Why Are Intellectuals Divorced from Working People?

By Carlos Garrido

Republished in modified form from the Midwestern Marx Institute for Marxist Theory and Political Analysis.

The question we are exploring today — the divorce of intellectuals from the working class — is fundamental for assessing the crisis we face in the subjective conditions for revolution [1]. The first thing to interrogate is what is presupposed in formulating the problem in such a manner. When we say that there has been a split, a schism, between intellectuals and the working class, there is a specific type of intellectual we have in mind.

The grand majority of intellectuals, especially within the capitalist mode of life, have their lots tied to the dominant social system. They function as a necessary component of the dominant order, those who take the ideals of the bourgeoisie — the class enemy of most of humanity — and embellish them in language which opens the narrow interests of the ruling class to the consenting approval of their class enemies. In the same manner Karl Marx described the bourgeoisie as the personified agents of capital, the intellectuals have been the personified agents of capitalist ideology. They are tasked, as Antonio Gramsci taught us, with making these dispersed and unpopular bourgeois assumptions into a coherent and appealing outlook — one people are socialized into accepting as reality itself. Intellectuals have always, in a certain sense, been those who light the fire and move the statues which the slaves in the cave see as cave shadows embodying reality itself.

But these intellectuals — the traditional intellectuals — are not the ones we have in mind when we speak of a schism between intellectuals and workers. We are speaking, instead, of those who have been historically able to see the movement of history, to make slits within bourgeois worldviews, and who have subsequently thrown their lot in with the proletariat and popular classes — those forces which present the kernel for the next, more human and democratic, mode of life. Marx and Friedrich Engels noted that there is always a section of “bourgeois ideologists” who raise “themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole” and “cut [themselves] adrift [to] join the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands.” We are talking about the W. E. B. Du Boises, the Herbert Apthekers, the Juan Marinellos, the Michael Parentis, and others who, while coming out of the institutions of the bourgeois academy, aligned their interests with working and oppressed peoples. They would become the theoreticians, historians, and poets which gave the working-class movement various forms of clarity in their struggle for power. 

What has happened to this section of intellectuals and its relationship with working people? Have they lost their thirst for freedom? Has their capacity for trembling with indignation at the injustices waged on working and oppressed people dissipated? 

It is important to note that any attempt to answer this question in this short timespan will always, by necessity, omit important aspects of the conversation. I would love here to speak at length about the campaigns of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the formation of a fake anti-communist left, and the role imperialist state departments, bourgeois foundations, and other such outfits had in creating a left intelligentsia divorced from the real movements of working people, both within the imperial core and in the periphery [2]. I know my colleagues here will be paying due attention to such monumental components of answering the question we have before us. 

However, I’d like to instead focus on the practice of intellectuals; on the expectations and requirements set by the academy itself, which have already baked into its very structure the divorce of radical intellectuals from the struggles and movements of working and oppressed peoples. The first thing that must be noted is the following: We cannot simply treat this problem as one rooted in the intellectuals as a class, nor as one rooted in the subjective deficiencies of particular intellectuals. The Marxist worldview requires us to examine the system, the social totality, that produces such a split.

We are tasked with exploring the political economy of knowledge production, if you will, which structures the relations of its mental workers through forms which insularize them to the structures and needs of the academy. As Gabriel Rockhill would say, it is a political economy of knowledge that systematically reproduces radical recuperators, compatible Lefts, and pseudo-radical purity fetish outlooks that play an indispensable role in the reproduction of our moribund capitalist-imperialist system.

From the moment prospective radical scholars enter graduate school, they are integrated into this system. Their lofty hopes of being active participants as intellectuals in a class struggle are castrated by the demands the academy makes upon them qua scholars. They’re told that their writing should take a distinctively academic tone, that popular vernacular is frowned upon, that hyper-referentiality, the practice of citing all the intellectual gods in the cosmos who have commented on a topic, is a sign of good work, of proper scholarship.  

Truth and the struggle for human freedom are at best given a backseat, and that’s if they’re in the vehicle at all. Young scholars in the incubators of their careers are already indoctrinated in the aristocratic dogmas of writing for a select group of elite scholars, worshiping journal impact factors, and condescendingly dismissing those who use their intellectual capacities to work for the people, to actually, in proper Socratic fashion, engage in the radical quest for truth – those who seek to properly understand the world in order to work with the masses of humanity to change it.

Young scholars, burdened by tens of thousands of dollars accumulated in undergraduate studies debt, are told that — even with a PhD — they will have an extremely difficult time finding a job – at least one suitable for continued academic work that pays sufficiently enough to pay back the accumulated debt. They are told — specifically those with radical sensibilities — that they should focus on joining academic associations, network with people in their fields, familiarize themselves with the work published in leading journals so that they too, one day, can join the publication hamster wheel aimed at advancing these slaves through the tenure ladder. They are told they mustn’t waste their time writing for popular audiences, that doing broadcasts and media work — that reaches infinitely more people than the readers of ridiculously paywalled journals or university editorial books — is a waste of time. Every attempt at rooting their scholarship in the people, in the real movements of our day, is shot down. 

The gurus mediating their initiation into the academic capitalist cult ask:

“Do you know how this sort of work on your resume would look to hiring committees?”

“Do you think the scholars in charge of your tenure advancement will appreciate your popular articles for Countercurrents, your books from Monthly Review, your articles in low impact factor, or impact factor-less, journals?” 

At every turn, your attempts to commit yourself to the Socratic pursuit of truth, to playing a role in changing the world, is condemned as sinful to the gods of resume evaluations.

“Do you not want to finish your degree with the potential of obtaining gainful employment?”

“Do you want to be condemned to adjunct professorship, to teaching seven classes for half the pay of full professors who teach three?”

“Do you want to condemn your family to debt slavery for decades to come simply because you did not want to join our very special and elite hamster wheel? After all, who wouldn’t want to spend months writing an article to send it in to a journal that will reply in a year telling you, if you’re amongst the lucky ones, that it has been accepted with revisions rooted in the specific biases of the arbitrary reviewers? Doesn’t that sound fun? Isn’t this what philosophy, and the humanities in general, is all about?”

Eventually, material pressures themselves break the spirit of young visionary scholars. Re-proletarianized and unable to survive on teaching assistantships, they resign themselves to the hamster wheel, with hopes of one day living the comfortable lives of their professors. 

Their radical sensibilities, however, are still there. They need an outlet. They look around and find that the academic hamster wheel has a pocket of “radicals” writing edgy things for decently rated journals. They quickly find their kin, those who reduce radical politics to social transgressiveness, those who are concerned more with dissecting concepts like epistemic violence than with the violence of imperialism. 

Here it is!, the young scholar thinks. A place where I can pad my resume and absolve myself of the guilt weighing down on my shoulders — a guilt rooted in the recognition, deep down, that one has betrayed the struggles of humanity, that one has become an agent of the forces they originally sought to combat. 

Their existence, their lives, will always be rooted in what Jean-Paul Sartre called “bad faith.” Self-deception becomes their norm. They are now the radical ones, the ones enlightened in issues of language. The working class becomes a backward rabble they must educate — and that’s if they come near them at all. What hope could there ever be in the deplorables?

Sure, American capitalism could be criticized, but at least we’re enlightened, woke to LGBT and other issues. Those Russians, Chinese, Venezuelans, Iranians, etc., aren’t they backward? What are their thoughts on trans issues? Should we not, in the interests of our enlightened civilization, support our government’s efforts to civilize them? Let’s go deliver them some of our valued democracy and human rights. I’m sure their people will appreciate it very much. 

I have presented the stories which are all too familiar to those of us still working in the academy. It is evident, in my view at least, that the divorce of radical intellectuals from working-class people and their movements has been an institutionalized effort of the capitalist elite. This division is embedded, it is implied, in the process of intellectuals becoming what the system requires of them for their survival. The relations they occupy in the process of knowledge production presupposes their split with working people. 

This rigidity of academic life has intensified over the last century. Yes, we do have plenty of past cases of radical academics, those who have sided with the people, being kicked to the curb by their academic institutions. But where have they landed and why? A blackballed Du Bois got to teach at the Communist Party’s Jefferson School. Herbert Aptheker, following his expulsion from the academy, became the editor-in-chief of the Communist Party’s theoretical journal Political Affairs. Besides the aforementioned, what other factors make our day different from, say, the 1950s United States? 

The answer is simple: what counter-hegemonic popular institutions we had were destroyed, in part by the efforts of our government, in part by the collapse, or overthrow, of the Soviet bloc. Although some, like ourselves, are currently in the process of attempting to construct them, today we have nowhere near the material and financial conditions we had in the past. The funding and aid the Soviets provided American communists is, unfortunately, not something provided for us by the dominant socialist states of our era.

Ideology does not exist in a transcendental realm. It is embodied materially through people and institutions. Without the institutions that can ensure radical scholars are not forced to toe the line of the bourgeois academy, the material conditions for this split will persist. 

If I may, I would like to end with the following point. It is very easy to condemn the so-called radical academics we find in the bourgeois hamster wheel divorced from the people and their struggles. While condemnation might sometimes be justified, I think pity is the correct reaction. 

They are subjects of a tragedy. As G. W. F. Hegel notes, the essence of a tragedy is found in the contradictions at play between the various roles an individual occupies. Sophocles’ Antigone is perhaps the best example. Here, a sister (Antigone) is torn between the duty she has to bury her brother (Polyneices), and the duty she has as a citizen to follow King Creon’s decry, which considers Polyneices a traitor undeserving of a formal burial. This contradiction is depicted nicely in Hegel, who says that “both are in the wrong because they are one-sided, but both are also in the right.” 

Our so-called radical intelligentsia is, likewise, caught in the contradiction of the two roles they wish to occupy — revolutionary and academic. Within existing institutions, there can be no reconciliation of the duties implied in each role. This is the setup of a classical tragedy, one which takes various forms with each individual scholar. It is also, as Socrates reminds Aristophanes and Agathon at the end of Plato’s Symposium, a comedy, since “the true artist in tragedy is an artist in comedy also.” 

The tragic and simultaneously comedic position occupied by the radical intelligentsia can only be overcome with the development of popular counter-hegemonic institutions, such as parties and educational institutions like the Hampton and Midwestern Marx Institutes, the International Manifesto Group, the Critical Theory Workshop and others. It is only here where scholars can embed themselves in the people. However, scholars are humans living under capitalism. They, just like everyone else, have bills to pay. These institutions, therefore, must work to develop the capacity to financially support both the intellectual traitors to the traditional bourgeois academy, and the organic intellectuals emerging from the working class itself. That is, I think, one of the central tasks facing those attempting to bridge the divide we have examined today. 

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). 

Footnotes

[1] For more on the indispensability of subjective conditions to social revolutions, see the last chapter of the author’s book, The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism.

[2] For more on imperialist efforts to create an inorganic left intelligentsia, see the author’s book, The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism, Frances Stonor Saunders’s The Cultural Cold War, and Gabriel Rockhill’s forthcoming book, The Intellectual World War.

[3] In the last couple of decades, scholars like Anthony Monteiro (fired from Temple University for not toing the bourgeois line of the African American Studies department) and Norman Finklestein (“unceremoniously kicked out” of Hunter College for his pro-Palestine work) have been blackballed from the academy for their anti-establishment views. 

[4] China here is undoubtedly the only one capable of filling the shoes of the Soviet Union. Yet it has failed to meet the Soviet standard of international proletarian solidarity

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). 

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”)

W.E.B. Du Bois and the Meaning of Progress: Revisiting "The Souls of Black Folk" on Its 120-Year Anniversary

By Carlos Garrido

Republished from Midwestern Marx.

Aristotle famously starts his Metaphysics with the claim that “all men by nature desire to know.”[1] For Dubois, if there are a people in the U.S. who have immaculately embodied this statement, it is black folk. In Black Reconstruction, for instance, Du Bois says that “the eagerness to learn among American Negroes was exceptional in the case of a poor and recently emancipated folk.”[2] In The Souls of Black Folk, he highlights “how faithfully, how piteously, this people strove to learn.”[3] This was a stark contrast with the “white laborers,” who unfortunately, as Du Bois notes, “did not demand education, and saw no need of it, save in exceptional cases.” [4]

Out of the black community’s longing to know, and out of this longing taking material and organizational form through the Freedman’s Bureau, came one of the most important accomplishments of that revolutionary period of reconstruction – the public schools and black colleges. It was these schools and colleges, Du Bois argued, which educated black leaders, and ultimately, prevented the rushed revolts and vengeance which could have driven the mass of black people back into the old form of slavery. [5]

This year marks the 120th anniversary of Dubois's masterful work, The Souls of Black Folk. In this essay, I will be concentrating my analysis on the fourth chapter, titled "Of the Meaning of Progress," where I will peruse how the subjects of education and progress are presented within a greatly racialized American capitalism.

The Tragedy of Josie

The chapter retells a story which is first set a dozen or so years after the counterrevolution of property in 1876. It is embedded in the context of the previous two decades of post-emancipation lynchings, second class citizenship, and poverty for those on the dark side of the veil.

Du Bois is a student at Fisk and is looking around in Tennessee for a teaching position. After much unsuccessful searching, he finally finds a small school shut out from the world by forests and hills. He was told about this school by Josie, the central character of the narrative. Along with a white fellow who wished to create a white school, Du Bois rode to the commissioner’s house to secure the school. After having the commissioner accept his proposal and invite him to dinner, the “shadow of the veil” fell upon him as they ate first, and he ate alone. [6]

Upon arriving at the school, he noticed its destitute condition – a stark contrast to the schools he was used to. The students, while poor and largely uneducated, expressed an insatiable longing to learn – Josie especially had her appetite for knowledge “hover like a star above … her work and worry, and she,” Du Bois says, “studied doggedly.”[7] While certainly having a “desire to rise out of [her] condition by means of education,” Josie’s quest for knowledge also went deeper than that.[8] It was, in a sense, an existential longing for education – a deeply human enterprise upon which a life-or-death struggle for being fully human ensued. “Education and work,” as Du Bois had noted in the Talented Tenth, “are the levers to uplift a people;” but “education must not simply teach work-it must teach Life.”[9] “It is the trained, living human soul,” Du Bois argues, “cultivated and strengthened by long study and thought, that breathes the real breath of life into boys and girls and makes them human, whether they be black or white, Greek, Russian or American.”[10]

Josie understood this well. She strove for that kind of human excellence and virtue the Greeks referred to as arete. But her quest was stopped in its track by the shadow of the veil; by the reality of poverty, superexploited labor, and racism which characterized the dominant social relations for the black worker.

A decade after he completed his teaching duties, Du Bois returned to that small Tennessee town. What he encountered warranted the questioning of progress itself. Josie’s family, which at one point he considered himself an adopted part of, had gone through a “heap of trouble.”[11] Lingering in destitute poverty, her brother was arrested for stealing, and her sister, “flushed with the passion of youth … brought home a nameless child.”[12] As the eldest child, Josie took it upon herself to sustain the family. She was overworked, and this was killing her; first spiritually, then materially. As Du Bois says, Josie “shivered and worked on, with the vision of schooldays all fled, with a face wan and tired,—worked until, on a summer's day, someone married another; then Josie crept to her mother like a hurt child, and slept—and sleeps.”[13]

In his youth Du Bois had asked: “to what end” might “[we] seek to strengthen character and purpose” if “people have nothing to eat or, to wear?”[14] Josie’s insatiable thirst for knowledge required leisure time, i.e., time that is unrestricted by the labor one does for their subsistence, nor by the weariness and fatigue which lingers after. Aristotle had already noted that it “was when almost all the necessities of life and the things that make for comfort and recreation had been secured,” that philosophy and the pursuit of science “in order to know, and not for any utilitarian end… began to be sought.”[15] Josie’s quest for knowledge, her longing for enlightenment, was made impossible by capitalist relations of production, and the racialized form they take in the U.S. As dilemmas within her family developed, she was forced to spend every ounce of her energy on working to sustain the meagre living conditions of the household. Afterall, as Du Bois eloquently says, “to be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.”[16]

It is true, as Kant said, that “all that is required for enlightenment is freedom;” but it is not true that, while being necessary, “the freedom for man to make public use of his reason in all matters” is sufficient![17] This freedom presupposes another – the freedom to have the necessaries of life guaranteed for oneself. What good can be made of the right to free speech by the person too famished to think properly? What good is this right to those homeless souls with constricted jaws and clenched teach in the winter? The artifices intended to keep people down, as Kant calls it, are also material – that is, they refer not only to the absence of opportunities for civic and political participation, but also to the absence of economic opportunities for securing the necessities of life.[18]

The great writer can emanate universal truths from their portraits of individuals. Du Bois accomplished this with Josie, who is a concrete manifestation of black folk’s trajectory post-emancipation. In both Josie and black folk at the turn of the century, the longing to learn, the thirst for knowledge, is met by the desert of poverty common to working folk, especially those on the dark side of the veil, where opportunity doesn’t make the rounds. As an unfree, “segregated servile caste, with restricted rights and privileges,” it is not only the bodies, but the spirit and minds of black folk’s humanity which were under attack.[19] It is a natural result of a cold world – one that beats black souls and bodies down with racist violence, superexploitation, and poverty – that a “shadow of a vast despair” can hover over some black folk.[20] And yet, Du Bois argues, “democracy died save in the hearts of black folk;” and “there are to-day no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes.”[21]

A Universally Dehumanizing System

Although intensified in the experience of poor and working class black folk – especially those in the U.S. – the crippling of working people’s humanity and intellect is a central component of the capitalist mode of life in general. This was already being observed by key thinkers of the 18th century Scottish enlightenment (e.g., Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, et. al.). For instance, in Smith’s magnus opus, The Wealth of Nations, he would argue that the development of the division of labor with modern industry created a class of “men whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations,” of which “no occasion to exert his understanding” occur, leaving them to “become as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.”[22] “His dexterity at his own particular trade,” he argues, is “acquired at the expense of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues.”[23] “In every improved and civilized society,” Smith observes, “this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it.”[24]

Writing almost a century later, and hence, having the opportunity of observing a more developed capitalist social totality, Marx and Engels saw that the degree of specialization acquired by the division of labor in manufacturing had even more profound dehumanizing and stupefying effects on the working class. “A labourer,” Marx argues, “who all his life performs one and the same simple operation, converts his whole body into the automatic, specialized implement of that operation.”[25] In echoing similar critiques brought forth by Ferguson and Smith, Marx explains how the worker’s productive activity is turned into “a mere appendage of the capitalist’s workshop,” and the laborer themself is converted into “a crippled monstrosity.”[26] It is a form of relationality which reduces working people to “spiritually and physically dehumanized beings.”[27] As Engels noted, capitalist manufacturing’s division of labor divides the human being and produces a “stunting of man.”[28] Alongside commodity production is the production of fractured human beings whose abilities are reduced to the activities they perform at work.

This mental and physical crippling of the worker under the capitalist process of production provides an obstacle not only to their human development, but to their struggle for liberation itself. No successful struggle against the dominant order can take place without educating, without changing the minds and hearts, of the masses being mobilized in the struggle. Education aimed at the acquisition of truth is revolutionary, that is why ignorance is an indispensable component of capitalist control. The “Socratic spirit,” as I have previously argued, “belongs to the revolutionaries;” it is in socialist revolutionary processes where education is prioritized as a central component of creating a new, fully human, people.[29] As Du Bois put it, “education among all kinds of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent. Nevertheless, men strive to know.”[30] “The final purpose of education,” as Hegel wrote, “is liberation and the struggle for a higher liberation still.”[31]

“How shall man measure Progress there where the dark-faced Josie lies?”

In the capitalist mode of life, this contradiction between the un-development of human life and the development of the forces of production has always gone hand in hand. From the lens of universal history, this is one of the central antinomies of the system. Progress of a certain kind has always been conjoined with retrogression in another. Du Bois says that “Progress, I understand, is necessarily ugly.”[32] He is quite correct in a dual sense. Not only has class society – and specifically, capitalist class society – always developed the productive forces at the expense of the un-development of human life in the mass of people, but also, when progress has been achieved in the social realm, it has never been thanks to the kindness and generosity of owning classes, it has never been the result of anything but an ugly, often bloody, struggle. As Fredrick Douglass famously said, “if there is no struggle, there is no progress.”[33]

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However, it is the first sense in which Du Bois’s statement on the ugliness of progress is meant. He asks, “how shall man measure Progress there where the dark-faced Josie lies?”[34] What is our standard for progress going to be? Human life and the real capacity for human flourishing? Or the development of industrial technologies and the accumulation of capital? Under the current order, all metrics are aimed at measuring progress in accordance with the latter. As I have argued before,

The economist’s obsession with gross domestic product measures is a good example. For such quantifiability to take place, qualitatively incommensurable activities must transmute themselves into being qualitatively commensurable... The consumption of a pack of cigarettes and the consumption of an apple loses the distinction which makes one cancerous and the other healthy, they’re differences boil down to the quantitative differences in the price of purchase.[35]

This standard for measuring progress corresponds to a mode of social life where, as the young Marx had observed, “the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion [to] the devaluation of the world of men.”[36] In socialist China, where the people – through their Communist Party – are in charge of developing a new social order, metrics are being developed to account for growth in human-centered terms. As Cheng Enfu has proposed, a “new economic accounting indicator, ‘Gross Domestic Product of Welfare,’”[37] (GDPW) is needed:

GDPW, unlike GDP, encompasses the total value of the welfare created by the production and business activities of all residential units in a country (or region) during a certain period. As an alternative concept of modernization, it is the aggregate of the positive and negative utility produced by the three systems of economy, nature, and society, and essentially reflects the sum of objective welfare.[38]

While forcing the reader to think critically about the notion of progress, it would be incorrect to suggest that Du Bois would like to entirely dispose of the notion. His oeuvre in general is deeply rooted in enlightenment sensibilities, in a belief in a common humanity, in the power of human reason, and in the real potential for historical progress. These are all things that, as Susan Neiman writes in Left is Not Woke, are rejected by the modern Heidegger-Schmidt-Foucualt rooted post-modern ‘woke left,’ and which stem, as Georg Lukács noted in his 1948 masterpiece, The Destruction of Reason, from the fact that capitalism, especially after the 1848 revolutions, had become a reactionary force, a phenomenon reflected in the intellectual orders by a turn away from Kant and Hegel and towards Schopenhauer, Eduard von Hartmann, Nietzsche, and various other forms of philosophical irrationalism.[39]

Instead of rejecting the notion of progress, Du Bois would urge us to understand the dialectical character of history’s unfolding – that is, the role that the ‘ugly’ has played in progress. He would urge us to reject the mythologized ‘pure’ notion of progress which prevails in quotidian society and the halls of bourgeois academia; and to understand the impurities of progress to be a necessary component of it – at least in this period of human history.

Du Bois would also urge us to understand that, while progress in the sphere of the productive forces has often not translated itself into progress at the human level, this fact does not negate the genuine potential for progress in the human sphere represented by such developments in industry, agriculture, and the sciences and technologies. Progress in the human sphere that is left unrealized by developments in the productive forces within capitalist relations ends up taking the form, to use Andrew Haas’ concept, of Being-as-Implication.[40] As Ioannis Trisokkas has recently elaborated, beyond simply being either present-at-hand (vorhandenseit) or absent, implication is another form of being; things can be implied, their being takes the form of a real potential capable of becoming actual.[41]

It is true, under the current relations of production, that the lives of people get worse while simultaneously the real potential for them being better than ever before continues to increase. This is the paradoxical character of capitalist progress. When a new machine capable of duplicating the current output in a specific industry is introduced into the productive process, this represents a genuine potential for cutting working hours in half, and allowing people to have more leisure time for creative – more human – endeavors. The development of the productive forces reduces the socially necessary labor time and can therefore potentially increase what Martin Hägglund has called socially available free time.[42] This is the time that Josie – and quite frankly, all of us poor working class people – need in order to flourish as humans. The fact that it does not do this, and often does the opposite, is not rooted in the machines and technologies themselves, but in the historically constituted social relations which mediate our relationship with these developments.

We can have a form of progress which overcomes the contradictions of the current form; but this requires revolutionizing the social relations we exist in. It requires a society where working people are in power, where the telos of production is not profit and capital accumulation in the hands of a few, but the satisfaction of human needs – both spiritual and material. A society where the state is genuinely of, by, and for the people, and not an instrument of the owners of capital. In other words, it requires socialism, what Du Bois considered to be “the only way of human life.”[43]

References 

[1] Aristotle, Metaphysics, in The Basic Works of Aristotle (Chapel Hill: The Modern Library, 2001), 689 (980a).

[2] W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction (New York: Library of America, 2021), 766.

[3] W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, in Writings (New York: The Library of America, 1986), 367-368.

[4] Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 770.

[5] Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 770.

[6] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 407.

[7] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 406-407.

[8] Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 766.

[9] Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth, In Writings, 861.

[10] Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” 854.

[11] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 411.

[12] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 411.

[13] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 411.

[14] Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” 853.

[15] Aristotle, Metaphysics, 692 (982b).

[16] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 368.

[17] Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightenment,” in Basic Writings of Kant (New York: The Modern Library, 2001) 136.

[18] Kant, “What is Enlightenment,” 141.

[19] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 390.

[20] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 368.

[21] Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 40; Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 370.

[22] Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations Vol II (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1910), 263-264.

[23] Smith, The Wealth of Nations Vol. II, 264.

[24] Smith, The Wealth of Nations Vol. II, 264.

[25] Karl Marx, Capital Volume: I (New York: International Publishers, 1974), 339.

[26] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 360.

[27] Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (New York: Prometheus Books, 1988), 86.

[28] Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1976), 291.

[29] Carlos L. Garrido, “The Real Reason Why Socrates Was Killed and Why Class Society Must Whitewash His Death,” Countercurrents (August 23, 2021): https://countercurrents.org/2021/08/the-real-reason-why-socrates-is-killed-and-why-class-society-must-whitewash-his-death/. In every revolutionary movement we’ve seen the pivotal role education is given – this is evident in the Soviet process, the Korean, the Chinese, Cuban, etc. As I am sure most know, even while engaged in guerilla warfare Che was making revolutionaries study. Education was so important that, as he mentioned in the famous letter Socialism and Man in Cuba, under socialism “the whole society… [would function] as a gigantic school.” For more see: Carlos L. Garrido and Edward Liger Smith, “Pioneros por el comunismo: Seremos como el Che,” intervención y Coyuntura: Revista de Crítica Política (October 11, 2022): https://intervencionycoyuntura.org/pioneros-por-el-comunismo-seremos-como-el-che/

[30] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 385.

[31] G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 125.

[32] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 412.

[33] Fredrick Douglass, Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. by Philip S. Foner (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1999), 367.

[34] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 414.

[35] Carlos L. Garrido, “John Dewey and the American Tradition of Socialist Democracy, Dewey Studies 6(2) (2022), 87.

[36] Marx, Manuscripts of 1844, 71.

[37] Cheng Enfu, China’s Economic Dialectic (New York: International Publishers, 2019), 13.

[38] Enfu, China’s Economic Dialectic, 13.

[39] Susan Neiman, Left is Not Woke (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2023). Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason (Brooklyn: Verso Books, 2021). For more on the modern forms of philosophical irrationalism, see: John Bellamy Foster, “The New Irrationalism,” Monthly Review 74 (9) (February 2023): https://monthlyreview.org/2023/02/01/the-new-irrationalism/ and my interview with him for the Midwestern Marx Institute: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4uyNEzLlRw.

[40] Andrew Haas, “On Being in Heidegger and Hegel,” Hegel Bulletin 38(1) (2017), 162-4: doi:10.1017/hgl.2016.64.

[41] Ioannis Trisokkas, “Being, Presence, and Implication in Heidegger's Critique of Hegel,” Hegel Bulletin 44(2) (August 2023), 346: DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/hgl.2022.3 Trisokkas here provides a great defense of Hegel from Heidegger’s critique of his treatment of being.

[42] Martin Hägglund, This Life (New York: Pantheon Books, 2019), 301-304.

[43] W. E. B. Du Bois, “Letter from W. E. B. Du Bois to Communist Party of the U.S.A., October 1, 1961,” W. E. B. Du Bois Archive: https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b153-i071

How the Capitalist Class Censors Dissenting Voices Via the US Government: The Case of TikTok and the Midwestern Marx Institute

By Carlos Garrido, Noah Krachvik, and Edward Liger Smith

​The First Amendment of the United States Constitution says that “Congress shall make no law… Abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” Yet in 2023 the United States is attempting to extradite Julian Assange because he published proof of U.S. civilian executions in Iraq, systematic torture at Guantanamo Bay, and the DNC rigging of the 2016 primary election against Democratic Socialist candidate Bernie Sanders, which is itself a violation of the Democratic rights enshrined in the American Constitution. The U.S., with its supposed constitutional guarantee of free speech and media, has indicted four leaders from the African People's Socialist Party (APSP) and Uhuru Movement on flimsy claims of “advancing Russian propaganda,” simply because they challenge the narrative of the imperialist financial cartels and war mongers. Even if we look only at these examples, how can we say there is freedom of speech or press in our modern age of neoliberal capitalist-imperialism? The Political establishment has shown that it will crack down on anyone who shares information that is damaging to its foreign policy interests, and most social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter, owned by wealthy shareholders like Mark Zuckerberg and others, have proven not only to be impressionable to the influence of US intelligence agencies like the FBI and other institutions of the ruling class, but (after the release of the Twitter files) directly steered by them at times.

No social media platform is more tightly linked to the intelligence community, NATO, or US State Department than the incredibly popular Tik Tok app. In 2020 the Midwestern Marx Institute for Marxist Theory and Political Analysis, within a few months of work, amassed 375,000 Tik Tok followers when the app was still owned and operated by the Beijing, China based company Bytedance, a testament to the people-oriented algorithms of Bytedance that allow any content that is genuinely popular to go “viral”, and a stark contrast to the money-centered way our Western software works. Unfortunately, that year the Biden administration would force ByteDance to hand over management of their U.S. servers to the Texas-based company ORACLE, a company with intimate ties to the CIA. No sooner had news of this forced change of control happened would the Institute have its account, which received millions of views on many videos containing factual information that challenged the narratives of the US war machine, banned from the platform. A second account that we started when the first one was wiped quickly accumulated 200,000 followers, and right when a growth parallel to the previous account was evident, the second account would also be banned. This blatant censorship would continue without explanation as the Institute had five more accounts banned by Tik Tok after they started to quickly gain popularity. It was later revealed that Oracle had hired a litany of former US State Department and Intelligence Operatives to manage the content for Tik Tok, as well as a few NATO executives for good measure. Tik Tok said that they deleted 320,000 “Russian accounts” which included many American socialist organizers who have never been associated with Russia in any way, such as an account ran by an organization of socialist organizers called “The Vanguard” that had over 100,000 followers when it was deleted.

Countless hours of our work that helped inform millions of people were stripped from the internet with little to no explanation, while truly hateful and incendiary accounts were allowed to remain up. Our institute's co-founder and editor, Eddie Liger Smith, was doxxed twice during this period, having his phone number, job, private social media profiles, and location shared by two creators working in tandem to attack Midwestern Marx. Both responsible accounts, Cbass429 and ThatDaneshGuy, were allowed to remain up until recently, when Cbass429 was finally banned for a completely unrelated incident. However, ThatDaneshGuy still has 1.6 million followers on Tik Tok, where he consistently calls for his political opposition to be fired from their jobs. ThatDaneshGuy called for his followers to contact Eddie’s place of employment and ask for his firing, claiming that it was deserved because of Eddie’s stance against US backed regime change efforts in Iran, which Danesh conflated with support for the Iranian Government executing people. Similar campaigns to these have been waged against other Institute co-founder Carlos Garrido and Institute contributor Kayla Popuchet, the latter who, like Eddie Smith, was fired from their place of employment because of the work they do for the Institute. On Tik Tok, the voices which speak the truth and champion peace are quickly banned, while those who harass and deceive people with imperialist lies are upheld by the algorithms.

Since the transfer of power to US entities, Tik Tok users have been fed a steady diet of neoliberal and imperialist propaganda, while critical voices are systematically being censored by the app’s content moderation staff. Neoliberal commentators like Philip Defranco are never made to retract errors, such as when Phil claimed that Russia blew up the Nord Stream Pipeline, despite all the evidence at the time pointing towards a Biden Administration sabotage. Award-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh later proved this to be the case in his detailed report on the incident. Despite all this, Defranco never had his account suspended or removed for posting this misinformation, and his video remains on the platform to this day, as do his comments accusing anyone who suggested the US might have sabotaged the pipeline of believing “Putin propaganda.” The Midwestern Marx Institute had predicted that Biden sabotaged the pipeline before it was revealed in detail and was unsurprisingly attacked and reported for doing so.

Censorship, clearly, does not emerge out of a void. And so, we must ask the question: what are the social conditions which make censorship necessary? Who does the censored speech threaten? Who does it uplift? In whose interests is censorship carried out? On whose side is truth - a category our moribund imperialist era, dominated by postmodern philosophical irrationalism, scoffs at? The liberal ideal of freedom of press can never be actualized so long as the press is owned by a small ruling class, by corporations and shareholders who profit from war and the exploitation of the mass of people. They will always censor dissent and push coverage that suits their foreign and domestic interests. This has been the case throughout history, and the modern Western ruling class is, in this regard, no different from any other. It lies, it manipulates, it misinforms to the best of its ability. It needs a population that can view its actions as ethical and just, and so it must spend countless hours and dollars papering over every crack that appears in the facade its media apparatus has built around the minds of the people.

A revolving door between the media, intelligence agencies, NATO, and the U.S. State Department is only the logical result of a society based on capitalist relations of production, where capitalists not only control the production of material goods, but the production of information as well. The ruling class sees the media, including social media, as a vital part of the societal superstructure that is needed to maintain and reproduce the relations of production at the core of society. In other words, they see it as an important tool to convince you that capitalism and U.S. Imperialism are good and eternal. Under these social relations, the constitutional right to free speech and media have always been exclusive - it excludes all speech and media which substantially challenges the dominant forms of societal intercourse. The freedom of speech and media is, therefore, actually the freedom of pro-capitalist speech and media. V. I. Lenin’s description of the media in capitalist society rings truer than ever in the 2020s, it is dominated by an “atmosphere of lies and deception in the name of the ‘freedom and equality’ of capital, equality of the starved and the overfed.” Any absolute statements about the freedom of the press must be followed by the Leninist question: “freedom of the press… for which class?” The capitalist media’s freedom to deceive the masses in their defense of the existing order is in contradiction to the masses’ interests in searching for and publicizing the truth.

Those who keep our people misinformed and ignorant, who have made their life’s purpose to attack truth-tellers, do so under the insidiously categorized guise of ‘combating misinformation.’ In their topsy-turvy invented reality, as Michael Parenti called it, they posit themselves as the champions of truth and free speech – a paradox as laughable as a vegan butcher. Anyone with the courage to fight for the freedom to speak truth to power should unite in fighting this blatant attack on our constitutional rights. We must stand against this censorship from our ruling class, those who are the worst purveyors of misinformation imaginable, and who now, in the backwards-world name of ‘fighting misinformation,’ censor the truth. 

There is ‘fighting misinformation,’ and there is fighting misinformation. The divide of class interests between the ruling class of the West, and the good, honest, hard-working people who live under their regime could not be clearer. One side finds it necessary to invent a reality, under the guise of fighting the ‘mis-informers,’ that paints the world in a disfigured backwardness, the other side, on the contrary, is sick to death of being lied to by the media machine, and their screams of “fake news” grow more and more common every day. The American people not only deserve the truth, but absolutely need its existence to find commonality in the world, stability, and the ability to pursue lives of meaning and dignity. They are tired of the private monopolization of media that has erased the ability for regular working people to speak on an equal playing field; they feel their voices drowned in a sea of well-funded lies by MSNBC, Fox News, and the rest of them. This struggle has crystallized into a fight over The Truth itself.

And so, if fighting misinformation is to be done, we must begin by asking: Where was the crackdown on the media outlets who got 4.5 million people killed by claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction? Where are the crackdowns on those who are lying us into a third World War with nuclear-armed powers? Where are the crackdowns against those who play the drums for those marching humanity towards nuclear Armageddon? Why is it only the outlets calling for peace that are dubbed “Putin propagandists” and wiped from the internet? Where are the crackdowns on the blood-thirsty warmongers? The answer is: they are nowhere, and they will continue to be nowhere while giant corporate financial interests control the lives and realities of regular Americans. Truth is censored and lies are proliferated because it serves the interests of the ruling capitalist class, and only through the overthrow of this class can a real freedom of thought, not an abstract empty freedom to deceive the people, be achieved. Until then, all we can have – it seems – is a media and culture that elevates the most odious imperialist voices while suppressing those who seek truth and peace. Nonetheless, the fight must continue, and with the dignity that comes from the incessant speaking of truth to power, the enemies of humanity will fall.

Let us remember the words of Julian Assange, whom the imperialists have rotting in a prison because of his sterling bravery… because he is a true journalist and not a lapdog of the powerful: “if wars can be started by lies, peace can be started by TRUTH.”

Carlos L. Garrido is a philosophy teacher at Southern Illinois University, editor at the Midwestern Marx Institute, and author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism and Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview.

Noah Khrachvik is a working class organizer, teacher, and editor at the Midwestern Marx Institute. 

Edward Liger Smith is an American political scientist and editor at the Midwestern Marx Institute.

A Fraternal Hand: The American Tradition of Socialist Democracy and Chinese Socialism

By Carlos Garrido

Republished from the Midwestern Marx Institute.

​There is a glaring paradox at the core of the American project. On the one hand, it proclaims its national self-determination with the values of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, right to revolution, and to a government of, by, and for the people. On the other hand, the rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness have never been guaranteed for anyone but the white, male, capitalist class (which is slowly being racially and sexually diversified). The leading thinkers of the American project, from Jefferson to Martin Luther King Jr., have warned about the corrupting influence the interests of capital can play in preventing the concretization of these rights.

Thomas Jefferson, for instance, understood that the ‘enormous inequality’ in property relations was the cause of the ‘misery [of] the bulk of mankind,’ and that, as Herbert Aptheker notes, this concentration of capital was ‘the central threat to democratic rights.’[1] In noticing how the interest of capital can turn a government of, by, and for the people into a government of, by, and for big business, Jefferson would go on to draw a distinction between the democratic man and the aristocratic man. The former, he argued, trusts the people’s will, the latter distrusts it and turns towards big business elitism. Jefferson believed the aristocratic man, if he came to dominate the American government, would undermine the ideals of the 1776 anti-colonial revolution. The first generation of home-grown socialists, flowering in the 1820s and 1830s, saw Jefferson’s prediction actualize itself in the embryonic industrialization period of the US. In the face of growing inequalities and disparities, thinkers like Langdon Byllesby, Cornelius Blatchley, William Maclure, Thomas Skidmore and others, developed the ideals of the declaration of independence into socialism, what they considered to be its practical and logical conclusion.

Throughout the ages, generations of American socialists have appealed to the declaration of independence to argue for socialism in a way that connects with the American people’s common sense. Leading historians and theoreticians of the American socialist tradition, thinkers like Staughton Lynd, Herbert Aptheker, W.E.B. Dubois, Eugene Debs, William Z. Foster and others, have elaborated on the subject, noting that regardless of the limitations encountered in the founding of the American experiment, it was a historically progressive event, whose spirit should be carried forth today by socialists and communists.

As the US is increasing tensions against China, leading to what many consider a ‘new cold war,’ it is important to look back at the values the American people accept, to the thinkers the American people consider their own, and to consider how different China’s practices – which our ruling class and its media constantly estrange to the American public – are from the ideals which founded our country. What we will find, I believe, is the values prioritized by the leading thinkers of the American experiment, from Jefferson to Dewey to Martin Luther King Jr., are best embodied today in Chinese socialism. This truth, in my view, should be brought forth to the American people. No longer should their consent continue to be manufactured to fight against peoples whose practices align with our ideals more than those we encounter in our own country.

John Dewey (1859-1952), known as ‘America’s philosopher of democracy,’ wrote that we must stop thinking about democracy as something ‘institutional and external;’ instead, we should treat democracy as a ‘way of life,’ one governed by the ‘belief in the common man.’[2] For Dewey, genuine democracy is a consistent practice; it has less to do with showing up to a poll every two to four years and more to do with the ability of common people – what in Spanish we call el pueblo – to steadily exert their collective power over the affairs of everyday life. Dewey understood that this genuine form of democracy was largely inexistent in the US, where the democratic spirit is reduced to voting every four years in political elections which, as he argued, function more as a ‘shadow cast on society by big business.’[3]

In line with the long tradition of home-grown American socialists, Dewey would conclude that the ideals of the founders – especially the radical flank commonly known as the ‘dissenters’ – would be realized ‘only as control of the means of production and distribution is taken out of the hands of individuals who exercise powers created socially for narrow individual interests.’[4] In the context of the US, Dewey held that this required ‘a radical change in economic institutions and the political arrangements based on them.’ ‘These changes,’ said Dewey, ‘are necessary in order that social control of forces and agencies socially created may accrue to the liberation of all individuals associated together in the great undertaking of building a life that expresses and promotes human liberty.’[5] For Dewey, in short, only socialism could make actual the radical, and for its time, deeply democratic, spirit of the declaration of independence.

A similar sentiment can be found in Martin Luther King Jr., the only American to have his own holiday (every third Monday of January). In one of his last sermons, whilst reflecting on the rights upheld in the declaration of independence, King would note that ‘if a man doesn’t have a job or an income, he has neither life, nor liberty, nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists.’ America, for King, had desperately failed to fulfill its promise, not just for the black souls it kept enchained for more than two centuries, but for all poor and working people who continued to ‘perish on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.’[6] This division was representative of what King called the ‘two Americas,’ the America of the poor working majority and the America of the few owners of big capital.[7]

Like Dives in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, King held that ‘if America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty and make it possible for all of God’s children to have the basic necessities of life, she, too, will go to hell.’[8] The stranglehold monopoly capital has over the American state turned the American dream – that is, the individual’s quest for life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness in harmony with the human community – into the American nightmare. No number of victories in the sphere of civil rights could change, in King’s view, the fundamentally polarizing character of the system. As King would argue years after the victories of the civil rights movement: ‘I have found out that all that I have been doing in trying to correct this system in America has been in vain… I am trying to get at the roots of it to see just what ought to be done… The whole thing will have to be done away with.’[9] For all its claims of being a beacon of democracy, for King, as Cornel West argues, ‘America’s two main political parties, each beholden to big money, offer merely alternative visions of oligarchic rule.’[10] Like Dewey and many others within the tradition of American socialism, King considered the values of the declaration of independence to only be universally applicable if America is able to move beyond the capitalist mode of life.

The American ruling class ignores and/or sanitizes this tradition of home-grown socialism which permeates even through the most universally admired of American figures. It wishes to hide the working class’s and oppressed people’s history of struggle in our country, for only in doing so can it perpetuate the McCarthyite lie that socialism and the values the American people accept are wholly incompatible. The truth is that, on the contrary, it is on the basis of the values the American people already accept that American socialism has developed. By showing the American people the positive role socialism has played in their national past – and how these struggles have seen themselves as continuations of the revolutionary tradition of 1776 –  the similarities in Chinese socialist construction and this unique tradition of American socialism become apparent. 

Martin Luther King Jr., for instance, found it condemnable to sustain poverty amidst material abundance; the rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness require the abolition of poverty for their genuine fulfillment. In just 40 years, Chinese socialism has been able to lift more than 800 million people out of poverty, abolishing that horrendous condition the capitalist mode of life makes necessary for the vast majority of people. While building a poverty-free world with common prosperity, China has been able to realize a condition for its people which looks a lot more like what the leading American minds (like Dr. King) stood for than what can be found in America itself.

As we approach the 55th anniversary of King’s assassination (which the FBI helped orchestrate), we should ask: has America – which celebrates King once a year – heeded to King’s concern for poverty and the condition of the working class? The answer is a resolute No! In no state of the US, for instance, is the federal minimum wage ($7.25) enough to survive; even if it is raised to $15 – as the democratic socialists and other progressives have called for – the minimum wage would still not be enough for a working class family to survive anywhere in the country. With stagnant wages and inflation at a 40 year high, almost 60% of Americans are currently living paycheck to paycheck. Many of these people are on the brinks of joining the 600,000 homeless people wandering around in a country with more than 17 million empty homes. It is not surprising, in a country where there are 33 times more empty homes than homeless people, that 34 million people, including one in eight children, experience hunger while 30-40% of the U.S.’s food supply (40 million tons of food) is wasted every year. For all the tokenization of King we find in America’s political circus, we can say that after 55 years since his state-sanctioned death, America has still not listened, and much less realized, the demands of Dr. King. However, China has!

Likewise, Dewey, perhaps the most prominent philosopher America has produced, felt that to carry forth today the democratic creed of the declaration of independence, we must deepen our understanding and practice of democracy. A mode of life where the same small group of monopolists owns most of the property, controls most of the media, and decides who gets elected and what they do when elected, can hardly be called democratic. For Dewey, we are not living up to the democratic creed if ‘democracy’ only matters every two to four years when elections come about and working people are bombarded with reasons why they should vote for one puppet of the ruling class over another. Dewey would wholeheartedly agree with Xi Jinping in asserting that ‘democracy is not an ornament to be used for decoration; it is to be used to solve the problems that the people want to solve.’ As Xi has noted,​

If the people are awakened only at the time of voting and go into dormancy afterward; if the people only listen to smashing slogans during election campaigns but have no say afterward; if the people are only favored during canvassing but are left out after the election, such a democracy is not a true democracy.

​One could see words like these coming out of the mouths of a John Dewey or a Martin Luther King Jr. These ideas governing China’s socialist whole-process people’s democracy should seem anything but foreign to Americans – it is what our leading democratic theorists hoped the US system would develop into. If Americans are faithful to the democratic creed of the declaration of independence, and to the leading theorists of our country who’ve developed these into notions of socialist democracy with American characteristics, then we should be praising China for how incredibly comprehensive their socialist democracy (which is still humbly considered a work-in-progress) is. Far from thinking about democracy in the reductive, election-only sense, China’s system of socialist democracy is embedded in ‘seven integrated structures or institutional forms (体制tizhi): electoral democracy; consultative democracy; grassroots democracy; minority nationalities policy; rule of law; human rights; and leadership of the Communist Party.’ A comprehensive study of this whole-process people’s democracy would lead any unbiased researcher to the conclusion Roland Boer has (along with a plethora of Chinese scholars) arrived at: namely, that ‘China’s socialist democratic system is already quite mature and superior to any other democratic system.’
​
Not only does the US lack this seven-tiered democratic system, but even in the one realm it does have, namely, electoral democracy, the results it produces could hardly be called ‘democratic.’ For more than a decade studies from bourgeois institutions have themselves confirmed what Marxists have known since the middle of the 19th century, namely, that the essence of capitalist ‘democracy’ is ‘democracy for an insignificant minority –  democracy for the rich.’[11] The U.S., which spreads its blood soaked hands around the world plundering in the name of democracy, has been outed as a place where the dēmos (common people) do anything but rule (kratos). As a Princeton study headed by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page shows,

In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagree with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.[12]

​In societies divided by class antagonisms we can never talk about ‘pure democracy,’ or abstract democracy in general; we must always ask - as Lenin did - ‘democracy for which class’?[13] The ‘democracy’ and ‘democratic freedoms’ of capitalist to exploit and oppress will always be detrimental to working and oppressed peoples. Only an all-people’s democracy (a working and popular classes democratic-dictatorship) can be genuinely democratic, for it is the only time ‘power’ (kratos) is actually in the hands of ‘common people’ (demos).
​
To claim – as American capitalists, their puppet politicians, and their lapdog media does – that the US is a ‘beacon of democracy,’ and China an ‘authoritarian one-party system,’ is to hold on to a delusional topsy turvy view of reality. Only by holding explicitly the idea of democracy as democracy for the rich – an oxymoronic truth which they must continue to conceal from the American public – would any part of their assessment contain truth. If democracy is considered from the standpoint of the capitalist’s ability to arbitrarily exert their will on society at the expense of working people and the planet, then, of course, the US is a beacon of this form of so-called ‘democracy,’ and China an ‘authoritarian’ regime. If instead, democracy is considered from the standpoint of common people’s ability to exert their power successfully over everyday affairs, that is, if democracy is understood in the people-centered form it etymologically stands for, and in the way leading American thinkers like Jefferson, Dewey, and Dr. King understood it, then it would be indubitable that China is far more democratic than the US (and any other liberal-bourgeois ‘democracy’).

As the US increases its anti-China rhetoric and actions – a symptom of its empire’s moribund stage – it becomes an imperative for all sane people to counter the propaganda setting the stage for, at best, a new cold war, and at worst, a third world-war. As Julian Assange – whose treatment reminds us everyday of how much the West cherishes its so called ‘individual rights’ to speech and press – once eloquently stated: ‘if wars can be started by lies, peace can be started by truth.’

It is the duty of American communists, socialists, and progressives, to show the American people the truth; to show them that China is not the enemy of the American people, that the real enemy of the American people are those who would like us to see China as an enemy. It is not China who has our country surrounded by military bases. It is not China who is funding and inciting separatist movements in our autonomous regions. It is not China who is slandering us with baseless accusations of the most heinous crimes of genocide humanity can imagine. It is not China who is creating international military alliances a la global NATO to militarily threaten us. It is the US empire who is doing this to China. The only interests which China threatens are those of our finance capitalists, who have spent the last century impoverishing both our people at home and our brothers and sisters in the global south. China is a friend of the American working men and women; just like it is a friend of the African peoples, and the peoples in the Middle East and in Latin America, whose win-win, mutually beneficial relations in international trade with China have afforded them the ability to turn away from predatory neoliberal debt-trapping loans which have been systematically forced on them for half a century by the capitalist West.

In sum – to be faithful to the democratic creed of the declaration of independence and of the greatest minds our country has produced, we must realize today that China is not our enemy; instead, it is the place wherein the ideals which guide this democratic creed are best embodied. Instead of buying into the easily confuted lies of Western pundits, who hope we are foolish enough to accept them and dance to the drums of a war to sustain Western capitalist-imperialist hegemony, we must learn from China and work together to build a peaceful, cooperative, and ecological shared future for mankind.

References
​
[1] Herbert Aptheker, The American Revolution: 1763-1783 (New York: International Publishers, 1960), 105.

[2] John Dewey, The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882-1953, ed. by Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967-1990), LW 14:228.

[3] Dewey, LW 6:163.

[4] Dewey, LW 11:28.

[5] Dewey, LW 11:28.

[6] Martin Luther King Jr, The Radical King, ed. and introduced by Cornel West (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015), 246- 247. 248.

[7] King Jr, The Radical King, 236.

[8] King Jr, The Radical King, 248.

[9] King Jr, The Radical King, xi.

[10] King Jr, The Radical King, xiii.

[11] V. I. Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 26 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977) 465. 

[12] Gilens, M., & Page, B. (2014). Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens. Perspectives on Politics, 12(3), 564-581. doi:10.1017/S1537592714001595
​
[13] V. I. Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 28 (Moscow: Progress Publishers,1974), 249.

Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American PhD student and instructor in philosophy at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale (with an M.A. in philosophy from the same institution). His research focuses include Marxism, Hegel, early 19th century American socialism, and socialism with Chinese characteristics. He is an editor in Midwestern Marx Institute for Marxist Theory and Political Analysis and in the Journal of American Socialist Studies. Carlos edited and introduced Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview: An Anthology of Classical Marxist Texts on Dialectical Materialism (Midwestern Marx Publishing Press, 2022). 

What is the Fetishism of Commodities?

By Carlos Garrido

I was asked by a few comrades to explain Marx’s concept of the fetishism of commodities, and with that, the main ways it has been misunderstood by both mainstream bourgeois academia and by well-meaning Marxists. The following short reflection attempts to do just that.

Marx begins section four of the first chapter of Capital by saying that “a commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing;” however, “its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” (Marx, 71). I can imagine ‘bourgeois’ political economists reading this in 1867 wondering what the hell is ‘queer’ about a commodity? I can envision them asking “what in the world does a commodity, a category of political economy, have to do with metaphysics and theology?” Before I analyze what Marx means, let us look at some of the things he doesn’t mean, but which, as usual, people think he does.

There are a few ways the commodity fetish is misunderstood, but the most prominent misunderstanding describes the fetishism of commodities as a sort of ‘false consciousness’ which takes us over when we engage in the market; a sort of ‘illusion’ that occurs when we idealize the products we consume, or the products we are faced with the opportunity to consume. The commodity fetish is understood here as a sort of libidinal connection to products. It is as if one could watch Confessions of a Shopaholic and retrieve the same message Marx is proposing in this section.

This is not, in my view, what Marx means by the fetishism of commodities. It is not an illusion which functions as a filter to distort our view of the world. If that were the case, as Michael Heinrich notes, “false consciousness must disappear once the real conditions have been explained” (Heinrich, 71).  This is not, however, the case. We don’t become immune to the ‘false consciousness’ of the commodity fetish after reading Marx’s Capital. Instead of thinking of the commodity fetish as a subjective experience of ‘false consciousness,’ Marx holds the fetish is in the world itself. It has an objective presence in the social relations of capitalist commodity production.

Marx uses the example of the construction of a table. When wood is formed into a table, there is no mystery present. We have a “common, every-day thing” (Marx, 71). However, “so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent” (Ibid – my italic). Notice here how he is very explicit that it is the object itself that is changed into something transcendent when it becomes a commodity. It isn’t, again, simply a matter of a mental illusion or false consciousness.

“The mystical character of a commodity,” Marx will go on to say, “does not originate, therefore, in their use-value” (Ibid). If it was simply a result of the use value of the good, all things – regardless of whether they were commodities or not – would have ‘metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.’ Instead, what makes a commodity such a queer thing is the relation which makes a good into a commodity in the first place –  its exchangeability. It is here where a good becomes a sinnlich übersinnliches ding (sensuous extrasensory thing). As Marx says: “whence, then, arises the enigmatic character of the product of labour, so soon as it assumes the form of commodities? Clearly from this form itself” (Ibid, 71-2).

For a good to carry an ‘exchange value’ means that the specific type of concrete labor and materials which were necessary to create that good have fallen to the background. What matters in exchange value is not the type of work, but the socially necessary time it takes for that work to produce its product. In essence, qualitatively different forms of work, producing objects with qualitatively different utilities, are all homogenized and differentiated only quantitatively, that is, by the amount of socially necessary labor time materialized in the work. The homogenization of the human element of the commodity creates the conditions where “the social relations of the producers… and the social character of their labour” takes “the form of a social relation between products” (Ibid, 72). The human source of the commodity disappears, it becomes absorbed and metamorphized into the thing itself, appearing “as an objective character stamped upon the product” (Ibid). In the commodity a “definite social relation between men” assumes “the fantastic form of a relation between things” (Ibid).

A good analogy to such a queer relation can be found in the religious fetish, wherein human creations (the Gods) are disconnected (in their being and in their qualities) from their human creators. The relationships are seen not as relations between human constructions, but relations between “independent beings endowed with life” (Ibid). A prominent example of this phenomenon can be seen in the religious alienation Ludwig Feuerbach depicts in The Essence of Christianity. Nonetheless, the point is that because this fetishism “attaches itself” to the “products of labor, so soon as they are produced as commodities,” in a system of commodity production, this fetish has an objective character (Ibid).

For instance, in the movie ‘They Live,’ the protagonist John Nada finds a box of glasses which when worn show the real message behind social symbols (e.g., advertisement for vacation reads ‘reproduce and consume,’ the dollar reads ‘this is your God,’ etc.). In his reaction to the film, Slavoj Žižek’s The Perverts Guide to Ideology provides a helpful analysis of these “ideology critique glasses,” which aids our understanding of how the commodity fetish has been misunderstood. Ideology, Žižek states, is usually thought of as a set of glasses distorting our view of the real world. Therefore, ideology critique is usually framed as the removal of these glasses, an act which allows a spontaneous and direct engagement with the real world. Similarly, the central misunderstanding of the commodity fetish is that it is merely an illusion we hold, once we remove the illusion from our understanding the fetish disappears. This way of thinking about ideology critique is, as Žižek notes, ideological as well.

Instead, as the movie rightly depicts, ideology is objectively in the world. The task of critique is beyond the commonsensical and spontaneous. Critique is an often-painful addition which mediates between us and the world in such a manner that provides us with insights into the objective limitations of the objective world. The commodity fetish is not a distorted view of the world. It is not ‘fixed’ through easy liberal consumptive practices; through knowing where your cow died and where your eggs came from. The commodity fetish is an objective reality in a world dominated by commodity production. It takes critique to see this, but a revolution to change it.

Bibliography

Karl Marx (1867), Capital Vol. I, International Publishers (1974).

Michael Heinrich (2004), An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital, Monthly Review (2012).

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

By Carlos Garrido

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

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

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

Synopsis of the Film

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Film's Anti-Capitalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

Limitations in the Film's Anti-Capitalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Western Marxism Misunderstands China’s Usage of Markets

By Carlos Garrido

I have elsewhere argued that at the core of Western Marxism’s[1] flawed analysis of socialist states lies a “purity fetish” which is grounded in a Parmenidean fixation of the ‘true’ as the one, pure, and unchanging. For this disorder, so I have contended, the only cure is dialectics. With the aid of Roland Boer’s prodigious new text Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, I wish to show how this purity fetish, or, in its negative formulation, how this lack of dialectical thinking, emerges in Western Marxists’ analysis of China’s usage of markets.

In V.I. Lenin’s ‘Conspectus to Hegel’s Science of logic’ he states that,

It is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx![2]

For anyone familiar with G.W.F. Hegel’s 700+ page arguably impenetrable monster this daunting task alone seems harder than making a revolution. However, the central message in Lenin’s audacious statement is this: without a proper understanding of the dialectical method, Marxism is bound to be misunderstood. A century later and still, Western Marxists struggle to understand Marx. The paradox is this: “Western Marxists, although claiming to be the ones who rekindle the spirit of Hegel into Marxism, are the least bit dialectical when it comes to analysis of the concrete world.” This is lucidly seen in their treatment of China’s usage of markets, where they dogmatically accept Ludwig von Mises’ stale binary which states  – “the alternative is still either Socialism or a market economy.”[3]

As Boer highlights, already in Capital Vol 3 (specifically chapter 36 on “Pre-Capitalist Relations”) Marx shows how markets existed in the slave economies of the ancient world, e.g., Rome and Greece, and in the feudal economies of the Middle Ages. Were the markets in each of these historical periods the same? Were they commensurable to how markets exist under capitalism? No, as Boer states “market economies may appear to be similar, but it is both the arrangement of the parts in relation to each other and the overall purpose or function of the market economy in question that indicates significant differences between them.”[4] As Boer points out, Chinese scholars, following the analysis of Marx’s Capital Vol 3, understand that “market economies have existed throughout human history and constitute one of the significant creations by human societies.”[5][6] If markets, then, predate the capitalist mode of production, why would a socialist mode of production not be able to utilize them?

Chinese Marxism, following upon the tradition of Eastern European socialism, was able to ‘de-link’ markets from capitalism and utilize them as a method (fangfa) and means (shouduan) to serve (fuwu) the ends of socialism, that is, to liberate the forces of production and guarantee collective flourishing.[7] If the last four decades – wherein China has drastically raised its population’s living standards and lifted 800 million out of poverty – has taught us anything, it is that China’s usage of markets as a shouduan to fuwu socialism works.

Considering the plethora of advances China has been able to make for its population and the global movement for socialism, why have Western Marxist continuously insisted that China’s market reforms are a betrayal of socialism and a deviation down the ‘capitalist road’? Unlike some of the other Western misunderstandings of China, this one isn’t merely a case of yixi jiezhong, of “using Western frameworks or categories to understand China,”[8] for, if the dialectical framework and categories the Marxist tradition inherits from Hegel were properly applied, there would be no misunderstanding here. Instead, it is precisely the absence of this dialectical framework which leads to the categorical mistakes.

In Hegel, but formulated clearer in Engels and Lenin, we come to know that universals are empty if not immanently negated by its particular (and individual) determinate form.[9] Since markets have existed throughout various modes of production, within the dialectic of universal, particular, and singular, markets stand as the universal term. Markets, Boer argues, as a “specific building block or component of a larger system” are a “universal institutional form” (tizhi), which can only be brought into concrete existence via a particular socio-economic system (zhidu).[10] When the particular zhidu through which the universal institutional form of a market comes into existence is a “basic socialist system” (shehuizhuyi jiben zhidu), the fundamental nature of how the tizhi functions will be different to how that tizhi functioned under the particular zhidu of slave, feudal, and capitalist modes of production. In short, as Huang Nansen said, “there is no market economy institutional form that is independent of the basic economic system of society.”[11]

As was the case with the planned institutional form in the first few decades of the revolution, the market institutional form has been able to play its part in liberating the productive forces and drastically raising the living standards of the Chinese people. However, because 1) China took this creative leap of grounding the market institutional form in socialism, and because 2) Western Marxists retain an anti-dialectical purity fetish for the planned institutional form, 3) the usage of markets in China is taken as a desecration of their Western Marxist pseudo-Platonic socialist ideal. It is ultimately a categorical mistake to see the usage of markets as ‘taking the capitalist road’ or as a ‘betrayal of the revolution.’ It is, in essence, a bemusing of the universal for the particular, of the institutional form for the socio-economic system. As Boer asserts, “to confuse a market economy with a capitalist system entails a confusion between commonality and particularity.”[12]

At a time when US aggression against China is moving the world into a new cold war,[13] these theoretical lapses carry an existential weight. The world cannot afford any more categorical mistakes which set the ground for an imperialist centered ‘left-wing’ critique of China. These, as has been seen in the past, merely give the state department’s imperialist narrative a socialist gloss.

Instead, it is time for the global left, and specifically the hesitant western left, to get behind China and its efforts to promote peace and international cooperation. The western left must stop being duped by propaganda aimed at weaponizing their sentiments to manufacture consent for a war that will only bring havoc and an unaffordable delay to the ingenious forms of global collaboration necessary to deal with the environmental crisis. It is the duty of every peace-loving individual to counter the US’ and former western colonial countries’ increasingly pugnacious discourse and actions against China. We must not allow the defense of their imperialist unipolarity to bring about any more death and suffering than what it already has.

Notes

[1] By Western Marxism I am referring specifically to a broad current in Marxism that comes about a quarter into the last century as a rejection of the Soviet Union and Marxism-Leninism. It is today, the dominant form of ‘Marxism’ in western academia. It encapsulates everything from the Frankfurt school, the French Marxists of the 60s-70s, the New Left, and the forms of Marxism Humanism that arise alongside these. Often, they phrase their projects as a Marxism that ‘returns to its Hegelian roots’, centering the Marx of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and reading the mature Marx only in light of the projects of the younger Marx. Some of the main theorists today include Jürgen Habermas, Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, Kevin Anderson etc. Although it might be tempting to just refer to this block as ‘Non-Marxist-Leninist Marxists’, I would urge against doing so, for there are many Marxist currents in the global south which, although drinking from the fountain of Marxism-Leninism, do not explicitly consider themselves Marxist-Leninists and yet do not fall into the same “purity fetish” Western Marxists do. It is important to note that a critique of their “purity fetish” does not mean I think their work is useless and shouldn’t be read. On the contrary, they have been able to make great theoretical advancements in the Marxists tradition. However, their consistent failure to support socialist projects must be critiqued and rectified.

[2] V.I. Lenin. Collected Works Vol 38. (Progress Publishers, 1976)., pp. 180.

[3] Ludwig von Mises. Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis. (Jonathan Cape, 1936)., pp. 142.

[4] Roland Boer. Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. (Springer, 2021)., pp. 119.

[5] Ibid.

[6] It is also important to note that this realization is common knowledge in economic anthropology since the 1944 publication of Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, where, while holding that “there is hardly an anthropological or sociological assumption contained in the philosophy of economic liberalism that has not been refuted,” nonetheless argues markets have predated the capitalist mode of production, albeit usually existing inter, as opposed to intra, communally. Karl Polanyi. The Great Transformation. (Beacon Press, 1957)., pp. 269-277.

[7] Boer. Socialism with Chinese Characteristics., pp. 118.

[8] Ibid., pp. 13.

[9] For Hegel the individual is also a determinate universal – “the particular, because it is only the determinate universal, is also an individual, and conversely the individual, because it is the determinate universal, is just as much a particular.” G.W.F. Hegel. The Science of Logic. § 1343.

[10] Boer. Socialism with Chinese Characteristics., pp. 122-3.

[11] Ibid., pp. 124. Quoted from: Huang, Nansen. 1994. Shehuizhuyi shichang jingji lilun de zhexue jichu. Makesizhuyi yu xianshi 1994 (11): 1–6.

[12] Ibid., pp. 124.

[13] Although with the emergence of AUKUS a warm one does not seem unlikely.

The World-Historic Shift Labor Undergoes in Hegel's Philosophy

By Carlos Garrido

Republished from Midwestern Marx.

For most of civilization physical labor, that labor which creates a tangible object, has been seen as an unfortunate task done merely for the sake of acquiring the necessaries of life. The Greeks and Romans in large part relegated this sort of work to slaves. The Middle Ages tell stories of kings, philosophers, theologians, and priests, but not of workers. And the capitalist era, from early mercantilism to modern imperialism, thrives insofar as it has labor to exploit, labor it can reduce to a commodity, labor whose activity and product can be stripped from the laborer. Today most people’s relation to their work is dull at best, a source of life drainage at worst. As a reaction, even many ‘left-wing’ theoretical spaces continue in the tradition of viewing work as an unfortunate necessity – one whose conditions might be improvable, but which is itself not fruitful. It only exists because people need the products it can create.

Although painted with a broad stroke, the history of the greatest minds in Europe has been one which sniffs at the activities for which their abstract mind games depended on. However, can labor be thought of as something done for purposes not limited to those of consumption? Can labor be fruitful and meaningful in itself? In G.W.F. Hegel, for the first time in a prominent western theorist, the response is YES! In Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Philosophy of Right one can see what I have elsewhere called a “world-historic shift” in how labor is conceived: from labor as an unfortunate necessity, towards labor as a valuable expression of creative activity which constitutes a moment of liberation. [1]

In the famed lord and bondsman section of his 1907 Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel describes the encounter of two self-consciousnesses with each other, an event plagued with a mutual desire for recognition. After a series of ambiguous supersessions between the two consciousnesses, this encounter leads to a life and death struggle, for “only through staking one’s life is freedom won.”[2] Realizing that “death is the natural negation of consciousness,”[3] for he who is dead cannot think and he who requires recognition for self-consciousness that is in and for itself cannot get it from a dead man, this infantile skirmish ends with one submitting to the other. This submission gives rise to the lord and bondsman, the former who posits himself as “pure self-conscious” and the latter as “merely immediate consciousness, or consciousness in the form of thinghood.” [4]

Although the lord is described as the “pure, essential action in this relation”, because what the “lord does to the other he also does to himself,” the recognition he receives from the bondsman is “one-sided and unequal,” i.e., in the relationship’s reduction of the bondsman to thinghood, his status as independent consciousness is negated and thus unable to afford the recognition necessary for the lord to be certain of his being for-self.[5] Simply put, in sex that you pay for you cannot affirm yourself as a good lover. Hegel concludes that “just as lordship showed that its essential nature is the reverse of what it wants to be, so too servitude in its consummation will really turn into the opposite of what it immediately is… it will withdraw into itself and be transformed into a truly independent consciousness.”[6]

How can Hegel affirm the slave as the one with the potential for ‘truly independent consciousness’? Hegel states that “through work, however, the bondsman becomes conscious of what he truly is.”[7] He continues,

Work forms and shapes the thing. The negative relation to the object becomes its form and something permanent, because it is precisely for the worker that the object has independence. This negative middle term or the formative activity is at the same time the individuality or pure being-for-self of consciousness which now, in the work outside of it, acquires an element of permanence. It is in this way, therefore, that consciousness, qua worker, comes to see in the independent being [of the object] its own independence.

Hence, although his immediate condition is as a slave, his externalization (or objectification for Marxists), although at first appearing as an alien force independent of the bondsman, eventually shows itself as his creation. Through observing the independence of his self-otherization into the object he can, to play with the language of Hegel's Science of Logic, absolutely recoil back into himself and reinstate his initial condition but in a higher form – as true self-consciousness.

Approximately thirteen years after the publication of the Phenomenology, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right reintroduces the liberatory role of labor, albeit without the imaginative and captivating language used in the lord and bondsman moment of spirit’s unfolding. When addressing certain philosophers’ romanticized theories of a ‘state of nature’ where man’s needs were such that the “accidents of nature directly assured to him” enough to subsist, Hegel condemns this view’s inability to see that there is a “moment of liberation intrinsic to work.” [8] For Hegel, this utopianism fails to see that work is meaningful in itself. Yes, its object satisfies needs, cravings, etc., but this satisfactory power of the object is what the French call jouissance, a sort of surplus enjoyment. The objects of labor are valuable [9]; they can fill empty stomachs, warm bodies, provide aesthetic enjoyment, and so on, but the laboring activity which the object presupposes can be valuable as well.

Unlike the traditional views of labor before him, for Hegel the first moment of value in labor is not the object, but the work itself. Work itself is meaningful and valuable because it consists of a dedication of “my time…, my being, my universal activity and actuality, [and] my personality,” [10] into creating, with the “raw materials directly supplied by nature,” [11] that upon which the human community sustains itself. For Hegel, the object labor creates is not simply an independent alien entity, instead, Hegel sees that the object “derives its destiny and soul from [the worker’s] will,” [12] the worker ensouls his object.

Hence, for Hegel the result of labor is 1) the liberating sense of growth, meaning, and flourishing it can provide the laborer and 2) the consumptive growth it brings the consumer (who could, naturally, be the same person). Although this historical-shift is praiseworthy, there are, of course, certain contradictions which ensue from Hegel’s attempt to both: 1) sustain a critique of chattel slavery grounded in his view of labor’s totalizing inalienability, while also sustaining 2) a defense for wage-slavery, grounded in his acceptance of labor’s alienation “for a specific period.” [13]

In my essay, “A World-Historic Shift: Hegel, Marx, and Labour” [14] I further explore how these contradictions arise and how Marx and Engels, by immanently taking Hegel to his logical and practical conclusions, sublate the contradictions Hegel encounters. For now, I simply urge the reader to recognize that this anarchistic disdain of work is not a part of the Marxist tradition. Starting from Hegel, but better formulated in Marx and Engels, labor is humanity’s unique life-activity – it allows one to transform nature consciously and collaboratively in accordance with human needs and aesthetic sensibilities. We must not universalize and fixate the wretchedness of alienated work under capitalism with work in general; for work, when done in a non-exploitative setting, can be the most fruitful and meaningful thing a human can do. In fact, I would argue the few but meaningful moments we do encounter under capitalism are those in which labor takes place in a setting which overflows (albeit never fully) the exploitative logic of capital – e.g., home craft projects, sports, revolutionary militancy, parenting, etc.

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


References

[1] The article I am referring to is “A World-Historic Shift: Hegel, Marx, and Labor,” which is set to appear in the fifth issue of Peace, Land, and Bread.
[2] Hegel, Georg. Phenomenology of Spirit. (Oxford, 1997), p. 114.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid., 115.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid., 117.
[7] Ibid., 118.
[8] Hegel, Georg. Philosophy of Right. (Oxford, 1978), p. 128.
[9] To be clear, I am referring to Value as Use-Value here.
[10] Ibid., 54.
[11] Ibid., 129.
[12] Ibid., 41.
[13] Ibid., 54.
[14] See note [i]