Origins of Modern Greed

By Steve Johnson

Greed is a strong and excessive desire for wealth, possessions, or power, often accompanied by an unwillingness to share or give to others. It is a trait characterized by an insatiable desire for more, often at the expense of ethical considerations or the well-being of others.

Dissecting the meaning of greed in the same manner that a word would be dissected in a legal document reveals that the entire definition is full of terrible human qualities that all point to an individual's choice to value their own life above all life. When we look at history, it’s important to remember that people have been capable of complex thought, compassion, empathy, and love for thousands of years. Early people were not hateful, fearful savages. They were as we are, but with different struggles and different technologies.

The Origin of Modern Greed, a Proletarian Theory

In an attempt to understand the origins of greed, I first looked at which civilizations have spread without pause and conquered the most throughout the previous 500 years of world history. It is easy to ascertain based on historical documents that it was the following nations: England, France, Germany, and the Netherlands. Next, I looked at what these nations have in common: harsh winters, some of the earliest archaeological evidence of widespread cannibalism, reduced sun exposure due to latitude, and limited landmass and resources as populations grew. I will now attempt to guide you through my thought process that greed is not a basic human trait that exists in us all, but instead developed as a means of survival during the most desperate of times in human history. I propose that the early civilizations of Northern Europe suffered resource scarcity, limited sun exposure, and cannibalism as a way of ensuring individual survival above all else which would later foster a culture of materialism and greed. Jared Diamond has touched on many of these topics in his book, Guns, Germs, and Steel. We will also look at Cannibalism by Bill Schutt to explore the long-lasting psychological trauma that cannibalism can have on a population. World history and general psychology references are common knowledge and can be verified by a multitude of sources at the reader’s convenience.

Survival of the Warmest

When I was four, my family moved from sunny Florida to beautiful Michigan. The changing of the seasons is something magical, however, winters in Michigan caused me to be very aware that there are different needs for survival depending on geographical location and season. There are unique challenges of a harsh winter that are not present in a place like Florida. Needing wood for heat during the winter and ensuring adequate food supply to last the season are top priorities. The need for winter clothing to stay comfortable in colder climates is a distinctive feature of civilizations accustomed to frigid temperatures.  There is less exposure to the sun, resulting in a loss of vitamin D and serotonin. That alone has a hugely negative impact on the human psyche. Winter is harsh, and it can leave a lasting toll on populations forced to endure such a climate. Everything about lasting through winter involves having more than you need to ensure survival, a fact of life missing from the more temperate climates of Earth, with year-round sun and milder season transitions. You simply need less when the outside world is more forgiving.

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The more you have going into winter, the more likely you are to survive. Over time, the strong or desperate survive and the weak die, resulting in more resources for the survivors. After winter, the more you have remaining, the more you can trade for other goods and services to prepare for the inevitable coming of the following Winter. This simple exchange based on supply and demand is the basis of materialism that develops into capitalism. Greed developed as a means of individual and communal survival in a time of limited resources that ensured the wealthiest and most powerful would survive. Over an extended historical timeframe, the accumulation of sufficient wealth could elevate an individual to the status of a chief, king, or ruler. Fast forward through all of the muddied conflicts of kings and kingdoms in Europe up to 1500 CE, and now we look again at who the primary conquering nations of indigenous people of the world were. England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain claimed much of South America, North America, Africa, and portions of Asia. No other nations have overrun so much of the Earth at one time. Survival of the fittest would be false, but survival of the wealthiest, cruelest, and most immune would be true, which the longest surviving families would be the pinnacle of. It is these lineages that lead the populations and determine where to invade, for the betterment of themselves and their strongest supporters. “It is often government that organizes the conquest, and religion that justifies it.” (Guns, Germs, and Steel Jared Diamond p166)

Survival of the Maddest

The latitude that the majority of the conquering nations exist at directly implies a lack of sun exposure throughout the winter. This will result in a vitamin D deficiency, which in turn leads to a weakened immune system, reduced bone strength, mood disorders, and sleep problems. This could translate into much of the Northern European population being tired, crabby, depressed, sore, and malnourished. It is not difficult to imagine that early Northern Europeans may have turned on each other during the course of a harsh winter to survive. The extent to which they may have turned on each other could theoretically be evident in archaeological sites around Europe and even in Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in America founded in 1607. Many human remains featured butchery marks that “were identical to the damage found on the bones of non-human animals that had presumably been used as food.” (Schutt, Cannibalism p 159) 

It may seem like quite the jump that I looked into the archaeological evidence of cannibalism in reference to greed. This stems from the knowledge of horrifically true stories of survival such as the Donner Party, the cruise ship Mignonette, and Flight 571. Nothing screams desperation to survive and valuing your own life above all else more than consuming your fellow man. A common theme in all of these scenarios is resource scarcity, harsh conditions, and desperation. Settings not unlike that which early civilizations of Northern Europe may have  been faced with in any given Winter.  This heinous act is often portrayed as very primitive, and usually is only referenced when it pertains to indigenous peoples, not caucasians. However, the vast majority of evidence of cannibalism discovered so far, has taken place in England and “many cultures share the belief that consuming another human is the worst (or close to the worst) behavior that a person can undertake.”(Schutt, Cannibalism p12)  For further reading on the history of cannibalism in Europe, I recommend Sarah Everts’ article here.

Survival of the Fittest Immune

During the time of Western conquest around the world, populations were surging in England, France, the Netherlands, and Germany. There was a lack of “food production, a major determinant of local population size and societal complexity —hence an ultimate factor behind the conquest.”(Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel) Much of Europe had taken to farming, while the populations in undiscovered lands were living in harmony with the earth as hunter/gatherer societies. The impact of Western colonization and imperialism on indigenous peoples worldwide was intense and devastating. Dispossession of land, loss of cultural heritage, introduction of diseases, violence, forced labor, and cultural assimilation were all common and terrible themes. Genocide, slavery, ecological damage were also prevalent. Indigenous people were no match for the diseases that farmers of Europe brought to the world. “The major killers of humanity throughout our recent history—smallpox, flu, tuberculosis*malaria, plague, measles, and cholera—are infectious diseases that evolved from diseases of animals, even though most of the microbes responsible for our own epidemic illnesses are paradoxically now almost confined to humans.”( Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel p196-197)

Survival of the Richest

If I could tell the entire world one thing, it would be this: Greed is an antiquated negative trait that arose out of a need for survival. By definition, it is only utilized to ensure the survivability of one’s self over others. We now live in a world of plentiful resources, deep philosophy, amazing technology, and a world population that craves peace, happiness, comfort, and autonomy above all else. Now is not only the time to ensure humanity’s survival, but also to allow humanity to truly thrive. To do so, we must turn away from the tragedies of the past and look to the future. We need to exchange our mirrors for windows, and look outside to our neighbors and offer assistance where needed. Continuing to hold more resources than any one person or family could use in multiple lifetimes is a luminous beacon to the world that you value your own life above all other life on this planet. The upper echelon view themselves as gods amongst men. But, the truth is, we have all survived equally and are here together, now.

Steve Johnson is a retired saltwater fisherman who has exchanged his rod and reel for pen and paper. His stories and articles range from observations of the world to fiction and back again. He enjoys spending time with his wife, kids, and grandkids in their hometown in Maine. Seeing the world through the eyes of children has added life and purpose to his writing.

Santa Claus and the Contradictions of Bourgeois Ideology

By Carlos Garrido

Republished from Midwestern Marx.

A comrade recently pointed my attention to a comedy skit by Foil Arms and Hog called “Santa is Captured by the Russians,” where for two minutes Mr. Clauss is interrogated by the Soviet police. Below are some excerpts from the conversation: 

​Santa:  I think there has been some sort of a mistake. You see I have a very busy night tonight.
Soviet Police 1: He was found attempting to hide in a chimney.
Soviet Police 2: Chimney? What were you doing in Russian airspace?
Santa: I've already told you…
(Santa gets slapped): Ho, ho, ho... That was naughty.
Soviet Police: We found a list of names.
Santa: Ah my list.
Soviet Police: These are American spies?
Santa: No, no…
Soviet Police: There was also a second list.
Santa: Oh you don't want to be on that list.
Soviet Police: You plan to kill these people.
Santa: No, no, they just get a bad present… It used to be a bag of coal… but the whole climate change thing...
Soviet Police: We intercepted a communication from one of his assets.
“Dear Santa, I have been a good girl. I would like a Silvanian Family Cosy Cottage Starter Home.”
Soviet Police: This is clearly code.
Santa: No it's not code.
Soviet Police: Then who is Santa?
Santa: That's me.
Soviet Police: You said your name was Father Christmas.
Santa: Yes, I'm known by very many names.
Soviet Police: So you are spy?... How do you know my children's names?... What are you doing in Russia?
Santa: Presents, I deliver presents.
Soviet Police: Presents? For who?
Santa: Well, to all the children in the world.
Soviet Police: All the children in the world? In return for what?
Santa: Well, nothing.
Soviet Police: Nothing? So...You are communist?
Santa: Da (Yes)… Why do you think I wear red comrade?
Soviet Police: Signals to officer outside “Comrade, two vodka, one cookies and milk.”

This captures wonderfully the gap between reality and the values and narratives enunciated by the liberal capitalist world. Father Christmas is said to be this selfless gift-bringer, someone who enjoys seeing the smile on kids’ faces as they receive – assuming they weren’t naughty – their new toys. Santa Claus gives, in the traditional narrative, to all kids, irrespective of class (but especially the poor), race, nationality, and sex. He gives these gifts, most importantly, for free. He does not give in exchange for money. His purpose, telos, is not profit. He gives gifts to meet the playful needs of children. His goal is social good, not capital accumulation. He gives so that kids can play, so that they may fulfill what it means to be a kid. He does not give so that parents’ pockets are hollowed, and his North Pole bank account inflated.

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Santa Claus’s logic is completely antithetical to the capitalist system. A system premised on producing for the sake of capital accumulation and not social and common good is in contradiction with Father Christmas’s telos. Both the real St. Nicholas (270 – 342 AD) and the Santa Claus we consume in popular culture gift-give without any attempt at obtaining recognition. Unlike the charities in the capitalist West, Santa’s giving does not afford him major tax deductions, and neither does it boost his ‘humanitarian philanthropist profile’ through large, broadcasted events. Saint Nicholas’s giving was not some big spectacle, quite the opposite. He climbs in through the chimney when everyone is sleeping to leave gifts and go. He stands on the side of the poor and does his part in attempting to bring about social justice.

While this is the dominant narrative we operate with, the reality of our commodified Christmas, and of Santa Claus as the personified agent of such commodification, is directly opposed to the narrative itself. As Valerie Panne notes, modern capitalist Christmas has turned Santa Claus into a “decorative marketing tool…for hysterical shopping.” Santa’s commodified image – first used by Coca-Cola in the 1930s – has become instrumental in helping the capitalists realize profit. He has become an instrument used to, as Marx notes in volumes two and three of Capital, “cut the turn over time of capital… The shorter the period of turnover, the smaller this idle portion of capital as compared with the whole, and the larger, therefore, the appropriated surplus-value, provided other conditions remain the same.”

Here we see a clear gap in the enunciated values and the reality of capitalist society. At the ideological level, that is, at the level of how we collectively think about the story and figure of Santa Claus, we find heartwarming values of empathy, selfless giving, and community. However, this ideological level is rooted in the reality of a Santa Claus used to promote conspicuous consumption (as Thorstein Veblen notes), the commodification of family time, traditions, and relations, and the accumulation of capital in the hands of the few.

The ideological reflection of the real world provides an upside-down, topsy-turvy image of itself. This is the essence of bourgeois ideology qua false consciousness. It is a social order that necessitates the general acceptance of an inverted understanding of itself. We come to erroneously understand the “capitalist” Santa through the narratives of the “communist” Santa. Reality is turned on its head. But this is not, as Vanessa Wills notes, a problem of “epistemic hygiene”. The root of the ‘error’ is not in our minds, that is, in our reflection of the objective phenomena at hand. As I’ve argued previously, “it is much deeper than this; the inversion or ‘mistake’ is in the world itself… This world reflects itself through an upside-down appearance, and it must necessarily do so to continuously reproduce itself.” As Marx and Engels noted long ago,

If in all ideology men and their relations appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.

To understand the gap between how Santa Claus (or Christmas) is understood and how it actually functions in modern capitalist society it is insufficient to see the problem simply as one of subjective ‘misunderstandings’ held by individuals, classes, or whole peoples. One must investigate the political economy which grounds, that is, which reflects that erroneous image of itself. The gap between the actual “capitalist” Santa and the ideological “communist” Santa is objective, it is required by the existing material relations of social production and reproduction. Capitalist ideology must disguise the cut-throat values of bourgeois individualism with the universalist values of Santa’s socialistic humanism.

But this is nothing new. Santa Claus is just another particular instant of a universal bourgeois phenomenon. The capitalist class has never been able to fully realize, to make actual, the values it enunciates with its appearance in the arena of universal history as a dominant force. Its universal appeals to liberty, equality, fraternity, etc. have always been limited within the confines of their class. As Marx had already noted in 1843, “the practical application of the right of liberty is the right of private property;” “the necessary condition for whose existence,” he and Engels write in 1848, “is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.” The phrasing of ‘all men’ used to formulate rights under capitalism is always with the understanding, as Marx notes, of “man as a bourgeois,” it is “the rights of the egotistic man, separated from his fellow men and from the community.” Its values, and their reflection in their judicature, always present their narrow class interests embellished by abstract language used to appeal to the masses and obtain their consenting approval for a form of social life which they’re in an objectively antagonistic relation with.

The ideologues of the bourgeoisie always provide the masses with a “bad check,” as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would say. But eventually, as King notes, the masses will come in to cash that check somehow. They’ll notice that within the confines of the existing order, the prosperity that checked promised is unrealizable. Capitalism has never, and will never, fulfill the universal values it pronounces as it breaks out of the bonds of feudal absolutism. Only socialism can.

The values embedded in the narrative surrounding Santa Claus, Father Christmas, Saint Nicholas, or whatever else you want to call him, will never be actual within capitalist society. Only socialism can universalize the form of selfless relationality we have come to associate with Santa. 


Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy instructor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2024). 

Examining the Role of Anti-Communist Rhetoric in the Growth of Reactionary Cult Movements

By Oskar Kaut

Amidst America’s increasingly polarized political climate, there has been growing concern regarding the emergence of reactionary groups that display cult-like behaviors and tactics, posing vital questions about the impact these groups have on individuals as well as mainstream political discourse. Cults can be broadly defined as groups or movements that share a set of philosophical, spiritual, or political beliefs that are by and large considered to be extremist or deviant by mainstream society. On the other hand, the label “reactionary” is typically given to individuals or organizations that oppose social change and desire a return to “traditional” values and practices. Such beliefs have been on the steady rise for several years, and the conception and popularization of affiliated organizations and movements have followed (Rodrik 162). Many fringe reactionary groups such as the Proud Boys and Patriot Front have come under scrutiny for some of their practices, which are often highly secretive and can involve physical and psychological manipulation (Ashland 37). In recent years, there has been a concerning rise of far-right movements worldwide, providing an opportunity for reactionary groups to amplify their message and reach a much larger audience. Many of these groups display clear cult-like behaviors, as demonstrated by their deference to authority and distorted sense of reality. These groups often use anti-communist rhetoric to infiltrate mainstream political discourse, which serves as a gateway to legitimizing and normalizing the extremist ideology of far-right cults. Resultantly, it is crucial to recognize and address the presence of these cults within right-wing movements and the impact their rhetoric can have on broader society. 

A cult is a group or movement centered around a given (typically extremist) belief system that uses coercive tactics to maintain its hold over followers. Sociological research has shown that cults utilize tactics of social influence in order to manipulate their followers into submission (Corvaglia 9). Morton Deutsch and Harold Gerard divided the concept of social influence into two subcategories. Informational social influence refers to humans’ intrinsic desire to be “right”, whereas normative social influence refers to the desire to be liked by others. Both of these concepts can be aptly applied to cults. Cults use normative social influence (known colloquially as “peer pressure”) to recruit new members. In an increasingly isolated society, cults offer some individuals an opportunity to be a part of something that they see as larger than themselves. The propagation of this form of influence can lead to cult members partaking in practices that they would normally oppose in an attempt to gain favor with other members (Deutsch & Gerard 14). Similarly, in a world where misinformation is increasingly rampant and it can be difficult to know which sources to trust, cults make use of informational social influence to develop genuine conformity to their beliefs and practices. Cults attempt to create a hegemony of “accurate information” for their followers, thus justifying even private conformity in which individuals truly believe that the group is right or justified in their struggle (Corvaglia 18).  

Many reactionary organizations and movements embody the aforementioned cult characteristics. Stanley Milgram’s classical experiments in conformity shed light on the willingness of individuals to obey those whom they view as authority figures and perform actions that go against their own conscience (Slater 32-63). The experiments found that test subjects were willing to administer increasingly severe electric shocks to another person (who they believed to be a fellow test subject) even to the degree where they believed the shocks to be lethal. Reactionary cults (like other cults) often exert substantial social influence over their members and rely on a hierarchical structure of authority that leaves them vulnerable to pressures similar to those exhibited in Milgram’s experiments. Oftentimes–as can be seen in the cults of personality surrounding Gavin McInnes within the Proud Boys or Nazi-collaborator Stepan Bandera in Ukrainian nationalist organizations–members of far-right movements are subject to pressures to conform to the extreme beliefs and practices of groups under the direction of authoritative leaders (Rabotyazhev 525). In many ways, this demonstrates the presence of normative influence within reactionary groups and movements. Moreover, members of fringe right-wing movements are also frequently subject to constant messaging from the group’s ideological leaders and even cut off from external sources of information (Jurg & Tuters). This can be clearly seen as an application of informational social influence, in which far-right organizations appeal to their members’ intrinsic desire to be right by bombarding them with their subjective version of reality accompanied by statements such as “facts don’t care about your feelings”. The intent of this process is to present their extreme viewpoints as objective truths that cannot be challenged, thereby working to shift members’ worldviews over time. The existence of such cult-like behavior in reactionary groups and movements presents real issues for mainstream society as the prevalence of these cults continues to grow. 

In recent years, the presence of reactionary groups has risen sharply both in the United States and globally (Rodrik 162). The attention given to these cults has also increased in the wake of sustained political polarization and social unrest. Large rallies such as the 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” march and the January 6th, 2021 attack on the United States capitol demonstrate the power that these fringe movements now hold as well as their capacity for violence and contribution to the erosion of democratic norms and social stability. The prevalence of right-wing cults can also be seen through the drastically increased proliferation of disinformation and conspiracy theories. Now more than perhaps ever in modern history, mainstream American politics are characterized by a general rejection of the notion of objective reality (Bleakley 1). One of the main causes of this rejection can be attributed to the prominence of echo chambers among political extremists on social media, in which aligning beliefs are reinforced and dissenting viewpoints are actively suppressed (Bleakley 12). This phenomenon hints at a bleak reality: the influence of reactionary cults and movements is not limited to their own movements. Rather, their extremist views and tactics can be observed slipping into mainstream political discourse. 

The growth of reactionary cults within far-right politics has drastically influenced mainstream political discourse. These cults both directly participate in mainstream political campaigns and employ a number of more indirect methods to influence political dialogue. As previously mentioned, the rise of fringe, right-wing cults has coincided with a sharp increase in the prevalence of disinformation and harmful conspiracy theories (Bleakley 2). Reactionary groups have used their growing platforms to disseminate propaganda promoting their fringe ideology and undermining that of their political opponents. Much of this is centered around tactics of fear-mongering in an attempt to create a feeling of urgency for action. Additionally, fringe-right cults are able to methodically slip into mainstream political discourse through media coverage of contentious issues as well as through the actions of individual politicians. Over the past several years, a large number of far-right politicians have adopted language that echoes the beliefs held by reactionary cults in attempts to appeal to certain voters. For example, both Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Rep. Lauren Boebert are former followers of the QAnon cult and continue to espouse much of the same rhetoric supported by the group today, even as they hold some of the highest elected offices in the country. Powerful politicians and media figures’ adoption of framing similar to that propagated by reactionary cults has led to a dramatic shift in the “Overton Window”—the frame of what beliefs are considered socially acceptable within mainstream society. 

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The Overton Window is a concept designed to describe the range of ideas that are considered largely acceptable within conventional society at a given time. Joseph Overton (for whom the term is named) conceptualized that ideas outside the window (i.e., politically unacceptable) may later fit within the realm of acceptable ideas because the “window” can “either move or be transformed in size” (Oleksandr 52). It is through this process that reactionary cults are able to slip their ideas into conventional political discussions. Even over relatively short periods of time, one can observe how views that were previously unthinkable become widely adopted within the mainstream. Similar to the concept of the Overton Window is that of deviance, which refers to the idea of departing from generally accepted standards present in society. According to Hewitt, “Deviance…represents a real or imagined threat to social order, and the deviant is accorded a special and discredited position in relation to it,” (214). Thus, views outside of the Overton Window at a given point in time typically also fall under the umbrella of deviant views. The concepts of the Overton Window and deviance (and the relationship therewithin) are crucial to understanding the strategic importance of falling within the views accepted by mainstream society for far-right organizations. As Zuckerman puts it, “Stray outside the sphere of legitimate debate into the sphere of deviance, and your position becomes invisible to mainstream media dialog,” (16). Essentially, in order to reach a larger audience, reactionary cults have to struggle to fit within the established norms of society at any given point in time. Because of the tactical need to infiltrate mainstream political discourse, many right-wing, reactionary cults seek to normalize their own viewpoints by falsely equivocating their views with those held on the left. 

Reactionary groups often use anti-communist rhetoric to slip into mainstream political discourse by framing their opposition to communism as a defense of democracy, individual liberties, and freedom. One of the simplest means by which fascists can achieve their ultimate goal of consolidating power is by utilizing anti-communism as a tool to create a common enemy. By depicting socialism as a threat to national security, reactionaries can silence opposition, suppress meaningful dissent, and legitimize their authoritarian system. Another means by which reactionary groups seek to utilize anti-communist rhetoric is to equivocate fascism (and oftentimes Nazism) and communism. This is of course, on its face, absurd: while communism promotes the seizure of the means of production by the workers (Marx & Engels 38), Nazism is characterized by its emphasis on racial purity and antisemitism. The false equivalence of communism and Nazism is often propagated by far-right cults and media figures alike as a means to both discredit left-wing ideas and shift the Overton Window in favor of their own ideology. Making the comparison between communism and Nazism serves to downplay the severity of the crimes of one of the worst atrocities in human history and silence legitimate criticisms of capitalism and neoliberalism. The conjoined propaganda tools of finding a common enemy around which to unite and equating communism to the atrocities of Nazism allow reactionary cults to both delegitimize leftist movements and slip their own beliefs into conventional political discourse, ultimately serving their own end goal of consolidating power within mainstream institutions. 

  Fictitious tropes equating communism to Nazism have been widely disseminated and adopted within transnational mainstream political discourse, perpetuating misinformation, reinforcing negative stereotypes about leftist political movements, and legitimizing the views of reactionary cults. While the degree to which such attempts varies, in some parts of the world (especially in former Soviet states), reactionary cults have been able to “...[capitalize] on decades of anti-communism mainstream discourse built-up to develop a full-blown populist radical right narrative and politics,” (Popescu & Vesalon 5). In practice, this means that fascist sects such as the AUR in Romania and the OUN/UPA cult in Ukraine have been able to normalize their own beliefs and have massive impacts on public opinion and public policy (Crstocea). As previously discussed, cults have a tendency to rely on (among other things), informational social influence. In many instances, this can include followers accepting blatantly false information and shaping their perceptions of reality around lies (Corvaglia 9). Naturally, it’s not difficult why it would be undesirable for distorted worldviews to slip into mainstream politics, but in many instances, it already has. One such example can be seen in The Black Book of Communism (Courtois et al, 1999), which coined the “100 million deaths by communism” myth that has since been thoroughly debunked (Francois et al 4). Despite being categorically disproven, this myth is still perpetuated within mainstream conservative (and even many liberal) circles. As the views of reactionary cults with distorted worldviews gain traction within mainstream political discourse, they are enabled to both expand their influence and increase their numbers. 

The presence of anti-communist rhetoric in mainstream political discourse has led to the growth of reactionary cults characterized by informational isolation and a deference to authority. The use of anti-communist rhetoric fosters an atmosphere of apprehension and widespread suspicion toward leftist ideologies, which renders individuals more vulnerable to the perspectives of reactionary groups. The fear-mongering and demonization of communism that has pervaded Western political discourse for decades has created a fertile breeding ground for reactionary cults and movements that espouse radical anti-communist ideologies. These groups oftentimes promise protection against a supposed communist threat and frame themselves as protectors of freedom and traditional values. By stoking fears of a communist takeover of institutions, these cults and cult-like movements are able to tap into the anxieties of ordinary people who are disillusioned with mainstream neoliberal politics and searching for a sense of belonging and purpose. Further, the adoption of fictitious anti-communist tropes by mainstream political leaders and media figures can also serve as a means of legitimizing the views of these movements, leading to a further increase in their membership and influence. As reactionary cults continue to gain traction in mainstream political discourse, the consequences of anti-communist rhetoric are becoming increasingly evident. The aforementioned groups are given steadily more and more massive platforms to promote fringe ideologies and often resort to violence, as seen in the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, North Carolina, and the storming of the United States Capitol on January 6th, 2021. Additionally, the dissemination of anti-communist disinformation and conspiracy theories among these cults creates a pipeline toward radicalization and a complete rejection of objective, factual information, facilitating the exacerbation of societal divides. The normalization of radical, anti-communist rhetoric also perpetuates narrow-minded perspective ideologies, discouraging both critical thought and nuanced discussions about complex societal issues. In conclusion, the prevalence of anti-communist rhetoric in mainstream political discourse has led to a sharp rise in reactionary cults, posing a threat to the very institutions that underpin Western so-called “liberal democracy”. Acknowledging and rectifying the adverse consequences of the normalization of anti-communist rhetoric is vital in averting the proliferation of reactionary cults and the further degradation of the material conditions of everyday Americans.

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Rabotyazhev, N. (2021). Far-right Radicalism in Ukraine in Past and Present. Post-Soviet Issues, 7(4), 516–531. https://doi.org/10.24975/2313-8920-2020-7-4-516-531 

Rodrik, D. (2021). Why Does Globalization Fuel Populism? Economics, Culture, and the Rise of Right-Wing Populism. Annual Review of Economics, 13(1), 133–170. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-economics-070220-032416 

Slater, L. (2004). Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century.”. W.W. Norton.

Walsh, Y. (2001). Deconstructing “brainwashing” within cults as an aid to counselling psychologists. Counselling Psychology Quarterly, 14(2), 119–128. https://doi.org/10.1080/09515070110058558 

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Zuckerman, E. (2017). Mistrust, efficacy and the new civics: understanding the deep roots of the crisis of faith in journalism. Zuckerman. https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/110987

Theoretical and Practical Self-Determination of Indigenous Nations in the Soviet Union

By Nolan Long

Introduction: Indigeneity in the Soviet Union

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was home to huge swaths of nationalities, including numerous Indigenous nations, many of which were located in Siberia. The Russian Empire, which preceded the Soviet Union, engaged in the systematic oppression of all minority nationalities, while promoting Great Russian nationalism. [1] As a result, it was a prime issue for the Bolsheviks to address national woes and relations. The Leninist approach to nationalities enshrined the equality of nations, opposed nationalism, and supported the unconditional right to self-determination. This right bore a special class character; in essence, the working and exploited classes of Indigenous nations gained the right to self-determination, not the ruling classes. The practical policies of the Soviets largely lined up with their theoretical outlaying, suggesting good faith on the part of the state towards the Indigenous peoples of the USSR.

One aspect of the Soviet approach to nationalities is that indigeneity, as such, was not expressly considered. While Indigenous nations were, in some cases, afforded special privileges, [2] Indigenous groups were firstly seen as minority nationalities, not as Indigenous nationalities. But it was because of the positive Soviet policy toward minority nationalities that Indigenous rights were, in some sense inadvertently, protected. The Soviet approach to national self-determination allowed Indigenous groups in the Soviet Union to flourish and experience a relatively high quality of living and independence, despite the lack of direct recognition of that indigeneity.

Indigenous groups in the Russian SFSR existed primarily in the North and the Far East. [3] Under the policy of the Russian Empire, the Indigenous peoples of these lands were negatively affected by the tsarist government. They were subjected to European diseases, resource extraction, settler colonialism, and induced alcoholism. [4] Contrastingly, the Soviet policy towards Indigenous groups was based on development, socialism, and the right of nations to self-determination.  This essay deals with Soviet Indigenous groups generally while occasionally looking at the Yakut for specificity. The Sakha/Yakut are an Indigenous group in Siberia who, during the Soviet era, maintained their ancient cultural practices (such as reindeer breeding) while also industrially developing under Soviet policy. [5] The Yakut had their own autonomous region, which allowed them to maintain their own culture. [6] Soviet policy stated that Indigenous groups with a population over 50,000 were to be recognized as ethnic minorities, rather than Indigenous as such. [7] However, the Indigenous groups with populations over this threshold (including the Yakut) were allowed to assemble into ASSRs with the right to self-determination. [8] The Soviet approach was complex due to this mutual recognition of the right of nations to self-determination, and the lack of recognition of the status of certain Indigenous groups. This dichotomy necessitates a study into the theoretical policy of the Bolsheviks.

The Theoretical Marxist-Leninist Approach to Nationalities and Self-Determination

In 1914, V.I. Lenin wrote, “self-determination of nations means the political separation of these nations from alien national bodies, and the formation of an independent national state.” [9] It is undeniable that the Soviet conceptions of nations and self-determination differed significantly from the Western ones. [10] J.V. Stalin added to this definition: “the right to self-determination means that only the nation itself has the right to determine its destiny, that no one has the right forcibly to interfere in the life of that nation, to destroy its schools and other institutions, to violate its habits and customs, to repress its language, or curtail its rights.” [11] This conception mapped out the later Soviet practice, which allowed for the political independence of Finland and the Baltic states shortly after the Russian Revolution, even while the Western nations opposed Soviet support for self-determination. [12]

Western opposition to the self-determination of nations, in the Soviet sense, was opposition to the emancipation of Indigenous and minority nations from tsarist rule, as well as opposition to socialist sovereignty. Gerald Taiaiake Alfred argues that the Western model of sovereignty is incompatible with Indigenous governance methods/structures. Indigenous governance is traditionally without absolute authority, hierarchy, or classism. [13] In comparison, the Soviet model of sovereignty, derived from its theory of nations and the right to self-determination, seems to be more compatible with Indigenous society and governance, given its tendency towards class abolition.

But while Finland, the Baltic states, and others gained their independence on the basis of Soviet support for self-determination, none of the many Indigenous nations did. Whether this is because the Bolsheviks opposed the rights of Indigenous nations to secession, or because these nations did not want to secede, is undeniably a debated topic. However, the evidence seems to show that Indigenous groups (at least their previously exploited classes) supported the new government. For example, communists were at work in the Yakutia working-class and peasantry. [14] So, while they did not become independent, the Indigenous nations generally seem to have been in support of the new Russian Soviet Socialist state nonetheless.

The Leninist approach recognized the necessity of nations to be able to pursue their own paths of development and to protect their own cultures.  This doctrine was derived from two related sources: fighting Great Russian nationalism [15] and adhering to proletarian internationalism. [16] Great Russian nationalism was that of the dominating nationality, of the ruling class of the Russian Empire. As the Bolsheviks believed in the equality of nations, [17] they believed in the necessity of fighting this nationalism in tandem with their struggle against Russian tsarism and capitalism. Proletarian internationalism is the belief that the working classes of all nations should share a sense of brotherhood in their mutual struggles against their respective ruling classes. Resultingly, Lenin believed it was in the interests of the Great Russian proletariat to struggle against the oppression that their bourgeoisie imposed upon minority nations. [18] “The Leninist position is made up of two intersecting tendencies: an internationalist outlook, and a support for the right to self-determination.” [19]

The Bolshevik leaders said relatively little about indigeneity. Rather, they focused on the ‘national question,’ and thus viewed Indigenous nations as minority nationalities in most cases. Consequently, the Soviet Indigenous policy was bound up in the national policy. Lenin did not say whether Indigenous groups should receive special status, but he “asserted the absolute, unconditional right of peoples to self-determination, including secession from a future socialist state.” [20] Stalin did not say whether Indigenous groups should receive political independence, but said that all minority nationalities (thus inclusive of Indigenous groups) have the right “to arrange its life on the basis of autonomy…[and] the right to complete secession.” [21] This silence on the question of Indigeneity is at least partially attributable to the fact that the Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik Party existed well before the modern centrality of Indigenous rights and politics on national and global stages. Nonetheless, the Soviet approach to national self-determination allowed indigenous groups in the Soviet Union to experience cultural development and protection, and levels of independence unparalleled in the Western world.

The Question of Class

Both Lenin and Stalin made it clear that the right to self-determination had a class character. Lenin wrote that the proletarian approach to self-determination “supports the bourgeoisie only in a certain direction, but never coincides with the bourgeoisie’s policy.” [22] The Russian proletariat, he said, should support the right of the oppressed nationalities to form their own state, as this right opposes Great Russian nationalism. [23] Stalin also made it clear that the right to self-determination does not mean that the socialist state should support every aspect of that national independence, at least when its independence puts it under bourgeois rule. [24] Bedford offers a concise summation: “whether support for the cultural aspirations of an ethnic group is in effect supporting the Indigenous bourgeoisie against the proletariat, or is serving to further the revolutionary struggle is the definitive question.” [25]

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The Indigenous nations of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union did, of course, have class relations, though they were quite different from those of the rest of the country. “Soviet authorities admit that the working class in Yakutia was few in numbers and contained almost no industrial proletariat.” [26] The Soviets, thus, had to consider the question of class differently in the Indigenous nations than in the non-Indigenous ones. Firstly, the principle of self-determination had to be analyzed; it was found that the workers and other exploited classes of Indigenous Yakuts were in support of the Russian Revolution. [27] However, the ruling classes of Yakutia, including the kulaks, were “stronger in Yakutia than elsewhere in the Soviet Union.” [28] Given these class conditions, the Bolsheviks found that self-determination belonged to the proletariat rather than the bourgeoisie, and aided the exploited Yakut classes in throwing off their ruling classes over a long period of time. Soviet intervention in Yakutia was not based on a policy of eliminating the Indigenous culture, but on removing the bourgeoisie from their culture.

Stalin addressed the question of culture and nationality: “the unity of a nation diminishes…owing to the growing acuteness of class struggle.” [29] The common culture between the proletariat and bourgeoisie of a nation is weakened by the development of capitalism. This evidences the Bolshevik claim to eliminating bourgeois cultural elements from Indigenous nations while not attacking the culture or people as a whole. For example, Shamans in Yakutia, identified as part of the ruling classes of that nation, were “chastised” as “being responsible for the ‘backwardness and ignorance’ of Indigenous communities.” [30] As such, given the material conditions of the Indigenous nations of the Soviet Union, self-determination took a proletarian character rather than a bourgeois one.

The Reality of Indigenous Self-Determination in the Soviet Union

As previously mentioned, the Soviet government put certain structures in place to ensure the special rights of Indigenous nations/individuals. “For example, if there were regions for hunting or fishing, those territories went to the Indigenous people right away on a natural basis without any constraints.” [31] The Committee of the North was a Bolshevik Party organ that “persuaded the Soviet government to extend certain special privileges to northern peoples,” including exemption from taxation and conscription. [32] Indeed, while Indigenous groups underwent some degree of change, [33] such as a ‘proletarianization,’ they were largely allowed to maintain their cultures and regular ways of life. “In the northlands, the indigenous people continued to be nomadic, everywhere the peasants depended largely on hunting and fur-trapping.” [34] The Indigenous Dargin people of the Caucasus “preserved their traditional Sufi-influenced Islamic practices and endured less government pressure [to adhere to atheism].” [35]

While the Soviet government attempted to include Indigenous nations in the worker culture of the USSR, their relatively lax approach to Indigenous culture demonstrates some level of good faith. Furthermore, Davis and Alice Bartels argue that “all national and ethnic groups were radically changed as a result of Soviet state policy,” [36] not just Indigenous groups. Industrialization, collectivization, educational opening, and the liberation of women were new and radical concepts for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous groups. [37] As such, these policies were not aimed at otherizing one group, or anything alike. Rather, such policies were aimed at national development and socialist construction.

The Soviets outwardly supported the cultural development and autonomy of Indigenous nations in more explicit ways. “Soviet policy [was] to encourage the development of national cultures and preservation of the native languages.” [38] Samir Amin writes that “the Soviet system brought changes for the better. It gave…autonomous districts, established over huge territories, the right to their cultural and linguistic expression.” [39] This cultural and linguistic expression included “the creation of written forms of [Indigenous] languages and educational programs in northern languages.” [40] The Soviet policy towards Indigenous groups was not one of assimilation, but allowance for autonomy (derived from self-determination) in the realm of culture.

Indigenous groups also had political rights which were reflective of their right to self-determination. “Stalin specified that each nationality should man its own courts, administrative bodies, economic agencies and government by its own local native peoples and conduct them in its own language.” [41] Lenin likewise argued that it was of great importance to create autonomous regions in Russia. [42] Soviet practice largely lined up with Leninist theory. Directly after the October Revolution, the Bolshevik Party released the Declaration on the Rights of Peoples of Russia, “which guaranteed the right to self-determination and the abolition of religious and ethnic discrimination.” [43] Skachko, an academic expert on Siberian Indigenous groups, wrote in 1930 that the Soviet state did not intend to keep Indigenous peoples “as helpless charges of the state in special areas reserved for them and isolated from the rest of the world…On the contrary, the government’s goal is their all-around cultural and national development and their participation as equals.” [44]

Conditions were not perfect for Indigenous nations in the Soviet Union; they experienced some drawbacks as a result of Soviet policies, sometimes due to the lack of recognition of indigeneity. “In 1917, the Yakut/Sakha people constituted 87.1% of the province’s total population.” [45] However, by the end of the Soviet era, the Indigenous people made up only 33% of the population. [46] Beyond the settlement of Indigenous land by non-Indigenous peoples, another drawback was that traditional Indigenous occupations had been “disrupted by industrial and resource development” by the late 1980s. [47] This is, however, at least partially attributable to the fact that Mikhail Gorbachev was not a Leninist, meaning he did not follow the preceding Soviet approach to nationalities.

The Soviet government “established a system to transfer capital from the rich regions of the Union (western Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia, later the Baltic countries) to the developing regions of the east and south.” [48] By providing aid for the newly autonomous Indigenous republics, the Soviets were expressly supporting their development. Beyond this aid, Indigenous political systems were manned by members of the nation itself. The Soviet policy of korenization (nativization) “sought to fill key management positions with Indigenous representatives.” [49] This policy was implemented because “leaders of the governing Bolshevik Party considered Great Russian chauvinism as a major impediment to economic and social development because it turned a blind eye to the national/social aspiration of the many peoples and nationalities in the Soviet Union.” [50] This policy allowed Indigenous nations to develop on their own terms while remaining within the Union, allowing them to express their self-determination without needing to exercise their right to secession.

While it is true that the Indigenous nations did not secede from the Soviet Union, two facts remain that prove that the Soviet state supported the independence of these nations; firstly, these nations were allowed to organize into Autonomous Republics which exercised a large amount of self-governing, even relative to the Soviet state and the Republic states. [51] Second, these nations still (at least theoretically) had the right to self-determination. [52] It is arguable, then, that the Indigenous nations of the USSR merely never exercised the right to cessation due to their support for the Soviet system/government.

Conclusion

In the capitalist Russian Federation, Indigenous peoples are significantly worse off than under the USSR. Russia has not yet adopted the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, [53] nor the ILO Convention 169. [54] Contrastingly, the Soviet Union was often at the forefront of international efforts to recognize Indigenous-centred issues, including the push to recognize cultural genocide in UN documents. [55] While Indigenous groups are formally protected by the Russian Constitution, the enforcement of these protections is often inadequate, leaving these groups in a precarious position where unemployment and poverty rates are high. [56] Whereas the Soviets funded the education of Indigenous languages, the Russian Federation now funds Russian-language schools in these regions, seriously threatening Indigenous languages. [57] Especially in view of the experiences of Indigenous peoples in the modern Russian Federation, the Soviet policies towards Indigenous nations continue to be vindicated.

In their theoretical and practical approaches, the Soviet state was relatively open, egalitarian, and accommodating to the Indigenous groups that lived within its borders. Relative at least to the Western nations, the Soviet Union, existing only until 1991, was consistently measures ahead in its policies towards indigeneity. [58] While not explicitly recognizing the concept of indigeneity in all Soviet Indigenous groups, the state nonetheless provided them with sufficient autonomy for their cultures to be preserved and developed. While imperfect, the Soviet approach was admirable in its own time, to say the very least.

Endnotes 

[1] Sidorova, Evgeniia, and Rice, Roberta. “Being Indigenous in an Unlikely Place: Self-Determination in the Yakut Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (1920-1991).” p. 5.

[2] Sulyandziga, Pavel. “We Need Two Keys.”

[3] Bartels, Davis A., and Bartels, Alice L. When the North was Red: Aboriginal Education in Soviet Siberia. p. ix.

[4] Ibid., p. 16-22.

[5] Ibid., p. x.

[6] Ibid., p. 1.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Lenin, V.I. The Right of Nations to Self-Determination. p. 4.

[10] Goshulak, Glenn. “Soviet and Post-Soviet Challenges to the Study of Nation and State Building.” p. 494.

[11] Stalin, J.V. Marxism and the National and Colonial Question. p. 18.

[12] Anderson, Edgar. “Finnish-Baltic Relations, 1918-1940.” p. 52.

[13] Alfred, Gerald Taiaiake. “‘Sovereignty’: An Inappropriate Concept.” p. 323.

[14] Kirby, Stuart E. “Communism in Yakutia – The First Decade.” p. 29.

[15] Lenin, V.I. The Right of Nations to Self-Determination. p. 48.

[16] Ibid., p. 91.

[17] Stalin, J.V. Marxism and the National and Colonial Question. p. 18.

[18] Lenin, V.I. The Right of Nations to Self-Determination. p. 31.

[19] Bedford, David. “Marxism and the Aboriginal Question: The Tragedy of Progress.” p. 108.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Stalin, J.V. Marxism and the National and Colonial Question. p. 18.

[22] Lenin, V.I. The Right of Nations to Self-Determination. p. 25-26.

[23] Lenin, V.I. The Right of Nations to Self-Determination. p. 29-30.

[24] Stalin, J.V. Marxism and the National and Colonial Question. p. 18.

[25] Bedford, David. “Marxism and the Aboriginal Question: The Tragedy of Progress.” p. 109.

[26] Kirby, Stuart E. “Communism in Yakutia – The First Decade.” p. 29.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Ibid., p. 39.

[29] Stalin, J.V. Marxism and the National and Colonial Question. p. 35.

[30] Sidorova, Evgeniia, and Rice, Roberta. “Being Indigenous in an Unlikely Place: Self-Determination in the Yakut Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (1920-1991).” p. 5.

[31] Sulyandziga, Pavel. “We Need Two Keys.”

[32] Bartels, Davis A., and Bartels, Alice L. When the North was Red: Aboriginal Education in Soviet Siberia. p. 30-31.

[33] First Peoples Worldwide. “Who are the Indigenous Peoples of Russia?”

[34] Kirby, Stuart E. “Communism in Yakutia – The First Decade.” p. 36.

[35] Eden, Jeff. God Save the USSR: Soviet Muslims and the Second World War.

[36] Bartels, Davis A., and Bartels, Alice L. When the North was Red: Aboriginal Education in Soviet Siberia. p. 4.

[37] Ibid.

[38] Szymanski, Albert. Human Rights in the Soviet Union. p. 51.

[39] Amin, Samir. Russia and the Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism. p. 29.

[40] Bartels, Davis A., and Bartels, Alice L. When the North was Red: Aboriginal Education in Soviet Siberia. p. 5.

[41] Ibid., p. 8.

[42] Bedford, David. “Marxism and the Aboriginal Question: The Tragedy of Progress.” p. 108.

[43] Bartels, Davis A., and Bartels, Alice L. When the North was Red: Aboriginal Education in Soviet Siberia. p. 29.

[44] Ibid., 30-31.

[45] Sidorova, Evgeniia, and Rice, Roberta. “Being Indigenous in an Unlikely Place: Self-Determination in the Yakut Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (1920-1991).” p. 7.

[46] Ibid., 8.

[47] Bartels, Davis A., and Bartels, Alice L. When the North was Red: Aboriginal Education in Soviet Siberia. p. xii.

[48] Amin, Samir. Russia and the Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism. p. 29.

[49] Sidorova, Evgeniia, and Rice, Roberta. “Being Indigenous in an Unlikely Place: Self-Determination in the Yakut Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (1920-1991).” p. 6.

[50] Kovalevich, Dmitri. “Ukrainian Nationalists Have a Long History of Anti-Semitism which the Soviet Union Tried to Combat.”

[51] Russian Federation’s Constitution of 1918. Art. 11.

[52] Russian Federation’s Constitution of 1918. Art. 6.

[53] Representatives of the Republic of Sakha. “An Appeal from the Representatives of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).”

[54] First Peoples Worldwide. “Who are the Indigenous Peoples of Russia?”

[55] Mako, Shramiran. “Cultural Genocide and Key International Instruments: Framing the Indigenous Experience.” p. 183.

[56] First Peoples Worldwide. “Who are the Indigenous Peoples of Russia?”

[57] First Peoples Worldwide. “Who are the Indigenous Peoples of Russia?”

[58] Szymanski, Albert. Human Rights in the Soviet Union. p. 295-296.

Bibliography

Alfred, Gerald Taiaiake. “‘Sovereignty’: An Inappropriate Concept.” In C. A. Maaka and C. Andersen (Ed.), The Indigenous Experience: Global Perspectives. Canadian Scholars Press, 2006.

Amin, Samir. Russia and the Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism. Monthly Review Press, 2016.

Anderson, Edgar. “Finnish-Baltic Relations, 1918-1940: An Appraisal.” Scandinavian Studies, Vol. 54, No. 1, 1982, pp. 51-72. jstor.org/stable/40918186?seq=2

Bartels, Davis A., and Alice L. Bartels. When the North was Red: Aboriginal Education in Soviet Siberia. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995.

Bedford, David. “Marxism and the Aboriginal Question: The Tragedy of Progress.” Canadian Journal of Native Studies, Vol. 14, No. 1, 1994, pp. 101-117. cjns.brandonu.ca/wp-content/uploads/14-1-bedford.pdf

Eden, Jeff. God Save the USSR: Soviet Muslims and the Second World War (eBook). Oxford University Press, 2021. doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190076276.003.0001

First Peoples Worldwide. “Who Are the Indigenous Peoples of Russia?” Cultural Survival, 2014. culturalsurvival.org/news/who-are-indigenous-peoples-russia

Goshulak, Glenn. “Soviet and Post-Soviet Challenges to the Study of Nation and State Building.” Ethnicities, Vol. 3, No. 4, 2003, pp. 491-507. jstor.org/stable/23889868

Kirby, E. Stuart. “Communism in Yakutia – the First Decade.” Slavic Studies, Vol. 25, 1980, pp. 27-42. eprints.lib.hokudai.ac.jp/dspace/bitstream/2115/5096/1/KJ00000113076.pdf

Kovalevich, Dmitri. “Ukrainian Nationalists Have a Long History of Anti-Semitism which the Soviet Union Tried to Combat.” Monthly Review, 2022. mronline.org/2022/10/21/ukrainian-nationalists-have-long-history-of-anti-semitism-which-the-soviet-union-tried-to-combat/

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Death, the Crisis of Meaning, and Capitalism

By Carlos L. Garrido

Republished in modified form from Midwestern Marx.

The Moving finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

- The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

Death as the Nexus for the Possibility of Meaning in Human Life

In This Life, philosopher Martin Hägglund argues that:

To attain a peaceful state of eternity you must be liberated from the risk of losing what you love. Were such liberation possible, however, nothing would matter to you. You literally would not care. There would be no urgency to do anything or maintain love for anyone, since nothing of value could be lost.

Homer’s The Odyssey presents us with a similar message in Book Five. The situation Odysseus (the central character) is thrust into on Calypso’s Island reflects the meaninglessness of eternal life (Calypso is a beautiful female deity who detains Odysseus for seven years). On the Island, Odysseus is guaranteed immortality and all the bodily pleasures he can imagine. However, when the character’s stay on the Island is introduced to the reader, Odysseus is weeping, missing his family, and longing to return to them. 

In our contemporary logic of shallow hedonism (or non-Epicurean hedonism) [1], where the satisfaction of desires and pleasures has raised itself into an ethical imperative, Odysseus’s actions reflect those of a madman. Within this contemporary logic, Odysseus’s actions are as unfathomable as Abraham’s killing of his son, Isaac, on God’s orders. Abraham’s action, as the Danish existentialist Søren Kierkegaard notes, is beyond the limits of comprehension, it is absurd and cannot be grasped as a “distinction among others embraced by understanding.” 

Within the logic of contemporary bourgeois society, our dominant mode of experience is having. We are what we have and what we consume. In our capitalist hyper-consumerist societies, the Cartesian cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) is turned into cōnsūmere, ergo sum (I consume, therefore I am). The world presents itself as a big “theater of consumption,” where meaningless enjoyment — whose real and well-hidden telos [2] is the realization of profit obtained in the consumed commodities — becomes life’s prime want. An island of infinite pleasure would seem, within the confines of this mode of relationality and irrational rationality, the purest form of good — a heavenly island. 

But it isn’t enough for Odysseus. Why? 

Well, not only are there things that matter more than pleasure (if you wish, think of a hierarchy of values, some of the higher ones which are inaccessible in Calypso’s Island), such as honor, loyalty, family, etc., but the possibility of anything mattering at all within the confines of immortality is impossible. Odysseus’s life on the Island might have been pleasureful, but — insofar as it was sustained within conditions of immortality — it would have also been meaningless.

Only when the ever-present reality of our finitude is the background of all our actions can life obtain meaning. Death, that which Martin Heidegger called “the possibility of the impossibility of any existence at all,” is the nexus through which meaning can emerge in our life. It is the fragile character of our lives which functions as the conditions for the possibility of meaning.

Odysseus’s struggle to leave the Island is a struggle for life, for family and honor, but most importantly, for a return to the finitude which underlays our being-in-the-world and provides us with the conditions for living meaningful, truly human lives.

As Achilles (played by Brad Pitt) in Wolfgang Petersen's 2004 masterpiece Troy says: “The gods envy us. They envy us because we’re mortal, because any moment may be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed.”

The Crisis of Meaning and Bourgeois Finitude 

While it is our finitude which grounds our ability to lead meaningful lives, an awareness of our finitude does not guarantee that we’ll find, or create, meaning in our lives. An awareness of our mortality, therefore, while necessary, is not in itself sufficient.

We know we are not immortal. In fact, in our hyper-consumerist societies, the primacy of shallow hedonism is often rooted in a deep sense of our mortality. For instance, just a few years ago, the acronym that grasped the American zeitgeist was “YOLO,” which stood for “you only live once”. Under this motto, pleasure-centered licentiousness [3] was legitimized. After all, why shouldn’t I enjoy myself to the fullest if I only live once?  

But this sense of mortality has not, and (under the conditions in which it exists) cannot, provide the fertile ground needed for us to create meaning in our lives. We live in societies riddled with depression, anxiety, stress, etc. As the young Karl Marx had already observed by 1844, capitalism systematically alienates us from our labor, its product, our fellow human beings, nature, and from our species-essence (gattungswesen, by which he meant our ability to creatively objectify ourselves onto nature through our labor) [4]. These are profound crises at the human level (crisis comes from one of the Greek words for separation, krísis), and pervade our lebenswelt (life-world) or forms of being-in-the-world under our current capitalist-imperialist mode of life.

In many ways, a lot of these social-psychological ills have been normalized. Even things like chronic illness, which we often take to be a result of genetics or some other form of a “bad luck of the draw,” are in many cases traceable to stress patterns formed out of the habits people are thrusted into by the dominant order. As Dr. Gabor Mate shows in The Myth of Normal, these illnesses are anything but arbitrary and normal. In fact, they are “profoundly abnormal” in just about every way possible. For instance, a 2019 study in Cancer Research found that “women with severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) were found to have twice the risk of ovarian cancer as women with no known trauma exposure.” Trauma (both its big T and small t iterations) is essentially rooted, as Dr. Mate notes, in a “fracturing of the self and of one’s relationship to the world.” This is, in essence, another way of describing the same crises Marxism has explained, condemned, and combatted since the middle of the 19th century. It is a crisis precisely because it is not “normal,” it is a separation rooted in our historically constituted mode of life. 

In the midst of our alienated, exploited, and oppressed mode of existence, the form of life we live in must, in order to successfully finish the cycle of capital accumulation for which we were exploited in the first place, bombard us with advertisements destined to make us Homo consumericus [5] in those few hours of the days were — although feeling the lingering effects of the work day – we are not directly getting exploited. The consumption of advertisements — which studies have shown take up, on average, four years of our lives — is a form of consumption which proliferates our desires to consume. It is the equivalent of drinking Coca-Cola, a drink shown to dehydrate us further, in order to quench our thirst. 

Additionally, since we often can’t afford this (wages have stayed low, prices and job precarity have risen), we are forced to turn to borrowing to pay for what we consume. The American working class is undoubtedly among the most indebted in history. This debt slavery, which characterizes the lives of the modern American proletariat and reproletariat (i.e., the section of the last century’s middle classes which have fallen back to precarity and instability), is a form of what Marx calls in Capital III the “secondary exploitation… which runs parallel to the primary exploitation taking place in the production process itself.” This has ushered into world-history a new form of super-exploitation within the metropole itself, where its working masses are not only exploited (direct, primary exploitation) but cripplingly indebted (secondary exploitation), and therefore, doubly, or, super-exploited.

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How can any meaning arise in lives plagued by alienated work and meaningless consumption? It is not enough to show that we are dealing, as a society, with a deep crisis of meaning. Viktor Frankl, for instance, already described in the middle of the last century through many widely read and celebrated books the universal character of meaninglessness in modern bourgeois society. But is this recognition enough? Must we not inquire as to its origins? Must we not explain, and not just describe, these crises?  

A scientific explanation of these pervasive social-psychological ills would have, as Dr. Mate notes, “revolutionary implications.” The question would be, can the sciences in these fields (especially its mainstream trends), be able to overcome what the Marxist scientists Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin have called their “Cartesian reductionism?” Can they move away from bourgeois philosophical assumptions which divide mind and body, individual and society, which observe things as dead and static entities, and which reify them from the larger totalities whose existence they presuppose? In short, can these sciences adopt — either consciously or not — the materialist dialectic and its focus on universal motion, interconnection, contradiction, totality analysis, etc.? These are the foundations through which we may reproduce the concrete concretely in thought, and hence, understand the world in all its complexities.

A central obstacle in this task is not only the bourgeois character of the institutions the sciences are forced to operate through, but, as an ideological reflection of this, their adoption of the view that they are (and this is especially true in the “hard” sciences) somehow above ideology and philosophy. What an ideologically loaded sentiment! We are back to Plato’s cave, back to prisoners who take the conditions of their particular enchainment to be the whole of reality itself. The truth is, while the sciences often fancy themselves to be “above” philosophy and ideology, “in most cases,” as Friedrich Engels had noted, they are “slaves to precisely the worst vulgarized relics of the worst philosophies.” 

“Nothing evokes as much hostility” in scientists, Levins and Lewontin write, “as the suggestion that social forces influence or even dictate either the scientific method or the facts and theories of science.” A regrounding of the mainstream sciences in a consistent dialectical materialist worldview, along with the uprooting of the profit motive that dictates its telos in our mode of life, would readily provide a richer, more comprehensive, and — necessarily — a more revolutionary understanding of our crisis of meaning and what overcoming it entails [6]. 

Finding Meaning in the Struggle for a New World 

The crisis of meaning we are experiencing is systematically rooted in the capitalist mode of life. This is something which can, and has, been scientifically proven. It is not simply a question of “culture” or “individual accountability.” While the crisis manifests itself in our culture and individual lives, its existence there reflects the forces at play in the economic base of society. The crisis in our culture and in our individual lives is a product of the heightening of the contradictions at the foundation of a moribund capitalist-imperialist order. 

This is where a lot of the commentary (especially critical in character) on the crisis of meaninglessness misses the mark. Most of it merely describes the way the crisis looks by the time it gets to the social-psychological level, remaining “cultural” in its critique through and through, never explaining the underpinning motion and contradictions producing that which they critique. The superiority of the Marxist outlook (i.e., dialectical materialism) is found in its ability to do precisely this — to explain and not just describe, to show the underlying foundations producing movement at the surface, and not simply taking that surface for the whole of reality. 

It is important to note, however, that our contemporary crisis of meaning doesn’t necessarily entail that meaningful lives are impossible. On the fringes of quotidian society, there are still people who, like Odysseus, find meaning in tending to familial duties. There are also, like Odysseus, people who may be rooted in a strong sense of honor, in a deep drive for greatness in their respective fields. This is certainly a reality for many athletes, whose striving within their sports provides a source of meaning in their lives.

However, no greater meaning can be derived than that which arises from fighting against the system that produces these crises of meaning. The greatest and most memorable human beings in history have been those, like Socrates, Jesus, Simón Bolívar, John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Marx and Engels, José Martí, Vladimir Lenin, Mao, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and many more, who have found their life’s purpose in the struggle to move humanity forward into a more rational and free world. There is, therefore, tremendous meaning to be found in the struggle against a world governed by exploitation, alienation, and oppression. A capitalist-imperialist order that has murdered tens of millions (four million in the Muslim world in the last two decades alone) and that is threatening humanity with nuclear Armageddon to sustain its hegemony, is worth making the object we commit our lives to destroying. 

But a purposeful and meaningful life does not have as its only end destruction. We seek to destroy this order, not so that we can dance on the rubble, but so that the fetters it has set on humanity are destroyed. We seek to destroy not for destruction’s sake, but because what we destroy is itself a system, as the British Marxist William Morris called, of waste and destruction. We destroy, in other words, so that we may construct a future free of poverty, exploitation, plunder, war, oppression, alienation, meaninglessness, bigotry, etc. We destroy so that we may construct a world in which humanity can flourish, where people of all creeds may, as Che Guevara hoped, achieve their “full realization as a human creature.”

Carlos L. Garrido is a philosophy teacher at Southern Illinois University, Director at the Midwestern Marx Institute, and author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2024).

Footnotes

[1] Epicurus’s hedonism has little to do with how we understand the concept today. Today, the hedonist is understood to be the person who concerns themselves with the basest pleasures of the body. The image of someone in a bubble bath, drinking sparkling wine, eating chocolate-covered strawberries usually comes to mind. However, for the Epicurean school of hedonism, pleasures and pains are of different kinds. There are natural, necessary, and vain pleasures we encounter. The goal of the enlightened pleasure seeker is to distinguish amongst these — to avoid those immediate pleasures that cause pain in the long run (e.g., drugs, unhealthy food, etc.), to contain the natural desires to a rational limit (e.g., sex, while natural, if not taken in moderation can lead to sex addictions, and this takes this natural pleasure to the point of ‘“pain”), and to recognize those immediate forms of pain that might actually lead to pleasure in the long run (e.g., exercise, medicine, etc.). All in all, the Epicurean enlightened hedonist will, in their actions, look a whole lot more like they’re following an Aristotelian virtue ethic than the base hedonism we encounter today.

[2] Its end, goal, purpose, highest good, etc.

[3] This term is not limited to its sexual connotation but refers to any notion of liberty” that operates through the abandonment of necessity — a state of lawlessness, an absence of social rules.

[4] For more on the development of the concept of alienation through Marx’s work, see my review article.

[5] A neologism that describes the turning of human beings into “consumerist animals” in modern bourgeois society.

[6] I have shown elsewhere how this poverty of outlook, conjoined with the material incentives of capitalism, has led to the utter failure of the sciences (the mainstream ones; there’s always good folks doing work that goes against the grain) to understand social-psychological ills such as depression (see: “The Failed Serotonin Theory of Depression: A Marxist Analysis”)

Pavlovian Socialism: How Metrics of Empire Can Ruin the Left

By Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso

It has been roughly a year since Ketanji Brown Jackson was sworn in to replace Stephen Breyer and become the 116th Justice of the US Supreme Court. The appointment has been hailed by liberal figureheads far and wide since then. President Joe Biden called the nomination an act of “[preserving] freedom and liberty here in the United States of America.” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer celebrated the appointment as a “greater moment for America as we rise to a more perfect union.” In reality, the affair speaks to a vital yet often ignored aspect of sociopolitical oppression in the United States: metrics of empire. 

In the United States, like in any imperialist force, the powers-that-be employ many different tactics to preserve their rule. These tactics include Pentagon involvement in Hollywood filmmaking, the deliberate whitewashing of grade-school education, and the skewing of news coverage to manufacture consent for pro-elite policies. Metrics of empire fall under this same category, as they refer to a carefully curated incentive structure by which accomplishments and developments in American society are measured and rewarded. 

The structure itself can be further broken down into three subcategories: Government, Private and Public. The Government subcategory consists of exactly what its name suggests: governmental forms of legitimation and recognition. American society has been made to believe that prominent government positions carry an inherent degree of legitimacy and sophistication, such that they should be admired and revered simply for existing, rather than routinely interrogated as hotbeds of imperialist empowerment and corruption. Such positions — due to their aforementioned societal rank — thus become rewards in and of themselves, serving as markers of achievement that deserve public reverence and praise regardless of their occupants’ work or character. Jackson’s Supreme Court nomination exemplifies this perfectly.

As a black woman working within the American legal system, Jackson experienced no shortage of hardships and systemic obstacles in her professional journey. Considering demographic data alone, it is clear that Jackson was in largely uncharted territory, as just under 5% of first-year law students are black women while they make up just over 3% of associates and less than 1% of partners. In the end, however, what was her reward for surpassing these systemic hurdles and beating overwhelming odds? A seat on the Supreme Court, a grossly antiquated, inherently undemocratic, and historically oppressive institution that most often operates at the behest of capital and bends to the will of America’s most reactionary impulses.

The Private category consists of entities such as private universities and privately owned publications:

1.  Universities (ex: The University of Chicago): The school is considered one of the 10 best in the country and has historically boasted competitive rankings across a broad range of subject areas and specializations. Yet, it was the so-called “Chicago Boys” — a group of economics graduates — who cultivated and ultimately spearheaded the implementation of neoliberal economic policy abroad, namely in Augusto Pinochet’s Chile. This cohort of Chicago alumni collaborated with the United States government to advance business interests by using Augusto Pinochet’s Chile as a testing ground for the economic models and policies they hoped to pursue domestically. 

2.  Publications (ex: The New York Times): Despite being heralded as the gold standard for journalism nationwide, the investor-owned New York Times routinely employs biased coverage and partisan language when discussing matters relevant to American foreign policy -- including Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and the Iraq War — whitewashing such atrocities to manufacture consent for the imperial project.  

The Public category consists of entities such as nonprofit organizations and public-facing awards:

1.  Nonprofits (ex: Doctors Without Borders): Though it is ranked 26th among America’s Top 100 Charities according to Forbes magazine, this organization is a hotbed of white saviorism and intraorganizational racism that perpetuates US hegemony abroad through the lens of healthcare and medical treatment. 

2.  Awards (ex: The Nobel Prize): The prize is widely considered to be the most prestigious recognition of achievement in the world. Yet, the awardees of the Peace Prize have included the likes of Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama. 

This state of affairs spells a particularly grim prognosis for the socialist movement across the United States. Metrics of empire have the very real potential to serve as direct inhibitors to tangible progress in the fundamentally socialist areas of social justice, economic transformation, and material improvement. As such, a sort of Pavlovian socialism can develop, one in which it is only through the awarding of such imperial accolades and symbols of legitimation that our work is perceived as successful, casting out all other achievements in the process.

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At best, this dynamic can create a qualitative hierarchy in which the work recognized by metrics of empire is considered superior. At worst, the dynamic can become a hegemonic enclosure fundamentally opposed to the radical dimensions of socialist praxis, eventually creating a scenario in which the metrics themselves become the sought-after achievements rather than the empirical progress made by the work that warranted the metrics’ awarding in the first place. 

We’ve seen this play out already with organizations across the country, one such organization being the Sunrise Movement. While its founding principles contained more radical conceptions of action and changemaking — including sit-ins at government offices, Wide Awake demonstrations, and recognition by prominent leftist figures such as Noam Chomsky — Sunrise’s more recent activism has left much to be desired. Since the beginning of this decade, it has largely shifted away from direct action-based initiatives to focus on electoral endorsements and armchair advocacy. Most notably, these shifts have resulted in a severe lack of climate victories on the legislative front as well as serious organizational neglect of representation and empowerment of marginalized voices in the movement, particularly those of color.

The shift can be largely understood as a pragmatic change resulting from an outstanding reliance on big-money donations as well as ties to government officials and politicians. Through accepting and actively engaging with metrics of empire in this context, namely of the governmental and private varieties, the Sunrise Movement and organizations like it have provided a glimpse of what such a dynamic could mean for the socialist movement when applied to actual revolutionary praxis in the future.

This is not to suggest that socialist praxis should be entirely devoid of notable awards or recognitions. After all, acknowledgements of outstanding achievement can be an incredibly valuable way of qualifying motivated, focused, and effective work. These “metrics of the proletariat,” however, must have a carefully curated relationship to the doers of the work and to the empirical effects of it. The metrics themselves must never come to occupy the place of the work’s initial objective: substantive and revolutionary change. 

As such, “metrics of the proletariat” are a thing of the socialist future, an element of our aspirational imaginary that can come to occupy the dynamics of our work down the line, but not that of the present day. So long as systemic injustices and widespread oppression reign supreme — further emboldened by the unrelenting fervor of imperial capitalism — these metrics will inevitably reward advantaged and privileged socialists and, more pressingly, will run the risk of becoming metrics of empire in and of themselves.  

Thus, as the socialist movement carries on with its vital work of national and global changemaking, it cannot neglect the very real hurdle that metrics of empire can come to represent. Only by preemptively abolishing the air of legitimacy these metrics now hold — and looking toward a future in which new metrics of success and achievement that honor socialist ideals and avoid imperial capitalist corruption will be established — can the movement avoid existing structures of incentive and recognition that seek to counteract its aims at every turn.

Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso is a Colombian Marxist. In his writing, he seeks to interrogate the nuances of socialist thought and praxis.

What the Titan Submersible Says About Capitalist Culture

By Saheim Patrick

It is ironic that the name of the doomed sub that captivated the minds of Americans this past week, contains the suffix: -gate, a morpheme that has become de facto synonymous with conspiracy theories. The irony stems from the fact that conspiracy theories, or at least the ones that attach -gate to their title, are a direct product of the type of distracting, unified discourse characteristic of our current, US society that has allowed the topic of the OceanGate submersible to thrive.

The story, largely irrelevant for reasons which will be divulged, goes like this: five men aboard a twenty-two foot carbon-fiber and titanium craft, named the Titan, planning to tour the ruins of the famed Titanic shipwreck. At an hour and forty-five minutes into their expedition, contact was lost with their surface ship: the Polar Prince. In the days following, the story and question of whether they were alive or not, left the public reeling, and the media magnates sensationalizing. It is important, for the sake of critiquing the discourse surrounding it, to note that the men aboard paid 250,000 USD each for this trip. This particular detail has stoked a fire in the discussions of the event, namely on Twitter, and has promoted a false dichotomy, a false binary, in talking about the sub. The sides that you can take are presented as: finding the likely deaths of these men a tragic event, or ridiculing and showing apathy towards their deaths. It is not uncommon for a simplification of this sort to happen in modern discourse.

The dominant medium of communication in the US is social media. It is easy to believe it to be the Internet as a whole, but the difference between a technology and a medium must be noted (not only for this clarification, but for our understanding of modern discourse as a whole). Neil Postman’s 1985 treatise on dominant mediums of communication throughout history and television as a medium, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, tackles specifically this difference.

We might say that a technology is to a medium as the brain is to the mind. Like the brain, a technology is a physical apparatus. Like the mind, a medium is a use to which a physical apparatus is put. A technology becomes a medium as it employs a particular symbolic code, as it finds its place in a particular social setting, as it insinuates itself into economic and political contexts. A technology, in other words, is merely a machine. A medium is the social and intellectual environment a machine creates.

In other words, a technology is a machine, and a medium is the use of that machine. It then becomes clear that while the Internet is a dominant technology today, the dominant medium, its dominant use, is social media. And with this in mind, it becomes abundantly clear as to why discourse today is the way it is.

There is a constant, pervasive threat of irrelevance anytime one posts on social media, and I am sure that anyone who has spent more than a few days on any given platform can attest to the rapid speed at which one buzzing topic moves to the next. As a result, arguments, ideas, and discussions are spewed out quick and without any nuance. Actual engagement with the ideas being talked out cannot be risked. In the time it takes you to study, read a book, or to genuinely think about the subject you are so fervent about, there is a new point of mass interest, and you are left speaking into a void which no longer cares to hear what you have to say.

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It is then not surprising to me that discourse on Twitter has taken such an extreme split; such a sharp turning away from the simple and foundational idea that multiple things can be true about a given thing at once. It is possible to believe that the deaths of the billionaires aboard the Titan are sad. Objectively, I think if any one of us were in that situation, ignoring of course the circumstances that got them in the situation in the first place, we would be primally and utterly terrified. That is a chilling thought. However, it is also possible to believe, at the same time, that the reaction this has caused in us is utterly terrifying. What is there to happen when people believe that they have to passionately defend billionaires’ sanctity of life? What does this mean for revolution in America?

I will put it this way: we are slaves on a plantation. Our plantation’s master has gone away on a boating trip with neighboring plantation masters. On this trip, an accident happens which leads to our master, and his master friends, dying. If you asked me, a slave, to put myself in the master’s shoes, and to divorce myself from the fact that I as a slave do not even have the resources to take a boating trip, I would surely say that would be a scary moment for me and I may feel your idea of empathy. However, my master has died, his plantation still exists, a new master will come soon to rule that plantation, and I am still a slave. Therefore, that idea of empathy that you have has its limits on me. As well, if there were a group of slaves on the plantation so intensely tore up about master’s death and scolding other slaves for not being as tore up, it would lead me to fear that when the time to fight for our liberation comes, these fellow slaves will not be able to be counted on. It brings into question whether someone is truly for the people; for if you are not staunchly for the people, you are against them.

The even more frightening factor here is that people so loudly championing empathy for the billionaires are not even aware that they are serving capitalist interests. They cannot tell that — by the way that the meticulous, scientific system of capitalism works — anytime you defend billionaires, you are defending capitalism. It is no coincidence that this story was pushed as hard as it was. Within three days of the submersible going missing, a documentary on it has already been filmed, produced, edited, and sent to air. Ask yourself, and I mean seriously ask yourself: why do we not hear the stories of the people who are ruthlessly exploited by billionaires as much as we do this? In that answer is also the answer as to why you will not hear the same people championing empathy for these billionaires, also championing empathy for their victims, whom are countless and suffering daily.

Aside from the political thought that this story may inspire, it is a synecdoche of a larger culture of irrelevant news and information that has been in place for centuries in US. What so many people fail to recognize about this story, and its parts, is that it simply does not matter.

What bearing does this have on your day-to-day life? I am not asking this to say that any story or information that is not directly related to you cannot have value, but I am saying that a lot of the information sensationalized by US media has no actual value, and for a reason.

It is the job of the capitalist system to keep the people subordinated and unconscious. If the system succeeds in doing this, people will blindly practice, uphold, and promote the interests and values of capitalism. For if the masses of people took even the most simple view of capitalism, it would become abundantly clear how unjust it is. A handful of people control and own not only the means of production, but the production, while those who work on these means of production and produce have no stake in where they work and often can’t even access what they produce. It is clear from even this base-level understanding of capitalism that it is a system built on exploitation. By extension, to keep people subordinated, unconscious, and unaware of this, they must remain uninformed; or, better yet, consumed with useless information. As Kwame Ture once put it, “the capitalist system makes the people think they’re thinking, when in fact they are not thinking.” Therefore, when the people waste our time discussing a situation which has no true effect on our lives, convinced that value can be traded for entertainment — and then, at that, discuss without a tinge of nuance, critical thinking, or rhetoric — the capitalist rejoices! This is because all while doing this, the people truly believe we are contributing to an important cultural discourse. Sure, the culture is having discourse, but what is it doing for the culture?

This irrelevant news disguised in a cloak of being relevant is not new. As Henry David Thoreau incisively remarked in 1849:

We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate .... We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.

My point is this: if you can tell me five facts about the Titan submersible, or any other nationally syndicated story, but not five about the community directly around you, you are not an informed person, you are a distracted one. And this battle of focusing and reshifting toward real issues and real change is one we must be constantly waging, because capitalism is constantly waging against that.

The Contradictions of Bourgeois Secularism

By Yanis Iqbal

We live in a conjuncture characterized by the resurgence of fascist groupings. This has meant the activation of religious fanaticism, in which spirituality breaks out of the confines of secularity to openly assert undemocratic identities. The inability of the modern epoch to preempt the emergence of primitive fundamentalism is a result of its internal contradictions. In “On the Jewish Question,” Karl Marx writes that feudal civil society “secluded the individual from the state as a whole and…converted the particular relation of his corporation to the state as a whole into his general relation to the life of the nation, just as…[it] converted his particular civil activity and situation into his general activity and situation.” This specific configuration of social organization meant that “the unity of the state, and also the consciousness, will, and activity of this unity, the general power of the state…appear[ed] as the particular affair of a ruler and of his servants, isolated from the people. The advent of bourgeois political revolution changed this situation by smashing “all estates, corporations, guilds, and privileges, since they were all manifestations of the separation of the people from the community.” Henceforth, state affairs would become affairs of the people, a matter of general concern.

Thus, the bourgeois political revolution “broke up civil society into its simple component parts; on the one hand, the individuals; on the other hand, the material and spiritual elements constituting the content of the life and social position of these individuals.” This division of humanity into the abstractness of political society and the concreteness of civil society “set free the political spirit, which had been, as it were, split up, partitioned, and dispersed in the various blind alleys of feudal society. It gathered the dispersed parts of the political spirit, freed it from its intermixture with civil life, and established it as the sphere of the community, the general concern of the nation, ideally independent of those particular elements of civil life.” However, the “political revolution resolves civil life into its component parts, without revolutionizing these components themselves or subjecting them to criticism. It regards civil society, the world of needs, labor, private interests, civil law, as the basis of its existence, as a precondition not requiring further substantiation and therefore as its natural basis.”

Further, “man as a member of civil society is held to be man in the proper sense, homme [man] as distinct from citoyen [citizen], because he is man in his sensuous, individual, immediate existence, whereas political man is only abstract, artificial man, man as an allegorical, juridical person.” In other words: “The real man is recognized only in the shape of the egoistic individual, the true man is recognized only in the shape of the abstract citizen…Political emancipation is the reduction of man, on the one hand, to a member of civil society, to an egoistic, independent individual, and, on the other hand, to a citizen, a juridical person”. This disjunctive dimension of bourgeois modernity has special implications for secularism. Insofar that the bourgeois state does not abolish real distinctions in the realm of civil society and feels itself to be universal only in opposition to the particularity of the latter, religion under capitalism is not weakened but simply displaced from the state into civil society. In short, capitalism privatizes religion.

Marx writes:

“Man emancipates himself politically from religion by banishing it from the sphere of public law to that of private law. Religion is no longer the spirit of the state, in which man behaves…as a species-being, in community with other men. Religion has become the spirit of civil society, of the sphere of egoism…It is no longer the essence of community, but the essence of difference. It has become the expression of man’s separation from his community, from himself and from other men…It is only the abstract avowal of specific perversity, private whimsy, and arbitrariness”. This conversion of religion from the social medium of public life to the individual language of private life ensures that religion continues to exist as the irrational counterpart of rational secularism. In fact, the abstract secularism of capitalist modernity can exist only through its constant juxtaposition to the parochial religiosity that makes up the concrete content of civil society. This is because the bourgeoisie does not want to radically transform the social relations that prevail in society; it is content with the empty idealism of the state. Such idealism does not eliminate the egoism that is found in feudal civil society. Instead, it accepts the “egoistic man…[as] the basis, the precondition, of the political state. He is recognized as such by this state in the rights of man. The liberty of egoistic man and the recognition of this liberty…is…the recognition of the unrestrained movement of the spiritual and material elements which form the content of his life. Hence, man was not freed from religion, he received religious freedom.”

Since the capitalist privatization of religion perpetuates the existence of undemocratic spirituality in civil society, we need a communist transformation of political society that replaces its thin conception of juridical generality with the thick conception of socially evolved universality. This would entail the democratization of religiosity, the fostering of communicative rationality wherein participants would critically argue and question stereotypical suppositions about religion. While this won’t necessarily translate into a radical conversion or the adoption of a totally different point of view, it would certainly facilitate the creation of a public discourse that has a willingness for democratic dialogue and self-critical examination. In this democratically-collectively managed spirituality, one will gain the ability to be both religious and rational, and take part in a praxis of communicative rationality without being hindered by any dogmas.

Teaching Politically and the Problem of Afropessimism

[Protesters at the Open Housing March, Chicago. Getty Images/Chicago History Museum]

By Nino Brown and Derek Ford

Republished from Black Agenda Report.

As teachers, we’re tasked with educating our students, students who are increasingly, like their teachers, becoming politically conscious and called to act. Yet the dominant political theories and forms of action are inadequate for real revolutionary transformation. In other words, the schools and universities in capitalist society are all too ready to accommodate and guide this consciousness and energy into forms it can accommodate. This is not a new phenomenon, but one that’s accelerated since the 1960s in particular.

For example, Charisse Burden-Stelly documents how Black Studies emerged in the 1960s “to fundamentally challenge the statist, imperialist, racist, and Eurocentric underpinnings of the traditional disciplines in westernized universities,” but that it was soon “more or less fully incorporated into the westernized university.”[1] What facilitated this absorption was the erasure of political and economic critique and action with cultural and literary analysis, which “reify the abstraction of Blackness” and divorce it from political struggle, not even questioning its relationship to and basis in the material conditions and struggles of the people.[2] As we wrestle with political pedagogy, then, our guiding orientation has to be one that resists such subsumption within capital.

Yet it’s not only that the “scholastic ideological apparatus” provides its own official pathways for “resistance” and “transformation,” from reading groups to Diversity and Equity Initiatives and intergroup dialogues. Perhaps a more fundamental problem for us--as our students participate in protest movements--are the academic theories and politics that they encounter there and often unconsciously absorb. We regularly hear students say “anti-Blackness” and, when we ask them what it means and what political orientation it comes from and reproduces, they’re not sure. Or we hear students say in regards to protests against particular forms of oppression that we have to “listen to and follow” the people who face that oppression. White and non-white students alike believe they have to “follow and listen to Black leaders” at protests against racist police terror and white supremacy. We’re told to cite Black scholars. In either case, the question of politics is completely effaced, as there’s almost a prohibition against asking: “which Black people?” Yet this is not a defect but a feature of Afropessimism, a feature that opens the arms of white supremacist imperialism.

The happy marriage of capitalism, Afropessimism, and liberal identity politics

We and our students want radical transformation, and so many often jump to the latest and seemingly most radical sounding phrases, slogans, and theories. In education, as in so many other disciplines, one of the increasingly dominant phrases is “anti-Blackness” and the theory of Afropessimism. The two foundational theorists here are Frank Wilderson and Jared Sexton. For Wilderson, Afro-pessimism contends that “Blackness cannot be separated from slavery,” and that “the Slave’s relationship to violence is open-ended, gratuitous, without reason or constraint,” whereas “the human’s relationship to violence is always contingent.”[3]

There are crucial problems with this framework that make it perfectly acceptable to capitalism and perfectly antithetical to those who want to change the world. For one, they are completely Eurocentric in that Africa and the African diaspora are flattened into “Blackness” as a condition of the “human.” As Greg Thomas notes, this is “the [B]lackness and humanism of white Americanism, specifically and restrictively, an isolationist or exceptionalist Americanism.”[4] In other words, Afropessimism takes aim at a civil society and takes refuge in a Blackness that are both uniquely American. The U.S. historical and political experience is transformed into a transcendent, static, and universal ontological status or structure. More specifically, the theories of academics in highly prestigious and exclusive institutions in the U.S. are presented as ahistorical and global realities.

As identities, Black and Blackness are, in the U.S., fairly recent developments. The earliest recorded appearances are in Richard Wright’s 1954, Black Power and in 1966 as the first words spoken by Black Panther Stokely Carmichael when he left his jail cell after imprisonment for registering voters. White and whiteness are older but still relatively recent. Theodore Allen writes that he “found no instance of the official use of the word ‘white’ as a token of social status before its appearance in a Virginia law passed in 1691, referring to ‘English or other white women.’”[5] The point here, as Eugene Puryear observes, “is that the ideology of white supremacy emerged not because of timeless antagonisms based on phenotype differences, but in a precise historical context related to the development of racial slavery.”[6] This is precisely the historical context that Afropessimism erases and precisely the phenotypes they use to define Blackness.

Afropessimism addresses an apparent radical omission in the primary theory that oppressed people have utilized for liberation: Marxism. Wilderson’s work, however, is based on a fundamental misreading of Marxism, such as his contention that in “Marxist discourse” (whatever that is) “racism is read off the base, as it were, as being derivative of political economy.”[7] To be sure, there’s an unfortunate history of some Marxist groupings asserting “class first” politics, but Marx and Engels, and Lenin, together with the history of the international communist movement, always asserted the primacy of race.  Marx’s theory of class was a theory of race and colonialism, as was his communist organizing. As a historical-materialist, Marx understood that the base and superstructure of society change over time and are context-dependent. Neither the base nor superstructure are unified, static, or ahistorical. The relations of production in the U.S. are neither unified nor even strictly economic in the sense that they’re structured and divided by hierarchies of race, nationality, gender, dis/ability, sexuality, and other divisions.In an 1894 letter, Engels clarifies yet again the base-superstructure model, what it entails, how it works, and exactly what it’s supposed to do. First, he says that “economic conditions… ultimately determines historical development. But race itself is an economic factor.”[8]

Marx not only supported anti-colonial uprisings in India and China but even said that they might ignite the revolution in Britain. “It may seem a very strange, and very paradoxical assertion,” Marx wrote about the 1850-53 Taiping Rebellion in China, “that the next uprising of the people of Europe, and their next movement for republican freedom and economy of government, may depend more probably on what is now passing in the Celestial Empire.”[9]

Marx fought ruthlessly against racism and national chauvinism, particularly as he experienced the deep-seated racism of English workers against the Irish. He “argued that an English workers' party, representing workers from an oppressor nation, had the duty to support an oppressed nation’s self-determination and independence” and that “English workers could never attain liberation as long as the Irish continued to be oppressed.”[10] He recognized that the fate of Black slaves, Black workers, and white workers were bound together when he wrote in Capital that “Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the [B]lack it is branded.”[11] Marx even organized workers to support the abolitionist struggle by galvanizing them to oppose a British intervention in the U.S. Civil War on behalf of the slaveocracy, an intervention that, because the British had the largest Navy in the world, could have altered the war drastically.[12]

Perhaps the real problem is that Marx treats race as a dynamic and contingent social production rather than a fixed and abstract ontological category. Black people face particular forms of oppression in the U.S. and elsewhere, as do other oppressed and exploited peoples. These change over time and are in a dialectical relationship with the overal social totality. Iyko Day got it right by equating economic reductionism to Afro-pessimism, insofar as it “frames racial slavery as a base for a colonial superstructure” and “fails to take into account the dialectics of settler colonial capitalism.”[13]

Why the neoliberal university loves Afropessimism

The reason anti-Blackness critique is welcome in schools is because it is devoid of praxis and politics, or, to be more precise, because it celebrates its lack of politics. The impossibility of praxis and the rejection of organizing are fundamental tenets for two reasons. The first is that there is no answer to the question “what is to be done?” and the second is that the mass movements necessary for transformation are “from the jump, an anti-black formation,” as Wilderson told IMIXWHATILIKE.[14] Of course, the only thing to do is to condemn every attempt at fighting oppression and improving material conditions. For example, when a student group at one of our schools staged a protest when Condoleeza Rice came to speak, they were denounced as “anti-Black.” There was no political criteria for such a denouncement, no defense of Rice, and likely no knowledge of the reasons behind the protest. It didn’t matter that Rice was a key figure of the white supremacist imperialist power structure, or that she played a major role in the murder of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, the torture of thousands of Arab and African people.

Examples of “anti-Blackness” that often come up in organizing are that non-Black people of color are to be met with suspicion when organizing on issues that sharply affect Black people. One such issue is immigration. In the struggle for immigrant rights, which is often overcoded as a “Latinx” issue, some Black activists and organizers point to the fact that 44% of those caged by ICE, for example, are Haitians. Instead of directing their ire towards the racist state that holds many Black immigrants in horrendous conditions, the focus then becomes the irrevocable anti-Blackness that exists in Latinx communities. Ideologies like Afro Pessimism have working class people of color (Black people included) fighting amongst each other, with the same framework as liberal identity politics. They both reduce solidarity to checking one’s privilege and fashioning oneself as the consummate ally of Black people and their liberation. So, instead of building a united front against the racist state, the lack of corporate/mainstream media focus on the fact that there are many Black immigrants, and immigration is a “Black issue” unnecessarily shifts attention to other workers who are subjected to the same “anti-Black” ideology of the ruling class and it’s media apparatuses. Instead of calling out the “Latinx community” for their “anti-Blackness” a revolutionary perspective frames the issue as not one stemming from any said community, but from the ruling class which oppresses the vast majority of immigrants in this country.

Capital in these instances are let off the hook. The problem is no longer that the ruling class owns the means of production and thus the means of ideological production that reinforce anti-working class ideologies such as racism. The problem is the “anti-Blackness”--and the often posited “inherent” anti-Blackness--of non-Black communities. It’s a structural feature of society, but apparently one that can’t be changed. As a result, there’s no need to do anything except critique.

No wonder, then, that Afropessimism is so welcome in the neoliberal university and the increasingly corporatized public school system in the U.S. It’s incredibly easy to call something anti-Black, to condemn anti-Blackness, and to play more-radical-than-thou. It’s more than easy, it’s what academia is about. Moreover, and this is related to the Rice protest mentioned earlier, when “Black faces” do appear in “high places,” they’re immunized from any possible critique from any group that isn’t Black (enough). It doesn’t matter if the head of a school, corporation, or any other entity has the same politics as the imperialist and racist power structure, because they’re black and so to critique or challenge them would be an act of anti-Blackness.

This last reason is why white people love Afropessimism so much. The vague calls to “follow Black people'' not only fulfill racist tropes that all Black people are the same (in, for example, their unruliness and “threat” to society) but moreover let white people off the hook for doing any real political investigation and work. The real response to “Follow Black people'' is: “Which Black people?” Should Derek follow his comrade Nino or John McWhorter? Should he go to the police protest organized by the local Black Lives Matter group or the one organized by the local Congress of Racial Equality? Should he get his racial politics from Barack Obama or Glen Ford? He certainly shouldn’t get his politics--or take his lessons in class struggle--from today’s Afropessimists.

None of this is to devalue Black leadership in the Black liberation movement, to be clear. Black people have and will lead the Black struggle and the broader class struggle. Nor is it to claim that random white people should show up to a Black Lives Matter protest and grab the microphone. Then again, how much of a problem is that really? Shouldn’t we forget the myth that we can learn all the proper rules before we struggle and instead just go out and struggle? And as we struggle, be conscientious of our actions and how they could be perceived; know that we’ll make mistakes and own up to them; and most importantly build with those whom this racist society has segregated us from so we can unite against a common enemy. Black people will lead the Black struggle and the class struggle. So too will Asian Americans, Indigenous people, and Latino/a/xs. So too will the child of an African immigrant and a Filipino domestic worker. So too will some white people. The key ingredients are unity, political clarity, and strategic proficiency.

Such a recipe entails a necessary risk in that, first, politics are divisive and draw lines between friends and enemies and that, second, achieving unity and strategic proficiency takes hard work without any guarantees of success. Educators who are or want to be radical, however, have no choice but to accept this risk. We need to be rooted in movements and resist incorporation into neoliberal structures, refusing to allow them to guide our political decisions. Only if we have hope and faith in the power of the masses to change the world does it make sense to struggle at all. We choose to struggle! And we hope our students do too.

Nino Brown is a public school educator and labor activist in Boston. He is also an organizer with the ANSWER coalition, the Jericho Movement and the Boston Liberation Center. He's a member of the Liberation School Collective and is an editor of the forthcoming book on Marxist pedagogy, Revolutionary Education: Theory and Practice for Socialist Organizers (2021).

Derek R. Ford is assistant professor of education studies at DePauw University, where he teaches and researches at the nexus of pedagogy and political movements. He’s written six books, the latest of which is Marxism, Pedagogy, and the General Intellect: Beyond the Knowledge Economy (2021). He’s also the lead editor of Liberation School’s “Reading Capital with Comrades ” podcast series.

Notes

[1] Charisse Burden-Stelly. “Black studies in the westernized university,” in Unsettling eurocentrism in the westernized university, ed. J. Cupples and R. Grosfoguel, pp. 73-86 (New York: Routledge, 2019), 73.

[2] Ibid., 74.

[3] Frank B. Wilderson III, Afropessimism (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2020), 217, 216.

[4] Greg Thomas, “Afro-Blue Notes: The Death of Afro-pessimism (2.0)? Theory & Event 21, no. 1 (2018): 291.

[5] Theodor Allen, The Invention of the White Race (vol. 2): The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (New York: Verso, 1997), 161-62.

[6] Eugene Puryear, “The U.S. State and the U.S. Revolution,” Liberation School, November 01, 2018. Available at: https://liberationschool.org/the-u-s-state-and-the-u-s-revolution/.

[7] Frank WIlderson III. “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?” Social Identities 9, no. 2 (2003): 225.

[8] Friedrich Engels, “Engels to W. Borgius in Breslau.” In Marx-Engels Selected Correspondence (New York: Progress Publishers, 1894/1965), 441

[9] Karl Marx, “Revolution in China and Europe,” in K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected works (vol. 12), 93-100 (London: Lawrence & Wisehart, 1979), 93.

[10] Gloria La Riva, “Lenin and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination,” in Storming the Gates: How the Russian Revolution Changed the World, ed. J. Cutter (pp. 75-83) (San Francisco: Liberation Media, 2017), 76, 77.

[11] Karl Marx, Capital: A critique of political economy (vol. 1): The process of capitalist production, trans. S. Moore and E. Aveling (New York: International Publishers, 1867/1967), 284.

[12] ​​See Gerald Runkle, “Karl Marx and the American Civil War,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 6, no. 2 (1964): 117-141.

[13] Iyko Day, “Being or Nothingness: Indigeneity, Antiblackness, and settler colonial critique,” Critical Ethnic Studies 1, no. 2 (2015): 112.

[14] Frank B. WIlderson III, “‘We’re Trying to Destroy the World’: Anti-Blackness and Police Violence After Ferguson,” in Shifting Corporealities in Contemporary Performance: Danger, Im/mobility and Politics, ed. M. Gržinić and A. Stojnić (New York: Palgrave, 2018), 55.

Spectacular Death and the Histrionics of Loss

By Michael Templeton

Republished from Peace, Land, and Bread.

For one summer, I worked at a local cemetery mowing grass. Spring Grove Cemetery encompasses over 700 acres of land. It was chartered in 1845 and remains open to this day. The cemetery is a major destination for walking, biking, sight-seeing, and simply relaxing in the natural surroundings. One of the things I came to notice as an employee was the stark contrast between the older parts of the cemetery and the newer plots. The oldest stones and grave markers contain little information. Some stones do not even have names on them. They simply say “Father” or “Infant,” etc. Older stones that do have writing on them generally state the date of birth, the date of death, and a few lines from the Bible. There are symbols on some of the stones which denote certain professions—doctors, clergy, military men—carry an iconography specific to those vocations and most of this iconography is quite ancient. By contrast, the newer stones are covered with writing. Lines from popular songs, poetry, and sentiments from the bereaved clutter these stones. The newest stones may have etched images from photographs so that an image of the deceased is engraved onto the stone. In the newer parts of the cemetery, one can find grave markers shaped like cartoon characters. Some of the stones have the appearance of modernist sculpture so as to set it apart from older gravestones. The change from stones and graves which leave nothing but a bare stone to graves which are covered with information is not attributable to mere fashion or advances in technology. Rather, this change has everything to do with the ways people understand death itself.

Spring Grove Cemetery itself came into existence due to increasing concern over cholera outbreaks and the unsanitary and unsightly presence of old church cemeteries which left dead bodies to decay into sources of drinking water and were an affront to middle-class ideas of how neighborhoods should appear. The dual pressures of public health and changing attitudes toward the emplacement of the dead coincided throughout the Western world with the emergence of the modern cemetery and Spring Grove Cemetery is emblematic of those pressures. It is now an enormous example of the drive to create a space for the dead which was easily accessible to the city center but outside of the city proper, and it is an example of such a space that serves the additional purpose of being a destination for recreation. It is adjacent to the city but not in it. It is a space reserved for the interment of the dead, but it is a marvel of landscape design and architecture. Lastly, it contains something of an archaeological record of a shift in the way individuals understand death itself.

The cemetery is an example of that type of space defined by Foucault as a heterotopia. It is both real and unreal. It occupies a border region in terms of the actual space which is occupied by real individuals.

Heterotopias are liminal places—the way a mirror offers a real place which is both present and absent:

"The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there." [1]

The cemetery offers a similar social function. It is the mirror image of the city in that it is completely deliberate in its spatial design and it is occupied. Yet, the cemetery is designed not to facilitate the movement of bodies but to inter bodies—and it is occupied with the dead. It is the inverse version of the city itself. Like the mirror, the cemetery is a real place, but it operates in a manner that is unreal since it does not function as a place for individuals to exist, only to desist. So, the modern cemetery emerged as a site in which societies could place the dead in a real place that functioned as a kind of unreality with regard to everyday life. There is the place of the dead which one could visit and even enjoy, but the place of the dead could be put out of mind when it came to living life.

Spring Grove was born of this social movement. Founded in 1845, it coincides with the historical period described by Foucault and it bears the cultural traces which Foucault describes as signs of the modern cemetery. These are sacred spaces, but they emerged during a time that was distinctly secular. The modern “cult of the dead” emerges during a time of a paradox:

"This cemetery housed inside the sacred space of the church has taken on a quite different cast in modern civilizations, and curiously, it is in a time when civilization has become ‘atheistic,’ as one says very crudely, that western culture has established what is termed the cult of the dead." [2]

An “atheistic,” or secular, society is also the society that creates an entire city devoted to the preservation of the dead. It is under these conditions—conditions in which a firm belief in the life of the soul is fading and therefore must be performed in an ever more elaborate fashion—that the place in which commemoration of the dead becomes a visible and dramatic presence. In previous times, when the conditions of possibility created the conditions in which individuals firmly believed that God guaranteed the care of the soul, people did not need to commemorate bodies. As faith in the soul decreased, care of the body increased. Again, Foucault:

"Basically it was quite natural that, in a time of real belief in the resurrection of bodies and the immortality of the soul, overriding importance was not accorded to the body’s remains. On the contrary, from the moment when people are no longer sure that they have a soul or that the body will regain life, it is perhaps necessary to give much more attention to the dead body, which is ultimately the only trace of our existence in the world and in language. In any case, it is from the beginning of the nineteenth century that everyone has a right to her or his own little box for her or his own little personal decay, but on the other hand, it is only from that start of the nineteenth century that cemeteries began to be located at the outside border of cities." [3]

We create a city of the dead only when we are no longer certain that God has done this for us. This is not to say that the advent of the cemetery coincided with the complete abandonment of faith in the afterlife. Rather, the rise of the modern cemetery marks a time in which faith in the afterlife is no longer a fundamental fact for the living and must therefore be demarcated in the form of a space that is both sacred and secular so that the living may continue to have access to some kind of symbolic place and sign which stands in for both loss and faith in the afterlife. The modern cemetery is a heterotopia in the sense that it is an “other space” and it is a place in which a paradoxical understanding of death could find some measure of reconciliation.

We see evidence of complete faith in the afterlife in the forms of gravestones which carry little to no information. The facts of the life of the deceased are of no importance because the deceased is no longer in the world and has passed on to another world. To consign the dead to a nearly anonymous place in the world requires absolute faith that the soul of the dead has literally passed on to another world. A parent who has lost a child, for example, does not require a stone with the child’s name engraved upon it in order to remember that child. The stone simply does not perform that function. It marks the site of a burial and nothing more. As Foucault states, it is the move toward a more “atheistic” society which demands monuments to testify to the life of the deceased. What is more, the monuments and the small personal boxes for bodies speak more to the living than to the dead. We do not erect monuments for the dead for the simple fact that they are dead. We erect monuments for ourselves. They are markers to prove to ourselves that the deceased were in fact important to us, and the monuments are to show others that we care. The heterotopia of the cemetery has much more in common with the mirror than the dialectic of the real and the unreal.

As we move into the 20th century, the gravestones become more loquacious. Modern and contemporary stones are engraved with lines of biblical scripture. They bear poetry and song lyrics. The most recent stones bear engraved images from photographs. These are extremely realistic images which look like black and white photographs which have been directly printed onto the stone. In another cemetery in Southern Indiana, the stones are almost all this type. People leave photographs, toys, trinkets of all kinds, along with religious items such as rosary beads and crosses. As we move into contemporary times and the function of religion and faith fades from playing any role in everyday life, the demonstrations of grief and loss, the sheer number of words used to mark loss, and the profusion of images just explodes all over the cemetery. The more removed faith in the afterlife becomes, the more pronounced the declarations of faith in the afterlife.

More words are inscribed to mark the faith of those who still live. More realistic images are rendered to commemorate the lost loved ones. This would indicate more than a loss of faith. It indicates a turn away from loss itself and a nearly obsessive focus on the ego of the bereaved.

The contemporary grave marker is a mirror of the ego on which the bereaved can gaze upon themselves. The heterotopic structure remains, but it has returned on the level of the ego.

A fundamental lack of real belief finds an expression in the iconography and cluttered language of the contemporary headstone. What we see in these histrionic displays is a profound inability to confront the reality of death. One forestalls the reality of death by filling in the loss with a profusion (and confusion) of images, words, and trinkets thus shifting the focus away from loss itself and onto the individual who experiences the loss.

Rather than allow the progression of psychological mechanisms in which an individual experiences loss, suffers the process of mourning, and finds resolution in the acceptance of the loss, we see the cultural expression of a complete fixation on loss itself. This is Freudian melancholia on the scale of public theater, and it manifests itself in forms which resemble graffiti. Freudian mourning and melancholia are distinguished by the thorough process of mourning in which the ego is directed outside of itself and melancholia in which the ego contemplates itself:

"In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself." [4]

This would be sufficient except that the contemporary ego is already poor and empty since it has been evacuated of substance by finding a place of meaning exclusively in the exterior drama of the spectacle. This is an inversion of Artaud’s “Theater of Cruelty” in that these demonstrations do not reflect what Artaud envisioned as an expression of “both the upper and lower strata of the mind.” These are theatrical advertisements for loss that express only the most superficial marks of grief. [5] Contemporary life projects the ego into the external world and can only find a ground of being and meaning to the extent that this exterior ego function is reified in the system of exchange which only knows consumer existence.

Consumer existence requires the system of exchange in order for anything to be real. The form of melancholia expressed through the verbose and graffiti strewn headstones we find in the newest parts of the cemetery indicate an ego which cannot comprehend death at all except as an affirmation of itself.

Far from paying homage to the deceased and far from a spiritual declaration of faith in the afterlife, the contemporary headstone is a testament to the flimsy ego of the same individuals whose lives are devoid of any reality because at the level of individual experience. There is no reality which exists outside the realm of merchandise and display. The profusion of words and images is designed to compensate for an ego that has been entirely evacuated of substance.

What we witness in the contemporary graveyard is not melancholia proper since the ego fixation on itself is in fact an ego fixation on a prescribed mode of performance loss. There is no confrontation or meaningful experience of loss since it is denied in the form of a spectacular show of loss.

"The dominant trait of the spectacular-metropolitan ethos is the loss of experience, the most eloquent symptom of which is certainly the formation of that category of “experience”, in the limited sense that one has “experiences” (sexual, athletic, professional, artistic, sentimental, ludic, etc.). In the Bloom [the indeterminate form of contemporary life], everything results from this loss, or is synonymous with it. Within the Spectacle, as with the metropolis, men never experience concrete events, only conventions, rules, an entirely symbolic second nature, entirely constructed." [6]

The loss of experience means the loss of the ability to truly experience death. People experience the forms of loss, grief, and mourning only to the extent that there are prescribed modes of experience which come from elsewhere. That is to say “forms” of loss, grief, and mourning because the actual experience is deferred in favor of the performance of these modes of experience. The loss of experience proper negates the experience of loss.

Death, of course, remains a reality, but in its social forms, the reality of death cannot exist except insofar as it can become a commodified abstraction. Death is the abstract nothing forestalled by the business of creating a form of life. Individuals render the loss of their own loved ones with the histrionic displays engraved onto headstones. They otherwise deny death by buying into economic abstractions which further render death an abstraction. There is a business of death prior to death: “Promoters of life insurance merely intimate that it is reprehensible without first arranging for the system’s adjustment to the economic loss one’s death will incur.” [7] Death can only be grasped from within the abstractions prescribed by the spectacle, and rendered in equally abstract images that have more in common with advertising than individual loss and grief.

Under present cultural conditions, this theological ground no longer holds, and we see this clearly in maudlin displays of grief which are in fact desperate displays of melancholia. The nature of contemporary consciousness is such that we find no resolution in the face of death therefore we simply deny it. We hide from death because it is invisible and unknowable, yet we perform grief with ever greater histrionic displays so as to affirm our egos in the face of the one thing we know expunges the ego.

Returning to the most basic features of the spectacle, we can find the same mystifications at work that we saw in spectacular pseudo-belief:

"The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images." [8]

Our relationship to each other and to the world around us is mediated by images to the extent that what is known is no longer things in the world but our relationship to images of things in the world. Our understanding of death is now captured in the spectacle as much as any other aspect of life. Death is negated by the image of death and we find a sense of solace in loss through our relationship to these images of death, mourning, and loss.

There is no death, mourning, and loss; there is only the performance and image of death, mourning, and loss. One expresses themselves through engraved images of the lost loved one, not the lost loved one. The contemporary grieving person finds some measure of peace in contemplating the image of the person they lost, and this constitutes a fundamental denial of loss. The only thing that matters is that the grieving person remains alive and anyone who passes the grave of the deceased knows that someone lost someone else. In this way “it is thus the most earthbound aspects of life that have become the most impenetrable and rarefied.” [9]

It is not death that is impenetrable and rarefied, it is the consumer of signs of loss and death.

The spectacle denies the validity of life as it is lived in everyday experience. Nothing so common as loss can be commodified unless images and tangible commodifiable expressions of loss can be made to supersede the lived experience of real loss.

Thus, it is that “the absolute denial of life, in the shape of a fallacious paradise, is no longer projected into the heavens, but finds its place instead within material life itself.” [10] We find a sense of the afterlife only in images that dramatize the beyond because there can be no way of conceptualizing anything that is not material and commodified. Gravestones are no longer markers of death and loss. They are markers of the ongoing participation of one who has lost, but one whose sole understanding of loss is as a histrionic expression of their own ego within the heaven of spectacular images.

Spectacular life cannot include death. There is simply no place for something so utterly final and real. As we saw above, we never experience concrete events; we only experience the conventions and rules of events. The experience of events has been replaced with the formal specifications of events. We do not experience a rock concert, we experience the prescribed modes of behavior which a rock concert demands. There are formal aspects to concert experiences which are dictated ahead of time by representations of musical events. In the same way, contemporary life excludes the possibility of experiencing death.

One does not live the experience of the death of a loved one. One experiences the formal attributes of loss.

The television news will never show you a person bereft of any and all expression as they are overcome with loss and grief. What we see through the screens are rehearsed performances, histrionic displays. People repeat the same clichés: “they were too young,” “they had their whole life ahead of them,” “our thoughts and prayers are with the family,” etc. In the absence of the possibility of belief, as we saw above, there can be no understanding of anything that resists representation. There is no real death, only images that mediate a collective inability to recognize the reality of death.

The function of religion with respect to death was, in essence, a Hegelian sublation. Death negates life. Religion serves as a mediating force which negates the negation. The simultaneous negation and transformation of the fact of death constitutes a resolution. The dead are negated and elevated to another plane of existence. In effect, the religious mediation of death served the function of Freudian mourning. The finality of death is resolved in the sublation of this finality into a spiritual faith in something that transcends death. This step in the psycho-social confrontation with death depended on a qualitative change in one’s existence. The finality of death serves as the negation of our temporal existence. This negation is itself negated as the soul of the deceased is lifted into another plane of existence. In this, the full dialectic is resolved.

Death under the dominance of the spectacle provides no such resolution. Within the spectacle, death negates life. Rather than confronting this fact, the contemporary subject simply disavowals that which cannot be transformed into life.

There is no finality in consumer culture; only a new version of the commodity which is designed to fill the void that does not exist without consumer culture. The contemporary confrontation with death is manifest in the grave marker which is yet another consumer spectacle. It can be consumed endlessly, therefore there is no death. The gravestone stands in for an absence that is never properly experienced as an absence. The clutter of the stone creates presence. Contemporary understandings of death can find no resolution and subsequent sublation. What we have is a childish disavowal of the reality of death and a psychological return to our own ego. Cluttered and outlandish grave markers do not signify the deceased. They signify the living. These grave markers scream “me, me, me” and “I, I, I.” They are infantile demonstrations of impotence. There is no dialectical resolution since contemporary life does not allow for any qualitative differences as valid differences. We have only quantitative differences. Under a regime of knowledge that can admit nothing but quantity, there is no net gain from death. Therefore, death can only be disavowed with quantities of grief. More display equals more grief. The operative term is “more.”

Even the medical establishment disavows death. Even as science moves to endlessly split hairs on the medical definition of death, the mechanisms of medical science cannot find the precise moment or even conditions that constitute death. For centuries, death was defined as the moment the heart and breathing stopped. This was simple. When a body no longer showed basic vital signs, that body was dead. Beginning in 1959, a new definition of death began to emerge. With the medical classification of what is termed coma depasse, or overcoma, medical science began to take account of a body which was by all objective measures dead but would continue to show basic vital functions with the assistance of medical instruments that assist with breathing and feeding. [11] The living person was effectively dead, but they continued to live at the most basic biological level to the extent that organs continue to function with the help of machinery. Near the end of the Twentieth Century, medicine advanced the notion of brain death as the final determination of death. This meant that “(o)nce the adequate medical tests had been confirmed the death of the entire brain (not only of the neocortex but also of the brain stem), the patient was to be considered dead, even if, thanks to life-support technology, he continued breathing.” [12]

However, the definition of brain death was confirmed because brain death finally leads to the cessation of heart and respiratory functions. Brain death is confirmed with the definition of death that preceded it. This is to say that, “According to a clear logical inconsistency, heart failure—which was just rejected as a valid criterion of death—reappears to prove the exactness of the criterion that is to substitute for it.” [13] The moment of death is brain death, but brain death leads to heart failure which is the moment of death. All of this leads to a zone of indeterminacy wherein death occurs but does not occur at the same time. Agamben draws this problem out to further his theory of the state of exception which lies at the heart of contemporary biopolitics. For our purposes, it is enough to understand that death remains a fundamentally unreal thing, even in the realm of medical science.

Contemporary consumer culture depends on externalizing all real lived experience. Individual experience only takes on validity once it is sutured into the realm of consumable images and the commodities which give these images meaning. My “I” only exists to the extent that it enters the flow of other egos who participate in the systems of exchange. Whereas the individual was once a mystification within capitalism insofar as one’s individuality exists in relation to one’s participation as a working subject of capitalism, we have gone many steps further and one’s individual status as a human can only exist insofar as you have projected yourself into the realm of images and rendered yourself a meaningful participant in spectacular culture. All of this renders individual subjectivity a completely external feature of public consumption and the realm of interior life has no value or even any meaning.

Individual beliefs no longer exist because belief takes place elsewhere, in the realm of the image. Individual egos have no meaning other than as externalized performances of ego-ness. I demonstrate myself, therefore I am. Just as images circulate in a state of pseudo-eternity in image space and image time, in the realm of pseudo-cyclical time as we saw above, so the contemporary ego circulates forever in a consumerist limbo that will not admit death.

Medical determinations of death are left to systems of political power. Since doctors are only in the business of life, they have no obligation to offer a final determination of death that would serve in all cases. Death is a political question. It is not a medical or biological question. Death is not even a theological question, no matter the amount of biblical language you inscribe on a stone. Death is not, and the heterotopia of the cemetery serves the dual function of being a place for the dead, and yet another place to publicly perform yourself. No longer that other space where the city lays its dead adjacent to the city proper where people continue to live, the cemetery is now the other space where we wallow in our emptiness against one of the only things that cannot be commodified: the absolute finality of death.

Michael Templeton is an independent scholar, writer, and musician. He completed his Ph.D. in literary studies at Miami University of Ohio in 2005. He has published scholarly studies and written cultural analysis and creative non-fiction. He is also the blog writer for the Urban Appalachian Community Coalition in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Endnotes

[1] Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces," p. 4

[2] Ibid., p. 5

[3] Ibid., pp. 5-6

[4] Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia,” p. 246

[5] Artaud, Antonin. The Theatre and its Double. p. 82

[6] The Invisible Committee. Theory of the Bloom, pp. 47-48

[7] Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle, p. 115

[8] Ibid. 12

[9] Ibid. 18

[10] Ibid. 18

[11] Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, p. 160

[12] Ibid. p. 162

[13] Ibid. p. 163

References

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Tr. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.

Artaud, Antonin. The Theatre and its Double. p. 82.

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Tr. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1995.

Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité. October, 1984; (“Des Espace Autres,” March 1967 Translated from the French by Jay Miskowiec).

Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” From The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. XIV. Tr. and General Editor James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press.

The Invisible Committee. Theory of the Bloom. Tr. Robert Hurley. Creative Commons. 2012.