Like rotary phones, typewriters, and VHS tapes, capitalism has outlived its usefulness.
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If at certain moments in its historical development it served an important role in unleashing the productive forces from the shackles set on it by feudal relations of production, today in our highly financialized, ultra-parasitical decaying capitalist-imperialism, it is as evident as ever that social utility has long ago stopped being an unintended side-effect of capital accumulation. Well past are the times of capitalism’s vitality, when Marx and Engels could confidently proclaim that the form of life had “accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals.”[1] Today these wonders are erected in China, Russia, and the flowering multipolar world.

Western Imperialist Financialization and the Global South’s Economic Development

Faced with the culmination of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, and of the unwillingness to return to the government intervention which dominated most capitalist economies in the Second World War, the crisis of the 1970s forced capitalists in the West to choose primarily two lifelines to recover worthwhile profit margins and prolong the life of the system. On the one hand, it could export productive capital abroad, increasing the rate of profit through buying labor power cheaper (and hence, lowering the cost of what Marx calls “variable capital”).[2] On the other hand, it could seek to make profits in more financialized and parasitic forms, through, for instance, interest rates, rents, and stock buy backs. Both led to general deindustrialization in the West and the gutting of any semblance of a productive economy.

The American capitalist class took both routes; it exported productive capital to the global south and deviated investments towards profiting from rents, interest rates, and stock buybacks. Today, as the economist Michael Hudson has shown, 92% of the profits of the Fortune 500 companies have been used to buy stocks – their own stock buyback programs – or to pay out as dividends. Only 8% is used on new investment.”[3] As Radhika Desai argues, the U.S. and Britain, therefore “led [most of] the world down the path that could only weaken productive economies and expand predatory and speculative finance.”[4] 

Faced with the fact that most profits in the Western capitalist states, especially its imperial heartland in America, are coming from activities which produce absolutely no real economic growth, the capitalist class has had to abandon the promethean attitude to growth that characterized its position on economic development in the 20th century. Today, faced with the objective devastation produced by capitalist growth on the environment, it has resuscitated Malthusianism with an environmentalist garb. I’ve called this Environmental Neo-Malthusianism (ENM).[5]

Instead of seeing the ecological crisis as rooted in capitalist production, which is fundamentally uncapable to develop ways to grow in harmony with nature, it has blamed growth itself. Both economic and populational growth are pinned as responsible for the product of Western capitalist-imperialism. How convenient that at a stage when productive development occurs primarily in the BRICS+ countries, especially in a China that outpaces U.S. production by two, that bourgeois ideology turns to ENM and paints real economic growth as the villain.

This is, of course, an abstract view of growth. It is exactly what should be expected from bourgeois ideology, which is fundamentally unable to ascend to the concrete, i.e., to understand the concrete concretely. Everything for them is reified, disconnected from the processes and webs of interconnections in which things are located. Growth in general is then blamed for the effects of a particular, historically and geographically situated, capitalist growth.

The intention here is clear. As the Western capitalist class shows itself incapable of any real economic growth, it condemns growth itself. Of course, the growth it condemns is of the kind that occurs in the global South and East, where productive development often outpaces even the U.S. It has no problem praising the growth obtained by parasitic Western finance capital. This is nothing but the form imperialist ideology has to take today to sustain a position that promotes the impoverishing of the global South.

Imperialism, as Lenin taught us, aims to fundamentally suffocate the ability of the colonized and imperialized to grow. Amilcar Cabral echoes Lenin when he tells us that “We have seen that violent usurpation of the freedom of the process of development of the productive forces of the dominated socio-economic whole constitutes the principal and permanent characteristic of imperialist domination, whatever its form.”[6] This is why leaders of the socialist and anti-colonial struggles in the 20th and 21st centuries have so fiercely pronounced the importance of economic, scientific, and technological development.

For Mao, central to the project of Chinese sovereignty was socialism, because “only socialism can save China.”[7] This is because, as Mao writes, “the socialist system has promoted the rapid development of the productive forces of our country, a fact even our enemies abroad have had to acknowledge.”[8] Writing in the early 1960s, Mao would say that their “main accomplishment has been to clear the way for the development of the productive forces.”[9]

Deng Xiaoping would write that “A Communist society is one in which there is no exploitation of man by man, there is great material abundance and the principle of from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs is applied. It is impossible to apply that principle without overwhelming material wealth. In order to realize communism, we have to accomplish the tasks set in the socialist stage. They are legion, but the fundamental one is to develop the productive forces so as to demonstrate the superiority of socialism over capitalism and provide the material basis for communism.”[10]

Cabral himself emphasized the futility of the comprador bourgeoisie in “direct[ing] the development of the productive forces,” urging us to remember that “the productive forces are the motive force of history, and total freedom of the process of their development is an indispensable condition for their proper functioning.”[11]

Kim Il Sung emphasized that “without building an independent national economy [i.e., economic self-sufficiency], it is impossible to guarantee the firm political independence of a country, develop the productive forces and improve the people’s standard of living.”[12] To be “in conformity with socialist society,” Il Sung urged the need to “develop the productive forces [and] place all sectors of the national economy on the basis of modern technology.”[13]

Writing out of Cuba, Che Guevara would say that “The struggle against imperialism, for liberation from colonial or neocolonial shackles, which is being carried out by means of politi­cal weapons, arms, or a combination of the two, is not separate from the struggle against backwardness and poverty. Both are stages on the same road leading toward the creation of a new society of justice and plenty.”[14] This requires the unleashing of the productive forces currently being suffocated by Western imperialism.

“Degrowth Communism” Contra the Classics of Marxism

Today, however, the new fad in the so-called bourgeois academy is ‘degrowth communism’. Thinkers like Jason Hickel, Kohei Saito, and others, who uphold a distorted caricature of Marxism which condemns economic growth and urges economic ‘degrowth,’ are propped up as a ‘radical’ form of Environmental Neo-Malthusianism.[15] Matt Huber is right to point out, in his critique of the degrowth “communists,” that “it would be quite sad to build a socialist movement capable of seizing the means of production only to prohibit from the outset the further development of the productive forces. Socialism is not stasis. What about fusion power? Curing cancer? We still have so much left to accomplish as a species that capitalism might be holding us back from.”[16]

Seeking to always confuse the mass of people into thinking that theories which are fundamentally anti-Marxist and anti-communist are actually their opposite, the bourgeoisie has set the stage for these characters to present the public with a Frankenstein Marxism, a Marxism put together by an eclectic mix of liberalism, abstracted quotes from random unpublished manuscripts (Saito), and a general hodgepodge of decades of CIA-MI6 funded anti-communist ‘leftism,’ aimed at creating a compatible, imperialism friendly “left.” At a time when most of the American people are living paycheck to paycheck, drowning in debt-slavery, and living lives plagued by desperation and material insecurity, to pitch communism as ‘degrowth’ is to confirm the McCarthyite lie that socialism will make everyone poor. Instead of debunking this ruling class lie and showing how communists seek to create the sort of material abundance that allows for universal human flourishing, these so-called “socialists” embrace it. Perhaps their socialism has Klaus Schwab and World Economic Forum characteristics, because it sure sounds a whole lot like telling poor working class people that they’ll “own nothing and be happy.”

We must be clear, this ‘degrowth communism’ is nothing more than the ‘radical’ form environmental neo-Malthusianism has to take to win over the middle-class leftists to their side. These are the priestly class that ensures, through the iron triangle of the media, NGO’s, and the academy, that this junk is fed into wrongly self-proclaimed popular, grassroots, or even ‘socialist’ organizations. It is, however, anti-Marxist and anti-communist through and through.

The Marxist tradition has always understood that only in the development of the forces of production can socialism flourish. In Capital Vol. I, for instance, Marx writes that:

"The development of society's productive forces… [create the] material conditions of production which alone can form the real basis of a higher form of society, a society in which the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle."[17]

It is the development of “the material conditions and the social combination of the process of production” which “ripens,” in the capitalist mode of life, “both the elements for forming a new society and the forces tending towards the overthrow of the old one.”[18] As with other modes of life, Marxist have long understood that capitalist relations of production, while at one point being “forms of development [for] the productive forces,” have in time “turn[ed] into their fetters.”[19] Socialist relations of production have always been understood to have the capacity of breaking through these fetters and helping unleash the forces of production. As Marx famously writes in Capital Vol. I.,

"The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. Thus integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated."[20]

A similar argument is made by Engels in his celebrated Socialism: Utopian and Scientific:

"The expansive force of the means of production bursts asunder the bonds imposed upon them by the capitalist mode of production. Their release from these bonds is the sole prerequisite for an unbroken, ever more rapidly advancing development of the productive forces, and thus of a practically unlimited growth of production itself."[21]

In his “Critique of the Gotha Program,” while elaborating on some general characteristics and preconditions for the highest phase of communist society, Marx would say that,

"In the highest phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banner: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!"[22]

Capitalist relations of production in time become a barrier for human progress, as it is evident in today’s fully financialized Western capitalist-imperialism. But the fetters are not just for the forces of production, i.e., the economic base of society, but also for culture, politics, arts, philosophy i.e., the superstructure of society. The decadent and degenerate culture of today’s Western capitalism should itself demonstrate how profoundly fettering it is to the cultural development of humanity.

Overcoming the “System of Waste”

While more progressive than the feudal orders which preceded it in Europe, capitalism also produces enormous waste. It is in this wastefulness and inefficiency, this anarchy of production, that capitalism has been able to produce an environmental crisis it is unfit to deal with. Capitalism wastes labor, human potential, nature, and everything in between. As British socialist William Morris eloquently stated, “The truth is that our system of Society is essentially a system of waste.”[23]

Not only would socialist relations of production remove the artificial fetters created by a society wherein production is aimed at profit, but also the extreme wastefulness in labor, life, and things created by such anarchic production for-profit. As Engels argues,

"The social appropriation of the means of production puts an end not only to the current artificial restrictions on production [i.e., capitalist fetters], but also to the positive waste and devastation of productive forces and products… It sets free for the community at large a mass of means of production and products by putting an end to the senseless luxury and extravagance of the present ruling classes and their political representatives. [This affords] the possibility of securing for every member of society, through social production, an existence which is not only perfectly adequate materially and which becomes daily richer, but also guarantees him the completely free development and exercise of his physical and mental faculties."[24]

The emphasis on the development of the forces of production has led critics of Marxism to argue that socialism would reproduce the same ‘productivism’ as capitalist society. This depicts a fundamental poverty of dialectical thinking. Yes, socialism seeks to unleash the productive forces and create the sort of abundance wherein the human community can “leap from the kingdom of necessity into the kingdom of freedom.”[25] However, this growth is people-centered, not capital-centered. The aim of the development of the forces of production is not the accumulation of endless profit in a small group of hands. Far from this capitalist telos, which grows without regard for nature and human life, socialist growth is centered on creating conditions for the greatest amount of human flourishing – something which necessarily implies de-alienating humans from nature and overcoming the metabolic rifts anarchic capitalist production creates.[26]

Instead of carrying out production in environmentally unsustainable ways – as capitalism does – socialist production allows for both developments in the productive forces and – because of its efficiency and elimination of superfluous waste – for this development to be carried out in a metabolic harmony with nature. As Marx argues in Capital Vol. III., communist production would

"Govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature."[27]

China, Sustainable Development, and Socialist Ecological Civilization

This harmonious metabolism, or balance, can be seen most clearly in China’s efforts to build a socialist ecological civilization – a task it proposed for itself at the 17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in 2007. As it reads in the latest update to the CPC’s constitution, following the 20th National Congress of the CPC in 2022, the Party must “work to balance … relations between humankind and nature.”[28] “Harmony between humankind and nature,” as the constitution argues, is a fundamental component “in building a socialist ecological civilization” capable of creating “a positive path to development that ensures increased production, higher living standards, and healthy ecosystems.”[29]

This dialectic of sustainable development, central to Marx and Engels’s understanding of socialism, finds its highest concrete form to date in China’s efforts to construct a socialist ecological civilization. As John Bellamy Foster, who has spearheaded the movement towards emphasizing the ecological dimensions of Marx and Engels’s thought, argued in one of his older works: China’s “developments reflect the recognition of a dialectic in this area that has long been part of Marxist theory.”[30] In so doing, Foster argues, “China’s role in promoting ecological civilization as a stage in the development of socialism can be seen as its greatest gift to the world at present in terms of environmental governance.”[31]

Far from accepting the false binary of growth with ecological devastation or degrowth, we must (as China has done) sublate this spurious dialectic by positing the necessity of sustainable growth, a reality that can only be actualized through planned control of the economy to serve peoples needs. Only socialism can both provide the abundance necessary for all to live fulfilling, flourishing lives, and do so in a manner that doesn’t destroy the nature upon which human existence is premised.

"China will stay committed to promoting ecological conservation. As I have said many times, we should never grow the economy at the cost of resource depletion and environmental degradation, which is like draining a pond to get fish; nor should we sacrifice growth to protect the environment, which is like climbing a tree to catch fish. Guided by our philosophy that clean waters and green mountains are just as valuable as gold and silver, China has carried out holistic conservation and systematic governance of its mountains, rivers, forests, farmlands, lakes, grasslands and deserts." – Xi Jinping

Citations

[1] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works Vol. 6 (Moscow: Progress Publishers), 487.

[2] Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1 (New York: Penguin, 1982), Ch. 8.

[3] Michael Hudson, “Debt, Empires, Oligarchs and a More Perfect State,” DSPod (July 2023): https://demystifysci.com/transcripts/2023/7/22/michael-hudson-on-debt-empires-oligarchs-and-a-more-perfect-state

[4] Radhika Desia, Capitalism, Coronavirus, and War (London: Routledge, 2022), 85.

[5] Carlos L. Garrido, “Overcoming the Dangers of Environmental Neo-Malthusianism and the Errors of Degrowth Ideology,” Philosophy in Crisis (January 2024): https://carlosgarrido.substack.com/p/overcoming-the-dangers-of-environmental

[6] Amilcar Cabral, “The Weapon of Theory,” (January 1966), Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/cabral/1966/weapon-theory.htm

[7] Mao Tse-Tung, Selected Works Vol. 5 (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1977), 394.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Mao Tse-Tung, “Reading Notes On The Soviet Text Political Economy,” (1961-2) Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-8/mswv8_64.htm

[10] Deng Xiaoping, “Reform is the Only Way for China to Develop Its Productive Forces,” (August 1985) The Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping: https://dengxiaopingworks.wordpress.com/2013/03/18/reform-is-the-only-way-for-china-to-developed-its-productive-forces/

[11] Cabral, “The Weapon of Theory.”

[12] Kim Il Sung, Works Vol. 19 (Pyongyang: Foreign Language Press, 1984), 266.

[13] Kim Il Sung, Works Vol. 13 (Pyongyang: Foreign Language Press, 1983), 229.

[14] Ernesto Che Guevara, Che Guevara Reader: Writings on Politics & Revolution, ed. David Deutschmann and María del Carmen Ariet (Havana: Ocean Press, 2013), 340.

[15] See, for instance, Jason Hickel, Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the Planet (New York: Penguin, 2020); Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023); Michael Löwy, “Nine Theses on Ecosocialist Degrowth,” Monthly Review 75(3)  (July 2023): https://monthlyreview.org/2023/07/01/nine-theses-on-ecosocialist-degrowth/ (It is unfortunate that the great American Marxist journal and editorial, Monthly Review, has accepted ‘degrowth.’ While most of the other work is still great, the turn from sustainable development rooted in Marxist ecology to degrowth has been disheartening).

[16] Matt Huber, “The Problem with Degrowth,” Jacobin (July 2023): https://jacobin.com/2023/07/degrowth-climate-change-economic-planning-production-austerity

[17] Karl Marx, Capital Vol I., (London: Penguin, 1982), 739.

[18] Marx, Capital Vol I., 635.

[19] Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (New York: International Publishers, 1999), 21.

[20] Marx, Capital Vol. I., 929.

[21] Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (Chicago: Revolutionary Classics, 1993), 109.

[22] Marx and Engels, MECW Vol. 24, 87.

[23] William Morris, “As to Bribing Excellence,” William Morris Archive: http://morrisarchive.lib.uiowa.edu/items/show/2322. 

[24] Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, 109.

[25] Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, 110.

[26] Capitalism “produces conditions that provoke an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself.” Karl Marx, Capital Vol. III (London: Penguin, 1991), 949. For more see John Bellamy Foster’s older works, especially Marx’s Capital and The Return of Nature, and Ian Agnus’s work, especially Facing the Anthropocene. While the theory of metabolic rifts is today used to defend a notion of ‘planetary limits and ecological overshoots’ which is foundational for the degrowthers, this is itself rooted in an abstract and static understanding of nature’s metabolisms. Metabolisms are dynamic, they can speed up or slow down. When rationally planned and subjected to more advanced technologies and instruments of production, nature’s metabolisms can be adapted to the ever-growing needs of humanity. The rift occurs when, thanks to the capitalist profit motive, no consideration is given to how a certain form of growth could have detrimental effects for the nature upon which that growth itself is premised. When human needs and nature are operative and central factors in the considerations behind economic development, one could still have their development and prevent the rifts capitalism creates.

[27] Karl Marx, Capital Vol III, 958-9.

[28] “Constitution Of The Communist Party Of China (Revised and adopted at the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China on October 22, 2022),” Qiushi (October 2022): http://en.qstheory.cn/2022-10/27/c_824864.htm 8.

[29] “Constitution of the Communist Party of China,” 10.

[30] John Bellamy Foster et. al., “Why is the great project of Ecological Civilization specific to China?,” Monthly Review (October 2022): https://mronline.org/2022/10/01/why-is-the-great-project-of-ecological-civilization-specific-to-china/

[31] Foster et. al., “Why is the great project of Ecological Civilization specific to China?”

A recent study published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry sent shockwaves across the scientific community and popular outlets as it disproved the predominant “serotonin hypothesis” of depression. In just two weeks since its publication it has been accessed by nearly half a million people and the subject of dozens of subsequent articles. The researchers analyzed a total of seventeen systematic reviews, meta-analyses, and other large studies focused on the following six tenets pertinent to the “serotonin hypothesis” of depression:

“(1) Serotonin and the serotonin metabolite 5-HIAA—whether there are lower levels of serotonin and 5-HIAA in body fluids in depression; (2) Receptors—whether serotonin receptor levels are altered in people with depression; (3) The serotonin transporter (SERT)—whether there are higher levels of the serotonin transporter in people with depression (which would lower synaptic levels of serotonin); (4) Depletion studies—whether tryptophan depletion (which lowers available serotonin) can induce depression; (5) SERT gene—whether there are higher levels of the serotonin transporter gene in people with depression; (6) Whether there is an interaction between the SERT gene and stress in depression.”1

None of the studies were able to prove any significant link between serotonin levels and depression based on the above tenets, leading the researchers to conclude that “there is no convincing evidence that depression is associated with, or caused by, lower serotonin concentrations or activity.”2

The researchers further argue, “The idea that depression is the result of abnormalities in brain chemicals, particularly serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine or 5-HT), has been influential for decades,” such that today “80% or more of the general public now believe it is established that depression is caused by a ‘chemical imbalance.”3 In light of this finding, one must ask—how did a hypothesis which failed to substantially prove the connection it is based on achieve such general acceptance?

The serotonin hypothesis wasn’t always the dominant explanation for depression. Shortly after the Second World War, “the first antipsychotic, chlorpromazine, was synthesized when chlorine was added to the promethazine structure.”4 This synthesis formed “the basis of the development of the first antidepressants” which emerged following Roland Kuhn’s 1957 presentation in the World Psychiatric Association Meeting, where shortly after the first tricyclic antidepressant was released for clinical use in Switzerland.5
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A decade later, in the mid-1960s, a series of studies introduced serotonin as the “molecule behind depression.” These studies culminated in the work of Lapin and Oxenkrug, who postulated in 1969 the ”serotonergic theory of depression, which was based on a deficit of serotonin at an inter-synaptic level in certain brain regions.”6 In the following years, the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly created a serotonin-depression study team, which found that fluoxetine hydrochloride was “the most powerful… selective inhibitor of serotonin uptake among all the compounds developed.”7 The results led to the 1987 Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of the clinical usage of Prozac (the brand name given to fluoxetine), the first major selective serotonin receptor inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressant drug.8

​The release of Prozac revolutionized the commodification of medicine, incorporating a new field of mass advertisement which has since become the norm. However, as the documentary, Prozac: A Revolution in a Capsule demonstrates, the drug obtained its prominence not only through advertisement—which, interestingly enough, first occurred through business and finance magazines—but through its incorporation into culture as an iconic symbol of the zeitgeist.9 From Woody Allen movies to The Sopranos to late night talks shows, Prozac became the drug of the age, a commodity which, like Brave New World’s soma, could provide direct, unmediated happiness. This quickly resulted in the “Prozac boom,” making it by 1990 the most prescribed drug in the United States, and within ten years of its 1988 release, visits to the doctor for depression doubled and the prescribing of antidepressants tripled.10

The association of depression with low levels of serotonin was an intentional result of institutionally supported (e.g., American Psychiatric Organization) marketing campaigns from the pharmaceutical industry. This has provided “an important justification for the use of antidepressants” and perpetuated an antidepressant drug market that was valued at almost $16 billion in 2020 (a number expected to rise to $21 billion by the end of the decade);11 in today’s antidepressant epidemic, one in six Americans are on antidepressants.12 This phenomenon cannot be understood separately from the general commodification and marketization of medicine. As Joanne Moncrieff has argued, “there are some obvious drivers of this trend, such as the pharmaceutical industry, whose marketing activities have been facilitated both by the arrival of the Internet, and political deregulation, including the repeal of the prohibition on advertising to consumers in the US and some other countries in the 1990s.”13
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This is how and why the serotonin theory gained and sustained its hegemony since the 1990s. However, within the scientific community this hypothesis has been on the chopping block for almost two decades as individual studies have disconfirmed various parts of the hypothesis. The scientific community, in general, is much more skeptical of the “serotonin hypothesis” than the general public. This disconnection between the much more nuanced science on depression and the public perception of the issue has been the subject of various articles and speaks to both the separation of science from everyday life and to the effectiveness of medical marketization.14 Nonetheless, the explosion the recent study caused is a result of its comprehensive character as an “umbrella review” which examined all parts of the serotonin hypothesis at once—and in doing so, went well beyond the many studies which have focused on separate parts in the last couple of decades.
​

​​There is a prevalent myth which holds that those who function in society as professional “intellectuals” are somehow “autonomous and independent” from the dominant social order and the interests of the ruling class.15 This myth predominates in the community of the “hard” sciences perhaps more than in any level of traditional intellectuals. Here it is taken as sensum communem that science is objective and disconnected from ideology and social factors. For these folks, as Marxist scientists Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin said, “nothing evokes as much hostility… as the suggestion that social forces influence or even dictate either the scientific method or the facts and theories of science.”16 But it is in this illusion of non-ideological objectivity where ideology can be seen to be the most entrenched, functioning as unknown knowns, that is, as unrecognized assumptions or inherent biases which mediate how scientists approach the world.
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This does not mean, as the postmodernist disease17 which influences some of the philosophy of science holds, that we should maintain a “deep epistemological skepticism” which often, as Ellen Meiksins Wood notes, conflates “the forms of knowledge with its objects… as if they are saying not only that, for instance, the science of physics is a historical construct, which has varied over time and in different social contexts, but that the laws of nature are themselves ‘socially constructed’ and historically variable.”18

On the contrary, in Marxism, as Helena Sheehan argues, there is “no conflict between [stressing] the historical and contextual nature of science and [affirming] the rationality of science and the overall progressive character of its development.”19 In essence, the Marxist tradition’s understanding of the socially determined character of scientific production does not mean that scientific objectivity is rejected and that the object of scientific study itself is conceived of as relative. The form of abstract and unmediated objectivism which prevails in the sciences is rejected and what is affirmed is a necessarily socially mediated understanding of scientific objectivity. This overcomes, as Sheehan notes, the stale “objectivist/constructivist” binary which today structures the discourse about science and affirms instead a dialectical both/and attitude.20 This is important to clarify so that the forthcoming analysis of capitalism’s influence on science is not confused as an embracement of relativism and a rejection of science’s ability to produce objective knowledge of the world.

The serotonin hypothesis emerges from what Levins and Lewontin called “Cartesian reductionism” (the objectivist extreme), which they held to be the “dominant mode of analysis” in all spheres of today’s sciences. In psychiatry this shows up as genetic and biochemical determinism, an attempt to reduce the complexity of mental health issues to genetics or to biochemical mechanisms which, with respect to the latter, somehow the major pharmaceutical companies always have a pill for. But, as Moncrieff has argued, “mental health problems are not equivalent to physical, medical conditions and are more fruitfully viewed as problems of communities or societies.”21

​For instance, studies have shown that “within a given location, those with the lowest incomes are typically 1.5 to 3 times more likely than the rich to experience depression or anxiety.”22 The plethora of factors that stem from and contribute to poverty has allowed researchers to establish “a bidirectional causal relationship between poverty and mental illness,” such that poverty both increases the likelihood of mental illness and is proliferated further by it.23 The fact that the poorest in any context are up to three times more likely to experience depression than the rich shows that any analysis of depression must necessarily take into account the socioeconomic context of the individual. This inequality induced dissatisfaction allows one to understand both poverty and depression relationally. As Marx had already noted in 1847,

​Our desires and pleasures spring from society; we measure them, therefore, by society and not by the objects which serve for their satisfaction. Because they are of a social nature, they are of a relative nature… A house may be large or small; as long as the surrounding houses are equally small it satisfies all social demands for a dwelling. But let a palace arise beside the little house, and it shrinks from a little house to a hut… if the neighboring palace grows to an equal or even greater extent, the occupant of the relatively small house will feel more and more uncomfortable, dissatisfied and cramped within its four walls.24

The Cartesian reductive framework contains various methodological flaws which prevent the concrete understanding of the world. It treats, for instance, the interactions of parts and whole one-sidedly—as if parts are homogenous entities ontologically prior to the whole, and hence, as if the whole was simply the sum of its parts. In so doing, this outlook draws artificial hard and fast lines between causes and effects and fails to see how parts and wholes are reciprocally conditioning, i.e., how “their very interaction structures the way they are interrelated and interpenetrated, resulting in what is called a whole.”25 In short, how wholes are not simply the sum of their parts, but the totalities through which the parts themselves attain the functions which form the whole. It is, in essence, a methodological reflection in the sciences of bourgeois individualism and Robinsonade26 forms of thinking, which artificially divorce individuals from society and hold the latter to be simply the sum of the former.

However, biochemical determinism/reductionism does not necessarily have to reduce explanations to only one factor. For instance, the inconsistent success of SSRIs27 in treating depression has led some scientists to sustain ex juvantibus28 (from reasoning backwards) that serotonin’s role in depression is interactive and dependent on its relations with adrenaline, dopamine, and other chemical processes. Although this represents a more complex view of the serotonin hypothesis in particular, and of the often wrongly conflated “chemical imbalance” view of depression, it is nonetheless a form of biochemical determinism.29 This is because it fails to see how the “chemical imbalances” don’t arise out of a void but are produced by the concrete environment the individual is in. The point, again, is not to diminish the biochemical in order to elevate the role of the environment, but to see both the biochemical and the environment as dialectically interconnected, acting “upon each other through the medium of the [individual].”30 As Levins and Lewontin argue, the individual “cannot be regarded as simply the passive object of autonomous internal (biochemical composition/genes) and external (environment) forces;” instead, the individual functions as a subject-object which is both conditioned by these factors (as object) and reciprocally conditions them (as subject).31

The limitations of the prevalent serotonin hypothesis also helps to demonstrate what Friedrich Engels noted in his unfinished Dialectics of Nature: although “natural scientists believe that they free themselves from philosophy by ignoring it or abusing it… they are no less in bondage to philosophy but unfortunately in most cases to the worst philosophy.”32 This reductive, bio-determinist outlook straitjackets science within abstract thought, preventing it from seeing things in their movements and interconnections. It forces the reduction of larger problems to simple components—since these are seen as the ontological basis of wholes—and limits the possibility of observing issues like depression dynamically and comprehensively.

It is much easier to reduce depression to a biochemical phenomenon in the brain than to analyze how the social relations prevalent in the capitalist mode of life create the conditions for the emergence of depression. Similarly, once this reduction is established, it is much easier to treat the “solution” through individualized drug consumption than through socially organized revolutionary activity. As Moncrieff has argued, “by obscuring [the] political nature” of mental illness, certain “contentious social activities” are enabled, and attention is diverted “from the failings of the underlying economic system.”33

Tracing depression to the exploitative and alienating relations sustained between people and their work, their peers, and nature, is not only a much more laborious task, but one which would necessarily end in the realization of the systemic root of the problem. Given capitalism’s universal commodification, and the form this takes in what Levins and Lewontin call the “commoditization of science,” such a result is directly against the interests of the institutions that control scientific knowledge production.34 As one of many other fields in which the universalizing logic of commodity production has penetrated, the aim is, of course, profitability; the quest for truth and scientific discovery is subsumed under the quest for profit. This is especially true after four decades of neoliberalism, where, as Moncrieff notes, “more and more aspects of human feelings and behaviour” have been commodified and turned “into a source of profit for the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries.”35 “Investing in research,” as Levins and Lewontin argue, is but “one of several ways of investing in capital.”36

In the West, this reality was clear to the rich tradition of British Marxists scientists like J.B.S. Haldane, J.D. Bernal, Hyman Levy, and others which emerged following the 1931 Second International Congress of the History of Science and Technology. As J.D. Bernal stated in 1937, “production for profit can never develop the full potentialities of science except for destructive purposes,” only “the Marxist understanding of science puts it in practice at the service of the community and at the same time makes science itself part of the cultural heritage of the whole people and not of an artificially selected minority.”37

​
The serotonin theory gained prominence because: 1) it fits within the one-factor, causally linear framework of the Cartesian reductionist outlook prevalent in mainstream science; 2) it was a diagnosis which facilitated the greatly profitable solution embodied in the tens of billions of dollars’ worth antidepressant drug industry; 3) it plays a hegemonic role in steering the diagnosis of the depression epidemic away from its real source—capitalist social relations which sustain the mass of people alienated from what they produce, from other people, and from nature—and, specifically with respect to the United States, in drowning debt for getting sick, pursuing an education, or attempting to own a home.
​
Socialism removes these material difficulties upon which many mental health issues are grounded and places the working class in control of the economy, state, and civil institutions, making them function in the service of human and planetary needs, not profit. By abolishing poverty and war; guaranteeing healthcare, housing, and education as a right for all; providing everyone with meaningful well-paying jobs; amongst other things, a socialist society creates the economic and social security which radically transforms the environment in which most cases of depression are rooted. If one seriously seeks to overcome the depression epidemic capitalism is hurling the mass of people into, socialism is the only real solution.

​Likewise, only socialism can de-commodify science and provide the general social atmosphere for a move away from a hegemonic outlook dominated by static, reductive, abstract, individualist, irrationalist, deterministic, and binary thought, and towards a dialectical materialist one which emphasizes change, interconnection, reciprocity, sociality, emergence, and concrete investigation of the concrete.38 The extraordinary successes of Cuban science and medicine testify to what can be done when the profit motive is removed and comprehensive, preventative, and community-based care becomes the norm.

While enduring an internationally denounced blockade from the most formidable of empires, the Cuban revolution’s commitment to a science for the people has allowed it to construct what is internationally recognized as one of the best health care systems in the world.39 Cuba’s comprehensive social care emphasizes the impact of biological, social, cultural, economic and environmental factors on patients. Far from the United States’ drug-first approach of dealing with mental health issues, Cuba’s comprehensive social care allows all medical issues to be better understood at their source, treated, and prevented from occurring.40 In Cuba, mental health treatment emphasizes “individual and group psychotherapies” of various kinds,41 and when not hampered by the blockade, incorporates psychopharmacology in an integrated fashion with the former.42

Cuban scientists see mental health issues and treatment “within the context of the community,” not isolated individuals.43 As Alexis Lorenzo Ruiz, president of the Cuban Society of Psychology, said: “At all times, the community—like the family—are participants and necessary contributors in each action taken to move toward an improvement in the wellbeing of people with mental illness.”44 Additionally, unlike the disease-centered model of care which predominates in most capitalist countries, this human-centered approach promotes multidisciplinary and integrative relations between mental and medical care within the different fields of medicine—various forms of medical doctors, psychologists, nurses, and other health care professionals train side by side each other within the communities they serve in.45 This socialist model has afforded the Cuban people the conditions where, despite the enormous material difficulties created by the US blockade, depression in Cuba affects only 3.8 percent of the population, whereas in the United States 4.8 percent.46
​
In their 1985 book, The Dialectical Biologist, Levins and Lewontin reformulate Marx’s Eleventh Thesis and state that “dialectical philosophers have thus far only explained science. The problem, however, is to change it.”47 In the West, the seeds of such a change are emerging once again. As Nafis Hasan wrote in Science for the People, “recent developments in the fields of immunology, cancer, theoretical and evolutionary biology lend credence” to the view that “any non-reductionist approach (e.g., systems biology) to studying biology will advertently end up using a dialectical approach.”48 The fall of the reductive serotonin hypothesis in depression research is but one instance in many pointing to the fact that the dominant outlook presents a fetter for the development of the sciences. Just like a socialist revolution is needed to free humanity and the forces of production from the fetters of the capitalist system of waste, a revolution in outlook is needed to free the sciences from its archaic Cartesian reductionism and furnish it with “the most scientifically apt method for understanding the world”—dialectical materialism.49

​Who was Pol Pot and how did he come to symbolize one of the most horrible and repressive regimes in the history of modern times? The subtitle of Philip Short’s biography says it all-- a nightmare! Short knows his subject well, having been a reporter for the BBC, the “Times” (London) and “The Economist” and living in China and Cambodia during the 1970s and 80s.


His book is more than a biography of Pol Pot. It is a history of modern Cambodia as well. He attempts to explain the rise and fall of the Khmer Rouge, also known as the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK).


As a Marxist, I was particularly interested in what Short had to say about the origins of the political party, the CPK, that Pol Pot headed. How could it be possible for a Marxist party to do what the Khmer Rouge did in Cambodia. That is, to be responsible for the killing one and a half million people-- at least-- 500,000 outright by mass executions of whole villages including women, children and old people and another million through malnutrition and disease.


Could it be that the Khmer Rouge was not really a “Marxist” party at all? Was it possible that the CPK’s relation to “Marxism” was analogous to the relation that the National Socialist German Workers Party had to “Socialism” or Pat Robertson to “Christianity? That is to say, the word was used but it was empty of any of its traditional content. To me this was a distinct possibility as all the folks I know who consider themselves Marxists or Marxist-Leninists are repulsed by the actions of the Pol Pot government.


I had read Jean-Louis Margolin’s essay “Cambodia: The Country of Disconcerting Crimes”, chapter 24 in The Black Book of Communism the new anti-communist Bible (and just as historical) and he maintains that the CPK is part of the history of the international communist movement. If Margolin was correct my theory would be insupportable.


So, I read Short’s book with great anticipation to see if there was any evidence to support my thesis. Before going any further, let me define what I mean by “Marxism” or “Marxism-Leninsm,” and most especially what I consider a “Marxist” ( “Communist”) party to be. This is a definition based both on history and theory.


Needless to say a Marxist or Communist party will have its program rooted in the theories of Marx, Engels, and Lenin as a minimum. It will be a party based on, and in, the working class and represent the material and spiritual interests of that class, especially its industrial component. It will be internationalist in outlook and represent the most historically advanced ideas based on an objective materialist and scientific outlook.


According to these criteria, I would conversely consider a party to be in various degrees “anti-communist” in so far as it deviated from them. Since the term “anti-communist” has already been associated with the fascist movements and other right-wing political groupings, I will use the term “non-communist” or “non-Marxist” to describe ostensibly radical parties that fail to reflect the criteria expressed above. Now I will try to show, on the basis of Short’s research, that Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge associates were “non-communists” and in fact, their values and actions were diametrically opposed to the teachings of Marxism.


That this is the case has been hinted at by the leadership of the Khmer Rouge. Consider the following statement by Ieng Sary (vice-premier) who claimed, quoted by Short, the Khmer Rouge would rule “without reference to any existing model” and would go where “no country in history has ever gone before.” They certainly did that!


Margolin, in his anti-communist essay, writes: “The lineage from Mao Zedong to Pol Pot is obvious.” This is a superficial observation. Short argues that the Pol Pot regime morphed into what it became as a result of the cultural background unique to Cambodia. This cultural backdrop was the Khmer version of Theravada Buddhism “which teaches that retribution or merit, in the endless cycle of self-perfection, will be apportioned not in this life but in a future existence, just as man’s present fate is the fruit of actions in previous lives.”


There was a “cultural fracture” between Khmer culture and the cultures of China and Vietnam, based as they are on Confucian values. Throughout the history of Cambodia this fracture has led to “mutual incomprehension and distrust, which periodically exploded into racial massacres and pogroms” by the Khmers against the Chinese and Vietnamese inhabitants of the country.


Short presents a picture of Khmer society as having within it all the violence and brutality that the Khmer Rouge so horribly displayed. Previous movements and governments engaged in the same type of murder and mayhem that the Khmer Rouge indulged in-- the difference was one of magnitude. A case of quantitative change leading to qualitative change.


Pol Pot and his associates were conditioned as children into Khmer culture (naturally) and when they joined in the nationalist and anti-colonial struggles of the 50s through the 70s they naturally allied themselves and identified with the Communist movements in Asia which were their only possible allies. But, as Short, points out: “Marxism-Leninism, revised and sinified by Mao, flowed effortlessly across China’s southern border into Vietnamese minds, informed by the same Confucian culture. It was all but powerless to penetrate the Indianate world of Theravada Buddhism that moulds the mental universe of Cambodia and Laos.”


The Pol Pot leadership, made up of former students who had been educated in France as well as local anti-colonialist elements based themselves on the class of the poorest peasants and this was reflected in the ideology of the leadership. Here is Pol Pot talking about his “Marxism”-- “the big thick works of Marx... I didn’t really understand them at all.” Ping Say (one of the founders of the CPK ) remarked “Marx was too deep for us.” In fact, although influenced by their own version of “Marxism,” only two Cambodians ever attended the French CP’s school for cadres. For Pol Pot and his cronies “Marxism signified an ideal, not a comprehensive system of thought to be mastered and applied.”


The tragedy that befell Cambodia was that a basically ignorant leadership gained control of the Cambodian revolution and carried out an atavistic racially based program against non-Khmer nationalities inside Cambodia as well as rooting itself in the values of the lower peasantry (abolishing money, formal education, traditional arts and technology).


The policies of the US government, as well as those of China and Vietnam, helped this leadership come to power. The US aggression in Vietnam, as well as its attacks on Cambodia, were primarily responsible. In sheer numbers of people killed and mutilated the US aggression was twice as deadly as the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge.


As for the support from China and Vietnam, it is only fair to point out that, as Short says, until 1970 Pol Pot had not done “or permitted to be done by the Party he led any intimation of the abominations that would follow.” But after Lon Nol overthrew the Sihanouk government (1970) the Khmer Rouge waged, with Chinese and Vietnamese help, a guerrilla war that eventually, after much bloodshed and indiscriminate killing (including massive bombing of civilians by the US) on all sides, led to their victory (1975). Short points out that, “The United States dropped three times more bombs on Indochina during the Vietnam War then were used by all the participants in the whole of the Second World War; on Cambodia the total was three times the total tonnage dropped on Japan, atom bombs included.” The US claimed to be bombing Viet Cong and Khmer Rouge troops, “but the bombs fell massively and above all on the civilian population.”


But why were the Khmers so violent? Short maintains that the Chinese and Vietnamese communists treated their prisoners and enemies under the Confucian expectation that human beings are capable of change and reform. He also says that in Khmer culture there is no such expectation. Enemies will never change and have to be destroyed. “In the Confucian cultures of China and Vietnam, men are, in theory, always capable of being reformed. In Khmer culture they are not.” It was, as one Pol Pot’s bodyguards put it, a “struggle without pity.”


After they came to power, the Khmer Rouge became xenophobic nationalists. Turning against the Vietnamese as the “hereditary enemies” of Cambodia they became anti-Vietnamese as Vietnamese of no matter what ideology. They also distrusted China and struck out on a path to be completely self-sufficient and dependent on no one (“independence-mastery” was the slogan). This is of course completely contradictory to any Marxist theory. Marxism stress internationalism and cooperation of fraternal and working class parties. It was that very internationalism which the Khmer Rouge banked on to get into power and which they immediately betrayed.


What followed was disaster. By 1979 the Khmer Rouge had driven hundreds of thousands Vietnamese out of Cambodia and created a “slave state” at home. They finally began attacking across the Vietnamese border and this resulted in their being attacked in return and deposed from power.


Earlier I quoted Ieng Sary to the effect of making a revolution that would be unique in history. He also said that theory was to be avoided and that the Khmer Rouge would just rely on revolutionary consciousness. In other words, they are a revolution now and will make their own reality. Short says this calls into question whether “Cambodian ‘communism’.... could be considered Marxist-Leninist at all.”


I think it clear that it could not. Here is Pol Pot remarking that “Certain [foreign] comrades take the view that our party... cannot operate well because it does not understand Marxism-Leninism and the comrades of our Central Committee have never learnt Marxist principles.” His reply was that the CPK “did ‘nurture a Marxist-Leninist viewpoint’ but in its own fashion.”


Its own fashion was not good enough. Short remarks that the “Cambodian Party had never been an integral part of the world communist movement... and it took from Marxism only those things which were consonant with its own worldview.” That worldview was narrow, insular and constricted and completely incompatible, I believe, with the ideas we usually, and properly, associate with the names of Marx, Engels and Lenin.


After the Khmer Rouge were deposed by the Vietnamese, and the whole world could no longer pretend not to know what type of regime they had been running, how did that world react? The US, China, and the UN General Assembly sided with the Khmer Rouge and condemned the Vietnamese!


As for the CPK, in 1981 it abandoned its claim to being a “communist” party and turned to the West and Sihanouk as allies. Pol Pot said “the communists are fighting us [i.e., the Vietnamese and the anti-Khmer Rouge Cambodians]. So we have to turn to the West and follow their way.”


Short writes that this action by Pol Pot “provided confirmation, were any needed, that the veneer of Marxism-Leninism which had cloaked Cambodian radicalism had only ever been skin- deep.” Q.E.D.


The rest of Short’s book continues the history of the Khmer Rouge to the death of Pol Pot and the final end of the movement in 1999. This is a book that should be read by everyone who wants to understand what happened to the Cambodian Revolution. It should also help to remind us that Marxism-Leninism is not just a name-- it is a working class movement not a movement to be dominated by petit bourgeois intellectuals and peasants.

​​About the Author:
Thomas Riggins is a retired philosophy teacher (NYU, The New School of Social Research, among others) who received a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center (1983). He has been active in the civil rights and peace movements since the 1960s when he was chairman of the Young People's Socialist League at Florida State University and also worked for CORE in voter registration in north Florida (Leon County). He has written for many online publications such as People's World and Political Affairs where he was an associate editor. He also served on the board of the Bertrand Russell Society and was president of the Corliss Lamont chapter in New York City of the American Humanist Association.