As a wrestling coach and athlete living in the Midwest I have plenty of interaction with MAGA supporters. My current wrestling coach, one of the greatest American Wrestlers of all-time, is a Trump supporting MAGA guy who regularly tells me that every single politician on both sides is corrupt, he doesn’t trust the Israeli and Ukrainian Governments, and that it's bullshit that people have to pay money to the banks for housing when banks don’t actually provide anything of substance. My coach wants a political and economic revolution, and because he feels that Donald Trump is the politician who best represents his anti-establishment political leanings, he supports Donald Trump.
      
One might think that as a Communist I would have nothing to talk about with a MAGA supporter, but me and my MAGA coaches and teammates discuss politics frequently, and I openly tell them about my views, oftentimes while rocking my Ivan Drago t-shirt that displays a large hammer and sickle, which one of these teammates told me I NEEDED to buy. When these types of friends ask me for political sources I send them to Jackson Hinkle and Haz Al-Din of the Institute for a Free America, because I know that they will always preach pro-working class and anti imperialist politics without any of the leftist jargon that might be off putting to someone who hasn’t been through four years of liberal arts university courses about intersectionality and become accustomed to the near obsession with liberal identity politics that many leftists have.
      
When I first heard of the MAGA Communism strategy I thought it was a fantastic idea. But after hearing various people I respect say that the strategy was a distraction because tailing a bourgeois politician would get us nowhere, my views changed and I made a video speaking out against the strategy. And this brought me much validation from the liberal online left who was ecstatic to see that I was moving away from the basket of deplorables known as MAGA.

However, now I have watched the strategy in action and I believe in its usefulness, at least for a certain period of time. Two nights ago I spoke at an event coordinated by Jackson Hinkle and Haz Al-Din and I don’t remember them mentioning Trump a single time. Al-Din gave a brilliant speech about the history of European and American political economy and how it has evolved to its current stage today where our entire political and economic system is dominated by a small number of shareholders and banks, and how this differs to Eastern nations like China where socialism and central economic planning has been used to control finance and divert resources towards social ends. Hinkle also gave what I felt was a fantastic and hilarious speech, establishing the connection between US imperialism and the Israeli genocide, calling the US’s undying support for Israel “a costly suicide mission” and saying “we are sending billions to diaper forces.” Hinkle also openly called himself a Communist, advocating for the US to open trade relations with the developing world instead of constantly interfering in their governments, and used a quote from Lenin to make his points, which received a positive reaction from the crowd.

It is clear to me that the purpose of MAGA communism was never to tail Donald Trump around uncritically as recent hit pieces about Hinkle have alleged.(1)The purpose was to reach the working class members of Trump’s base who are discontented with the current political establishment and are desperate for something new. And in doing that they’ve been quite successful. Hinkle has amassed 2.6 million followers on X after being banned from every other major social media platform for repeatedly and unapologetically going against mainstream media narratives. At the event this weekend I met an older lifelong Communist who told me how he brought 15 MAGA people into his Communist organization by focusing on class politics in his conversations with them. Additionally I met dozens of blue collar workers who told me how they’ve used the work of Haz and Hinkle, as well as my organization Midwestern Marx, to push their co-workers towards socialism.

The allegations against Hinkle are endless, he’s a grifter, he’s a fed, he’s a reactionary, he’s a Russian plant. And while I see how people could be suspicious of his meteoric growth, for those who have followed it closely it makes more sense. Hinkle acquired large audiences on multiple social media platforms by posting frequently and going on any large show that would have him. Upon getting banned from all of these social media platforms his fan base would migrate towards X and more attention would be drawn to his account because of the bannings.
      
And while I haven’t agreed with 100% of what Jackson Hinkle has said in the past three years, I do deeply agree with the core of his politics which is anti-imperialist and pro-worker. I can’t help but be excited by someone who accumulates over 2 million followers while openly wearing the title of Marxist Leninist and defending Stalin to the likes of Alex Jones. When I disagree with Hinkle I tell him openly and respectfully, and in the past it has always been a fruitful discussion that allows both of our audiences to learn and refine our rhetoric. And to be honest with you the Jackson Hinkle of today is not the Jackson Hinkle of three years ago, he’s become so much more confident in his positions and refined in his rhetoric when speaking sometimes it's hard to remember that he’s only 24. I would encourage people to avoid the tendency to quickly write others off without giving them the time to grow in their understanding of the world, or without giving them the courtesy of discussing whatever positions you might disagree with.
      
I do not think Communists should be afraid of Jackson Hinkle and Haz Al-Din and I definitely do not think Communists should be afraid of working class MAGA people. It is our duty to advance the struggle of the proletariat regardless of its consciousness at the current moment. If we can speak to the anti-establishment leanings of MAGA workers in order to push them towards supporting socialism then that is an avenue which should be pursued!
      
It was Vladimir Lenin who would send party members to the meetings of the fascist and anti-semetic Black Hundreds peasant groups in order to disrupt them and win people away from their reactionary worldview by teaching them Marxism. If it was worth it for Lenin to reach out to fascistic peasants, surely it is worth it for us to reach out to proletarians who voted for Trump over the butcher of Libya Hillary Clinton and genocide Joe Biden.
      
In my view Hinkle and Al-Din have thoroughly overcome what my colleague Carlos Garrido calls the Purity Fetish (2), which has plagued the American left for decades. The Purity Fetish can be observed by western leftists who see people as static and unchanging entities who can’t change or be reached, which is a belief that is antithetical to Marxist Dialectical Materialism which teaches that the one constant thing in this world is that everything is constantly in flux and subject to change. Much of the Western Left is openly opposed to reaching the Trump’s MAGA base with socialist politics because they see them as too ideologically impure, while viewing themselves as the enlightened leftist who stands above the proletarian Trump supporter because they hold the correct political beliefs. The purity fetish left also falls into the trap of national historical nihilism, viewing America as a settler colonial nation which can never achieve socialism because it is uniquely evil as a country. These leftists fail to see the formation of the American nation which was advanced by the positive aspect of our history which should be celebrated and studied. The revolutionary war, civil war, and civil rights movement, were fought to advance our country forward and place black and white workers on an equal playing field, so that now they might struggle as one against the capitalist ruling class and their corrupt politicians.
      
Hinkle and Al-Din overcome all of these elements that exist within the purity fetish left. They reject national historical nihilism and reach out to working class Americans who are considered impure by much of the Western Left. In the past I have encouraged them to remember that it’s just as important to reach out to workers who vote for Biden (many of whom do so because they believe him to be more supportive of union organizing) as it is to recruit those who vote for Donald Trump. But this is actually one of the reasons why Midwestern Marx has decided to begin working with these two and their Institute for a Free America because their approach is slightly different to ours, but our goals are the same, to advance the class struggle in America and bring an end to US imperialism.

For those who have derided, smeared, and attacked those who want to reach out to working class MAGA folks, or who to those who have been deceived into thinking that Hinkle and Al-Din are reactionary fascists by out of context clips on X, or by straight up fake and doctored posts (which leftists have used to attack Hinkle many times including by the Communist Party USA itself in a now deleted piece) (3) the door will always be open. We will not cancel you like you have canceled so many of us. We will be here building when you decide to overcome the purity fetish and join us in this struggle to create a new and better social system that actually serves the working masses!

​References

1. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/5/24/2242596/--MAGA-Communism-A-new-flavor-of-crazy-for-the-anti-establishment-nihilist-incel-fringe 
2. Carlos L. Garrido, The Purity Fetish and the crisis of Western Marxism (Midwestern Marx Publishing Press, 2023).
3. Noah Khrachvik, "A Sad State of Affairs: The Decline of the Communist Party USA." Midwestern Marx Institute (May 10, 2024).

Historical narratives are constituted by our capacity to suffuse them with an imaginary, un-real supplement: this was one of the great insights of modern historiography. It is never enough to recount the facts as they are – the brutal soberness of ‘facts’ are often in themselves coloured by inevitable distortions of a form of ideological appraisal. Neutral facts are, in other words, mostly impossible to present ‘by themselves’. To understand a historical period, one must necessarily understand its phantasmatic and imaginary aspects – one must engage with how a historically materialistic set of facts is retrospectively ‘filled in’ by a subjective construction of meaning. Ultimately, understanding any great juncture in history implies a recognition that the account of this juncture is often immediately formulated in retrospect by a certain supplementary, speculative historicization. The most radical of historical events are all too often forced to ‘make sense’ by being applied to a dogmatic set of presuppositions.
​
As with any radical thinker in the history of ideas, Marx’s intervention is from its conception coloured by the type of narrative which is only retrospectively positioned. The radical novelty of Marx’s thought inversely meant that he was inevitably placed in a conceptual relation to various preceding philosophical traditions. Ultimately, the capacity to understand ‘Marx for himself’ was almost immediately abandoned.

This question of a retrospective integration of Marx (both of dialectical materialism and of historical materialism) into a theoretical legacy was, for justifiable reasons, narrowed into a question of Marx’s fidelity to and heritage in Hegelian philosophy. Marx frequently presented his texts as revisions of or reactions to Hegel’s system. His references to Hegel were extensive and his origin in the Young Hegelian tradition of the mid-19th century is well documented. This Marx-Hegel conjunction would therefore inevitably continue after Marx’s death.

During the early 20th century, the intellectual trend of Hegelian Marxism rose to prominence. Lenin himself rigorously engaged with Hegel’s Science of Logic in 1914-1915 (although his interest in Hegel undoubtedly continued aften this period) in order to substantiate his reading of Marx. Lukács’ seminal work (History and Class Consciousness, 1923) was partially characterised by a theoretical engagement with the origin of the legacy of dialectical materialism in Hegelian thought. The reciprocal positioning of Marxism and Hegelianism, whilst sceptical, was distinctively kept alive by Lukács’ return to the necessity, as Marx put it, of not treating Hegel as a ‘dead dog’.

This frequent attempt at understanding Marx alongside the spectres of Hegelianism was however progressively abandoned. A definitive shift emerged towards the radical separation of Marx and Hegel. The novelty of Marx was framed according to the irreducibility of his theoretical invention to Hegel’s absolute idealism. Lenin had famously stated that we need Hegel’s Science of Logic in order to understand Marx’s Capital (Lenin, 1929). However this dependency of Marx upon Hegel was either negated, or progressively inverted into the dependency of Hegel upon Marx. Althusser is perhaps the most recognisable figure of this inversion. Lenin’s statement that Hegel’s Logic is the key to Marx’s Capital was reformulated. For Althusser, if anything ‘we need Marx in order to understand Hegel’ (Althusser, 1969). Hegel remains fallible until you translate his Logic into dialectical materialist terms.

Althusser is in part most famous in this tradition for eventually decisively asserting that Marx’s dialectical materialism owes nothing to Hegel. As a standalone philosophy, it breaks with Hegelianism to the point of being unrecognisable at its very core from the latter. Both For Marx (1965/2005) and the early texts of On Ideology (2020) would lay the ground for precisely this de-coupling of Marx and Hegel. The Ideological State Apparatus as furnishing the everyday coordinates of reproducing the fundamental conditions of capitalist-economic modes of production; an analysis reformatted to be deployed on the ideological level of our subjective-discursive methods of interpellation into a decentralised, diffused State apparatus; a non-idealised, un-centralised understanding of consciousness as posited within a pre-existing set of material conditions – these were aspects of Marxism which Hegel had failed to ever articulate.

At the same time, Althusser’s grand treatise on the independence of Marx and his undeniable break from previous methods of philosophical questioning was Reading Capital (1965), in which the vision of a Hegel-independent Marx is most clearly argued for. Althusser’s purism towards Marx is clear: the very ‘object of enquiry’ posited in Capital is itself furnished by the new method of questioning which Marx installs; new disjunctive temporalities of independent historical and economical ensembles/regimes are opened up; a scientific analysis grounded in the recognition of a constitutively ‘blundered view’ of ideological enquiry is stressed. Marx’s epistemological rupture is at its roots understood as anti-humanist and anti-historicist (and hence irreconcilable with the historicism of Spirit for Hegel). Fundamentally Althusser deploys a profound criticism of any attempt to think Marx inside the confines of Hegelian philosophy. In the same work, Ranciere, Balibar, Macherey, and Establet similarly provide a vision of Marx constitutively detached from Hegel: the analysis of commodity fetishism, and an analysis of the concept of ‘determination in the last instance by the economy’ (to be returned to below) are only some of the examples of this.

In the following decade, we can turn to Deleuze and Guattari as avatars of this vision of ‘Marx without Hegel’. The two-volume work, Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972 & 1980), sees in its eccentric overturning of French structuralism an abandonment of Hegel’s idealising thinking according to absolute categories: ‘negation’ and ‘the absolute’ are replaced by rhizomatic fluidities and a philosophy of ‘pure difference’. Yet despite this aggressive tradition subsumed under a vision of ‘Marx for himself’ which characterised 60s and 70s French philosophy, a return to Hegel emerged as a necessary treatment of Marx’s (at this point) confused intervention.

Interestingly, Žižek would reproduce Althusser’s inversion of the Marx-Hegel relation: Marx’s Capital is indeed necessary in order to retrospectively fully understand Hegel’s Logic. Žižek indeed agrees that Hegel most directly makes sense in the light of (and in his difference from) post-German-Idealist philosophy – however Žižek would draw the opposite conclusion to Althusser: that Hegel is clarified by Marx, makes Hegel the more radical of the two thinkers. This is one of the principal theses of his self-described magnum opus, Less Than Nothing (2013): by understanding Hegel in the confines of Marx, we see that Hegel is clearer in conceptualising the political agency of the rabble. In other words, for Žižek, the potential for revolutionary political action is more present in Hegel than in Marx.

A similar homogenisation of Marxism and Hegelianism emerges with the work of Badiou, who defends the communist hypothesis from the perspective of what he calls an ‘event’. An event is an ontologically-grounded disparity in a structured political, artistic, or scientific order, which conditions an aggressive and targeted reformulation of the logical forms of our discursive and historical forms of understanding – the event is an unstructured multiplicity irreducible to the situation in which it appears. Importantly, the logic of the event is not possible without Hegel. What Badiou calls his ‘mathematical ontology’ is, according to his own words, an appropriation of Hegel’s ‘greater logic’ (Badiou, 2006). Thus his Marxist framework for the intervention of popular political movements is explained by a Hegelian logic. Once again, Marx has to be thought within the confines of Hegel.

The question of the Marx-Hegel relation returns today with the same tensions. Some of the perceived failures of 20th century Marxist-Leninist projects has prompted Western “Marxists” to ‘return to Hegel’ as a method of reflecting upon political and historical events in order to discern a logical mode of articulating new forms of politically grounded social justice. Others insist that the attempt to discern the Hegelian workings of Marx is an inexcusable attempt to institutionalise (and neutralise) his radical political potential: Marx is kept ‘safe’ by being framed according to an intellectual game or hermeneutics of the Hegelian forms latent in Marx’s texts. In order for Marx’s works to mean something, in order for them to carry any political weight, they must exist as a separate entity from any (inherently sterilising) Hegelian speculation.

Žižek’s argument that Hegel is more radical than Marx himself would be the ultimate suffocation of any form of spontaneous and collective political agency. By implication, workers must get acquainted with the Science of Logic and learn to decipher a radical, practical potential within the dialectic of the concept, through a rigorous approach to Hegel’s 150-year long conceptual engagement with Marx. To claim that any political collective must be grounded in an expert reading of Hegel is in this sense an impossible and bourgeois proposition. Others may argue, as Žižek himself does, that, politically speaking, it is not enough to ‘just do things’: we have a duty to reflect upon why an instinctual fixation upon direct, unquestioning action – a dedication to mindlessly and endlessly producing ‘formal’ political acts (protests, union strikes etc.) – is an inevitably impotent endeavour. The antidote to this impotence would be Hegel, who allows us to ‘think through’ Marx in a politically productive way.

It is barely worth mentioning that major moments in the history of Marxism (Luxemburg, Gramsci, Korsch, Bloch, nuances in the writings of the Hegelian Marxists, the unique position of the Frankfurt School, and a multiplicity of reversals in classical and contemporary Marxism, just to name a few) are missing in the above exposition. However this exposition is far from an intended history of Marxism, and rather serves to briefly illustrate the distinctive lack of univocity in the development of thought on the relation between Marx and Hegel.

‘Marx’ or ‘Marx and…’: these are the opposed poles of a political-philosophical thought that have come to partially define the continental tradition. These two positions are understood as profoundly irreconcilable, and entail radically different implications for the coordinates of political agency and for the recurrent Leninist question, even more pressing now, of what is to be done. But are these positions truly as mutually antagonistic as assumed? It would seem that the alternative between ‘Marx’ and ‘Marx and…’ reproduces Lacan’s paradox of a robber who gives the (false) alternative between ‘your wallet or your life’. In this forced decision, the wallet is always and unquestionably up for taking. The context in which an apparent choice is presented is conditioned by the appearance of a free choice. This ‘free choice’ is however nothing but the freedom to choose a forced alternative. The question of ‘your wallet or your life’ implies the same inevitable consequence – the asymmetry is clear: I cannot somehow choose to ‘give my life and keep my wallet’ as the alternative of ‘giving my wallet and keeping my life’ – the question implies a non-existent freedom. The asymmetry inherent in the choice derives from the fundamental identity of each position. In either case, the wallet is taken.

The latent form of the Marx-Hegel debate is a similarly unavoidable asymmetry, a fundamentally false sense of choice. Hegel is a fictive implication, a retrospective addendum to the category of Marx. The addition of Hegel, if Marx is to be properly understood, will in itself mean nothing to any formulation of ‘Marxism for itself’. The Marx-event (the unsettling introduction of Marxism in the history of ideas) must be understood as radical enough to be independent of any Hegelian tone that may be attributed to it, as much as this tone may nevertheless necessarily be attributed to it. What is of fundamental concern is, in fact, the Marx-event as an initially inarticulable disjunction. When considered from the perspective of his distinctive originality, it will be inevitable that Marx will be thought from the retrospective formulation of ‘Marx and…’ – there is no ‘Marx for himself’ if the ‘and what?’ is not inscribed in the basic logic of his emergence in the philosophical tradition. The most unique inventions are unavoidably framed according to what preceded them, however irreconcilable they are to their original context.

Hegel became the privileged reference-point for this speculative, conceptual and reflective counterpart to the category of ‘Marx and…’: for each Marxist innovation, its formal avatar can be, however forcefully, seemingly discerned in the Hegelian system. One of the more contested instances is perhaps what (via Engels and Althusser) would be called ‘determination in the last instance by the economy’ – a category contested even within Marxist literature. With the structures of surplus-value production and forms of commodity circulation (and the ‘socially determining’ aspect of their investment-processes and inherent commercial tendencies) detailed in Capital (1867, 1885, & 1894), ‘determination in the last instance’ is generally understood to denote the conceptual, indirect agency of economic modes of production in positing the presuppositions for the social structures in which these same modes of production are exercised. The furnishing of the ground of a system’s own intervention – this retrogressive logic is generally attributed to Marx’s dialectical materialism. However is this dialectical method of furnishing the ground for one’s own articulation not even more fundamentally inscribed in the very core of the Hegelian ‘concept’ (Begriff), in the Science of Logic (1812/2014)? The concept is the dynamic actualisation of the logical becoming of essence out of the constitutive antagonism of existence (a transient indeterminacy between being and nothing). The concept must exist towards, as constituted by, that which is radically other, or constitutively irreducible, to itself – it must therefore posit the coordinates of its own un-representable negation as internal to its own substantial expression, and in so doing it posits its own presuppositions in an interminable contradiction of which it is itself the product.

Ultimately, as can be seen in these many examples, there appears to be little value in desperately searching for the ‘missing aspect’ of dialectical materialism which will either reconcile it with, or make it irreducible to, other philosophical systems. Even with more recent trends insisting that Hegel is himself a materialist, any history of the Marx-Hegel relation is itself more of a logical problematic, as Fraser and Burns (2000) had suggested. However, this problematic indeterminacy of Marx can be framed as being far from a weakness. In fact, it is the paradoxical, conceptual strength of reflection that it can reformulate the new according to its roots in the old. This is not to be taken as a detriment to Marx, but as a testament to his originality. His intervention is so retrospectively malleable precisely because of the radical indeterminacy of his historical and dialectical materialism. If we return to Badiou, we can propose that the ontologically inassimilable discontinuity conditioned by an ‘event’ is so radical precisely because it lends itself to an infinite series of possible retrospective reformulations. It is a testament to Marx’s conceptual ingenuity, as a philosophical and as an economical thinker, that he is indefinitely and retrospective forced into various philosophical systems in order to ‘make sense’ of him.

The question should not therefore be, ‘what does Marx owe to Hegel?’ Marx can be made to owe a lot of things to a lot of philosophers. In order to maintain a fidelity to the originality of Marx’s thought, the initial question should be, ‘what about Marx made him retrospectively assimilable to a variety of philosophical traditions? What about Marx’s thought lent him a malleability allowing him to be constructed according to his meaning for any of a series of preceding philosophical systems? The question of Marx’s fidelity to Hegel might be an interminable question, however this question does not herald an immanent articulation of the relation or reproduction of absolute idealism within dialectical materialism, but rather signifies a constitutive inarticulability central to the Marxist intervention, which renders his work constitutively and retrospectively constructed by his temporary ‘fit’ within a historical tradition. Marx’s break from philosophy is radical enough to be both indeterminate and incomplete. Recognising that the debate on Marx’s relation to Hegel is a consequence of this historical inconsistency of Marxism itself, and thus of its undisputable originality, is becoming an increasingly important task for the 21st century avatars of Marxist thought.

 
References
 
Althusser, L. (1965/2005). For Marx. London: Verso Books.
Althusser, L. (1965/2014). Lire Le Capital. PUF.
Althusser, L. (1969). Lenin before Hegel. Available from Marxists Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1969/lenin-before-hegel.htm.
Althusser, L. (2020). On Ideology. Verso Books.
Badiou, A. (2006). Logiques des Mondes. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1972/2013, 1980/2013). Capitalism and Schizophrenia [Anti-Oedipus & A Thousand Plateaus]. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Fraser, I. & Burns, T. (2000). Introduction: An Historical Survey of the Hegel-Marx Connection. In: Burns, T., Fraser, I. (eds) The Hegel-Marx Connection. Palgrave Macmillan, London.
Hegel, G. W. F. (1812/2014). The Science of Logic. Cambridge University Press.
Lenin, V. I. (1929). Conspectus of Hegel’s Science of Logic. Available from Marxists Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/cons-logic/.
Lukács, G. (1923). History and Class Consciousness. Available from Marxists Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/.
Marx, K. (1867, 1885, & 1894). Capital [vols. 1-3]. Available from Marxists Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/.
Žižek, S. (2013). Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. Verso Books.

While neoliberalism is the economic and political ideology that dominates most of the Western world today, it is an ideology that is unknown to most American citizens. The purveyors of neoliberal ideology present themselves as objective and as being above ideology, which serves as a method of concealing the real underlying principles of neoliberalism, which are actually wildly unpopular with regular people. In this book journalist George Monbiot and filmmaker Peter Hutchison attempt to reveal these hidden principles of neoliberalism so that the ideology can be better understood and combatted. And while they do a good job revealing what makes neoliberal capitalism such a predatory, exploitative, unequal, imperialistic, and ecologically disastrous system, they also fall into the left-anticommunism that plagues so much of the Western left, which was critiqued brilliantly by Michael Parenti in his 1997 classic Blackshirts and Reds.
         
The most valuable contribution of this book is that it traces the ideological history of neoliberalism through different thinkers such as Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig Von Mises, and Milton Friedman, up until today where neoliberals themselves now reject the word neoliberalism because of how unpopular it has become. Instead, neoliberals prefer to posture as being above ideology, and to portray the principles of neoliberalism as being natural and eternal.

The authors show how the rise of politicians like Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Agusto Pinochet represent a transition away from Keynsianism and toward neoliberalism, or an unregulated, monopolistic, financialized, version of capitalism, justified by the idea that if we allow the rich to concentrate as much wealth and power into their hands as possible, then somehow this wealth will eventually “trickle down” to the rest of us at the bottom. Since the rise of Reagan and Thatcher inequality has skyrocketed, ecological degradation has accelerated, countless wars have been fought on behalf of corporate plunder, rents and debts are through the roof, and wealth has been concentrated at the top at unprecedented rates.
         
The book also makes a pertinent and valuable analysis of the rise of right wing populist demagogues like the business tycoon Donald Trump in the US, the Musolini praising Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, and the far right Hindutva associated leader of India Narenda Modi. Monbiot and Hutchison avoid falling into what some have called “Trump derangement syndrome” by making a sober and realistic analysis of Trump’s rise to power, arguing convincingly that deteriorating economic conditions make people more susceptible to right wing demagogues who claim to be fighting the establishment while doing its bidding in reality. They point out that it was Bill Clinton, the husband of Hillary Clinton who Trump ran against in 2016, that allowed many good manufacturing jobs in middle America to be outsourced to the Global South with the passing of the free trade agreement NAFTA. Free trade is a core principle of neoliberal ideology, and thus the authors show how it is neoliberalism that set the stage for the populist right wing movement, masterminded by the likes of Steve Bannon, and brought to fruition by his preferred candidate Donald Trump.
         
I also found the author’s analysis of mental health under neoliberalism to be pertinent, as too often we overlook the atomization of humanity and the lack of social connection that permeates throughout the neoliberal system. Obviously these factors play a role in the unprecedented rates of depression, opioid addiction, and mass shootings that now exist across the US. Too often the issue of social isolation in society is overlooked as politicians push half-baked cure-all solutions to these problems that won’t upset their corporate donors. For example the Democrats pushing for gun control, and gun control alone, everytime a new shooting takes place, while generally having very little to say about social isolation and the deterioration of community. It is important to understand that these social issues are complex and are rooted in the social system, and therefore, require systemic and complex solutions. The authors do a fantastic job of making this case in their systematic critique of neoliberalism.
         
Neoliberals tell us that the current state of society is the way things have to be, that this is the natural order of life which must be maintained forever because there are simply no alternatives. And it is this assumption that Monbiot and Hutchison look to challenge in their book. However, by also claiming that communism is a “failed ideology” {1}full stop, with absolutely no explanation or analysis of why it has “failed”, they too are unwittingly propagating the idea that there is no alternative to capitalism. In the words of Michael Parenti, “to claim that Communism can never work is to ignore that fact that it has for millions of people around the world.” Today China is leading the charge against neoliberalism and in doing so have accomplished the incredible feat of bringing 800 million people out of poverty. {2} A fact that the authors of this book don’t even attempt to grapple with, instead falling back on the lame cold war talking point that communism has simply failed.

I would encourage these two authors to read economist Michael Hudson’s fantastic article “America’s Neoliberal Financialization Policy vs.China’s Industrial Socialism”{3} which lays out in great detail the systemic differences between American neoliberalism and Chinese socialism. Although, if a positive word was spoken about Chinese socialism in this book it might not have gotten published by Penguin publishing house. Thus, the decision to badmouth socialism while completely ignoring all of its successes may have been more of a financial decision than a scholarly one.
         
Existing socialist countries are only mentioned a few times in this book and always disparagingly. In Blackshirts and Reds Michael Parenti says “For decades, many left leaning writers and speakers in the United States have felt obliged to establish their credibility by indulging in anti communist and anti-Soviet genuflection, seemingly unable to give a talk or write an article or book review on whatever political subject without injecting some anti-red sideswipe. The intent was, and still is, to distance themselves from the Marxist Leninist Left.” {4} The authors of Invisible Doctrine: The secret history of neoliberalism repeatedly engage in this time honored tradition of bashing socialist countries in order to distance themselves from the communist left, and to fit their message within what is allowed by the established political orthodoxy. It’s amazing how the authors can be aware of the fact that our society is dominated by corporations, bankers, and shareholders, who spend billions of dollars trying to manipulate the public’s understanding of political economy, yet they seem to believe everything that these entities are telling us about communism. As a result the author's analyses of communism sound no different than what you would see in old school cold war propaganda, or a corporate owned news outlet like Fox.
         
Parenti’s text goes on to say that “sorely lacking within the US (or in this case the British) Left is any rational evaluation of the Soviet Union.” {5} Likewise, sorely lacking from the Invisible Doctrine: The secret history of Neoliberalism, is any kind of rational evaluation of China, Cuba, Vietnam, or even non-socialist nations like Iran, who are attempting to construct an alternative economic system to Western neoliberalism. Which you’d think would be important in a text about neoliberalism. The authors choose to totally ignore the emerging multipolar world which is challenging the existing Western power structure and trying to bring about a world where the neoliberal US is no longer the unipolar global hegemon. Even the notedly anti-communist academic Noam Chomsky made a better analysis of China and the multipolar world in his recent book The Withdrawal which was a joint effort with Communist academic Vijay Prashad. {6}

Instead of socialist nations like China, these authors choose to champion the region of Rojava as an existing example of a possible alternative to neoliberalism. Rojava is a semi-autonomous region in Syria which is governed by a self described socialist party with many different branches known as the PKK or the Kurdistan Workers Party. During the Syrian Civil War the PKK sided with the US and CIA backed Free Syrian Army which allied itself with Jihadist extremist groups like ISIS and Al-Nusra in their effort to overthrow the sovereign Government of Bashar Al-Assad. It was in the chaos of this horrific civil war that the Syrian Kurds were able to establish a semi-autonomous zone in so-called Rojava for the first time. Rojava and the PKK have been criticized, especially by the Marxist Leninist left, for acting as proxies of Western imperialism, and for enforcing ethno-nationalist policies that have reportedly led many Syrian Christians to flee Rojava. [7]

The authors champion Rojava because of its efforts to implement Democratic reforms, socially progressive policies distinct from the rest of Syria, and to establish worker cooperatives. But there are many reasons to question whether Rojava should be upheld as a viable alternative to Western neoliberalism, especially when Rojava and the Kurds were recently used as pawns in a regime change effort led by Western neoliberals, intended to overthrow a sovereign state by putting arms in the hands of some of the worst extremist groups in the region. The US currently maintains seven military bases in so-called Rojava which further brings into question whether or not this region is truly a new kind of popular democracy distinct from Western neoliberalism. It is highly possible that Rojava is being allowed by Western neoliberals to experiment with some new forms of Governance so long as they continue to act as a proxy of Western power in the Middle East. {8}

Similarly to Rojava, the state of Israel has adopted a progressive veneer in the past, claiming to be champions for women's rights and for the labor movement, or even claiming to have a socialist economic system due to the prevalence of worker co-ops. However, nobody in their right mind would argue that Israel is a country that anyone should attempt to emulate. As they have of course been charged with maintaining a system of apartheid that systematically discriminates against Palestinian Arabs, who have been ethnically cleansed by the US and British backed State of Israel for over 70 years. Palestinian living standards have reached disastrously low levels, and over 70% of Palestinian people are now living in refugee status, proving that it is impossible to build an equitable and democratic state so long as you allow yourself to be a pawn of western imperialism.  We should be wary of any US backed countries that claim to be heroes for women's rights and Democracy.

Comically, Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds singles out two left anti-communist intellectuals for specific criticism, those being the anarchist environmentalist Murray Bookchin, and the self described socialist novelist George Orwell. Murray Bookchin once mocked Parenti for trying to make a balanced analysis of the Soviet Union by derriding him for caring so much about “the poor little children who got fed under communism” (his words). Ironically, it is Bookchin’s vision of a future society that Monbiot and Hutchison champion as the most viable alternative to neoliberalism. Despite the fact that no such society has ever been created and sustained in practice, unless you accept their fallacious argument about Rojava. This is not the case with Marxist-Leninist socialism, which has seen a great deal of success in practice, and has already elevated living standards for billions of people.
The other ideologue who Parenti criticizes, George Orwell, used his voice to vehemently denounce and criticize the Soviet Union at a time when they were locked in a mortal struggle with Hitler and the Nazis. Ironically, George Monbiot won the Orwell award for journalism in 2022 and has since given lectures for the George Orwell Foundation {9} carrying on Orwell’s legacy of criticizing capitalism, while bashing and deriding those around the world who are doing the most to construct an alternative to it.

While this book grasps the evils and contradictions of neoliberalism quite well, it fails to understand the geopolitical situation today in which a new multi-polar order is arising against US dominated neoliberal hegemony. The US is desperate for regime change in countries like China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, etc. because they continue to build stronger economic ties with one another, while preventing western neoliberals from plundering their resources and manipulating their Government policy.

Confusingly, the authors at one point lump Russian President Vladimir Putin together with neoliberal demagogues around the world such as Bibi Netanyahu in Israel, Donald Trump in the US, and Narenda Modi in India. And while Russia did fall in line with the Neoliberal world order during the 1990s with the collapse of the Soviet Union and subsequent plundering of the Russian economy by Western capital, under Putin they have largely reversed course, building stronger trade ties with China, nationalizing sections of the energy industry, cracking down on certain oligarchs and Russian firms, and investing more resources in infrastructure development. It is for these reasons that the US desperately seeks regime change in Russia today, dumping billions of dollars into a Ukrainian Proxy war against Russia, and terroristically blowing up the Nord stream Pipeline to sever Russian economic relations with Europe. The Russia of today, with Putin at the helm, is far from fitting in with neoliberal puppets of the West like Netanyahu in Israel or Zelensky in Ukraine. This is why Putin receives only vitriol from the US Government, while the other two receive a seemingly endless supply of money and guns.

The authors also make the claim in this book that China’s production quotas under Mao Zedong had no social utility whatsoever, which simply shows a complete lack of understanding of Chinese history and socialist economic planning. Prior to the era of Mao, China was a feudal agrarian country with very little industry to speak of. The country was dominated by feudal landlords who ruled over vast swaths of land worked by impoverished peasants. In order for China to become a modern society Mao needed to industrialize the nation and teach these peasants to engage in modern economic practices such as steel working. This is why the now infamous backyard furnaces came about, as Chinese peasants had to be given tools by the state in order to teach themselves how to do modern industrial production. And while these policies were far from perfect, the first years of Mao’s rule in China were the fastest increase in human life expectancy that has ever been seen in human history. China transformed in a matter of decades from a backwards feudal agrarian dictatorship, into a modern economy where social metrics like literacy, housing, and access to healthcare, have been massively expanded. To say that the production quotas under Mao had no social utility, and to compare them to production as it now exists in the neoliberal United States, is a statement that can only be described as absurd and ignorant.

The authors do choose to acknowledge the power of central economic planning and how it can be used to direct production towards social ends. However, instead of analyzing how the USSR and China used economic planning to transform themselves from being semi-feudal agrarian countries into industrialized global superpowers in a matter of decades, the authors instead choose to praise Franklin Delano Roosevelt for the way that he was able to direct all production towards military equipment during the Second World War. And to be fair, this is not a bad example. It does show that the US can, and has historically, used central economic planning to direct production toward social ends. However, to use this as an example while dismissing China’s use of central economic planning as a failure is completely ludicrous.

An area of agreement I have with the authors is that the left of today needs to offer people a new narrative as to how our system can be radically changed. We at the Midwestern Marx Institute for Marxist Theory and Political Analysis have been attempting to do just that, by fleshing out a theory of American Marxism, or what we call the American Trajectory. We believe that America has already gone through three periods of revolutionary change, those being the 1776 revolution against british colonialism, the Civil War of the 1860s which abolished slavery and made capitalism the dominant mode of production in the American South, and the civil rights movement which did away with apartheid putting black and white workers on a more equal playing field, and allowing them to organize together against the ruling class as one. As Americans we need to understand that our history is one of colonial plunder and corporate power, but it is also a history of resistance to that power. Heroes like WEB Dubois and Martin Luther King helped to fight for historic advances that brought us to the situation we are in today free of slavery and apartheid. The struggles of the past have moved our society forward and set the stage for what must come next… American Socialism. The abolition of the neoliberal capitalist system and the transition into a truly democratic system where production is directed towards social ends, rather than the production of surplus value alone. This is the American Trajectory and this is the “New Story” that I believe we need to start selling the American Public on.

Marxism is not a failed ideology. It is a science that must be applied uniquely to each country so that we might understand our current situation and how to change it through class struggle. Once we learn to apply Marxism to our own conditions and use it to understand our country’s history, we can start to understand how we got to the current situation, and how we can best move forward with changing it. There are many analyses in this book that are passed off as unique, but were already made by Karl Marx more than a century ago. Such as the idea that the ruling economic class of society will try to portray its own narrow interests as being in the interest of the whole of society, including the workers they exploit. This was something that Marx and Engels realized as early as 1840 in his text The German Ideology. The authors reformulate Marx and Engels’s analysis in different words without crediting or citing them, before turning around and claiming that Marxist ideology has failed. Such instances are common among Western Leftists who tend to throw endless shade at the work of Marx while copying some of his most important analyses of capitalism without credit.

Despite falling into left-anticommunism throughout, the authors of Invisible Doctrine: the secret history of neoliberalism, provide a solid and pertinent critique of capitalism and the current neoliberal social system. Because of this book, many people will come to understand how the social problems we face today are rooted in capitalism, and the neoliberal political ideology that stems from it, and serves to justify its continued existence. The book proves without a shadow of a doubt that for the vast majority of people living under neoliberalism the system has failed.

However, by arguing that capitalism's antithesis, socialism, has also failed, the authors further confuse the masses and push them to seek solutions in the anarchist school of thought which has yet to produce a successful revolution, or build a social system separate from western capitalism and imperialism. By arguing that keynesianism, neoliberalism, and socialism have all failed the authors extinguish some of the hope that the masses might place in the rise of socialism and the multipolar world. This might be acceptable if the authors made a sober analysis of rising socialist powers like China and Cuba, or their non-socialist allies like Russia and Iran, in order to argue that their rise will not be enough to destroy neoliberalism, and there is still much work to be done by workers here in the imperial core. Which is an argument that I would agree with. However, the authors instead fall back on cold war style state department talking points to dismiss these rising socialist and socialist adjacent powers without offering a shred of real analysis. And thus the book gives a solid analysis of neoliberalism, but confuses the current state of geopolitics by neglecting to analyze the massive and growing resistance to neoliberalism that is taking place in the East and the Global South.
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Read this book if you want to gain a better grasp on modern neoliberalism, and especially its ideological roots which can be traced back to the beginning of the last century. However, also make sure to pick up Vijay Prashad and Noam Chomsky’s The Withdrawal for a more all encompassing and accurate analysis of the current geopolitical situation. Also don’t be afraid to pick up some Marx and Lenin. I promise there is more to learn from them than what much of the Western left would lead you to believe.

Citations

1. Monbiot, George, and Peter Hutchison. The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism. Penguin Books Ltd, 2024.
2. “Lifting 800 Million People Out of Poverty – New Report Looks at Lessons from China’s Experience.” Worldbank.Org, The World Bank, 1 Apr. 2022, https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/lifting-800-million-people-out-of-poverty-new-report-looks-at-lessons-from-china-s-experience. Accessed 2024.
3. Hudson, Michael. “America’s Neoliberal Financialization Policy vs. China’s Industrial Socialism.” Michael-Hudson.Com, 14 Apr. 2021, https://michael-hudson.com/2021/04/americas-neoliberal-financialization-policy-vs-chinas-industrial-socialism/.  Accessed 2024.
4. Parenti, Michael. “Left Anti Communism.” Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism & the Overthrow of Communism, City Lights Books, San Francisco, California, 1997, p. 43.
5. Parenti, Michael. “Left Anti Communism.” Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism & the Overthrow of Communism, City Lights Books, San Francisco, California, 1997, p. 45.
6. Prashad, Vijay, et al. The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power. The New Press, 2022.
7. Hamou, Ammar, and Will Christou. “Syrian Christians: Exploited or Protected Minority?” Syria Direct, 22 Dec. 2019, syriadirect.org/syrian-christians-exploited-or-protected-minority/.
8. Line Struggle Collective. “On Rojava and the Western Left.” Linestruggle.Medium.Com, Medium, 22 Apr. 2022, https://linestruggle.medium.com/on-rojava-and-the-western-left-bac1b858173e. Accessed 2024.
9. “George Monbiot.” The Orwell Foundation, The Orwell Foundation, 13 July 2022, www.orwellfoundation.com/journalist/george-monbiot/.

​The principal question for any socialist movement today, be it in the U.S. or outside, is where it stands on issues of war and peace – what will be its position regarding American imperialism. As the great W. E. B. Dubois had long ago noted, “the government of the United States and the forces in control of government regard peace as dangerous.” The foundation of American society, as it exists under the tyranny of capital, is war. They have built up a grand machinery of lies, pumping out through all mediums the twisted facts and invented realities needed to support their topsy-turvy narrative of world events – and thereby, obtain consent for their crimes. They have slaughtered people and allowed whole populations to face the meat grinder of war to defend the right of accumulation for the owners of big capital – the monopoly-finance capitalist class. To defend the ‘rights’ of those who have pillaged the world for centuries. Those who make a killing out of killing. Who trade in the annihilation of life for profit.
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As everyone knows, wherever there is oppression and immiseration there will be, sooner or later, resistance. This is a universal law of all human societies fractured by class antagonisms. It is this dialectic of class struggles which pushes humanity forward, often producing the births of whole new social systems from the ashes of a previous one. But these moments of societal renewal, where a new class comes into a position of power and creates a world in its own image, are not guaranteed – even if the conditions for producing it are. There is always the possibility, as Marx and Engels had long ago noted, of a general societal dissolution. To put it in terms fitting with the contradictions of the capitalist mode of life, it isn’t only socialism which stands as a possibility within the embryo of capitalism, equally capable of actualizing itself is, as Rosa Luxemburg long ago noted, barbarism.

The human element, what in traditional communist literature is called the subjective factor or the subjective conditions, are indispensable. It does not matter how bad things get, how clearly revolutionary the objective conditions are, without the subjective factor all is nil. It is the organized masses, led by the most conscious within their ranks, that make, out of the objectively revolutionary conditions, the revolutions.

For Lenin and the communist tradition, objectively revolutionary conditions require the presence of a few key factors: 1- the worsening of the masses’ living conditions, 2- their inability to go on in the old way, 3- their willingness to act (and not just passively accept dissatisfaction), and 4- a crisis in the ruling class itself, where even they cannot continue on in the old way. These objective conditions are present, and intensifying daily, in American society. I chronicle them in detail in my book, The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism.

We are faced with the first generations in American history to live lives worst than their parents. Precarity has become a general reality for working people, the majority of whom are a lost paycheck away from joining the 600 thousand homeless wandering around in a country with 33 times more empty homes than homeless people. Debt slavery has also become, in our highly financialized capitalism, a generalized reality drowning most working-class Americans. Hundreds of thousands die yearly for lacking the financial means to access medical services or overdosing on opioid drugs pushed by the medico-pharmaceutical industrial complex in cahoots with the government, the universities, and NGOs. Social decay is evident as former industrial powerhouse cities are plagued by zombified humans and rusted remains of the industries that once were the basis of decent working-class communities. The American dream has become a joke for working-class people who have more and more come to realize what the comedic-critic George Carlin once said: it’s called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.

But these conditions, although functioning as the prime matter for building a revolutionary movement, are not enough. Why is that? I turn to Lenin, who says that “it is not every revolutionary situation that gives rise to a revolution; revolution arises only out of a situation in which the above-mentioned objective changes are accompanied by a subjective change, namely, the ability of the revolutionary class to take revolutionary mass action strong enough to break (or dislocate) the old government, which never, not even in a period of crisis, ‘falls’, if it is not toppled over.”

Like Sisyphus, the left of the last two decades seems condemned to roll the rock up simply to see it fall… rinsing and repeating continuously every few years. Since the protest movement against the invasion of Iraq, to Occupy Wall Street, to the Bernie Movement, to the Black Lives Matter Protests, to the current protests against the Zionist Genocide, the left has seen itself condemned to pull hundreds of thousands, and sometimes even millions, into the streets to express anger with whatever injustice is latched onto, only to then, after a few weeks or months, have everything return to square one.

I genuinely hope that the protest for a permanent ceasefire breaks this trend.

But if we are honest with ourselves, what fruit has borne out of the last two decades of protests? Did the Iraq protests stop the invasion and further destruction of the middle east? Did the occupy wall street protests stop financial speculation and overthrow the 1 percent? Did the Bernie movement win political power and bring with it the much-promised political revolution? Did the BLM protests actually challenge policing, the prison industrial complex, and the system which has made them necessary? The answer is not only No. The answer is, besides not achieving their desired ends, they have often accomplished quite the contrary. Movements such as Bernie’s and BLM, whatever still remains of it, were clearly just absorbed into the liberal, frankly most dominant, wing of the ruling class. They became what I’ve called a controlled form of counter hegemony, presenting a veneer of radicality on what is essentially a bourgeois politics that serves to reinforce the status quo with radical sounding language.
Giving up is, of course, not an option. The necessity for struggle is in the air. What do we do then?

I think we must start with being open to self-critique. Far too often even the attempt at doing so will receive backlash from those who are more comfortable with continuing the failures. Marxism is to dogma as water is to oil. If one is present the other cannot be, or at least not for long. If the tactics of the past have not worked, then it’s time to go back to the drawing board and ask: why have the working masses not been won over to our side? Why have all the movements we’ve led this century ended in disappointment? It is okay to fail, but what is insane is to continue to fail in the same way while expecting a different outcome.

When questions such as these are tackled by the dominant left, the blame is almost always placed upon working people. Working people are not enlightened enough, too brute to realize how bourgeois ideology manipulates them, etc. While components of the narrative are true, the question is, so what? What is the point of communists if not precisely to piers through that, to win the struggle for the hearts and minds of the people – to rearticulate the rational kernels of the spontaneous common sense they’ve developed within the bourgeois order towards socialism, either producing active militants in the process or the sympathetic mass which it leads. In my view, the chunk of the blame for our failures lies on the left itself. On its middle-class composition and the purity fetish outlook it operates with.

Therefore, while we find objectively revolutionary conditions in the U.S., we have a deep crisis in the subjective factor, that is, a poverty of revolutionary organizations and their worldviews. Most of the organizations of the socialist left are governed by the professional managerial class, what in the time of Marx and Engels was simply called the intelligentsia. What were supposed to be working-class organizations, vehicles for the conquest of political power by this class, have become centers of petty-bourgeois radicalism, as Gus Hall used to say. This analysis is not new, many theorists have pointed out how, since the late 1970s, along with the State Department's attack on communists and socialists in the labor unions, and its promotion, through programs such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom, of a compatible anti-communist left, the working-class left has been destroyed and replaced by middle-class "radical recuperators," as Gabriel Rockhill calls them. The U.S. State Department, as I show in my work, has been effective in creating a "controlled counter-hegemonic left," a left that speaks radically but in substance always allies itself with imperialism.

This is far from a condemnation of intellectuals in general, but the reality is that, as it currently exists in the U.S., the dominance of the professional managerial class within socialist organizations is deeply alienating to workers, who are less concerned with their middle-class moralism than with surviving in a declining society.

On an ideological level, I have shown that this middle-class left suffers from purity fetish, a worldview that makes them relate to the world on the basis of purity as a condition for support. If something doesn't live up to the pure ideas that exist in their heads, it's rejected and condemned. In essence, it is the absence of a dialectical materialist worldview, a flight from a reality governed by movement, contradictions, and interconnectedness, and toward a pure and lofty ideal safe from desecration by the meanness of reality. This purity fetish, I argue in my work, takes three central forms in the United States:

1) Because a bloc of conservative workers are too imperfect or "backward" for the American left, they are considered baskets of deplorables or agents of a "fascist threat." Instead of raising the consciousness of the so-called backward section of the working population, the purity fetish left condemns them, effectively removing about 30-40% of American workers from the possibility of being organized. This is a ridiculous position which divorces socialists from those working in the pressure points of capital. The purity fetish left, therefore, eschews the task of winning over workers irrespective of the ideas they hold. In doing so, they simply sing to the choir, i.e., the most liberal sections of the middle classes that already agree with them on all the social issues they consider themselves to be enlightened on.

2) The second form that the purity fetish takes is a continuation of the way it is generally present in the tradition of Western Marxism, which has always rejected actually existing socialism because it does not live up to the ideal of socialism in their heads. In doing so, they have often become the leftist parrots of empire, failing to recognize how socialism is to be built, that is, how the process of socialist development occurs under the extreme pressures of imperialist hybrid warfare in a world still dominated by global capital. In its acceptance of capitalist myths about socialism, this left acquiesces to the lie that socialism has always failed, and arrogantly posits itself as the first who will make it work. Instead of debunking the McCarthyite lies with which the ruling class has fed the people, this left accepts them.

3) The third form of the purity fetish is the prevalence of what Georgi Dimitrov called national nihilism: the total rejection of our national past because of its impurities. A large part of the American left sees socialism as synonymous with the destruction of America. Bombastic ultra-left slogans dominate the discourse of many of the left-wing organizers, who treat the history of the United States in a metaphysical way, blind to how the country is a totality in motion, pregnant with contradictions, with histories of slavery, genocide, imperialism, but also with histories of abolitionist struggles, workers' struggles, anti-imperialist and socialist struggles. It is a history that produces imperialists and looters, but also produced Dubois, King, Henry Winston, and other champions of the people’s struggle against capital, empire, and racism.

This purity fetish left forgets that socialism does not exist in the abstract, that it must be concretized in the conditions and history of the peoples who have won the struggle for political power. As Dimitrov put it, it must socialist in content and national in form. Socialism, especially in its early stages, must always have the specific characteristics of the history of the people: in China it is called socialism with Chinese characteristics, in Venezuela Bolivarian socialism, in Bolivia it means embedding socialism within the indigenous traditions of communalism.  etc.  Kim Il Sung once wrote “What assets do we have for carrying on the revolution if the history of our people’s struggle is denied.” This is effectively what the national nihilists, rooted in the purity fetish outlook, do.

Their national nihilism, contrary to their intentions, leads them into a liberal tinted American exceptionalism, which holds that while all countries have had to give their socialist content a national form, the U.S., in its supposedly uniquely evil history, is the exception. Like German guilt pride, it is a way of expressing supremacism through guilt.

To put it in philosophical terms, there cannot be – contrary to the tradition of Western philosophy – abstract universals devoid of the specific forms they take in various contexts. On the contrary, as the Hegelian and Marxist traditions (both rooted in dialectical worldviews) maintain, the universal can only be actual when it is concretized through the particular. In other words, if we don't take the rational progressive kernels of our national past and use them to fight for socialism, we will not only be doomed to misinterpret U.S. history, but we will fail, as we have, to connect with our people and successfully develop a socialist struggle in our context.

In every instance, the purity fetish of the middle-class left forbids them not only from properly understanding the world, but from changing it. It is no coincidence that the part of the world in which Marxist theoreticians find everything too impure to support is also the one that has failed, even under the most objectively fertile conditions, to produce a successful and meaningful revolutionary movement.

In short, conditions in the U.S. are objectively revolutionary. But the subjective factor is in deep crisis. Processes of social change cannot succeed if these two conditions are not united. For the U.S. left to succeed, it must re-centralize itself in the working masses and dispel its purity fetish outlook, replacing it with the dialectical materialist worldview – the best working tool and sharpest weapon, as Engels pointed out, that Marxism offers the proletariat. It needs a party of the people guided by this outlook, what has been traditionally called a communist party. Although some might bear that name today and tarnish it with decades of fighting for the liberal wing of the ruling class, the substance of what a communist party stands for, what it provides the class struggle, is indispensable for our advancement. It is the only force that can unite the people against the endless wars of empire that not only lead to the deaths of millions around the world, but also to the immiseration of our people and cities, who live under a state that always has money for war, but never any to invest in the people. Only when the people actually come into a position of power and create a society of, by, and for working people, can this fate change. For this we need a communist party, a people’s party. 

​A discussion of the origins of urbanization may provide some insight into the character of modern social problems by highlighting the long historical dynamic at work. It may not be out of place here to point out that anti‑states are well known in the modern world, above all in what the U.S. Federal Reserve Board classifies as eleven offshore banking centers. Five such enclaves are in the Caribbean: Panama, the Netherlands Antilles (Curacao), Bermuda, the Bahamas, and the British West Indies (Cayman Islands). Three enclaves—Hong Kong, Macao, and Singapore—were founded to conduct the China trade. The remaining three are Liberia, Lebanon, and Bahrain at the mouth of the Persian Gulf—the island which Bronze Age Sumerians called Dilmun when they used it to trade with the Indus valley and the Iranian shore.
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Nothing would seem more modern than these offshore banking and tax-avoidance centers. They are the brainchildren of lawyers and accountants in the 1960s seeking to weave loopholes into the social fabric—to provide curtains of secrecy (“privacy”) to avoid or evade taxes, and to serve as havens for ill‑gotten earnings as well as to facilitate legitimate commerce.

Whereas modern nation‑states enact laws and impose taxes, these enclaves help individuals evade such regulations. And whereas nation‑states have armies, these centers are the furthest thing from being military powers. They are antibodies to nationhood, yet more may be learned about Ice Age, Neolithic, and even Bronze Age gathering and meeting sites by looking at these modern enclaves than by examining classical city‑states such as Athens and Rome.

Timeless Features of Entrepots

1. They Lack Political Autonomy

Instead of being politically independent, the modern offshore banking centers and free trade zones are small former colonies, e.g., the Caribbean islands as well as the Chinese entrepots. The Grand Cayman Island was a Jamaican dependency until 1959, when it chose to revert to its former status as a British crown colony so as to benefit from what remained of imperial commercial preferences. Liberia and Panama are U.S. dependencies lacking even their own currency system (both use the U.S. dollar). Hong Kong did not gain title to its own land until Britain’s leases expired in 1997. Panama did not gain control of its canal until 1999.

In sum, whereas political theorists define the first characteristic of modern states (and implicitly their capital cities) as being their ability to enact and enforce laws, offshore banking centers are of no political significance. In the sense of being sanctuaries from national taxes and law authorities, such enclaves are in some ways akin to the biblical cities of refuge. If they are not sanctuaries for lawbreakers in person, they at least provide havens for their bank accounts and corporate shells.

2. They Occupy Convenient Points of Commercial Interface Between Regions

Typically, entrepots are on islands or key transport navels such as the Panamanian isthmus. They are separated as free ports politically, if not physically, from their surrounding political entities. They often are centers of travel and tourism (“business meetings”) and for gambling. In antiquity they typically were centers for sacred festivals or games such as were held at Delphi, Nemia, the Corinthian Isthmus, or Olympia (whence our modern Olympic games originated in a sacred context).

3. They Enjoy Sacred (or Legal) Protection Against Attack

Although Delphi and Olympus were landlocked (as was Çatal Hüyük), they were centrally located for their local regions. They served as religious and cultural centers, whose festivals and games could be conveniently attended by the Hellenic population at large. Even visitors who were citizens of mutually belligerent city‑states enjoyed sanctuary. Of course, today’s enclaves no longer claim sacred status, except for the Vatican and its Institute for Religious Works promoting money-laundering functions1. Their commercial focus has become divorced from the religious setting associated with international commerce down through medieval Europe with its great fairs. And indeed, their attraction is especially to wealthy individuals avoiding the tax laws and criminal codes of their own homeland.

4. They Are Militarily Safe

Although today’s enclaves rarely have armies of their own, they are militarily safe. Thanks to their unique apolitical status, and indeed to their ultimate dependence on larger powers, their neighbors have little motive to attack them and every reason to use them as business channels and even for government transactions such as arms dealing, money laundering, and related activities not deemed proper behavior at home. The resulting commerce thrives free of regulations and taxes, conducted in militarily safe environments without the cost of having to support standing armies, and hence less need to levy taxes for this purpose, or to monetize national war debts.

5. They Are Politically Neutral Sites

To create such enclaves has been an objective of mercantile capital through the ages. It patronizes the world’s politically weakest areas as long as they do not do what real governments do: regulate their economies. The search for “neutral territory” expressed itself already in the chalcolithic epoch, many millennia before private enterprise developed as we know it. The result of this impetus is that neolithic towns such as Çatal Hüyük, Mesopotamian temple cities such as Nippur, island entrepots such as Dilmun, the Egyptian Delta area, Ischia/Pithekoussai, and the biblical cities of refuge share the following important common denominator with today’s offshore banking centers: Instead of being centers of local governing, legal, and military power, they were politically neutral sites established outside the jurisdictions of local governments.

6. They Create Forums for Rituals of Social Cohesion

Whether the status of these urban sites was that of sanctified commercial entrepots or amphictyonic centers, they provided a forum for rituals of social cohesion to bolster their commerce. These rituals included the exchange of goods and women (intermarriage)—commerce and intercourse in their archaic sexual meaning as well as in the more modern sense of commodity exchange.

I have cited above the archaic practice of conducting trade via island entrepots. The sacred island of Dilmun/Bahrain in the Persian Gulf represents history’s longest lasting example of such an enclave. It served as an entrepôt linking Sumer and Babylonia (whose records refer prominently to the “merchants of Dilmun”) to the Indus civilization and the intervening Iranian shore. Its status as a sacred as well as commercial center may have been promoted by the fact that its waters were a source of pearls, prized as sacred symbols of the moon (being round, pale, and associated with deep water). It also seems to have served as a high‑status burial ground for prosperous individuals, or at least for parts of their bodies. Lamberg‑Karlovsky2 reports that there are more fingers and other limbs than full skeletons, as the Sumerians partook piecemeal in the island’s sanctity (although some commentators believe that this may be simply the result of grave robberies through the centuries3). In any event, these social and commercial virtues helped make Dilmun one of the most expensive pieces of Bronze Age real estate, not unlike modern Bahrain.

7. They Facilitate Commercial Development

The sacred status of such entrepots facilitated commercial development in ways that did not abuse Bronze Age sensibilities, much like the sacred status of temples did when they became the major economic and textile production centers. While creating the economic conditions and organization of large‑scale enterprise within traditional social values and order, Bronze Age institutions provided leeway so as not to stifle commercial development with overcentralized control. This may be part of the reason why trade was conducted outside the city gates. The philosophy was to create “mixed economies” in which institutional and private sectors each had their proper role.

1. David A. Yallop, In God’s Name: An Investigation into the Murder of Pope John Paul I, 1984, pp. 92-94.
2. C.C. Lamberg-Karlovsky “Dilmun: Gateway to Immortality,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Jan 1982, 41(1), pp. 45-50.
3. P.R.S. Moorey, “Where did they bury the Kings of the IIIrd Dynasty of Ur?” Iraq, 46, 1984, pp. 1‑18.

​GDD 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.

​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.

​The 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.

​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.
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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.
​

​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]
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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:

Paul 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:

1. Paul Robeson, “Primitives,” 1936 ↩︎
2. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History, 1989 ↩︎
3. V.I. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, 1908 ↩︎
4. Albert Einstein, “Physics and Reality,” 1936 ↩︎
5. Albert Einstein, Letters to Solovine, 1906-1955 ↩︎
6. B.G. Kuznetsov, Albert Einstein, 1965 ↩︎
7. Vladimir A. Fock, “On the interpretation of quantum mechanics” in V.A. Fock – Selected Works: Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Field Theory, ed. L. D. Faddeev, L. A. Khalfin, and I. V. Komarov, 2004 ↩︎
8. Peter Woit, Not Even Wrong, 2006 ↩︎
9. W.E.B. Du Bois, “Galileo Galilei,” 1908 ↩︎
10. John Horgan, The End Of Science: Facing The Limits Of Knowledge In The Twilight Of The Scientific Age, 1996 ↩︎
11. Martin Luther King Jr., “My Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” 1958 ↩︎
12. Martin Luther King Jr., “Rediscovering Lost Values,” 1954 ↩︎
13. James Baldwin, “Of the Sorrow Songs: The Cross of Redemption” ↩︎

​The 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/#.

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.

It 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.

​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.