Ideology

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Tue Sep 14, 2021 1:34 pm

Image

The Limits of “Lived Experience”
September 12, 2021
By Erica Caines – Sep 10, 2021

Online, the “left” continues to find itself in a never ending series of bad faith arguments around self-determination. Many terms/frameworks that may have had a subversive character within their original context when first articulated, have now been incorporated and distorted by liberalism encouraging radical individualism and anti-materialism. More and more, analyses that are dependent upon identity and “lived experience” are propped up, ultimately resulting in ad hominems, mud-slinging, intellectual dishonesty, and the inevitable tried-and-true anti-communism.

Anti-communist rhetoric from self-identifying socialists/communists is not new, but the relatively recent trend of rejecting revolutionary theory in favor of “lived experience” shows a lack in our processes for political education. The discourse following the protests that took place in Cuba on July 11th offers us a concrete example of this lack. Inside of the US, as anti-imperialist organizations and individuals worked to develop principled positions in response to the protests, counter-revolutionary forces, ranging from borgouise media, university academics, and anti-communist Cubans in Miami, were able to push their own narrative by abusing the device of “lived experience”. The demand was that everyone should “shut up and listen to Cuban voices”. However, at no point was a distinction made among which of those voices we should be listening. Should people listen to liberal Cuban voices? Should people listen to socialist Cuban voices? Should people listen to Cuban voices in Miami? More often than not, the answer to those questions is covertly the latter.

By dominating public discourse using identity (Afro-Cubans) as a weapon, history is negated. No account is taken for the relationship between Cubans, the Cuban state or it’s ongoing processes post-revolution. Therefore, a proper anti-imperialist response is thwarted because proper investigation has not occured. The scientific process has been denied. Amilcar Cabral understood this as the struggle against our own weaknesses. In his 1966 speech, The Weapon of Theory, Cabral says,

“When the African peoples say in their simple language that “no matter how hot the water from your well, it will not cook your rice,” they express with singular simplicity a fundamental principle, not only of physics, but also of political science. We know that the development of a phenomenon in movement, whatever its external appearance, depends mainly on its internal characteristics. We also know that on the political level our own reality — however fine and attractive the reality of others may be — can only be transformed by detailed knowledge of it, by our own efforts, by our own sacrifices.”

In Cuba’s case, identity reductionism and a collaborated bastardization of afro-pessimism and abolition instead pushed forward lazy analyses from many “leftists”. This not only rejects historical and contemporary context around what influences current conditions in Cuba, but aligned with the continuous US aggression towards the island.

Much of this confusion is made possible through political education processes that discourage people from engaging Marxism negating how African revolutionaries, whose works we understand are vital (like Castro, Jackson, Bishop, Sankara, Nkrumah, Machel, etc) engaged and used those texts to come to understand their own conditions. Understanding that materialist theory is a culmination of many lived experiences that help us scientifically analyze our material conditions is crucial to navigating the world as is. Instead, “leftists” are evoking “lived experience”, not as enhancement or strengthening of material analysis, but as a substitution for material analysis, thus allowing for subjects to become personal and individualized while overlooking historical truths. When Walter Rodney was engaged in struggle while in Tanzania, he took up a number of the debates which were happening in the revolutionary state, while also knowing his place as an outsider and not overstepping. He discusses this issue in the Tanzanian socialist state pretty precisely as a struggle between idealism and materialism. For Rodney, this divide represented a class divide between bourgeois/individualist and proletarian/peasant contradictions:

“Therefore one found there’s tremendous conflict taking place between bourgeois knowledge and scientific analysis which derived from looking at the actual practice of the producer classes in Tanzania and in the world at large at this particular point in time. Some of the questions were of theory; they had to address themselves to the whole plethora of bourgeois knowledge and understand its methodology, its perceptions, to understand the struggle between idealism and materialism.”

Dialectical-materialism suggests that human knowledge can in no way be abstracted from practice if there is an understanding that the material basis of a reality is constantly changing. Undoubtedly, one’s impressions of society are intricately linked to society itself. Analysis and abstraction are interwoven and that must be taken into context. Lived experience, however, is flawed because non-materialist attitudes have formed opinions based on first hand accounts around issues, like patriarchy and racism, but not from the point of view of global movement. Moreover, a rejection of scientific approaches, rigorous analytic tools, and abandonment of returning to the source (i.e. traditional methods) has bore outright anti-materialist sentiment. At best, lived experiences can serve as anecdotal impressions of what it’s like to be a member of an oppressed group, but they are not inherently true, ethical, moral or correct simply because they come from a member of a colonized/oppressed group. Furthermore there are outright reactionary lived experiences being pushed forward serving as anecdotes.

The commonly retorted, “Listen to the people of [insert group]” statement is void of analyzing the class character of the people and voices being elevated. This places emphasis on individuals and not what is actually occurring, because the lens to view it through is blurred by varying interests. This is the exact issue with relying on lived experience as an analytical tool.

Material analysis should correctly apply dialectical materialism to a particular problem. One thing “the left” can agree on is a changed society, but that change can not come without knowing how society functions. That requires an observation and analysis of class, national, ethnic and cultural characteristics of a society, not an emotional appeal with no material basis. That requires a scientific analysis that is far removed from an individual point of view that evades the fact that ‘experience’ cannot adequately describe the material structures that dominate our lives. Society isn’t a collection of individual experiences informed by nothing. Experiences are foundational, but they are not pure. Outside factors always mediate the lived experience. The best way to begin to understand this is an emphasis on fundamental political education that emphasizes the material basis of a reality in constant change.


Erica Caines is a poet, writer and organizer in Baltimore and the DMV. She is an organizing committee member of the anti war coalition, the Black Alliance For Peace as well as an outreach member of the Black centered Ujima People’s Progress Party. Caines founded Liberation Through Reading in 2017 as a way to provide Black children with books that represent them and created the extension, a book club entitled Liberation Through Reading BC, to strengthen political education online and in our communities.

Featured image: File Photo

(Hood Communist)


https://orinocotribune.com/the-limits-o ... xperience/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Sun Oct 03, 2021 2:24 pm

Image

Liberal Feminism is an Imperialist Project – Part 1
October 2, 2021
By Sou Mi and Madeleine Freeman – Sep 11, 2021

U.S. imperialism is responsible for the conditions facing women in Afghanistan today and others like them all across the world. Liberal feminism, with its reliance on the imperialist capitalist state, will never liberate the working class and poor women.

This article is the first in a Left Voice series on the situation of women in Afghanistan and the tasks of the international feminist movement in the fight against gender oppression. The return of Taliban rule in Afghanistan promises, and in many areas has already imposed, a rollback of women’s political, economic, and social rights that were hard-won by the Afghan feminist movement.

The plight of Afghan women and children has long been exploited as an excuse for foreign intervention in the country. These same arguments are being trotted out today to justify a continued U.S. presence, despite the official withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country. The dire conditions women Afghan women face today under brutal Taliban control are in fact the result of U.S. imperialism, as well as religious fundamentalism and civil war. They stem from an imperialist system built on the exploitation of the vast majority for the profit of a few.

There is an urgent need to adopt an anti-imperialist perspective as part of fighting back against the reactionary measures of the Taliban and winning the liberation of all women from the yoke of capitalist exploitation and oppression. From a socialist feminist perspective, the articles in this series take up the question of imperialism and liberal feminism and the history of the feminist movement in Afghanistan, and debate other strains of anti-imperialist feminism.

***

As Joe Biden initiated the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and city after city fell to the Taliban in a matter of days, the world watched the scenes from Kabul and across the country in horror. Babies were hoisted up to U.S. soldiers with the hope of getting them to safety and bodies fell from planes while U.S. citizens, officials, and allies were evacuated. As Afghans fought to protect their futures, they faced repression from Taliban forces.

Biden has received vicious bipartisan backlash for the events unfolding in Afghanistan, from liberals decrying the fall of democracy to the forces of fundamentalist reaction, to neocons bemoaning a humiliating end to U.S. imperialism’s longest war. The major bourgeois publications have rung the death knell of the Biden administration’s honeymoon phase and raised alarm bells of a shifting geopolitical landscape after this latest blow to U.S. imperialism. The sounds of the first major crisis in the Biden administration are deafening.

But above the din a resounding chorus can be heard: what about Afghanistan’s women and girls?

National and international politicians, public figures, and analysts who were silent for years about the dire conditions facing women and children in Afghanistan when it was U.S. bombs killing people in their homes and U.S.-backed militia commanders beating and killing women have suddenly found their voices again.

A bipartisan group of senators, led by Democrats Bob Menendez and Edward Markey, has already signed a letter urging Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to take special measures “to protect Afghan women,” saying they “are gravely concerned about the safety of women leaders, activists, judges, parliamentarians, and human rights defenders.”

António Guterres, the Secretary General of the United Nations, said in a statement to the UN Security Council that he is “particularly concerned by accounts of mounting human rights violations against the women and girls of Afghanistan who fear a return to the darkest days.”

Texas Republican Senator Michael McCaul, an outspoken opponent of women’s rights and abortion access, also suddenly expressed an overwhelming concern for the rights of women, saying, “We’re seeing this nightmare unfold — unmitigated disaster of epic proportions, and what I am really worried about the most are the women left behind and what’s going to happen to them.”

Democratic representative Nancy Pelosi was quick to say that she is “deeply concerned about reports regarding the Taliban’s brutal treatment of all Afghans, especially women and girls,” and that “The U.S., the international community and the Afghan government must do everything we can to protect women and girls from inhumane treatment by the Taliban.”

Make no mistake: the centralization of power by the Taliban — an ethnic-religious nationalist group with extreme anti-women views — has already put hundreds of thousands of women and girls at risk, and portends the scaling back of the gains made by the Afghan feminist movement over the last two decades. Reports from the ground tell stories of women afraid to go outside for fear of being beaten by Taliban soldiers, women being turned away from their jobs, students forbidden from entering their universities, and activists fearing for their lives as targets appear on their backs for speaking out against the Taliban.

If the Taliban’s advance across Afghanistan over the last twenty years has proved anything, it is that its rule means the brutal oppression of women as a means of social stabilization — robbing them of the freedom of movement, bodily autonomy, and participation in public life. Despite the Taliban’s assurances that “there will be no violence against women” in order to garner international support and recognition, we don’t need to imagine what its rule will look like; the “return” of the Taliban to Afghanistan’s metropolitan areas most directly under the influence of the United States has been a reality for many women across the country for years. This has meant public beatings and executions, women refused medical care without a male chaperone, and young women denied access to education or the ability to earn money for their families after their fathers and brothers have been killed by Taliban forces, the Afghan army, or the United States.

Yet the outpouring of pious outrage on behalf of Afghanistan’s women and girls is a morbid echo of the same deceitful reasons given for invading Afghanistan in 2001 which created the oppressive conditions for Afghan women for the last two decades. In fact, the women of Afghanistan have been treated as pawns of imperialism since before the Soviet occupation in 1979, used first as an excuse to meddle and invade and then discarded as collateral damage in the quest for profits for foreign and domestic capitalists and influence in the region.

Calls to “save” the women of Afghanistan from the clutches of the reactionary Taliban in the name of “human rights” and “democracy” are little more than a renewed justification for continued imperialist intervention in Afghanistan and elsewhere, whether it is in the form of military support or “humanitarian aid.” Imperialist intervention has never and will never “save” the women of Afghanistan, and justifications for such intervention in the name of “liberal feminism,” with its reliance on the capitalist state, merely co-opts feminists into the capitalist fold,making them oppressors themselves.

Any of the gains made in the terrain of freedom and rights of women have not come about because of the intervention of the United States or their allies in the Afghan government, but rather by the independent mobilization of Afghan feminists. As the Taliban secures its hold on power, Afghan women’s survival — whether inside the country or as refugees across the world — rests on the shoulders of the millions of Afghans fed up with both the Taliban and U.S.-backed governments and who are looking for their own solutions. Their liberation depends on the alliance of the Afghan women’s movement with the working class and the oppressed of the country and the whole region — and even within the feminist movements in imperialist countries — so that neither American imperialism, nor the Taliban, nor the Northern Alliance decide for the exploited and oppressed of the country.

The Toll of 20 Years of U.S. Occupation

A brief snapshot of conditions across Afghanistan is enough to show definitively that 20 years of U.S. intervention and its imposition of imperialist feminism at gunpoint has, far from drastically improving the lives of the majority of women in the country, directly ensured their continued oppression. Proponents of the Afghan War and liberal feminism like to point to a selection of woman journalists, doctors, and other “professionals” — as well as the occasional politician and capitalist — in Afghanistan’s major cities to show the positive influence of U.S. capitalism. They also ignore the millions of working-class and poor women who have been repeatedly displaced, impoverished, maimed, and killed in the course of a civil war waged with U.S. support for several decades.

Not only did the United States play a pivotal role in the creation of the Taliban and support fundamentalist militias in order to humiliate the occupying Soviet Union, but since switching sides in the 1990s and initiating its own invasion in 2001, U.S. forces in Afghanistan have enabled and participated in countless instances of violence against women by leaders of the Northern Alliance and other groups who oppose the Taliban. As Tariq Ali writes:

As for the status of women, nothing much has changed. There has been little social progress outside the NGO-infested Green Zone. Despite repeated requests from journalists and campaigners, no reliable figures have been released on the sex-work industry that grew to service the occupying armies. Nor are there credible rape statistics — although US soldiers frequently used sexual violence against “terror suspects,” raped Afghan civilians and green-lighted child abuse by allied militias.

Even as they decried the Taliban’s treatment of women, the United States backed the Northern Alliance and offered it international recognition at the level of the UN, despite the fact that they have few ideological differences with the Taliban when it comes to the rights of women. Many of those leaders had positions in the Afghan government until the Taliban took over in mid August.

This is to say nothing of the toll the Afghan War has taken on Afghans living in the region or displaced from their homes in the course of the war. Women and children have borne the brunt of the violence, first under the eye of the Soviet Union, then under the Taliban, and then under the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and U.S. forces.

According to official reports, over 71,000 civilians have died as a direct result of the conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan, at least 7,679 of which were children. Since 2010, more than 3,000 women have died as a result of the fighting, and over 7,000 injured. According to a recent report by the UN, “more women and children were killed and wounded in Afghanistan in the first half of 2021 than in the first six months of any year since records began in 2009.” Of course, the actual numbers are likely quite higher and do not take into account the hundreds of thousands of people who have died from hunger, disease, and injury.

At the time of Kabul’s fall to the Taliban in mid-August, there were more than 3.5 million people displaced within Afghanistan, living in makeshift shelters without adequate access to water, healthcare, and food. Of the 555,000 people displaced this year alone, 80 percent are women and girls. This is to say nothing of the millions of Afghan refugees who have fled their country to escape persecution and poverty only to face similar conditions in countries like Iran, Turkey, and Germany.

U.S. intervention and the constant civil war, while creating profits for U.S. weapons manufacturers and lining the pockets of Afghan and Taliban officials, created conditions of extreme poverty which undermine Afghan feminists’ ongoing struggles to fight for their lives and for expanded rights. In 2020, a reported 47.3 percent of the population lived below the national poverty line. The unemployment rate in Afghanistan is over 11 percent, with higher rates among women than men. More women may have entered the workforce since power was seized from the Taliban in 2001, but the majority face precarious conditions and low pay. While literacy rates have improved among women in certain areas of Afghanistan, among teenage girls it is still 37 percent.

These conditions, coupled with repressive laws and violently enforced religious practices, have made millions of women in Afghanistan dependent not only on male partners and family members for survival, but also on militias and warlords armed with American weapons. These are the material underpinnings of sexism and high rates of violence against women in the region.

The United States invaded Afghanistan using, among others, the excuse of rescuing Afghanistan’s women and children from fundamentalist Islam. But its nation-building and war-profiting priorities have been clear from the start: the United States has spent over $2 trillion on the conflict, nearly “1,000 times more money on its military intervention than on women’s rights efforts.”

As representatives from the feminist organization Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) recently explained, there is a direct line between the U.S. invasion and the oppression women face in Afghanistan today:

The US invaded Afghanistan under the pretext of ‘women rights’ but the only thing it brought on our women in the past eighteen years is violence, murder, sexual violence, suicide and self-immolation, and other misfortunes. The U.S. brought to power the most vicious enemies of Afghan women, the Islamic fundamentalists, and committed an unforgivable treachery against our suffering women. This has been its tactic for the past four decades. By nurturing Jihadi, Taliban and ISIS which are all Islamic fundamentalist elements and not just murderous criminals, but misogynists as well, the U.S. has practically oppressed our women.

The Dead End of Liberal Feminism

The reality of the U.S. occupation exposes the lies told over the last 20 years to justify the continued occupation of Afghanistan and support for the Afghan government. But it has also made clear that liberal feminism offers no solution to Afghan women or any other women fighting oppression across the world. Celebrating U.S. military intervention, liberal feminism created a false narrative of western feminism saving Arab and Muslim women from the clutches of their reactionary cultures while simultaneously undermining local anti-imperialist feminist movements and hacking away at women’s livelihoods over the years while a few benefitted. Nowhere is this more evident than in the festishization of the burqa and hijab as symbols of women’s oppression. These same arguments are being trotted out once again amid renewed calls to “save” the gains made by women over the last 20 years from the Taliban.

Not only does this obscure the fact that sexism has far from been eradicated in Western countries and that the majority of working-class and poor women in imperialist nations also suffer gender oppression at the hands of the state, but it ignores two important elements: first, the conditions giving rise to women’s oppression in specific social and political circumstances — painting the “clash of civilizations” as one of democracy against terrorism, culture against culture — and second, the critical role that sexism plays in sustaining the capitalist economy.

The ideology of liberal feminism is built on the economic foundations of neoliberal capitalism. It claims that the way to fight sexism is through a combination of hardened individualism, participation in the free market, and cooperation with the capitalist state to make women and men “equal” under capitalist democracy. It promises that a rising tide for some will lift all boats, but in the end it ensures the freedom of a small selection of women built on the exploitation of the vast majority of working and poor women.

That’s why liberal feminists are quick to draw on the plight of Afghan women entrepreneurs and politicians in their political posturing but conveniently seem to forget the millions of women who work for them for low wages, the women who have been thrown into abject poverty as a result of their policies and prolonged war, or even the millions of Afghan refugees who have escaped the Taliban only to be treated as second-class citizens in foreign countries. They see the way forward in Afghanistan as being paved by NGO-sponsored programs to encourage opportunities for women entrepreneurs and professionals who will then produce profits, if not directly for U.S. capitalists, for their allies in local government. Meanwhile, those NGOs abandon and impoverish many more women than they help. As Rafia Zakaria explains:

The hundreds of millions in development aid that the United States poured into its savior-industrial complex relied on second-wave feminists’ assumption that women’s liberation was the automatic consequence of women’s participation in a capitalist economy.

But as we have already explained, conditions for the vast majority of women in Afghanistan today — who rely mostly on foreign aid to survive and prop up much of the Afghan economy through “informal” or unpaid labor — shows the utopian delusion of meritocracy in capitalist society. While a few women may have been able to win positions in the government or get well-paying jobs inside and outside Afghanistan, the majority of women do not enjoy those same freedoms, whether under the Taliban or U.S.-backed forces. In contrast, they make up the backbone of the weak Afghan economy, working in factories, schools, restaurants, hospitals, etc. and doing the majority of the country’s unpaid social reproduction.

Though it may take different forms, liberal feminism ultimately relies on the capitalist state to carry out women’s liberation, paradoxically pinning its hopes on the very institutions that ensure women’s subjection in the first place. The last 20 years in Afghanistan paint this picture quite clearly. On paper, Afghanistan has one of the most progressive constitutions in the region. It states unequivocally that “men and women are equal before the law” and makes provisions for women to participate in the government. Several laws passed since then have sought to expand on those rights and protections, particularly the 2009 Elimination of Violence against Women (EVAW) law which “mandates punishments for 22 acts of violence against women, including rape, and obliges the government to take specific actions to prevent violence and assist victims. It also criminalizes violations of women’s civil rights, including depriving a woman of her inheritance or preventing a woman from pursuing work or an education.”

But, as Lenin states, equality in law is not the same thing as equality in life. The constitution and the EVAW have never been fully implemented anywhere in Afghanistan. Government institutions, from the police to the courts, actively undermine what little protections these documents aim to provide. Further, the constitution stipulates that the EVAW and any subsequent legislation are also subject to legitimate legal challenge by applications of Sharia law and the restrictive 1976 penal code, allowing religion to be weaponized by the state to subjugate women for the benefit of a false social stability. Moreover, what little protections women in Afghanistan have won over the years are under constant attack by reactionary elements inside the Afghan government and Talbian forces outside the major cities.

So while feminists in imperialist countries might like to pat themselves on the back for supporting the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001 and the institution of a government that made certain reforms by presidential decree, the reality of inequality and gender violence at the hands of partners, the militias, and the state tells a different story of vast gender oppression in the country. According to a report by the UN Global Database on Violence Against Women, 46 percent of Afghan women have reported instances of sexual or physical assualt from partners in the last 12 months. As Oxfam reports, 87 percent of all women in Afghanistan experience some type of violence daily. What cases do get reported are often thrown out or ignored by the police who side with abusers to keep women in their place. In many cases the police themselves are the ones carrying out these acts of violence. As the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission recently reported, “nearly 15% of honour killings and sexual assaults carried out against women in the last two years were by police.”

The liberal feminist answer to these obstacles is to rely more heavily on the state and its auxiliaries in the NGOs — giving more funding to international women’s safety programs and the police — and to increase women’s representation in government. They took the limited number of women in the Afghan government — before it fell to the Taliban — as a sign of progress and equality; in reality these women were merely participating in the renegotiation of the terms of exploitation and oppression of the vast majority of working class and poor women across the nation. Nowhere is this more grossly demonstrated than by the scenes of women politicians taking part in peace negotiations with the Taliban, with the United States acting as mediator, during the Intra-Afghan peace talks in 2020.

With the withdrawal of U.S. troops and the failure of U.S. imperialism in Afghanistan, liberal feminists are once again searching for ways to “save” Afghan women from the very conditions the U.S. created in the country. With increased U.S. intervention off the table for now, their horizons are limited to calling for sanctions against Afghanistan, a massive program of relocating Afghan women who have benefitted the most from U.S. occupation, and donations to NGOs. As countless historical examples have shown, these non-solutions will undoubtedly lead to further hardship for the Afghan women left behind to deal with Taliban rule. Rather than pressuring politicians, sanctions merely place more burden on the working class and oppressed. A relocation program that picks and chooses only those women who the U.S. deems worthy leaves millions of the most vulnerable women even more exposed to poverty, displacement, and violence. Donating to NGOs is just imperialist intervention in another form, integrating certain sectors of semicolonial economies further into the capitalist fold and putting a band-aid on increasing social disintegration.

U.S. imperialism is responsible for the conditions facing women in Afghanistan today and others like them all across the world. Liberal feminism, with all of its reliance on the imperialist capitalist state, is a dead end when it comes to the liberation of the working class and poor women. Liberal feminism presents us with an alternative where the economic liberation of a small fraction of women is brought about by the devastating bombs of the American state. We must reject this alternative which claims that supporting the Democratic Party is the lesser evil when the Afghan tragedy is the responsibility of the bipartisan regime.

In the United States, a truly anti-imperialist feminism must be at the forefront of the struggle against the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, which will not cease just because the troops have been pulled out. We must build a strong feminist and anti-imperialist movement in the heart of the beast to fight immediately for open borders for Afghan refugees, oppose U.S. sanctions, an end to U.S. bombing campaigns, and for the self-determination of the Afghan people.

https://orinocotribune.com/liberal-femi ... t-project/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Sun Oct 17, 2021 2:31 pm

Image

A Critique of Western Marxism’s Purity Fetish
October 16, 2021
By Carlos L. Garrido – Oct 13, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

Parmenides Contra Heraclitus

Image

Whereas Manoel and Losurdo see the root of this purity fixation in Christianity, it is in the classical Greek debates on the question of change – taking place 500 years or so before Christ – where this fixation emerges. It will be necessary to paint with a broad stroke the history of philosophy to explain this thesis.
The Heraclitan philosophy of universal flux, which posits that “everything flows and nothing abides; everything gives way and nothing stays fixed”, would lose its battle against the Parmenidean philosophy of permanence.Parmenides, who held that foolish is the mind who thinks “that everything is in a state of movement and countermovement”, would dominate the conceptions of truth in the ancient, medieval, modern, and contemporary world.[ii] Although various aspects of Heraclitus’ thought would become influential in scattered minds, the dialectical aspect of his thought would never be centered by any philosophical era.Plato, as the next best dialectician of the ancient world, attempted a reconciliation of Parmenides and Heraclitus. In the realm of Forms, the Parmenidean philosophy of permanence would reign; in the physical realm, the Heraclitan philosophy of flux would. In his Phaedo, Plato would note that the realm of the physical world is changing and composed of concrete opposites in an interpenetrative, i.e., dialectical, relationship to one another. In the realm of the “unchanging forms”, however, “essential opposites will never… admit of generation into or out of one another”.[iii] Truth, ultimately, is in the realm of the Forms, where “purity, eternity, immortality, and unchangeableness” reign.[iv] Hence, although attempting to provide a synthesis of Parmenides’ and Heraclitus’ philosophy of permanence and change, the philosophy of purity and fixation found in Parmenides dominates Plato’s conception of the realm of the really real, that is, the realm of Forms or Idea.

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

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

Hegel Contra Parmenides

Image

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

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

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

The Paradox of Western Marxists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Western Marxist dogmatist fetishize binaries, the immediate (either intuitive or empirical), and the pure. To them, something is either socialism (if it is pure) or not-socialism (if it is impure). They cannot grapple, in practice at least, with the concept of becoming, that is, with the reality of the construction of socialism. Socialism must be constructed, it is an active enterprise emersed necessarily in a world riddled by imperialist pressures, contradictions, and violence – both active and passive. Western Marxist will write splendid critiques of positivism’s fetish of the ‘fact’, but in their own practical analysis of socialist construction in the world they too castrate facts from the factors that allowed them to exist.
Hence Žižek, the most prominent Hegelian Marxist today, couches his anti-dialectical bourgeois critiques of socialism in Cuba (as well as China and pretty much every other socialist experiment) within a reified analysis that strips the Cuban reality from its context. It ignores the historical pressures of being a small island 90 miles away from the world’s largest empire; an empire which has spent the last 60+ years using a plethora of techniques – from internationally condemned blockades, to chemical attacks, terrorist fundings, and 600+ CIA led attempts on Fidel’s life – to overthrow the Cuban revolution. Only in ignoring this context and how it emerges can Žižek come to the purist and anti-dialectical conclusion that the revolution failed and that the daily life of Cubans is reducible to “inertia, misery, escapism in drugs, in sex, [and] pleasures”.

The Panacea to the Fetishes of Western Marxism

Image

In sum, expanding upon the analysis of comrade Manoel, it can be seen that the purity fetish, and the subsequent infatuation with failed experiments and struggles which, although never achieving the conquest of power, stayed ‘pure’, can be traced back to a Parmenidean conception of Truth as Unchanging Permanence which has permeated, in different forms, all throughout the various moments of western philosophy’s history.
This interpretive phenomenon may be referred to as an intellectual rot because; 1) at some point, it might have been a fresh fruit, a genuine truth in a particular moment; 2) like all fruits which are not consumed, they outlive their moment of ripeness and rot. Hence, the various forms the Parmenidean conception of Truth took throughout the various moments it permeated might have been justified for those moments, but today, after achieving a proper scientific understanding of the dialectical movement in nature, species, human social formation and thought, Parmenidean purity has been overthrown – it has spoiled, and this death fertilizes the soil for dialectical self-consciousness.
Although all theorists are still class subjects, bound to the material and ideological conditioning of their class and geographical standpoint (in relation to imperialism specifically) – the panacea for Western Marxists’ purity fetish is dialectics. Dialectics must not be limited simply to the theoretical realm in which they engage with it. If it stays in this pure realm, it will suffer the same fate socialism has for them – nothingness, absolute negation. Dialectical logic must be brought beyond the textbook and used as the interpretive framework with which we analyze the world in general, and the construction of socialism in specific. Only then will Western Marxism gain the possibility of being something more than a ‘radical’ niche of Western academia, focused only on aesthetics and other trivialities where purity can be sustained without risk of desecration.

Citations.
Wheelwright, Phillip. The Presocratics. (The Odyssey Press, 1975). pp. 70.
[ii] Ibid., pp. 97.
[iii] Plato. “Phaedo” in The Harvard Classics. (P.F. Collier & Son Corporation, 1937). pp. 70, 90.
[iv] Ibid., pp. 71.
[v] Aristotle. “Metaphysics” In The Basic Works of Aristotle. (The Modern Library, 2001)., pp. 736.
[vi] Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Lectures on the History of Philosophy Vol I. (K. Paul, Trench, Trübner, & Company, 1892)., pp. 278.
[vii] Ibid., pp. 282, 278.
[viii] Ibid., pp. 282.
[ix] Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Science of Logic. § 132-134.
[x] Ibid., § 187
[xi] Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phenomenology of Spirit. (Oxford University Press, 1977)., pp. 10.
[xii] Ibid.
[xiii] pp. 19.
[xiv] Hegel’s Lectures pp. 283 and Phenomenology pp. 19.
[xv] Phenomenology., pp. 19.
[xvi] Ibid., pp. 23.
[xvii] Ibid., pp. 2.
[xviii] In Hegel’s jargon, ‘absolute negation/negativity’ refers to the second negation, i.e., the negation of the negation. This is not how I am using it here. Instead, what I intend to mean by ‘absolute negation’ here is simply the complete annihilation of the original conception, as opposed to the process of aufhebung, where the cancelation is partial and a part of the old conception is sustained or elevated into the new one in a higher ‘level’.
[xix] Phenomenology., pp.6.
[xx] Marx, Karl. “Critique of the Gotha Program” In Robert C. Tucker’s The Marx-Engels Reader. (W.W. Norton and Company, 1978)., pp. 529.
[xxi]Phenomenology., pp. 23.





Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American graduate student and assistant 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, 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.





Featured image: Cuban leader Fidel Castro along Chilean martyr President Salvador Allende. File photo.

(Midwestern Marx)

https://orinocotribune.com/a-critique-o ... ty-fetish/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Wed Oct 27, 2021 1:41 pm

Image

China and Cuba’s Market Reforms Aren’t “Revisionist”

October 26, 2021
By Rainer Shea – Oct 24, 2021

In his work Critique of the Gotha Programme, Karl Marx took his objection to the analysis of some other communists as an opportunity to put forth an analysis of what needs to happen within communist development. At least in regards to the means of production, this analysis consists of the following ideas:

-That labor is not the source of all wealth; even without labor, we would have the wealth that nature gives us. Therefore, whether society has wealth doesn’t necessarily stem from whether labor is present.

-That there’s a difference between “labor” as it’s defined under the capitalist means of production, and labor as it would be defined under fully developed communism. Whereas labor under capitalism centers around business and the acquisition of property, labor under fully developed communism would not involve these things.

As Marx articulates this: “In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”

The steps towards such an outcome include the abolition of money and the abolition of the state, which reinforce the capitalist model of production. As Marx implies, such a shift would not take away society’s wealth and prosperity. It would only take away the inequalities that the capitalist model of production creates.

Under the capitalist model of production, the fact that people have different productive capacities makes them bound to become unequal. This is what he means by “bourgeois right”; the ability which the capitalist model of production gives individuals to unequally accrue resources. As Marx says, this right “tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege.”

During the initial stage of a socialist revolution, where the state and money haven’t yet been abolished, the bourgeois right is still recognized, because the capitalist model of production hasn’t yet been phased out. The workers now control the means of production, but they haven’t so far replaced it. As Marx writes, “What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges.”

This facet in the steps towards communism, where Marx acknowledges that capitalism needs to be developed beyond in increments, applies to current events within the countries that are governed by Marxist-Leninist parties. Events that pertain to a crucial debate within today’s global communist movement: whether or not a communist party allowing private businesses to exist under its governance is revisionist.

The five modern socialist states China, Cuba, Laos, Vietnam, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea all allow private businesses within their borders to differing extents. And to the ire of some factions within the communist movement, China and Cuba in particular have responded to the imperialist sabotage of their economies by economically opening up. After Mao’s death, China decided to utilize markets to grow its economy (an approach that’s been behind the lifting of 850 million Chinese out of poverty, according to the research of Peking University’s Yao Yang). And this year, Cuba opened up its economy to private businesses to alleviate the costs of the pandemic and of U.S. sanctions.

The communist faction that believes Cuba’s economic policies to be revisionist is significant, at least enough to considerably impact mainstream thought within the movement. Marxists.org, which describes itself as the “Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line,” features a 1983 article titled Cuba: What Went Wrong? It claims that it’s “clear that the Cuba of today is not a revolutionary country,” citing in part Cuba’s economic dysfunction and the consequential woes regarding the country’s living standards.

No doubt the “anti-revisionist” camp holds the same view of today’s Cuba in light of its recent reforms, as this camp continues to frequently decry modern China for its own utilizations of markets. But just as was the case in the 1980s, this camp is wrong. The central basis for the “anti-revisionist” position—and for the 1983 Cuba article’s argument—is that the Soviet Union became not just revisionist, but “social imperialist,” and that Cuba in turn became a sugar colony for this imperialism. According to the article, this made Cuba’s leadership complicit in a neo-colonial project, indicating that it’s willing to betray Marxism in other ways.

But this characterization of the USSR’s socioeconomic role, which these “anti-revisionists” now apply to China with their accusations of the PRC engaging in “neo-colonialism,” is erroneous when directed at both countries. Neither fit the criteria for Lenin’s definition of imperialism, nor for the type of definition that one can apply in the 21st century. The PRC lacks the characteristic of a monopoly capitalist class that’s crucial for a country to be imperialist in the era of capitalism, as did the USSR.

This is why those who seek to paint existing socialism as “revisionist” hold tightly to the narrative about Soviet and Chinese imperialism; without it, their argument holds no theoretical or historical weight. There’s a difference between the actually revisionist domestic policies of the USSR’s post-Stalin leadership—which actively weakened the state’s role as an instrument of class struggle—and the policies of the modern socialist countries, which retain the proletariat dictatorship model laid down by Lenin and Stalin. Xi Jinping himself has stated that the post-Stalin USSR made a fatal mistake in abandoning the parameters provided by Marxism-Leninism. And the structure of today’s Communist Party of China continues to follow these parameters, despite the misleading attempts from the “anti-revisionists” to paint the party as controlled by capitalists.

When you peel back the misleading accusations of “social imperialism,” and of communist parties serving as fronts for capitalist oligarchies, you find that the existing communist countries are merely following in the path that Marx explained will be necessary for reaching communism: retain the capitalist model of production during the initial stage, and make that model extinct when the conditions allow for it. In the current conditions of imperialism, where all attempts to build communism are perpetually under siege, the state needs to be utilized by revolutionaries. This is the basis for Marxism-Leninism.

And so long as a communist party doesn’t repeat the mistakes of the Soviet leadership, it can utilize markets without being revisionist. Given Cuba’s current conditions, where the imperialists are weaponizing the pandemic and the subsequent economic crisis to incite counterrevolutionary sabotage within the country, utilizing markets could turn out to be the country’s route out of counterrevolution. Because if market reforms have been indispensable for bringing China out of poverty, they’ll likely be indispensable for improving Cuba’s conditions, and therefore for weakening the leverage of the imperialists. They’ll also help address the legitimate internal shortcomings with Cuba’s economic model that the “anti-revisionists” have seized upon.

Featured image: Miguel Díaz-Canel president of Cuba.

https://orinocotribune.com/china-and-cu ... visionist/

The so-called anti-revisionists' are afflicted with the 'infantile disorder' and provide but another line of defense for the capitalist ruling class. Thanks, guys....It is what we expect from the petty bourgeoisie.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Wed Nov 03, 2021 2:06 pm

Image

All Communists Must Properly Grasp Geopolitics in Order to Win
October 31, 2021
By Rainer Shea – Oct 28, 2021

The global class and anti-colonial war is a conflict that the imperialists have been able to rig at every turn. In the era of imperialism, where capital has gotten its tentacles into virtually every corner of the planet, those who seek to supplant capital must at all times carefully anticipate the next maneuvers of the forces of counterrevolution. This is because for as long as imperialism remains dominant, for as long as monopoly capital and finance capital have more leverage than the revolutionaries, the revolutionaries must navigate global markets.

This requires compromises. This requires tact, level headedness, and pragmatism. At this stage, to try to bypass these compromises in the name of ideological purity, to rush ahead with notions of immediately abolishing the state, money, nations, or all business, is to condemn the revolutionary struggle. As Michael Parenti wrote, this is what utopian socialist thinkers don’t grasp:

Real socialism, it is argued, would be controlled by the workers themselves through direct participation instead of being run by Leninists, Stalinists, Castroites, or other ill-willed, power-hungry, bureaucratic, cabals of evil men who betray revolutions. Unfortunately, this ‘pure socialism’ view is ahistorical and nonfalsifiable; it cannot be tested against the actualities of history. It compares an ideal against an imperfect reality, and the reality comes off a poor second. It imagines what socialism would be like in a world far better than this one, where no strong state structure or security force is required, where none of the value produced by workers needs to be expropriated to rebuild society and defend it from invasion and internal sabotage.

“Dengists” are now another one of those categories of supposed villains that get accused of corrupting socialism. At the core of the attacks against Deng Xiaoping’s approach towards building socialism in China—which range from flimsy charges of Chinese imperialism to outright CIA disinformation about Uyghur ethnic cleansing—is the idea that the Dengists have embraced a “revisionist” vision of Marxism. This charge is propagated not just by sectarians within the communist movement, but by the U.S. media at large; the concept that China is an imperialist oligarchy that’s socialist only in name prevails within how pundits frame the country. Whatever real or imagined contradictions exist within China—or within the other socialist countries—get exploited to hammer in this argument. The argument that gets interpreted by much of the U.S. left as a call for geopolitical neutrality, where we should take the stance of “neither Washington nor Beijing.”

The same applies to the questions of whether to defend Assad, or Iran, or Venezuela, or Cuba, or the DPRK, or Russia, or the anti-imperialist government in Belarus. Because the CIA’s narratives about these countries can’t be questioned without provoking accusations of atrocity denial, “authoritarianism,” “campism,” or (within the sectarian leftist facet of this rhetoric) “revisionism,” the default Western leftist stance is to not take sides when it comes to geopolitics. This is the approach advocated for by the Democratic Socialists of America, which has put forth the statement: “Against Campism, for International Working-Class Solidarity.” Numerous other sources within the U.S. left, from Jacobin to Haymarket, have endorsed this sentiment.

There’s something deeply suspect about all of this. Foremost, why does this divisive backlash against “campism” exist at all, and why has it gained such prominence within leftist discourse specifically during the recent years when Washington has launched a full-on hybrid asymmetrical war against China? Why does the rhetoric of this backlash paint things so simplistically, portraying solidarity with besieged anti-imperialist countries not as the nuanced stance that it is but as an uncritical endorsement of everything these countries do? International workers solidarity and anti-imperialist solidarity aren’t mutually exclusive. We can view China as a socialist country while supporting the struggle of China’s workers to overcome the contradictions they continue to face. We can defend Russia from Washington‘s propaganda while supporting the struggle of its proletariat to restore the Soviet Union.

And why do these calls for “nuance” in discussing anti-imperialist countries consistently exaggerate or fabricate the transgressions of these countries, resorting to Western media tropes like the one about Chinese “neo-colonialism” in Africa? Nothing about these arguments comes across as good faith. They all take on the characteristics of concern-trolling, where someone raises an issue of “concern” simply for the sake of raising an issue.

What happens when a communist lets this rhetoric control the narrative? When they accept the flawed arguments about China being imperialist, and about today’s great geopolitical conflict therefore being an inter-imperialist rivalry rather than the class war that it is? What happens is they sabotage their own cause. They can even become pawns in Washington’s cold war machinations, whether in propaganda terms or in more destructive areas. Last year the Philippine communist party, a Maoist entity which subscribes to the narrative that Dengists betrayed socialism, began a campaign to use its armed wing for attacking Chinese firms within the country.

Look at how enthusiastic the CIA’s propaganda outlet Radio Free Asia was to report this news, and to emphasize the overlap in interests that Washington has with the Maoists in sabotaging China’s projects:

[The Maoists] target Chinese companies involved in infrastructure projects, including state-backed firms that the United States has blacklisted for their part in Beijing’s militarization in the South China Sea. The communists announced the move six weeks after the Philippine government – their enemy for the past half-century – declared that it would not follow Washington’s lead by cutting ties with firms involved in China’s building of artificial islands and military installations in the disputed waterway. At least one of those 24 firms sanctioned by the U.S. is involved in Philippine infrastructure projects.

These terrorist attacks against China’s firms—firms which serve the national interests of the Philippines by enabling it to usher in a “golden age of infrastructure”—come on the heels of fifty years of guerrilla warfare waged by the Maoists. This war could have ended with the country’s 2016 peace deal, but the Maoists have continued to deprive the country of peace, ironically to the consequence of setting back the victory for proletarian revolution in the Philippines; like the infamous “Gonzaloist” Maoists in Peru, they’ve pursued and continued violence to an excessive degree, one that the material conditions don’t call for. All rationalized by their core belief that existing socialism is the enemy, and that the Maoist splinter ideology (along with its adventurist impulses) must therefore be adhered to at all costs.

It’s no wonder why in addition to anarchism, Maoism is historically one of the ideologies that the FBI’s counterintelligence program has promoted in order to splinter the left, and to attack existing socialism from a “socialist” position. Maoism, and ultra-leftism generally, have always posed a risk of destabilizing the proletarian movement. In regards to the Naxalites, India’s branch of this Maoist sectarian faction, the Communist Party of India has featured a 1985 article which affirms that this faction is a threat to the global proletarian movement:

[It’s] the time-tested experience of the international communist movement that left–sectarianism and ultra-left adventurism is the observation of right-reformism and revisionism and ends up serving the interests of the ruling classes. Ultra–leftism of any variety of which naxalism is type, contains within itself the seeds of disruption and self-destruction.

It is well known that the naxalite movement disintegrated into myriad groups and factions in the early seventies within five years of its birth. Along with this organizational disintegration, and preceding it, was the ideological disarray and confusion. In this article, the focus is on the ideological dead end these groups have reached, which is the basis for the continuing derailment of the left-adventurist stream. After continuously grappling with the ideologically bankrupt positions taken at the outset, the naxalite groups are nowhere near resolving the problems, which began when they abandoned their Marxist-Leninist moorings. Every theoretical and political issue, which confronts them, leads [to] further ideological confusion and consequent organisational splintering. Despite their decade-long struggle to “reorient and rectify” their positions none of these groups have come anywhere near correcting their dogmatic errors. On the other hand, these groups have further degenerated into anti-left anarchic groups subject to the worst forms of petty-bourgeois deviations.


And these problems still apply to the Naxalites, who are fighting a perpetual decades-long guerrilla war in parallel to the situation of the Philippine Maoists. This is the consequence of failing to properly grasp geopolitics. Because the original Maoists made the mistake in their geopolitical analysis of concluding that the USSR was “social imperialist,” they splintered the global communist movement upon the introduction of the Deng reforms, seeing any deviation from Mao’s approach as a repeat of the Soviet Union’s mistakes (mistakes which they exaggerated in the first place). Now they’re promoting the narrative that China has become imperialist due to its market reforms, and are using this as a rationale for militarily attacking Chinese firms to Washington’s delight.

Without a careful geopolitical analysis, one that allows for building the necessary bonds with socialist countries like China and learning from China’s socioeconomic development, communists will find themselves running in circles of guerrilla struggle, splintering into quarreling factions, and acting as warfare proxies for the imperialists. And should they ever win their endless guerrilla wars, the socialist states they’ll try to build will be constrained by dogma, with these states’ leaders refusing to utilize private business like every existing socialist state has done.

https://orinocotribune.com/all-communis ... er-to-win/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Fri Nov 05, 2021 2:18 pm

Image

Richard Lewontin, dialectical materialism, the relationship between evolutionary biology and Marxism
Originally published: Science for the People by Erik Svensson (November 3, 2021 ) | - Posted Nov 04, 2021

On July 4, 2021, the great population geneticist and evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin passed away at the age of 92. Lewontin left a strong political legacy in the United States in addition to his scientific one. He shared this political legacy with his fellow Marxist and comrade Richard Levins, who passed away five years ago and who was memorialized in an article titled “The People’s Scientist” in Jacobin in 2016.1 In 1985, the two co-authored a famous but also controversial book, The Dialectical Biologist. Published in the last phase of the Cold War and during the Reagan era, The Dialectical Biologist was a brave attempt to promote Marxism as a useful philosophy to biologists during a politically difficult time for those on the left. Levins and Lewontin forcefully argued that Marxism in general, and dialectical materialism in particular, could enrich evolutionary thinking and help us better understand the complexities of the natural world.

Dialectical materialism combines two philosophical traditions: historical materialism formulated by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and dialectics, an idealist philosophy formulated by German philosopher Georg Willhelm Friedrich Hegel. Marx and Engels rejected Hegel’s idealism, but incorporated his dialectical philosophy into their historical materialist theory of how societies change. They argued that while human societies developed through configurations of productive forces and changes in economic and material conditions (including access to natural resources), materialism alone is not enough to understand human societies. Marx and Engels’s intervention was the addition of history, which reflects the internal contradictions within societies: class struggles between lords and peasants under feudalism and between workers and capitalists under capitalism. Whereas historical materialism reflects that all human intellectual activities and achievements ultimately have a material basis and that history does not unfold according to some unknown and mysterious spiritual force or pre-determined plan, dialectics complements this materialist insight and emphasizes the inner contradictions of all material systems ultimately needed for history to take place at all. In other words, although there might be general rules and natural laws shaping the history of both humans and other parts of the natural world, inherent contradictions in all material systems generate historical contingencies. This idea is something that most evolutionary biologists are familiar with, and the arcs of neither history nor biology are therefore inevitable. Both dialectics and materialism were equally important in the philosophy of Marx and Engels, and this philosophy had an influence on later followers, including Levins and Lewontin.

Dialectical materialism was therefore an attempt to synthesize and combine two philosophies with different origins. The reason Marx and Engels gave for this integration of these two traditions is that dialectics without materialism runs the risk of becoming naïve idealism, whereas materialism without dialectics runs the risk of becoming naïve reductionism. Levins and Lewontin contrasted their dialectical materialist perspective to the two popular but idealistic currents among bourgeois intellectuals: vitalism and reductionism.2 A large part of Levin’s and Lewontin’s inspiration came from Engels’s classic text Dialectics of Nature, which stimulated their attempt to reintroduce dialectical materialism into Western science.

In Dialectics of Nature, Engels put forward some rather speculative ideas that, although not always upheld by later research, revealed a brilliant and creative approach and showed how dialectics could provide a fruitful way of thinking about the evolutionary process. Among Engels’s more radical contributions was to suggest that the human hand and bipedalism had coevolved with the evolution of a large brain. Engels argued that these two traits were mutually reinforcing during evolution: as the brain became more capable of solving difficult problems, the hand was enabled to take on more tasks, which resulted in a selective feedback loop that drove the evolution of an even more advanced cognitive ability of the brain, and so forth.

Here we see the intellectual precursor of an idea that Lewontin and Levins developed further in The Dialectical Biologist: that different traits are not independent of each other, but rather quasi-independent and many times co-selected for a common function. Organisms are thus not the mere collection of a series of independent “traits,” and the whole (the organism) is clearly more than the sum of its parts (the organism’s traits). To quote Levins and Lewontin: “Every part or activity of an organism acts as environment for other parts” (p. 58), which means that an important part of the selective environment of every trait in an organism are other traits of that organism, as well as the need for traits to function together with each other. Furthermore, Levins and Lewontin emphasize that “…interdependence permits survival when the parts function well, but in pathological conditions, produces pervasive disaster” (p. 58) and that “… different organs or processes that have little direct interaction may be bound together ecologically by their common adaptive significance” (p. 60), underscoring that organisms are co-adapted systems, where the sum is more than the parts and traits are co-selected to improve organismal survival and reproduction in challenging natural environments.

The idea that traits function and evolve together, rather than being selected on in isolation, is an important insight promoted by Levins and Lewontin and supported by many evolutionary biologists today. One particularly relevant area of research has been to understand the genetic, genomic, and evolutionary consequences of correlational selection, that is, selection for certain character combinations over others.3 Such correlational selection can promote the evolution of genetic and developmental integration between different traits, even if they have different genetic and developmental origins, and thereby provides a link between ecology, evolution, genomics, and molecular biology.4 Thus, traits can become linked through selection for a common ecological function, even if they are governed by different sets of genes, provided that certain trait and gene combinations are more favorable to organismal survival than others. In short: organisms are more than the sum of their parts (traits) but represent successful co-adapted combinations of traits that are co-selected.

Science and Scientists under Capitalism

Scientists in general, including many evolutionary biologists, typically view themselves as apolitical and cold objective observers of the natural world. Many scientists tend to shy away from anything that risks undermining that illusory self-image. This is quite evident in Western capitalist countries, where the organization of modern science largely reflects the dominant bourgeois ideology, with its emphasis of state and market interests and the need for immediate and commercially useful results, and where politicians typically promote an atmosphere of uncritical celebration of competition among scientists as the only way to distribute grants and research resources. Levins and Lewontin, on the other hand, took an opposite stance: they argued that it was an advantage to be explicit about their philosophical and political views, rather than hiding under false objectivity, like many Western bourgeois intellectuals tend to do.

While science as a general human knowledge-producing enterprise clearly can reveal objective facts about our natural world, individual scientists are seldom (if ever) entirely objective and impartial (and should not even pretend that they are). In chapter 8 of The Dialectical Biologist, “ The Commoditization of Science,” Levins and Lewontin explored how modern science is both constrained by, and grew out of capitalism, and they noted several tendencies that have become amplified ever since and that are still operating in academia today: elitism, commoditization, separation of thinking from feeling, and increasing demands that scientific discoveries be quantifiable and ideally commercialized. To quote the first sentence of chapter 8 of the book, “modern science is a product of capitalism.”5 Levins and Lewontin further argued that the traditional view of science in the West is built on a strict Cartesian and reductionist worldview where nature and organisms are portrayed as well-functioning clock-like machines that can only be understood by breaking down the organisms into their constituent parts. A dialectical perspective, in contrast to such Cartesian reductionism, views organisms as more than the sum of their parts and emphasizes that traits typically function together, rather than in isolation. In short: organisms are not Cartesians machines, but products of a long evolutionary history, where their traits are quasi-independent and often subject to co-selection.

A good example of the failure of the Cartesian reductionist approach is the Human Genome Project (HGP), launched with the promise that once we knew the entire genetic code of all humans, we would be able to understand all human diseases and develop so-called “personalized medicine” based on the genetic makeup of every individual. More than three decades after the launching of HGP, we have only been able to explain a minor fraction, often only 5 to 10 percent of the variation in some of many important human diseases. The failure is most likely due to interactions among genes and between genes and environmental factors ignored by Genome Wide Association Studies (GWAS) and the search for single genes of major effect.6 These insights from the last decades of human genomic research are broadly consistent with the issues that Levins and Lewontin raised in their still highly relevant critique of naïve reductionism in molecular biology.

Lewontin and Evolutionary Biology

The Cartesian reductionist worldview criticized by Levins and Lewontin can still be seen in contemporary biology, including the research approach from some British evolutionary biologists like Alan Grafen and Andy Gardner, and particularly in Grafen’s “Formal Darwinism-project.”7 These biologists, alongside many other contemporary behavioral ecologists, are mainly interested in organismal adaptations, and not so much in the evolutionary processes and history behind such adaptations. Neither are these British evolutionary biologists very interested in developmental, genetic, or other constraints on adaptations. Their research approach is largely built on the intellectual foundations of British population geneticist Ronald Fisher, developed in his 1930 book The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection.8 The Fisherian worldview is one in which natural selection is an omnipresent force that operates on populations of very large sizes and where selection is thus largely unopposed by random factors and stochasticity. As a consequence of this, organisms are expected to be predominantly shaped by the optimizing force of natural selection, and few maladaptive features or constraints are expected to interfere with a “perfect” organismal adaptive design.

The science philosopher Tim Lewens has labelled this research approach as the “Neo-Paleyan”9 evolutionary biology tradition in Britain, where selection is an omnipresent force that refines the tiniest details of organisms, making them perfectly adapted to their environments. The term Neo-Paleyan refers to the intellectual legacy of Pastor William Paley, a natural theologian living in eighteenth century England who saw design everywhere in nature and took such design as evidence for the existence of the Designer, an almighty God. Paley’s most famous analogy of design in nature was that if one would find a functioning clock on a beach, there must be a designer who has produced this clock. In the narrow intellectual research tradition of Neo-Paleyan evolutionary biologists, there is little room for historical legacies, evolutionary constraints, and maladaptive features of organisms, because natural selection is the only evolutionary force that matters in nature.

An extreme example of the Neo-Paleyan research tradition is illustrated in the views of another British evolutionary biologist and popular science writer Richard Dawkins. Dawkins, unlike Paley, is an atheist, but he has declared his great admiration of Paley in his popular science book The Blind Watchmaker. In this well-written book, Dawkins seems to almost replace God with Darwin’s principle of Natural Selection, and repeatedly emphasizes the perfection of organisms, which are viewed as almost “designed” by natural selection. Another famous book by Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1976), further illustrates the Cartesian reductionist perspective and the Neo-Paleyan view of organisms as well-functioning machines. In this book and others, Dawkins reduces organisms to temporary survival machines of their genes. Organisms are not interesting in their own right, except as temporary vehicles for their genes, called replicators, which are the only important evolutionary units.10 In this ultra-reductionist view, the genetic level is the only level that matters in evolution and is sufficient to explain phenotypic change at the level of the organism.

The evolutionary biology tradition represented by Lewontin and some other North American biologists is very different from the ultra-adaptationist and ultra-Darwinist intellectual tradition represented by the Neo-Paleyan biologists in the behavioral ecology tradition in Great Britain. In North America, by contrast, a different research tradition developed in population genetics that was based more on the ideas of Sewall Wright, who emphasized not only natural selection, but also the role of randomness and stochasticity in evolution, particularly the role of genetic drift.11 Lewontin was largely a product of this Wrightian tradition in population genetics, where the interaction between natural selection, genetic drift, and stochasticity was the main focus, in contrast to the British Fisherian and Neo-Paylean tradition’s focus on natural selection alone.

Lewontin has also repeatedly emphasized that processes and interactions between different parts in nature are as important as the parts themselves. To understand complex systems such as organisms, populations, or ecosystems, it is not enough to divide up the systems into their component parts (e.g. genes or environments). One must also analyze the interactions between the parts (e.g. how genes and environments interact). Specifically, it is Lewontin’s view that in order to understand organisms, we must recognize that genes do not act in isolation, but are expressed in different environmental contexts, and that one aspect of the environment is actually other genes in the organism. The technical terms for these phenomena are gene-by-environment interaction and epistasis. These phenomena are seldom acknowledged by the Neo-Paleyans, who are mainly interested in global adaptive solutions, rather than in geographical variation, historical contingencies, or how different populations and species have evolved different adaptive “solutions” to similar ecological “problems.”

In Lewontin’s perspective, environmental context and history matters, and the organism plays a central role in evolution. Lewontin repeatedly emphasized that the fitness of organisms and the selective advantage of gene variants (alleles) was unlikely to be constant, but changed over time as environmental and genetic conditions changed. For instance, a well known evolutionary process is frequency-dependent selection, in which the fitness of a gene variant depends on its frequency in the population.12 A gene variant could be associated with high fitness when it is rare, and frequency-dependent selection would maintain genetic variation in the population. Conversely, a gene variant could give its bearers high fitness when it is common; then it would spread through the population and replace other existing genetic variants. Frequency-dependent selection is important because the fitness of the organism is not solely a result of its own genotype, but an emergent property of the interaction between the genotype and the genetic environment it finds itself in, i.e. the frequency of its own genotype in the population. Frequency-dependent selection therefore illustrates the dialectical principle that the whole is more than the sum of the parts; that genotype and environment are both needed to correctly infer fitness; that it is impossible and meaningless to assign a constant fitness value to a particular genotype. Fitness is highly context-dependent upon the local gene-frequency environment.

Another important and related point emphasized repeatedly by Lewontin is organism-environment interaction, which was beautifully illustrated in chapter 3 of The Dialectical Biologist, “The Organism as the Subject and Object of Evolution.” Here, Levin and Lewontin applied dialectical thinking and their Marxist philosophical perspective more explicitly than anywhere else in the book. The main point is that organisms are not simply passive subjects to external evolutionary forces like natural selection, but organisms are also active subjects in their own right. Specifically, organisms do not simply enter empty ecological niches, but they actively construct their niches, thereby influencing the selection pressures operating on themselves. As an example, consider thermoregulation in some ectothermic (“cold-blooded”) organisms like lizards, where the body temperature is largely determined by external ambient temperature.13 One might envision lizards as passive objects of their external environmental circumstances, freezing to death during cold spells and dying of overheating during hot spells. This is not what actually happens in nature. Instead, lizards actively seek out warmer environmental patches under cold weather conditions, and cooler spots during hot weather conditions. The lizards therefore actively counteract the selection pressures operating on themselves, by maintaining homeostasis and keeping favorable body temperatures. This is an excellent example of the central role of organisms in the evolutionary process that Lewontin highlighted. Chapter 3 gave rise to the term “niche construction” that has germinated lively debates in the evolutionary biology research community about the intricate relationships between organisms, their environment, and evolution.14 More generally, Levins and Lewontin emphasized reciprocal causation in evolution, involving selective feedbacks where a cause would later become an effect (and vice versa) in chains of causation,15 exemplified by reciprocal interactions between, for example, predators and prey in the process of co-evolution.16

Evolutionary Biology and Marxism: Natural Bedfellows?

A dialectical perspective fits very well with a worldview where nature is seen not as a static phenomenon but rather as a series of dynamic equilibria that change as the balance of various counteracting forces change. Lewontin was not alone; he was not the only great evolutionary biologist who openly identified as a Marxist. As a matter of fact, the fields of evolutionary biology and population genetics have had many high-profile, openly Marxist scientists, at least during parts of their life. Among these are population geneticists J. B. S. Haldane and John Maynard Smith (Haldane’s student), paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, and science philosopher Elliott Sober. It is interesting, and maybe not a coincidence, that these great scientists were all interested in the balance of forces, either in population genetics (Haldane, Maynard Smith, Lewontin, Sober), at the macroevolutionary level (Gould) or in ecology (Levins).

John Maynard Smith, for instance, was a committed Marxist and member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, as was his mentor Haldane, although both of them later left the party. Smith was also sympathetic to The Dialectical Biologist and reviewed it favourably, and he and Lewontin remained close friends and colleagues during their entire careers.17 Perhaps population and evolutionary geneticists, with their main focus and research interests in the evolutionary process rather than evolutionary outcomes such as adaptations, are more prone than other biologists, such as behavioral ecologists, to incorporate dialectical thinking in their research programs. This interpretation is strengthened by the fact that philosopher Elliott Sober—known for his classic book The Nature of Selection-Evolutionary Theory in Philosophical Focus (1994)—who spent some time in Lewontin’s laboratory, has openly identified as a Marxist and defended Marxism in 1994, after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the East Bloc.18 Sober’s work explores how different forces such as mutation, selection, recombination, and gene flow interact in the evolutionary process. It remains an excellent overview of the philosophical implications of population genetics, and one can also see signs of dialectical thinking, despite this term not being mentioned explicitly in this classic text. Natural selection is often opposed by other evolutionary forces such as mutations and genetic drift, a common focus of much population genetics research. This dynamic view of the evolutionary process is seen very little in Dawkins’s static adaptationism and among Neo-Paleyan evolutionary biologists in Great Britain, but for Marxists, it is a natural perspective on both society and nature.

More recent examples of ecologists and evolutionary biologists who implicitly or explicitly use dialectical thinking in their research include theoretical biologist Sergey Gavrilets and former population ecologist and current quantitative historian Peter Turchin, who were both born in Russia and exposed to Marxist philosophy growing up in the Soviet Union. Gavrilets has taken an explicitly dialectical approach when modelling the evolutionary transition from a hierarchical social system in our close relatives, the great apes, to the more egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies in our own species, Homo sapiens.19 In Gavrilets’s models, human egalitarianism and social norms arise as emergent results from within-group conflicts, where subordinates form alliances to prevent dominant “bullies” from monopolizing resources. To Gavrilets, “the same forces that shape the emergence of highly despotic groups dialectically create conditions for the evolution of counterdominant coalitionary behavior and psychology.”20 Moreover, the evolutionary transition to egalitarianism could have been very fast and proceeded in the form of a rapid phase transition driven by a positive feedback loop, where larger and cooperative alliances grow even larger, resulting in an egalitarian revolution.21

Such rapid phase transitions driven by positive feedback loops were discussed by Engels in Dialectics of Nature, and later in The Dialectical Biologist as exemplifying the dialectical principle of “the transformation of quantity into quality.” The most well known example of this is water moving from a liquid state to a gas state when the boiling temperature is reached. Similar ideas about how slow, gradual change can cross certain critical thresholds above which rapid major change is triggered have been put forward in several areas of modern evolutionary biology, including the ideas of “punctuated equilibrium” in paleontology and “tipping points” in speciation research.22

The “Lysenko Affair” and the Politicization of Science
Richard Lewontin’s Marxism was not aimed at pushing political dogmas, but rather at a critical analysis of science, aiming to improve the state of affairs and pointing to hidden non-scientific and ideological assumptions that practicing scientists were unaware of. In his critique of science under capitalism, Lewontin certainly did not deny the many successes of the Cartesian reductionist approach, and in The Dialectical Biologist, even describes evolutionary game theory as a spectacular success of bourgeois economics. In a recent obituary for Lewontin, Andrew Berry and Dmitri Petrov stated that “ his Marxism was arguably a key component of his scientific success” and that “he was dogmatically non dogmatic.”23

Nevertheless, liberal technocrats and bourgeois critics of Marxism often claim that science should be kept entirely free from politics and ideology, because otherwise the consequences would be disastrous. As a case in point, they often point to the “Lysenko Affair” in the Stalin-era Soviet Union. Readers are probably already aware of the horrific state terror directed toward Mendelian geneticists under Stalin’s regime, which promoted the “barefoot” scientist Trofim Lysenko to a high position. Lysenko denounced Mendelian genetics as “undialectical” and idealistic, instead promoting a Lamarckian hereditary theory which proposed that plants could acquire traits during their life-time, and then transmit these traits to their offspring. Lysenko was not, however, a rigorous scientist, and his experiments failed to support his claim that acquired characteristics could be inherited. Lysenkoism clearly had a negative effect on the development of agricultural science and genetics in the Soviet Union, and many Marxists and communists in the West lost their illusions about the Soviet Union, communism, and Marxism as a result of these tragic events.

In chapter 7 of The Dialectical Biologist, Levins and Lewontin critically dissected Lysenko’s vulgarization of Marxism and his use of superficial dialectical arguments. They concluded that Lamarckism cannot be considered a refuted hereditarian theory or a valid alternative to Mendelian inheritance, as it was completely abandoned as a plausible hypothesis following the development of modern genetics. For this reason, they described the Lysenko movement as a failed attempt at a scientific revolution, but which reflected some real tensions and class-based conflicts in Soviet society neglected by the Western liberals who characterized it as a movement created from above by the Communist Party, Stalin, and other political leaders. Thus, Levins and Lewontin did not only criticize Lysenko and his followers; they also criticized the simplistic views within and outside of the Soviet Union who tried to explain away Lysenkoism by a broad stroke reduction to mere authoritarianism. Levins and Lewontin argued that Lysenkoism was a genuine populist movement, albeit one built on erroneous assumptions about how heredity and biology work. Lysenkoism, then, should not be understood as a natural outcome of Marxist science, but rather as a vulgarization of Marxism. At the same time, they issued an important warning that “unless Marxism examines its failures, they will be repeated.”24

Our Dialectical Future: Ecosocialism or Climate Breakdown
I did not know Lewontin personally, although I briefly interacted with him in Tennessee in 2001, during a meeting arranged by the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE). Lewontin’s work and ideas were always inspiring to me and many of my colleagues in evolutionary biology. Growing up in Sweden, a small country strongly influenced by the British behavioral ecology research tradition, with its strong emphasis solely on organismal adaptation, it took me a while to discover Lewontin’s work. Before this discovery, I struggled hard to reconcile my socialist political sympathies and my Marxist identity with my professional research identity as an evolutionary biologist. I tried to keep these identities apart—not always successfully—because identities in separation were, and still are, the ideals in the British behavioral ecology and evolutionary biology tradition that has passed down to my generation. When I discovered Lewontin, I realized that being a Marxist could actually be an advantage for a scientist. Marxists see problems differently from liberal intellectuals, who often have great difficulties appreciating other perspectives than the strict Cartesian and reductionist view of organisms as machines.

As Levins and Lewontin pointed out in The Dialectical Biologist, a dialectical perspective is not the only way to resolve contradictions in science, writing that “ Dialectical materialism is not, and has never been, a programmatic method for solving particular physical problems. Rather, dialectical analysis provides us with an overview and a set of warning signs against particular forms of dogmatism and narrowness of thought.”25 These points are more valid than ever before, and reveal undogmatic and dynamic mindsets of both Levins and Lewontin and the Marxism they represented.

Many of the ideas put forward by Lewontin under the umbrella of Marxism and dialectical materialism several decades ago have, once again, become highly relevant today in light of the unfolding climate crisis, and with all the societal feedback associated with it. Indeed, many evolutionary biologists do already unconsciously adopt a dialectical perspective in their research. By viewing natural systems as results of various counteracting forces that keep each other more or less in balance, we can better understand the dynamics of evolutionary change than we could if we viewed the world as composed of a number of static objects. One theorist working in Lewontin’s dialectical tradition is a Swedish environmental historian, climate activist, and ecosocialist: Andreas Malm. Malm has made many aware of the positive feedback driving climatic systems and the dialectical relationships between fossil capital, nature, and society.26 Such dialectical feedback loops are crucial knowledge in our times of rapid climate change that threatens the long-term survival of humanity. Humans are perhaps the best example of an organism that can construct (and destroy!) its own niche, emphasizing Lewontin’s perspective that organisms are not passive objects of natural external forces, but actively construct their niches and the selection pressures on themselves. Indeed, humans have been called the world’s greatest evolutionary force, and human activities strongly affect the evolution of other organisms with profound consequences for our own societies, and by extension our future survival prospects.27

In light of these bleak prospects for humanity, Malm, myself, and other ecosocialists therefore argue that the only way to prevent the forthcoming disaster is through a social revolution and a large-scale socialist transformation of society. Dialectical materialism reminds us that history is contingent and influenced by internal conditions and contradictions within societies. This philosophy can help us recognize humans as active agents capable of shaping our future, and realize that fossil capital must be abolished, and that workers and citizens must take control and socialize finance and the means of production.28 Ultimately, we should develop a democratically and centrally planned economy that is organized along scientific principles and in an environmentally sustainable way. The alternative to such a socialist transformation is horrific so even non-Marxists will soon realize that social revolution is our only remaining chance as a species to survive in the long run. Otherwise, we risk seeing our civilization collapse under the weight of accelerating climate breakdown. The options could be illustrated, to put it rather bluntly, by reformulating a famous quote from the socialist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg (“Socialism or barbarism!”) to emphasize the stark choice we now face in our own time: “Socialism or extinction!”29

Erik Svensson is Professor of Evolutionary Ecology at the Department of Biology, Lund University, Sweden.

Notes:

1.↩ Pankaj Mehta, “The People’s Scientist,” Jacobin, January 22, 2016, www.jacobinmag.com.
2.↩ Brett Clark and Richard York, “Dialectical Nature: Reflections in Honor of the Twentieth Anniversary of Levins and Lewontin’s The Dialectical Biologist,” Monthly Review 57, no. 1 (May 2005), monthlyreview.org.
3.↩ Barry Sinervo and Erik Svensson, “Correlational Selection and the Evolution of Genomic Architecture,” Heredity 89 (2002): 948–955, doi.org; Erik Svensson et al., “Correlational Selection in the Age of Genomics,” Nature Ecology & Evolution 5, no. 5 (2021): 562–573, doi.org.
4.↩ Svensson et al., “Correlational Selection,” 562.
5.↩ Levins and Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist, 197.
6.↩ Evan E. Eichler et al., “Missing Heritability and Strategies for Finding the Underlying Causes of Complex Disease,” Nature Reviews. Genetics 11, no. 6 (June 2010): 446–50, doi.org; Teri A. Manolio et al., “Finding the Missing Heritability of Complex Diseases,” Nature 461, no. 7265 (October 8, 2009): 747–53, doi.org.
7.↩ Alan Grafen, “The Formal Darwinism Project in Outline,” Biology & Philosophy 29 (March 2014): 155–174, doi.org.
8.↩ Ronald A. Fisher, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (Clarendon Press, 1930).
9.↩ Tim Lewens, “Neo-Paleyan biology,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C 76 (August 2019): 101185, doi.org.
10.↩ Richard Dawkins, “Replicators and Vehicles,” PhilPapers, accessed October 20, 2021, philpapers.org.
11.↩ William B. Provine, Sewall Wright and Evolutionary Biology (University of Chicago Press, 1986); Ernst Mayr and William B. Provine, The Evolutionary Synthesis: Perspectives on the Unification of Biology (Harvard University Press, 1998).
12.↩ Richard Lewontin, “A General Method for Investigating the Equilibrium of Gene Frequency in a Population,” Genetics 43, no 3 (May 1958): 419–434, doi.org.
13.↩ Raymond B. Huey, Paul E. Hertz, and B. Sinervo, “Behavioral Drive versus Behavioral Inertia in Evolution: A Null Model Approach,” The American Naturalist 161, no. 3 (March 2003): 357–366, doi.org.
14.↩ F. John Odling-Smee, Kevin N. Laland, and Marcus W. Feldman, Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003); Thomas C. Scott-Phillips et al., “The Niche Construction Perspective: A Critical Appraisal,” Evolution 68, no. 5 (May 2014): 1231–43, doi.org.
15.↩ Erik I. Svensson, “On Reciprocal Causation in the Evolutionary Process,” Evolutionary Biology 45 (2018): 1–14, doi.org.
16.↩ Svensson, “On Reciprocal Causation in the Evolutionary Process.”
17.↩ John Maynard Smith, “Molecules Are Not Enough,” in Did Darwin Get It Right? Essays on Games, Sex and Evolution, ed. John Maynard Smith (Springer-Verlag, 1988): 30–38, doi.org; John Maynard Smith, “Reconciling Marx and Darwin,” Evolution 55, no. 7 (July 2001): 1496–1498, www.jstor.org.
18.↩ Erik Olin Wright, Andrew Levine, and Elliott Sober, “Reconstructing Marxism: A Reply,” Science & Society 58, no. 1 (Spring, 1994): 53–60, www.jstor.org; Elliott Sober, The Nature of Selection: Evolutionary Theory in Philosophical Focus (University of Chicago Press, 1984).
19.↩ Sergey Gavrilets, Edgar A. Duenez-Guzman, and Michael D. Vose, “Dynamics of Alliance Formation and the Egalitarian Revolution,” PLoS ONE 3, no. 10 (October 2008): e3293, doi.org; Sergey Gavrilets, “On the Evolutionary Origins of the Egalitarian Syndrome,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109, no. 35 (August 2012): 14069–74, doi.org.
20.↩ Gavrilets, “On the Evolutionary Origins of the Egalitarian Syndrome.”
21.↩ Gavrilets, Duenez-Guzman, and Vose, “Dynamics of Alliance Formation”.
22.↩ David Sepkoski, Rereading the Fossil Record: The Growth of Paleobiology as an Evolutionary Discipline (University of Chicago Press, 2012); Patrik Nosil et al., “Tipping Points in the Dynamics of Speciation,” Nature Ecology & Evolution 1 (Janurary 2017): 1–8, doi.org.
23.↩ Andrew Berry and Dmitri A. Petrov, “Richard C. Lewontin (1929–2021),” Science 373, no. 6556 (August 2021): 745, doi.org.
24.↩ Levins and Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist, 166.
25.↩ Lewontin and Levins, The Dialectical Biologist, 191.
26.↩ Andreas Malm, “The Anthropocene Myth,” Jacobin, May 30, 2015, jacobinmag.com.
27.↩ Stephen R. Palumbi, “Humans as the World’s Greatest Evolutionary Force,” Science 293, no. 5536 (September 2001): 1786–90, doi.org; Andrew P. Hendry, Kiyoko M. Gotanda, and Erik I. Svensson, “Human Influences on Evolution, and the Ecological and Societal Consequences,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 372, no. 1712 (January 2017): 10160028, doi.org.
28.↩ Andreas Malm, “The Climate Movement Must Disrupt the Normal Routines of Fossil Capital,” Jacobin, October 14, 2020, jacobinmag.com.
29.↩ Mark Montegriffo, “Yes, Socialism or Extinction is Exactly the Choice We Face,” Jacobin, April 9, 2020, jacobinmag.com.

https://mronline.org/2021/11/04/richard ... d-marxism/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Wed Nov 10, 2021 3:06 pm

Image

On American Patriotism: A Marxist Polemic
November 9, 2021
By Danny Haiphong – Nov 5, 2021

The embrace of American patriotism, what some are calling “proletarian patriotism” within online circles, is yet another attempt to rebrand American nationalism. It is similar in character but different in form to the ongoing effort to rebrand the two-party system through the development of a “socialist” bloc within the Democratic Party’s corporate jaws. Ideology is rendered an abstraction in each case rather than a reflection of the material conditions of society. The Democratic Party is a capitalist-owned party and therefore cannot but serve the interests of the capitalist class. American patriotism is an outgrowth of the U.S.’s peculiar form of imperialism and therefore cannot be divorced from its reactionary nationalist and racist roots.

Analyzing ideology from its materialist origins is a major component of the Marxist philosophy of dialectical materialism and is relevant not just to patriotism but any concept. In answering socialists who decried the concept of “authority,” Friedrich Engels stated such activists “think that when they have changed the names of things they have changed the things themselves.” Engels goes on to explain that material conditions define how authority, or the imposition of one’s will upon others, is expressed in the real world. To give an example, the state under capitalism enforces the authority of the capitalist class vis-à-vis the state. Under socialism, Engels says, the state remains a mechanism of suppression but this time to enforce the authority of the working class over the capitalist.

Similarly, the concept of patriotism holds a definitive meaning in the context of the United States which is not fundamentally transformed by placing “socialist” or “proletarian” in front of it. Socialist patriots assert that their patriotism means love “for one’s own people” and specify that they celebrate the resistance of the workers as the primary expression of the ideology. Some who ascribe to this tendency do not deny that patriotism in the United States emerged from a bourgeois society whose origins rest in slavery, genocide, and white supremacy—all of which remain significant to the United States’ current stage of development. However, socialist patriots claim that the material basis of American patriotism in bourgeois nationalism is secondary to their schema of the ideology.

Such a claim is an affront to dialectical materialism. Racism and imperialism cannot be denounced on the one hand while their ideological expression, American patriotism, is embraced on the other. American patriotism has always been the property of the U.S. ruling class. How Ho Chi Minh, Vladimir Lenin, or any other revolutionary leveraged patriotic sentiment in the U.S. does not change its fundamental character. Ho Chi Minh spoke in admiration of the U.S.’s founding principles upon the declaration of an independent Vietnam in 1945 not because he was a firm supporter of American patriotism but because he understood that an opportunity has arisen to leverage the U.S.’s competition with France over colonial possessions during World War II for the benefit of the national liberation movement. The same goes for Lenin’s appeal to Great Russians to oppose the Tsar and Russia’s imperialist participation in the First World War.

Both Ho Chi Minh and Vladimir Lenin, however, were very clear in distinguishing between bourgeois nationalism and revolutionary nationalism rooted in the struggle for self-determination of oppressed nations. Patriotism denoted a different meaning within the colonial and semi-feudal contexts of Vietnam and imperial Russia (what would become the USSR). Lenin’s impression on Ho Chi Minh led the Vietnamese revolutionary to declare that “only socialism and communism can liberate the oppressed nations and the working people throughout the world from slavery” (emphasis my own). Patriotism in Vietnam was an expression of revolutionary nationalism—the project of liberating the nation from the brutal oppression and exploitation of the European and Japanese colonial project. In pre-revolutionary Russia, national liberation and “patriotism” meant developing the requisite unity among several nationalities to overthrow the (still underdeveloped) capitalist state while respecting the right to self-determination for oppressed nationalities who suffered most under bourgeois rule.

It should come as no surprise, then, that both Ho Chi Minh and Lenin were devout internationalists whose works were applied with greatest effectiveness in non-white, colonized nations often referred to as the underdeveloped world. Inspiration from Lenin and Uncle Ho’s legacy also extended into the West where communists of all races have spent more than a century fighting for socialism in the citadels of the imperialist orbit. But Lenin provided specific guidance to revolutionaries around the National Question that remains relevant in the present moment. In his work on socialism and self-determination, Lenin explains that

The proletariat of the oppressor nations…cannot remain silent on the frontiers of a state founded upon national oppression; a question so ‘unpleasant’ for the imperialist bourgeoisie. The proletariat must struggle against the enforced retention of oppressed nations within the bounds of the given state, which means they must fight for self-determination. The proletariat must demand freedom of political separation for the colonies and nations oppressed by ‘their own’ nation. Otherwise, the internationalism of the proletariat would be nothing but empty words…

American patriotism is by definition bourgeois nationalism from the vantage point of U.S. capitalist development and its particular form of national oppression. The so-called “culture” of the United States is a byproduct of colonialism and empire. The American flag, for example, connotes freedom for the capitalist oppressor and the boundaries of settler colonialism and exploitation for oppressed nations. This includes Black people and Indigenous people, who by Lenin’s analysis of the National Question comprise of oppression nations within the United States. While anyone can subjectively redefine American patriotism for the presumed purpose of winning over “American” workers, the principal contradiction of American “nation-building” is empire, war, racism, and genocide. The brutally racist conditions that have been justified in the name of American patriotism cannot simply be pushed into the background so that a new, more comforting definition can come to the foreground. To do so is an act of revisionism.

Furthermore, it is important to acknowledge the material conditions which have given rise to the attempt to rebrand American patriotism for the purposes of class struggle. Donald Trump’s success with so-called working class white Americans and the Democratic Party’s role in the U.S.’s Race to the Bottom austerity regime has much to do with the rise of “America First” attitudes. The Democratic Party has neutralized the Left and steered numerous movements, including the movement for Black self-determination, into its massive political graveyard. A political vacuum has emerged from the decay of U.S. imperialism which is characterized by a wholesale bandying of ideas within a context of reaction. Without leadership, some leftists have become infatuated with a nostalgia for the past. This has led to distortions such as believing that working class victories achieved during the labor struggles of the early 20th century are a reflection of the true greatness of “America” and therefore form the basis of “real American patriotism.”

In other words, if we simply remember and apply the greatness of the “American” working class, then the United States can be made great again. The problems with this formulation are numerous. First, the United States was never great (hardly controversial). Second, there is no singular “American” working class as the United States is a prison house of nations. Third, no material basis exists for drawing a direct association between movements against oppression with the oppressor nation that produces such movements prior to revolutionary victory. Any subsumption of the broad mass of workers under the banner of patriotism is a subjective decision driven by emotions that are rooted in loyalty to American exceptionalism.

The first duty of the revolutionary is to tell the truth. The truth is that class unity will not be achieved by “loving America”, a settler colony and an imperialist empire, but through the development of class solidarity around concrete issues that sharpen the contradiction between the oppressed and the bourgeoisie. Patriotism does not provide guidance for how to secure self-determination for oppressed nations, food for hungry people, living wages for the mass of workers, or address any other class question. In fact, American patriotism is the ideological entry point for all forms of U.S.-imposed oppression due to its usefulness to the ruling class project of disguising the imperatives of capital under the unifying banner of the “nation.”

A new culture, a revolutionary culture, arises from struggle. The works of Amilcar Cabral, Frantz Fanon, and countless other revolutionary leaders of the anti-colonial and socialist movement make this point clearly. Cabral explains that

…the liberation struggle must bring diverse interests into harmony, resolve contradictions and define common objectives in the search for liberty and progress. The taking to heart of its objectives by large strata in the population, reflected in their determination in the face of difficulties and sacrifices, is a great political and moral victory. It is also a cultural achievement of decisive importance for the subsequent development and success of the liberation movement. The greater the differences between the culture of the dominated people and the culture of their oppressor, the more possible such a victory becomes.

Of course, the United States is not an oppressed nation like Guinea Bissau or Cape Verde but an empire in decline. What we can learn from Cabral, however, is that the backward ideas embraced by the masses can only be resolved in the practice of struggle. That said, the embrace of American patriotism has divorced the ideology from its objective historical context. Frank Chapman notes in his work Marxist-Leninist Perspectives on Black Liberation and Socialism that this error became increasingly significant following the demise of the First International, a phenomenon that gave rise to the rightist tendency to look upon Black people as merely members of the working class while subordinating racial oppression and Jim Crow fascist rule to problems of the working class as a whole. This pattern was corrected by the Third International under Lenin’s leadership when the influence of the historic struggle of Black people themselves as a nation within a nation made Black self-determination a key programmatic priority of the world socialist movement.

It appears that the so-called “American” Left is in another need of a course correction. American patriotism is not merely a bourgeois deviation but a distraction from the task at hand. Class unity among the workers is achieved only through concrete struggle around common interests. American patriotism has zero utility in this regard. White communists and communists within oppressor countries should focus on applying the National Question and Lenin’s work on self-determination to the current period. The Black Lives Matter movement and a renewed interest in the word “socialism” in the United States indicate that more white Americans on the left are willing to engage in united class struggle with respect to the National Question.

Still, ideological battles over the utility of American patriotism reveal how the primacy of Yankee ideology continues to place barriers in front of the class struggle in the United States. Black revolutionary and prison movement leader George Jackson often discussed the relevance of these barriers to the challenge of uniting prisoners of all races around the common goal of improving living conditions behind the walls of the prison. He left us with the following words to reflect upon, “I’m always telling the brothers some of those whites are willing to work with us against the pigs. All they got to do is stop talking honky.”

(Patreon)

https://orinocotribune.com/on-american- ... t-polemic/

Why am I thinking about our old 'comrade' Mike B?
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Mon Nov 15, 2021 2:18 pm

Image

Why Western Marxism Misunderstands China’s Usage of Markets
November 14, 2021
By Carlos L. Garrido – Nov 12, 2021

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

In V.I. Lenin’s ‘Conspectus to Hegel’s Science of logic’ he states that,
It is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx![ii]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes
'i' By Western Marxism I am referring specifically to a broad current in Marxism that comes about a quarter into the last century as a rejection of the Soviet Union and Marxism-Leninism. It is today, the dominant form of ‘Marxism’ in western academia. It encapsulates everything from the Frankfurt school, the French Marxists of the 60s-70s, the New Left, and the forms of Marxism Humanism that arise alongside these. Often, they phrase their projects as a Marxism that ‘returns to its Hegelian roots’, centering the Marx of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and reading the mature Marx only in light of the projects of the younger Marx. Some of the main theorists today include Jürgen Habermas, Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, Kevin Anderson etc. Although it might be tempting to just refer to this block as ‘Non-Marxist-Leninist Marxists’, I would urge against doing so, for there are many Marxist currents in the global south which, although drinking from the fountain of Marxism-Leninism, do not explicitly consider themselves Marxist-Leninists and yet do not fall into the same “purity fetish” Western Marxists do. It is important to note that a critique of their “purity fetish” does not mean I think their work is useless and shouldn’t be read. On the contrary, they have been able to make great theoretical advancements in the Marxists tradition. However, their consistent failure to support socialist projects must be critiqued and rectified.
[ii] V.I. Lenin. Collected Works Vol 38. (Progress Publishers, 1976)., pp. 180.​
[iii] Ludwig von Mises. Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis. (Jonathan Cape, 1936)., pp. 142.
[iv] Roland Boer. Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. (Springer, 2021)., pp. 119.[
v] Ibid.
[vi] It is also important to note that this realization is common knowledge in economic anthropology since the 1944 publication of Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, where, while holding that “there is hardly an anthropological or sociological assumption contained in the philosophy of economic liberalism that has not been refuted,” nonetheless argues markets have predated the capitalist mode of production, albeit usually existing inter, as opposed to intra, communally. Karl Polanyi. The Great Transformation. (Beacon Press, 1957)., pp. 269-277.
[vii] Boer. Socialism with Chinese Characteristics., pp. 118.
[viii] Ibid., pp. 13.
[ix] For Hegel the individual is also a determinate universal – “the particular, because it is only the determinate universal, is also an individual, and conversely the individual, because it is the determinate universal, is just as much a particular.” G.W.F. Hegel. The Science of Logic. § 1343.
[x] Boer. Socialism with Chinese Characteristics., pp. 122-3.
[xi] Ibid., pp. 124. Quoted from: Huang, Nansen. 1994. Shehuizhuyi shichang jingji lilun de zhexue jichu. Makesizhuyi yu xianshi 1994 (11): 1–6.
[xii] Ibid., pp. 124.
[xiii] Although with the emergence of AUKUS a warm one does not seem unlikely.​

https://orinocotribune.com/why-western- ... f-markets/

The use of Roman numerals for notes required me to substitute 'i' for . If you know a better way do tell.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Tue Nov 16, 2021 3:36 pm

Image

“I am Lenin” – Remembering the Bolshevik Revolution from India
November 15, 2021
By ​Suryashekhar Biswas – Nov 8, 2021

In 1917, the worker-peasant alliance in economically-backward Russia began the formation of the first state in the world that truly belonged to the hardworking masses. The Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Lenin, displayed to the whole world that it was possible for ordinary people to achieve self-determination. With counter-revolutionaries, loyalists, monarchists and revivalists attempting to purge Russia from within and imperialists waging war from outside, the tale the first “Really Existing Socialism” began under circumstances of great challenge. Nonetheless, the red star had begun to shine. Its light extended beyond the borders of the USSR, through Eastern Europe, all the way to the colonised third-world. Mired in the tactics of internationalism and world-socialism, the successful revolution offered its amicable hands to its toiling comrades of the third-world, who were struggling against the excesses of imperialism.

​Before going further, it is important to note that communism in India had its origins in the material conditions of India, in its process of historical development, and its efforts to resolve the contradictions of British imperialism on the one hand, and feudal landlordism on the other. Communism in India was not a formula implanted into the minds of people by bureaucrats sitting in Moscow, as certain right-wing ideologues claim. That being said, the Bolshevik Revolution and the worker’s state it established, had a profound impact on the Indians grappling with their reality, and also provided them some theoretical frameworks.

The national and colonial questions, as they were called, were not peripheral ponderings that arbitrarily occurred in the minds of the Third International revolutionaries. For Lenin, and many others, national liberation and the anti-colonial struggle was central to the process of overthrowing capitalism. This extends from the idea that imperialism was integral for capitalism to function – which was to become Lenin’s core thesis in ‘Imperialism – The Highest Stage of Capitalism’. These revolutionaries found it preposterous that many communists of the colonizing countries (read Europe) did not concern themselves with the colonial question. In the second Congress of the Comintern, Lenin stated, “All Communist parties should render direct aid to the revolutionary movements among the dependent and underprivileged nations … and in the colonies.”

​On this day, celebrating the 104th anniversary of the October Revolution, let us take a look at what this revolution meant to the masses of India, the country where I live.

Comintern: National and Colonial Questions ​

​The world had changed immensely since the collapse of the First International, and the reformism, anarchism and Eurocentrism of the Second International led many revolutionaries to utter disappointment. The 1905 revolutionary coup in Russia had failed. Lenin had further solidified his understanding of imperialism as an inevitable extension of capitalism, and understood the importance of an international communist organisation that could truly connect with the people of the colonized countries. Overdetermined by these conditions, the Third International (or Comintern) was formed.

​In the second Congress of the Comintern, held between July and August 1920, there were delegates from across the world, including the colonized countries. M.N Roy, a young communist of Indian origins, was representing the Mexican communist party, which he had helped form during his self-exile from India. Abani Mukherjee represented India. Lenin delivered his draft-thesis on ‘National and Colonial Questions’ which substantiated the need for the communist movement to grapple with the material conditions of colonised country and agree on some strategies and tactics to lead the spread of the revolution in the colonized world. He called for suggestions and criticisms from the delegates of various nationalities, who understood their own reality better.

​Lenin-Roy Debate

​Although M.N Roy was representing Mexico in the Second Congress of the Comintern, his remarks were almost entirely about the struggle in India. In response to Lenin’s address and call for criticism, M.N Roy put forward the arguments which form the basis the famous Lenin-Roy Debate. The debate can be fragmented into three areas of contention: (a) the economic mode-of-production in the colonies, (b) the role and nature of the national bourgeoisie of the colonized countries, and by obvious extension from the previous two points, (c) the mode of struggle and strategy to be applied in the colonized countries.

Lenin had remarked (in the thesis mentioned earlier) that unlike what Marxism had originally anticipated, the colonized world does not go through the subsequent historical stages and their economic mode-of-production remains backward. In the colonized countries, capitalism gets the liberty to be overwhelmingly vicious and ruthless. The character of the national bourgeoisie in those countries is also inversely affected, as the colonizers don’t allow the nationalist bourgeoisie to play the role of developing the productive forces according to its own needs and interests. However, Lenin insisted that there needs to be a strategic support and alliance with the national bourgeoisie of the colonized countries, in the process of overthrowing colonialism. In the USSR, a form of bourgeois-democratic revolution had happened before the socialist revolution could succeed. In the colonized world, the overthrow of colonialism in alliance with the national bourgeoisie would mark a similar step, paving way for socialism.

Roy disagreed on the count that the nationalist bourgeoisie of India was mired in reactionary conservatism. He argued that it was due to Lenin’s lack of awareness about the material conditions of India that the latter ascribed a progressive and revolutionary role to the Indian national bourgeoisie. Roy argued that the bourgeois-nationalist movement led by the Indian National Congress and Gandhi, was backward looking. If the communists had to align with them, the national bourgeoisie would eventually take over control of the alliance and subvert the movement. People would be led to be satisfied with bourgeois-democratic forms of capitalism and nothing more. For clarity of the Russian comrades, Roy compared Gandhi’s movement with the populist movements that had happened in Russia earlier: these were motivated by religious zeal and cultural revivalism, and were reactionary even if they might have appeared to be progressive.

​The final resolution of the Congress settled on the following line:

​“With regard to those states and nationalities where a backward, mainly
feudal, patriarchal or patriarchal-agrarian regime prevails, the following
must be borne in mind: All communist parties must give active support
to the revolutionary movements of liberation….”


​Initially, the phrase towards the end had assured support to “bourgeois-democratic liberation movements”. But Roy’s intervention had successfully warranted its upgrade to “revolutionary movements of liberation”.

The struggle in India was not only the struggle of the INC and Gandhi, argued Roy. The working-class and peasantry had begun to organise. It was a duty of the Communist International to support those movements.

The Communist Party of India was formed in Tashkent, sometime between 1920 and 1921, the dates are contestable. It was consolidated in the Communist Conference in Kanpur, on December 1925.

Bolshevism in Art

Maxim Gorky wrote his iconic novel ‘Mother’, after the failure of the 1905 coup. It tells the story of Mother Nilovna, a working-class woman who slowly turns to the radical path when her son Pavel (aka Pasha) exposes her to the communist movement taking place then. Avtar Singh Sandhu, a militant communist poet from Punjab, read the novel in the 70s and declared his pen name to be ‘Pash’ – named after Pasha. Between the time when the novel was written to lighten up the struggling revolutionaries of Russia, and when it was read and perceived by Pash, came so many events of thrill and solidarity.

​Pash wrote about Comrade Bhagat Singh:

​“The awakening of the people of Punjab
To a revolutionary consciousness,
Was done for the first time
By Bhagat Singh.

On the day that he was hanged,
They had recovered from his lock-up cell,
Among his belongings
A Lenin book,
On which he had marked the page
Till where he had read;

Now it is our turn
To read the book to that page, and read it further;
To lead the struggle to that stage, and lead it further.”


​Among others, Maxim Gorky – a comrade of the revolution and a literary genius, held the idea that the revolutionary Soviet republic should have a revolutionary printing press that actively translated a wide range of texts across different languages. A publishing house for world literature was established in 1919, which survived for five years. A magazine titled ‘Literature of the World Revolution’ was launched in 1931. The most significant was the creation of Publishing Co-operative of Foreign Workers (ITIR), which translated books into foreign languages. Through Comintern connections, ITIR employed mostly migrants from different parts of the world, who brought in their indigenous wisdom. In its first year, it translated to seventeen European languages and five Asian languages. Within two decades, it was translating to various Indian, Arab and African languages. In 1963, ITIR would merge with another organization to give rise to the legendary Progress Publishers. Thousands of books from these publications would come to India, throughout the period of the Soviet Union’s existence. This would bring all kinds of books, from old fairy-tales from across the world, to analyses on political economy.

The impact of the Bolshevik Revolution on art was manifold. ‘Amar Lenin’, a short film by Ritwik Ghatak portrays a working-man from rural Bengal who comes across a jatra about the Bolsheviks going from village to village, understanding the troubles of the peasants and arming them with theory. (A jatra is a drama form practised primarily in Rural Bengal, characterised by music and theatrics.) This was a part of Ghatak’s cinema of praxis, a concept he held on to, even after his fallout with the communist party. There were several such instances where Bolshevism arose in art and armed the working people with confidence to fight.

​The vigorous impact of the revolution, may be summed up with a few lines from a poem by Sukanta Bhattacharya:

​“We sailed across the murderous seas, we reach the safe shore,
The fields of freedom have arrived, we see no chains anymore;

Only a voice, that whispers my words from within
Saying out it seems as though that I am Lenin.”


No revolution without Lenin

​It is important to note that Marxism came to India through Soviet Russia. For a sufficient period of time, Indian people who were exploring different paths of liberation, found their theory in Lenin’s writings and were thus introduced to Marxism. In the Western world, several factions of Marxist thought, both in the academic arena and the political, tend to skip Lenin. The essence of Western Marxism lies in the rejection of Soviet interpretation of Marx, which is denounced as ‘objectivist’. They go further to say that this form of Marxism was derived from Engel’s misrepresentation of Marx, and has no bearing to the original Marx at all. Other schools of the New Left make it a point to develop “anti-Stalinism” in their politics, to avoid bureaucracy and totalitarian control.

​Revolutionaries in our world – the colonized world, do not have that luxury. For us, revolution runs through Leninism, which we see as the only path through which we can build socialism. Our party offices and pamphlets, alongside our own indigenous revolutionaries and heroes, have posters of Lenin, Stalin and Engels (and Mao). Not for us the defeatism of Trotsky. Not for us the entitlement of Eurocommunism. It is crucial for us, all the more, to uphold and defend the legacies of the great Bolshevik revolution.

​Spectre of Communism

Three decades have passed since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The renegades of capitalism have declared the “end of ideology”. The agents of the market who had begun their penetration in the Indian soil with liberalisation in the 80s, are making attempts to seep in further into every nook and corner of the country, their most recent prey being Bhagat Singh’s Punjab. In 2018, a statue of Lenin in the state of Tripura was demolished by the fascist forces, among other reasons, to drive home the point that communism is dead and done with. Yet, there are communist parties, trade-unions and students unions striving to organize and put forth the demands of the hardworking masses. There are countless people finding solace in the red-flag, as the only genuine alternative to the dominant corporate oligarchy. Surely, one may find a know-it-all bourgeois news-anchor screaming, “The USSR collapsed long ago, so what are you on about!” Across the streets and corners, in ghettoes and slums, in villages and universities, one will also find a steadfast communist, answering, “What if the reactionary forces destroy the Taj Mahal some day? Will we stop falling in love?”

Appendix

​This is a very personal attempt at presenting the impact of the Bolshevik Revolution in India. This is not a comprehensive overview. Therefore, I have had to omit certain figures and events, which may have been important. There have been important communist and socialist movements parallel to the CPI, such as the famous HSRA with Bhagat Singh, which I have omitted. I also recognise that in the section on art, my references come from Bengal and North India. I have left out a rich plethora of art from South India, simply because of my lack of knowledge of it. Among the poems mentioned, the poem by Pash was written in Punjabi and the one by Sukanta was written in Bangla. Both have been translated by the present author.



​References
Chowdhuri, S. R. (2007). Leftism in India: 1917-1947. Palgrave.

Prashad, V. (2019). The East was read: Socialist culture in the third world. LeftWord.

​Riddell, J., Prashad, V., & Mollah, N. (2019). Liberate the colonies!: Communism and colonial freedom, 1917-1924. LeftWord Books. (The section on Lenin’s Draft Thesis on the National and Colonial Questions, and M.N Roy’s supplementary thesis on the same.

https://orinocotribune.com/i-am-lenin-r ... rom-india/

****************************************

Image

Prashad to Harvey: “You Live on the Other Side of Imperialism”
August 2, 2021

The following video contains three short speeches by Viyay Prashad, a Marxist historian and director of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Taken together, these form a devastating critique of world renowned Marxist David Harvey’s insistence that the concept and theory of imperialism is not relevant to understand today’s world.

While the world is divided between a small handful of rich nations and a large majority of poor ones, Professor Harvey, who lives and worked in the United States, finds it “too easy” to describe the contemporary world system using the term “imperialism”. In this 2013 book Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism Harvey did not rank imperialism even among capitalism’s top seventeen contradictions. In that book Harvey asserted, without any attempt to justify the claim, that:

“The net drain of wealth from East to West that had prevailed for over two centuries has been reversed as East Asia in particular has risen to prominence as a powerhouse in the global economy.”

Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and The End of Capitalism (London: Profile Books, 2014), p170.


The problem with this statement is obvious. If it were true, and wealth had indeed beginning shifting from “West” to “East” (and by this Harvey principally means China), how could it be possible that the “East” remains far, far poorer?

Obviously for people living in, say, China – which has a per capita income around twenty percent of the USA and Australia, or India, where per capita income is around five percent, this unsubstantiated assertion by a First World based academic who presents himself as “Marxist” was taken by many to be quite offensive.

Harvey had every opportunity to respond to Prashad’s critique in the forum. To the extent that he does, it is available here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVqPSF4IlfE

Prashad does not attack Harvey, as such. As an invited guest to a forum to launch Harvey’s latest book launch, he recommends the book to his audience… as the best introduction to the views of David Harvey if you are not familiar with them. With entertaining flair, Prashad outlines – from his own point of view – what is arguably a devasting demolition of Harvey’s view.

The video is embedded below or visit the YouTube page version.


https://orinocotribune.com/prashad-to-h ... perialism/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Fri Nov 26, 2021 2:33 pm

The Marxist concept of "alienation"
10.10.2016
Problems of the Marxist concept of understanding the phenomenon of "alienation" in the context of modernity.

From the editor .
Your attention is invited to an article by Roman Osin, a member of the Ideological Commission of the Central Committee of the RKWP-CPSU, Candidate of Philosophical Sciences, dedicated to the Marxist understanding of alienation and the problems of overcoming it in modern conditions. The main provisions of the article were previously outlined at a lecture held at the Politprosvet club .

Based on the analysis of the "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts" by K. Marx, the author deduces his own classification of various aspects of the phenomenon of "alienation". At the end of the article, a description of the features and specifics of alienation in modern capitalist society (in the world and in Russia) is given.

The problem of alienation is insufficiently developed and therefore controversial in modern Marxist literature, therefore, certain provisions of the article may be controversial and require further discussion. In general, the material will help to get a systematic view of alienation and, most importantly, to think about this problem. What is alienation? How does it differ from exploitation? What types and sides of alienation can be distinguished? Private property: a source of alienation or a guarantee of overcoming it? What are the features of alienation in Soviet and modern society? How to overcome the alienation of labor? These and other questions are answered in the article by Roman Osin.


Introduction

Alienation is one of the attributes of modern (like any class) society. This category was often used by Marx in his early works, which allowed, on the one hand, some authors to reduce alienation to capitalist exploitation, and on the other hand, to use alienation as a kind of magic formula that in itself should explain everything. At the same time, of course, without highlighting clear criteria for the very phenomenon of alienation.

In the article we will consider the concept of the category of alienation, its types and sides, as well as the features of manifestation in modern capitalist society and methods of overcoming.

The Alienation of Labor: The Formulation of the Question by Marx

Speaking of the category of "alienation", our attention is drawn to the "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts" written by the young Marx in 1844. Despite the rough nature of these manuscripts, in them Marx essentially gave a systematized presentation of his understanding of the phenomenon of "alienation", laying those methodological foundations from which one can start from today when studying this phenomenon. In his analysis, Marx focused not on the moral-ethical, but the socio-economic aspect of alienation. He proceeded from the fact that a person is a social being, and therefore realizes himself in practical (primarily labor) activities. Therefore, the problem of alienation should not be posed “in general,” but as a problem of alienated labor. It is alienated labor that is that side of alienation,

Image

In the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx showed what exactly alienated labor consists of. Expanding this question, Marx wrote:“Labor is for the worker something external, not belonging to his essence; in the fact that in his work he does not assert himself, but denies, he feels not happy, but unhappy, does not freely develop his physical and spiritual energy, but exhausts his physical nature and destroys his spiritual strength. Therefore, the worker feels himself to be himself only outside of labor, but in the process of labor he feels himself to be torn off from himself. At home he is when he is not working; and when he works, he is no longer at home. Because of this, his work is not voluntary, but forced; it is forced labor. This is not the satisfaction of the need for labor, but only a means for the satisfaction of all other needs, but not the need for labor. The alienation of labor is clearly manifested in the fact that, as soon as physical or other compulsion to labor ceases, they flee from labor, like the plague. External labor, labor in the process of which a person alienates himself, is self-sacrifice, self-torture. And, finally, the external character of labor is manifested for the worker in the fact that this labor does not belong to him, but to another, and in the process of labor he does not belong to himself, but to another. "

In this quote, several important points are concentrated at once, which we will explain below.

First, “labor is something external for the worker , not belonging to his essence. " Here we are also talking about the alienation of labor as a process, not only taken from the side of the result, but also taken from the side of the mechanism for realizing the ability to work. Developing his thought, Marx shows that we are talking not only about the fact that labor that creates a product for another person turns into alien due to the force of exploitation, but also about the exhausting nature of labor itself, regardless of who appropriates its results. The exhausting nature of labor does not bring joy, does not develop the worker, but only takes away his strength for life. In this work, the worker does not realize himself as a social being, but spends his time and energy in “nowhere,” thereby alienating not only labor, but also the worker’s life time, which he spends in the labor process.

Secondly, it is completely natural that such work is not actually a manifestation of human essence. Here Marx directly deduces a psychological negative attitude towards labor from the technical, technological and social nature of labor, which makes this labor unbearable: “therefore, the worker feels himself to be himself only outside of labor, and in the process of labor he feels cut off from himself. At home he is when he is not working; and when he works, he is no longer at home. " Aversion to work is caused by two aspects: social alienation associated with the appropriation of the results of the employee's work by another subject, and technical and technological alienationassociated with an insufficient level of development of productive forces in order to make work exciting, bringing joy to the employee, and not exhaustion of the body. In the first case, working for another person, the employee does not feel any involvement in the results of labor, and therefore disgusts work, seeing in it only a way to maintain his existence (hence the principle that wages are the main goal of labor). In the second case, the employee does not have the opportunity to enjoy work due to its very nature, which is inextricably linked with routine, physically and psychologically exhausting the body, functions. Such work, even in the absence of capitalist exploitation, nevertheless evokes psychological disgust in the worker, who continues to perceive it as “wasted time” as before. Here Marx also speaks of the need for labor, which is not satisfied by alienated labor. The very formulation of the question of the need for labor seems to be the most important methodologically. Today, many believe that man is by nature lazy. Incidentally, the same idea was expressed by L.D. Trotsky, who seemed to be positioning himself as a Marxist, nevertheless, wrote the following about industriousness: “as a general rule, a person seeks to evade work. Hard work is not at all a natural trait: it is created by economic pressure and social education. We can say that man is a rather lazy animal. " that man is by nature lazy. Incidentally, the same idea was expressed by L.D. Trotsky, who seemed to be positioning himself as a Marxist, nevertheless, wrote the following about industriousness: “as a general rule, a person seeks to evade work. Hard work is not at all a natural trait: it is created by economic pressure and social education. We can say that man is a rather lazy animal. " that man is by nature lazy. Incidentally, the same idea was expressed by L.D. Trotsky, who seemed to be positioning himself as a Marxist, nevertheless, wrote the following about industriousness: “as a general rule, a person seeks to evade work. Hard work is not at all a natural trait: it is created by economic pressure and social education. We can say that man is a rather lazy animal. "

The explanation of "natural laziness" allows the ruling classes, on the one hand, to justify their domination (they say, without us, the lazy mass of the people will ruin everything), and on the other hand, to inspire the working people with the idea that a society in which labor would be the highest human need, because it is, they say, “utopia” and does not correspond to “human nature”. Nevertheless, practice shows that by nature it is precisely the need for work that is immanent in a person, since the very formation of a person as a person, as a thinking being, is associated with labor activity. Of course, the very nature of labor and its social conditions play an important role here. Monotonous, hard physical labor is unlikely to be able to turn into a vital need by itself. Likewise, creative work, performed in the conditions of human exploitation by a person, significantly narrows its "creative" component. At the same time, even under capitalism, one can often observe people of creative professions (scientists, teachers, engineers and other representatives of "universal labor") who consider labor not only as a way of earning money. Moreover, many are engaged in, as it were, two types of work: one work as a way to survive (official work), and the other work as a way of activity "for the soul", which is the meaning of human life. Examples are socially active workers who spend the lion's share of their free time on educational activities, trade union struggle, party work and other types of "universal labor." even under capitalism, one can often observe people of creative professions (scientists, teachers, engineers and other representatives of "universal labor"), who consider labor not only as a way of earning money. Moreover, many are engaged in, as it were, two types of work: one work as a way to survive (official work), and the other work as a way of activity "for the soul", which is the meaning of human life. Examples are socially active workers who spend the lion's share of their free time on educational activities, trade union struggle, party work and other types of "universal labor." even under capitalism, one can often observe people of creative professions (scientists, teachers, engineers and other representatives of "universal labor"), who consider labor not only as a way of earning money. Moreover, many are engaged in, as it were, two types of work: one work as a way to survive (official work), and the other work as a way of activity "for the soul", which is the meaning of human life. Examples are socially active workers who spend the lion's share of their free time on educational activities, trade union struggle, party work and other types of "universal labor." many are engaged in, as it were, two types of labor: one labor as a way to survive (official work), and the other labor as a way of activity "for the soul", which is the meaning of human life. Examples are socially active workers who spend the lion's share of their free time on educational activities, trade union struggle, party work and other types of "universal labor." many are engaged in, as it were, two types of labor: one labor as a way to survive (official work), and the other labor as a way of activity "for the soul", which is the meaning of human life. Examples are socially active workers who spend the lion's share of their free time on educational activities, trade union struggle, party work and other types of "universal labor."

Thirdly, Marx emphasizes "and, finally, the external character of labor manifests itself for the worker in the fact that this labor does not belong to him, but to another, and in the process of labor he belongs not to himself, but to another." We draw attention to the fact that Marx only at the end brought out the social alienation of the results of labor, showing that the worker, producing the product of labor for another person, thus alienates his activity and his human essence, his life to that person. That is, a person cannot but be alienated if he works for another person. At the same time, the alienation of labor is associated by Marx not only with the social-class side, but also with the material conditions that make class alienation possible. Insufficient consideration of this moment does not allow us to sufficiently understand the essence of alienation, as well as its specificity in Soviet society.

Marx linked the category of alienation with the dependence of man on the external manifestations of the social element, first of all, with the division of labor into mental and physical labor imposed from the outside, private property and exploitation of man by man. In other words, alienation is a process in which the result of a person's activity, like his activity itself, and with it the entire system of social relations, become beyond the control of a person, exist and develop according to their own logic, dominate a person. Overcoming social and technical and technological alienation is the process of social liberation of a person.

Types and sides of alienation

Marx identified several types of alienation: alienated labor (the main type), alienated product of labor, alienation of people from each other, alienation of social life (or alienation of "generic activity"). And in each of these types of alienation, both technical (technical and technological), socio-economic and psychological aspects of alienation are manifested. But in addition to the types of alienation, which show what exactly is alienated from a person, it seems reasonable to single out its sides, which would reflect the reasons for alienation.

Summarizing the above provisions of Marx, we came to the conclusion that three closely related aspects of the phenomenon of alienation can be distinguished: the technical and technological side (hereinafter we will refer to this side as “technical alienation”), social (socio-economic and social -political) and psychological.

Technical and technological sidealienation (technical alienation) is associated, first of all, with the domination of circumstances over a person without a direct connection with exploitation. The basis of this side of alienation is the level of development of productive forces that is insufficient for social liberation, as well as technical-technological and organizational-technical limitations of production relations. Technical alienation, as we will show below, can exist, in a certain sense, even in the absence of direct exploitation of man by man as a consequence of the limited possibilities of the productive forces of society. The preservation of technical alienation is associated, to a large extent, not with relations between people, but with the unwillingness of society to move into a new technical and technological (and hence socio-economic) quality - the quality of freedom from the quality of necessity. That is, we have here the unpreparedness of human society for socio-economic conditions under which all its members will be free not only from exploitation, but will also receive real material conditions for all-round development. In conditions of technical alienation, we are dealing with the domination of a person by social forces still unknown to him, which appear for him as “unknown” and “uncontrollable”. This side of alienation extends to the technical, technological and organizational and technical aspects of production relations, does not always affect the purely social side, which is associated with the property level of production relations. Long-term preservation of technical alienation significantly complicates the development of the need for labor and contributes to a negative attitude towards the labor process in a significant part of society. This same technical alienation contributes to the formation of conditions under which the emergence of the social and psychological side of alienation is possible. The Soviet Union faced this problem, in which socialism was forced to build on an inadequate technical and technological base, which inevitably led to a number of contradictory tendencies that gave rise to the existence of alienation, although there was no longer any exploitation in the capitalist sense of the word.

The social side of alienation is associated with the alienation of labor as a result of social relations between people, when one group of people is assigned the products produced by other people. In the social side of alienation, it is legitimate to distinguish two types: social-class (or socio-economic) and socio-political alienation .

Socio-economic alienation concerns, first of all, production relations between people based on the domination of private ownership of the means of production and the appropriation of the results of social labor by private owners. Here we are dealing with the product of labor, which is appropriated not by the person who produced it, but by the one who has private ownership of the means of production and thus alienates in his favor the product that was not produced by him. Along with the alienation of the product, the process of labor itself is alienated, which acts as an antipode to man. The worker, starting to perform his labor functions, understands that the results of his efforts will not be appropriated by them, that his labor will only allow him not to die of hunger. Together with labor, the entire system of social relations is alienated from a person (in Marx it was called "generic alienation" ), in which he has little effect. Here we are dealing with the alienation of social and political institutions, the alienation of cultural achievements as a result of the alienation of labor. This type of alienation, according to Marx, is a direct consequence of private property and the exploitation of man by man.

The social side of alienation can cause technical and technological alienation. So, for example, the desire to obtain unlimited profits pushes the owners of the means of production to economize on ensuring decent working conditions for workers, using low-skilled cheap labor, instead of developing automation of the production process, etc.

Socio-political side of alienation It directly follows from the socio-economic and is connected with the fact that since the product of labor is appropriated not by the worker himself, but by those for whom he works, then the political functions of management are also alienated from the person and are appropriated by representatives of the ruling class. On the other hand, an ordinary person simply does not have the physical ability to carry out political functions, since the lion's share of his time is absorbed by work (alienated labor). By proclaiming formal political rights and freedoms, enshrining them in constitutions and declarations, a society based on private property relations cannot create material conditions for the genuine involvement of all working people in government. Political practice shows that, despite the formal equality of all before the law, we are dealing with practical inequality.

A separate manifestation of political alienation is the institution of representation. According to some political analysts, any delegation of authority in itself is fraught with danger.alienation. In our opinion, delegation to delegation is different. Under the conditions of democratic control by organized workers over the people's representatives, mechanisms for recalling deputies, political alienation is significantly reduced and, ultimately, removed. If a member of the labor collective, nominated to a representative body of power, feels his responsibility to his voters, knows that in case of improper performance of his duties, he can be recalled at any time, there can be no question of alienation. It is a different matter when "servants of the people" turn into "masters over the people", when, under conditions of a poorly developed level of self-organization of workers and control on their part, state power turns into a political force not controlled by society, for which corporate interests are put above public ones. Here, the institution of representation turns into the strongest element of political alienation, playing only a decorative, formal role in serving the political elite and giving legitimacy to the power of the ruling class.

Here we come close to the psychological side of the phenomenon of alienation, since, strictly speaking, any alienation passes through the “head” of a person and manifests itself in a person's attitude to social life.

The psychological side of alienation is expressed in the attitude of a person to society as not to his own, but alien. Often, researchers have studied this aspect of alienation as the main one. From our point of view, it is legitimate to consider the psychological side of alienation, although significant, but nevertheless, a derivative of the technical-technological and socio-economic.

The psychological side of alienation, however, is the most diverse, as it reflects in itself both the political and socio-economic and cultural-ideological sides. Thus, psychological alienation can manifest itself as a person's alienation from himself, as a religious alienation, as a result of which a person seeks salvation in the other world and, thereby, leaves the problems of the real world. There are other diverse manifestations of the psychological side of alienation, which we will not consider in detail in this study. One way or another, any alienation takes on a psychological aspect.

Image
The 1989-1991 miners' strikes: success for units - defeat for many

We summarize that the individual, being alienated from the results of his labor and from the labor process itself, realizing this, ceases to treat the surrounding society as his own. The market element with the cult of competitive struggle extends this struggle not only to representatives of the ruling classes, but also to the poor strata of society, as a result of which we can observe indifference and unwillingness to help each other, distrust, suspicion, envy, etc. In such a situation, everyone is for himself and a competitor against the other.

Another component of the issue is connected with the fact that, having no time and energy to participate in political life, the working people themselves sometimes “voluntarily” refuse it, entrusting political functions to “professionals”. Erich Fromm described this phenomenon in sufficient detail in his work "Escape from Freedom". We see an example of such a “flight” in modern Russia, where citizens often rely not on their own struggle for their rights, but on a “strong hand” that “will suit everything” and “will do everything”. Fascist Germany, where a significant part of the citizens voluntarily agreed to obey the Fuehrer, gave us more disastrous examples of "flight". This also includes false forms of consciousness. First of all, these are religious and other anti-scientific forms of worldview, reactionary ideologies caused by the alienation of man from political and philosophical knowledge. Under such conditions, people can quite consciously fight and even achieve certain successes in the struggle for the ideas about the best structure of society that have developed in their minds, while in themselves these ideas do not correspond to the interests of those who are fighting for them. An illustrative example is the situation of the miners, who in the late 1980s fought for the secession of the RSFSR from the USSR, for greater economic independence of enterprises, and the weakening of labor discipline. They believed that it was these measures that would lead to an improvement in their lives. However, the result was, as you know, massive lawlessness and deterioration of their financial situation, and in fact the requirements were met! "Lenta ru" cites interesting recollections of the participants in those strikes, which well illustrate alienation as a distorted consciousness. We will also give them:

“Ironically, almost all the requirements of the miners and their leaders were met,” reminds Aman Tuleyev. And today we are reaping the fruits of the 1989-1991 miners' strikes. The strikers demanded that Russia leave the USSR - they got the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991. In the economic sphere: did you achieve independence of the coal industry enterprises? They demanded to allow mines and open-pit mines to establish their own production rates? Have achieved! Did you insist on abolishing the disciplinary charter, liquidating the state mining and technical inspection? They say they interfere with work. Made! They demanded not to check, not to feel the miners before descending into the face for the presence of tobacco, lighters, matches? Now they are not checking. "

“We fought for socialism with a human face,” explains Valentin Kopasov, in the 1980s he was the head of the Tsentralnaya mine, who became a member of the leadership of the strike committee in Vorkuta. - And ran into the "murlo", the vile "mug" of capitalism. Then show the guys a picture of 2016 - is that what you want? I'm sure many would like to stay in 1989. The worker was more protected, more respected, work was held in high esteem. If you knew what it would lead to, you would stay away from the strike activity. "

Have seen it ... It's a pity, but the price of such "insight" is the fate of socialism. However, even a negative lesson in history is also a lesson, the main thing is that it should be learned in the upcoming class battles.

The attitude of a certain part of the population to public property in the USSR as to "no one's" is also a manifestation of the psychological side of alienation as a reflection of the socio-economic alienation that has not been completely overcome. In general, the psychological aspect of alienation has been considered in sufficient detail in Western (especially neo-Marxist) and Russian literature.

At the same time, while recognizing the dependence of the psychological side of alienation on socio-economic factors, one cannot completely deny a certain independence of the psychological perception of alienation. Psychological alienation does not always literally copy social and technical and technological alienation. So, for example, there are cases from history when people in difficult conditions for themselves, with primitive tools of labor, were not psychologically alienated from the fruits of their activities, but felt pride and involvement in the process. An example of this can be the well-known subbotnik, to which Lenin dedicated his famous article "The Great Initiative". Similar examples are the heroic labor exploits of rear workers during the Great Patriotic War, which, despite routine labor functions, enormous wear and tear of physical strength,

On the other hand, we can very often observe people who live in comfortable conditions, work in cozy offices, but do not feel any involvement in the common cause, experience a strong psychological feeling of depression and alienation from the process and the result of their work, despite the technical equipment of their jobs and relatively high wages. Spiritual slavery, a feeling of loneliness and lack of prospects for personal growth - this is the source of the alienation of a person who is relatively well-off materially, but spiritually poor.

Separately, I would like to say about the alienation of people from each other. Here, the decisive role is played by precisely those social relations in which the vital activity of the individual proceeds. I still remember the times when houses had only wooden doors, which in Soviet times were not even always locked, people were open to each other. And it is precisely because of the social polarization of the population, the imposition of universal competition between everyone and everyone, and to put it bluntly, because of the transition to capitalism, it became possible for each person to become self-contained, to be protected from the outside world with the help of numerous iron doors, high fences, etc. People, at times, do not know their neighbors on the floor, not to mention the neighbors on the entrance, which in Soviet times was simply unthinkable. Living seemingly in relative comfort, the degree of alienation between people is much higher, than in the conditions of everyday difficulties at the beginning of the Soviet period, war and post-war times. And here a big question arises as to who will be more alienated: a modern, relatively wealthy individualist-man in the street in a cozy Moscow apartment, or a simple worker from a communal apartment, living a single life with the collective and feeling his involvement in the building of socialism. And here the technical and technological level can be higher in the first case, while the degree of alienation is higher, of course, in the second, since the technical and technological level, taken apart from socio-economic and political relations, does not in itself lead to overcoming alienation. a modern, relatively well-off individualist-man in the street in a cozy Moscow apartment or a simple worker from a communal apartment, living a single life with the collective and feeling his involvement in the building of socialism. And here the technical and technological level can be higher in the first case, while the degree of alienation is higher, of course, in the second, since the technical and technological level, taken apart from socio-economic and political relations, does not in itself lead to overcoming alienation. a modern, relatively well-off individualist-man in the street in a cozy Moscow apartment or a simple worker from a communal apartment, living a single life with the collective and feeling his involvement in the building of socialism. And here the technical and technological level can be higher in the first case, while the degree of alienation is higher, of course, in the second, since the technical and technological level, taken apart from socio-economic and political relations, does not in itself lead to overcoming alienation.

Under the conditions of capitalism, it is also interesting that the consideration that alienation from labor applies not only to hired workers who alienate their labor in favor of other people, but also to an idle consumer who lives only at the expense of someone else's labor. Such an individual will never understand the positive emotions that the labor process can bring, since he is alienated from labor as from the process of self-development of the human personality, as the process of a person's growth over himself, his all-round development and transformation. Thus, under capitalism, the alienation of labor is total in nature and applies to all members of society.

Image

It should be noted that in modern literature the Marxist approach, according to which alienation is inextricably linked with the domination of private ownership of the means of production, is shared by only a part of the researchers, while some researchers of the non-Marxist tradition, on the contrary, associate alienation with the absence of such, believing that “socialization means of production, their politicization, "nationalization", depersonalization, alienation from individual, real people, in the same way overcomes and eliminates the figure of a human individual in the economic sphere, as the system and regime of the dictatorship of the proletariat - in the political sphere, the monopoly domination of the communist party ideology - in the sphere spiritual life, etc. ”. From the point of view of this group of researchers, “the whole history of the human race has confirmed that property that serves man, Is private property. Only private property ... gives its owner the broadest rights. " Private property, as Friedman Milton writes, "is the source of freedom." Socialism, in the opinion of representatives of this trend, is"Road to slavery . "

Indeed, it is difficult to disagree with the position that private property "gives its owner the greatest rights", the only problem is that the owners of private property, as a rule, are a smaller part of the population (and far from always gets this property at the expense of their labor) , while the majority of this very property is alienated. And these are not just Marxist conclusions. Thus, a study by CreditSuisse bank revealed that in the world 1% of the rich own half of the world's wealth . At the same time, the poorest half of the world's population owns only 1% of the world's wealth . In 2015, the wealth of the 62 richest people in the world equaled the wealth of the poorest half of humanity - 3.6 billion people . In 2010, only 388 super-rich could equal half of humanity. At the same time, over the past 5 years, the wealth of the poorest half of humanity has decreased by a trillion dollars - by 41% . The wealth of the 62 fattest rich men grew by 44% over the same period - more than half a trillion dollars.

Alienation through the prism of changing socio-economic formations

The history of the development of society appears in the form of a gradual elimination of various forms of human dependence, and, consequently, various forms of his alienation from the product and the labor process ( however, this process is by no means linear and is accompanied by many zigzags, ebb and flow ).

So, in a primitive society, man was completely suppressed by nature and, accordingly, was deprived of understanding many of the processes of being, which gave rise to the endowment of natural phenomena with divine features. At this time, one can state the emergence of the first psychological forms of human alienation from cognitive activity through the deification of certain natural processes unknown to him at that time.

Image

The slave-owning and feudal modes of production led to social alienation associated with the exploitation of man by man. Here alienation was associated with the personal dependence (in the slave system of complete personal subordination ) of the worker from the master, that is, the alienation of the person's personality, as well as the alienation of the results of his labor in favor of the master. These modes of production (especially slavery) gave us an example of complete suppression of the individual, alienation not only of the product of labor, but also of human freedom as such.

Capitalism was able to partially overcome the alienation of the human person, making everyone formally equal and personally free. But the acquisition of personal freedom (the capitalist, unlike the feudal lord, could not sell the proletarian, or kill him, which the slave owner could do in relation to the slave ) did not solve the problem of removing alienation. The preservation of the economic dependence of a person deprived of ownership of the means of production (the proletarian) from the owner of the means of production (the bourgeois) led to the preservation and alienation of labor, which in the new conditions meant the alienation of labor from the proletarian in favor of the capitalist.

Attempts at communist construction in the USSR significantly overcame the socio-economic side of alienation, however, due to the insufficient development of the productive forces for transforming society on such a radical basis, they could not completely end the technical and technological side of alienation (the high proportion of the spread of hard manual labor in the USSR did not play here the last role). Of course, this could not but lead to relapses of not only technical and technological, but also social alienation in the USSR. In general, a distinctive feature of alienation in Soviet society is that it was not associated with exploitation and private ownership of the means of production, but stemmed from the technical and technological unpreparedness for socialism, to overcome which it took the exertion of all forces and the partial collapse of Soviet democracy. Not the least role in the alienation was played by the high proportion of the prevalence of hard manual labor (about 40%). This, by the way, once again shows that alienation is not removed with overcoming the exploitation of man by man and the establishment of social property in the form of formal socialization (mediated by the state apparatus), but requires progress towards real socialization. On the other hand, it is important to see the difference between technical and technological alienation under capitalism and under socialism. So, if under capitalism Marx stressed that machine technology just makes a person dependent on capital. This is what Marx called Not the least role in the alienation was played by the high proportion of the prevalence of hard manual labor (about 40%). This, by the way, once again shows that alienation is not removed with overcoming the exploitation of man by man and the establishment of social property in the form of formal socialization (mediated by the state apparatus), but requires progress towards real socialization. On the other hand, it is important to see the difference between technical and technological alienation under capitalism and under socialism. So, if under capitalism Marx stressed that machine technology just makes a person dependent on capital. This is what Marx called Not the least role in the alienation was played by the high proportion of the prevalence of hard manual labor (about 40%). This, by the way, once again shows that alienation is not removed with overcoming the exploitation of man by man and the establishment of social property in the form of formal socialization (mediated by the state apparatus), but requires progress towards real socialization. On the other hand, it is important to see the difference between technical and technological alienation under capitalism and under socialism. So, if under capitalism Marx stressed that machine technology just makes a person dependent on capital. This is what Marx called that alienation is not removed with overcoming the exploitation of man by man and the establishment of social property in the form of formal socialization (mediated by the state apparatus), but requires progress towards real socialization. On the other hand, it is important to see the difference between technical and technological alienation under capitalism and under socialism. So, if under capitalism Marx stressed that machine technology just makes a person dependent on capital. This is what Marx called that alienation is not removed with overcoming the exploitation of man by man and the establishment of social property in the form of formal socialization (mediated by the state apparatus), but requires progress towards real socialization. On the other hand, it is important to see the difference between technical and technological alienation under capitalism and under socialism. So, if under capitalism Marx stressed that machine technology just makes a person dependent on capital. This is what Marx calledreal subordination of labor to capital, when the worker can no longer find any other occupation for himself but to be an appendagecars. Under socialism, the machine makes it possible to shorten the working day and contributes to the development of the all-round abilities of the individual, his liberation. The same applies to all technical progress, which under capitalism very often acts as an additional factor of alienation, an instrument of enslavement of the individual, and under socialism it becomes a condition for overcoming alienation in all its forms. What are the so-called "information technologies", which allow, on the one hand, to provide universal access to knowledge, but in capitalist conditions are actively used to "brainwash" the population. And here we again find that in order to overcome alienation it is not enough just to develop productive forces, as supporters of the theory of "post-industrial society" believe, radical changes in production relations are also necessary.

If we talk about socialism as a whole as the lowest phase of communism, then alienation persists there too, due to the specifics of the distribution “according to work”. First, the principle “according to work” preserves a certain inequality of people among themselves, and this is due not only to inequality arising from the unequal abilities of people, but also from the inequality of living conditions. After all, if we imagine a person with a large family and someone who lives alone, then with the same abilities, their real earnings will not be the same. A person with a large family will, as it were, alienate part of his labor to support his family and, thus, be in a worse position. Secondly, the principle "according to work" creates another problem, namely, the problem of determining the measure of labor. How to calculate which work is more useful for society, and which is less useful? And, therefore, to whom to pay more: a person engaged in scientific or pedagogical work, without which the training of new specialists is unthinkable, or a worker at a factory that produces the means of production most important for the country of socialism and spends much more physical strength, and, therefore, more drains his body? And here, too, not everything is unambiguous, because in the Soviet Union there was a problem of labor motivation, which consisted in the fact that workers often did not have enough incentive to improve their level of education and qualifications due to the relatively high wages, which almost exceeded the level of wages Engineers and employees. This significantly reduced incentives for professional development. Moreover, as noted by the Soviet sociologist M.N. Rutkevich, “in many cases, workers who received a diploma of a technician (or engineer), they refuse to accept the offer to move to the post of foreman and to other posts of engineering and technical personnel out of material considerations. " And this is also a problem that requires its solution under socialism and generates, within certain boundaries, the preservation of alienation.



Alienation in modern society

In the modern capitalist world, alienation not only persists, but intensifies. With the collapse of the USSR, in our country, and throughout the world, the social side of alienation began to dominate again (in the Western countries, the so-called "social state", created in order to counter the revolutionary threat), that is, the alienation of labor, both from the side of its results and from the side of the process itself with all the ensuing consequences both in the political sphere and in the psychological attitude of a person to his activities. Despite the technical and technological capabilities of significant removal of alienation, under the conditions of the capitalist system, these achievements are used for directly opposite purposes. Thus, the information potential of the so-called “post-industrial society” turns in fact into a total information processing of the population to please one or another political mood of the ruling elite, total surveillance of the working people, and invisible censorship in the media. All this is associated with the revival of extremely reactionary forms of social consciousness, which is most clearly manifested in the growth of clericalization of society., substitution of the scientific picture of the world with all kinds of irrational forms of social consciousness. The same applies to the reincarnation of the most reactionary and misanthropic forms of fascist and neo-Nazi ideologies, which are intensively fueled by big capital, both materially and informationally.

Image

In modern society, the so-called "self-alienation" from the political sphere, or as E. Fromm called this phenomenon, "flight from freedom", makes itself felt with particular force. True, this "flight" is different from the flight that took place in Nazi Germany. There, people voluntarily submitted to the dictatorship, while realizing the very fact of its existence, in modern society, many still need to prove that any power is the dictatorship of the ruling class. A fairly large number of our compatriots, living in relatively prosperous conditions in large cities (first of all, this concerns Moscow and St. Petersburg), have plunged into the routine of their problems and hardly understand (and what is saddest of all, do not want to understand) the political processes of modern society. Therefore, being the actual "slaves", they themselves rejoice in their "chains", taking them for "freedom." It is clear that there is no question of any mass struggle for socio-economic and even more so political rights, but protest takes the shape of local outbreaks, which are easily suppressed by the centralized power of big business. I must say that in the Western countries the situation is somewhat different. There, protest activity is stronger, and the level of self-organization is much higher than in Russia. And, nevertheless, political alienation is manifested there no less than in the Russian Federation. Indeed, despite all the power of the institutions of self-organization of workers in those countries, the struggle there is waged not for fundamental changes and not for the replacement of one social formation for another, but for private concessions from the government. People are ready to fight for little, but so far not everyone understands the need for radical, revolutionary changes in the very foundations of bourgeois society. that there is no question of any mass struggle for socio-economic and even more so political rights, the protest takes on the shape of local outbreaks, which are easily suppressed by the centralized power of big business. I must say that in the Western countries the situation is somewhat different. There, protest activity is stronger, and the level of self-organization is much higher than in Russia. And, nevertheless, political alienation is manifested there no less than in the Russian Federation. Indeed, despite all the power of the institutions of self-organization of workers in those countries, the struggle there is waged not for fundamental changes and not for the replacement of one social formation for another, but for private concessions from the government. People are ready to fight for little, but so far not everyone understands the need for radical, revolutionary changes in the very foundations of bourgeois society. that there is no question of any mass struggle for socio-economic and even more so political rights, the protest takes on the shape of local outbreaks, which are easily suppressed by the centralized power of big business. I must say that in the Western countries the situation is somewhat different. There, protest activity is stronger, and the level of self-organization is much higher than in Russia. And, nevertheless, political alienation is manifested there no less than in the Russian Federation. Indeed, despite all the power of the institutions of self-organization of workers in those countries, the struggle there is waged not for fundamental changes and not for the replacement of one social formation for another, but for private concessions from the government. People are ready to fight for little, but so far not everyone understands the need for radical, revolutionary changes in the very foundations of bourgeois society.

The specificity of modern alienation lies in the social component, in the position of a person, his instability, his dependence on external circumstances, and not in extreme poverty, although the latter has not gone anywhere either . In this regard, the technical and technological side of alienation here acts as a product and consequence of the social, in contrast to the USSR, where social alienation was a consequence of the technical. It is the desire to acquire more profits that leads the capitalist to the desire to save on working conditions, to hire foreign workers who, due to their desperate situation, agree to lower wages, instead of introducing new technologies into production, improving working conditions, etc.



How can alienation be overcome?

Overcoming alienation means a transition from the "kingdom of necessity" to the "kingdom of freedom", but this is impossible without the transition from one socio-economic formation to another - more progressive (without the transition from capitalism to communism). It is precisely as a transition from one (more reactionary) to another (more progressive) socio-economic formation, accompanied by the transfer of power from one class to another (more progressive), that the social revolution is understood in Marxism, which must end with the complete victory of the new social order. Socialism (and, in the long term, also communism) was to become such a social device, representing an alternative. It is communism as a society based on the conscious management of social processes, not knowing the exploitation of man by man, applying technological progress to expand the material and cultural capabilities of a person, will put an end to all forms of alienation. Indeed, even in the event of a contradiction, a society armed with knowledge, a society deliberately organized, will be able to resolve them without much difficulty, eliminating the basis of any kind of alienation - the domination of circumstances over a person. It is communism as a system in which a person is the master of his life, a person dominates circumstances and can completely overcome the phenomenon of alienation.

Image

But it is obvious that the path to such a society lies not through “recommendations to the government and the President,” but through the constant class struggle of the working people and their self-organization in this struggle. Only the working people and, first of all, the proletariat (hired workers of physical and mental labor, deprived of ownership of the means of production), organized as a political entity (alas, today the proletariat as an independent political entity is almost absent) can bring the end of capitalism closer with their struggle. Currently, the way to overcome alienation can be the massive involvement of workers in the social-class struggle in all its forms (economic, ideological and political). Alas, today the proletariat lacks its own class policy, independent of the bourgeoisie of one sort or another. After all, a man who avoids political life of his own free will, is doubly alienated. A person who realizes the need to fight for his rights, even while remaining in a difficult economic situation, remaining alienated from the results of his labor, takes a step towards overcoming his self-alienation ("escape from freedom"), a step towards building a classless society, a step from the realm of necessity to the kingdom of freedom. Hence, it seems obvious that in modern capitalist society the path to overcoming alienation lies not through "internal self-liberation" or "revolution of consciousness" (although this is also important), and even more so not through "constructive wishes to the authorities", but through practical remaining alienated from the results of his labor, he takes a step towards overcoming his self-alienation ("escape from freedom"), a step towards building a classless society, a step from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom. Hence, it seems obvious that in modern capitalist society the path to overcoming alienation lies not through "internal self-liberation" or "revolution of consciousness" (although this is also important), and even more so not through "constructive wishes to the authorities", but through practical remaining alienated from the results of his labor, he takes a step towards overcoming his self-alienation ("escape from freedom"), a step towards building a classless society, a step from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom. Hence, it seems obvious that in modern capitalist society the path to overcoming alienation lies not through "internal self-liberation" or "revolution of consciousness" (although this is also important), and even more so not through "constructive wishes to the authorities", but through practicalthe class struggle of the proletariat in all its forms. It is from such a struggle that the revolutionary transformative road is formed from the prehistory of mankind to its true history - communist society.



Published in the socio-political journal "Alternatives" # 3 (92). 2016 year. S. 25-42.

https://www.rotfront.su/%d0%bc%d0%b0%d1 ... %b8%d1%8f/

Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

Post Reply