The Moving finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it. - The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám Death as the Nexus for the Possibility of Meaning in Human LifeIn This Life, the philosopher Martin Hägglund argues that: To attain a peaceful state of eternity you must be liberated from the risk of losing what you love. Were such liberation possible, however, nothing would matter to you. You literally would not care. There would be no urgency to do anything or maintain love for anyone, since nothing of value could be lost (2019, 44). Homer’s The Odyssey presents us with a similar message in book five. The situation Odysseus (the central character) is thrust into on Calypso’s Island reflects the meaninglessness of eternal life (Calypso is a beautiful female deity which has detained Odysseus for seven years). In the Island, Odysseus is guaranteed immortality and all the bodily pleasures he can imagine. However, when the character’s stay on the Island is introduced to the reader, Odysseus is weeping, missing his family, and longing to return with them. In our contemporary logic of shallow hedonism (or non-Epicurean hedonism), where the satisfaction of desires and pleasures has raised itself into an ethical imperative, Odysseus’s actions reflect those of a madman. Within this contemporary logic, Odysseus’s actions are as unfathomable as Abraham’s killing of his son, Isaac, on God’s orders. Abraham’s action, as the Danish existentialist Søren Kierkegaard notes, is beyond the limits of comprehension, it is absurd and cannot be grasped as a “distinction among others embraced by understanding” (Kierkegaard 1985, 75). Within the logic of contemporary bourgeois society our dominant mode of experience is having – we are what we have and what we consume (Fromm 1976, 26-7). In our capitalist hyper-consumerist societies, the Cartesian cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) is turned into Cōnsūmere ergo sum (I consume; therefore, I am). The world is turned into a big “theater of consumption,” where meaningless enjoyment – whose real and well-hidden telos is the realization of profit obtained in the consumed commodities –becomes life’s prime want (Mbembe 2004, 394). An Island of infinite pleasure would seem, within the confines of this mode of relationality and irrational rationality, the purest form of good – a heavenly Island. But it isn’t enough for Odysseus. Why? Well, not only are there things that matter more than pleasure (if you wish, think of a hierarchy of values, some of the higher ones which are inaccessible in Calypso’s Island), such as honor, loyalty, family, etc., but the possibility of anything mattering at all within the confines of immortality is impossible. Odysseus’s life on the Island might have been pleasureful, but – insofar as it was sustained within conditions of immortality – it would have also been meaningless. Only when the ever-present reality of our finitude is the background of all our actions can life obtain meaning. Death, that which Martin Heidegger called “the possibility of the impossibility of any existence at all,” is the nexus through which meaning can emerge in our life (1962, 307). It is the fragile character of our lives which functions as the conditions for the possibility of meaning. Odysseus’s struggle to leave the Island is a struggle for life, for family and honor, but most importantly, for a return to the finitude which underlays our being-in-the-world and provides us with the conditions for living meaningful, truly human lives. As Wolfgang Petersen's 2004 masterpiece Troy has Achilles (played by Brad Pitt) say: “The gods envy us. They envy us because we’re mortal, because any moment may be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.” The Crisis of Meaning and Bourgeois Finitude While it is our finitude which grounds our ability to lead meaningful lives, an awareness of our finitude does not guarantee that we’ll find, or create, meaning in our lives. An awareness of our mortality, therefore, while necessary, is not in itself sufficient. We know we are not immortal. In fact, in our hyper-consumerist societies, the primacy of shallow hedonism is often rooted in a deep sense of our mortality. For instance, just a few years ago the acronym that grasped the zeitgeist of the U.S. was ‘YOLO,’ which stood for You Only Live Once. Under this motto, pleasure-centered licentiousness was legitimized. After all, why shouldn’t I enjoy myself to the fullest if I only live once? But this sense of mortality has not, and (under the conditions in which it exists) cannot, provide the fertile ground needed for us to create meaning in our lives. We live in societies riddled with depression, anxiety, stress, etc. As the young Karl Marx had already observed by 1844, capitalism systematically alienates us from our labor, its product, our fellow human beings, nature, and from our species-essence (gattungswesen, by which he meant our ability to creatively objectify ourselves onto nature through our labor).[1] These are profound crisis at the human level (crisis comes from one of the Greek words for separation, krísis), and pervade our lebenswelt (life-world) or forms of being-in-the-world under our current capitalist-imperialist mode of life. In many ways, a lot of these social-psychological ills have been normalized. As Dr. Gabor Mate shows in The Myth of Normal, even things like chronic illness, which in many cases can be traced back to stress patterns formed out of the habits people are thrusted into by the dominant order, are anything but normal – in fact, they are “profoundly abnormal” in just about every way possible (Mate 2022, 7). Trauma (both its big T and small t iterations) is essentially rooted, as Dr. Mate notes, in a “fracturing of the self and of one’s relationship to the world” (Mate 2022, 23). This is, in essence, another form of the same crisis Marxism has explained, condemned, and combatted since the middle of the 19th century. In the midst of our alienated, exploited, and oppressed mode of existence, the form of life we live in must, in order to successfully finish the cycle of capital accumulation for which we were exploited in the first place, bombard us with advertisements destined to make us Homo consumericus in those few hours of the days were – although feeling the lingering affects of the work day – we are not directly getting exploited. The consumption of advertisements – which studies have shown to take up, on average, four years of our lives – is a form of consumption which proliferates our desires to consume. It is the equivalent of drinking Coca-Cola, a drink shown to dehydrate us further, in order to quench our thirst. Additionally, since we often can’t afford this (wages have stayed low, prices and job precarity have risen), we are forced to turn to borrowing to pay for what we consume. The American working class, indubitably, is amongst the most indebted in the history of humanity. This form of debt-slavery which characterizes the lives of the modern American proletariat and reproletariat (i.e., the section of the last century’s middle-classes which have fallen back to precarity and instability), is a form of what Marx calls in the third volume of Capital the “secondary exploitation… which runs parallel to the primary exploitation taking place in the production process itself” (Khrachvik 2024; Marx 1974, 609). This has ushered into world-history a new form of superexploitation within the metropole itself, where its working masses are not only exploited (direct, primary exploitation) but cripplingly indebted (secondary exploitation), and therefore, super, or doubly, exploited. How can any meaning arise in lives plagued by alienated work and meaningless consumption? It is not enough to show that we are dealing, as a society, with a deep crisis of meaning. Viktor Frankl, for instance, already described in the middle of the last century through many widely read and celebrated books the universal character of meaninglessness in modern bourgeois society (Frankl 1985, 164). But is this recognition enough? Must we not inquire as to its origins? Must we not explain, and not just describe these crises? A scientific explanation of these pervasive social-psychological ills would have, as Dr. Mate notes, “revolutionary implications” (Mate 2022, 8). The question would be, can the sciences in these fields (especially its mainstream trends), be able to overcome what the Marxist scientists Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin have called their “Cartesian reductionism” (Levins and Lewontin 1985, xii)? Can they move away from bourgeois philosophical assumptions which divide mind and body, individual and society, which observe things as dead and static entities, and which reify them from the larger totalities whose existence in they presuppose? In short, can these sciences adopt – either consciously or not – the materialist dialectic and its focus on universal motion, interconnection, contradiction, totality-analysis, etc.? These are the foundations through which we may reproduce the concrete concretely in thought, and hence, understand the world in all its complexities (Garrido 2022, 34-40). A central obstacle in this task is not only the bourgeois character of the institutions they’re forced to operate through, but, as an ideological reflection of this, their adoption of the view that they are (and this is especially true in the ‘hard’ sciences) somehow above ideology and philosophy. What an ideologically loaded sentiment! We are back to Plato’s cave, back to prisoners who take the conditions of their particular enchainment to be the whole of reality itself. The truth is, while the sciences often fancy themselves to be ‘above’ philosophy and ideology, “in most cases,” as Friedrich Engels had noted, they are “slaves to precisely the worst vulgarized relics of the worst philosophies” (Engels 2012, 213). “Nothing evokes as much hostility” in scientists, Levins and Lewontin write, “as the suggestion that social forces influence or even dictate either the scientific method or the facts and theories of science” (Levins and Lewontin 1985, 4). A re-grounding of the mainstream sciences in a consistent dialectical materialist worldview, along with the uprooting of the profit motive that dictates its telos in our mode of life, would readily provide a richer, more comprehensive, and – necessarily – a more revolutionary understanding of our crisis of meaning and what overcoming it entails.[2] Finding Meaning in the Struggle for a New World The point which I would like to get across here is the following: the crisis of meaning we are experiencing is systematically rooted in the capitalist mode of life. This is something which can, and has, been scientifically proven. It is not simply a question of ‘culture’ or ‘individual accountability’. While it manifests itself in our culture and individual lives, its existence there reflects the forces at play in the economic base of society. The crisis in our culture and in our individual lives is a product of the heightening of the contradictions at the foundation of a moribund capitalist-imperialist order. This is where a lot of the commentary (especially critical in character) on the crisis of meaninglessness misses the mark. It merely describes the way the crisis looks by the time it gets to the social-psychological level, remaining ‘cultural’ in its critique through and through, never explaining the underpinning motion and contradictions producing that which they critique. The superiority of the Marxist outlook (i.e., dialectical materialism) is found in its ability to do precisely this – to explain and not just describe, to show the underlying foundations producing movement at the surface, and not simply taking that surface for the whole of reality. It is important to note, however, that our contemporary crisis of meaning doesn’t necessarily entail that meaningful lives are impossible. In the fringes of quotidian society there are still people who, like Odysseus, find meaning in their family life, in tending to familial duties. There are also, like Odysseus, people who may be rooted in a strong sense of honor, in a deep drive for greatness in their respective fields. This is certainly a reality for many athletes, whose striving within their sports provides a source of meaning in their lives. However, no greater meaning can be derived than that which arises from fighting against a world which systematically produces these crises of meaning. The greatest and most memorable human beings in the history of our species have been those, like Socrates, Jesus, Simón Bolívar, John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Marx and Engels, José Martí, V. I. Lenin, Mao, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and many more, who have found their life’s purpose in the struggle to move humanity forward into a more rational and free world. There is, therefore, tremendous meaning to be found in the struggle against a world governed by exploitation, alienation, and oppression. A capitalist-imperialist order that has murdered tens of millions (four million in the Muslim world in the last two decades alone) and that is threatening humanity with nuclear Armageddon to sustain its hegemony, is worth making the object we commit our lives to destroying. But a purposeful and meaningful life does not have as its only end destruction. We seek to destroy this order, not so that we can dance on the rumble, but so that the fetters it has set on humanity are destroyed. We seek to destroy not for destruction’s sake, but because what we destroy is itself a system, as the British Marxist William Morris called, of waste and destruction (Morris 1884). We destroy, in other words, so that we may construct a future which obliterates poverty, exploitation, plunder, war, oppression, alienation, meaninglessness, bigotry, etc. We destroy so that we may construct a world in which humanity can flourish, where people of all creeds may, as Che Guevara hoped, achieve their “full realization as a human creature” (Guevara 1969 162). Footnotes [1] For more on the development of the concept of alienation through Marx’s work, see my review article: “Karl Marx’s Writings on Alienation,” Monthly Review Online (June 11, 2022): https://mronline.org/2022/06/11/karl-marxs-writings-on-alienation-by-marcello-musto-reviewed-by-carlos-l-garrido/ [2] I have shown elsewhere how this poverty of outlook, conjoined with the material incentives of capitalism, has led to the utter failure of the sciences (the mainstream ones, there’s always good folks doing work that goes against the grain) to understand social-psychological ills such as depression (See: “The Failed Serotonin Theory of Depression: A Marxist Analysis”). An elaboration of these critiques is beyond the goals of this brief paper, I recommend interested readers to read the article referenced above from more of my work in that area. References Achille Mbembe, “Aesthetics of Superfluity,” Public Culture 16(3): 373–405. Carlos L. Garrido, “Book Review: Karl Marx’s Writings on Alienation. By: Marcello Musto,” Monthly Review Online (June 11, 2022): https://mronline.org/2022/06/11/karl-marxs-writings-on-alienation-by-marcello-musto-reviewed-by-carlos-l-garrido/ Carlos L. Garrido, Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview: An Anthology of Classical Marxist Texts on Dialectical Materialism (Dubuque/Carbondale: Midwestern Marx Publishing Press, 2022). Carlos L. Garrido, “The Failed Serotonin Theory of Depression: A Marxist Analysis,” Science for the People (September 09, 2022): https://magazine.scienceforthepeople.org/online/the-failed-serotonin-theory-of-depression-a-marxist-analysis/ Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, Selected Works of Ernesto Guevara (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1969). Erich Fromm, To Have or to Be? (New York: Harpers and Row Publishers, 1976). Friedrich Engels, Dialectics of Nature (London: Wellred Publication, 2012). Gabor Mate and Daniel Mate, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing In a Toxic Culture (London: Vermilion, 2022). Karl Marx. Capital Vol. III (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974). Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom (New York: Pantheon Books, 2019). Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: Harpers Collins Publishers, 1962). Noah Khrachvik, Reproletarianization: The Rise and Fall of the American Middle Class (Dubuque/Carbondale: Midwestern Marx Publishing Press, 2024 Forthcoming). Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985). Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (New York: Penguin Books, 1985). Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (New York: Washington Square Press, 1985). Willaim Morris, “A Factory as It Might Be,” Justice (May 17, 1884), 2, Retrieved from: https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1884/justice/10fact1.htm Author Carlos L. Garrido is a philosophy teacher at Southern Illinois University, Director at the Midwestern Marx Institute, and author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (Forthcoming 2024). Archives September 2023
2 Comments
“You can’t be Neutral on a moving train” - Howard Zinn I am standing in front of an assemblage of found objects, culled from a midwestern city ravaged by capitalism and racism. The pile has been helpfully located here by an artist with support of the local billionaire’s philanthropic foundation, and a private art school in the suburbs. The artist’s statement informs me that the work is about the possible importance of these objects in the past, before they were abandoned, he wants me to consider how the objects were theoretically important to someone once. I’m confused because these are not trinkets from ancient Rome, many of the people who abandoned them are likely still alive, and the reason they were abandoned seems inextricably connected to the billionaire who paid for the show. I move along to a second piece, a display of books about the apocalypse. The artist's statement again offers insight, saying that they find the books interesting because the apocalypse has never come. I turn and look back at the shards of shattered lives that the artists had piled up with the help of the billionaire. It seems that the apocalypse came for those people. Their worlds ended and broke. Perhaps it doesn’t count if the apocalypse didn’t affect the rich people. Perhaps the next apocalypse will. The artist's statement assures me that the meaning is in the uncertainty, the billionaire’s logo bids me farewell as I leave. Ambiguity is a key tool of the artist. The use of unresolved imagery and open metaphors allows for artwork to incorporate collaboratively constructed meaning, built by both the artist and the viewer. This allows the artists to deepen and expand their craft- developing a broad range of approaches to connect with an audience beyond direct literal representation. However when we look around at the post modern context, something seems to have gone wrong with this tool. What was once uncertain meaning has become in many cases intentionally oblique artworks, at best requiring an advanced degree to appreciate, and at worst offering little more than their own lack of clarity as a thesis. Today, the art world seems to have fetishized ambiguity: celebrating inscrutability for its own sake, regardless of the effect on the piece- and seem almost to value a failure to communicate with a mass audience as the highest form of work. It seems worth at least briefly investigating the effects of this trend, try to understand why it may be playing such a role at this moment in history, and offering a lens to understand and critique not ambiguity as such, but this trend of fetishized inarticulate artistic production. In the modern art world, so completely dominated by capital: from foundations, to galleries, auction houses, collectors, tax loopholes, and media; excessive ambiguity seems to abdicate the construction of meaning not to the individual viewer, but to these very capitalist institutions. The artist allows capital to construct and guide the meaning of a piece far beyond any mythologized individual interaction between viewer and artwork. Taken from this perspective ambiguity risks creating art that simply allows the meaning of culture to be even more shaped by the rich and stamped with their world view. I am personally invested in the role of artwork in helping shape and transform the world, how it can support working class emancipatory politics, and inspire communities engaged in this struggle. This is obviously not the only goal of art, however, judging by present discourse in the art world, it appears to be a deeply undervalued one. Empowered by this broad indifference, I hope to offer not a complete conclusion, but to at least reassert a key avenue of critique. To begin we must generally define what we mean by “Ambiguity.” For the purposes of this critique I identify ambiguity as the quality of uncertain meaning or subject in a piece of artwork, and the endorsement of this uncertainty by the creator. As stated above, at its best ambiguity allows an artwork to elevate beyond pure depiction, or a single viewpoint, and create a space where the perception of the viewer helps create the piece. Sometimes this creates a specific interpretation but just as likely it can make the uncertainty and quest for meaning a living part of the work. All of this is perfectly reasonable and indeed critical as a tool of the artist. A career of artwork that speaks in one voice and offers no space for engagement is less that of an artist and more of an advertiser. The quarrel then is not with ambiguity as such, but the more specific role it plays in the socio-economic context of the modern art world. It is difficult to define a clear line between the use of ambiguity by any one artist, and the more general trend of fetshized ambiguity. This is in part because the difference occurs not just at the level of the individual creator, but at the structural level- what works are purchased, funded, rewarded, and discussed by the broader art world. The break arises when ambiguity becomes not a tool for engaging an audience member, but to distance them from the artwork, to enforce a division between an elite who “gets” the piece, and the masses who are increasingly deflected from engagement. Rather than creating space for the audience to collaboratively craft meaning, fetishized ambiguity seems intent upon alienating or distancing a significant portion of the audience, in order to make what can often boil down to fairly shallow points about the uncertainty of modern life. Some of this is visionary complex work to be sure, but it seems worth questioning the inherent elitism of this approach, its widespread popularity among the institutions of the art world- and its intention in an art world already so deeply imbued with divisions class and power. As with all aspects of cultural production, ambiguity functions in a matrix of several variables, and its meaning must be evaluated in this context. Key factors include: the relative visibility of the artist in society, the socio political system of artistic production and validation, and the overall reproductive system of the society at large. Thus, as the visibility of the artist in the society escalates, or the system artistic production is more captured by a specific class interest, or the political moment becomes more tenuous, the issue of ambiguity must be critiqued with more precision. In this context, the tool of ambiguity can overtake the overall mission of artwork- becoming fetishized into an end in it’s own right in order to serve specific class interests. This tendency is similarly conditioned by the very same social/political factors such as methods of display, popularization, materials costs, scale etc. that condition production as a whole. The question is not one why artists are creating ambiguous work, nor why their work is increasingly fetishizing ambiguity, this but why this tendency is being rewarded by the capitalists in control of the artistic sphere. In our present moment then, we must engage with how the art world functions and the role that fetishized ambiguity might play in this system. The art world in capitalist society is controlled not by the public, artists, critics, or even curators- but by capital. This is a point made by many fabulous scholars, though I am most influenced by Mike Davis essays, and Chin Tao Wu’s book “Privatizing Culture.” Through this scholarship, we can understand the art world less as a site of artistic production than of capital accumulation, appreciation, and tax avoidance. As a site of capitalist production, it has faced the same escalating investment as any industry, with capital propping up key galleries, expensive artistic experiences or traveling shows, and private foundations as key value and taste making institutions. A huge amount of artistic labor is done on speculation, never rewarded by collectors/foundations uninterested in its output, or by communities too under resourced to support it. Under capitalism the “art market” is concerned with the production of commodities that meet the needs of it’s consumers — who, be it through the foundation, gallery, or direct patronage, are the rich. Art becomes less about expression and more about developing either speculative value on the art itself OR a variety of side benefits be it to increase the value of a real estate holding, improving the patrons’ image, or helping avoid taxes. There remains a portion of this that is artistic production, attempting to explore human experience, emotions, history etc. but this role is increasingly eclipsed by the role of accumulation and commodification that has developed to serve the broad goals and needs of the rich. While the rich may also patronize specific works of a radical, or particular voice, these exceptions prove the broader structural rule of the modern art world- creating imagery in the service of capital. It is in this context that the fetishization of ambiguity must be evaluated for it’s purpose and role in the art world- which is to say in the goals of the rich. So why does artwork that fetishizes ambiguity serve the goals of the rich? In the context of capitalist production, art is valued as a site of surplus value production, cultural capital, and to obscure value from the state. None of these goals is invested in the content of the work- and in fact many of them may be harmed by work with a specific viewpoint that makes it unappealing to other wealthy buyers, particularly when coming from new artistic voices without pedigree that can be banked upon. A Jackson Pollock painting thus is more easily sold and resold by various investors (the word collector here seems to give them too much credit) than is a piece with a more clear, enunciated, or challenging content. Particularly once key taste making foundations and funders have funded and popularized his work. Thus ambiguity serves to increase the transferability of an artwork- no just allowing the rich to control it’s messaging, but to complete the transformation of artwork into a transferable token of wealth- a goal potentially undermined by political stance and clarity of purpose of the artists. This fetishization of ambiguity is even more particularly interested, not just in the ambiguity of message- but in an ambiguity of solutions. Political artwork has long proved perfectly capable of being incorporated as yet another commodity to be incorporated into the value circuits outlined above. While it may suffer some limitations as a commodity that more formalistic or abstract work does not (narrower market, negative reception etc.) it can still be metabolized to this system and its goals. Where the line of demarcation is more starkly apparent however, is on the ambiguity of solutions about the political problems we face. The reason for this is not overly complex- living as we do within a capitalist society characterized by the exploitation and oppression of the vast majority in order to benefit the wealthy- many solutions that fundamentally address the problems we face are tied up with doing away with this system, and by extension the rich as a class. Artwork that clearly asserts this fact and communicates with a working class audience not only doesn’t serve the goals of the rich, but actively inverts the distancing of modern art, alienating the primary force creating and shaping the art world: wealth, and reaching out instead to a mass audience. Criticism is acceptable, collectible, and profitable, so long as the artist does not begin to reach for solutions, and/or so long as those solutions remain unconnected from the working class. When a piece of artwork is created, it is not released into an abstract individualized world, but rather into a web of social relationships constructed by capital and history. To release an ambiguous piece, in a context where the audience, spaces, language, and reward structures are all inextricably linked to and shaped by capital, is to risk handing over the task of interpretation to the rich. What institutions frame the work, what “public” views it, and what interpretations are crafted and elevated all become conditioned by a specific capitalist class, race, and gender analysis. In this context, is a gallery that relies upon the Gilbert foundations likely to show work that points out the exploitative/feudal relationship he has built with the city and its people; and If it does, will the gallery prioritize this critical interpretation if given the space to avoid doing so by the ambiguity of the piece and the artist’s stance? The point is not that ambiguity is a bad tool- it is that constructing an art world around the fetishization of ambiguity does not put the artists into dialogue with an independent audience, but rather into a dialogue with a disproportionately rich, white audience in an art world shaped by the rich. Ambiguity then becomes a tool for the rich to shape meaning in such a way as to continue their primary goals of profit expansion, and shaping our understanding of reality so as to limit the alternatives to the status quo. What’s more, we should perhaps be more sketical of an ambiguity that repeatedly asks questions with researchable answers, or invite us to once more contemplate the complexity of life. So if the problem is not with ambiguity as such, but with the broader structures of wealth, where does that leave us? I would hesitate to fully prescribe a solution to such a vast and structural issue- however the very scale of the forces involved does suggest a first step: enter into a community practice. Socially conscious art can not be made in isolation, and an individuals distanced observations will all too frequently retain a voyeuristic shallow quality. Join a party, an organization, a reading group, a union, your block club- the point is to enter into the life of the masses, not attempt to interpret your community in isolation. Beyond this, it would be foolish to try and prescribe some sort of universal formula for how to approach ambiguity as an artist. It seems better to hold a few questions in tension as we produce work- a lens to critique how and why we are choosing to use ambiguity in our work. Why are you choosing to use ambiguity in your work? Are you uncertain about the question you are asking? Have you done enough research to make a meaningful statement? Does your work stop at asking “what is happening?” Or does it invite the viewer into a process of imagining and building the future? Who will see this work, and in what context? What readings of the work will be most empowered by that audience and venue? Finally, there is the issue of the artist who stands behind the work. While it is no substitute for creating work that is able to communicate, artists must use as much of their platform as possible to explicitly combat a softening or limiting of their work by the art world. This does not mean self martyrdom by refusing to ever make money, or ever have your work engaged with by the art world, but it does mean being explicit about your values when in these spaces- and not deriving our value as artists from these spaces. Again this approach becomes meaningful and possible only as the artist roots themselves in their community and the actual work of understanding the world. The struggle to produce impactful work does not end when the artist sends their work out into the world- it continues as long as capital dominates the institutions and structures that interpret culture. Despite all of this ambiguity remains a critical tool. The future is full of uncertainty, and art has a huge role to play in helping us as we struggle toward a future that we do not yet know. Ambiguity, framed as a collaboration with a working class audience to develop new meanings for our work and our world- this is a key place for this type of artistic ambiguity and exploration in our world. What we must abandon, or at least interrogate far more critically, is the ambiguity of analysis, of alternatives, of struggle. Neither artists nor the working class more generally needs yet another discussion of “what does it mean to pay rent and live in a world of ruthless exploitation, imperialism, and ecological collapse,” rather we need artwork that is helping us all engage with what me must do about these facts: a decisive shift from endlessly reflecting “what is happening” and toward the new horizons of “what is to be done?” Author Ian Matchett is an organizer and artist working in Detroit. His art can be found on his website. Republished from Hampton Institute. Archives September 2023 Conventional historians often like to talk about the so-called ‘Greek Miracle’ lasting from about 700-300 BCE in which many of the foundational concepts of the Western world first emerged. Pioneering developments in disciplines as diverse as architecture, drama, philosophy, poetry, political science, and sculpture were made by creative geniuses such as Euripides, Phidias, Socrates and Aristotle who remain the starting points for study in their respective fields. The era also witnesses dramatic political upheavals including the rise of Athenian democracy, its clashes with the Persian Empire and the Spartan state and the climactic hegemony of Alexander the Great. Marx was intrigued by the philosophical problem of why this era, perhaps above all other pre-capitalist ones, retained its appeal in the modern world: ‘The difficulty we are confronted with is not, however, that of understanding how Greek art and epic poetry are associated with certain forms of social development. The difficulty is that they still give us aesthetic pleasure and are in certain respects regarded as a standard and unattainable ideal. Why should not the historical childhood of humanity, where it attained its most beautiful form, exert an eternal charm because it is a stage that will never recur? Many of the ancient peoples belong to this category. The Greeks were normal children. The charm their art has for us does not conflict with the immature stage of the society in which it originated. On the contrary, its charm is a consequence of this and is inseparably linked with the fact that the immature social conditions which gave rise, and which alone could give rise, to this art cannot recur.’ Built on slavery As materialists, Marx and Engels were clear-eyed that the undoubted epochal achievements of antiquity were rooted in a merciless and rapacious system of human slavery which condemned the bulk of the population to grinding misery so that an exploitative stratum, including the aforementioned personalities, had the time and leisure to develop their revolutionary concepts and techniques. Engels writes: ‘It was slavery that first made possible the division of labour between agriculture and industry on a larger scale, and thereby also Hellenism, the flowering of the ancient world. Without slavery, no Greek state, no Greek art and science, without slavery, no Roman Empire. But without the basis laid by Hellenism and the Roman Empire, also no modern Europe. We should never forget that our whole economic, political and intellectual development presupposes a state of things in which slavery was as necessary as it was universally recognised.’ No miracle Also as materialists, Marx and Engels understood that the achievements of the Greek Miracle were the consequence of a conjuncture of social and economic forces converging in the Eastern Mediterranean at a particular historical point, and not due to any supposed superiority of Western values, as bourgeois historians in the 18th and 19th centuries had argued. Greece and its associated islands in the Aegean Sea were ideally situated to benefit from the intersection of trade in both goods and ideas that flowed between the neighbouring civilisations of Egypt, Babylon and India as the Iron Age supplanted the Bronze Age round about 800 BCE. These societies were more economically advanced but their predominantly flat geographical terrain made them vulnerable to top-down control by oppressive and powerful monarchies. As a largely mountainous territory, Greece in contrast, was harder for rulers to establish expansive hegemony and the linked islands developed efficient navies to protect their independence. Money had emerged in Asia Minor during this era, allowing the maritime economies of the Greeks to expand and prosper. Ionian revolution Significantly, it was in Ionia on what we call the west coast of Turkey that philosophy first developed. The coastal port of Miletus, in particular, was home to a remarkable sequence of thinkers who collectively created an unprecedented materialist view of the universe; that is to say, one which underplayed or even eliminated religion as a factor in the conception of the natural world. The city, and the surrounding region at this time became the site of intensified class struggle between the new class of merchants and traders who challenged the political power of established control of landowning aristocracies. This added to the intellectual and economic ferment that stimulated the rise of the school of Milesian materialism, pioneered by Thales who lived from about 640 to 546 BCE. Although our knowledge about him is extremely scanty, ancient sources record that Thales remarkably predicted the solar eclipse that took place in 585, a remarkable testament to the astronomical and mathematical advances that accompanied the expansion of commerce and navigation in the Aegean at this time. Unsurprisingly in light of his location, the foundation of Thales’ materialism was a belief that water is the basis of all things in nature. Like all the Milesian materialists, Thales’ brilliant intuition may seem simplistic to our sophisticated scientific outlook in the 21st century but considering the crucial importance of water in the development of life on Earth and in our own bodies it represents a huge step forward in loosening the grip of religious dogma. One of Thales’ relatives and pupils, Anaximander, brilliantly anticipated the Darwinian view of evolution many centuries before the great Victorian scientist by highlighting the interaction of quantitative and qualitative change in all living and non-living things: ‘It is the principle of all becoming and passing away; at long intervals infinite worlds or gods rise out of it and again they pass away into the same.’ Common to the Milesians, Anaximander based his supposition not merely on abstract reasoning on close observation of nature, particularly how the fossil record indicated the existence of many species which although long extinct had contributed in some way to the surviving life forms on the planet. Pristine simplicity The last of the great early Ionian materialists, Anaximenes, postulated that modulations of air were the primary building blocks of the universe. Again, an inspired guess in light of our current understanding about the critical role of hydrogen in the early history of the universe. Engels neatly observed how the unadorned directness of the Milesians was at once the source of both their greatness and their ultimate limitation: ‘Here dialectical thought still appears in its pristine simplicity… Among the Greeks — just because they were not yet advanced enough to dissect, analyse nature — nature is still viewed as a whole, in general. The universal connection of natural phenomena is not proved in regard to particular; to the Greeks it is the result of direct contemplation. Herein lies the inadequacy of Greek philosophy, on account of which it had to yield later to other modes of outlook on the world. But herein also lies its superiority over all its subsequent metaphysical opponents.’ The Ionian materialists laid the foundations for the next wave of Greek philosophers who overlapped with the revolutionary events in Athens which famously brought the world’s first democracy to power. In 508 BCE a coalition of merchants, small property owners and indebted peasants coordinated an uprising in the city that expelled the Pisastratids, a family of tyrants, and initiated a framework of popular participation and voting which represented the peak of political development in antiquity. The democracy of the following 5th and 4th centuries was limited by modern standards-excluding women, foreigners and slaves-but still was a huge advance on the absolute monarchies which dominated previous societies. Lenin on Heraclitus The first of the truly dialectical thinkers to emerge in the Aegean region was Heraclitus who lived from c 540-483 BCE and resided in Ephesus in modern Turkey. His seminal idea about change being a fundamental aspect of reality reflects the intensified class struggle of this crucial era. He is probably the best known of these Presocratic thinkers with his famous aphorism that ‘you cannot step into the same river twice’ frequently cited even today. Heraclitus explicitly rejected the existence of the gods and proposed fire as the primordial element of the universe: ‘This one order of things was created by none of the gods, nor yet by any of mankind, but it ever was, and is, and ever shall be eternal fire-ignited by measure and extinguished by measure.’ His emphasis on strife or conflict as an essential and ever-present factor in all aspects of nature was a significant influence, centuries later, on the thinking of Marx and Engels about the centrality of class struggle in human societies. Heraclitus writes: ‘We must know that struggle is common to all and strife is justice, and that all things come into being and pass away through strife.’ Lenin also hailed Heraclitus as one of the trailblazers of dialectics for this underscoring of how the clash of conflicting forces is the dynamo of progress at all levels: ‘For the One is that which consists of two opposites, so that when cut into two the opposites are revealed. Is not this the proposition that the Greeks say their great and famous Heraclitus placed at the head of his philosophy and gloried in it as a new discovery.’ Marx and the Atomists The most important of the Greek philosophers, as far as the fathers of Marxism are concerned, were Democritus and Epicurus. As a student in Germany in the early 1840s, Marx focused his doctoral dissertation on a comparison of these two great thinkers. At this point in his life, Marx of course was yet to fully develop the theoretical system that would come to be associated with his name, but this work was one of the avenues of thought that would lead him towards revolutionary socialism a few years later. Democritus was the pioneer of atomic theory, writing about 460-370 BCE. Incredibly without any scientific equipment, Democritus speculated that the whole of nature is composed of invisible and indivisible particles of matter which are in constant motion and interaction through the void, which he first described as atoms. Our modern understanding of the sub-atomic world means that the Democritean framework looks simplistic but his fundamental insight about the essential building blocks of nature remains a cornerstone of physics. From philosophy to politics Marx recognised the great achievement of Democritus but valued Epicurus, who lived a few decades later, as even more important in his ideas. For the latter, atoms are the unseen components of nature but their activity is not deterministic or mechanistic as Democritus suggested. For Epicurus, autonomy and chance play significant roles in the movements of atoms. As young Marx was inching his way towards a version of historical materialism which emphasised human agency as a force in history, his preference for Epicurus over Democritus becomes comprehensible. As Marx wrote in his doctoral thesis: ‘The deviation of the atom from the straight line is not an accidental feature in the physics of Epicurus… Just as the atom frees itself from its relative existence, the straight line, by setting it aside, by withdrawing from it, so the whole Epicurean philosophy withdraws from the limitative mode of being, wherever the abstract notion of individuality, autonomy and the negation of relativity in all its forms find expression in it.’ This, of course, is not the clearest expression of Marx’s breakthrough emphasis on the self-emancipation of the working class but his promotion here of Epicurus’ more dynamic model of the atom is an embryonic version of what would emerge as the distinctively Marxist belief in the ability of human beings to be the subjects, and not just the objects of history. Author Sean Ledwith is a Counterfire member and Lecturer in History at York College, where he is also UCU branch negotiator. Sean is also a regular contributor to Marx and Philosophy Review of Books and Culture Matters. Republished from Counterfire. Archives September 2023 The threat of war today looms larger today than it did even during the era of the Cold War [1]. However, the very forces that have brought the world to the brink of war have also, paradoxically, created the conditions for a greater movement of peace than ever existed before. This movement nevertheless needs organization, unity and ideological clarity. War in Ukraine The focus of the past year has been on the war in Ukraine. It has become clear over the past few years that this is NATO and the US’s war against Russia. Over the course of the war, the US has given close to $70 billion in aid to Ukraine, with the collective west (US + EU) giving $140 billion [2]. Much more aid is committed with the U.S. Congress having already approved $113 billion [3]. By way of comparison, Russia’s annual military spending in 2022 was $86.4 billion [4]. The US is openly sharing intelligence and has several military and intelligence agents in Ukraine [5]. A recent comprehensive assessment by John Marsheimer, one of America’s most influential geopolitical analysts, who has been rejected from the mainstream because of his views on the war, essentially predicts that the war will continue, that Russia will eventually win and that Ukraine will be left as a “rump” state which will not present a serious threat to Russia [6]. As Marsheimer and others have repeatedly pointed out, the blame for the war lies with the West, which led waves of NATO expansion into the east in 1999 and 2004 and subsequently promised entry of Ukraine into NATO in 2008 [7]. The west engineered a coup in Ukraine in 2014 against the then president Victor Yanukovych [8]. This included setting a trade union building in Odessa to fire resulting in the death of 48 people. This led to conflict in the Donbas region in the eastern part of Ukraine which was then attacked by the government in Kyiv leading to thousands of casualties and an influx of refugees into Russia [9, 10]. The Minsk agreements in 2015 attempted to resolve this crisis and grant a degree of autonomy to the Donbas region. However, these agreements were taken as an opportunity by the West to arm the Ukrainian government and prepare it for military conflict. It should be noted that anti-Russia hysteria in the U.S. started in 2016 when Russia was blamed for the defeat of Hilary Clinton by Donald Trump. This conspiracy theory that Russia “hacked” the U.S. elections was perpetrated with intense fervor across the mainstream U.S. media with not a shred of evidence to support the claim [11]. Trump was identified with Russia, a precursor to how the western ruling elite sees the twin challenge to “democracy” in this time. Indeed, the western ruling elite has conceptualized the whole fight as that between “democracy” and “authoritarianism”, an ideological framing they use to describe both the internal populist rebellions in the U.S. and Europe as well as the nature of the government in China, Russia and India. It is therefore important to understand the nature of both the changes on the international level as well as the internal changes in the west. A changing World Order It is now evident that the larger consequence of the war in Ukraine has been the acceleration of the ongoing decline of the west and of processes that will eventually lead to a new world order. Evidently, even though the west has united around the Ukraine war it has failed to gain the support of India, China, Iran, South Africa, Vietnam, Algeria, Brazil and others. As the New York Times reported in February, “The West tried to Isolate Russia. It didn’t work.” [12] Western Sanctions on Russia have totally failed and its trade has recovered. Further, several countries are now implementing trade in national currencies forgoing the dollar [13]. Russia, Bangladesh and Brazil have been trading with China in the Yuan with reports of even some Indian state refiners purchasing Russian crude oil in Yuan [14, 15]. Brazilian president Lula has spoken of a common South American currency [16]. There have been talks of BRICS floating a new currency [17]. This will mean the end of western sanctions and dollar domination of the world. At the center of the changing world order is the rise of China. The astonishing rise of China is a bitter pill to swallow for the west. China represents not merely an ideological challenge to the west, but a technological challenge as well. It is an example of a political system that is distinctly different from the hegemonic form of liberal democracy but has succeeded remarkably in uniting and developing a society of more than a billion people. Most impressive of all has been the elimination of extreme poverty in Chinese society. To condemn China as “authoritarian” is typical of the racist mentality that holds that the world must be made in the image of white people and white society. The western ruling elite has produced moral monsters who would rather see the world destroyed than accept that they will not be at the center of it. “They are impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin” [18]. The rise of Xi Jinping represents not the death of democracy but is an expression of the democratic re-ordering of the world. This is a new democracy where the teeming millions are surging forward shaping their own destiny, able to participate in the shaping of the world for the first time. Those liberals who have nostalgia for the good old days when most of the world was under poverty and a few white men and their allies ruled the world merely betray their profound contempt for the majority of people. It is this new democratic awakening, the rise of the peoples of the formerly colonized nations, their opportunity to contribute to modern culture, politics and science that is the real promise of democracy. The Internal Politics of the West However, the biggest crisis for the West lies not abroad but at home. This is best seen in the leading power of the West, the United States of America. The U.S. Government faces a profound “crisis of legitimacy”. The U.S. population has unprecedented levels of mistrust in every single U.S. institution including the Courts, Congress and News Media [19]. The American population is discontented and pessimistic about democracy in the U.S [20]. Close to half the population thinks there might be a civil war [21]. In this context, a recent speech by the National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan is particularly significant. Sullivan identified four challenges that the U.S. faced, the hollowing out of the industrial base, geopolitical competition, climate crisis and the challenge to democracy from inequality. He said, further, “And frankly, our domestic economic policies also failed to fully account for the consequences of our international economic policies.”. This speech, the start of a “new Washington consensus” is an admission at the highest levels of the destructive nature of the policies of neoliberal globalization that the West instituted particularly after the overturning of the Soviet Union. The economic consequences, which became acute after the financial crisis, have hit ordinary Americans hard. There have been so called “deaths of despair” of more than 100,000 people from drug overdoses [22]. The people primarily affected by these deaths are middle aged white men without college degrees i.e. the white working class. The political consequence of these facts has been a tri-pronged rebellion in the United States which is preparing for a presidential election next year. Within the Republican party, Donald Trump continues to be the leading candidate. However, he has significantly radicalized his campaign. Trump is campaigning for an end to the Ukraine war, saying “Every day this proxy battle in Ukraine continues, we risk global war…We need PEACE without delay.” and further “There must also be a complete commitment to dismantling the entire globalist neo-con establishment that is perpetually dragging us into endless wars, pretending to fight for freedom and democracy abroad…” [23]. Robert F Kennedy Jr. is similarly running a campaign in the Democratic primaries against Biden for an end to the war. His campaign website says “As President, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. will start the process of unwinding empire. We will bring the troops home. We will stop racking up unpayable debt to fight one war after another. “[24] . Finally, Cornel West’s campaign as a third-party candidate is important not so much for its electoral prospects, but for the possibility that it may re-energize a people’s movement for peace. One of his campaign issues is to “Support veterans, stop all foreign military aid, close the bases, disband NATO, and ban nuclear weapons globally” [25]. These three candidates, who have many differences on many political issues, are nevertheless unified by the fact that they are against the American ruling establishment and are each campaigning on a platform of peace. They reflect the fact that the American people are tired of wars and earnestly searching for peace. The forward movement of the American people in their struggle to end these wars may be the determining factor in the struggle for peace in our time. India and a New Peace Movement As we face an era of the end of neoliberal globalization, the rise of the darker nations of the world and the possibilities of a new democratic world order, what are the tasks in India today? India is at the center of this changing world. It has a huge amount of moral legitimacy abroad that it gained from the Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi governments and their support for anti-colonial struggles around the world. It is no surprise that S. Jaishankar has gained such prominence today because India’s international role is being watched around the world. Currently, the government seems to be hedging its bets, participating in both the Quad and the SCO. However, the public discourse is quite shallow with editorials in leading newspapers, from a “leading expert” in an appropriate think-tank routinely warning us of the dangers of Chinese authoritarianism and Russian aggression. Further, a section of the Indian liberal intelligentsia has fully swallowed the narrative that the west represents “democracy” as opposed to authoritarianism around the world including at home. Indians are the richest ethnic group in the U.S. by median income and Indian intellectuals have immense prominence in the west. This link to the west no doubt serves to shape the narrative among our intelligentsia. India has played a historic role in the peace movement and it is important that we live up to our legacy today. Apart from the role that our government played, such names as Rameshwari Nehru, Aruna Asaf Ali, Saifuddin Kitchlew, Romesh Chandra and E.S. Reddy stand out as examples of how Indians contributed to world peace. A huge responsibility rests with the Indian people and the peace movement in particular. It must re-energise itself and achieve clarity on its objectives. The peace movement faces the following tasks: First, the peace movement must seek the broadest possible basis. Peace is a precondition for all other positive changes in society. The peace movement must include all of those who have an interest in peace and not be sectarian or narrow in its basis. Second, It must reject the idea that the west, which has committed genocide, colonialism, racism and imperialism for centuries represents the hope for “democracy”. There are different paths to democracy which ultimately involves the ability of the majority of human people to rise above poverty and find creative fulfillment as human beings. We must struggle for the right of a people to take their own democratic path unmediated by western elites. Clarity on this will also deepen our own internal struggle for a more democratic country. Third, the peace movement must work for peace between India and China. In the past, there have been reservations about the role of China internationally for several good reasons. However, the China of today is not the China of 1962 and its leadership has a very different vision. We must seek to understand the changes taking place in China, and encourage dialogue and communication with it. Fourth, the peace movement must renew itself on the fountain of its legacy. This legacy includes the fight against American military bases in Asia and Africa, a new international economic and information order and the struggle for Afro-Asian solidarity. Finally, the peace movement must look towards the future. The shared global challenges of Artificial Intelligence and Climate Change can only be resolved if Asia and Africa, which will be at the center of the new world, seek a united and common perspective in how it views these challenges. It is the task of the peace movement to fight for this solidarity and common perspective. The new peace movement in India has the Indian people at its base. Alongside them stand the world’s people who are more inclined towards peace today than ever before. The children of the peasantry and the working masses of people deserve a future, and we must fight against a small ruling elite which seeks to take away their future. Peace is the call of today and it is the need of tomorrow. References [1] A fact routinely acknowledged see e.g. China and the Revenge of Geopolitics, Edward Luce https://www.ft.com/content/a17a14f2-704f-478f-bfa6-18f41eed0a40 [2] https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-support-tracker/ [3] https://www.crfb.org/blogs/congress-approved-113-billion-aid-ukraine-2022 [4] https://www.sipri.org/media/press-release/2023/world-military-expenditure-reaches-new-record-high-european-spending-surges [5] https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2023/04/18/just-how-many-us-troops-and-spies-do-we-have-in-ukraine/ [6] https://mearsheimer.substack.com/p/the-darkness-ahead-where-the-ukraine [7] https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_8443.htm [8] https://mronline.org/2022/07/06/anatomy-of-a-coup/ [9] https://cprf.ru/what-is-happening-in-and-around-ukraine/ [10] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-29029060 [11] As documented by the journalist Aaron Mate. See his book: https://www.amazon.com/Cold-War-Hot-Russiagate-Washington/dp/1682193659 [12] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/02/23/world/russia-ukraine-geopolitics.html [13] https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202307/1294673.shtml [14] https://www.scmp.com/economy/economic-indicators/article/3220087/which-8-countries-are-using-chinas-yuan-more-and-what-does-it-mean-us-dollar [15] https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/india-refiners-start-yuan-payments-for-russian-oil-imports-say-sources/article67038366.ece [16] https://www.dw.com/en/brazils-lula-proposes-south-american-currency/a-65775540 [17] https://www.outlookindia.com/business-spotlight/brics-expansion-plan-and-launching-of-brics-currency-to-decrease-influence-of-us-dollar-gaurav-gupta–news-292814 [18] White Man’s Guilt by James Baldwin (https://www.douglasficek.com/teaching/phil-4450-phil-of-race/baldwin.pdf) [19] https://news.gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-institutions.aspx [20] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/americans-are-widely-pessimistic-about-the-state-of-democracy-in-the-u-s-ap-norc-poll-finds [21] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/29/us-civil-war-fears-poll [22] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2021/20211117.htm [23] https://www.donaldjtrump.com/agenda47/agenda47-preventing-world-war-iii [24] https://www.kennedy24.com/peace [25] https://www.cornelwest24.org/#section-issues Author Archishman Raju is a scientist based in Bengaluru also associated with the Saturday Free School in Philadelphia and the Gandhi Global Family. Republished from Countercurrents. Archives August 2023 I intend to analyze this 1918 work by Lenin to see what is still relevant for our day and what is for the present historically dated. Many Socialist/Communist parties have at the present time abandoned Marxism as understood by the historical world communist movement and adopted revisionist, rightest, and opportunist positions that are no threat to the imperial powers or the ruling bourgeois parties throughout the world. They have leaders which Lenin would classify as renegades. I will try and determine if that classification is still accurate. There are 11 parts to this work and I will go over them in sequence and highlight the issues that still have contemporary significance. PREFACE Lenin wrote this work in response to Kautsky’s The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, 1918. Lenin considers this work to be a complete abandonment of Marxism and full of revisionist errors regarding the nature of democracy and of the state. Lenin says he had to write this reply because the “proletarian revolution is now becoming a practical issue in a number of countries.” We may not feel this urgency today because the proletarian revolution is not now on the agenda as it seemed to be in 1918. Nevertheless, capitalism and US imperialism are in advanced stages of decay and the possibility that a revolutionary outbreak may occur cannot be discounted. In any event, the revisionist views Kautsky has on the nature of the state is his “chief theoretical mistake.” These renegade views are still prevalent in many Socialist and Communist Parties. HOW KAUTSKY TURNED MARX INTO A COMMON LIBERAL A working class takeover of the state, violently or not, would constitute a victorious outcome of a proletarian revolution. Kautsky’s work is about what Lenin calls the “very essence” of such a revolution: the dictatorship of the proletariat. Kautsky claims there are two ways to conduct the proletarian revolution — “the dictatorial [Bolshevik] and the democratic [non-Bolshevik.]” This is not a case of dictatorship versus democracy as Kautsky would have us believe. For Marxists it is a question of what kind of democracy will exist after the revolution. “The question of the dictatorship of the proletariat is a question of the relation of the proletarian state to the bourgeois state, of proletarian democracy to bourgeois democracy.” The revisionist Kautsky confuses this issue. He speaks just like the liberal bourgeoisie referring to “democracy” with no qualifications. He ignores the “class term” that Marxist use to discuss this issue— I.e., “bourgeois democracy” as the kind of democracy before the revolution that prevails under capitalism. In contrast to bourgeois democracy after the revolution we will have “proletarian democracy.” The difference reflects which class controls the State— the bourgeois exploiters or the working people and their allies. Lenin quotes Marx (Critique of the Gotha Program) to clarify this: “Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat”. This quote from Marx, Lenin says, “sums up the whole of his revolutionary teaching.” Kautsky must have known this, but it is typical of revisionists, renegades, and the bourgeois liberals to try and play down the quote. Lenin stresses the fact that Marx and Engels never tired of saying that the revolution had to dismantle the bourgeois capitalist state and replace it with a new proletarian state. Kautsky knows but ignores the fact that the term “dictatorship of the proletariat’ is a “historically concrete and scientifically exact formulation of the proletariat’s task of ’smashing’ the bourgeois state machine.” Revisionists and renegades never tire of disparaging the use of the term “dictatorship of the proletariat” (DP) as used by Marx, Engels and Lenin (MEL). Here is a contemporary quote by an alleged Marxist that could have come from Kautsky’s pen: “‘Dictatorship of the proletariat’. Probably the worst phrase uttered by a political theorist ever. Who wants to live in a dictatorship?” (Joe Sims, “Ten Worst and Best Ideas of Marxism,” Political Affairs 2008). But MEL never viewed the DP as a typical bourgeois dictatorship such as run by Franco or Pinochet. Marxism maintains that history is the history of class struggle and in class societies we find a ruling class and an exploited class— masters and slaves, feudal lords and serfs, capitalists and proletarians, etc. All of these societies exist as States. And every State has a ruling class that controls it and uses it to control and exploit the productive and abused underclass whose labor makes its continued existence possible. Marxists maintain that all bourgeois States are real class dictatorships. The State qua State is the instrument for one class to hold down and oppress another. The socialist revolution overthrows the bourgeois dictatorship and installs the proletarian State which deprives the capitalists of all political power and the ability to exploit working people. The DP is a class dictatorship and the State is now a tool of the working class to eliminate the bourgeoisie as a class— not physically, but by depriving it of its power to rule. This is elementary Marxism 101 and all the windbag fulminations against the DP won’t change that, but it will allow us to spot the revisionists and renegades when they raise their heads. These people claim to be defending “democracy” when they reject the DP but Lenin points out “It is natural for a liberal to speak of ‘democracy’ in general; but Marxists will never forget to ask: “for what class.” The DP is necessary because “The proletarian revolution is impossible without the forcible destruction of the bourgeois state machine and the substitution for it of a new one which, in the words of Engels, is “no longer a state in the proper sense of the word.” Kautsky tries to convince us that the DP can come about through “universal suffrage” without having to curtail the political rights of the bourgeoisie (the franchise) and he cites the Paris Commune as an example. But the Commune only lasted three months and its early use of “universal [male] suffrage” was not its main merit. “Marx and Engels analyzed the Paris Commune in a most detailed manner and showed that “its merit lay in its attempt to smash, to break up the ‘ready-made state machinery’.” BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIAN DEMOCRACY As long as we live in a capitalist State we cannot just speak of ‘’democracy’’ as if it is some great system we have dispensing ‘’liberty and justice for all’’ as the Pledge would have it. We have two types of democracy to consider. “History knows of bourgeois democracy which takes the place of feudalism, and of proletarian democracy which takes the place of bourgeois democracy.” This distinction is rarely, if ever made, by the revisionists and renegades that defend the Biden administration against the specter of Trumpism (an ultra-right, racist faction of the monopoly capitalists which controls the Republican Party and which the Democrats want to work with under the guise of bipartisanship.) The problem of defending bourgeois democracy just as ‘’democracy’’ is that it disarms the workers in the class struggle against fascism and the monopoly capitalist class. Proletarian democracy is a higher state of democracy which preserves what is of value in bourgeois democracy — universal suffrage for all working people, the right to form unions, equal rights for all the oppressed, and eliminates what is no longer historically justified — anti-labor laws (‘’right to work laws’’), election restrictions by gerrymandering, laws which de facto discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and it puts forth what is now historically called for— the abolition of private property in the means of production, and the construction of a new people’s economic system, socialism – which puts people before profit. Bourgeois democracy can be defended against Trumpism but not at the expense of not also pointing out its limitations and the need to advance along the road to proletarian democracy. Not to constantly remind our class and allies of our goal, to take their eyes off the prize, is to betray them and to de facto leave them at the mercy of the enemy. “Bourgeois democracy, although a great historical advance in comparison to medievalism always remains, and under capitalism is bound to remain, restricted, truncated, false and hypocritical, a paradise for the rich and a snare and deception for the exploited, for the poor. It is this truth, which forms a most essential part of Marx’s teaching, that Kautsky the ‘Marxist’ has failed to understand.’’ Not only Kautsky, but the modern-day revisionists and renegades as well. Lenin says that even in the most democratic of bourgeois states the masses are still oppressed, slaves dependent on the capitalist economy (’wage slaves’’). “It is this contradiction that the agitators and propagandists of socialism are constantly exposing to the people, in order to prepare them for revolution!’’ Ay, there’s the rub. Lenin wrote this because he thought the “the era of revolution has begun.” Well, it was 1918 and Soviet Russia was coming into its own with the overthrow of the capitalist government (1917) that had replaced the Tsar. World War I had ended and revolutionary movements were breaking out in many countries, the renegade parties in the Second International were beginning to split with their left-wings becoming Communist Parties around the world. The Third International advocating world communism was soon to be founded (1919). International capitalism appeared doomed. To make a long story short, capitalism wasn’t doomed; it consolidated itself and by 1923 the revolutionary wave had broken, at least in Europe. Lenin was ill and died at the beginning of 1924 and by the end of the year Stalin and the Third International had embarked on the polices of ‘’Socialism in One Country.’’ Did all this mean Kautsky was right after all and Lenin was wrong? The answer is no. In the theory of democracy Lenin was 100% correct and also in the practice of the new Soviet Russia where Lenin points out proletarian democracy replaced bourgeois democracy. At the time Lenin wrote, Soviets of the workers and exploited people had taken over the ruling of the country and the old State bureaucracy had been scattered. ‘’Proletarian democracy is a million times more democratic than any bourgeois democracy; Soviet power is a million times more democratic than the most democratic bourgeois republic.” The Soviet working class and exploited masses had their own state, if they could keep it. CAN THERE BE EQUALITY BETWEEN THE EXPLOITED AND THE EXPLOITER? Kautsky, not understanding Marxism, can’t see why if we can win an election with democracy we need a dictatorship, I.e., the DP. Lenin lists 4 reasons: 1. To break down the resistance of the bourgeoisie (don’t think the ruling class will go quietly into the night). 2. To inspire the reactionaries with fear (regrettable but necessary unless you want to end up like Allende.) 3. To maintain the authority of the armed people against the bourgeoisie (Allende should have armed the workers the day after his election — he must have forgotten this part of MEL). 4. That the proletariat may forcibly hold down its adversaries. (Revolution— once you’ve had that there’s no going back). Kautsky further argues that there must be “equality” for all, and the DP violates this [bourgeois] principle. We have this in the Pledge: ‘’I pledge allegiance … blah, blah … with liberty and justice for all.’’ In other words, bourgeois democracy treats everyone equally under the law. But Lenin maintains “The exploiter and the exploited cannot be equal.” Kautsky [and his modern epigones] “takes formal equality (which is nothing but a fraud and hypocrisy under capitalism) for actual equality!” Lenin stresses the fact that, “there can be no real, actual equality until all possibility of the exploitation of one class by another has been totally destroyed.” Not all the exploited are on the right side of the revolution, we should also note “that a section of the exploited from the least advanced middle-peasant, artisan and similar groups of the population may, and indeed does, follow the exploiters has been proved by all revolutions, including the Commune.” Advanced industrial societies don’t have ‘’peasants’’ but this observation applies to elements both of the middle class and the urban lumpenproletariat [traditionally denizens of the demimonde sans class consciousness and prone to utilization by fascist and reactionary forces]. Now, to be very clear, Lenin was well aware that his views were shaped by the experiences of the Russian Revolution. He would understand perfectly today what the Chinese mean by “Socialism with Chinese characteristics.” The way the DP will treat the bourgeoisie, will it be stripped or not of all political rights, the franchise, etc., “is a nationally specific” question. Other revolutions are not bound by the actions of the Russian Revolution. Stripping the bourgeoisie of the franchise “is not absolutely necessary for the exercise of the dictatorship, it is not an indispensable characteristic of the logical concept ‘’dictatorship,’’ it does not enter as an indispensable condition in the historical and class concept ‘’dictatorship.’’ But, theoretical and practical situations do not always coincide during a revolution. How the exploiters will be dealt with ‘’is a question of the specific national features of this or that capitalism, of this or that revolution.’’ So we can have classes and discuss in theory ‘’is the dictatorship of the proletariat possible without infringing democracy in relation to the exploiting class.” We know pretty much how revisionists, renegades, and those looking to get rid of the worse ideas of Marxism or “reload” it with blanks will answer this question. However, in practice, there is a fact that must be faced. ‘’The proletariat cannot achieve victory without breaking the resistance of the bourgeoisie.’’ This will require [if history is any guide] the proletariat ‘’forcibly suppressing its adversaries.’’ And, “where there is ‘forcible suppression’, where there is no ‘freedom’, there is, of course, no democracy,’’ that is, no bourgeois democracy. THE SOVIETS DARE NOT BECOME STATE ORGANIZATIONS Bad as Kautsky was, he was still to the left of those today who advocate such anti-Marxist counter-revolutionary nonsense as ‘’vote for all Democrats, defeat all Republicans’’ or ‘’vote blue no matter who,’’ which does nothing to increase the class consciousness of workers regarding the need for socialism and creates the false impression that the Democratic Party is pro-working class — a view also propagated by the trade union bureaucracy which supports and benefits from the capitalist system and only demands a bigger share of the spoils as their reward for keeping the class struggle confined to parameters acceptable to the bourgeoisie. What were the Soviets? Lenin said, ‘’The Soviets are the Russian form of the proletarian dictatorship.’’ What did Kautsky say about the Soviets? They first appeared in the 1905 Revolution [the dress rehearsal for October]. He called them “the most all-embracing form of proletarian organization, for it embraced all the wage-workers.” Not only that, but they are the most advanced revolutionary expression of the working-class consciousness. He says, “it appears that everywhere the old methods of the economic and political struggle of the proletariat are inadequate against the gigantic economic and political forces which finance capital has at its disposal.” He also notes that the “trade union bureaucracy’’ is ‘’useless for the purpose of directing the mighty mass battles that are more and more becoming a sign of the times….” So what’s the problem? The same situation is facing us today 100 years later — we are not in a revolutionary situation, it is true, but we are at least in the beginning of a pre-revolutionary situation as world capitalism — especially in the form of the ‘’American Century” is beginning to crack up. Capitalism could crash as unexpectedly and as suddenly as most of the world Communist movement did 30 years ago. Maybe that is too much to hope, but it is possible. The Romans never expected the Vandals. Anyway, the above was Kautsky’s view before the Bolsheviks came to power in October 1917 and took up the slogan “All power to the Soviets.” They overthrew the provisional government (Kerensky) which took over in February after the Tsar’s abdication. After the Bolsheviks took over, Kautsky changed his tune. He supported the February Revolution and the attempt to create a bourgeois democratic form of government. He supported the Soviets as a militant force representing the working class and its role to pressure the government progressively from the outside. Lenin’s “All power to the Soviets” overthrew the government of Kerensky and instituted the DP. The Bolsheviks “destroyed the democracy which the Russian people won in” the February Revolution, Kautsky said. In other words, while the Soviets represented the working people as a whole, (the vast majority by far of the Russian people were workers or peasants [agricultural work]), they had no business becoming the government of Russia. Kautsky had said the Soviets were needed in the “decisive battles” between labour and capital. Well then, Lenin asks, won’t that decisive battle ‘’decide which of the two classes will assume state power?” It was clear to the revolutionaries of 1917-18 that the Soviets should take state power through the agency of the Bolsheviks. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was established in 1922 and came to an end in 1991. Just when did the Soviets cease to control state power and power devolved to the party, to a clique, to an individual, to a ‘’new’’ class— was it due to Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev? The debate still rages and many party leaders just want to blame the CIA and move on — criticism and self-criticism can be unsettling. At any rate, Lenin concluded: ‘’Bourgeois democracy was progressive compared to medievalism. And it had to be utilized. But now it is not sufficient for the working class. Now we must look forward instead of backward— to replacing the bourgeois democracy with proletarian democracy.’’ Are there any forces in the USA today that can do this, or even want to? THE CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY AND THE SOVIET REPUBLIC ‘’The All Russian Constituent Assembly was a constituent assembly convened in Russia after the February Revolution of 1917. It met for 13 hours, from 4 p.m. to 5 a.m., 18–19 January [O.S. 5–6 January] 1918, whereupon it was illegally dissolved by the Bolshevik-led All-Russian Central Executive Committee proclaiming the Third All-Russian Congress of Soviets the new governing body of Russia.’’— Wikipedia. This action by the Bolsheviks is, Lenin says, “the crux” of the book by Kautsky he is critiquing. The Bolsheviks are accused of ‘’destroying’’ democracy. ‘’This question is really an interesting and important one, because the relation between bourgeois democracy and proletarian democracy here confronted the revolution in a practical form.” How does Kautsky justify his attack on Lenin and the Bolsheviks? He wants to use Lenin’s own words against him. He will take quotes from Lenin but, as we shall see, they are taken out of context. This is still a practice today used by revisionists and renegades who take quotes from MEL out of context to justify their deviations from sound Marxist principles. In the year between the February Revolution and the October one, Lenin often praised the idea of a Constituent Assembly but, as the revolution progressed and the balance for forces shifted away from the Mensheviks and radical bourgeois forces, Lenin’s attitude towards the Constituent Assembly (CA) changed. When the elections were held that formed the basis for the CA the bourgeois democrats had the majority votes and the Bolsheviks were in the minority. But then the Soviets exploded in popularity due to the inability of the bourgeois democratic government to take any actions to improve the wellbeing of the masses. When the CA finally got seated to begin governing the Bolsheviks were in the majority of the population, but this was not represented in the CA. The Soviets dismissed the CA and proclaimed themselves the government of Russia — this was accepted by the workers and peasants and the soldiers and sailors throughout Russia and Lenin and the Bolsheviks were in power —the Soviet government lasted until 1991. How it lost power is still being debated. But there was no debate about it in 1918 except by Kautsky, the Mensheviks, and the out of power bourgeois forces. Kautsky says Lenin justified the takeover by the following quote: “The Republic of Soviets is not only a higher type of democratic institution (as compared by the usual bourgeois republic crowned by a Constituent Assembly), but is the only form capable of securing the most painless transition to socialism.” Kautsky implies Lenin is a hypocrite by saying, “It is a pity that this conclusion was arrived at only after the Bolsheviks found themselves in the minority in the Constituent Assembly. Before that no one had demanded it [the CA] more vociferously than Lenin.” The problem with this is Lenin had been touting the superiority of the proletarian state to a bourgeois state long before the CA had come into existence. “Everyone knows that on the very day of my arrival in Russia, on April 4, 1917, I publicly read my theses in which I proclaimed the superiority of the Paris Commune [Soviet] type of state over the bourgeois parliamentary republic.” So much for Kautsky’s libels. The important issue is the theoretical one: “Is it true that the bourgeois-democratic parliamentary republic is inferior to the republic of the Paris Commune or Soviet type?” There was no doubt in 1918 that the answer was yes. The new Soviet government ended the war with Germany, redistributed land to the peasants, and ended the economic and social anarchism that was reigning in Russia and which the bourgeois government was unable to control. There were still many problems, but the majority of the people supported and worked with the Soviets to make the new government succeed. Lenin wanted to be fair to Kautsky and says that before he got cold feet and afraid of revolution, before he became a Marxist renegade, he had been a real Marxist thinker and from this time “such works of his will remain a permanent possession of the proletariat in spite of his subsequent apostasy.’’ Lenin felt the same way about Plekhanov. We can make the same distinctions today between the works of Stalin, Trotsky, and Mao, among others— I mean between correctly formulated Marxist works and deviationist works when they responded to events hastily and without a correct theoretical grasp of the situation. Even the current running dogs of the Democratic Party occasionally adopt a correct position in spite of their right-opportunistic pseudo-socialist positions. It is absolutely correct to support workers striking for living wages, for example, but to tell them that President Biden has their backs is problematic – as the rail workers found out when it was a different part of their anatomy he had them by when he forced them not to strike and take a bad contract. The real problem with Kautsky was he didn’t prioritize in reality proletarian rule over the “formal” ideals of bourgeois democracy. He didn’t see that class struggle was more important than abstractly presented “democratic” struggles. The universal right to vote can produce reactionary, even fascist, governments as well as liberal or progressive ones. Bourgeois democracy gave us Trump (at least the US version did). The issue regarding the overthrow of the CA and the establishment of the Soviet state boiled down to the fact that the class interests of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat are not compatible — they contradict one another. Despite Kautsky’s views on the value of “pure” or “bourgeois” democracy, the masses of the workers and exploited Russian people had “turned away from petty-bourgeois leadership, from the illusion that it was possible to reach a compromise with the bourgeoisie, and had joined the proletarian revolutionary struggle for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie.” We haven’t reached this point in the US yet, and we never will as long as our so-called Marxist leaders don’t forcibly tell the masses we must sometimes compromise and even vote for the lesser of two evils, but they are still evils and we have to build the class consciousness of the exploited masses and intensify the class struggle, not confuse it with petty bourgeois radical demands which are also worthy of support but as part of the class struggle. Lenin would likely suggest we give up unrealistic slogans such as ‘’left-center unity’’ (which doesn’t exist), and ‘’coalition partners’’ (only a few really qualify) for temporary cooperation with petty bourgeois progressives and unions on issues of common concern. THE SOVIET CONSTITUTION The closing of the CA did not, in fact, exclude the petty bourgeois parties from ‘’democracy’’— these parties were also represented in the Soviets and thus participated in proletarian democracy— only now they were minority parties. The new constitution didn’t come about until the middle of 1918, so the Soviets ran the country directly from 1917 onwards. Besides the Bolsheviks the other main parties were the Mensheviks, the Socialist Revolutionaries, and the Constitutional Democrats (Cadets). The Bolsheviks never set out to ban opposition parties and kick them out of the Soviets, but that is what happened. Lenin explains what occurred in this section. I am not going over every detail as the historical minutiae are unimportant in the context of this essay (they are readily available in history books.) What it boils down to is that the bourgeoisie as a class refused to accept the fact that working people controlled the State. Kautsky and his followers attacked the Soviets in the press and at meetings constantly. Fine, Lenin and the Bolsheviks could live with that— reality was on their side politically. In the time between the Soviet assumption of power in 1917 and the adoption of the constitution in 1918 the bourgeoisie not only formulated military mutinies, but also, with western support, waged a civil war that raged in Russia from 1917 until 1923. The bourgeois parties gave support to the White armies (the anti-Soviet side). The Soviet constitution proclaimed the Russian State to be a proletarian State and outlawed all enemy classes— since the bourgeois parties were engaged in treason, supporting an attempt to overthrow the government, they were outlawed. It was the complete refusal of the bourgeois parties to coexist with the Soviet State that led to a one-party State. It’s true, however, when you get down to the brass tacks, that Marxists really hate the capitalist system and what it has done to the people of the world. We want to abolish it and all its oppressive institutions. But what about Bill of Rights Socialism? Yes, Lenin would have supported a Bill of Rights under Socialism. What is a rose by any other name? Socialism is itself the living embodiment of any Bill of Rights. Lenin said this to the bourgeoisie: “You, exploiters and hypocrites, talk about democracy, while at every step you erect thousands of barriers to prevent the oppressed people from taking part in politics. We take you at your word and, in the interests of these people, demand the extension of your bourgeois democracy in order to prepare the people for revolution for the purpose of overthrowing you, the exploiters. And if you exploiters attempt to offer resistance to our proletarian revolution we shall ruthlessly suppress you; we shall deprive you of all rights; more than that, we shall not give you any bread, for in our proletarian revolution the exploiters will have no rights, they will be deprived of Fire and Water, for we are socialists in real earnest, and not in the Scheidemann or Kautsky fashion.” [Phillip Scheidemann 1865-1939 SPD/ Weimar Republic leader; anti-Bolshevik revisionist and de facto fascist enabler.] There will be a Bill of Rights Socialism for the oppressed and exploited masses who come to power in the revolution (peaceful or not)— it won’t be for the exploiters and oppressors of the people; it will be the essence of Socialism itself. WHAT IS INTERNATIONALISM? Marxists are supposed to be internationalists: “Workers of the world unite….” etc. Just what does this mean? After the breakup of the socialist international over WWI, the ensuing peace, and the Russian Revolution, it began to mean different things to different groups of people calling themselves Marxists and socialists. This section will try and elucidate what it means to those who take MEL seriously. Lenin says he is going to ‘’dwell’’ on Kautsky’s form of “internationalism” because it is the major form taken by the Mensheviks and parties of the Second International. The Mensheviks disbanded as a party in 1921, but their views live on and are mentioned after 1921. Today there are both socialist and Communist Parties practicing, to a greater or lesser degree, Menshevik, revisionist, Euro-communist, and /or purely social-democratic ideas. They comprise a hodgepodge, and if I use one of the four terms to describe a group it is highly probable the other terms could also have been applied. Kautsky, who was not a Menshevik, was a supporter and agreed with them on the CA and how the war should end. They did not support a separate peace (between Russia and Germany) but wanted to fight on with the Allies until there was a general peace. He said the Bolsheviks wanted a separate peace and were willing to undermine the army to get it. Well, he was right, but that was what the masses in the Soviets wanted, and they overthrew the provisional government (which included the Mensheviks) to get it. Kautsky was totally against the Bolsheviks taking power and dismissing the CA. What did Lenin think of the idea of prolonging the imperialist war and leaving the bourgeoisie in charge of the government? “Theoretically, this shows a complete inability to disassociate oneself from the social-chauvinists and complete confusion on the question of the defense of the fatherland. Politically, it means substituting petty-bourgeois nationalism for internationalism, deserting to the reformists’ camp and renouncing revolution.” Here Lenin makes a major distinction between Marxists, Communists, and the revisionist de facto allies of the bourgeoisie. “The proletariat fights for the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeoisie; the petty bourgeoisie fights for the ‘’reformist’’ improvement of imperialism, for adaptation to it, while submitting to it.” But, as Lenin said, this is what we must do when we are in a time of revolutionary ferment. But this is not such a time. To pull off a revolution we have to be able to weaken and disorganize the armed forces of the bourgeoisie, and to be successful we have to “smash the old army and replace it with a new one.” In fact, the five only still existing socialist countries did just that. I don’t think any sane Marxist think we are in a time in which the Armed Forces of the USA are about to be smashed by the US working class. But, Kautsky and the renegades reply, what to do in the meantime. If a war breaks out and people use violence against our country, we have the duty to defend it. Even today we have such arguments extended to our friends” as well. Look, Russia is using violence against Ukraine, our friend, by helping Ukraine we are imposing violence back against Russia. How’s that different than WWI when the working people fought for their own countries? How should Marxists respond to violence? Lenin says, “Socialism is opposed to violence against nations.” It’s also against individual people using violence against one another. But Socialists are not pacifists. In a revolutionary situation, Lenin says, Socialists have never opposed the use of revolutionary violence when it was necessary. This also includes a revolutionary war such as the one the US colonials proclaimed against the British beginning in 1775-76. This does not apply to WWI. “The imperialist war of 1914-18 is a war between two groups of imperialist bourgeoisies for the division of the world, for the division of the booty, and for the plunder and strangulation of small and weak nations.’’ The desire to continue to participate in this war until a general settlement is reached, as Kautsky, the Mensheviks, and other renegades propose, has nothing to do with Socialism and is a position of bourgeois lackies. The position of Kautsky and company (defense of the fatherland/motherland) is commonplace jingoism having nothing to do with class analysis and proletarian internationalism. This is ‘’My country right or wrong” nonsense. The only thing of importance is which class or group is benefitting from the war— the imperialists, the capitalists or the workers, the masses. It “does not depend on who the attacker was, or in whose country the ‘enemy’ is stationed; it depends on what class is waging the war, and what politics this war is a continuation of.’’ Socialists are duty bound to educate the workers and instill in them the basics of MEL— that wars, imperialism, and plunder of the poor by the rich can only be ended by the establishment of Socialism and they must adopt a revolutionary perspective to be ready for revolutionary situations when they occur. As an example, let’s ask this question concerning the proxy war between the USA and Russia going on now, July 2023. The class question:1. Russia: with a national bourgeoisie recently emerged from the collapse of the USSR. This class is relatively new, weak, and inexperienced. The GDP of Russia, for all its size and great extent, is smaller than that of South Korea. Russia’s economy is #11 in the world. 2. USA: run by a monopoly capitalist bourgeoisie with international connections and controlling the number 1 world economy. It commands a worldwide imperialist empire with 780 military bases in 80 different countries and a military budget larger than the combined budgets of the next 10 nations combined. Russia has about 20 foreign bases— outside of 2 in Syria and 1 in Vietnam the others are in former parts of the USSR. The politics behind the war: 1) The USA seeks to enlarge its empire using its NATO military alliance and the threat of force in other areas of the world. It is the most aggressive military imperialism in history which has been waging and fomenting wars and overthrowing governments continuously since the end of WWII. 2. Russia, since the end of the USSR, has used its military defensively in two ways 1. Fighting separatist movements mostly in southern Russia against Islamist militants. 2) Taking defensive action against USA provocative and aggressive actions, overt and covert, using NATO expansion along its borders, including Ukraine (de facto) and in Georgia along its southern border. It wants to weaken US imperialism, end its Unipolar control of globalization, and create a multi-polar world free of USA domination. These are the facts of the current state of internationalism. There will be other events now and in the future in which Marxists will have to decide what is in the best interests of the world’s workers and exploited masses, as well as their own working class. How should they react to events such as above— support one of the two sides or be neutral, or something else. This is important because we are not now in a revolutionary situation and one of, if not the most important, conclusions, Lenin draws in this section of his work is: “It is the ABC of Marxism that the tactics of the socialist proletariat cannot be the same both when there is a revolutionary situation and when there is no revolutionary situation.’’ In the remainder of this section Lenin excoriates Kautsky for attacking the Bolsheviks and other revolutionary sections of the working class from the point of view of positions taken as if there was not a revolutionary situation in 1918, one that was produced by the violence and destruction of the world war. At this time Lenin was clearly correct and Communist movements were springing up all over Europe and the working class was joining and leading them. The Second International had dissolved by 1916 into three different groups— Central Power pro-war ’socialists,’ Triple Entente pro-war ‘socialists,’ and anti-war socialists. The third group carried on the anti-war tradition that had been the official position of the Second International until the actual war broke out. Lenin and the Bolsheviks and their allies realized a new international was needed to unify the third group. “Bolshevism has created the ideological and tactical foundations of a Third International, of a really proletarian and Communist International, which will take into consideration both the gains of the tranquil epoch and experience of the epoch of revolutions, which has begun.” The Third International was founded in 1919. A lot has happened in a century. The revolutionary fervor of the immediate post war years died down as capitalism proved more stable than was anticipated by the revolutionary socialists. Lenin had provided for this possibility and stated, regardless of what the future might hold, the “Soviet government has done so much that even if Soviet government in Russia were to be crushed by world imperialism tomorrow….it would still be found that Bolshevik tactics have brought enormous benefit to socialism and have assisted the growth of the invincible world revolution.’’ It took world imperialism almost seventy years to crush the Soviet government and the last word on the world revolution has yet to be written. SUBSERVIENCE TO THE BOURGEOISIE IN THE GUISE OF ‘’ECONOMIC ANALYSIS’’ It is difficult to get lessons for advanced capitalist states from the economic arguments between Lenin and Kautsky regarding the Russian Revolution since some of the concepts used are not applicable to countries such as the USA today. We have no peasantry which the proletariat needs to ally with, and petty bourgeoisie and semi-proletarians are terms used differently. There is also a classification used by some today, “the professional-managerial class” or PMC that was not in use in Lenin’s day. In traditional Marxist analysis, such as found in MEL, the PMC doesn’t qualify as a “class” but as a mixture of capitalist or proletarian strata based on relations to the means of production either directly expropriating surplus value or by receiving excessively high incomes from wages or salaries paid by those who do. Basically, there were two approaches, exemplified by Lenin and Kautsky, about how the workers should relate to the bourgeoisie. Kautsky and Lenin were more or less on the same page regarding the 1905 Revolution that broke out and failed. The Mensheviks held that it was a bourgeois democratic revolution because capitalism was not advanced enough in Russia to sustain a proletarian revolution. The aim should be to reform the state and the workers should follow the lead of the bourgeoisie. The Bolsheviks held that the revolution was bourgeois because the peasants were, and the workers should ally with them and then win over the “semi-proletariat” (all the workers and oppressed not in the industrial proletariat) and overthrow the middle peasants and big bourgeoisie and begin a Socialist Revolution. The peasants were divided into lower (the vast poor majority) the middle, and the rich or higher (Kulaks). Lenin pointed this out in Two Tactics (1905). The idea that Lenin is rejecting is ‘’that in a bourgeois revolution one must not go farther than the bourgeoisie!’’ Kautsky had come to this Menshevik view by 1918. In terms of the modern tactic of “Left-center Unity” Mensheviks, ever subservient to the bourgeoisie, would urge us not to outstrip the most advanced demands of the Center. Some even refuse to criticize the Center at all— for the sake of ‘’unity.’’ The next few pages concern Kautsky’s claim that the Soviets are exercising a dictatorship in Russia, but that it’s not a proletarian dictatorship but a peasant dictatorship because the proletariat is small and the vast majority are peasants. Lenin says, this is just Kautsky not understanding how the Revolution has developed. The Soviets first called for unity with the peasantry as such. The rich peasants didn’t go for this and supported the bourgeoisie. The middle peasants began to waver and oscillated between the bourgeoisie and the workers, The poor peasants did unite with and support the workers. The Revolution, therefore established the Soviets of workers and poor peasants. The Bolsheviks were the leading force in these Soviets, so the Revolution was a proletarian revolution of the workers and poor peasants. It is important to remember that the peasants are members of the petty bourgeoisie and Lenin points out that “owing to the basic features of its economic position, the petty bourgeoisie is incapable of doing anything independently.’’ This is why it broke up with the middle and upper elements supporting bourgeois rule and the lower and poor elements falling in with the proletariat and semi-proletariat. Lenin says it would have been foolhardy for the Bolsheviks to have proclaimed a socialist revolution right off the bat in 1917. The peasant majority in the rural areas were not prepared for this. The Bolsheviks called for a worker-peasant alliance, when the kulaks balked, they made concessions to the middle peasants, and as the class divisions became clearer, they ended up with a worker- (poor) peasant alliance representing a majority of the population. It is necessary for us ‘’to understand that a general peasant revolution is still a bourgeois revolution, and that without a series of transitions, of transitional stages, it cannot be transformed into a socialist revolution in a backwards country.” This is a general feature of the petty bourgeoisie as such, wavering, not just the peasant faction. This is why, in our day, Left-center Unity, a revisionist bourgeois Menshevik position, is a failing strategy and leads to the victory of the neoliberals and the defeat of the workers. It’s because the center defects to the right when push comes to shove. Obama, once elected for example, moved to the right and supported neoliberalism and imperialism and gave only a few halfhearted reforms to the workers (Obamacare, for example, rather than Medicare for all, which still leaves over 26 million out in the cold with no coverage). The Center in the USA has its own right, middle, and left wings and what we need now is a Left-Center Left alliance, not a Left-Center alliance because as things fall apart the Center cannot hold. In alliances it is important to support the demands and slogans that the masses are making, even if they are not as advanced as the vanguard (the party, the Bolsheviks) think they should be. This involves compromises and patience and at the same time keeping the more advanced positions alive and discussing them within the alliance but not trying to force the issue (ultra-leftism). These less advanced positions cannot just be dismissed out of hand. “And the ideas and demands of the majority of the working people are things that the working people must discard of their own accord: such demands cannot be either ‘abolished’ or ’skipped over.’” Communists must help the masses “to disregard petty bourgeois slogans, to pass from them as quickly and easily as possible to socialist slogans.’’ It is the failure to do this that has led many Communist Parties to fall off the Road to Socialism into revisionism, right opportunism and liberalism, aping organized parties like the Democratic or Republican parties and de facto supporting the bourgeoisie. All the issues facing the American people, for example, are the same that have been facing them since the end of WWII and even earlier: women’s rights, civil rights, police brutality, constant war, weak unions, homelessness, racism, low wages, lack of proper health care, poverty, etc., etc., whichever party is in control the problems never go away, they go up and down, new ones come, but the old ones never go away. The Left has no program to solve these problems — it just circles around with the same old ideas; build coalitions, fight the ultra-right, target the Republicans, blah, blah, blah, the more they dust off and renew their same old responses to capitalism, the more they stay the same, and now, what some call the “socialist moment,” the socialist “plus” or even their “superpower” based on collectivity (while they purge their ranks of dissidents) the political reality around them has moved beyond the ultra-right towards outright fascism while the same losing tactics remain the same. In his response to the renegade Kautsky, Lenin outlined what the job of the Left was. The bourgeois democratic revolution in the USA has long ago reached its limit— the two-party system alternating in the White House, a Congress controlled by finance capital whichever party happens to control it, the Supreme Court, as usual, serving the interest of corporations not people. Marxists have to tell the workers the truth their bourgeois sellout labor leader bureaucrats won’t. The bourgeois democratic revolution which founded the USA has long ago reached its limit as a progressive force. Any bourgeois revolution that has reached its limit, has stagnated, whether in Russia in 1917 or the USA now in decline, shows that by ‘’reaching its limit, it all the more clearly, rapidly and easily reveals to the people the inadequacy of bourgeois-democratic solutions and the necessity of proceeding beyond their limits, of passing on to socialism.” The only raison d'être for a Communist Party is to lead the working class beyond the limits of bourgeois democracy, not play it up as the be all and end all of the struggle. It is true we are not yet in a revolutionary environment. The delusions of bourgeois democracy still have a grip on the masses not yet won over to fascism. As long as we live in a society based on private ownership of the means of production and commodity production, “socialism” remains an ideal future solution to the contradictions of poverty and wealth, universal suffrage and voter suppression, justice for all (the rich not the poor), the social production of wealth and its private appropriation – but Marxists have to keep directing the eyes of the workers on the prize and not, like Kautsky and today’s revisionist leaders, present to the workers, “as far as theory is concerned, an incredible hodge-podge which is a complete renunciation of Marxism, and, as far as practice is concerned, a policy of servility to the bourgeoisie and their reformism.’’ Lenin didn’t actually finish this last part of his polemic against Kautsky. Because “news was received from Germany [November 9,1918] announcing the beginning of a victorious revolution….” North Germany was in turmoil and a revolutionary council had taken power in Berlin. As far as this work was concerned, “The conclusion which still remained to be written to my pamphlet on Kautsky and on the proletarian revolution is now superfluous.’’ The German Revolution of 1918-1919 overthrew the Kaiser and ended with the establishment of the Weimar Republic. It failed to become a socialist revolution because the revisionist leaders of the SPD allied with the military and the bourgeoisie against the workers. I leave it to the perspicacity of the reader to determine whether or not a conclusion would have been superfluous. Postscript: There are two items at the end of Lenin’s polemic listed as appendices. Appendix I. Theses on the Constituent Assembly The Bolshevik closing of the Constituent Assembly was a big deal in 1918 and I have covered all the arguments for it in the main body of this text. Here we find 19 numbered explanations of why this was a justified action. It is unnecessary for our purposes to go over this appendix, but it is worth reading on your own just to reinforce Lenin’s position given in the main body of the text. Appendix II. Vandevelde’s New Book on the State Emile Vandervelde (1866-1938) was, along with Kautsky, a top leader of the Second International and his book Socialism versus the State (1918) was another renegade, revisionist anti-Marxist tract dealing with the State in the same manner as Kautsky dealt with the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. This appendix is a brief review by Lenin along the lines of his criticism of Kautsky. You can read it on your own, but it isn’t necessary here to go over its arguments. The arguments focus on the nature of the State and the transition to socialism and from socialism to the withering away of the State and are the same as or similar to the arguments against Kautsky. 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. He is the author of Reading the Classical Texts of Marxism and Eurocommunism: A Critical Reading of Santiago Carrillo and Eurocommunist Revisionism. Archives August 2023 “...If a Communist took it into his head to boast about his Communism because of the ready-made conclusions he had acquired, without putting in a great deal of serious and hard work, without understanding the facts which he must examine critically, he would be a very deplorable Communist. Such superficiality would be decidedly fatal.” Lenin’s speech to these young Communists in the early twentieth century could very easily be given to young people learning Marxism in the USA of the twenty-first century. It is much easier to talk the talk than it is to walk the walk. It is easy to one day wake up and say, “I think I will call myself a Communist today.” From there, we could buy a t-shirt with Karl Marx’s face on it, and we could put a little hammer and sickle emoji in our Twitter profile, and we could tell everyone we believe in Communism. But would this make us a Communist? Probably not, right? If we are interested in viewing things from the Marxist perspective, this is backwards from how we should be going about things. It is not, after all, people’s consciousness that determines their existence, but on the contrary, their social existence that determines their consciousness. From the Marxist perspective, the material world is primary, and our thoughts and ideas are reflections of that primary material world. The idea does not determine reality. It is reality that determines the idea. And you know, speaking of Lenin - in the Soviet Union, people did not simply decide to call themselves Communists. Being a Communist was something you earned, something you achieved. It meant you had passed all of the tests and joined the Communist Party. You had built yourself into a Communist, rather than made a decision on how you choose to perceive yourself. The difference between the two begins at the level of worldview, of ideology. In twenty-first century America, the way we see things, think, and the characteristics of the way we approach issues and problems is by default a reflection of what Marxists call the “economic base”. That material world is primary, and our thoughts and ideas are reflections of it, right? And so this is a reflection of the brand marketing economy, that what matters is the brand of a thing, rather than the product itself. In this case, the brand is Communist. There is a whole lot more that goes into how peoples’ identities are shaped these days, but that’s so far outside the scope of this paper that you’d need a telescope to see it from way over there. So we’ll briefly mention that Carlos Garrido dissects this in his recent book The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism, wherein he says, “In the era of profilicity, where, as Hans Georg Moeller and Paul D’Ambrosio argue, identity formation takes the form of profile curation, the socialist identity is most clearly seen in people’s social media bios, where they mention the sort of socialism they identify with, either through the word itself or through emojis (democratic socialist rose, communist hammer and sickle). In the context of the hyper-individualist West’s treatment of socialism as a personal identity, the worst thing that may happen for these ‘socialists’ is for socialism to be achieved. That would mean the total destruction of their counter-cultural fringe identity. Their utter estrangement from the working masses of the country may in part be read as an attempt to make socialist ideas fringe enough to never convince working people, and hence, never conquer political power. The success of socialism would entail a loss of selfhood, a destruction of the socialist-within-capitalism identity. The socialism of the West is grounded on an identity which hates the existing order but hates even more the loss of identity which transcending it would entail. This is how Western Marxism’s purity fetish manifests itself in the sphere of identity formation in the age of profilicity. What matters is having the perfect bio, the perfect posts, the perfect online comeback. The conquest of political power by the working class is, in short, an existential threat for the identity-socialists of the West,” and get back to the matter at hand, shall we? If we’re speaking of genuinely embodying this thing called “Communist”, and viewing what that is from the Marxist mode of the material being primary, well, then we must understand that a Communist is a universal thing that must concretize in particular form, embodying the process of Communism itself - the new society taking shape in the shell of the old, and embodying the best traits of the revolutionary class in society. Even being a member of a Communist Party isn’t enough. How many members of our own Party have no interest whatsoever in actually overthrowing capitalism or in becoming the type of people capable of carrying out such an immense task? How many lie and cheat and engage in the scummiest of middle class prejudices, looking down on the people of their own country, rather than being guided by a love of the people? This, my friends, is no Communist. As Che Guevara once said, a true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is IMPOSSIBLE, he explained, to imagine a genuine revolutionary lacking that quality. And a Communist must at the same time be a revolutionary. But that isn’t the whole list of things we must build ourselves into. Not even close. A Communist must hold his or herself to the highest standard possible, even if the Party they belong to has not yet built or rebuilt itself into an institution capable of demanding they do so. In fact, in doing this building, they are helping to build that Party into just such an institution, and leading those not there yet, like the folks mentioned above, by setting an example. The Bolsheviks were just such a Party, but we should always be realistic and approach our current situation with clear eyes and clear heads. In 2023, we are in a period of ascendancy, but there is a lot of ground to cover to even bring ourselves to the level of the old Communist Party in the USA, let alone surpassing that and becoming the institution capable of leading the American people through the struggles ahead of us and into revolution. And we’re not going to get there by putting hammer and sickle emojis in our Twitter profiles and then telling everyone who doesn’t have every opinion we do how awful they are. The Bolsheviks did not gain the support and respect of the working masses of the Soviet Union by bragging and talking down to them. The massively powerful and effective Chinese Party doesn’t win their support (an 85% approval rating) by continually organizing witch hunts against each other, or “trolling” each other, or making up wild fantasies about each other in order to look down on each other. They lead by example. And an American Communist must do the same. If we are serious about what we say our goals are; if we intend to overthrow the most powerful ruling class in human history, then even learning our theory, analyzing the world with Marxism, and dropping bourgeois standpoint epistemology is not enough. Shaping the theory of our era is not enough. We must also deal in shaping ourselves into the people who can earn the respect and support of the toiling masses. And, in fact, it is that theory that leads us to this conclusion. If we keep in mind that the default way that the people are trained to view things (without even knowing other ways are possible) is through that brand marketing economy, then we must create a brand of “Communist” that disproves all the lies spread about us from the ruling class over the last hundred years, in ALL their forms. Even being correct is not enough. If we do not package a correct message in a way that appeals to regular working class people, we are learning nothing about the people and allowing middle class prejudices that wormed their way into our organizations over the last period of history to maintain dominance. And I don’t know about you, but pretending we are the enlightened few and hating everyone not as “enlightened” as we think we are seems to be a sign that we have done neither. This is precisely what Mao was talking about when he said that a Communist must humble him or herself before the people. In order for Communists to lead the people, we must recognize that the people are the ones leading Communists. And this means we must carry ourselves in a certain way. We must work on making ourselves into a certain thing. We must be above reproach and humble, strong, capable, and intelligent. We must never take ourselves too seriously, even as our task is the most serious task in the world. For every hundred people I see who call themselves Communists these days, I can honestly say I see only one who actually carries themselves as such. So, let’s go over a few qualities a Communist must have, because it is very easy, as noted above, to simply say we are a thing. It is quite another to embody that thing and become a person worthy of leading the working classes, worthy of the word Communist.
Above all, a Communist needs to prove to the rest of the working masses of their society that they are not just worthy of their respect, but of leading them into revolution and a new state that is genuinely of, by, and for the people. A Communist does not demand respect without earning it like a petulant child. A Communist earns that respect through his or her actions. This is an incredibly difficult task, and I don’t think we can ever be truly done with it. For me, there are certain people I try to imagine the opinions of, when deciding what I should do in a given situation. My father (whom everyone in the union and the neighborhood fondly referred to as “Pops”), who was one of the greatest people I’ve ever known, and taught me everything I know about what it means to be a man - the epitome of what it takes to earn respect through action; Henry Winston, the man who could inspire better in everyone around him and the greatest American Communist in history; and JV Stalin, whose character was above reproach and whose hard work and dedication helped lead the Soviet Union, the first land of the working class, from rural huts to space in a handful of decades. Or I think about whether or not my son can look at me and say, “That’s my dad. I’m proud of him and I want to be more like him when I grow up.” And so, if we are deciding on a course of action, think about having to explain it to your children (or maybe your future children), or your parents, or… Henry Winston, if you don’t have any of these in your situation. Would they respond by saying what you are doing is a good thing? Would they respect it? Would Henry Winston see you trying to bring yourself up at the expense of a random stranger online and greet it with admiration, or with disappointment? If we can embody all of the traits above, if we can approach that question with honesty and humility, we can begin to build ourselves into the kind of people worthy of the respect of the toiling masses. The contradictions of capitalism are growing more acute every day. We have run out of time to waste. Our ruling class is quickly leading us to destitution and nuclear war. The impossibility of continuing on in the old way grows as re-proletarianization does. The time for childishness and larping is over. The time for action is now. So let’s get to action. Author Noah Khrachvik is a proud working class member of the Communist Party USA. He is 40 years old, married to the most understanding and patient woman on planet Earth (who puts up with all his deep-theory rants when he wakes up at two in the morning and can't get back to sleep) and has a twelve-year-old son who is far too smart for his own good. When he isn't busy writing, organizing the working class, or fixing rich people's houses all day, he enjoys doing absolutely nothing on the couch, surrounded by his family and books by Gus Hall. Archives August 2023 8/13/2023 From the American System to the Chinese Dream: A materialist Understanding of the American Revolution's Place in Global History. By: Marius TrotterRead NowThis is part 2 in a series of articles on the American Revolution. Here is Part 1. Before we go into the reasons the liberal/left intelligentsia has decided to disown the American Revolution (the subject of part 3), it is important to take a step back and re-examine the event with new eyes. The American Revolution as a Developmental Project The American Revolution was not merely a war of independence. It was also an economic revolution- the creation of the first major power that broke free of the laissez-faire free market empire of the British elites who held the world in thrall for the better part of two or three centuries. The problem with the popular conception of the American Revolution is viewing the war of Independence as a singular event, confined to the iconic year 1776. But if one were to take a more holistic interpretation, the American Revolution was a more prolonged process. It spanned generations and its key tasks were not fully resolved until the cataclysm of the American Civil War/Reconstruction period of 1861-77. Instead of the War of Independence and the Civil War being two separate events, they were bookends of the same revolutionary transformation. The Founding Fathers were concerned with how independence, tenuously won, could be maintained. Starting with Alexander Hamilton, the (later) Thomas Jefferson, Congressional leader Henry Clay and finally culminating with Abraham Lincoln, these far-sighted leaders represented the most politically advanced sections of the ascendant bourgeoisie. They enacted protectionist, non-free market policies which made the United States into the first successful large scale developmentalist state. In the decades and centuries to come, aspects of this state would be imitated, built and improved upon in many national liberation movements, including socialist and nationalist governments across the Americas, Europe, Africa and Asia. Like all their colonies, Britain had designed the 13 colonies to be little more than a trading hub for its merchants and an extraction point for raw materials. Royal law had in fact forbidden independent colonial manufacturing. William Pitt the Elder, the British Prime Minister and otherwise known to be a sympathizer of the American colonial’s cause, famously said “if the Americans should manufacture a lock of wool or a horseshoe, I shall fill their ports with ships and their towns with troops.”[1] Coming from a place of colonial underdevelopment, the American Revolution was a premature bourgeois revolution. Once the Americans had managed to oust the British, the mercantile capitalists and bankers of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states found themselves unable to hold onto state power. The newly freed colonies had only embryonic industry and the urban working class barely existed. The overwhelming majority of the new country’s working population were small yeoman farmers, artisans, indentured servants, and in the South chattel slaves. Thus, the economic base of their class was extremely weak in the 18th century. The new American republic was in a perilous position. The Southern planter aristocracy was wealthy yet parochial and stagnant in its overall worldview. They had no interest in supporting industrialization in America, being content with importing manufactured goods from Europe. This is especially true between the War of 1812 (when the cotton boom began and saturated the Atlantic markets with the commodity) and the Civil War, where the South can essentially be seen as a sort of neo colony of Britain, only semi-independent and a source of raw materials for foreign powers, who subsidized an indolent comprador aristocracy. In league with them were the financial capitalists headquartered in New York City, who cared little for the industrial development of the nation overall as long as they could speculate on the cotton trade. The slavocracy and their allies had little interest in putting the government behind infrastructure construction, since they ruled their home states like jealous feudal fiefdoms and viewed a too powerful federal government as a potentially hostile power center. Modern roads and canals would make direct trade with Northern states easier, but it would also make it easier for slaves to escape, for impoverished Southern whites to migrate North in search of better wages and for federal troops to march in. An agrarian, un-urbanized, un-industrialized America dependent on manufactured imports from its sworn enemy Great Britain would have inevitably been brought back under the Crown’s sway financially, if not outright militarily. It was Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury and aptly named ‘Father of American Capitalism’, who devised a strategy for how the Northern capitalists could build up their economic strength while also saving the new Republic from falling back into the clutches of foreign powers. Advocating the ‘American School’ of economics, Hamilton pushed several key tenets which were seriously at odds with Adam Smith’s free market orthodoxy. First was the creation of a National bank that would extend credit to development projects deemed to be of long term national interest and not merely short term profit. Second was heavy tariffs against manufactured goods from Britain that would provide a protective wall behind which American manufacturers could grow. Third was using money from these taxes and other sources for ‘internal improvements’ (roads, canals) which would stimulate interstate and internal commerce, designed to pull the republic away from the British dominated maritime economy.[2] As the First US Secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton succeeded in founding the First Bank of the United States in 1791, and he succeeded in getting the Tariff of 1789 enacted. This tariff, the second piece of legislation ever passed by Congress, was signed into law by President George Washington on July 4, 1789. It was originally conceived as a way to pay off debts accrued by the states during the War of Independence. While not officially protective, in actual practice it was. Imported china and glassware were taxed at 15 percent, cotton and woolen clothing taxed at 7.5 percent, as well as all metal manufactures.[3] Jefferson’s Democratic Republicans, at odds with the Federalists, decried these measures as against the principles of liberal free trade. Thomas Jefferson, a romantic rather than a realist, banked on the salvation of the new American republic through the spread of bourgeois democratic revolutions across the Atlantic to Europe, ideally leading new anti-monarchical allies to come to America’s aid. In Jefferson’s analysis, the American republic could hold foreign enemies at bay and remain a decentralized, primarily rural society of free, small property-owning yeoman farmers-the ideal republican citizens in Jefferson’s mind. Jefferson feared that the expansion of federal powers, intertwined with the nascent influence of banks, was a threat to his vision of a decentralized agrarian republic. Hamilton had planted the germ of the idea into political discourse that short term profit motive should be subordinated to the national interests of the country as a whole. This vision of a semi planned economy was not, to be clear, for the benefit of the proletariat. Rather, it was a strategy for an immature and new economic polity to hold its own and eventually prevail over much more well established and wealthy mercantile powers who had rigged the global trade system in their favor. Hamilton’s meteoric political career was cut short with the fatal duel with Aaron Burr on July 11, 1804. This, along with the passing of George Washington in 1799, deprived the Federalist Party of respectable leadership with a national vision, leading to the party’s unraveling. Seven years later in 1811, the bank’s charter wasn’t renewed, with the deciding vote being cast by James Madison’s vice president George Clinton. Seemingly stillborn, the American System was jolted back to life by the threat of counterrevolution. Thomas Jefferson in his later years as President began to embrace some of Hamilton’s policies, although he never admitted it as such. Jefferson’s hatred and fear of Britain, and the pragmatic exigencies of the Napoleonic wars which threatened to pull the United States into the titanic conflict between Britain and France, led him to embrace the Embargo Act of 1807, which essentially cut off the American republic from commerce with Europe as well as the British Empire. No longer able to receive manufactured goods from Europe, private capital in the Northeastern US was forced to invest in manufacturing at home. Thousands of unemployed dock workers, sailors and merchant men became an eager labor force for the new factory system. Thus it was Jefferson who ironically played a key role in helping bring about the urbanized industrial capitalist empire he would have detested had he seen it come to its final fruition. Historian Henry Adams (descendant of John and John Quincy Adams) made the observation that “American manufactures owe more to Jefferson than to northern statesmen who encouraged them after they were established”.[4] The British retaliated against Jefferson’s punitive trade measures by attacking American shipping, forcibly impressing American seamen into the British navy, and escalating hostilities to the point where Jefferson’s successor, James Madison, felt he had no choice but to declare war on London five years later. The War of 1812 resulted in a series of alarming defeats for the young American Republic at the hands of the British, culminating in the burning of the White House in August 1814. The backward, poorly armed United States barely avoided catastrophe. The prospect that independence could be lost, that the Revolution could be reversed, spurred a wave of nationalism that demanded the government take measures to ensure US economic independence from the stranglehold of British domination. Even the South temporarily abandoned its sectional interests in this climate. Henry Clay, a young speaker of the House from Kentucky of Jeffersonian Democratic convictions (the first and only to become speaker in his first term as Congressman, obtaining the position at 34), rode the wave of this new national fervor to implement what he called ‘The American System’- resting on the same essential principles Hamilton had formulated: the tariff, the national bank and ‘internal improvements’. Henry Charles Carey, the economist most famous for providing the intellectual ammunition for the American System (and later an economic advisor to Abraham Lincoln), elaborated in his book A Harmony of Interests how this model differed from that practiced by the British Empire: “Two systems are before the world; the one looks to increasing the proportion of persons and of capital engaged in trade and transportation, and therefore to diminishing the proportion engaged in producing commodities with which to trade, with necessarily diminished return to the labor of all; while the other looks to increasing the proportion engaged in the work of production, and diminishing that engaged in trade and transportation, with increased return to all, giving to the labor good wages, and the owner of capital good profits. …One looks to compelling the farmers and planters of the Union to continue their contributions for the support of the fleets and the armies, the paupers, the nobles, and the sovereigns of Europe; the other to enabling ourselves to apply the same means to the moral and intellectual improvement of the sovereigns of America. …One looks to underworking the Hindoo, and sinking the rest of the world to his level; the other to raising the standard of man throughout the world to our level. One looks to pauperism, ignorance, depopulation, and barbarism; the other to increasing wealth, comfort, intelligence, combination of action, and civilization. One looks towards universal war; the other towards universal peace. One is the English system; the other we may be proud to call the American system”[5] This time, the nation at large and the political elites were receptive to an activist government on economic matters. In rapid succession a Second National Bank was established with its headquarters in Philadelphia, and in 1816 a heavy tariff was introduced on British goods, with duties on commodities deemed threatening to American manufactures, such as iron, glass, paper, taxed at 20-30%. Thomas Jefferson, who had previously opposed such policies, expressed his support for them: “...to be independent for the comforts of life we must fabricate them ourselves. We must now place the manufacturer by the side of the agriculturist. The former question is suppressed; or rather assumes a new form: shall we make our own comforts, or go without them, at the will of a foreign nation? He therefore who is now against domestic manufacture must be for reducing us either to dependance on that foreign nation, or to be clothed in skins, & to live like wild beasts in dens & caverns. I am not one of these. Experience has taught me that manufactures are now as necessary to our independence as to our comfort…for in so complicated a science as political economy, no one axiom can be laid down as wise and expedient for all times and circumstances…[there are] those who use their former opinion only as a stalking horse to cover their disloyal propensities to keep us in eternal vassalage to a foreign & unfriendly people”[6] (emphasis added). The British correctly perceived the threat these new policies posed to their hold over the transatlantic economy and engaged in a form of retaliatory economic warfare against the United States by oversaturating American markets with their goods, even taking profit losses to do so. This contributed to a depression in 1819, but the country recovered in two years.[7] Starting during the administration of James Monroe (1817-25) and accelerating during the administration of John Qunicy Adams (1825-29), a plethora of massive state sponsored infrastructure projects took shape. Clay, first as Speaker of the House and later as Secretary of State under Adams, was instrumental in marshaling political support for many of them. The first notable example was the National Road, also known as the Cumberland Road. Beginning in Cumberland, Maryland, this road ultimately extended over 600 miles, cutting through the Appalachian Mountains into the agricultural heartland of North America. Work had already begun on the road in 1806, but it originally was to go no further than Wheeling, [West] Virginia. Clay, as speaker of the House, led Congress to fund further extensions of this road throughout the 1810’s and 1820’s, so that it finally reached hundreds of additional miles, stretching as far as Vandalia, then the capital of the new state of Illinois. This major work of public infrastructure connected the east coast with the rich agricultural valleys of the Ohio and upper Mississippi for free farmers, who poured across the mountains to settle what became the most prosperous farming region in human history.[8] Another example was the Erie Canal, constructed between 1817 and 1825 under the leadership of Governor Dewitt Clinton. This canal connected the Hudson Valley, and thus the Atlantic Ocean, with the Great Lakes, circumventing the Appalachians and facilitating direct river traffic between the Midwest and the East Coast, reducing transport costs by as high as 90%. Although not technically receiving federal funding (most of the money came from the state government of New York and private philanthropists), government assistance to this project was nonetheless crucial. Work on the canal began directly across the river from the West Point Military Academy (established by President Jefferson in 1802), which at the time was the only school in the entire United States that trained engineers. The West Point Foundry reportedly designed the locks which were crucial to the canals functioning.[9] As New York City rapidly grew and became a flourishing global trade hub in the subsequent 20-30 years, the West Point Foundry also built much of the sewage pipe system of NYC in the 1830’s and 40’s, and in 1830 built ‘The Best Friend of Charleston’, the first locomotive for revenue service built entirely in the United States. The Ohio and Erie Canal was built with the finances of the state government/state bank of the newly established state of Ohio between 1825 and 1832, and was surveyed/designed by the US Army Corps of Engineers under the supervision of General Simon Bernard, a Frenchman who had served Napoleon and defected to the United States after Waterloo.[10] The canal connected Lake Erie with the Ohio River, stretching over 300 miles with 146 river locks. The cities of Cleveland, Toledo, and Columbus grew along this canal route, flourishing from new direct commerce with the East Coast. The Second National Bank played a key role in financing numerous canals, railroads and roads. Printing one quarter of the United States’ entire currency, and having 25 branches across the country, the national bank was in a unique position to provide financing to infrastructure projects of national interest, either through direct funding, buying the land upon which the infrastructure would be built, or extending credit to private actors so that they’d be willing to invest in such projects long term. Among the vital infrastructure financed by the bank was: Delaware and Chesapeake Canal- A canal constructed between 1825 and 1829 that connected the Delaware river with Chesapeake Bay, removing a major natural obstacle to internal and international maritime commerce. The canal is still in use to this day. Morris Canal- A New Jersey canal, constructed between 1829 to 1839, that was primarily used to transport anthracite coal from the coal fields of Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley to blast furnaces in New Jersey and the New York City area. The canal also transported iron ore westwards to places like Bethlehem, Pennsylvania which was the embryo of enterprises like Bethlehem Steel. New Orleans Canal- A canal built between 1831 and 1838 to cut through swampland and connect the cities ports with the Gulf of Mexico. Slave labor was not used, but Irish migrant wage laborers were. Tragically, the harsh work conditions led many to perish from yellow fever. The canal was nonetheless so effective that it served as the city's main canal until World War II. Reading Railroad- A railway connecting the coal producing region of northeastern Pennsylvania with Port Richmond, the single largest tidewater rail terminal in the world at the time, enabling coal exports across the world that could compete with the British coal industry. (The information is available in a report on the national banks activities issued by a committee of financier stockholders in 1841).[11] All these projects kick-started industrialization and stimulated commerce between the East Coast and the new territories of the Midwest, especially because they made the flow of agricultural goods, iron, coal and other raw materials of the Midwestern breadbasket/Appalachian Mountains to the coastal manufacturing hubs easier and cheaper than ever before. The mileage of railroads connecting different regions of the country went from zero to thousands of miles. The continental, land-based economy in North America began to take shape, free of the maritime trade dominated by the trade ships and war vessels of the British Empire. By increasing the wealth and autonomous economic muscle of Northeastern and Midwestern industrial as well as agricultural capital, leaders like Clay built up the strength of their class for the looming violent confrontation with the slave holding aristocracy of the South, and its international allies. The nature of this escalating conflict was personified by what was called the “Triumvirate”- the three giants of Congress and the Senate who dominated American politics in the second quarter of the 19th century. These men were Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John C. Calhoun. Clay represented the up-and-coming landholding entrepreneurs of the newly forming Western states. A slave holder himself, he nonetheless supported gradual, compensated emancipation and believed that increased interstate commerce would enable the West as well as the South to catch up to the Northeast in terms of economic development, and thus ease sectional tensions over time. Webster represented the old established mercantile shipping interests and industrial capitalists of the East Coast. As an acclaimed Massachusetts lawyer, he had personally represented the interests of Francis Cabot Lowell, the owner of the first big textile factory in the United States Boston Manufacturing Company, and John Jacob Astor, the fur trader, opium dealer, and real estate mogul of early 19th century NYC and the USA’s first multi-millionaire. He was widely considered the wealthiest lawyer of his era.[12] An opportunist, he had at first opposed protectionist policies in the name of the dogmas of free trade, but shifted his positions when he saw that Northeastern industry would turn more of a profit in the long term by keeping British manufactured goods out of the market. In short, he represented the more cautious and conservative faction of the pro developmental bourgeoisie. Lastly was John C Calhoun, the South Carolina Senator who represented the most reactionary interests of the Southern slave plantation owners. Historian Richard Hofstadter called Calhoun the “Marx of the Master Class”,[13] a social and economic theorist who recognized class conflict as the motor force of history, and yet for that precise reason rejected industrial capitalism which he thought gave too many freedoms to the laborers, arguing that only the ultra-hierarchical system of chattel slavery could subdue the unholy horror of class warfare. Of the three men, Clay was the most forward looking, seeing in the American System not only a good development plan for the United States, but the beginning of an entirely different global economic order. Clay foresaw an interconnected economy of mutual prosperity spanning the entire Americas, free of the fetters of feudalism, colonialism and hereditary privilege that weighed down the Old World. As Secretary of State under John Quincy Adams, Clay vocally supported the freedom struggles of Simon Bolivar in South America, and also supported American recognition of the revolutionary Republic of Haiti, to the scandalization and horror of most Southern slave owners.[14] The American System more or less prevailed from 1816 to around 1833 and gave American industrialization a vital boost, but was derailed by a reactionary backlash represented by the rise of Andrew Jackson to the presidency. Jackson represented all the worst aspects of Jeffersonianism without any of its redeeming qualities. A narrow-minded parochial champion of petit bourgeois interests in cahoots with parasitic finance capital centered in New York, Jackson utilized vulgar populism to bring down Clay’s national bank, claiming that it was a corrupt institution unfairly favoring certain politically connected business interests over others, stifling American capitalist meritocracy. The two hammer blows to the American System came in 1832-33. First, in 1832, the Southern slave owners, led by Calhoun, effectively blackmailed the rest of the country into rolling back the protectionist tariff. South Carolina threatened to secede unless the 1828 protectionist tariff, called by Southern demagogues ‘The Tariff of Abominations’, was repealed. Calhoun considered the high tariff a Northern plot to economically ruin the South, just one step removed from emancipating the slaves- to him, the tariff and abolitionist agitation were one and the same (‘While the tariff takes from us the proceeds of our labor, abolition strikes at the labor itself’ Calhoun said).[15] Although President Jackson’s threat of using military force cowed the secessionists into not crossing the final red line, the Northern bourgeoisie gave in to the threats. Clay (by now a Senator) and Webster crafted the Compromise of 1833 whereby the 40% tariff on manufactured imports would gradually be lowered to 25% over a period of several years. Passionate as Clay was in support of the American System, he prioritized preserving the Union above all else. His enemies did not. Then came the great attack on the national bank. Under the direction of his Secretary of the Treasury Roger B Taney (the later Supreme Court Chief Justice infamous for the pro slavery Dredd Scott decision), the national developmental bank was drained of its funds, the funds were put in local state banks run by Jackson’s political cronies (described by Whig critics as ‘pet banks’), who instead of spending the funds on internal improvements, spent the money on land sales to those settling the West.[16] In the subsequent ‘free banks’ era from 1837 to 1863, the average life expectancy of a bank was five years, given reckless speculation and lack of a sound currency.[17] Despite Jackson’s reactionary sabotage, the American System lived on at a state level, with Northeastern and Midwestern state governments led by the Whigs putting up the money for internal improvement projects. One of the most prolific politicians in this endeavor was the young Abraham Lincoln, who in his eight years in Illinois’s state legislature(1834-1842) succeeded in pushing through legislation creating a State Bank of Illinois, as well as appropriating 8.5 million dollars in state funds for the creation of the Illinois and Michigan Canal which connected the Great Lakes with the Mississippi river basin.[18] Such was his enthusiasm for this project that he served on the state commission overseeing the canal's construction. The canal diverted trading activity from southern and central Illinois to Chicago which sat where the canal connected to the Great Lakes, leading to Chicago’s meteoric rise into the Midwest's greatest metropolis. This and other projects only widened the gap between the development of the productive forces of the Northeast and the Midwest vis-a-vis the South, leading to the slavocrats' position being weakened in the economy. Their only hope lay in a rigged political system that granted disproportionate representation through the Senate and the Supreme Court, and failing that, the threat of civil war and possible British intervention on their behalf. The Whigs led by Clay attempted in vain to re-implement the American System on a national level. Jackson was followed by Van Buren, who was ruined politically by the economic crash of 1837, brought about in part by usurious interest rates at the hands of Wall Street and local banks no longer restrained or regulated by a national bank. William Henry Harrison, a Whig, was elected in 1840 but died after only a month in office, leading to him being replaced by his running mate John Tyler. Tyler treacherously abandoned his own party's platform once in office and sided with the Jacksonian Democrats in vetoing a new national bank (which resulted in a riot by Clays supporters in front of the White House). In a final rally for the nationalist cause, Whigs in Congress passed a protectionist tariff in 1842 over Tyler's veto. Clay then ran for President in 1844 against the rabidly pro free market, pro slavery expansionist James K. Polk and narrowly lost. Abraham Lincoln and other Whigs charged, on the floor of Congress, that Polk had been elected with financial and propaganda assistance from the British.[19] Jacksonian Democrats hammered the nail in the coffin to the American System when they passed the Walker Tariff in 1846, the most pro free market tariff measure passed to date. They also embarked on a predatory war of conquest against Mexico to expand the territories available for slaveholders. Although there was a temporary economic boom with the explosion of land speculation following the annexation of vast Mexican territories, lack of regulation of interest rates led to a major economic crash in 1857, bringing Northern factory owners to the point of ruin. The newly annexed Mexican territories reignited the slavery controversy, due to disagreements over whether slavery would be allowed into these western lands or not. Senators Clay and Webster, summoning all their rhetorical and political gifts one last time, crafted the Compromise of 1850. The agreement admitted California as a free state and banned the slave trade in the nation’s capital Washington DC. However, to placate the South, it also included the hideous Fugitive Slave Act, which gave license to Southern slave patrols to pursue runaways in Northern states. Thus, an illustrious career in public service ended in disgrace for both men. The only good thing that can be said about the compromise is that it gave the North another ten precious years to industrialize further and prepare for the coming storm.[20] In 1852 both Henry Clay and Daniel Webster died within months of each other, depriving the Whig Party of its most able leadership. Simmering sectional differences over slavery, kept at bay for over 30 years, could no longer be suppressed. The ‘Conscience Whigs’, tired of their party’s compromises with slavery, broke from the party, forming the nucleus of the new Republican Party. The pro slavery faction, the ‘Cotton Whigs’, joined the Southern Democrats. The newly ascendant Republican Party represented the consolidation of a cross class alliance between Northern industrial capitalists, workers, Midwestern free farmers and a small but growing group of reformers and abolitionists to push the Slave Power off its throne. Their ranks grew until they triumphed in the election of 1860. With the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, the industrial bourgeoisie was finally able to capture the commanding heights of state power. In 1861, the Morrill tariff was passed, which reversed the free trade policies of the previous 15 years, to the great boon of Northern industry. A single centralized national bank was not re-established, but on the advice of Lincoln’s economic advisor Henry Charles Carey, a nationwide network of Federal banks in each state was created, issuing ‘greenback’ paper money backed by the federal treasury and creating a standardized fiat currency. The state banks were heavily taxed to discourage competition with the federal banks. This made raising money for the upcoming war effort far more efficient.[21] In response to the loss of its power, the Southern slavocracy seceded and made war, declaring itself the Confederacy (whose constitution, in addition to codifying slavery into law forever, included a provision forbidding the government providing funding for internal improvements).[22] The process of economic decoupling from Britain was completed when the slavocracy was crushed at the cost of 750,000 lives in four years of brutal civil war. The decisive blow was inflicted by the slaves themselves in the ‘General Strike’ eloquently described by W.E.B. Dubois in Chapter 4 of Black Reconstruction, in which hundreds of thousands of runaways fled to the Union lines, depriving the plantation system its vital labor force, and providing 200,000 additional soldiers to crush the rebellion, tipping the balance of forces decisively for the Union cause. In the immediate post war period, the Northern bourgeoisie was faced with a dilemma. The emancipation of the slaves meant that they no longer counted as three fifths of a person, but a full person in the eyes of the law. This meant increased Southern representation in Congress. Without black suffrage and votes, this opened the door for unreconstructed reactionaries from the ranks of the just recently defeated planters to take seats in the new Congress. The Northern business interests didn’t care one way or another about black suffrage, but they knew such a Congress would lift the tariff and attack other policies the industrialists prized deeply. If there had been an industrial bourgeoisie in the South for their Northern counterparts to make common cause with against the Southern oligarchy, they would have done so. But given the South’s extreme underdevelopment, the only available ally that could produce Southern state governments aligned with Northern capital was the newly emancipated black proletariat, along with some Unionist white proletarians.[23] The Northern industrial capitalists made a move unprecedented in any bourgeois revolutionary process- they backed, with the full force of the United States military, a dictatorship of the proletariat in the American South. The political and military leadership of the defeated Confederacy, the Southern nobility, were denied the right to vote and hold political office. The American Revolution, in its final culmination, resulted in the brief but unprecedented acquisition of state power for laboring people, backed by the bayonets of the United States Army. Three years before the Paris Commune, fifty years before the Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace in Russia. Central to this new order was the establishment of the Freedmen's Bureau in the reconstructed South, a federal government entity under the command of the War Department with broad powers to provide food, clothing, shelter, and other welfare programs for emancipated blacks, build schools and educational facilities for the freedmen and poor whites, defend the voting rights of the freedmen, provide an alternative court system for the freedmen, run a government bank for the freedmen’s finances, and rebuild the damaged infrastructure of the war torn South. Dubois described this massive government agency, the first of its kind ever entrusted with such wide-ranging authorities, as a proto socialist institution, the embryo of a true workers republic. Had it been allowed to grow unimpeded, it had the potential to become a “vast and single eyed dictatorship [that] could guide us up from murder in the South and robbery and cheating in the North into a nation whose infinite resources would be developed in the interest of the mass of the nation- that is, of the laboring poor.”[24] The forces of reaction gathered against this nascent workers power in the form of the Ku Klux Klan, the White League, the Red Shirts and other paramilitaries. These organizations constituted the shock troops of the decayed remnants of the deposed Southern planter oligarchy, as well as the upcoming new Southern bourgeoisie drawn from the ranks of former slave overseers and traders. This was an alliance of declassed aristocrats and lumpen against the workers, in essence a form of proto fascism. They waged a terrorist Contra war against the proletarian dictatorship, murdering thousands of black men and pro Reconstruction whites. In 1876-77 they triumphed, when the Northern bourgeoisie pulled the rug out from under the proletariat of the South and came to a gentleman’s agreement with the Southern reactionaries in the infamous Compromise of 1877, in a private meeting held at the Wormley Hotel in Washington DC. According to progressive Southern historian C Vann Woodward,[25] the nascent new Southern bourgeoisie was promised Northern investment in canals, railroads and bridges to rebuild their war damaged economy. In exchange, Radical Reconstruction was to end and the black proletariat stripped of its political power, and all federal troops protecting their rights were to be withdrawn. The black proletarians of the South were thrown to the wolves of lynch mob terror and disenfranchisement, while the Northern industrial interests (especially the railway giants) acquired what they wanted- domination of the vital economic infrastructure of the South. Thus the South went from being a source of raw materials for Britain to being a source of raw materials for the industrial hubs of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Illinois, lorded over by the Vanderbilts and the Carnegies. Thus, the real counterrevolution in American history was not 1776 but 1876. The bourgeois democratic revolutionary project which had begun in 1776 had at last achieved full independence from British domination both direct and indirect, had rid itself of comprador traitors to national liberation, and stood on the precipice of a social republic built on the uplift of all workers regardless of skin color. Instead, the ascendant industrial mega bourgeoisie set up a new dictatorship of banking/steel/railroad/mining/canal monopolies. It was at this moment that the American bourgeoisie ended what revolutionary role it had and became yet another predatory imperial powerhouse, glutting itself on the labor and resources of its own working class North and South, and later, much of the world. The tragedy of the defeat of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the South is that it occurred just as the labor movement in the North was coming into maturity. In the summer of 1877, the United States was rocked by a massive rebellion by railway workers, the largest in American history. Upwards of 100,000 laborers took part in a spontaneous explosion against starvation wages, unemployment due to the depression of 1873, and dangerous working conditions. Half of all freight being carried by trains in the US came to a halt.[26] In Chicago, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and other cities, workers battled with strikers and company goons. St. Louis was briefly governed by a workers' soviet in July 1877, led by the Workingmen's Party of the United States, an early US Marxist organization. President Rutherford B. Hayes, who had taken office thanks to the Compromise of 1877, called out the army to crush the rebellion, killing 100 people nationwide and injuring/jailing thousands. The very federal troops which were enforcing the dictatorship of labor only months earlier immediately turned their guns around in defense of the dictatorship of capital. Had the proletarian power in the South not been crushed under heel, they may have linked arms with the emerging proletarian behemoth of the North and changed the trajectory of the distribution of the spoils of America’s burgeoning industrial empire. The cause of economic democracy for all Americans, black and white, was set back for sixty years, until the Franklin Roosevelt era (which will be addressed in the next article). The case of China Just as the American Revolution of 1776 was an arguably premature bourgeois revolution in a society where the industrial capitalist class was weak, so the Chinese Revolution of 1949 was an arguably premature socialist revolution in a country where the modern urban proletariat was small and barely formed in most areas outside a few coastal ports, with the overwhelming majority of the population being serfs who worked the land in feudal power relations. In addition to this, the nation had been devastated by thirty seven years of continuous warfare- ten years of fighting between rival warlords, then ten years of fighting between the Communists and Chiang Kai Shek’s Nationalists, followed by eight years of a war of national self-defense against the Japanese, and finally another four years of renewed fighting between the Communists and Nationalists. As a result, Mao Zedong did not advocate an immediate transition to full socialism at first, but a period of ‘New Democracy’- a transitional state whereby the proletariat and peasantry would govern in cooperation with the urban petit bourgeois and the national bourgeoisie (capitalists who had opposed China’s subordination to foreign powers). Known as the ‘Bloc of Four Classes’, these classes had allied with each other in opposition to feudalism and imperialism. Mao did not specify how long this period would last, saying that it would “need quite a long time and cannot be accomplished overnight. We are not utopians and cannot divorce ourselves from the actual conditions confronting us.”[27] The assumption behind the policy of New Democracy was that with the assistance of its sister Communist giant the Soviet Union, the People's Republic would industrialize and with time, would be able to achieve a developed socialism- ‘the Soviet Union’s present is our tomorrow’ being a popular slogan of 1950’s China. Until that time, a certain level of private enterprise would be tolerated, and foreign investment from capitalist countries allowed, provided it ‘did not dominate the economic livelihood of the people’.[28] In this time, relations with the USSR were amicable, and the Soviets assisted in providing money, technical/engineering expertise, and materials for 150 major industrial projects in China- mostly in the sectors of energy, manufacturing, and extraction of raw materials. This became the core of modern China’s industrial base.[29] During 1957-60, this period of a mixed economy ended when Chinese relations with the USSR went south. Khruschev’s 1956 Secret Speech denouncing Stalin was seen by Mao as an ideological capitulation to Western imperialism. Mao publicly denounced the Soviets as betrayers of the communist project. A war of insults between Moscow and Beijing escalated, and thousands of Soviet technical, engineering and scientific advisors were abruptly withdrawn from China in July 1960, many in mid-project, crippling China's development at a crucial moment.[30] Coupled with an American embargo and nuclear threats, China was confronted with the prospect of developing in extreme isolation from both the Eastern Bloc and the capitalist world. From that point forward, China took its own independent path. From the mid to late 1950’s until his death in 1976, Mao took a turn towards state socialism, which was largely an autarky. To be certain, enormous accomplishments were achieved in this period. Literacy rose from 20% to 90%, no worker or farmer went without healthcare, the average life expectancy rose from a mere 32 years to 65 years in a generation. For those who want to separate the Mao and subsequent Deng period as two entirely different phenomena, the fact remains that without the education of the population and the beginnings of industrialization of China, the subsequent reforms by Deng Xiaoping would not have taken off in the form that they did. Mao uprooted not just feudal relations but semi colonial dependency in a manner that never occurred in India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, or elsewhere in Asia. This progress, while substantial, was almost derailed by Mao’s deepening slide into ideological rigidity over pragmatic considerations, which reached a crescendo during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. To what extent the worst excesses of the GPCR were the result of Mao himself, the result of Mao falling under the sway of the Gang of Four (which included his wife, Jiang Qing), or somewhere in between is something no one can tell for sure. Suffice to say that a large segment of the party vanguard was seized by a paralyzing fear of fifth columnists and traitors to socialism from within, and the hunt for turn coats turned all China upside down.[31] The ultra left Red Guards who were followers of the Gang of Four, while extremely politically far removed from Andrew Jackson’s Democrats and the Southern oligarchy of the 19th century US, nonetheless played a similar destructive role towards China’s socialist development as the former did towards America’s bourgeois economic development. The Gang of Four fetishized the peasant masses as the source of untainted revolutionary virtue, much as the Jackson Democrats fetishized the farmer and the small property owner as the vessel of bourgeois democratic purity. The Gang of Four’s belief that ideological fealty to communism in the abstract would achieve an ideal form of socialism mirrored the Jacksonian Democrats zeal in unleashing liberal market forces without restraint or a plan. Appeals to ‘the market’ and ‘the masses’ functioned as thought terminating cliches that evaded concrete strategy or planning. In reality, the objective actions of both slowed the industrialization of both new republics and crippled their development. The Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution’s violence was directed inwards at ‘capitalist roaders’ and ‘imperialist running dogs’ (many of them loyal Communists who ran afoul of demagogues), while the Jacksonian Democrats violence was directed outwards towards Native Americans, Mexicans and others who dared to stand in the way of Manifest Destiny settler colonial expansionism. The most fervent advocates of ‘Democracy’ and ‘Communism’ in rhetoric proved to be most destructive towards both political projects in practice. Not only were millions humiliated, persecuted and in a number of cases killed, but the very foundations that the People’s Republic were built on were destabilized. The urban petit bourgeois intelligentsia was severely persecuted during the Cultural Revolution; as anyone who had been an educated specialist before the Communists took power was treated with suspicion. When Zhou Enlai, Mao’s foreign minister (who had been seen as sympathetic to the intelligentsia’s plight) died in April 1976, his funeral in Tiananmen Square turned into a mass demonstration led by intelligentsia elements against the Gang of Four, and by extension against the Communist Party itself.[32] If the Party lost the support of this strata, China’s prospects of economic development would be quite bleak. There was a serious legitimacy crisis. Only a month after Mao died, the Gang of Four were toppled from power, arrested, and jailed. Just as the American Revolution underwent a ‘course correction’ with the establishment of the American System in 1816 and then again in 1860 with the election of Lincoln, so the Chinese Revolution underwent a course correction in the late 1970’s and 1980’s with the rise to the fore of three remarkable leaders in particular: Deng Xiaoping, Chen Yun, and Li Xiannian. In that order, they are generally considered the three most powerful figures in China in the last two decades of the 20th century. Deng Xiaoping was originally from a middle level landowning family in Sichuan. As a teenager he had studied in France and acquired experience in mechanics at a French factory. Returning to China, he joined the Communists in their fight against warlordism and foreign imperialists. He achieved distinction as a military commander in the Long March and in the One Hundred Regiments campaign against the Japanese in World War II. In Mao’s revolutionary government he served as an economic planner, where he tried to emphasize a focus on more consumer goods and using prices as an indicator of enterprise’s success. These views led him to be accused of being a ‘capitalist roader’ by the Gang of Four. He was exiled into the countryside for his ideological ‘mistakes’, and his eldest son was severely beaten by Red Guards and crippled for life when he threw himself out of a window trying to escape his torturers.[33] After the arrest of the Four, Deng was allowed back into politics, and quickly became the most powerful man in the party. Deng Xiaoping was the strategist who charted the path by which the PRC could stave off internal counterrevolution as well as develop its internal productive forces, which included selectively opening sectors of China’s economy to foreign capitalist investment in the so called SEZ’s (Special Economic Zones). These zones, with their low taxes, lax regulations and less restrictions on foreign enterprises, were meant to attract foreign investment in China and thus acquire badly needed revenue for the Chinese state. The first four SEZ’s were established in Guangdong, Shenzhen and Fuijan in southern China in 1979.[34] Five years later, 14 additional ports were designated SEZ’s as well, and more were added in the coming decades. These islands of capitalism, where economic activity was monitored but not dictated by the Communist Party, became important engines of China’s growth. Why did Deng pursue this strategy? An explanation is needed. State socialist projects of the 20th century were bedeviled by the following conundrum: Since they took power in extremely impoverished, semi feudal nations where the local bourgeoisie was relatively weak (‘weak links in the chain’ as Lenin famously said), how could they sustain continuing economic growth? The Soviet model of top to bottom state control was extremely effective at helping underdeveloped countries clear the initial hurdles of industrialization, eliminate extreme poverty and spur modernization which Third World capitalist countries could only dream of. However, in nations where Communists were in power long enough, after those tasks were achieved such systems had a tendency to stagnate 30-40 years down the line. Because their economies were nationalized, such states were almost completely closed off from commerce with much of the world, and kept to trading with fellow socialist states for ideological reasons, thus lacking the capital to develop further. The pie was evenly divided, but it was a relatively small pie. As Deng explained: “When a backward country is trying to build socialism, it is natural that during the long initial period its productive forces will not be up to the level of those in developed capitalist countries and that it will not be able to eliminate poverty completely. Accordingly, in building socialism we must do all we can to develop the productive forces and gradually eliminate poverty, constantly raising the people’s living standards… If we don’t do everything possible to increase production, how can we expand the economy? How can we demonstrate the superiority of socialism and communism?”[35] Deng’s point was that while orthodox Marxism Leninism had succeeded in proving existing socialism was superior to capitalism in the developing world, in living standards they were still far behind the developed capitalist West and Japan. Socialism would not triumph in the world unless it broke through to that next level. To do that, a departure in orthodoxy was needed. If markets were necessary to stimulate the forces of production, they should be used. As Deng’s famous expression went ‘it does not matter if it is a black cat or a white cat, as long as it catches mice’. Deng encouraged China’s engineers, economists, technicians and intellectuals to learn everything they could from the capitalist world in terms of technical expertise, laws of supply and demand, and manufacturing design. Even the expertise of the World Bank, the arch neoliberal institution, was consulted.[36] One of the greatest sources of inspiration was Japan’s economic model, which although capitalist, had significant state ownership, major trade barriers to protect domestic manufacturers, and was closer culturally to China than Western capitalist nations. Deng was able to look past the enormous death and destruction Japan had inflicted on China (Deng himself had served as a military commander against the Japanese in World War II), to objectively study what had made their country prosperous, and instructed the party vanguard to do the same. Full scale Japanese factories were built in China for the purposes of training the Chinese in Japanese production techniques.[37] (This is not unprecedented by a Communist state. Stalin hired engineers and specialists from the Ford company to assist in building Soviet factories during the USSR’s industrialization drive in the 1930’s. Stalin even said that ‘The combination of Russian revolutionary sweep with American efficiency is the essence of Leninism in Party and state work.’).[38] It is worth noting that Japan’s paternalistic capitalism was built from the Meiji period (1868-1912) onward by Japanese leaders and economists inspired by the protectionist ideas of the German economist Friedrich List, who in turn had been influenced by Hamilton and Clay. Thus, in an indirect, roundabout fashion, the American System did influence Deng.[39] Not as well-known as Deng, but widely considered the second most powerful political figure in China throughout the ‘reform and opening up’ period, was Chen Yun. Li Xiannian was the third most powerful.[40] Both came from comparatively more humble backgrounds than Deng. Chen Yun had been an urban worker in Shanghai, working in a publishing house from the age of 15. He became a union organizer and organized a strike five years later, joining the Communists around this time. In 1925, he witnessed British colonial troops massacre striking Chinese laborers. He became an urban guerilla and fought Chiang Kai Shek in an underground capacity. Such experiences made him deeply hate and distrust Western imperialism and capitalist exploitation for the rest of his life. As a statesman, he refused to even meet with Western leaders.[41] Eventually escaping to the countryside and linking up with Mao, Chen Yun rose to prominence in the Party because of his talents as an economic planner and a rigorous attention to detail. He was put in charge of economic management of Harbin, the first major industrial center to come under the control of Communist forces, and his methods there became a model for Communist management of production in every city they occupied. When Mao took Beijing, he was put in charge of managing the national economy. He was most notable for cracking down relentlessly and successfully on illegal speculation and succeeded in bringing down inflation. When Mao enacted disastrous policies during the Great Leap Forward, it was Chen Yun who saved the day, instituting reforms that helped the economy recover in the early 1960’s.[42] In this period Chen Yun introduced material incentives for increased productivity and stressed economic growth goals as opposed to ideological ones. A famous phrase of his from the time, which he used a lot more later, was that market forces could be like a ‘bird in a cage’- allowed to operate within certain limits, but always boxed in by the party and the state. This made him a target of criticism during the Cultural Revolution as a ‘capitalist roader’, although Chen Yun was skilled at avoiding direct confrontations or overtly contradicting party leadership in a way that would get him into trouble. After the downfall of the Gang of Four, Yun was initially supportive of Deng’s market reforms, but in the early to mid-1980’s he was increasingly critical. He denounced the evils of capitalism the SEZ’s brought with them- drugs, prostitution, pornography, gambling, and parasitic financial speculation.[43] He was instrumental in the campaigns ‘Against Spiritual Pollution’ which pushed back against Western values of liberal individualism and consumerism, and reasserted the overall authority of the Party even as economic changes were underway. Li Xiannian, like Chen Yun, came from a humble background, being born to an impoverished peasant family in Hubei. He distinguished himself as a commander in the Huai-Hai campaign of November 1949-January 1949, the decisive battles of the Chinese Civil War which broke the back of Chiang Kai Shek’s army. From 1954 onward he was the Minister of Finance in the Communist government. He and a number of leading Communist officials were known as the ‘February Countercurrent’ in 1967 who opposed the fanaticism of the Gang of Four and criticized them for destabilizing the country. Xiannan was closely aligned with the so-called ‘oil clique’ whose power base was the Daqing oil fields, the single largest petroleum reserves within China. These generals (most notably Yu Qiuli), out of both Communist convictions and Chinese nationalist sentiments, were big proponents of the state run sector, especially in energy. Due to the Daqing fields providing for so many of China’s energy needs after the break with the USSR, Li and Yu exerted great influence.[44] Under the influence of Chen Yun and Li, important sections of China’s economy remained under the control of the state, especially energy and heavy industry. The 1950 Land Law made all land the collective property of the Chinese people and nation and remained in effect (private entities cannot own land, they can only lease it from the state. Revisions in the law in the 1980’s made it possible to own buildings but not the land the buildings are on, and private property can be nationalized at any point if the state deems it necessary). Perhaps most significantly, China’s largest banks remained under state control, meaning that access to hard currency was (and still is) a state monopoly, forcing private enterprise to rely on the state for good credit. These are the parameters of the ‘cage’. Deng, Chen and Li had different power bases they appealed to and spoke for- Deng appealed to the urban petit bourgeoisie that approved of market reforms, meanwhile Chen Yun and Li Xiannian spoke for the masses of workers and farmers who were loyal to the core socialist values of the revolution and skeptical of the West. By creating a vibrant consumer economy, Deng slowly but surely won back the loyalties of the urban petit bourgeois and intelligentsia to the Communist Party. Thus Deng tried to accelerate the reforms, while Chen and Li reigned them in and limited their scope (and by extension, pushed back on the efforts of even more right wing proponents of market reforms like Zhao Ziyang and Hu Yaobang, who wanted to take the reforms in an outright laissez-faire direction). The dialectic between these opposing forces ensured that the market reforms went ahead, but slowly and controlled enough that the socialist state was able to absorb them and not get overwhelmed. Deng and Chen Yun were the Communist equivalents to Clay and Webster, the innovative risk taker and the conservative reformer. Deng's faction was described as the ‘builders’ while Chen Yun and Li Xiannian were called the ‘balancers’.[45] Deng, Yun, and Xiannian’s tenures are the bridge between China’s first revolutionary generation led by Mao and the current revolutionary generation of Xi Jinping, just as Henry Clay was the bridge between the original Founding Fathers and Lincoln. Just as Hamilton and Clay departed from free market liberal orthodoxy to make the American republic’s economy one that could compete with Britain, so China under Deng departed from what had been Marxist Leninist orthodoxy up to that point to survive, and prevail over the Washington consensus. The reforms, while benefiting the port cities and creating entirely new ones (most famously Shenzhen), nonetheless created a huge gap in living standards and economic development between China’s coastal cities and the countryside, an imbalance which was deep and pronounced by the time both Deng and Yun both died in the mid 1990’s. This was reversed in the wake of the 2008 recession, when due to the economic downturn in the West, China’s export industries suffered and faced mass layoffs. Thanks to the fact that public planning remained in command, 27 million workers were transferred from export sector industries to building infrastructure in China's interior provinces. Using the immense capital accumulated from three decades of Western and Japanese investment, the Chinese state starting in 2008-2009 invested 4 trillion yuan (over $500 billion) in infrastructure and social spending.[46] An enormous drive in internal improvements began. Between 2008 and 2020, 18,305 miles of high speed rail have been constructed in China under the direction of the state run China Railway Rolling Stock Corporation.[47] The scale of the transportation boom is something unseen since the rise of the railroad in the United States from the 1830’s-1870’s. By contrast, the Western capitalist nations responded to the 2008 crisis with cuts to the welfare state, social spending, and increasing austerity to the working class, simultaneously giving enormous bailouts to unproductive finance capital. To this day, China maintains an economy which many observers describe as ‘mercantilists’ or ‘neo-mercantilist’. Many aspects of the American System, which the United States itself has long since abandoned, can be seen in Beijing’s contemporary economic practices. These include: Heavy tariffs on foreign imports to protect its own industries- the average Chinese tariff on imported foreign goods was 9.6%, while the USA’s was just 3.5%. For computer and video technology the tariffs were 20-30% or higher.[48] In response to Trump’s trade war in 2018-2019, China raised its average tariff on American imported goods to 20%.[49] In addition to tariffs, China uses heavy documentation requirements and selectively applied bureaucratic red tape to discourage imports of various forms of machinery and technology which are technically allowed. The Chinese state also heavily subsidizes its own exports, even though this is against the rules of the World Trade Organization (which China is officially a member of). China’s steel industry has gotten billions in subsidies from state run banks (the United States took legal action against China within the WTO in an attempt to stop this practice). Clean energy industries such as solar and wind power have gotten similar state support.[50] The core of this Communist mercantilism, which enables this artificial subsidization, is China’s state run banking system, which is largely concentrated in the ‘big four’: Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, China Construction Bank, Agricultural Bank of China, and the Bank of China, With nearly 19 trillion in assets they dwarf the total assets of JP Morgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs combined. The American System for Eurasia and beyond In November 2012, Xi Jinping became the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. Xi immediately moved to address some of the long festering contradictions in the PRC’s construction boom that had been unleashed from 2008 onwards. The main one was corruption within the Party, caused by many high-ranking Party members taking bribes from private actors in exchange for their approval of building and development projects. This was a threefold problem: first, it damaged the Communist Party’s trust amongst the masses and undermined its legitimacy, second it blurred what should have been an iron wall between the private sector and the state, third and most serious of all, it constituted a dire national security threat, since a number of these corrupt officials were also in the pay of the CIA, giving foreign intelligence access to the government’s innermost secrets.[51] The latter was of particular concern given the changing international political climate. The US had tolerated the PRC and even aided its rise in the 80’s to a degree because of the Late Cold War strategy of propping up China against the USSR, and with the exception of the 1989-92 period around the Tiananmen crisis, the US had refrained from overt efforts to encourage regime change in Beijing from the 1980’s to the 2000’s. This had provided the PRC breathing room for its experiment in market socialism. In 2012 this all changed with Obama’s declaration of a ‘Pivot to Asia’. The reallocation of US troops to Asia and the Pacific from the Middle East in that year began a massive decade-long US military buildup confronting China. It thus became imperative that Beijing rid itself of its own fifth column at home while simultaneously breaking out of Washington’s military, diplomatic and economic encirclement. The ‘Tiger Hunt’ of 2012-2022, as it’s been called, resulted in the prosecution, jailing and expulsion from the Party of 2 million members- the greatest turnover in Party membership since the Cultural Revolution. This included over 120 high ranking officials, among which were several current and former members of the Politburo. Five of them were heads of state-owned enterprises who were illegally selling off or leasing state run assets for a price, and/or enriching themselves off of rent seeking at the state’s expense. Thanks to the Tiger Hunt campaign, Party and government officials were increasingly reluctant to enter into any sort of partnership with private entities, especially in the areas of real estate, to avoid even the appearance of corruption. Thus the state owned enterprises achieved new pre-eminence, and took over considerable areas of the economy which had been private up to that point.[52] With the state owned enterprises under the watchful eye of the powerful Central Committee for Discipline Inspection (the anti-corruption organization tasked with investigations), the ability of the capitalists to buy influence within the Party and undermine its role as the vanguard was crippled. The economic and political rearguard secured, Xi and his allies were able to implement the breakout strategy called The Belt and Road Initiative. A multi decade, $4-8 trillion project, this program of building infrastructure and economic corridors aims to create an alternative network of commerce that completely bypasses the Atlanticist economy that’s dominated the globe for centuries. Given overwhelming US naval power, China has a great interest in investing in land-based trade routes that cannot be potentially disrupted by a US naval embargo (especially the vulnerable Straits of Malacca), as well as giving countries China has an interest in deepening relations with, such as Russia and Iran, a direct line to China. The first great linkage across Eurasia has been the New Silk Road railway completed in 2016, stretching over 6,000 miles from Yiwu City in Zhejiang province in eastern China to Tehran in Iran- making it possible to deliver freight goods in only 14 days, 30 days shorter than delivery takes over sea. The second has been the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, an 1,864 mile network of roads, railroads, power plants and electric lines that directly connects China to the Indian Ocean via Gwadar, one of the world’s largest deep water ports (this network now accounts for one quarter of all Pakistan’s electricity).[53] Gwadar is one of the so-called ‘String of Pearls’, a network of Chinese financed ports stretching from Myanmar to Kenya. The BRI has built over 3,700 miles of roads and railroads each in Africa alone, almost 20 ports and over 80 power plants.[54] Much of the financing for these mega projects is carried out by the Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank, founded in 2016 and headquartered in Beijing. After the World Bank, it is the single largest multilateral investment institution on the planet. It is truly the developmental infrastructure banking institution of the World Island (Eurasia and Africa) that the likes of Hamilton and Clay only envisioned for the Americas but never achieved. The economic opportunities offered by the bank are so lucrative that even close US allies such as the UK and Germany are members of the bank, along with the overwhelming majority of Asian and African nations. There have, however, been setbacks. The trade war unleashed by the Trump administration in 2018 (which continues under Biden), landed several blows against China. The COVID pandemic slowed, but did not stop, China’s economic growth, forcing Beijing to abandon or at least scale back several major projects. Political turmoil in Sri Lanka resulted in the overthrow of the Beijing friendly government in 2022, putting the future of the Hambantota Harbor port, which Chinese companies have a majority stake in, in jeopardy, ultimately imperiling the entire ‘String of Pearls’. Russia’s war with the collective West puts attempts to extend the Belt and Road through Russia to Europe on hold, possibly permanently, although the China brokered peace agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran holds out the possibility of the BRI extending deeper into the core oil producing region of the world, further threatening the dominance of the US petrodollar. As Xi Jinping stated in his speech during the trade war on May 20, 2019: “We are here at the starting point of the Long March where the Red Army began its journey. We are now embarking on a new Long March, and must start all over again”. In August of 2023 the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) will enter into discussions about an entirely new currency separate from the US dollar, its value based on rare earth minerals in China and Russia.[55] China studied and learned from the World Bank, so it could build institutions capable of surpassing and supplanting the World Bank. The short-term investment opportunities the opening of China presented to Western multinationals blinded them to the fact that they were building up a mortal enemy. A Note on Contrasts An obvious difference between the two revolutions is that China's developmental process was (and is) guided by a single party, while much of the American revolutionary trajectory was operating in the context of a two-party system. It was not necessarily destined to be so. George Washington, John Adams and numerous other founders made statements to the effect that there shouldn’t be a competitive party system in the United States at all, fearing that factional infighting would doom the American republic to collapse the same way the Greek and Roman republics had. The Federalist and Whig parties attempted and failed to be the guiding parties of America’s bourgeois developmentalism. They faltered in the face of the narrow sectional interests of the South that increasingly dominated the Democratic Party, leading to a crisis that eventually could only be resolved through a civil war that very nearly torpedoed the entire experiment. China’s process of socialist development being led by a Marxist party, with a well worked out ideological line and iron discipline, has been both a blessing and a curse. It was a blessing in the initial victory of China’s national liberation when the feudalists were crushed, but became a curse when the party apparatus was taken over by the fanatics of the Gang of Four. After the purging of the Gang, however, the CPC was able to make effective long term economic plans. China has capitalists and comprador elements in league with foreign finance capital, but given the nature of China’s system, they have not been able to consolidate into a politically independent and active element, like the Democrats in the antebellum US did. The World Historic Place of the American and Chinese projects In conclusion, we may assess the world historic impact of the American and Chinese revolutions by laying them side by side with their sister bourgeois and socialist revolutions, the French and Russian revolutions, respectively. Each has played a roughly analogous role in the global transition from feudalism to capitalism, and from capitalism to socialism. Revolutionary France, like the Soviet Union, took on the old order it was struggling against in the form of a full-fledged, frontal attack. Revolutionary/Napoleonic France was at war with its aristocratic and feudal enemies throughout nearly the whole of its existence, from 1792 to 1815. Its strategy for victory hinged on full mobilization of the entire French nation against the decadent nobility of the Hapsburgs, the Prussians and the British, while swelling its ranks with emancipated peasants as French armies marched across Europe. The Russian revolutionary experiment likewise can be seen as a series of military assaults that expropriated the resources of one enemy after another to expand its project- first the Russian bourgeoisie and aristocracy in 1917-18, then the kulak landowners in collectivization to assist industrialization, then the taking of industry from eastern Germany as reparations for the losses of the Great Patriotic War. After 1945 the USSR settled into a protracted frozen conflict with the West and was dragged into an arms race. The Soviets funneled arms into national liberation struggles worldwide, hoping the accumulation of allies in the Third World would tip the power balance in their favor. Both strategies, while bold and Earth shaking, ultimately failed. The French strategy could only succeed with an uninterrupted string of military victories, which came to an end with Napoleon’s disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812. Only three years later, the Bourbon monarchs were restored to the throne in France and the vengeful conservative aristocrats of the Congress of Vienna imposed a reactionary order on all of Europe for decades. The USSR was never outright conquered due to the factor of nuclear weapons, but the arms race drained much of the resources it needed for robust social spending. Neglect of the home front, especially under Brezhnev (1964-1982), proved disastrous. Economic stagnation set in, and the vanguard party became complacent, out of touch with the working class grassroots, and corrupt. This demoralized the population and enabled the rise of a capitulationist wing of the Soviet Communist Party willing to surrender to the West, which happened in 1989-1991. The Communists won in Vietnam, Angola and Cuba, only to lose in Moscow. By contrast, both the post ‘reform and opening up’ People's Republic of China and the American Republic from the 1810’s until the 1870’s fought the rival economic order in an indirect and circuitous fashion. Both steadily built up their own independent economic base on their respective continents, while avoiding inciting or directly supporting revolutions abroad. In doing so, they provided ‘strategic depth’, a rear area if you will, of an alternative economic order. And eventually became such an economic juggernaut that direct war or conquest of their adversaries became unnecessary- the entire economic center of gravity shifted in their direction, towards America by the time of the First World War when much of Europe including Britain became indebted to Wall Street banks, and towards China in the last decade or so as the Belt and Road Initiative has taken off. The mere existence of the United States put pressure on the 19th century European despotisms to reform, as the serfs and reform minded middle classes of Ireland, Germany and elsewhere now had the option of migrating to America, where they could themselves be landholders. Feudalism withered as the new industrial powerhouse in North America rose. China, by contrast, brings development to other countries rather than encouraging emigration to its own shores. Thus, it uplifts people from countless nationalities while not contributing to a ‘brain drain’ from the developing world that the Western imperial core has, nor facilitating polarizing culture clashes that mass immigration to the West has. But it has the same dynamic of creating mounting pressure on the old financial capitalist order- nation after nation in the Third World migrates from the debt bondage offered to them by the IMF and the World Bank to the Belt and Road Initiative which offers them a better deal. The American System lives on, but in Eurasia. And Wall Street is now the new London, attempting to crush all developmental projects that are not indebted to them. This is the essence of the New Cold War. The role of American and Western intellectuals in this state of affairs will be addressed in Part 3. References [1] Charles Halstead Van Thyne, England and America: Rivals in the American Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 1927), 33. [2] Alexander Hamilton, ‘Report on the Subject of Manufactures’, 5 December 1791. Accessed via the National Archives: https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-10-02-0001-0007 [3] Douglas A. Irwin and Richard Sylla, Founding Choices:American Economic Policy in the 1790’s(University of Chicago Press, 2009), 100. [4] Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (Vintage Books, 1989 edition), 52. [5] Henry Charles Carey, “A Harmony of Interests: Agricultural, Manufacturing and Commercial’ (New York, Myron Finch, 1856), 228-229. Karl Marx considered Carey to be ‘the only American economist of importance’ in his era. [6] Thomas Jefferson’s letter to Benjamin Austin, January 9, 1816. Accessed via the National Archives website: https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-09-02-0213 [7] Charles McFarland and Nevin E. Neal, “The Nascence of American Protectionism: American Tariff Policies, 1816-24”, Land Economics, Vol.45, No.1(Feb.1969): 23, University of Wisconsin Press. [8] Maurice A. Baxter, Henry Clay and the American System(The University Press of Kentucky, 1995), 110-111. [9] T. Arron Kotlensky, “West Point Foundry and the Great Feats of Mechanical Engineering Before the Civil War”(The American Society of Mechanical Engineers, published 2019): 3, 6: : https://www.asme.org/getmedia/29767c69-8e78-4c48-b5d6-e19b3cf5f668/asme-wpfp_-brochure.pdf [10] William H. Carter, “Bvt. Maj. Gen. Simon Bernard”, Professional Memoirs, Corps of Engineers, United States Army, and Engineer Department at Large, Vol. 5, No. 21 (May-June, 1913): 312. [11] “Report of the Committee of Investigation Appointed at the Meeting of the Stockholders of the Bank of the United States”, Philadelphia, 1841. Relevant information on funding for internal improvements is on pages 28-30 of the report: https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/docs/bankunitedstates/firstsecondbank_reportboardofdirectors_18410405.pdf?utm_source=direct_download [12] Robert V. Remni, Daniel Webster: The Man and his Time (W.W. Norton & Company,1997), 146. [13] Hofstadter, p.89-90 [14] HW Brands, Heirs of the Founders: Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster(New York: Anchor Books, 2018),124-126. [15] Hofstadter, 102 [16] Brands, 229-230. [17] Daniel S. Shaffer, Profiting in Economic Storms (New Jersey: Wiley & Sons, 2005), 102. [18] Emir Philips. “Lincoln’s Well Considered Political Economy(The American System) Trumped the British System”, Cambridge Journal of Economics, Volume 43, Issue 6(November 2019): 1445, Oxford University Press [19] Philips, 1441. [20] Perhaps because of his guilt over this, as well as his own lifelong status as a slave owner, Clay freed his female slaves in his last will and testament, made instructions for their education and apprenticeships for gainful employment, and stipulated that they should be given compensation for their labors: https://henryclay.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/The-Last-Will-And-Testament-Of-Henry-Clay.pdf [21] David A. Dieterle & Kathleen M. Simmons, Government and the Economy: An Encyclopedia (Holtzbrinck, 2014), 249–250. [22] Article 1. Section 8, part 3 of the Confederate Constitution, March 11, 1861: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_csa.asp [23] W.E.B. Dubois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 (New York: Free Press edition, 1998), 212-213. [24] Dubois, 585. [25] The book in question is ‘Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction’ by C. Vann Woodward(Oxford University Press, 1951). [26] Joseph Adamczyk, “Great Railroad Strike of 1877: History, Facts, and Significance”, www.brittanica.com. Accessed July 20, 2023. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Great-Railroad-Strike-of-1877 [27] Mao Zedong, ‘On New Democracy’, January 1940: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/mswv2_26.htm [28] Ibid. [29] Baichun Zhang, Jiuchun Zhang, Fang Yao, “Technology Transfer from the Soviet Union to the People’s Republic of China”, Comparative Technology Transfer and Society Vol. 4. Number 2 (August 2006): 110-111, Project MUSE. http://english.ihns.cas.cn/Publications_new/Ra/201310/W020131015378079814609.pdf [30] Zhang, Zhang, and Yao, 145-146. [31] When the anticommunist massacres in Indonesia took place in 1965-66 (in which a million people were murdered), there was a simultaneous genocide of the ethnic Chinese population, who were suspected of pro-Communist sympathies. Some survivors fled to the Chinese mainland. Mass public meetings were held by Communist cadre where stories by these witnesses were recounted. The fact that Indonesia, which had been a bastion of progressive anti-imperialism under Sukarno, was turned into a fascist terror state seemingly overnight, held a lesson, in the eyes of Maoist idealogues: that the enemies of socialism were hiding amongst the people and the party apparatus, and had to be rooted out without mercy before they stabbed the revolution in the back. Vincent Bevins notes this vital detail in his book ‘The Jakarta Method’ (New York, Public Affairs, 2020). This may have been an important precipitating factor of the extreme zealotry that defined the Cultural Revolution. [32] Guo Jian, Yongyi Song, and Yuan Zhou, Historical Dictionary of the Cultural Revolution (Rowan and Littlefield Publishers, 2015), 287-88. [33] Ezra F. Vogel, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (Harvard University Press, 2011), 53. [34] Vogel, p. 398. [35] Deng Xiaoping, ‘We Shall Concentrate on Economic Development’, 1982. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/deng-xiaoping/1982/215.htm [36] Vogel, pages 456-461. [37] Vogel, pages 297-310, 462-464. [38] Stalin, Josef. ‘The Foundations of Leninism’, 1924. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1924/foundations-leninism/ch09.htm [39] Shaun Breslin, “Friedrich List to a Chinese mode of Governance”, International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944-) Vol. 87, No. 6 (November 2011), 1323-1343. [40] ‘In economic policy, the two most important elders were Chen Yun and Li Xiannian’ Loren Brandt and Thomas G. Rawski, China’s Great Economic Transformation(Cambridge University Press, 2008), 102. [41] Vogel, 718. [42] Vogel, 721 [43] Patrick E. Tyler, “Chen Yun, Who Slowed China’s Shift to Market, Dies at 89”, New York Times, April 12, 1995: https://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/12/obituaries/chen-yun-who-slowed-china-s-shift-to-market-dies-at-89.html [44] Li Hou. Building for Oil: Daqing and the Formation of the Chinese Socialist State (Harvard University Press, 2021), 168-201. [45] Vogel, p. 424 [46] ‘China’s Stimulus Package: A Breakdown in Spending’. Economic Observer website, March 7, 2009, http://www.eeo.com.cn/ens/finance_investment/2009/03/07/131626.shtml The breakdown was 1.5 trillion yuan in public infrastructure, 1 trillion in rebuilding from the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan, 400 billion in social welfare, 370 billion in rural development. [47] Vera Baginova, Andrey Baginov, & Dmitry Kuzmin. “High Speed Rail System in China: Best practice, state of affairs and prospects for development”.E3S Web of Conferences Volume 164(May 2020): 3. https://www.e3s-conferences.org/articles/e3sconf/pdf/2020/24/e3sconf_tpacee2020_07013.pdf [48] Fu-Lai Tony Yu, “Neo Mercantilist Policy and China’s Rise as a Global Power”,. Contemporary Chinese Political Economy and Strategic Relations: An International Journal, Vol. 3, No. 3, (Dec. 2017): 1053. https://rpb115.nsysu.edu.tw/var/file/131/1131/img/2374/CCPS3(3)-Yu.pdf [49] Chad P. Bown (PIIE), Euijin Jung (PIIE) & Eva (Yiwen) Zhang (PIIE). Peterson Institute for International Economics website, June 24, 2019. “China is Raising Tariffs on American Exports and Lowering them for Everybody Else”. https://www.piie.com/research/piie-charts/china-raising-tariffs-united-states-and-lowering-them-everybody-else [50] Yu, 1054 [51] Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, “Xi Jinping’s anti corruption drive had a counterintelligence motive”, Axios News, December 22 2020, https://www.axios.com/2020/12/22/xi-jinping-corruption-drive-intelligence-china [52] Himing Fang, Jing Wu, Ronjie Zhang, & Li-An Zhou, “Understanding the Resurgence of the SOE’s in China: Evidence From the Real Estate Sector”, National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper No. 29688 (January 2022): 26-27. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29688/w29688.pdf [53] Mian Sufur Rahman & Asif Mehmood Butt, “Chinese support to Pak economy will continue: Nong Rong”, The News International, January 9, 2023, https://www.thenews.com.pk/print/1028685-chinese-support-to-pak-economy-will-continue-nong-rong [54] “China has built over 6,000 kilometers of roads in Africa”, Seetao News, February 22, 2023, https://www.seetao.com/details/204053.html [55] Joseph W. Sullivan, “A BRICS Currency Could Shake the US Dollars Dominance”, Foreign Policy, April 24, 2023, https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/04/24/brics-currency-end-dollar-dominance-united-states-russia-china/ Author Marius Trotter is a writer residing in Massachusetts. He comments on history, politics, philosophy and theory. He can be reached by his email trottermarius@gmail.com Archives August 2023 8/5/2023 120 Years of Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk: Education and Progress in “Of the Meaning of Progress.” By: Carlos L. GarridoRead NowAristotle famously starts his Metaphysics with the claim that “all men by nature desire to know.”[1] For Dubois, if there are a people in the U.S. who have immaculately embodied this statement, it is black folk. In Black Reconstruction, for instance, Du Bois says that “the eagerness to learn among American Negroes was exceptional in the case of a poor and recently emancipated folk.”[2] In The Souls of Black Folk, he highlights “how faithfully, how piteously, this people strove to learn.”[3] This was a stark contrast with the “white laborers,” who unfortunately, as Du Bois notes, “did not demand education, and saw no need of it, save in exceptional cases.”[4] Out of the black community’s longing to know, and out of this longing taking material and organizational form through the Freedman’s Bureau, came one of the most important accomplishments of that revolutionary period of reconstruction – the public schools and black colleges. It was these schools and colleges, Du Bois argued, which educated black leaders, and ultimately, prevented the rushed revolts and vengeance which could have driven the mass of black people back into the old form of slavery.[5] This year marks the 120th anniversary of Dubois's masterful work, The Souls of Black Folk. In this essay, I will be concentrating my analysis on the fourth chapter, titled "Of the Meaning of Progress," where I will peruse how the subjects of education and progress are presented within a greatly racialized American capitalism. The Tragedy of Josie The chapter retells a story which is first set a dozen or so years after the counterrevolution of property in 1876. It is embedded in the context of the previous two decades of post-emancipation lynchings, second class citizenship, and poverty for those on the dark side of the veil. Du Bois is a student at Fisk and is looking around in Tennessee for a teaching position. After much unsuccessful searching, he finally finds a small school shut out from the world by forests and hills. He was told about this school by Josie, the central character of the narrative. Along with a white fellow who wished to create a white school, Du Bois rode to the commissioner’s house to secure the school. After having the commissioner accept his proposal and invite him to dinner, the “shadow of the veil” fell upon him as they ate first, and he ate alone.[6] Upon arriving at the school, he noticed its destitute condition – a stark contrast to the schools he was used to. The students, while poor and largely uneducated, expressed an insatiable longing to learn – Josie especially had her appetite for knowledge “hover like a star above … her work and worry, and she,” Du Bois says, “studied doggedly.”[7] While certainly having a “desire to rise out of [her] condition by means of education,” Josie’s quest for knowledge also went deeper than that.[8] It was, in a sense, an existential longing for education – a deeply human enterprise upon which a life-or-death struggle for being fully human ensued. “Education and work,” as Du Bois had noted in the Talented Tenth, “are the levers to uplift a people;” but “education must not simply teach work-it must teach Life.”[9] “It is the trained, living human soul,” Du Bois argues, “cultivated and strengthened by long study and thought, that breathes the real breath of life into boys and girls and makes them human, whether they be black or white, Greek, Russian or American.”[10] Josie understood this well. She strove for that kind of human excellence and virtue the Greeks referred to as arete. But her quest was stopped in its track by the shadow of the veil; by the reality of poverty, superexploited labor, and racism which characterized the dominant social relations for the black worker. A decade after he completed his teaching duties, Du Bois returned to that small Tennessee town. What he encountered warranted the questioning of progress itself. Josie’s family, which at one point he considered himself an adopted part of, had gone through a “heap of trouble.”[11] Lingering in destitute poverty, her brother was arrested for stealing, and her sister, “flushed with the passion of youth … brought home a nameless child.”[12] As the eldest child, Josie took it upon herself to sustain the family. She was overworked, and this was killing her; first spiritually, then materially. As Du Bois says, Josie “shivered and worked on, with the vision of schooldays all fled, with a face wan and tired,—worked until, on a summer's day, someone married another; then Josie crept to her mother like a hurt child, and slept—and sleeps.”[13] In his youth Du Bois had asked: “to what end” might “[we] seek to strengthen character and purpose” if “people have nothing to eat or, to wear?”[14] Josie’s insatiable thirst for knowledge required leisure time, i.e., time that is unrestricted by the labor one does for their subsistence, nor by the weariness and fatigue which lingers after. Aristotle had already noted that it “was when almost all the necessities of life and the things that make for comfort and recreation had been secured,” that philosophy and the pursuit of science “in order to know, and not for any utilitarian end… began to be sought.”[15] Josie’s quest for knowledge, her longing for enlightenment, was made impossible by capitalist relations of production, and the racialized form they take in the U.S. As dilemmas within her family developed, she was forced to spend every ounce of her energy on working to sustain the meagre living conditions of the household. Afterall, as Du Bois eloquently says, “to be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.”[16] It is true, as Kant said, that “all that is required for enlightenment is freedom;” but it is not true that, while being necessary, “the freedom for man to make public use of his reason in all matters” is sufficient![17] This freedom presupposes another – the freedom to have the necessaries of life guaranteed for oneself. What good can be made of the right to free speech by the person too famished to think properly? What good is this right to those homeless souls with constricted jaws and clenched teach in the winter? The artifices intended to keep people down, as Kant calls it, are also material – that is, they refer not only to the absence of opportunities for civic and political participation, but also to the absence of economic opportunities for securing the necessities of life.[18] The great writer can emanate universal truths from their portraits of individuals. Du Bois accomplished this with Josie, who is a concrete manifestation of black folk’s trajectory post-emancipation. In both Josie and black folk at the turn of the century, the longing to learn, the thirst for knowledge, is met by the desert of poverty common to working folk, especially those on the dark side of the veil, where opportunity doesn’t make the rounds. As an unfree, “segregated servile caste, with restricted rights and privileges,” it is not only the bodies, but the spirit and minds of black folk’s humanity which were under attack.[19] It is a natural result of a cold world – one that beats black souls and bodies down with racist violence, superexploitation, and poverty – that a “shadow of a vast despair” can hover over some black folk.[20] And yet, Du Bois argues, “democracy died save in the hearts of black folk;” and “there are to-day no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes.”[21] A Universally Dehumanizing System Although intensified in the experience of poor and working class black folk – especially those in the U.S. – the crippling of working people’s humanity and intellect is a central component of the capitalist mode of life in general. This was already being observed by key thinkers of the 18th century Scottish enlightenment (e.g., Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, et. al.). For instance, in Smith’s magnus opus, The Wealth of Nations, he would argue that the development of the division of labor with modern industry created a class of “men whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations,” of which “no occasion to exert his understanding” occur, leaving them to “become as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.”[22] “His dexterity at his own particular trade,” he argues, is “acquired at the expense of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues.”[23] “In every improved and civilized society,” Smith observes, “this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it.”[24] Writing almost a century later, and hence, having the opportunity of observing a more developed capitalist social totality, Marx and Engels saw that the degree of specialization acquired by the division of labor in manufacturing had even more profound dehumanizing and stupefying effects on the working class. “A labourer,” Marx argues, “who all his life performs one and the same simple operation, converts his whole body into the automatic, specialized implement of that operation.”[25] In echoing similar critiques brought forth by Ferguson and Smith, Marx explains how the worker’s productive activity is turned into “a mere appendage of the capitalist’s workshop,” and the laborer themself is converted into “a crippled monstrosity.”[26] It is a form of relationality which reduces working people to “spiritually and physically dehumanized beings.”[27] As Engels noted, capitalist manufacturing’s division of labor divides the human being and produces a “stunting of man.”[28] Alongside commodity production is the production of fractured human beings whose abilities are reduced to the activities they perform at work. This mental and physical crippling of the worker under the capitalist process of production provides an obstacle not only to their human development, but to their struggle for liberation itself. No successful struggle against the dominant order can take place without educating, without changing the minds and hearts, of the masses being mobilized in the struggle. Education aimed at the acquisition of truth is revolutionary, that is why ignorance is an indispensable component of capitalist control. The “Socratic spirit,” as I have previously argued, “belongs to the revolutionaries;” it is in socialist revolutionary processes where education is prioritized as a central component of creating a new, fully human, people.[29] As Du Bois put it, “education among all kinds of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent. Nevertheless, men strive to know.”[30] “The final purpose of education,” as Hegel wrote, “is liberation and the struggle for a higher liberation still.”[31] “How shall man measure Progress there where the dark-faced Josie lies?” In the capitalist mode of life, this contradiction between the un-development of human life and the development of the forces of production has always gone hand in hand. From the lens of universal history, this is one of the central antinomies of the system. Progress of a certain kind has always been conjoined with retrogression in another. Du Bois says that “Progress, I understand, is necessarily ugly.”[32] He is quite correct in a dual sense. Not only has class society – and specifically, capitalist class society – always developed the productive forces at the expense of the un-development of human life in the mass of people, but also, when progress has been achieved in the social realm, it has never been thanks to the kindness and generosity of owning classes, it has never been the result of anything but an ugly, often bloody, struggle. As Fredrick Douglass famously said, “if there is no struggle, there is no progress.”[33] However, it is the first sense in which Du Bois’s statement on the ugliness of progress is meant. He asks, “how shall man measure Progress there where the dark-faced Josie lies?”[34] What is our standard for progress going to be? Human life and the real capacity for human flourishing? Or the development of industrial technologies and the accumulation of capital? Under the current order, all metrics are aimed at measuring progress in accordance with the latter. As I have argued before, The economist’s obsession with gross domestic product measures is a good example. For such quantifiability to take place, qualitatively incommensurable activities must transmute themselves into being qualitatively commensurable... The consumption of a pack of cigarettes and the consumption of an apple loses the distinction which makes one cancerous and the other healthy, they’re differences boil down to the quantitative differences in the price of purchase.[35] This standard for measuring progress corresponds to a mode of social life where, as the young Marx had observed, “the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion [to] the devaluation of the world of men.”[36] In socialist China, where the people – through their Communist Party – are in charge of developing a new social order, metrics are being developed to account for growth in human-centered terms. As Cheng Enfu has proposed, a “new economic accounting indicator, ‘Gross Domestic Product of Welfare,’”[37] (GDPW) is needed: GDPW, unlike GDP, encompasses the total value of the welfare created by the production and business activities of all residential units in a country (or region) during a certain period. As an alternative concept of modernization, it is the aggregate of the positive and negative utility produced by the three systems of economy, nature, and society, and essentially reflects the sum of objective welfare.[38] While forcing the reader to think critically about the notion of progress, it would be incorrect to suggest that Du Bois would like to entirely dispose of the notion. His oeuvre in general is deeply rooted in enlightenment sensibilities, in a belief in a common humanity, in the power of human reason, and in the real potential for historical progress. These are all things that, as Susan Neiman writes in Left is Not Woke, are rejected by the modern Heidegger-Schmidt-Foucualt rooted post-modern ‘woke left,’ and which stem, as Georg Lukács noted in his 1948 masterpiece, The Destruction of Reason, from the fact that capitalism, especially after the 1848 revolutions, had become a reactionary force, a phenomenon reflected in the intellectual orders by a turn away from Kant and Hegel and towards Schopenhauer, Eduard von Hartmann, Nietzsche, and various other forms of philosophical irrationalism.[39] Instead of rejecting the notion of progress, Du Bois would urge us to understand the dialectical character of history’s unfolding – that is, the role that the ‘ugly’ has played in progress. He would urge us to reject the mythologized ‘pure’ notion of progress which prevails in quotidian society and the halls of bourgeois academia; and to understand the impurities of progress to be a necessary component of it – at least in this period of human history. Du Bois would also urge us to understand that, while progress in the sphere of the productive forces has often not translated itself into progress at the human level, this fact does not negate the genuine potential for progress in the human sphere represented by such developments in industry, agriculture, and the sciences and technologies. Progress in the human sphere that is left unrealized by developments in the productive forces within capitalist relations ends up taking the form, to use Andrew Haas’ concept, of Being-as-Implication.[40] As Ioannis Trisokkas has recently elaborated, beyond simply being either present-at-hand (vorhandenseit) or absent, implication is another form of being; things can be implied, their being takes the form of a real potential capable of becoming actual.[41] It is true, under the current relations of production, that the lives of people get worse while simultaneously the real potential for them being better than ever before continues to increase. This is the paradoxical character of capitalist progress. When a new machine capable of duplicating the current output in a specific industry is introduced into the productive process, this represents a genuine potential for cutting working hours in half, and allowing people to have more leisure time for creative – more human – endeavors. The development of the productive forces reduces the socially necessary labor time and can therefore potentially increase what Martin Hägglund has called socially available free time.[42] This is the time that Josie – and quite frankly, all of us poor working class people – need in order to flourish as humans. The fact that it does not do this, and often does the opposite, is not rooted in the machines and technologies themselves, but in the historically constituted social relations which mediate our relationship with these developments. We can have a form of progress which overcomes the contradictions of the current form; but this requires revolutionizing the social relations we exist in. It requires a society where working people are in power, where the telos of production is not profit and capital accumulation in the hands of a few, but the satisfaction of human needs – both spiritual and material. A society where the state is genuinely of, by, and for the people, and not an instrument of the owners of capital. In other words, it requires socialism, what Du Bois considered to be “the only way of human life.”[43] References [1] Aristotle, Metaphysics, in The Basic Works of Aristotle (Chapel Hill: The Modern Library, 2001), 689 (980a). [2] W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction (New York: Library of America, 2021), 766. [3] W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, in Writings (New York: The Library of America, 1986), 367-368. [4] Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 770. [5] Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 770. [6] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 407. [7] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 406-407. [8] Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 766. [9] Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth, In Writings, 861. [10] Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” 854. [11] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 411. [12] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 411. [13] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 411. [14] Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” 853. [15] Aristotle, Metaphysics, 692 (982b). [16] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 368. [17] Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightenment,” in Basic Writings of Kant (New York: The Modern Library, 2001) 136. [18] Kant, “What is Enlightenment,” 141. [19] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 390. [20] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 368. [21] Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 40; Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 370. [22] Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations Vol II (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1910), 263-264. [23] Smith, The Wealth of Nations Vol. II, 264. [24] Smith, The Wealth of Nations Vol. II, 264. [25] Karl Marx, Capital Volume: I (New York: International Publishers, 1974), 339. [26] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 360. [27] Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (New York: Prometheus Books, 1988), 86. [28] Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1976), 291. [29] Carlos L. Garrido, “The Real Reason Why Socrates Was Killed and Why Class Society Must Whitewash His Death,” Countercurrents (August 23, 2021): https://countercurrents.org/2021/08/the-real-reason-why-socrates-is-killed-and-why-class-society-must-whitewash-his-death/. In every revolutionary movement we’ve seen the pivotal role education is given – this is evident in the Soviet process, the Korean, the Chinese, Cuban, etc. As I am sure most know, even while engaged in guerilla warfare Che was making revolutionaries study. Education was so important that, as he mentioned in the famous letter Socialism and Man in Cuba, under socialism “the whole society… [would function] as a gigantic school.” For more see: Carlos L. Garrido and Edward Liger Smith, “Pioneros por el comunismo: Seremos como el Che,” intervención y Coyuntura: Revista de Crítica Política (October 11, 2022): https://intervencionycoyuntura.org/pioneros-por-el-comunismo-seremos-como-el-che/ [30] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 385. [31] G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 125. [32] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 412. [33] Fredrick Douglass, Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. by Philip S. Foner (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1999), 367. [34] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 414. [35] Carlos L. Garrido, “John Dewey and the American Tradition of Socialist Democracy, Dewey Studies 6(2) (2022), 87. [36] Marx, Manuscripts of 1844, 71. [37] Cheng Enfu, China’s Economic Dialectic (New York: International Publishers, 2019), 13. [38] Enfu, China’s Economic Dialectic, 13. [39] Susan Neiman, Left is Not Woke (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2023). Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason (Brooklyn: Verso Books, 2021). For more on the modern forms of philosophical irrationalism, see: John Bellamy Foster, “The New Irrationalism,” Monthly Review 74 (9) (February 2023): https://monthlyreview.org/2023/02/01/the-new-irrationalism/ and my interview with him for the Midwestern Marx Institute: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4uyNEzLlRw. [40] Andrew Haas, “On Being in Heidegger and Hegel,” Hegel Bulletin 38(1) (2017), 162-4: doi:10.1017/hgl.2016.64. [41] Ioannis Trisokkas, “Being, Presence, and Implication in Heidegger's Critique of Hegel,” Hegel Bulletin 44(2) (August 2023), 346: DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/hgl.2022.3 Trisokkas here provides a great defense of Hegel from Heidegger’s critique of his treatment of being. [42] Martin Hägglund, This Life (New York: Pantheon Books, 2019), 301-304. [43] W. E. B. Du Bois, “Letter from W. E. B. Du Bois to Communist Party of the U.S.A., October 1, 1961,” W. E. B. Du Bois Archive: https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b153-i071 Author Carlos L. Garrido is a philosophy teacher at Southern Illinois University, editor at the Midwestern Marx Institute, and author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism and Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview. Archives August 2023 8/5/2023 Russia helped Africa reach these anti-imperialist victories. The western left was wrong to disavow it. By: Rainer SheaRead NowIt’s no coincidence that multiple African countries have begun to carry out unprecedented measures towards breaking from neo-colonial control at the same time when American power has been seeing an acceleration in its decline. At a time when we’re two decades into the process of realignment of global power which started in the 2000s; where the world’s anti-imperialist forces began to regain their strength, while Washington’s criminal actions brought upon it compounding self-destructive consequences. And when it comes to Russia’s role within this series of progressive victories, there’s a reality that Marxists need to recognize amid the recent events in Africa: even though Africa absolutely could have come to be able to start expelling the imperialists if not for Russia’s assistance, Russia’s efforts to defy the hegemon have tangibly contributed to the events that led to this outcome. Many smaller actions made this great triumph possible, and if Russia has been behind any number of them, it deserves credit. There’s a reason why the supporters of Burkina Faso’s anti-imperialist president Traoré have been displaying the red, white, and blue, except not in the form of the U.S. flag but rather the Russian flag: due to internal popular pressure upon Russia’s bourgeois government, post-Soviet Russia has been continuing its predecessor’s tradition of aiding those seeking freedom from colonial rule. It’s thereby been embodying the virtuous liberatory spirit which those colors are supposed to represent. The members of Burkina Faso’s anti-imperialist movement have demonstrated love for Russia not only because of Russia’s deciding to strike back against imperialist crimes within Europe; but also because of Russia’s providing their own country, and other formerly colonized countries, with the tools for fighting off U.S.-created terrorists. Associated Press wrote this spring about the country’s pivot away from dependence on France, and towards partnership with Russia: “The anti-French sentiment coincides with increasing Russian support, including demonstrations in the capital, Ouagadougou, where hundreds of protesters have waved Russian flags. France has had troops in West Africa’s Sahel region since 2013 when it helped drive Islamic extremists from power in northern Mali. But it’s facing growing pushback from populations who say France’s military presence has yielded little results as jihadi attacks are escalating. Burkina Faso’s junta says it has nothing against France but wants to diversify its military partners in its fight against the extremists and, notably, has turned to Russia.” In response, the hegemon’s narrative managers have been working to try to portray Russia’s assistance to countries like Burkina Faso as an overall negative; and the western left has been inclined to accept this backward view of these developments. In the same report, AP repeats the accusations made against Russia’s military contractors by the U.S. government, the EU, the American-controlled UN, and the rights groups that have a financial incentive to appease these entities. When you look at the strongest “evidence” that these groups have used to “expose” the supposed crimes of the Russian mercenaries, you see propaganda tactics similar to the ones in which “China watchers” shared satellite images of buildings within Xinjiang that “proved” Uyghur concentration camps existed. It’s easy to find an image of explosions happening, and easier to attach words to it claiming it depicts innocents being slaughtered; it’s harder to produce more veracious evidence for these claims, the kinds that American whistleblowers have been able to give of the U.S. military committing war crimes. Then there’s the question these charges beg: why would these countries keep requesting that Russian contractors assist them if these contractors have been undeniably proven to be menaces towards civilian citizens? This story is too convenient for the imperialists, too good of a reason for them to declare: “see? You should have remained colonies of ours, instead of trying to get help from our rivals!” The truth is that Russia has been providing these countries with the means to attain civil stability, amid attempts by the imperialists to dominate and destabilize them via neo-colonial occupation tools such as AFRICOM. Perhaps the most meaningful way that Russia has furthered Burkina Faso’s journey towards becoming a fearless fighter of empire, though, has simply been the inspiration it’s provided the country’s anti-imperialist movement. (The equivalent applies to Mali, which has joined Burkina Faso in defying the imperialists.) The pro-Russia demonstrations have represented a galvanization of popular will towards defying the colonizers, expanding revolutionary consciousness throughout the people by making the anti-imperialist struggle more visible. Russia’s Operation Z is showing the formerly colonized world a demonstrable example of a country which used to be a U.S. client state successfully working to weaken the hegemon. When freedom fighters know they have strong allies, and know these allies are winning their fights against the oppressors, the morale that they need in order to win becomes more abundant. The same thing has been happening with the communists in the heart of imperialism who’ve taken the pro-Russia stance, and thereby become ideologically motivated to build an anti-imperialist movement which seriously threatens our ruling institutions. The predominant elements of the western left, though, have in effect rejected this encouragement that comes from aligning with the most powerful anti-hegemonic forces. This is because these elements have a purity fetish, where essentially no real progress is viewed as worth celebrating or learning from due to this progress not being pure enough. In The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism, the communist Carlos Garrido explains the features of this mentality: The purity fetish, I will argue, is an integral component of the Western metaphysical outlook, an outlook which which concretizes itself in a variety of ways throughout history, but which sustains, with very few exceptions, key philosophical assumptions traceable to Parmenidean metaphysics. In the US left this can be found in three major areas, all of which prevent both the acquisition of truth and the development of socialist movement: 1) in the assessment of socialist (and non-socialist but anti-imperialist) struggles abroad, where the phenomenon Max Scheler (elaborated from Nitezsche) calls ressentiment is indubitably present; 2) in the assessment of the diverse character of the working class at home; and 3) in their national nihilistic assessment of US history. In each of these areas, the purity fetish limits their judgment to being at best one-sided and fetters their practical efforts to develop the subjective factor in the working masses. These beliefs reinforce each other. Because modern U.S. leftist has only seen failure for revolutionary politics within their lifetime, they forget the history of successful progressive struggles by the people in their country. Because they have this nihilistic assessment of their people’s past, they view the people within their own conditions as fundamentally reactionary, and therefore untrustworthy as potential revolutionary allies. Because of this alienation from the people, they view America as exceptional, in that this is essentially the only place where consistently promoting solidarity with anti-imperialist struggles (such as Russia’s) wouldn’t be an effective tactic. Because of this impulse to compromise on anti-imperialism, they adopt certain rationales; rationales that make it seem justifiable to break from the view of anti-imperialism shared by existing socialist states (like the DPRK, which has voiced support for Russia) and by Global South movements. They reject Kim Il Sung’s conclusion that the contradictions within the forces opposing imperialism are the secondary issue, becoming too fixated on these contradictions to be able to effectively contribute to the anti-imperialist cause. Garrido writes that the purity fetish comes from an impotency within the western left, because “broiling in this impotency envy develops into ressentiment: the success in the East, because it has been impure, is deemed a failure in the West, because purity has been sustained, is deemed a success. It is a topsy-turvy world which the Western Marxist sees.” The consequence is that these leftists and “Marxists” come to a detached, infantile view of the conflicts between imperialist and anti-imperialist forces, even when the imperialist side in these conflicts is clearly fascist in character. Garrido writes of Zizek and his pro-NATO, anti-Cuba stance: “he ignores that the Donbass people had been asking for Russian aid since they began getting attacked in 2014, and that the communist parties of the Russian Federation, Ukraine, Donetsk and Lugansk, the most progressive forces in the region, were the ones who first called for Russian aid…Cuba is too ‘impure’ to support, they don’t measure up to his pure socialism; however, the US, NATO, and the Nazi friendly fascist state of Ukraine are not ‘impure’ enough to support against the Russian menace, a ‘menace’ which is supported by the former colonized countries (those without US puppet governments at least) and by the contemporary socialist camp.” There’s a deeper reason behind why the purity fetish exists. Behind why it’s now driving western Marxists to react to the events in Africa by cheering one contributor to this victory (the African progressive forces) while disavowing another (Russia); or worse by dismissing not just Russia, but also the other great African revolutionary ally China, and even the African progressives themselves. The reason is that these leftists, being in the heart of imperialism, are sheltered. They haven’t sufficiently experienced the practical realities of fighting a vastly superior enemy. They could experience these realities if they wanted to, but that would require them giving up the purity fetish which has kept American radicalism ineffectual since the U.S. communist movement got destroyed and co-opted. It would require them adopting a serious anti-imperialist practice, and then becoming a major target of the state; such as orgs like the African People’s Socialist Party have after deciding to consistently fight the Ukraine psyop. The effect of this liberal tailist attitude is to render the left insular, uninterested in doing anything that could bring one out the movement and into the masses. Therefore even if an American leftist has invested themselves in the most radical parts of the domestic struggle, they undermine their own cause should they neglect the international struggle; you can only become an effective revolutionary, one that can reach the people, when you’ve given up the liberal tailist stances that keep you isolated to “left” circles. Staying limited to these circles is a willful embrace of the detached role that the communist Jay Tharappel has observed the western left inhabits: To justify empire building, colonising cultures produce racism of two kinds, one which justifies conquest on the grounds of naked national self-interest, and another which justifies conquest by claiming to ‘civilise’ conquered nations and ‘save’ them from ‘despots’, and ‘evil dictators’ (a saviour complex). Anti-Stalinism is comparable with the latter kind in the sense that it encourages its followers to believe they’re on the side of The People ™ but who are these people exactly? In the Syrian war, Anti-Stalinists today support the overthrow of President Assad’s government by “the people” while also claiming to oppose the actual armed militias that make up the actual people that are attempting that overthrow. “The people” who “rise up” against a “brutal dictator” demanding “freedom and democracy” has become the Anti-Stalinist chorus over the past decade, one accompanied by imagery of homogenous mobs of poor oppressed victims bullied into submission by a cartoonishly evil ‘oppressive’ ‘brutal’ ‘tyrant’, be it Stalin, Mao, Gaddafi, or Assad – all spinoffs of the ‘Stalinist’ caricature projected by Anti-Stalinists…Inability to think in a logical and consequential manner is why Anti-Stalinists often forget they have the privilege of living in a state that isn’t threatened by other states, this includes Anarchists. Nations that establish their dominance can afford to be more liberal especially if they’re not threatened by more powerful enemies, whereas countries that find themselves actively fending off aggression by more powerful enemies do not have the luxury of adhering to ‘liberal’ standards premised on a privileged place in global affairs. It’s a hard pill to swallow, but many of the ‘liberal’ freedoms Anti-Stalinists take for granted at home are founded upon a history of being the colonial masters abroad, and not solely due to domestic struggles. Inheriting the memory of an arrogant colonising culture, the first–world Left in general has the weakest historic memory of having fought off a foreign colonial power compared to the socialist and postcolonial worlds against whom extreme genocidal levels of violence have been inflicted over the last several centuries. It’s so easy for those within the safety of the imperial center to say that Russia shouldn’t have taken action in Ukraine, when their neighborhoods have never been threatened by a genocidal fascist invasion like the communities of the Donbass were last year. Or for them to minimize the historically progressive role that Russia has been having within the historically colonized countries, uncritically believing the atrocity propaganda and acting aghast about the great Wagner villain. Wagner isn’t the thing within these conflicts they should be focused on; they should be more concerned about ending the actually documented crimes of AFRICOM, and of the fascist U.S.-backed Ukrainian forces. Their perspectives would be different if they were to break from the safe, Democratic Party-adjacent “left” space which they’ve invested themselves in, and adopt the practice of groups like APSP. That’s what makes the American left’s ongoing failures on anti-imperialism so inexcusable: to become serious about the cause, socialists in the United States wouldn’t even need to travel to Ukraine or Africa to join in on the battles there. All they would have to do is stop tailing the Democrats, join with a broad anti-imperialist coalition, and work to influence the discourse in a way which genuinely threatens the state. This means not disavowing the anti-imperialist actions of Russia or other countries simply because these countries have internal contradictions. To forsake solidarity with the Russian people’s struggle (and by extension the African people’s struggle) because reactionary coupists imposed capitalist restoration onto Russia is, in effect, to punish the global proletariat for having had a crime committed upon it. It’s not the Russian people’s fault that they’re for now stuck with a bourgeois government, and it’s certainly not the fault of these revolutionary movement members across the Global South who’ve been flying this government’s flag. In the context of what these people are doing, and of how they’ve seen Russia advance their liberatory cause, displaying this flag makes sense. It would be chauvinistic, even racist in the way that Tharappel talks about, to try to invalidate their perspective by strawmanning any pro-Russian sentiment as necessarily being in suppor of Russia’s internal counterrevolution. As our class and geopolitical conflict keeps escalating, though, we’re more and more going to see the “left” political actors in imperialism’s heart embrace such chauvinism. We must reject these counterproductive attitudes, and instead embrace a project to build unity with the world’s anti-imperialist forces. Archives August 2023 Western Marxism is dominated by the use of empty phrases when the need arises for a practical intervention in the conjuncture. Slavoj Žižek, for instance, has been calling for a “stronger NATO” in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, so that “European unity” can be preserved. The analytical focus is wholly tilted towards ahistorical cultural symbols. For Žižek, a “Eurasian” project is not about the reduction of European countries’ dependence on the US-led unipolar world order through trade with Russia and China. Instead, it represents a fascist third way attempting to find a balance between the individualism of the West and the collectivism of the Far East. This diagnosis is justified through a reference to the “imperial ambition” that is found in “one direction of Russian culture”. The vagueness of this perspective obscures the concrete complexity of the Russian social formation. Its central driver is not, as Žižek suggests, the “ideological madness” of Russian politics, but rather a sovereigntist position that pragmatically operates based on multiple ideologies, challenging the legitimacy of US imperialism. Putin’s geopolitical opposition to the American empire, rooted in a recentralized state system benefiting from extractive ventures, has given rise not to fascism, but to Realpolitik. This approach deploys ideological plurality to contest USA’s hegemonic narratives. Objective DialecticsThe inability of Western Marxism to situate the dynamics of class struggle in a ramified system of contradictions can be traced to a disciplinary division that forms the core of the imperial academia in the Global North: the ontic or empirical domain appropriate for the sciences; and the ontological or transcendental domain studied by philosophy. This is a neo-Kantian postulate that presents the socio-historic mediation of the objective natural world as a barrier that prevents the human subject from knowing how it is in itself. Considering it is unfeasible to isolate the subjective from the objective, or the human from the non-human, it is senseless to inquire about the essence of anything independently of our relationship with it. Insofar as the difference between the subject and the object is rendered as internal to the subject itself, a subjective order is constituted whose coherence is guaranteed not by an external reference to an ontologically independent reality but by an epistemologically self-sufficient index of constructability. The consistency of these indexes, in turn, is supplied by a second-order subjective structure, which must also be subsumed at a higher level, and so on, thus initiating an infinite regress. This outcome can be obviated only through the positing of an originary independent subject. Hence, we arrive at the idealism of the subject, according to which the human being is an embodiment of a self-constituting subjective essence. The paradigmatic example of Western Marxism’s subjective idealism is provided by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Their book “Dialectic of Enlightenment” is structured by a binary between the subsumptive abstraction of capitalism and the enlightened sublimation effected by reflexive reason. The totalizing tendencies of “Enlightenment thought” are believed to have occluded the meaningful particularity of nature, consequently giving birth to “instrumental rationality”. This can be corrected through the discerning negativity of reason, which serves as a mediator of human significance by integrating nature into the network of social memory and history. As Ray Brassier notes, this is “the rehabilitation of a fully anthropomorphic ‘living’ nature – in other words, the resurrection of Aristotelianism: nature as repository of anthropomorphically accessible meaning, of essential purposefulness, with the indwelling, auratic telos of every entity providing an intelligible index of its moral worth.” In this instance, the notion of practice only includes the objectivization of the dialectical forms of consciousness, neglecting the subjectivization of the objective dialectic that is constitutive of nature. The human mediation of nature is itself mediated by natural history; the reflexive negativity of reason is always-already circumscribed by the irreflexive negativity of nature. For dialectical materialism, the idealist inflation of reason ignores the scientific truth of cosmic extinction, which functions as the originary purposelessness driving all organic or psychological purposefulness. Friedrich Engels remarks: “in nature – in so far as we ignore man’s reverse action upon nature – there are only blind, unconscious agencies acting upon one another, out of whose interplay the general law comes into operation…nothing happens as a consciously desired aim.” The concept of a purpose or aim for the universe is dissolved in the context of universal interaction. Humanity emerges within it, develops, and ultimately disappears within it. The idea of the highest aim of human existence is rationalized through the comprehension of its necessary genesis, development, and death within the interdependence of all forms of motion of universal matter. The change, contingency, evolution, and integration that characterize the universal metabolism of nature lead to the self-emergence of the human, whose dialectical power of self-development is dependent upon its physical corporeal existence within the folds of nature. This represents an immanent logical framework, wherein complex intelligibility is divorced from the unicity of meaning. Contrary to Adorno and Horkheimer, who believe that commemorative reflection should give rise to a narrative representation of nature’s presumed richness, the world does not have an author, and there is no inherent narrative encoded in its structure. Nature does not unfold like a story crafted by the self-reflective consciousness of reason. Marxist theory, by asserting the meaninglessness of objective reality, creates a political space where the various mediations that underpin the immediacy of meaning can be explored. The best way to understand human agency would be to prioritize the neurological and social mechanisms that construct our perception of our individuality. Whereas Western Marxism hypostatizes agency as a substantive essence, dialectical materialism regards it as a formal logical condition that individuates human beings and diversifies their thoughts and behaviors. Due to its subjective idealism, Western Marxism evaporates the dynamic complexity of concrete existence in the stasis of an abstract universal. As the concept of reality becomes more abstract, its understanding becomes more obscure and easily applicable to various entities. Consider, for example, the equivalence Adorno draws between communism and fascism as two variants of “totalitarianism”. Marxism, on the other hand, begins “from the concept that expresses the real actual cause of the thing, its concrete essence”. The real-universal cause serves as a clearly articulated universal principle through which we can progressively obtain more concrete determinations. The concept that reveals the core of the matter leads to a systematic, interconnected network of determinations that express the specific aspects of the object being examined. All these distinct elements are linked together through a formal complex that logically represents reality, rather than being merely the abstract projection of a human essence. Here, it is instructive to consider Adorno and Horkheimer’s defense of the imperialist invasion of Egypt by Israel, Britain and France, aimed at controlling the Suez Canal and ousting Gamal Abdel Nasser, who pursued a project of autocentric state development. Adorno and Horkheimer called Nasser “a fascist chieftain…who conspires with Moscow”. Furthermore, Israel – a beachhead of US imperialism – was portrayed as a victim of the machinations of Arab states. One can’t help but remember Evald Ilyenkov’s words that “any ‘expert of human nature’ who thinks concretely is not satisfied with any abstract labelling of an event – murderer, soldier, or customer. Such an ‘expert’ does not see in these abstract-general terms the expression of the essence of the matter, phenomenon, human being or event.” However, this basic dictum is ignored by the abstract humanism of Western Marxism, which substitutes the concrete analysis of the concrete conjuncture with the repetition of flowery thoughts. Revolutionary ScienceInsofar as conceptualization involves the analysis of the myriad mediations that form the actual concreteness of reality, it can’t limit itself to the absolutized self-consciousness advanced by abstract humanism. Human subjectivity is attained through a practical engagement with the impersonal reality in which we are situated. Abstract self-consciousness cannot achieve the transition from its simple, essentialist, or egocentric form, where it is certain of its existence, to a self-consciousness that imparts determinateness upon its unity. The sole accomplishment of egocentric self-consciousness is reinforcing itself by unilaterally negating anything different from itself. To break free from this purely egocentric form, the dialectical objectivity of the world needs to be fully acknowledged. This would create an onto-epistemological paradigm wherein the impersonal otherness of objective reality actively negates the putative givenness of subjectivity and pushes it towards a conjuncturally evolving path of the revolutionary re-fashioning of individuality. In the absence of this, the subject continues to treat the world as an alien other that needs to be simply subjected to the transcendental horizon of the subject. This means that new objective dimensions of the world fail to have any intrinsic impact upon the organization of subjectivity. Western Marxism, insofar as it dissociates itself from socialist experiments, represents a state of subjective tranquility whose distance from actual involvement in organizing is matched by the grandiloquence of its invariant philosophical pronouncements. In actually existing socialist regimes, by contrast, Marxism involves a continually shifting theoretical prism that is refracted by the cadence of class struggle. “In places like Cuba and China,” writes Carlos L. Garrido, “when one calls themselves a communist, they are referring not simply to ideas that they agree with, but to actions which they take within the context of a Communist Party. To be a communist is not simply a matter of personal identification; it is a label that is socially earned by working with the masses through their representative organizations.” The embeddedness of comrades in the collective structure of the party indicates a non-substantive form of agency, whose source lies not in the qualitative uniqueness of an abstract essence but in the impersonality of theory and practice. That’s why comrades are characterized by “machinic impersonality” and “fungibility” – their identity consists in political relationality. Jodi Dean writes: “Interchangeability, whether between soldiers, commodities, schoolchildren, travelers, or party members, characterizes the comrade. As with puppets, cogs, and robots, commonality arises not out of identity, not out of who one is, but out of what is being done – fighting, circulating, studying, traveling, or being part of the same apparatus.” The subjective collectivization operationalized by the party-form is seen by Western Marxists as a naturalization of the social world, which uses the “dialectical laws of matter” to elide the specificity of the transformative powers possessed by humanity. However, this criticism is based on the cult of the abstract individual who is perennially opposed to the institutional dominance of objective regularity. Politically active Marxist thought, on the other hand, implies that the autonomy of the self can be deepened only through the tracing of its immanent connections with the different aspects of objective reality. That’s why the fidelity of comrades to the truth “is, by definition, ex-centric, directed outward, beyond the limits of a merely personal integrity.” The rigorous elaboration of truth entails fully embracing and following its unfolding consequences. Fidelity suggests that our arrival at truth can only be accomplished through an impersonal process that moves away from the givenness of abstract subjectivity to the disciplined work that is undertaken under the guidance of the party-structure. Louis Althusser once said that the subject of abstract humanism is like a “little lay god”. Even though it is immersed in reality, it is always endowed with the magnificent ability to transcend that reality. The religio-mythological connotations are not accidental. They are an evidence of the fact that Western Marxism is unable to produce a scientific analysis of the conjuncture. According to Ho Chi Minh, the revolutionary destruction of the old and its replacement with the new represents the continuous progress of science. Galileo Galilei challenged the notion of Earth as the center of the universe by proposing the heliocentric model. George Stephenson revolutionized transportation by inventing the steam locomotive. Charles Darwin transformed biology by proposing the theory of evolution. Karl Marx brought about an economic revolution through his studies of capitalism, imperialism, and class struggles. These scientific breakthroughs are condensed in revolutionary theory, which Ho Chi Minh describes as “the science of laws governing the development of nature and society”. Thus, revolutionary theory presupposes that “[r]eality is problems to be solved and contradictions lying within things.” As human production, knowledge, and science advance, the Kantian thing-in-itself tends to fade away. This reflects the maturation of a dialectical and relational perspective that enables us to understand the world in which we belong. Communist politics can be carried out only on this basis. AuthorYanis Iqbal is an independent researcher and freelance writer based in Aligarh, India and can be contacted at yanisiqbal@gmail.com. His articles have been published in the USA, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India and several countries of Latin America. Archives July 2023 Bertrand Russell discusses the philosophy of Karl Marx in chapter 27 of his A History of Western Philosophy (HWP). He begins by telling us he is not going to deal with his economics or politics, just his philosophy and its influence on others. While Lenin saw Marx’s philosophy as developing from three sources— British economic theory, early French socialist thought, and classical German philosophy (Hegel) Russell sees only two sources. Marx’s philosophy is the “outcome” of “the Philosophical Radicals (mostly British) and French materialism. He credits Marx with a broad outlook, at least with respect to Western Europe where he shows “no national bias.” But, Russell says, it’s not the same regarding Eastern Europe because “he always despised the Slavs.” A comment about this. This meme about the Slavs was widespread in anti-Marxist and anti-Soviet propaganda (and still is) in the time of the writing of the HWP. It has no basis in fact. Marx and Engels made highly critical, even derogatory, remarks about some groups of Slavs in the Austrian Empire who fought on the reactionary Austrian aide in putting down the progressive forces leading the 1848-49 pan-European anti-feudal revolution. But they were in full support of the Polish revolutionaries at that time, and later supported the progressive revolutionary forces that were developing in Russia. After this maladroit observation, Russell continues in a more positive vein. He does mention economics, saying Marx’s economic philosophy is an outgrowth of classical British thought on this subject, in agreement with Lenin. There is a difference, however, the British economists wrote in defense of the up and coming industrialists and were opposed to the interests of the agriculturalists and the laboring classes. I should mention, though, that Adam Smith did have a lot to say in defense of the laboring classes and criticized their treatment by the up and coming industrialists. Marx, on the other hand, was completely on the side of the wage-earners. He never relied on emotional appeals when he laid out his theories and, Russell says, “he was always anxious to appeal to evidence, and never relied on any extra-scientific intuition.” Russell next discusses Marx’s “materialism”. It’s not the mechanical materialism of the French enlightenment. In which external objects react on a passive human consciousness. Russell points out that under the influence of Hegel, Marx’s materialism is an interaction between the subject and object in which both are changed — it’s what’s meant by the term “dialectical.” Russell says this view is similar to what non-Marxists refer to as “instrumentalism”. This will not do. It is too subjective as instrumentalism, a form of pragmatism, judges the truth of a statement by its usefulness— true statements do not necessarily relate to some objective x in-itself but they are statements that are useful for our future actions and ability to understand or control reality as it appears to us. Let’s deconstruct the following quote. “In Marx’s view, all sensation or perception is an interaction between subject and object; the bare object, apart from the activity of the percipient, is a mere raw material, which is transformed in the process of becoming known”. The problem with this is that it reeks of Kantianism. The raw material is the thing-in-itself which is transformed by perception into the thing-for-us. The mind is much too active here. Marxists have used the analogy of a mirror in discussing the relation of subject and object— perception is a “reflection” of the external world. Perception doesn’t change the object. The mind is not totally passive as experience is the collection of all our perceptions and the mind has to order and evaluate them so as to understand the world it reflects. The world itself is in constant motion and change. The concept of “dialectics” is used to describe this aspect of reality, it doesn’t impose dialectics on the objects, it reflects the workings of the objectively existing dialectical motions exhibited in the external world. There is no spoon bending telekinesis going on. Russell gives a long quote from Marx ending with “Philosophers have only interpreted the world but the real task is to alter it.” It’s a quote from his Theses on Feuerbach. It’s a famous quote, but it is beside the point regarding the transformation/reflection theories of perception as acting on our percepts to change aspects of external reality follows from either theory. Russell next asserts that “It is essential to this theory [Marxism] to deny the reality of “sensation” as conceived by British empiricists.” This empiricist conception of ‘sensation” was a revolutionary new development, Russell says, introduced into philosophy by John Locke (1632-1704). The mind is originally a blank slate (tabula rasa) and all our ideas are based on sensations as input from the five senses (experience, perception) which are then put into order by an internal power of the mind or “reflection” (our thoughts, and ideas) called internal perception. There are no innate ideas. Russell admits both empiricism and idealism have technical philosophical problems that are still today unresolved. This stems from a view that external objects have some kind of unchanging essence that the brain passively accepts and then fools around with by means of reflection. He says Marx has a more activist view of the interaction between the world and the brain, but he won’t discuss this further in this chapter but will deal with it in a later chapter. That turns out to be the chapter on Dewey and his view of “instrumentalism” mentioned above. Russell says that Marx didn’t spend a lot of time on these concerns and so he intends to move on to Marx’s views on “history.” Russell tells us that Marx’s philosophy of history is a “blend” of Hegel plus classical British economy. He takes the dialectic from Hegel but interprets it materialistically not idealistically as Hegel does. He tells us that the “matter” in Marx’s version of materialism is “matter in the peculiar sense that we have been considering, not the wholly dehumanized matter of the atomists.” It’s true that Russell was describing a “peculiar” kind of matter above when discussing perception as a “mutual” interaction between subject and object, but he is wrong in saying this was Marx’s view. Matter is the objectively existing material world that exists whether humans exist or not— it was here before humans evolved and will be here when humans are extinct. But while we are here, we have to understand it to survive and prosper and science is the best method we have found to do so. Philosophy prospers when it incorporates the findings of science, religion when it ignores or denies them. Russell next takes up Marx’s “materialist conception of history”. Basically, the main features of the art, religion, and philosophy (and culture in general) of any epoch are “the outcome” of the economic mode of production and distribution by which society maintains and reproduces itself. I think Marxists would prefer “conditioned by” rather than Russell’s “the outcome of”. Russell only accepts some of the features of this view which he adopted in writing the HWP, but he rejects the thesis “as it stands.” He will illustrate what he means by considering Marx’s thesis as applied to the history of philosophy. All philosophers think their philosophy is “true”. No one would bother to write philosophy if they thought it was just some time-conditioned ultimately irrational product of their particular environment and not objectively but just subjectively “true”. He says, “Marx, like the rest, believes in the truth of his own doctrines; he does not regard them as nothing but the expression of the feelings natural to a rebellious middle class German Jew who was born in the middle of the nineteenth century.” So, what can we make of this? Well, Russell does think the ideas of an epoch do generally reflect the socio-political background— those of Aristotle and Plato were “appropriate” to city states, the Stoics to “cosmopolitan despotism,” medieval scholasticism to the Catholic Church, those of Descartes and Locke to “the commercial middle class” and Marxism and Fascism to the modern industrial State. Russell believes this to be important and true. The above seems like a form of elementary Marxism that hasn’t really been thought out very well. Nevertheless it’s the part of Marx that Russell says he gets. He does, however, say there are two major objections he has to Marxism. First, Russell rejects economic determinism as he thinks “wealth” is less important than “power” as the motivating force of history. Since he has already written a book about this (Power, 1938) he refers us to it and will not deal with this topic here. Neither will I, as Marxism is not based on economic determinism which is trotted out by anti-Marxists in order to refute a misinterpretation of Marxism and think Marxism itself has been refuted. Second, having disposed of “economic determinism”, Russell looks at other theories of “social causation” used to explain history; he doesn’t exactly mention any by name but wants to argue that personal reasons, temperament, emotional attachments, etc. make any general theory of social causation moot. He picks some very special technical issues in philosophy (the problem of universals, the ontological argument, the truth or not of materialism) and says, contra Marx, that he thinks that it’s a waste of time to look for economic reasons to explain the positions of the different philosophical opinions on these issues. Marx would agree. Marx would agree because his sub/super structure distinction, that the laws, values, moral outlooks, art, religious views (the superstructure of ideas and institutions) are in general conditioned by the physical environment people inhabit which affects how they make their living— obtain food, social wealth, living arrangements, etc. (the substructure). People living in a Stone Age environment are not going to build the Empire State Building. A Gothic cathedral is not going to be built by animists. The superstructure also feeds back influences on the substructure so there is mutual interaction between them. Marx never advocated the simple one-way determinism or social causation which upsets Russell. As far as “materialism” goes, the following comments should cover Russell’s views. 1) Russell says the word has many meanings, but he has shown above that Marx “altered” the traditional meaning. I already pointed out how Russell was in error about this. 2) The problem with using this word is that people have “avoided” defining what they mean by it. 3) Depending on the definition materialism can be a) proven to be false, b) may be true but “there is no positive reason to think so”, c) there are some reasons to believe it, but they are not conclusive. Since b and c are basically the same there are just two responses needed. Response to 2. In Marxism the distinction between Materialism and Idealism boils down to the view about the existence of external objects— does the Universe depend upon the existence of the human brain and consciousness in order to exist or is it independent on the human consciousness and existed before there were any conscious beings or ideas at all— say at the time of the “Big Bang” and the millions and billions of years before any type of life at all emerged in the universe? If you believe the Universe and matter (the quarks, photons, etc.,) existed before humans then, for a Marxist, you are a materialist. If you believe there was some great big Consciousness before the Big Bang, and it caused the Big Bang (and waited around 13.5 billion years or so before deciding to make humans or whatever) you are not. Response to 3. Russell says Big Bang Materialism may be true “but there is no positive reason to think so.” I think the modern results of the scientific view of the origin of the Universe are positive enough. It may be the case that the science of the future replaces the “Big Bang” with a different explanation, but I don’t think the replacement will claim that the Universe was dependent on humans. There are two “different elements” referred to by the word “philosophy.” One involves scientific knowledge and technical expertise in which a great deal of mutual agreement is possible. The other is the social area where the ruling element is “passionate interest” and reason takes a backseat— here is where, Russell says, Marx’s insights are “largely true.” 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. He is the author of Reading the Classical Texts of Marxism and Eurocommunism: A Critical Reading of Santiago Carrillo and Eurocommunist Revisionism. Archives June 2023 De-dollarization is apparently here, “like it or not,” as a May 2023 video by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a peace-oriented think tank based in Washington, D.C., states. Quincy is not alone in discussing de-dollarization: political economists Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson outlined its mechanics across four shows between February and April 2023 in their fortnightly YouTube program, “Geopolitical Economy Hour.” Economist Richard Wolff provided a nine-minute explanation on this topic on the Democracy at Work channel. On the other side, media outlets like Business Insider have assured readers that dollar dominance isn’t going anywhere. Journalist Ben Norton reported on a two-hour, bipartisan Congressional hearing that took place on June 7—“Dollar Dominance: Preserving the U.S. Dollar’s Status as the Global Reserve Currency”—about defending the U.S. currency from de-dollarization. During the hearing, Congress members expressed both optimism and anxiety about the future of the dollar’s supreme role. But what has prompted this debate? Until recently, the global economy accepted the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency and the currency of international transactions. The central banks of Europe and Asia had an insatiable appetite for dollar-denominated U.S. Treasury securities, which in turn bestowed on Washington the ability to spend money and finance its debt at will. Should any country step out of line politically or militarily, Washington could sanction it, excluding it from the rest of the world’s dollar-denominated system of global trade. But for how long? After a summit meeting in March between Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and China’s President Xi Jinping, Putin stated, “We are in favor of using the Chinese yuan for settlements between Russia and the countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.” Putting that statement in perspective, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria said, “The world’s second-largest economy and its largest energy exporter are together actively trying to dent the dollar’s dominance as the anchor of the international financial system.” Already, Zakaria noted, Russia and China are holding less of their central bank reserves in dollars and settling most of their trade in yuan, while other countries sanctioned by the United States are turning to “barter trade” to avoid dependence on the dollar. A new global monetary system, or at least one in which there is no near-universal reserve currency, would amount to a reshuffling of political, economic, and military power: a geopolitical reordering not seen since the end of the Cold War or even World War II. But as a look at its origins and evolution makes clear, the notion of a standard global system of exchange is relatively recent and no hard-and-fast rules dictate how one is to be organized. Let’s take a brief tour through the tumultuous monetary history of global trade and then consider the factors that could trigger another stage in its evolution. Imperial Commodity Money Before the dollarization of the world economy took place, the international system had a gold standard anchored by the naval supremacy of the British Empire. But a currency system backed by gold, a mined commodity, had an inherent flaw: deflation. As long as metal mining could keep up with the pace of economic growth, the gold standard could work. But, as Karl Polanyi noted in his 1944 book, The Great Transformation, “the amount of gold available may [only] be increased by a few percent over a year… not by as many dozen within a few weeks, as might be required to carry a sudden expansion of transactions. In the absence of token money, business would have to be either curtailed or carried on at very much lower prices, thus inducing a slump and creating unemployment.” This deflationary spiral, borne by everyone in the economy, was what former U.S. presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan described in his famous 1896 Democratic Party convention speech, in which he declared, “You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” For the truly wealthy, of course, the gold standard was a good thing, since it protected their assets from inflation. The alternative to the “cross of gold” was for governments to ensure that sufficient currency circulated to keep business going. For this purpose, they could produce, instead of commodity money of gold or silver, token or “fiat” money: paper currency issued at will by the state treasury. The trouble with token money, however, was that it could not circulate on foreign soil. How, then, in a global economy, would it be possible to conduct foreign trade in commodity money and domestic business in token money? The Spanish and Portuguese empires had one solution to keep the flow of metals going: to commit genocide against the civilizations of the Americas, steal their gold and silver, and force the Indigenous peoples to work themselves to death in the mines. The Dutch and then British empires got their hands on the same gold using a number of mechanisms, including the monopolization of the slave trade through the Assiento of 1713 and the theft of Indigenous lands in the United States and Canada. Stolen silver was used to purchase valuable trade goods in China. Britain stole that silver back from China after the Opium Wars, which China had to pay immense indemnities (in silver) for losing. Once established as the global imperial manager, the British Empire insisted on the gold standard while putting India on a silver standard. In his 2022 PhD thesis, political economist Jayanth Jose Tharappel called this scheme “bimetallic apartheid”: Britain used the silver standard to acquire Indian commodities and the gold standard to trade with European countries. India was then used as a money pump for British control of the global economy, squeezed as needed: India ran a trade surplus with the rest of the world but was meanwhile in a trade deficit with Britain, which charged its colony “Home Charges” for the privilege of being looted. Britain also collected taxes and customs revenues in its colonies and semi-colonies, simply seizing commodity money and goods, which it resold at a profit, often to the point of famine and beyond—leading to tens of millions of deaths. The system of Council Bills was another clever scheme: paper money was sold by the British Crown to merchants for gold and silver. Those merchants used the Council Bills to purchase Indian goods for resale. The Indians who ended up with the Council Bills would cash them in and get rupees (their own tax revenues) back. The upshot of all this activity was that the Britain drained $45 trillion from India between 1765 and 1938, according to research by economist Utsa Patnaik. From Gold to Gold-Backed Currency to the Floating Dollar As the 19th century wore on, an indirect result of Britain’s highly profitable management of its colonies—and particularly its too-easy dumping of its exports into their markets—was that it fell behind in advanced manufacturing and technology to Germany and the United States: countries into which it had poured investment wealth drained from India and China. Germany’s superior industrial prowess and Russia’s departure from Britain’s side after the Bolshevik Revolution left the British facing a possible loss to Germany in World War I, despite Britain drawing more than 1 million people from the Indian subcontinent to serve (more than 2 million Indians would serve Britain in WWII) during the war. American financiers loaned Britain so much money that if it had lost WWI, U.S. banks would have realized an immense loss. When the war was over, to Britain’s surprise, the United States insisted on being paid back. Britain squeezed Germany for reparations to repay the U.S. loans, and the world financial system broke down into “competitive devaluations, tariff wars, and international autarchy,” as Michael Hudson relates in his 1972 book, Super imperialism, setting the stage for World War II. After that war, Washington insisted on an end to the sterling zone; the United States would no longer allow Britain to use India as its own private money pump. But John Maynard Keynes, who had written Indian Currency and Finance (1913), The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), and the General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936), believed he had found a new and better way to supply the commodity money needed for foreign trade and the token money required for domestic business, without crucifying anyone on a cross of gold. At the international economic conference in 1944 at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, Keynes proposed an international bank with a new reserve currency, the bancor, that would be used to settle trade imbalances between countries. If Mexico needed to sell oil and purchase automobiles from Germany, for instance, the two countries could carry out trade in bancors. If Mexico found itself owing more bancors than it held, or Germany had a growing surplus of them, an International Clearing Union would apply pressure to both sides: currency depreciation for debtors, but also currency appreciation and punitive interest payments for creditors. Meanwhile, the central banks of both debtor and creditor nations could follow Keynes’s domestic advice and use their powers of money creation to stimulate the domestic economy as needed, within the limits of domestically available resources and labor power. Keynes made his proposal, but the United States had a different plan. Instead of the bancor, the dollar, backed by gold held at Fort Knox, would be the new reserve currency and the medium of world trade. Having emerged from the war with its economy intact and most of the world’s gold, the United States led the Western war on communism in all its forms using weapons ranging from coups and assassinations to development aid and finance. On the economic side, U.S. tools included reconstruction lending to Europe, development loans to the Global South, and balance of payments loans to countries in trouble (the infamous International Monetary Fund (IMF) “rescue packages”). Unlike Keynes’s proposed International Clearing Union, the IMF imposed all the penalties on the debtors and gave all the rewards to the creditors. The dollar’s unique position gave the United States what a French minister of finance called an “exorbitant privilege.” While every other country needed to export something to obtain dollars to purchase imports, the United States could simply issue currency and proceed to go shopping for the world’s assets. Gold backing remained, but the cost of world domination became considerable even for Washington during the Vietnam War. Starting in 1965, France, followed by others, began to hold the United States at its word and exchanged U.S. dollars for U.S. gold, persisting until Washington canceled gold backing and the dollar began to float free in 1971. The Floating Dollar and the Petrodollar The cancellation of gold backing for the currency of international trade was possible because of the United States’ exceptional position in the world as the supreme military power: it possessed full spectrum dominance and had hundreds of military bases everywhere in the world. The U.S. was also a magnet for the world’s immigrants, a holder of the soft power of Hollywood and the American lifestyle, and the leader in technology, science, and manufacturing. The dollar also had a more tangible backing, even after the gold tether was broken. The most important commodity on the planet was petroleum, and the United States controlled the spigot through its special relationship with the oil superpower, Saudi Arabia; a meeting in 1945 between King Abdulaziz Al Saud and then-President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on an American cruiser, the USS Quincy, on Great Bitter Lake in Egypt sealed the deal. When the oil-producing countries formed an effective cartel, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), and began raising the price of oil, the oil-deficient countries of the Global South suffered, while the oil exporters exchanged their resources for vast amounts of dollars (“petrodollars”). The United States forbade these dollar holders from acquiring strategic U.S. assets or industries but allowed them to plow their dollars back into the United States by purchasing U.S. weapons or U.S. Treasury securities: simply holding dollars in another form. Economists Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler called this the “weapondollar-petrodollar” nexus in their 2002 book, The Global Political Economy of Israel. As documented in Michael Hudson’s 1977 book, Global Fracture (a sequel to Super Imperialism), the OPEC countries hoped to use their dollars to industrialize and catch up with the West, but U.S. coups and counterrevolutions maintained the global fracture and pushed the global economy into the era of neoliberalism. The Saudi-U.S. relationship was the key to containing OPEC’s power as Saudi Arabia followed U.S. interests, increasing oil production at key moments to keep prices low. At least one author—James R. Norman, in his 2008 book, The Oil Card: Global Economic Warfare in the 21st Century—has argued that the relationship was key to other U.S. geopolitical priorities as well, including its effort to hasten the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1980s. A 1983 U.S. Treasury study calculated that, since each $1 drop in the per barrel oil price would reduce Russia’s hard currency revenues by up to $1 billion, a drop of $20 per barrel would put it in crisis, according to Peter Schweizer’s book, Victory. In 1985, Norman recounted in his book that Saudi Arabia “[opened] the floodgates, [slashed] its pricing, and [pumped] more oil into the market.” While other factors contributed to the collapse of the oil price as well, “Russian academic Yegor Gaidar, acting prime minister of Russia from 1991 to 1994 and a former minister of economy, has described [the drop in oil prices] as clearly the mortal blow that wrecked the teetering Soviet Union.” From Petrodollar to De-Dollarization When the USSR collapsed, the United States declared a new world order and launched a series of new wars, including against Iraq. The currency of the new world order was the petrodollar-weapondollar. An initial bombing and partial occupation of Iraq in 1990 was followed by more than a decade of applying a sadistic economic weapon to a much more devastating effect than it ever had on the USSR (or other targets like Cuba): comprehensive sanctions. Forget price manipulations; Iraq was not allowed to sell its oil at all, nor to purchase needed medicines or technology. Hundreds of thousands of children died as a result. Several authors, including India’s Research Unit for Political Economy in the 2003 book Behind the Invasion of Iraq and U.S. author William Clark in a 2005 book, Petrodollar Warfare, have argued that Saddam Hussein’s final overthrow was triggered by a threat to begin trading oil in euros instead of dollars. Iraq has been under U.S. occupation since. It seems, however, that the petro-weapondollar era is now coming to an end, and at a “‘stunning’ pace.” After the Putin-Xi summit in March 2023, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria worried publicly about the status of the dollar in the face of China’s and Russia’s efforts to de-dollarize. The dollar’s problems have only grown since. All of the pillars upholding the petrodollar-weapondollar are unstable:
But what will replace the dollar? “A globalized economy needs a single currency,” Zakaria said on CNN after the Xi-Putin summit. “The dollar is stable. You can buy and sell at any time and it’s governed largely by the market and not the whims of a government. That’s why China’s efforts to expand the yuan’s role internationally have not worked.” But the governance of the U.S. dollar by the “whims of a government”—namely, the United States—is precisely why countries are looking for alternatives. Zakaria took comfort in the fact that the dollar’s replacement will not be the yuan. “Ironically, if Xi Jinping wanted to cause the greatest pain to America, he would liberalize his financial sector and make the yuan a true competitor to the dollar. But that would take him in the direction of markets and openness that is the opposite of his current domestic goals.” Zakaria is wrong. China need not liberalize to internationalize the yuan. When the dollar was supreme, the United States simply excluded foreign dollar-holders from purchasing U.S. companies or assets and restricted them to holding U.S. Treasury securities instead. But as Chinese economist Yuanzheng Cao, former chief economist of the Bank of China, argued in his 2018 book, Strategies for Internationalizing the Renminbi (the official name of the currency whose unit is the yuan), Beijing can internationalize the yuan without attempting to replace the dollar and incurring the widespread resentment that would follow. It only needs to secure the yuan’s use strategically as one of several currencies and in a wider variety of transactions, such as currency swaps. Elsewhere, Keynes’s postwar idea for a global reserve currency is being revived on a more limited basis. A regional version of the bancor, the sur, was proposed by Brazil’s President Luis Inácio (“Lula”) da Silva. Ecuadorian economist and former presidential candidate Andrés Arauz described the sur as follows in a February interview: “The idea is not to replace each country’s national, sovereign currency, but rather to have an additional currency, a complementary currency, a supranational currency for trade among countries in the region, starting with Brazil and Argentina, which are the sort of two powerhouses in the Southern Cone, and that could then amplify to the rest of the region.” Lula followed up the sur idea with an idea of a BRICS currency; Russian economist Sergey Glazyev proposes a kind of bancor backed by a basket of commodities. Currency systems reflect power relations in the world: they don’t change them. The Anglo gold standard and the American dollar standard reflected imperial monopoly power for centuries. In a multipolar world, however, we should expect more diverse arrangements. Author Justin Podur is a Toronto-based writer. You can find him on his website at podur.org and on Twitter @justinpodur. He teaches at York University in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change. Archives June 2023 6/23/2023 Why Are Archaeologists Unable to Find Evidence for a Ruling Class of the Indus Civilization? By: Adam S. GreenRead NowLittle more than a century ago, British and Indian archaeologists began excavating the remains of what they soon realized was a previously unknown civilization in the Indus Valley. Straddling parts of Pakistan and India and reaching into Afghanistan, the culture these explorers unearthed had existed at the same time as those of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, and covered a much larger area. It was also astonishingly advanced: sophisticated and complex, boasting large, carefully laid out cities, a relatively affluent population, writing, plumbing and baths, wide trade connections, and even standardized weights and measures. What kind of a society was the Indus Valley Civilization, as it came to be known? Who lived there and how did they organize themselves? Archaeologists and other experts ask these questions to this day, but the first explorers were already noticing some unique features. In Mesopotamia and Egypt, “much money and thought were lavished on the building of magnificent temples for the gods and on palaces and tombs of kings,” observed Sir John Marshall, who supervised the excavation of two of the five main cities, Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, “but the rest of the people seemingly had to content themselves with insignificant dwellings of mud.” In the Indus Valley, “the picture is reversed and the finest structures were those erected for the convenience of the citizens. Temples, palaces, and tombs there may of course have been, but if so, they are either still undiscovered or so like other edifices as not to be readily distinguishable from them.” In its heyday, from about BC 2600 to BC 1900, the Indus Valley Civilization created what may have been the world’s most egalitarian early complex society, defying long-held presumptions about the relationship between urbanization and inequality in the past. Its large cities were expansive, planned, and boasted large-scale architecture, including roomy residential houses, and smaller settlements in the surrounding areas appeared to support a similar culture with a similar standard of living. The most tantalizing feature of the ancient Indus Valley remains is what they appear to lack: any trace of a ruling class or managerial elite. This defies the longtime theoretical assumption that any complex society must have stratified social relations: that collective action, urbanization, and economic specialization only develop in a very unequal culture that takes direction from the top, and that all social trajectories evolve toward a common and universal outcome, the state. Yet, here was a stable, prosperous civilization that appeared to remain that way for centuries without a state, without priest-kings or merchant oligarchs, and without a rigid caste system or warrior class. How did they manage it? Unfortunately, in the early decades of exploration and research, archaeologists tended to assume that lack of evidence of a top-down, hierarchical society in the Indus Valley remains meant only that they had not yet been found. Some have argued that lack of evidence of inequality only indicates that the region’s ruling class was very clever at disguising the boundaries between itself and other social strata. Pointing to the fact that Indus Valley burial sites contain no monumental tombs, some researchers suggest that the rulers may have been cremated or deposited in rivers, as was the practice in other imperial cultures. But cremation is not archaeologically invisible; the remains of other cultures often include evidence of it. More recently, archaeologists have been willing to go back to the original explorers’ observations and use the evidence directly in front of them to develop theories about ancient life in the Indus Valley Civilization. Archaeological data from South Asia has improved greatly: and there is much more of it. Numerous Indus sites are now known to archaeologists that decades ago were not, and the environmental contexts that enabled urbanization in the region—climate, natural resources—are now much clearer. Archaeologists have also honed a strong set of tools for identifying inequality and class divisions: from mortuary data, palace assemblages, aggrandizing monuments, written records, and soon, possibly, from household data. Yet, in a century of research, archaeologists have found no evidence of a ruling class in the Indus Valley that is comparable to those recovered in other early complex societies. In the late 1990s, Indus archaeologists started to consider a new concept that seemed to better fit the facts. Heterarchy asserts that complex political organization, including cities, can emerge through the interaction of many different, unranked social groups, rather than from top-down decisions by an elite: that cooperation, not domination, can produce collective action. It’s now widely argued that multiple social groups contributed to the construction of Indus cities and the economic activities that took place in them, and that none seemed to dominate the others. Bolstering this argument, no evidence exists that any group of Indus producers was excluded from the use of scarce materials that craftspeople had to obtain from long distances away, or that particular groups limited access to those materials to seize a higher position for themselves in Indus society. One of the most distinctive and technically dazzling products of the Indus culture are stamped seals engraved with imagery and text; over 2,500 have been found at Mohenjo-daro alone. But the seals were produced by many different groups of artisans in many locations, and there is no evidence that a ruling class controlled production. Technological styles tended to cross-cut different groups of artisans, indicating a great deal of openness and knowledge sharing. Indus city-dwellers built large- and small-scale public buildings; the Great Bath at Mohenjo-daro is a massive structure that contained a large paved bath assembled from tightly fitted baked bricks, waterproofed with bitumen and supplied with pipes and drains that would have allowed control over water flow and temperature. At Mohenjo-daro, nonresidential structures were built atop brick platforms that were as substantial as the structures erected on top of them, and would have required a great deal of coordinated action. It’s been calculated that just one of the foundation platforms would have required 4 million days of labor, or 10,000 builders working for more than a year. Yet, at both Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, these large nonresidential structures were relatively accessible, suggesting that they were “public,” as opposed to palaces or administrative centers restricted to a privileged class. Some of these may have served as specialized spaces for exchange, negotiation, and interaction between different groups clustered in neighborhoods or along important streets and roads. These spaces may have helped the city-dwellers maintain a high degree of consensus on planning and policy and ensured that no one group was able to accumulate wealth at the expense of the rest. The Indus Valley remains have yet to yield all of their riches. The Indus script has yet to be deciphered, and we still don’t know why the civilization started to decline in the second millennium BC. One of the most positive recent developments has been a dramatic increase in data and interest in the civilization’s small-scale settlements, which may shed light on the question whether these settlements were qualitatively different from one another or from the cities—and how far Indus egalitarianism extended across its broader landscape. What we have already found, however, suggests that egalitarianism may have been a boon to collective action: that distinct social groups may have been more willing to invest in collective action if the benefits were not restricted to a subset of elites. That suggests that heterarchy may act as a kind of brake on coercive power amongst social groups, and across society as a whole. If this is the case, and after a century of research on the Indus civilization, archaeologists have not found evidence for a ruling class comparable what’s been recovered in other early complex societies, then it’s time to address the Indus Valley’s egalitarianism. Urbanization, collective action, and technological innovation are not driven by the agendas of an exclusionary ruling class, the evidence suggests, and can occur in their total absence. The Indus Valley was egalitarian not because it lacked complexity, but rather because a ruling class is not a prerequisite for social complexity. It challenges us to rethink the fundamental connections between collective action and inequality. The priest-king is dead: or, in this case, most likely never existed. Author Adam S. Green is a lecturer in sustainability at the University of York. He is an archaeological anthropologist focused on South Asia, specializing in the comparative study of early states through the lenses of technology, the environment, and political economy. Follow him on Twitter. This article was produced by Human Bridges, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Archives June 2023 While Audre Lorde’s proclamation that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” is so often borne out as sage—her thesis being woefully apropos to the milieus of contemporary American finance capital, electoral politics, and commercial artistry—there are myriad examples of creators and actors, acolytes to ideologies that are dead-left of the Overton window in their respective fields, weaponizing the means, methods, and terrestrial infrastructure of said field to levy a critique, be it broad form or surgically narrow (110). With the above as guiding credo, this essay will examine two instances of this kind of philosophical counterinsurgency in the film industry: Jacques Tourneur’s 1947 noir-thriller Out of the Past, and Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1945 lo-fi noir Detour. It is my opinion that these films—both conceived, actualized, and broadcast during the height of the Old Hollywood autocracy, in which money-minded studio executives and their political remora (think the Jesuit doctrinaire who authored the Hays Code, and the PCA bureaucrats who enforced it) held unassailable dominion—are not only pointed indictments of budding late-stage capitalism, assembly line-style popular culture, and the ambient anomie this cultural machine (in tandem with the embedded mode of postwar production) instills in the citizenry, but are encoded with condemnations of the commercial film industry; its fantasy-peddling and reactionary agitprop, in particular. A note on methodology: it is my belief that both directors share a kindred, if well sublimated, political and metaphysical sensibility with certain members of the Frankfurt School, specifically Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse. This shared sensibility stems not only from likeminded rearing—Tourneur and Ulmer, same as the listed members of the Frankfurt School, were born and bred in Europe—and the rangingly similar metrics of cultural discernment (what might be more aptly classified as ‘taste’) that said upbringing could engender, but a visceral distrust of the Hollywood model as a means of generating and disseminating culture to the masses. The reasons for this distrust varies widely among the names mentioned heretofore—for the directors, there is ad hominem-flavored personal grievance, while our scholarly émigrés phrase their disgust in terms much more academic—but a sense of spiritual malaise and dislocation is salient in the work of each. Therefore, I will frame my analysis around the postulations and diagnoses of the Frankfurt School. Historically, the Frankfurt School has often found itself at loggerheads with orthodox Marxism. Devotees of mainline Marxist-Leninist thought have convincingly argued that the FS proper was plagued by an aggressive strain of philosophical sophistry and anti-materialist charlatanism which lent itself to cooption by state-sanctioned forces of reaction and anti-communism (Rockhill). While the documentary record does support this assessment, I would still argue there is palpable ideological overlap between the two movements. In particular, I believe the analytic exegeses of media and popular culture that were undertaken by several faction stalwarts constitutes the Frankfurt School’s most clear-eyed and salient discursive contribution, one which provides a useful corollary to classical Marxism’s understanding of the relationship between the cultural apparatus and the dominant mode of production. Thus, this analysis will utilize the critical framework and nomenclature of Horkheimer & Adorno’s monograph The Dialectic of Enlightenment. Procedurally, this will consist of a close reading of Adorno and Horkheimer’s essay “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” and the application of the pronouncements/postulations outlined therein to Detour and Out of the Past. For breadth, this predominant thread of critique will be accented by selections from the writings of Herbert Marcuse, among other thinkers and texts associated with the wider discourse community of film criticism. All that being said, the brand of critique—commonly known as Critical Theory—attributed most famously to the Frankfurt school is not just applicable to the two movies I have selected, but the genre of film noir as a whole. Coined in 1946 by the French critic Nino Frank to describe the style of moviemaking that was regnant in Hollywood at the time, a majority of critics now agree that the heyday of ‘classic film noir’ “fall[s] between 1941 and 1958, beginning with John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon and ending with Orson Welle’s A Touch of Evil” (Conard 1). But while other genres can be demarcated by their tonal conceits (romance, comedy), topographical setting (Western), or plot machinations (action, horror), film noir is most convincingly taxonomized by its themes. Film scholar Mark T. Conard lists noir’s eminent philosophical concerns as such: “the inversion of traditional values and the corresponding moral ambivalence; […] the feeling of alienation, paranoia, and cynicism; the presence of crime and violence; and disorientation” (1-2). Honing in, a nigh-ubiquitous alienation from what Robert Porfirio calls “that native-bred optimism that seemed to define the American character,” appears on many academics’ lists of the defining thematic attributes of film noir (Porfirio X). Among scholars, opinions on what accounts for said alienation are myriad and spectrum-spanning. In his monograph Dark Borders, Jonathan Auerbach says this “profound sense of dispossession” is an outcome of “the [nascent] Cold War’s redefinition of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship” (Auerbach 2). Conversely, Dennis Broe identifies the engine behind this detachment as something plain and barely obfuscated: “In the period immediately following World War II, when the hopes and dreams of American working men and women seemed about to be realized, they were dashed […] by the forces of [corporate] reaction” (Broe xvi). Mark Osteen, in what could be termed a summation of these other viewpoints, finds the locus of this alienation in the “quintessentially American […] quest for fame” which is purportedly possible through dogged wiles and “individual striving,” but ends in either atomized failure or, for the microscopically small contingent that does ‘make it,’ a “self that is emptied of meaning” (Osteen 1). There is a strain of Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique that corroborates these assertions, especially Broe’s. Steeped in materialist analysis and traditional Marxist dialectics, it is not heterodox to claim that they would agree with Broe’s classical anatomization of alienation: namely, that the industrial/capitalistic mode of production alienates workers from their own labor—i.e. by doing the physical work, the laborer creates surplus profits for a passive ‘owner,’ who in turn has complete dominion over said profits, while the worker is only remunerated a fraction of this surplus in the form of a wage—and this axiomatic alienation, which for most has to be endured and reckoned with on a daily basis, metastasizes, warping and destabilizing other aspects of the laborer’s psyche. Obviously, this identitarian discontinuity and sensory disorientation manifests negatively in the personality and conduct of the laborer. Thus, with such a fractured and neurotic populace, the forging of community becomes almost impossible (grimly emblematized by the world-weary and beleaguered truck driver who in a roadside diner tells Al Roberts, Detour’s protagonist, “I ain’t got nobody at all”) (Detour). Historically, this condition writ large has been the central exigence of Marxist thought and praxis. Engaging with any part of Horkheimer and Adorno’s corpus, even at the most cursory or facile level, will reveal the above to be a foundational aspect of their methodology, but what makes them unique and exceptionally significant to this analysis is their emphasis on culture and how it augments, accents, and flat-out architects the heretofore mentioned alienation. Consonant with traditional Marxist historiography, Horkheimer and Adorno see the relationship between the economic base and the cultural superstructure as especially dynamic—symbiotic, even. In their critical conception, culture does more than just upkeep the status quo; to them, it is essentially as crucial in controlling and stratifying the public as the reigning mode of production, sustaining a level of “relative autonomy” far beyond that which some Second International-era vulgarians might have allowed for (Garrido). Furthermore, since culture in the age of infant late capitalism was largely authored by the same tectonic interests (or at their behest, at least) who most benefited from the current economic iteration, there is no authentic—i.e. created independent of, or outside the monetary incentive-structure of—culture to speak of. In its place, there is a lumbering and labyrinthian Culture Industry, which enshrines “the triumph of invested capital, whose title as absolute master is etched deep into the hearts of the dispossessed in the employment line” (Adorno 125). The baneful impacts of the Culture Industry on the citizenry, particularly those in the most oppressed and put-upon classes, are myriad. As is noted by practitioners of black letter, by-the-book materialism, it does indeed serve to undergird and re-enunciate in the minds of workers their extant purposes: working and consuming. On this, Horkheimer and Adorno further align with the consensus—“Industry is interested in people merely as customers and employees, and has in fact reduced mankind as a whole and each of its elements to this all-embracing formula” (147). And though these two directives might appear to be dichotomized, they in all actuality manifest as an Ouroboros—the ancient serpent eating its own tale, ad nauseam—in the era of the Culture Industry, workers work so as to have the means to consume, and this consumption acts as a kind of triage, a balm or salve, that patches them up enough spiritually to continue laboring. Or, as Horkheimer and Adorno state it, “Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work. It is sought after as an escape from the mechanized work process, and to recruit strength in order to be able to cope with it again” (137). In addition, the Culture Industry, through the brute amalgamation of both labor and leisure, also seeks to preserve the social and economic order. When consuming cultural products, “what sinks in is the automatic succession of standardized operations. What happens at work, in the factory, or in the office can only be escaped from by approximation to it in one’s leisure time” (137). The end result of this procedural blending of what working and consuming entails content-wise, this “aesthetic barbarity”—embodied by the vapid, rote, and deadening nature of the actual cultural products being consumed, a majority of which, be it music or movies, are concertedly plotted to be banal, low-stakes, and easily digestible—is just another buttress for the presiding economic order: “having ceased to be anything but style, it [the Culture Industry] reveals the latter’s secret: obedience to the social hierarchy” (131). Finally, and perhaps most insidiously, Adorno and Horkheimer pinpoint in the Culture Industry a mandate to inseminate false wants and needs in the masses. These wants exhibit themselves in two ways: one is an almost zombielike urge to be the “eternal consumer,” to continue intaking this bland cultural product, which has such low potency that it demands more and more product, more and more extreme degrees of consumption, to elicit even a baseline response (124). Theoretically, the Culture Industry is supposed to function as a metaphysical unguent for the bleak toil of wage labor, but, in Horkheimer and Adorno’s opinion, “The paradise offered by [it] is the same old drudgery. Both escape and elopement are predesigned to lead back to the starting point. Pleasure promotes the resignation which it ought to help forget” (142). The second stripe of want is most typically associated with the long-vaunted and squabbled over concept of the ‘American Dream,’ and the level of access to it that rank-and-file Americans have. The film industry, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, is especially guilty of instilling false dreams and quixotic aspirations, of propagating insatiable consumption as the one true avenue toward identity formation and genuine individuality. Said “Pseudo-individuality” is a result of the hoax air of possibility and meritocratic mythos emitted by an industry which “is represented as unceasingly in search of talent. Those discovered by talent scouts and then publicized on a vast scale by the studio are ideal types of the new dependent average. Of course, the starlet is meant to symbolize the typist in such a way that the evening dress seems meant for the actress as distinct from the real girl. The girls in the audience not only feel that they could be on the screen, but realize the great gulf separating them from it. […] [This success] might just as well have been hers, and somehow never is” (154, 145). This brand of mass gaslighting is what the British psychologist David Smail calls “magical voluntarism” (Smail 6). In layman’s terms, magical voluntarism is the notion that it is within every individual’s power to make themselves whatever they wish to be, and failing to do so is a sign of a particular person’s shiftlessness, not a shortcoming stitched into the societal fabric. This internalized policy, that of a structural problem being pathologized/reduced to the actionable purview of the individual, is one of the chief byproducts of the Culture Industry. There is no more suitable synecdoche for these unattainable hopes and lofty hankerings, part and parcel to the Culture Industry’s unchecked proliferation, than the city of Los Angeles, including its outlying suburbs and exurbs; or, as it is metonymically known, Hollywood. Beyond its status as the creative womb and procedural birthing-place of film noir, where the lion’s share of these movies were filmed, it is also where the majority of noirs are set. The two films that this essay focalizes fall into the above category as well, albeit with a slight wrinkle. While not the initial setting, both Detour and Out of the Past claim Los Angeles as their physical and existential terminus. Hollywood, as an ontological aspiration and a destination, looms large in each. Detour begins—I am speaking of the linear plot (the film actually begins at the chronological ending, in media res, with Al hitchhiking to a diner in Reno, Nevada)—with Al Roberts, a lovelorn jazz pianist in New York City, trying to save up the necessary funds to join his girlfriend, a striving singer, in Los Angeles. As is wont for the genre, a lack of money hamstrings Al’s designs for his own life, and we find him from the nonce thoroughly enervated and embittered by the capitalistic scurry to accrue. Though deeply skeptical and suspicious of the starry-eyed, rags-to-riches Hollywood narrative, Los Angeles does function for Al as a break from the tedium and monotonous familiarity of his life in New York, a chance to start anew. Because he has only his own labor to sell, i.e. he has no equity or capital to passively plump his coffers, Al is forced to work for proverbial peanuts at a cheap nightclub, squandering his talent and deferring any legitimate artistic yearnings (in-scene, this is represented by the riff-driven and mostly intuitive jazz we hear Al playing for pay, versus the classical music—Chopin’s Waltz in C# Minor, op.64, no. 2—he plays for pleasure) (Cantor 149). This is a fact that Al laments throughout the film, time and again bemoaning that decisions which should be his to make, should feasibly be within any continent adult’s sphere of agency and autonomy, are in all reality adjudicated by an ever-lurking scarcity: “Money. You know what that is, the stuff you never have enough of. Little green things with George Washington’s picture that men slave for, commit crimes for, die for. It’s the stuff that has caused more trouble in the world than anything else we ever invented, simply because there’s too little of it” (Detour). Evident in the quote is an object definition of classical alienation, which accords with the orthodox Marxist perspectives outlined at length earlier in this essay. But also implicitly present—given what we know about Roberts’s stifled potential and stagnating ambitions as a pianist, which are a direct result of his need to make money—is an example of the effect that a society schematized around maximizing production and profit above all else does to what Herbert Marcuse calls the creative “Eros” of the worker. Because his status as an industrial cog is so inviolably codified, fiscal precarity his lifelong affliction, the worker is at every turn forced to repress his own wants, to forgo the “instinctual needs for peace and quiet,” for the sake of streamlined manufacturing and the hallowed GDP (Marcuse xiv). Indentured to this capitalistic cycle of “production and destruction,” the worker recedes into the unwitting thrall of Thanatos, or the death drive (xi). Rounding back to film noir, the above dynamic could account for the aberrant and dissociative actions of not only Al Roberts and Jeff Markham (Out of the Past’s antihero), but countless characters throughout the entire film noir catalogue who seem to be operating in a cognitive fog, barreling toward their own ruin. Embodying this, from the opening credits we find Al not exactly suicidal, but with a tacit wish for insentience that only intensifies as the film progresses. We find Jeff Bailey, assumed name of Out of the Past’s Jeff Markham, in similar straits. Once a successful private eye, a romantic tryst gone bad—with the runaway woman he was hired to apprehend, no less—has Markham laying low, leading a banal life in the rural mountain town of Bridgeport, California. At the film’s commencement, he is the owner-operator of a piddling gas station. Rather than feeling rejuvenated by the ambling, gently-paced domesticity of his new life—it is pertinent to note here that some film historians, Jonathan Auerbach in particular, attribute the “intense anxiety, paranoia, and disorientation” that so often plagues noir protagonists to “an absence of domesticity, a lack of fixity”—Markham is at best blasé toward the simple, low-octane wage labor that now constitutes his daily existence (Auerbach 151). In fact, I would argue that—given the glimpses of lusty avariciousness and laconic criminality we as viewers glean from Markham in the first act’s expository reminiscence, and the second act’s resumption of detective work—it is his newfound epistemological conception of himself as merely a wage-worker (since he owns the service station, one could quibble that he is more a member of the petite bourgeois than proletariat, but this is largely nullified by the lack of passivity in his income; besides a mute boy, Markham appears to be the sole operator of his service station) that is by and large the mother of his discontent. From its opening repartee, a pitch-perfect case study in the witty, idiomatic to-and-fro that would come to be known as the ‘hardboiled’ mode of dialogue, Markham’s subtle sourness concerning this recent change of profession is discernible in his reunion with Whit Sterling, the pedigreed crook and gambling kingpin who originally hired him to find his girlfriend: Sterling: I understand you’re operating a little gasoline station? Clearly, Markham’s status as clock-punching-everyman does not harmonize with Sterling’s initial impression, nor can it be understood meta-textually as anything other than a radical departure from Markham’s previous understanding of himself as someone who transcended the accepted bounds of societal hierarchy, a dauntless maverick who continually eluded the prison of the humdrum and workaday. Thus, given yet another shift in his comportment and bearing in the film’s second act, the noumenal aura of Hollywood—which, though several key plot-developments occur in other California and Mexican cities, I would argue is the presiding turbine of delusion and phantasm in Out of the Past--functions for Markham not just as a return to the procedural life of a private eye, but as hinge point and hearthstone in his entire psychic architecture of selfhood. And, with this crucial vantage in mind, it is easier to parse the manifest Thanatos that eventually leads to his demise—afforded form and flesh in the character of Kathie Moffet, Markham’s obsession (and an obvious nod toward the ‘femme fatale’ trope so famously associated with the genre)—as both an act of keen defiance against the deeply-entrenched mode of postwar production, i.e. quiet desperation and faceless ‘wage-slavery,’ and a thematic/proverbial recoupment of Markham, who made it his mission statement to flout the worker/consumer dichotomy at every overture, by the ‘universe,’ a euphemism for the purposely mystified facets of corporate propagandization and the superstructure which superintend the public. The lattermost claim—that Markham’s death can be read as celestial punishment for defying the established order of things, for not abiding the business-friendly version of the American dream—is lent credence by Out of the Past’s closing scene, which depicts a mute boy, Markham’s lone employee, smiling and saluting his name on the filling station marquee. Like Jeff Markham and Al Roberts, several members of the Frankfurt School also found themselves, by choice or bitter necessity, in Los Angeles in the mid-twentieth century. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, in particular, spent a great deal of column-inches trying to shed clarity on the estrangement and exploitation that underwrote so much of the buoyant optimism that surrounded this city—their interim homeplace—that film theorist Tina Olsen Lint says “[was] perceived as being the last metropolitan manifestation of the westward movement and the promise of personal freedom and fresh starts inherent in that migration” (331). Given their scholarly preoccupations, and the caste-based, aristocratically-calcified continent they had just fled, it is no gargantuan wonder that Horkheimer and Adorno would find worrisome and altogether Kafkaesque a municipal center where “[the myth] of incessant mobility broke down the social control agencies of the established communities and gave rise to rootlessness, lawlessness, and an overall sense of unreality” (332). With its cultural product as critical aperture—i.e. the movies and music concocted there—Adorno and Horkheimer come to similar conclusions about Hollywood and its namesake industries; chiefly, that it is a varnished nothing: a steamrolled simulacra of the American experience that seeks to—in addition to what has already been discussed in this essay—strictly define ‘normalcy,’ viciously ostracize those who venture outside these boundaries, reinforce the inalienable laws of working and consuming, and pacify the masses with its soporific product (neutering any possibility of popular backlash; or, as stated in The Culture Industry, “Culture has always played its part in taming revolutionary and barbaric instinct. Industrial culture adds its contribution) (152). Throughout his storied career in letters, Adorno specifically made his distaste for popular forms of ‘art,’ philistine consumption, and the Hollywood model felt: “Every visit to the cinema, despite the utmost watchfulness, leaves me dumber and worse than before. Sociability itself is a participant in injustice, insofar as it pretends we can still talk with each other in a frozen world, and the flippant, chummy word [on screen] contributes to the perpetuation of silence” (Adorno Section 5). Castigating movie-going as a purely performative social activity that not only exacerbates the intellectual torpor of the working classes, but actually furnishes them a tangible excuse to communicate less with their peers, receding further and further into their own solitary orbits of disaffection. On the widespread dissemination of commercial music and talk-show chatter, a forthright result of the Hollywood apparatus, Adorno is equally acerbic: “The radio [has become] the universal mouthpiece of the Fuhrer; his voice rises from street loudspeakers to resemble the howling of sirens announcing panic—from which modern propaganda can scarcely be distinguished anyway. […] The gigantic fact that [his] speech penetrates everywhere replaces its content, just as the benefaction of the Toscanini broadcast takes the place of the symphony. No listener can grasp its true meaning any longer, while the Fuhrer’s speech is lies anyway” (159). Interestingly enough, Adorno’s qualm with mass broadcasting—that its very omnipresence and infinite accessibility cheapens whatever scope or substance there was in the original piece—finds a vehement corollary in the form of Al Roberts’s dyspeptic reaction to the Jukebox that whines out in Detour’s opening scene (“Turn that off! Will you turn that thing off?!”). As is evident, neither Horkheimer nor Adorno had any romantic misconceptions about Los Angeles, and each would probably categorize both Roberts and Markham’s pilgrimages there as just plain old orthodoxy, a stab at fulfillment that is as futile and inevitable as the worker who tithes a percentage of his measly income to the Culture Industry in exchange for movie tickets, the newest and catchiest album. In direct contrast to the boomtown hubris and parvenu brashness of Old Hollywood, as conceived and rendered onscreen by our directors, is the brute liminality of the rest of the country. Particularly in Detour, we see the space between New York and Los Angeles—in its sinisterly flat topography, all but irradiated flora, and abject dearth of municipal coherence—depicted as anarchic and barren. Paul A. Cantor, in an article on Detour, attributes this viscerally pessimistic representation of the American heartland to “Ulmer’s distinctively European vision of the United States,” which is underpinned by the belief that “there is nothing between New York and Los Angeles—just a vast wasteland” (Cantor 154-55). Cantor goes on to posit that Ulmer’s “dark vision of the rootlessness of America” is predicated on the total absence in this nation of the type of centralized order and ironclad hierarchies that many European’s associate with statecraft and standardized culture (152). Furthermore, Cantor points out that many patently American pastimes and obsessions—automobiles and conspicuous automobile customization, simple and hearty diner food (usually prepared by blatant neophytes, and scarfed down more for ballast than pleasure), freedom of movement (made explicit by America’s synonymous nomenclature for its major roadways: the freeway and the interstate), ceaseless travel and provisional rooming houses—simply do not compute with the European outlook. Thus, when these aspects of American life are depicted in Detour, it is in a malevolent and dystopian light. And, indeed, Al Roberts’s cross-country hitchhiking trip is colored not only by the luckless bewilderment of the plot, but a physical and geographic dereliction that is seemingly inescapable. Far from exalting nominal freedom of movement and an intractably solitary populace as laudable facets of the American project, Detour shows how these sterile environs between the coastal megalopolises—interrupted only by featureless clusters of motels, sand-burnt filling stations, and roadside diners—function as a temporal totem of late-stage industrial loneliness, and mirror the blighted interiority of its characters. Here, I believe, is another bit of connective sinew between Ulmer and the Frankfurt School. Theodor Adorno, specifically, is known for his hardly-cloaked loathing of what he saw as slipshod and makeshift in American culture. In fact, he inveighed amply against a number of the cultural mainstays listed in the previous paragraph. For instance, in Minima Moralia, he paints a scathing portrait of a country marred by innumerable highways and destinationless back roads: [these roads] are always inserted directly in the landscape, and the more impressively smooth and broad they are they are, the more unrelated and violent their gleaming track appears against its wild, overgrown surroundings. They are expressionless […] it is as if no one had ever passed their hand over the landscape’s hair. It is uncomforted and comfortless. And it is perceived in a corresponding way. For what the hurrying eye has seen merely from the car it cannot retain, and the vanishing landscape leaves no more traces behind than it bears upon itself (Adorno 48-49) Acclimated to the surprisingly congested and closely situated countryside of Europe, it is no small wonder that Adorno found disconcerting their American equivalent. In addition, he was essentially repulsed by the ad-hoc attitude of the service industry in the United States. While moth-eaten motel clerks, disheveled bus station attendants, and the staffers at fluff periodicals (especially those churning out horoscopes and star charts) all invoke ire, Adorno seems especially off-put by the roadside diner, where “a juggler with fried eggs, crispy bacon, and ice-cubes proves himself [to be] the last solicitous host” (117). Time and again, Adorno attributed the shabbiness, one-size-fits-all logic, and anti-artisanal nature of American tourist culture to capitalism, and the unquenchable compulsion, among its proprietors, to magnify profit and minimize infrastructural investment. Paralleling the unconquerable homogeneity and awing sparseness of Detour’s landscapes is the cartoonishly poor luck that hounds Al Roberts throughout the film. Far from an injection of levity or some slapstick device, this ill fate can be critically understood as denotative determinism. In all his interactions—whether it’s with the sleazy bookie Charles Haskill (who dies of a heart attack suddenly and in such a way that Al is falsely implicated, forcing him to conceal the body and assume Haskill’s identity), or Vera, who blackmails Roberts into participating in her harebrained impersonation scheme, then dies in a freak accident that leaves him even more precariously implicated—Roberts appears not only defeated, resigned to some cosmic sentence he cannot even comprehend enough to contest, but abjectly puppeteered by circumstance. With each unwitting capitulation—taking Haskill’s money and identity, picking up Vera, agreeing under duress to her intrigues—Roberts’s ostensible autonomy, his self-authorship, is winnowed (or, as he feebly offers in explanation for his malaise and existential impotence, “until then I had done things my way, but from then on something stepped in and shunted me off to a different destination than the one I’d picked for myself”) (Detour). At the beginning of his arc, Roberts appears to be a character driven to amend his situation and pursue his passions (artistic, romantic, and otherwise), obstacles be damned. But by film’s end, the viewer is left questioning whether he had any substantive agency to start with. The notion that Roberts is more acted-upon than action-igniting is echoed by John Tusk’s statement that, given any scrutiny or inspection, he can be read as “almost passive from the beginning: things happen to him and they are not things he caused” (Tusk 212). Elsewhere, Tusk argues that Roberts is just one of a surfeit of film noir protagonists who are, for all thematic intents and purposes, “hostages of fate” (42). In scene, this crippling passivity, this idea that we are all just scraping past at the whim of some malign energy, is summarized by a haggard and dejected Al Roberts’s, imagining his eventual arrest for two crimes he did not commit, closing soliloquy: “[addressing mankind as a whole] Someday a car will stop that you never thumbed. Yes. Fate, or some mysterious force, can put the finger on you or me for no good reason at all” (Detour). In his own steely and tight-lipped manner, Jeff Markham appears resigned to the blind caprices of fate, as well. Though his stylistic mien is the diametric opposite of Roberts’s head-scratching befuddlement, Markham’s attitude toward the things that happen to him—whether they be turns of event without pinpointable causality, or those occurrences that are the direct consequence of his decisions (the predominant mode)—is markedly similar. As a general rule, in a film like Out of the Past, where the protagonist and narratorial consciousness perishes, one must be careful not to retroactively interpret the unfolding plot through a fatalistic lens. But, by and large, Markham seems from the inaugural second to be destined for demise. In a variation on the inscrutable and externally catalyzed plight of the ever-puzzled Al Roberts, Jeff Markham’s dissolution is mostly self-inflicted, his hamartia manifesting as an irrepressible obsession with Kathie Moffat. Early in Out of the Past, we are given glimpse of the opportunity Jeff Markham, alias Jeff Bailey, is afforded to lead a normal, quotidian life. Courting Ann Miller (who is portrayed by Virginia Huston as the archetypically guileless and goodhearted small-town girl), helming a small filling station, Markham appears to have acquired all the requisite trappings, all the bureaucratic ephemera necessary to be considered a shareholder in the American Dream, LLC. But, far from sating him, this stint as a proverbial Joe Public renders Markham deadpan and passionless. According to John Tusk, Markham “is corrupted by desires which vitiate his ability to be a good husband and provider,” and his words and actions do seem to bear out this blatantly Calvinistic reading (212). Staking out a crummy gin-joint, Markham muses, in a detached and out-of-body timbre, on the utter senselessness of endeavoring to find Kathie again—an undertaking which previously almost cost him his life, livelihood, and mental solvency: “I knew I’d go every night until she showed up. I knew she knew it. I sat there and drank bourbon and shut my eyes [.] […] I knew where I was and what I was doing…what a sucker I was. I even knew she wouldn’t come the first night. But I sat there, grinding it out” (Out of the Past). And, most explicitly, in one of the film’s more memorable scenes, when Kathie confesses her past misdoings in a deluge of contrition, Markham simply responds, “Baby, I don’t care” (Out of the Past). As is evident, Markham’s obsession with Kathie—avatar of reprobation and ruin, antithesis of the seemly and upright Ann Miller—and his subsequent death, is not just chanced upon, a nasty situation stumbled into a la Al Roberts, but actively marched toward. For Markham, the tumult and devastation that Kathie personifies is preferable to the chintzy anguish of his life in Bridgeport. And, most importantly, he is metacognitive of this value hierarchy from the film’s opening. In his monograph Mythologies, Roland Barthes famously described “the principle of myth” as the transformation of “history into nature” (Barthes 129). I can think of no better aphorism than this for parsing and translating the staunch determinism that hangs like a pall over the plots of Out of the Past and Detour. By bedeviling their respective protagonists—barraging them with overawing tribulations and, ultimately, relegating them to dysphoric and grisly ends (all while claiming the begetter of these hardships is ‘fate,’ a force at once undeniably innate and conveniently apolitical)—these films allegorize, and meta-textually chide, the trend in Old Hollywood, and the motion picture industry in general, to show characters whose epistemological standpoint or psychosocial orientation exists in any way outside the sanctified binary of worker/consumer summarily punished. This narrative machination is, of course, demanded by the larger Culture Industry. As mentioned earlier in this essay, popular media must portray anyone who even in the slightest spurns this binary as mutant and unnatural: a fatally-flawed outcast, ostracized by polite society, teetering always on the fringes of disaster and disrepair (as Horkheimer and Adorno observe: “anyone [in the world of film] who goes cold and hungry, even if his prospects were once good, is branded an outsider”); lest the viewing masses—themselves fleeing the boredom and ennui of their jobs—get the idea that it is possible to live some other way, or permissible to even ponder it (150). According to Horkheimer and Adorno, in a late-stage capitalist society, the transcendent purpose of all culture is to “hammer into every brain the old lesson that continuous friction, the breaking down of all individual resistance, is the condition of life[.] […] Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate in real life get their thrashing so that the audience can learn to take their own punishment” (Adorno 138). Thus, in Old Hollywood filmmaking, ‘fate’ is just the mystified—I am using the term in its Marxist sense—political agenda of the studio/production executives, legislative censors, and corporate elites who concoct and fund the films in question. With that truth in mind, cohering the treatment of Al Roberts and Jeff Markham is a much simpler task. When we hear Roberts, bewailing the wage-labor system that compels him to play for tips in a lowbrow jazz band, say something like “so when this drunk handed me a ten spot after a request, I couldn’t get very excited. What was it, I asked myself? A piece of paper crawling with germs. Couldn’t buy anything I wanted,” or see Markham gleefully abandon his Hallmark-esque existence in Bridgeport for a higher-voltage life of conspiracy and carnality with Kathie, we know that some kind of ‘celestial,’ i.e. corporal, penalty is coming (Detour). Because this fiercely polemical pressure determined narratalogical structures more so than any fidelity to artistic license or aesthetics, Horkheimer and Adorno view concepts like fate and destiny, in the era of late capitalism, as signifiers of false consciousness: “[Referring to verisimilitude in film] Life in all the aspects which ideology today sets out to duplicate shows up all the more gloriously, powerfully and magnificently, the more it is redolent of necessary suffering. It begins to resemble fate. Tragedy is reduced to the threat to destroy anyone who does not cooperate[.] […] Tragic fate becomes just punishment, which is what [the] bourgeois always tried to turn it into” (152). In this way, the ‘tragedy’ of Al Roberts and Jeff Markham is both teleological and tautological; primarily, it is a didactic lesson for those watching: if you deviate from your state-prescribed vectors of identity (working/consuming), what awaits you is unequivocal downfall. But, since this message is packaged as ‘fate’—an example of what Kenneth Burke would call a “God-term”—then their downfall becomes a tautological necessity. By exerting their power and influence over mass culture, capitalists have indeed been able to make what was historically contingent (i.e. the largely one-sided relationship—glaringly so post Taft-Hartley act (1948)—between labor and ascendant capital in postwar America) seem fated and natural, hence the Barthes’ quote (Burke 355). At this juncture, it seems pertinent to speak to the concertedness of Ulmer and Tourneur’s winking critique of the film industry. That is, how can we know that they intentionally weaponized, not simply parroted, the tropes and stylistic bromides of the Old Hollywood machine? And can these films in good faith be read as trenchant denunciations of American Culture, with the film industry functioning as a symbol of its alienation and bloodless excesses? The case for this, I hope, has been implicitly assembled throughout. But, beyond the prevailing critical estimation that these films “serve as counterweight to the typical product of the Hollywood dream factory,” there is further evidence that Tourneur and Ulmer, for reasons both personal and ideological, were disenchanted with commercial filmmaking and the postwar cultural climate (Cantor 141). Examining Tourneur’s oeuvre, there are numerous examples in the films he directed of moneyed interests, whether it be the landed gentry or urban, finance-based powerbrokers, using imagined culture grievances to misdirect the fear and anxieties of the masses, usually heaping them onto some equally oppressed ‘other,’ and preserve the economic order. In one of his better known films--Stars in My Crown, set in the Reconstruction-era South—an esteemed local businessmen fans the flames of racial tension and cultural embitterment to eliminate competition and expand his predatory mining empire. This mimics in miniature how the culture industry broadly functions in the real world: not only as a stifler of unrest and punisher of dissent, but gatekeeper for popular opinion and sentiment. It also aligns with Horkheimer’s view of the teleological mandate of culture in our times: “The task [of culture] in late capitalism is to remodel the population into a collectivity ready for any civilian and military purpose, so that it functions in the hands of the newly restructured ruling class” (Horkheimer 120). Ulmer, as well, harbored a deep distrust for Hollywood. And, given the particulars of his career, this disdain is justifiable. According to Paul A. Cantor, Ulmer both lived and lost the Hollywood dream: after directing The Black Cat, a critical and commercial triumph, “Ulmer’s future seemed bright. But […] he had an affair with the wife of a nephew of Carl Laemmle, the head of Universal. The resulting divorce and Ulmer’s marriage to the woman he loved led to his being banished from the Universal lot […] [and] effectively exiled [from Hollywood] for over a decade, thus sending him off on his checkered career as a more or less independent filmmaker, or at least operating largely outside the major studio system” (143). With these distinct travails in mind, it is hard not to read Al Roberts as autobiographical; like his ever-dispirited fictional stand-in, Ulmer obviously knew what it meant to be a victim of the baffling caprices of fate and fortune, or the political and corporate potentates that masquerade as ‘fate’ in the era of late capitalism. The lives and works of both directors, in fact, suggest overt ideological affinities with the Frankfurt school. That is why the critical espousings of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno are such a useful heuristic for understanding Detour and Out of the Past. Not only do they make blatant certain thematic undercurrents and subtly implanted subtexts that might otherwise be glanced over, but they also outline how said films function as both mimetic analogs to the decade-specific (1940s) struggle between worker and owner, and enunciate how The Culture Industry’s infiltration of the working class psyche enkindled the ambivalence and apathy that would eventually allow the forces of capital to, through attrition, bridge the gap between what David Harvey calls the “embedded liberalism” of postwar America and the rampant, unleavened neoliberalism that was soon to follow (Harvey 11). Works Cited Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia. Verso, 2020. Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Verso, 2016. Auerbach, Jonathan. Dark Borders: Film Noir and American Citizenship. Duke UP, 2011. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Hill and Wang, 2013. Broe, Dennis. Film Noir, American Workers, and Postwar Hollywood. Florida UP, 2009. Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. California UP, 1969. Cantor, Paul A. “America as Wasteland in Edgar Ulmer’s Detour.” The Philosophy of Film Noir, edited by Mark T. Conard, Kentucky UP, 2007, pp.139-161. Conard, Mark T. “Introduction.” The Philosophy of Film Noir, edited by Mark T. Conard, Kentucky Up, 2007, pp. 1-4. Detour. Directed by Edgar G. Ulmer. Producers Releasing Corporation, 1945. Dixon, Wheeler Winston. Film Noir and the Cinema of Paranoia. Rutgers UP, 2009. Garrido, Carlos. “Critique of the Misunderstanding Concerning Marx’s Base-Superstructure Spatial Metaphor.” Hampton Institute, 27 June 2021, https://www.hamptonthink.org/read/critique-of-the-misunderstanding-concerning-marxs-base-superstructure-spatial-metaphor#_ednref2. Accessed 3 June 2023. Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford UP, 2007. Horkheimer, Max. “The Jews in Europe.” Critical Theory and Society: A Reader, edited by Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas MacKay Kellner, Routledge, 1989, pp. 77-94. Lint, Tina Olsin. “The Dark Side of the Dream: The Image of Los Angeles in Film Noir.” Southern California Quarterly, Vol. 69, No. 4, Winter 1987, pp. 329-348. Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press, 2007. Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. Beacon Press, 1974. Osteen, Mark. Nightmare Alley: Film Noir and the American Dream. Johns Hopkins UP, 2014. Out of the Past. Directed by Jacques Tourneur. RKO Radio Pictures, 1947. Porfiro, Robert. “Foreward.” The Philosophy of Film Noir, edited by Mark T. Conard, Kentucky UP, 2007, pp. ix-xiii Rockhill, Gabriel. “The CIA & the Frankfurt School’s Anti-Communism.” The Philosophical Salon, 27 June 2022, https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-cia-the-frankfurt-schools-anti-communism/. Accessed 3 June 2023. Smail, David. Power, Interest and Psychology: Elements of a Social Materialist Understanding of Distress. PCCS Books, 2005. Tuska, John. Dark Cinema: American Film Noir in Cultural Perspective. Greenwood Press, 1984. Author Ian Hall was born & reared in Eastern Kentucky. His scholarship is featured in Appalachian Journal and The Southeast Review, among others. Archives June 2023 6/14/2023 The Purity Fetish and Middle Class Radicalism: Review and Application of Garrido's The Purity Fetish. By: Paul SoRead NowCarlos Garrido’s book The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism is undoubtedly an essential reading for any revolutionary American Marxist who is serious about building socialism. It is an open secret, and an embarrassment, among leftists in the west that they are politically impotent. Despite the fact that an increasing number of millennials and generation z’s in the United States have a positive attitude towards socialism and Marxism, Marxists remain relatively impotent. Notwithstanding the rising popularity of Marxism, this popularity has not, as of yet anyway, transitioned into political action with significant impact on the world. Garrido, like any good Marxist, believes that one of the key contributing factors to the impotence of our socialist movement is due to our lack of understanding what Marxism really means. So, what is Marxism? Marxism is a worldview that seeks to understand all things in terms of their movement or change. Every movement, and every change, is made up of the ‘struggle’ between interpenetrating forces within a given thing. Capitalism is a historically specific mode of production, but it can’t be understood statically as a stationary object frozen in time. Rather, capitalism must be understood dialectically as a dynamic system in motion which consists of an internal contradiction between labor and capital. More specifically, its movement is accumulation of capital at the expense of labor. It is this very antagonism between capital and labor, in the form of accumulation, that turns into another species of movement: stagnation. But this species of movement creates conditions for a qualitatively new species of movement: revolution. The above insight is just a summation, a gist if you will, of Marx’s dialectical materialism. Where the Western left seems to get hung up, however, is not in understanding abstract reasoning like this, but in its application to real-world issues. It’s one thing, after all, to grasp dialectical materialism on paper, but it’s quite another to apply dialectics in practice to understand the world that is in constant motion. Garrido argues that Western Marxists refuse to support successful socialist revolutions because of an inability to understand the objective revolutionary motion of socialist projects. Instead of the application of this dialectical materialist worldview, even when knowing the words written about it by Marx and Engels, they arrive at dogmatic conclusions about particular characteristics socialism must have in order to qualify as socialism, a pure socialism that exists only in the abstract realm of thought. And so, even when capitalist and feudal modes of production were qualitatively transformed into socialism against the background of imperialist encirclement, Western Marxists focus on the intrinsic attributes or lack thereof in socialist projects. Instead of looking at the objective motion, driven by both internal and external contradictions, of each successful socialist revolution, they focus on intrinsic “defects” of said revolutions and conclude that they aren’t real socialist revolutions. This is a very obvious failure to apply a materialist dialectic to societal motion, just as Carlos explains in the book. But why do they fail to apply dialectics? Carlos’s answer is the Purity Fetish. Marxist scholars Domenico Losurdo and Jones Manoel critique Western Marxism in a similar way, explaining this rejection of socialism in the real world as desire for an ideal and pure socialist revolution without any blemish. Lusordo and Manoel contend that this desire for purity is influenced by the Judeo-Christian tradition that values purity and innocence. All three thinkers agree that Western Marxism’s refusal to support successful revolutions stems from its fetishization of purity, but Carlos offers an alternative and more compelling explanation for the origin of this purity fetish. In particular, he argues that the purity fetish is ultimately rooted in the Eleatic school of thought. What is characteristic of the Eleatic School’s outlook is Zeno of Elea’s conclusion that denies the existence of motion based on his affirmation that our entire reality is one homogenous, unchanging, and pure being. Zeno of Elea’s argument for his conclusion goes something like this: suppose an archer shoots an arrow at his target and when one pauses at a specific moment (the beginning) an arrow just barely leaves an archer’s bow. At this specific moment there is a measurable distance between an arrow and its target. Supposedly it takes an arrow a specific duration of time to reach its target. However, there are infinite divisions, and within each division there are infinite subdivisions, in between the beginning point (arrow just leaving an archer’s hand) and the end point (arrow hitting its target) that result in an infinity of infinitesimal intervals. An arrow must traverse each infinitesimal interval between its beginning point and end point, but precisely because there are infinite infinitesimal intervals an arrow can’t traverse all of them to reach its ultimate destination. Zeno concludes from this reasoning that motion is an illusion and what really exists is an infinite series of snapshots of an arrow at rest in different positions for each snapshot. Zeno denies the existence of motion because it involves a contradiction. What’s the contradiction? It’s that there are infinite infinitesimal intervals between the arrow’s origin and its destination and at the same time the arrow traverses through all of them and reaches its target. Zeno assumes that both facts can’t be true. In the light of this contradiction, Zeno denies that the arrow traverses through all infinite infinitesimal intervals and subsequently concludes that motion is an illusion. In stark contrast to Zeno’s denial of motion, Heraclitus affirms the existence of motion because he understands it as a unity of two contrary forces. Heraclitus sees motion, a unity of contrary forces, as an intrinsic feature, not a bug, of reality. Unlike Zeno, Heraclitus holds that reality is not one homogenous, unchanging, and pure being, but a unified reality consisting of contrary forces pulling and pushing against one another. Overall, Zeno denies motion precisely because he believes in a pure, unchanging, and homogenous reality that doesn’t contain any impurity, whereas Heraclitus believes in motion because he believes in an impure, changing, and heterogenous reality that consists of contrary forces in constant tension with one another. And so, this character of the Eleatic School does not simply deny motion, but fetishizes purity, as that which breaks purity must only be an illusion for it. This is the complete opposite of Marxism, a worldview which has its Heraclitian heritage, inherited from Hegel’s dialectics, manifested in its systematic analysis of motion as contradictions. We see here, then, that these Western ‘Marxists’ arrive not from the roots of Marxism at all, but instead, from the Eleatic school of thought, which takes a far different path from Marxism to arrive at modern conclusions. And what conclusions. For example, the refusal to acknowledge China’s project of socialist construction because it does not conform to their ideal and abstract archetype of unadulterated socialism purged of impurities and contradictions. Specifically, according to Western Marxists, since China’s economic system is a market economy where class exploitation, private property, and mass commodity production exist, how can China legitimately claim to be a socialist country? It is not the idea of socialism held in their heads, after all. In contrast to Western Marxists, Carlos cites Chinese Marxists who argue that socialism is not an abstract universal without any impurities and contradictions, but rather it is a contradictory process of construction where the market functions like a scaffolder, arriving from the Marxist school to give us all a breath of fresh air and dialectics. Chinese Marxists argue that Marx observed in Capital that markets exist in pre-capitalist modes of production such as ancient slave societies and feudal societies. Nobody concludes from such observation that such societies are capitalist. While markets are essential to capitalism, capitalism isn’t simply a market economy. A market in an ancient slave society exists as a groundwork for the commodification of human beings as slaves for exchange. A market in a feudal society exists for guilds and peasants to produce and sell their surplus of goods. Overall, a market plays a different function under different modes of production. Like anything else, a market can’t be analyzed in isolation, but rather it must be analyzed in relation to a mode of production that encompasses it. A socialist market doesn’t exist ultimately for the accumulation of capital. Rather, the accumulation of capital is an extension of developing productive forces. Specifically, in the context of China, accumulation of capital translates into an accumulation of productive forces; this is the primary purpose of accumulation of capital for the Communist Party of China. Any surplus of wealth that is accumulated is invested into developing infrastructure, factories, machineries, and other forms of technology essential to developing China’s economy. Furthermore, the surplus of wealth is also invested back into its country to eliminate extreme poverty. Overall, while the accumulation of capital controlled by the dictatorship of the proletariat creates wealth inequality, it also develops the productive forces and eliminates extreme poverty because the worker state is able to control how the generated wealth is invested as part of its overall central plan for the economy. While “capitalists” exist, they are subordinated to the state that represents the interest of the working class. If socialism is understood in the abstract as simply workers controlling the means of production, one might find the above account of China’s socialist market economy to be a mere rationalization. Afterall, China has capitalists. How can a socialist country have billionaires? However, one must keep in mind that Marx understood socialism as a process or movement towards a new form of society. In the case of China, it was Mao who pointed out that during this process there still exist classes, and therefore some level of exploitation. While the bourgeoisie went through a complete expropriation of political power, they haven’t yet experienced full economic expropriation. In other words, the bourgeoisie experiences political expropriation insofar as it no longer has significant control over the state apparatus to enforce and protect their collective class interest, but economic expropriation of their means of production is not yet fully completed. Marx suggests this when he wrote in the Communist Manifesto (Chapter 2): “The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.” (My emphases) In the above passage, when Marx speaks of the proletariat using its political supremacy, he’s assuming a scenario where the proletariat has already politically expropriated the bourgeoisie and thereby established its political supremacy by creating a new state apparatus for the working masses. However, Marx also adds that when the proletariat uses its political supremacy to expropriate capital from the bourgeoisie, it will have to do so by degree rather than all at once (and history has played out precisely in this manner - there has never been a revolution that simply eliminated all bourgeois right, all capital from their class, etc., at once - always, it has been by varying degrees based on the conditions prevailing within a given revolution and what challenges it faced). This implies that economic expropriation is not yet complete while political expropriation is already complete. In effect, classes, and therefore exploitation and private property, can and to some degree must exist during the process of socialist construction. Economic expropriation, then, is an ongoing process during the process of socialist construction, but it isn’t necessarily prioritized in the case of China because the development of productive forces takes primacy. China’s case, with the knowledge of Marx’s theory, illustrates that how socialism is constructed in China will take on a particular form that is unique to China’s condition. In the Soviet Union economic expropriation took place rapidly after the Soviet Union’s NEP period, but China’s economic expropriation is an ongoing and unfinished process because it takes priority in developing its productive forces through its market. Why is this the case? Chinese Marxists since Mao theorized that China is in the preliminary stage of socialism (also known as the primary stage of socialism) where socialism is particularly underdeveloped because it inherited underdeveloped productive forces from China’s feudal agrarian and semi-colonial past. Even after a series of five year plans under Mao when China enjoyed substantial development, China was still far behind western capitalist countries whose productive forces were highly developed, due in large part to their four centuries of plunder, enslavement, colonization, and expropriation. How can China construct a highly developed and modern socialist economy given its relatively unique history of underdevelopment? It’s important to step back for a moment and recall one very important aspect of dialectics: the dialectical interpenetration between the universal and the particular. For the Marxist worldview, Socialism is conceived as an abstract category or a universal. However, like all universals, socialism only becomes realized through its concretization in a particular form. A universal that remains detached from reality is merely something that happens in the realm of thought. When a universal takes on a particular form through historical development driven by contradictions, contrary forces, and based on its conditions, it exists in material reality because it exists through a particular. Just as there is no such thing as a pure and fixed universal “dog” without any diversity and particularity of dogs conditioned by the history of breeding and evolution, there is no such thing as a pure and fixed universal “socialism” without a variety of historically conditioned particulars of socialism. The dialectical relationship between universal and particulars is key to understanding not only dialectical materialism, but also the Purity Fetish. Essential to the theory is the complete alienation of the universal from the particulars. The result of this alienation of a universal from particulars is a pure, abstract, and fixed universal, which means it is also a completely dead, hollow, and destitute universal - as opposed to an organic, rich, rooted, concretized or particularized universal embodied in a material world as an embodied particular in motion. A universal embodies a particular form with its own internal contradiction propelling it to develop and unfold itself in a complex and hostile material world. In other words, there is no such thing as a pure and ideal oak tree without an acorn. An oak tree must take on a particular form, but this form has its own particular ‘moments’ necessary for the development of the oak tree. The oak tree begins by taking the embryonic particular form of an acorn, so that the particular acorn can fully develop to realize its potential to become an oak tree. In this context, there is an interpenetration of opposites between a particular embryonic form (acorn) and a universal that constitutes its real content (oak tree). A particular embryonic form is unintelligible without a universal in the same way one can’t understand an acorn without understanding its real content, an oak tree, ready to unfold in motion. In effect, both the universal and its embryonic particular belong to one another as one organic whole consisting of a unity of opposites. Thus, if an oak tree as a universal is alienated from its particular, the acorn, we simply have a dead and impoverished universal that merely exists as an abstract thought, the particular is nothing more than an empty carrier. It is this estrangement between a universal and a particular, a fissure that breaks apart an organic whole into two artificially separate things, that results in a dismembered corpse. What is a dismembered corpse to a dialectician is preserved perfection to a purity fetishist. In essence, the Purity Fetish is an alienation of the universal from its particulars by reifying the universal as more real and perfect than particulars. To reify is to not only abstract the universal from its particulars like one would abstract the universal “dog” from a tapestry of particular or individual dogs (e.g., from a German Sheppard to a poodle), but also treating an abstraction or universal as independent from its concrete particulars and more real than its particulars. This is an error because the universal can’t exist without its particulars. Thus, purity fetishists commit this error of reifying universals by treating the universal as more real than its particulars. So much more real, in fact, that the actually existing and therefore particular version of a universal couldn’t possibly embody it. The universal is treated as a transhistorical archetype that transcends the particulars as opposed to being embodied in them. Because the universal is treated as not only alien to the particulars, but also more dominant over them due to its alleged perfection, it is also fetishized as having independent authority or power over the particulars; the particulars must conform to the universal’s dictum rather than the universal adapting and living through the particulars. To fetishize something isn’t necessarily to sexualize it, but to treat it as possessing a supernatural or sacred quality, power, or authority when in fact it doesn’t really possess such features. Universals are fetishized by purity fetishists because they are treated as having a supernatural or sacred quality, power, or authority of commanding particulars to imitate them, but in reality they lack such features because they can only exist through a particular. Socialism is reified and fetishized by Western Marxists as an independent and abstract universal possessing an innate authority over how particular socialist revolutions are supposed to proceed. They believe that particular socialist projects are supposed to imitate this pure and abstract universal which they call “socialism.” In this sense, the Western “Marxists” (Scare quotes necessary) resemble Platonists who believe the realm of particulars are supposed to imitate the realm of universals because of the latter’s perfection. It is Plato who believes in the fundamental divide between the universal and particulars; the universals were more real, perfect, and eternal than the particulars - and conversely, the particulars were imperfect and distorted imitations of the universals. The universals live in the celestial, transcendent, and incorruptible realm of ideas while the particulars dwell in the terrestrial, material, and corruptible realm where all things are fleeting. Western Marxists treat socialism in this way, as a perfect archetype that exists in the realm of ideas but hasn’t materialized in the realm of particulars. In reality, socialism is an organic and concrete whole, a unity of opposites between the universal and its particular socialist project. Treating socialism as only identical to the universal is to alienate the universal from its particular. Overall, the Purity Fetish denies the objective motion of society – revolution – because it is made impure in its concretization, in the real world, which is necessarily impure and contradictory. Underneath this denial of motion is the unconscious attempt to alienate universals from particulars by reifying universals as more real and perfect than particulars and fetishizing universals as possessing an innate authority over particulars. Socialism as a universal is reified by Western Marxists as more real than particular socialist projects, holding it above reality, fetishizing it. The purity fetish of Western Marxists is essentially platonic because it segregates the universals and particulars into artificially separate realms: the perfect realm of suprasensible ideas and the imperfect realm of particulars - the only difference is that the Western Marxists do this on an ideological level, whereas Plato was quite conscious of his thought and reasoning. For the Western “left”, socialism only exists in the realm of ideas, only to be imitated by socialist projects. In effect, socialism as an alienated and estranged universal is therefore deprived and hollowed out of all its real content, as opposed to a universal that embodies a particular form in motion. Marxism is then turned from a worldview which strives to change the world to a platonic and idealist worldview that interprets what socialism is supposed to mean in the realm of ideas where no motion is taking place at all. This, in effect, is the absolute poverty of particulars - and the very essence of dogmatism. On Middle Class Radicalism: Gus Hall wrote a paper in 1970 developing an addition to Marxism Leninism for the American context - the theory of petty bourgeois radicalism, or what I call middle class radicalism. The middle class radicals, as I understand it, are essentially the same as Gus Hall’s petty bourgeois radicals in meaning, but I use the term “middle class radicals” to denote a stratum of the middle class, a class which developed during the Cold War Era in affluent capitalist countries such as the United States. Like the proletariat, the middle class consists of workers who don’t own the means of production and live on the sale of their labor power, but unlike the proletariat the middle class workers don’t have the same relationship to the reserve army of labor. The proletariat can only exchange his labor power for a wage that is equivalent to its means of subsistence and therefore it is incapable of accumulating above its means of subsistence. It is precisely because the proletariat can’t accumulate above his means of subsistence through the sale of his labor power that he lives in constant precarity and is at the razor thin edge of joining the reserve army of labor. However, the middle class worker can exchange his labor power for a highly secure and well paid job from which he receives an income that is above his means of subsistence because his income affords him means of stability. A middle class worker’s means of stability is his house, car, retirement pension, and possibly a small amount of capital in the form of stocks or shares. It is the middle class’s accumulation of means of stability through the sale of their labor power among other things that protects them from the risk of joining the reserve army of labor. The accumulated means of stability creates and reproduces conditions that not only determine middle class social consciousness, but differentiates it from that of the proletariat whose precarious condition is living on means of subsistence acquired through wage labor. When this material basis for the middle class is under threat by crises of capitalism, the middle class is losing its means of stability and enters into the condition of precarity, giving rise to middle class radicalism.[1] In his Crisis of Petty Bourgeois Radicalism, Hall identifies two major characteristics, both of which, according to my analysis above, could be updated to include analysis of the purity fetish. First, middle class radicals develop concepts they take to be revolutionary, but in practice those concepts bounce off from reality because such concepts are based on unreal abstractions. Second, middle class radicals reject class struggle, including the proletariat, as the vehicle for revolution. The first characteristic is explained by the second – because middle class radicals reject class struggle as the vehicle for revolutionary change, their concepts are divorced from reality. What drives their rejection of the proletariat? The worldview of the purity fetish. The proletariat in the United States was created by a historical process of contradictory forces that were behind the development of capitalism. Slavery, colonization, genocidal expropriation (settler-colonialism), conquest, exploitation of immigration, and so on created the foundations for the expansion of American capital. Such conditions created a variety of dispossessed peoples whose labor was ripe for exploitation by capital. Without these contradictory processes, the American working class wouldn't have existed today. The working class as a universal embodies an embryonic particular form of an American working class and develops through these contradictory processes of the so-called primitive accumulation of capital. At the same time, it must not be forgotten that the American Civil War, Reconstruction, the civil rights political revolution (often wrongly reduced to a movement), and so on also contributed to the development of the working class. This contradictory motion, constituted by progressive push and reactionary pull, has created and developed the working class of today. Middle class radicals reject that the working class in America is a revolutionary agent because of those impure and contradictory processes that created conditions for its production and reproduction. Without slavery, settler-colonialism, expansionism, and so on, the working class wouldn’t have existed today. So Middle class radicals reason that the working class benefited from the past that created their condition for reproduction as a class. After all, capitalism in the U.S. is built on stolen land and resources. But capitalism can only exist when land and resources are transformed into constant capital owned by capitalists, and it is this very same transformation that constitutes dispossession and expropriation for the masses and their descendants. Capitalism takes on a particular form in the United States; it takes on an embryonic form of settler-colonialism which begins as genocidal expropriation of indigenous peoples, enslavement of Africans, and indentured servitude of poor Europeans in order to transform all land and resources into embryonic capital. Once settler-colonialism has created conditions hospitable for capitalism, it begins hatching its particular shell to emerge as industrial capitalism, feeding the textile mills of the British Empire with slave labor cotton. In this sense, in the context of America’s history of class struggle, settler-colonialism is embryonic capitalism. Settler-colonialism’s transformation into mature capitalism has created the proletariat much in the similar way that expropriation of the commons, which transformed them into capital, transformed peasants into proletarians. It is the inhumane and heterogeneous process of settler-colonialism with its slavery and genocidal expropriation that has created the proletariat of America. Once the proletariat was created it was never docile and servile, but rebellious from the beginning (and even beforehand, if we want to go back to the original abolition movements). The Civil War (including the general strike of enslaved proletarians), Reconstruction (including the dictatorship of the proletariat that took place), Pullman strike, Haymarket affairs, the battle of Blair Mountain, and so on are all testament to the proletariat’s tendency to rebel. The transformation of settler-colonialism (embryonic capitalism) into capitalism in the US has created the proletariat, but just like all other forms this universal of ‘proletariat’ has taken on in other times and places, the US proletariat has had advanced sections that represent the future of the class, and those advanced sections led the charge in the contradiction between the proletariat and bourgeoisie in the American context, the same as other forms have in other contexts. Despite this nuanced and contradictory history of American class struggle, middle class radicals of the US reject their proletariat. They point out the mass lynchings of the white proletariat against their black counterparts, but fail to recognize these black counter-parts as part of the same class, and at our most revolutionary moments, representing the vanguard of the entire class. They ignore that the American proletariat as a whole, like all things, has its own internal contradiction between various peoples of all colors. Nothing exists without any internal contradiction. This doesn’t excuse mass lynchings at all. The proletariat of now, which is far more advanced than it was a century ago, wouldn't have been the same without Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Revolution that created conditions for the proletariat’s further advancement. Instead of studying the American proletariat in motion, driven by its own internal contradiction between various proletarian peoples and the struggle against their exploiters, middle class radicals subconsciously imagine an alienated yet perfect archetype of the proletariat, the revolutionary agent, absent of any internal contradiction and thereby incapable of embodying an imperfect particular form. Middle class radicals treat the revolutionary agent as a pure and abstract universal whose origin can’t contain a single pollutant. Perfection must come from perfection. But you can’t separate a thing produced by its condition from the condition that produced it. Detaching the proletariat from its impure condition to preserve its pure essence is to destroy it. The “proletariat-ness” of the American proletariat can’t be alienated from the historical process and conditions that created it. Settler-colonialism in America as embryonic capitalism, developing into a mature capitalism, has created the American proletariat, but one can’t claim that this proletariat can’t be the real proletariat just by extracting their class character and history away from them and treating this abstract class character as too pure for them to claim. Class character will always take on a historically particular form of real and concrete people embedded in and created by their material conditions. In essence, middle class radicals alienate the universal revolutionary agent from its particular American form by reifying it as more perfect and real than the particular and concrete working class of America. Middle class radicals fetishize the universal revolutionary agent as having independent power and authority over the particular working class in America to imitate it. Since the particular working class of America fails to imitate this dead and impoverished universal that middle class radicals take to be more perfect and real, the real, living, and concrete working class is rejected, dismissed in a hundred different ways, according to whatever subject may give rise to the dismissal in a given form. Middle class radicals develop concepts divorced from reality: they predicate their understanding on a view of the ideal and perfect revolutionary agent that doesn’t exist in reality, and precisely because their particular working class fails to imitate this dead universal, they reject their working class for the pure ideal. This is the form in which middle class radicals, governed by the purity fetish worldview, reject class struggle as a whole. Until we are able to address and overcome the purity fetish, this middle class radical section of society will continue to be a thorn in the side of revolutionary organization - a thorn we can scarcely afford in the current era. While this doesn't mean that the remnants of the middle classes can't be organized in revolutionary organs of worker power, it does mean that their middle class instinct and purity fetish consciousness must be abandoned for the dialectical materialist worldview - the historical outlook of the most advanced sections of the workers and communist movement. [1] This analysis is inspired by Noah Khrachvik’s theoretical contribution in his work about re-proletarianization, which will be featured in his upcoming text, Re-proletarianization: The Life and Death of the American Middle Classes (Forthcoming 2023). Author Paul So is a PhD student in philosophy at University of California Santa Barbara. He received his MA in Philosophy from Texas Tech University (2017) and later received his MA in Bioethics from New York University (2019). While his original research interest was on Philosophy of Mind, he developed his newfound passion in Marxism not only as his research interest, but also as his world outlook. His current research for his dissertation focuses on Karl Marx’s account of alienated labor, Labor Republicanism, and Structural Domination. Paul enjoys taking a long walk, lifting weights in the gym, and visiting art galleries and museums. Archives June 2023 |
Details
Archives
March 2024
Categories
All
|