On the Marxist Critique of Heidegger

By Carlos Garrido

Martin Heidegger is undoubtedly one of the most creative and influential philosophers of the 20th century. Virtually all areas of philosophy, along with many other disciplines as well, have had to tackle in one form or another the questions he poses, and the insights he provides. His work grasped the zeitgeist of the 1930s and 40s for most of continental philosophy. It is a tour de force Marxist philosophers must face head on. Simply calling it ‘bourgeois,’ ‘Nazi’, or the expression of the middle-class state of being in post WW1 Germany is not enough. While it is important to situate Heidegger in his proper historical and class context, and while it is essential to show the Nazism and antisemitism he was undoubtedly committed to for a significant period of his life, this is insufficient to defeat the thought of this giant.

Other leftist scholars have already made tremendous inroads in this area. Since at least the publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, but especially now with the publication of Richard Wolin’s recent text, Heidegger in Ruins, the intimate connection between Heidegger and Nazism is indisputable – even though many, including those working within his Gesamtausgabe (collected works), have tried to paper over it. Certainly, to borrow an expression Domenico Losurdo uses to describe Nietzsche scholarship, there has pervaded a “hermeneutic of innocence” in Heideggerian scholarship which tries to divorce his work from the essentially political context that embeds it. Its political horizon, its class basis, its connection with Nazism, these are all things any Marxist discussion on Heidegger should include. But we must ask, is this enough to ‘defeat’ Heidegger? If he was simply a ‘Nazi,’ why hasn’t he, like Emmanual Faye suggests, been taken off philosophy shelves and put next to Goebbels?[1]

Why have so many leftist scholars in the Global South and East, thinkers aware of Heidegger’s Nazism, turned in various parts of their work to Heidegger for insights? Unlike the tradition of Western Marxism, where the eclecticism is intimately connected to a politics that throws on the support of imperialism a radical veneer, a lot of these scholars are fervent critics of U.S. imperialism and have stood for decades on the side of socialist construction. Why does, for instance, the late Bolivian Marxist, Juan Jose Bautista Segales, find that he can incorporate insights from Heidegger’s critique of modernity into the process of understanding the dimensions of the indigenous struggle for socialism, a struggle that must, necessarily, tarry with the question of capitalist modernity?  Why does the Brazilian theologian, Leonardo Boff, one of the founders of the radical, Christian Socialist liberation theology tendency, central to so many socialist and anti-imperialist struggles in Latin American, turn to Heidegger to discuss the question of care in ethics?

In his Prison Notebooks Antonio Gramsci reminds us that:

A new science proves its efficacy and vitality when it demonstrates that it is capable of confronting the great champions of the tendencies opposed to it and when it either resolves by its own means the vital questions which they have posed or demonstrates, in peremptory fashion, that these questions are false problems.[2]

Gramsci would go on to lambast Nikolai Bukharin, in part, for failing to address in his ‘Manual’ the critics of Marxism in their utmost coherence, i.e., for failing to deal with the best bourgeois philosophy and science had to offer, opting instead to obtaining the quick victories one gets when they challenge an opponent of a lower caliber. Gramsci says that while reading Bukharin’s text, “one has the impression of someone who cannot sleep for the moonlight and who struggles to massacre the fireflies in the belief that by so doing he will make the brightness lessen or disappear.”[3]

Unfortunately, a similar fatal flaw can be observed in the traditional Marxist-Leninist critiques of Heidegger. Far from engaging with him honestly and comprehensively, we have opted for quick victories based on dismissals of his thought as petty-bourgeois, subjectivist, Nazi, etc. While components of this critique are certainly true, they are not enough – i.e., they are not worthy of proper Marxist-Leninist critique. Yes, Marx, Engels, and Lenin name-called their opponents and spoke of the class positions and subsequent political interests they often spoke from – but in conjunction with this was always a thorough demolishing of their arguments along the kind described by Gramsci previously. Additionally, how these thinkers expressed in their work and concerns a class position was something that was proved, i.e., there was a concrete study of the relationship between the base and superstructure, between the class the thinker represents and the ideas they enunciate. This refined analysis has often been missing in our tradition’s treatment of Heidegger. Far too often conclusions that have to be proven are accepted simply at face value. As R. T. De George, who did an umbrella study of Marxist-Leninist writing on Heidegger up until the mid-1960s, argued,

The failure of Marxist criticism of Heidegger, as well as of other Western philosophers, is not necessarily that it has been wrong; but rather that most of it has been shallow, polemical, beside the point, and poor Marxism. Marxist criticism is difficult. Marxist-Leninist criticism has become too easy. It would perhaps be too much to ask that Marxists follow Lenin's advice and criticize not in the manner of Feuerbach but in the manner of Hegel, i.e. not by merely rejecting views but by correcting them "deepening, generalizing, and extending them, showing the connection and transitions of each and every concept". But this presumably is what Marxist and Marxist Leninist philosophy should do.[4]

De George is, of course, not a Marxist. But he is right to call us out on this shortcoming. In doing so he is being a good ideological enemy, an enemy that, to use an obscene American expression, wants us to get our shit together.

In the 20th century, the best inroads into the Marxist-Leninist critique of Heidegger would be made by Georg Lukács, who situates him within the irrationalism of the imperialist period in his seminal Destruction of Reason. Here Lukács is correct about what it takes to carry forth this critique in a proper Marxist manner. He writes:

To reveal [a thinker’s] social genesis and function is of the greatest importance, but in itself by no means sufficient. Granted, the objectivity of progress will suffice correctly to condemn as reactionary an individual phenomenon or orientation. But a really Marxist-Leninist critique of reactionary philosophy cannot permit itself to stop at this. Rather it must show in real terms, in the philosophical material itself, the philosophical falsity and the distortion of basic philosophical questions, the negation of philosophy's achievements and so on… To this extent, an immanent critique is a justified and indeed indispensable element in the portrayal and exposure of reactionary tendencies in philosophy. The classic Marxist authors have constantly used it. Engels, for example, in his Anti-Duhring and Lenin in his Empirio-Criticism. To reject immanent criticism as one element in an overall survey also embracing social genesis and function, class characteristics, exploration of the true nature of society and so on is bound to lead to a philosophical sectarianism, to the attitude that everything which is axiomatic to a conscious Marxist-Leninist is also immediately obvious to his readers…[Therefore, while] the antithesis between the various bourgeois ideologies and the achievements of dialectical and historical materialism is the self-evident foundation of our treatment and critique of the subject-matter, [we must still] prove in factual, philosophical terms the inner incoherence, contradictoriness, etc., of the separate philosophies [as] also unavoidable if one wants to illustrate their reactionary character in a truly concrete way.[5]

This is precisely the task that Lukács sets for himself in this monumental text. However, as he tells us, it is a task that cannot possibly be completed in one book, even an 800 page one. The Heidegger section, for instance, is a mere 25 pages. Even shorter is his treatment of Heidegger in Existentialism or Marxism, published a few years after. Nonetheless, it is on the basis of this limited work that a proper Marxist-Leninist critique of Heidegger can be developed.

Lukács tells us that with Heidegger phenomenology “turned into the ideology of the agony of individualism in the imperialist period.”[6] He performed a “terminological camouflaging of subjective idealism,” a “transference of purely subjective-idealist positions into objective (i.e., pseudo-objective) ones.”[7] His “ontological materiality” and claims to concreteness “remained purely declarative,” dominated through and through by irrationalistic arbitrariness and an “epistemological hocus pocus.”[8] Even in the aspects of his thought that are ‘historical’, what is operative, Lukács argues, is the “transformation of real history into a mythified pseudo-history.”[9] In Heidegger the “Husserlian tendency towards a strictly scientific approach,” intuitivist and irrationalist though it might have been in its own right, had now “faded completely.”[10] Philosophy’s task was “to keep investigation open by means of questions.”[11] The discipline is turned into a big question rigamarole centered on a question of Being that had already been answered by the discipline more than a century prior in Hegel’ Science of Logic, where it was shown, in its indeterminacy, to be indistinguishable from nothing, impelling us to move beyond pure being into being as coming to be and seizing to be, being as becoming, determinate being, and all the subsequent categories unfolded out of these in the Logic.

The context which situates the rise of Heidegger, Lukács writes, is akin to the post-1848 context which saw the rise of Soren Kierkegaard’s romantic individualist agony: “Kierkegaard's philosophy was aimed against the bourgeois idea of progress, against Hegel's idealist dialectics, whereas the renovators of existential philosophy [i.e., Heidegger and et. al.] were already principally at odds with Marxism, although this seldom found overt and direct expression in their writings.”[12] This mood of despair, for Lukács, produced like it had decades prior, an “ideology of the saddest philistinism, of fear and trembling, of anxiety” which “was precisely the socio-psychological reason for the influence of Heidegger and Jaspers” on the eve of Hitler’s seizure of power.[13] It was a “yearning to rescue naked existence from universal collapse.”[14] Philosophically it was marked by an attempt at ‘third ways’ beyond idealism and materialism and rationalism and irrationalism, but in each instance, idealism and irrationalism ultimately showed their dominance.

While his phenomenology and ontology were, in Lukács’s words, little more than “abstractly mythicizing” a “vitalistic anthropology with an objectivistic mask,”[15]it nonetheless provided, he admits, an “often grippingly interesting description of intellectual philistinism during the crisis of the imperialist period.”[16] In his phenomenological description of the inauthenticity of everyday existence, pervaded by Verfallensein, a state of falling prey, we come under the “anonymous dominance of das Man” (the one or they).[17] Lukács argues that Heidegger’s detailed description of this fallen state “constitute the strongest and most suggestive part of Being and Time, and in all likelihood they formed the basis of the book’s broad and profound effect… [It is] here, with the tools of phenomenology, [that] Heidegger [gives] a series of interesting images taken from the inner life, from the worldview of the dissolute bourgeois mind of the post-war years.”[18] While he was fundamentally unable to understand the socio-historical causes that grounded such experience, Lukács holds that the value of his account is seen in the fact that it “provides – on the descriptive level – a genuine and true-to-life picture of those conscious reflexes which the reality of the post-war imperialist capitalism triggered off in those unable or unwilling to surpass what they experienced in their individual existence and to go further towards objectivity, i.e., towards exploring the socio-historical causes of their experiences.”[19]

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Here Heidegger follows to the T the tradition of irrationalism which preceded him and of which he becomes a central figure of in the 20th century. As Lukács writes in Existentialism or Marxism:

In times of the crisis of imperialism, when everything is unstable, everything is in disarray, when the bourgeois intelligentsia is forced to observe, as the next day refutes what seemed indestructible today, it is faced with a choice. It must admit either its own defeat or the defeat of reason. The first path means recognizing your inability to comprehend reality in thought. Here it would be the turn of reason, but it is from this rationality that bourgeois thinking must withdraw. It is impossible to recognize this defeat from a bourgeois standpoint, for that would mean a transition to the camp of socialism. Therefore, at the crossroads, the bourgeois intelligentsia must choose a different path; it must proclaim the collapse of reason.[20]

While the scope of the work leads Lukács to sometimes move too quick in his critique of Heidegger, his situating of him in the tradition of irrationalism and its rejection of the enlightenment is a thread that must be picked up and developed by Marxist scholarship on Heidegger. The best place I have seen this done is in Domenico Losurdo’s Heidegger and the Ideology of War, published first in Italian in 1991, and in English a decade after. Here it is lucidly shown how Heidegger and the Nazis inherit the Kreigsideology (War ideology) of the post-WW1 period, rooted in a mythical Gemeinschaft (community) inhibited by an equally dubious notion of fate (Schicksal) and a fetish of death and its proximity as central to authentic life. Reason, which is tied to civilization and society (Gesellschaft), is lambasted for tearing communal bonds and breaking from the community’s destiny.[21] The enlightenment, the French Revolution, and Marxism, which takes the rational kernel of the former to their historical and logical conclusion, are necessarily condemned.[22]

The rejection of modernity and the Enlightenment has been a fad in Western academia for decades. Heidegger alone is not to blame. But he is, as a fellow traveler of the tradition of irrationalism, a key voice in the anti-modernity and anti-Enlightenment discourse. The Enlightenment, although imperfect and filled with contradictions, brought with it the notion of a universal humanity that we all share in as rational creatures, that provides for us the ability to see and fight for progress in history. It represented the thought of the bourgeoisie in its most progressive moment, before it undeniably turns into a force of reaction after the 1848 revolutions. The universalist ideals of the enlightenment have been given concrete content through the various progressive struggles of the last three centuries – from the American revolution to the French to the Haitian and to the socialist and anti-colonial revolutions of the 20th century. Those who have stood against it have been the forces of reaction – those who deny our common humanity in favor of tribalism (usually of a hierarchical and supremacist kind). It has been the reactionary and conservative forces who have historically rejected the use of reason and the notion of progress, since both of these can provide challenges to the ruling order… an order which can become the object of critique through reason, and which can be shown, through an appeal to the progressive dialectical unfolding of history (or, in Martin Luther King Jr.’s words, through the arch of the moral universe that bends towards justice) to be just a moment in humanity’s development towards greater freedom.

Central to any Marxist critique of Heidegger, then, is also considering how this foundational rejection of the enlightenment – necessary for bourgeois philosophical irrationalism and its turn towards indirect apologetics of the system – takes alternative forms after Heidegger. John Bellamy Foster has done important work in this area, showing how currents dominating contemporary social sciences in Academia like postmodernism, post-Marxism, post-colonialism, post-humanism, etc. all share a foundation in philosophical irrationalism and its indirect apologetics of the dominant order.[23] Although with certain downfalls, the work of Susan Neiman in Left is Not Woke also does a swell job in showing how the tribalism central to contemporary wokeism is fundamentally rooted in the reactionary, anti-modernist and anti-enlightenment tradition which Heidegger is a central figure of. For all the claims to being ‘woke’, this dominant ideology in the liberal wing of capital is deeply ignorant of the reactionary philosophical foundations underlaying their worldview – a worldview that serves to reinforce the dominant order under the delusion that it is waging an emancipatory attack on it.

A Marxist critique of Heidegger, therefore, must also contain an awareness of how the tradition he works through has seeped into the Academic and activist left, often giving its deeply reactionary philosophical foundation a seemingly progressive gloss. For this we must also study the work of our colleague Gabriel Rockhill, who outlines the political economy of knowledge that has facilitated and promoted this eclecticism to counter the genuine communist left.

In sum, while necessary, exposing Heidegger’s Nazism and his thought’s class basis is insufficient to defeating him. As Gramsci and Lukács have argued, we must also beat these monumental figures of contemporary bourgeois thought in the realm of ideas as well – showing how the problems they pose are baseless, or how the response they provide to real problems are insufficient. These are things that must be shown, not just taken axiomatically for granted simply because we understand the Marxist worldview to be the most advanced humanity has given rise to. If in questions of ethics or meta-historical narratives comrades of the left (like the two I previously mentioned) turn to Heidegger, it is not sufficient to just lambast them for taking partial insights from a problematic thinker. We must also inquire into what deficiency is there in our answering – or even asking – of the problem that led them to turn to Heidegger. How can the Marxist worldview extend itself to commenting concretely on every possible topic of intellectual inquiry such that the need to turn to Heidegger, or any other bourgeois thinker, is superfluous for those within our tradition.

This requires an explicit turn away from the Western Marxism accepted in the Academy. This so called ‘Marxism’, imbued with postmodernist sensibilities, cringes at the description of Marxism as an all-encompassing worldview. They wish to limit Marxism to the sphere of history and social analysis, rejecting the dialectics of nature and the fruitful insights the dialectical materialist worldview can provide in any sphere of investigation. In China, where Marxism-Leninism has been able to develop relatively peacefully since at least 1949, the tendency is towards the contrary. The more fields the Marxist worldview can be present in the merrier. I would like to conclude with a quote from Cheng Enfu’s China’s Economic Dialectic,

Marxism is a telescope through which we can clearly see the trends according to which reality develops, and a microscope through which we can see its crucial details. It is a set of night-vision goggles through which we can see light and hope in the darkness, a set of diving goggles through which we can see things at a deeper level, a fluoroscope through which we can see into the nature of the matter beyond the level of appearance, and a megaloscope through which we can make sense of blurred images. Marxism is a reflector through which we can see the truth behind things, a polygonal mirror that enables us to see the diversity and unity of opposites, an asymptotic mirror that allows us to see things near and far with multiple focal points and a monster-revealing mirror in which, if we have sharp eyes, we can see mistakes clearly.[24]

This should help to get us to see Marxism as an all-encompassing worldview. A worldview which, as Lenin told the Young Communists in 1921, absorbs and develops upon the “knowledge of all the treasures created by mankind.”[25] When we are successful in this task, the need for anyone in the camp of the genuine progressive forces to turn to Heidegger or any other bourgeois thinker would be superfluous, since they would find a much more concretely explicated account for their inquiry within the tradition itself… or, at the very least, the tools to do so themselves ready-to-hand (pun intended).

Notes

[1] Gregory Fried, “A Letter to Emmanuel Faye,” in Confronting Heidegger: A Critical Dialogue on Politics and Philosophy (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2020), 5

[2] Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 2014), 433.

[3] Ibid.

[4] R. T. De George, “Heidegger and the Marxists,” Studies in Soviet Thought, 5(4) (1965), 294.

[5] Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason (New York: Verso, 2021), 5-6.

[6] Ibid.,489.

[7] Ibid., 496, 494.

[8] Ibid., 495-6, 493.

[9] Georg Lukács, “Heidegger Redivivus,” in Existentialismus oder Marxismus. Retrieved through Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/archive//lukacs/works/1951/heidegger.htm

[10] Lukács, Destruction of Reason, 497.

[11] Ibid. 498.

[12] Ibid. 491.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid., 493.

[15] Ibid., 498, 497.

[16] Ibid., 498.

[17] Ibid., 498-9.

[18] Ibid., 500.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Georg Lukács, “The Crisis of Bourgeois Philosophy,” in Existentialismus oder Marxismus. Retrieved through Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/1948/bourgeois-philosophy.htm

[21] Domenico Losurdo, Heidegger and The Ideology of War: Community, Death, and the West (New York: Humanity Books, 2001), 15-40.

[22] I am happy to see my friend, Colin Bodayle, recently take this task up. I have known no other Marxist who has studied Heidegger’s work as closely as he has (and in the original German). For more, see the series titled “Why the Left Should Reject Heidegger’s Thought,” published through the Midwestern Marx Institute for Marxist Theory and Political Analysis. Part one is here: https://www.midwesternmarx.com/articles/why-the-left-should-reject-heideggers-thought-part-one-the-question-of-being-by-colin-bodayle

[23] John Bellamy Foster, “The New Irrationalism,” Monthly Review 74(9) (February 2023):

https://monthlyreview.org/2023/02/01/the-new-irrationalism/

[24] Cheng Enfu, China’s Economic Dialectic: The Original Aspiration of Reform (New York: International Publishers, 2019), 20.

[25] V. I. Lenin, “The Task of the Youth Leagues,” in Collected Works Vol. 31 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), 287.

Woke Antiracism: It's a Gospel According to John McWhorter

By Marc James Léger

Republished from Blog of Public Secrets

There are many facets to today’s woke culture wars and many ways of approaching the subject. Disciplines like sociology, psychology, anthropology and political science would make use of standard methods of analysis, as would subdisciplines and interdisciplinary clusters find something to say about it. Political tendencies treat the subject differently, depending on their principles and orientation. And the mass and social media that could be referred to as the field of communications find their own uses for social tensions. 

When a difficult subject with intractable social characteristics — like for example fascism or police violence — combines clear characteristics with dreadful implications, its analysis often calls for extra-disciplinary efforts. The Frankfurt School, for example, explained the failures of the twentieth-century workers’ movement by recourse to psychoanalysis and theology. A similar challenge has preoccupied the critics of recent trends like woke-washing and cancel culture. 

Since the rise of Black Lives Matter and MeToo, the political nihilism and eclectic materialism of the postmodern theories that had been challenged by the successes of the anti-globalization movement and movements of the squares have returned under the guise of new academic trends like intersectionality, privilege theory, decoloniality, and critical race theory. While some may argue that they never disappeared and that to think so is a form of intellectual regression, there is nevertheless the sense that the spread of postmodern ideas beyond the academy and into popular culture, and now also into public policy, is cause for concern and resistance. That is the tenor of John McWhorter’s Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. In reviewing McWhorter’s book, the question for us is: What is the political orientation of this concern and what forms of resistance are advocated? 

Before publishing Woke Racism, McWhorter had gained an online media presence by appearing alongside Glenn Loury on the YouTube Glenn Show at Bloggingheads.tv. A Columbia University linguist with a considerable list of book publications and magazine articles, McWhorter is a long-time advocate of (black) capitalism and critic of (black) radicalism. This is important to keep in mind when listening to McWhorter’s forays into what seems to be common sense about race and social aspiration. 

After a private school education and degrees at Rutgers, New York University, and Stanford, McWhorter taught at Cornell and UC Berkeley. He then worked as a fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (MI) from 2003 to 2008. Although he identifies as a liberal democrat, McWhorter’s affiliation with the MI allows us to appreciate the conservative political orientation of his diagnosis of woke antiracism. Formerly known as the International Center for Economic Policy Studies (ICEPS), the MI is a libertarian think tank that was co-founded by Sir Antony George Anson Fisher, an advocate of neoliberal free-market theories who established no fewer than 150 similar institutions around the world. These corporate-funded and right-wing think tanks, like the Atlas Network and the International Policy Network, support hundreds of similar think tanks in dozens of countries. 

ICEPS was at one time headed by former CIA Director William Joseph Casey, who in 1977 established the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, which promotes the same ideological principles that characterize McWhorter’s critique of civil rights activism: individual freedom, private initiative, personal responsibility, welfare reform, privatization, supply-side economics, free markets, and limited government. The MI was co-founded by Casey, an advocate of the Truman Doctrine and aid to the Nixon, Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations. Casey was a fixture of American Cold War policy and was implicated in the Iran-Contra affair.

The MI promotes its anti-communist propaganda through books, articles, and publications like City Journal. Neoconservative MI ideologues argue that Keynesian welfare programmes cause poverty and offer non-scientific, social Darwinist “alternatives” to social spending. They advocate monetarist economic policies, budget cuts, low corporate taxes, low wages, urban gentrification, the charterization schools, pharmaceuticals, tough-on-crime policing, fossil fuel extractivism, climate change denial, economic inequality for the sake of prosperity and social mobility, the security state, and the promotion of corporate capitalism through business schools. Affiliates of the MI have included Daniel Patrick Moynihan, William F. Buckley, Rudy Giuliani, Rupert Murdoch, Henry Kissinger, Paul Ryan, Jeb Bush and Charles Murray. 

Not that a scholar is guilty by association, but McWhorter’s colleague Glenn Loury is likewise an advocate of entrepreneurialism and individual responsibility. Loury has also been a fellow of the Manhattan Institute and has links to the Heritage Foundation, a Washington D.C. think tank founded by right-wing conservatives, anti-communists and the Christian Right. The Heritage Foundation has closer ties to the military apparatus than even the MI and has been implicated in foreign policy “defense” initiatives in Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Nicaragua, and Iraq. 

When it comes to race issues, Loury’s conservative politics advocate socioeconomic mobility through the expansion of the black middle class. Like McWhorter, he rejects the black leftist critique of bourgeois America as well as the definition of blacks as victims. For Loury, social justice does not require government reform but rather the protection of freedoms. While both of these black conservatives acknowledge that racial disparities are due to the history of racial discrimination, they argue that liberation from this legacy is a matter of individual freedom and responsibility. According to them, black politics and leadership should privilege voluntary action and individual initiative.   

As a popular commentator and public intellectual, McWhorter has repeatedly demonstrated his liberal-to-conservative values, while occasionally acknowledging the views of his left-wing colleagues. As someone who speaks as a black American man about black issues, like housing, education, poverty, and crime, it is easy to mistake McWhorter’s politics as socially responsible, along the oxymoronic lines of George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism.” By targeting mainstream black antiracists like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, and Nikole Hannah-Jones, McWhorter would seem to share some common ground with left-wing critics like Adolph Reed Jr., Cedric Johnson, Vivek Chibber, and David Walsh. But that is hardly the case and that is why it is necessary to elucidate the difference between a leftist and a conservative critique of woke antiracism. 

The Left and Right critiques of antiracism are not, as Robin D.G. Kelley has suggested, strange bedfellows. The left-wing view defines woke antiracism as a petty-bourgeois politics of the professional-managerial class. While there is an existing and growing literature on the Left that defends emancipatory universality and advances a class critique of contemporary identity politics, these views are not widespread and the political Left tends to follow the radical democratic tendency of new social movements. This makes it that much easier for McWhorter to correctly associate woke antiracism with postmodern theories.

The right-wing critique of woke antiracism makes the task of the Left more complicated than it was previously. Unfortunately, the activist and academic milieu has been reluctant to criticize woke culture wars, fearful that any such effort would serve the Right. Moreover, the “cancel culture” that has gripped postmodern progressives is at times as harrowing as the conditions of labour precarity and so creates an atmosphere of conformity. 

Compromise formations have been the modus operandi for leftists since the postwar period and it would be foolhardy to think that we can advance the cause of socialism without taking up what appears to some to be matters that are secondary to problems of political economy. However, the weakness and reluctance of a Left that has been in retreat for decades has reduced the socialist challenge to capitalism to an inoperative infrapolitics of resistance and democratic agonism. Today’s petty-bourgeois leftism considers genuine socialism to be an outmoded totalitarian ideology. The only remaining task for conservatives is to attack the countercultural attitudes of postmodern scholars and activists. 

Against the latter, McWhorter adopts conservative takes on public issues. At the risk of taking some of his views out of context, this would include the following: racism is hardwired; the elimination of racism is a utopian pipe dream; black America’s problems are not all about racism; black antiracists want whites to give them more attention and kowtow to them; the politics of respectability and responsibility are not incompatible with black pride; black agonism is self-defeating and insults blacks; black people should stop thinking of themselves as victims and should instead prepare for the job market; family dysfunction is not a distinctly black issue and poverty is a multiracial problem; the Congressional Black Caucus contributed to flawed War on Drugs policies; the emphasis on white-on-black crime ignores black-on-black crime; the election of Barack Obama and the success of people like Condoleezza Rice and Tiger Woods are rebukes to the insistence that America is defined by its racism; Obama did not disappoint black people; the Trump election was not a whitelash but was mostly due to social media having made politics more aggressive; antiracists turn black people against their country; oppositionality is a question of psychology, not politics, and exaggerates the problem of racism; because segregation is illegal, antiracists must inflate minor problems; the obsession with the concept of institutional racism is more damaging to black people than the n-word; oppositional antiracism prevents reasonable analysis of the problems of racism; antiracists betray the cause of black progress; antiracist academics are expanding the classification of racism to new areas, repeating the failed indoctrination methods and psycho-social experiments of the radical sixties and seventies; antiracism is self-congratulatory delusion; progressives should focus on helping those who need help rather than attacking the power structure; antiracists prefer a conversation about race than they do advancing practical priorities like ending the war on drugs, promoting vocational education, and ending the AIDS and obesity epidemics.

Each of these points are not necessarily countered by simple contradiction. Some of them may be correct, but for the wrong reasons. Some of them may be wrong, but for the right reasons. Others require a different set of historical, social, cultural, political, and economic considerations. Woke Racism offers more than enough, in that regard, to make the assertion that McWhorter’s conservative politics have nothing in common with the class politics of leftist universalism. 

The book begins with five assertions, each of which has its left counterpoint: 1) McWhorter’s argument that the ideology of woke antiracism is best understood as a destructive, incoherent, and seductive religion mitigates a critical explanation; 2) his goal of explaining why it is that black people are attracted to a religion that treats them as simpletons ignores the class function of antiracism (and racism) within a multiracial social space; 3) his suggestion that the woke religion harms black people avoids the analysis of which social groups it benefits — namely, the black middle class, the multiracial professional-managerial class, and, ultimately, the capitalist upper class; 4) the argument that a woke-free Democratic Party-friendly agenda can advance the cause of black Americans ignores the organic link between capitalism and the Democratic Party, a tendency that harms radical left politics more generally; 5) his suggestion of ways to lessen the grip of woke religion on public culture entails the problem that a flawed analysis cannot lead to effective solutions. 

While McWhorter wishes to reassure his readers that he is not against religion, even in its BLM incarnation, he also wishes to reassure liberals and leftists that he is not a supporter of the conservative Right. He seeks to address New York Times and NPR-type audiences that, he says, have wrongly accepted the argument that virtue signaling about racism will in some way help black people. McWhorter thus marshals Martin Luther King’s idea that character is more important than skin color against the kind of victim politics that emphasizes weakness and injury as rewards in their own right. 

While the rejection of a culture of complaint is perhaps necessary to political integrity, it has also been an alibi for those who seek to restrict benefits to those who can already afford them. That is why McWhorter’s defeatist stance abandons the task of convincing antiracists that their approach to social praxis is mistaken. On this point, McWhorter’s post-racialism complements rather than challenges the ideology of race managers like Coates and Kendi. His call to “live graciously” among antiracist power brokers should not be countered with activist outrage and indignation, or even smarmy academic irony, but with those left critiques and strategies that have sustained the communist hypothesis across and beyond the valley of postmodernism.

While leftists are no more enamored of DiAngelo-style diversity training than the black guys at Bloggingheads or the reasonable folks at The New Culture Forum, the Left does not advocate self-reliance so much as autonomy in and through solidarity. That the concept of solidarity is now also under attack from the academic Left is only one reason why radical leftists, unlike McWhorter, do not see themselves as serving their race or, as the case may be, attacking their own (white) race. For a socialist, politics is not a matter of identity.   

Building an in-group, rather than a universalist politics, so as to buttress society against the woke mob, is McWhorter’s first line of attack. The first chapter of Woke Racism is dedicated to establishing who these “woke” people are who, for example, cancel nurses for saying things like “everyone’s life matters.” What kind of people are they? Why do they get away with their righteous attacks? Should others allow them to continue? 

In some ways, these questions answer themselves. The devil is in the details insofar as the mounting of any challenge to woke antiracism must appreciate the distinct aspects of the postmodern variant of antiracism. Although nothing about political purges or encounter groups is new, McWhorter is correct to say that some of what we are witnessing did not exist only five years ago. One of the shifts, as Angela Nagle has argued, is that countercultural transgression is now also common on the Right, while the liberal Left has arguably become more censorious than it was during the politically correct eighties.

To take one example described by McWhorter, the data analyst David Shor was fired in 2020 for tweeting a study by a black Ivy League scholar which shows how violent sixties protests were more likely to deliver voters to the Republicans than nonviolent protests. The fact that Shor was not endorsing this study did not prevent his critics from arguing that it was inappropriate for a white man to make this information available. What Shor did, regardless of his intention, is nothing that someone like Chris Hedges would not also say. However, not everyone has the platform that Hedges has to defend his views from those who would demand absolute conformity to inexistent and absurd rules.

What defines the new phase of antiracism is the shift away from abolition and civil rights struggles toward the kind of “third wave antiracism” (TWA) that considers whites to be inherently complicit with structural racism. The obverse to this is the assumption that the fact of embodiment makes blacks inherently radical. McWhorter rightfully decries the zealous sort of inquisitorial micro-politics that brands even leftists as backward. Wokesters do more damage than they advance the cause of antiracism when they define mathematics and punctuality as “white” or reduce Shakespeare and Lincoln to racism. That this heightening of performative politics, of giving and taking offense, has led to denunciatory rituals is an indication of the illiberal shadow of conventional liberalism. It’s a capitalist world, after all, and that is something that most cynics can agree about. 

McWhorter is correct to say that the woke serve a purpose other than the one they say they do. However, his critique of contradictions does not point to those of labor and capital, but rather to an anthropological realism that is populated by bigots, killjoys, power-mongers, and social justice slayers. The “catechism of contradictions” that McWhorter attributes to latter-day inquisitors is as dualistic as it is metaphysical and no doubt the lodestar of a Protestant work ethic that continues to associate material wealth with salvation. 

McWhorter contends that only religion explains why the actually existing antiracist public policies are not enough for the woke. Since these missionaries are inherently self-interested, he adopts Joseph Bottum’s concept of “the Elect” to define those who consider themselves the chosen ones who can lead their people to the promised land. A moral critique is thereby devised to strategically detract from the political and class critique. This moral critique is something that liberals share with conservatives about as much as their concern for tax breaks. 

McWhorter ignores the reality that causing “beautiful trouble” is today not only a matter of social justice but also a career in the creative and knowledge industries. The main character in the TV series The Chair tells the continuing education student David Duchovny that a great deal has happened in the last 30 years, like affect theory, ecocriticism, digital humanities, new materialism, book history, and critical race theory. Indeed.

McWhorter predicts that the woke will soon have to tamper their Elect nonsense if they are not to lose more people to the Trump Right. In the meanwhile, the best defense against the Elect is knowing how to identify them and understanding the ways in which they operate like a religious sect. The woke do not know they are religious, yet they unquestioningly accept doctrine as a matter of etiquette, demanding the submission of their followers. Their clergy includes gifted orators who denounce the sin of white privilege, going the extra mile to denounce the presence of this within themselves. Testifying to privilege on Sunday is more important than what one does the rest of the week. 

Woke evangelism teaches that the discussion of racism is in and of itself a matter of revelation. Donations to the church of woke by corporate America, even in the form of expiation, like the removal of Confederate statues or The New York Times 1619 Project, or just taking a knee, are accepted as signs of the infallibility of the Elect’s view of the world. As the list of heretics who are burned at the stake increases along with the number of words that constitute blasphemy, their power increases. In practical terms, this means that unless one is actively committed to issues of race, gender and sexuality, one can be suspected of heresy.

While the Elect can be found anywhere, their presence among university faculty adds intellectual cachet to their prosecutorial might. All of this is true enough, but the reality of academic life is that it is a competitive environment in even the best of circumstances. Cornel West has been decrying the gangsterization of academic life since at least the 1980s. The difference now is that, with the disappearance of tenure and the overreliance on adjunct teachers, the pressures placed on instructors by neoliberal administrations and disrespectful students has made “the last job that makes sense anymore” into an increasingly privatized zone of conflict. 

Because it risks undermining solidarity, TWA accompanies and facilitates the managerial deskilling, commodification and marketization of education. Even those programs that specialize in TWA are affected by what they do. As McWhorter claims, or as Thomas Kuhn might have put it in more scientific terms, TWA supplants older religions. While one might think that ceci tuera cela is par for the course in an innovative knowledge sector, new knowledge is not necessarily better knowledge. The march through the institutions by radical intellectuals is undermined in this regard by the broader defeats of the Left in the postwar era, leading, as Richard Barbrook has put it, to a replacement of the struggle between socialism and capitalism with the struggle between old (left) forces and the new (left) social movements. Since TWA is by and large a postmodern phenomenon, even this matters less than the term social justice suggests. 

If religion has no place in the classroom, which is not a claim that can be fully sustained, what about race metaphysics and applied social justice postmodernism, as Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay refer to it? McWhorter claims that the woke do not play according to the rules of Enlightenment reason. However, if the classroom is to remain a place of critical inquiry, it does not serve anyone to limit what can and cannot be studied. As Slavoj Žižek says, it takes religion to make good people do bad things. McWhorter says the same about woke antiracism. For this reason, he insists that trends like critical race theory can not only be taught, but that they can also be criticized. The question for us is whether the extended metaphor of religion is fair in that regard. 

As with fascist irrationality, the definition of woke antiracism as a religion allows McWhorter to generously add that its advocates are not simply insane. Like Pluckrose and Lindsay, his rejection of TWA allows him to make a second, arguably more ideologically important move, which is to relate the “performative ideology” of the woke Elect to literary deconstruction and then extend this critique of postmodernism to the academic Left. If woke activists can claim that seeing a white man hold a black baby hurts them, or claim that cisheteropatriarchy justifies looting, then the shift from a socially reformist Left to a culturally conformist Left transforms the politics of equality into a guerrilla war against reason, objectivity, truth and accountability. This is not a politics of speaking truth to power but a will to empowerment through the relativization of truth claims through concepts like standpoint epistemology. Postmodernism’s suspicion of meta-narratives becomes the meta-narrative of suspicion.

McWhorter argues that Electism is today more powerful than the Marxist pretense to offer a comprehensive worldview. The woke are thus identified and identify themselves as the left in contemporary American politics. So long as there is no socialist around to provide some needed contrast, the woke can present themselves as the redeemers of humanity, filling the left-wing hole that was created with the political shift to neoliberalism. 

Deconstructing privilege, the woke have come to view their struggle as the activist dismantling of hegemonic structures. Unlike Jane Addams and MLK, McWhorter says, the woke do not accomplish anything much since they have given themselves the easy task of denouncing everything as racist, sexist and homophobic. He argues that buzzwords like structural and institutional racism anthropomorphize the term racism and require that people suspend their disbelief that not everything is driven by prejudice. This interesting suggestion does nothing to alter the reality that these concepts are products of the same Cold War liberalism that McWhorter ascribes to but does not analyze, better to leave his readers none the wiser about that fact. And why should he when so many of the more critical voices among academic and activist leftists do not do so themselves? 

Woke antiracism is an ideological support of neoliberal institutions that have undergone a thorough legitimation crisis. Since McWhorter defends this system, his sleight of hand on the issue of antiracism substitutes class politics for disingenuous concern about the fate of black people. While nothing about his own politics has much in common with the labor politics and anti-imperialism of the Civil Rights generation, the fact that BLM has little to do with them either allows him to pose as the defender of black interests. 

The transformation of black radicalism in the form of TWA difference politics now finds “allies” among whites who gladly engage in sycophantic rituals of humility and demand that others do the same. Although not all black people want or expect this from whites, the focus on the condition of being psychologically broken, according to McWhorter, is advanced as proof that one has not sold out to the white power structure. The loyal opposition of the woke antiracist is therefore not the Marxist Left or white liberals but right-wing whites. The Elect ultimately associate all heretics with this group, regardless of the reasons for them having fallen out of favor. 

The only group remaining that can advance the cause of blacks, McWhorter claims, are black conservatives. Along postmodern lines, today’s blackness is more a deconstructed category than it is a matter of black essentialist authenticity since blackness is not defined by the woke in terms of what it is, but rather in terms of what it is not, namely: not white and not racist. “Elect ideology,” McWhorter writes, “requires non-white people to found their sense of self on not being white, and on not liking how white people may or may not feel about them.”Like the hysteric in Freudian analysis, antiracists do not call for people to stress their individuality but their condition of secondariness. On this topic, McWhorter avoids the more heady concepts of people like Orlando Patterson, Sylvia Wynter, Frank Wilderson, Jared Sexton, and Fred Moten. 

Although someone can genuinely be said to be victimized – like George Floyd, for example, or Julian Assange – victim politics counter-defines McWhorter’s definition of individualism. One is an individual (like John McWhorter) because one is not a victim or because one refuses the status of victim on the singular basis of ascriptive racial category. However, one can be both an individual and a victim. The experience of victimization need not lead to the balkanization of the self but a social world in which the latter would be a desirable outcome, in the form of negative theology, is one in which Marxism has lost all purchase on reality and praxis. That this can be reverse engineered by the kind of zealotry that McWhorter otherwise accurately describes merely underscores the reactionary if not fascist frames of reference in which these social phenomena and discussions take place. 

This perhaps more than anything else explains why woke antiracists make “being oppressed” the essence of black identity — because victim status is a seemingly winning hand in a game that blacks cannot lose given the postulate that majority subjects cannot make similar claims. If they do, they identify with reactionary racist whites and lose the game twice over. While McWhorter’s rejection of antiracism as a performative and expressive anti-politics is shared by some leftists, the limitation of (black) politics by anyone to notions of masquerade and transgression is not something that can pose a serious challenge to capitalism.   

McWhorter is correct to say that there is nothing progressive about a performative game of victim politics that is gloomy, illogical, and pointless. However, a different game cannot be played when people insist on its unwritten rules. Changing the game means changing the rules of the game. On this point, McWhorter is no help at all. While he does not wish to insist on “the race thing” in the same way that people like Kendi do, he is self-admittedly short on solutions.

Rather than the long list of policy demands that defined the Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns, for example, McWhorter is satisfied to identity three policy proposals: 1) end the War on Drugs, 2) teach phonics to improve literacy, and 3) get past the idea that everyone needs to go to college and instead value working-class jobs. Why so few planks? Because, McWhorter says, platforming too many good ideas is more performative than actionably pragmatic in a polarized parliamentary system. Although Great Society efforts are facts of history and Democratic Party liberals like Mark Lilla advocate a return to them, McWhorter dismisses this as unsophisticated utopianism. Better to keep your sights on the realistic future rather than bygone times, he advises, adding that those gains achieved by the labor struggles he cannot bring himself to mention have not, in his estimation, had any lasting effect. Only a limited number of policy proposals that have a chance of making it through Congress and come with in-built gains should be pursued. 

One can see from this why it is that working-class jobs need to be valorized. If nothing can realistically advance the interests of the working class in corporate America at the level of wages, paid time off and holidays, affordable housing, free college tuition, universal health care, criminal justice reform, ecology, day care and elder care, etc., then conservatives do well to minimize demands for equality since any one major gain for the working class, like those civil rights laws that were not simply utopian, threaten to lead from one victory to another.

Woke Racism offers no real solutions to our problems. It is not even a good analysis of them. It just says no to woke antiracism in the same way that conservatives say no to the countercultural “mobocracy” that they consider to be little more than a nuisance.

McWhorter is right to say that opposition to racism is not by itself a politics. What would do the most to alleviate the problems that are exacerbated by racism or that lead to racism is not something that he addresses head on. Rather than the broad set of phenomena that cannot be limited to minorities or to racism, he prefers, as a black man, to think of woke antiracism as an exaggerated form of virtue signaling. If the performance of black authenticity is inoperative as the substance of left politics, it is not, as McWhorter suggests, because it lacks logic, but because it does not, by itself, provide a radical perspective on class relations. 

While there are different approaches to the identity and class debate, Žižek’s recent publication, Heaven in Disorder, offers a useful summary of the fundamental dilemma. In the entry “Class Struggle Against Classism,” Žižek mentions the political divide between progressive neoliberals like Biden — who give lip service to identity and demographics but are otherwise no different than the Republicans — and progressive populists, who mobilize constituencies on the basis of progressive policy as well as cultural competence, meaning the kind of postmodern equity that replaces universalist equality with attention to disparities based on ascriptive differences. 

An ostensibly “inside-outside” populist like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez can criticize the Biden administration while simultaneously rejecting the “class essentialism” of socialists. This criticism, Žižek argues, is the old liberal-left trick of accusing the Left of serving the Right. It is reflected in Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara’s downplaying of the January 6 coup attempt and warning to the Left that too much criticism of the Democratic Party only serves the far Right. 

The “brocialist” Left is said to privilege class over anti-racism and feminism. The question is: Does the progressive neoliberalism of Clinton, Obama, and Biden actually do anything better to advance the cause of women, blacks, and minority groups? Assuming it is accepted that global capitalism is the target of left politics, class essentialism cannot be considered to be the problem, that is to say, except as Stalinist deviation. 

Contrary to his equivocation on the Biden administration on the Bad Faith Podcast, Žižek does not accept the Democratic Party agenda as part of a strategy that, by making things worse, would eventually lead to change. He does not advocate staying “inside” the system so as to pursue a more radical “outside” politics. This does not imply that the Left must reject any and every progressive policy put forward by the Biden administration — not that there have been very many, beyond the withdrawal from Afghanistan. 

The accusation of class essentialism, Žižek says, misses its mark. Without dismissing ecological, feminist, antiracist, decolonial, and national struggles, class should be understood as the dynamic that overdetermines these interacting and multiple struggles. Against radical democratic and intersectional approaches, Žižek rejects the bell hooks idea that class is only one in a series of antagonisms. When class is reduced to one among other identities, he argues, class becomes another version of identity politics. The resulting “classism” advocates (self-)respect for workers, which Žižek says is a characteristic of both populism and fascism.

The problem with John McWhorter’s Woke Racism is that it tacitly accepts racial oppression because it defends class exploitation. Since capitalism makes use of antiracism in ways that are similar to its use of racism — by and large to divide the working class and defend the interests of the ruling plutocracy — internationalist class solidarity is the missing element of his study. Class overdetermines the relation between race and class in McWhorter’s analysis. Because he accepts capitalist class exploitation, his description of race politics has no explanatory value. 

Not only is McWhorter’s theory regressive with respect to the possibility of improving people’s lives, but it must rely on anthropological guilt structures, couched in the terms of religion, in order to make capitalism seem eternal and unchanging. In the end, it is McWhorter who is a strange bedfellow of woke antiracists since both rely on a static view of the social order. The woke libertarian’s emphasis on the original sin and eternal damnation of racism is echoed by the economic libertarian’s conservative theory of human nature and ratification of capitalist social relations as the norm and telos of social progress.   

Marc James Léger is a Marxist cultural theorist based in Montreal. He is author of Bernie Bros Gone Woke: Class, Identity, Neoliberalism (2022) and Too Black to Fail: The Obama Portraits and the Politics of Post-Representation (2022).

Clarifying and Inspiring Revolution for 130 Years: Marx's "Critique of the Gotha Programme"

By Mazda Majidi and Derek Ford

Republished from Liberation School.

Karl Marx never intended to spell out what the communist future would look like or how we would get there. His writing that comes closest to doing this is a short letter he wrote in 1875, given the title Critique of the Gotha Programme. Published 130 years ago—in 1891—by Friedrich Engels, Marx’s lifelong collaborator and comrade, the short and incisive text served to clarify and inspire the working-class struggle for power through a critique of the draft version of the Gotha Programme, a program eventually adopted with a few revisions at the First Congress of the Social Democratic Party of Germany in the city of Gotha in 1875. The program brought together the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany and the General Association of German Workers. The latter was founded by Ferdinand Lassalle, whose ideas strongly influenced the new party’s platform.

Lassalle and Marx became friends and comrades through their participation in the 1848 democratic revolutions throughout Europe. Marx first organized for the revolution in Brussels but was banished to Germany, where Lassalle lived, and where Marx continued to agitate and organize. Lassalle was imprisoned for inciting violence and served six months in prison. Years later, in 1864, when he was only 39, having been deprived of the chance to marry a woman he loved, Lassalle challenged the man to whom the woman’s father married her, a Romanian prince, to a duel. Lassalle was killed.

In his preface to the 1888 English edition of The Communist Manifesto, Engels wrote in a footnote that “Lassalle personally, to us, always acknowledged himself to be a disciple of Marx” who “stood on the ground of the Manifesto,” although in the last two years of his life his “public agitation… did not go beyond demanding cooperative workshops supported by state credit” [1].

The Gotha Programme was a compromise between the followers of Lassalle and Marx. Marx wrote his critique in preparation for the Congress, and it circulated widely amongst Party members, especially those coming from the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany. Marx addressed it to his allies in an effort to convince them not to compromise with the reformist ideas of Lassalle. In 1875, Engels wrote a letter to August Bebel, who for most of his life was a Marxist. Engels wrote that he and Marx were only aware of the unification efforts through public papers and that the “programme has certainly astonished us not a little” [2].

Engels published The Critique of the Gotha Programme in 1891, after Marx’s death and the same year the Erfurt Programme replaced the Gotha Programme. Although the Erfurt Programme was more revolutionary in content than the earlier one, the Party apparatus was still dominated by what we’d now refer to as social democrats and adherents to other non-revolutionary variants of socialism.

It is important to read the text for what it was: a critique, a commentary written in conversation with the socialist movement at a certain juncture in history. At the same time, the short Critique (of an even shorter program itself) has a long legacy with lasting impacts on the world socialist and then communist movements. Given the attention Lenin gave to the text and to Marx and Engels’ letters about it in his State and Revolution, we can see that the Critique provided some theoretical groundwork for the revolutionary Marxism of the Third International to split with the reformism and national chauvinism of the Second International [3].

Background of the Critique: Marx’s analysis of capitalism, the state, and revolution

After the 1848 revolutions some—or actually most—people in the movement and in the Communist League believed there would be an immediate resurgence of struggle after the counterrevolution prevailed. Marx and Engels disagreed. They forecast—correctly—that a reactionary period was settling in for some time. As a result, they believed that the immediate tasks of the communist movement should emphasize revolutionary education and theory. Marx and Engels were able to convince the Communist League’s branch in London of their conviction, although the League would dissolve in 1852.

In accordance with the new tasks for the new period, Marx turned his attention to the study of political economy, a study in which he had not systematically engaged yet. This work was ironically facilitated after the German authorities put Marx on trial several times, in each of which he was acquitted. They kicked him out of Germany in 1849. Marx first tried going back to Paris, but the authorities said he was too dangerous. So Marx ended up in London, where he spent the rest of his life.

Marx’s studies of political economy culminated in the 1867 publication of the first volume of Capital–Marx’s most developed analysis of capitalist production–where he articulated the theory of value and surplus value. Marx was working on other volumes at the time, although the workers’ movement forced him to turn his attention elsewhere. Particularly relevant to the Critique was the experience of the Paris Commune. His study of the Commune was published in 1871 as The Civil War in France, and was one of Marx’s most developed analyses of the state and the revolutionary process.

The essence of Marx’s critique

The real dynamics of capitalism and the role of the state in the revolutionary struggle for communism are at the heart of Marx and Engels’ criticisms. At the same time, it’s important to remember that Marx was writing to comrades in the German Party (not for the public) and it was a highly contextual intervention. The essence of the Critique revolves around the program’s interrelated misconceptions of 1) labor, classes, and wages; 2) the state’s role in the emancipation of the working class; and 3) the revolutionary transition from capitalism to communism. In this section, we highlight some of the most relevant insights that emerge from the text.

The program did not comply with Marx’s theory of value [4]. The draft and final version of the Gotha Programme demanded the “equitable distribution” of the “total labour” of society. There’s no acknowledgement of the fact that what is produced has to be divided between replacing “the means of production used up,” investments in expanding productive capacities, and the creation of a reserve of surpluses for an “insurance fund.” Moreover, society’s products have to fund administration, common “needs, such as schools, health services,” as well as “those unable to work” [5]. The demand is thus utopian in that it supposes a communist society based “on its own foundations” rather than on the actual foundations on which it emerges: capitalism [6].

Rather than “equal distribution” there will, under socialism–the first stage of communism–be unequal distribution because socialism inherits inequalities from capitalism that can’t be wished away. In the first stage of communism–socialism, material goods are not distributed evenly. There is still the distinction between the wages of skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled labor. Only “in a higher phase of communist society” can “society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” [7]!

The Program proclaimed that all classes besides the working class “are only one reactionary mass” and ignored the existence of other classes, such as landlords, the self-employed, peasants, and the middle classes [8]. With the continued concentration of capital, these classes are largely proletarianized, giving them a revolutionary potential dismissed in the Gotha Programme. At the same time, the program declared that its utopian demands would be achieved by the “democratic control” of “state aid,” which would establish “the free basis of the state” [9]. This free basis includes a number of democratic demands like universal suffrage, free and compulsory schooling, and a progressive income tax.

Marx asks: “Free state – What is this” [10]? The state isn’t free-floating or neutral, but is rooted in the capitalist mode of production. The experience of the Paris Commune, in particular, showed that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes” [11]. Instead, the struggle for communism entails a “period of revolutionary transformation,” to which “there corresponds… also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat” [12]. Marx insists on the necessary struggle for the working and oppressed to conquer state power to repress the former ruling classes.

Although “the free basis of the state” in the draft was replaced with “the state,” the essence remained unchanged because the state was seen as a neutral vehicle to be used to replace capitalism with socialism.

Later developments and political consequences of Marx’s critique

Because this was a founding program based on principles rather than strategies, Marx and Engels worried about its impact on the Party and the workers’ movement as a whole. In their correspondence on the unification congress, both insisted that “every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes” [13]. What matters more than what the Party says is what the Party does. For example, even though the final program addressed Marx’s criticism of the implicit nationalism in the draft–which didn’t include “a word… about the international functions of the German working class!”–the Party’s later support for World War I would make their chauvinism clear [14].

The critique was a key resource for Lenin’s study and publication of The State and Revolution. Lenin expanded on the transition between the first and second stages of communism and justified the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Lenin writes that “the first phase of communism cannot yet produce justice and equality; differences, and unjust differences, in wealth will still exist, but the exploitation of man will have become impossible” [15]. This, Lenin writes, guards against idealism insofar as “we must not think that having overthrown capitalism people will at once learn to work for society without any rules of law. Besides, the abolition of capitalism does not immediately create the economic prerequisites for such a change” [16]. The dictatorship of the proletariat is essential in consolidating this phase and guiding society towards the next phase, in which there’s “no need for society, in distributing the products, to regulate the quantity to be received by each; each will take freely ‘according to his needs’” [17].

Importantly, the construction of communist society is a possibility without guarantees. “By what stages, by means of what practical measures humanity will proceed to this supreme aim,” Lenin insists, “we do not and cannot know” [18].

Marx’s emphasis on the importance of the proletarian dictatorship in the transition between capitalism and communism in the Critique is echoed in W.E.B. Du Bois’ classic, Black Reconstruction in America. Du Bois initially titled one chapter, “the dictatorship of the Black proletariat in South Carolina.” In a 1934 letter to his publisher (in which he admits he only has a few of Lenin’s works), Du Bois defends the title in response to objections from others, noting that “in 1867, there were distinct evidences of a determination on the part of the [B]lack laborers to tax property and administer the state primarily for the benefit of labor.” The title was important, he insisted, because it “revolutionizes our attitude toward Reconstruction” [19].

While the title was eventually changed to “the Black proletariat in South Carolina,” the book still speaks of the struggle between the dictatorship of capital and labor. In the aftermath of the Civil War, Du Bois laments how the reunited U.S. “delivered the lands into the hands of an organized monarchy of finance while it overthrew the attempt at a dictatorship of labor in the South” [20]. In chapter 14 of the book, Du Bois argues that “in the South universal suffrage could not function without personal freedom, land and education, and until these institutions were real and effective, only a benevolent dictatorship in the ultimate interests of labor, Black and white, could establish democracy” [21]. For Du Bois, as for Marx, reconstruction was a struggle over state power, over how and in whose interests the state would be used. In the vision of united labor’s dictatorship, “unjust differences” would still exist, and the dictatorship was necessary for creating the conditions for real equality.

Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme was an internal response to debates and figures that belong to a different era, and Marx didn’t write it as a blueprint or roadmap for communism. Yet it remains a rich resource for our own struggles and agitation, for winning workers over to Marxism rather than liberalism, and for clarifying the socialist program in the U.S. Over the last 130 years, the struggle has persisted between reformists, who falsely claim that the capitalist state can be adjusted to serve the interests of the working class, and revolutionary communists, who insist that fundamental change is only possible when the working class smashes the state apparatus of the bourgeoisie and constructs its own workers’ state through the dictatorship of the proletariat.

References

[1] Engels, Friedrich. (1888/1967). “Preface to the German edition of 1883,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,The communist manifesto(New York: Penguin), 200.
[2] Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. (1891/1966). “Appendix I: From the correspondence of Marx and Engels concerning the Gotha Programme,” in Karl Marx,Critique of the Gotha Programme, ed. C.P. Dutt (New York: International Publishers), 27.
[3] For the historical impact of The state and revolution, see Becker, Brian. (2018). “How “The state and revolution” changed history.”Liberation School, September 30. Availablehere.
[4] See Ford, Derek and Mazda Majidi. (2021). “Surplus value is the class struggle: An introduction,” Liberation School, March 30. Availablehere; and Majidi, Mazda. (2021). “Relative surplus value: The class struggle intensifies.”Liberation School, 18 August. Availablehere.
[5] Marx, Karl. (1891/1966).Critique of The Gotha Programme, ed. C.P. Pruitt (New York: International Publishers), 7.
[6] Ibid., 8.
[7] Ibid., 10
[8] “Programme of the German Workers’ Party: Draft,” inCritique of the Gotha Programme, 89.
[9] Ibid., 90.
[10] Marx,Critique of the Gotha Programme, 17.
[11] Marx, Karl. (1871/1966).The civil war in France(Peking: Foreign Languages Press), 64.
[12] Marx,Critique of the Gotha Programme, 18.
[13] Marx and Engels, “Appendix I,” 34.
[14] Marx,Critique of the Gotha Programme, 13.
[15] Lenin, V.I. (1918/1964). “The state and revolution,” inLenin: Collected works (vol. 25): June-September 1917, ed. S. Apresyan and J. Riordan (Moscow: Progress Publishers), 471.
[16] Ibid., 472.
[17] Ibid., 474.
[18] Ibid., 477.
[19] Du Bois, W.E.B. (1934). “Letter from W.E.B. Du Bois to Ben Stolberg, October 1.” W.E.B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries,1, 2.
[20] Du Bois, W.E.B. (1935). Black reconstruction in America: An essay toward a history of the part which Black folk played in the attempt to reconstruct democracy in America, 1860-1880(New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company), 580.
[21] Ibid., 585.

A Marxist Analysis and Critique of "Don't Look Up"

By Carlos Garrido

​Capitalism is a form of life riddled with social antagonisms. Every Marxist knows this well. Most have been using the effects these antagonisms produce to predict the fall of capitalism for the last century and a half. However, like the weebles wobble toys from the early 2000s, these contradictions have wobbled capitalism, but have yet (in the West at least), made it fall. There are many causes which one could point at as the source of capitalism’s ability to pull its head out when its internal contradictions have sunk it the deepest. In the West, one of the central reasons one must point to is the efficiency with which the ideological apparatuses have been able to consistently reproduce mass acquiescence, even in the times when crisis have been the most intensified.

The film industry has been one of the key modes through which this acquiescence has been perpetuated. Throughout the last century Hollywood has been at the forefront of perpetuating the ideals, values, and beliefs of bourgeois society to the working masses. However, the form through which this ideological containment takes place isn’t always the same – not all movies are in-your-face about their support for imperialism, capitalism, consumerism, etc. Some take up the role of perpetuating bourgeois ideology through a critique of the blatant irrationalities encountered in our current form of life. These deceptive ones, which through criticism perpetuate in subtle and implicit ways the ideology of capital, play the most important role in the moments where capitalism is in crisis and discontent is assured to spread amongst the working masses.

In an age when American capitalism is facing an unprecedented crisis which combines the contradictions of capitalism at home (workers strikes and en masse quitting, barbaric income inequality, homelessness, child hunger, a large chunk of the population drowning in debts of various forms – medical, school, etc.), with an empire in decline (rising global influence of China, rise of new Latin American socialist wave, etc.), and a global pandemic (whose fumble has led to 900 thousand deaths in our country); it is not surprising that we now encounter numerous ‘anti-capitalist’ movies and shows. In light of this, we wish to discuss the limits of this emerging ‘anti-capitalist’ media and how they may, in various implicit and perhaps unconscious ways, perpetuate mass acquiescence to a moribund capitalism. To do this, we will focus on the Christmas Eve released film “Don’t Look Up”.

Synopsis of the Film

​“Don’t Look Up”, a film co-written by the Bernie Sanders senior advisor and speech writer, David Sirota, brings together numerous household name A-listers like Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Cate Blanchett, Meryl Streep, Jonah Hill, Matthew Perry, Ariana Grande and Tyler Perry to depict an existential comet crisis facing humanity within six months of its discovery. An astronomy professor (DiCaprio) and one of his PhD candidates (Lawrence) find a comet twice the size of the one that made the dinosaurs extinct heading right towards earth. Its impact, calculated on finding to be within six months and 14 days, is suggested to have the capacity to end all life on earth.

Upon taking this information to the president (Streep), the pair finds an administration skeptical and indifferent to their findings and concludes their day-delayed meeting by telling them they will “sit tight and assess.” The administration’s inactivity leads them to leak the finding to the media, an action which culminates in a TV appearance for a cable news network. The story, however, did not get any traction. The media pundits (Tyler Perry and Blanchett) leave the story for last and mock the seriousness with which the story is depicted; this leads Lawrence to blow up and quickly turn into a meme.

After the failed leak, which culminated in the Lawrence meme and the general public’s appreciation of DiCaprio as an AILF (Astronomer I’d Like to F), the crisis finally receives some attention by the administration when it becomes politically favorable for them to distract from a recent scandal which had been dropping the president’s polling numbers. In this apparently optimistic moment, the administration devices a plan to deviate the direction of the comet and save the planet.

As the plan was in play, and the shuttles en route, the whole thing gets shut down when the third richest man in the world (Mark Rylance), tech capitalist and prime funder for the president’s campaign, finds the comet contains hundreds of trillions of dollars in resources which are becoming limited on earth.

Under the banner of ending hunger and other noble claims, the focus shifts from rerouting the comet to mining it for profit. DiCaprio, who was the only one of the original discoverers who was allowed in the meeting concerning the change in strategy, is offered a position in the president’s administration to legitimize and promote the new plan as safe and beneficial for the public good. This leads to a splinter between Lawrence, who wanted to fight against this, and DiCaprio, who felt that him being inside could assure the necessary overwatch so that things wouldn’t get out of control. This splinter is removed when DiCaprio notices none of the plans are peer-reviewed and that every scientist who has questioned this has been removed from their position.

After privatizing decisions over the comet to include only the American tech capitalist and the American government, we find out that China, Russia, and India collaborated on their own project to deviate the route of the comet. This project, to the detriment of humanity, was sabotaged by a bombing of their station. Although not explicitly said, it is implied that this bombing was an action from the US to protect its risky, but profitable plans for dealing with the comet.

After a mass “Just Look Up” movement to counter comet skepticism and the profit-driven concerns of dealing with this planet-killing force ultimately fails, the mining options comes forth as the only plan available for dealing with the comet. As scientifically expected, this plan fails to control the comet in the ways it predicted doing so, and ultimately, all life on earth is lost. This excludes 2000 of the tech capitalist’s friends (including the president) who had a plan B of leaving the planet until a humanly habitable one was found. This quest took over 20 thousand years in which the passengers’ lives were artificially sustained until, as the movies’ epilogue shows, they were able to find a new planet and exit the shuttle, in an Adam and Eve manner, into their new garden.

The Film's Anti-Capitalism

​“Don’t Look Up” does a great job at depicting how a profit driven system is incapable of dealing with existential crisis threatening human and planetary life. The movie, originally conceived as a metaphor for the incoming intensification of the climate crisis, depicts how politicians are bound to political games and scandal maneuvering to keep their poll numbers high and their donors happy. It depicts, further, how the media works as a sheer lapdog to those in power, whose central role is to keep the masses entertained in celebrity gossip and ignorant of the non-fun issues which concern human life. Additionally, it depicts how these conditions (which arise when the state and its institutions are merely the tools of the owners of capital) create fertile grounds for erroneous and dangerous forms of anti-science skepticism – such as the Don’t Look Up crowd in the movie, or the climate change (or covid) deniers in real life.

Besides its critique of the influence of money in politics and the media, “Don’t Look Up” also does a great job at depicting how actions which are profitable but endanger life (such as the mining of the comet), require an ethical gloss to conceal the real reasons for which the actions are taken. The public must be blinded from the profit-driven and capitalist-controlled reasons for the new plan to mine the comet. These actions are masked by the seemingly benevolent aims of curing hunger, poverty, and providing jobs, all which supposedly would come with the mining of the comet. The fact that all of these could be done with the existing resources, while preventing the highly risky (and ultimately failed) strategy of the comet mining plan, is also concealed.

This is an important critique of how profit driven policies are legitimized in the US, both at home and abroad. The public can never know the real reasons for the US’s involvement in the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, China, etc. The capitalist, corporate-profit driven nature of these expeditions must be concealed by a benevolent veil of ‘spreading democracy’ or ‘fighting human rights abuses’. Whatever fabrications and atrocity propaganda is needed to help manufacture consent for these actions will be duly provided. Actions which benefit a small percentage of people, namely – major capitalists, their media pundits, and political puppets, are necessarily sold as serving the ‘common good’. Those who would have benefited from the mining of the comet were not those (poor and working people) tokenized to formally justify a policy which led to the death of life on the planet.

The movie also shows how attempts to work within the existing structures of power are usually futile. DiCaprio’s position in the president’s administration gave him no power to change the course of events and the life-threating route of the administration’s plans. Ultimately, DiCaprio, along with Lawrence, find a beyond-institutional form of resisting as the best route to fight back. Instead of focusing on infiltrating individuals into the ruling circles, they realize only a mass movement (Just Look Up), can bring about change. This, ultimately, shifts the agent of progressive change from high profiled benevolent individuals, towards active masses as the protagonists of their own future.

Although this ultimate failure of the mass movement might lead socialists to claim that the movie, although critical of capitalism, in depicting the end of the world before the end of capitalism, ultimately enforces what Mark Fisher called ‘capitalist realism’, this examination would be superficial. It is true that the movie depicts an apocalyptic end of planetary life and not an end to the forms of social intercourse whose mismanagement of the crisis led to the dreadful apocalyptic end. However, in comparison to a movie like “The Platform” or a show like “Squid Game” – both of which are critical of capitalism while enforcing a form of ‘capitalist realism’ – “Don’t Look Up” is much closer to envisioning an alternative than either of the former two. This is not because it is able to draw up a post-capitalist world, but because it depicts a form of struggle which is aimed at a world in which the irrationalities of the existing order are eliminated.

It is in collective struggle in which a new world begins to be crafted. In “The Platform” and “Squid Game”, the struggles of the protagonists are not directed against the existing order, but against people who, like them, are just trying to survive. In “Don’t Look Up”, on the other hand, survival is not a matter of individuals sinking others to stay alive, but of individuals coming together to collectively struggle for a form of life which prioritizes people and planet over profit. In “Don’t Look Up” capitalist realism is transcended in a mass struggle which, although ultimately failing, aims at a world which resolves the antagonisms which allow the existing form of life to risk planetary death if it means the enrichment of a few. The film is not just critical, in the various scenes of the Just Look Up movement, shallow as some of them may be, the seeds of envisioning a new form of life are present. If anything, the film suggests that we ought not to delay these collective efforts by convincing ourselves that those in power will ‘fix’ or ‘manage’ things according to the common good. To survive we must take things into our own hands, and like the comet in the film, with climate change the clock is also ticking.

Limitations in the Film's Anti-Capitalism

​However, there are certain limitations in the film’s anti-capitalism that ought to be noted. These center primarily around the usage of the comet as a metaphor for climate change. Although metaphors are not meant to be direct comparisons, the comparison effective in a metaphor should share the essence (nature or central characteristics) of that which it is a metaphor of. When we compare the comet crisis in the film to the climate crisis we face in the real world, we find the two crisis have fundamentally different natures - one is a result of an inevitable cosmic event humans had no control over (the comet), and the other is the result of the last 70 years of fossil capitalism (climate change).

The gap between the metaphor and a systematic understanding of climate change is far too wide; either 1) the comet is not a metaphor for climate change, 2) the movie writers do not have a systematic understanding of climate change, 3) the movie writers do have a systematic understanding of climate change but wish to limit their blame of capitalism to a question of management, and not blame it as the source of the climate crisis itself.

Option number 1 fails because the writers have been very explicit about the fact that the comet is a metaphor for climate change. The covid crisis and its effects, although much more aligned to the comet metaphor (in the sense that unlike climate change, there is a greater level of arbitrariness with covid’s emergence in relation to human activity), arises a year or so after the original planning for the movie. Therefore, it would be more honest to consider climate change the counterpart of the comet metaphor, and to thereby judge it on its ability to metaphorically express the depth and complexity of climate change as its counterpart.

Having established climate change as the comet metaphor’s counterpart, we must now ask the critical question - what is the condition for the possibility of the current climate crisis? That is, what does the climate crisis presuppose? The answer is simple, a system which prioritizes the expansion of capital, and specifically since WW2 fossil fuel-based capital, over human and non-human planetary life.

The capitalist form of life is at the root of the climate crisis; the climate crisis is not the consequence of a contingent cosmic event, but of the social relations the mass of humanity has been coerced and/or convinced to participate in over the last century. In the posing of the crisis there is a fundamental discrepancy between the film’s comet and climate change; the missing piece corresponding to the gulf between the comet metaphor and its counterpart is a critical and systematic understanding of capitalism as the source of climate change.

But is the movie not successful in critiquing capitalism and it’s failed management of the crisis? Yes, but when it fails to understand that the crisis capitalism fails to manage is a self-created crisis, the understanding of the issue, and subsequently, the critique of capitalism, is castrated - the root is ignored, the focus is limited to the stem and leaves.

We must not forget the social democratic positioning of the writers behind the film, for the shortcomings of the film are but the cinematic reflection of the shortcomings of social democracy. In both case the root is always ignored. In the movie, the comet metaphor necessarily limits the critique of the existing order to one of management, and in so doing, leaves the role the existing order played in creating the problem unexamined. In the case of social democrats, the focus is always on the realm of distribution, the relations of production which lay at the root of the problem of distribution (observed by them as a problem of income inequality) is also left unobserved. Therefore, it seems like option 2, grounded on an ignorance of the systematic nature of the issue at hand, applies more fittingly to the limitation in the comet metaphor since ignorance of the systemic root of issues is a staple of social democracy’s ‘anti-capitalism’.

However, the result of this is that the adjustment, the ‘fix’, always stems out of a realm whose ground is left unexamined. For instance, the social democrats’ solutions to the problems posed by the antagonisms in capitalism usually revolve around taxation and creating more equitable institutions for distributing the taxed loot accumulated by Western capitalists through their imperialist expropriation of foreign lands and their exploitation of foreign and national working masses.

The limitations of the movie’s anti-capitalism, then, are simply the reflected limitations of social democracy. The failure of the comet metaphor in accurately depicting the nature of its counterpart crisis (climate change), stems from the lack of a critical, dialectical materialist approach to examining the world. In this failure, the movie, like social democracy, leaves itself open to being the sort of anti-capitalism that is friendly to capitalism; an anti-capitalism which poses the problem of capitalism as one of management, and not as a problem grounded in the asymmetric and exploitative social relations at the core of the system.

The film is, in terms of critique, a step forward from the capitalist ‘realist’ anti-capitalist media we have seen over the last few years. However, it fails to go down deep enough to grasp the root of the issue, and this failure leaves it open to playing the historical role of social democracy – that is, a role which ultimately sides with, and serves in moments of crisis, capital and imperialism.

Under certain historical and geographical circumstances this ‘anti-capitalist’ limitation found in social democracy (and in the film), does not represent an antagonistic contradiction to those striving for socialism. Under these circumstances, alliances and coalitions can be made. At other times these limitations cut the legs of the socialist movement and breed factionalism and unhealthy forms of class collaborationism. In these circumstances, where an irreconcilable antagonism between the two exists, socialists should refrain from alliances and coalitions.

Today the socialist movement in the US finds itself somewhere in between. The film, as the cinematic expression of the ambiguity of social democracy, ought to be appreciated in its progressive and anti-capitalist aspects, but also critiqued in the limitations present in these.

​Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American graduate student and instructor in philosophy at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. His research focuses include Marxism, Hegel, and early 19th century American socialism. His academic work has appeared in Critical Sociology, The Journal of American Socialist Studies, and Peace, Land, and Bread. Along with various editors from The Journal of American Socialist Studies, Carlos is currently working on a serial anthology of American socialism. His popular theoretical and political work has appeared in Monthly Review Online, CovertAction Magazine, The International Magazine, The Marx-Engels Institute of Peru, Countercurrents, Janata Weekly, Hampton Institute, Orinoco Tribune, Workers Today, Delinking, Electronic Anarchy, Friends of Socialist China, and in Midwestern Marx, which he co-founded and where he serves as an editorial board member. As a political analyst with a focus on Latin America (esp. Cuba) he has been interviewed by Russia Today and has appeared in dozens of radio interviews in the US and around the world.

Populate the Internationalist Movement: An Anti-imperialist Critique of Malthus and Neo-Malthusianism

[Image: Ints Vikmanis / shutterstock]

By Michael Thomas Kelly

The 2018 documentary Germans in Namibia opens with an interview in which a wealthy, German-descended landowner blames the economic plight of poor Namibians on overpopulation and unchecked breeding. Malthusian “overpopulation” remains a powerful and frequently used shorthand to deflect from the ongoing legacies of genocide, colonialism, and neo-colonialism. In this paper, I argue that Malthus’ thesis on natural scarcity was primarily a normative argument against social welfare and economic equality. Malthus was wrong, then, in an ethical and political sense in that he provides an ideological framework for population control policies that imperialism and racial capitalism pursue by design – and broadly use to cause harm and maintain systems of oppression. I begin by briefly summarizing Malthus’ original thesis and clarifying how Malthus made a political, not predictive, argument against social equality. I show how neo-Malthusianism works as an ideological justification for how capitalism and imperialism generate surplus populations and maintain inequality – highlighting racial, gender, and spatial components. Drawing from neo-Malthusianism’s critics, I present a different theory of population across geographical space based on anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism.

In his 1798 Essay on Population, Thomas Malthus put forward a vision of natural scarcity, inevitable class division, and checks on exponential rises in population. Malthus asserted that finite resources and unchecked population growth through procreation – “fixed laws of our nature” (Malthus 1798: 5) – inevitably come into conflict. Barnet and Morse (1963: 52) summarize: “The limits of nature constitute scarcity. The dynamic tendency of population to press continually to the borders of subsistence is the driving force.” The conflict between natural resource scarcity and natural population growth, Malthus argued, must necessarily fall on the poorest members of society: “no possible form of society could prevent the almost constant action of misery upon a great part of mankind, if in a state of inequality, and upon all, if all were equal” (Malthus 1798, 11). Malthus also identified “positive checks” on population growth: “Hunger and famine, infanticide and premature death, war and disease” (Kallis 2019, 14).

Critics of Malthus and his original writings explain how he was consciously making a political intervention against revolutionary or redistributive demands. According to Kallis (2019), Malthus had issued “a rebuttal of revolutionary aspirations” (9) and argued that “revolutionaries would cause more harm than good. Malthus wanted to see the abolition of the Poor Laws—a proto-welfare system that provided free food in the parishes” (12). Malthus’s thesis “was not meant as a prediction” (Kallis 2019: 22) but an argument “for the impossibility of a classless society” (23). Similarly, Harvey (1974: 258) characterizes Malthus’ essay “as a political tract against the utopian socialist-anarchism of Godwin and Condorcet and as an antidote to the hopes for social progress aroused by the French Revolution.” Aside from any logical consistency or merit, the essay’s “class character” (Harvey 1974: 259) is what reveals the political intention and function behind the essay and the ideologies it set forth.

More recent proponents of neo-Malthusianism use Malthus’ ideological groundwork to defend private property, uneven development, and structural racism in the context of climate change. For example, Malthus’ Essay presaged arguments that bourgeois economists later made rejecting “redistribution and welfare in the name of free markets” (Kallis 2019: 19). According to Harvey (1974: 262), “Malthus was, in principle, a defender of private property… Private property arrangements inevitably mean an uneven distribution of income, wealth, and the means of production in society.” Both Kallis (2019) and Ojeda, Sasser, and Lunstrum (2020) highlight the popularity – and danger – of natural limits arguments in modern environmental circles. Kallis (2019: 44-45) describes how some 1970s environmental movements “inherited the logic of Malthus,” basing arguments on the fear and supposed impossibility of infinite growth on a finite planet. More recently, Ojeda, Sasser, and Lunstrum (2020: 319) explain: “Influential Western leaders and trend-setters have… argued that climate change can be mitigated by addressing overpopulation.” Highlighting “sharp, uneven geographies,” arguments for “natural scarcity… misdiagnose the causes of climate change, often placing blame on marginalized populations” while doing “little to address the root of the problem” (Ojeda, Sasser, and Lunstrum 2020, 317-318).

Capitalism has a specific use for population – within structurally determined class and social relations – quite apart from the natural limits Malthus invoked to justify inequality. Unlike Malthus, whose theory of population was rooted in human nature and natural scarcity, Marx posited a “law of population peculiar to the capitalist mode of production” (Harvey 1974, 268). Marx ([1867] 1993: 782-793) argued that an industrial reserve army of labor, or relative surplus population, is necessary under capitalism to discipline the employed working-class and absorb the expansions or contractions of the capitalist market. Relative surplus population is inherent to capitalism and produces poverty and guaranteed unemployment by design: “Marx does not talk about a population problem but a poverty and human exploitation problem. He replaces Malthus’ concept of overpopulation by the concept of a relative surplus population” (Harvey 1974, 269). Ojeda, Sasser, and Lunstrum (2020: 324-325) highlight a contemporary example in which the expansion of palm oil plantations in Colombia had uneven spatial and gendered effects on local populations: “the entry of mitigation projects in the region has resulted in more gender inequality, more dependency of women towards their male partners and their circumscription to domestic spaces” (325). In this case, “natural limits” and “overpopulation” offer no accurate or worthwhile explanation. Instead, this concrete example is better understood as one in which a new plantation market absorbed male wage workers, caused gendered harm in a Global South nation, and showed the limits of climate mitigation in a system in which private property and ownership structures remain intact.

Imperialism and neo-colonialism similarly drive predictable, uneven effects on populations globally, which population control policies and discourses serve to obscure. Harvey (1974: 274) explains: “The overpopulation argument is easily used as a part of an elaborate apologetic through which class, ethnic, or (neo-) colonial repression may be justified.” For example, “several years after Hurricane Katrina, former Louisiana Representative John LaBruzzo… proposed paying people who received state welfare assistance $1,000 to undergo surgical sterilization” (Ojeda, Sasser, and Lunstrum 2020, 320). Also, the US justifies its military presence in Africa through tropes of “overly-reproductive, resource-degrading women” and “the perceived urgency of preemptively addressing climate conflict” (Ojeda, Sasser, and Lunstrum 2020, 321). In both cases, the political function of Malthusianism – that overpopulation will collide with natural resource scarcity – obscures the actual underlying power dynamics. The increased intensity of storms and drought in desert regions are attributable to industrial capital’s emissions of CO2 and play out unevenly across existing racial segregation in the US and neo-colonial underdevelopment in Africa (Rodney [1972] 2018). Global capitalism drives climate apartheid and racialized, gendered poverty, which Malthusians wrongly ascribe to unchecked population and natural limits.

Critiques of Malthus and neo-Malthusianism offer pathways for a different theory of population rooted in principles of anti-imperialism and internationalism. Kallis (2019: 98) locates the following example in terms of limits, but perhaps it is better understood as a struggle over Indigenous sovereignty: “it is the… marginalized who draw limits to stop others from encroaching on their space; think of a community that prevents a multinational corporation from logging its sacred forest.” Relatedly, Ojeda, Sasser, and Lunstrum (2020: 324) explain the gendered aspects of “‘planetary care work’ (Rocheleau 2015), as local communities are largely made responsible for containing and reversing the effects of climate change.” In both cases, ongoing, Indigenous-led efforts to restore relations of stewardship with the world’s land and biodiversity – and overturn existing private property relations and US policy abroad – could better serve oppressed populations. Citing Marx, and critiquing Malthus’ separation of humans and nature, Harvey (1974: 267) suggests that humans can achieve a “unity with nature.” In fact, the “emergence of an abstract nature” in some environmentalist rhetoric implies “the invisibilization of alternative productions of nature and myriad forms of resistance… including localized and feminized experiences of climate change from impoverished and racialized communities in the global south” (Ojeda, Sasser, and Lunstrum 2020, 325). Moving past “human” versus “nature” permits us the necessary nuances, contradictions, and local differences within both non-universal categories of human and nature. Lastly, Kallis (2019: 98) again posits the following demands in terms of limits – minimum wage increase, progressive taxation, working-day reduction – but these are also demands to reduce capital’s essential drive to accumulate, seek profit, and expand. Furthermore, these demands can be strengthened and better contextualized when one considers the working-class’ global dimensions and how relative surplus populations are created and used across various geographical, international, and gendered scales.

Debates over theories of population have important implications for future research and political organizing. Environmental movements can recognize Malthusian arguments as part of a political project against redistribution and revolutionary socialism. Scholars and activists can also grasp how guaranteed unemployment, population control, and ecological damage are attributable to structural, changeable systems of racial capitalism, imperialism, and white supremacy – not natural laws. On that principle, organizers can work to build an internationalist movement that understands population, production, and scarcity as socially produced categories that can be placed under forms of collective ownership.

References

Barnett, H.J. and Morse, C. (1963). Scarcity and growth: The economics of natural resource availability. Washington, D.C.: Resources for the Future, 51-71.

Harvey, D. (1974). Population, resources, and the ideology of science. Economic Geography, 50(3), 256-277.

Kallis, G. (2019). Limits: Why Malthus was wrong and why environmentalists should care. Stanford, C.A.: Stanford University Press.

Malthus, T. (1798). An essay on the principle of population. London: J. Johnson, in St. Paul’s Church-Yard.

Marx, K. ([1867] 1993). Capitalism Volume 1. London: Penguin.

Ojeda, D., Sasser, J., and Lunstrum, E. (2020). Malthus’s specter and the Anthropocene. Gender Place and Culture, 27(3), 316-332.

Redfish Media. (2018). Germans in Namibia. Redfish Media. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0U2g5K8JaJk

Rodney, W. ([1972] 2018). How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. London, U.K.: Verso.

A Critique of Western Marxism's Purity Fetish

By Carlos Garrido

Republished from Midwestern Marx.

Western Marxism suffers largely from the same symptom as Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby – each’s fixation on perfection and purity leaves perpetually unfulfilled all that it claims to desire. On one hand, Jay seeks a return to the purity of his first encounter with Daisy, and in the impossibility of this return to purity, the actual potential for a relationship is lost. On the other hand, western Marxists seek a pure form of socialism, but in the impossibility of such a purity arising, they lose the potential to actuate or defend any socialist revolution. The purity of each is met with the reality that reality itself is never pure – it always contains mistakes, negations, breaks and splits.

Jay Gatsby cannot officially reestablish himself with Daisy insofar as she admits to having loved Tom Buchanan – her husband – during the intermediate time before she re-connects with Jay. This imperfection, this negation of purity, is unacceptable – Daisy must tell Tom she never loved him to reestablish the purity of their first encounter. With no purity, there can be no relationship.

Similarly, for Western Marxists the triumphant socialist experiments of the 20th and 21st century, in their mistakes and ‘totalitarianisms’, desecrate the purity in the holiness of their conception of socialism. The USSR must be rejected, the Spanish civil war upheld; Cuban socialism must be condemned, but the 1959 revolution praised; Allende and Sankara are idols, Fidel and Kim Il-Sung tyrants, etc. What has died in purity can be supported, what has had to grapple with the mistakes and pressures that arise out of the complexities and contradictions of building socialism in the imperialist phase of capitalism, that must be denied.

As was diagnosed by Brazilian communist Jones Manoel’s essay, ‘Western Marxism Loves Purity and Martyrdom, But Not Real Revolution’,  western Marxists’ fetishization of purity, failures, and resistance as an end in itself creates “a kind of narcissistic orgasm of defeat and purity”. Comrade Manoel rightly points out the fact that western “Marxism preserves the purity of theory to the detriment of the fact that it has never produced a revolution anywhere on the face of the Earth”. Western Marxists celebrate the emergence of a revolutionary movement; but, when this revolutionary movement is triumphant in taking power, and hence faced with making the difficult decisions the concrete reality of imperialism, a national bourgeoisie, economic backwardness, etc. force it into, the western Marxists flea with shouts of betrayal! For the western Marxists, all practical deviation from their purity is seen as a betrayal of the revolution, and thus, the cries of ‘state capitalism’ and ‘authoritarianism’ emerge.

Manoel, reflecting on the work of the late Domenico Losurdo’s Western Marxism, does a superb job in providing the meat for this thesis. Nonetheless, he (as well as Losurdo) conceives of this theoretical lapse as being “smuggled in as contraband from Christianity”. I will argue that although Christian mysticism may be present here, the root of the rot is not Christian contraband, but western metaphysics (which precedes Christian mysticism itself). The root, in essence, is found in the fixated categories that have permeated western philosophy; in the general conception that Truth is in the unchanging, in the permanent, in substance; and only indirectly in the mystical forms these have taken under the Christian tradition. The diagnosis Engels gave reductive Marxists in 1890 applies to today’s western Marxists  – “what all these gentlemen lack is dialectics”.

Parmenides Contra Heraclitus

Whereas Manoel and Losurdo see the root of this purity fixation in Christianity, it is in the classical Greek debates on the question of change – taking place 500 years or so before Christ – where this fixation emerges. It will be necessary to paint with a broad stroke the history of philosophy to explain this thesis.

The Heraclitan philosophy of universal flux, which posits that “everything flows and nothing abides; everything gives way and nothing stays fixed”, would lose its battle against the Parmenidean philosophy of permanence.[1] Parmenides, who held that foolish is the mind who thinks “that everything is in a state of movement and countermovement”, would dominate the conceptions of truth in the ancient, medieval, modern, and contemporary world.[2] Although various aspects of Heraclitus’ thought would become influential in scattered minds, the dialectical aspect of his thought would never be centered by any philosophical era.

Plato, as the next best dialectician of the ancient world, attempted a reconciliation of Parmenides and Heraclitus. In the realm of Forms, the Parmenidean philosophy of permanence would reign; in the physical realm, the Heraclitan philosophy of flux would. In his Phaedo, Plato would note that the realm of the physical world is changing and composed of concrete opposites in an interpenetrative, i.e., dialectical, relationship to one another. In the realm of the “unchanging forms”, however, “essential opposites will never… admit of generation into or out of one another”.[3] Truth, ultimately, is in the realm of the Forms, where “purity, eternity, immortality, and unchangeableness” reign.[4] Hence, although attempting to provide a synthesis of Parmenides’ and Heraclitus’ philosophy of permanence and change, the philosophy of purity and fixation found in Parmenides dominates Plato’s conception of the realm of the really real, that is, the realm of Forms or Idea.  

Aristotle, a student of Plato, would move a step further away from the Heraclitan philosophy of flux. In Aristotle we have a metaphysical system which considers the law of non-contradiction the most primary principle – “the same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject and in the same respect”.[5] In addition, in Aristotle we have the development of the world’s first logical system, an impressive feat, but nonetheless composed of abstract fixated categories completely indifferent to content. The fixation found in the logic would mirror the fixation and purity with which the eidos (essence) of things would be treated. Forms, although not existing in a separate realm as in Plato, nonetheless exist with the same rigidity. The thinking of essences, that is, the thinking of what makes a species, a type of thing, the type of thing it is, would remain in the realm of science within this fixated Aristotelian framework. Although the 16th century’s scientific revolution begins to tear away the Aristotelianism which dominated the prevalent scholastic philosophy, only with the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species would Aristotelian essentialism be dealt its decisive blow. This essentialism, undeniably, is an inheritance of the Parmenidean philosophy of permanence.

The philosophy of Plato, in the form of Neo-Platonists like Plotinus, would be incredibly influential in the formation of Christian thought – especially in Augustine of Hippo. Christianity would remain with a Platonic philosophical foundation up until the 12th-13th century’s rediscovery of Aristotle and the synthetization of his philosophy with Christian doctrine via Thomas Aquinas. Centuries later the protestant reformation’s rejection of Aristotelianism would mark the return of Plato to the Christian scene. All in all, the Christianity which Manoel and Losurdo see as the root of the fetishization of purity in every moment of its unfolding presupposes Greek philosophy. It is fair, then, to go beyond Christianity and ask the critical question – “what is presupposed here”? : what we find is that in every instance, whether mediated through Plato or Aristotle, there is a Parmenidean epistemic and ontological fixation which posits the eternal and unchanging as synonymous with truth, and the perishable and corporeal as synonymous with false.

Hegel Contra Parmenides

The spirit of the Heraclitan dialectic will be rekindled by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who argued philosophy came to finally see “land” with Heraclitus. In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel says that “there is no proposition of Heraclitus which I have not adopted in my Logic”[6]. It is in Heraclitus, Hegel argues, where we “see the perfection of knowledge so far as it has gone”; for, Heraclitus “understands the absolute as just this process of the dialectic”.[7] Heraclitus’ dialectics understood, as Hegel notes, that “truth only is as the unity of distinct opposites and, indeed, of the pure opposition of being and non-being”.[8] This unity of pure being and non-being is the starting point for Hegel’s Science of Logic. Here, he argues:

[Pure] being, the indeterminate immediate, is in fact nothing, and neither more nor less than nothing… Pure being and nothing are, therefore, the same. What is truth is neither being nor nothing, but that being – does not pass over but has passed over – into nothing, and nothing into being.[9]

Insofar as being exists in a condition of purity, it is indistinguishable from nothingness. Being must take the risk of facing and tarrying with its opposite in order to be. Being only takes place within the impurity present in the oscillation and mediation from being and non-being, that is, being only takes place when sublated into becoming qua determinate being, as “coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be”.[10] This is why, in his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel understands that “Substance is being which is in truth Subject”.[11] Substance, whose purity holds the crowning jewel of Truth for western philosophy, can be only insofar as it is “self-othering” itself.[12] Like Spirit, Substance, must look the “negative in the face, and tarry with it”.[13] Only insofar as something can self-otherize itself, which is to say, only insofar as a thing can immanently provide a negation for itself and desecrate its purity by wrestling with the impure, can conditions for the possibility of it actually being arise. Hence, the “truth of being” is “characterized as Becoming”; truth is won “only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself”.[14] Purity, the “[shrinking] from death [to] keep itself untouched by devastation”, is lifeless.[15] Jay cannot be with Daisy insofar as he wishes to retain the relationship in purity. Western Marxists will never build socialism, or find a socialism to support, insofar as they expect socialism to arise in the pure forms in which it exists in their heads.

The Paradox of Western Marxists

Having shifted our focus from Christianity to the purity fixated epistemology-ontology of western philosophy, we can now see the fundamental paradox in Western Marxism: on the one hand, in hopes of differentiating themselves from the ‘positivistic’ and ‘mechanistic’ Marxism that arose in the Soviet Union it seeks to return to Hegel in their fight against ‘orthodox dogma’; on the other hand, although producing phenomenal works on Hegel and dialectics, Western Marxist’s interpretive lens for looking at the world remains with a Parmenidean rigidity and Aristotelian form of binary thinking. Western Marxists, although claiming to be the ones who rekindle the spirit of Hegel into Marxism, are the least bit dialectical when it comes to analysis of the concrete world.

They are unable to understand, as Hegel did, the necessary role apparent ‘failures’ play as a moment in the unfolding of truth. For Hegel, that which is seen as ‘false’ is part of “the process of distinguishing in general” and constitutes an “essential moment” of Truth.[16] The bud (one of Hegel’s favorite examples which consistently reappears in his work) is not proven ‘false’ when the blossom arises. Instead, Hegel notes, each sustains a “mutual necessity” as “moments of an organic unity”.[17] Socialism is not ‘betrayed’ when it, encountering the external and internal pressures of imperialism and a national bourgeois class, is forced to take more so-called ‘authoritarian’ positions to protect the revolution. Socialism is not ‘betrayed’ or transformed into ‘state capitalism’ (in the derogatory, non-Leninist sense) when faced with a backwards economy it takes the risk of tarrying with its opposite and engages a process of opening up to foreign capital to develop its productive forces.

The ‘authoritarian’ moment, or the moment of ‘opening up to foreign capital’, are not the absolute negation of socialism – as western Marxists would have you believe – but the partial negation, that is, the sublation of the idealistic conceptions of a socialist purity. These two moments present themselves where they appear as the historically necessary negations needed to develop socialism. A less ‘authoritarian’ treatment of the Batista goons after the Cuban revolution would have opened the window for imperialism and national counter-revolutionary forces to overthrow the popular revolution. A China which would not have taken the frightening risk of opening up would not have been able to lift 800 million out of poverty (eradicating extreme poverty) and be the beacon of socialist construction and anti-imperialist resistance in the world today.

Hegel understood that every leap towards a qualitatively new stage required a long process, consisting of various moments of ‘failures’ and ‘successes’, for this new stage to mature into its new shape. Using for Spirit the metaphor of a child he says,

But just as the first breath drawn by a child after its long, quiet nourishment breaks the gradualness of merely quantitative growth-there is a qualitative leap, and the child is born-so likewise the Spirit in its formation matures slowly and quietly into its new shape, dissolving bit by bit the structure of its previous world, whose tottering state is only hinted at by isolated symptoms.[18]

Western Marxists ignore the necessity of the process. They expect socialism, as a qualitatively new stage of human history, to exist immediately in the pure form they conceived of in their minds. They expect a child to act like a grown up and find themselves angered when the child is unable to recite Shakespeare and solve algebraic equations. They forget to contextualize whatever deficiencies they might observe within the embryonic stage the global movement towards socialism is in. They forget the world is still dominated by capitalist imperialism and expect the pockets of socialist resistance to be purely cleansed from the corrupting influence of the old world. They forget, as Marx noted in his Critique of the Gotha Program, that socialist society exists “as it emerges from capitalist society which is thus in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birth marks of the old society from whose womb it emerges”.[19]

Where is Hegel, in concrete analysis, for these Western Marxists? The answer is simple, he is dead. But Hegel does not die without a revenge, they too are dead in the eyes of Hegel. Their anti-dialectical lens of interpreting the material world in general, and the struggle for socialism in specific, leaves them in the lifeless position Hegel called Dogmatism. For Hegel,

Dogmatism as a way of thinking, whether in ordinary knowing or in the study of philosophy, is nothing else but the opinion that the True consists in a proposition which is a fixed result, or which is immediately known.[20]

Western Marxist dogmatist fetishize binaries, the immediate (either intuitive or empirical), and the pure. To them, something is either socialism (if it is pure) or not-socialism (if it is impure). They cannot grapple, in practice at least, with the concept of becoming, that is, with the reality of the construction of socialism. Socialism must be constructed, it is an active enterprise emersed necessarily in a world riddled by imperialist pressures, contradictions, and violence – both active and passive. Western Marxist will write splendid critiques of positivism’s fetish of the ‘fact’, but in their own practical analysis of socialist construction in the world they too castrate facts from the factors that allowed them to exist.

Hence Žižek, the most prominent Hegelian Marxists today, couches his anti-dialectical bourgeois critiques of socialism in Cuba (as well as China and pretty much every other socialist experiment) within a reified analysis that strips the Cuban reality from its context. It ignores the historical pressures of being a small island 90 miles away from the world’s largest empire; an empire which has spent the last 60+ years using a plethora of techniques – from internationally condemned blockades, to chemical attacks, terrorist fundings, and 600+ CIA led attempts on Fidel’s life – to overthrow the Cuban revolution. Only in ignoring this context and how it emerges can Žižek come to the purist and anti-dialectical conclusion that the revolution failed and that the daily life of Cubans is reducible to “inertia, misery, escapism in drugs, in sex, [and] pleasures”.

The Panacea to the Fetishes of Western Marxism

In sum, expanding upon the analysis of comrade Manoel, it can be seen that the purity fetish, and the subsequent infatuation with failed experiments and struggles which, although never achieving the conquest of power, stayed ‘pure’, can be traced back to a Parmenidean conception of Truth as Unchanging Permanence which has permeated, in different forms, all throughout the various moments of western philosophy’s history.

This interpretive phenomenon may be referred to as an intellectual rot because; 1) at some point, it might have been a fresh fruit, a genuine truth in a particular moment; 2) like all fruits which are not consumed, they outlive their moment of ripeness and rot. Hence, the various forms the Parmenidean conception of Truth took throughout the various moments it permeated might have been justified for those moments, but today, after achieving a proper scientific understanding of the dialectical movement in nature, species, human social formation and thought, Parmenidean purity has been overthrown – it has spoiled, and this death fertilizes the soil for dialectical self-consciousness.

Although all theorists are still class subjects, bound to the material and ideological conditioning of their class and geographical standpoint (in relation to imperialism specifically) – the panacea for Western Marxists’ purity fetish is dialectics. Dialectics must not be limited simply to the theoretical realm in which they engage with it. If it stays in this pure realm, it will suffer the same fate socialism has for them – nothingness, absolute negation. Dialectical logic must be brought beyond the textbook and used as the interpretive framework with which we analyze the world in general, and the construction of socialism in specific. Only then will Western Marxism gain the possibility of being something more than a ‘radical’ niche of Western academia, focused only on aesthetics and other trivialities where purity can be sustained without risk of desecration.   

Notes

[1] Wheelwright, Phillip. The Presocratics. (The Odyssey Press, 1975). pp. 70.

[2] Ibid., pp. 97.

[3] Plato. “Phaedo” in The Harvard Classics. (P.F. Collier & Son Corporation, 1937). pp. 70, 90.

[4] Ibid., pp. 71.

[5] Aristotle. “Metaphysics” In The Basic Works of Aristotle. (The Modern Library, 2001)., pp. 736.

[6] Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Lectures on the History of Philosophy Vol I. (K. Paul, Trench, Trübner, & Company, 1892)., pp. 278.

[7] Ibid., pp. 282, 278.

[8] Ibid., pp. 282.

[9] Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Science of Logic. § 132-134.

[10] Ibid., § 187

[11] Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phenomenology of Spirit. (Oxford University Press, 1977)., pp. 10.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid., pp. 19.

[14] Hegel’s Lectures pp. 283 and Phenomenology pp. 19.

[15] Phenomenology., pp. 19.

[16] Ibid., pp. 23.

[17] Ibid., pp. 2.

[18] Ibid., pp. 6.

[19] Marx, Karl. “Critique of the Gotha Program” In Robert C. Tucker’s The Marx-Engels Reader. (W.W. Norton and Company, 1978)., pp. 529.

[20] Phenomenology., pp. 23.

Critique of the Misunderstanding Concerning Marx’s Base-Superstructure Spatial Metaphor

By Carlos Garrido

Karl Marx’s 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy [i] represents one of the clearest reflections of the development of his and Engels’ thought. In what amounts to a short four and a half pages, Marx concisely exhibits the resulting conclusions of more than two decades worth of studies – from his first encounter with the economic question in 1842-3 via the polemic over landed property and forest theft, to the latest decade and a half painfully spent in the British Museum in London (except for the short interruption of the 48 revolutions) divided between the political writings for the New York Tribune and his economic studies for this text and for Capital, which this text is a dress rehearsal for. Although endless work can be done on these four and a half pages, I would like to limit myself to a clarification of the famed and famously misinterpreted spatial metaphor of the economic foundation and the political-legal superstructure. 

The most common misunderstanding of this metaphor posits that the economic foundation absolutely determines the ideological superstructure. In this view, all legal, political, philosophical, and religious structures and forms of consciousness are reducible to a reflection of the present economic situation. This perspective, held primarily by various vulgar Marxists of the second international and by critics of Marx (esp. the Weberian conception of Marxism), has come to be labeled as economically reductive and subsequently critiqued by dozens of 20th century Marxist, e.g., Althusser, Gramsci, Lukács, Lenin.

On the other hand, as a reaction to this economic reductionism, some Marxists have rejected the conception that the economic foundation influences the superstructure any more than the superstructure influences the economic. This perspective holds that there is a mutual conditioning of the two spheres, a dialectical interpenetrative relation between the opposing poles of the economic foundation and the ideological superstructure, where, as Marcuse states, “ideology comes to be embodied in the process of production itself.”[ii] The various reactions to economic determinism may take different forms, generally, what they share is a refusal to describe the influence of the economic realm on the ideological as ‘determinist’ – unless couched within a framework that equalizes the determination of the superstructure on the economic in a dialectical fancy of interpenetrative determination.   

Funny enough, Marx’s preface presents the relation between the economic and the superstructural with an ambiguity which seems to foreshadow both misinterpretations. First, he states that “the mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life,” then that “it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness” (KM, 20-21). These two sentences chronologically follow each other but refer to two different (albeit synonymous) concepts for describing the relationship between material life and the ideological superstructure, viz., conditions and determines.

Although synonymous, ‘conditions’ carries conceptually an openness for a less rigid affecting relationship. To say that something conditions can range from meaning that it influences to determines. Given the conceptual ambiguity, it would seem that the economic reductionist group would read conditions qua determines while the group which reacts to the reductionists would read conditions qua influences. Between this binary of blue and red pill, can we ask for another color?

I think Marx offers us blue and red for us to make purple, indubitably the most beautiful color keeping with Plato. In essence, both misunderstandings are partly correct – the economic foundation determines the superstructure, but the superstructure can also influence the economic foundation.

As Althusser noted,[iii] in a seemingly contradictory manner the superstructure is determined by the economic base while nonetheless sustaining a “relative autonomy” in relation to it, effectively allowing it to have “reciprocal action” upon it. It is important to note that this Althusserian formulation is actually a reconceptualization of how Engels dealt with the issue in a 1890 letter response to Conrad Schmidt. In this letter from an aged Engels, we find an elucidation for this often-misunderstood spatial metaphor, and consequently, a clarification of the scope of rigidity the concept of determination carries in his and Marx’s works.

This letter, along with the others with which it was jointly published as Engels on Historical Materialism, gives a fascinating insight into how determination ought to be read in the Marxist tradition. Before Engels deals with the question of the economic foundation’s determination of the superstructure, he examines production’s (as in the moment, the “point of departure,”[iv] not the whole) determinative relation to the moment of exchange, and the moment of exchange’s determinative relation to the newly separated money market. He says,

Production is in the last instance the decisive factor. However, as soon as the commercial exchange of commodities separates itself from actual production it follows a movement which, although as a whole still dominated by production, in turn obeys in its particular details and within the sphere of its general dependence, its own laws.

The same is true for the money market. Just as soon as dealing in money is separated from commodity exchange, it acquires a development of its own, special laws determined by its particular nature, and its own phases. Yet they all take place within the given limits and conditions of production and commodity exchange

The same relational function of determination/conditioning is sustained with the economic foundation and the political superstructure (and afterwards with the legal, philosophical, and scientific aspects of the superstructure):

While the new independent power must, on the whole, submit to the movement of production, in turn it also reacts, by virtue of its immanent, i.e., its once transmitted but gradually developed relative independence, upon the conditions and course of production. There is a reciprocity between two unequal forces; on the one side, the economic movement; on the other, the new political power which strives for the greatest possible independence and which having once arisen is endowed with its own movement. The economic movement, upon the whole, asserts itself but it is affected by the reaction of the relatively independent political movement which it itself had set up. This political movement is on the one hand the state power, on the other, the opposition which comes to life at the same time with it.

These passages not only demonstrate with utmost clarity how a determinative relation can sustain within it a relative independence (what Althusser later calls ‘relative autonomy’) which allows the determined variable a capacity to react and influence that which determines it, but in demonstrating the translatability into various spheres of how this relationship functions, Engels is providing a general formulative understanding of the question on determination. In essence, the variable which determines (or conditions) sets the parameters for the determined variable, such that the determined variable presupposes the other’s boundaries for its activity. Concretely, the superstructure presupposes a specific economic foundation which has set a historical boundary on it. Within this determined space, the superstructure is relatively autonomous, enough so that it becomes capable of emergent qualities which can have a reactive or “counter-active influence” upon that which determines it.

Philosophically, the position can be labeled as compatibilist, i.e., there is a soft determination which allows for the conditioned autonomous expression of that which is determined. Therefore, although the determination of the economic foundation on the superstructure is not absolute (hard determinism), neither is it nonexistent. Engels critiques both positions: he argues it is “altogether pedantic to seek economic causes for all” things, asserting that in doing so Paul Barth is “contending against windmills,” while also criticizing the position which altogether either denies determination or places the primary source of determination on the wrong variable as participating in “ideological conceptions” whereby the real relationship is inverted and placed on its head, making one take the “effect for the cause.”

Why do these misunderstandings arise? As the conclusion in Engels’ letter states,

What all these gentlemen lack is dialectics. All they ever see is cause here, effect there. They do not at all see that this is a bare abstraction; that in the real world such metaphysical polar opposites exist only in crises; that the whole great process develops itself in the form of reciprocal action, to be sure of very unequal forces, in which the economic movement is far and away the strongest, most primary and decisive. They do not see that here nothing is absolute and everything relative. For them Hegel has never existed. Yours, etc.

Carlos L. Garrido is a philosophy graduate student and assistant at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. His specialization is in Marxist philosophy and the history of American socialist thought (esp. early 19th century). He is an editorial board member and co-founder of Midwestern Marx  and the Journal of American Socialist Studies. 

Notes

[i] All subsequent quotes from this text will be from this edition: Marx, Karl. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. (International Publishers, 1999).

[ii] Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. (Beacon Press, 1966), p. 189.

[iii] In his essay Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses

[iv] In the appendix to the above edition of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, a drafted introduction called ‘Production, Consumption, Distribution, Exchange (Circulation)’ provides an analysis of the relation each of the four moments has with the other. Here he calls production the “moment of departure.” This draft is included in the introduction of a series of manuscripts now known as Grundrisse.

An Internationalist Critique of the Green New Deal

[SHAWN THEW/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock]

By Tyler Okeke

In 2019, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez unsat the powerful Democratic Congressman Joe Crowley and spurred a wave of progressive congressional campaigns. Soon after being sworn in, Ocasio-Cortez partnered with Senator Ed Markey to introduce House Resolution 109, popularly known as the Green New Deal. The Green New Deal is an ambitious framework for environmental, economic, and racial justice in the United States. It aims for a speedy transition to net zero emissions through the use of renewable energy sources and green technology, a federal jobs guarantee, and a whole host of other social programs like paid medical and family leave, medical care for all, and expanded access to unions. Though not the first of its kind, the political movement on which the policy rides has won the Green New Deal more than a hundred co-sponsors in Congress.

The Green New Deal recognizes the gravity of global climate change and makes an effort to include domestic economic and social welfare reforms in its framework. Despite all this, the Green New Deal is largely deficient and is cause for concern for scholars, policymakers, and activists interested in an internationalist approach to climate change. An internationalist approach not only addresses inequality in the United States but challenges global inequality by reconfiguring the global economy and taking a reparative approach to generations of colonial and neo-colonial exploitation of the Global South. This exploitation has been largely carried out by governments, multinational corporations, and international financial institutions based in the Global North. 

The Green New Deal is also deficient and unimaginative because it forgoes thinking critically about the American people’s unsustainable relationship to energy and production. Instead, the Green New Deal seeks to move from one unsustainable energy source—fossil fuels—to another: cobalt and other minerals necessary for developing climate technology. 

Addressing climate change requires robust engagement not only with domestic contexts, but also with the global contexts that make domestic political and economic life possible.  Especially in a global empire like the United States where US monetary policy and corporate interests define the global economic landscape, policymakers, scholars, and activists have a responsibility to draft solutions where rapid, equitable climate adaptation is possible for all nations. 

The Green New Deal lacks international attention and critical engagement with the nation’s unsustainable relationship with energy and production. To be sure, this deficiency does not detract from the ways in which the Green New Deal is much more ambitious than more moderate approaches to climate change. The Green New Deal asks that the United States reach net-zero emissions in ten years, provide millions of good, high-quality union jobs, invest in green infrastructure and sustainable industry to protect lives and livelihoods, and expand social welfare to ensure a decent quality of life for every American. The Green New Deal not only addresses the domestic economics of climate change but also aims for justice and equity for Americans in its climate solution. 

However, my contention is that these benefits should be available to all people and a concerted effort must be made to ensure that they are tangible for nations in the Global South who will bear the brunt of the effects of climate change despite contributing the least to global emissions. The United States is a global hegemon that actively works against international egalitarianism through the dominance of the US dollar and Washington D.C.’s ability to write the rules of international trade and development. The American government is primarily concerned with securing profit for American and Global North multinational corporations and maintaining the core-periphery relationship between the Global North and the Global South where the economic growth of one is predicated on the underdevelopment of the other. The United States is able to secure privileges for its corporations and its goods through a heavy-handed political and military dominance of global trade and finance. US economic hegemony limits the ability of nations in the Global South to receive a fair return on their exports, make independent economic decisions, and accelerate their development or adaptation. If Americans do not pay particular attention to redistributing global economic power and thinking critically about how to ensure every nation has what they need to respond to the climate crisis, we risk a bleak future defined by social democracy in the Global North and apocalyptic crises everywhere else. 

Solutions like the Green New Deal are consistent with how imperialist nations respond to capitalism’s contradictions, in this case its ecological contradictions. Climate change is the most significant contemporary challenge to modern capitalism, but capitalism has faced significant challenges in the past, and made strategic responses to preserve itself. In the post-World War II moment when capitalism was challenged on both the domestic and international front by fiery worker’s movements in metropolitan cities in the Global North and decolonization movements in the colonies, capitalism made a strategic pivot to assuage its working masses and present the illusion of political independence in its former colonies while maintaining capitalism’s basic infrastructure domestically and globally. 

Nations in the Global North, like the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, granted their workers careful concessions like social security, higher wages, better working conditions, broader access to higher education, and other improvements that were no doubt progressive reforms but maintained the basic structure of capitalism. To fund these reforms and maintain profit for multinational corporations, the colonies got cosmetic political independence but their basic core-periphery relationship to the global economy was maintained by a careful transition from national imperialism to a collective imperialism. The United States played a predominant role and newly independent nations in the Global South were entangled with international financial institutions like the World Bank and World Trade Organization which exercised broad control over their trade and economic policies. The Green New Deal, if it fails to problematize and break this relationship, is a similar reform that ensures social democracy for the core of the empire and sustained exploitation for the dependent nations of the Global South. 

A phrase that haunts the pages of the Green New Deal is “as much as technologically feasible.” This phrase follows virtually every stipulation that mandates pollution removal or greenhouse gas emissions reduction. The Green New Deal is invested in technological stop gaps to systemic problems with American energy use and production of goods. Countries, especially mass emitters like the United States, need to prioritize living within their ecological means and make serious efforts to localize production and consumption. The Green New Deal prioritizes status quo industrial productivity over a radical but necessary reimagining of how energy use and the economy should be organized. Instead of thinking about how to make energy and production relationships sustainable, the Green New Deal simply seeks another power source. 

The “green” technology that the Green New Deal ambiguously refers to references solar panels, waste and energy use tracking systems, fuel cells, and other technological units. It is dishonest to call any of these “green” or climate-friendly, as they rely on cobalt and other green minor metals which are extracted from the ground by multinational corporations and usually in the shadow of gross human rights violations. In the case of the Democratic Republic of Congo, cobalt mining is connected to child labor, rape, war, environmental degradation, starvation wages, and even slavery. An early anthropologist of energy, Leslie White, posits that a society's energy source is the key to understanding and analyzing that society. In fact, the anthropological term energopower refers to the analysis of modern power through the lens of electricity and fuel. This approach is central to understanding the deficiencies of the Green New Deal and its maintenance of an unsustainable status quo.

Perhaps the Green New Deal will usher a new array of power relations under the cobalt-infused green technology energy regime. But given the resolution’s lack of attention to the global economy, it seems safe to assume that a climate future based on green metal extraction across the Global South and perhaps native land in the United States is not one to be hopeful about. It seems safe to assume that oil and natural gas exploitation across indigenous lands in North America, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa will only be switched out for cobalt and green metal extraction in the same places and the military apparatus that protects U.S. energy security will only turn the muzzle of its gun to new sites of resource extraction and human exploitation. Without serious rethinking, this is the future the Green New Deal promises.

All US climate solutions are incomplete if they do not chart out how a nation with a global effect will relinquish its unsustainable dominance of the global economy and ensure that all nations will have access to the financing and resources they need to adapt to the demands of climate change. This doesn’t only look like reparations in the form of direct cash transfers and debt cancellation but also assurance that nations can trade at equitable prices and chart out their own development trajectory. So long as Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal seeks to tinker around the edges and leave the imperial framework from which the United States benefits untouched, it should be considered an imperial project that is ideologically opposed to the realization of international sovereignty and the right of all people to live dignified, full lives. It is the responsibility of internationalists and people interested in global equity to problematize the Green New Deal’s current framework and advocate for the solutions that this moment requires — a robust redistribution of global wealth and power as soon as possible.

Against Akon's New Liberia: Class Remains The Key Link

By Christopher Winston

This was originally published at Hood Communist.

There has been much confusion regarding the character, purpose, and benefit of projects in Africa such as those launched by multimillionaire musical artist Akon in Senegal. This project is described by the New York Post as being “run entirely on renewable energy” and Akon himself is quoted as saying: “With the AKoin we are building cities, the first one being in Senegal…we’re securing the land and closing out all the legislation papers for the city. We want to make it a free zone and cryptocurrency-driven as a test market.” Essentially, this is a capitalist project. This is an old strategy, one of wealthy diasporic Africans (Akon himself is of Senegalese extraction) returning to the motherland, buying up property, and trying to construct little Wakandas. The recolonization movement in the early 1800s (backed by wealthy colonizers in the UK and US) led to the formation of two “independent states” on the West Coast of Africa, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. These countries were not independent, they can be seen as the first neocolonial test cases. In the case of Sierra Leone, initially populated by diasporic Africans who self-liberated from slavery during the American “Revolution”, it remained a colony of Britain until 1961. Both countries lacked native control over their natural resources. Liberian rubber was the property of Yankee corporations, diamonds from Sierra Leone remained in the grasping hands of the British. One of the main reasons that the Americans sought to destroy the movement led by Marcus Garvey was that it promoted, encouraged, and developed strategies for African economic self-determination in the US, in the Caribbean and Latin America, and in the Continent. The imperialists simply could not allow this, and it is to the eternal demerit of Communists that we failed to develop mass links and a United Front with this movement which captured the energy and support of tens of millions of Africans, instead of working for its destruction because we saw it as an ideological and political rival. 

Back to the Akon City project. Akon’s goals, I believe, are not willfully malicious. I begrudge no African that thinks they are genuinely helping their people. However, this project is a capitalist project and thus is doomed to either fail or set up a wealthy utopia for Europeans and Africans with the means to play around with cryptocurrency and such. In essence, Akon is hamstrung by his class position and class stand. Rich Africans returning to the Continent and seeking to set up what are essentially little Liberias and little Wakandas is a strategy that does not take into account the presence and insidious machinations of neocolonialism and bureaucratic capitalism (compradorism). Africa is poor not because the people there are bad capitalists. Africa is poor because of capitalism and imperialism and its lackeys on the Continent who are installed to ensure the flow of resources to the old colonial metropoles. Akon City is closed to the tens of thousands of Congolese youth who mine the coltan which will fuel Akon’s cryptocurrency. Akon City is closed to the hundreds of thousands in Dakar who live in shipping containers and do not have running water, or electricity. Akon City is as real to the majority of Africans as Wakanda is. For all Africans to enjoy a high standard of living it is essential to replace capitalist pipe dreams with Pan-African socialist reality. Africans, working-class and peasant Africans, must have control of our wealth and our Continent. Neocolonialism and imperialism must be buried with armed force. As long as colonizers continue to loot our continent we will see no peace, millions of us will continue to die no matter how many glass and concrete monstrosities Akon constructs. Look to Liberia and Sierra Leone as negative examples, and study the works of those such as Kwame Nkrumah, Malcolm X, and other Pan-African revolutionaries. Apply them to our day to day reality, analyze and criticize everything, and seize the time. Take class as the key link.

All the Ways Bernie Might Lose: A Socialist Critique of Social Democracy

By Andrew Dobbs

The largest political organization on the US left, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) just informally polled its members as to whether or not they should immediately endorse Senator Bernie Sanders for president. About a quarter of the group could be bothered to vote, and they supported the Sanders endorsement three to one. DSA's membership grew eleven-fold since the last presidential election, with most observers giving Sanders credit for raising the popularity of "democratic socialism," his self-described philosophy. The outcome makes sense.

Despite many revolutionaries likewise joining DSA, the political center of gravity in the organization seems to be in favor of electoralism and collaboration with the Democratic Party; DSA's endorsement of Sanders now seems to be a foregone conclusion.

This is a profound display of willful historical ignorance. DSA's growth is an encouraging sign in some ways, but they are on the precipice of plunging into failure the way so many leftists have in recent decades.

There are six generally possible outcomes for this exercise, each with clear historical antecedents that demonstrate the ease with which the ruling class would blunt any electoral effort even calling itself socialist. It is crucial that DSA members remember this history and resist the well-trod path to embarrassment they are considering right now. Here are the ways history has shown a campaign like this one can be destroyed.

Losing: the Jackson Outcome

Far and away the most likely outcome for the Sanders campaign is the most likely outcome for all presidential campaigns: they lose. There are about a dozen Democrats running with at least a few more still waiting to jump in, and by definition all of them but one - at most - will lose. Sanders supporters have fooled themselves to a great extent about his chances and popularity, a trend reminiscent of how the left perceived the Jesse Jackson campaigns in 1984 and 1988.

In light of Jackson's later foibles and eclipse their eagerness now seems absurd, and even at the time he was deeply controversial. The left did not acknowledge this. "The more Jackson gains, the more he upsets both the right and the established Democratic Party leadership," an article following early 1988 primaries in the socialist newspaper Unity said. "These are further signs it will be an uphill fight all the way - but Jesse Jackson can win!"

This sentiment sounds familiar to those who have followed Sanders supporters online. Those arguing that the Sanders campaign could be used to build political power subsequent to the election even if he loses should ask themselves what we have to show for the Jackson campaigns.

The Party Thumb on the Scale: the 2016 Outcome

The other, more exigent lesson from 2016 should be to remember the ways the Democratic Party's establishment went out of their way to block Sanders from the nomination. Former DNC Chair Donna Brazile admitted that the party was being run by Clinton's campaign even before the nomination was settled, confessing that "if the fight had been fair, one campaign would not have control of the party before the voters had decided which one they wanted to lead."

Before her later confession Brazile used her position at CNN to obtain planned questions for Clinton prior to a primary debate, and the debates themselves were clearly scheduled by the DNC to minimize viewership and shield the front-runner Clinton from insurgent challenge.

Of course, the most likely outcome if none of this had happened would still have been a Clinton nomination, but they weren't going to take that chance. Afterwards there was effectively no accountability for this scheme. What would keep them from pulling out the stops to direct the nomination away from Bernie and towards one of the other, less concerning candidates again? Nothing, but for whatever reason DSA is considering playing a rigged game.

Sabotage the Election: the McGovern Outcome

Even if Bernie does overcome these profound obstacles the party could sabotage his chances in the general election. We know this because they did it the last time a modestly leftist candidate won the party's nomination, George McGovern in 1972.

McGovern backed an immediate end to the Vietnam War, a massive reduction in defense spending, what would now be termed a universal basic income, amnesty for all draft resistors, decriminalizing pot and even went on to coin the term "Medicare for All." The Democratic Party's leadership went out of their way to crush the campaign. The urban political machines central to the party's operations of the era mostly stayed at home, and the large unions stayed formally neutral or endorsed Nixon.

McGovern was crushed in the largest landslide in modern history to that point. He would likely have lost no matter what, but the party's leadership made sure that it was a total rout so that no Democrats would get the wrong idea about running on the left again.

The same mechanisms are not necessarily available this time, but one is already presenting itself - Howard Schultz. The billionaire has made it clear that his campaign is about blocking Sanders from being president, and there is every reason to believe that key Democrat thought leaders, influencers, and organizers could legitimize him and send enough of the electorate over to him to cost Bernie the race. Sure, it would re-elect Trump, but it's not like they didn't hate Nixon back in the day, too. The ability to maintain their control of the party and the comfort of their class is worth four more years of what amounts to annoyance for them.

You can be sure that the corporate media would frame the whole thing as Sanders' fault as well, questioning whether his "socialist" politics had alienated voters and opened the door for four more years of Trump. DSA will be villains, and whatever gains they have now will be gone.

Making Bernie Sell Out: the SYRIZA Outcome

This outcome may be the one the ruling class would enjoy most. Bernie wins the White House only to be compelled to betray all of his stated principles and enact the very sort of abusive capitalist policies DSA et al. got behind him to stop.

Again, this has happened when actual leftists have won office. One notorious example was in 2015 when the Greek leftist party SYRIZA rode a wave of mass outrage over EU-led economic bullying to win that country's general elections on a militant, anti-capitalist platform. A few months later the SYRIZA government held a nationwide referendum on whether or not to capitulate to EU austerity and bailout demands. 61% of voters said no - there was a clear mandate to struggle against the neoliberal impositions of European finance.

Only 8 days after the referendum, however, Prime Minister and SYRIZA leader Alex Tsirpas gave in to an agreement even more harsh than the one voters rejected. The agreement's terms included tax increases - especially on farmers - major service cuts, raised retirement ages, increased contribution requirements for insurance, slashed wages, canceled labor contracts, and major privatization of state assets.

The next US elections could very well happen in the context of a major recession, according to a variety of indicators. If Bernie were to come to office with unemployment soaring, stocks plummeting, growth at next to nothing, etc. would he really pull the trigger on gutting some of the largest industries in the country, the insurance and medical industries, for example? Would he raise taxes on the wealthy - and even the middle class, as would be necessary for most of his programs? Or would he delay the big stuff "for now" and focus on the very same kind of austerity any other candidate would take up?

The fact is that his whole program is dependent upon capitalist industry creating profits and managerial/technical wages to tax to fund his programs. But the rate of profit for US firms is less than half what it was during the New Deal era, and average economic growth has declined by more than two-thirds. This downgrade is what prompted neoliberal gutting of the welfare state in the first place.

If DSA members really are socialists they should know that capitalism isn't just mean or ugly, it's doomed. Any political program that rests on the idea of allowing it to persist by just rearranging its output through taxation and government expenditure is also dead on arrival.

Make the Economy Scream: the Venezuela Outcome

Even if Bernie accomplishes the near impossible task of winning and then actually pursuing a socialistic program, he can expect pointed economic warfare to crush his movement once and for all. "If you try this, you'll end up like Venezuela" is not a prediction or a possibility, it's a warning.

Because both the Bernie agenda and the Bolivarian program to date have assumed the continued existence of private production and finance, a capital strike can immediately produce crucial shortages and financial disruption. In Venezuela they stopped importing toilet paper, beer, and flour used for staple baked goods, or they hoarded them and drove up the price to make money off the black market. Banks refused to provide dollars to Venezuelan sovereign accounts so they could not pay debts and their currency collapsed.

Similar economic warfare plagued Chile when a "democratic socialist" took power there in 1970. The CIA worked with the AFL-CIO to organize middle-class owner/operators like truckers, taxi drivers, and shopkeepers to go on strike. This plunged the country into chaos as shelves went empty, pumps ran dry, and transportation became impossible. By the time September 1973 rolled around there was substantial support for a coup just to try and bring consumer life back to normal.

Now imagine if hospital companies announced that "Medicare for All" just won't cover their bills so they are shutting down half the facilities in the country. Pharmaceutical companies could announce they are ceasing production of chemotherapy drugs - they just can't afford to make them under "socialism." Store closures, layoffs, 401(k)s going broke, the list is endless really.

Actual socialist governments face many of these threats and many other hardships, but they prevent the worst by expropriating entire industries and putting them under public control. Sanders is not planning for any such thing, and the right-wing unrest liable to follow would be presented on every channel and newspaper as "peaceful protest" in glowing tones. Bernie does not want to eliminate the ruling class, and so they will rule over him too, one way or the other.

Social Chauvinism: the "Democratic Socialist" Outcome

Finally, the most pernicious outcome of all would be what many DSAers might consider victory. Bernie could win the election and enact a social democratic reform effort with huge new benefits for people living in the US without doing anything whatsoever for the billions of people around the world exploited by our system as a whole.

This again is a well-established historical possibility. The social democratic movements of Europe that created the welfare states of those countries all depended upon imperialist extraction. The Iranian coup against Mossadegh was fully backed by the same Labour government that founded the National Health Service. France's first "socialist" president, Vincent Auriol, waged war in Indochina, overthrew the government of Morocco, jailed Tunisian independence leaders, and pursued a brutal war of repression in Madagascar. Even in the US, the "Great Society" came at the same time as the Vietnam War.

Bernie would fit right in this tradition if he got everything he wants. He's promising more drone strikes, continued military spending, ongoing hostility to anti-imperialist governments and a transfer of exploited surplus not back to the workers we stole it from, but mostly to middle-class folks in this country.

This isn't socialism; it's imperialism with a human face. Its days are just as numbered as any other capitalist program, and at best we'd get what Europe got - a generation or so of social democracy followed by ever-deepening austerity and reaction. If this is what DSA is looking for, by all means they should endorse Bernie.

Conclusion

As DSA, for whatever reason, lines up behind this folly, actual revolutionaries need to leave the organization and do something else. The great news is that there is a burgeoning, if still loose and immature, network of revolutionary collectives popping up in communities all over the US. Even if there isn't one where you live, the folks who have done it elsewhere can give you insight on how to get going. Find them, reach out, and start building something new so that we don't waste time doing what we know has never worked.

Let's remind each other of this truth staring us in the face from repeated historical experience. For the moment it means treating Bernie as the obstacle and danger he is so that we can instead fight until victory, always.