to recant); and this overthrow could occur only as part of the transcendence of the feudal order, i.e., as part of the bourgeois revolution, of which the 1640 English Revolution was a prime example. The development of modern science in Europe therefore was inextricably linked from the very beginning with the development of capitalism; and this fact left its indelible imprint on the use to which scientific advances were put. This bourgeois imprint also had major epistemic implications with which philosophers (like Akeel Bilgrami) have been concerned, namely the treatment of nature as “inert matter” and the attribution of a similar “inertness” to indigenous populations in far-flung areas of the world (“people with no history”) which “justified” in European eyes the acquisition of “mastery” as much over nature as over such distant populations, and hence “justified” the phenomenon of imperialism. Keenly aware of the fact that the freedom-enhancing role of science could be fully realised only through a transcendence of capitalism itself, the finest of scientists in the era when such transcendence had come on to the historical agenda, joined the struggle for socialism. This was not just essential for them as citizens, to prevent the abuse of science; it was also a moral imperative for them as scientists: struggling against the abuse of their own praxis that produced scientific advance, had paramount importance for them. In the matter of struggling for socialism the example of Albert Einstein is well-known. He was not only an avowed socialist, but actively participated in political activities and meetings, because of which the American FBI had put a “tail” on him and kept a dossier on him which is now open to the public; in fact because of his socialist convictions he was not given security clearance for taking part in the Manhattan project that developed the atom bomb. Likewise in Britain, the finest scientists in the twentieth century were part of the Left, from JD Bernal to Joseph Needham, JBS Haldane, Hyman Levy, GH Hardy, Dorothy Hodgkin and many others. With the onset of neo-liberalism however there has been a fundamental change. There has been a “commoditisation” of science, under which the responsibility of funding research has shifted from the State to private, mainly corporate, donors. This has meant that the freedom of the scientist to express political opinions that underscore the need for transcending capitalism has got greatly curtailed. If a scientist wants to engage in a research project then he or she has to be sufficiently acceptable to private donors; and it does not help the scientist if he or she is known to hold socialist beliefs. Even university appointments are determined by the ability of the scientist to attract funds from donors. The same political constraints therefore apply even in a sphere where until recently the academics had the freedom to profess diverse beliefs. Commoditisation of science in other words produces, as a necessary consequence, a political conformism, and hence a social irresponsibility, on the part of the scientist. The “luxury” of internalising the moral imperative of attempting to go beyond capitalism, in order to make one’s scientific practice contribute towards human liberation, is denied to the scientist in the era of neo-liberalism; and this in turn implies the adoption of scientific advances without adequate discussion of consequences. An obvious example of such thoughtless adoption that is occurring today before our very eyes relates to artificial intelligence. It has of course several implications which I shall not go into; my concern is only with one implication, namely the creation of massive unemployment, to which the recent strike by the Hollywood script writers drew attention. Any measure that substitutes human labour by a mechanical device is potentially liberating: it can reduce the drudgery of work, or alternatively raise the magnitude of output with the same deployment of labour as before, and hence the availability of goods and services for the population. But under capitalism, every such substitution of human labour by a mechanical device adds to human misery. Consider an example. Suppose an innovation doubles labour productivity. Under capitalism, each capitalist would use the innovation for retrenching half the work-force that was being employed earlier. This very fact would increase the relative size of the reserve army of labour, because of which those who continue to remain employed would experience no increase in their real wage. There would therefore be a halving of the wage-bill and an increase in the magnitude of surplus, if the earlier level of output keeps getting produced. But because of the shift from wages to surplus at the earlier level of output, there would be a fall in demand (since a larger proportion of wages is consumed than of surplus) and hence the earlier level of output will not be produced and there would be an additional degree of unemployment, this time because of insufficient demand, over and above the unemployment generated because of the original doubling of labour productivity. The English economist David Ricardo had not cognized this additional unemployment because of the deficiency of demand. He had assumed Say’s Law, that is, that there is never any deficiency of aggregate demand, and that not only are all wages consumed but all surplus in excess of the part that is consumed is automatically invested. From this assumption he had drawn the conclusion that the shift from wages to surplus, while it would lower total consumption out of the earlier output, would raise investment, but leave the earlier output unchanged to start with; and this raising of the share of investment would raise the output growth rate and hence the employment growth rate. The use of machinery therefore, while it may reduce employment immediately, would raise its rate of growth, so that employment exceeds after some time what it would otherwise have been. Say’s Law however has no validity whatsoever. Investment under capitalism is determined by the expected growth of the market and not by the magnitude of surplus (unless there are untapped colonial markets that can be accessed or the State is ever willing to intervene to overcome a deficiency of aggregate demand). The reason why technological change did not historically cause mass unemployment within the metropolis was two-fold: first, colonial markets were available on tap, because of which much of the unemployment generated by technological change was shifted to the colonies (in the form of deindustrialisation); that is,there was export of unemployment from the metropolis. Second, whatever local unemployment was generated by technological change did not linger, because the unemployed migrated abroad. Through the “long nineteenth century” (up to the First World War) 50 million Europeans migrated to the temperate regions of white settlement like Canada, the United States, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. Today however an entirely different situation prevails. It is not just that colonialism does not exist, but third world markets are inadequate to counter any deficiency of aggregate demand in the metropolis. Likewise, the State cannot counter a deficiency of aggregate demand as it can neither increase its fiscal deficit beyond the FRBM Act limit, nor tax the rich for increasing its expenditure (taxing the working people to increase its expenditure scarcely increases aggregate demand). It follows therefore that mechanisation, including the use of artificial intelligence, in the context of capitalism today will inevitably generate massive unemployment. Consider what would happen in a socialist economy by contrast. Any mechanisation, including the use of artificial intelligence, will reduce the drudgery of work without reducing employment, output and hence the wage-bill of the workers, all of which are centrally determined. This fundamental difference between the two systems explains why the benign use of artificial intelligence is conditional only upon a transcendence of capitalism. Author Prabhat Patnaik is an Indian political economist and political commentator. His books include Accumulation and Stability Under Capitalism (1997), The Value of Money (2009), and Re-envisioning Socialism (2011). Republished from MR Online Archives March 2024 Nietzsche’s philosophy has shaped theoretical debates on the Left ever since he died over 120 years ago. This is owed, at least in part, to Nietzsche’s popularity among working-class readers. According to surveys and sociological studies of German workers at the turn of the 20th century, Nietzsche tended to trump Marx in terms of popularity, a trend that likely remains true today. However, Nietzsche’s popularity has also split workers. Different methods of reading the philosopher have emerged. For some Nietzsche was anathema to their interest in greater equality and for a life beyond the degradation of wage labor, while others embraced Nietzsche’s aristocratic agenda in ways that would often divert them from the cause of working-class liberation.1 The question as to whether Nietzsche can be combined with Marx poses a philosophical conundrum, given that both thinkers offer up a political project that draws on similar social and political problems. But while the basis of Marx and Nietzsche’s political visions could not be more diametrically opposed, the reality of this difference has become a debate on the Left. Nietzsche’s politics are often interpreted as indeterminate and metaphorical, with Nietzsche scholars on the Left tending to claim that his unabashed anti-egalitarian, anti-revolutionary, and reactionary commitments are ultimately marginal to any assessment of his philosophy. This reading and method of interpreting Nietzsche has grown popular on today’s Left, and was set by the academic trends that emerged in French philosophy after the Second World War among philosophers Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. It was also brought about by Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche as a resolutely metaphysical, and thus not a primarily political thinker. The German American translator Walter Kaufmann suggested Nietzsche be read as an apolitical thinker completely decontextualized from the historical and political concerns that drove his thought. Kaufmann thereby removed Nietzsche’s deeply-embedded, reactionary political thought and whitewashed Nietzsche’s political inflections and intentions, even removing certain words that advocated the annihilation of the weak and the failed.2 Where Kaufmann emphasized the psychological and the aesthetic insights of the thinker to the total neglect of the political, the French readers of Nietzsche tended to reduce him to an indeterminate and metaphorical thinker, whose aphorisms can be read in multiple, even contradictory ways. Derrida famously dedicates several pages of writing to an in-depth analysis of the possible meanings of a random note in Nietzsche’s journal late in life, which read: “I have forgotten my umbrella.”3 The phrase could spell the secret key to the entirety of Nietzsche’s esotericism, or it could mean nothing. These methods of reading and interpreting have made any possible Marx-Nietzsche rapprochement a seemingly easy synthesis. The latest popular intervention in the field of Left-Nietzscheanism is Jonas Čeika’s How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle: Marx and Nietzsche for the 21st Century Left published in 2021 with Repeater Books. What distinguishes this book from the tradition of Left-Nietzschean interventions in the lineage of French theory (Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida) is that the author aims to reopen a more explicitly political core of Nietzsche’s thought to serve as the basis for a renewed, Marxist-Nietzschean Leftism. But the political core of Nietzsche that Čeika offers is not developed or unearthed in its full depth, and misses a serious confrontation with Nietzsche’s politics. This results in a lopsided combination of Nietzsche with Marx that risks incorporating certain Nietzschean political strategies that ultimately will prove to be a dead end for any 21st century socialism. The book develops what I call an “elective affinity” reading method by attempting to combine two radically divergent philosophies—Marx and Nietzsche—and proceeds to make their thought compatible around key points of supposed commonality. Elective affinity is a reading method that analyzes the philosophical concepts and ideas of Nietzsche as detached from the historical and social forces that drove his work. It then seeks to combine the insights of the two philosophers that could not be more dissimilar in political analysis and practice, thereby rendering these differences to be non-substantial or indeterminate. It is true that Marx and Nietzsche are driven by similar concerns over the division of labor, dialectics, socialism, and morality but upon further scrutiny, it becomes clear that their critiques and political visions could not be more divergent. Importantly, this is not to say that 21st century socialist philosophy should not draw from Nietzsche when considering socialist practice and theory; it is, rather, that in drawing from Nietzsche, we must not neglect or deny the central role that anti-socialism, political economy and undeniable political reaction plays in Nietzsche’s oeuvre. To neglect this radical reactionary core in Nietzsche will risk the development of a Nietzschean-Marxism that embeds certain Nietzschean orientations that may prove damaging to any 21st century thinking of socialism. Just as working-class readers developed their own singular methods of reading Nietzsche in the early 20th century, socialists today can benefit from reading Nietzsche without any apologetic agenda that seeks to cover over his reactionary radicalism. This is why books like Čeika’s, which combine a scholarly argument but are written for a broader popular audience, are important for thinking about socialist praxis in our time. But the Left can only truly learn from Nietzsche once we have more fully analyzed the extent of his aristocratic agenda and examined how this agenda influenced his major concepts. Can Nietzsche Be Synthesized with Marx? To frame his understanding of Nietzsche’s politics, Čeika says that “Nietzsche’s work lacks an explicit political program because he identified modern politics themselves as nihilistic; because he sought a world which transcended politics.”4 This is a contradictory account of Nietzsche’s politics: we are led to believe that Nietzsche did desire to transform the world beyond politics, and that his vision is in line with Marx’s vision of political transformation because both thinkers present a version of politics that is beyond the “cold abstractions of both commerce and the state.”5 But how can Nietzsche’s politics intend to bring about a “new-found, human” (or superhuman) “control over the Earth” (“the overman shall be the meaning of the earth!”)6 while holding an agenda that does not involve any explicit political program? Despite his admission that Nietzsche aims to invent a new man capable of exerting control over the earth, his praxis is to be understood as “anti-political,” by which Čeika means that for Nietzsche, politics are something to be superseded. With this idea of anti-politics, Čeika aims to influence a particular readership, namely a Left-Nietzschean readership who might suspend Nietzsche’s actual political agenda and envision a hypothetical, socialist Nietzsche. He says the book is written “not to a hypothetical Nietzsche that became a Marxist,” but to “today’s living Nietzscheans, who have perceived, more than Nietzsche could have, the full extent of capital’s dominating tendency and its globally destructive force.”7 But as we will come to see in our analysis of the function of Nietzsche’s anti-politics, when we consider the precise way that Nietzsche critiqued conservatives in his time, the sort of anti-politics Nietzsche preaches was specifically meant to shut down class-based politics and, specifically, to mute politics centered on working-class liberation. Unless we pay attention to the design of Nietzsche’s anti-politics, we end up reading his concepts in a dehistoricized way. We risk understanding his philosophy as abstract in ways that we would seek to avoid when analyzing Marx. We read Marx as a thinker whose ideas and concepts were engaged in the class struggle of his time, a struggle that we have inherited and continue to confront. When Nietzsche is brought into our analysis, however, his political thought is somehow de-linked from the struggles of his time and his insights are treated as purely philosophical. To his credit, Čeika is concerned with answering the question of whether Nietzsche’s reactionary views and anti-socialism are deeply central to his thought. Unfortunately, he answers that they are not central to his thought, thereby leaving the reader to assume that if they were to be judged this way it would risk shutting down the entire project of uniting Marx with Nietzsche in the first place. Regardless, the position of the book is that Nietzsche’s “anti-politics” are compatible with Marx’s political praxis, and that Nietzsche’s understanding of socialism was limited to the utopian socialist movements of his time as well as vulgar socialist philosophers such as Eugen Dühring. We are led to believe that Nietzsche, much like Marx and Engels—who also critiqued Dühring—waged his critique of socialism as a fundamentally moral doctrine, “defined in terms of equality, rights, and justice. But that is not the socialism of Marx, it is not our socialism.”8 On this basis, Čeika says we can align Nietzsche’s views on socialism with Marx’s views because both saw moralistic socialism as a “disguised religious fanaticism and life-denying asceticism.”9 But these assumptions avoid the extensive literature on Nietzsche and socialism as well as the numerous references to socialism in Nietzsche’s writings, which go far beyond a critique of moralistic socialism. Indeed, Nietzsche critiqued the socialists and the anarchists on the streets of Paris in the Paris Commune of 1871, and consistently wrote about the condition of the working-class during the Second Reich under Bismarck. Any attempt to fuse Marx with Nietzsche must seriously consider the ways in which both thinkers responded to the concrete events of the Paris Commune. Both Marx and Nietzsche derive distinct understandings of the problem of the liberation of the working-class from the events of the commune. For Nietzsche, the commune is referenced in The Birth of Tragedy (1872) as the rising of a barbaric slave class, and Nietzsche continues to develop a wide-ranging set of theories about the importance of pacifying the political agency of the working-class. But when we read Nietzsche via a model of elective affinity we might assume, as Čeika does, that Nietzsche’s insights into overcoming guilt in the Genealogy of Morality are somehow applicable to the liberation of the workers in the Paris Commune, or that Nietzsche might have supported the liberation of workers from what he calls their “miserable condition” in Daybreak.10 The fusion of contradictory philosophical insights completely untethered from historical or social contexts are a hallmark of the Left-Nietzschean, elective affinity reading method. As an example of the danger of elective affinity, Čeika argues that Nietzsche’s radical critique of the division of labor, had he only been familiar with Marx’s communist vision, would possibly have led him to align with Marx. He writes that the “forms of socialism [Nietzsche] was familiar with in his time were not radical enough to attack the division of labour itself.”11 This is highly misleading and it ignores any treatment of the elaborate discussions of socialism throughout Nietzsche’s oeuvre. It also refuses to grapple with his views on political economy, or the fact that Nietzsche possesses a reactionary agenda against the working class and its liberation. With this example, we are shown the strategy of Left-Nietzscheanism; it must dehistoricize Nietzsche by turning his politics into an open, indeterminate question so as to activate his philosophical concepts from the perch of a detached position. As Marxists committed to historical materialist treatment of ideas and concepts, we owe Nietzsche and Marx a more thoughtful consideration of how their ideas and concepts interact with the political contexts of their time. Thus, when dealing with Nietzsche’s political thought and seeking to forge it with Marx and Marxism, it is imperative that we understand the significance that anti-socialism played for Nietzsche. Moreover, we must understand that anti-socialism was not a marginal concern for Nietzsche’s philosophy, but a major thrust of his thought. The Problem of Moralistic Socialism for Marx and Nietzsche Let us approach the question as to whether Nietzsche and Marx align out of a shared critique of moralistic socialism, as Čeika and many Left-Nietzscheans assume. Marx and Engels offer arguably one of their most pointed critiques of moralistic socialism in the Communist Manifesto, when they take on “true socialists” such as the Young Hegelian Bruno Bauer, and the quasi-religious socialists Moses Hess and Wilhelm Waitling. These thinkers sought the conditions of socialism in the misty abstractions of universal truth, not in the practical force of the workers’ movement and proletariat. The problem with moralistic socialists owes not only to the absence of any serious critique of political economy in their work. It is tied to their failure to theorize a revolution of society from the standpoint of the proletariat. The true socialists err not only in their philosophical outlook; they err because they understand socialism as a purely-contemplative movement, detached from the working class. The true socialists leave no room for theory to actualize in social and political struggles because the basis of their theory is abstracted from the concrete struggles of workers, and they have no account of the way that the masses can be seized by revolutionary theory. At a superficial level of comparison, we might say that Nietzsche would critique the true socialists for their abstract, quasi-religious understanding of socialism. But this is not the core of what Marx and Engels claim is problematic in moralistic socialism; the core problem of moralistic socialism, again, is that the true socialists cannot locate the working class in any conception of revolutionary theory. With this in mind, let’s examine how Nietzsche’s political thought squares with this critique by looking at his extensive commentary on the very same class that Marx and Engels argue theory must galvanize towards revolutionary agitation, namely the working class. Unlike the true socialists, Nietzsche was a perspicuous reader in political economy, and he commented widely on the problem of the working class. As Dmitri Safronov has elaborated in his recent work Nietzsche’s Political Economy (2023), Nietzsche possessed a fundamental hostility towards any future revolution from below and to any changing of the condition of private property. For Nietzsche, the propertyless class represents the “greatest danger to society,” and any notion of a revolution that would be led by the working class’ demands would only promise the compounding of ressentiment and entrench new forms of psychological slavery on humanity.12 Without a fuller appreciation of the breadth of content in Nietzsche’s politics, it is hard to understand how Nietzsche’s vitalist insights, his embrace of amor fati, and aesthetic notions of becoming can truly offer a revolutionary view of the past in any substantive political register. But Čeika finds Nietzsche’s insights into history to be “essential to socialists” as they offer an affective strength to not be resentful towards the past. At the level of social and political memory, this remains a curious claim given Nietzsche’s profound skepticism over the legacy of the egalitarian revolutionary tradition that was opened in the modern period with the French Revolution, and which continued into the 1871 uprising of the Paris Commune, of which Nietzsche remarked it was among the saddest days of his life.13 For Nietzsche, the French Revolution was unequivocally seen as the first modern slave revolt, and he commented on the movements for the abolition of slavery in his time both in Europe and the United States, which was undergoing a bloody Civil War over the ending of chattel slavery.14 Safronov points out that for Nietzsche, “the abolition of slavery has little to do with moral enlightenment and more with perpetuating more subtle forms of impersonal and anonymous slavery.”15 Nietzsche thought the egalitarian movements from below, such as the universal movement for male suffrage and the abolition of chattel slavery, would give rise to new psychological forms of enslavement. But this assessment did not merely remain at the level of a written critique. Nietzsche’s critique of bourgeois morality is meant to be enacted, i.e., the Overmen are invited to introduce new types of inequality. Moreover, Nietzsche sought justification for newer forms of inequality, with which modern slave morality had allegedly lost touch. For example, Nietzsche redefines the notion of the “underprivileged” beyond political or economic forms of privilege with his emphasis on physiological inequality.16 In Beyond Good and Evil, when discussing the “multitude,” or the working masses, Nietzsche refers to the working masses as “unvollständige Menschen” (“incomplete individuals”) in the sense that their physiological flaws result in psychological frailty. Nietzsche’s critique of slave morality, as Safronov shows, is based on the idea that capitalism suppresses a spiritual hierarchy. Thus, part of what Nietzsche’s critique is meant to bring about is a new reality of rank and distinction bound up with differences in physiological disposition. The secret truths of this new ranking order are to be ushered in by a small group of individuals who force it upon an amorphous majority. Nietzsche’s obsession with physiology as the basis of the realization of his project is evident when we look at his more unabashedly reactionary followers such as far-Right internet personality Costin Alamariu (aka Bronze Age Pervert) who elevates Nietzsche as the modern prophet of superior breeding and racial difference. These insights may be useful for academic investigations into psychology and even psychoanalysis, but taken up as a political project, they have the practical consequence of adding psychological and physiological differences—not only economic and cultural differences—between individuals as the primary basis of inequality. Nietzsche’s political project is meant to restore a missing balance that modern slave morality has disrupted in physiological rank. This project only complicates and further weighs down the goals of class emancipation and the ending of wage labor. Moreover, Nietzsche’s entire political orientation is bent on retaining conditions of enforced labor for a subjugated class, and a profound skepticism over abolishing private property. Nietzschean Leftists, should they aim to incorporate Nietzsche’s insights into physiological and psychological ranking in their understanding of socialism, risk sidestepping Marx’s insights into the basis of class conflict at the center of social life under capitalism. Nietzsche’s emphasis on physiological difference adds new, ascriptive identity markers based in physiology to any understanding of equality, and this obscures the importance of overcoming the class-based relations of exploitation and domination that socialists should advocate. Nietzsche’s views on political economy make him diametrically-opposed to Marx and Engels in thought and practice. Without a serious and historically informed analysis of Marx and Nietzsche, the “Left-Nietzschean” project risks gleaning shallow insights from the two thinkers (at best) or incorporating reactionary concepts and frameworks from Nietzsche unbeknownst to the Left-Nietzschean (at worst). In What Way is Nietzsche Reactionary? Čeika suggests that any Nietzsche-Marx rapprochement hinges on whether Nietzsche can plausibly be understood as a reactionary. While he admits that Nietzsche held some reactionary views here and there, he suggests that these views are marginal to the wealth of insights that he offers to contemporary socialists. He further argues that Nietzsche overcomes any reactionary baggage if we isolate how he understood dialectics, particularly how Nietzsche appropriated the Hegelian notion of aufheben, or the idea that a form can be abolished while simultaneously preserving a core of its substance. Nietzsche’s dialectic involves an element of “lifting up” in the final negation, and this overcoming “is the reason Nietzsche is decidedly not a reactionary, at least if we understand a reactionary as being someone who wants society to return to a previously existing condition.”17 “Reactionary” philosophy is defined here very narrowly as simply any attempt to resurrect a glorified past. Nietzsche’s philosophy is thus exempted from this definition of reactionary because he apparently does not ascribe any romantic, historical glorification to the Greeks or any past historical age. Nietzsche is thought, rather, to offer an affirmative embrace of the future and of the present– amor fati! Despite the problems with this rather narrow definition of reaction, we are led to the view that Nietzsche possesses a dialectical understanding of capitalism, for which Čeika finds support in a passage from Twilight of the Idols entitled “In the ear of the Conservatives.” In this passage, Nietzsche speaks to the politicians and parties that aim to take humanity back to an earlier standard of virtue, and he warns, “no one is free to be a crab. There is nothing for it: one has to go forward, which is to say step by step further into decadence.”18 In Čeika’s reading of this specific passage, the kernel of Nietzsche’s aufheben of decadence is understood to be in line with Marx’s notion of aufheben, “according to which capital has to expand before it can be abolished.”19 In other words, Nietzsche’s understanding of overcoming decadence (aufheben) by stepping into it further is conflated and made to be in alignment with the general Marxist idea that capitalism as a system generates contradictions that undermine itself. This is the same move we saw before with the assumption that Marx and Nietzsche share a similar critique of socialism. Now they share a similar philosophical and political conception of dialectics as an overcoming of capitalism, as well. However, Nietzsche’s notion of overcoming decadence is not bent on any overcoming of capitalism, and this is evidenced when we analyze the precise aphorism in question, which Čeika claims does not express reactionary views. In what follows, we will demonstrate that Nietzsche’s “whispers in the ear of conservatives” were indeed expressive of a right-wing political position. We can realize this when we situate our understanding of Nietzsche as a philosopher working amidst the crisis of the bourgeois class following the Paris Commune, and the rise of imperial conquest and European colonization. In this milieu, the European bourgeoisie had lost all hope that they lived in the best of possible worlds, and these decadent social conditions gave way to what György Lukács, in The Destruction of Reason, calls “a complacent, narcissistic, playful relativism, pessimism, nihilism, et c.”20 In this context, Nietzsche’s philosophy performed a specific social task of rescuing and redeeming the bourgeoisie as a cultural and social class. Lukács shows how Nietzsche’s philosophy offered a road for the bourgeoisie of his time that avoided the need for any break, or indeed any serious conflict, with the class struggle.21 Thus, Nietzsche’s anti-politics, contrarily to how they have been defined in Čeika’s work, must be understood as a class project in line with furthering the material interests of the bourgeoisie, and designed to shut down proletarian consciousness and revolutionary possibility. We can further assess the intent of Nietzsche’s “whispers” by understanding his critique of Bismarck, wherein he broke with the German politician from an explicitly right-wing position. Lukács notes that Nietzsche’s break with Bismarck involved two points: the first was a break from the project of democratic representation, which Nietzsche saw as constituting an “increasing stultification of democratic man, and the consequent stultification of Europe and belittling of European man.”22 The second break stemmed from Nietzsche’s claim that Bismarck did not understand the true gravity of the coming age of imperial wars. Nietzsche held to the importance of upholding the Prussian military state in the face of the coming catastrophe: “The upholding of the military state is the ultimate means of adopting or sustaining the great tradition with regard to the higher type of person, the type that is strong.”23 It is hard not to read Čeika’s political account of Nietzsche’s thought as representing what Domenico Losurdo refers to as the “hermeneutics of innocence,” a reading method that makes Nietzsche’s political substance nonexistent or marginal, and based on this misreading seeks to then forge a Nietzschean Marxism.24 Nietzschean Marxism: A Lopsided Political Praxis Nietzschean Marxism can be problematic when it is built on a depoliticized understanding of Nietzsche. These problems are not merely philosophical; I want to argue that Nietzschean Marxism can have practical effects on the direction of socialist political thought and praxis. How are we, as socialists, to engage bourgeois forms of equality? How are we meant to transcend or incorporate aspects of equality in our conception of socialism and of a future socialist society? The way we understand and advocate for equality entails an engagement with philosophy, and this has direct bearing on the sort of demands that socialists advocate for the working-class. If socialist philosophers advocate a lifting of living standards for the working-class through expansion of the social safety net, are they succumbing to the slave morality of bourgeois morality? A Nietzschean Marxism will tend to cast profound skepticism on the raising of working class living standards due to this aversion not only towards equality, but towards rights as such. The Nietzschean suspicion of rights is a long-standing motif in Left readings of Nietzsche, and it can be seen in more recent Left-Nietzschean works by Deleuze and Foucault. Both read Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals as setting the bar for liberation based on a continual disobedience towards institutions. Čeika similarly urges the Left to eschew a commitment to rights: “the reason that such rights are required in the first place is evidence of a fundamentally alienated society, a society based on a gulf between the rulers and the ruled, consisting of citizens whose social powers are removed from their immediate control.”25 Such strong skepticism towards bourgeois rights is warranted to an extent, but the problem comes about in the way Left-Nietzschean skepticism proffers a skepticism over rights in the very notion of a communist society to come. As Igor Shoikhedbrod convincingly argues in his work on Marx’s interpretation of liberalism, “[it is] a mistake to conclude that the historical achievements of capitalism, including the granting of formal legal rights, would be annihilated under communism. Abolishing elementary formal rights would mean reverting to pre-capitalist social relations, in which the direct domination of the master, lord, or patriarchal community actively inhibited the free development of individuals.”26 Marx does not chide equality and rights as such, as we know from his commentary on the way that each mode of production implies a new legal relation. Marx saw that rights are necessary, but not sufficient for political emancipation. In Left-Nietzschean praxis, the necessary basis of rights is thrown out the window, and this has the practical consequence of making the Left vulnerable to anarchistic practice, untethered from institutions entirely. The downside to this individualist praxis is evident in Foucault’s statement in his famous debate with Chomsky: “individual members of the proletariat desire a proletariat revolution for their own sake, that they may have more power.”27 The Nietzschean praxis not only dissuades commitments to rights, it construes of revolution in a highly unmediated and individualist way; on offer is a ludic and joyful rebellion, but one that is detached from the development of working-class interests and skeptical of parties, institutions and leadership. This suspicion of rights has the practical effect of presenting a conception of liberation that risks forcing socialists to shift their demands away from the arena of the state entirely, and this in turn kneecaps large-scale political mobilization within the parliamentary or democratic system. Nietzschean Marxism can very often cast shade on the prospect of building a workers’ party, on forming leadership within the socialist movement, and it can often lead to libertarian-socialism and anti-institutional forms of anarchism. We should always remember that Marx consistently advocated for political demands such as that of limiting the hours in the working day. A deeper appreciation of the political core of Nietzsche produces different conclusions regarding how both Marx and Nietzsche relate to one another. For example, both thinkers consider the liberal-democratic version of equality as hollow. However, Nietzsche prefers the liberal bourgeois order to any socialist doctrine of equality. Nietzsche’s praxis is thus bent on social transformation in ways that are anathema to any direction of collective, egalitarian achievement. He is particularly wary of any threat to private property.28 The question for Left Nietzscheans, given they have absorbed so many elements of Nietzsche’s anti-egalitarian agenda but construed this agenda as tertiary to his core concepts and insights, remains this: Will the development of a Nietzschean-Marxist praxis fall sway to a formula for revolution that ultimately represents “a declaration of war on the masses by higher men,”29 as Nietzsche put it? In other words, when we make Nietzsche the primary philosopher for the Left, we risk forcing a type of elitist adhesion to political leadership, which moreover risks a form of leadership that retrenches existing elite hierarchies, and even celebrates the status quo in terms of class power, precisely by obscuring the truth of class oppression. Due to these problems, Nietzschean Leftism must be combined with a rigorous class analysis from a Marxist perspective, and after this has been done, the Nietzsche problem will become apparent to the Left. A socialist Left that has abandoned equality runs a risk of damaging the philosophical compass that shapes its commitments to institutions, and ultimately to the development of a strategic political vision. These days, the liberal discourse on equality, rights, and representation is already tarnished and rendered suspect. Liberals have abandoned any notion of equality other than equality determined on the market. The hollowness of liberal appeals to market equality is why the discourse on rights and equality are necessary for achieving forms of working-class emancipation such as the achievement of new forms of leisure, labor rights and increases in social welfare. Nietzschean socialists will often lead the Left to assume that bettering the material condition of workers will risk miring the proletariat in forms of ressentiment that are intractable. This argument forms the backbone to the widely-read essay “Telling the Truth About Class” by G.M Tamás, which re-casts Nietzsche’s notion of ressentiment in support for avoiding a conception of socialism that would aim to build working-class culture and equality. Even though Tamás does not espouse a Left-Nietzschean project as a Marxist, the influence of Nietzsche’s anti-egalitarian thought has been negatively absorbed into his core conception of socialism in problematic ways. We can benefit from Nietzsche’s politics as a theoretical surplus of insights only after we have carefully understood the reactionary agenda at the heart of his work. As Marxists, it is best not to apologetically gloss over the extent to which Nietzsche’s thought is forged in response to the revolutionary tradition, to anti-egalitarianism, and to a highly developed anti-socialist politics. When we miss that, we miss out on understanding how his indirect apologetics for capitalism and support for adhesion to status quo class relations truly works. We must develop a new reading method for Nietzsche, which avoids the apolitical and whitewashed versions of his thought that we have inherited from the post-war Nietzsche industry. This can only begin when we have a more historically-grounded confrontation with Nietzsche, one that makes no apologies for his sophisticated opposition toward the revolutionary tradition that he sought to extinguish, and in which we find our compass for political action. Notes
Author Daniel Tutt is a writer and philosopher based in Washington, DC. He is the author of How to Read Like a Parasite: Why the Left Got High on Nietzsche with Repeater Books. Republished from Cosmonaut Archives March 2024 When interest-bearing commercial and agrarian debt came to be incorporated into civilization’s economic structure in the third millennium BC, it was accompanied by clean slates that liberated bondservants and restored to debtors the rights to the crops and land that creditors had taken. By the second millennium BC in Babylonia these royal “restorations of order” became customary proclamations rescuing debtors whose family members had been reduced to bondage or who had lost their land to foreclosing creditors. Anthropologists have looked at surviving tribal enclaves for ideas of how the Bronze Age takeoff may have been managed. But no tribal communities in today’s world possess the outward-reaching dynamics of Mesopotamia during its commercial takeoff, which occurred in many ways that are alien to modern ways of thinking. The documentation describes an approach operating on different principles from those that most modern observers assume to have been primordial and universal. The Character of Bronze Age Debt That Made Royal Clean Slates Necessary The dynamics of interest-bearing debt are different from those of tribal gift exchange and related reciprocity obligations. Monetary credit arrangements bear a specific interest rate, and the date of payment is specified in advance rather than left open-ended. That requires debts to be recorded in writing and formally witnessed. Creditors may take foreclosure measures for non-payment, leading to the debtor’s bondage or the loss of land rights. Civilization’s earliest written records, from Sumer in the third millennium BC, provide the best evidence for civilization’s monetized debt relations “in the beginning.” Two categories of debt existed, each associated with its own designated monetary commodity. Business obligations owed by traders and entrepreneurial managers were denominated in silver, above all those associated with foreign trade. The agrarian economy operated on credit denominated in barley units, assigned a value equal to the silver shekel in order to strike a common measure. Money Loans and Long-Distance Trade Rules for money loans described in scribal training exercises are found almost exclusively in the commercial sphere, especially in connection with long-distance trade. These loans were denominated in silver at the equivalent of a 20 percent annual rate of interest, doubling the principal in five years. Under normal conditions merchants were able to pay this rate to their creditors and keep a profit for themselves. Lenders shared in the mercantile risk, taking what in effect was an equity position. If caravans were robbed or ships and their cargoes lost at sea through no fault of the merchant, the debt was voided. There is no indication that payment of such mercantile debts led to problems requiring royal intervention. Interest-bearing debt had initially arisen in the commercial sphere, taking the form of advances of assets by the large public institutions to entrepreneurial recipients, enabling them to make an economic gain in commerce and land management. But throughout all antiquity the most problematic debts disrupting the economy’s fiscal and social balance were in the agrarian sphere. The original objective of charging interest to sharecroppers and other cultivators, however, can hardly have been to reduce them to bondage or to expropriate them from their self-support land. Their labor was needed for the agrarian economy to function. Agrarian Debt and Land-Rental Agreements Rural usury and the consequent widespread forfeiture of lands seem to have derived from advances of land, animals, and tools to sharecroppers (or their manager intermediaries) by temples and palaces. Sharecropping land and agricultural inputs were advanced for a rent of one-third of the (optimistically) estimated normal crop yield 1. Interest was charged on arrears of this rent and other agrarian obligations not settled at harvest-time. The interest rate charged on these carry-over debts was the same as the sharecropping rental rate: one-third. Even arrears for unpaid debts for food or credit for other needs, such as priestly social services, were charged interest at the rate of one-third of the sum owed, simply mirroring the sharecropping rental return for creditors. Arrears on agrarian obligations must have been infrequent, given the ever-present risk of crop failure preventing anticipated crops payments from being paid. Researchers Alfonso Archi and Piotr Steinkeller show that agrarian interest rates denominated in barley are attested by the middle of the third millennium BC. Officials, collectors for the palaces and temples, and merchants often acted in their own private capacity to make interest-bearing loans to cultivators in arrears for arrears of fees owed to the large institutions. Rural usury thus emerged as well-to-do “big men” charged for arrears owed to the palace and temples, also lending food and other necessities to distressed cultivators. But agrarian interest-bearing debt, especially usury charged to borrowers in need, was always denounced as socially unfair. The question therefore arises as to just how such charges originated in the first place. Few types of barley debt involved actual loans of money. What often are called “loan documents” should more literally be termed “debt records” or simply “notes of obligation.” Even in the commercial sphere with its debts denominated in silver, textiles, and other handicrafts that temple and palace workshops consigned to merchants for trade were recorded as debts. And when contractual work was to be performed, craftsmen gave customers tablets of obligation when they were given materials to make into a finished product. The basic contractual formulae were well established by the end of the third millennium BC. Debt tablets state the sum owed, the due date, and the names of witnesses, with the appropriate seals. Additional stipulations might include the pledges involved, guarantees by individuals who stood surety, and the interest rate to be charged (often to accrue only if the debt were not paid on time). Some documents were given a title citing the reason why the debt was established. Agrarian debts mostly arose on rental agreements on land advanced by public institutions to intermediaries, who then subleased it to sharecroppers. Near East researcher Johannes Renger describes how land and workshops were administered directly by palace officials in Ur III (2111-2004 BC), but by the Old Babylonian period (2000-1600 BC) the palace franchised the management of its fields and date orchards, herds of sheep, brick-making workshops, and other handicrafts to “entrepreneurs” as Palastgeschäfte, “royal enterprises.” These managers were entitled to keep whatever they could produce or collect above and beyond the amount stipulated by their contract with the palace, but if the sums they collected fell short, their arrears were recorded as a debt and they were obliged to pay the difference out of their own resources. The rate of interest payable by cultivators on such debt arrears was, as described above, one-third, being the same as the rate charged for advances of sharecropping land. Cultivators were also charged this one-third rate of interest for unpaid arrears of charges for advances to buy food or beer or meet emergency needs on credit. If they lacked the means to pay out of whatever assets they had, they had to work off the debt charges in the form of their labor service or that of their family members (daughters, sons, wives, or house-slaves), and ultimately they had to pledge their land rights. How Agrarian Debt Transformed Land Tenure Barley debts had an annual character reflecting the crop cycle, falling due upon harvest. The accrual of such debts did not reflect a parallel growth in the cultivator’s ability to pay out of their harvest. Creditors obtained work at harvest-time by extending loans whose interest was paid in the form of labor service, as labor-for-hire was not generally available in this epoch. In addition to their labor, debtors were obliged to pledge their family members as bondservants, followed by their land rights. Self-support land had traditionally been conveyed from one generation to the next within families, not being freely disposable outside of the family or neighborhood. Land transfers did occur when families shrank in size and transferred their cultivation rights to distant relatives or neighbors. But starting with rights to its crop usufruct, subsistence land was pledged and relinquished to outsiders after 2000 BC. Debtor families initially were left on the land after they lost their crop rights, but were forced off the land as the new appropriators turned to less labor-intensive cash crops such as dates. Debtors often ended up as members of rootless bands or mercenaries after the middle of the second millennium BC. Instead of crop and land rights being lost only temporarily—being returned to their original owners by royal edicts that restored the status quo ante2—such forfeitures became irreversible by the first millennium BC, especially in Greece and Italy to the west. The Logic of Canceling Rural Debts and Reversing Land Forfeitures An inability to meet obligations was inherent in the risks to which agrarian life was subject throughout antiquity: drought, flooding, infestation, or an outbreak of disease, capped by military disruptions. The problem confronting rulers was how to prevent debts from mounting up to the point where they threatened to expropriate the community’s corvée labor and fighting force, dooming debt-ridden realms to defeat by outsiders. If the indebted rural citizenry were to survive along customary lines, priority could not be given to creditors. Mesopotamian rulers countered the rural debt problem not by banning interest outright, but by annulling barley debts. To restore the means of self-support, rulers issued edicts “proclaiming justice,” decreeing economic order and “righteousness.” These proclamations date from almost as early as interest-bearing debt is attested, starting in Sumer with Lagash’s rulers Enmetena circa 2400 BC and Urukagina and 2350 BC. Much as commercial debts were forgiven when the merchandise was lost through no fault of the merchant, Hammurabi’s laws (§48) provided that cultivators would not be obliged to pay their crop debts if the storm-god Adad flooded their field and the crop was lost. The operative principle was that debtors should not lose their economic liberty by being held liable for “acts of God.” And inasmuch as most barley debts were owed to the palace or royal officials, it was easy for rulers to cancel them. Letting officials and merchants keep the crops and labor of debtors would have deprived rulers of their ability to collect the customary royal fees and land rents for themselves and to obtain corvée labor and military service. There was no modernist thought that the dynamics of interest-bearing debt might be self-stabilizing by letting “market forces” proceed unimpeded. There was no thought of Adam Smith’s Deist god designing the world to run like clockwork, with checks and balances automatically maintaining equilibrium without any need for intervention by kings or priestly sanctions. Not even the wealthy voiced the ideology of modern free-market fundamentalism arguing that society’s wealth and revenue would be maximized by letting it pass into the hands of the richest and most aggressively self-serving individuals reducing hitherto free families to bondage. Notes 1. Although not clear from the records, it seems likely that agricultural inputs were advanced as part of a “package” with the land for a total rental of one-third of the crop.↩ 2. The classic studies of these edicts are F.R. Kraus, Königliche Verfügungen in altbabylonischer Zeit (Leiden, 1984); Jean Bottéro, “Désordre économique et annulation des dettes en Mesopotamie à l’époque paléo-babylonienne,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, vol. 4 (1961): pp. 113-164; J.J. Finkelstein, “Ammisaduqa’s Edict and the Babylonian ‘Law Codes,’” Journal of Cuneiform Studies, vol. 15 (1961): pp. 91-104; “Some New misharum Material and Its Implications,” in Assyriological Studies, no. 16 (1965); Studies in Honor of Benno Landsberger on His Seventy-Fifth Birthday: pp. 233-246; “The Edict of Ammisaduqa: A New Text,” Revue d’Assyriologie et d’Archéologie Orientale, vol. 63 (1969): pp. 45-64; and the works of Igor Diakonoff and Dominique Charpin.↩ AUTHOR Michael Hudson is an American economist, a professor of economics at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, and a researcher at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College. He is a former Wall Street analyst, political consultant, commentator, and journalist. You can read more of Hudson’s economic history here. This article was produced by Human Bridges. Archives March 2024 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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