From Commodity Fetishism to Teleological Positing: Lukács’s Concept of Labor and Its Relevance

By Wang Pu

Republished from Monthly Review.

The concept of labor constituted a pivotal problematic in Georg Lukács’s theoretical development throughout his Marxist years. His 1922 essay, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat”—the central piece of his work History and Class Consciousness, famously opens with the phrase phantom objectivity. The idea of phantom (or phantom-like) objectivity derives from Karl Marx’s discussion of commodity and labor in Capital. The question of labor becomes especially crucial in the third section of History and Class Consciousness, where the young Lukács argues that the proletariat will become conscious of being the object-subject of history. On one hand, labor is reduced to the pure abstractness of labor-time, which marks the nadir of capitalist reification; on the other, it is within the immediate experience of reified labor that the proletarian consciousness is rendered possible. In this sense, labor under capitalism not only determines the lowest point of reification, but also forms “the vantage point of the proletariat.” [1]

Lukács’s later criticism of History and Class Consciousness revolved around the issues of labor and human praxis in general. In his preface to the 1967 edition, he wrote that “the purview of economics [in History and Class Consciousness] is narrowed down because its basic Marxist category, labor as the mediator of the metabolic interaction between society and nature, is missing.” Thus, labor refers not only to the historical phenomenon of reification (that is, wage-labor), but also stands for a more general, even ontological, question. In the same preface, Lukács later wrote that labor, characterized by its “teleological system,” should be taken as “the original form and model” of all human praxis. [2] He described his own development in the following way:

Once I had gained a definite and fundamental insight into what was wrong with my whole approach in History and Class Consciousness, this search became a plan to investigate the philosophical connections between economics and dialectics. My first attempt to put this plan into practice came early in the thirties, in Moscow and Berlin, with the first draft of my book The Young Hegel (which was not completed until autumn 1937). Only now, thirty years later, am I attempting to discover a real solution to this whole problem in the ontology of social existence, on which I am currently engaged. [3]

The first attempt produced his book The Young Hegel, in which the discussion of labor is associated with his reading of G. W. F. Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit and his encounter with Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. The outcome of this project, on which he was working in the 1960s, was The Ontology of Social Being, one chapter of which was devoted to the question of labor. In that chapter, labor is philosophically defined as the fundamental teleological positing that forms the model for social praxis.

His 1923 essay “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” and later works, The Young Hegel and TheOntology of Social Being, constitute a trajectory in his theorization of labor. Here, we trace emergence of the question of labor in “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” and the ambiguity it causes in the Hegelian-Marxian tradition.

Dualism of Wage-Labor: Labor-Time and the Soul

It is no accident that the issue of the of labor emerges in third section of essay “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” in which Lukács discusses immediacy and mediation. The reification confronting the proletariat differs little from the rigid immediacy imprisoning the bourgeoisie. However, the proletariat contains the potential of unveiling and overcoming the “opposition of subject and object.” For the proletarian consciousness to emerge, both the immediacy and the mediating force must consist of reified labor. When writing this essay, Lukács was highly concerned with “the Marxist analysis of labor under capitalism.” What he referred to as labor was wage-labor, rather than labor per se. He conceived of wage-labor as the point of departure for the identity of immediacy and mediation for the proletariat. [4]

Above all, Lukács wrestled with the issue of labor-time. While bourgeois thought always assumes a rigidly double form, “for the proletariat social reality does not exist in this double form.” To substantiate this thesis, Lukács followed Marx’s abstraction of labor into labor-time in the first volume of Capital. This abstraction is identical to the historical “process of abstraction of which [the proletarian] is the victim.” Yet Lukács also went on to claim that it is this very fact of quantification into labor-time that “forces [the worker] to surpass the immediacy of his condition.” At this point, the young Lukács’s eloquence and ambiguity become intertwined. He continued thus: “the quantitative differences in exploitation which appear to the capitalist in the form of quantitative determinants of the objects of his calculation, must appear to the worker as the decisive, qualitative categories of his whole physical, mental and moral existence.” The emergence of this consciousness hinges on the fact that “the worker is forced to objectify his labor-power over against his total personality and to sell it as a commodity.” In this sense, labor-time is not merely considered the immediate social existence of reification and abstraction in which the worker is dehumanized; it is also the mediation for class consciousness. [5]

A presupposed duality, however, is already discernible, for the commodification of both the worker’s labor-power and “total personality” coexist in the same labor-time. Lukács then raised the question of the “work-situation” as the concrete experience of dualism within wage-labor, abstract labor-time versus “the soul”:

This enables us to understand why it is only in the proletariat that the process by which a man’s achievement is split off from his total personality and becomes a commodity leads to a revolutionary consciousness. It is true…that the basic structure of reification can be found in all the social forms of modern capitalism… but this structure can only be made fully conscious in the work-situation of the proletarian. For his work as he experiences it directly possesses the naked and abstract form of the commodity, while in other forms of work this is hidden behind the facade of ‘mental labor.’… The more deeply reification penetrates into the soul of the man… the more deceptive appearances are. Corresponding to the objective concealment of commodity form, there is the subjective element. This is the fact that while the process by which the worker is reified and becomes a commodity dehumanizes him and cripples and atrophies his ‘soul.’… It remains true that precisely his humanity and his soul are not changed into commodities.

Here, the word soul is especially worth pausing over. Lukács indicated that it is the coincidence of the reifying manual, machine-like labor and the resisting soul in the same work-situation that determines the proletariat’s “vantage point,” from which to grasp historical totality. [6]

To this point, we can summarize that Lukács’s dualism assumes two corresponding, yet incongruous, forms: the first, as shown above, is the dual meaning of labor-time, that is, that labor-time is simultaneously recognizable as the pure quantity and the determining category of personality. The second is a kind of internal division of the “total personality.” The worker is divided into two antagonistic parts: the commodified labor-power and the soul resisting dehumanization. To some extent, the second seems to be developed to mediate the first, but at any rate, the two forms highlight the ambiguity in the identification of immediacy with mediation. Between the two forms arises Lukács’ ambivalence. [7]

The reference to “the soul” reminds us of Lukács’s pre-Marxist aesthetic endeavor; his invocation of experience also is reminiscent of the Diltheyian categories and the Neo-Kantian atmosphere of German so-called spiritual sciences in the early twentieth century. We must also bear in mind that, as Harrt Liebersohn has tried to demonstrate, the young Lukács’s pre-Marxist conception of labor was in dialogue with Weber’s and Simmel’s discussions of work in the context of bourgeois life and Christian-Protestant culture. Yet what characterizes Lukács’ dualism on the issue of labor in “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” is his radical move from German sociology and Neo-Kantianism to revolutionary Marxism. The mediation for this move was nothing other than his turn toward Hegel. [8]

One of the philosophical origins for such correlation between labor and self-consciousness is found in Hegel’s “lord-bondsman dialectic.” According to his work The Phenomenology of Spirit self-consciousness springs from the triangular relationship among the lord, the bondsman, and the object on which the bondsman is working. Hegel asserted forcefully that “through work… the bondsman becomes conscious of what he truly is.” Thus, Hegel assumed the activity of labor as the “middle term” and concluded that “it is in this way, therefore, that consciousness, qua worker, comes to see in the independent being [of the object] its own independence.” What lies hidden the bondsman’s work is the issue of objectification. That is to say, the bondsman’s spiritual freedom is objectified in the “permanent independence” of the product of his labor, and thereby is made conscious. [9]

Though Lukács certainly drew upon Hegelian logic in the discussion concerning labor and consciousness, it is evident that his case was complicated by the fact that he wedged commodity fetishism into this context. The worker’s objectification through wage-labor is interlocked with the commodification of labor-power. [10] As quoted above, wage-labor is shaped by the “compulsion to objectify [the worker] himself as a commodity.” Lukács then argued:

Above all, the worker can only become conscious of his existence in society when he becomes aware of himself as a commodity. As we have seen, his immediate existence integrates him as a pure, naked object into the production process. Once this immediacy turns out to be the consequence of a multiplicity of mediations, once it becomes evident how much it presupposes, then the fetishistic forms of the commodity system begin to dissolve: in the commodity the worker recognizes himself and his own relations with capital. [11]

Here, the mediating role of work in Hegel’s dialectics is repeated, yet reversed: while the Hegelian bondsman recognizes his freedom in his objectification, the Lukácsian worker recognizes his imprisonment. If the product of work attests to the bondsman’s humanity, as is shown in Hegel’s case, then the capitalist history in the Lukácsian sense is the opposite: the worker himself is commodified as the “pure, naked object.” To translate this into Marxian language: what the bondsman recognizes in the object is his own objectification; what the worker recognizes in the object/commodity, according to Lukács, is actually his own “phantom-like objectivity.”

Moreover, though this step forms a parallel with Hegel’s idea of labor as the “middle term,” in Lukács this very mediation itself is dualized—at least implicitly—corresponding to Marx’s fundamental insight about labor’s duality under capitalism (that is, use-value/value, objectivity/phantom-like objectivity). The antithesis between the qualitative objectivity and the quantitative “phantom objectivity” cannot be solved by a Marxian version of the Hegelian notion of labor that mediates self-consciousness. Rather, what is at stake here is how, in the crude immediacy of the “work-situation,” can commodity fetishism dissolve in the experience of the worker, rather than devour the worker’s whole humanity and absorb it into phantom objectivity? Despite Lukács’s theoretical vigor, the chasm between objectification (as found in Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit) and phantom objectivity (from the penetrating analysis offered by Marx) remains unbridgeable. [12]

Vergegenständlichung and Entäusserung [13]

It is interesting to note that, when writing History and Class Consciousness, Lukács, like V. I. Lenin, had no access to Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. In formulating his revolutionary labor theory of Entäusserung (or alienation, also translated as estrangement and externalization), the young Marx placed Entwirklichung (“the loss of realization”) in opposition to Vergegenständlichung (objectification), thereby launching a profound critique of Hegel’s phenomenology:

The object which labor produces—labor’s product—confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labor is labor which has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labor. Labor’s realization is its objectification. In the sphere of political economy this realization of labor appears as loss of realization for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation. [14]

Concerning the alienation of labor, Marx went on to say:

The fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his essential being; that in his worker, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself…does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home. [15]

This striking account, with no doubt, marks a Marxian subversion of Hegel’s dialectics of labor: the independence of the product does not testify the bondsman’s freedom, but stands as an alien power governing the worker’s existence. While the Hegelian concept of work humanizes the bondsman and realizes his being as self-consciousness, Marxian wage-labor dehumanizes the worker totally and alienates the worker from his or her own “essential being.”

Marx’s critique turned out to be a crucial intervention into Lukács’s theoretical practice following the debate about History and Class Consciousness. In his preface to the 1967 edition he recollected one of his “unexpected strokes of good luck” in the 1930s: “the text of the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts had just been completely deciphered and I was able to read it.… In the process of reading the Marx manuscript all the idealist prejudices of History and Class Consciousness were swept to one side.” [16] This encounter with early Marx therefore helped initiate his study of early Hegel. The same passage from the young Marx was used in The Young Hegel to lay the foundation for Lukács’s analysis of the difference between Hegelian Entäusserung and Marxian Entäusserung. Lukács’s emphasized Hegel’s “confusion” concerning alienation: the young Hegel equated alienation (Entäusserung) with objectification (Vergegenständlichung), while the young Marx drew a “precise distinction between objectivity and alienation in human praxis.” [17]

Only when it comes to the question of labor can the relevance of such confusion or distinction be fully manifested. In the chapter “Hegel’s Economics During the Jena Period,” Lukács dealt with the young Hegel’s labor theory in relation to Entäusserung. Correspondingly, in the concluding chapter, “‘Entäusserung’ as the Central Philosophical Concept of The Phenomenology,” Lukács elaborated on this concept in relation to Marx’s labor theory. Through a close reading of the bondsman’s labor, Lukács believed that Hegel’s discovery of the origin of self-consciousness concerned labor as the universal mode of human existence. Whereas in “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” Lukács focused on wage-labor under capitalism, this time, Lukács wanted to seize the interpretation of labor (in a universal sense) found in Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit. [18]

Here arises the problem of Entäusserung. In short, at least two interrelated points made by Lukács are significant at this juncture. First, since Hegel had no insight into the “specifically capitalist form of ‘externalization’ (alienation or Entäusserung), i.e. what Marx would later call ‘fetishism,’” Hegel tended to equate Entäusserung with objectification. [19] Second, as the alienation of labor was beyond his sight, Hegel made a “false equation of ‘externalization’ (Entäusserung) and ‘thinghood’ or objectivity.” [20] This led to his central theme that “all alienation (Entäusserung) of the human essence is therefore nothing but alienation of self-consciousness.” [21] As a consequence, alienation can always be superseded by returning to the subject-substance identity. Hegel’s characterization of labor as the origin of self-consciousness, therefore, conceals the starting point of what Lukács called the “mystification of alienation.” Drawing upon Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Lukács summarized Hegel’s confusion in a schematic manner: “on the subjective side, there is the mistaken identification of man and self-consciousness demonstrated and criticized by Marx; on the objective side, there is the equation of alienation and objectification in general.” [22] Meanwhile, Lukács’s distinction between alienation and objectification is built solely upon a distinction between two modes of labor itself. The following passage, as a part of Lukács’s cross-reading of Hegel with Marx, is particularly lucid:

For alienation is sharply distinguished from objective reality, from objectification in the act of labor. The latter is a characteristic of work in general and of the relation of human praxis to the objects of the external world; the former is a consequence of the social division of labor under capitalism, of the emergence of the so-called free worker who has to work with the means of production belonging to another and for whom, therefore, these means of productions as well as his own product exist as an independent, alien power. [23]

One can even go so far as to say that if the act of labor is the universal mode of human praxis, objectification is the alienated labor under capitalism.

While Lukács asserted that “the socialist critique of ‘externalization’ (Entäusserung) has exposed the real alienation contained in the capitalist form of work, an alienation that has to be annulled in reality,” he nevertheless gave much credit to Hegel for uncovering labor as the origin of human essence: “the decisive factor…was that Hegel thought of work as the self-creating process of man, of the human species.” Rather than point out the road toward the supersession of alienation of labor (so-called bad labor), Lukács seemed more concerned with laying the philosophical foundation of labor as the genesis and model of praxis, that is, the universal and humanizing labor (or good labor). [24]

Between these two chapters of The Young Hegel, there is a chapter devoted to labor and the problem of teleology. There, Lukács turned to Marx for a definition of labor as “an exclusive characteristic” of human beings. He quoted from Marx: “at the end of every labor process, a result emerges which had already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, hence already existed ideally.” By linking it with Hegel’s philosophy, Lukács tried to elevate this Marxist insight into labor as a “purposeful activity” to a kind of teleology of labor, and, therefore, a teleology of history. Since labor is posited as the objective realization of purpose, Lukács’s teleology of labor comes back to Hegelian alienation/objectification and use-value. What he attempted to demonstrate is that “Hegel’s concrete analysis of the human labor-process shows that the antinomy of causality and teleology is in reality a dialectical contradiction in which the laws governing a complex pattern of objective reality become manifest in motion.” For the young Hegel, the bondsman’s labor—associated with a pre-capitalist, quasi-feudal economy—is a phenomenological agent; in early Marx, the worker’s labor testifies to the alienation of labor under capitalism. But in grounding labor as the model of human praxis, Lukács now reached a point of further generalizing labor as an ontological category. [25]

The If… then of Teleological Positing Versus the as if of Commodity Fetishism

In his post-Hungarian Uprising magnum opus, The Ontology of Social Being—written in the 1960s and still under revision until the last days of the author’s life—Lukács addressed the issue of labor in the first chapter of the second volume. His elaboration of labor teleology was a direct continuation of his discussion of the relationship between labor and teleology in The Young Hegel. [26]

In the section on “teleological positing,” Lukács came to focus on what he found missing in his early writings (such as “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat”): labor as immediacy and mediation; as the metabolism between man and nature; and as a condition for human social being. In this way, he proceeded from the so-called general characteristic of labor to “elementary labor” in its “essential original nature.” In this chapter, most of Lukács’s examples come from primitive forms of labor, such as the making of a knife or an axe from stone. This generalization was undertaken by Lukács in order to fill the gap left by what he called the “leap” from nature to humanity. Again, labor is posited as the “genuine humanization of man.” [27]

At the beginning, Lukács cites Marx’s definition of labor as purposive activity: “labor, then, as the creator of use-value, as useful labor, is a condition of human existence which is independent of all forms of society.” Central here is use-value/objectivity in labor teleology. Lukács then articulated his ontological category of labor:

Through labor, a teleological positing is realized within material being, as the rise of a new objectivity. The first consequence of this is that labor becomes the model for any social practice, for in such social practice—no matter how ramified its mediations—teleological positings are always realized, and ultimately realized materially. [28]

Clearly, the Hegelian ideas of objectivity and realization again resurface. Here, the later Lukács reverts to the Hegelian/pre-Marxist idea of Entäusserung (alienation/objectification), which, according to Lukács’s interpretation, initially meant the positing of the object in the German idealist tradition. [29] Ultimately, the “teleological positing of causality” is supposed to contain the “ontological kernel of freedom.” Consequently, every social practice, no matter how developed or complex it is, can be ontologically reduced to the original nature of labor, which, he maintained, is as elementary as everyday experience. Its basic rationality, as Lukács contended, can be formulated as if… vthen. [30]

Though Lukács often said that he would deal with the question of capitalist labor in subsequent chapters, one cannot help but realize that what is missing on this ontological landscape is precisely the phantom objectivity of capitalist labor, or commodity fetishism. According to Slavoj Žižek, commodity fetishism centers on the fantasy of as if rather than if… then For Žižek, the problem of fetishism happens on the side of objective reality: people act as if the money-form is the embodiment of the objective Universal; “they are fetishists in practice, not in theory.” It is in the sense of as if that the objectivity of capitalist labor becomes phantom-like at best. Interestingly enough, both the Žižekian as if and the Lukácsian if… then hinge on the famous Marxian formula to which both Lukács and Žižek frequently referred: “they do not know it, but they do it.” Žižek considered Marx’s formula to be a definition of ideology and related it to the “fetishistic illusion” Žižek attempted to demonstrate that commodity fetishism is “at work in the social reality itself, at the level of what the individuals are doing” and that it is in the reality of doing that people “are guided by the fetishistic illusion.” He then drew the following conclusion:

The illusion is not on the side of knowledge, it is already on the side of reality itself, of what the people are doing. What they do not know is that their social reality itself, their activity, is guided by an illusion, by a fetishistic inversion. What they overlook, what they misrecognize, is not the reality but the illusion which is structuring their reality, their real social activity. They know very well how things really are, but still they are doing it as if they did not know.

In this light, we can say that phantom-like objectivity is presupposed and performed as if it were the Universal the objective necessity. [31]

Yet for Lukács’s ontology, Marx’s formula means that, even though humans do not consciously recognize the causality of objective necessity, the teleological positing of causality is still constantly practiced in basic human labor. In this labor, objective causality is directed to human ends, and in turn contains the genesis of science and human knowledge. However, a closer look reveals that this rationality is not purged of as if. Above all, if labor teleology is indeed ultimately determined by social being itself, then objective necessity (the internal necessity of nature; the chain of causality; the logic condition of if… then; and so on) can be viewed as if it were necessity. The formula of if… then seems to be drawn closer to the “bourgeois philosophy” that had been criticized by the young Lukács in “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat.” In the labor process of if… then, an illusion has to be presupposed as the internal necessity of nature in order to structure labor (doing/reality) itself. Under capitalism, a new layer of phantom-like objectivity is added upon the layer of presupposed objective necessity in order to structure capitalist labor. This is what Lukács depicted as the “doubly intensified” alienation (or objectification) of labor or, in Žižek’s language, the “doubled” illusion. [32] At this point, Žižek came much closer to the critique of bourgeois idealism developed in “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat.” Žižek wrote that “the roots of philosophical speculative idealism are in the social reality of the world of commodities; it is this world which behaves ‘idealistically.’” In this light, the later Lukács’s ontology of if…then has idealized—if not fetishized—labor per se with a concealed, yet presupposed, as if. Thus, if then actually represents an elementary level of fetishistic as if. [33]

While raising the question of teleology in The Young Hegel, Lukács cited Lenin: “in actual fact, men’s ends are engendered by the objective world and presuppose it… but it seems to man as if his ends are taken from outside the world, and are independent of the world.” [34] This is a Leninian version of Marx’s formula, a version in favor of Lukács’s labor teleology. However, Lenin’s as if should be reversed to a Žižekian one. To translate it into Žižekian language: as if happens precisely on the side of presupposition; on the side of actual human activity. The presupposition of the objective world is an as if, which engenders the chain of if…then. The idea of teleological positing betrays the imprint of positing as if. [35]

All this leads us to the issue of the fundamental leap from nature to human. As we have seen, Lukács’s labor teleology is formulated in order to address this leap ontologically. Although—and also because—this leap cannot be historically reconstructed, Lukács believed that his labor teleology could fill the unfathomable chasm between nature and human beings. As he wrote: “the leap remains a leap, and in the last analysis it can only be made clear by intellectual comprehension.” [36] Here, by “intellectual comprehension,” Lukács meant the Marxist method of abstraction. Yet his ontological abstraction—from every social practice to the elementary realization of use-value—runs counter to Marx’s historical abstraction which, following the abstracting power of capital itself, moves from use-value to phantom objectivity. Nevertheless, this ontologization/de-historicization is itself a structural positing, or presupposition like as if, in the understanding of human nature.

Conclusion and Further Questions

From the “phantom objectivity” of labor-time to “useful labor” as teleological positing, this theoretical trajectory can be sketchily characterized as a reversal in development of the historical abstraction from use-value to value that opens Marx’s Capital. Moreover, this counter-movement should be examined alongside the historical context in which Lukács was writing. As Lukács himself noted, History and Class Consciousness was related to the high tide of Bolshevism and Messianism in Central Europe, as well as his determination to become a communist in the wake of the catastrophic First World War and triumphant October Revolution. His study of Hegel was associated with his reflections on his early work, but also on the changed situation of European communist politics. After the defeat of the Hungarian Revolution and the controversy of his Blum Theses, he had to reorient himself amid a series of party struggles toward the new historical task of antifascism. This turn should be viewed as an effort to renew the linkage between Marx and Hegel under Stalinism. One should bear in mind, finally, that The Ontology of Social Being was undertaken in a post-1956 situation; it was written between his Specificity of the Aesthetic (finished in 1963) and his long-planned (yet constantly suspended) Ethics. When he dealt philosophically with the realization of freedom modeled on elementary labor, he was, practically speaking, concerned with the deterioration of everyday ethical life under socialism as it existed at the time.

This outline of Lukács’s theoretical development is not immune to doubt, for the theology of labor was not intended to be the final chapter of Lukács’s The Ontology of Social Being. His philosophy of labor was written in preparation for subsequent chapters on reproduction, ideology, and alienation. Yet the other side of the story is also worth noting: according to his student István Mészáros, when Lukács began writing his Ethics, he realized in the process that it was necessary to write an introductory ontology. Not only did this introduction turn out to be a manuscript of more than two thousand pages, but the protracted writing of this social ontology “procede[d] very slowly” up until his death. [37] The difficulty for our philosopher might be this: there is always an idealistic short-circuit in any materialistic ontology, just as in Žižekian sense, reality presupposes a fetishistic as if. Lukács’s theory of labor attains particular significance in that it shows how he was caught between historicization and ontologization—a structural yet symptomatic tension of his Marxist theory.

But we will not end this essay merely with this critical note. Criticism of a similar kind, in fact, have already surfaced in internal debates between Lukács himself and his disciples. “Notes on Lukács’ Ontology”—a document prepared by his students Ferenc Fehér, Agnes Heller, György Márkus when Lukács requested critical feedback in the late 1960s—records their discontent with their mentor’s manuscript. The first sentence of their commentary to the labor chapter reads thus: “In our view, the greatest defect of this chapter is that the problem of objectification remains unsolved—indeed, is not even posed—which is the same reproach that Comrade Lukács leveled against his own History and Class Consciousness.” [38] In this, his students touched upon the ultimate aporia of Lukács’s lifelong philosophical inquiry. As they indicate in their notes, they became inclined to believe that a project of Marxist ontology may be a dead end. Upon receiving these critical yet insightful comments, the ailing Lukács submerged himself in painstaking revisions and suspended publication of the work. In “Lukács’ Later Philosophy,” Heller laments the futile effort–though “not a complete failure” of The Ontology of Social Being while lauding The Specificity of the Aesthetic as the true masterpiece of later Lukács. [39]

But should we simply consign the ontological issue of labor to the trash bin of the history of philosophy? I contend that precisely because of this aporia of ontologization that the role of the concept of labor in Lukács’s philosophical development should not be overlooked, and that his problematic conceptualization of labor spurs us on to re-problematize this classic Marxist category in a vastly changed historical context. Marxism holds that the fundamental contradiction of capitalism is the antinomy between capital and labor. Yet it seems to me that our current perception of labor—both as a concept and as human experience—has become ever-more confusing; vague and pallid. On one hand, the idea of labor has degenerated into a common positivistic word for sociology or economics, losing philosophical and political relevance. On the other hand, wage-labor has penetrated into every corner of social praxis and everyday life, becoming more amorphous and pervasive. Its contemporary dominant form is immaterial labor, which has less to do with the mediation between nature and humanity and more to do with the constant reconfiguration of effects within commodity fetishism itself. As a result, even the machine-like labor of industrial age seems backward and primitive, receding into the remote horizon. In this fully fetishized world, is an ontology of social being possible? To what extent can we revive and redeem the category of labor as a part of our de-fetishization and as a reflection of social praxis and its future? If we deny the possibility of the socio-anthropological-ontological issue of labor, we will surely avoid the idealistic abstractions we see in Lukács. At the same time, we risk giving up a task of critical philosophy and unintentionally succumbing to vulgar sociology, which is yet another product of bourgeois, limited consciousness. Therefore, Lukács’s conceptualization of labor, with all its insights and limitations, is not yet a closed case.

Wang Pu is associate professor of Chinese and chair of the comparative literature program at Brandeis University. He attended Peking University and received his PhD in comparative literature from New York University. He is author of The Translatability of Revolution: Guo Moruo and Twentieth-Century Chinese Culture (Harvard University Asia Center, 2018). He is also the translator of the Chinese edition of Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life.

Notes

1. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 83; Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage), 128.

2. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, xvii, xviii, xx.

3. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, xxxiv.

4. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 167.

5. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 165, 166, 167–8.

6. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 171–2. Not only can one detect the duality between the dehumanization of labor power and the soul that resists such dehumanization, but there is also some trace of the latent division between the manual, mechanical labor and mental labor, the latter of which is doomed to fuller fetishization and therefore penetrates the soul. For the question of fetishism of intellectual labor, see Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labor: A Critique of Epistemology (London: MacMillan, 1978), 13–16.

7. For one thing, the idea of “total personality” or “soul” seems to be too subjective to be historically grounded. In this respect, the soul is more like an enclave of overwhelming reification, further exposing an intense duality. This might account for what Lukács, in his later self-criticism, called subjectivism. More important, while labor-power can be reduced to the totalizing abstractness of labor-time, the “total personality” cannot be restored to the level of the historical totality. The furthest point Lukács could reach is labor’s daily experiential or phenomenological confrontation, or in his own language, appearance: the labor-time or work-situation “appears to the worker” as a qualitative category. Meanwhile, for the “mental laborer,” the appearance is too deceptive to be demystified. After all, according to the duality of capacity and personality that Agnes Heller, one of Lukács’s disciples, proposed in Everyday Life, the daily activity of work under capitalism does not necessarily involve any historical experience or historical consciousness. See Agnes Heller, Everyday Life, 60–70 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984). In other words, while in “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” the abstraction of labor is sufficiently formulated alongside historical abstraction, the mediating force of wage-labor turns out to be an invalid leap (or rebound) from the immediate work-situation to revolutionary consciousness, which itself remains unmediated. In short, rather than illustrate the identity between immediacy and mediation, Lukács became enmeshed in ambiguous dualism.

8. Harry Liebbersohn, “Lukács and the Concept of Working German Sociology,” in Georg Lukács: Theory, Culture, and Politics, ed. Judith Marcus et al., (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1989), 63–71.

9. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 118, 114. Here arises the question of recognition, or, in Hegel’s language, “recognition as an independent self-consciousness,” a question that has been (over)developed by Alexandre Kojève and others. When Kojève marked the lord-bondsman dialectic (which he translated as “master-slave”) as the starting point of so-called recognition politics, he downplayed the relationship between the bondsman and the object was downplayed, thus missing the point of labor in his account.

10. Whereas Hegel’s lord-bondsman anecdote bears reference to feudalist conditions.

11. Lukás, History and Class Consciousness, 168; emphasis added.

12. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 128.

13. I leave the two terms untranslated because people have translated Entäusserung into different words. For instance, Martin Milligan, the translator of Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 into English, translated Entäusserung as estrangement. Rodney Livingstone, a major translator of Lukács, translated Entäusserung as alienation when related to Marx, and as externalization when related to Hegel.

14. Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, ed. D. J. Struik, trans. Martin Milligan (New York: International Publishers, 1984), 108.

15. Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 110.

16. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, xxxvi.

17. Georg Lukács, The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations between Dialectics and Economics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976), 561. Also see Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, xxiv.

18. Elsewhere in the book, Lukács was critical of Hegel’s myopic observation of labor under capitalism. Though the young Hegel, a reader of Adam Smith, was sensitive to the phenomena of labor division, abstraction or mechanization of labor, exchange of labor, and so on, his era simply did not allow for a dialectical understanding of capitalist labor. (See Georg Lukács, The Young Hegel, 329–31.)

19. Livingstone explained why he translated Hegelian Entäusserung as externalization in his Translator’s Note: “I have preferred to translate it as ‘externalization’, since in Hegel’s usage it has a broader application than the current term.” See Luckács, The Young Hegel, i.

20. Lukács, The Young Hegel, 540, 542.

21. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 178.

22. Lukács, The Young Hegel, 551.

23. Lukács, The Young Hegel, 549

24. Lukács, The Young Hegel, 570, 553.

25. Lukács, The Young Hegel, 338–64; Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 284, 346.

26. This chapter includes sections of “Labor as a Teleological Positing” and “Labor as a Model for Social Practice,” translated into English as an independent volume entitled Labor.

27. Marx, Capital, vol 1, 133; Georg Lukács, The Ontology of Social Being: Labor, trans. David Fernbach (London: Merlin, 1980), 42.

28. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 133; Lukács, The Ontology of Social Being: Labor, 3.

29. See Lukács, The Young Hegel, 538; especially Lukács’s etymological survey of Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s use of this term.

30. Lukács, The Ontology of Social Being: Labor, 39.

31. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, (London: Verso, 1989), 31

32. Lukács, The Ontology of Social Being: Labor, 18; The Young Hegel, 549.

33. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 32.

34. Cited in Lukács, The Young Hegel, 350

35. The disagreement between István Mészáros and Jean Hyppolite concerning Entäusserung can be viewed as a similar case. What was at issue was whether the transcendence of Entäusserung, which Mészáros insisted is a myth, or the “insurmountable otherness” (central to Hyppolite’s Hegelian version of Entäusserung), is a mystification. See Mészáros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation (London: Merlin, 1972), 243–44.

36. Lukács, The Ontology of Social Being: Labor, iii

37. István Mészáros, Lukács’ Concept of Dialectic (London: Merlin, 1972), 6–7

38. Ferenc Fehér et al., “Notes on Lukács’ Ontology,” in Lukács Reappraised, ed. Agnes Heller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 141.

39. Agnes Heller, “Lukács’ Later Philosophy,” Lukács Reappraised, ed. Agnes Heller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 190.

Capitalism and the “Feminization of Poverty”: A Marxist Perspective on Ending Women’s Oppression

By Radhika Miller

Republished from Liberation School.

Sexism is so endemic today that it can be difficult to imagine a society that does not degrade and devalue women. Modern capitalist society is a form of class society, and in today’s capitalist society women face sexism everywhere we turn — within our own homes and personal relationships, in school and in our professional careers, even as we walk down the street.

But this is not the way things always have been and, despite its prevalence in today’s society, the oppression of women is not a part of human nature. Sexism is not natural, which means we can eliminate it.

The oppression of women is rooted in a hierarchical system that values men over women, a system organized around patriarchal norms but that is much broader than patriarchy, in which the oppression of people is not based simply on sex but on class.

Class society the root of women’s oppression

For the vast majority of human history, society was organized around communal groups, and women were not specially oppressed. It was the emergence of class society that formed the foundation for patriarchal norms and the oppression of women.

Class society is the organization of society based on economic exploitation. People are separated into two classes with opposing interests: one is the group of people who own the means of production, who use this ownership of resources and productive forces to accumulate wealth unto themselves — the ruling class; the other class is the group of people who do not own the means of production, but who, through their labor, in fact produce the wealth of society — the laborers. The ruling class exploits the laboring class in order to amass wealth.

Feudalism and capitalism are two examples of class society. In a feudal society, serfs and peasants worked the land, but they did not own the land, and they did not keep the full value of what they produced. Much of the fruits of their labor were handed over to the lords, the landowners that were members of the ruling class that became rich off the land. In a capitalist society, workers produce goods and provide services, but they do not own factories and corporations. The capitalists who own the factories, banks and corporations, members of the ruling class, become rich by paying workers less than the value of the goods produced and lining their pockets with the difference — the profits.

Communal society

If we think of all of human history as one year, or 365 days, the duration of class society and patriarchy would be only five days — less than one week. For the vast majority of our existence, we lived in communal societies. In those societies, women and men performed different work, but all people were valued for their contributions to the survival of the group.

For thousands of years, humanity struggled together for survival in the face of scarcity and deprivation. There were no social classes based upon wealth or power, and no individuals or families amassed wealth; everything was owned by the communities as a whole. Each task was critical to survival and considered a communal responsibility. Hunting, gathering, building homes, child rearing and caring for elders — each of these tasks was valued as critical and was accomplished by members of the group working together rather than by individuals or individual familial units. An individual’s value to society was not based on their gender but rather on their ability to contribute to each of these critical tasks, tasks which may have been performed by different genders but were held in high esteem regardless.

In “The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State,” Frederick Engels outlined the material reasons for why people lived communally:

A division of the tribe or of the gens into different classes was equally impossible. And that brings us to the examination of the economic basis of these conditions. The population is extremely sparse; it is dense only at the tribe’s place of settlement, around which lie in a wide circle first the hunting grounds and then the protective belt of neutral forest, which separates the tribe from others. The division of labor is purely primitive, between the sexes only. The man fights in the wars, goes hunting and fishing, procures the raw materials of food and the tools necessary for doing so. The woman looks after the house and the preparation of food and clothing, cooks, weaves, sews. They are each master in their own sphere: the man in the forest, the woman in the house. Each is owner of the instruments which he or she makes and uses: the man of the weapons, the hunting and fishing implements, the woman of the household gear. The housekeeping is communal among several and often many families. What is made and used in common is common property — the house, the garden, the long-boat.

Society at this stage was matrilineal: women, the organizers of food, shelter and child rearing, were the center of life. The lineage of any person was traced through the mother’s line. Children were not the sole responsibility of the biological mother and/or father but rather were linked by kinship to what we now refer to as extended family.

Class society produces inequality

As Engels explained, inequality emerged for the first time only after millennia of this communal, shared existence. With the emergence of surplus, wealth, and class society came the emergence of patriarchal society and the oppression of women. Over time, as the development of the tools and methods of production produced a surplus, one sector of society, primarily men as the primary hunters and organizers of animal husbandry, could hoard and accumulate wealth as private property.¹ Before the advent of private property, there was no special power or privileges associated with this type of labor. As explained above, all types of labor were valued as critical to survival of the community.

As the capacity to produce continued to grow beyond the minimum for survival, the social and productive relations of matrilineal pre-class societies weakened.

Mother-right was overturned, and men came to control the wealth and resources, using organized violence and redefined family institutions in the form of monogamous marriage to maintain their new position in society.

Engels describes the magnitude of this historical development:

The overthrow of mother-right was the world historical defeat of the female sex. The man took command in the home also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude, she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children. This degraded position of the woman, especially conspicuous among the Greeks of the heroic and still more of the classical age, has gradually been palliated and glossed over, and sometimes clothed in a milder form; in no sense has it been abolished.

The origins of violence against women and the denial of women’s right to control reproduction can be traced to this development. The overthrow of mother-right resulted in women essentially becoming the property of men. Female sexuality, once freely expressed, was now severely restricted in order to assure the “legitimate” line of descent from father to son for the purposes of inheritance. This was, in turn, tied to the emergence of class society itself, initially on the basis of slavery through warfare.

Engels explained:

The increase of production in all branches — cattle-raising, agriculture, domestic handicrafts — gave human labor-power the capacity to produce a larger product than was necessary for its maintenance. At the same time, it increased the daily amount of work to be done by each member of the gens, household community or single family. It was now desirable to bring in new labor forces. War provided them; prisoners of war were turned into slaves. With its increase of the productivity of labor, and therefore of wealth, and its extension of the field of production, the first great social division of labor was bound, in the general historical conditions prevailing, to bring slavery in its train. From the first great social division of labor arose the first great cleavage of society into two classes: masters and slaves, exploiters and exploited.

Previously, the victors in war either killed or adopted those they defeated into their own tribes to contribute critical tasks of survival, but now, they enslaved the losers in order drive production and create wealth. Slavery was an early form of class society. The development of productive forces and advent of private property set into motion: (1) the emergence of the male-controlled family; (2) the emergence of class society itself. These are closely related, and in the modern form of capitalism, inextricable.²

Women’s oppression in capitalist society

Women’s oppression has changed over time as economic exploitation has changed. Slavery, feudalism and capitalism all demonstrate the exploitation of people in class society. The oppression of women under capitalism manifests in a myriad of ways.

Capitalism is a class society driven by the generation of profits. The capitalist class owns the means of production. This includes the factories and resources required to produce material goods, which run the gamut from shoes to houses. Resources include the means to access fuels, like oil, and even necessities like water. Capitalist production requires the employment of both male and female laborers. Since its inception, working-class women have been drawn out of the isolated atmosphere of the home and into collective production. Some of the first factory workers were women.

And since its inception, capitalism has generated profits by exploiting and undervaluing women in the workplace to a greater degree than men. This directly affects economic status, both by underpaying women and by excluding them from higher paying positions — relegating them to “gendered” positions that are typically service-oriented and lower-paying.

In the United States, women work longer hours and make less money than men. Even though equal pay for equal work has been federal law since 1963, when compared to men with similar education, skills and experience, women earn less than 76 cents to the dollar. For women of color, this is closer to 50 cents. In fact, the average 25-year-old working woman will lose almost $500,000 due to unequal pay during her lifetime as a worker. Yet, she will pay the same for rent, food, utilities and services as her male counterpart. In addition, she is likely to pay more for necessities like health care and more likely to lose money when she is sick. In the United States, among working women earning less than $40,000 per year, up to half are without basic benefits, including secure, affordable health insurance, prescription drug coverage, pension or retirement benefits, or paid sick leave.

This inequality allows capitalism to thrive. Lower pay for a sector of workers — women — plays two critical roles: (1) This directly translates to greater profits because capitalists keep more of the value of the good or service by not paying as much to workers. (2) It also creates a division within the working class, pitting women and men against each other in the workplace because the availability of cheaper labor by women is a bargaining chip that allows capitalists to pay men less as well.

Beyond being underpaid in the workplace, women carry out a great amount of unpaid labor in capitalist society. This is because work like childcare, preparing food in the household and other similar work that was greatly valued in pre-communal society is not assigned a monetary value in capitalist society. Moreover, this work has been de-socialized. Often referred to as “the second shift,” what used to be a communal responsibility has become the onus of individual women to complete on top of the work they perform for pay outside the home. Of course, these tasks are no less necessary to survival to the workforce, regardless of gender. As critical tasks performed at no cost to the capitalists, this unpaid labor — the exploitation of women — is a great source of profit in capitalist society.

All of this makes women more likely to be poor. In 1978, professor Diana Pearce used the term “feminization of poverty” to describe trends in the standard of living in the United States. The fact that women perform unpaid labor, are more likely to perform lower-paying jobs, and that even when performing the same job are paid less means that under capitalism, women will always be poorer than their male counterparts simply because they are women. In the United States, almost 60 percent of adults with an income of less than half the poverty line are women. Black and Latina women have a much higher poverty rate than white women (generally two to three times as high).

In addition, the violence against women we see in today’s capitalist society is a vestige of women’s historic status as property — a status that emerged with and is inextricably tied to class society. Rather than a random or individual crime, violence against women is a symptom of women’s subordinate position in modern class society. The sheer magnitude of violence against women around the world, including in the most advanced capitalist societies speaks to this. In the United States, every two minutes a women is sexually assaulted and every six minutes one is raped. This amounts to about 200,000 victims per year, with 17 percent of women having survived a complete or attempted rape. Domestic violence is the greatest form of injury to women in the United States, more than all other causes combined.

Moreover, the emergence of “global capitalism” has meant that all of these manifestations of women’s oppression are being incorporated into business practices and imperialist military strategies worldwide.

Globally, women earn about 50 percent of what men earn and are the majority of the 1.5 billion people who survive on a dollar or less a day. In transnational sweatshops doing business under free-trade agreements like NAFTA, young women working for slave wages are routinely abused at work. Since 1993, more than 1,000 women and girls have been killed in Juarez, Mexico. Most were workers in the “maquiladora” factories in the free-trade zone in the U.S.-Mexico border. Around the world, one in three women has been beaten, forced into sex or abused in her lifetime.

Despite militant struggle and the many hard-fought gains of the women’s liberation movement, oppression continues on a broad scale, and every gain faces the threat of being rolled back. In the United States, one of every two women experience sexual harassment at school or work; homicide is the leading cause of death for pregnant women; women’s health care rights, including reproductive rights, are increasingly under attack; and although abortion is legal, there are no abortion providers in 83 percent of U.S. counties. Critical programs like childcare, housing, education and health care are constantly under attack, if not outright denied or zeroed out.

In cases of violence against women, the police and the courts find every excuse to avoid punishing the perpetrator. Every stage is a struggle: to have it recorded as a crime, to force an investigation, to force a prosecution, to force a trial, to win a conviction. Even when a woman wins at all of these stages, her subjugation by society remains ever apparent. That is what happened in the recent and notorious Stanford rape case, in which, despite his conviction by a jury for raping an unconscious woman and a request by prosecutors for six years, Judge Aaron Persky sentenced Brock Allen Turner to only six months in jail. Persky’s reason: a prison sentence would have a severe impact on Turner, and he would not be a danger to others.

Under capitalism, feminists fight for — and can win — important rights and equality under the law. But capitalism relies on the subordination of sectors of the working class, including women. Without a state and society determined to enforce equal rights, and determined to deem the subordination of women and violence against women unacceptable — in the eyes of society and in the demonstrated enforcement of law — women will remain oppressed. This is exactly why a woman becoming president of the United States does not signal the liberation of women. The state she would lead is a capitalist state. It is a state constructed to uphold, what is necessary to uphold capitalism — exploitation, inequality and oppression — not to eliminate them. This is exactly why the full liberation of women is not possible within the capitalist system.

Socialism lays the basis for women’s liberation

Socialism lays the basis for two necessary steps toward women’s liberation: (1) removing the inextricable motivation for women’s oppression — the need to exploit workers in order to generate profits; and (2) building a society and state committed to combatting oppression, and not just recognizing but also enforcing the equality of all workers.

In regards to this Sarah Sloan noted at a Party for Socialism and Liberation conference in 2014:

Socialist revolutions have not happened in rich societies but in the poorest parts of the world. At the time of the Russian Revolution in 1917, the Russian economy was one-twelfth the size of the U.S. economy. By eliminating the profits for a tiny handful of capitalists, even a poor country like the Soviet Union, managed by the 1930s, to provide every worker with the right to a job and the right to free health care.

By 1960, the Soviet Union had emerged as the second-biggest economy in the world. There was no unemployment and there was a right to housing — to pay no more than 6 percent of your income for rent. Evictions were illegal because there were no landlords. It was your housing.

Women had a right to free childcare and one year’s paid maternity leave, and they had the right to put their child in child care facilities at no cost. Women in the Soviet Union had the right to retire at 55 years of age at half pay. And remember, they had free health care, so retirement didn’t mean being plunged into poverty. They had a month’s paid vacation.

It doesn’t mean that there were no problems in the Soviet Union, or that we agree with all the policies of different leaderships. But the Soviet Union proved, just as Cuba proves today, that when you take the wealth out of the hands of the capitalists, it can be used to meet people’s needs.

Socialist Cuba has made enormous strides in combatting women’s oppression since its revolution in 1959, which was declared socialist in 1961. And, as women leaders there often state, there is still much work to be done to achieve full equality.

In 1966, Fidel Castro spoke at the fifth national plenum of the Cuban Women’s Federation. Aware of the challenges that face a new socialist society after the overthrow of the ruling class, he described the fight against women’s oppression as a revolution within the socialist revolution. The vestiges of capitalist society’s special oppression of people based on race and gender cannot be simply swept away with a revolution. The revolution begins the work of undoing those vestiges.

However, there is no comparison between the capitalist society of the United States and the socialist one of Cuba. Cuban women are guaranteed housing, health care, education and employment. Men and women are guaranteed parental leave for up to one year. Reproductive rights, abortion and birth control, for example, are legal and provided for by the national health care system. These are just a few examples but they are illustrative.

The United States has no guaranteed paid parental leave. Reproductive rights are constantly under attack. Housing, education, health care and employment are not considered rights.

We fight for reforms and struggle for full liberation through socialism

What, then, is women’s liberation? The term evokes images of women leading marches, rallies, strikes and hunger strikes to demand the right to vote, to demand safe working conditions, to demand equal pay, the right to abortion and reproductive freedom; women standing together to demand an end to sexism and against sexual assault. It is marked by militant struggle in the face of extreme repression and by victories in the recognition of rights and changes in societal attitudes. The women’s liberation movement militantly struggles for equal rights and status for women.

As revolutionary feminists, we must embrace the militancy of the women’s liberation movement and carry it forward. We must remain strong and unwavering in our demand for equal rights. It is critical to fight for as many rights recognized by law, for as many legal reforms, for as many changes in society thought and action as possible. All of this eases the oppression faced by women.

As socialists, we also understand that while militant struggle can win important rights in capitalist society, the women’s liberation struggle reaches beyond the goal of equal rights. It is telling that after centuries of struggle, women still do not have equal rights under the law. What is even more telling is the other component of the struggle — that capitalist society continues to subject women to patriarchal norms; that in capitalist society, women remain oppressed.

When a society is built upon exploitation, as capitalism is, equality is contradictory to the system. This is the very reason why — even in the face of militant struggle — women do not have equal rights, and why even the rights we do have are rarely enforced and continuously threatened and eroded by legislatures and courts, instruments of the capitalist ruling class. Capitalism relies on social constructs, such as race and gender, to support the exploitation of groups of people that is necessary to generate profits froms the labor of workers. By reclaiming political power from the capitalists, we attack the root of all bigotry and inequality based on these social constructs. In doing so, we lay the basis for the full liberation of women and all oppressed people.

Endnotes

1. Women also participated in hunting, but men were the primary hunters and controllers of the process of the domestication of animals.

2. The emergence of class society not only led to the oppression of women, it is also the root of LGBTQ oppression and bigotry. Maintaining the concentration of wealth in the upper class requires children who can inherit that wealth — same-sex relationships became valueless, although they naturally have continued. As is the oppression of women, the oppression of LGBTQ people is inextricably tied to today’s capitalist society.

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

By Marc James Léger

Republished from Blog of Public Secrets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Hierarchies and Humanity: A Review of ‘The Dawn Of Everything’ by David Graeber and David Wengrow

[Pictured: Waving across time, the Cave of Hands in Argentina, painted as far back as 11,000 B.C., reminds us that prehistory was filled with real people. Credit: R. M. Nunes / IStock / Getty Images Plus]

By Nathan Albright

Before his sudden death in September of 2020, two weeks after the completion of his final book, The Dawn of Everything, the beloved anthropologist David Graeber had demonstrated a knack for writing about the right thing at the right time. In 2011, his masterwork Debt: The First 5,000 Years, an inquiry into the relationship between debt, morality, and political power, was published just a few months before Occupy Wall St. began an international conversation on much the same. In addition to authoring the book and other writings that circulated in the movement, Graeber was actively involved from the beginning of the encampment, participating in direct actions and assembly meetings, and famously coining the Occupy mantra “We Are the 99%.” In 2013, Graeber, again, struck a chord with a short article titled On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs, in which he batted around a few ideas about how a surprising number of jobs seem to be “utterly meaningless,” even to those working them, and speculated that this kind of work had become more widespread than is openly talked about. Within a week of its publication, the article was read by millions and translated into over a dozen languages, prompting countless responses, mostly from those  effusively agreeing with Graeber’s premise and wanting to share their own anecdotes of meaningless work. In 2018, Graeber expanded the article, and combined it with the testimonies that readers had sent him, along with some of his past writing on gendered labor, authority, bureaucracy, and imagination, into what became his most accessible and widely read book, Bullshit Jobs. Its main themes, especially his willingness to question what work is actually necessary, foreshadowed many of the discussions that took shape during the the early days of the Covid 19 pandemic as the public found itself split into essential and non-essential workers. In the years since, as droves of workers have quit their jobs in what is being called the Great Resignation, Graeber’s writing has been widely circulated in online communities like the Anti-work sub-reddit, an online forum where millions of users share stories of workplace abuses and encourage one another to quit their jobs and seek more meaningful and less exploited ways of living.

Years before, in 2005, long before Graeber amassed much of a readership, he wrote a pamphlet titled Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, which, maybe more than any other work, serves as a prequel to his final publication. In the pamphlet, he asks, if Anthropology is the academic field most familiar with the variety of social arrangements that have existed without structures of domination – those which have valued cooperation over competition, creativity over conformity, and autonomy over obedience – why does it, as a discipline, so rarely engage with social movements that are, sometimes rather aimlessly, trying to recreate just such conditions. Graeber concluded the pamphlet with a call for his fellow anthropologists to make common cause with social movements because, in short, “we have tools at our fingertips that could be of enormous importance for human freedom.” That same year, Yale University controversially declined to renew his teaching contract, a move that many saw as retaliation for his political affiliations. Sixteen years later, the posthumous release of The Dawn of Everything, coauthored with the archeologist David Wengrow, shows that the incident only sharpened Graeber’s resolve to actualize the kind of ‘anarchist anthropology’ his pamphlet had envisioned, and to do so in a way that could not be ignored. According to Wengrow, Graeber insisted on publishing each section of the book individually in peer reviewed journals before releasing the full compilation in order to head off any efforts to dismiss their findings. What the two present in the volume is a radically different vision of human history, an attempt to broaden our understanding of what we, as a species, have been, that is as doggedly hopeful as it is rigorously researched. 

Graeber and Wengrow set out from one of the oldest questions in the social sciences: “what is the origin of inequality?” They begin by turning the question on its head, instead asking, how is it that social theorists of 18th Century Europe came to be interested in the idea of inequality in the first place? The answer, they suggest, is simple: although Enlightenment thinking is often framed as the unique brainchild of individual European male genius, it was actually the result of an explosion of cultural exchange following first contact with the indigenous people of the Americas who had exposed Europeans to entirely different ways of thinking and living. Moreover, Indigenous intellectuals like the Huron-Wendat chief Kandiaronk (who the authors profile at length in the second chapter), were so horrified by the hierarchy, competitiveness, and poverty permeating European culture that they leveled scathing critiques of the inequalities they witnessed.

That this indigenous critique is to thank for enlightenment debates over inequality is plain to see in the historical record. In fact there is simply “no evidence that the Latin terms aequalitas or inaequalitas or their English, French, Spanish, German and Italian cognates were used to describe social relations at all before the time of Columbus,” not to mention that while most Western historians seem to overlook it, the fact is that most enlightenment figures openly “insisted that their ideas of individual liberty and political equality were inspired by Native American sources and examples.” It only makes sense that enlightenment thinkers would have come across indigenous critiques because, at the time, some of the most popular books circulating in Europe were summaries and accounts of cultural exchanges with Native Americans, usually in the form of dialogues and debates. In some of these debates, the European, often a Jesuit priest, argued at length against the idea of freedom as a virtue, a line of argument so utterly untenable by today’s standards that it is clear just how drastically indigenous thinking went on to shape the course of history.

The popularity of this indigenous critique left European pride bruised, and the authors suggest that reactionary thinkers scrambling for counter-arguments to protect their sense of superiority developed lines of thinking that have endured to the present day. The Economist A.J.R. Turgot, friend and colleague of Adam Smith, pioneered a line of argument that societies move through stages of development marked by forms of technology and subsistence that are progressively more sophisticated. Thus, the mere fact that some indigenous peoples were hunter gatherers meant that they were inferior.  Graeber and Wengrow point out that Turgot latched on to technology and forms of subsistence as central to superiority because, when it came to quality of life, wisdom, or happiness, equality, or freedom, eighteenth century Europe was in abysmal shape. But the emphasis on forms of subsistence and technological progress stuck, and eventually developed into its two most enduring forms in the writings of Hobbes and Rousseau. Hobbes essentially argued that indigenous people were equal only in so far as they were equally poor and stupid, that life for the so-called uncivilized was a vicious \war of all against all and modern powers vested in governments were the only thing keeping people from tearing each other apart – reasoning that remains the bedrock of conservative thought. Rousseau on the other hand, painted indigenous people as coming from a utopian state of innocence, totally unaware of inequality and un-corrupted by the kinds of inevitable technological advances, like agriculture, which had forced Europeans to lose touch with their own Eden. 

While both formulations are patently false and racist in their own unique ways, the authors note that Rousseau was not wrong in observing that something had been lost in European culture that clearly did exist among indigenous groups. Settlers, when exposed to indigenous ways of life, overwhelmingly chose to remain, or even to return after failing to re-integrate to European society. Indigenous Americans brought to European society, on the other hand, would invariably seek every opportunity to escape and return home. Even European children separated from their parents and brought to Indigenous communities would often choose to stay. But why? What was so different, so much more appealing about indigenous life? “The fact that we find it hard to imagine how such an alternative life could be endlessly engaging and interesting,” the authors suggest, “is perhaps more a reflection on the limits of our imagination than on the life itself.” Our understanding of life in other times and places, and therefore our idea of what is possible for our lives here and now, is shaped by our own narrow experiences. The authors provide an example: travel routes uncovered by archaeologists. These pathways have frequently been assumed to be trade routes, an assumption that reflects a modern obsession with markets, but, in actuality, these routes served as everything from elaborate circuits traversed by healers and entertainers, to inter-village networks for women’s gambling, to long distance vision quests for individuals guided by dreams. “When we simply guess as to what humans in other times and places might be up to,” the authors write, “we almost invariably make guesses that are far less interesting, far less quirky – in a word, far less human than what was likely going on.” The rest of the book, with this in mind, sets out to retell some of the most widely misunderstood stories that we have come to believe about our past and, with the help of some of the most recent archaeological discoveries, to uncover this more colorful, more imaginative, more human history. 

Some of the details the authors cover won’t be new to a student of Anthropology: medieval serfs worked significantly less hours than the modern office or factory worker, and “the hazelnut gatherers and cattle herders who dragged great slabs to build Stonehenge almost certainly worked less than that.” Such details were made widely known in the 1960’s in an essay titled The Original Affluent society by the anthropologist Marshal Sahlins, who would later serve as Graeber’s thesis advisor. The authors confirm that the basic tenets of the essay have held up over time, but it too provided a limited picture of what pre-agricultural life was like. For one thing, the break between pre-agricultural and agricultural was not so clean, not the “revolution” we have been taught, but a long process of experimentation. There were sometimes thousands of years between the first examples of agriculture in a region and any kind of consistent use for subsistence purposes. The first instances of farming looked a lot more like gardening, and were carried out with little effort, often in delta regions where seasonal floods would do most of the work of tilling, fertilizing, and irrigating – such liminal farming spaces also had a sort of built in resistance to measurement, allotment, or enclosure. The first farmers in these spaces, it seems, were women, and they often grew herbs or ornamental crops rather than food staples as had once been assumed. There’s even evidence that early farmers actually worked against traditional hallmarks of plant domestication in order to avoid becoming solely dependent on their own labor to produce crops. The authors use the term “play farming” to describe this millennia long process of leisurely experimentation and learning. 

More to the point, Graeber and Wengrow want to get one thing straight – the advent of agriculture was not the revolutionary social, political, cultural catalyst it has been heralded as. There is no evolution of social forms based on subsistence mode. How a group of people obtains its food doesn’t determine how it’s politically or hierarchically structured. In fact, pre-agricultural life was not made up of roving bands of hunter gatherers, but “marked, in many places, by sedentary villages and towns, some by then already ancient, as well as monumental sanctuaries and stockpiled wealth, much of it the work of ritual specialists, highly skilled artisans and architects.” Similarly the authors dispel the idea that greater scale, of a city for example, necessarily results in greater hierarchy. A revelation that upends an assumption so widespread that is long been considered common sense. 

Cities populated by tens of thousands began appearing around the world roughly six thousand years ago and there is surprisingly little evidence of any kind of hierarchy among them. Neither, it seems, were they dependent on a rural population to supply their needs, but instead relied on forms of subsistence gardening, animal husbandry, fishing, and continued hunting and gathering in surrounding areas. “The first city dwellers,” the authors write, “did not always leave a harsh footprint on the environment, or on each other.” Graeber and Wengrow provide examples of self governing cities from regions around the world including Ukraine, Turkey, China, central Mexico, Mesopotamia, the Fertile Crescent, the Indus Valley and others. The evidence that most of these early cities were non-hierarchically organized is so compelling the authors argue that the burden of proof is now on those trying to find evidence for hierarchy. 

Life in these early cities, the authors write, was one grand social experiment: large public works projects, public housing, elaborate city planning, monuments, temples and more, all before the widespread adoption of farming. In many of the largest early cities, the grandest projects, centrally located, elaborately adorned and monumentally constructed, appear to have been public meeting spaces, likely for citizen’s assemblies, neighborhood councils, and any number of other forms of direct democracy. In fact, popular councils and citizen’s assemblies were simply part of the fabric of life in early cities, even those civilizations that readers will be most familiar with like Sumeria, Akkadia, and other Mesopotamian cities as well as among the Hittites, Phoenicians, Philistines, and Israelites. “In fact,” the authors write, “it is almost impossible to find a city anywhere in the Near East that did not have some equivalent to a popular assembly – or often several assemblies … even … where traditions of monarchy ran deep.” 

In the Americas, this applies not only to pre-history, but also to relatively recent history, including the time of first contact with Europeans. Even the conquistador Hernando Cortez wrote at length about the assemblies he encountered in central Mexico, comparing it favorably to the forms of Italian democracy he was familiar with. While we tend to learn the history of the few, large-scale hierarchical empires in the Americas, like those Cortez most directly sought out, Graeber and Wengrow convincingly argue that the majority of indigenous Americans actually lived in social arrangements specifically formed in contrast to these cities, self-consciously arranged in such a way as to prevent forms of domination from emerging. The authors describe a world of constant experimentation and fluidity in the structures that did exist. Some groups, for instance, transitioned from short term rigid hierarchy during a hunting season, to total egalitarian relations during the next. The result of such fluid experimentation seems to have been a much more accepting, creative populous, where eccentricities were celebrated, and individuals could change identities, kin, even names from season to season as a a spirit of perpetual reinvention and regeneration flourished. Far from Rousseau’s naive state of innocence, the indigenous people of the Americas were keenly aware of the dangers of hierarchy and had become adept at the art of heading off any signs of individuals amassing coercive power. 

The evidence suggests that this fluidity of social forms and an avoidance of hierarchy, alien as it may now seem, was characteristic of most social life for most of human history. The authors suggest that perhaps the most guarded values common to all people were autonomy (as in, the complete freedom of the individual from domination by others) and communism (as in, ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’) – one serving as the necessary precondition for the other. Far from the realm of idealistic fantasy, these were the social relations in cities of hundreds of thousands of people who self-governed for periods of thousands of years. In fact, there are periods in the archeological record of up to 500 years in which entire regions as large as “eastern North America” show remarkably little evidence of traumatic injuries or other forms of interpersonal violence. For the majority of human history, throughout the majority of the world, except for islands of hierarchy, people tended to resist domination and instead live in voluntary associations of mutual support.

A book with such an inspiring reinterpretation of human possibility, written by an author who has on more than one occasion presaged social movements, is a glimmer of hope in a very dark time. As the largest protest movement in US history swept across the country, raising questions of police and prison abolition, demonstrators could have used a vote of confidence from anthropologists who are keenly aware that the kind of possibilities activists are pursuing have not only existed, but thrived for millennia at a time. Abolitionists may be heartened to read the Huron-Wendat chief Kandiaronk’s views on the European penal system: “For my own part, I find it hard to see how you could be much more miserable than you already are. What kind of human, what species of creature, must Europeans be, that they have to be forced to do good, and only refrain from evil because of fear of punishment?”

As Wildcat Workers Unions, Tenant’s Unions, Citizens’ Assemblies, and Mutual Aid Networks are blossoming around the country, participants must wonder on what scale this kind of grassroots self-organization is possible. The answer, according to Graeber and Wengrow, is entire regional federations of metropolises –  as big as any hierarchical structure has ever managed and arguably with much greater success.  

What kind of a social movement could take form armed with the knowledge of the full spectrum of social forms throughout human history? Could humanity’s oldest values, autonomy and mutual-aid, flourish again? Can the violence and rot of capitalist empire really be undone? If a reader takes one thing from The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow want it to be this: nothing in history was ever predetermined. Neither Hobbes’ mindless automatons nor Rosseau’s innocent children of Eden ever existed. History is alive with self-conscious actors, constantly negotiating the conditions of their lives and with far more possible outcomes than we were ever led to believe. But more importantly, so is the present.

Nathan Albright is a building super in Brownsville, Brooklyn. His writing can also be found in The Catholic Worker newspaper and at TheFloodmag.com.

Proletarian Poetry Returns: A Review of Matt Sedillo's 'City On The Second Floor'

By Jon Jeter

Reading Matt Sedillo’s second book of poetry, City on the Second Floor, reminded me of the late, hip hop icon, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, who chose that colorful pseudonym, according to his bandmates in the Wu Tang Clan, “because there was no father to his style.”

That is not entirely true of Sedillo. As I myself wrote in my review of his first book, Mowing Leaves of Grass –a postcolonial takedown of Walt Whitman’s fabled 1855 book of poetry, Leaves of Grass – Sedillo’s verses shares much in common with the late, African American griot, Amiri Baraka. I wrote at the time:

"Present in the work of both poets –the late icon and the relative ingenue respectively –is the rhythmic mixture, una mezcla, of the street, and minds sharpened, like swords, by struggle, and self-enlightenment.

This is not to suggest that Sedillo’s poetry is all fire and brimstone. Like Baraka before him, Sedillo infuses his poetry with a certain knowing, or playfulness, befitting an outsider who is in on the joke, and has seen through the illogic of a handful of Europeans “discovering” 90 million indigenous people. The white settler’s arrogance produces both amusement and blinding, righteous, anger.”

Hints of Baraka are also present in City on the Second Floor, but reflecting a relatively-young poet who continues to find his voice, Sedillo’s verses are evolving, making it difficult to pinpoint one single, or dominant, influence. Or, to return to the example of Ol’ Dirty Bastard, it is not that his style is fatherless, but rather it seems the product of many fathers.

Aside from Baraka’s work, City on the Second Floor’s most glaring resemblance is perhaps to the work of another son of Los Angeles, Charles Bukowski, although the similarities between the two poets are superficial, and I suspect, purely coincidental. Like Sedillo, Bukowski’s poetry was often a paean to his hometown, the City of Angels, and its seedy underbelly but Bukowski ‘s gritty portraiture veers towards cynicism, and even solipsism, mindful, perhaps,`` of film noir. Sedillo uses Los Angeles’ grit much differently, casting the city’s Chicano community and dispossessed populations in sharp relief, and his poetry is reminiscent not of any sterile Hollywood oeuvre, but of Mexico’s iconic Marxist muralist, Diego Rivera, and his classic fresco depicting the Ford River Rouge plant in interwar Detroit.

In a poem entitled The Pope of Broadway, Sedillo writes:

Heard a story that

When Anthony Quinn married in to the DeMille family

It was on the condition that his very Mexican family would not be attending the wedding

And that's the ticket, the price of admission, what they are buying and you had best be selling

And let me tell you one thing

When Dallas, Minneapolis, Ann Arbor, Orlando, Toledo, Scranton Ohio sends their people

They don’t send their best

They're vain

They're shallow

They're narcissists

And some of them I imagine are good waiters

Flight of the sociopaths

Transplants turned cynics chasing down plans, hopes and ambitions

On roads paved in ways I would never even begin to dream to imagine

Talking only to themselves, defining a place by all they claim it is not but it’s them

Fake, fakes, fake as fuck, fuck them

They don’t know this town, this region the history

Hell they don’t even know the valley

A certain class consciousness imbues the work of both Bukowski and Sedillo, but while Bukowski maintains a comfortable distance from the unwashed, bearing witness to the struggle but not really getting his hands dirty, Sedillo picks a side, and dives in head first, grounding — to borrow a term introduced by the late Marxist, Jamaican economist Walter Rodney — with the masses. His poetry is equal parts art, advocacy, and anthropology. Consider his poem from which the book draws its title:

There is a city on the second floor

An international destination

Whose entrance is prohibited

To all those appearing

Too poor for travel

Where commerce crosses

Bridges of wire and concrete

Just above the street light

Rises an economy of scale

Where buildings and offices

Connect to disconnect from the world below

Here

In the space between

Worker and destination

Conversation spins profit

And no one moves without reason

And no one speaks without purpose

Here

The word is stillborn

A commodity

And the world dies anew

While working stiff spend wages

In cheap imitation

Of their exploitation

Arrogant

Delusional

Walking dead

Laughingly dreaming

Of a penthouse suite

They will never reach

While staring down from terraces

Towards the street below

In this and other poems, I detect echoes of two, towering Midwestern poets whose work is often associated with proletarian themes: Detroit’s Philip Levine, and Chicago’s socialist scribe, Carl Sandburg, whose poem, Chicago, remains one of my all-time favorites. City on the Second Floor is indescribably good, as rich and textured as the best bottle of wine you’ve ever consumed, , in part because of this almost sociological lens that Sedillo applies to his verses. But reading it for me was a bit of a chore, akin to a high-stakes wine-tasting contest, as I struggled mightily to identify the differing bouquets: was that vanilla or almond, nutmeg or currants?

After identifying hints of Baraka and Bukowski, Sandburg and Levine and even a subtle aroma of Rivera, I still felt I was missing someone. Finally, after my second reading of Sedillo’s poem entitled simply, The Rich, it hit me: the Spanish poet, , Federico Garcia Lorca, who was assassinated by Spanish fascists in 1936. It reads:

You see the rich

And the poor

Well, they're just like you and me

Two hands

Two feet

The sky

The sea

And everything between

One heart that beats

And the time

To make the most of it

So, you'll find no sympathy

Reaching into these deep pockets

All we ever asked was our fair share

And God damn it, that's all of it

So, while you're out in the streets screaming for peace and justice

We’re sleeping in satin sheets dreaming free and guiltless over oceans and tariffs liquidating pensions then off to bid on porcelain and portraits at billion dollar auctions

You know you need us

You know we're selling your secrets

It is not that Sedillo is a surrealist as Garcia Lorca was but his poetry represents Chicanos in the same unapologetic way that Garcia Lorca represented his tribe of Andalusian Roma people, who suffered under the thumb of Franco’s regime just as Sedillo’s tribe suffers under the white settler regime in LA. Reading Sedillo’s use of the words “us” and “we” is subversive, particularly in such dire times, and emotionally triggering, but in a good way, harkening back to a day when the best artists were not feted with awards and university chairs, but were instead held in contempt by the pharaohs, for helping the people fight their oppressors.

Jon Jeter is a former Washington Post correspondent and the author of Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People and the co-author of A Day Late and a Dollar Short: Bright Nights and Dark Days in Obama’s Postracial America.

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).

Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh Remind Us of the Roots of White Supremacy in the Aftermath of the Buffalo Shooting

By Danny Haiphong

Republished from Substack.

On May 15th, a white supremacist named Payton Gendron opened fire on a Tops supermarket in Buffalo’s Black district of Kingsley, killing ten people. The massacre was immediately labeled a hate crime and liberal mainstream corporate media went to work finding easy explanations that would absolve them and their elite handlers of any wrongdoing. Democrats placed blame on the GOP for normalizing racism. GOP-aligned Fox News host Tucker Carlson was given special attention for mainstreaming the “Great Replacement Theory” that filled the pages of Gendron’s manifesto.

Indeed, white supremacy has been the GOP’s organizing principle for more than a half century. The “Great Replacement Theory” is the 21st century version of a historic trend. The Republican Party’s “Southern Strategy” successfully mobilized white Americans fearful of the Black movement for social justice into a formidable political bloc. Ronald Reagan’s ascendancy transformed the racist rhetoric within the Republican political establishment into a coded war on “welfare queens” and “crime.” The “Great Replacement Theory” is another iteration of white supremacist ideology which posits that Black Americans, immigrants, Muslims, and non-whites generally are invading the Anglo world in a bid to eradicate whites.

There is no doubt that the influence of far right and white supremacist ideology has played a role in the more than one hundred mass shootings that have occurred in the United States over the past several decades. A society organized to dehumanize and wage war on the masses is ultimately a society at war with itself. However, it is too simplistic to view white supremacy as a purely ideological phenomenon. White supremacy is not merely a set of ideas that, once spread, sets the stage for racist violence. This idealist conception of history strips white supremacy of its roots in the system of U.S. imperialism and simplifies its existence to a matter of moralistic virtue.

Such idealism presents only one solution to white supremacy; the marginalization or eradication of a few bad apples in Tucker Carlson and the GOP.  On May 19th, the world will celebrate the birthdays of Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh, two deceased revolutionaries who commented extensively on the roots of white supremacy. Ho Chi Minh was the first president of an independent and socialist Vietnam and arguably the most important force in that country’s struggle for liberation from colonialism. Malcolm X was one of the most important leaders of the Black liberation movement that the United States has ever known, and his influence on the political development of the global struggle for peace and self-determination remains immense.

Though Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh spent much of their lives on different hemispheres, both charted a course for liberation that was influenced by the rising prestige of Black nationalist, anti-colonial, and socialist politics. Both were internationalists who traveled the world learning and seeking solidarity from movements abroad. Ho Chi Minh traveled to New York City and worked as a dish washer while attending United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) meetings held by Marcus Garvey. Shortly before his assassination in 1965, Malcolm X made his third trip to the African continent and paid visits to Ghana, Egypt, Kenya, Algeria, and Tanzania. He would go on to form the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) upon his return, stating in his first public address for the new organization that the success of African nations in uniting against colonialism directly inspired his determination to organize and unite Black people in a global struggle for freedom, peace, and dignity.

Ho Chi Minh wrote several articles on racism and the Black condition in the United States. In his 1924 article on lynching, the Vietnamese revolutionary declared:

It is well known that the black race is the most oppressed and most exploited of the human family. It is well known that the spread of capitalism and the discovery of the New World had the immediate result the rebirth of slavery which was, for centuries, a scourge for the Negroes and a bitter disgrace of mankind. What everyone perhaps does not know, is that after sixty-five years of so-called emancipation, American Negroes still endure atrocious moral and material sufferings, of which the most cruel and horrible is the custom of lynching.

Ho Chi Minh and Malcolm X believed that racist violence could not be understood outside of the global struggle between the oppressed and the oppressor. Vladimir Lenin and the Russian Revolution inspired Ho Chi Minh to embrace socialism in the liberation of Vietnam from colonialism and imperialism. It was African revolutions which motivated Malcolm X to adopt an internationalist vision for Black liberation in the United States. For each, racism was not about bad apples. The entire system of imperialism was rotten and both sought to uproot it through the positive means of winning the power of the oppressed to control and manage their own societies.

This doesn’t mean that Ho Chi Minh or Malcolm X ignored ideology. Ho Chi Minh struggled intensely with the socialist parties of the Second International, opposing their chauvinistic support of “fatherland” Western governments in the First World War to the detriment of colonized people. Malcolm X outlined the key tenets of what is now called the “Great Replacement Theory” nearly sixty years ago in 1964 when he said,

During recent years there has been much talk about a population explosion. Whenever they are speaking of the population explosion, in my opinion, they are referring to the people primarily in Asia or in Africa— the black, brown, red, and yellow people. It is seen by people of the West that, as soon as the standard of living is raised in Africa and Asia, automatically the people begin to reproduce abundantly. And there has been a great deal of fear engendered by this in the minds of the people of the West, who happen to be, on this earth, a very small minority.

In fact, in most of the thinking and planning of whites in the West today, it’s easy to see that fear in their minds, conscious minds and subconscious minds, that the masses of dark people in the East, who already outnumber them, will continue to increase and multiply and grow until they eventually overrun the people of the West like a human sea, a human tide, a human flood. And the fear of this can be seen in the minds, and in the actions, of most of the people here in the West in practically everything that they do. It governs their political views, it governs their economic views and it governs most of their attitudes toward the present society.

But even here Malcolm X related white fears of replacement not to some unexplainable hatred but to the material reality that white Americans and Westerners were quickly losing their ability to control the destinies of oppressed peoples of the world. Malcolm X’s words have only become more relevant in the current period. The rise of socialist China has precipitated a Cold War response from imperialism that has poured gasoline on the fire of anti-Asian racism and violence. The Black struggle for self-determination has faced a severe backlash from the U.S. mass incarceration state, opening the floodgates of racist reaction. And the fact that Payton Gendron was wearing a white supremacist Black Sun symbol so commonly seen on the uniforms Nazi Azov fighters in Ukraine is no coincidence. White supremacy is a global system of social control that is directed at any person, government, or movement (Russian, Chinese, Black American, Muslim, Arab, etc.) that is perceived to threaten the domination of Euro-American imperialism.

The entire system of U.S. imperialism is thus implicated in racist violence. This includes the Democratic Party, which has for decades been wedded to a neoliberal model of governance reliant upon austerity, state repression, and war. The Republican Party is but the loudest and most ideologically influential political branch of the U.S.’s racist and imperialist system. The more that the U.S. finds itself bogged down in its own contradictions, the stronger the tide of racist reaction becomes. A true fight against white supremacy involves popular organization against the forces that gave it birth: the U.S. military state waging wars fueled by dehumanization, the two-party duopoly enacting policies that deprive oppressed people of their needs, and the economic system of capitalism robbing the earth of public wealth and ecological sustainability to enrich its corporate masters.

Danny Haiphong’s work can be followed on Twitter @SpiritofHo and on YouTube as co-host with Margaret Kimberley of Black Agenda Report Present's: The Left Lens. You can support Danny on Patreon by clicking this link.   He is co-author of the book “American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People's History of Fake News- From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror.” You can contact him at haiphongpress@protonmail.com. 

The Contradictions of Bourgeois Secularism

By Yanis Iqbal

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

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

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

Marx writes:

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

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

The Emergence of Neoliberal Education and Its Deteriorating Effects For the Working Class

[Photo credit: Megan Jelinger/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images]

By Yanis Iqbal

Under neoliberal capitalism, the commodification of education has accelerated. Before the establishment of the current accumulation regime, the educational sector was predominantly controlled by an interventionist state, committed to countercyclical macroeconomic management. The labor process of teaching within a state-owned domain followed the general pattern of any other production process. According to Michael Heinrich, such a general form – which is independent of any social determinations – comprises a distinction “among functional activity (labor), the object of labor (which is modified by labor), and the means of labor (the tools with which this process of modification is made possible) as elements of the labor process.”

In the educational setting, labor is the teacher’s intellectual labor-power, the object of labor refers to students, and the means of labor comprises various teaching resources, equipment etc. The state organizes these factors into a particular set of relationships of production. Through the interaction between the elements of the production process, knowledge is generated, which is ultimately crystallized in the new labor power of educated and enculturated students. Thus, as Karl Marx stated, “education produces labor capacity”. Through the production of knowledge-enhanced labor power, the teachers contribute to an increase in labor productivity and facilitate the expansion of capital. In this pedagogical operation, teachers not only aid the reproduction of capital but create surplus-value. David Harvie explains: 

“[T]he exchange value of school, college or university graduates’ labor power (i.e. the wage they can command) may reflect the cost of their education; that is, the value of their educators’ labor power, rather than the value produced by their educators and embodied in the graduates. Yet graduates are, at least potentially, more productive by virtue of their education: by employing these graduates, capital is thereby able to appropriate not only the surplus value produced by them, but also that produced by their teachers.”

As is evident, public education meets certain demands of capitalist development. By skilling and socializing the future labor force, mass homogenous education enables the extensive mobility of personnel which is required under capitalism, in contrast to the feudal era, when people rarely went out of their villages or local areas. In this way, a person is equipped to serve the needs of capital, no matter where s/he is. The mass of working people that is to be educated is dependent on the degree of development of the productive forces. Marx remarked: 

“In order to modify the human organism, so that it may acquire skill and handiness in a given branch of industry, and become labor-power of a special kind, a special education or training is requisite, and this, on its part, costs an equivalent in commodities of a greater or less amount. This amount varies according to the more or less complicated character of the labor-power [emphasis mine]. The expenses of this education (excessively small in the case of ordinary labor-power), enter pro tanto into the total value spent in its production.”

In the post-World War II period, provisions for universal education were made by the state in both the Global North and Global South. For the Global North, the reasons for universalizing education were: a) the need for an educated workforce to promote dynamic economic growth, particularly in science, technology and other white-collar job categories; and b) the threat of communism – represented by the Soviet Union – which forced the Western ruling classes to create a class collaborationist social contract aimed at the fulfillment of workers’ basic needs. For the Global South, the reasons for universalizing education were: a) the need to produce urban pockets of semi-skilled and high-skilled laborers for the smooth execution of import-substitution industrialization; and b) the political dynamics of post-colonial national compacts which required Third World elites to alleviate mass poverty through welfarist methods. 

The promise of universal, state-sponsored education began to wither from the late 1960s. This was caused by the recession that both Global North and South economies faced due to distinct reasons and which forced them to dismantle public education in order to open new opportunities for capitalist expansion. In the Euro-Atlantic world, the economic crisis was the result of a falling rate of profit. According to Edwin N Wolff, the rate of profit decreased by 5.4% from 1966 to 1979 – a downfall precipitated by an increase in the organic composition of capital, and the contradictions of permanent arms economy and growing international competition. In the Global South, the economic crisis was caused by a drop in commodity prices which made the states borrow heavily. To recover, they turned to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In return for offering short-term credit, the IMF demanded “structural adjustments” – a euphemism for austerity and the destruction of public utilities. 

Disinvestment of state sector equity and privatization of state sector assets, invariably at throwaway prices, put an end to public education. This process symbolized the thorough commodification of education. In the words of Prabhat Patnaik, this means “not only that the labor power of those who are the products of the education system becomes a commodity, but that the education itself that goes into the production of this commodity [knowledge] becomes a commodity. The education system becomes in other words a process for the production of a commodity (the labor power of those who receive education) by means of a commodity (the education they receive).” In other words, education itself becomes a source of profit-making. 

Marx had predicted this when he wrote the following in Volume one of “Capital: A Critique of Political Economy”: 

“That laborer alone is productive, who produces surplus-value for the capitalist, and thus works for the self-expansion of capital. If we may take an example from outside the sphere of production of material objects, a schoolmaster is a productive laborer, when, in addition to belaboring the heads of his scholars, he works like a horse to enrich the school proprietor. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory, does not alter the relation.” 

In “Theories of Surplus Value”, he similarly said: 

“[T]he teachers in educational establishments may be mere wage workers for the entrepreneur of the establishment; many such educational factories exist in England. Although in relation to the pupils such teachers are not productive workers, they are productive workers in relation to their employer. He exchanges his capital for their labor power, and through this process enriches himself.”

The privatization of education is not just another tactical decision taken by capital to overcome barriers to surplus-extraction. It represents a qualitatively developed version of capitalism, one in which capital directly produces socially reproductive processes. As Marx elaborated in the “Grundrisse”: 

“The highest development of capital exists when the general conditions of the process of social reproduction are not paid for out of deductions from the social revenue, the state’s taxes—where revenue and not capital appears as the labor fund, and where the worker, although he is a free wage worker like any other, nevertheless stands economically in a different relation—but rather out of capital as capital. This shows the degree to which capital has subjugated all conditions of social reproduction to itself, on one side; and, on the other side, hence, the extent to which social reproductive wealth has become capitalized, and all needs are satisfied through the exchange form; as well as the extent to which the socially posited needs of the individual, i.e. those which he consumes and feels not as a single individual in society, but communally with others— whose mode of consumption is social by the nature of the thing—are likewise not only consumed but also produced through exchange, individual exchange”.

When private accumulation through an expropriation of state assets meets vigorous resistance, public sector activities themselves are cheapened through exploitative methods. In the case of education, the state either lowers labor costs by devaluing the work of teaching or asks teachers to do more with the same or fewer resources. This predictably leads to systematic casualization and forced flexibilization. Budgetary cuts to government institutions lead to problems of underfunding, encouraging the university administration to seek the help of external funders, such as well-resourced corporations. In this way, universities get reconstructed as an educational equivalent of joint-stock companies, subject to the ruthless and coercive logic of competition for research grants and student numbers. 

While in the initial period of neoliberalization the gutting of public education functioned as a conjunctural move to shore up profit rates, over the succeeding years it became structurally tethered to the economic requirements of a reworked productive base. In Northern countries, neoliberalism has led to three developments. First, investments have decreased due to overproduction, weak demand (caused by wage depression) and low profit rates in the productive sectors. Consequently, asset accumulation by speculative means has replaced actual accumulation or productive investment as a route to the increase of wealth, generating a system whose growth is based on financial bubbles and unsustainable explosions of credit/debt. 

Second, given the already high organic composition of capital, new productive investments have relied on automation, thus giving a temporary market advantage to the capitalist who is the first to introduce the technology. This technology allows him/her to squeeze out more value from each worker in a given period of time. But when the labor-saving technology becomes generalized in a sector, the benefits accruing to the capitalist are eliminated since everyone now produces commodities with the same automated labor process. Third, Northern capital has shifted the locus of value creation from the core to the periphery, outsourcing jobs to Third World where wages are very low. In other words, giant multinational monopolies are using differential rates of national exploitation to gain super-profits. 

All in all, the net effect of the aforementioned three changes is to reduce the number of individuals who are needed as trained workers in the Global North and thus, progressively deskill work. This, in turn, eliminates the need for an architecture of public education. In his book “The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame”, David Blacker explains: 

“The situation with production has changed due to its automation and globalization such that proportionately far fewer of the individuals once comprising the working classes of the global North are needed as workers. These people are being cut out of the economic loop altogether through a variety of proximal means: outsourcing, attrition, layoffs etc. They are being “casualized,” which is to say rendered ever-more precarious as forced participants in an increasingly stressful, dangerous, less stable and less remunerative subsistence “informal” economy. The autoworker becomes a service attendant who becomes a street vendor or worse…How much education do these latter really need? How much will elites tax themselves for such “waste”?

In Southern countries, neoliberalism has signified the assassination of the Third World project and the attendant blockage of autocentric development. This has translated into the entrenchment of extroverted economies. Countries rich in natural resources export primary goods to the Global North, and then tend to re-import manufactured products from these same countries. The value added to these manufactured commodities – typically constructed from the primary inputs imported earlier – generates profit for Northern countries while maintaining the Southern countries in a perpetual trade deficit. Other countries have soldered their economic engine to giant multinational corporations who through outsourcing operations and subcontracting chains extend parts of their productive processes to the South in search of abundant and cheap labor. 

The twin processes of primarization and global labor arbitrage have converted the Third World into an impoverished arena of labor-intensive activities such as extractivism, production, processing, and assembly, with export-oriented industrialization never going beyond the production of simple parts in mass quantities. Performing relatively unspecialized operations for multinationals, the jobs of peripheral workers generally feature low wages, high labor intensity, long working hours, and poor working environments. The global tendency toward deskilling, however, has not completely erased skilled labor. Financialization and the revolution in communications and digitalized technology have given rise to elitist and exclusive high-tech education training for high-skilled and knowledge workers. William I. Robinson notes: 

“[W]ork is increasingly polarized between unskilled and low-skilled labor on the farms and in the factories and office and service complexes of the global economy (as well as in the armed and security forces of the global police state), and on the other hand, high skilled technical and knowledge workers. While it is still too early to draw a final conclusion, it is likely that the revolutions just getting underway in nanotechnology, bio-engineering, 3D manufacturing, the Internet of Things, and robotic and machine intelligence—the revolutionary technologies of the immediate future, the so-called fourth industrial revolution—will only heighten this tendency towards bifurcation in the world's workforce between high-skilled tech and knowledge workers and those relegated to Mcjobs, at best, or simply to surplus labor.”

Taking into account the inextricability of neoliberal capitalism and a deregulated-commodified education, any struggle for public education has to strike at the very roots of economic exploitation. If the grotesque wealth inequalities inflicted by neoliberal savagery upon the working masses are allowed to remain, then a proliferation of public institutions providing inexpensive education would result only in the subsidization of upwardly mobile social classes. Therefore, a growth in government spending on education has to be accompanied by a strategy of nationalizations, wealth taxation, capital controls etc. Even then, the sustainable spread of socially progressive and universal education can be ensured only when the decision-making on investment and jobs has been taken out of the hands of the capitalist sector. For all of this to happen, we need to build a radical movement that is willing to abolish capitalism and pave the way toward communist experiments.

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.