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
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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 6/13/2023 Book Launch Presentation: The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism. By: Carlos L. GarridoRead NowThis is a transcript from Carlos Garrido's presentation at the book launch of recent book, The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism, which you may purchase HERE. In an 1875 letter to Wilhelm Bracke, Marx would say that “Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes.” This is the living spirit of Marxist analysis – the emphasis is laid on real struggles, on the forms of social formation these struggles discover in their overturning, to a lesser or greater extent, of the current state of things. This is the essence of one of the most central ways in which Marx and Engels formulate what communism is – as they say in The German Ideology, “Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.” The Purity Fetish outlook which permeates Western Marxism is fundamentally antagonistic to this living and open Marxist worldview (weltanschauung). It holds pure static ideas as sacred, and it consistently rejects reality when such reality desecrates its pure ideals. This is the essence of the purity fetish outlook – it is an incessant passing of judgement grounded on a superficial assessment of whether reality measures up to pure ideas or not. Ideologically, it is deeply rooted in the traditions of Western philosophy, dating back at least to the Eleatic school 500 years before Christ. In this school, thinkers like Parmenides and Zeno would put forth the view that truth is unchanging, one, and indivisible. To accept change, contradiction, and a heterogenous understanding of totality would be to participate in the way of falsity and opinion. With the exceptions of Heraclitus, Hegel, and Marxism, this form of thinking has dominated Western thought up to our day, and, in the Western Marxists, it takes various distinctive forms which, while sustaining the appearance of Marxist analysis, is devoid completely of its revolutionary substance. The diagnosis Engels gave reductive Marxists in an 1890 letter to Conrad Schmidt applies fittingly to Western Marxists – “what all these gentlemen lack is dialectics”. When I first developed the concept of the purity fetish in October of 2021, there was primarily one form through which I observed the purity fetish manifesting itself in Western Marxism. If there is a common thread found in the Western Marxist tradition, it is its unwavering rejection of socialist experiments – especially those led by Communist Parties. In the 1990s, following the overthrow of the Soviet Union, Michael Parenti had labelled them the adherents of “pure socialism,” because they imagine, as he argued, “what socialism would be like in a world far better than this one, where no strong state structure or security force is required, where none of the value produced by workers needs to be expropriated to rebuild society and defend it from invasion and internal sabotage.” Gabriel Rockhill called their brand of “critical theory” ABS theory, as in “Anything But Socialism” – their work, in direct and indirect forms, “ultimately leads to an acceptance of the capitalist order since socialism is judged to be far worse.” The Western Marxists ignore the constant hybrid warfare, as Vijay Prashad labels it, under which the successful revolutionary projects have to construct socialism. They ignore the effects – especially for the experiments in the global South and East – that centuries of colonialism have had in keeping these areas poor and subjugated politically, economically, and culturally to the West. They ignore the colossal pressures, both historically inherited and contemporary, under which socialism is struggled for. And most importantly, they ignore how these pressures shape the parameters of embryonic socialist construction in these areas. As I argue in the book, Socialism is not ‘betrayed’ when, encountering the external and internal pressures of imperialism and a national bourgeois class, it is forced to take more so-called ‘authoritarian’ positions to protect the revolution. Socialism is not ‘betrayed’ or transformed into ‘state capitalism’ (in the derogatory, non-Leninist sense) when faced with a backwards economy it takes the risk of tarrying with its opposite and engages a process of opening up to foreign capital to develop its productive forces. The ‘authoritarian’ moment, or the moment of ‘opening up to foreign capital,’ are not an annihilating negation of socialism – as Western Marxists would have you believe – but the sublation of the idealistic conceptions of a ‘pure’ socialism, especially in its earliest stages. The Western Marxists’ purity fetish makes them immune to seeing socialist construction as a process, one which will, undoubtedly, develop contradictions which will in time be likely overcome. A paradox arises in the Western Marxists sacrosanct abstract ideals: namely, while real socialism is always too impure to obtain their support – these same “Marxists” won’t hesitate to endorse, directly or indirectly, capitalist-imperialism in its attempts to undermine both socialist experiments and non-socialist experiments that exists outside of US imperialism’s spheres of influence. As Alan Freeman and Radhika Desai write in their recent dossier calling for a global anti-imperialist left, "it no longer makes sense to describe [the current Western left] as ‘Left’," since they are, at their core, partisans of the Western imperialist states. This form of so-called Marxism, grounded on the purity fetish outlook, has been for decades an indispensable component of bourgeois hegemony. Their theorist’s role as left-wing delegitimizers of socialist and anti-imperialist states has earned them the part of being tambourines enhancing the tune of mainstream media’s war drums. They are, as I’ve labeled them in the book, the agents of a controlled counter-hegemony – the radical recuperators, as Rockhill calls them, that absorb any and all dissenting attitudes in the masses into their compatible left, leaving capitalist-imperialism fundamentally unchallenged. At its core the purity fetish Marxists express a form of that which Georg Lukacs called “indirect apologetics:” their superficial repudiation of capitalism – when conjoined with their rejection of real socialism – is one of the most effective ways of affirming the dominant capitalist mode of life. They accept, at least in practice, Churchill’s dictum about capitalism being the worst system except for all the other ones. For them bourgeois liberal democracy is, like the world Leibniz’s God has created, the best of all possible worlds. This makes it the ideal form of controlled opposition; an opposition that buys fully into Thatcher’s TINA (there is no alternative), and hence, will never substantially oppose the existing order, for it considers the alternative far worse. As Keti Chukhrov describes it, their key function is in the “radicalization of the impossibility of exit.” As the general crises of capital are intensified by what John Bellamy Foster has called the “two forms of exterminism: [namely,] nuclear war and the planetary ecological emergency,” it becomes indispensable for Marxists to struggle against this purity fetish outlook. It is a worldview which not only obstructs the acquisition of truth, but vacillates from simply being revolutionary futile to being an indispensable material and ideological force for the conservation of the dominant order. In the US the purity fetish takes an additional two forms which I would like to briefly bring up. In each case, again, it prevents the acquisition of truth and the development of a revolutionary movement. There is a strong current on the left, both in social democrat and in communist spaces, that views the Trump voting part of the working class as constituting a ‘fascist’ threat. These workers are seen as a contaminated basket of deplorables, in the words of comrade Clinton, who are unfit to be organized. As someone who has spent their whole organizing life in the Midwest, the area of the country most densely populated with pro-Trump workers, these sentiments are far from true. But even if they were, even if this was the most backward part of the working class, what is the point of communists if not precisely to lift the consciousness of workers – regardless of their ideological starting point? Would we not just be preaching to the choir if we expected the working class to already meet all the pure standards of our “enlightened” social consciousness? The task of communists is to organize along class lines, not ideological ones, and to raise the consciousness of workers – regardless of their ideological standing – to socialist class consciousness. As Gramsci would put it, the task of the communist is to find the kernels in the masses’ incoherent worldview which could be rearticulated towards socialism. Patronizing attitudes towards the masses makes this task impossible. One must learn from the masses in order to guide them towards socialism. The educator, as Marx noted, must themselves be educated. If the purity fetish leads one to reject organizing the 40 percent or so of workers which voted for Trump, this paralyzes the class struggle at a time when conditions couldn’t be riper for its development. If this is true of those on the ultra-left who ‘cancel’ the Trump part of the working class because it fails to meet their pure standards of what enlightened social consciousness workers must have before being organized, it couldn’t be more true of those fringe elements which see all non-indigenous workers as “settlers.” The second unique form the purity fetish takes in the American Marxists can be found in their assessment of their national past. The dialectical worldview (both in Hegel and in Marxism) rejects the idea of an unchanging, pure, ahistorical universal, and instead urges that universals are necessarily tied to historically conditioned concrete particulars. Universals are always concrete – that is, they exist and take their form through the particular. What does this tell us about socialism? Well, simply that there is no such thing as abstract socialism. Socialism is a universal which cannot exist unless concretized through the particular. In every country it has taken root in, socialism has had to adapt itself to the unique characteristics of the peoples that have waged and won the struggle for political power. In China this has taken the form of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics; in Cuba this has meant incorporating José Martí and the anti-colonial traditions into socialist construction; in Venezuela this has taken the form of Bolivarian socialism; in the Plurinational state of Bolivia this has taken the form of combining Marxism with the indigenous communist traditions which have been around for centuries; in the continent of Africa this has taken the form of Pan-African socialism, and so on. In each case the struggle has been, as Georgi Dimitrov had already noted in 1935, “national in form and socialist in content.” In various parts of the U.S. left, the purity fetish outlook has obscured this historical lesson, and made rampant the phenomenon which Dimitrov called national nihilism. Our people’s history is reduced to slavery, settler colonialism, imperialism, and all the evils of capital and the state. In doing so, they reject drawing from their national past to give form to socialist content. Far from the ‘progressivism’ they see in this, what this actually depicts is a liberal tinted American exceptionalism, which thinks that the struggle for socialism in the US will itself not have to follow this concrete universal tendency seen around the world, where socialism functions as the content which takes form (i.e., concretizes) according to the unique circumstances in which it is being developed. This has prevented the U.S. left from genuinely learning from its progressive history and connecting with its people. It makes impossible the task of rearticulating the kernels of progressive thought in our people’s common sense towards socialism. It prevents the American Marxists from understanding their national past dialectically – as a social totality in constant movement propelled by its immanent objective contradictions. Because our national past is impure, the purity fetish Marxists make the task of learning from our progressive struggles – from Douglass to Du Bois and Winston – impossible; these figures and the movements they were attached to are held to be – in a form of Left-wing McCarthyism – anti-American. The anti-communist myth we fought against last century has been accepted in this one, namely, that America and the American people are on one side and socialism on the other, with an unbridgeable gap in the middle. The acceptance of this McCarthyite nonsense has been thanks to the development of the purity fetish within a greatly debilitated communist movement that was left wandering in the dark after the overthrow of the Soviet Union. But times have changed. And so can we. Today, as the younger generations of Americans face – for the first time in history – living standards worse than their parents; as 60 thousand people continue to die a year because they do not have health insurance; as 60% of Americans are a lost paycheck away from joining the 600 thousand homeless wandering around in a country with 33 times as many empty homes as homeless people; as 34 million Americans, including one in eight children, experience hunger in a country which throws away 40% of its food supply; as stagnant wages and inflation have working class American struggling to make ends meet; as failed proxy wars and global dedollarization kicks in – demonstrating with undoubtable clarity the moribund character of US capitalist-imperialism; as, in short, it becomes clear that neither the people nor the ruling class can continue in the old way – signifying the objective revolutionary conditions of our historical moment – the purity fetish today stands as the primary barrier preventing the development of the subjective conditions for a revolutionary movement. We must overcome the purity fetish outlook before it obliterates our ability to overthrow, in a timely manner, our demented ruling class that is pushing the world to the precipice of nuclear Armageddon in the name of sustaining their global hegemony. These enemies of humanity are wobbling, but, as Lenin said, they will never fall if not toppled over. FULL BOOK LAUNCH HERE: 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 June 2023 This is a transcript from Radhika's presentation at the book launch of Carlos Garrido's The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism, which you may purchase HERE. Thanks for the invitation to be part of this panel of some of the most acute thinkers discussing this very important book. It is important particularly for its focus on dialectics, which is a philosophical mode that is much maligned and misunderstood in the English speaking world, dismissed as ‘Hegelian mystical fog’. Garrido’s is a crystal clear discussion of dialectics and why it matters, very practically, today. In the few minutes I have, I want to liken Carlos’s discussion of what he calls the purity fetish – the inability of most of the Western left to give up its juvenile longing for some sort of pure socialism and embrace socialism in its inevitably soiled earthiness – to Marx’s discussion of ‘the fetish character of commodities’. Though Carlos uses the term fetish in his title and argument, he does not draw the parallels that I see between Marx’s discussion of ‘the fetish character of commodities’ at the end of the first chapter of Capital, volume 1. I also value this opportunity to make this parallel because I am fed up with people, including many scholars claiming to be well versed on Marx and Capital, assuming that the ‘fetishism of commodities’ is about ‘consumerism’. The similarities between Marx’s argument about the fetish character of commodities and Carlos’s argument about the purity fetish become clearest if we begin with what Carlos argues at the close of his introduction: that what can help overcome Western Marxism’s purity fetish is not simply, as Losurdo argues, “learning to build a bridge between the different temporalities” found in Marx’s notion of communism – that is, on one end, the utopian remote future where “society inscribes on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!” and the actual future where communism is described as the “real movement which abolishes the present state of things.” If, for Garrido, this intellectual move is not enough, this is very similar to Marx’s argument that the intellectual recognition of the source of value is not enough to banish the fetish character of commodities. The ‘mystical character’ attaches itself to the commodity thanks to its social form and the three-fold objectivity it gives to historically specific social relations. First is that ‘[t]he equality of the kinds of human labour takes on a physical form in the equal objectivity of the products of labour as values’. Secondly, the measure of the expenditure of human labour-power by its duration takes on the form of the magnitude of the value of the products of labour’. And thirdly, ‘the relationships between the producers, within which the social characteristics of their labours are manifested, take on the form of a social relation between the products of labour’. Thus the fetish character of commodities arises from
However, Marx also argued that the mere intellectual understanding was not going to be enough to banish the mysticism and replace it with clarity. That clarity would only be achieved by a clarification, and thus transformation, of the social relations: The belated scientific discovery that the products of labour, in so far as they are values, are merely the material expressions of the human labour expended to produce them, marks an epoch in the history of mankind's development, but by no means banishes the semblance of objectivity possessed by the social characteristics of labour. Something which is only valid for this particular form of production, … appears to those caught up in the relations of commodity production … to be just as ultimately valid as the fact that the scientific dissection of the air into its component parts left the atmosphere itself unaltered in its physical configuration. The reason is that the appearance arises spontaneously, not from thought but from practice. Men do not therefore bring the products of their labour into relation with each other as values because they see these objects merely as the material integuments of homogeneous human labour. The reverse is true: by equating their different products to each other in exchange as values, they equate their different kinds of labour as human labour. (KI: 166) This means, again in Marx’s words, that The veil is not removed from the countenance of the social life-process, i.e. the process of material production, until it becomes production by freely associated men, and stands under their conscious and planned control. This, however, requires that society possess a material foundation, or a series of material conditions of existence, which in their turn are the natural and spontaneous product of a long and tormented historical development. There is no way of banishing the semblance when it is daily reproduced by human social practice. Carlos’s argument in The Purith Fetish is similar. The purity fetish cannot be removed by mere intellectual advances. It requires the emergence of a different reality, in his case, a different kind of left. Mere intellectual realization of the truth is not enough. Although [it] is important, …. a more accurate ‘cure’ is for Western Marxism to reflect on the objective conditions which drive its purity fetish, and once self-conscious of these, move towards both changing these objective conditions (which means moving away from a PMC dominated left and towards a working class centered left, free of the dominant influence of the PMC Iron Triangle institutions and culture), and towards stripping its purity fetish outlook – something which can only be done through the rearticulation of its ambiguous ideological elements towards a consistent dialectical materialist worldview. In essence, Garrido’s argument is that the purity fetish is rooted in the objective division between intellectual and manual labour which, in late capitalism, had developed into a veritable class divide. Indeed. In the twenty-first century, it is also a national divide, with the intellectual and manual elements of the working class occupying not just different parts of cities or different parts of a country, but different countries. The richer countries of the world not only concentrate within themselves the ‘intellectual’ functions of labour, but also rely on regularly siphoning off the ‘intellectual’ elements of the working classes of the rest of the world, appropriating these, gratis, from the rest of the world. This is also why the struggle for socialism must also always be anti-imperialist. Unless we move on from this sort of left, towards a left that is connected with the real struggles of working people world-wide, we will not be rid of the purity fetish. FULL BOOK LAUNCH HERE: Author Dr. Radhika Desai is a Professor at the Department of Political Studies, and Director of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group at University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. She has proposed a new historical materialist approach to understanding world affairs and geopolitical economy based on the materiality of nations. Some of her recent books include Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire (2013), Karl Polanyi and Twenty First Century Capitalism (2020) Revolutions (2020) and Japan’s Secular Stagnation (2022). Her articles and book chapters appear in international scholarly journals and edited volumes. With Alan Freeman, she co-edits the Geopolitical Economy book series with Manchester University Press and the Future of Capitalism book series with Pluto Press. Her latest book is Capitalism, Coronavirus and War: A Geopolitical Economy, which is now available through open access. Archives June 2023 This is a transcript from Alan's presentation at the book launch of Carlos Garrido's The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism, which you may purchase HERE. Transcription by Emily Doringer Noah Khrachvik: … Alan Freeman is a former principal economist with the Greater London Authority and is now a research affiliate of the University of Manitoba. With Radhika Desai, he is co-director of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group. He is also co-editor of the Future of World Capitalism book series with Pluto Books, and the Geopolitical Economy book series with Manchester University Press He is a committee member of the Association for Heterodox Economics (www.hetecon.net) and a vice-chair of the World Association for Political Economy. He is a board member of Video Pool Winnipeg and the Christopher Freeman Trust, and a former board member of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra. Go ahead, Alan-- Alan Freeman: I’m very pleased to be in this discussion for two reasons. One is that it’s a wonderful book, but the second is that we’re talking, that we have at least three organizations whose origins are completely different, who are sitting around and actually talking. And I must say from my experience on the left—this is a very rare event. This is a very important new stage in the evolution of the left, grounded in actually acknowledging a variety of different views that exist and discussing them out, so that’s a very welcome event, it’s a very welcome book. I often say that I prefer to meet and discuss with people that I don’t agree with than people I agree with because if I discuss with people I agree with, I know what they’re going to say. So, the reason for discussing with people you don’t agree with is precisely to bring out differences, which is the purpose of dialectic. So I am going to kind of, in a humorous way, say, I’m going to throw out a criticism of the book, which is a friendly criticism. I think it’s too soft on the hard left. And I’ll try to do a second thing, which I don’t know if I can do in the time, and that is to bring that into an evaluation of a very important contribution of the book, which is its critique of the Socratic and Platonic tradition. And you may think, “what the hell is the connection between those?” So I’m going to read a few quotes out to you that may make you think more about, you know, what did Plato actually say? The first is Alfred North Whitehead, who said: “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that is consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” So everything you’ve been brought up on, that you’ve been told is the basis of western democracy owes most of what it claims to its heroes Plato and Socrates. What they forget is that both Plato and Socrates were irreconcilable enemies of democracy. Their position in Greek society arose after the defeat of the Athenian democracy in the Peloponnesian War, probably self-inflicted, but nevertheless a defeat. A tyranny of the Council of Thirty, who killed nearly 5% of the Athenian population, exiled many more. And they came to the conclusion after looking at this that the problem was democracy, and what you needed what a rule of the experts, a rule of the philosophers. And this rule had to be based on what Plato calls the “noble lie.” So your recipe for democracy is first of all, you put experts in charge. Don’t have anything to do with democracy which Socrates and Plato both called, “the rule of the ignorant.” And second is you have to lie to them. That’s the foundation of western democracy. And the lie in Plato is justified in the following terms: that it is necessary in order to maintain social harmony, so it’s a “noble lie.” And he tells a fictional tale know as the “Myth (or Parable) of the Metals.” And this is the origin of the Three Social Classes who compose his “Ideal,” his “Pure” republic, which never came into existence. It’s perhaps the first form of the purity fetish. And these are--the gold, the silver, and the iron. And the gold, the silver, and the iron are--the rulers, the workers (the iron), and the guys in the middle who kind of, you know, do the real business. Now I want to put it to you that that “Noble Lie” and the rule of the philosophers are what we are actually getting from the far left. And I explain this in the following way: I have never met a member of the far left who is, and I count myself as a member of the far left, but of a far left purist organization, that has justified supporting the Provisional IRA in Marxist terms, or defending Saddam Hussein in Marxist terms, or defending the Iranian Revolution in Marxist terms, or siding with Russia in the aggression of NATO against it that provoked the current war, in Marxist terms. I’ve never heard any justification for supporting socialist China in Marxist terms, from many of these people. So what are these people? They are apologists for imperialism. Let’s say that bluntly. Let’s say that loud, and let’s say that clearly. And the way they do it is the same as the method of Plato, which is they construct—basically based on a confusion between form and essence – an ideal form: an ideal society has to be like this, and if it’s not, it’s wrong, it’s impure, it’s imperfect. But the doctrine of essence that was developed in the Hegelian-Marxist tradition is something very different. It says, “no, we don’t look at what’s ideal, we look at what lies behind what we see.” Now in both of them they can appear quite similar, because they make a contrast between what you see and what’s really going on. So this gets distorted, I mean I have a lovely quotation from Wolras, the founder of modern economic thesis: “A truth long a go demonstrated by the Platonic philosophy is that science does not study corporeal entities, but universals of which these entities are manifestations. Corporeal entities come and go, but universals remain forever. Universals, their relations, and their laws are the object of all scientific study.” Now that, you know, you could sort of square that with a kind of Hegelian narrative that underneath the reality there lies some, underneath the observed superficial appearance, there lies something. But actually, it’s the opposite. And there’s another beautiful quotation from Plato that illustrates this. Because Plato argued that to stop people resorting to the sin of looking at things as they really were, what you have to do is you have to have gods that are out of reach. So Plato actually invented the idea that the heavens are the abode of the gods. Not Mount Olympus. Because they’re so far above us that you will never have people saying I want to go there and see what’s happening. Nowadays, you do have it, in Plato’s time you didn’t. And he justifies this with this wonderful phrase which I’ve—just sums it all up: “No one can ever gain knowledge of any sensible object by gazing upwards, any more than shutting his mouth and searching for it on the ground because there can be no knowledge of sensible things. These intricate traceries in the sky are no doubt the loveliest and most perfect of material things. But still part of the visible world, and they therefore fall far short of the true realities, the real relative philosophies in the world of pure number and all perfect geometrical figures.” So he says not only can you not see things in the heavens, but there’s no point in looking at the heavens, because the real heaven is even beyond all that. It’s completely inaccessible. Now, how does that work? The gold and the silver and the iron are with us today. The gold is the world created by the imperialists. It’s perfect, it’s wonderful. Everything else is an inferior form of that. Then we have the people who kind of go along with that, and they’re the silver. The people who collaborate with that. And then you have the iron who is everybody else. And everybody else is inferior. The fundamental way that Russians are described in the narrative of the West is in the words of somebody like [EU foreign policy chief] Joseph Borrell: “Europe is a garden, and everywhere else is a jungle.” That’s naked racism, and when people in the Ukrainian government persistently say that the problem is all Russians, not the Russian state, not the Russian government, but all Russians—that naked racism. And it’s only accepted by people from pure Marxism because they use the pure Marxism to prove that Russia is just an imperialist country like any other. Now I’m going to say one more thing to bring all that back together. And this is what you might call the classic origin of purity, which is the way in which Lenin defended the Russian Revolution against the charge of putschism. And he does that by reference to the Paris Commune. And from the notion of the Paris Commune is the dictatorship of the proletariat, or the prototype thereof, there comes the justification that he gives for the Soviet form of the state. I think I have no issue with that at all. But I think that subsequently what happened, is people then, through the purity fetish in its earliest form, said “only if you have a Soviet republic do you have a pure democracy, do you have a real democracy, do you have something that fits the criteria of Marxism-Leninism.” Now what’s wrong with that? Lenin never says that the Paris Commune proves that the ideal form of democracy is Soviet democracy. What he says, and this is essence as opposed to form, is that you cannot have a socialist revolution. You cannot go to a new form of society in which the working class rules, without smashing the existing state. There are a hundred different ways to smash the state. Sometimes it just dissolves itself and then you can have a quiet, peaceful process. Sometimes it fights back very, very hard and then you have to have a revolutionary war. Or, as in China, sometimes you simply have an upsurge against the state, and the state virtually disappears and is replaced by something that you don’t quite understand, like the Iranian state. But to impose on that the criterion that it has to meet the ideal form is to misunderstand the need to look at it from the standpoint of essence. That is, does it advance and defend the interests of working people and does it retard and make more difficult the interests of the property owners? And I’ll finish on a wonderful statement that was given in one of our webinars by an Iranian revolutionary, which is the analogy of the ice cream. He says the way that revolutionaries approach revolutions is they say—"I’m going to an ice cream van, and I’m going to get offered a strawberry ice cream, a Neapolitan ice cream, a vanilla ice cream. And I’ll choose the strawberry one.” He says, when you have a revolution, you don’t get a choice. You get the damn ice cream. And you take what you’re given. I think that notion that you deal with the reality, you look at the essence behind it, but you do not worship form, is the true way that the tradition of Marxism and of all the revolutionary currents one finds, whether they call themselves Marxist or not, should be adopted and taken on board in a rich and broad dialogue – for instance, - with Bolivarianism, with the Iranian revolutionary tradition, with the emerging currents that we now see in the very fervent debate going on in Russia, with the socialist China and the Chinese Communist Party and the Vietnamese Communist Party. That’s the kind of debate we need. A broad debate in which we all engage with each other on the basis of mutual respect without any precondition that we’re going to say, “this is pure” and if you don’t say that, then we’re actually going to go into another shouting match. FULL BOOK LAUNCH: 6/13/2023 On The Dialectics of Socialism and Western Marxisms’ Purity Fetish. By: Gabriel RockhillRead NowThis is a transcript from Gabriel's presentation at the book launch of Carlos Garrido's The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism, which you may purchase HERE. Transcription by Emily Doringer Noah Khrachvik: Our next speaker is Gabriel Rockhill. Gabriel Rockhill is a Franco-American philosopher, cultural critic and activist. He is the founding Director of the Critical Theory Workshop and Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University. His books include Counter-History of the Present: Untimely Interrogations into Globalization, Technology, Democracy (2017), Interventions in Contemporary Thought: History, Politics, Aesthetics (2016), Radical History & the Politics of Art (2014) and Logique de l’histoire (2010). In addition to his scholarly work, he has been actively engaged in extra-academic activities in the art and activist worlds, as well as a regular contributor to public intellectual debate. Follow on twitter: @GabrielRockhill Gabriel Rockhill: Thank you so much, comrades, it’s great to be here with you for this important event. I have a few congratulatory remarks for Carlos, and then I have three comments based on the book, which have to do with elements that inspired my thinking and conversations I’ve been having with organizers in my circles. So first and foremost, I think the book is quite an significant achievement, at two levels at least. One is that it manifests the collective ethos of everything that you’ve been doing at Midwestern Marx, which is quite an incredible undertaking. It is very impressive that a group of people can build on their own such a significant, collectively resourced institute that provides political education, brings people into the struggle, breaks down complex ideas, makes them accessible to a large audience, etc. You occupy a very significant position, and I think an important element of Carlos’s work has to do with the ways in which he’s been working with other people in this collective endeavor, not simply to fight intellectually against the purity fetish, but to build institutional power in order to struggle back against it. Collective institution building should never be given short shrift because it’s one of the most important things we can do. The second achievement is that the book itself is highly accessible and very well written. It is also urgent, insofar as it addresses one the central problems facing the contemporary left, particularly within the imperialist core . It provides a resounding critique of the purity fetish, of controlled counter-hegemony, and other related issues, while also advancing a positive project. So it’s dialectical through and through, and that’s one of its strengths. It’s also a kind of manifesto for the anti-imperialist left. I would therefore encourage everyone to read the book. As Radhika pointed out, it is also relatively thin so you can get through it. It is erudite without being bogged down in academic referentiality. Regarding the points that I want to highlight for discussion, the first one is that Carlos provides us with a very astute account of what I would call the dialectics of socialism. The relationship between capitalism and socialism is not a simple relation between two fixed socio-economic systems, as if there would be capitalism over here, which would be “A” and socialism over here, which would be “B.” On the contrary, socialism is a collective project that is built out of the skeletal system of capitalism in its decline. Therefore, socialism inherits so many of the problems that plague the history of capitalism. And it is tasked with doing something that is nearly impossible, which is moving from a system that is based on profit over people to one in which people are put at the center of the socio-economic system. One of my favorite jokes that I’ve heard about the socialist project is the following: socialism looks good on paper, but in reality… you just get invaded by the United States. This, of course, addresses the fact that we’ve never had a free socialist country emerge in the history of the world. We have only had what Michael Parenti calls “socialism under siege”: every single socialist experiment has been the target of imperialist destruction. This means that socialism as it emerges in the very real world has to deal with these concrete material factors that it does not control, because it is coming from the bottom up, within a world-system dominated by capitalism. Moreover, socialist countries need to develop by starting out from a position within the geopolitical world of structural under-development. They have to do this without relying on many of the principal mechanisms of development under capitalism, such as colonialism and extreme forms of racist super-exploitation. Finally, socialists inherit all of the political and moral injustices of the capitalist system—baked in racism and homophobia, misogyny and gender oppression, all of the ideologies of the capitalist world—as well as ecological degradation. I think that Carlos’s book does a good job of bringing to the fore this dialectics of socialism and the fact that we should never expect a pure and perfect socialist system to spring forth fully formed as if from the head of Zeus. Instead, we should actually anticipate that socialism will be wracked by a whole series of contradictions related to the fact that it is born out of a system of human and environmental degradation, which is the capitalist system. What is absolutely remarkable, and again Carlos’s book brings this to the fore, is that in spite of all of these odds, or against all of these odds, if you look at the quantifiable data that we currently have, socialism has registered some truly remarkable victories. In fact, there’s an interesting study that was done in 1986 that used data from the World Bank, which couldn’t be accused of being a communist sympathizer, and which is arguably the largest body of data globally. This study compared the Physical Quality of Life Index—which is a composite index calculated from life expectancy, infant mortality rate, and literacy rate—in socialist and capitalist countries at similar levels of development. It found that socialist countries had a more favorable performance in 22 of 24 comparisons. So what’s extraordinary is that even though socialism emerges in this dialectical tension with capitalism, it has nonetheless proven itself successful at the level of its material gains for working people. In that regard, Carlos’s book is an invitation for us to think very differently about the socialist project than the Western fetishization of purity tends to make us think about it. That is, it encourages us to both recognize the extreme difficulties of the socialist project and also support and celebrate the incredible gains that have been made for humanity, and for that matter planet Earth, given the environmental policies of socialist countries. On the latter front, there have, of course, been times of significant contradictions between the need to develop the productive forces in underdeveloped countries and the ecological footprint that this brings (until the productive forces have been developed to the point of being able to work through the contradictions, as in contemporary China for instance). My two other comments have to do with a series of thoughts that were provoked in both reading Carlos’s book and then discussing it with some people who are very close to me. The first is how the purity fetish relates to the longstanding criticisms of utopian socialism, and in particular those that were already expressed by Marx and Engels. You can look at the Communist Manifesto or the Poverty of Philosophy, where Marx explains that utopian socialism was largely a product of the lack of development of both the capitalist system and the state of class struggle at that point in time. This meant that the class struggle had not yet fully revealed to the working class the systemic workings of the capitalist ruling class, and therefore scientific socialism, as it emerged with the work of Marx and Engels, was actually a consequence of the material evolution of both capitalism and class struggle. So one of my questions for Carlos is: How would you situate your understanding of the “purity fetish” in relationship to these longstanding critiques of utopian socialism, and in particular those critiques that foreground the material forces that are operative behind these ideologies. I think this echoes some of the things that Radhika said because I’d like to hear Carlos more on the central role played by the labor aristocracy in the history of the imperial left, and what kind of material forces are operative behind this. I’m thinking here of the promotion of the idea that socialism has to be something that is structurally impossible: it has to be absolutely pure and come forth in the world in a way that would be untainted by the history of capitalism. In short, it has to be basically immaterial. And ultimately that’s what a segment of the Western left wants: an immaterial socialism, meaning one that would never exist. This would thereby preserve the extant social relations such that this segment of the left would remain at the top of global labor structures. My last comment has to do with leftist organizing in the imperial core. If we take seriously the material role of the labor aristocracy in promoting certain forms of ideology, such as that of the “purity fetish,” then what is to be done? I was recently reading the book Communisme by Bruno Guigue, which I strongly recommend. Drawing on Gramsci, he argues that the class struggle within the imperial core takes on a different form. Since socialist revolutions have generally proven themselves to be successful across the tri-continent, meaning the global south, and we have not had one within the global north of the imperial core, it makes sense that class struggle here would take on a slightly different form. Guigue draws on the distinction that Gramsci makes between a war of position and a war of maneuver. Within the imperial core, there is such a deeply developed level of industrialized ignorance, due to the power of the cultural and media apparatus, as well as the system of indoctrination referred to as education. The Western left is therefore faced with a very fundamental problem, namely that the masses, for the most part, are profoundly uneducated about very basic things about how the world works (which, of course, is not necessarily their fault). Guigue suggests, therefore, that what we need in the imperial core is a war of position, meaning a form of trench warfare in which we focus primarily on hegemonic struggle, fighting for political education. The war of movement, the war in which you’d actually be able to seize power in a revolutionary manner, as has been done across the global south in certain instances, is for the most part, I take it—that’s at least what he’s implicitly suggesting—not really on the table at this point in time. It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t advocate for developing the necessary conditions. Someone like George Jackson is quite clear in this regard: if there is not a revolutionary situation, the onus is on us to make one. Guigue’s position, I take it, is that to do that in the imperial core requires tasks that are slightly different. The fight against the purity fetish that Carlos is undertaking in this book is part of—it seems to me—a larger struggle for political education and for wresting control away from controlled counter-hegemony, while building up a real counter-hegemony—like Midwestern Marx is trying to do, like the International Manifesto Group is endeavoring to do, as well as the Critical Theory Workshop and many other organizations with which we all work. These are my three general thoughts on Carlos’s book, including a few questions for the discussion to follow. I’ll finally close just by saying that it’s extremely impressive and inspiring to have such a young scholar and vibrant mind doing such important work at an early stage in his career. I really look forward to continuing to collaborate with everyone at Midwestern Marx, learn more from you, and continue the struggle. FULL BOOK LAUNCH: This is a transcript from Tom's presentation at the book launch of Carlos Garrido's The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism, which you may purchase HERE. Transcription by Emily Doringer Noah Khrachvik: Awesome, our first speaker is Thomas Riggins. Thomas is a retired philosophy teacher from NYU, the New School for Social Research and others. He received a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center in 1983 and he’s the Consulting Editor for the Midwestern Marx Institute. He’s been active in the civil rights and peace movements since the 1960’s, when he was Chairman of the Young People’s Socialist League at Florida State University. And he also worked for CORE in voter registration in North Florida. He’s written for many online publications like 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’s the author of Reading the Classical Texts of Marxism and Eurocommunism: A Critical Reading of Santiago Carrillo and Eurocommunist Revisionism. Here’s Thomas… Thomas Riggins: Well, I’m going to introduce this book in the spirit of our comrades from the Middle Flowery Kingdom. I have the 5 Takeaways that we need to have from this book. I should reformulate that as the Middle Flowery People’s Republic. The 5 Takeaways from The Purity Fetish. These are the five most important things I think that you’ll have to remember:
FULL BOOK LAUNCH: Image credit: Left Voice. The history of Marxism has a parallel history of counter-Marxism — intellectual currents that posture as the true Marxism. Even before Marxism came into being as a coherent ideology, Marx and Engels devoted an often-neglected section of their 1848 Communist Manifesto to debunking the existing contenders for true socialism. As the workers’ movement painfully sought a system of beliefs to animate its response to capitalism, the ideas of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels gradually won over workers, peasants, and the oppressed. It was not an easy victory. Liberalism — the dominant ideology of the capitalist class — served workers and peasants in their fight against absolutist tyranny. With capitalism and liberal institutions firmly established, anarchism — the ideology of the disgruntled petty-bourgeois — rivalled Marxism for the leadership of the workers’ movement. Contradictorily, embracing extreme individualism and Utopian democracy distilled from capitalism, yet voicing a bitter hatred of capitalist institutions and economic arrangements, the anarchists failed to offer a viable escape from the crushing weight of capitalism. Once Bolshevism seized power in 1917, the workers’ movement found an example of real-existing-socialism led by real-avowed-Marxists, a powerful beacon for the way forward in the struggle against capitalism. The victory of the Russian Revolution established Marxism as the most promising road for an exploited majority, with Leninism the only successful ideology for revolutionary change and socialism. To this day, Leninism has remained the only proven guide to socialism. Immediately after the revolution, rival “Marxisms” sprang up. The failure of subsequent European revolutions outside of Russia, especially Germany, sheared away numerous intellectuals, like Karl Korsch and György Lukács,who imagined a different, supposedly better, path to proletarian revolution. Buoyed by material support from benefactors, university appointments, and the many eager sponsors of class betrayal, critics and detractors of Leninism abounded. Especially in the West — North America and Europe– where the working class was significant and growing dramatically, dissidence, class betrayal, and opportunism proved disruptive forces in the world Communist movement, forces that capitalist rulers were eager to support. Young people, inexperienced workers, aspiring intellectuals, and the déclassé, were especially vulnerable to the appeal of independence, purity, idealism, and liberal values. Money, career opportunities, and celebrity were readily available to those who were willing to sell these ideas. Indeed, not every critic of Marxism-Leninism — revolutionary Communism — was or is insincere or without merit, but honesty demands recognition that no real advocate for overthrowing capitalism could achieve prominence, celebrity, or a mainstream soap box in the capitalist West. He or she could be a curiosity or a token for the sake of appearances — a stooge. Conversely, any intellectual or political figure who does achieve wide-spread prominence or influence cannot represent a serious, existential challenge to capitalism when the road to prominence and influence is patrolled by the guardians of capitalism. Nonetheless, the workers’ movement has been plagued by divisive ideological trends or fads spawned by independent voices who, wittingly or not, are exploited by and render service to the capitalist class. In the West, it is almost impossible to be a young radical and not be tempted by a veritable ideological marketplace of putative anti-capitalist or socialist theories, vying with one another for allegiance. Since the demise of unvarnished, real-existing socialism in the Soviet Union and the disorientation of many Communist and Workers’ parties, the competition of ideas has created even more confusion. Clearly, the working-class movement, the revolutionary socialist movement, needs guidance to avoid distractions, bogus theories, and corrupted ideas. The march of political neophytes through the arcade of specious, fantastic ideas is a great tragedy, especially regarding those ideas posing as Marxist. ***** Happily, a new generation of Marxist thinkers are challenging the allure of Marxist pretenders, more specifically, those associated with what has come to be called “Western Marxism.” A sympathetic Wikipedia article offers about as accurate a definition of the words as one might want: “The term denotes a loose collection of theorists who advanced an interpretation of Marxism distinct from both classical and Orthodox Marxism and the Marxism-Leninism of the Soviet Union.” It couldn’t be made clearer: Western Marxism is anything but the Marxism-Leninism that has buttressed worker-engaged revolutionary parties since the time of the Bolshevik revolution! Marxist historian and journalist, Vijay Prashad, gave a seminar at the Marx Memorial Library on November 21, 2022, in which he excoriated the Western Marxism of the 1980s: "There was a sustained attack on Marxism in this period, led by New Left Books, now Verso Books, in London, which published Hegemony and Socialist Strategy by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in 1985. The book mischievously utilised the work of Antonio Gramsci to make an attack at Marxism, to in fact champion something they called “post-Marxism.” Post-structuralism, post-Marxism, post-colonialism: this became the flavour of academic literature coming out of Western countries from the 1980s… Particularly after the collapse of the Soviet Union there was a great weakness in our ability to fight back against this denigration of Marxism in the name of post-Marxism… When they [Laclau and Mouffe] talk about “agency” and “the subject” and so on, they have basically walked away from the structuring impact of political economy and returned to a pre-Marxist time; they have in fact not gone beyond Marxism but back to a time before Marxism." (“Viewing Decolonization through a Marxist Lens,” published in Communist Review, Winter 2022/2023) Prashad places the influential works of Hardt and Negri and Deleuze and Guattari in the same post-Marxist mix. He regrets the multiculturalism turn because it ”basically took the guts out of the anticolonial, anti-racist critique, at the global level you had the arrival of ‘postcolonial’ thought, and also ‘decoloniality’ — in other words, let’s look at power, let’s look at culture, but let’s not look at the political economy that structures everyday life and behavior and reproduces the colonial mentality; that has to be off the table… So, we entered into a kind of academic morass, where Marxism was not, in a sense, permitted to enter.” Prashad might well have added the intrusion of rational-choice theory into Marxism in the 1980s, an uninvited analysis of Marxist theory through the lens of methodological individualism and liberal egalitarianism. One leading exponent of what came to be called “analytical Marxism” eviscerated the robust Marxist concept of exploitation by proving that if we have inequality as an initial condition, we will quite logically reproduce inequality– a trivial derivation with little relevance to understanding the historically evolved concept of labor exploitation.. Prashad might have noted the continuing influence of postmodern relativism upon Marxist theory in the 1980s and beyond, a denigration of any claim that Marxism is the science of society. For the postmodernist, Marxism can only be, at best, one of several competing interpretations of society, coherent within Marxist circles, but forbidden from making any greater claim for universality. Moreover, the postmodernist denies that there can ever be any valid overarching theory of capitalism, any “metanarrative” that plots a socio-economic system’s trajectory. While its flaws can not be addressed here, the late Marxist historian Ellen Meiksins Wood exposed the academic trend with great clarity. Another excellent, contemporary critique of Western Marxism can be found in the writings of Marxist author Gabriel Rockhill. Rockhill skillfully and thoroughly discredits the Frankfurt School of neo-Marxism, especially its most celebrated thinkers, Hockheimer, Habermas, Adorno, and Marcuse, exposing their fealty to various sponsors. Those who paid the bills enjoyed sympathetic ideas, an outcome often found with the practitioners of Western Marxism. Rockhill also does a scathing exposé of today’s most prominent Marxist poseur, Slavoj Žižek. I was happy to heap praise on Rockhill’s deflation of Žižek’s unmatched ego in an earlier post. Both Rockhill’s unmasking of the Frankfurt School and his destruction of the Žižek cult are essential reading in contesting Western Marxism.
Western Marxists can conveniently overlook capitalism’s history of genocidal, undemocratic, and exploitative sins while excoriating the Fidelistas for settling accounts with a few hundred Batista torturers. They deplore the sweeping changes that Soviet and Chinese Communists implemented in agriculture to overcome the frequent famines that devastated their countries when the changes unfortunately coincided with severe famines, as though great change for the better could evade natural events and tragedy anywhere but in their imagination. They turn a blind eye to the human costs imposed on humanity by ruling elites’ resistance to great change, while denouncing revolutionaries for seeking that change and risking a better future. Western Marxism diminishes the great accomplishments of real existing socialism, while relentlessly denouncing the errors incurred in socialist construction. Garrido effectively underscores the necessary pains and errors in realizing a new world, in escaping the clutches of ruthless capitalism. As Garrido notes: This is the sort of ‘Marxism’ that imperialism appreciates, the type which CIA agent Thomas Braden called “the compatible left.” This is the ‘Marxism’ which functions as the vanguard of controlled counter-hegemony. He eloquently summarizes: Socialism for the Western Marxists is, in the words of Marx, a purely scholastic question. They are not interested in real struggle, in changing the world, but in continuously purifying an idea, one that is debated amongst other ivory-tower Marxists and which is used to measure against the real world. The label of ‘socialist’ or ‘Marxist’ is sustained merely as a counter-cultural and edgy identity which exists in the fringes of quotidian society. That is what Marxism is reduced to in the West — a personal identity. I might add that it is also a commonplace for Western Marxists to invest heavily in other-people’s-socialism. Rather than engaging their own working classes, Western Marxists fight surrogate struggles for socialism through the solidarity movement, picking and choosing the “purest” struggles and debating the merits of various socialisms vicariously. Garrido elaborates on socialism-as-an-investment-in-identity: 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. Garrido’s objectives are not completed with his masterful dissection of Western Marxism. In addition, he devotes great attention to Western Marxism’s critique of the Peoples’ Republic of China (PRC) in a section entitled China and the Purity Fetish of Western Marxism. Of course, he is correct to deplore Western Marxism’s unprincipled collaboration with bourgeois ideologues in attacking every policy or act of Peoples’ China since its revolution in 1949. As with the USSR, any honest, deeply considered estimation of the trajectory of the PRC must — warts and all — see it as a positive in humanity’s necessary transcendence of capitalism. As anti-imperialists, we must defend the PRC’s right (and other countries’ rights) to choose its own course. As Marxists, we must defend the Chinese Communist Party’s right to find its own road to socialism. But Garrido goes further, by mounting an impassioned, but one-sided defense of Chinese socialism. As a militant advocate of the dialectical method, this is an odd departure. As esteemed Marxist R. Palme Dutt argued in the 1960s, the pregnant question for a dialectical materialist is Whither China? not: Does the PRC measure up to some pure Platonic form of socialism? A more balanced view of the PRC road would reference the significance of the Communist Party’s overwhelmingly peasant class base in its foundation, its engagement with Chinese nationalism, and the strong voluntarist tendency in Mao Zedong Thought. It would consider the 1960s’ break with the World Communist movement and the rapprochement with the most reactionary elements in US ruling circles in the 1970s, capped by the shameful material support for US and South African surrogates in the liberation wars of Southern Africa. PRC was funding Jonas Savimbi and UNITA while Cuban internationalists were dying fighting them and their apartheid allies. Which suggests the question: Could Peoples’ China do more to help Cuba overcome the US blockade, as did the Soviet Union? A fair account would address the PRC invasion of Vietnam in 1979 and Peoples’ China’s unwavering defense of the Khmer Rouge. Surely, all these factors play a role in assessing the PRC’s road to socialism. These uncomfortable facts make it hard to agree with Garrido that the PRC has been “a beacon in the anti-imperialist struggle.” Of course, today is another matter. My own view is that the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party is “riding the tiger” of a substantial capitalist sector, to use imagery reminiscent of high Maoism. How well they are riding it is in question, but they are indeed riding it. There are many promising developments, but also some that are worrisome. In any case, the comrades who are critical or skeptical of the Chinese road should not be summarily swept into the dustbin with Western Marxism. Garrido brings his purity fetish home when he discusses US socialist organizing. He casts a critical eye on the class character of most of the US left, rooting it in the petty-bourgeoisie and the influence of petty-bourgeois ideas. He locates the conveyor for these ideas in academia, the media, and NGOs. Additional material support for petty-bourgeois ideology comes from non-profit corporations and, of course, the Democratic Party. The petty-bourgeois bias of the US left reinforces its hyper-critical attitude toward movements attempting to actually secure a socialist future. Wherever socialists or socialist-oriented militants tackle the enormous obstacles before them, many on the left will insist that they adhere to courteous liberal standards, an unrealistic demand guaranteeing failure. Garrido mocks the insistence on revolutionary purity: “…the problem is that those things in the real world called socialism were never actually socialism; socialism is really this beautiful idea that exists in a pure form in my head….” The purity fetish of the middle strata extends to radicals who scorn workers as “backward” or “deplorable.” Garrido counters this purity obsession with a wonderful quote from Lenin: one “can (and must) begin to build socialism, not with abstract human material, or with human material especially prepared by us, but with the human material bequeathed to us by capitalism.” Regarding the Trump vote and the working class, Garrido scolds the US left: …they don’t see that what is implicit in that vote is a desire for something new, something which only the socialist movement, not Trump or any bourgeois party, could provide. Instead, they see in this chunk of the working class a bunch of racists bringing forth a ‘fascist’ threat which can only be defeated by giving up on the class struggle and tailing the Democrats. Silly as it may sound, this policy dominates the contemporary communist movement in the U.S. While not all of the left is guilty of this failure, the charge is not far off the mark. Finally, Garrido faults much of the US left for its blanket dismissal of progressive trends and achievements in US history. Many leftists debase heroic struggles in US history by painting a portrait of a relentless trajectory of reaction, racism, and imperialism. Garrido correctly sees this as an instantiation of a negative purity fetish– denouncing every page of US history as fatally wanting and inauthentic: “…purity fetish Marxists add on to their futility in developing subjective conditions for revolution by completely disconnecting themselves from the traditions the American masses have come to accept.” While this is true, it must be remembered that there is always the danger that US history would be celebrated so vigorously that the country’s legacy of cruelty and bloody massacre might be muted by patriotic zeal. During the Popular Front era, for example, Communist leader Earl Browder’s slogan that “Communism is twentieth century Americanism” invested too much social justice in Americanism and too little in Communism. US history and tradition is contradictory and Marxists should always expose that contradiction– a legacy of both great, historic social change and ugly inhumanity. The country’s origin shares a tragic settler-colonial past with countries like Australia and South Africa in its genocidal treatment of indigenous people. Those same settlers established or tolerated the brutal exploitation of Africans forced into chattel slavery. While we could lay the blame at the doorstep of the US ruling class, it is US history as well. At the same time, the US revolution was the most radical for its time and every generation produced a consequential movement to correct the failings of the legacy or advance the horizon of social progress. An emancipating civil war, the expansion of suffrage, workers’ gains against corporations, social welfare and insurance, and a host of other milestones mark the peoples’ history. While writing and reflecting on the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution (Echoes of the Marsellaise), Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm couldn’t help but be struck by the lesser global influence of the earlier US revolution upon nineteenth-century social change. He thought that reformers and revolutionaries of the time could recognize their point of departure “more readily in the Ancien Régime of France than in the free colonists and slave-holders of North America.” Undoubtedly, the stain of the genocide of indigenous peoples and brutal slavery influenced that disposition. Indeed, Hobsbawn’s observation underscores the contradictory character of the US past. It is not a “purity fetish” that explains this judgment, but the cold, harsh facts of US history. Nonetheless, it is appropriate for Garrido to remind us of the many revolutionaries — Marx, Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, William Z Foster, Herbert Aptheker, Fidel, and more — who have both drawn inspiration and offered inspiration from the victories of the people as well as the fierce resistance to ruling-class oppression contained in US history. He effectively cites Communist leader Georgi Dimitrov who rejects the practice of national nihilism — the denigration of all expressions of national pride and accomplishment. Within every national identity is an identity to be celebrated in its resistance to oppression and its dedication to a better way of life. Workers must draw national humility from the failures of the past, while drawing national pride from the victories over injustice. A left that attends to only one and not both will fail the working class. ***** Western Marxism — Marxist scholasticism, disconnected from revolutionary practice — distracts far-too-many well-meaning, hungry-for-change potential allies on the arduous road to socialism. It is heartening to find voices rising to challenge the sterile, obscurantism of this distraction, while defending and promoting the tradition of Marxism-Leninism and Communism. We should encourage and support Marxists like Prashad, Rockhill, and Garrido in conducting this struggle. AuthorGreg Godels writes on current events, political economy, and the Communist movement from a Marxist-Leninist perspective. Read other articles by Greg, or visit Greg's website. This article was republished from Dissident Voice. Archives May 2023 5/17/2023 April 29, 2023 - Cornel West: The Limits of Neo-Pragmatism and the Quest for a Democratic Philosophy By: Anthony Monteiro & Saturday Free SchoolRead NowWe are publishing a transcript of Dr. Anthony Monteiro’s opening remarks from the Saturday Free School’s April 29, 2023 session Continuing Hegel’s Science of Logic. The Free School meets every Saturday at 10:30 AM, and is streamed live on Facebook and YouTube. Good morning to everybody. We are going to go back to Hegel, but it’s always useful to contextualize the reading of a text like this, and to keep the text itself and our reading of it grounded in the reality that we live, including the ideological reality of this time. And so without going for too long, I just wanted to talk about the Cornel West event that we attended at the University of Pennsylvania, and there were a lot of questions that we had afterwards and perhaps we could even you know go through some of those questions again because they are very fascinating and they are philosophical and they do relate to Hegel, the Science of Logic, the whole concept of a philosophical system which I would wish to explain in a moment. And then a little talk about unified theories, and the reason I just wanted to touch on that is because in a certain sense we in the Free School are attempting to forge a unified theory of Lenin and Du Bois, or you know the revolutionary and Marxist tradition of Europe and of the Russian Revolution, and the Black Radical Tradition which is grounded in Du Bois, but I’ll come back to that. Just some things before we read – [I want to] talk a little bit about how we should look at this great work. Frankly, as a not yet complete work, and I think Hegel saw it that way himself – a work in progress. But let’s talk about Cornel West. Last Thursday we attended a really, I think important, lecture by Cornel West. You know, the two most important public intellectuals in the United States today are Noam Chomsky and Cornel West. And there are many, many things philosophically that they hold in common, I think. And there are differences, I also think. As you know, Noam Chomsky is more a social scientist, a cognitive scientist, a theorist of language and grammar and semiotics, et cetera. Cornel West is a philosopher, a pure philosopher. It was a very fascinating lecture. I had not seen Cornel West in a couple of years in person and I’ve only kind of kept up with him in relationship to his political commentary, in effect, as you know, his anti-Trump politics and his claim that Trump is a neo-fascist thug and so on. Which then pushes him of course towards Bernie, and I think that’s a real trap given Bernie’s recent political practice relative to Robert Kennedy’s announcement of his presidency challenging Biden from a very progressive point of view, an anti-war, anti-militarist, anti-corporatist state position. And Biden could not hardly announce his candidacy before Bernie is endorsing him. I mean in good faith you could have waited at least. I mean, how do you just so quickly and easily jump on the Joe Biden bandwagon, and this is the most dangerous presidency in the history of the country threatening war on two continents just because Trump is an alleged fascist, so I got to go with the guy that’s pushing the world toward maybe a nuclear confrontation. Well it doesn’t make any sense, but it does make a lot of sense if you know that Bernie Sanders is a fake socialist, a fake progressive and a political opportunist of the worst type. And I don’t see any other way to put it. We cannot excuse and we cannot apologize for it. Cornel, and this was the sad thing – although Cornel’s lecture stayed at the level of philosophy – and theology by the way – he did say in passing that Biden would be better than Trump without making the argument. I think it was some of that which left most of us, and not quite me – I’m a bit biased for reasons that I’ll try to explain – but most of the people in the Free School who were there found the lecture unfulfilling, I’ll use that language. People can use their own. That Cornel’s brilliance, you know, you get a cat with a huge brain and all of this philosophy and literature and theory packed. A guy who also has, apparently, what is a photographic memory. So he’s a formidable thinker, really a formidable thinker with a big heart. He’s not satisfied with confining himself to his academic office or to a university. He goes into the world, engages with the world, and I should tell you, sometimes putting his own life in jeopardy. There was an instance in about 1998 at the Black Radical Convention in Chicago, and he and I happened to be there and together, and a guy stepped to Cornel in a threatening way. And I happened to step to the guy before he could, you know, accost Cornel. And I never forgot, Cornel was a bit shaken I guess you might say. And he said, you know, “I’m a Christian, but I’m not a pacifist,” you know, blasé blasé blasé. But I’m just saying that to say, I’m certain that for all kinds of reasons, a lot of people feel, because he is accessible, he is in the world, he usually travels alone. Although I kind of sense this time he had a security person with him to help him out, just in the event that somebody stepped to him. But I just say all of that to say that the man has a heart and he has a lot of heart. He’s not a punk. He’s not afraid in that regard. And even in my own case at Temple University, he was so gracious to support me and to even come to a rally that we held, and then to appear at the [Free School’s] Black Radical Tradition conference and speak. And so I’m a little biased because of all of that. Although of course philosophically, we’re not on the same page. And just in his lecture, his determining category is the category “catastrophe.” And his narrative is, how do you live a principled life in the face of social catastrophe? And then along with that, a principled moral life in the face of so many people bending to the politics of the dominant class. And so he is, when he speaks – and he deploys everybody from Chekhov to William James to Kierkegaard – I mean, I’m sitting there and I’m saying, “Oh, I’m hating, man. I’m never gonna be able to know all of that.” And then I’m saying, “I got to put some respect on your name.” I mean just to have achieved that, you know, is quite a bit. And to have achieved all of that knowledge and not used it for his own academic promotional reasons, as y’all know, he left Harvard in the early 2000’s I think because the then-president called Cornel, and this when Cornel was a tenured professor, a full tenured professor in fact, at Harvard. And Lawrence Summers, who was the president – he called Cornel in to his office and tried to, to say intimidate is not really the word – literally to put him in his place, literally saying, “You should be grateful that you have this position at Harvard, and you should thank us, meaning we the white establishment, every day of your life. And therefore we want you to cease this engagement with the hip-hop generation, with the younger generation and withdraw into doing polite and acceptable academic things.” I don’t know what Cornel says but I do know that Cornel can curse. He’s from the hood, you know, Sacramento, so he knows how to curse like I curse. And he may have cursed him out and told him to kiss his behind, and then left Harvard and took a position at Princeton. I don’t know whether Richard Rorty was still around, the philosopher, or who was around but they told him, “Look man, you don’t have to put up with that, come to Princeton.” And then he went to Princeton, and then a few years, maybe ten years later, the black people in particular at Harvard said, “Larry Summers is gone and we want you back here and we will guarantee you tenure, that you will get your tenure back.” So when he went back to Harvard, everybody said, “Oh, yeah, Cornel’s back at Harvard.” You just assumed he had tenure. But he didn’t have tenure. And I put that on the shoulders of the black professors who told him to come back, and did not do what they needed to do to guarantee tenure. Tenure would give him the protection that a person like him needs because he’s going so much against the grain on so many things. Then it turns out, about two years ago, it comes out Cornel doesn’t have tenure. And they’re telling him, “Well, we’ll give you a year-by-year contract and don’t worry about it.” And at that point he left Harvard and took a position at Union Theological Seminary. I think that’s where he began his teaching career and that’s where he is today. But you know, with all of that he maintained his dignity and this is important. When you’re betrayed, and he had to be betrayed in that “come back to Harvard” thing. And humiliation in a certain sense, you know ‘cause a lot of people who for jealousy, envy, just don’t like you ‘cause they just don’t like you kind of thing. “You’re too large, talk too much,” all that, were on the sidelines snickering and laughing. You know how that goes, I won’t go into that. But he handled himself with dignity, he goes back to Union Theological Seminary and hasn’t missed a beat. He continues to be Cornel West and to do what Cornel West does as an intellectual and a public intellectual and a figure that lives with integrity and creates these wide discursive spaces where people like us can both agree and disagree. You see what I’m saying, by keeping the door to discourse, and serious discourse – you know, not just some Afro-centrism kind of, you know, “We are Africans,” and all of that – but drinking from the deep wells of human knowledge wherever he can find it. And of course no one person in his brain can grasp the totality of human civilizations and knowledge, I mean, when I think about string theories and their claim of ten dimensions of space and time, you know I’m often reminded of the Bhagavad Gita, which talk about seven time dimensions. But anyway, I mean, just to wrap your head around the Bhagavad Gita and Plato’s dialogues and Martin Luther, I mean, come on. You need an army of intellectuals who live monastic lives to grasp all of that. But Cornel, unafraid, unashamed, drinks from the wells of knowledge. And of course he could be canceled, just like, you know, “Why are you quoting Plato? He supported a slave-owning society and plus he’s a white man, and a man.” You know, that kind of cancel culture dismissal. Or his thing with Chekhov. But he doesn’t seem to be fazed by it. He continues pushing this high level of discourse, trying to make what is in the end a principled, moral, ethical argument about how to live a life that resists injustice at this time. Now, having said all of that, Cornel West is a combination of what we call neo-pragmatism which is a unique American philosophy; pragmatism arose in the United States as a philosophical movement in the middle of the 1800s. It morphed in the 1960s and 1970s into what we call neo-pragmatism. The fundamental argument of neo-pragmatism – first of all it is American but it’s also English, it’s an English American, we call it Anglo-American philosophical move. As you know, the English philosophers going back in many ways to the beginning, we talk about George Berkeley or David Hume, John Locke – the beginning of English serious philosophy – has always staked out its differences with European rationalism. In particular what they call philosophy that attempts to build systems. In our case Kant and Hegel. Pragmatism, and usually the founder of pragmatism is usually associated with a man named [Charles Sanders] Peirce, whose work I really don’t know, I have to be honest with you. And then further developed by Du Bois’s mentor at Harvard, William James. But what pragmatism argues is that it philosophizes from the standpoint of the ordinary human being, not from the standpoint of a supposed rational system of philosophy and of knowing. Thus it claims to be a democratic philosophy, a philosophy that upholds, I think Cornel has used this word, plebeian democracy, the democracy of the ordinary person. Hence, they often say it is philosophy without foundations, without prior assumptions, without categories. We’ve gone a bit through this, that Kant and Hegel think through categories. For instance the categories of time and space, the category of being, the category of non-being. Each appeals, Kant and Hegel, to logic. Different logics, of course. Hegel, we know, dialectical logic. Kant, more traditional. Each, Kant and Hegel, were trying to align philosophy with science, in particular Newton and Copernicus but Newton in particular. And to align science with philosophy, and this is why Hegel said that philosophy is a science. I think Kant would have agreed with that. Hegel said it is the science of sciences; another way of saying that – it is the scaffolding upon which the meaning of scientific experiments and the meaning of scientific discoveries can be elucidated. This is a huge undertaking by the way, huge undertaking, and remains a part of the way we in the Free School think. We’ll come back to that. But Cornel starts from a pragmatist point of view – that it is the individual seeking meaning in a world that does not in and of itself provide meaning. That is why if you listen to Cornel, there is always on the edge, if you will, or suggesting, that we live on the edge of suicide, of you know, what Jean-Paul Sartre talked, being and nothingness. And how do we realize our being? It is through more moral engagement with a world that will not give us meaning. It is living in good faith, moral good faith in a world where things are commodified, where money trumps principle and hence bad faith. You operate without a moral imperative, without a moral intentionality, you see where I’m coming from. So, neo-pragmatists. Richard Rorty is big in Cornel West’s graduate studies at Princeton. Richard Rorty is the famous academic philosopher, a neo-pragmatist at Princeton. He wrote his last book, a small book but I think a very important and should-be famous book entitled Achieving Our Country. The title of the book he takes from James Baldwin. And Rorty attacks the intelligentsia and the academics who have abandoned the working class. It is a great book, a great manifesto which takes, you know, the whole question of the plebeian or democratic thrust in philosophy, I think, to an important place of engagement. But this is Cornel, you know a plebeian – a people’s philosophy, a people’s framing. Framing philosophical and moral issues from the standpoint of the ordinary person. And that is why I think he has this great fidelity, this great commitment to the blues – with critique, and I didn’t quite agree with his critique. But the blues, which is the narrative of the ordinary people. The blues, talking about navigating the narration of disappointment, but the narration of overcoming, of resilience, of “I’m still here in spite of everything.” He considers the blues to be a very high expression of living morally in a world that tries to undermine your efforts to do that. You know, the pressure is to sell out all the time. But here’s the blues man, the blues woman saying that we can still be principled in spite of the pressure to sell out. So Cornel calls himself a blues man of the mind. He has such interesting formulations. But he sees himself as a blues man and as a traveling musician. He also sees himself in relationship to the blues and John Coltrane. And this scaffolding, this architecture of morality coming out of black resistance is so much a part of him and the way he lives. And you know, even as he talked about music you all might remember, and he really digs Philadelphia, loves Philadelphia because of Philly’s music. And he says Philadelphia’s a soulful city. And he mentioned the O’Jays – and his soundtrack by the way, is the same soundtrack as the Free School. The same music that we listen to, he was gesturing to. The Isley Brothers – did he mention “Harvest For the World”? One of those great calls to morality to resistance. And of course he talked about Stevie Wonder’s love song “Love’s in Need of Love.” You know, which is like us. And the moderator, who I was not too thrilled by. (‘Cause I know some people weren’t there, so I’m filling in, creating a picture.) But the moderator, when Cornel was talking about the O’Jays and the Isley Brothers, [the moderator] tried to say Meek Mills. Now how do you get from that, to that? I don’t see it. But Cornel resisted it, you know in his generous way of course without saying, “I disagree,” but just saying the music that he stands upon. And he’s absolutely right about this, he’s absolutely right. That blues, jazz and R&B is still the strong hand in our music and poetry. But along with neo-pragmatism [for Cornel] is existentialism, a contemporary form of existentialism, and this is again where I would find myself in a bit of a difference with Cornel. For him, the important existentialists would be people like Karl Jaspers and Albert Camus, not Jean-Paul Sartre, the radical, the communist, the socialist, the anti-colonialist. Not Jean-Paul Sartre, but Albert Camus who in fact opposed the Algerian independence movement. Oh by the way this is something that James Baldwin spoke about as well in one of the essays in No Name in the Street, I think the first one entitled “Take Me to the Water.” Jimmy Baldwin did not like Albert Camus either and felt, like Sartre, that Albert Camus was pro-colonialist and operated in bad faith. So it is this sense of the absurd, and in philosophical and existentialist terms, the absurd means non-being or no meaning or lack of meaning. You see what I’m saying. And so it is this tightrope that Cornel navigates upon. To me, it is interesting, it is dramatic, it is exciting. Like I said, “I got to put some respect on your name, hometown. You know, you remain so energized, so hopeful, so alive, you know what I’m saying?” Where it would be easy to say, to throw in the towel, “I’ve been doing this for too long you know. Three of my marriages broke up because of this, I’m going to throw in the towel.” But he stays real, he stays alive and he remains who he is. And welcomes difference and critique. That’s the positive thing. Philosophically, and in terms of social theory, I feel that his approach does not account for a big part of human history including the Russian and Chinese revolutions, the revolutionary leaderships of these movements and their philosophies and theories. It does not account for philosophies paralleling science, or philosophies in the Hegelian or Kantian sense attempting to correct science, and to clarify for scientists and non-scientists what the discoveries of science suggest, in scientific terms and in human terms. That tradition is usually associated with what is called rationalism although it’s much, much more than that. Can you see what I’m saying? Cornel’s position is more in the English American tradition of empiricism, pragmatism and existentialism. There is not … I guess we could put it this way using what we’ve already read in Hegel. There is not, in pragmatism and neo-pragmatism – in fact they reject the whole concept of mediation – it is all resolved at the level of the immediate, and of the individual. And not to mention, that English philosophers – I would say everybody from John Stuart Mill through Bertrand Russell and up to till present, have always smeared Hegel as somehow being the source of authoritarianism and even Nazism. That the rationalist tradition, especially as it crystallizes in Hegel’s philosophy, can only lead to anti-democratic practices and that to return democracy to philosophy, you have to separate philosophy from what is called the rational tradition, or thinking through categories. We can come back to that. So it is a claim and I think this is a problem for Cornel because it generalizes, in fact reduces the question of democracy to an Anglo-Saxon practice. That everything that is not Anglo-Saxon in its theory and practice of democracy is by definition authoritarianism. Well does that sound familiar? Yes it does, because that’s the paradox that the Biden administration and the US ruling class tries to present us with. Either Anglo-Saxon democracy or authoritarianism. Either John Locke and John Stuart Mill – or Hitler. I won’t say my friend, but a guy that I follow, Lex Fridman is always doing, sadly, this conjunction of Mao, Stalin and Hitler – they’re all the same, you know. But that’s the Anglo-Saxon smearing of human revolutionary aspirations. So when you listen to Cornel, he is operating and thinking within the folds of Anglo-American philosophy, and hence the unusual in the political arena that does not fit the narrative of Anglo-American democratic theorizing and narrative is thereby authoritarian and even neo-fascist. And I want to underline the unusual, because the thing of Anglo-American philosophy has become a dogma rather than a project of scientific critique, of democracy and the possibilities of changing it, of advancing it. I just want to say a couple of few other things. In this sense, and people who were there, we saw a crescendo in his narrative, and to me it was exciting because I’m trying to, you know – all of these people, you know, I read, I know a little bit about. But he seemed to weave this narrative out of all of these thinkers from Chekhov to Kierkegaard to William James, and just, I mean just unbelievable, man. That’s why I said, “I got to put some respect on your name.” But in the end, he reaches the apogee and he couldn’t go any further. And then it had to be a repeat. It had to be a re-do, re-saying of similar things that he had previously said because he refused to go to the world of contradiction, of possibility, of danger. He stayed within this beautiful narrative, this exciting narrative that he started with. The other thing is his constant referencing and gesturing to Christianity, in the sense of liberation Christianity or Black Christianity. No problem. As we all know through our own experiences and observations, that Black religion is a religion of resistance, that being is realized in-becoming as Martin Luther King said in one of his graduate school papers. Being is in-becoming. That for Black Christianity, the end is not an end, it is the beginning of something new. And he’s right about that. But then, to me there’s a paradox between Anglo-American political theory and philosophy, and Black Christianity, which is not grounded in the individual or not grounded as Cornel West suggested, in fake hope in the future. It is futuristic but not this Disneyland futurism of the standard ruling class narrative in this country. And just my last point, I think he gets King wrong. King was not a naive pacifist. If you want any evidence of that just listen to the speech “Why I Oppose the War in Vietnam.” King understood St. Thomas Aquinas’s differentiation between just and unjust wars. I don’t think that Cornel understands the actual and practical real-life meaning of that as it relates in particular to the Ukraine War. Is Russia an imperialist nation, as he says? Or is Russia defending itself against the imperialism, militarism and aggression of the United States. Were the Vietnamese waging a just war? Were Koreans waging a just war? Were they waging a war for peace? King understood that. He understood the difference between just and unjust wars. And I think that rather than pigeonholing King into this nebulous, ill-defined category of pacifism – you know, King was far too philosophically developed to be reduced to that. What Cornel has not considered is that King in fact was a theorist and practitioner of the struggle for democracy. A peaceful means, a political rather than a civil war path to the democratic and political transformation of the American nation; to disarm the ruling elite in its efforts to pit black against white in the struggle to change the country, for black and white people. That is what King was saying. He was a theorist and a practitioner of the struggle for democracy. The concept of love. You cannot, in King’s sense, appeal to pragmatist or neo-pragmatist philosophers, or to English theorists of liberal theory or society, to understand King’s concept of love and the Beloved Community. It seems that Cornel missed a tremendous opportunity to further develop, to further deepen, to further extend his own theory of moral behavior and moral action. How beautiful might it have been if he could have turned or extended that discourse to King’s notion of the Beloved Community, which goes hand-in-hand with his idea of the means to radical transformation as important – this is King – as important as the ends themselves. So King was talking about a democratic path to achieve a new democracy, that unites and transforms the people in the process. I don’t think the philosophies that ground Cornel necessarily predisposed him to that kind of Kingian or even Baldwinian thinking. I’ll stop there and just say that we had a rich discussion for the time that it lasted on Thursday evening. AuthorDr. Anthony Montiero is a long-time activist in the struggle for socialism and black liberation, scholar, and expert in the work of WEB Dubois. In fact, he is one of the most cited Dubois scholars in the entire world. He’s worked and taught longer than most of us have been alive. Currently, he organizes with the Saturday Free School for Philosophy and Black Liberation in Philadelphia. This article was republished from Positive Peace Blog. Archives May 2023 5/16/2023 The Debt Ceiling Debate Is a Massive Deception Against the Public. By: Richard D. WolffRead NowFuture historians will likely look back at the debt ceiling rituals being reenacted these days with a frustrated shaking of their heads. That otherwise reasonable people would be so readily deceived raises the question that will provoke those historians: How could this happen? The U.S. Congress has imposed successive ceilings on the national debt, each one higher than the last. Ceilings were intended to limit the amount of federal borrowing. But the same U.S. Congress so managed its taxing and spending that it created ever more excesses of spending over tax revenues (deficits). Those excesses required borrowing to cover them. The borrowings accumulated to hit successive ceilings. A highly political ritual of threats and counterthreats accompanied each rise of the ceiling required by the need to borrow to finance deficits. It is elementary economics to note that if Congress raised more taxes or cut federal spending—or both—there would be no need to borrow and thus no ceiling on borrowing to worry about. The ceiling would become irrelevant or merely symbolic. Further, if taxes were raised enough and spending cut enough, the existing U.S. national debt could be reduced. That situation has happened occasionally in U.S. history. The real issue then is that when borrowing approaches any ceiling, the policy choices are these three: raise the ceiling (to borrow more), raise taxes, or cut spending. Of course, combinations of them would also be possible. In contrast to this reality, U.S. politics deceives by constricting its debate. Politicians, the mainstream media, and academics simply omit—basically by refusing to admit or consider—tax increases. The GOP demands spending cuts or else it will block raising the ceiling. The Democrats insist that raising the ceiling is the better choice than cutting spending. Democrats threaten to blame the GOP for the consequences of not raising the debt ceiling. They paint those consequences in lurid colors depicting U.S. bondholders denied interest or repayment, Social Security recipients denied their pensions, and government employees denied their wages. The unspoken agreement between the two major parties is to omit any serious discussion of raising taxes to avoid hitting the debt ceiling. That omission entails deception. Here are some tax increases that could help solve the problem by avoiding any need to raise the debt ceiling. The social security tax could be applied to all wage and salary incomes, not only those of $160,000 or less as is now the case. The social security tax could be applied to nonwage income such as interest dividends, capital gains, and rents. The corporate profits tax could be raised back to what it was a few decades ago: near or above 50 percent versus the current 37 percent rate. A property tax could be levied on property that takes the form of stocks and bonds. The current property tax in the United States (levied mostly at the local level) includes land, houses, automobiles, and business inventories, while it excludes stocks and bonds. Perhaps that is because the richest 10 percent of Americans own roughly 80 percent of stocks and bonds. The current property tax system in the United States is very nice for that 10 percent. Another logical candidate is the federal estate tax which a few years ago exempted under $1 million of an estate from the tax, but now exempts over $12 million per person (over $25 million per couple). That exemption makes a mockery of the idea that all Americans start or live their lives on a level playing field where merit counts more than inheritance. The U.S. could and should go back from that tax giveaway to the richest. There are many more possible tax increases. Of course, there are strengths and weaknesses entailed in raising every tax, positive and negative consequences. But the exact same is true of raising the debt ceiling and thereby increasing the U.S. national debt. Likewise cutting spending has its pluses and minuses in terms of pain and gain. There is no logical or reasonable basis for excluding tax increases from the national debate and discussion about raising the debt ceiling and thereby the national debt. It is rather the shared political commitments of both major parties that require and motivate the exclusion. There is no reason for U.S. citizens to accept, tolerate, endorse, or otherwise validate the debt ceiling deception perpetrated against us. Nor is the debt ceiling deception alone. The previous national debate over responding to inflation by having the Federal Reserve raise interest rates provides another quite parallel example. That debate proceeded by debating the pros and cons of interest rate increases as if no other anti-inflationary policy existed or was even worth mentioning. Once again elementary economics teaches that wage-price freezes and rationing have been used against inflations in the past—including in the United States—as alternatives to raising interest rates or alongside them. U.S. President Nixon in 1971 used wage-price freezes. U.S. President Roosevelt used rationing during World War II. But the government, Federal Reserve, major media, and major academic leaders carried on their recent policy debates as if those other anti-inflationary tools did not exist or were not worth including in the debate. Wage-price freezes and rationing have their strengths and weaknesses—just as tax increases do—but once again the same applies to raising interest rates. No justification exists for proceeding as if alternative options are not there. The U.S. national debate over fighting inflation was deceptive in the same way that the debate over the debt ceiling is. Nor is the deception any less if it is covered by a claim of “realism.” Those who grasp elementary economics enough to know that tax increases could “solve” the debt ceiling issue become complicit in the deception by invoking “realism.” Since the two major parties are jointly subservient to corporations and the rich, they rule out tax increases on them. It thus becomes “realistic” to exclude that option from the debt ceiling debate. What is best for corporations and the rich thus gets equated to what is “realistic.” It is worth remembering that throughout history ruling classes have discovered, to their shock and surprise, that the ruled can and often do quickly alter what is “realistic.” The debt ceiling deceptions favor corporations over individuals and the richest individuals over the rest of us. In our thinking and speaking too, the nation’s class structure and class struggles exhibit their influential power. The mainstream debt ceiling debate deceives by lying by omission rather than commission. Author: Richard D. Wolff is professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a visiting professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, in New York. Wolff’s weekly show, “Economic Update,” is syndicated by more than 100 radio stations and goes to 55 million TV receivers via Free Speech TV. His three recent books with Democracy at Work are The Sickness Is the System: When Capitalism Fails to Save Us From Pandemics or Itself, Understanding Socialism, and Understanding Marxism, the latter of which is now available in a newly released 2021 hardcover edition with a new introduction by the author. This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Archives May 2023 5/12/2023 Philosophy and the Struggle for a New Human Future By: Anthony Monteiro & Saturday Free SchoolRead NowWe are publishing a transcript of Dr. Anthony Monteiro’s opening remarks from the Saturday Free School’s April 15, 2023 session on Hegel’s Science of Logic and Artificial Intelligence. The Free School meets every Saturday at 10:30 AM, and is streamed live on Facebook and YouTube. Artwork by Serafina Harris I just wanted to say a few things about why Hegel, why we’re reading Hegel and how we want to read Hegel and the context for our reading of Hegel, and for a reading of Du Bois or anything – what is the ideological and political context? We’re in a moment of what is perhaps the most consequential ideological struggle in the modern epoch and maybe in the ideological history of humanity. In part, this is so because of the sheer magnitude and numbers of people involved, literally billions of people. Now the fact that the masses of humanity are no longer passive, ignorant and unconscious of this great ideological struggle – and they are [conscious], and of course we must begin, unlike let us say, revolutionaries of the past who had to assume that the majority of people were not themselves conscious of the revolutionary struggle. And so the idea that a few people would storm the barricades, or storm the Winter Palace – that approach is radically, even fundamentally different from what must be assumed in these times. We must assume, as I think it is a fact, that the majority of humanity – the majority of the eight billion human beings that constitute humanity in one or another way – are conscious of the world that they live in, are conscious of ideas, and are in one or another way conscious of the consequences of ideas and of themselves as agents of history. This has never been the case. Most people lived in isolation from the main currents of ideas up until the present time, and by the present time I’m talking of the last 125 years. Why and what brought about this change? There are, I think, two fundamental reasons. A lot of people, you’ll hear talk – “Well it’s social media – oh, it’s the Internet that has awakened the consciousness of the broad masses of people.” And that’s a form of what we would call technological determinism. It is not that. It is the socialist revolutions and the anti-colonial struggles that freed the vast majority of humanity to be makers of history. And by makers of history we mean in the sense of not just acting upon other people’s plans but themselves having a consciousness and understanding and a plan. So it is fatal to assume that the majority of mankind is ignorant and unconscious of where history is and where history might go. To put it another way, the majority of humanity has an imaginary, a futuristic outlook that things as they are today can change. If we went back over a hundred years ago, most people believe that the way their ancestors, their great-great-grandparents, their grandparents had lived – they too would live that way. Today people don’t think that way. And while I mentioned the Socialist Revolutions, of course the Russian Revolution, Chinese Revolution and going forward, and the anti-colonial struggles – we must also indicate, and this is the greatest part of the great scientific value of [Du Bois’s] Black Reconstruction – the awakening of the enslaved proletariat who were being told over and over again – and I would say the majority of human beings on the planet to the extent they knew about it, believed that slavery was natural, and that Africans were naturally inferior. What Du Bois establishes is that the enslaved proletariat itself, in its consciousness of itself, was in the vanguard of the human struggle for liberation. It is also the black freedom movement that as well awakens humanity not only to the fact that things could change, but that things inevitably will change. As King often quotes from the abolitionist preacher Theodore Parker, “The arc of the moral universe is long and it bends to justice.” The concept of freedom as an inevitable part of the human condition. Most human beings on the planet now would believe that in one or another way. I don’t care where you go. So the ideological struggle is inevitable and central to the radical and revolutionary remaking of the planet. To put it another way, no ruling class, including the ruling class of the United States, can assume that they can just dictate to people what should be and what they should do and what they shouldn’t do. They have to at least make an effort to ideologically win people to their side. Well, to say that for today, we also have to say that even the bourgeois democratic revolutions – when the bourgeoisie was weak and a small part of the population of let us say France or Germany or England or of even of the United States, the bourgeoisie had to convince the people that they the bourgeoisie as opposed to the aristocrats and the kings and the landowners and the the popes and the bishops, that they, the bourgeoisie could bring into existence another system that would establish liberty, what we today would call freedom, and emancipate the masses from the the drudgery, the misery, of the old feudal system. We see the same thing in the Indian independence movement where Gandhi took on the garments of the peasantry and lived like a peasant, went among the peasants and day-by-day won them to the struggle for independence from British rule. The same thing with the Chinese revolutionaries, when Mao said we have to go to the countryside ‘cause that’s where the people are. It was a strategy of winning the majority of people to the cause of revolution, not the dogmatic idea that the working class will lead the peasantry, enter into an alliance but lead the peasantry. What Mao ‘n those were saying is that the peasantry on its own is a revolutionary force and the fact is the majority can and should be won to the cause of democratic change in China. So today we’re talking about processes, which Hegel could never have imagined – the Hegelian idea that the history of humanity is the history of ideas, that human beings were the manifestation, human societies were the manifestations of great ideas, et cetera. He could have never imagined the majority of humanity being involved, first of all and its own liberation, but also in the struggle of ideas. So again, to understand how we got to a point in a matter of a brief period, I mean we could say 125 years, we could say maybe a little bit longer if you include the civil war and black reconstruction and that kind of thing. What we call the ideological struggle, which is maybe not the best way to talk about this thing, the word ideology or ideological comes from the German. And ideology in German philosophy and political theory is what we would call ideas, big ideas. So the ideological struggle is really the struggle over ideas and more importantly, the human future. Therefore the struggle of ideas or the ideological struggle must be broadly conceived and not narrowly, as in a conflict between “left” or “revolutionary groups” about who is more pure in their ideology. That is a superficial way, but it’s really a trivialization of the magnitude of what we’re talking about, and of course it is a throwback to a situation that existed over 150 years, 200 years ago, where the majority of human beings were not involved. So the question of “ideological purity” or “ideological correctness” of a “revolutionary vanguard” is so out of step with where humanity is at this point as to literally be something that would fit more and into a Saturday Night Live, or what we used to call a black exploitation film, it’s a joke. It is not serious. What we’re talking about in terms of ideas and the struggle of ideas is ultimately the struggle of the people. Hence, for us we talk about the centrality of the ideological struggle. Now a lot of people would say, and they say it all the time, the so-called left – and whenever you say left you always have to put quotations around it or the word so-called – a lot of this is a joke, frankly. They will say for example, “well, the people are not interested in your ideas – the people are not interested in you reading Hegel. What black people are interested in that?” Well first of all, you don’t know what black people are interested in, and just because you’re not [interested], you might be an outlier. You might not represent black folk or the working class. “They’re more interested in putting food on their tables, and therefore they’re interested in activism, it is the activist that has the greatest appeal to the masses of people.” Well I can tell you from my own experience of course here in Philadelphia, but I think it’s other places, that a lot of people don’t trust activists, especially those who proceed from a “woke” or “identity politics” position. People are interested in a future, hence they are interested in ideas. And they’re interested in ideas in the organic sense. They’re interested in ideas in the same ways that we are interested in ideas. The sites of the struggle that we’re talking about, the ideological struggle, are everywheres but some of them – philosophy, art literature and science, often or most times in academic circles, philosophers or professors of literature and art will say that we’re not doing ideology, we’re doing deep readings and deconstructive readings, et cetera. That we’re not bringing any externalities or biases to the question. Most philosophers would say that what we’re doing is a reconsideration based upon our own time and all of that of the great philosophers, and so on. And to claim that, for example, as we claim that philosophy is politics by other means, they would find that not only transgressive but demeaning of the high calling of what they do. And of course all professors think they’ve been summoned by a higher calling, something greater than any of us can understand, and they’re not driven by money and other things, crude things like that. And certainly when you get to science, especially the Natural Sciences, most theoretical or experimental physicists, biologists, chemists, act like and will dispute anyone who would make the argument that science, and especially at the theoretical level, is a branch of philosophy and hence of ideological engagement. In other words the experiments that they do, the instruments that they build, are not the result of just the internal dialectics of their particular discipline and groups of theorists and scientists that they interact with. What we are saying is that as parts of societies, they are as ideologically shaped as anybody else. And so the work of theoretical physics, including quantum mechanics or relativity theory, or string theory, the way these things are thought about, talked about are really philosophical questions, which again are ideological questions. Our return to Hegel and philosophy through Hegel – not exclusively Hegel, and I want to underline that – not exclusively Hegel – is our doing in another way what we did with Black Reconstruction, and what we’ve done with so many other things, and what we plan to do going forward with the year of James Baldwin and all of that type of thing. We are doing ideology and in substance doing, or participating, I should say, in the great work of the people to free themselves from a system that has no way out for them. Frankly any ethnography, that is to say, the sociological work of going among the people, observing them, talking to them – always shows a profound interest, especially that mature part of the working class – a profound interest in ideas. And always seeking out honest thinkers that are not using ideas to make them themselves the “thinker” – look smarter than everybody else. That’s why people are so interested in a person like Baldwin and wanting to know him better, are so interested in King, and to the extent that we make it available, Du Bois and so on, Gandhi, et cetera. Being concerned with philosophy brings us into certain areas of knowledge that are central to what philosophy does. Let me just name a few of them: logic, and I want to return to this because that’s a big question as we get into AI and even quantum mechanics. Logic, methodologies, methods. Logic and methodology I don’t think are that separate, at least in Hegel’s sense. They are ways of knowing, of discovering truth. Phenomenology, and again I find Hegel’s definition of phenomenology to be the best, although it is not the only one – where he defines phenomenology as a science of human consciousness. The existentialist would define phenomenology as the science or study of being, or what they would call existence. We’ll come back to that. And there’s an important separation between existentialist phenomenology and Hegelian phenomenology. I would just throw one other philosopher’s name in here when we get to this kind of existential phenomenology and that is Frederick Nietzsche. He could be the start of that kind of phenomenology. But nonetheless, phenomenology. And the other which is bound up with phenomenology and logic and that is epistemology, or theories of philosophies of knowledge, how we know. Epistemology is very connected to so much going on in the fields again of quantum physics and string theory. String theory is one of those areas that has been mathematized. In other words, physicists that work in string theory talk to each other through mathematical equations, which means the rest of us don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. And I think they like it like that. But string theory is sometimes called a “theory of everything.” Can there be a huge theory which unites classical physics? That is, the physics of Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, rooted in an understanding of gravity. And for Einstein, a theory of time really – can that school of physics, the physics of large bodies, be united with a physics of subatomic particles? Thus far, as far as science is concerned to my knowledge, theoretical physics is concerned, the behavior of subatomic particles goes against the theories of gravity that apply to large bodies. And so the challenge is, can there be a steering to unite these two apparently disparate, two conflicting things, and thus it is called string theory, or better, a theory of everything, or a unifying theory of Einstein and quantum mechanics? Relativity theory and quantum mechanical theory. This is huge and has gone unsolved since – well, the real great meeting to see if there could be some reconciliation occurred in 1925 in Copenhagen. We talked about that before. Up to this point they have not been reconciled; there has not been a unified theory of everything. In fact, there seems to be among theoretical physicists who deal with particle physics or quantum mechanics, a movement away from a recognition of the existence of a world outside of the human consciousness. In other words, there are people in recent times who get Nobel prizes in theoretical physics who have made the claim that subatomic particles do not exist in and of themselves. They exist because our consciousness brings them into existence. This is a huge assertion because it would deny the existence of a world outside of consciousness. The consequences of that, ultimately for the transformation of the world in a sense from the epoch of Western hegemony to the epoch of humanity is not possible and can only be seen as a dead end. I’ll explain that a little bit more. I would say that that type of philosophy – the philosophy of this is not new – the philosophy that they’re asserting – the claims that they are making have a philosophical history going back to what we call British empiricism and the first philosopher Berkeley and then of course the major one in the British empiricist tradition David Hume, who said we can only claim the existence of the world as a result of our consciousness. We’ll come back to that. If there is no world outside of our consciousness, then what is truth? This philosophical problem, or as I would say the geography, the structure of this problem of the existence of the world outside of consciousness, has its reflection in the discussion of artificial intelligence. Again, not a small matter. A very important matter because of the conclusions that they are drawing, because AI through the devices of the internet and iPhones and other things is a greater reality in the lives of everyday people than quantum mechanics – the type of philosophical assertions that they make either openly or as subtext, has greater influence upon the ways that billions of people will view themselves and their futures. Our approaches in philosophy and of course Hegel, and again I want to emphasize, not as the last word – we are not making a god of Hegel the way some people in AI want to make a god of AGI, that is artificial intelligence that becomes God-like, or artificial intelligence which through the evolution of machine intelligence can arrive at absolute truths, a kind of an end game where God-like means all-knowing. But even they in the AI discourse say that in arriving at that civilization itself will be destroyed. We’ll come back to that. A lot of these guys I don’t take too seriously, the chatter as it were. We’ll come back to that. We are concerned with logic and phenomenology. We are concerned first of all with Hegel’s assertion and maybe one of the most important claims in the history of modern philosophy,that Aristotle did not have it right, that the substance of the logic of real things in the real world is dialectical and not formal. Formal logic is that logic associated most with Aristotle. Aristotle established that the laws of logic were laws designed to bring clarity to philosophical and other claims, and to establish what in fact were the logical conditions of truth. No small matter, not to be trivialized. Nor because of Hegel’s dialectic can we dispense with Aristotelian logic. We cannot, for all kinds of reasons, including that science is so bound up with Aristotelian logic. The ways that scientists think, the ways that experiments are constructed, the ways that they evaluate truth, et cetera, are all bound up strongly with Aristotelian logic and not with Hegelian dialectics. There are philosophers of science and of mathematics, for instance Bertrand Russell, who will say – and I think he was all out of school on this one – “I never read Hegel’s Science of Logic and I don’t think it’s worth reading. It’s conflicted and confused.” And then he goes on to attempt to establish a system whereby logic could clarify the statements of philosophy. This is a kind of symbolic or mathematical logic – a lot of people try to replace ordinary language with mathematical formula and therefore you would have a committee of philosophers let us say and linguists who would take all of the statements – I guess this is part of what they think AI will do – take all the statements ever made by philosophy, all the statements ever made by anybody and use a criteria of mathematics to clarify what those statements really meant, to indicate what the contradictions in this statement versus the other statement a person made. In other words, a return to what Aristotle wanted to achieve. Logic as a way of achieving clarity about truth claims. Now there are three laws of Aristotelian logic. And it’s very simple, but in its evolution very complex because it relates so much to all fields of mathematics as far as I can see, or can apply to all fields of mathematics, including calculus and geometry and algebra. You know, these simple laws. First of all, the law of identity: a thing is always itself. The second is the law of negation: a thing cannot be itself and its opposite at the same time. And the third is the most fascinating of them, and that is the law of the excluded middle, which is kind of a combination of the two previous ones. Nothing can exist as itself and its opposite at the same time – the law of excluded middle. Which, for Aristotle to base logic on anything but the law of identity would mean to clutter knowledge with other types of claims and contradictions. Remember, logic in this sense is to bring clarity and to eliminate all contradictions. The law of the excluded middle is a denial of the existence of contradiction and statements of truth or methods seeking to know the truth. However, Hegel in his logic says that in fact, all things exist in a state of contradiction and that the principal law of logic is the law of negation. Or to put it another way, the negation of the negation. That seems so odd or so out of bounds because we don’t talk about things in that way, but that is where Hegel begins and that in the end is the subversive and revolutionary character of his thinking Hegel is a student of Immanuel Kant – by the way, Immanuel Kant is my favorite modern philosopher. I use my favorite for several reasons, not because I agree with him more than I agree with Hegel. But Hegel comes forward with what in fact is a revolutionary proposition, that the logic of real things, the logic of real ideas, the logic of things that we live with, the logic of what we are is grounded in the unity of opposites. Hegel therefore proposed a logic of things in motion and change, as opposed to a logic of things in a static and lifeless existence I’ve already mentioned about phenomenology, I won’t go back to that except to say that there is a kind of empty and an infantile, childish, more popular existentialism today associated with the word wokeness, identity, associated with pop psychology, intersectionality. And we should be very clear, intersectional analysis is not a dialectical analysis. This existential phenomenology centers upon the individual, is ahistorical, is unable to deal with the great philosophical questions. In a lot of ways identity politics and the philosophies of it and intersectionality are distractions from the great struggles of this time. It is completely subjective and self-oriented, egotistical in the sense of the self – the individual is the main center of philosophy. Isn’t that a real backward move from Hegel? But it is not an unusual evolution in Anglo-American philosophy. I’m of the opinion that people like John Stuart Mill would be very comfortable with this outcome. And there are philosophers who from an “existentialist” point of view analyze everything from hip-hop to gender sexuality, through the lens of identity and frankly of Aristotelian logic. There are so many ironies with this – these people who are so much against white men who said anything in the past are really basing their philosophy, their theories in Aristotle and John Stuart Mill and maybe John Locke if you will. The other application of phenomenology which is not Hegel necessarily is Immanuel Kant and I would say even David Hume, who use phenomenon to mean our sensual experiences. Sensual, that feeling, tasting, seeing, etcetera experience. And Kant made a distinction between what he called phenomena: those things that are available to our reasoning process, our logical process. And noumena: those things beyond our feeling or experience. Phenomena, where all of those things that are available to us through our experience and are available to knowledge, to reason. Noumena is that universe, that world which is beyond anything we can experience, hence beyond anything we can know. So the world of knowledge is the world of phenomena. Hegel, on the other side, said that because we and all things exist in time. Because of that, and because all things exist in motion, while we might never get to be absolute, i.e. we become God, we can increasingly know not only our experiences but that which is beyond our experience, perhaps in the realm of the abstract. I don’t want to get into that right now, but Hegel excoriated and criticized Kant for limiting the possibilities of knowledge to our immediate experience. We can come back to that. As I said already, we’re going back into this philosophical thing as a way to engage the ideological struggle and the ideological struggles today. I don’t know how you do it without philosophy. A lot of this is empty, uninformed discourse by poorly educated professors and others. A lot of it wouldn’t be acceptable to Kant or Hegel or Du Bois or Baldwin, or anybody. It’s so empty, so superficial. To think that you can have a discourse on gender and race over here, and a discourse on quantum mechanics and AI over here, and they have nothing in common. My argument is they have a whole lot in common and each of them in their logics, in their methods, in the phenomenologies weigh in heavily upon humanity’s future, or the majority of humanity’s imaginary of their future. Woke identity politics is a way of in fact taking billions of people out of the struggle for their own future. AI discussions do the same thing – well, what links them? I think there are common philosophical assumptions, whether stated or not. Common philosophical assumptions, and that at one cannot effectively wage the struggle for ideas without getting at the deep structure of ideas. Kant called it a transcendental logic. Aristotle is right – there’s something more to this than just what you say or how you construct your argument. What are the assumptions grounding what you say and grounding your argument? Again, whenever you deal with Hegel, you’re gonna get all the blowback in the world. From every anti-revolutionary force no matter where they are in academic disciplines or in public discourse, they will blow back against Hegel as unrealistic, unworkable and confused. And again it is because of the two things. Time, which is indispensable in Hegel, not just as a structure, but time as inseparable from the existence of things themselves – things exist in time and motion. But also the fundamental law of Hegelian dialectics: the negation of the negation. That just doesn’t sit well with a lot of people. You know, you say “Well it’s a logic based in the negation of the negation.” “Oh there you go again, you’re negative.” “No, I’m not negative at all.” You see what I’m saying? So, the liberal mind, they have this happy-happy positive thing. No, we’re not talking about your personal feeling, we’re talking about the way things exist in motion. What Hegel said is the logic of actual existing things is a logic based upon negation. The new emergence from the old. And the two become a synthesis. You know, in social philosophy, social theory, revolutionary thinking. If one does not engage that or acknowledge that, one is condemning oneself to dogmatism and repeating over and over and over again formulations that may have applied adequately and scientifically to one set of circumstances but might not apply in this. In the realm of theory and ideas, to deny dialectics in my estimate is to deny the creative potential of all great ideas to birth new ideas. Out of the old comes the new. The old is not completely destroyed, it is synthesized with the new to produce something new. It is a creative process, the unity of opposites leads to a higher synthesis. We’re reading the Science of Logic in the same way we read Black Reconstruction. We read the Science of Logic the way not that Bertrand Russell read it – or didn’t read it – but the ways that Marx and Lenin, among others, have read Science of Logic. We read Science of Logic and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind the way Du Bois did, and the ways that Hegel is implemented and deployed in Black Reconstruction. If you know Hegel, you can see Du Bois working through a dialectical logic to explain reconstruction and the anti-slavery struggle. And in fact, reading Black Reconstruction the way we read him, creates creative possibilities to think about the world. We read Hegel the way the now-defunct Soviet Academy of Philosophy did. In other words, we read him in a revolutionary way, and why shouldn’t we? We’re not anti-revolutionary. And frankly I don’t think there’s a moral way to exist in the world – and I get this from Baldwin – if you’re not revolutionary in revolutionary times, that is in times of revolutionary change in technology, philosophy, systems of governance and et cetera. We do not read Hegel in the limited bourgeois way – we do not read Hegel or Black Reconstruction in a way to uphold the rule of the current so-called liberal bourgeois elite. We do not read Hegel the way Bertrand Russell or John Stuart Mill did, or more recently the way George di Giovanni, the translator and writer of the introduction in the current Cambridge edition of Science of Logic. Di Giovanni says in his introduction, “Let’s be real, the Science of Logic is antiquated; it has no relevance to now.” Well, if your standpoint is the permanence, end-of-history permanence of liberal bourgeois rule then of course it’s antiquated. Any philosophy that talks about the inevitability of change would not be to your personal liking because you see this system as the best representation of human aspiration. A person like di Giovanni would provide a great deal of argumentation and support to a person like Joe Biden. That seems strange, doesn’t it. Or at least his speech writers, who would say that the struggle on the world scale is between democracies and autocracies, and once you get up off the floor having fell on the floor laughing at such nonsense, and especially coming out of the mouth of a warmonger like Joe Biden, you know, you have to say, well let’s be more sober about this question. Is that, as you stated, Joe Biden, the fundamental dialectic of this time? Since you want to say that there is a dialectic in world history, at least at this time, and if you want to say that – well Joe Biden, are you prepared to embrace the law of the excluded middle? That all things exist as a negation of negation, and is the negation of the current system something completely different from it, leading to a new synthesis? Hence, even in your broke-down ignorant way, or your speechwriters, you have to acknowledge that history and time compel all matter, all things, including human consciousness, to exist in a state of movement. Why do we have time, anyway? In this sense, I guess it’s fair for us to say that we take a stance against the privileging, without contextualizing, of mathematical and symbolic logics, or linguistic logics. In other words, the great achievements of mathematics and mathematical logic and linguistic theories are undeniable, but is that the end of the story, is that the final say? There are those who operate on behalf of, and are themselves a part of the ruling elite who are waging an existential battle for their existence in a time where they have fallen into a crisis of legitimacy – the people don’t believe them and don’t want to hear much that they have to say. That they come forward suddenly with a new technology. That if you think you people are like us, or average people, that you were so smart – we now have technology that will replace you with a quickness. And it’s known as artificial intelligence. And if you think you’re so smart, I’m using their words, if you think you are so smart – this technology can go through its own evolutionary process, on its own, producing a form of superhuman intelligence that is “God-like.” And if you eff with us, the liberal bourgeois elite, we will unleash God-like intelligence on all of y’all and destroy civilization as such. Listen to some of the Lex Fridman discussions with these MIT engineers and tech entrepreneurs and AI experts and all-around near-God intellects. If you can listen to that for any length of time, you will literally hear them literally saying something close to what I’m saying. We got the technology to take most of your fucking asses out of history, and it’s called AI. If you mess with us for too long, we’re going to unleash God-like intelligence on your buns. You think Francis Fukuyama had something to say about the end of history – we can do it now, and it’s known as AGI – artificial general intelligence or otherwise referred to as God-like intelligence. This is an ideological question. It’s a money question too because Silicon Valley, they have to market themselves and get people to invest in them. But anyway, I’ll just say my last thing. Look, even if you put aside woke and identity politics which is, you know – it’s a weak hand for the bourgeoisie, very weak hand, and the thinkers in that field are so weak that they didn’t stay around too long and almost self-destructed and you don’t really hear too much from them. But it’s a weak hand. The strong hand from the standpoint of the bourgeoisie, of the ruling class which must be concerned with not just ruling the United States, or ruling France, but managing humanity – their strongest hands are in quantum mechanics, string theory, and in artificial intelligence, and this is the context, the framework that shapes and in a sense organizes our approach to the reading of Hegel’s Science of Logic. AuthorDr. Anthony Montiero is a long-time activist in the struggle for socialism and black liberation, scholar, and expert in the work of WEB Dubois. In fact, he is one of the most cited Dubois scholars in the entire world. He’s worked and taught longer than most of us have been alive. Currently, he organizes with the Saturday Free School for Philosophy and Black Liberation in Philadelphia. This article was republished from Positive Peace Blog. Archives May 2023 5/4/2023 Degrowth: An environmental ideology with good intentions, bad politics. By: Collin Chambers and Liberation SchoolRead NowIntroduction The planet is experiencing multiple environmental crises: biodiversity loss, deforestation, increased rates of pandemics, chemical pollution, soil depletion, water contamination and shortages, runaway non-renewable energy consumption, and climate change. “Degrowth” is an environmental ideology that arose as a political response to these compounding crises. Degrowth was originally termed by André Gorz in 1972. Gorz argued that global environmental balance, which is predicated upon non-growth (or “degrowth”), is not compatible with the capitalist system, which requires “accumulation for the sake of accumulation” [1]. Degrowth, according to Gorz, is thus a challenge to capitalism itself. Degrowth has become increasingly popular among many environmentalists and leftists. There are some who even call themselves “degrowth communists” [2]. Thus, it’s important to have a clear understanding of exactly what degrowth is and whether it has the potential to advance or hold back the class struggle. Jason Hickel, a prominent proponent of degrowth, defines it like this: “The objective of degrowth is to scale down the material and energy throughput of the global economy, focusing on high-income nations with high levels of per-capita consumption” [3]. The degrowth perspective asks why society is so obsessed with “growth” (measured by Gross Domestic Product) and seeks to deconstruct the entire “ideology of growth.” The “ideology of growth” is used by the capitalist class to argue that more and more growth is needed to overcome poverty and to create jobs. This is bourgeois ideology in the sense that capitalism relies upon and produces the artificial scarcity to which we’re subjected. The reality is that, in developed capitalist countries like U.S., there is an overabundance of material wealth and that scarcity is socially produced by the capitalist market and private ownership. Degrowth is correct on the point that if wealth were redistributed then there would indeed be abundance. However, even though proponents of degrowth are well intentioned and truly want to solve environmental crises, the political-economic methods and solutions that degrowth calls for actually work against creating the critical mass necessary to make a socialist revolution here in the U.S. I address each of these below by showing how 1) degrowth reproduces Malthusian ideas about so-called “natural limits;” 2) it’s anti-modern and anti-technological orientation lacks a class perspective; and 3) there are key practical issues with deploying degrowth ideas in the class struggle itself. The Connections between Thomas Malthus and Degrowth Thomas Malthus was an aristocratic political-economist who did much of his work before the development of industrial-scale agriculture. In his 1798 book, An Essay on the Principles of Population, Malthus argued that in every geographic region there are particular resource limits or “carrying capacities” [4]. Malthus’ so-called “law of population” says that unchecked population growth will outstrip this carrying capacity that eventually leads to a “natural check” in the form of massive deaths from starvation and disease to bring the population back under the carrying capacity. Malthus blamed poor people for “unchecked” population growth and argued against policies to alleviate people from abject poverty because it delayed the inevitable: the “natural check” of overpopulation. Rising wages, Malthus said, led to workers having more children and thereby creating overpopulation. He blamed workers themselves for economic crises, with a convenient argument against rising wages. Marx rebuffed Malthus’ erroneous theories, clarifying that “every special historic mode of production has its own special laws of population,” and that crises were caused by capital, not by workers [5]. (This is also a point on which he diverged from Darwin, who adopted Malthus’ ideas of population). Much of this same Malthusian discourse continues to exist today as an explanation for problems such as environmental degradation and poverty. However, the development of industrial agriculture and the production of increasingly higher crop/food yields proved much of Malthus’ theories incorrect. Malthusianism focuses on “overpopulation” as a main cause of environmental degradation. Degrowth actually reproduces this faulty notion through the proposition that once resources and wealth are equally redistributed (which degrowth rightly wants to do), there must be some “check” on population because, as population grows without any added economic growth, people will eventually have access to fewer and fewer resources. For instance, Giorgos Kallis, another major proponent of the movement, says that “degrowth envisions radically reducing the surplus” and advocates so-called “self-limitations” where there are “collective decisions to refrain from pursuing all that could be pursued” [6]. Rather than the typical Malthusian “natural” external limits, degrowth goes a step further: it calls for a collective enforcement of the internalization of Malthusian ideas of limits and constraints. The target of degrowth, Kallis declares, is “not just capitalism, but also productivism” [7]. Proponents of degrowth argue that any type of “economic growth is ecologically unsustainable—whether it is capitalist growth or socialist does not make a difference” [8]. In doing so they artificially equate the two antagonistic systems and abstract away from the qualitative differences between socialist and capitalist growth. Kallis justifies this claim by arguing that if we did not change consumption levels in a post-carbon energy regime, then nothing would really change in terms of environmental destruction because “the manufacturing of renewable energies requires lots of earth materials. And the fact that they cost more than fossil fuels might have something to do with their lower energy returns and higher land requirements” [9]. Thus, degrowth does not really have an ecological theory of capitalism, but an ecological theory of accumulation. For degrowth, any type of accumulation is bad and requires increased “material throughput.” False equivalences between different social systems But do proponents of degrowth know what accumulation entails? Accumulation simply means reinvesting the surplus back into production (either to expand or repair existing means of production). The accumulation of a surplus is necessary in any society. In his discussions of the reproduction schemas in the second volume of Capital, for instance, Marx writes that there has to be some sort of accumulation in order to reproduce existing society, to replace and repair fixed capital like machinery and roads, societal infrastructures, to care for those who can’t work, and so on. There also has to be surpluses for, say, pandemics and droughts. The difference is that accumulation under socialism is guided by the workers themselves who collectively determine what and how much surplus to produce and how to use it. Under capitalism, accumulation happens for accumulation’s sake, without a plan, and purely in the interests of private profit. Under socialism, accumulation benefits society as a whole, including even the ecosystems we inhabit. When workers are in control of the surplus, will we not develop and grow the productive forces to make life better and easier for ourselves and more sustainable for the earth and its inhabitants? Wouldn’t we especially grow green productive forces to build more (and better) schools, public transportation, etc.? Shouldn’t socialists in the U.S. strive to repair the underdevelopment of imperialism by assisting in the development of productive forces in the formerly colonized world? While there are sufficient surpluses of, say, housing in the U.S., there are certainly not surpluses of housing in the entire world. Since the rise of neoliberal capitalism, the size of the working-class stratum composing the “labor aristocracy” has substantially reduced. Whom exactly are we telling to “self-limit” what we consume and live at a time when most workers in the U.S. are living paycheck to paycheck, and accumulating more and more debt? Wages have remained stagnant since the 1970s while prices have increased over 500 percent. Who exactly is supposed to limit themselves, and to what? Isn’t the problem that the masses are limited by capitalism? Degrowth is, in essence, a form of ecological austerity for working-class people [10]. Stated simply, by focusing so much on the consumption habits of workers within capitalism and so little on the conditions and relations of production, proponents of degrowth end up reproducing Malthusian ideas of “natural limits.” We must analytically evaluate production and show how production “produces consumption” itself [11]. The wasteful and environmentally unsustainable consumption patterns of the working class are not produced by “personal” choice but are system-induced. Every day, millions of workers in the U.S. commute to work in single occupant vehicles not because we “choose” to drive. It’s because public transportation is so unreliable (if it exists at all), jobs in the labor market are so unstable and temporary that few workers are actually able to live close to work, and the rents around major industries tend to be unaffordable for our class. Then there is planned obsolescence, such as when commodities like cell phones are produced to break every two years. When capitalism is overthrown and replaced with socialism, we can produce things that are “built to last” because our aim is to satisfy society’s needs and not private profit. Indeed, Marx argues that capitalist production in itself is wasteful, even in its “competitive-stage:” “Yet for all its stinginess, capitalist production is thoroughly wasteful with human material, just as its way of distributing its products through trade, and its manner of competition, make it very wasteful of material resources, so that it loses for society what it gains for the individual capitalist” [12]. Degrowth is antithetical to Marxism Proponents of degrowth argue that there are absolute “planetary limits” and a fixed “carrying capacity” that cannot be surpassed by humans if we want to avoid ecological collapse. This is not only pessimistic in that it dismisses the idea that, under socialism, we could figure out new sustainable ways to grow, but it’s also completely devoid of class analysis. There’s no distinction between socially-produced limits and natural limits. Degrowth is anti-modern, anti-technological, and anti-large scale production and infrastructure. Kallis argues that “only social systems of limited size and complexity can be governed directly rather than by technocratic elites acting on behalf of the populace… Many degrowth advocates, therefore, oppose even ‘green’ megastructures like high-speed trains or industrial-scale wind farms[!]” [13]. The same can be said about degrowth solutions to the problems the capitalist agricultural system creates. Proponents of degrowth propose small scale (both urban and rural) methods of agriculture production to replace industrial-scale agriculture. They, in fact, glorify and romanticize “peasant economies.” Despite the problems of capitalist industrial agriculture, there are two main benefits of industrial-scale agriculture. First, it has drastically increased yields. At the present moment, there is enough food produced to feed 11 billion people. Second, industrial farming has thoroughly decreased the backbreaking labor needed for agricultural and food production. In 1790, 90 percent of the U.S. workforce labored on farms. In 1900, it was 35 percent At the present moment, only one percent of the U.S. workforce works on farms [14]. Certainly, in any just society we would want to spread out food production more evenly amongst the population. But getting rid of industrial-scale agriculture and reverting to small-scale peasant and small landowner agriculture would require massive numbers of workers to go back to the land and perform backbreaking agricultural work. Such a transformation would inevitably reduce agricultural yield substantially, increasing the possibility of food insecurity and hunger among vast swathes of the population. And what would we do with the commodities and infrastructure we’d have to destroy to create such plots of land? Moreover, such a vision necessitates the redistribution of land from private ownership of large landholders. Is this achieved through revolution or through governmental reforms? In either case, if we’re struggling to reclaim land then why not broaden our horizons and redistribute land in the interests of the environment and the people, including Indigenous and other oppressed nations in the U.S.? Degrowth is, furthermore, idealist and divorced from the material reality within which U.S. workers currently live. Matt Huber, a Marxist environmental geographer, argues that a “truly humane society must commit to relieving the masses from agricultural labor,” and that we cannot act as if “small-scale agricultural systems are much of a ‘material basis’ for a society beyond industrial capitalism” [15]. This is not to say that small-scale and urban farming are undesirable, but that they’re insufficient in a country like the U.S. The Cuban model of urban farming and agriculture–which is a heroic achievement of the Cuban Revolution–can’t simply be mapped onto this country or the rest of the world. Additionally, we shouldn’t forgo modern technologies that already exist just because they are “large scale” or because they currently contribute to environmental degradation within capitalist society. Doing so would in effect produce more ecological waste! In an important piece on capitalism and ecology, Ernest Mandel writes: “it is simply not true that modern industrial technology is inevitably geared towards destroying the environmental balance. The progress of the exact sciences opens up a very wide range of technical possibilities” [16]. Increased rates of pollution and environmental degradation occur because capitalists pursue profits at the expense of the environment, not because of the technologies themselves. Socialists have to distinguish between instruments of production and their use under capitalism. Degrowth and building the class struggle In the U.S., degrowth remains an ideology that is relatively socially isolated but gaining influence among environmentalists and some on the left. It’s an ideology of guilt rather than revolutionary action. The ideas from degrowth will not appeal to masses of exploited and oppressed people who actually need more, not less. Imagine, for example, canvassing and talking to people in working-class neighborhoods, trying to get them on board with a degrowth political platform. How do degrowth proponents think workers in oppressed neighborhoods respond if they were told they needed to consume less to fight climate change? Many of us already wait as long as possible in the winter to turn on our heat! As organizers, we would not get the time of day, and we wouldn’t even believe ourselves. Can you imagine organizing homeless and unemployed workers around a program of less consumption? Degrowth is an ideology fit for the privileged, and if they want to consume less, they should. From the perspective of the practical class struggle, degrowth is particularly problematic. Degrowth has a rhetorical strategy problem. In an unequal country such as the U.S., is the discourse of less and “self-limitation” realistic and inspiring? Is this tactic energizing, does it speak to the needs of the exploited and oppressed, can it mobilize people into action? Rather than limit everything, we actually need to grow certain sectors such as green infrastructures and technologies. Our class doesn’t need a political platform that calls on us to give up the little pleasures we might have–if any at all–for the sake of the environment. Our class needs a political platform that states clearly what the real problem is and how we can solve it to make life will better. Degrowth takes a non-class approach towards consumption and production. It is true that some of the more privileged sectors of the working class, particularly in imperialist countries, consume excessively and wastefully. Degrowth, however, fails to account for the class that takes wasteful consumption to almost unimaginable levels and the system that produces these production and consumption patterns. An increasing portion of the labor of the working class is wasted on supporting the consumption habits of the numerically small capitalist class. No amount of preaching self-limiting morality is going to convince the capitalist class to consume less, expropriate less, or oppress less. Once we can get rid of the parasitic imperialists, then human needs and desires can be met through a planned economy led by the working class. Thus, the solution to these multifaceted and compounding environmental crises is not “degrowth”, but rather, as Mandel formulates it, “controlled and planned growth:” “Such growth would need to be in the service of clearly defined priorities that have nothing to do with the demands of private profit…rationally controlled by human beings… The choice for ‘zero growth’ is clearly an inhuman choice. Two-thirds of humanity still lives below the subsistence minimum. If growth is halted, it means that the underdeveloped countries are condemned to remain stuck in the swamp of poverty, constantly on the brink of famine… “Planned growth means controlled growth, rationally controlled by human beings. This presupposes socialism: such growth cannot be achieved unless the ‘associated producers’ take control of production and use it for their own interests, instead of being slaves to ‘blind economic laws’ or ‘technological compulsion’” [17]. References [1]“Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets! ‘Industry furnishes the material which saving accumulates.’ Therefore save, save, i.e., reconvert the greatest possible portion of surplus-value or surplus product into capital! Accumulation for the sake of accumulation, production for the sake of production: this was the formula in which classical economics expressed the historical mission of the bourgeoisie in the period of its domination.” Marx, Karl. (1867/1976). Capital Vol 1 (New York: Penguin Books), 742. [2] Hansen, Bue Rübner. (2021). “The kaleidoscope of Ccatastrophe: On the clarities and blind spots of Andreas Malm.” Viewpoint Magazine, April 14. Available here. [3] Hickel, Jason. (2019). “Degrowth: A theory of radical abundance,” Real-World Economics Review 87, no. 19: 54-68. “Throughput” is the flow of energy and materials through a system. [4] Malthus, Thomas R. (1789/2007). An essay on the principle of population (New York: Dover). [5]Marx, Capital, 784. [6] Kallis, Giorgos. (2018). In defense of degrowth: Opinions and manifestos (UK: Uneven Earth Press), 22, 21. [7] Ibid., 24. [8] Kallis, Giorgos. (2019). “Capitalism, socialism, degrowth: A rejoinder.” Capitalism Nature Socialism 30, no. 2: 189. [9] Ibid., 194. [10] See Phillips, Leigh. (2015). Austerity ecology & the collapse-porn addicts: A defense of growth, progress, industry and stuff (Washington: Zero Books). [11] See Karl, Marx. 1993. Grundrisse: Foundations of the critique of political economy (rought draft), trans. M. Nicolaus (New York: Penguin), 90-98. [12] Marx, Karl. (1991.) Capital Vol 3 (New York: Penguin), 180. [13] Kallis, In defense of degrowth, 21. [14] The World Bank. (2021), “Employment in agriculture (% total employment) (model ILO estimate),” January 29. Available here. [15] Huber, Matt. (2018). “Fossilized liberation: Energy, freedom, and the ‘development of the productive forces.’” In Materialism and the critique of energy, ed. B.R. Bellamy and J. Diamanti (Chicago: MCM’ Press), 517. [16] Mandel, Ernest. (2020). “Ernest Mandel on Marxism and ecology: ‘The dialectic of growth.’” Monthly Review, June 17. Available here. [17] Ibid. First published in Liberation News Archives May 2023 I've just come away from watching an interview with the acclaimed author and philosopher, John Bellamy Foster, conducted on the Midwestern Marx YT channel. It was like a bucket of ice water in the face (for me!). In what way? Well, as anyone unfortunate enough to read my stuff will know, I’m enthralled by what Foster would call philosophical “irrationalism”. Years ago, I resurrected my mental stability in part through the works of philosophers such as Schopenhauer, Von Hartmann, Nishida Kitaro, Bergson etc etc. All very much philosophers of mysticism and intuition. The closest I get to similar levels of enthusiasm with purely rational philosophers is with Marx and Spinoza. My bad. I’m not just saying that, nor am I being ironic. I think Foster is absolutely right. We have a looming twin apocalypse ahead from either nuclear war, climate collapse or both. It’s time for politically thinking people to dwell in the rational and practical. In fact, Foster’s talk held up an inconvenient mirror for me. I constantly bang on about how bloody awful and destructive the arisen cults of irrational contrarianism, conspiracy theorism, and general anti-realism are, while concurrently in my private moments, I wrap myself in deeply mystical thought. In my own defence, I try to keep a clear enough distinction between my ‘spiritual' life, which is the proper realm for mysticism, and my social attitudes and praxis (limited though that has unfortunately been in recent years). I keep the necessary wall in tact, a feature of mature political republicanism, between my religious beliefs and what has to be done for securing the life and well-being of all people. But even here, I suppose, having listened to Foster, I am guilty of placing far too much importance on my private musings. The main thrust of Foster’s argument (actually, go and watch the interview if you can : it’s just released on Midwestern Marx YT, conducted by Carlos Garrido) is the neutering obscenity of what passes in the western academy for “left”, ie the successors of the post-modernists, the Frankfurt school, the daft imperialism-friendly woo of Zizek etc and how these siphon off vital energy and attention from the real struggles. It centers on a discussion of the mid 20th century Hungarian philosopher Lukacs and his criticisms of the Frankfurt school as a sort of academic brothel for western capitalism, anti-communism and imperialism, and of Heidegger as well as the ongoing apologetics for Heidegger (in shame, I admit to having re-read Being and Time and not found it without merit, though I retain an extremely dim view of the man). It’s an excellent and timely discussion. Now I’m going to go for a cold shower. Realism might be growing on me. AuthorROSS ION COYLE This article was republished from Ross Ion Coyle. Archives April 2023 |
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