By November 2023, it was already clear that the Israeli government had begun to deny Palestinians in Gaza access to water. “Every hour that passes with Israel preventing the provision of safe drinking water in the Gaza strip, in brazen breach of international law, puts Gazans at risk of dying of thirst and diseases related to the lack of safe drinking water’, said Pedro Arrojo-Agudo, U.N. special rapporteur on the human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation. “Israel,” he noted, “must stop using water as a weapon of war.” Before Israel’s most recent attack on Gaza, 97 percent of the water in Gaza’s only coastal aquifer was already unsafe for human consumption based on World Health Organisation standards. Over the course of its many attacks, Israel has all but destroyed Gaza’s water purification system and prevented the entry of materials and chemicals needed for repair. In early October 2023, Israeli officials indicated that they would use their control over Gaza’s water systems as a means to perpetrate a genocide. As Israeli Major General Ghassan Alian, the head of the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), said on 10 October, “Human beasts are dealt with accordingly. Israel has imposed a total blockade on Gaza. No electricity, no water, just damage. You wanted hell, you will get hell.” On March 19, U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator for Palestine Jamie McGoldrick noted that Gaza needed “spare parts for water and sanitation systems” as well as “chemicals to treat water,” since the “lack of these critical items is one of the key drivers of the malnutrition crisis.” “Malnutrition crisis” is one way to talk about a famine. Faeq Hassan, Iraq, “The Water Carriers,” 1957. The assault on Gaza – whose entire population is “currently facing high levels of acute food insecurity,” according to Oxfam and the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification – has sharpened the contradictions that strike the world’s people with force. A U.N. report released on World Water Day (March 22) shows that, as of 2022, 2.2 billion people have no access to safely managed drinking water, that 4 in 5 people in rural areas lack basic drinking water, and that 3.5 billion people do not have sanitation systems. As a consequence, every day, over a thousand children under the age of 5 die from diseases linked to inadequate water, sanitation, and hygiene. These children are among the 1.4 million people who die every year due to these deficiencies. The U.N. report notes that, since women and girls are the primary collectors of water, they spend more of their time finding water when water systems deteriorate due to inadequate or non-existent infrastructure or droughts exacerbated by climate change. This has resulted in higher dropout rates for girls in school. A 2023 study by U.N. Women describes the perils of the water crisis for women and girls: “Inequalities in access to safe drinking water and sanitation do not affect everyone equally. The greater need for privacy during menstruation, for example, means women and girls and other people who menstruate may access shared sanitation facilities less frequently than people who do not, which increases the likelihood of urinary and reproductive tract infections. Where safe and secure facilities are not available, choices to use facilities are often limited to dawn and dusk, which exposes at-risk groups to violence.” The lack of access to public toilets is by itself a serious danger to women in cities across the world, such as Dhaka, Bangladesh, where there is one public toilet for every 200,000 people. Access to drinking water is being further constricted by the climate catastrophe. For instance, a warming ocean means glacier melt, which lifts the sea levels and allows salt water to contaminate underground aquifers more easily. Meanwhile, with less snowfall, there is less water in reservoirs, which means less water to drink and use for agriculture. Already, as the U.N. Water report shows, we are seeing increased droughts that now impact at least 1.4 billion people directly. According to the United Nations, half of the world’s population experiences severe water scarcity for at least part of the year, while one quarter faces “extremely high” levels of water stress. “Climate change is projected to increase the frequency and severity of these phenomena, with acute risks for social stability,” the U.N. notes. The issue of social stability is key, since droughts have been forcing tens of millions of people into flight and starvation. Aboudia, Côte d’Ivoire, “Les trois amis II” or “The Three Friends II,” 2018. Climate change is certainly a major driver of the water crisis, but so is the rules-based international order. Capitalist governments must not be allowed to point to an ahistorical notion of climate change as an excuse to shirk their responsibility in creating the water crisis. For instance, over the past several decades, governments across the world have neglected to upgrade wastewater treatment facilities. Consequently, 42 percent of household wastewater is not treated properly, which damages ecosystems and aquifers. Even more damning is the fact that only 11 percent of domestic and industrial wastewater is being reused. Increased investment in wastewater treatment would reduce the amount of pollution that enters water sources and allow for better harnessing of the freshwater available to us on the planet. There are several sensible policies that could be adopted to immediately address the water crisis, such as those proposed by U.N. Water to protect coastal mangroves and wetlands; harvest rainwater; reuse wastewater; and protect groundwater. But these are precisely the kinds of policies that are opposed by capitalist firms, whose profit line is improved by the destruction of nature. Ibrahim Hussein, (Malaysia, “The Game,” 1964. In March 2018, we launched our second dossier, “Cities Without Water.” It is worthwhile to reflect on what we showed then, six years ago: “The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Technical Paper VI (IPCC, June 2008) is on climate change and water. The scientific consensus in this document is that the changes in weather patterns — induced by carbon-intensive capitalism — have a negative effect on the water cycle. In other words, watering golf courses is more important than providing piped water to the thousand of children under the age of five who die every day due to water deprivation. Those are the values of the capitalist system. AuthorVijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and, with Noam Chomsky, The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and the Fragility of U.S. Power. This article was produced by Consortium News. Archives April 2024
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Sabah, Libya, is an oasis town at the northern edge of the Sahara Desert. To stand at the edge of the town and look southward into the desert toward Niger is forbidding. The sand stretches past infinity, and if there is a wind, it lifts the sand to cover the sky. Cars come down the road past the al-Baraka Mosque into the town. Some of these cars come from Algeria (although the border is often closed) or from Djebel al-Akakus, the mountains that run along the western edge of Libya. Occasionally, a white Toyota truck filled with men from the Sahel region of Africa and from western Africa makes its way into Sabah. Miraculously, these men have made it across the desert, which is why many of them clamber out of their truck and fall to the ground in desperate prayer. Sabah means “morning” or “promise” in Arabic, which is a fitting word for this town that grips the edge of the massive, growing, and dangerous Sahara. For the past decade, the United Nations International Organization of Migration (IOM) has collected data on the deaths of migrants. This Missing Migrants Project publishes its numbers each year, and so this April, it has released its latest figures. For the past ten years, the IOM says that 64,371 women, men, and children have died while on the move (half of them have died in the Mediterranean Sea). On average, each year since 2014, 4,000 people have died. However, in 2023, the number rose to 8,000. One in three migrants who flee a conflict zone die on the way to safety. These numbers, however, are grossly deflated, since the IOM simply cannot keep track of what they call “irregular migration.” For instance, the IOM admits, “[S]ome experts believe that more migrants die while crossing the Sahara Desert than in the Mediterranean Sea.” Sandstorms and Gunmen Abdel Salam, who runs a small business in the town, pointed out into the distance and said, “In that direction is Toummo,” the Libyan border town with Niger. He sweeps his hands across the landscape and says that in the region between Niger and Algeria is the Salvador Pass, and it is through that gap that drugs, migrants, and weapons move back and forth, a trade that enriches many of the small towns in the area, such as Ubari. With the erosion of the Libyan state since the NATO war in 2011, the border is largely porous and dangerous. It was from here that the al-Qaeda leader Mokhtar Belmokhtar moved his troops from northern Mali into the Fezzan region of Libya in 2013 (he was said to have been killed in Libya in 2015). It is also the area dominated by the al-Qaeda cigarette smugglers, who cart millions of Albanian-made Cleopatra cigarettes across the Sahara into the Sahel (Belmokhtar, for instance, was known as the “Marlboro Man” for his role in this trade). An occasional Toyota truck makes its way toward the city. But many of them vanish into the desert, a victim of the terrifying sandstorms or of kidnappers and thieves. No one can keep track of these disappearances, since no one even knows that they have happened. Matteo Garrone’s Oscar-nominated Io Capitano (2023) tells the story of two Senegalese boys—Seydou and Moussa—who go from Senegal to Italy through Mali, Niger, and then Libya, where they are incarcerated before they flee across the Mediterranean to Italy in an old boat. Garrone built the story around the accounts of several migrants, including Kouassi Pli Adama Mamadou (from Côte d’Ivoire, now an activist who lives in Caserta, Italy). The film does not shy away from the harsh beauty of the Sahara, which claims the lives of migrants who are not yet seen as migrants by Europe. The focus of the film is on the journey to Europe, although most Africans migrate within the continent (21 million Africans live in countries in which they were not born). Io Capitano ends with a helicopter flying above the ship as it nears the Italian coastline; it has already been pointed out that the film does not acknowledge racist policies that will greet Seydou and Moussa. What is not shown in the film is how European countries have tried to build a fortress in the Sahel region to prevent migration northwards. Open-Air Tomb More and more migrants have sought the Niger-Libya route after the fall of the Libyan state in 2011 and the crackdown on the Moroccan-Spanish border at Melilla and Ceuta. A decade ago, the European states turned their attention to this route, trying to build a European “wall” in the Sahara against the migrants. The point was to stop the migrants before they get to the Mediterranean Sea, where they become an embarrassment to Europe. France, leading the way, brought together five of the Sahel states (Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger) in 2014 to create the G5 Sahel. In 2015, under French pressure, the government of Niger passed Law 2015-36 that criminalized migration through the country. G5 Sahel and the law in Niger came alongside European Union funding to provide surveillance technologies—illegal in Europe—to be used in this band of countries against migrants. In 2016, the United States built the world’s largest drone base in Agadez, Niger, as part of this anti-migrant program. In May 2023, Border Forensics studied the paths of the migrants and found that due to the law in Niger and these other mechanisms the Sahara had become an “open-air tomb.” Over the past few years, however, all of this has begun to unravel. The coup d’états in Guinea (2021), Mali (2021), Burkina Faso (2022), and Niger (2023) have resulted in the dismantling of G5 Sahel as well as the demand for the removal of French and U.S. troops. In November 2023, the government of Niger revoked Law 2015-36 and freed those who had been accused of being smugglers. Abdourahamane, a local grandee, stood beside the Grand Mosque in Agadez and talked about the migrants. “The people who come here are our brothers and sisters,” he said. “They come. They rest. They leave. They do not bring us problems.” The mosque, built of clay, bears within it the marks of the desert, but it is not transient. Abdourahamane told me that it goes back to the 16th century, long before modern Europe was born. Many of the migrants come here to get their blessings before they buy sunglasses and head across the desert, hoping that they make it through the sands and find their destiny somewhere across the horizon. AuthorVijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and, with Noam Chomsky, The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and the Fragility of U.S. Power. This article was produced by Globetrotter. Archives April 2024 Today I visited the Lincoln memorial and felt a genuine sadness at the fact that our country has totally failed to live up to the ideals that it was founded upon. Consider the last words of Lincoln’s second inaugural address which are carved into the walls of the Lincoln memorial: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” Far from creating a lasting peace among nations, the United States has become a world imperialist hegemon, which acts as the number one threat to world peace. Or consider the much simpler quote from George Washington plastered all over the Washington monument’s gift store. “Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth." Perhaps old George would have been more correct to say, Capital, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth, concentration, and accumulation. Because the U.S. is now a country which prioritizes the profits of capitalists and bankers far above the liberty of its citizens. The words that most affected me though were from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, which like the second inaugural address, have been immortalized on the walls of the Lincoln Memorial. “[T]his nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." How far we have strayed from a Government of by and for the people that these American leaders of the past dreamed of, and that hundreds of thousands of union soldiers fought to create. We now live in a so called Democracy where 92% of elections are determined by the candidate who raises the most money, where the Supreme Court has completely legalized political bribery through passing Citizens United, and where bills are literally written by corporate lobbying firms. Right across from the Lincoln Memorial is the Federal Reserve, which is one of many tools that the U.S. Government uses to control currency, and maintain unprecedented dominance over the global economy. Ironic that such a building is placed right across from a memorial dedicated to preserving a Government “of, by, and for the people.” So while my trip to the Lincoln memorial slightly disturbed me, it also inspired me. Visiting the memorial that day were busses of young schoolchildren on a field trip around Washington D.C. It got me thinking about what kind of country we are going to leave the youth? It is fully possible to create an economy and political system that works of, by, and for the people. It is called socialism. The only way to actually live up to the ideals that the country was founded upon is for working people to stand up and fight, to stand up and take this country back from the cretinous Wall Street parasites who have completely captured it. Just like our ancestors in the Union army stood up against slavery and tyranny not so long ago. Author Edward Liger Smith is an American Political Scientist and specialist in anti-imperialist and socialist projects, especially Venezuela and China. He also has research interests in the role southern slavery played in the development of American and European capitalism. He is a wrestling coach at Loras College. Archives April 2024 4/2/2024 On the General Discussion Document of the CPUSA's 2024 National Convention. Part 1. By: Thomas RigginsRead NowPREFACE This is the first in a series of opinion pieces on the upcoming CPUSA convention based on the main general discussion document (GDD). It is not my claim that the positions taken by the CP leadership are not consistent with their premises. My claim is that their premises are not Marxist and/or not sound. PART 1 GDD-1 Having postponed its mandated 2023 National Convention for a year in order to consolidate its control of the party, the current leadership has scheduled a National Convention for June 2024. Since the end of the Gus Hall era in 2000 the party leadership appears to have fallen into the hands of a right leaning Eurocommunist, Bernstein-inspired revisionist leadership cadre that under consecutive top leaders Sam Webb, John Bachtell and Joe Sims has followed a liquidationist policy [Webbism] which has seen the abolition of the print edition of the party newspaper and its replacement with a saccharine left liberal social-democratic internet version devoid of a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary working terminology, the abolition of the existing YCL and the creation of a new youth organization more in the form of The Sims Youth than an independent YCL affiliated with the party, a turnover of the party archives to a bourgeois affiliated labor library associated with NYU, the abolition of the party’s theoretical journal and a decline in Marxist class consciousness as reflected in party literature. Webb has himself left the party to support the Democrats, Bachtell resigned as top leader and has said he no longer considers himself a Leninist but he remains in control of the party press. Joe Sims was put in his place as a top leader (or ‘’co-leader’’) and prefers the term ‘’scientific socialism’’ to ‘’Marxism’’— although now as the putative leader of the party he uses Marxist terminology pro forma that he had abandoned previously. Well, I need to provide some justification for the above remarks. I hope my analysis of the General Discussion Document [GDD] the leadership has put out as the guide to the upcoming convention will do this. CPUSA conventions are usually well choreographed to end up exactly as the leadership wants and the GDD will give a good idea of what kind of program is in store for the membership [hint: it has something to do with making revisionism look orthodox and getting out the vote for Biden.] This, of course, is just my opinion of the post-Hall era, after 50+ years of seeing the party in action, and I could be wrong. The document opens with a general description of the effects today of the general crisis of capitalism, more or less similar to the effects that have characterized it for the last 50 or 60 years. The GDD also points out that ‘’fascism is increasingly promoted as an alternative by the most reactionary sections of the billionaire class.” It should be pointed out that Marxist theory doesn’t refer to a ‘’billionaire’ class.’’ The class in question is the monopoly capitalist (le gran bourgeoisie) class which owns and controls the financial and industrial means of production in the US— I.e., the ruling class which controls the Republican and Democratic parties as well. We are next told ‘’The crisis has its origins in the U.S.’ incomplete bourgeois democratic revolution that granted freedom to those with property, but subjected those without to bonded labor, slavery, and genocide, systems of exploitation that not only contributed to the country’s development but also laid the basis for a united struggle against such exploitation.’’ This is historically incorrect. The bourgeois democratic revolution was completed in the US in the 19th century after the Civil War. The bourgeois democratic revolution’s goal was to replace one ruling class with another— i.e., to make the capital class, the bourgeoisie, the ruling class and replace the feudal class which has no positive role to play in the new economic system of capitalism. At the end of the Civil War, with the downfall of the slave owning section of the capitalists (free independent workers not slaves or serfs are the theoretical exploited class under capitalism) the industrial bourgeoisie consolidated itself as the ruling class and completed the bourgeois democratic revolution in the US. The political struggle today is confined within the limits of this revolution. There is, however, a higher form of democracy that Marxists are fighting for— i.e., proletarian or working class democracy which will replace bourgeois democracy. How to conduct this fight will be determined by whether or not Marxists decide to build a revolutionary movement to bring about this higher form or confine themselves to trying to improve by reforms the already basically completed bourgeois revolution by which the capitalist class maintains its power. PART 2 coming up AuthorThomas 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. Archives April 2024 4/2/2024 War on Gaza: We were lied into genocide. Al Jazeera has shown us how By: Jonathan CookRead NowFor weeks, as Gaza was battered with bombs and the body count in the tiny enclave rose inexorably, western publics had little choice but to rely on Israel’s word for what happened on 7 October. Some 1,150 Israelis were killed during an unprecedented attack on Israeli communities and military posts next to Gaza. Beheaded babies, a pregnant woman with her womb cut open and the foetus stabbed, children put in ovens, hundreds of people burned alive, mutilation of corpses, a systematic campaign of indescribably savage rapes and acts of necrophilia. Western politicians and media lapped it up, repeating the allegations uncritically while ignoring Israel’s genocidal rhetoric and increasingly genocidal military operations these claims supported. Then, as the mountain of bodies in Gaza grew still higher, the supposed evidence was shared with a few, select western journalists and influencers. They were invited to private screenings of footage carefully curated by Israeli officials to paint the worst possible picture of the Hamas operation. These new initiates offered few details but implied the footage confirmed many of the horrors. They readily repeated Israeli claims that Hamas was “worse than Isis”, the Islamic State group. The impression of unparalleled depravity from Hamas was reinforced by the willingness of the western media to allow Israeli spokespeople, Israel’s supporters and western politicians to continue spreading unchallenged the claim that Hamas had committed unspeakable, sadistic atrocities—from beheading and burning babies to carrying out a campaign of rapes. The only journalist in the British mainstream media to dissent was Owen Jones. Agreeing that Israel’s video showed terrible crimes committed against civilians, he noted that none of the barbarous acts listed above were included. What was shown instead were the kind of terrible crimes against civilians all too familiar in wars and uprisings. Whitewashing genocide Jones faced a barrage of attacks from colleagues accusing him of being an atrocity apologist. His own newspaper, the Guardian, appears to have prevented him from writing about Gaza in its pages as a consequence. Now, after nearly six months, the exclusive narrative stranglehold on those events by Israel and its media acolytes has finally been broken. Last week, Al Jazeera aired an hour-long documentary, called simply “October 7”, that lets western publics see for themselves what took place. It seems that Jones’ account was closest to the truth. Yet, Al Jazeera’s film goes further still, divulging for the first time to a wider audience facts that have been all over the Israeli media for months but have been carefully excluded from western coverage. The reason is clear: those facts would implicate Israel in some of the atrocities it has been ascribing to Hamas for months. Middle East Eye highlighted these glaring plot holes in the West’s media narrative way back in December. Nothing has been done to correct the record since. The establishment media has proved it is not to be trusted. For months it has credulously recited Israeli propaganda in support of a genocide. But that is only part of the indictment against it. Its continuing refusal to report on the mounting evidence of Israel’s perpetration of crimes against its own civilians and soldiers on 7 October suggests it has been intentionally whitewashing Israel’s slaughter in Gaza. Al Jazeera’s investigations unit has gathered many hundreds of hours of film from bodycams worn by Hamas fighters and Israeli soldiers, dashcams and CCTV to compile its myth-busting documentary. It demonstrates five things that upend the dominant narrative that has been imposed by Israel and the western media. First, the crimes Hamas committed against civilians in Israel on 7 October—and those it did not—have been used to overshadow the fact that it carried out a spectacularly sophisticated military operation on 7 October in breaking out of a long-besieged Gaza. The group knocked out Israel’s top-flight surveillance systems that had kept the enclave’s 2.3 million inhabitants imprisoned for decades. It smashed holes in Israel’s highly fortified barrier surrounding Gaza in at least 10 locations. And it caught unawares Israel’s many military camps next to the enclave that had been enforcing the occupation at arms’ length. More than 350 Israeli soldiers, armed police and guards were killed that day. Second, the documentary undermines the conspiracy theory that Israeli leaders allowed the Hamas attack to justify the ethnic cleansing of Gaza—a plan Israel has been actively working on since at least 2007, when it appears to have received U.S. approval. True, Israeli intelligence officials involved in the surveillance of Gaza had been warning that Hamas was preparing a major operation. But those warnings were discounted not because of a conspiracy. After all, none of the senior echelons in Israel stood to benefit from what unfolded on 7 October. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is finished politically as a result of the Hamas attack, and will likely end up in jail after the current carnage in Gaza ends. A colonial arrogance Israel’s genocidal response to 7 October has made Israel’s brand so toxic internationally, and more so with Arab publics in the region, that Saudi Arabia has had to break off plans for a normalisation agreement, which had been Israel and Washington’s ultimate hope. And the Hamas operation has crushed the worldwide reputation of the Israeli military for invincibility. It has inspired Yemen’s Ansar Allah (the Houthis) to attack vessels in the Red Sea. It is emboldening Israel’s arch-enemy, Hezbollah, in neighbouring Lebanon. It has reinvigorated the idea that resistance is possible across the much-oppressed Middle East. No, it was not a conspiracy that opened the door to Hamas’ attack. It was colonial arrogance, based on a dehumanising view shared by the vast majority of Israelis that they were the masters and that the Palestinians—their slaves—were far too primitive to strike a meaningful blow. The attacks of 7 October should have forced Israelis to reassess their dismissive attitude towards the Palestinians and address the question of whether Israel’s decades-long regime of apartheid and brutal subjugation could—and should—continue indefinitely. Predictably, Israelis ignored the message of Hamas’ attack and dug deeper into their colonial mindset. The supposed primitivism that, it was assumed, made the Palestinians too feeble an opponent to take on Israel’s sophisticated military machine has now been reframed as proof of a Palestinian barbarousness that makes Gaza’s entire population so dangerous, so threatening, that they have to be wiped out. The Palestinians who, most Israelis had concluded, could be caged like battery chickens indefinitely, and in ever-shrinking pens, are now viewed as monsters that have to be culled. That impulse was the genesis of Israel’s current genocidal plan for Gaza. Suicide mission The third point the documentary clarifies is that Hamas’s wildly successful prison break undid the larger operation. The group had worked so hard on the fearsome logistics of the breakout—and prepared for a rapid and savage response from Israel’s oppressive military machine—that it had no serious plan for dealing with a situation it could not conceive of: the freedom to scour Israel’s periphery, often undisturbed for many hours or days. Hamas fighters entering Israel had assumed that most were on a suicide mission. According to the documentary, the fighters’ own assumption was that between 80 and 90 per cent would not make it back. The aim was not to strike some kind of existential blow against Israel, as Israeli officials have asserted ever since in their determined rationalisation of genocide. It was to strike a blow against Israel’s reputation for invincibility by attacking its military bases and nearby communities, and dragging as many hostages as possible back into Gaza. They would then be exchanged for the thousands of Palestinian men, women and children held in Israel’s military incarceration system--hostages labelled “prisoners”. As Hamas spokesman Bassem Naim explained to Al Jazeera, the breakout was meant to thrust Gaza’s desperate plight back into the spotlight after many years in which international interest in ending Israel’s siege had waned. Of discussions in the group’s political bureau, he says the consensus was: We have to take action. If we don’t do it, Palestine will be forgotten, totally deleted from the international map. For 17 years, Gaza had gradually been strangled to death. Its population had tried peaceful protests at the militarised fence around their enclave and been picked off by Israeli snipers. The world had grown so used to Palestinian suffering, it had switched off. The 7 October attack was intended to change that, especially by re-inspiring solidarity with Gaza in the Arab world and by bolstering Hamas’ regional political position. It was intended to make it impossible for Saudi Arabia—the main Arab power broker in Washington—to normalise with Israel, completing the marginalisation of the Palestinian cause in the Arab world. Judged by these criteria, Hamas’s attack was a success. Loss of focus But for many long hours—with Israel caught entirely off-guard, and with its surveillance systems neutralised—Hamas did not face the military counter-strike it expected. Three factors seem to have led to a rapid erosion of discipline and purpose. With no meaningful enemy to confront or limit Hamas’ room for manoeuvre, the fighters lost focus. Footage shows them squabbling about what to do next as they freely wander around Israeli communities. That was compounded by the influx of other armed Palestinians who piggybacked on Hamas’ successful breakout and the lack of an Israeli response. Many suddenly found themselves with the chance to loot or settle scores with Israel—by killing Israelis—for years of suffering in Gaza. And the third factor was Hamas stumbling into the Nova music festival, which had been relocated by the organisers at short notice close to the fence around Gaza. It quickly became the scene of some of the worst atrocities, though none resembling the savage excesses described by Israel and the western media. Footage shows, for example, Palestinian fighters throwing grenades into concrete shelters where many dozens of festivalgoers were sheltering from the Hamas attack. In one clip, a man who runs out is gunned down. Fourth, Al Jazeera was able to confirm that the most extreme, sadistic and depraved atrocities never took place. They were fabricated by Israeli soldiers, officials and emergency responders. One figure central to this deception was Yossi Landau, a leader of the Jewish religious emergency response organisation, Zaka. He and his staff concocted outlandish tales that were readily amplified not only by a credulous western press corps but by senior U.S. officials too. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken graphically told of a family of four being butchered at the breakfast table. The father’s eye was gouged out in front of his two children, aged eight and six. The mother’s breast was cut off. The girl’s foot was amputated, and the boy’s fingers cut off, before they were all executed. The executioners then sat down and had a meal next to their victims. Except the evidence shows none of that actually happened. Landau has also claimed that Hamas tied up dozens of children and burned them alive at Kibbutz Be’eri. Elsewhere, he has recalled a pregnant woman who was shot dead and her belly cut open and the foetus stabbed. Officials at the kibbutz deny any evidence for these atrocities. Landau’s accounts do not tally with any of the known facts. Only two babies died on 7 October, both killed unintentionally. When challenged, Landau offers to show Al Jazeera a photo on his phone of the stabbed foetus, but is filmed admitting he is unable to do so. Fabricating atrocities Similarly, Al Jazeera’s research finds no evidence of systematic or mass rape on 7 October. In fact, it is Israel that has been blocking efforts by international bodies to investigate any sexual violence that day. Respected outlets like the New York Times, the BBC and Guardian have repeatedly breathed credibility into the claims of systematic rape by Hamas, but only by unquestioningly repeating Israeli atrocity propaganda. Madeleine Rees, secretary general of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, told Al Jazeera: A state has instrumentalized the horrific attacks on women in order, we believe, to justify an attack on Gaza, of which the majority suffering are other women. In other cases, Israel has blamed Hamas for mutilating the bodies of Israeli victims, including by driving over them, smashing their pelvises. In several cases, Al Jazeera’s investigation showed that the bodies were of Hamas fighters mutilated or driven over by Israeli soldiers. The documentary notes that reporting by the Israeli media—followed by the western media—“focuses not on the crimes they [Hamas] committed but on the crimes they did not”. The question is why, when there were plenty of real atrocities by Hamas to report, did Israel feel the need to fabricate even worse ones? And why, especially after the initial fabrication of beheaded babies was debunked, did the western media carry on credulously recycling improbable stories of Hamas savagery? The answer to the first question is that Israel needed to manufacture a favourable political climate that would excuse its genocide in Gaza as necessary. Netanyahu is shown congratulating Zaka’s leaders on their role in influencing world opinion: We need to buy time, which we gain by turning to world leaders and to public opinion. You have an important role in influencing public opinion, which also influences leaders. The answer to the second is that western journalists’ racist preconceptions ensured they would be easily persuaded that brown people were capable of such barbarity. ‘Hannibal directive’ Fifth, Al Jazeera documents months of Israeli media coverage demonstrating that some of the atrocities blamed on Hamas—particularly relating to the burning alive of Israelis—were actually Israel’s responsibility. Deprived of functioning surveillance, an enraged Israeli military machine lashed out blindly. Video footage from Apache helicopters shows them firing wildly on cars and figures heading towards Gaza, unable to determine whether they are targeting fleeing Hamas fighters or Israelis taken hostage by Hamas. In at least one case, an Israeli tank fired a shell into a building in Kibbutz Be’eri, killing the 12 Israeli hostages inside. One, 12-year-old Liel Hetsroni, whose charred remains meant she could not be identified for weeks, became the poster child for Israel’s campaign to tar Hamas as barbarians for burning her alive.
The widespread devastation in kibbutz communities—still blamed on Hamas—suggests that Israel’s shelling of this particular house was far from a one-off. It is impossible to determine how many more Israelis were killed by “friendly fire”. These deaths appear to have been related to the hurried invocation by Israel that day of its so-called “Hannibal directive”—a secretive military protocol to kill Israeli soldiers to prevent them from being taken hostage and becoming bargaining chips for the release of Palestinians held hostage in Israeli jails. In this case, the directive looks to have been repurposed and used against Israeli civilians too. Extraordinarily, though there has been furious debate inside Israel about the Hannibal directive’s use on 7 October, the western media has remained completely silent on the subject. Woeful imbalance The one issue largely overlooked by Al Jazeera is the astonishing failure of the western media across the board to cover 7 October seriously or investigate any of the atrocities independently of Israel’s own self-serving accounts. The question hanging over Al Jazeera’s documentary is this: how is it possible that no British or U.S. media organisation has undertaken the task that Al Jazeera took on? And further, why is it that none of them appear ready to use Al Jazeera’s coverage as an opportunity to revisit the events of 7 October? In part, that is because they themselves would be indicted by any reassessment of the past five months. Their coverage has been woefully unbalanced: wide-eyed acceptance of any Israeli claim of Hamas atrocities, and similar wide-eyed acceptance of any Israeli excuse for its slaughter and maiming of tens of thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza. But the problem runs deeper. This is not the first time that Al Jazeera has shamed the western press corps on a subject that has dominated headlines for months or years. Back in 2017, an Al Jazeera investigation called The Lobby showed that Israel was behind a campaign to smear Palestinian solidarity activists as antisemites in Britain, with Jeremy Corbyn the ultimate target. That smear campaign continued to be wildly successful even after the Al Jazeera series aired, not least because the investigation was uniformly ignored. British media outlets swallowed every piece of disinformation spread by Israeli lobbyists on the issue of antisemitism. A follow-up on a similar disinformation campaign waged by the pro-Israel lobby in the U.S. was never broadcast, apparently after diplomatic threats from Washington to Qatar. The series was eventually leaked to the Electronic Intifada website.
Once again, the British media, which had played such a critical role in helping to destroy Corbyn, ignored the Al Jazeera investigation. There is a pattern here that can be ignored only through wilful blindness. Israel and its partisans have unfettered access to western establishments, where they fabricate claims and smears that are readily amplified by a credulous press corps. And those claims only ever work to Israel’s advantage, and harm the cause of ending decades of brutal subjugation of the Palestinian people by an Israeli apartheid regime now committing genocide. Al Jazeera has once again shown that, on matters that western establishments consider the most vital to their interests—such as support for a highly militarised client state promoting the West’s control over the oil-rich Middle East—the western press is not a watchdog on power but the establishment’s public relations arm. Al Jazeera’s investigation has not just revealed the lies Israel spread about 7 October to justify its genocide in Gaza. It reveals the utter complicity of western journalists in that genocide. Monthly Review does not necessarily adhere to all of the views conveyed in articles republished at MR Online. Our goal is to share a variety of left perspectives that we think our readers will find interesting or useful. —Eds. AuthorThis article was produced by Monthly Review. Archives April 2024 (*) This text was presented at a symposium on the World System held at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil, on September 22nd, 2023. Shortly before his death, in a series of writings, Samir Amin unfolded the two issues that mainly concerned him. The first was China’s refusal to succumb to financial globalization, that is, to the totalitarian power of global financial capital; the second was the need to build a “Fifth International.” We had been to China together, and I remember his immense anxiety on both subjects. One day he woke me up and asked me to urgently go to his room, where he was interviewed on a Chinese television, in order to talk, to describe to the Chinese public what I had experienced in Moscow, watching as a journalist the collapse of the Soviet regime and the restoration of capitalist relations of production and distribution. He feared that Beijing might, in some twist of its so sui generis evolution, make a decisive turn towards capitalism and wanted to ”inoculate ” somehow the Chinese in advance. Samir did not believe that the Chinese regime is a socialist one. “I will not say China is socialist, I will not say China is capitalist,” he said in a speech at a prestigious University of Peking. Sometimes he hoped, he thought, that there might be a way leading through state capitalism to state socialism and finally to socialism. If China were to completely embrace the financial globalization and its hierarchical structure, it would face enormous problems itself, but it would also decisively reinforce a rapid-forming Hyper-imperialist system, the one whose operational framework we all witness now in the war in Ukraine. Today, all the states of the collective West, with the exception perhaps of Turkey and in a very limited form, of Hungary, are acting in blatant opposition to their most elementary national interests. Turkey is an exception. It belongs half to the West and half to the periphery of the planet. It is not of course in any way an anti-imperialist force, still it disposes of a considerable degree of independence, using it in order to negotiate a privileged status in the ranks of western imperialism without identifying with all his policies. The rise of Hyper-imperialism tends to reduce Western nation-states to mere pawns, as big international finance capital gains control over all democratic institutions, stripping them of their national and democratic essence. In the principal capitalist countries there is still a remnant of the type of bourgeois democracy, but it is becoming increasingly hollow. How a road to socialism can be reopened, after the distortions and defeats of the 20th century, is certainly an open question. In order for this path to be unlocked, it is crucial to simultaneously shut down the path towards the further empowerment of the fast-evolving totalitarian Western capitalism, with the collusive possibilities offered to it by modern technological forces. And this has become possible today thanks to the resistance of the peoples of Yugoslavia and the Middle East, thanks to the social struggles in Europe and Latin America, thanks to the return of Russia to world politics, thanks to the fantastic economic rise of China. That is why every revolutionary Marxist, wherever he comes from, from the South, the East or the west of our continent, must be resolutely against Western imperialist interventions and not be led astray by the humanitarian and “democratic” pretexts used by western imperialism. None of their interventions brought democracy, all of them led to social and national disasters in the countries where they took place. The first duty of every conscious militant of the Left today is the opposition to imperialist wars and sanctions. This certainly does not mean unconditional support for the regimes that are attacked every time by imperialism, be it Serbia or Afghanistan, Iraq or Iran, Russia or China. It means an understanding of what the total domination of the West on the planet would mean for human civilization and for the very survival of the human species. Today, the emergence of the BRICS, the moves towards a multipolar world, the weakening of the role of the dollar are paving the way for a new, democratic world order. These are huge, historic steps. But it is only the necessary, not the sufficient, condition for a new world order. Our problem should not be a question of defeating the Western world in order to just replace it, but of moving all of humanity towards a new civilization that can face the enormous threats that have appeared for the first time in human history, due to the productive forces and technologies we have developed and which, if not controlled, will very soon put the very survival of humankind at risk. The West does not have the means to defeat the emerging majority of humanity. But in its effort not to lose its global dominance, it can proceed with policies that can blow up humanity with the means of mass destruction, a danger inherent in its adventurist policies towards Russia and China. Even if this scenario does not come to pass, the climate crisis is rapidly evolving and neither the West nor emerging global powers are taking action to address the most severe threat to humanity in the history of our existence, one that surpasses even the danger of nuclear conflict. Because nuclear war may or may not happen. But the Climate Change is coming with certainty, not with probability and humans will not survive it. They have to stop it but in order to stop it another social system and another civilization is what is needed. That is, even if we avoid the catastrophe of a World War, we risk finding ourselves in an environment of destruction due to a prolonged stalemate and conflict between North and South, East and West. If Rosa Luxemburg declared a century ago we had to choose “socialism or barbarism,” the dilemma today is: socialism or extinction. In our fight against climate change we fight for socialism. And in our fight for socialism we fight to save the planet. No one of the big problems humanity is facing can be addressed now on a national or regional level. This is one of the reasons we badly need a new International. The problems I mentioned above and other such issues cannot be solved solely by the action of states which are opposed to the dominant Western powers, These States are, by the way, mostly conservative, and just aim at the West leaving them alone and not interfering in their affairs, which is impossible because Imperialism is the nature of Capitalism. In any case, merely relying on states is not enough to tackle the challenges that humanity is up against, we need the conscious mobilization of vast popular masses in both the North and the South of the planet. We need also an alliance between western popular classes and the oppressed nations of the South and a mobilization of peoples all over the world. Such an alliance means addressing simultaneously socio-economic, geopolitical and ecological problems in the direction of a nationally, regionally and globally planned and democratically controlled economy. This should be our strategic goal. You cannot nowadays address the ecological but not the social, the social but not the geopolitical, the geopolitical but not the social. We need a 5th International for a variety of reasons, in order to unite the regions of the world on the basis of a new socialist project—because without such unity war will become unavoidable. We need also unite and coordinate the fights against capitalism, against imperialism, against totalitarianism, against climate change and degradation of nature. We cannot for example phase out the use of fossil fuels without taking into account the different position of different countries, etc. etc. Progress and planning become synonymous. In the light of the experience of the 20th century we cannot contain ourselves to the state ownership of the productive forces; we need to seek social ownership and control through the extensive use of methods of self-management. Socialism does not mean state ownership, it means the exercise of power by the people at all levels. It also means that we must rethink the pursuit of the constant perpetual development of the productive forces. For some ideas as to what this alternative transitional program of a fifth international should be, I refer you to a text of mine which asks some first questions. www.defenddemocracy.press AuthorDimitris Konstantakopoulos This article was produced by Monthly Review. Archives April 2024 Ben Ughetti discusses the factors behind the left's repellent image. Picture The Activist Loser– a person who dedicates their entire personality to ‘the cause’. The political stripe of said person is usually meaningless albeit almost entirely predictable. They all look a certain way with unkempt or alternative haircuts, clothes that might not look or fit right and of course hundreds of badges on their lapels– proclaiming to the world everything from their trade union membership, vegan leanings, and the minority identity they’ve adopted. Try to have any form of conversation with these people and you quickly find they have none of the same interests and ambitions that most other people have. They live in a microcosm of their own sense of moral superiority. This person is a walking cliché from a Citizen Smith episode. It would be tempting to just point and laugh at The Activist Loser, however their association with our movement has resulted in reputational damage beyond belief. We know that on the Labour Party left there seems to be an endemic problem of ‘losers’, for want of a better term. The regular spectacle of Jeremy Corbyn being attacked, denounced and mocked in many critical interactions during his election campaigns was cringeworthy. Ultimately, you had a situation where a man who looked like an aged Activist Loser– some lefty allotment owner who couldn’t wear a tie properly– was being humiliated in the national media week after week. The optical issues that the Corbyn campaign faced are issues almost every section of the left has to deal with today. Left wing people in this country are not seen as normal people but almost a subculture of society, and as a result, are routinely rejected by the ordinary people that they portend to speak for. The obvious question here is why? Why does the left attract such a high proportion of these Activist Losers who exist on the fringes of society? The socialist cause is undeniably a noble one. To stand up against oppression, fight for equality and to build a better world. With this the left has always traditionally attracted a ‘softer’ type of person. In his post-capitalist desire lectures, Mark Fisher makes the observation that the left in many ways holds a position that they are the “wounded” and therefore cannot imagine themselves in a form of power against their enemies. This wounded mentality becomes an easier position to hold. It takes a certain type of person to make being wounded a status signifier, never mind a political position. We must imagine our Activist Loser as a wounded person. The best example of what is meant by this is when the left is directly attacked. Assessing the response of them for example in debate with a conservative on culture, the response is often to retreat into decrying bigotry. Or when facing state repression, to hysterically bemoan how badly the capitalist government is treating them. To the outside observer, this becomes very demoralising to watch, and any potential for sympathy from the masses is outweighed by the repulsion such plaintive trilling generates. We should be able to look at these responses and disagree. We know the nature of the capitalist class and need to be able to match and defeat them. The constant insistence amongst the left that we need to be fighting a cause of one-hundred different fronts in the never-ending identity wars, is emblematic of wounded victim mentality. For vast sections of the left the possibility of taking power is unimaginable. For these people however, this is actually preferable. They see politics as an extended personality trait or hobby, not as something transformative for our class. In the 1960’s with the rise of postmodernism, the left began to redirect the struggle not in the purpose for fighting class war, but for control of a moral authority afforded by fighting an identity war. Philosophers like Michel Foucault made the case that any and all societal norms had to be challenged on all fronts whether it be norms around prisons, hospitals or sexuality. As a result we saw a rise of new individualistic leftists who now didn’t see the cause of the left as the cause of class struggle but the cause of thousands of fractured ‘struggles’. Where political movements historically found success in getting as many disparate groups to unite on a single issue, the socialist movement now seems determined to produce more division among those who already support them. This is succinctly illustrated by the complete false assertion that ‘you can’t be a socialist if you don’t support feminism, open borders, trans rights, environmentalism etc’. Where Activist Losers use politics as a badge collection to show off how many correct stances they personally take. In a self-capitulating sense, this variety of individualistic leftist becomes a capitalist’s anti-capitalist: they have been able to digest the anti-capitalist theory and education to a degree where they are able to use its linguistics to redefine revolutionary ideas to be about the self. Using the tools provided to us by materialism we know that even the concept of societal norms is no concrete thing but rather for the usage of communists. A way to engage contemporary political discourse. Rejection of any and all norms for contrarian’s sake is clearly a fool’s errand that if popularised any further in the left will result in becoming divorced from the very idea of popular movement itself. What separates left and right individualists? The right individualists see themselves in a way of personal improvement to gain more capital, maintain certain moral structures and to reduce the capacity of the state. By contrast, the left individualists see themselves in a fight for the boundaries which they wish to keep pushing. These people frequently appear as downtrodden, but in reality are very focused on achieving dominion of moral authority with which they can pressure and influence the rest of the left and to an extent, wider society. With the rise of these individualists the traditional left’s fight for our class was pushed aside in favour of more identity politics based issues. Ultimately these people are the ones who see themselves as righteous victims of the most ugly parts of contemporary society instead of the class exploited by our economic system. These people will identify themselves in a variety of shades whether it be postmodernist, anarchist, intersectionalist or anything else. In their rejection of not only the norms of society but working-class culture they become increasingly abstracted from normality. All of this of course is not a rejection of subculture entirely, or to say that subculture is inherently a bad thing. In some ways, we could harness subculture to our advantage in support of class struggle. However, that is for a competent communist movement to decide, and until then, we should be able to have rational and meaningful conversations with the public without putting them off. The current optics of the left are not sustainable and will never earn the respect of the working people of Britain. The current stereotype of the left being easily offended, privately educated, Guardian-reading moralists who seek to sit in front of traffic or pontificating to people about fad nonsense such as ‘fatphobia’ or ‘cultural appropriation’ cannot continue. “It is very significant that it is not the embittered failures, not the careerists and reckless political adventurers, but the flower of the youth who turn to communism and who make the best communists.” – Harry Pollitt So, how do we respond to this? The Soviet Union explored what the ideal Soviet citizen would look like. A lot of this was firstly about being a functioning member of society and contributing to the growth of the Soviet Union. The intent and basis for this should be instructive for us. Not only in our political lives should we seek to be the best communists that we can be in order to sculpt the societal view of who we actually are. While I might not currently be able to answer what the perfect communist looks like it is very easy to deduct what doesn’t make a good communist and answering this question is a worthwhile endeavour. One of the most useful things we could do is cast-off this baggage of being part of ‘the left’. We are communists and our demand is Marxism-Leninism. We don’t fit ourselves in boxes to join people who we fundamentally disagree with. Our image also is our own, to set apart from the Activist Losers. The second and most immediate thing for us to do is to consider how we as individuals fit ourselves in society. This is something that needs a high degree of self-criticism. When thinking about your political work ask yourself: am I just sitting on Discord servers debating who I would have sided with in the Sino-Soviet split? Is this actually a good use of my time or am I throwing myself deeper into the echo chamber? You should have friends and relationships beyond your cadres, from work or from school, with other interests outside of politics, whether it be films, music, books, art or sports: the basic ingredients for both a healthy life and a tolerable personality. As Marx writes in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 the less you do these things the further alienated you become from life itself. Communists are not some sort of caricature where we are all too serious to celebrate Christmas or go out with our friends. Life is meant to be enjoyed and communists in their fight should know this more than anyone else. We should be able to look at ourselves in the mirror aspirationally and ask: am I as physically fit as I could be? Could the way I dress and my haircut potentially put people off talking to me in public? Of course, we shouldn’t be prescribing universal looks and mandated haircuts but we shouldn’t look like a fringe group either. It’s a fine and tricky line but one we should be striving to get right. As extreme as our beliefs may be perceived by some in our communities, we can at least attempt to act and look as relatable as possible. The struggle for communism is ultimately a struggle for a popular movement. The sight of Activist Losers is disheartening and a sign of loss to the movement. However, when we use such slogans as “the only war is class war” or “smash capitalism” we should be self-reflective to how we can better ourselves to fulfil the essential tasks. If we are to build our movements of popular struggle and mass unity it requires us to be able to use the framework of dialectical materialism to dissect what will actually speak to working people on a level they can relate to. It’s for these reasons that it would be more beneficial for us to not think of ourselves as being “on the broad left” or apart of some sort of left wing super alliance but as the communist movement. We are serious people and as a result should treat our optics as such. So next time before you leave the house, perhaps reconsider the spiked leather jacket or the Che Guevara beret. It might just be worth leaving at home. Or better still, the dustbin. AuthorBen Ughetti is a member of the Young Communist League’s South Yorkshire Branch This article was produced by YCL Challenge. Archives March 2024 3/28/2024 ‘Too Soon to Tell’: The Dialectics of Time and Revolutionary Struggle. By: Carlos L. GarridoRead NowIt is said that Zhou Enlai once, when asked about the impact of the French Revolution, replied that it was still ‘too soon to tell’. We tend to assume that the revolutionary simply fights for the future. An abstract progressivism looks backwards and sees nothing but a has-been, a completion, a fact, or series of facts, which can be narrated and judged with precision. For some, history, at best, conditions our present. It creates the potential, the horizon, for what can be actualized in the future. But history is left there, in the background. For the ahistorical mind and for the abstract historicist the past is past… it is dead. History is, as we Americans say, a done deal. Like a chauffeur, it brought us to our destination, the ‘present’. For this we pay and go our way. From these frameworks, sharing in their judgement of history-as-dead, a has-been, Enlai’s response is baffling. Cannot the impact of the French Revolution be answered clearly and precisely through the immediate events it produced? How can it be too soon to tell the impact of the revolution which sought to “realize the promises of philosophy”? Enlai’s response is not a cheap diplomatic answer to the foreign questioner. It expresses a profound insight on the temporality of revolutionary struggles, one not limited to the French Revolution. We are, of course, able to speak about the influence revolutionary movements have had… so far. But, in the final instance, none of these discussions can be conclusive. The question cannot be answered with full concreteness, since the questioned phenomenon is still being disclosed. The ‘impact’ of, say, the French Revolution, is still unfolding. Its meaning is still being fought for. This gets us to the key insight implicit in Enlai’s response: Revolutions aren’t simply about winning a future, realizing a ‘concrete utopia,’ as Bloch would say. They are, equally, about redeeming the past… they concern themselves with the fulfillment of the goals and aspirations of our ancestors in the struggle. Our fight is for the future, but it is also for the past. It is a struggle which prevents previous struggles from having died in vain. “History is rewritten in various periods,” Adam Schaff writes, “not only because new sources become accessible, but also because the newly appearing effects of past events make possible a new appraisal of the past.” Our construction of a new future is, at the same time, a reconstruction of the past. It allows us to shed light, retrospectively, on new meanings of past events – meanings which were implicit, latent, and which have been actualized through the construction of the new. For the dialectical materialist, revolutionary temporality is comprehensive – it understands and acts conscious of the interconnected and contradictory character of time. The present is seen as a launching off point for the realization of that which is in-itself, implicit, potential, Not-Yet. It is, also, a launching off point for that which is wrongly treated as a has-been, but which, as we know, is still becoming. For us, then, the future, past, and present are dialectically interconnected and interdependent. The present and future are determined by the past, but equally so, the past is determined by the present and future. This is, of course, a temporal unity of opposites… an objective contradiction in life. The future is found, as implication, in the past, and the past is found, as realization, in the future. A one-sided, reifying outlook cannot capture this complexity. An outlook which fears contradictions will be left astray, forced to castrate the temporal dialectic of the world to fit the neat categories in their heads. It is theoretical brumotactillophobia, a deep-seated fear in the dialectical intermingling of categories one hopes to keep purely apart. Enlai, as a proficient dialectician, was correct in his assessment of the French Revolution. It is still ‘too soon to tell’ precisely because the rational kernel, the progressive demands, of the revolution have yet to be fully realized. These find themselves unactualizable within the bourgeois form of life. They find their realization in the communist form of life, which, for most of the world, exists only implicitly/in-itself, as a hope which drives us to realize its latent potential. We have a world to win. And when it is won, we’ll secure for ourselves not only the future, but also the past. Author Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy instructor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2024). He has written for dozens of scholarly and popular publications around the world and runs various live-broadcast shows for the Midwestern Marx Institute YouTube. You can subscribe to his Philosophy in Crisis Substack HERE. This article was republished from the author's Substack, Philosophy in Crisis. Archives March 2024 3/28/2024 A Portrait of Love in a City at War: Who Assassinated Haitian Community Leader Tchadenksy Jean Baptiste? By: Danny ShawRead NowLast year, on Tuesday, March 21st, a sniper’s bullet from an Israeli-made Galil ripped through the flesh of 24-year-old Haitian community leader and writer Tchadenksy Jean Baptiste. The war in Port-au-Prince counts among its victims hundreds of thousands of children and families who have been burnt out of their homes, raped and murdered. In Sniper City, death squads battle each other, the organized and unorganized masses and the police for territory and power. The police are among the favorite targets of the mercenaries, with on average 15 officers murdered every month in the capital. Amidst the imperial maelstrom, despite the bullets, gangs and hunger, community and resistance leaders continue their work, steadfast and confident in their people, their ancestors and their spiritual way of life. Armed with his perennial smile and poetry, Tchad was one such example of a determined militan (member of the organized protest movement) who never ceased to believe in and fight for Haiti’s unfinished second revolution. “Pa Gen Moun Pase Moun” (No one is better than anyone else) To walk with Tchadensky in the korido yo (alleyways) of Belè, Fò Nasyonal and Port-au-Prince’s many sprawling, perilous slums was to walk shoulder to shoulder with revolutionary royalty. In neighborhoods where the battle for hegemony plays out between criminal, paramilitary organizations and the masses, every neighbor, every elder and youth knew him and looked up to him. He didn’t believe in eating alone. Children gathered around cement blocks or big boulders that served as makeshift tables eagerly waiting to see what their big brother had cooked up for them. His habit of always sharing his hot plate worried his mother who perennially wondered if her oldest son had eaten enough. The elders reminded younger generations that this collective approach flowed from lespri aysyen (the Haitian way or soul). Squatting in front of a ripped poster of Jan Jak Dessalin, on a side alleyway off John Brown Avenue, the 24-year-old speaks to a group of Rasta youth: “We fight for everyone to be treated like the dignified human beings that they are.” He stopped mid breath and mid sentence and pleaded with his political family: “Why are we losing this battle? How do we take our neighborhoods back?” Despite fleeing from home to makeshift shacks and then sleeping in the streets, in stadiums, abandoned buildings and in public parks alongside hundreds of families displaced by the proxy death squads, Tchadensky never stopped reading and writing. He cited Soviet leader Mikhail Kalinin who taught that it was important to find time to read and write even if it was on the battlefield. Tedina, his life partner, remembered him as a prankster, a chef, a perfectionist, a scholar, an indefatigable fighter and lover of life. “I don’t have time for hate. I only have time for love.” A year after his death, the university where Tchadensky studied and performed has yet to come to terms with their loss. His close friend and colleague James Junior Jean Rolph offered his own eulogy, reminiscing that this youthful renaissance man did not “have a big head, constantly motivated his peers, worked and progressed without complaining and always had his head in the books.” Tchadenksy, like so many in this city of 2.5 million, lived on the run. He remained a light in Port-au-Prince’s most infamous neighborhoods 一 Matisan, Delma 2, Kafou Fèy and Belè. These are the bidonvils (ghettos) that provide the canvas for the clips of unrestrained violence that circulate on Haitian whatsapp. Tchad and the movement rejected the sensationalism of the media. Internally within MOLEGHAF and other socialist organizations, they discouraged the sharing of what they saw as “Black Death Pornography.” Tchad and others cautioned against the sharing on Whatsapp of grizzly images of heads cut off, sexual violence against the most vulnerable, bodies tortured and massacres. After a deep breath, he patiently explained to a crowd that they and their self-esteem had been brutalized and traumatized enough. The insurgent’s responsibility was to re-instill hope and love in the masses. And this is what our protagonist did until he was again run out and his home, alongside thousands of others, was burnt down. How many poems, memories, dreams, libraries and futures have disappeared in the flames, smoke and ashes of imperialism? For some militan, what they most lamented after the loss of life, was the loss of memories. How many bookshelves of fresh literature and newly-written poems have been sacrificed at the altar of the U.S. government’s obsession with guns, violence and plunder? Haiti’s top newspaper, Le Nouvelliste, published the poet’s last words “Running, Always Running” which has survived the author and the hybrid war[3]: “Running, Always Running" I am always on the run Until I am out of breath I am not an athlete I am no type of sportsman But I am always running I am fleeing and hiding from stuff I did not do After Lasalin I am in Aviyasyon I sprint through Dèlma 2 All I know how to do these days is run Drenched in sweat I am running out of breath I’m not running To get in better shape Or to impress anyone with a 6-pack I run because I am on the run I have my backpack on My baby is in my hands I have blankets wrapped around me I grab any last memories I can I drop my passport in the fury I search for a corner A nook and cranny To rest my weary head My exhausted body To think of the life I completely lost. We all run We run together Our grandmothers Little ones Everyone United Running Some of us are burnt Others are on fire All of us running shoulder to shoulder with the trauma To see who will cross the line of death first. After Kanaran I run through Divivye Then Site Solèy We are all running Drenched in sweat We are running out of breath We search for a hiding spot A refuge Where we can maroon the bullets So the stray bullets Do not Swallow us whole On the path where we are running” David vs Goliath And on a Tuesday, like any other, surrounded by one of his usual extended families, Tchadensky suddenly went quiet and crumbled underneath his own weight. The children saw the bleeding wound on the side of his stomach and screamed out “Amwey! Tchadenksy pran bal.” “Help! Tchandenksy was shot.” Amidst the shock, his comrades scrambled to gather the money necessary to pay a motorcycle to bring him to The Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) hospital. According to Domini Resain, Coordinator of Mobilization for MOLEGHAF, (Movement for the Equality and Liberation of All Haitians ), the student leader was organizing a community meal and a workshop for children displaced by the gang war when a sniper blasted a bullet from an IMI Galil into his abdomen. Everyone speculated: “the sniper who shot Tchad, was he a police officer, a paid assassin or a gang member from the G9 or G-Pèp paramilitaries who have know reconstituted themselves under the command of Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier as the Viv Ansanm alliance (Live Together)?” Domini intervened before a crowd who gathered to express their condolences: “Does it matter who killed Tchad? They are all the same. These are not stray bullets as they claim. They are state bullets. These are PHTK bullets. These are police bullets. These are Washington bullets .” In the “Confessions of a Haitian kidnapper ,” police officer Arnel Joseph unpacks the secret connections that exist between political and economic power elites, the Haitian National Police and the gangs. While the dominant narrative carried by telejòl (television or media reports carried by mouth or through rumors) stated that a stray bullet struck the popular leader, the militan were quick to point out that these were state bullets and Washington bullets. As Peter Hallward’s classic book , Damming the Flood: Haiti and the Politics of Containment, on the rise and repression of the Lavalas movement shows, all of modern Haitian history is a contest for power between the desperately poor 99.9 percent and the fabulously opulent 0.1 percent of the Petyonvil mountain enclave. In this asymmetrical war, Tchad mobilized poems, smiles and flowers as his class enemies hired professional assassins for a cheap day’s pay. How many tens of thousands of Lavalas organizers and fighters from the broad social movement have been disappeared, exiled, imprisoned and assassinated?The oligarchy disappears the expression, art and leadership they deem to be an obstacle to their rule. If anything remains clear in Haiti, it is the fact that a handful of elite families hide behind their heavily-fortified castles and the carefully curated media they own and manage. There are more private security guards than public police in the most unequal country in the Western hemisphere. It was an entire system that murdered Thadensky, like so many others from his generation. Washington Bullets and Resistans Ayisyen (Haitian Resistance) The average life expectancy in France is over 82 years. The average life expectancy in The Dominican Republic is 73 years. In Haiti , it is 10 years less. For a revolutionary in Haiti, the statistic drops several more decades. Tchadenksy joined a growing list of community leaders liquidated under the rule of the PHTK, the Haitian Bald Headed Party, named so because their first dictator, Michel Martelly was bald. The party's rule is especially sinister because they hide behind their hired mercenaries, denying any involvement. Paramilitaries are more effective in Haiti, just as they were in Colombia, Argentina, El Salvador and other U.S. neocolonies because they are not accountable to anyone. The modern makouts (thugs and assassins) are loyal to Izo, Kempès Sanon, Barbecue, Vitalhom or whoever the local warlord is. Three survivors of a kidnapping in Mon Kabrit, who do not want to be named, explained: “The young recruits didn’t have money to eat that day but they gripped AR15s and AK47s worth over $10,000 on the streets of Haiti. We know they are involved with the drug trade. How can they get such expensive weapons when most of us are hungry? When they divided the men from the women (the speaker looked down), the kidnappers screamed allegiance to their leader Lanmò San Jou (Death without a day announced). They asked us who we were loyal to…which political party or gang? Refusing the debate, we looked away. They hit us and reminded us that their president and the president of all of Haiti was their boss, the paramilitary gang leader, Lanmò San Jou.” This anecdote is telling and sheds light on the highly localized reality of gang bosses who preside over their own fiefdoms of looting, raping and destruction. This is the colonial Haiti run by guns for fire that Tchadensky resisted, and the one that ultimately consumed him and thousands of other innocents. Our protagonist never hesitated to denounce the powers that be, “the gangsters in ties ” and foreign forces who fanned the flames of the fratricidal war. The griot articulates what so many know but cannot express or are deathly afraid to express – the chaos in Haiti has its origins faraway in the palaces and boardrooms of Washington D.C., New York, Miami, Ottawa, Montreal and Paris. While CNN, Fox and the New York Times deceitfully portray Haiti as isolated, the Caribbean nation of over 11.5 million has for centuries been integrated into the international capitalist machinery .[4] And if the maroon nation ever steps out of line, U.S. Marines are not far off to remind them of their place in the global pecking order. Washington now prefers mercenaries from Brazil, Kenya, Chile, Chad, Nepal or Benin to carry out their fourth invasion and occupation of Haiti in the past 100 years. Regardless of the historical odds, there is an abundance of leaders and organizations who trained with Tchadensky and are fighting to elevate their homeland out of the neoliberal quagmire. They too are survivors of this hybrid war. Highly conscious of the ideological and media war against them, MOLEGHAF, the Black Panthers of Haiti , model another brand of leadership, honest, self-sacrificing and anti-imperialist.[5] For this reason, they have been targeted by state and paramilitary bullets. Many political demonstrations and protests in Haiti are in front of the U.S. embassy precisely because of this anti-imperialist awareness. Dahoud Andre, a spokesperson of KOMOKODA, the Committee to Mobilize Against Dictatorship in Haiti, and host of "Haiti Our Revolution Continues" on WBAI analyzed the ins-and-outs of the struggle today for Haiti’s definitive self-determination on Black Agenda Radio. On the anniversary of the death of a Haitian Fred Hampton, take time to resist the mainstream clichés against Haiti and share the memories of our Haitian saints. The Gregory Saint-Hillaires , Jean Anil Louis Justes and Tchadenskys gave everything for everyone, while awaiting nothing for themselves in return, as they fought and fell in combat in order to guarantee all the homeland’s children an abundance of water, food, peace, liberty, dignity and joy. Fanmi Lavalas (Sali Piblik) KRÒS Kowòdinasyon Rejyonal Òganizasyon Sidès yo MOLEGHAF: Mouvman pou Libète Egalite sou Chimen Fratènize Tout Ayisyen OTR: Òganizasyon Travayè Revolisyonè Radyo Resistans SOFA: Solidarite Fanm Ayisyen Rasin Kanpèp Konbit Òganizasyon Politik ak Sendikal yo Tèt Kole Ti Peyizan MPP Movman Peyizan Papay Movman Popilè Revolusyonè (Sitè Soley) Sèk Gramsci Sèk Jean Annil Louis-Juste KOMOKODA (Komite Mobilizasyon kont Diktati an Ayiti Committee to Mobilize Against Dictatorship in Haiti) Jounal revolisyonè: La Voix des Travailleus Revolutionaire Platfòm Ayisyen Pledwaye pou yon Devlopman Altènatif SROD'H: Syndicat pour la Rénovation des Ouvriers d'Haïti ROPA: Regwoupman Ouvriye Pwogresis Ayisyen OFDOA :Oganizasyon Fanm Djanm Ouvriye Ayisyen Altènativ Sosyalis Fwon Popilè e Patriotik JCH Jeunesse communiste haïtien Notes [1] All spellings are in the national language of Haiti, Kreyòl, not the colonial language, French. [2] Translation: “Your smile opens up a new path for Haiti. Your poetry lived and died for Haiti. See you again soon comrade God bless!” [3] For the original version of the poem in Kreyòl see the embedded link. With permission from Tchadensky’s family, I translated the poem into English. [4] The Haitian state last conducted a census in 2003 under the leadership of Jean Bertrand Aristide so the population is probably much higher than 12,000,000. [5] Partial List of Leftist, Anti-Imperialist Organizations in Haiti Author Danny Shaw teaches Latin American and Caribbean Studies and International Relations at the City University of New York. He holds a master’s degree in International Affairs from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. As the Director and professor of the International Affairs Department at the Midwestern Marx Institute, he works to build unity and anti-imperialist consciousness. He is fluent in Spanish, Haitian Kreyol, Portuguese, Cape Verdean Kreolu and has a fair command of French, and works as an International Affairs Analyst for TeleSUR, HispanTV, RT and other international news networks. He has worked and organized in eighty-one countries, opening his spirit to countless testimonies about the inhumanity of the international economic system. He is a Golden Gloves boxer, fighting twice in Madison Square Garden for the NYC heavyweight championship. He teaches boxing, yoga and nutrition and works as a Sober Coach. He is a mentor to many, guiding them through the nutritional, ideological, social and emotional landmines that surround us. He is the father of Ernesto Dessalines and Cauã Amaru. He has also authored articles on Latin American history, boxing and nutrition, among other topics. You can follow his work at @profdannyshaw Republished from Black Agenda Report Archives March 2024 On February 29, 2024, the Israeli army deliberately ran over a Palestinian man in Gaza City’s Al-Zaytoun neighborhood after he was arrested. The man was harshly interrogated by Israeli soldiers, who tied his hands with plastic zip-tie handcuffs before running him over with a military vehicle from the legs up. In order to ensure that he was thoroughly crushed, Israeli soldiers laid him on asphalt instead of an adjacent sandy area. The man had his clothes removed, since he was seen wearing only his underpants. When one looks at the body, one is confronted with the absolute unidentifiability of the man that it previously constituted: the individuality of the human being has been flattened into scattered, disfigured organs and parts. Colonial Reality How do we think about the comprehensively destroyed body? In mainstream liberal thought, the evisceration of a human being can be regarded as a “moral” failing, as a loss of “lives” that has to be prevented. Palestinians here figure merely as “victims” of terror; their redemption, consequently, lies in the normative abstraction of “peace”. The body of the victim is sensationalized and marketed as a blot upon the fabric of humanity so that people can be convinced in favor of the cessation of hostilities. Politics is reduced to “outrage,” while collective action is postponed to the day when everyone’s moral conscience has awoken. When this spontaneous moral awakening doesn’t happen, a sense of helplessness pervades. All this while, the individual can pride themselves over their distance from the violence of Hamas, which is considered as a myopic outburst without any political vision. This is clear in renowned Marxist philosopher Etienne Balibar’s response to the Palestine crisis. He says that Hamas’ October 7 military operation can’t be justified because it was “accompanied by particularly odious crimes against the Israeli population: the murder of adults and children, torture, rape and kidnapping.” These “exterminist massacres…replicated the massacres perpetrated by the Jewish paramilitaries on Palestinian villages during the Naqba.” All the supposed atrocities committed by Hamas have been debunked as Zionist propaganda. Most of the 1,154 Israelis that the government claims were killed by Palestinians were actually killed by the Zionist state itself. This is the result of Israel’s Hannibal Directive, which authorizes the killing of Israeli soldiers if they fall into enemy hands. The story about the killing of babies was propagated without evidence, being based on the words of Major David Ben Zion – an extremist settler who has explicitly called for violence against Palestinians. Claims about rape were established through a fraudulent New York Times investigation, which was published even though not a single rape victim was found. Balibar’s willingness to accept the demonization of Palestinian resistance is rooted in the aforementioned logic of liberal peace, wherein clean, uncluttered thought is prioritized over the spiraling movement of anti-colonial resistance. Any counter-attack on Zionist settler-colonialism is said to be caught within the confines of the extant social reality. Palestinians and Israelis, then, become two sides of an overarching situation, continuously mirroring each other in terms of their deplorable violence. An exit from this situation can be conceived only in an external manner, as the intervention of a supervening agency. Thus, Balibar says that the only possible outcome consists in the intervention of the international community and its institutions, “demanding an immediate ceasefire, the release of the hostages, the prosecution of the war crimes committed by both sides, and the implementation of the countless UN resolutions that have gone unheeded.” But he himself adds that this desired resolution has no chance of happening because “institutions have been neutralized by the major or medium-sized imperialist powers, and the Jewish-Arab conflict has once again become an issue in the maneuvers they engage in to determine spheres of influence and networks of alliances, in a context of cold and hot wars.” Geopolitical and regional power dynamics “obliterate any effective international legality. We are in a circle of impotence and calculation from which there is no escape. The catastrophe will therefore carry to term, and we will suffer the consequences.” Impotence – this becomes the fate of a liberal-pacifist strategy that wants to separate the Palestinian question from any contaminating influence of concrete geopolitical and social actors. In order to build an alternative to Balibar’s (anti)politics of impotence, consider these words by him: “I see the massacre on October 7th involving various atrocities perpetrated against civilians as a pure terrorist action (also in the literal sense: meant to spread terror), which forces to confer a terrorist character upon the organization itself.” Instead of disavowing this characterization, I want to interpret it literally: yes, a war of national liberation does intend to spread terror among the settlers so that the sense of security enjoyed by the colonial system can be upended. Colonial society in its entirety should be woken out of its racist insularity by being forced to pay the price of occupation, just as the colonized pay the price for national oppression. Terror should be felt on both sides. When anti-colonial practice inflicts damage upon structures of brutality through the deployment of terror, the entire alliance of imperialist states comes together to contain the movement. Therefore, when Balibar says that a “terrorist character” should be conferred upon Hamas, he forgets that this has already been done through sanctions and terror lists created by states of the Global North. But these instruments of repression have had a counterproductive effect, introducing a form of delinking among the entities that are at the receiving end of imperialist strangulation. In the words of Max Ajl: “As political organizations were “maximally” coerced and quarantined, they made mutual linkages. Delinking led to a type of regional collective self-reliant security doctrine, architecture, and technological and military coordination. Imperialism built an inadvertent scaffolding for its opponents’ ideological and political goals.” Thus, anti-colonial terror lays bare the contours of confrontation, imposing upon us the stark divide of national liberation and imperialism. Operation Al-Aqsa Flood has heightened the antagonism between the colonizer and the colonized, with the entire globe feeling the reverberations of this binarized division. As the divide between national liberation and colonialism is sharpened, amplified, and simplified, one can’t say that both the sides are involved in a cycle of violence, wherein each mimes the other in the performance of cruelty. In order to say that the colonizer and the colonized are similar in terms of their violent acts, one has to compare this violence against a common standard of peace. But the peculiarity of colonialism consists in the fact that there is no unified notion of peace. Frantz Fanon elaborates: “The zone inhabited by the colonized is not complementary to the zone inhabited by the colonizers. The two zones confront each other, but not in the service of a higher unity. Governed by a purely Aristotelian logic, they follow the principle of mutual exclusion: There is no conciliation possible, one of the terms is superfluous”. Since Balibar wants to establish a similarity between the violence of Hamas and Israel, he has to acknowledge that he is comparing both these forms of violence from a higher standpoint of peace. And this is exactly what he does. He writes that the aim of Hamas’ October 7 attack was “to provoke a response of such violence that the war would enter a new, truly “exterminationist” phase, obliterating forever the possibilities of the two peoples living together.” Possibilities – this is a key word of liberal ideology, as it presupposes that the colonial situation always contains a reservoir of morality, a hope of reconciliation. However, colonialism is an irreconcilable struggle between two opposing forces. Even if Hamas had remained completely quiet, Israel would have maintained its genocide of Palestinians. Settler sovereignty can only be ensured through the perpetually enacted destruction of indigenous presence. The mere fact of Palestinian existence is a threat to Israel. Hamas’ military operations don’t determine the character of Israeli response. The response of Israel is ingrained in the structure of colonialism, which mandates the extermination of the native. That’s why Balibar is wrong to say that Operation Al-Aqsa Flood has erased the “possibilities” of peace. There never was such a possibility. In a colonial situation, possibilities are created by cracking open the shell of frozen impossibilities. This brings me back to the dismembered body of the Palestinian man. The colonial violence enacted upon this body can’t be judged against a higher notion of morality, as colonialism drives back all ethereal ideological words into the soil of struggle. In order to understand the crushed body, one has to analyze the concrete causes that have brought about this kind of death. Without these causes, we will end up in the fantasy world of liberal ethics, where everything is subordinated to the judgmental gaze of a contemplative observer. Here, it is instructive to read Nikolai Bukharin’s explanation of the materiality of the body: Now man is a very delicately organized creature. Destroy this organization, disorganize it, take it apart, cut it up, and the “mind” at once disappears. If men were able to put together this system again, to assemble the human organism, in other words, if it were possible to take a human body apart and put it together again just as one may do with the parts of a clock, consciousness would also at once return; once the clock has been reassembled it will operate and start to tick; put together the human organism, and it will start to think. Comparing a body to a clock – this seems offensive the sensibilities of liberal morality where “humanity” is constantly touted as an inviolable construct. However, a mechanical perspective is appropriate for the politics of anti-colonialism, where one mourns not the violation of the body’s humanity but its disorganization by specific actors. In politics, the disorganized body is reassembled through collective action, through the gathering of masses that preserves the desire for life through concrete practices of disobedience and construction. This organized mass targets the entity that is responsible for the disorganization of bodies, namely the Zionist state. If violence needs to be deployed in the struggle against colonialism, then it is fully justified. It is simply an instrument that assists in the reassembly of bodies through the disassembly of the colonial enemy. Strategies of Civility Balibar believes that violence is not a mere instrument. In his book Violence and Civility: On the Limits of Political Philosophy, he states that “political violence can never be completely controlled. One cannot simply use it as a means in the service of certain ends…without oneself feeling the ambivalent effects of its use, “deliberate” or not.” Violence, accordingly, can no longer be thought as “a means or an instrument employed to accomplish something else…It is, rather, the uncertain stakes of a confrontation with the element of irreducible alterity that it carries within itself.” This “irreducible alterity” refers to the fact that violence “exceeds the purposes guaranteeing it a permanent place in the economy of power and production.” It is never entirely functional, as it “exceeds the intentions and escapes the control of those exercising violence”. This dysfunctionality has been foregrounded through the defeat of the “ideologies of modernity” that believed in the “grand narrative of progress”. This grand narrative can be summarized in the thesis of the “convertibility” of violence: “the consequences of the most massive acts of destruction are ruins and mourning, but they cannot not be constructive (or reconstructive), even as they destroy.” The “historical optimism or faith in the meaning of history” has been lost with the defeat of revolutionary projects. These projects practiced counter-violence, which Balibar classifies as a simplistic “inversion” of ruling class violence. Socialist revolutions believed that they that they must reduplicate bourgeois violence if they are to properly “monopolize” it. This monopolization is “dangerous for the very people who wield and institute them”. Why? “[B]ecause they are nothing other, at the limit, than crystallized or stabilized violence and, in the final analysis, the relative stabilization, by groups and individuals in a given society, of their own violence – in the form of a distantiation and unequal distribution, a more or less permanent appropriation of the means of violence by some of them.” Balibar believes that the hierarchical foundation of revolutionary counter-violence – its status as an unequal distribution of force – was overlooked due to the construction of a grand narrative, namely class struggle as the “motor of history”. This narrative of history demarcated a new division between “revolutionary” violence and “counterrevolutionary” violence. The latter was excluded “from the meaning of history” as it was regarded as an obstacle to the revolution. Insofar as revolutionary projects dogmatically justified their violence through the construction of a facile grand history, they failed to engage with legitimate disagreements and antagonisms. Any dynamic that didn’t agree with state policy was classified as “counterrevolutionary”. This initiated a “truly suicidal process” of increasing repression. State institutions and police apparatuses in socialist societies came to replicate the hierarchical structure of the enemies against whom they were fighting. According to Balibar, globalization has operated a “practical refutation of the grand schemes of the intelligibility of politics”. Both bourgeois and post-revolutionary states depended upon the primacy of the nation, which functioned as a form of “collective subjectivity” integrating individuals “in the process of historical universality (patriotism, civic duty).” Insofar as globalization has diminished the significance of the nation, it has destroyed the myth of a unified history. Today, events no longer unfold as part of an evolving chain of meaningful collective action. Conflicts no longer oppose a “negative” to a “positive”. Rather, “the intrinsic complexity or order of multiplicity that characterizes conflict” introduces a new reality that can’t be captured by the binaries of revolutionary counter-violence. These binaries assumed that conflict would birth progress. However, progress has been replaced by the explosion of myriad forms of “extreme violence” (environmental catastrophe, ethnic wars, etc.) that don’t contribute to any grand narrative. This form of violence that is not part of the “universal meaning” of history is “inconvertible” violence i.e. violence that can’t be incorporated into a teleological narrative. Inconvertible violence shows that totalizing discourses will always fail in their attempt to convert all violence into social stability. An inconvertible remainder inevitably haunts the unity of grand narratives. As Balibar remarks, “the history of society or the field of politics is that of an excess or irreducible remainder of violence (if only latent violence) over the institutional, legal, or strategic forms for reducing and eliminating it.” Insofar as inconvertible violence lies outside the justificatory web of totalizing discourses, it directly attests to the entanglement of politics with antagonisms, the fact that politics is not a stable and absolute idea but a form of fragile power relation. This fragility is present in extreme violence, which is shorn of any larger narrative of progress. Consequently, extreme violence is faced with the abyss of indeterminacy, the inability of a justification to permanently ground politics. Instead of accepting the indeterminacy of politics, extreme violence aims to tear apart social bonds in order to generate security. That’s why it targets “the humanity in man, the very fact of inclusion in the human race,” an impossible task that needs to be repeated in order to guarantee a temporary sense of “omnipotence”. Extreme violence thus reveals an “incompressible minimum,” an excess that can’t be eliminated: “individuality is not a simple totality which could be circumscribed in a unique discourse, a unique way of life; there always remains an indefinite multiplicity of “parts,” relationships, and fluctuations which exceed such an imaginary project, and wind up subverting it.” Balibar asks us to accept the groundlessness of politics that is revealed in a perverse fashion by the anxieties of extreme violence. Instead of eliminating the threat of conflict (which extreme violence tends to do), we should accept the fundamental conflictuality of politics itself. Not all violence can be converted into the teleology of a social order. There always remains an inconvertible remainder that disturbs the stability of discourses. The ends for which we want to deploy violence are overpowered by an excess of violence that we wrongly relegate to mere means. Balibar writes: “violence can’t be simply the other of politics, unless we want to imagine a politics without powers, power relations, inequalities, conflicts, or interests, which would be tantamount to a politics without politics.” The acknowledgement of violence as a conflictual dynamic that can’t be suppressed points us towards the “precariousness” of politics, the fact that it can’t be guaranteed once and for all by a grand historical narrative. Instead, politics is constituted by an “infinite circularity”: a political action depends on its own movement of permanent negotiation, instead of being subordinated to an invariant foundation. When this circularity is ignored, we enter the realm of extreme violence where one engages in the impossible search for a metaphysical foundation. As Balibar puts it: [We need] to conceive of politics…as an absolute “fiction,” or an institution with no foundation that is necessarily and irremediably contingent…The sole “foundation” is a negative one, terror or extreme violence (or a combination of the forms of extreme violence, which is, precisely, terror). The alternative, it is the aleatory, purely practical possibility of avoiding terror, of deferring it more or less completely and for a relatively protracted period. The aleatory mode of politics leads to “civility,” wherein politics doesn’t renounce the imperative of liberatory violence but attempts to combat its “nihilism” through careful controls. This enables Balibar to contrast the nihilistic tendencies of revolutionary counter-violence to “anti-violence,” which denotes “resistance to the reactive violence that violence itself elicits when it is generalized”. Thus, the anti-violence of civility allows a mass movement to “take a distance from itself” and engage in self-critique. There always has to be a space where people can “reflect on the consequences and aftereffects of their own “social movements” when they confront a violent social order or a legal state of injustice”. In other words, civility is a second-order reflection that prevents mass movements from falling prey to unthinking “barbarity”. It is the practice that pits careful reflection against uninformed action. As Balibar notes, “we must take risks and know which risks we take”. My objection is that the notion of civility ontologizes politics by tying it to the “ultrapolitical” instance of contingency or groundlessness. This is evident when Balibar says that whenever progressive has succeeded in its objectives, “this has never happened in accordance with the logic of such politics alone. Rather, another politics, irreducible to any of these received political concepts, has always had to intervene in addition, or to provide politics with its underside, as it were: precisely the politics that I am hypothetically calling civility.” Even if we admit that politics is groundless, this doesn’t necessitate the transformation of this groundlessness into the “impolitic limit of politics”. On the contrary, the contingent nature of politics testifies to the fact that the effects of violence can’t be moderated by the reflective faculty of an enlightened intellect. When Balibar asks political militants to take risks while knowing which risks they are taking, he elides the collective character of politics, wherein decisions are outside the remit of knowledge. Knowledge presupposes a relation of correspondence between the knower and the object that is to be known. In politics, the risks that are to be known are outside of one’s grasp since their effects come into display only when they join the general field of social reality. Unless we take risks, we are never going to know their precise character. Balibar knows that politics is aleatory, that it can’t be provided with a permanent foundation. But he turns this very fact of contingency into a guiding principle that can be implemented by people when they undertake politics. This accords a transcendental authority to the power of abstract reflection, which swoops in from afar to judge if a specific political action is respecting the contingency of politics. In concrete cases, this leads to a vague democratic ideology that repeats anti-communist and pro-imperialist falsities. The Ideology of Bourgeois Democracy The ontologization of politics is visible in Balibar’s comments on the Russia-Ukraine war. He says that the rationale behind the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine was two-fold. First, Russia wanted to “rebuild the Empire that had been formed over centuries under the tsarist regime and sanctified by the messianic mission of “Holy Russia”, then secularized and expanded by Stalin under the name of communism, now resurrected with the help of a virulent nationalist ideology that counterposes an idealized traditional “Greater Russia” or “Eurasia” to the “degenerate” democratic West.” He never explains why Stalin’s rule represented a form of imperialism. He merely mentions the Holodomor – the 1932-33 famine that killed Ukrainian peasants. Balibar regards the Holodomor as part of the “greatest genocides of the 20th century,” putting it on par with the Holocaust. This interpretation takes part in an anti-communist model that attributes the Ukrainian famine to the evil intentions of Stalin. According to Mark B. Tauger, “the famine was not limited to Ukraine, but affected virtually the entire Soviet Union, and resulted first of all from a series of natural disasters in 1931–32 that diminished harvests drastically”. It is illogical to say that Stalin killed Ukrainian peasants, because “the Soviet regime depended for its survival on the peasantry and relied on the peasants to overcome the famine, which they did by producing a much larger harvest in 1933, despite the tragic famine conditions in which they worked.” This shows that “collectivization allowed the mobilization and distribution of resources, like tractors, seed aid, and food relief, to enable farmers to produce a large harvest during a serious famine, which was unprecedented in Russian history and almost so in Soviet history.” It is also important to remember that it was farm collectivization that strengthened the Soviet state against the Nazi army “by ensuring the priority of Red Army soldiers and war workers over peasants in the wartime allocation of food.” Without the defeat of Germany by the Soviets, Hitler would have achieved domination over continental Europe, possibly leading to Britain’s withdrawal from the conflict and hindering American support to Europe. Top of FormThus, when we look beyond the decontextualized invocation of the famine, we can observe how the Soviet Union pre-empted the spread of fascism and then brought about large-scale, revolutionizing changes in Ukrainian society. It turned a largely agricultural and illiterate country into a highly industrialized nation in the developed world. For instance, the first computer in the USSR was developed in Kyiv. With Soviet collapse, Ukraine’s industry suffered greatly due to open theft and deterioration. Ukraine couldn’t find any market for its industrial goods after the destruction of Soviet trade links. The absence of concrete analyses is also present in the equivalence that Balibar makes between the Holodomor and the Holocaust. Jaquelin Coulson notes that the Holodomor has functioned as a nationalist narrative in the building of Ukraine, mobilizing hatred not only against Russians (who are constructed as a foreign, invasive Other) but also against Jews. In wartime Soviet Ukraine, Nazi occupiers used public accounts of the famine to stoke anti-Semitic sentiments, blaming the Jews for committing genocide against Ukraine. Since its establishment in 1929, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) framed “Judeo-Bolshevism” as a powerful threat to Ukrainian nationalism, thus carrying out violent acts against Ukrainian Jews. This anti-Semitic worldview led to the belief that Jews had somehow caused, benefited from, or escaped the famine. Levko Lukyanenko, author of the Declaration of Independence of Ukraine, thought that the Jews were in control of the Soviet government when the supposed genocide took place. By not undertaking a historically grounded dissection of the Ukrainian famine, Balibar partakes in the politics of “competitive atrocity” wherein suffering is inflated as a unique, immoral event instead of being referred to its socio-structural contexts. Balibar says that the imperial ambitions of Russia are being reinvented through the dichotomy of a traditionalist “Greater Russia” or “Eurasia” and a “degenerate” democratic West. This is a purely culturalist analysis that overlooks the actuality of geo-economic politics. A Eurasian project is not about traditionalist and imperialist ideology but about the reduction of European countries’ dependence on the US-led unipolar world order through trade with Russia and China. Due to the war in Ukraine, Europe has reduced its use of Russian gas, thereby increasing its dependence on costlier US liquefied natural gas (LNG). The US has exploited this energy crisis by selling its LNG to Europe at high prices. This allows the US to exercise greater influence on European foreign policy. What Balibar characterizes as the traditionalism of present-day Russia is not the core component of the country’s reigning politics. Rather, Russian pragmatically operates according to multiple ideologies that can challenge the legitimacy of the US-led world order and thus, help combat imperialist attacks against Russia. Western observers have accused Russia of being traditionalist because they overemphasize the conservative and authoritarian elements that compose Putinism. What they overlook is the fact that these ideologies are said to be against the excessive liberalism and globalism of the West. Thus, what matters for Putin is a sovereigntist position against the West, one that uses patriotism against an interventionist Western liberal order. The 2023 report “Russia’s Policy Towards the World Majority,” published by the most influential foreign policy institutes of Russia, argues that US unipolarity is being challenged by a new coalition that is not “anti-West” but “non-West”: it is not ideologically hostile to the West but finds itself opposed to the objective interests of the Global North. This opposition manifests itself in support for a multipolar world order where nation-states are free from imperialist influence and thus more permeable to popular influence. As the report states: The extremist mutation of the liberal idea currently underway in the West should be classified as a specific product of Western civilization not subject to internationalization. There is a need for our own response – agreeable with the cultural and philosophical traditions of different civilizations – to the most acute challenges to human development ranging from environmental issues to ethical problems related to modern technologies. Blindly following the Western agenda is not just useless but is also harmful. The distinction between “anti-West” and “non-Western” is important because it highlights that Russia’s illiberal and traditionalist biases are not reflective of imperial ambitions. Instead, they are a subordinate component of a sovereigntist position that supports multipolarization. Insofar as multipolarization will democratize the world order, it needs to be critically welcomed even as we oppose the traditionalist streaks of Russian politics. Second, Balibar writes that the Russian invasion was a “preventive political war” aimed at crushing “the liberal-democratic orientation of the Ukrainian state” so that it didn’t inspire reformist changes in Russia itself. He says that the Maidan-Revolution of 2013-14 was a “democratic invention” despite all its weaknesses, like sectarianism, oligarchical manipulation, political corruption, and involvement of militias. For Balibar, the ultimately “democratic” character of the Maidan-Revolution lies in the fact that “it initiated…a collective move towards the official values of the Western European democratic systems (however “oligarchic” they can be themselves, but leaving room for political pluralism) and it could represent a model for the citizens of the Russian federation.” So, the “democratic” character of the Maidan revolution lies in its espousal of bourgeois-liberal democracy. It is hardly a foregone conclusion that the political pluralism of liberal democracy is superior to other regimes. Pluralist democracy can very well function as the most efficient means of authoritarianism. This is what happened in the Maidan revolution. The 2014 Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych tried to play Russia and the European Union (EU) off one another to get the best economic deal for Ukraine. Thus, he became the target of Western-backed business interests and Russophobic neo-Nazi groups. With US backing, the latter staged a coup and forced Yanukovych to flee to Moscow. The overthrow of the elected president came to be known as the Maidan Revolution, named after the Kiev square that hosted the protests. On February 6, 2014, an anonymous entity leaked a call between US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and US ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt. They could be heard saying that Arseniy Yatsenyuk is America’s choice to replace Yanukovych, which he did. The new government adopted pro-EU and pro-NATO policies. It imposed restrictions on the teaching of the Russian language in eastern Ukraine and Crimea, provoking resistance among the inhabitants. With the support of the majority of the population, expressed in a referendum, Putin joined Crimea to Russia. In the same year as Russia’s annexation of Crimea, separatist leaders supported by Moscow seized Donetsk and Luhansk – populated primarily by Russian ethnic minorities striving for independence – and declared the “People’s Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk”. These events angered ultra-nationalist Ukrainian forces; they declared war on the people that were opposing Yatsenyuk’s Euro-American posture. So, far from being an instance of “democratic invention,” the Maidan revolution was a maneuver through which Northern imperialist forces staged a coup, promoted neo-Nazi forces in the state apparatus, and launched a war against Russian ethnic minorities in the country. This liquidated the sovereignty of Ukraine and plunged it “into a simulated semicolonial situation without being directly occupied and divided but nevertheless reprogrammed to launch a war against itself and to point offensive weapons at neighboring Russia”. Instead of initiating a democratic resurgence, liberal democracy functioned as a framework for a NATO-Neo-Nazi axis that wanted to wage war against Russia without any concerns for the human cost. However, Balibar ignores all this by merely asserting that “there is a complete dissymmetry for a democratic country between the perspectives of being taken and swallowed again by a backward-looking autocratic empire, and the perspective of being incorporated into a federation which creates or perpetuates inequalities, but has set up rules for negotiating participation.” In the end, we get an Orientalist assertion that replaces a concrete examination of the Russian social formation with an unverified faith in the goodness of bourgeois, Western democracy. Given that Balibar’s politics of civility forgoes the confrontation of social forces in favor of the reflective power of bourgeois democracy, it is no surprise that his discussion of the global significance of the Palestinian movement is oriented towards the abstract goal of “justice”. He says that both Ukraine and Palestine are united their pursuit of “justice”: “not only the justice that refers to a position in war, on one side or the other of the divide between aggressor and victim, or oppressor and resistant, but the justice that can acquire a universal resonance, the justice that confers a universalistic dimension upon the claim of rights that some actors embody in the war.” Both Ukraine and Palestine “appear as incarnations of universal principles of self-determination and resistance to oppression, reason why, in different parts of the world, there are today activists who make valuable efforts to simultaneously support and articulate the two causes.” This universalist perspective of justice is different from the logic of “campism” which sees the current conflagrations either “in terms of a conflict between “democracies” and “totalitarian states”, or a conflict between the “Western imperialism” (under US hegemony, organized by NATO) and the “emerging peoples” with a tricontinental basis.” Balibar wants to repudiate both these campist perspectives by emphasizing “the specific history of each war, each people, each territory in its own local terms” and by describing “the modalities in which a war has developed out of conditions and choices that were made by their own actors: Russians, Ukrainians, Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, with all their internal divisions and their complete history.” What is relevant to note here is that Balibar wants to replace the actual reality of geopolitical camps with the philosophically concocted fantasy of struggles that transcend these camps and strive for “justice” and “liberty”. The American Empire controls, through NATO and other modalities, 74.3% of all military spending worldwide. This amounts to more than US$ 2 trillion. Thus, “the single most important aspect of state power – that is, military power – the absolute central danger to the working classes of all countries, especially to the darker nations of the world, lies in the US-Led Imperialist Camp.” The struggles for “justice” and “liberty” that Balibar imagines obscure the contradiction between the imperialism of the American Empire and the people of Global South. He says that this division, “while remaining real (and crucial), is also compounded by other “global” phenomena,” namely “global warming and the environmental catastrophe,” which subvert “all borders in the world”. But ecological degradation itself is differentially distributed according to the socio-economic gradations of the world-imperialist system. Countries of the Global South are disproportionately affected by climate change due to the fact that global warming hits the hotter, low latitude, tropical, and subtropical regions of the earth especially hard. These countries are also generally poor due to imperialist factors such as underdevelopment, mal-development, poverty, corruption, and inequality which amplify each extreme weather event into social tragedies as communities suffer displacement, hunger, and heightened precarity. Balibar sees contemporary conflicts not as a division between “camps” but as a “globalized,” “hybrid” war. This hybrid war supposedly subverts the boundary of those camps by unleashing a quest for “justice” and “liberty” that is not reducible to geopolitical and military conflicts. We can see here how the politics of civility ends up with an abstract, contemplative mindset that wants to attain justice not through the struggle of camps but through another ethereal struggle that floats above all concrete divisions. In the end, this ethereal level of justice becomes synonymous with the defense of bourgeois democracy, since it contains the appearance of pluralism. Civility becomes a pro-imperialist prejudice that constantly rails against the hordes of “uncivil” masses who are not trained in the kind of reflection that bourgeois democracy teaches. In the real world, by contrast, conflicts are resolved not through careful contemplation but through “uncivil” antagonisms. Today, the most important division is between imperialism and humanity. The Palestinian cause can’t be separated from the struggle against US domination, a fact that is well understood by the Axis of Resistance (Iran, Syria, Yemen, Hezbollah, Iraq). Popular democracy can be realized only through strengthened national sovereignty that is capable of waging defensive wars against USA’s policy of sanctions, invasions, encroachment, and destabilization. As Ajl writes: “Wars of national sovereignty against imperialism are pro-working class… the contemporary axis plays a limited but real liberatory role in staving off state collapse in the countries near and around Palestine and shielding populations’ social reproduction and popular well-being against the reaper of accumulation-through-development.” The same logic of anti-imperialism applies to Russia. The country witnessed more than 25 million deaths due to the invasion of European fascists when it was governed by communists. Today, Russia is again a target of imperialist forces. The US-NATO camp wants “to permanently destroy Russia’s nuclear military capacity and install a puppet regime in Moscow in order to dismember Russia in the long term and replace it with many smaller, permanently weakened vassal states of the West.” Thus, we have a campist struggle that no one can escape. Any new horizon has to be born from within these camps, amidst the uncontrollable, contingent materiality of struggles. Revolutionary Movement The present-day Palestinian movement is giving us indications of what an alternative revolutionary politics can look like by erecting a sharp divide between the democratic ideology of bourgeois intellectuals and the militancy of the masses. On the one hand, intellectuals like Balibar are worried that Hamas is reproducing the violent mentality of Zionism. This is based on the assumption that the October 7 attack was an irrational outburst of primitive sentiments without any political rationale. That’s why politics can only entrusted to the reflective scrutiny of democratic discussions. In Balibar’s theory, such reflective scrutiny is provided by civility, which is a form of politics that can touch the ultra-political contingency of politics itself. This ultra-political contingency is present as the inconvertible violence that forms the limit-point of every political action. If we hubristically suppose that all violence can be converted into reason, we will end up with the fantasy of omnipotence in which all resistance is eliminated in a cycle of nihilistic violence. That’s why Balibar’s politics of civility wants us to respect the contingency of politics without attempting to hide it beneath fantasies of omnipotence. Thus, even though politics is tragic – groundless and without guarantees – this “tragedy of politics can become a politics of tragedy on the basis of the “ethical” decision that the risk of the perversion of the revolt is not a sufficient reason not to revolt.” In the paradigm of civility, people will revolt with the full knowledge that they are intrinsically impotent and can’t wholly eliminate antagonism. Thus, we get a “politics of tragedy” sustained by ethical reflection upon the groundlessness of politics. On the other hand, we have the mass action of Palestinian anti-colonialism wherein the dilemmas of politics are answered not through the philosophical invocation of ultra-political contingency but through the confrontation of forces on the terrain of social reality. Balibar simplifies divisions by dissolving them into a transcendental level of civility wherein the political actor can treat antagonisms in a peaceful manner. Instead of trying to eliminate the enemy, the enlightened political actor focuses on how antagonism can never be entirely eliminated, or how politics can never attain full stability. This knowledge curbs violence against the enemy and cultivates a more civil attitude. One can’t fail to emphasize how Palestinians are constantly asked to demonstrate their civility; their language has to remain perpetually aware of the kind of effects that it may have on others. This leads to a hyper-moderation of Palestinian behavior, where anything that is disliked by Israeli oppressors is deemed “anti-Semitic”. Mohammad el-Kurd writes: We were instructed to ignore the Star of David on the Israeli flag, and to distinguish Jews from Zionists with surgical precision. It didn’t matter that their boots were on our necks, and that their bullets and batons bruised us. Our statelessness and homelessness were trivial. What mattered was how we spoke about our keepers, not the conditions they kept us under—blockaded, surrounded by colonies and military outposts—or the fact that they kept us at all. In this situation, “simple ignorance” becomes a “luxury” for Palestinians. If we keep focusing on how the oppressed should regulate themselves so that they don’t fall into barbarity, we will forget that no matter how they behave, they will never be perfect enough for a dialogue with the oppressors. Balibar thinks that by being the “perfect victims” the oppressed will convince the oppressors to negotiate their antagonisms with them in a thoughtful manner. But this is never going to happen. Antagonisms are irreconcilable as long as they are not fought out to their end. El-Kurd rightly asks us to “renew our commitment to the truth, to spitting the truth”. Spitting is a physical expression of disgust, or aggression. It is an open declaration of hostility instead of a solely cognitive exchange of knowledge. Cognition and reflection fail to initiate the flow of ideas since the sea of thinking remains trapped in spaces of colonialism, the bodily realities of colonized and colonizing subjectivity. The flow of ideas will happen once their spatial encasements are burst open. Antagonisms have to jump-started through the act of spitting the truth, through violence against the colonialist. Balibar, in contrast, subscribes to a cognitive schema because regards antagonisms as concrete representatives of an ultra-political antagonism, which he designates as the “precariousness” of politics that we have to constantly recognize. Such an ultra-political antagonism doesn’t exist; in social formations, we only have concretely situated groups with concrete interests. These interests can’t be removed through careful reflection and discussion. On the contrary, they are material structures whose rigidity needs to be broken down through a concrete struggle of forces. This is what anti-colonial violence does by eroding the sense of entitlement enjoyed by colonizers and exposing them to the popular power of the colonized. In the midst of struggle, only a detached philosopher can ask the oppressed to use violence in a way that preserves the openness of antagonisms. This openness or precariousness of politics is not an idea that can be theoretically pondered upon or a reservoir of morality that can be used to practice civility. Rather, it is an emergent reality formed through the destruction of the oppressors. That’s why inconvertible violence as such doesn’t exist. The inconvertibility of violence is determined conjuncturally when political procedures of conversion encounter certain impasses/obstacles. Instead of staring at the impasse and turning it into a philosophical principle of precariousness, we need to use the impasse to reconfigure our own political perspective and carry on the struggle. The groundlessness of politics is not a tragedy that we need to codify into an ethical principle but a material fact out of which we need to weave the dynamic of political action. Politics is indeterminate and without guarantees, but this doesn’t mean that indeterminacy has to become a moral horizon. Instead, indeterminacy functions as the motor that renders politics inexhaustible and confronts it with obstacles that demand specific responses. Far from conforming to the reflective carefulness of civility, politics is like the uncivil act of flooding unleashed by Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, wherein hierarchies are flooded with the deluge of popular energy, a deluge that listens to nothing but its own undulating waves. Author Yanis Iqbal is an independent researcher and freelance writer based in Aligarh, India and can be contacted at yanisiqbal@gmail.com. His articles have been published in the USA, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India and several countries of Latin America. Archives March 2024 On March 19, 2024, the head of France’s ground forces, General Pierre Schill, published an article in the newspaper, Le Monde, with a blunt title: “The Army Stands Ready.” Schill cut his teeth in France’s overseas adventures in the Central African Republic, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, and Somalia. In this article, General Schill wrote that his troops are “ready” for any confrontation and that he could mobilize 60,000 of France’s 121,000 soldiers within a month for any conflict. He quoted the old Latin phrase—“if you want peace, prepare for war”—and then wrote, “The sources of crisis are multiplying and carry with them risks of spiraling or extending.” General Schill did not mention the name of any country, but it was clear that his reference was to Ukraine since his article came out just over two weeks after French President Emmanuel Macron said on February 27 that NATO troops might have to enter Ukraine. A few hours after Macron made his indelicate statement, the U.S. president’s national security advisor John Kirby said, “There will be no U.S. troops on the ground in a combat role there in Ukraine.” This was direct and clear. The view from the United States is bleak, with support for Ukraine diminishing very fast. Since 2022, the U.S. has provided over $75 billion in aid to Ukraine ($47 billion in military aid), far and away the most important assistance to the country during its war against Russia. However, in recent months, U.S. funding—particularly military assistance—has been held up in the U.S. Congress by right-wing Republicans who are opposed to more money being given to Ukraine (this is less a statement about geopolitics and more an assertion of a new U.S. attitude that others, such as the Europeans, should shoulder the burden of these conflicts). While the U.S. Senate passed a $60 billion appropriation for Ukraine, the U.S. House of Representatives only allowed $300 million to be voted through. In Kyiv, U.S. national security advisor Jake Sullivan implored the Ukrainian government to “believe in the United States.” “We have provided enormous support, and we will continue to do so every day and every way we know how,” he said. But this support will not necessarily be at the level it was during the first year of the war. Europe’s Freeze On 1 February, the leaders of the European Union agreed to provide Ukraine with €50 billion in “grants and highly concessional loans.” This money is to allow the Ukrainian government to “pay salaries, pensions, and provide basic public services.” It will not be directly for military support, which has begun to flounder across the board, and which has provoked new kinds of discussions in the world of European politics. In Germany, for instance, the leader of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the parliament—Rolf Mützenich—was taken to task by the parties of the right for his use of the word “freeze” when it comes to military support for Ukraine. Ukraine’s government was eager to procure Taurus long-range cruise missiles from Germany, but the German government hesitated to do so. This hesitation and Mützenich’s use of the word “freeze” created a political crisis within Germany. Indeed, this German debate around further arms sales to Ukraine is mirrored in almost all the European countries that have been supplying weapons for the war against Russia. Thus far, polling data across the continent shows large majorities against the continuation of the war, and therefore against the continuation of arming Ukraine for that war. A poll conducted for the European Council on Foreign Relations conducted in February shows that “an average of just 10 [percent] of Europeans across 12 countries believe that Ukraine will win.” “The prevailing view in some countries,” the poll analysts wrote, “is that Europe should mirror a U.S. that limits its support for Ukraine by doing the same, and encourage Kyiv to do a peace deal with Moscow.” That view is beginning to enter the discussions even of the political forces that continue to want to arm Ukraine. SPD parliamentarian Lars Klingbeil and his leader Mützenich both say that negotiations will need to start, although Klingbeil said it would not happen before the U.S. elections in November, and until then, as Mützenich had said, “I think that the most important thing now is that [Ukraine] get artillery ammunition.” Military Not Climate It no longer matters whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden wins the U.S. presidential election in November. Either way, Trump’s views on European military spending have already prevailed in the United States. The Republicans are calling for U.S. funding for Ukraine to be slowed down and for the Europeans to fill the gap by increasing their own military spending. This latter point will be difficult since many European states have debt ceilings; if they are to increase military spending this would be at the expense of precious social programs. NATO’s own polling data shows a lack of interest from the European population in a shift from social to military spending. Even more of a problem for Europe is that its countries have been cutting back on climate-related investments and increasing defense-related investments. The European Investment Bank (set up in 2019) is, as the Financial Times reported, “under pressure to fund more projects in the arms industry,” while the European Sovereignty Fund—set up in 2022 to promote industrialization in Europe—is going to pivot toward support for military industries. Military spending, in other words, will overwhelm the commitments to climate investments and investments to rebuild Europe’s industrial base. In 2023, two-thirds of the total NATO budget of €1.2 trillion was from the United States, which is double what the European Union, the UK, and Norway spent on their militaries. Trump’s pressure for European countries to spend up to 2 percent of their GDP on their armies will set the agenda even if he loses the presidential election. Can Destroy Countries, but Can’t Win Wars For all the European braggadocio about defeating Russia, sober assessments of the European armies show that European states simply do not have the ground military capacity to fight an aggressive war against Russia let alone defend themselves adequately. A Wall Street Journal investigation into the European military situation bore the stunning title, “Alarm Grows Over Weakened Militaries and Empty Arsenals in Europe.” The British military, the journalists pointed out, has only 150 tanks and “perhaps a dozen serviceable long-range artillery pieces,” while France has “fewer than 90 heavy artillery prices” and Germany’s army “has enough ammunition for two days of battle.” If they are attacked, they have few air defense systems. Europe has relied upon the United States to do the heavy bombing and fighting since the 1950s, including in the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Due to terrifying U.S. firepower, these Global North countries are able to flatten countries, but they have not been able to win any wars. It is this attitude that produces wariness in countries such as China and Russia, who know that despite the impossibility of a Global North military victory against them there is no reason why these countries—led by the United States—will not risk Armageddon because they have the military muscle to do so. That attitude from the United States—mirrored in the European capitals—produces one more example of the hubris and arrogance of the Global North: a refusal to even consider peace negotiations between Ukraine and Russia. For Marcon to say things like NATO might send troops into Ukraine is not only dangerous, but it strains the credibility of the Global North. NATO was defeated in Afghanistan. It is unlikely to make great gains against Russia. AuthorVijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power. This article was produced by Globetrotter. Archives March 2024 If there is one leader whom the current Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, follows, it is Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism, which would form the bedrock of Netanyahu’s Likud party. Since 2005, Israel has had a Memorial Day to honour Jabotinsky (29 Tammuz, the day of his death on 4 August 1940, according to the Hebrew calendar). At a 2017 celebration, Netanyahu said: ‘I have Jabotinsky’s works on my shelf, and I read them often.’ He reminded his audience that he keeps the Zionist leader’s sword in his office. At the 2023 Memorial Netanyahu stated: ‘One hundred years after the “iron wall” was stamped in Jabotinsky’s writings we are continuing to successfully implement these principles. I say “continuing” because the need to stand as a powerful iron wall against our enemies has been adopted by every Government of Israel, from the right and the left. We are developing defensive and offensive tools against those who seek to harm us, and I can tell you with certainty that they do not distinguish between this or that camp among us. Whoever tries to harm us on one front, or more than one front, needs to know that they will pay the price. We will continue to oppose, with uncompromising strength, Iran’s efforts to develop a nuclear arsenal, and we will stand steadfast against its efforts to develop terrorist fronts on our borders—in Gaza, in Judea and Samaria, in Syria and in Lebanon. This was at a time of mounting tension in the occupied West Bank, where the Israelis would kill over 300 Palestinians in that year, beginning long before Hamas’s 7 October attack on Southern Israel. The ‘Iron Wall’, which Netanyahu invokes, was a 1923 essay by Jabotinsky in which he argued a Jewish state could only be created from a position of overwhelming military strength, by proving in arms to the Palestinians and the Arab states, that Zionism could not be defeated. Today it underlines the position of the coalition government Netanyahu leads in how to respond to Hamas’ 7 October attack on Southern Israel. Far-right Zionism Revisionist Zionism was founded by Jabotinsky after he rejected the belief that Britain would grant the Zionists a Jewish state, and instead he stood for the establishment of a Jewish state and army. During the First World War he had established three battalions of the Jewish Legion, part of the British army in Palestine’s King’s Fusiliers, which fought in the latter part of General Allenby’s conquest of Palestine and Syria. They were disbanded by the British in 1920 as they became effectively a Zionist militia engaged in fighting with the Arabs. It would become the backbone of the Haganah, the main Zionist armed group key to the 1948 Nakba. He wanted all of European Jewry to migrate to Palestine and the extension of the Jewish state to both banks of the River Jordan. The Israeli historian Benny Morris writes: In 1925 he established the Revisionist Party (so named because it sought to “revise” the terms of the Mandate, particularly to provide for the re-inclusion of Transjordan [Jordan] in Mandatory Palestine). He also set up the party’s youth movement, Betar, which was characterised by militaristic, some might say fascist, appearances (dark brown uniforms), activities (parade ground drill and firearm exercises), slogans and ideology (“in fire and blood Judea will be reborn”) and structure (A rigid hierarchy). Jabotinsky admired Mussolini and his movement and repeatedly sought affiliation and assistance from Rome. Jabotinsky summed up his beliefs by stating: There is no justice, no law and no God in heaven, only a single law which decides and supersedes all—settlement. Jabotinsky believed the Arabs were implacably hostile to the creation of a Jewish state and, accordingly, concluded: We cannot promise any reward either to the Arabs of Palestine or to the Arabs outside Palestine. A voluntary agreement is unattainable. And so those who regard an accord with the Arabs as an indispensable condition of Zionism must admit to themselves today that this condition cannot be attained and hence that we must give up Zionism. We must either suspend our settlement efforts or continue them without paying attention to the mood of the natives. Settlement can thus develop under the protection of a force that is not dependent on the local population, behind an iron wall which they will be powerless to break down. In his 1923 essay called ‘The Iron Wall’, Jabotinsky argued that the Palestinian Arabs would not agree to a Jewish majority in Palestine and that: Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population—an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy. He then explained his differences with Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion, heads of the Jewish Agency, the Zionist proto-government, thus: ‘One prefers an iron wall of Jewish bayonets, the other proposes an iron wall of British bayonets …’ In fact, by 1936, after the great Arab Revolt against Zionist immigration and British rule, Ben-Gurion had come round to the same way of thinking: Both realised that the Arabs would continue to fight for as long as they retained any hope of preventing the Jewish takeover of their country. And both concluded that only insuperable Jewish military strength would eventually make the Arabs despair of the struggle and come to terms with a Jewish state in Palestine. Ben-Gurion did not use the terminology of the iron wall, but his analysis and conclusions were virtually identical to Jabotinsky’s. In 1931, Jabotinsky founded the Irgun (The National Military Organization in the Land of Israel), an armed militia separate from the more mainstream Haganah, which Jabotinsky saw as fighting both the British authorities and Palestinians resisting colonisation. In 1937, it moved from defence of the Yishuv (Jewish community in Palestine) to terror attacks on the Palestinians. In December 1937, a member of the Irgun hurled a hand grenade at a market in Jerusalem killing and injuring dozens. In Haifa in March 1938, members of the Irgun and Lehi (the Stern gang) threw grenades into the market, killing eighteen, and injuring 38. Later that same year, again in Haifa, Irgun exploded booby-trapped vehicles in the market, killing 21 and injuring 52. The two operations for which Irgun is best known are the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, headquarters of the British administration, where 91 people, Arabs, Jews and British, were killed, and the April 1948 Deir Yassin massacre, which killed at least 107 Palestinian Arab villagers, including women and children, carried out together with another terrorist group Lehi, or the Stern Gang. By then, Jabotinsky was dead, having died of a heart attack on a visit to the U.S. in August 1940. Benjamin Netanyahu’s father, Benzion, was an activist in Jabotinsky’s Revisionist movement, editor of its publications a private secretary to the leader. In 1993, the year Benjamin Netanyahu was elected leader of Likud, he also published a book, A Place among the Nations: Israel and the World. It sought to show that it was not the Jews who had taken the land from the Arabs, but the Arabs who had taken it from the Jews: ‘Netanyahu viewed Israel’s relations with the Arab world as one of permanent conflict, as a never-ending struggle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness.’ He claimed: Violence is ubiquitous in the political life of all the Arab countries. It is the primary method of dealing with opponents, both foreign and domestic, both Arab and non-Arab. For Netanyahu, there was no right to self-determination for the Palestinians, and there could be no compromise with them, because they were out for the liquidation of Israel. In a chapter titled, ‘The Wall’, he argues Israel must expand its military hold of the high ground in the Golan Heights and in what he calls Judea and Samaria—the West Bank—and exert military control over virtually all of the territory west of the Jordan River. His conclusion is a one-state solution, from the river to the sea: To subdivide this land into two unstable, insecure nations, to try to defend what is indefensible, is to invite disaster. Carving Judea and Samaria out of Israel means carving up Israel. In response to the Oslo Accords, he wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times on 5 September 1993, titled ‘Peace In Our Time’, referencing Neville Chamberlain’s claim on his return from Munich in September 1938 after agreeing to carve up Czechoslovakia with Hitler. In it he rejected the whole suggestion of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, stating: ‘A P.L.O. state on the West Bank will strip the Jewish state of the defensive wall of the Judean and Samarian mountains won in the Six-Day War, re-creating a country ten miles wide, open to invading armies from the east.’ He went onto say that the PLO would use that state to foment an allied Arab assault against a truncated Jewish state. Adding, for two decades Yasir Arafat has championed this plan. In 1996 Netanyahu stated bluntly: ‘Might is a condition for peace. Only a strong deterrent profile can preserve and stabilise peace.’ After his first election win, he declared: ‘The government will oppose the establishment of an independent Palestinian state and will oppose the “right of return” of the Arab population to parts of the Land of Israel west of the Jordan.’ He added that his government would ‘act to consolidate and develop the settlement enterprise,’ and that ‘united Jerusalem, the capital of Israel … will forever remain under Israeli sovereignty.’ Today, Netanyahu is Israel’s longest-serving prime minister. He first came to power in 1996 and served a three-year term before he was replaced by Ehud Barak. He would return to power in 2009 and then serve for fourteen of the last fifteen years. Netanyahu and his government oppose the establishment of a Palestinian state, support the expansion of illegal Jewish settlement in the occupied Palestinian territories, wish to annex the West Bank, and have introduced a law which denies equality to the native Palestinian minority in the Jewish State. Above all, they wish that the Palestinians accept they have suffered a historic defeat and accept the Zionist control of Palestine. Peace can only follow total defeat. It’s often said that Netanyahu needs the current war in Gaza to go on because, if it ends, his political career is over. There is truth in that, but it’s not the only reason. On 7 October, Israel lost something Netanyahu and his cabinet colleagues held most dear—military deterrence. Suddenly Israel looked vulnerable. The instinct of his government and IDF commanders is to inflict maximum retaliation on the people of Gaze to deter anyone from repeating that attack. That’s the ‘Iron Wall’ in today’s Israel. But despite killing over 30,000 people, overwhelmingly civilians and a third of children, and levelling Gaza, Netanyahu has been seen to fail in his pledge to ‘annihilate’ Hamas; they are still standing, still resisting. Internationally, the war in Gaza has brought a tidal wave of revulsion against Netanyahu and co, but not in Israel, where polls and the local elections results show a big majority in support of Likud and their allies to the right. Netanyahu and his supporters want to continue the war, and they are looking at extending it by taking on Hezbollah, in the belief they can achieve an elusive victory to restore deterrence. It is, of course, a manic pipe dream; Hezbollah are far stronger and better armed than Hamas, have had time to prepare, and, back in 2006, gave the IDF a bloody nose. Netanyahu is driven by his belief in the ‘Iron Wall’. His is the logic at the heart of Zionism. But the wall is rusty. Israel does not seem invincible. The clock of history is ticking for Zionism. AuthorChris Bambery is an author, political activist and commentator, and a supporter of Rise, the radical left wing coalition in Scotland. His books include A People’s History of Scotland and The Second World War: A Marxist Analysis. This article was produced by Monthly Review. Archives March 2024 This past Sunday, a group of Cubans took to the streets of Santiago de Cuba, in the east of the island, to show their dissatisfaction with the economic situation in the country. In recent weeks, fuel shortages have caused long hours of scheduled blackouts, especially in that city, which, along with food shortages and salaries strongly affected by inflation, have turned the daily life of Cubans into an odyssey of frustration. Immediately after the news broke, the hegemonic media of the North and some sectors of the ultra-right-wing in Florida and other parts of the world tried to take advantage of the circumstances to bring about a change of regime in the country. They hoped that what began as a peaceful protest amid a painful economic situation would multiply throughout the island and turn into a social outburst that would lead Cubans to confront one another. It hurts how they dismiss the real causes of the economic crisis in Cuba, which includes, above so many other reasons, the U.S economic blockade that has continued non stop against the island for over 64 years, preventing us from establishing trade relations with the rest of the world and, therefore, our own development. The opportunists look at us from a distance with hamburgers in hand and want us to get heated up, with sticks in hand against the government, as if they were attending one of the battles of the U.S. bestseller The Hunger Games. This Sunday, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel acknowledged on the social network X that people had expressed dissatisfaction with the current situation. He warned that this context is being taken advantage of by the enemies of the Revolution “for destabilizing purposes.” Their objective has nothing to do with the needs of the Cuban people. Diaz-Canel denounced that terrorists based in the United States are encouraging actions against the internal order of the country. The president also reiterated the willingness of the Cuban authorities of the Communist Party, the State, and the Government, to attend to the demands of the Cuban people. “We are willing to listen, dialogue, and explain the many steps taken to improve the situation, always in an atmosphere of tranquility,” he said and reaffirmed the government’s commitment to “work in peace to overcome the current situation, despite the blockade that seeks to suffocate the nation.” While the president took the podium to assure the people that they are not alone and that the government understands, listens, and acts, the U.S. embassy took to social media to speak about “human rights.” On the official X account, the diplomatic headquarters in Havana posted, “We are aware of reports of peaceful protests in Santiago, Bayamo, Granma, and elsewhere in Cuba, with citizens protesting the lack of food and electricity. We urge the Cuban government to respect the human rights of the protestors and address the legitimate needs of the Cuban people.” Spoken like they are innocent concerned bystanders. On Monday, U.S. Chargé d’Affaires Benjamin Ziff was summoned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs by Deputy Minister Carlos Fernández de Cossío, who formally expressed Cuba’s firm rejection of the U.S. government’s and its embassy in Cuba’s interference and slanderous messages regarding internal affairs of the Cuban reality. “How cynical and despicable to ask the government of Cuba to satisfy the needs of its people, when your government has been applying a brutal siege for +60 years to deprive my people of the essentials and cause its suffocation,” Cuba’s Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs, Josefina Vidal, denounced. The destabilizing plan and its execution are obvious for all to see. It rests on the reinforcement of a ruthless economic war to provoke and exploit the natural irritation of the population. It is financed with tens of millions of dollars from the U.S. federal budget every year. According to a statement issued by the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the plans have a powerful technological infrastructure to exploit digital networks from U.S. territory for aggressive purposes. They enjoy the complicity of important U.S. and international mainstream media and the mercenary support of people based mainly in South Florida, in the United States, whose only livelihood is the industry of aggression against the island. What do Cubans need? To reject the suffocation to which we are subjected to, the lack of access to food, inflation, bureaucracy, corruption, and internal problems that can be solved but we will do that. And above all, we condemn the determination of the U.S. Government to limit and hinder every effort of the Cuban State to find solutions and provide answers to the economic and social needs of the country. It is actually quite simple, as a sovereign country we are resolute in our insistence that we will build our society without the dictates of any country. Archives March 2024 This is a section from the introduction to the author's edited and introduced anthology, Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview: An Anthology of Classical Marxist Texts on Dialectical Materialism. Dialectical Materialist Ontology In his Dialectical Materialism, Henri Lefebvre uses Marx’s Capital and Engels’s Dialectics of Nature to say that “the laws of human reality cannot be entirely different from the laws of nature.”[1] A similar sentiment is expressed in the posthumously published A Defense of History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic, where Lukács says that it is “self-evident” that “the dialectic could not possibly be effective as an objective principle of development of society, if it were not already effective as a principle of development of nature before society.”[2] Precisely because of this universal character, argued Lefebvre, is that dialectical materialism “acquires the full dimension of a philosophy: it becomes a general conception of the world, a weltanschauung and hence a renewal of philosophy.”[3] In the last section we defended the treatment of Marxist philosophy (i.e., dialectical materialism) as a weltanschauung, now let us present its ontological basis. Objective dialectics, i.e., the dialectical materialist ontology, first and foremost holds that the world is dominated by change and interconnection, “nothing is eternal but eternally changing.”[4] It acknowledges that “movement is itself a contradiction,” and that “contradiction propels movement.”[5] These are the basic premises of dialectics pertaining to the ontological constitution of the world. It is important to note, however, that these central premises make it an ontology of becoming, not being. Insofar as being is understood as an unchanging, pure, universal substratum, it is rejected as an explanatory category. If being, however, is understood as a constant “coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be,” that is, if it is understood as becoming, then it can be sustained as a foundational category in a dialectical materialist ontology.[6] Nonetheless, as Hegel noted, although “the first truth is to be found in becoming,” this first concrete category is still an abstract first step which gives way to a more concrete understanding of the world.[7] If we stop here, then, we have merely achieved the position of Greek (more specifically Heraclitan) dialectics mentioned above. Although, as Engels said, “the new age begins with the return to the Greeks – negation of the negation,” this return is mediated by half a millennium of metaphysically framed scientific studies,[8] and therefore, it is not a return to the same Greek dialectic, but to a richer (more concrete) one.[9] Hence, what is required is not just the understanding that everything is in constant motion and interconnection, driven by internal contradictory forces, but a concrete understanding of the mechanisms and structures through which these changes occur. The dialectical materialist ontology, as an ontology of becoming, is concerned with the “most general laws” of human and natural “historical development” and “of thought itself.”[10] Marx and Engels both agreed that these laws had already been discovered by Hegel, but in a mystified form. For instance, Marx says in a letter to Dietzgen that “The true laws of dialectics are already contained in Hegel, though in a mystical form,” and Engels similarly repeats this by saying that “all three [laws of dialectics] are already developed by Hegel… [but] foisted on nature and history as laws of thought, and not deduced from them.”[11] These ‘laws’ are 1) the unity and struggle of opposites, 2) the transition from quantity into quality and vice versa, and 3) the negation of the negation. It is important to note that Hegel never referred to them as ‘laws’; in his Logic[s] they are merely categories, little different than the plethora of other categories his logical unfolding of the concept introduces. However, the reason behind Marx and Engels’ classification of these Hegelian categories as ‘laws’ lies in the fact they can be seen in every ‘moment’ of the movement of Hegel’s concept, and most importantly, because Marx and Engels ‘re-discover’ them in the movement and interconnection of nature and society and postulate their objective existence as the source for their reflective (subjective) existence in the mind. These three dialectical laws, by being the most universal forms in which change occurs, are also the most abstract, and hence, serve as the base upon which a more concrete understanding of change and interconnection in smaller or larger organic totalities can take place. It is here where the accusations of simplifying dialectics usually begin. Once these three laws are established, it becomes a game of examples, whoever can fit the schema of these laws on nature, human society, history, or thinking the most wins. In treating these laws as a “sum total of examples,” Lenin argued, “dialectics usually receives inadequate attention.”[12] For Lenin the architype for this was Plekhanov, although at times, he argued, “the same is true of Engels.”[13] To be clear, the problem is not the examples in themselves, but when dialectics is en toto reduced to a collection of examples. When this reduction takes place, Chris Arthur is right to say that dialectics turns into a “lifeless formalism” which proceeds by “applying abstract schemas adventitiously to contents arbitrarily forced into the required shape.”[14] However, one must not confuse this vulgarization of dialectics to mean that one cannot provide examples in nature, society, or thinking that confirm these laws. Like we saw in the previous section, one can hold onto Marxism as a weltanschauung and simultaneously reject vulgarizations of this weltanschauung. Similarly, one can reject the reduction of dialectics to a basket of artificially foisted examples but still use examples to understand objective dialectics. After all, the central difference between the Hegelian and Marxist dialectics is the latter’s materialist position that dialectics is the ontological condition of the world, and only when this world is concretely understood does dialectical thinking emerge. It is necessary, then, to use concrete examples from the world to understand the world itself, and hence, grasp objective dialectics subjectively. The materialist dialectic, therefore, must walk a thin line between two precipices into idealist dialectics: on the one hand, if no concrete examples are used, the ‘dialectic’ would be purely mental, and hence, idealist; on the other hand, if examples are artificially fabricated out of an apriorist dialectical schema foisted onto the world like a cookie cutter, then the ‘dialectic’ one is proposing replicates at its core the same mistake of Hegel’s demiurgos, except at a much more vulgarized level, lightyears away from the genius with which Hegel espoused his. The theoretical panacea and balancing pole necessary to avoid falling into the precipices of idealism is the dialectical method of going from the abstract to concrete. Only in the rigorous process of investigation required for this method can one be sure that their examples are actually in-the-world, and not foisted on it by an abstract dialectical schema. An exposition of this method will have to wait until the following section. It is this context in which Engels deduces the dialectical laws in his scientific studies, and Marx in his economic studies. The examples they provide are concrete, and (esp. in the case of Engels) usually include comments on how science already accepted (in certain fields) these ‘laws’ but under different names. For instance, in Engels’ letter to Friedrich Albert Lange, he argues that the “modern scientific doctrine of reciprocity of natural forces [is] just another expression or rather the positive proof of the Hegelian development on cause & effect, reciprocity, force, etc.”[15] Let me now provide a few concrete examples in which these most general laws of change and interconnection can be observed. Recall that by being the ‘most general’ they are also the most abstract, and hence, each example is in itself insufficiently understood if the only thing one says is how one or another of these dialectical laws is observed in it. To be concretely understood, each of these examples must take the structural appearance of the laws as a mere starting point to the investigation of the phenomenon. The laws work like the study of a townhouse community; by knowing how the outside of each townhouse looks, one has grasped the most general fact in the community. This ‘most general’ fact can then serve as the abstract starting point for the concrete study of the internal structural differences in each household. One cannot claim to know the community by simply knowing the ‘most general’ fact, and similarly, by only knowing the differences in each household one is blind to the ‘most general’ fact that the object of one’s study is not independent houses, but a townhouse community. The Three Ontological Laws of Dialectics in Political Economy “The most important aspect of dialectics,” Hegel argued, is the “grasping of opposites in their unity.”[16] Similarly, Marx would say in Capital Vol. I that the “Hegelian contradiction [is] the source of all dialectic.”[17] Lenin would repeat this by saying that “the division of a unity into two and the cognition of its contradictory parts is the essence of dialectics.”[18] It is thus, with the law of the unity and struggle of opposites that we must begin, for the “condition for the knowledge of all processes in the world in their ‘self-movement,’ in their spontaneous development, in their real life, is the knowledge of them as a unity of opposites.”[19] It is this law which allows the understanding of the other two, for not only does it “furnish the key to the ‘self-movement’ of everything that exists; it alone furnishes the key to the ‘leaps,’ to the ‘interruption of gradualness,’ to the ‘transformation into the opposite,’ to the destruction of the old and the emergence of the new.”[20] Let us now see how Marx observes the functioning of this law in the realm of political economy. The law of the unity and struggle of opposites can be seen from the dawn of Marx’s Capital with the commodity, the “cell-form of bourgeois society” and “germ of all contradictions.”[21] Commodities, as Marx says, have an “internal opposition inherent in them,” namely, they are “at once use-values and values.”[22] As Roslyn Wallach Bologh adds, “the commodity is this contradictory relation, a totality of opposing moments: production of exchange value which excludes use value and the realization of exchange value which requires use value.”[23] The commodity, the “simplest, most ordinary and fundamental, most common and everyday relation of bourgeois society,” presents us with a clear example of the law of the unity and struggle of opposites.[24] Since, as Lenin said, the commodity is the “germ of all the contradictions,” we can see similar examples in more ‘concrete’ categories in Marx’s Capital.[25] For instance, merchant’s capital, Marx argues, “presents… a unity of opposing phases, a movement that breaks up into two opposing actions – the purchase and the sale of commodities.”[26] This cell-form of bourgeois society, as the unity of the opposing forces of exchange and use value (and in its metamorphosis of commodity and money), is the “most abstract form of crisis,” and contains within it (implicitly or in itself) the general crisis of capitalist production, which, in its periodic actualizations, provides the “manifestation of all the contradictions of bourgeois economy.”[27] In all the contradictions of capitalist production as a whole we have lucid examples of the law of the unity and struggle of opposites, and, as Marx adds, “the most abstract forms are recurring and are contained in the more concrete forms.”[28] In regard to social class, for instance, the capitalist mode of life is marked by the contradiction between the working and the capitalist class. These two classes are both struggling amongst themselves and in unity under capitalism, that is, capitalism contains – not externally, but in itself – two opposing forces whose struggle shapes its development. As Lenin argued, once the understanding of the unity and struggle of opposites is grasped, we are ‘furnished’ with the keys to understand the other laws of movement. The law of the unity and struggle of opposites, or what is the same, the law of the universality of contradictions, would be enriched by Mao Tsetung’s 1937 essay “On Contradiction.” Here, Mao develops important categories relating to the particularity of contradictions, further concretizing the dialectical materialist ontology and its ability to understand the concrete concretely. The first important categorial development is the notion of principal and secondary contradictions. As Mao notes, “there are many contradictions in the process of development of a complex thing, and one of them is necessarily the principal contradiction whose existence and development determine or influence the existence and development of the other contradictions.”[29] It becomes an imperative, therefore, to “devote every effort to finding [the] principal contradiction” in whatever complex process one is studying, for “once this principal contradiction is grasped, all problems can be readily solved.”[30] Likewise, Mao notes that in any contradiction, i.e., in any unity of opposites, there is always one antipole which is dominant. This is what he calls the principal aspect of a contradiction, it refers to the “aspect which has gained the dominant position.”[31] This dominant position is not static, but always subject to change; what is the principal aspect in one moment may turn into the non-principal aspect in another. Additionally, Mao refines the law of the unity and struggle of opposite by recapturing a distinction Lenin had already noted between antagonisms and contradictions. Lenin argued that “antagonism and contradiction are not at all one and the same… under socialism, the first will disappear, the second will remain.”[32] Mao clarifies this by showing that “antagonism is one form, but not the only form, of the struggle of opposites.”[33] Class societies are bound, sooner or later, to develop “the form of open antagonism” which shifts the class struggle into a moment of revolution.[34] In Gramscian terms, these are the moments when the emphasis is switched from the war of position (the battle for hegemony) to the war of maneuver, where the opposites engage in direct frontal attacks. Sometimes non-antagonistic contradictions develop into antagonistic ones, and likewise, antagonistic contradictions develop into non-antagonistic ones.[35] Contradictions obtain an antagonistic form in moments of explosion, when “open conflict to resolves old contradictions” takes place and new things are produced.[36] Recognizing whether a contradiction is antagonistic or not is fundamental to the process of resolving it. For instance, the working and the capitalist class are in an irreconcilable antagonism, one which can only be solved through the working class’s revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist class. The utopian socialists, for example, did not see the antagonistic character of this contradiction, and therefore, their ‘resolutions’ involved the harmonizing of class distinctions through an appeal to the benevolence of the owners. History has shown that the incorrect assessment of the relationship between the antipoles of worker and capitalist has produced unsatisfactory resolutions which either became relics of the 19th century, or, in the case of similar strategies by the social democrats, sustained the dominance of capital over labor. On the other hand, the contradiction between the peasantry and the working class is not, on most occasions, an antagonistic one; therefore, the resolution must take (and has taken) a radically different form, one which unites the peasantry and the working class, under the leadership of the latter, in the struggle for socialism. After having grasped the law of the unity and struggle of opposites, and how this general law was concretized by Mao, we may examine the law of the transition from quantity to quality and vice-versa. In the transition from money into capital we have an example of the law of the transformation of quantity into quality. For money to be transformed into capital, that is, into something qualitatively new, surplus-value needs to be created. For this to happen, it is necessary for a specific amount of money to be turned “into commodities that serve as the material element of a new product,” and further, to “incorporate living labor” onto this “dead substance.”[37] If the labor-power incorporated creates only the value necessary for the laborer’s subsistence, i.e., if it produces an equivalent to the exchange value it was bought for, then no surplus could be realized. However, what “really influenced” the buyer [i.e., the capitalist] of labor-power was “the specific use-value which this commodity possesses of being a source not only of value, but of more value than it has itself.”[38] To create surplus value, and hence, materialize the use value for which the labor-power was bought (viz., to be a source of “more value than it has itself”), that labor power must be extended beyond the time it took it to produce the amount of value it was bought for.[39] As Marx says, “if we compare the two processes of producing value and of creating surplus-value, we see that the latter is nothing but the continuation of the former beyond a definite point.”[40] This “definite point” is what Hegel call “nodal points” in his Logic[s], it is the moment when “gradual [i.e., quantitative] increase… is interrupted” and the result is “a leap from quantitative into qualitative alteration.”[41] The quantitative extension of the working day beyond the time necessary to produce the value the labor-power was bought for is how surplus-value arises. A quantitative accumulation of working hours, at a ‘definite point’ [i.e., nodal point], produces a qualitative leap and surplus-value comes about. Quantitative change has resulted in a leap into something qualitatively different. This qualitative leap into surplus-value, “a process which is entirely confined to the sphere of production,” creates the conditions for the “metamorphosis of money into capital,” another qualitative leap effected by the transcendence of labor-power beyond this ‘nodal point.’[42] There is a plethora of other places where the law of the transition of quantity into quality can be observed in Capital. For instance, Marx says that “not every sum of money, or of value, is at pleasure transformable into capital;” a “certain minimum of money or of exchange-value must be pre-supposed in the hands of the individual possessor of money or commodities.”[43] This is because there is a nodal point at which the variable capital [i.e., labor-power] involved in production turns the owner into a capitalist proper. “The guilds of the middle ages,” Marx argued, “tried to prevent by force the transformation of the master of a trade into a capitalist, by limiting the number of labourers that could be employed by one master within a very small maximum.”[44] This fetter presented in the middle-ages prevented the development of the capitalist proper. Only when this fetter is broken can “the possessor of money or commodities actually turn into a capitalist.”[45] This transformation occurs “in such cases only where the minimum sum advanced for production greatly exceeds the maximum of the middle ages.”[46] Marx then explicitly says that “here, as in natural science, is shown the correctness of the law discovered by Hegel (in his “Logic”), that merely quantitative differences beyond a certain point pass into qualitative changes.”[47] These feudal fetters would be eroded as the barbarism of primitive accumulation evolved. As Marx says, “these fetters vanished with the dissolution of feudal society, with the expropriation and partial eviction of the country population.”[48] This “historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production” is the “fundamental condition” for the development of the capitalist mode of production.[49] Its history is written in the “annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.”[50] The history of this expropriation, of the usurpation and enclosure of the commons, is the “prelude to the history of capitalism,” and produces “the first negation of individual private property.”[51] This first negation establishes, as we saw previously, a qualitatively new mode of production – capitalism. “But,” Marx would go on to famously say, “capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of the negation.”[52] Capitalism immanently creates the conditions were, Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolise all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.[53] Here we have the clearest depiction, within the lens of universal history, of the law of the negation of the negation. Capitalist private property negates “self-earned private property.”[54] It socializes production and creates for the first time ever a “division of labour in the workshop.”[55] Its private “mode of appropriation” at a nodal point presents a fetter to the centralized and socialized means of production, immanently creating its own conditions for its sublation [i.e., negation of the negation].[56] This is a process which involves the “expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people,” and hence, is expected to be “incomparably [less] protracted, violent, and difficult” than the capitalist negation of feudalism.[57] As can be seen from the examples in political economy, these dialectical laws are interconnected. The internal contradiction in all things propels universal movement. At times – in the nodal points mentioned above – this movement breaks its quantitative gradualness and undergoes a qualitative leap. All qualitative leaps are negations of that which has undergone a qualitative transformation. These negations immanently create the conditions for their own negation and bring about, in certain nodal points, a negation of the negation. No negation fully annihilates that which it has negated, part of it is always preserved in the qualitatively new it has unfolded into. For instance, capitalism sustains feudal private property but cancels out feudal individualized production; socialism sustains the socialized production of capitalism but cancels out its privatized accumulation. These are, of course, simple examples; but they are nonetheless helpful pedagogical tools to understand the most general laws of movement and interconnection, and hence, to build the base necessary for knowing more concrete things concretely. Notes [1] Henri Lefebvre, Dialectical Materialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2009), 95. [2] Georg Lukács, A Defense of History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic (New York: Verso Books, 2000), 30. What is interesting about this affirmation is that for most Marxist scholars, the ‘break’ between ‘western’ and ‘soviet’ Marxism (and hence, the beginning of the ‘Engels debate’) occurs first in Georg Lukács’ famous sixth footnote of the first chapter in his 1923 History and Class Consciousness, where he says that “Engels–following Hegel’s mistaken lead–extended the [dialectical] method also to knowledge of nature.” Instead, argued Lukács, the dialectical method should be limited to “historical-social reality.” What those who have banked on this footnote forget, or are unaware of, is that Lukács comes to reject his own position to the point of “[launching] a campaign to prevent the reprints of his 1923 book.” Lukács had argued that his book was ‘outdated,’ ‘misleading,’ and ‘dangerous’ because “it was written in a ‘transition [period] from objective idealism to dialectical materialism.’” Additionally, he was quite explicit in arguing that “’[his] struggle against… the concept of dialectics in nature’ was one of the ‘central mistakes of [his] book.’” For more see my review of Friedrich Engels and the Dialectic of Nature cited above. [3] Lefebvre, Dialectical Materialism, 95-96. [4] Engels, Dialectics of Nature, 40. [5] Lefebvre, Dialectical Materialism, 28. [6] G. W. F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, translated by A. V. Miller (London: Allen and Unwin, 1969), § 187. [7] G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy (New York: Routledge and Kegan, 1968) 283. [8] I am using ‘metaphysics’ here in the way Engels and Marx do, as a way of analyzing things statically and isolated from the interconnections in which it exists. I must note, however, that this is not the same way metaphysics is defined in the history of philosophy. [9] Engels, Dialectics of Nature, 195. [10] Engels, Dialectics of Nature, 63. [11] Karl Marx, “Marx to Joseph Dietzgen,” May 9, 1868, In Marx-Engels Collected Works Vol 43 (New York: International Publishers, 1988), 31; Engels, Dialectics of Nature, 63. [12] Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 38, 357. [13] Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 38, 357. [14] Chris Arthur, The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital (London: Brill, 2004), 3. [15] Friedrich Engels, “Engels to Lange,” March 29, 1865. In Marx-Engels Collected Works Vol 42 (New York: International Publishers, 1987), 138. [16] Hegel, Science of Logic, §69. [17] Marx, Capital Vol. 1 (New York: International Publishers, 1974), 596. [18] Lenin, Collected Works Vol 38, 357. [19] Lenin, Collected Works Vol 38, 358. [20] Lenin, Collected Works Vol 38, 358. [21]Lenin, Collected Works Vol 38, 358-359. Lenin uses ‘cell,’ Marx uses ‘cell-form.’ [22] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 104. [23] Roslyn Wallach Bologh, Dialectical Phenomenology: Marx’s Method (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 64. [24]Lenin, Collected Works Vol 38, 358. [25] Lenin, Collected Works Vol 38, 359. [26] Karl Marx, Capital Vol. III (New York: International Publishers, 1974), 391. [27] Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value Vol. II (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975), 509, 507. [28] Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value Vol. II, 509. [29] Mao Tsetung, “On Contradiction,” In Five Essays on Philosophy (Peking: Foreign Language, 1977) 51. [30] Tsetung, “On Contradiction,” 53. [31] Tsetung, “On Contradiction,” 54. [32] V. I. Lenin, "Remarks on N. I. Bukharin's Economics of the Transitional Period" Selected Works, Russ. ed., Moscow-Leningrad, 1931, Vol. XI, p. 357. [33] Mao, “On Contradiction,” 68. [34] Tsetung, “On Contradiction,” 69. [35] Tsetung, “On Contradiction,” 70. [36] Tsetung, “On Contradiction,” 69. [37] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 195. [38] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 193. [39] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 193. [40] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 195. [41] G. W. F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, translated by George di Geovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 321-322. [42] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 194-195. This latter transformation requires the surplus-value produced in the moment of production to return to the moment of circulation and realize itself. As Marx says in Capital Vol. III, “industrial capitalist merely realises the previously produced surplus-value, or profit, in the process of circulation.” Marx, Capital Vol. III, 283. [43] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 307-308. This is the example Engels uses in his Anti-Dühring when discussing the law of the transformation of quantity into quality. [44] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 308-309. [45] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 309. [46] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 309. [47] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 309. [48] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 751. [49] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 714, 774. [50] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 715. [51] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 762-763. [52] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 763. [53] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 763. [54] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 774. [55] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 359. “Division of labour in the workshop, as practices by manufacture, is a special creation of the capitalist mode of production alone.” [56] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 763 [57] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 764. Author Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy instructor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2024). He has written for dozens of scholarly and popular publications around the world and runs various live-broadcast shows for the Midwestern Marx Institute YouTube. You can subscribe to his Philosophy in Crisis Substack HERE. Archives March 2024 3/19/2024 Why the Left Should Reject Heidegger’s Thought. Part One: The Question of Being. By: Colin BodayleRead NowHeideggerian thought is everywhere. A list of thinkers influenced by Heidegger reads like a “who’s who” of famous twentieth century philosophers. Foucault said: “For me, Heidegger has always been the essential philosopher.”[1] Derrida once called Heidegger “the great unavoidable thinker of the century.”[2] Sartre conceived of Being and Nothingness while reading Heidegger’s “What is Metaphysics?” Deleuze acknowledges the influence of Heidegger in the Preface to Difference and Repetition.[3] Žižek wrote his first book on Heidegger.[4] Many of Heidegger’s students became famous philosophers, including several who significantly impacted political theory: Hannah Arendt would develop the discourse of “totalitarianism” found in liberal philosophy, Leo Strauss would influence the neoconservative movement, and Herbert Marcuse would be a leading thinker for the New Left. It seems surprising that Heidegger should exert this much influence on contemporary thought, given that he was an unapologetic Nazi who began each lecture with “Heil Hitler” during his tenure as rector of Freiburg. One wonders, especially, why he has been embraced by so many thinkers on the Left. Heidegger scholars have long attempted to separate Heidegger’s philosophy from his Nazism. This separation became increasingly difficult, however, after the Black Notebooks were published in 2014. These personal notebooks offer further evidence of Heidegger’s open embrace of racism, antisemitism, and Nazism. They also show Heidegger developing some of his most famous philosophical concepts directly out of Nazi ideology. In 1933, Heidegger writes: The Führer has awakened a new actuality, giving our thinking the correct course and impetus. Otherwise, despite all the thoroughness, it would have remained lost in itself and would only with great difficulty have found its way to effectiveness.[5] When Heidegger’s collected works were published, evidence of the extent of Heidegger’s Nazi involvement was largely erased. As Richard Wolin points out: “Following the war, Heidegger fabricated and rewrote entire passages, inserting them in earlier texts in order to promote the myth that, during the 1930’s, he had acted ‘heroically,’ as an intellectual and political dissident.”[6] Among those “in the know,” however, it was already an open secret that many of Heidegger’s published works had been altered to hide incriminating references to Hitler, fascism, or “world-Judaism.”[7] While most leftists have no problem rejecting Heidegger as a person, many ostensibly progressive or left-wing philosophers have nevertheless adopted Heideggerian positions. This includes thinkers who identify as communists like Sartre, Kojève, and Marcuse. There are reasons for Heidegger’s popularity. Heidegger talks about feelings of angst, the struggle to be authentic amid conformity, the weight of future possibilities, and our fears regarding our inevitable mortality. Young people are drawn to Heidegger because they wrestle with these questions, especially given the pressures of capitalist society. As a young person, I too was drawn to Being and Time for similar reasons, leading me to spend almost a decade studying Heidegger’s thought. Although I have broken completely with Heidegger, I wouldn’t deny that Being and Time is a powerful and thought-provoking work of philosophy. Yet there are deep-seated problems within Heidegger’s thinking, contradictions that bubble to the surface when we examine Heidegger’s positions carefully. Criticizing Heidegger is important. Seeds of Heideggerianism are scattered throughout leftist thought, and we cannot simply point to Heidegger’s Nazi roots to unplant them. We must scorch the soil of Heidegger’s thinking with the fires of critique. Heidegger writes in idiosyncratic jargon, coining a cryptic vocabulary of neologisms based on the etymology of German words. The task of translating Heidegger is a nightmare. Often, his language puts a spell over his audience, warding Heidegger from hasty criticisms. Demystifying Heideggerese takes a great deal of effort, so I have decided to divide this task into a series of articles, touching on some of the main points of relevance in each. My aim in this series is to clarify why Marxists should reject Heideggerian thinking. In the current article, I will be focusing on the most significant aspect of Heidegger’s thought: the question of being. In the next article, I will be exploring his analysis of Dasein in Being and Time. In the final article, I will be examining his critique of technology and modern science. Heidegger’s Single Thought: The Ontological Difference Heidegger once claimed that “Each thinker only thinks one single thought.”[8] The great philosophers, Heidegger claimed, take one idea and paint all of reality in its colors. If Heidegger had “one thought,” this would be the ontological difference. The ontological difference is the distinction between beings (things that are) and being (their “to be”). According to Heidegger, philosophers have overlooked this distinction. Whenever philosophers have asked about the meaning of being, they have treated being as if it were a being. Philosophy has failed to consider “being itself,” that is, being apart from beings. The history of Western metaphysics, according to Heidegger, consists of various attempts to explain being through the lens of beings. The Presocratic philosopher Thales, for example, claimed that being was water, interpreting the being of beings in general in terms of a specific kind of being. For Thales, solid objects are frozen liquid, air is just vaporous water, and fire is akin to steam. The being of every being, for Thales, is water. Beginning with Aristotle, Heidegger claims, metaphysics adopts a twofold strategy for explaining the being of beings. First, it uses the being of some special being to explain being in general, then it grounds the existence of all beings in terms of some highest being. For Aristotle, for example, being is understood in terms of motion and this account is grounded in the unmoved mover. Heidegger calls these kinds of explanations “ontotheology” because they begin with an ontology of being in general and then ground this ontology in a theology of the highest being. In the Middle Ages, Heidegger claims, we enter into a new epoch of the history of being. For the Medievals, beings in general are understood as created out of nothing, and the totality of beings are grounded in God, the highest being. Beginning with Descartes, however, philosophy moves away from God and towards the human mind. Now, beings are understood as representations grounded in the human mind or transcendental ego. This modern conception of beings, in fact, somewhat resembles what Marxists would understand by the term “idealism.” The final epoch in the history of being, according to Heidegger, is modern technology, which corresponds to Hegelian philosophy as the complete system of science and the two “inversions” of Hegelianism: Nietzscheanism and Marxism. In modernity, everything becomes an object for technological manipulation with modern science revealing how we can dominate and control nature. The center of this final epoch of ontotheology, according to Heidegger, is the isolated, finite human will, a will that simply wants to keep on willing, subordinating everything to its desire for control and mastery, including the human species itself. Heidegger argues that philosophy and the history of metaphysics ends with the technological interpretation of the meaning of being, covering over the ontological difference and making it impossible for any new philosophical paradigm to emerge. For both Heidegger and Bill Clinton everything depends on “what is is.” Each epoch of metaphysics, Heidegger claims, operates under a specific interpretation of the meaning of being in general. Yet each epoch also covers over the difference between being and beings. Yet what is the difference between being and beings? We might illustrate this using the example of light. If I turn on the lights in the room, the objects become visible through the light. The objects in the room, however, are not the light itself. The lightbulb, too, is not the light, but the source of the light. In fact, the lightbulb is also made visible by the light. The light itself, however, cannot be made visible by means of light. Instead, we notice that there is light because the objects themselves become visible. The relationship between being and beings, for Heidegger, is similar to the relationship between visible objects and light. We cannot illuminate being by treating it as a being, because being is the “to be” of beings. Being itself is not a being, which means that, strictly speaking, being “is not.” Heidegger thus calls being the presencing of presence, the manifestness of the manifest. He also describes being using contradictory, almost dialectical-sounding language, saying that being is “revealing/concealing.” Just like the light reveals itself by revealing bright objects, but light cannot directly reveal light, being reveals itself by revealing beings yet concealing itself. The unconcealment of being makes metaphysics possible. Metaphysics and modern science, however, distort this more primordial unconcealment by representing being in various ways. Science, for example, represents beings in terms of their mathematically quantifiable and manipulatable properties. Heidegger claims that this distorts a more primordial unconcealment of being. For Heidegger, we discover being itself in the sheer “thatness,” the fact that something is rather than is not. We discover such unconcealment, Heidegger thinks, whenever we let something be without trying to represent it. Art and poetry accomplish this feat. A painting of a river, for Heidegger, simply aims to present the being of the river, not to quantify the river or measure its force. He writes: “The more essential the work [of art] opens itself, the more luminous becomes the uniqueness of the fact that it is rather than is not.”[9] A work of art, by putting its subject matter on display, lets it appear as itself. We are overwhelmed by its strangeness. “Only when the strangeness of beings oppresses us does it arouse and evoke wonder.”[10] Being, for Heidegger, is the realization that “holy shit, there are things!” This pure givenness, the fact that anything exists at all, this “unconcealment” or “manifestness” is what Heidegger identifies with being as such. The Contradictions of Heideggerian Thought Heidegger follows Hegel in recognizing that being is not a being. Yet Hegel draws the conclusion that pure being is empty indeterminacy, a total abstraction, the negation of all determinacy and content. Being, in other words, is nothing. In fact, this is the first dialectical transformation of Hegel’s Logic, the thought of pure being turning into its opposite. Heidegger cannot accept this conclusion. He attempts to avoid this dialectic by making the following argument: The question “What is being?” seems paradoxical, because in asking “what is being?”, we presuppose that we already understand the “is.” Yet we do understand the question, Heidegger says, we just can’t articulate the meaning of “being.” Heidegger thus concludes we implicitly understand the meaning of being, and that we always operate with an implicit understanding of the meaning of being. This understanding of being determines the basis upon which anything can appear or be understood at all. For something to appear, Heidegger claims, it must appear as something, and this requires an understanding of what it means for something to be. From this, Heidegger concludes that we cannot speak of being apart from our understanding of being. In his later language, being is the unconcealment of beings, yet this unconcealment only takes place within the sphere of human existence. Even Heidegger’s term for human beings, Da-sein (literally “being-there”) indicates this, since as Heidegger says, Dasein is “the site that being necessitates for its opening up,” that is, the site where being unconceals itself.[11] Does this mean that Heidegger is not really concerned with what actually exists in the real world, but only with the appearance or phenomenon of being? Put differently, is he talking about how we understand being or reality, or about being or reality itself? This question produced a lively debate between the Heidegger scholars Thomas Sheehan and Richard Capobianco.[12] This scholarly quarrel, however, is merely a manifestation of a deeper contradiction within Heidegger’s own thinking. Heidegger claims that if Dasein no longer exists, then we cannot speak of “being.” Heidegger writes: “Being (not beings) is dependent upon the understanding of being, that is, reality (not the real) is dependent upon care” (SZ, 212).[13] By this, Heidegger means that “being” belongs to our implicit or explicit understanding of the being of beings. Human beings, moreover, are finite and temporal, which makes the understanding of being also finite and temporal. Heidegger struggles throughout his entire career to express this point. Consider what Heidegger is saying: “Being (not beings) is dependent upon the understanding of being.” He puts the phrase “(not beings)” in parentheses, yet this implies the statement: “beings are not dependent upon the understanding of being,” or put positively: “beings are independent of the understanding of being.” Yet this statement cannot be correct, since it says: “beings are,” which would seem to be a statement about the being of beings. Heidegger wants to say that the things in the world are independently of the human understanding of being, but they have no being (are not) unless they appear to human beings. These two things cannot both be true. Lukács rightly calls this “epistemological hocus-pocus.”[14] From this passage, Thomas Sheehan draws the conclusion that for Heidegger: “Before homo sapiens evolved, there was no ‘being’ on earth… because ‘being’ for Heidegger does not mean ‘in existence.’”[15] When Sheehan says “existence,” however, he cannot mean this in any Heideggerian sense of the word, because Heidegger knows no sense of being or existence outside of Dasein’s understanding of being. Nevertheless, Heidegger himself is frequently forced to speak in this contradictory manner about being. He even starts crossing out the word “is” when talking about being. Heidegger’s Subjective Idealism If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound? For materialists, the answer is simple: Of course it does. Sound is a vibration of the air, and the tree landing makes the air vibrate regardless of whether anyone hears it. For idealist philosophers, however, the question is far more complicated. An objective idealist (say, Husserl) would claim that it does make a sound, since if a person were present, they would hear it. No one actually hears the sound, but it would be possible for a mind to hear it. Heidegger takes a far more extreme position than the objective idealists. For Heidegger, the being of the sound depends on Dasein, and we can only speak of its mind-independence if we have already presupposed human beings with an understanding of the meaning of being. Being, for Heidegger, only appears within the horizon of human finitude and history. He thus writes: Before Newton’s laws were discovered, they were not “true.” From this it does not follow that they were false or even that they would become false if ontically no discoveredness was possible any longer … The fact that before Newton they were neither true nor false cannot mean that the beings which they point out in a discovering way did not previously exist. These laws became true through Newton, through them beings in themselves became accessible for Dasein (SZ, 226-27).[16] Heidegger does not deny the truth of Newton’s laws, yet he claims that we cannot speak of the truth or falsity of these laws until they were discovered by Newton. Beings must be accessible for us before we can speak of their being. Heidegger thus wraps objective truth inside subjective idealism. Normally, we think of truth as the correspondence between a thought or statement and reality. Heidegger claims, however, that truth as “correspondence” depends on the discovery of truth. We cannot check to see whether an idea corresponds to reality unless we have already discovered reality. Yet only human beings can discover reality, and these discoveries can be lost or forgotten. Heidegger thus says: “The fact that there are ‘eternal truths’ will not be adequately proven until it is successfully demonstrated that Dasein has been and will be for all eternity” (SZ, 227). Heidegger claims there are no eternal truths because if human beings go extinct, all knowledge is lost and so nothing is true. Being and truth die with Dasein. The laws of physics are no longer true if human beings cease to exist. Heidegger’s history of being and critique of Western metaphysics rests on this basic contradiction within his philosophy. For Heidegger, human history is a series of epochs, each with its own interpretation of the history of being. We cannot escape the horizon of human finitude. Yet because Heidegger eschews the language of consciousness and mind for Dasein, he claims to be speaking of “mind-independent beings.” Beings, he claims, are mind-independent, but their being is Dasein dependent. No Dasein, no being. Heidegger recognizes that knowledge production is a historical process, one that requires intellectual labor, scientific experiments, and institutions that transmit and preserve this knowledge. On this point, Heidegger is quite correct. Yet the truth or falsity of knowledge does not depend on knowledge production. Truth or falsity is independent of discovery, and beings are whether human beings exist or not. They do not require human beings to be. Heidegger claims to be beyond the subjective and the objective, yet he merely collapses both into the subjectivity of human finitude and history. This Heideggerian framework leads to absurd claims. Consider, for example, the French anthropologist-philosopher Bruno Latour, who claimed that Pharaoh Ramses II didn’t die of tuberculosis because the bacteria wasn’t discovered until 1882. Heidegger does not “solve” the problem of the relationship between mind and world—he collapses all objectivity into finite human subjectivity. Marxist philosophy cannot ally itself with Heideggerian subjective idealism. The most fundamental commitment of dialectical materialism is the view that a material world exists independently of the mind prior to human consciousness. Compare Heidegger’s view of Newton’s laws to this statement from Lenin in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism: Yesterday we did not know that coal tar contained alizarin. Today we learned that it does. The question is, did coal tar contain alizarin yesterday? Of course it did. To doubt it would be to make a mockery of modern science … Things exist independently of our consciousness, independently of our perceptions, outside of us, for it is beyond doubt that alizarin existed in coal tar yesterday and it is equally beyond doubt that yesterday we knew nothing of the existence of this alizarin and received no sensations from it.[17] On the question of whether there are “eternal truths,” Engels states quite clearly in Anti-Dühring that “certainly there are,” writing: If it gives anyone any pleasure to use mighty words for such simple things, it can be asserted that certain results obtained by these [physical] sciences are eternal truths, final and ultimate truths; for which reason these sciences are known as the exact sciences. But very far from all their results have this validity.[18] Engels is quite careful to acknowledge that even the exact sciences are “swamped by hypotheses as if attacked by a swarm of bees,” yet such hypotheses and abstractions are necessary for scientific progress. Many scientific theories are not valid for every single thing in reality, but indeed have a limited or restricted validity. Einstein’s theory of relativity, for example, cannot explain quantum mechanics, yet our iPhones can still accurately pinpoint our locations by communicating with satellites, a feat that would be impossible without Einstein’s equations. The restricted validity of Einstein’s theories does not falsify the results of our GPS. Against these common sense positions, Heidegger engages in what Lukács rightly calls a “terminological camouflaging of subjective idealism.”[19] Heidegger claims to be talking about being and ontology, yet he actually is talking about the phenomenon or meaning of being. He thus ends up in a position that is more subjectivistic than the idealisms of Husserl or Kant. Heidegger says he is not a subjectivist because he avoids using the language of “consciousness” or “mind,” yet Heidegger simply reduces all objectivity to human existence and history. Scientific objectivity, truth, and being itself only appear within the human sphere, and if human beings cease to exist (and if there are no “Daseins” on other planets), truth no longer exists. Heideggerian Thought Today Recently, some contemporary decolonial theorists have unquestioningly adopted this Heideggerian philosophical framework. Like Heidegger, these thinkers reduce being to our understanding of being. Decolonial theorists like Mignolo and Maldonado-Torres, for example, talk about the “coloniality of being,” yet by “being” they do not mean the actual theft of material resources or the exploitation of labor by the colonizers, but the structure of meaning or appearances. Of course, Marxists should not deny that certain philosophical ideas and epistemological frameworks are indeed influenced by colonialism. For example, Heidegger’s philosophy was influenced by Nazism, a racist and colonial ideology, so if the “coloniality of being” is anywhere, it is in Heidegger’s Eurocentric history of being.[20] These decolonial theorists, however, take Heidegger’s framework of the history of being yet rewrite this history so that the meaning of being is somehow determined by colonialism. Everything that takes place after colonialism allegedly corresponds to the “coloniality of being.” When Descartes says: “I think, therefore I am,” this is based in the “I conquer, therefore I am,” a skepticism about the humanity of indigenous peoples and a desire to assert one’s own European identity.[21] Since these theorists do not distinguish between being and the understanding of being, they tend to see the “coloniality of being” everywhere (except perhaps in the real material relations of neocolonialism). As Maldonado-Torres writes: “as modern subjects, we breathe [sic] colonialism all the time and everyday.”[22] For these decolonial theorists, “coloniality survives colonialism,” meaning the legacy of colonialism primarily exists in certain “colonial” modes of knowing that determine the meaning of being, not in the real continuation of colonial relations of exploitation through neo-colonialism or imperialism (nor the literal colonialism currently taking place in Palestine, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and elsewhere). The task becomes criticizing ideas for their “coloniality” and trying to produce alternative “decolonized” ways of thinking rooted in non-European epistemologies. The ontological becomes epistemological. The real struggle becomes a war of ideas. Heidegger frames his history of being in an idealist fashion. He has no understanding of the real driving forces of history. For Heidegger, history is just different paradigms of being, new ways of understanding the meaning of being, different interpretations of the meaning of human existence and the things around us. In each historical epoch, the meaning of being is metaphysically determined, the ontological difference disappears behind an ontotheological metaphysic, and being no longer reveals beings in any other way. If history is determined by various representations of being, then the driving forces of history are ideas and interpretations, not the real events occurring in society and nature. Against Heidegger and those who follow him on his quest for being, I would simply say that after a decade of searching for the meaning of being, I found the answer in Hegel’s Logic. “Being itself” is an abstraction, devoid of all content. The meaning of being is nothing.[23] Notes [1] Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture, trans. Alan Sheridan et. al (London: Routledge, 1988), 250. [2] This comment was made by Derrida in an interview in reference to Althusser’s engagement with Heidegger. In the same interview, Derrida criticizes Marxism for failing to engage with Heidegger, stating that “some engagement with Heidegger or a problematic of the Heideggerian type should have been mandatory.” Jacques Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971-2001, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 154 & 173. [3] Cf. Giles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), xiv. [4] Gabriel Rockhill points out that Heidegger was “the principle reference for the Slovenian anti-communist opposition according to Žižek himself.” See Gabriel Rockhill, “Capitalism’s Court Jester: Slavoj Žižek,” Counterpunch, January 2, 2023. https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/01/02/capitalisms-court-jester-slavoj-zizek/ For a discussion of Žižek’s relation to Heidegger, see Christopher Hanlon and Slavoj Žižek. “Psychoanalysis and the Post-Political: An Interview with Slavoj Žižek.” New Literary History 32:1 (Winter, 2001): 1-21. [5] Martin Heidegger, Ponderings II-VI: Black Notebooks 1931-1938, translated by Richard Rojcewicz. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 81. [6] Richard Wolin, Heidegger in Ruins (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022), 37. [7] The most notorious example was Heidegger’s 1935 Introduction to Metaphysics, which featured the passage “What is peddled about nowadays as the philosophy of National Socialism, but which has not to do with the inner truth and greatness of this movement [namely, the encounter between global technology and modern humanity], is fishing in these troubled waters of ‘values’ and ‘totalities.’” Heidegger claimed to have written this line about “global technology” in the original lecture, yet not said it during the lecture for fear of reprisal from the Gestapo. It was later shown, however, that this was fabricated by Heidegger, who went so far as to destroy this page from the original manuscript. Ironically, Heidegger said in his 1953 preface “What was spoken no longer speaks in what is printed.” No doubt. See Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 222 & xlv. See also Wolin, Heidegger in Ruins, 28-34. [8] Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volumes Three and Four, ed. by David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979), 4. [9] Martin Heidegger, “Origin of the Work of Art,” Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (London: Harper Perennial, 1973), 190. [10] Martin Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?”, Basic Writings, 103. [11] Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 228. [12] Sheehan claims that Heidegger was interested only in the meaning of being, or being within a phenomenologically reduced sense. See Thomas Sheehan, “A Paradigm Shift in Heidegger Research,” Continental Philosophy Review, 32 (2001): 183-202. Capobianco defends the more orthodox reading of Heidegger’s project in his books Engaging Heidegger (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010) and Heidegger’s Way of Being (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014). [13] References to Being and Time cite the German page numbers. I have used the Joan Stambaugh translation throughout. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996). [14] Georg Lukács, Destruction of Reason, trans. Peter Palmer (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1981), 493. [15] Thomas Sheehan, “A Paradigm Shift in Heidegger Research,” Continental Philosophy Review 32(2001): 191. [16] Even in this passage, Heidegger falls into a contradictory way of speaking. Joan Stambaugh highlights this contradiction even more in her translation when she says that the beings revealed through Newton’s laws “did not previously exist,” a violation of Heidegger’s terminology, yet a symptom of his contradictory idealism. In German, Heidegger uses the phrase: sei vordem nicht gewesen, which Mcquarrie and Robinson render more accurately as “before him there were no such entities.” [17] V.I. Lenin, Materialism and Empiro-Criticism, ttps://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/mec/two1.htm#bkV14E042 [18] Frederick Engels, Anti-Dühring, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch07.htm [19] Lukács, Destruction of Reason, 496. [20] The connection between Nazism and colonialism was famously highlighted by Césaire, who argued that Hitler “applied to Europe colonialist procedures” previously reserved for those in the global south. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 36. The work of Domenico Losurdo has further explored the relationship between colonialism and Nazism. See Domenico Losurdo, War and Revolution: Rethinking the 20th Century, trans. Gregory Elliot (London: Verso, 2015). [21] Maldonado-Torres claims, following Enrique Dussel, that “The Cartesian idea about the division between res cogitans and res extensa (consciousness and matter) which translates itself into a divide between the mind and the body or between the human and nature is preceded and even, one has the temptation to say, to some extent built upon an anthropological colonial difference between the ego conquistador and the ego conquistado.” Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “On the Coloniality of Being,” Cultural Studies, vol. 21, no. 2-3 (2007): 245. [22] Ibid., 243. [23] I would like to thank Jared C. Bly and Carlos L. Garrido for providing helpful feedback for this article. Author Colin Bodayle teaches philosophy at Villanova University. His research currently focuses on Hegel, Marx, and anti-colonial theory. Archives March 2024 |
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