Ideology

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Thu Dec 09, 2021 6:05 pm

This looks to be very good. We could sure use something like this in a US frame for the 'screen dependent'.
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Watch “Marx is Back”, Episode 1: Bourgeois and Proletarians
Originally published: Left Voice by PTS (Socialist Workers Party) (May 2017 ) | - Posted Dec 08, 2021

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.

Those words, written in the 19th century, continue to ring true. In Marx is Back, a young Argentine worker begins to read the Communist Manifesto and dreams about meeting Marx.

The mini series takes place in modern-day Argentina, where workers bear the brunt of the economic crisis.In this episode, the protagonist, Martin, who works at a print shop begins to read the Manifesto and to see that society is divided into classes.

These videos were produced by the PTS (Socialist Workers Party) of Argentina in 2013.



https://mronline.org/2021/12/08/watch-m ... letarians/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Sun Dec 12, 2021 8:04 pm

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The Soviet delegation at the International History of Science Congress in London, 1931: Nikolai Bukharin, Modest Rubenstein, and Boris Hessen in the foreground.

Marxism and STS: From Marx and Engels to COVID-19 and COP26
Posted Dec 11, 2021 by Helena Sheehan

Ideology, Marxism, Media, MovementsEurope, GlobalMonthly Review Essaysco-published, Featured
This article is a co-publication of MR Online and Science for the People.

At the recent conference of the Society for the Social Study of Science, I came to the conclusion that the history of Marxism in relation to science and technology studies is an increasingly forgotten story.

From the beginning, Marxism took science extremely seriously, not only for its economic promise in building a socialist society, but for its revelatory power in understanding the world.1 Marxism has made the strongest claims of any intellectual tradition before or since about the socio-historical character of science, yet always affirmed its cognitive achievements.

Science was seen as inextricably enmeshed with economic systems, technological developments, political movements, philosophical theories, cultural trends, ethical norms, ideological positions. Indeed, with all that was human. It was also a path of access to the natural world. There were studies, texts, theories, tensions, and debates exploring the complexities of how this was so.2

The objectivist/constructivist dichotomy could never capture its epistemological dynamic. Nor could the internalist/externalist dualism ever do justice to the interacting field of forces harnessed in its historiographical process. Knowledge was conceived always as interactive, so there was no object without subject, no access to an external world without the socially evolved apparatus of conceptualization of it, no ideas unshaped by history, but no reason to think this invalidated knowledge.

Marx and Engels were acutely attuned to the science of their times and integrated this awareness at the core of their thought process in developing the intellectual tradition and political movement that came to be called Marxism.

There have been controversies about the Marx-Engels relationship, with a tendency to counterpose a humanist Marx to a positivist Engels, especially to dissociate Marx from Engels’s posthumous work Dialectics of Nature. The dialectics of nature debate resurfaces periodically, including recently, and there is an even stronger tendency to vindicate Engels than when I entered the fray decades ago.3 What is at stake is the development of a comprehensive worldview embracing both human society and the natural world with a strong emphasis on cutting edge science.

The subsequent generation of Marxists, during the period of the Second International, also paid such acute attention to the onward development of science and there were debates among themselves and others about its implications and consequences, especially in response to trends such as positivism, Machism, neo-Kantianism.4

After the October revolution, there was an intensification of this activity in Soviet society. Science was a necessity in building a new social order. Scientific theory was thought to be not only a matter of truth and error, but of life and death. There were many debates, some between those more grounded in the empirical sciences and those who stressed the continuity of Marxism with the history of philosophy.

Intertwined with all the intellectual debates of the day was an intense struggle for power. There was tension around a more cosmopolitan Marxist intelligentsia, who had found their way to Marxism in difficult and dangerous conditions, exposed to an array of intellectual influences, accustomed to mixing with intellectuals of many points of view and arguing the case for Marxism in such milieux.

Increasingly they were coming under pressure from those who had come up under the revolution, never been abroad, knew no foreign languages, had little detailed knowledge of either the natural sciences or the history of philosophy, and never mixed with exponents of other intellectual traditions. Some were more inclined to cite the authority of classic texts or party decrees than to engage in theoretical debate. They were being fast-tracked in their careers and taking over as professors, directors of institutes and members of editorial boards, occupying positions of authority over intellectuals of international reputation. There was high drama and there was soon to be blood on the floor.

It was the more cosmopolitan intelligentsia that came to London in 1931 for what is perhaps the most memorialized conference ever. News of the Second International History of Science Congress spilled over into the mass media with the arrival of a Soviet delegation led by N. I. Bukharin and including B. M. Hessen, N. I. Vavilov and others renowned in the history of science. The 1931 congress brought forces already in motion into a new level of interaction with each other. At the congress, contrasting worldviews were in collision. The majority of those in attendance were professional historians of science or scientists with an antiquarian interest in history, who discussed the subject in a leisurely way with an implicit positivism. They were stunned by the Soviets discussing science in connection with philosophy and politics and in such a world-historical way. Those most touched by this confrontation were leftist scientists in Britain who shared the vision of the visitors from afar. The ideas of J. D. Bernal, J. B. S. Haldane and other leading scientists who became Marxists took hold among many of their contemporaries and gave rise to a dynamic radical science movement in the 1930s.5

Bernal saw Marxism as providing an integrated framework. It was a philosophy derived from science that brought order and perspective and illuminated the onward path of science. It provided a method of co-ordinating the experimental results of science and unifying its different branches in a deep socio-historical perspective. He called for a science of science—what came to be called Science and Technology Studies (STS).

After 1945, the influence of Marxism spread ever wider. In Eastern Europe, Marxism became the dominant force in the universities, research institutes, and academic journals of new socialist states. It spread to Asia, Latin America, Africa in liberation movements, some of which became parties of power.

There was serious work done in developing a distinctive approach to STS, particularly in exploring the philosophical implications of the natural sciences. This was the case in the academies of Eastern Europe, particularly in East Germany, in the intellectual life of communist parties, in journals such as Science and Society, La Penée and Modern Quarterly. It was very different from the narrowly methodological approach being pursued in philosophy of science elsewhere. It was also work of profound significance that was too little known outside these milieux.

Marxism combined attention to the advancing results of the empirical sciences, development of a philosophical framework capable of integrating expanding knowledge and awareness of the socio-historical context of it all.

The 1960s and 1970s put Marxism on the agenda in a new way in the rest of the world where capitalism held sway. New Left ferment pervaded North America and Western Europe especially. This was a time when all that had been assumed was opened to question, when the universities and the streets became contested terrain. Academic disciplines were scrutinized at their very foundations. Philosophy, sociology, literature, science—all knowledge—was seen as tied to power. University campuses and academic conferences were alive with passion and polemic. Journals such as Radical Philosophy, Insurgent Sociologist, Science for the People, Radical Science Journal, and Science as Culture gave expression to this ferment. Many of my generation threw ourselves wholeheartedly into this.

I was interested in Marxism as a comprehensive worldview and intrigued by the ways in which intellectual movements were rooted in socio-historical forces. I saw the whole history of philosophy that I had been studying in a new way. I saw everything in a new way, a way in which everything was interconnected: philosophy, culture, politics, economics, science. I decided to focus on science within this network of relationships. Researching my book Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: A Critical History was an absorbing adventure, especially during my intervals in the USSR. I felt like a detective uncovering an intricate series of intersecting stories. I tried to write a Marxist history of Marxism and science, despite the enormous and opposite pressures on me as I strove to do so, pressures from east and west, from left and right, from old and new left, from commitment and career.

Sometimes, to my surprise, I felt more of an affinity with the previous generation than my own. I could not understand why my contemporaries, especially among British Marxists, turned their backs on the earlier generation of British Marxists and went flocking to Althusser or Foucault. New Left Review veered between obliviousness and hostility to the previous generation of British Marxists.

Radical Science Journal did engage with the earlier generation, however critically. Gary Werskey’s book The Visible College was perhaps the most substantial work mediating between these generations on the question of science. Robert Young’s “Science is social relations ” was the most explicit and provocative exposition of a new left position on science. Reacting strongly against the view that science itself is neutral and that only the use or abuse of science is ideological, Young and Radical Science Journal held that science as such is ideological. From the premise that modern science, with its characteristic concepts of truth and rationality, and modern capitalism, with its alienating division of labour, arose upon a single edifice, came the conclusion that both would have to be totally dismantled. So, for Young, science equaled capitalist science. It was a far cry from the affirmation of science characterizing previous generations of the left.6

Living as if in some parallel universe much of the time, parts of academe proceeded as if the only story in philosophy of science was the one proceeding from the Vienna Circle through Popper, Lakatos, Kuhn.7 Philosophy of science in philosophy departments rarely took a sideward glance at this other tradition.

Meanwhile, Soviet delegations were no longer a surprise at international conferences. They were integrated into the organizing structures and gave papers in many sessions. However, how much of a meeting of minds occurred was another matter. The World Congress of Philosophy was held in Düsseldorf in August 1978. I spent much of that year in Eastern Europe, mostly in Moscow. The philosophers there were constantly talking about the upcoming congress. In fact, they were preparing for it as if for Warsaw Pact maneuvers. They kept asking me what Irish and British philosophers were planning. However, they weren’t planning anything. They were coming or not coming as individuals and thinking only about their own papers and travel arrangements.

At the congress itself, philosophers from the socialist countries and philosophers from the rest of the world mostly read papers past each other (as most academics at most congresses do). There were, however, several skirmishes and a cold war atmosphere. I felt myself to be in a similar situation to that of British Marxists at the 1931 congress. I moved between both sides in a way that very few did. People like me were constantly challenged at such congresses to prove that Marxism plus science did not necessarily equal Lysenkoism.8

There were other enclaves where there was sustained cross fertilization, such as the Boston Colloquium in Philosophy of Science, which resulted in many volumes of Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, edited by Robert Cohen and Marx Wartofsky. The Inter-University Centre in Dubrovnik was also a pioneering and important base for interaction between east and west, between Marxists and non-Marxists.

In 1990 it seemed that the world turned upside down. The USSR, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia disappeared from the map. I had often wondered how many of the intellectuals I met in Eastern Europe would be Marxists if there was a regime change, and I soon found out. I had several confrontations in the 1990s with those who had made their careers professing Marxism and then made their careers by denouncing it. Academic life all over the world is full of such people. They do what is necessary to advance themselves and they are rewarded, then and now, but they will never produce anything of real value.

I have returned over the years to Eastern Europe to see where all the Marxists have gone. I have been most impressed when visiting the vanquished, the Marxist intelligentsia who were still Marxists, who once occupied the apex of academe and subsequently led quite marginalized lives. Loren Graham of MIT, who spent his whole professional life studying Soviet and post-Soviet science and philosophy of science said of dialectical materialism: “This philosophy of science is actually quite a sensible one and corresponds to the implicit views of many working scientists all over the world.” Graham, not a Marxist, also went on to show that this philosophy had a lasting impact on Russian scientists, even after the demise of the Soviet state.

So what does Marxism have to offer to science and STS now? Science and STS seem to be flourishing in the sense that there is much funding, many metrics,9 all sorts of empirical studies. Much of this is interesting and valuable, although a lot of it is bland and bitty. Many studies are short and shallow and driven by market demand and fast-track careerism more than intellectual quest. There is not much in the way of thinking that is simultaneously empirically grounded, philosophically integrated, socio-historically contextualized. This is what Marxism could bring to bear. Instead, science and STS go from one extreme to the other: from the minutiae of molecules to the “tao” of physics. It is either science stripped of philosophical or historical reflection or it is new age nonsense stepping into the philosophical gap and filling the bookshop shelves. Both are commercially successful. Contradiction sells.

The intensification of the commercialization of science, as part of the general commodification of knowledge, is the strongest force in the field today. A new orthodoxy has taken command, not so much by winning arguments, but by wielding systemic power on a global scale. Universities are being harnessed to operate by market norms and survival of the fittest in commercial competition is outstripping all other forms of validation, particularly truth criteria, theoretical depth and breadth, moral responsibility, political engagement. There are powerful pressures disincentivizing, eroding and marginalizing critical thinking, creative thinking, systemic thinking.

Universities are contested terrain. The atmosphere has changed drastically from what prevailed in the 1960s and 1970s. Then there were large-scale contending paradigms in every area facing off with each other with great energy and passion. It has dissipated now. It is disconcerting, because it is not as if anything has been solved. It is that people have learned to live with problems unresolved or unacknowledged or to settle for resolution at a less than fundamental level. The confrontations of worldviews have given way to low-level eclecticism. There is a narrowing of perspective and a retreat from engagement, whether through myopia, ignorance, shallowness, conformity, fear or careerism.

So much of what I read or review in so many areas is so half-baked. Conceptualization is weak and confused. Contextualization is thin and random. Marxism has nurtured in me a demand for conceptualization that is strong and lucid, for contextualization that is thick and systemic. Many social studies of science, including some associated with the strong program, are still too weak in conceptualization and contextualization.

There have been periodic rediscoveries of the socio-historical context of science as if Marxism had never happened —from Kuhn to Edinburgh School to Latour or whomever. This is not to deny the significant contribution of the Edinburgh School, who have offered an impressive output of empirical studies of intriguing episodes in the history of science.10

The science wars of the 1990s took up the threads of this tension.11 I found myself on both sides, yet wholly on neither. I agreed with those who wanted to defend the cognitive capacity of science against epistemological anti-realism, irrationalism, mysticism, conventionalism, especially against anything-goes postmodernism. I also agreed with those who insisted on a strong socio-historical account of science against a reassertion of scientism. A better grounding in what the Marxist tradition has brought to bear on these issues would have illuminated the terrain.

I do not believe that the debunking of science in terms of its cognitive capacity is an appropriate activity for the left. It is neither epistemologically sound nor politically progressive. The left should take its stand with science, a critically reconstructed, socially responsible science, but with the possibilities of science.

STS has tended increasingly to back away from the big ideas that were once in play. It is becoming too small, too introverted, obsessed with mini-debates of micro-tendencies with only weak evidence of relevant intellectual history and thin social context.

As to philosophy, although it is central to the human condition, many professional philosophers have reduced STS to technicist esoterica or obfuscating nonsense. They have alienated many who have come to it seeking meaning, putting any defense of its declining status on dubious grounds. Some texts in philosophy of science seem to me to be equivalent to obsession with a game of chess while the house is burning down around it.

Marxism is still an alternative. It is still superior to anything on the scene. It is a way of seeing the world in terms of a complex pattern of interconnecting processes where others see only disconnected and static particulars. It is a way of revealing how economic structures, political institutions, legal codes, moral norms, cultural trends, scientific theories, philosophical perspectives, even common sense, are all products of a pattern of historical development shaped by a mode of production.

Marxism as a philosophy of science is materialist in the sense of explaining the natural world in terms of natural forces and not supernatural powers. It is dialectical in the sense of being evolutionary, processive, developmental. It is radically contextual and relational in the sense that it sees everything that exists within the web of forces in which it is embedded. It is empiricist without being positivist or reductionist. It is rationalist without being idealist. It is coherent and comprehensive while being empirically grounded.

Marxism has been a major position in the history of philosophy. It has been a formative force in STS and other disciplines and it is a continuing influence. It is not as influential as it deserves to be on the current intellectual landscape, but it is still more influential than many might think. It is there in ways that are not always acknowledged. It is sometimes the philosophy that dare not speak its name. Moreover, many of its premises have come to be so accepted that it seems no longer necessary or opportune or even known from where they have come.

There are ebbs and flows and new waves of realization all the time.

The current push for decolonization of knowledge is important. I cheered as Rhodes fell at University of Cape Town in 2015, but I have watched as a lot of this progressive impulse has become unmoored with a year zero mentality denying what has been achieved by previous generations as well as a failure to see that the central force colonizing knowledge is capital. I am already seeing a lot of it co-opted into the bland and blind liberal agenda of diversity and inclusion.12

There is evidence of a revival of interest in Marxism in relation to science now in our current planetary emergency, particularly the looming climate catastrophe and the persisting COVID-19 pandemic. Positivist scientism has some limited potency, but is too narrow, too myopic to grasp the full picture. Premodern or postmodern anti-science is a blind alley. The postmodernist critique of science has evaporated. Because science has become so salient, so immediate, so crucial to our collective fate, no one wants to hear that we have no criteria for deciding between contending truth claims or that science is inherently deceptive or oppressive.

Yet science under capitalism has become problematic and only systemic analysis can deal with that.

The statistics on carbon emissions or loss of biodiversity only get us so far unless we address the system that created the problem, fuels the process onward and blocks possible solutions. There is so much being written about ecological crisis, but it is Marxists, such as John Bellamy Foster, Ian Angus, and Andreas Malm, who connect the science to philosophy, sociology and political economy, who bring the whole picture into clear focus and point the way beyond it.13

It is the same with the current pandemic. The statistics on COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, deaths, vaccinations and mitigation measures only get us so far unless we see what conditions have created this pandemic and persist to create future and fiercer pandemics. It is Marxists, such as Mike Davis and Rob Wallace, who predicted that such a pandemic was coming and showed when it came how it was bound up with the circuitry of capital. Whatever may have happened in the Wuhan lab or Wuhan market, the real source is deforestation, destruction of habitats, wildlife trafficking, the whole industrialized system of food production and the global circuitry of capital. Marxists and others have highlighted the downgrading of public health systems, the negative effect on patents and the stranglehold of big pharma in obstructing just distribution of vaccines and therapeutic medicines.14 We need a more open, cooperative, international science to deal with these problems. There have been moves in this direction in response to current crises, but the obstructions are still formidable.

Marxists have been to the fore in doing the systemic thinking demanded by these crises, not only in clarifying the causes, but in pointing to the solutions—solutions difficult to achieve, because the imperatives generated by ecological and epidemiological crises go contrary to the very logic of capitalism. I think this is being realized by more and more people, the sort of people who gathered outside the barriers of COP26 or those who couldn’t travel but followed news reports with dismay.

The history of Marxism and its relation to science is tied inextricably to the history of everything else. It is still the unsurpassed philosophy of our time.

Notes:
1.↩ This article is an edited version of Helena Sheehan, “Science and Technology Studies: A Marxist Narrative,” online presentation, November 17, 2021, Youtube Video, 1:58:47, www.youtube.com.
2.↩ This article is necessarily sketchy, sweeping through decades and dealing with many thinkers, theories and debates. For the fuller story, see my more comprehensive account in Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: A Critical History (London: Verso Books, 2018).
3.↩ For a good account of the whole history of this debate, see Kaan Kangal, Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).
4.↩ Sheehan, Marxism and the Philosophy of Science.
5.↩ For more on this congress and its aftermath, see Gary Werskey, The Visible College: A Collective Biography of British Scientists and Socialists of the 1930s (London: Allen Lane, 1978); Christopher Chilvers, “Five Tourniquets and a Ship’s Bell: The Special Session at the 1931 Congress,” Centaurus 57, no. 2 (2015): 61–95; Sheehan, Marxism and the Philosophy of Science. A book containing the Soviet papers from this congress was published as N. I. Bukharin et al., Science at the Crossroads (London: Kniga 1931).
6.↩ Werskey, The Visible College; Robert Young, “Science is Social Relations,” Radical Science Journal 5 (1977): 65–129.
7.↩ This tradition began with the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle and progressed through various forms of neo-positivism and post-positivism, generating a considerable volume of literature. It was narrowly focused on epistemology and scientific method, particularly demarcation criteria, rather than questions of worldview preoccupying Marxism.
8.↩ For a more elaborate account of these conferences and other events and movements of these years, see Helena Sheehan Navigating the Zeitgeist (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2019).
9.↩ By metrics here I mean quantitative studies as well as impact statistics.
10.↩ The strong program in the sociology of knowledge of the Edinburgh School held that scientific theories considered both true and false should be treated equivalently in terms of their need for sociological explanation.
11.↩ The catalytic events were the publication of, among many, Gross and Levitt Higher Superstition in 1994, the infamous Sokal hoax in 1996 and the flurry of publicity surrounding it, the science wars special issue of Social Text with the Sokal article in it and the book without it, the New York Academy of Science conference published as The Flight from Science and Reason. For an overview, see Ullica Segerstrale, eds., Beyond the Science Wars: The Missing Discourse about Science and Society (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000) and Helena Sheehan, “The Drama of the Science Wars: What Is the Plot?” Public Understanding of Science 10, no. 2 (2001).
12.↩ Helena Sheehan “Class, Race, Gender and the Production of Knowledge: Considerations on the Decolonisation of Knowledge” Transform 7, 13-30, 2020.
13.↩ John Bellamy Foster, Marx and Ecology (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000); John Bellamy Foster, The Return of Nature (New York: Monthly Review, 2020); Ian Angus, A Redder Shade of Green: Intersections of Science and Socialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017); Andreas Malm, The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World (New York: Verso Books, 2017); Andreas Malm, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Verso Books, 2020).
14.↩ Mike Davis, The Monster Enters: COVID 19, Avian Flu, and the Plagues of Capitalism (New York: Verso Books, 2020); Rob Wallace, Big Farms Make Big Flu (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016); Rob Wallace, Dead Epidemiologists: On the Origins of COVID-19 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016).

https://mronline.org/2021/12/11/marxism ... and-cop26/
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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Fri Dec 24, 2021 3:17 pm

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Bourgeois Idealism & the Promotion of Anti-Intellectualism
Originally published: Hood Communist by Ahjamu Umi (December 16, 2021 ) | - Posted Dec 23, 2021

I know already as I’m writing this piece that it’s not going to be a piece that’s widely read and/or shared. I know this because I’ve written a number of pieces that have been read and shared by thousands. As a result, I’ve learned that the formula for that level of popularity in literature is ensuring the topic is high on the popular culture list. This relates to what bourgeois celebrities, politicians, etc. are doing. These are the people the capitalist system validates as worthwhile. And, all of us, whether we know it or not, whether we admit it or not, are programmed to respond the way capitalism has programmed us to respond— so, celebrities and the issues they are concerned about. If those two things jibe with what is going on in popular culture, then you are much more likely to have a piece that gains traction if you write about those things.

Due to this phenomenon, many people who make attempts to address the issues confronting humanity feel pressured to somehow navigate through the superficial realm that capitalism has provided for us. In the ten plus years that I’ve been writing, I’ve tried my absolute best to resist that urge. What’s been most important to me is presenting an analysis and perspective that speaks truth while attempting to match truth with our material realities as human beings. And, to be able to do that while writing in a style that still manages to resonate with everyday people who are the basis of everything that exists in this world today. Also, I hear the voice of the honorable Marcus Garvey in my head when he said “What you do today can impact someone tomorrow!” Once I write each piece, it’s out in the world and it’s quite possible that I can write something that may not be widely read today, but will gain the attention of the future Assata Shakurs, Teodora Gomes, Malcolm Xs or Kwame Tures who may not even be born yet.

So, it’s in that spirit that I present this analysis rooted in addressing elements that all of us are impacted by daily, although many of us are not consciously aware of this. It is the capitalist system which is the complete reason for this confusion.

Capitalism is the dominant economic system on earth today. It’s a system which prioritizes profit over people. It is a system that gained and maintains its stronghold by physically, psychologically, and spiritually dominating the masses of people on earth. The strategy that capitalism relies on to maintain its grip is ensuring that the masses of people remain confused. The fact that the masses envision the very capitalist system that is responsible for all the suffering that exists on earth today, as the only system that can bring them peace and salvation is amazing. For capitalism, ensuring the masses believe this, and never ever question it, is essential to its survival. As a result, capitalism has spent the last five centuries consolidating lies about its origins and its day to day existence. Those lies are not just individual misspoken statements. They are systemic manifestations (white supremacy, patriarchy, homophobia, individualism, elitism, idealism) that are reinforced 24/7/365. In other words, since the reality of capitalism is oppression, death, and destruction, all over the world, instead of risking the masses coming to this realization, capitalism creates an illusion and perpetuates it so often and so systematically that most people cannot tell the difference.

A major reason for the continued success of this strategy is capitalism’s devaluing of the study of ideas. Capitalists know that the struggle to understand ideas is a key skill that would permit the masses to learn how to see through their tricks. Consequently, they will never provide or endorse that type of skill development. And, anyone who suggests doing so will be discredited by them (through their massive propaganda mechanisms like mass media, schools, churches, mosques, etc.). This is why capitalist mass media has millions of people convinced that they are providing you a balanced perspective of what’s happening in the world. They tell you this, and you and many people you know believe it to some extent. This is also the reason there is no real study of our material conditions in places of worship. You do not have an atmosphere where congregants can rise up during a service and correct the lies of the pastor. There is no collective study, just rote dictation of biblical verses. That’s why people can quote biblical verses, but can rarely provide historical context. It’s also why movies, news, television shows, etc., promote the same general themes, which means most of the time you can predict the outcome without having seen the show before.

The capitalist system really only talks to you about two or three things and they tell you only what they want you to know about those two or three things as often as they possibly can. If you think about 2020, the only things all of the bourgeois news stations told you is how they intend to frame the U.S. presidential election and coronavirus. You learned nothing about the political, economic, and social realities in Africa, Asia, Latin America or the Caribbean in 2020. You didn’t even learn anything about the realities in communities across the U.S. On the elections and Covid they didn’t give you a broad perspective with critical information. You were never provided much of a glimpse into the on-the-ground mutual aid work (carried out by mass organizational efforts, not government) which has been necessary and essential to helping people exist over the past two years. They ignored that because if they provided that information people would be led to question why these efforts should even be necessary in such a rich country. They didn’t show you the disparate impacts of Covid on poor colonized communities in concrete and consistent ways that would help you understand how oppression manifests itself in this society. And, they certainly didn’t ever expose you to the efforts others have made and are making to address Covid, especially if those others are their enemies like socialist Cuba, for example. Despite these glaring contradictions, they will come before you every day with a straight face and tell you that this is democracy at work. The same democracy that harps over and over that the November 2020 U.S. presidential election was “democracy at work.” The obvious contradiction is that they have convinced millions of this while simultaneously, the U.S. was exposed as having played a leading role in subverting democracy in Bolivia and Venezuela’s elections. This contradiction is as obvious as the sun coming up this morning, but because the so-called mass media never talks about Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba, etc., except to demonize them. They have been able to create the reality where millions of people believe this one sided dishonest portrayal is a balanced view. Think of it like this: if your parents and/or your partners (and for many of us, unfortunately this is true) told you unstop that you are worthless then eventually, you would come to believe on some levels that this is a true and correct analysis about you.

These capitalists’ dirty tactics are also continuously successful because they have been able to convince so many of us that studying information is a waste of time and a poor example of human behavior. Think about how seldom you see people reading comprehensive material. We are not talking about pop culture internet articles, magazines, and the like. We are talking about how often do you see people reading books on philosophy, ideology, history, etc.? And, even if you can say you have seen people doing this, that’s only on an individual level. A small finite number of you can claim you know of people collectively and consistently engaging in these practices. Practically never is going to be the consistent answer. Most of you reading this probably rarely do this. This is the reality because we have permitted them to convince us that doing so is not necessary; that we already know all we need to know to properly conduct our lives. And, we believe this because they have trained us to see the world from an idealist and individualist perspective. This means whatever we think we know, that’s all that matters, nothing else. We need not be concerned about anything outside of our individual experience, i.e. what directly impacts us in ways we understand. Once they have convinced us to believe this nonsense, then we will effectively turn off all elements of life that we do not see as directly impacting what we are doing in our individual lives. If it isn’t helping us understand how to buy a house or car, if it doesn’t help us get our hands on more money, then it’s not relevant. This is the most effective anti-intellectual campaign since Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

This is why it has become so difficult to convince people of common logic. Regardless of the fact you have all the information and evidence, they still refuse to accept it because it doesn’t fit their only criteria – relevance to what they are thinking and doing. On top of that, capitalism has these systems of oppression that work day and night to convince people that regardless of how oppressed they are, they still have the chance to become a millionaire. Win the lottery. Marry a billionaire. So, they should always maintain faith in the capitalist system because if they don’t, they could miss that opportunity. Even if they have been houseless for 25 years. Even if they have been oppressed by white supremacy and/or patriarchy, still maintain that faith. And, certainly and absolutely reject any inclination that another reality could be possible. Under these dysfunctional circumstances, a houseless person will defend capitalism against you even if you drop clear evidence of greed and oppression as the reason for their suffering. I can think of no better example of anti-intellectualism.

Many people are confused and can only view this and other discussions like it through that individualistic vision. As a result, they see us talking about anti-intellectualism being a problem and to them this means we are criticizing people who do not study. If you have the means and capacity to study and you don’t, then absolutely, you are to be criticized, but that’s not the point of the argument. The point is how the capitalist system has convinced us that studying is a bad idea. What happened to “information is power” and what great minds like Malcolm X said when he told us that “history is best qualified to reward our research.”

Don’t get us wrong, we have great faith in the masses of humanity, but we are not confused. Our people died and were savagely beaten to win our right to gain access to organized education not just in the U.S., but all over the world. All over the world. Faith in the masses cannot just mean faith in you individually, especially if you haven’t really done much to warrant that level of respect. It has to include, and even start with, respect for the sacrifices and contributions of those who fought for us to have a better life on a collective level. Our people didn’t fight for education because they wanted an individual education. They fought, without receiving the education they fought for themselves, because they knew that we as a people needed that victory. They knew we needed that victory because they understood, even if we have lost this understanding today, that education, properly organized, is a tool that we can use effectively to find solutions to liberate our people from the oppression the capitalist system continues to reap upon us.

Being anti-reading is not cool, its silly. If people have physical and/or psychological impediments that make it difficult or impossible for them to study, then we have to work to develop mechanisms to address this with/for them, but under no circumstances should we buy into this backward concept that studying is a bourgeois concept. It’s the bourgeoisie that don’t want you to study because they know you doing that would mean their downfall. What an irony! They know they can use the threat of appearing to mimic them as a tool to prevent so many of us from doing what’s needed to eliminate them. If you don’t understand the clear difference between revolutionary political education and bourgeois elitist academics, we are happy to demonstrate the difference. We want the former, not the latter, and we want and need all of us to understand and accept this reality so that we can get to work. The problems of this world require education. Not a few select people gaining it and solving the problems for everyone, but the masses of people having the tools to collectively solve our problems on a collective level. That is the most logical and clear definition of a revolutionary process that we can provide for you.

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Mon Dec 27, 2021 3:03 pm

A mixed bag here but worth the time. Of historical value at the very least.

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‘Imperialism runs deep’: Interview with Robert Biel on British Maoism and its afterlives
19 Dec

Written By Robert Biel

In this interview, Robert Biel recounts his experiences of the British Maoist movement in the 1980s, the positive lessons that can be drawn from it, and the need for Marxists to transcend Eurocentrism and connect with diverse struggles against oppression.

Maoism was a truly global movement, and the radical energies unleashed by the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution captured the imagination of the New Left generation, including in Britain. In 1976, the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Labour government Denis Healey racistly referred to his left-wing critics as being ‘out of their tiny Chinese minds’ (quoted in Tom Buchanan, East Wind: China and the British Left, p. 189).

From the standpoint of the revolutionary left, a more specific impact was made by the Chinese Communist Party’s polemics against Nikita Khrushchev’s ‘revisionist’ notion of peaceful coexistence with capitalism during the Sino-Soviet split. From the 1960s–80s anti-revisionist Marxism-Leninism (often simply referred to as Maoism) amassed tens of thousands of followers in France, Germany and Scandinavia, but as Tariq Ali points out equivalent currents in Britain were far smaller. This was partly due to the predominance of Trotskyism among the British New Left intelligentsia, as well as the absence of a mass Communist Party from which sizeable Maoist factions could emerge. Nonetheless, there were a smattering of anti-revisionist splinters from the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), which most surviving Marxist-Leninist groups in the country can trace their lineage back to.

Very little is written on Maoism in Britain, beyond the scattered sources held at the Encyclopaedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line, and the media sensationalism surrounding the Balakrishnan cult. The movement is usually cast in negative terms, focusing on the excesses of ideological struggle and sectarian insularity. However, as Robert Biel argues in this interview, the interventions of the Chinese Communist Party had contradictory results. The desire of many anti-revisionists to uphold an ‘untainted’ version of Marxism-Leninism, while cutting against the reformist drift of Occidental communism, did often lead to an ossification of theory and practice, as remains strongly apparent with lingering micro-sects such as the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) (CPGB-ML).

At the same time, the Chinese revolution represented a crushing blow against global imperialism. Western Maoism was not just a movement of white students, as the stereotype holds, and the example of China as a beacon of ‘Third World’ socialism held appeal to many Black and Brown radicals in Britain. Mao’s China was a key reference point for Claudia Jones and the militant Caribbean Workers’ Movement, several British Black Power organisations, and the great Indian Workers Association. Such cross-fertilising currents, largely erased from the historical memory of the British left, ran parallel to more widely studied trajectories in the North American context (see e.g. Max Elbaum’s Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che).

As Robert Biel affirms, there are many positive things to take from the Maoist experience: its relative successes in building support for global South liberation movements, the openings it provided to challenge Eurocentric distortions of socialism, and the notion of continual struggle and renewal of Marxism. A member of the Revolutionary Communist League of Britain (RCLB), a group described by a contemporary as representing ‘the more serious side of Maoism’ who were involved in a number of anti-imperialist and anti-racist campaigns including the Bradford Twelve, Biel authored an internationally circulated monograph titled Eurocentrism and the Communist Movement which first appeared in 1987 and was reprinted in an updated form in 2015. Biel now teaches Political Ecology at University College London, and his more recent books are The New Imperialism (2000), The Entropy of Capitalism (2011), and Sustainable Food Systems: The Role of the City (2016), which is available open access.

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Robert Biel: First of all, thanks so much for this invitation, and I’m honoured to contribute to this project.

The starting point for your inviting me was the book Eurocentrism and the Communist Movement, and I did indeed initiate the project which led to this (the Political Economy Study Group, convened under the auspices of the Revolutionary Communist League of Britain), and I also researched and wrote the book. However, this was only made possible by a far-reaching movement of political struggle and mass work launched by the Marxist-Leninist movement, which I played only a very small part in initiating. I was educated by my comrades, and also – as a result of our collective effort to overturn the racism and imperialist supremacism characteristic of much of the Left – in particular by the close collaboration which we developed with Black and oppressed-nationality fighters.

Alfie Hancox: Can you tell us about the political climate – national and international – which shaped the outlook of the Revolutionary Communist League of Britain?

RB: If you look back to the late 1970s, when the RCLB began, there was a strong sense that capitalism was in deep trouble. There was also a deep sense of continuity with a revolutionary tradition, which had stretched almost uninterruptedly since the time of Marx. Even the first three-quarters of the twentieth century had seen wave after wave of national liberation struggles: World War I, the Russian Revolution, the Great Depression, World War II, the Chinese revolution, independence movements which forced the liquidation of colonial empires, the radical protest movements of 1968, the Cultural Revolution in China, the collapse of the ‘postwar boom’ leaving capitalism locked in interminable structural crisis throughout the 1970s, followed by the US’s defeat in Vietnam in 1975. In Britain, the Tories and Labour had alternated in trying vainly to manage an economic-social crisis to which there seemed no obvious solution. We used the word ‘crisis’ a lot at the time!

The circumstances therefore seemed favourable for socialists to offer an alternative and take humanity forward from the ruins of the capitalist epoch. So what was stopping this? While our sense of continuity with the Left’s heroic traditions was strong, we were also aware that serious errors had become embedded, not just in the organised labour movement (which had always tended to collaborate with imperialism), but also the various left trends in Britain at that time.

So we identified our tasks: immerse ourselves in the mass movement, and understand the world in the process of striving to change it; and at the same time, analyse the errors in politics and world-view which were holding back a radical anti-imperialist alternative. Obviously, these two tasks were indissolubly linked. The social reality we wanted to understand and change was that of our own country, so this was always the primary point of reference.

In retrospect, we can say capitalism has revealed itself to be more resilient than it seemed at the time. Using the twin evils of neo-liberalism and globalisation, it found a way to unleash a fresh wave of frenzied development at the expense of immense harm to the planet, to the working class, and to humanity’s prospects for survival. In Britain, this was initiated by the Thatcher government from 1979.

But, although capitalism was ultimately to emerge stronger from the 1980s, at the time it was anything but secure. This was a period of very intense and multi-faceted struggle, during which capitalism and imperialism was often on the defensive. In Britain, there were the inner-city uprisings against racism and in defence of communities, mass struggles against fascist organisations, campaigns against deportations, the miners’ strike, acute struggles in Ireland including the epic Republican hunger strike, liberation struggles in Southern Africa, etc. etc., and many points of contact and mutual support between all these. I’m very happy that Marxist-Leninists did some excellent work in solidarity with all these movements. The theoretical side – and in particular the work which led to Eurocentrism and the Communist Movement – was always inseparable from our deep involvement in these realities.

Looking back from today’s standpoint, although it’s true that capitalism went through a period of dynamism from about 1980–2008, this was always on shaky and unsustainable foundations, and the fundamental weaknesses and contradictions remain. In an important sense, the crumbling basis of capitalism is the ecology, and in fact the costs of capitalism’s expansion have always been met by the environment (e.g., Thatcherism was entirely funded by North Sea oil!). We didn’t really understand this dimension at the time, which was probably the biggest gap in our analysis.

AH: What was the significance of ‘Eurocentrism’ as an analytical lens for understanding the development of the Marxist tradition?

RB: We saw ourselves as heirs of the Left tradition, and this carried with it a huge responsibility. While the history was glorious, it also included grave errors, which led to great evils and abuses (for example in the USSR after Lenin’s death). We had to be completely honest, and openly expose those errors and correct them, otherwise we’d simply relive them.

Lenin’s work offers an important guide in understanding and critiquing the corrupting influence of imperialism. He explained how complicity, and even actually sharing the spoils of imperialist exploitation, was a root cause of the left’s degeneration. The value of Lenin’s work has not diminished in this sense.

However, while the theory of imperialism remains important (and I’ve consistently used it in my writing on contemporary issues), its accepted form is dangerously insufficient. It was only our solidarity with, and learning from, Black struggles (in Britain itself, as well as in the oppressed nations) which opened us up to this issue. To put it bluntly, the issue of racism was never taken seriously, or in fact barely noticed. Conventionally, imperialism is supposed to have begun around 1900, and this sweeps under the carpet the fundamental historical issues of colonial destruction of indigenous societies and cultures reaching back to the origins of capitalism, and in particular the slave trade. By keeping quiet on these issues, the left effectively made itself an accomplice.

Eurocentrism is really the same as racism, it’s simply that, by using this term, we highlight some important ways this manifests itself: the sense that the white world is the most dynamic, and leading, force in world history. Such a perception was deeply embedded in the Left movement, under the guise that the industrial proletariat is the most advanced class, whose supposed triumph will drag the ‘backward’ nations in its wake.

I should just add a point which doesn’t come up directly in your questions, but obviously imperialism oppresses nations internally, as well as externally. The Irish question, which was key to a large part of our efforts in the RCLB at the time, links together both internal and external dimensions, while the dominance over Wales and Scotland is also a fundamental issue in understanding the roots of imperialism in deep time. And of course, the country’s working class, and population more generally, is intrinsically multi-national. While in this interview we are extensively discussing racism, we must also recognise that this has a dimension of suppressing national cultures and traditions. The RCLB’s debates aimed at generating a political line and practical programme of solidarity, and were very centrally concerned with these issues.

AH: How did the RCLB view the Labour Party in relation to the anti-imperialist struggles?

RB: Our position was roughly as follows. Historically, Labour was a vehicle of imperialism and at best merely glossed this over with a more ‘enlightened’ veneer; the post-1945 Labour government, though somewhat radical on a domestic front, was savagely oppressing movements in Malaysia, Kenya etc. Subsequently, the ‘West’ (i.e. NATO), under US leadership, switched to neo-colonialism, which means dominating the South indirectly through subservient regimes and economic control, and this was promoted equally by Labour and Tory governments. On the question of Ireland – which was enormously important at the time we are discussing – there was virtually no difference.

On a domestic front, particularly under the Wilson-Callaghan governments which immediately preceded Thatcher, Marxist-Leninists often referred to Labour as the ‘best bosses’ party’ – precisely because it was able to mobilise its links with the bureaucratised trade union movement to neutralise resistance, something which was more difficult for Tories. Of course, once Thatcher came in, the Tories were the enemy over a long period; but still, Labour never really developed any line which could explain or effectively oppose neo-liberalism, or the newer forms of imperialism conveyed by globalisation.

There’s nothing in Marxism which says you can’t tactically back some mainstream party in a temporary situation of overwhelming importance. But in the circumstances of that time, backing Labour would have contradicted exactly what we thought should be done, which was make a clean break with that approach. And in general, we felt it was much more important to concentrate our energies on the mass movement rather than electoral politics.

In this, it was essential not to be sectarian and we were always very ready to unite with other groups to further progressive causes. For instance, there was at the time a big threat from extreme right-wing groups (the National Front, and subsequently BNP) and we joined with many on the left in fighting this while continuing to uphold our own position – which was that you must never reduce racism to these fascist groups, which were merely a particular manifestation of something structurally embedded throughout imperialist society.

If we interpret imperialism to include the rise of parasitic finance capital, then from my standpoint in London today, what I see is Labour in local government hand-in-glove with developers in profiting from an agenda to liquidate social housing and with it any possibility for the ordinary people to exist in the city, effectively a class war on imperialism’s behalf. Lenin’s point about sharing in the spoils still makes sense!

AH: What has it meant within the British left to be pro-China, and how has this changed over time?

RB: Just a point I should make here. You use the term ‘Maoism’, and I am quite OK with this, in that we looked up to Mao Zedong for his role in the immense historical event which was the Chinese Communist Revolution, and because there is great stuff in his published work. However, we didn’t use the term ourselves, which in fact carried some implications from the bad aspect of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, particularly in the late 1960s. We identified as Marxist-Leninist (ML), part of an international movement for a forward-looking regeneration of radical politics, which was at the same time a peeling back to a radical tradition which the mainstream left had lost sight of. To reiterate, our reference point was always the struggle in our own country, and in this context, we identified for example with the nineteenth century Chartists, and sometimes signed our statements ‘William Cuffay’, adopting the name of the Black former slave who was one of their key leaders.

But of course, we were happy that the Chinese had initiated a current of regeneration in the left in all countries, and it was a great encouragement to feel part of an international ML movement. We received publications from ML parties all over the world and studied their experience. This linked with Marx’s position that the movement is national in form, but international in essence – a point which still totally remains valid.

Insofar as we were ‘following’ China, this also had a positive aspect, in that it was a blow against Eurocentrism if we accepted a creative impetus emanating from an area of the global South (the term we tended to use then was the Third World, i.e. the countries who had been victimised by imperialism and racism).

I could also discuss this question in a less formalistic and more human perspective. China was thrilling and creative and vibrant and full of energy. I was lucky to visit there in the late seventies, and the spirit and vibe was intoxicating. Also, the sense of building something new was never a repudiation of the long history of human creativity. You could see a rich indigenous cultural tradition which was now being opened up for the first time to the working class, rather than an elite. Very early in the morning in the Forbidden City (a former imperial palace converted into a public park), you could see ordinary citizens practising taijiquan or traditional flute-playing or Chinese opera songs. And this tradition contained quite a lot of spiritual and meditative aspects which I think are really important in rediscovering the indigenous perspectives which can heal humanity’s rift from the natural world. Again, these kinds of issues to do with ecology and wellbeing, although never explicit in the RCLB’s political line, were nevertheless things I began to understand through the critique of Eurocentrism.

The contrast was intense with Soviet-dominated East Europe where there was nothing to excite people, with a result that many yearned to imitate the West with its consumer goods and apparent freedom; and it’s worth noting that the authorities were putting a lot of effort into policing the borders of the Soviet bloc to stop the population leaving. Of course we can say that the West was able to offer these material attractions because of its imperialist exploitation over the rest of the world, which is certainly true. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the Soviet-style system wasn’t building anything which could capture the imagination and make people want to participate. There was no sense of a project; China in contrast was a lot poorer economically then, but people were fired up by the sense of building a new society. I think this notion of ‘project’ is really relevant if we are looking at how we articulate socialism today.

So there is a certain sense that the Sino-Soviet split represented the living versus the decayed aspects of socialism, the vibrant sense of ‘tradition’ versus the dead one.

Another historical factor in igniting the regeneration of the left was China’s Cultural Revolution, which ran from about the late sixties and into the seventies. The purpose of this movement was to seek a way to maintain socialism on a vital and creative path, and stop it getting bogged down in stagnancy. In the manner that this actually developed in China, it generated a lot of errors (hero-worship, dogmatism etc.), which contributed to getting the concept a bad name. Nevertheless, if we make our own analysis of ‘cultural revolution’ (with small letters), I think it has a lot of vital implications which remain central to our project today, one which places ecology at the centre and decisively challenges racism and sexism. Society needs a cultural reboot of a very profound kind. This is the point made by the movement around MeToo, Black Lives Matter etc. Actually, in the RCLB, I could say in retrospect that we did initiate a kind of cultural revolution against racism and sexism, even though neither of these issues was in any way included in the Chinese version!

AH: In his book on the North American ‘New Communist Movement’, Max Elbaum has argued that the Sino-Soviet split had an overwhelmingly negative impact, leading to mutually-damaging policies in Southern Africa and Southeast Asia, while submerging a more ‘multipolar’ anti-imperialism, symbolised by the Tricontinental Conference. Is this a fair assessment?

RB: This is a very interesting question. Let’s try to unpick what is quite a complex issue.

In Soviet strategy, developed in the 1960s–70s, there was quite a dodgy – and I would have to say dangerous – scenario, in which domestic revolution (within both imperialist and neo-colonial countries) was subordinated to the US-Soviet power balance. The point was not to rock the boat by struggling too vigorously; instead you should just bide your time, because everything would soon work out once the USSR triumphed over the West in economic competition. The assumption was that Soviet-type society would demonstrate its superiority over capitalism and that at some point capitalism would simply throw up its hands and say, OK, we’re beaten, we give in.

The economic foundation of this argument was totally unconvincing. The reason given for the alleged triumph of the Soviet system is that it was rational and centrally planned. But central planning, even though it may have a certain role, has never been the main criterion of socialism. And in fact, the quest for complete predictability is conceptually the antithesis of a socialist project which should on the contrary be edgy, thrilling, open to the unexpected. We need a decentralised society which can develop many nodes and zones of creativity, which defy rigid categories.

And even more, the basis in international politics was equally wrong. The notion that imperialism – i.e. capitalism viewed as an organised and military system – would simply throw in its hand, is beyond absurd.

The Chinese position was that Third World peoples should not be subordinated to such a Eurocentric, and moreover ridiculous, scenario, and should instead be free to struggle against imperialist exploitation. At the same time, the Chinese also felt obliged to critique this argument with respect to Europe itself. An important part of their earlier polemic (in the sixties) was against the leadership of the Italian Communist Party, who naively thought the imperialists would sit back and allow them to take power. You would have to say, the Chinese were proved completely correct: it’s now clear that the right-wing and pseudo-left-wing terrorism unleashed in Italy in the 1970s was part of a NATO-initiated contingency plan, in collaboration with the Italian establishment.

For all these reasons, it’s important to recognise that China did not provoke the showdown with the pro-Soviet camp, they simply responded to what they saw – correctly – as a dangerous precipice towards which the Soviets and their Eurocentric and bureaucratic followers were pushing the world’s people.

Having said all of the above, we must indeed recognise that the situation was very badly handled from a tactical angle, which also made it quite easy for the Soviets to pretend that the split was China’s fault. The unity of the Third World should have been preserved. Instead, the unity spirit of the Bandung Conference of 1955 was lost very quickly, and this made it easy for imperialism to deploy divide and rule policies, thereby decisively facilitating the imposition of neo-colonialism in the newly independent former colonies. For example, the conflict between India and Pakistan was undoubtedly entrenched by the Sino-Soviet split, and its legacy is still with us today, greatly facilitating the rise of reactionary nationalism. So in this respect, there is certainly some substance in the assessment to which you refer.

For a time, the Chinese were even arguing that the USSR was itself imperialist in a full sense; but the RCLB to its credit didn’t get bogged down in this issue, because it was always felt that our main responsibility to the international movement was to resist British imperialism, including of course its NATO allies.

AH: In Eurocentrism and the Communist Movement you identify some limitations of ‘anti-revisionism’ as an organising principle, in which the desire to restore an untainted, ‘pure’ Marxism often led to the retrenchment of orthodoxy. Was this the case with the RCLB?

RB: The Chinese Cultural Revolution reasserted a strong sense of struggle, as the way to arrive at a correct political line. They didn’t invent this, because it went back to the earlier time of Marx and Lenin who devoted much of their energies to polemics against other Left trends. Revisionism essentially means accepting the norms of imperialist society and working within them, which would inevitably shade off into living off crumbs from the imperialist banquet. ‘Struggle’ against this line is the antithesis of liberalism (which would lead to eclectic and unprincipled compromise). This whole way of thinking was enormously important in the Revolutionary Communist League.

On a positive side, struggle presupposes a certain democracy in that different opinions would need to be free to assert themselves. This was exactly the case in Marx and Lenin’s time. Once the Bolsheviks seized power, however, there was the possibility of imposing a line. Lenin resisted this, but under Stalin a tendency emerged to kill or repress those who disagreed, and although this was mitigated under subsequent Soviet leaderships, the principle of democratic participation remained compromised. This is an important reason why mainstream communism failed to renew itself and could offer little resistance – in terms of creativity – in the face of the imperialist onslaught of the 1980s.

In the history of the RCLB, there’s a lot we would have to affirm in the notion of struggle over political line. As individuals we had entered into this experiment thoroughly imbued with ideas from class and imperialist society, and it was only through struggle over line that we could possibly have achieved what was after all significant progress in highlighting and opposing racism and sexism. On the basis of this achievement, we were able to take our political line into new territory which went beyond the old debates, so I wouldn’t see it as entrenching orthodoxy in some backward-looking way. In fact, Eurocentrism and the Communist Movement contains the germ of some very interesting links between anti-imperialism and eco-centric and non-binary perspectives.

Nevertheless, there was also something restrictive in the way we understood ‘struggle’, which actually inhibited such creative developments.

If we are striving to build a movement for the long term, we would have to look at issues of care. Marxist-Leninists used to speak a lot about ideological ‘remoulding’, without realising this is a sensitive issue with a lot of dimensions of psychology. We are whole human beings, and it’s impossible to isolate some political or ideological faculty and treat it as separate from the rest of our existence. The binary opposition between politics and ourselves, as humans, is unhealthy and antithetical to wellbeing. It’s only by revealing, and correcting, these errors, that we can really open ourselves to absorbing the lessons from indigenous perspectives, feminism, queer reflection on the body, and of course nature/ecology as the indispensable context for our existence. Today, we have a much stronger and more multi-faceted apparatus with which to approach the task of building revolutionary organisations.

In this reflection, it seems I keep confronting the notion of ‘culture’. Let’s relate this to my actual experience in the RCLB in terms of anti-imperialist solidarity. In my case, based in London, we were working a lot with Pan-Africanist and other Black liberation struggles and became very close personally as well as politically. The centrality of culture really became clear in this context. I think the imperialist project is partly about forging a stunted humanity (cyborg soldiers and administrators) in which any caring faculty has been neutered. In contrast, the liberation movements made culture central, because it’s a way of liberating the whole human being, in the framework of our relation to the natural world. During the 1980s, I was also a musician, and through this it became clear that politics and culture were inseparable. At one point (using my carpentry skills) we were exploring traditional African techniques of instrument-making, and the connection with the natural world was a real eye-opener (the use of gourds as resonators, or spiders’ web to set up sympathetic vibrations). My friend the late Cheikh Ahmed Gueye (to whom I pay tribute in the introduction to Eurocentrism and the Communist Movement) wrote a poem ‘I am one with nature’, which makes the point really well.

So there were definitely ways in which anti-revisionism led – via a creative rediscovery of anti-imperialism – to some levels of understanding which are the antithesis of a dull orthodoxy.

AH: Another distinguishing feature of the RCLB was the attention it gave to the issue of gender oppression, and particularly its receptivity to ‘Third World’ feminisms. How was women’s liberation viewed in relation to the wider class struggle, and to what extent were feminist critiques successfully internalised by the group?

RB: When we began seeking a political line, our point of departure was probably what we saw, conventionally, as the need for a ‘class analysis’. Then, the next step came when we realised we must see the working class in a way radically different from the white, male stereotype of the mainstream labour movement. In this respect, we took on board the feminist critique of the household, the economic definition of ‘reproduction’ etc. All this was great, but it would be incomplete, or even reactionary, to leave the argument at this point. Male dominance is also an issue of power, violence and ingrained norms of society. It’s to the RCLB’s credit that we were able to make the progression through these various levels of understanding. Such was the importance we attributed to these issues, that we established an all-female central leadership. These are major achievements.

Despite these strengths, from today’s standpoint we might see the issue in a deeper way. For example, it seems surprising that our dedication to taking on board gender was not accompanied by any perspective on LGBT+ issues. Perhaps this is a clue that our line on gender was quite limited by binary perspectives.

Challenging these would open us up to a different way of seeing the world, and would also open us to indigenous voices and world-views. In fact, our line in the RCLB had nothing to say about the environment (which seems really strange from today’s perspective!). Ecofeminist, queer, indigenous and non-binary perspectives would critique the basis of our separation or alienation from the natural world, and link together issues of care, both for the ecology and for each other. The great perspectives which emerged from these areas of consciousness actually anticipated a lot of the issues which have come to the fore most recently with the pandemic, and can be of great significance in developing socialist responses.

AH: A key element of the philosophy of Maoism was the need for intellectuals to become integrated with the labouring classes. What was the reasoning behind this, and how was it applied within the urban British context?

RB: Contrary to what is often assumed, we weren’t all students! There was a strong working-class presence in the ML movement in Britain. The core was very much in the industrial Midlands and North, and London-based comrades were always travelling up there for various activities – which was great.

There was also a policy that it would be good for intellectual comrades to enter working-class jobs. This was partly because of an organisational commitment to industrial base-building but, also, there was certainly an element of ideological remoulding. I decided to work in the construction industry which was then thriving – and hiring – in London (unlike manufacturing which was already in decline, although there were still important factories like Fords in Dagenham where other comrades worked). At that time, there was a shortage of skilled labour in construction, and government-run Skillcentres were offering intensive courses which were actually excellent. In my case, I trained to be a carpenter.

Building sites were quite a major arena of class struggle at the time, with all sorts of union-busting tactics deployed by the big firms in collaboration with the Tories, so it was an interesting environment to be plunged into. In fact, I worked in this industry for 10 years – essentially the whole of the eighties – and I must say I loved nearly every minute and the experience transformed my life. Alongside the anti-imperialist solidarity and all the friends I made there, industrial work is certainly the aspect of Maoism which made the biggest impact personally. I should add that as a carpenter I worked for several years for a local authority doing repairs and maintenance in social housing, and was enormously privileged to become part of this multi-ethnic working class community in inner London; and through this gained a lot of insight about the repressive and bureaucratic role of the state apparatus at its most local level, and its contempt for people’s livelihoods. Imperialism runs deep.

Looking back from today’s standpoint, I’d like to pick up on another aspect of ‘cultural revolution’, which in this case is something directly related to the Chinese experience: dissolving the difference between mental and manual labour. In Marx’s early writing in the 1840s, he posed a question: ‘What does it mean to be human?’ This referenced a concept, much debated at the time, which can be translated as ‘species-being’ or ‘the human essence’. Marx’s view (the theory of evolution wasn’t established yet, but in a way he anticipated it!) was that humanity developed through a constant iterative process where we conceptualise the world by and through a process of learning skills to transform it, evolving both our hands and our brain in tandem, so theory and skill couldn’t be separated. When I encountered Maoism I was an intellectual, but would probably have become a really lousy one. As I proceeded to master a manual skill, I began, by the same process, to conceive the project of writing a different kind of book, one which might have come from a sort of ‘skillcentre’ addressing the conceptual and practical world of anti-imperialism. This formed the basis of Eurocentrism and the Communist Movement, and my subsequent books.

AH: Have the political ideas expressed in Eurocentrism and the Communist Movement informed your more recent work around environmental justice?

RB: As I was researching for the Eurocentrism book – when the British Library was still in the British Museum, basically unchanged from Marx’s time – and reading hands-on the works of the old imperialists of the nineteenth and early-twentieth century, I gradually began to realise how explicit ecology was in imperialist thought and practice. They understood perfectly well that natural resources are finite, which is precisely why they sought to grab them for themselves; they understood that indigenous people were living in harmony with nature and sustainably managing its resources, and that’s precisely why they wished to exterminate them. So you can kind of see, in Eurocentrism and the Communist Movement, the inkling of a notion that the foundations of an anti-imperialism must be ecological and pro-indigenous. This is something which the mainstream communist movement – including Maoism – never grasped. It’s this insight that I continued to develop in my subsequent work and teaching.

As soon as I came across Carolyn Merchant’s book The Death of Nature (first published in 1980), I immediately saw that the ecofeminist perspective was a kind of parallel line of argument to the critique of Eurocentrism. She’d done something similar to the Africanist scholars like W. E. B. Du Bois and Cheikh Anta Diop, in uncovering a whole strand of history which the mainstream suppressed, and which forces us to rethink our relations to the world. So when University College London gave me the opportunity to teach Political Ecology, I developed the course on this basis.

My research about the early imperialists also provided an inkling that their project involved conducting a kind of social/genetic engineering upon the metropolitan populations themselves: in order to dominate supposedly inferior ‘races’, they must construct a master race who had purged themselves of humanity or care. I knew that UCL had been implicated in this evil project (it’s politely known as eugenics, but we can better call it pseudo-scientific racism), and when I joined the university I was surprised to see that the figures who propagated this were still revered. So I developed the course to critique this.

At the same time, I wanted to demarcate myself from a fashionable post-modern kind of anti-Eurocentrism which is mainly about sounding clever, so I needed to get back to what I learned at first hand from liberation fighters, who had put their lives on the line in working for change. This is again a kind of cultural revolution, in the sense I mentioned earlier, so I tried to introduce a missing Black element into Political Ecology (using Walter Rodney and Bob Marley as teaching materials for instance).

Political Ecology, like the socialist project in general, is about being conscious of our responsibilities right now, poised between past and future. We need to understand our heritage, for good and bad, and the deep tradition of that strand within the human story which resists the alienation conducted by class society. And from this standpoint, we need to free the imagination. There is currently some interesting work around creating infrastructures for collective imagination. Indigenous cultures, for example in North America, are non-binary and gender-fluid, and this is precisely what has enabled them, over millennia, to think (dream) outside the box, and surmount immense challenges to environmental change. Similarly, Afro-futurism is a trend which is very much rooted in this dialectic between deep tradition and an emancipated vision of the possibilities of progressive change. So I have tried to make these elements central to my course.

Coming back to our earlier discussion about tactics, we currently face a lot of immediate challenges, notably with respect to the environment. In the spirit of Lenin’s ‘Left-Wing’ Communism: An Infantile Disorder, we must be prepared for alliances and compromises with different forces around some key issues, and Political Ecology, in an applied sense, could be part of this. But we can only do this in a principled way if the strategic vision is clear.

AH: What do you think are the main lessons that today’s left should take from the Maoist experience?

RB: I think there’s still something inspiring in Mao’s quotations: about things like ‘dare to struggle, dare to win’, ‘serve the people’, correct ideas emerging from practice, the people being the motive force in history, seeking truth from facts.

The idea of social investigation is an important principle, which comes directly out of the Maoist tradition. I was chatting recently to a US group who got in touch because of my books, and I was impressed by their emphasis on rediscovering this approach, and really trying to explore deeply what is going on in society. In the RCLB, it was really important that we had this commitment to developing a programme; it’s that which really pushed us to struggle and resolve issues of line, and bring to fruition the rethink which opened up all these issues around gender, racism and the national question.

Actually, in this respect the Maoist tradition has never disappeared. On the surface it’s less visible, but maybe that’s because it’s done something which is actually really important, by diffusing itself within mass movements.

As an illustration, I’d like to pay tribute to my friend and comrade, Aziz Choudry whom I met 20 years ago through one of the later incarnations of the ML movement, and who sadly died prematurely this year. He wrote and edited a lot of fantastic books, which you can easily search on the Web. This work developed a methodology of ‘activist scholarship’, which revealed a whole universe of social movements, which are themselves developing the knowledge that we need for the next stage of struggle: indigenous/First Nations movements, LGBTQ and non-binary liberation, feminism, environmental justice; and also all the class-struggle issues which fuse with issues of imperialism and national oppression and highlight the working class as it really is, i.e. care-givers, workers in the new industries spawned by neo-liberal and global forms of capitalism who are heavily determined by race and national descent, all the struggles within the new algorithm-driven and outsourced forms of exploitation, and movements to build a new, radical trade unionism propelled by the marginalised sectors. Moreover, these struggles span the whole globe. So this can give us confidence that we are part of a historic current of renewal.

Robert Biel

Robert Biel lives in Brixton, South London, an area famous for its uprisings in the 1980s, and more recently for struggles in defence of social housing against predatory capital. Having worked at times as delivery driver, cook, musician and actor, Robert qualified as a carpenter and worked in various aspects of the profession, notably the direct labour organisation of Lambeth council, where he chaired the shop stewards’ committee for all manual trades. More recently, he has been doing some lecturing in various colleges of London University, and currently in UCL. Robert would probably now mainly identify as a writer: Eurocentrism and the Communist Movement (the main focus of this interview) initiated a project which subsequently led to The New Imperialism and The Entropy of Capitalism. Through these books, one can trace an increasing focus on the ecology, a theme certainly present in Marx’ work, but too long neglected in the Left movement. Concretising this, Robert is a keen food grower, practitioner of agroecology and participant in the allotment movement, with whose traditions he strongly identifies. These experiences gave rise to his latest open-access book, Sustainble Food Systems.

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Sat Jan 15, 2022 2:29 pm

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The Soviet delegation at the International History of Science Congress in London, 1931: Nikolai Bukharin, Modest Rubenstein, and Boris Hessen in the foreground.

Marxism and STS: From Marx and Engels to COVID-19 and COP26
Posted Dec 11, 2021 by Helena Sheehan

This article is a co-publication of MR Online and Science for the People.

At the recent conference of the Society for the Social Study of Science, I came to the conclusion that the history of Marxism in relation to science and technology studies is an increasingly forgotten story.

From the beginning, Marxism took science extremely seriously, not only for its economic promise in building a socialist society, but for its revelatory power in understanding the world.1 Marxism has made the strongest claims of any intellectual tradition before or since about the socio-historical character of science, yet always affirmed its cognitive achievements.

Science was seen as inextricably enmeshed with economic systems, technological developments, political movements, philosophical theories, cultural trends, ethical norms, ideological positions. Indeed, with all that was human. It was also a path of access to the natural world. There were studies, texts, theories, tensions, and debates exploring the complexities of how this was so.2

The objectivist/constructivist dichotomy could never capture its epistemological dynamic. Nor could the internalist/externalist dualism ever do justice to the interacting field of forces harnessed in its historiographical process. Knowledge was conceived always as interactive, so there was no object without subject, no access to an external world without the socially evolved apparatus of conceptualization of it, no ideas unshaped by history, but no reason to think this invalidated knowledge.

Marx and Engels were acutely attuned to the science of their times and integrated this awareness at the core of their thought process in developing the intellectual tradition and political movement that came to be called Marxism.

There have been controversies about the Marx-Engels relationship, with a tendency to counterpose a humanist Marx to a positivist Engels, especially to dissociate Marx from Engels’s posthumous work Dialectics of Nature. The dialectics of nature debate resurfaces periodically, including recently, and there is an even stronger tendency to vindicate Engels than when I entered the fray decades ago.3 What is at stake is the development of a comprehensive worldview embracing both human society and the natural world with a strong emphasis on cutting edge science.

The subsequent generation of Marxists, during the period of the Second International, also paid such acute attention to the onward development of science and there were debates among themselves and others about its implications and consequences, especially in response to trends such as positivism, Machism, neo-Kantianism.4

After the October revolution, there was an intensification of this activity in Soviet society. Science was a necessity in building a new social order. Scientific theory was thought to be not only a matter of truth and error, but of life and death. There were many debates, some between those more grounded in the empirical sciences and those who stressed the continuity of Marxism with the history of philosophy.

Intertwined with all the intellectual debates of the day was an intense struggle for power. There was tension around a more cosmopolitan Marxist intelligentsia, who had found their way to Marxism in difficult and dangerous conditions, exposed to an array of intellectual influences, accustomed to mixing with intellectuals of many points of view and arguing the case for Marxism in such milieux.

Increasingly they were coming under pressure from those who had come up under the revolution, never been abroad, knew no foreign languages, had little detailed knowledge of either the natural sciences or the history of philosophy, and never mixed with exponents of other intellectual traditions. Some were more inclined to cite the authority of classic texts or party decrees than to engage in theoretical debate. They were being fast-tracked in their careers and taking over as professors, directors of institutes and members of editorial boards, occupying positions of authority over intellectuals of international reputation. There was high drama and there was soon to be blood on the floor.

It was the more cosmopolitan intelligentsia that came to London in 1931 for what is perhaps the most memorialized conference ever. News of the Second International History of Science Congress spilled over into the mass media with the arrival of a Soviet delegation led by N. I. Bukharin and including B. M. Hessen, N. I. Vavilov and others renowned in the history of science. The 1931 congress brought forces already in motion into a new level of interaction with each other. At the congress, contrasting worldviews were in collision. The majority of those in attendance were professional historians of science or scientists with an antiquarian interest in history, who discussed the subject in a leisurely way with an implicit positivism. They were stunned by the Soviets discussing science in connection with philosophy and politics and in such a world-historical way. Those most touched by this confrontation were leftist scientists in Britain who shared the vision of the visitors from afar. The ideas of J. D. Bernal, J. B. S. Haldane and other leading scientists who became Marxists took hold among many of their contemporaries and gave rise to a dynamic radical science movement in the 1930s.5

Bernal saw Marxism as providing an integrated framework. It was a philosophy derived from science that brought order and perspective and illuminated the onward path of science. It provided a method of co-ordinating the experimental results of science and unifying its different branches in a deep socio-historical perspective. He called for a science of science—what came to be called Science and Technology Studies (STS).

After 1945, the influence of Marxism spread ever wider. In Eastern Europe, Marxism became the dominant force in the universities, research institutes, and academic journals of new socialist states. It spread to Asia, Latin America, Africa in liberation movements, some of which became parties of power.

There was serious work done in developing a distinctive approach to STS, particularly in exploring the philosophical implications of the natural sciences. This was the case in the academies of Eastern Europe, particularly in East Germany, in the intellectual life of communist parties, in journals such as Science and Society, La Penée and Modern Quarterly. It was very different from the narrowly methodological approach being pursued in philosophy of science elsewhere. It was also work of profound significance that was too little known outside these milieux.

Marxism combined attention to the advancing results of the empirical sciences, development of a philosophical framework capable of integrating expanding knowledge and awareness of the socio-historical context of it all.

The 1960s and 1970s put Marxism on the agenda in a new way in the rest of the world where capitalism held sway. New Left ferment pervaded North America and Western Europe especially. This was a time when all that had been assumed was opened to question, when the universities and the streets became contested terrain. Academic disciplines were scrutinized at their very foundations. Philosophy, sociology, literature, science—all knowledge—was seen as tied to power. University campuses and academic conferences were alive with passion and polemic. Journals such as Radical Philosophy, Insurgent Sociologist, Science for the People, Radical Science Journal, and Science as Culture gave expression to this ferment. Many of my generation threw ourselves wholeheartedly into this.

I was interested in Marxism as a comprehensive worldview and intrigued by the ways in which intellectual movements were rooted in socio-historical forces. I saw the whole history of philosophy that I had been studying in a new way. I saw everything in a new way, a way in which everything was interconnected: philosophy, culture, politics, economics, science. I decided to focus on science within this network of relationships. Researching my book Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: A Critical History was an absorbing adventure, especially during my intervals in the USSR. I felt like a detective uncovering an intricate series of intersecting stories. I tried to write a Marxist history of Marxism and science, despite the enormous and opposite pressures on me as I strove to do so, pressures from east and west, from left and right, from old and new left, from commitment and career.

Sometimes, to my surprise, I felt more of an affinity with the previous generation than my own. I could not understand why my contemporaries, especially among British Marxists, turned their backs on the earlier generation of British Marxists and went flocking to Althusser or Foucault. New Left Review veered between obliviousness and hostility to the previous generation of British Marxists.

Radical Science Journal did engage with the earlier generation, however critically. Gary Werskey’s book The Visible College was perhaps the most substantial work mediating between these generations on the question of science. Robert Young’s “Science is social relations ” was the most explicit and provocative exposition of a new left position on science. Reacting strongly against the view that science itself is neutral and that only the use or abuse of science is ideological, Young and Radical Science Journal held that science as such is ideological. From the premise that modern science, with its characteristic concepts of truth and rationality, and modern capitalism, with its alienating division of labour, arose upon a single edifice, came the conclusion that both would have to be totally dismantled. So, for Young, science equaled capitalist science. It was a far cry from the affirmation of science characterizing previous generations of the left.6

Living as if in some parallel universe much of the time, parts of academe proceeded as if the only story in philosophy of science was the one proceeding from the Vienna Circle through Popper, Lakatos, Kuhn.7 Philosophy of science in philosophy departments rarely took a sideward glance at this other tradition.

Meanwhile, Soviet delegations were no longer a surprise at international conferences. They were integrated into the organizing structures and gave papers in many sessions. However, how much of a meeting of minds occurred was another matter. The World Congress of Philosophy was held in Düsseldorf in August 1978. I spent much of that year in Eastern Europe, mostly in Moscow. The philosophers there were constantly talking about the upcoming congress. In fact, they were preparing for it as if for Warsaw Pact maneuvers. They kept asking me what Irish and British philosophers were planning. However, they weren’t planning anything. They were coming or not coming as individuals and thinking only about their own papers and travel arrangements.

At the congress itself, philosophers from the socialist countries and philosophers from the rest of the world mostly read papers past each other (as most academics at most congresses do). There were, however, several skirmishes and a cold war atmosphere. I felt myself to be in a similar situation to that of British Marxists at the 1931 congress. I moved between both sides in a way that very few did. People like me were constantly challenged at such congresses to prove that Marxism plus science did not necessarily equal Lysenkoism.8

There were other enclaves where there was sustained cross fertilization, such as the Boston Colloquium in Philosophy of Science, which resulted in many volumes of Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, edited by Robert Cohen and Marx Wartofsky. The Inter-University Centre in Dubrovnik was also a pioneering and important base for interaction between east and west, between Marxists and non-Marxists.

In 1990 it seemed that the world turned upside down. The USSR, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia disappeared from the map. I had often wondered how many of the intellectuals I met in Eastern Europe would be Marxists if there was a regime change, and I soon found out. I had several confrontations in the 1990s with those who had made their careers professing Marxism and then made their careers by denouncing it. Academic life all over the world is full of such people. They do what is necessary to advance themselves and they are rewarded, then and now, but they will never produce anything of real value.

I have returned over the years to Eastern Europe to see where all the Marxists have gone. I have been most impressed when visiting the vanquished, the Marxist intelligentsia who were still Marxists, who once occupied the apex of academe and subsequently led quite marginalized lives. Loren Graham of MIT, who spent his whole professional life studying Soviet and post-Soviet science and philosophy of science said of dialectical materialism: “This philosophy of science is actually quite a sensible one and corresponds to the implicit views of many working scientists all over the world.” Graham, not a Marxist, also went on to show that this philosophy had a lasting impact on Russian scientists, even after the demise of the Soviet state.

So what does Marxism have to offer to science and STS now? Science and STS seem to be flourishing in the sense that there is much funding, many metrics,9 all sorts of empirical studies. Much of this is interesting and valuable, although a lot of it is bland and bitty. Many studies are short and shallow and driven by market demand and fast-track careerism more than intellectual quest. There is not much in the way of thinking that is simultaneously empirically grounded, philosophically integrated, socio-historically contextualized. This is what Marxism could bring to bear. Instead, science and STS go from one extreme to the other: from the minutiae of molecules to the “tao” of physics. It is either science stripped of philosophical or historical reflection or it is new age nonsense stepping into the philosophical gap and filling the bookshop shelves. Both are commercially successful. Contradiction sells.

The intensification of the commercialization of science, as part of the general commodification of knowledge, is the strongest force in the field today. A new orthodoxy has taken command, not so much by winning arguments, but by wielding systemic power on a global scale. Universities are being harnessed to operate by market norms and survival of the fittest in commercial competition is outstripping all other forms of validation, particularly truth criteria, theoretical depth and breadth, moral responsibility, political engagement. There are powerful pressures disincentivizing, eroding and marginalizing critical thinking, creative thinking, systemic thinking.

Universities are contested terrain. The atmosphere has changed drastically from what prevailed in the 1960s and 1970s. Then there were large-scale contending paradigms in every area facing off with each other with great energy and passion. It has dissipated now. It is disconcerting, because it is not as if anything has been solved. It is that people have learned to live with problems unresolved or unacknowledged or to settle for resolution at a less than fundamental level. The confrontations of worldviews have given way to low-level eclecticism. There is a narrowing of perspective and a retreat from engagement, whether through myopia, ignorance, shallowness, conformity, fear or careerism.

So much of what I read or review in so many areas is so half-baked. Conceptualization is weak and confused. Contextualization is thin and random. Marxism has nurtured in me a demand for conceptualization that is strong and lucid, for contextualization that is thick and systemic. Many social studies of science, including some associated with the strong program, are still too weak in conceptualization and contextualization.

There have been periodic rediscoveries of the socio-historical context of science as if Marxism had never happened —from Kuhn to Edinburgh School to Latour or whomever. This is not to deny the significant contribution of the Edinburgh School, who have offered an impressive output of empirical studies of intriguing episodes in the history of science.10

The science wars of the 1990s took up the threads of this tension.11 I found myself on both sides, yet wholly on neither. I agreed with those who wanted to defend the cognitive capacity of science against epistemological anti-realism, irrationalism, mysticism, conventionalism, especially against anything-goes postmodernism. I also agreed with those who insisted on a strong socio-historical account of science against a reassertion of scientism. A better grounding in what the Marxist tradition has brought to bear on these issues would have illuminated the terrain.

I do not believe that the debunking of science in terms of its cognitive capacity is an appropriate activity for the left. It is neither epistemologically sound nor politically progressive. The left should take its stand with science, a critically reconstructed, socially responsible science, but with the possibilities of science.

STS has tended increasingly to back away from the big ideas that were once in play. It is becoming too small, too introverted, obsessed with mini-debates of micro-tendencies with only weak evidence of relevant intellectual history and thin social context.

As to philosophy, although it is central to the human condition, many professional philosophers have reduced STS to technicist esoterica or obfuscating nonsense. They have alienated many who have come to it seeking meaning, putting any defense of its declining status on dubious grounds. Some texts in philosophy of science seem to me to be equivalent to obsession with a game of chess while the house is burning down around it.

Marxism is still an alternative. It is still superior to anything on the scene. It is a way of seeing the world in terms of a complex pattern of interconnecting processes where others see only disconnected and static particulars. It is a way of revealing how economic structures, political institutions, legal codes, moral norms, cultural trends, scientific theories, philosophical perspectives, even common sense, are all products of a pattern of historical development shaped by a mode of production.

Marxism as a philosophy of science is materialist in the sense of explaining the natural world in terms of natural forces and not supernatural powers. It is dialectical in the sense of being evolutionary, processive, developmental. It is radically contextual and relational in the sense that it sees everything that exists within the web of forces in which it is embedded. It is empiricist without being positivist or reductionist. It is rationalist without being idealist. It is coherent and comprehensive while being empirically grounded.

Marxism has been a major position in the history of philosophy. It has been a formative force in STS and other disciplines and it is a continuing influence. It is not as influential as it deserves to be on the current intellectual landscape, but it is still more influential than many might think. It is there in ways that are not always acknowledged. It is sometimes the philosophy that dare not speak its name. Moreover, many of its premises have come to be so accepted that it seems no longer necessary or opportune or even known from where they have come.

There are ebbs and flows and new waves of realization all the time.

The current push for decolonization of knowledge is important. I cheered as Rhodes fell at University of Cape Town in 2015, but I have watched as a lot of this progressive impulse has become unmoored with a year zero mentality denying what has been achieved by previous generations as well as a failure to see that the central force colonizing knowledge is capital. I am already seeing a lot of it co-opted into the bland and blind liberal agenda of diversity and inclusion.12

There is evidence of a revival of interest in Marxism in relation to science now in our current planetary emergency, particularly the looming climate catastrophe and the persisting COVID-19 pandemic. Positivist scientism has some limited potency, but is too narrow, too myopic to grasp the full picture. Premodern or postmodern anti-science is a blind alley. The postmodernist critique of science has evaporated. Because science has become so salient, so immediate, so crucial to our collective fate, no one wants to hear that we have no criteria for deciding between contending truth claims or that science is inherently deceptive or oppressive.

Yet science under capitalism has become problematic and only systemic analysis can deal with that.

The statistics on carbon emissions or loss of biodiversity only get us so far unless we address the system that created the problem, fuels the process onward and blocks possible solutions. There is so much being written about ecological crisis, but it is Marxists, such as John Bellamy Foster, Ian Angus, and Andreas Malm, who connect the science to philosophy, sociology and political economy, who bring the whole picture into clear focus and point the way beyond it.13

It is the same with the current pandemic. The statistics on COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, deaths, vaccinations and mitigation measures only get us so far unless we see what conditions have created this pandemic and persist to create future and fiercer pandemics. It is Marxists, such as Mike Davis and Rob Wallace, who predicted that such a pandemic was coming and showed when it came how it was bound up with the circuitry of capital. Whatever may have happened in the Wuhan lab or Wuhan market, the real source is deforestation, destruction of habitats, wildlife trafficking, the whole industrialized system of food production and the global circuitry of capital. Marxists and others have highlighted the downgrading of public health systems, the negative effect on patents and the stranglehold of big pharma in obstructing just distribution of vaccines and therapeutic medicines.14 We need a more open, cooperative, international science to deal with these problems. There have been moves in this direction in response to current crises, but the obstructions are still formidable.

Marxists have been to the fore in doing the systemic thinking demanded by these crises, not only in clarifying the causes, but in pointing to the solutions—solutions difficult to achieve, because the imperatives generated by ecological and epidemiological crises go contrary to the very logic of capitalism. I think this is being realized by more and more people, the sort of people who gathered outside the barriers of COP26 or those who couldn’t travel but followed news reports with dismay.

The history of Marxism and its relation to science is tied inextricably to the history of everything else. It is still the unsurpassed philosophy of our time.

Notes:
1.↩ This article is an edited version of Helena Sheehan, “Science and Technology Studies: A Marxist Narrative,” online presentation, November 17, 2021, Youtube Video, 1:58:47, www.youtube.com.
2.↩ This article is necessarily sketchy, sweeping through decades and dealing with many thinkers, theories and debates. For the fuller story, see my more comprehensive account in Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: A Critical History (London: Verso Books, 2018).
3.↩ For a good account of the whole history of this debate, see Kaan Kangal, Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).
4.↩ Sheehan, Marxism and the Philosophy of Science.
5.↩ For more on this congress and its aftermath, see Gary Werskey, The Visible College: A Collective Biography of British Scientists and Socialists of the 1930s (London: Allen Lane, 1978); Christopher Chilvers, “Five Tourniquets and a Ship’s Bell: The Special Session at the 1931 Congress,” Centaurus 57, no. 2 (2015): 61–95; Sheehan, Marxism and the Philosophy of Science. A book containing the Soviet papers from this congress was published as N. I. Bukharin et al., Science at the Crossroads (London: Kniga 1931).
6.↩ Werskey, The Visible College; Robert Young, “Science is Social Relations,” Radical Science Journal 5 (1977): 65–129.
7.↩ This tradition began with the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle and progressed through various forms of neo-positivism and post-positivism, generating a considerable volume of literature. It was narrowly focused on epistemology and scientific method, particularly demarcation criteria, rather than questions of worldview preoccupying Marxism.
8.↩ For a more elaborate account of these conferences and other events and movements of these years, see Helena Sheehan Navigating the Zeitgeist (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2019).
9.↩ By metrics here I mean quantitative studies as well as impact statistics.
10.↩ The strong program in the sociology of knowledge of the Edinburgh School held that scientific theories considered both true and false should be treated equivalently in terms of their need for sociological explanation.
↩11. The catalytic events were the publication of, among many, Gross and Levitt Higher Superstition in 1994, the infamous Sokal hoax in 1996 and the flurry of publicity surrounding it, the science wars special issue of Social Text with the Sokal article in it and the book without it, the New York Academy of Science conference published as The Flight from Science and Reason. For an overview, see Ullica Segerstrale, eds., Beyond the Science Wars: The Missing Discourse about Science and Society (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000) and Helena Sheehan, “The Drama of the Science Wars: What Is the Plot?” Public Understanding of Science 10, no. 2 (2001).
12.↩ Helena Sheehan “Class, Race, Gender and the Production of Knowledge: Considerations on the Decolonisation of Knowledge” Transform 7, 13-30, 2020.
13.↩ John Bellamy Foster, Marx and Ecology (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000); John Bellamy Foster, The Return of Nature (New York: Monthly Review, 2020); Ian Angus, A Redder Shade of Green: Intersections of Science and Socialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017); Andreas Malm, The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World (New York: Verso Books, 2017); Andreas Malm, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Verso Books, 2020).
14.↩ Mike Davis, The Monster Enters: COVID 19, Avian Flu, and the Plagues of Capitalism (New York: Verso Books, 2020); Rob Wallace, Big Farms Make Big Flu (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016); Rob Wallace, Dead Epidemiologists: On the Origins of COVID-19 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016).

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Tue Jan 25, 2022 2:05 pm

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Capitalism IS the Crisis May 25, 2013 March from Union Square to Washington Square New York, NY (Photo: Ed/Flickr)

How to overthrow a life-threatening capitalism?

Originally published: International Viewpoint by Stéfanie Prezioso - Le Club de Mediapart (January 20, 2022 ) | - Posted Jan 24, 2022

Capitalism jeopardizes the survival of humanity on earth. It reduces the price of the labour of reproducing labour power when it cannot make women do it for free within the family. How can we overcome it while putting the defence of life at the centre of our concerns?

For several months, with the emergence of COVID-19, the imperative need to break with a life-threatening system, put forward in recent years in demonstrations for climate justice, has been embodied very concretely in the life of hundreds of millions of people. The pandemic, linked to the consequences of capitalist globalization, which threatens the climate, biodiversity, and thereby the health of human beings, has ignited the powder keg.

It brutally gave substance to this terrifying image proposed by the Marxist economist Jean-Marie Harribey, according to which world capitalism is a “black hole” in the process of “engulfing” human activities, nature, living things, knowledge, etc. “To engulf, that is to say, to subject everything to the law of profitability, to profit and the accumulation of capital” (“The black hole of capitalism. In order not to be sucked into it, rehabilitate work, institute the commons and socialize money , 2020).

Life at the centre of our concerns

The reasons why women in many countries have gone on strike and have taken to the streets en masse for the past three years, but also the reasons why millions of young people have demonstrated for the climate, have suddenly acquired the force of evidence for many. sectors of the population. These two movements do indeed display certain common concerns by placing “life” at the centre of their struggle: nourishing earth, food, water but also “the social nutrients necessary for a fulfilling life ” (Tithi Bhattacharya).

What is it all about ? Daily care and even more in the event of illness, especially for the elderly, as well as the care and education of children, partly provided within the family; monetary income (salaries, pensions, insurance and various forms of social benefits) making it possible to acquire the essentials of life on the market; public services making education, health, transport and housing accessible to all; free time to talk to each other, to participate, to get involved, to create …

Placing life at the centre thus makes it possible to reappropriate the essential questions raised by ecofeminists of the global South – of this Third Estate of the world which had been the epicentre of the revolution in the post-war decades; a feminism anchored in a popular “territory of life”, and for that reason being the basis of experiences of community life and of anti-imperialist struggles against multinationals (water, mines, oil or agriculture).

It is on the basis of these considerations that comrades were able to write in our fortnightly, on the eve of the women’s/feminist strike of June 2020, that henceforth “revolutionary Marxist feminists had […] found it more relevant to analyze the system according to the capital/life contradiction, encompassing both the preservation of humans and the environment, instead of the traditional capital/labour contradiction. In part, they were right.

Yes, capital is opposed to life because it depletes the two sources of all wealth: human labour and nature. In this sense, the contradiction continues to sharpen between capital and the very conditions of existence of the human species on earth. And by doing so, capitalism could undermine the objective bases of its own sustainability to give rise to an unprecedented form of “barbarism”. Indeed, this mode of production, as Marx underlined, inexorably tends to sow death. Because it “has such ‘good reasons’ for denying the sufferings of the working population around him” , he is no more diverted from his objectives “by the prospect of the decay of humanity and finally by its depopulation than by the possible fall of Earth onto the Sun. (…) After me the flood! This is the motto of every capitalist and of every capitalist nation. Capital therefore does not worry about the length of the worker’s life, if it is not constrained to do so by society ” (Capital , Volume I). And the neoliberal order has accelerated these destructive tendencies.

However, the “old” capital/labour contradiction remains at the heart of the struggle to overthrow capitalism and establish a society of associated producers, reconciled with nature.

Work at the heart of the creation and reproduction of society

The tasks of daily care and education represent an essential sphere of human activity. Within the capitalist world, they cover paid or unpaid activities, within or outside the family framework, which are essential to the reproduction of labour power and its long-term exploitation. With COVID-19 and confinement, the centrality of this work of “social reproduction” has suddenly imposed itself on everyone. So much so that it no longer seems necessary to explain its indispensability for the economy: the essential role of front line carers has earned them hearty applause.

It took effort and courage to keep afloat, at the height of the crisis, public health systems that were severely weakened by budget cuts, education systems that were sorely tested, as well as food distribution and cleaning services, as exposed to view as they are poorly paid, carried out in large part by precarious workers, of whom women and racialized people constitute the vast majority. Not to mention those, working without papers, who lost their jobs without compensation at the start of confinement, nor of all the women whose domestic tasks within the family grew explosively.

This work, essential to the maintenance of life, was celebrated, not without contributing to the shift towards consolidating the traditional image of “woman as the saviour”, wife and mother, as in times of war, in the last century: the celebration of supposed sacrifices. accepted instead of a concrete analysis of living and working conditions, which should be radically called into question. Indeed, what does the notion of social reproduction refer to?

First of all, from the point of view of Capital, to the need to reproduce and reconstitute day after day the labour force from which it derives its profits (the famous surplus value). As early as the 1960s, Marxist feminists developed a concrete analysis of what must be considered as the hidden face of capitalist exploitation, partly subcontracted in the form of poorly paid, even informal, labour. partlycarried out free of charge, mainly by women, within the family.

It is not possible to develop here in all their complexity the rich debates conducted by authors such as Johanna Brenner, Susan Ferguson and Lise Vogel… They have paved the way for a new generation of Marxist feminists. Thus, in a recent book, Social Reproduction Theory. Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression (2017), Tithi Bhattacharya points to a decisive issue: in reality, productive and reproductive work are one. After having defined social reproduction as the set of activities necessary to “produce life, maintain it and guarantee the succession of generations”, she continues: “human labour is at the heart of the creation or reproduction of society as a whole “.

Living work at the heart of social change

The feminist movement, like the climate movement, has seized on the term “strike”, a word steeped in the history of the struggles of “living work”, the only producer of wealth, to sometimes snatch meagre victories from the holders of capital, of “dead labour”, the result of the exploitation of previous generations. In doing so, they always sought, even confusedly, the path to emancipation through collective action. The use of this term is of particular importance for the feminist movement, because it clearly suggests that production and social reproduction are part of a “same capitalist unity” and that, consequently, the class struggle cannot in any way case neglect the sphere of social reproduction in all its complexity.

An idea is taken up in the Draft resolution on the new rise of the women’s movement of the Women’s Commission of the Fourth International: “The use of the strike tool, the centrality of the struggles for social reproduction, the aspiration to understand the processes of production and reproduction as an integrated whole, and its functioning as a vector of politicization and radicalization of the masses, make this new feminist movement in itself a process of developing class consciousness.”1

Marxist feminists thus place human labour at the heart of their reflection, understood in its diversity and its globality, which is always based on the capital/labour contradiction. Indeed, it is in order to bring down the price of labour power that capital buys and increases the surplus value that it derives from it, that capital constantly aims to reduce the cost of its reproduction, borne mainly by women. poorly paid or working for free to produce the services essential to the reconstitution and sustainability of living labour.

Certainly, in the West in particular, many families, as far as they have the means, rely on salaried domestic work, most often poorly paid and informal, which mainly involves immigrant women, racialized, often without legal status, to take care of their children and their elders, as well as housework of all kinds.

These services can also be provided by platforms that hire bogus freelancers and thus dispense with all social and even tax charges, such as UberEats, Deliveroo, etc. In working-class families, who use them less, men take on a larger share of domestic chores, even though women always do more.

To understand the role played by productive and reproductive labour (salaried and non-salaried) in ensuring capitalist accumulation is also to understand that only living labour, because it is the very condition of the profits of a small minority of exploiters, is able to overthrow the yoke of capital, through the collective struggle for its emancipation. Above all, only their immense numbers and their strategic position at the heart of capitalist relations of production can give workers the strength to overthrow this deadly mode of production and found an eco-socialist social order based on the free association of producers, on gender equality and on respect for the essential metabolism between human activities and the natural environment.

First published on the blog Le Club de Mediapart 17 November 2020. Translated by International Viewpoint.

FOOTNOTES:
1.↩ This resolution was adopted by the International Committee in 2021 and is available here.

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Wed Feb 09, 2022 3:36 pm

Dr. Mandeville: the necessity of vices in the world of capital
11/15/2020

About capitalism without embellishment

November 15, 2020 marks the 350th anniversary of the birth of the outstanding English social thinker and poet Bernard de Mandeville (1670 - 1733). “An honest man and a clear head,” this is how Karl Marx (1818-1883) described Mandeville in Capital.

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By origin, B. de Mandeville is a descendant of the French. He was born and raised in Holland, graduated from the University of Leiden and received the title of Doctor of Medicine, writing and defending his dissertation on the subject "Philosophical Reflections on the Actions of Unreasonable Beings" (1689). In this dissertation, he developed the ideas of René Descartes (1599-1650), who viewed animals (but not humans) as automata. Somewhere around 1700 , Mandeville moved to England, where he wrote his main works.

At the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries, England was one of the most advanced countries of its time. In the middle of the 17th century, a bourgeois revolution took place in it, the king was cut off his head and the regime of the personal dictatorship of the leader of the revolution, Oliver Cromwell (1599 - 1658), was established. After the death of Cromwell, representatives of the overthrown Stuart dynasty returned to power , forced to make significant concessions to the bourgeoisie. However , King James II (1633 - 1701) , who came to power in 1685 , considered these concessions excessive and began to pursue a clearly inadequate policy, restoring most of the country's population against him.

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Oliver Cromville
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King James II of England

After assessing the current situation, a group of influential English politicians contacted the leader of the more developed bourgeois Holland, William of Orange (married to the daughter of King James II) and made it clear that the English people would understand with understanding the entry of Dutch troops into England to restore order. William of Orange got the hint right: on November 15, 1688, a 50,000-strong Dutch corps landed in Great Britain. The army did not defend King James, who fled to France at the end of December. In January 1689 , the wife of William of Orange, Mary (1662 - 1694) (daughter of James II) was proclaimed Queen of England. Soon King of England under the name of William III, her husband was also proclaimed. A month later, William of Orange was concurrently proclaimed king of semi-independent Scotland. These events were later called the Glorious Revolution.

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King William III
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Queen Mary II

The reign of William III proved to be very successful. Under him, a stable regime was established, which exists to this day, based on a compromise between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. Royal power was limited by parliament, the economy developed rapidly, and England's influence on the world stage increased. The formal independence of Scotland came to an end and England, together with Scotland, became a single country, Great Britain.

After the death of William III in the country there was a rollback, but it was not too deep. The country continued to develop, gradually turning into a "workshop of the world." The kings gradually turned into national symbols that did not have real power, which passed into the hands of the parliament and the government formed by it. In its political system, the kingdom of Great Britain differed little from a bourgeois republic.

At the end of the 17th century, the philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) formulated the ideology of emerging liberalism based on compromise and pragmatism. Different areas of philosophy are developing - from materialism ( John Toland (1670 - 1722)) to subjective idealism (Bishop George Berkeley (1685 - 1753)), blurring the line between reality and the creations of our imagination. These philosophical quests are balanced by the enlightened skepticism of David Hume (1711-1776). The pinnacle of socio-political thought in Great Britain is the classical political economy created by the works of Adam Smith (1723-1790).

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John Locke
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Adam Smith

English researchers, united in the Royal Society of London, delight Mankind with new discoveries in various fields. Eminent writers appear, such as Daniel Defoe (1660 - 1731), Jonathan Swift (1667 - 1745), Henry Fielding (1797 - 1754), outstanding artists, such as William Hogarth (1697 - 1764), Joshua Reynolds (1723 - 1792), David Gaisborough (1727-1788).

In the 18th century, two ruling classes coexisted in Great Britain, compromising between themselves. This is the aristocracy, which owns the land, and the bourgeoisie, associated with trade and industry. The customs of these classes differed greatly. The aristocrats strove to live luxuriously, while the bourgeoisie (with the exception of the top merchants) still led a rather modest life, investing all the money they earned in expanding their own business. These differences in lifestyle gave rise to differences in attitudes towards religion. The bourgeoisie was characterized by religious hypocrisy, and the aristocracy - cheerful atheism.

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"Shortly after the wedding", William Hogarth, painting from the cycle "Fashionable marriage", 1743-1745

Dr. Bernard de Mandeville was not an aristocrat. But the hypocrisy of the bourgeois hoarders was deeply disgusting to him. And in order to anger the hypocrites, the doctor decided to write a hooligan poem, which turned into one of the first realistic descriptions of the mechanism of the functioning of capitalist society. He called this poem "The Fable of the Bees" .
Once upon a time there was (apparently, in ancient Greek times) a beehive. A considerable part of its inhabitants were not distinguished by high morality and possessed the same vices as many inhabitants of contemporary Mandeville England. This upset other bees, and they turned to Zeus with a request to make all the inhabitants of the hive highly moral. Zeus heeded this request, after which an economic disaster ensued. Living modestly and virtuously, the bees stopped buying many goods. Their producers went bankrupt and also lost the opportunity to buy. In the end, the bees moved from a cozy hive to the hollow of an oak tree.
Any fable ends with a moral that briefly summarizes its main idea. The moral of his fable Mandeville formulated in the final verse:

In order to become a great nation,
vice must build a nest in it;
Prosperity - everything is a witness -
Only virtue will not give him.
And those who return another century,
Fine-hearted, golden,
Making everything with honest hands,
Will eat acorns.


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One of the first editions of The Fable of the Bees, London, 1714

By vices, Mandeville understands, first of all, self-interest and vanity. The possession of these qualities makes the people of capitalist society economically active. Which leads to the development of production and prosperity. Therefore, citizens who condemn these vices and dream of their disappearance are trying to cut the branch on which they themselves sit. Luckily, they don't succeed.

In essence, B. Mandeville wrote that the lack of morality is a necessary condition for the existence of his contemporary socio-economic system. And within the framework of this system, the “moral revival” that many good-hearted people like to talk about will not lead to anything good.

Mandeville also said that the poverty of the majority of the population is necessary for the normal functioning of the capitalist economy.
“Where property is sufficiently protected, it would be easier to live without money than without the poor, for who would work? Workers should be protected from starvation, but they should not receive anything that could be saved. If sometimes someone of the upper class, by extraordinary industry and malnutrition, rises above the position in which he grew up, then no one should hinder him in this; for it is indisputable that to live economically is the most reasonable thing for every single person, for every single family in society; but it is in the interest of all rich nations that the greater part of the poor should never be idle, and that they should continually and wholly spend whatever they get. Those who maintain their existence by daily labor are impelled to work solely by their needs, which it is prudent to soften, but it would be foolish to heal. The only thing that can make a working man industrious is a moderate wage. Too low wages bring him, depending on temperament, to cowardice or despair, too much makes him arrogant and lazy. From all that has been said so far, it follows that for a free nation, in which slavery is not allowed, the surest wealth lies in the mass of the industrious poor. Not to mention the fact that they serve as an inexhaustible source for manning the fleet and the army, without them there would be no enjoyment and it would be impossible to use the country's products to generate income. To make society (which, of course, consists of non-working people) happy, and the people contented even with their miserable condition, it is necessary, so that the vast majority remain ignorant and poor. Knowledge expands and multiplies our desires, and the less a person knows, the easier his needs can be satisfied.(quoted from Chapter 23 of the first volume of Capital by K. Marx).
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The mass of industrious poor in the painting by I. Repin "Barge Haulers on the Volga", 1873
Commenting on this text by B. Mandeville, K. Marx writes: “ Mandeville, an honest man and a clear head, still does not understand that the very mechanism of the process of accumulation with an increase in capital also increases the mass of “hard-working poor”, i.e. wage-workers who are compelled to turn their labor power into an increasing force in order to increase the value of an increasing capital and, precisely by this, increase their dependence on their own product, personified in the capitalist .”
In his writings B. de Mandeville undoubtedly acts as a bourgeois ideologist. He sees no way out of capitalism and does not try to look for them. But he honestly shows the other side of capitalism and does not try to embellish reality. This is why it is valuable for those who are trying to bring Mankind beyond the limits of the capitalist formation into the future world.

In 1723 , the English court recognized the "Fable of the Bees" as a harmful work that destroys morality. But no sanctions were applied against the author: in the UK of the 18th century, this was not accepted.

Some of the ideas of B. Mandeville, expressed in The Fable of the Bees, were far ahead of their time. What happened in the bee hive came to be called in more recent times the "crisis of overproduction." In the 19th century, these crises began to periodically shake the capitalist economy. These crises, of course, had nothing to do with moral rebirth.

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Mandeville also anticipated the idea of ​​"prestigious consumption" as a necessary condition for the effective functioning of the capitalist economy. This concept was introduced in 1899 by the American economist Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929). Prestigious consumption postpones crises of overproduction, but does not save us from them.

In the future, Dr. Mandeville wrote several more sociological works. In particular, Free Thoughts on Religion, the Church, and National Happiness (1720) and An Inquiry into the Origin of Honor and the Usefulness of Christianity in War (1732).

Bernard de Mandeville died on January 21, 1733 .

https://www.rotfront.su/doktor-mandevil ... most-poro/

Apologies for this Google Translation being rough as a cob. Nonetheless, a worthwhile article.

"descendant' of the French in this case = Huguenot = Calvinist. It is more than coincidence that Calvinism was 'invented' just as the still religious and
nascent capitalist class needed some spiritual justification for their injustices.

Gotta wonder if Bees by Dimitri Pisarev was a rather late responds to Mandeville's stark definition of class society. viewtopic.php?f=3&t=218

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EDIT: I moved this piece from 'bourgoise economics' as this thread is more appropriate. Sorry for the discombobulation.
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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Fri Feb 11, 2022 3:48 pm

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Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature. By: Kaan Kangal (Book Review)
February 10, 2022
By Carlos L. Garrido – Feb 8, 2022

Friedrich Engels’ Dialectics of Nature has been arguably the most polemic ‘book’ within the corpus of classical Marxist literature. It is fair to say that since its initial 1925[1] publication in German and Russian, one can infer a ‘Marxists’ political orientation based on their assessment of Engels’ text. However, the centrality of the ‘text’ in the debate between the artificial bifurcation of ‘soviet’ versus ‘western’ Marxism has been detrimental to a critical reading of the text and its intentions; “dismissive attacks, rather than seasoned arguments, shaped much of the polemical character of this literature” (203).[2] Against this backdrop of readings from pro and anti-Engels Marxists, Kaan Kangal’s Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature serves as a “prolegomenon for reading Engels anew” (7).

The ”Engels debate,” as Kangal coins it, has for one of its central questions the relationship of Engels to Karl Marx (17). The anti-Engels crowd, disenchanted by their homogentisic interpretations of the Marxisms that arose in former socialist states (specifically the USSR), hold that “the primary suspect in contaminating Marx’s theory” is Engels (11). Against this ‘Engelsian’ distortion, these theorists postulate that the ‘rational kernel’ of an authentic Marx can be recaptured if only Engels and the Engelsites (those who agree with Lenin on the “full conformity” of Engels and Marx) could be cast aside (13). To borrow from Husserlian phenomenology, if only Marx could be ‘bracketed’ out of Engelsian contamination, then the residuum of this phenomenological reduction would allow us to know the ‘real Marx.’[3]

V.I. Lenin states that “only ‘a sworn enemy of Marxism’ can use philosophical views to open ‘a direct campaign against Engels’” (Ibid). Further, Teodor I. Oiserman argues that “no true scholarship but a hidden anti-communism is behind those who come up with charges against Engels and separate him from Marx” (Ibid). Critics like Herbert Marcuse, Tom Rockmore, Terrell Carver, Leszek Kolawoski, Alfred Schmidt, Frederic Bender, Norman Levine, and others who purport the Engels ‘betrayal’ thesis have the burden of proof on their side, they are the ones that “need to demonstrate convincingly, [in the face of overwhelming textual evidence for the contrary], that Engels’ ‘going beyond’ and ‘following’ were not encouraged, supported and enabled by Marx” (15).[4] If unable to do this, there is little reason to believe, like Lenin and Oiserman, that they are anything more than a political version of little red riding hood’s false grandmother – an anti-communist wolf wrapped in Marxist clothing.As Kangal’s research shows, the critics have been unable to provide anything close to substantial proof to back their preposterous declarations. In the case of Carver and Levine, their argumentative poverty reaches the level of speculating on the psychological reasons why Marx and Engels maintained their relationship. This amounts to little more than the anti-communist projection of their evidence-less hypothesis onto the psychology of Marx. As Kangal amusingly states, “pretending to have a privileged access to author’s subconsciousness from an Archimedean point of view is not a very modest way to make a point” (34).Considering that Marx and Engels collaborated on more than 100 texts; that regarding Engels’ positions in philosophy and natural science Marx told him “I invariably follow in your footsteps;” and that Marx praised, promoted, and wrote a chapter for Engels’ Anti-Dühring (a text whose first part on philosophy greatly overlaps with Engels’ positions on dialectics in Dialectics of Nature), the Leninist collaborationist perspective is virtually indubitable from the standpoint of any honest assessment of the available textual evidence (16, 30-31). Carver, Levine, and the other Marx-Engels bifurcators must admit that “all the problems [they] associated with Engels may be found within Marx and Marxism rather than between Marx and Engels” (19).In addition to demolishing the ‘Engels contamination’ thesis of the contextual Engels debate, Kangal also provides a genealogy of the debate itself, and shows that the “controversy over natural dialectics is much older than the posthumous publication of Dialectics of Nature or even the publication of Anti- Dühring in 1878-1879” (198).


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Hungarian Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács (1885-1971)

For most Marxist scholars, the ‘break’ between ‘western’ and ‘soviet’ Marxism (and hence, the beginning of the ‘Engels debate’) occurs first in Georg Lukács’ famous sixth footnote of the first chapter in his 1923 History and Class Consciousness. Here, Lukács states that “Engels – following Hegel’s mistaken lead – extended the [dialectical] method also to knowledge of nature” (43). Instead, argued Lukács, the dialectical method should be limited to “historical-social reality” (ibid).

What those who bank on this footnote forget, or are unaware of, is that Lukács comes to reject his own position to the point of “[launching] a campaign to prevent the reprints of his 1923 book” (55). Lukács had argued that his book was ‘outdated,’ ‘misleading,’ and ‘dangerous’ because “it was written in a ‘transition [period] from objective idealism to dialectical materialism’” (ibid). Additionally, he was quite explicit in arguing that “’[his] struggle against… the concept of dialectics in nature’ was one of the ‘central mistakes of [his] book’” (56). Further, in the posthumously published A Defense of History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic, Lukács says that “the dialectic could not possibly be effective as an objective principle of development of society, if it were not already effective as a principle of development of nature before society” (Ibid).

Lukács’ rectification should also show that he was the one that was following G. W. F. Hegel’s lead, for Hegel held that “organic nature has no history” (162). Therefore, “contra Hegel and Lukács, Engels is on the right track because he advances the view that nature has a history, and that it is a self-grounded totality,” i.e., that “dialectics applies to nature” (201-2).

Notwithstanding, Kangal argues that “the novelty of Lukács’ claim is overrated” (44). Before, during, and after the lives of Marx and Engels, debates concerning dialectics in general, and dialectics in nature in particular, had already been taking place in socialist theoretical circles across Europe. Instead of the orthodox origin story of the debate in Lukács’ footnote, Kangal “offer[s] an alternative history of the origin” of the debate which “goes back to the critical readings of Hegel among his pupils, most notably Adolf Trendelenburg and Eduard von Hartmann” (44).

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German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831)

After situating the origin of the Engels debate in the Hegel debate of the early 1840s with Trendelenburg, and the late 1860s with Hartmann, Kangal shows how this debate was rekindled during Marx and Engels’ lives in their debates with Eugen von Dühring and their friend Friedrich Albert Lange. Concerning the former, Engels “jokingly complained” to Marx while writing Anti-Dühring that

You can lie in a warm bed studying Russian agrarian conditions in general and ground rent in particular, without being interrupted, but I am expected to put everything else on one side immediately, to find a hard chair, to swill some cold wine, and to devote myself to going after the scalp of that dreary fellow Dühring (37).

​Marx appreciatively noted in a letter exchange with Wilhelm Liebknecht the “great sacrifice” Engels made, “[postponing] an incomparably more important work [i.e., Dialectics of Nature],” to provide a comprehensive criticism of Dühring (31).

​Concerning their friend Lange, he argued in 1865 that the “Hegelian system [was] a step backward towards scholasticism,” and that Hegel’s views on mathematics and natural science were a substantial “weak spot” (47). In the same year Engels sent him a letter defending “the titanic old fellow” and argued that Hegel’s “true philosophy of nature is to be found in the second part of the ‘Logic,’ in the theory of essence, the authentic core of the whole doctrine” (ibid). To this he added that the “modern scientific doctrine of reciprocity of natural forces [was] just another expression or rather the positive proof of the Hegelian development on cause & effect, reciprocity, force, etc.” (ibid). Kangal notes that Lange’s latter work shows he took “Engels’ comments on Hegel seriously,” to the point of having developed in the posthumously published Logical Studies a “dialectical theory of probability” (48).In addition to the debates during the lifetime of Marx and Engels, Kangal also covers the debates that took place in the interlude between Engels’ death and the Russian 1917 revolution. For instance, he presents the arguments of the Russian Khaim Zhitlovskii (1896), who was the first to attempt a divide between Marx and Engels on the subject of natural dialectics; the arguments from the German revisionist Edward Bernstein (1921), who argued that “the great things which Marx and Engels achieved, they accomplished in spite of, not because of, Hegel’s dialectics”; the critical reply from the Austrian Marxist philosopher Karl Kautsky (1899), who in seeing and affinity between Bernstein and Dühring rhetorically asked (quoting Engels), “what remains of Marxism if it is deprived of dialectics that was its best ‘working tool’ and its ‘sharpest weapon?’”; and lastly, the debates between Austrian-Marxist Max Adler (1908) and the Russian Marxist Georgii Plekhanov (1891) over the former’s attack, and the latter’s defense, of philosophical materialism and dialectics (49-52).Kangal also provides a thorough study of the debates and contradictions that arose in the Soviet Union concerning the relationship of Marxism to Hegel, Marxism to philosophy, and of dialectics to nature. Focusing on the debates between the Deborinites and the Mechanists, Kangal brilliantly shows the plurality and heterogeneity of Marxist thought that existed in the Soviet Union. He says, “it is no exaggeration to say that the Soviet debates accumulated an astonishing variety of contradictions, even if some figures embodying those ambiguities, or later historians narrating them, would not openly admit this” (60).In journals like Pod Znamenem Marksizma (“Under the Banner of Marxism”), Vestnik Kommunisticheskii Akademii(“Bulletin of the Communist Academy”), Bolshevik, and Dialektika v Prirode (“Dialectics in Nature”) these debates would openly take place between scholars and party theoreticians (ibid). The research Kangal does of these Soviet debates lucidly depicts the monumental ignorance of ‘western’ Marxists’ dogmatic critiques of what they labeled as ‘Soviet Marxism.’ Such homogeneity never existed, plurality and debate were always present. Only in the anti-communist plagued minds of western Marxists did such homogeneity exist in Soviet philosophy.

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German polymath and co-developer of Marxism, Friedrich Engels (1820-1895)

​One of the novel points Kangal stresses is that the “197 manuscript fragments” contained in the “four folders” that would be made into the book we now know as Dialectics of Nature (or Dialectics and Nature for the 1927 German edition), has its “completeness and maturity… editorially imposed” (58, 3). This is something that has been mostly ignored by both sides of the Engels debate, each which assumed that, although incomplete, the book had a single and consistent intention it aimed to carry out. In response to this historical misreading of Engels’ intentions, Kangal states that,

​There is not necessarily a single overriding intention, a single goal, and a single argument in his entire undertaking; Engels’ readers do not appear to be prepared to accept the fact that some of his intentions, articulated or otherwise, might be incomplete, or incongruent with his other intentions, goals and arguments (184).

​Considering the former, Kangal argues that Engels’ “work in progress… remained incomplete” (124-5). This “incompleteness theorem,” as Kangal names it, states that “it is by no means self-evident that Engels’ project was ‘not finished’” (125). As he notes, a work can be “completed without being published” (ibid). A good example of this is The German Ideology, which although left to the “gnawing criticism of the mice,” nonetheless completed its “main purpose – self-clarification.”[5]One must ask, then, – why did Engels embark on such a momentous project? After providing a magnificent Marxist analysis of the function of theory and its relationship to practice, of the role of intellectuals in the workers’ struggle for socialism, and of the role of philosophy in relation to theory and practice, Kangal postulates four main motives behind Engels’ project: 1) “the political goal was to win over all (potentially) progressive forces, including natural scientists, to the socialist cause”; 2) to provide the natural sciences – who although think themselves to be free of philosophy are actually, according to Engels, always “under the dominion of philosophy” – the “methodological indispensability of philosophical dialectics”; 3) to consciously incorporate into the theoretical sciences the only method capable of comprehensively understanding the results derived from scientific studies – the Marxist materialist dialectics; and 4) to move beyond Ludwig Feuerbach’s insufficient discarding of Hegel, and instead sublate Hegel by showing that his revolutionary method is confirmed in nature and its historical development (something which Hegel rejected) (111-13).

In addition, after Marx’s death, Engels realized that Marx had never written the “2 or 3 sheets” he promised to him and Joseph Dietzgen where “the rational aspect” of Hegel’s method would be made “accessible to the common reader” (108). This, argued Kangal, was also an “occasion” (instead of a “direct reason”) for Engels’ undertaking in Dialectics of Nature (110).

After covering the Engels debate both contextually and genealogically, and providing a textual history of Dialectics of Nature and the multiple purposes behind it, Kangal dives into the most philosophically dense part of the book – his critical assessment of dialectics in Engels’ text. It is important to remember that although the critiques are directed at Engels and his Dialectics of Nature, the flaws Kangal points to are in Marx as well, for their perspectives on these were waged jointly. Here are some of the most important critiques Kangal provides of Engels’ “philosophical ambiguities” (125).

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Friedrich Engels

1- There are quite a few ambiguities and loose ends with Engels (and Marx’s) treatment of Hegel. First, Engels incorporates Hegelian categories (primarily from the first two sections of Hegel’s Science of Logic and Shorter Logic – the “Logic of Being” and the “Logic of Essence”) without an explanation for the differences in order and prioritization in how they appear in his and Hegel’s work. In Engels’ treatment, for instance, the categories from Hegel’s chapter “The Essentialities or Determinations of Reflection” (quantity/quality, identity/difference and its development into the categories of opposition and contradiction), are conjoined with the category of sublation (aufhebung) which Hegel introduces at the beginning of the “Logic of Being”, and are raised to the status of being ‘dialectical laws,’ that is, “the most general laws” of the “history of nature and human society.” These are, of course, the famous three – the “law of the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa, the law of the interpenetration of opposites, [and] the law of the negation of the negation.”[6]

Why he chooses these to be ‘laws’ over other Hegelian categories he uses throughout his work (like force/manifestation, coincidence/necessity, causality/reciprocity, shine/essence, nodal line, etc.) is unclear. Similarly, why some of Hegel’s categories are fully discarded with is also left unexamined. In addition, the treatment of Hegel’s Logic (which he primarily uses the Shorter Logic for) contains no consideration for Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, which Hegel argued his Science of Logic was the “first sequel” of.[7] With the exception of his critiques of Hegel’s philosophy of nature (which is part two of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences), Engels leaves what comes before and after the first division of Hegel’s Logic[s] (the sections in Objective Logic) largely unexamined.

The problem here is that it was Engels who, against Feuerbach, argued that Hegel couldn’t just be discarded, that his philosophy had to be “sublated in its own terms” (113). By discarding such a large amount of Hegel’s work, and further, by leaving largely unexplained the reasons for using those parts of Hegel which he does, Engels replicates (in a more advanced form) the Feuerbachian discarding of Hegel and fails to fully meet his own standards.

2- There are two central bifurcations Engels is engaging with in this text: dialectics and metaphysics, and idealism and materialism. As every Marxists knows, dialectics and materialism are supposed to be the ‘good guys’ and metaphysics and idealism the ‘bad guys.’ However, as Kangal shows, what allows for this neat separation is a synecdochal understanding of idealism and metaphysics on the part of Engels. Contrary to the common Marxist understanding, Kangal shows that there is a “compatibility rather than divergence between materialism and ‘a specific sort of) idealism, and between dialectics and (a specific sort of) metaphysics” (6).

Surely, Engels rejects Hegel’s depiction of the “realization of Spirit” or the “externalization of the Idea” by postulating the “primacy of nature over logic.” But this ‘inversion’ of what Hegel calls in his Philosophy of History a “true Theodicy” is not in itself a rejection of idealism en toto, but of a specific aspect of a particular philosopher’s (Hegel) objective idealism.[8] As Kangal states,

​Hegel and Engels diverge in the following respect: materialism regards nature as a self-grounded totality with its own history, while this is denied by idealism. Idealism presupposes a ‘Spirit’ that precedes nature into which it ‘externalizes’ itself. Engels has no reason to commit himself to Hegel’s religious mysticism, but this, in turn, is no sufficient reason to discard ‘idealism’ in Hegel’s sense of the term (194).

​​This wholesale discarding of idealism is shown to be even more absurd by the fact that part of Engels’ critique of the natural sciences, specifically his appeal for a conceptually realist understanding of ‘real infinities,’ is itself an argument for what Hegel would call ‘idealism’ (126). Idealism (in Hegel specifically) argues that,

Singular finite entities have no veritable being without collective dependence and mutual interaction among each other; mutual interdependence of finite parts is an infinitely self-developing totality within which the singular parts play the role of individual moments of the whole (157).

​​With this Hegelian definition of idealism Engels would be in full accord. The only thing he would disagree with is the characterization of the above mentioned as ‘idealism’. However, “the infinite stands and falls within the area of idealist investigation insofar as it is not subject to finite empirical observations of particular natural sciences” (194). Hence, it would be superfluous to come up with another term for the investigation of the infinite. The term ‘idealism’ is sufficient here.Engels’ unorthodox and synechdochal understanding of idealism (as it appears in the Hegelian tradition at least) is at the core of his (and Marx’s) artificial bifurcation of materialism and idealism. Instead, Kangal argues, we must realize that a “local materialism” and a “global idealism” are perfectly compatible (195). Kangal adds that he “wouldn’t be surprised if it had been a similar conclusion that prompted Lenin’s emphasis on the ‘friendship’ between materialism and idealism” (205).

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‘Before the sunrise’ (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels walking in night London) by Mikhail Dzhanashvili

3- Engels’ treatment of metaphysics suffers from the same setbacks as his treatment of idealism. For instance, in Anti-Dühring he argues that “to the metaphysician, things and their mental images, ideas, are isolated, to be considered one after the other and apart from each other, fixed rigid objects of investigation given once for all.”[9]However, this definition of metaphysics synecdochally depicts what Immanuel Kant and Hegel would call ‘old metaphysics’ as metaphysics en toto. As Kangal notes, “Kant and Hegel famously attack the flaws of ‘old metaphysics’, but Engels takes the anti-dialectics of the old metaphysics to represent the defects of metaphysics as a whole” (195).

Metaphysics, in the Hegelian tradition specifically, understands that,

​Rational foundations of sciences demand a rigorous inquiry into the fundamental structures of reality and our understanding of them; in order to conduct such an inquiry, we need to construct a categorial framework that explicitly formulates and self-critically revises the conceptual tools in use in order to improve our command of the ways we experience and think of the world (157).

​Once again, Engels’ text is littered with examples which depict his agreement with the above-mentioned propositions. The only disagreement here is terminological, that is, Engels would only reject the term metaphysics being used to describe the former perspective. This rejection, however, is grounded on his stinted understanding of metaphysics qua old metaphysics. There is, then, no contradiction at all between dialectics and metaphysics as described above. In fact, as Kangal rightly states, “Engels’ defense of philosophy against positivism is a defense of ‘metaphysics’’’ understood in these terms (195). For Hegel – who Engels and Marx praise and consider as the point of departure for Marxist materialism – one cannot escape metaphysics, human beings are “born metaphysicians”; all that matters is “whether the metaphysics one applies is of the right kind” (161).[10]

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​Kangal’s text also explores how the ambiguities present in Engels’ understanding of the relationship of idealism and materialism, and metaphysics and dialectics, are reflected and refracted into further confusions and knots concerning his association with Aristotle and his disassociation and critique of Kant. His text additionally traverses how these ambiguities are intensified by the variances between Engels’ Plan 1878, Plan 1880, and his four folders for Dialectics of Nature (165-176).

It is impossible to do justice, in such limited space, to such a wonderful work of Marxist scholarship. What I can say is this, any reader of Kangal’s book will surely appreciate its abundance of letter references and its resuscitation of texts which have been largely obscured in anglophone Marxist scholarship over the last half a century. Even in the most philosophically muddy places of Kangal’s text, he does an exceptional job at clarifying things for the reader. In contrast to what a recent critical reviewer of Kangal’s text argued, the difficulties found in the philosophically densest section of the text are not the fault of Kangal, but of Engels (and Marx, who shares Engels’ flaws), who uses unorthodox and synechdochal definitions of idealism and materialism, and dialectics and metaphysics, to position himself in relation to Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel. If anything, Kangal must be thanked for untangling, in his comparative and critical analysis of the aforementioned thinkers, knots set by Marx and Engels’ philosophically unorthodox usage of the previous concepts.


Notes

[1] Two essays withing the Dialectics of Nature manuscript collection had already been published before by Eduard Bernstein, “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man” (1895/6) and “Natural Science in the Spirit World” (1898).

[2] All numbers cited in the review article come from Kangal’s text: Kaan Kangal (2020), Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature, Palgrave.

[3] Edmund Husserl (1913), Ideas I, Hackett (2014)., pp. 109.

[4] Paul Blackledge article for Monthly Review (May 2020) “Engels vs. Marx?: Two Hundred Years of Frederick Engels,” also does a splendid job at countering the ‘betrayal’ or ‘corruption’ thesis of the Marx-Engels bifurcators.

[5] Karl Marx (1859), A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, International Publishers (1999)., pp. 22.

[6] Friedrich Engels (1964), Dialectics of Nature, Wellred Books (2012)., pp. 63.

[7] G. W. F. Hegel (1812), The Science of Logic, Cambridge (2015)., pp. 11.

[8] G. W. F. Hegel (1837), The Philosophy of History, Dover Publications (1956) ., pp. 457.

[9] Friedrich Engels (1879), Anti-Dühring, Foreign Language Press (1976)., pp. 20.

[10] It is also important to note that this ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater’ approach taken to idealism and metaphysics was never applied to the flaws they both saw in various parts of the materialist and dialectical tradition.

Featured image: Kaan Kangal, Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 213 pages.

(Midwestern Marx)

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Sat Feb 12, 2022 3:42 pm

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“The Last Refuge of Scoundrels”
Originally published: Science for the People by Stacy Farina and Matthew Gibbons (February 1, 2022 ) | - Posted Feb 11, 2022

The words “scientific racism” conjure up images of nineteenth century anthropologists measuring skulls with calipers. But it would be just as accurate to picture a Canadian psychologist in the 1980s obsessing over the size of genitals. That was J. Philippe Rushton, Professor of Psychology at the University of Western Ontario. Many have chronicled the story of Rushton’s disturbing attempts to enshrine his pseudoscientific beliefs about the biological basis of racial personality differences (from IQ, to sexual promiscuity, to criminality) into the scientific literature.1 But few know the full story, of which we present new evidence in this article, of the behind-the-scenes support Rushton received from eminent biologist E. O. Wilson.

On December 26, 2021, Edward O. Wilson passed away at the age of 94. He is remembered fondly by most who interacted with him and engaged with his writings.2 He has a well-earned reputation as a fierce advocate for the conservation of biodiversity and a world-class expert on ants and other social animals.3 However, throughout his career, he faced charges of racism due to his attempts to use evolutionary theory to explain individual differences among humans in terms of their behaviors and social status. Wilson dodged these charges skillfully, almost never mentioning race in his work or public comments.

Now that he has passed, the nature of his legacy has become a topic of intense debate. When Dr. Monica McLemore urged the scientific community to grapple with Wilson’s relationship with scientific racism in a Scientific American op-ed,4 she received swift and strong backlash from biologists and other supporters of Wilson. A few weeks later, Razib Khan, a blogger with a BS in genetics, wrote a letter of rebuttal claiming that these “accusations” are “baseless,”5 attracting dozens of academics to sign their names in support.6

Racism in academia and education is a perennially relevant topic. The U.S. Supreme Court recently agreed to hear cases that challenge affirmative action admissions at Harvard University and in the University of North Carolina.7 States throughout the country are banning or considering bans on the teaching of critical race theory.8Demographics of faculty and graduate students in the U.S. are far from reflecting the racial demographics of the country as a whole.9 Therefore, as Dr. McLemore put it, now is the time for “truth and reconciliation” as we confront how some prominent biologists have worked to lend credibility, both culturally and in the scientific record, to pseudoscientific notions of a biological racial hierarchy.

Evolutionary ideas continue to be used by “race realists,” scientists and commentators alike, to promote ideology regarding the origin and implications of individual differences among humans that fall into socially-constructed racial groups.10 Anti-racism in evolutionary biology requires an honest confrontation of these issues. While many have done this important work through the decades, including Theodosius Dobzhansky, Jerry Hirsch, Stephen J. Gould, Richard Lewontin, and Joseph Graves Jr, there is still much more work to be done.11 When answering the question of why scientific racism persists to this day, we can look at how systems, and the people within those systems, work to maintain credibility of racist and deeply flawed ideas.

Rushton died in 2012, but not before gaining a reputation as a prolific and outspoken racist. He spent the final decade of his life as head of the Pioneer Fund, a foundation that supports pseudoscientific research on race and is classified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an extremist group with white nationalism as their core ideology. He also spent his time writing articles for Mankind Quarterly and giving presentations for conferences of the hate group American Renaissance.12 All the while, Rushton maintained his credentials as a tenured professor of psychology. To this day, many of his most infamous papers remain published, although some have been posthumously retracted in recent years.13

We can’t know whether Rushton would have faded into obscurity without the professional support of his career by Wilson. However, while Rushton was a psychologist, he needed the backing of an evolutionary biologist to lend credibility to his biological claims.

Wilson and Rushton’s relationship is not a story of “guilt by association” or of honest mistakes and unfortunate missteps. It is a story about how racist ideas are woven into the scientific record with the support of powerful allies who operate in secret. While this story is extraordinary, it is not unusual.

At the request of the Library of Congress, Wilson donated much of the contents of his office—letters, reprints, conference proceedings, etc.—to the national archive. The Wilson Papers comprises hundreds of boxes of documents and numerous digital recordings. We started exploring these holdings in September 2021, out of our broad interest in the Sociobiology debate. We did not intend to investigate scientific racism. However, the four folders labeled “Rushton, John Philippe” caught our attention. And in light of the controversy initiated by the Scientific American op-ed, we hope to share them and provide additional context for understanding Wilson’s legacy and the broader legacy of scientific racism.14

One of the most striking documents is an impassioned letter from Wilson to Professor Case Vanderwolf, a neuroscientist in Rushton’s department at the University of Western Ontario. Vanderwolf’s department was in the process of defending their decision to sanction Rushton for scholarly misconduct, including denying Rushton salary increase and disallowing him from teaching. This was at the height of Rushton’s infamy, sparking student protests and international media coverage. E. O. Wilson wrote a strong letter of support for Rushton that harshly criticized the Department of Psychology and University of Western Ontario with dramatic flair.

“Dear Professor Vanderwolf: First rule for one who finds himself in a hole: stop digging. The University of Western Ontario is in a deep hole, being on the verge of violating academic freedom in a way that will give it notoriety of historic proportions.” Wilson’s letter begins, dated July 3, 1990 (box 143, folder 9). This was only months after Rushton made appearances on American talk shows by Geraldo Rivera and Phil Donahue to defend his claims about racial differences, fueling the broad notoriety that became characteristic of his late career.15

Wilson’s letter continues, “To be sure, you and Professor Cain have found fault with Professor Rushton’s writings on race, but some noted specialists in human genetics and cognitive psychology have judged them to be sound and significant.” Wilson asks Vanderwolf to consider a poll that “found that a large minority of specialists of human genetics and testing believe in a partial hereditary basis for black-white average IQ differences.” Further, Wilson states that the National Association of Scholars (a right-wing advocacy group) is soon to publish an analysis “concluding that academic freedom is the issue in this case and that Rushton’s academic freedom is threatened.” The National Association of Scholars remains actively involved today in fighting affirmative action in higher education admissions and against the teaching of critical race theory.

Vanderwolf replied a week later (box 143, folder 9) to clarify that he was not involved with the investigation, as Wilson had assumed, but was instead simply another professor at the University of Western Ontario who was greatly opposed to Rushton’s work. Vanderwolf writes to Wilson, “My disagreement with Rushton is that I believe he misrepresents data in his publications and that he is willing to accept the most dubious kinds of publications on par with well-conducted studies if they happen to agree with his own views. Would you accept an article in Penthouse Forum as evidence that black men have larger penises than white men? Rushton did.” Vanderwolf later detailed these and other criticisms in publications with the aforementioned Professor Cain.16

Rushton thanked Wilson in a hand-written note (box 143, folder 9) dated July 17, 1990. “Dear Ed … Vanderwolf has been one of my harshest critics and the letters from you [Wilson] have given him cause to pause, and think.” Rushton promises to keep Wilson posted and states, “The battle continues, and I am now committed to carrying it to a victory, i.e., allowing genetic and evolutionary perspectives on race to be treated as normal science.” Rushton signs off with “Again, my deepest appreciation for it all, With best regards, Phil.”

This exchange is not what spared Rushton’s career—from what we can tell, it was inconsequential to the investigation. But it is possible that the relationship that had developed in the decade prior between Rushton and Wilson contributed significantly to establishing Rushton’s scientific credibility, which he used successfully to appeal the charges of unethical scholarship by his institution and remain a tenured professor for the rest of his life.

In 1986, Wilson sponsored Rushton’s paper “Gene-culture coevolution of complex social behavior: Human altruism and mate choice” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS).17 PNAS is one of the most prestigious journals in the world, and publishing in this journal is a signal of merit and broad interest in an author and their work. However, unlike most journals, submitting to PNAS requires sponsorship from a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Sponsorship is not only an endorsement of the quality of the publication but an agreement to act as handling editor, sending the manuscript out for peer review and giving recommendations for revision and acceptance.

The peer reviews were a mix of positive and negative feedback (box 143, folder 11). The first review was “highly favorable but [the reviewer] has some quibbles” and the second by a “friendly critic” was “very unfavorable.” Wilson asked Rushton to decide whether criticisms from the second reviewer could be “safely bypassed” while Wilson attempted to solicit another “tough but friendly reviewer.” Two months later, Wilson wrote to Rushton to inform him of his decision to accept the article. While there is no record in the collection of what happened in the interim, two months hardly seems enough time to overhaul the work, address the “very unfavorable” reviews, and make satisfactory revisions toward publishing in a prestigious journal such as PNAS.

A year later, Rushton again asked Wilson to sponsor a PNAS article (box 143, folder 11). Wilson declined. This time, the article is explicitly about race, promoting Rushton’s now infamous ideas about applying r-K selection theory to racial differences.18 A few months later, Rushton submitted the paper to Ethology and Sociobiology, for which Wilson provided a strong positive review (box 143 folder 11), although it was eventually rejected.

In Wilson’s September 1987 letter declining to sponsor this paper, he states, “You have my support in many ways, but for me to sponsor an article on racial differences in the PNAS would be counterproductive for both of us.” He recounts an incident of being attacked for his views and continues,

I have a couple of colleagues here, Gould and Lewontin, who would use any excuse to raise the charge again. So I’m the wrong person to sponsor the article, although I’d be glad to referee it for another, less vulnerable member of the National Academy.19

Despite Wilson’s self-perceived vulnerability, he stuck his neck out for Rushton on many occasions. He behaved in many ways like a mentor. The relationship between the two men is almost heartwarming, until you start reading Rushton’s overtly racist work.

On July 1, 1989, Rushton received an evaluation from the Chair of the Promotion and Tenure (P&T) Committee, Dr. Greg Moran, rating his performance as “Unsatisfactory” (box 143, folder 11). Moran summarizes, “The members of the P&T committee were unanimous in their judgment that your overall performance in 1988–1989 was below the minimum acceptable level for a faculty member in this department.” While Rushton published extensively during this period, members of the committee “were of the unanimous opinion that your work on the genetic basis of race differences is substantially flawed and that your published record indicates serious scholarly deficiencies.” Rushton appealed the decision, and in his defense, he chiefly cited his numerous publications, some of which Wilson had helped to shape with his feedback in years prior through formal and informal communications (box 143 folder 11).

​​April 4, 1990, Wilson wrote to the Appeals Committee at the University of Western Ontario to support Rushton’s appeal of his Unsatisfactory rating (box 143 folder 9). Wilson argued that Rushton’s data and interpretation were “sound, being adapted in a straightforward way from well documented principles of r-K selection in biology.” He goes on to say that many other unnamed biologists agree with Wilson’s assessment, but added,

You may wonder why almost none have published their opinions. The answer is fear of being called racist, which is virtually a death sentence in American adademia [sic] if taken seriously. I admit that I myself have tended to avoid the subject of Rushton’s work, out of fear.

Wilson’s aforementioned July 1990 letter to Professor Vanderwolf, while ultimately inconsequential, calls attention to a message of support for Rushton from the National Association of Scholars through their publication Academic Questions. What Wilson does not mention is that Wilson himself solicited support for Rushton from the National Association of Scholars in a letter to its founder Stephen Balch on November 6, 1989 (box 143 folder 10). On December 5, 1989, Wilson writes to Rushton, copying Balch, with the following message:

I am very heartened by the response of the National Association of Scholars (Academic Questions) to your case… Much as they like, your [Rushton’s] critics simply will not be able to convict you of racism, and there will come a day when the more honest among them will rue the day they joined this leftward revival of McCarthyism.

A year later, on October 18, 1991, Rushton wrote Wilson an extensive letter of appreciation for his ongoing support (box 143, folder 9). Rushton had won his appeals, and the proceedings against him by his university had concluded. He boasted of a “solid” victory, “This year, on July 1, 1991, I received a rating of ‘Good’ despite an even greater percentage of my research being devoted to race differences.” He talks about his return to teaching “despite pickets, demonstrators, and the occasional class disruption.” He describes the important role that the National Association of Scholars played, facilitated by Wilson, in Rushton’s public defense.

In this same letter, Rushton tells Wilson that he compiled a book of supportive letters, including from Wilson himself.

A copy sat in the departmental coffee room for several months and bolstered those colleagues who might otherwise have felt I was too isolated to support. It is uplifting to look at that book and realize the strength of character of those, such as yourself [Wilson], who came forward to articulate principles in aid of so unpopular a cause. I remain immensely grateful for your help.

Rushton never missed an opportunity to express his gratitude for Wilson’s support, and he was convinced that it played a major role in keeping his job. Rushton remained a Professor of Psychology at the University of Western Ontario for the remainder of his career, lending him credibility as he toured the country speaking to groups of neo-Nazis.

It wasn’t enough for Wilson himself to support Rushton’s work. He also encouraged his friend and colleague Bernard Davis to do the same in May of 1990 (box 50, folder 19). At Wilson’s goading, Davis penned a letter in support of Rushton’s work on racial differences in IQ to The Scientist. Wilson wrote to Davis,

Rushton is breaking the taboo and may, after hair-raising persecution, eventually get away with it. Free discussion, permitting fresh ideas and release of tensions, may be possible in the next ten years.

Why was Wilson so sure that Davis would be willing to speak on Rushton’s work on race? While Wilson was cautious to rarely mention race publicly, Davis clearly had no such reservations. Davis was a professor at Harvard Medical School who was an outspoken opponent of affirmative action, particularly when it came to Black students earning admission to Harvard.20 Wilson’s papers reveal a close relationship with Davis (Box 50, 2 folders, Box 51, 6 folders), finding common ground and supporting each other against criticism leveled by Richard Lewontin.

Davis frequently had Wilson’s back, especially throughout Wilson’s most high-profile controversy: the debate with Lewontin and Gould, who were outspoken and relentless critics of Wilson’s Human Sociobiology. By Wilson’s own account in the previously quoted September 1987 letter to Rushton, the two Harvard colleagues and critics had a chilling effect on his ability to support Rushton’s race science. One might wonder whether Wilson would have been far bolder, like Davis, without constant pressure from scientists like Lewontin and Gould.

This feud is well documented and has been the subject of much discussion about the nature of politics and ideology among scientists. But for Davis and Wilson, the “correct side” of the debate was obvious. In a letter to Davis (box 51, folder 5), Wilson provided some commentary about their “favorite anti-racists of the Left.” Wilson pontificated that arguing for equity among groups of people was ideologically similar to racism, adding the evocative phrase “my way of putting it would be that anti-racism is the last refuge of scoundrels.”

This is one story of many that can be found among the letters of this famous biologist. The collection also includes correspondences between Wilson and notorious “race scientists” Arthur Jensen and Richard J. Herrnstein, and of course intense sparring with Gould and Lewontin. We encourage those with an interest to explore the collection.

But this is a part of a much bigger story. Close ties between biologists and white supremacists continue to exist. Racists are often thrilled for an opportunity to see their ideology lent credibility by biologists, especially those of great renown. If we are to address the history and present of racism in the field of biology and in our society at large, we need to contextualize these stories. On the one hand, we may recognize how the system can nurture racist ideologies that are legitimized by scientists; on the other, we may draw inspiration from and continue the work of those “scoundrels” who relentlessly “raise the charge” against racist pseudoscience.

Stacy Farina and Matthew Gibbons are a wife and husband team with an interest in the history of science. Dr. Farina is an Assistant Professor at Howard University with a PhD in Evolutionary Biology. Matthew Gibbons has a BA in Humanities and works in public health.

Notes:
1.↩ Andrew S. Winston, “Scientific Racism and North American Psychology,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Psychology, 2020, doi.org; Joseph L. Graves, “What a Tangled Web He Weaves: Race, Reproductive Strategies and Rushton’s Life History Theory,” Anthropological Theory 2, no. 2 (June 1, 2002): 131–54, journals.sagepub.com.
2.↩ Scott Neuman, “E.O. Wilson, Famed Entomologist and Pioneer in the Field of Sociobiology, Dies at 92,” NPR, December 27, 2021, www.npr.org; Felicia He, “E.O. Wilson, Renowned Harvard Biologist Known as ‘Darwin’s Natural Heir,’ Dies at 92,” The Harvard Crimson, December 31, 2021, www.thecrimson.com; Bert Hölldobler, “Edward Osborne Wilson, Naturalist (1929-2021),” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 119, no. 5 (February 1, 2022), doi.org.
3.↩ Doug Tallamy, “Remembering E.O. Wilson’s Wish for a More Sustainable Existence,” December 27, 2021, www.smithsonianmag.com.
4.↩ Monica R. McLemore, “The Complicated Legacy of E. O. Wilson,” Scientific American, December 29, 2021, www.scientificamerican.com.
5.↩ Razib Khan, “Setting the Record Straight: Open Letter on E.O. Wilson’s Legacy,” Razib Khan’s Unsupervised Learning (blog), January 19, 2022, razib.substack.com.
6.↩ After the revelation that the blogger held white nationalist views, several academics retracted their signatures. But many maintain that they are in agreement with the blog’s contents.
7.↩ Adam Liptak and Anemona Hartocollis, “Supreme Court Will Hear Challenge to Affirmative Action at Harvard and U.N.C,” The New York Times, January 24, 2022, www.nytimes.com.
8.↩ Liz Crampton, “GOP Sees ‘huge Red Wave’ Potential by Targeting Critical Race Theory,” POLITICO, January 5, 2022, www.politico.com.
9.↩ Maya L. Gosztyla et al., “Responses to 10 Common Criticisms of Anti-Racism Action in STEMM,” PLoS Computational Biology 17, no. 7 (July 2021): e1009141, doi.org.
10.↩ Nuno M. C. Martins, Michael J. Carson, and the Genetics and Society Working Group, “What Can Current Genetic Testing Technologies Tell You About ‘Race’?” Science for the People, November 19, 2021, magazine.scienceforthepeople.org.
11.↩ Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (W. W. Norton, 1996); Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon J. Kamin, Not In Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature (Haymarket Books, 2017); Joseph L. Graves Jr, The Emperor’s New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium (Rutgers University Press, 2003).
12.↩ Mankind Quarterly is “a pseudoscientific journal founded after the Second World War to argue against desegregation and racial mixing.” See Angela Saini, “The Internet Is a Cesspool of Racist Pseudoscience,” Scientific American Blog Network, accessed January 31, 2022, blogs.scientificamerican.com.
13.↩ J. P. Rushton, “RETRACTED: An Evolutionary Theory of Health, Longevity, and Personality: Sociobiology and r/K Reproductive Strategies,” Psychological Reports 60, no. 2 (April 1987): 539–49; J. P. Rushton, “RETRACTED: Contributions to the History of Psychology: XC. Evolutionary Biology and Heritable Traits (with Reference to Oriental-White-Black Differences): The 1989 AAAS Paper,” Psychological Reports 71, no. 3 Pt 1 (December 1992): 811–21; J. P. Rushton, “RETRACTED: Race and Crime: International Data for 1989-1990,” Psychological Reports 76, no. 1 (February 1995): 307–12; J. Philippe Rushton and Donald I. Templer, “RETRACTED: Do Pigmentation and the Melanocortin System Modulate Aggression and Sexuality in Humans as They Do in Other Animals?,” Personality and Individual Differences 53, no. 1 (July 1, 2012): 4–8.
14.↩ The materials presented in this article have not, to our knowledge, been made available to the participants on either side of the debate on Wilson’s legacy.
15.↩ Antony Violanti, “A Researcher, or a Racist? Ontario Professor Draws Fire for Theory That Links Intelligence and Race,” January 16, 1991, The Buffalo News, buffalonews.com.
16.↩ C. H. Vanderwolf and D. P. Cain, “The Neurobiology of Race and Kipling’s Cat,” Personality and Individual Differences 12, no. 1 (January 1, 1991): 97–98, doi.org; Donald P. Cain and C. H. Vanderwolf, “A Critique of Rushton on Race, Brain Size and Intelligence,” Personality and Individual Differences 11, no. 8 (January 1, 1990): 777–84, doi.org.
17.↩ J. P. Rushton, C. H. Littlefield, and C. J. Lumsden, “Gene-Culture Coevolution of Complex Social Behavior: Human Altruism and Mate Choice,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 83, no. 19 (October 1986): 7340–43, doi.org.
18.↩ In summary, r-K selection theory was a term coined by Wilson to describe how evolutionary forces may act to produce two types of reproductive strategies: “r” in which organisms produce many offspring with little parental care and “K” in which organisms produce few offspring and care for them greatly. In his pseudoscientific analyses, Rushton proposed that people of African ancestry were “r” strategists and people of European and Asian ancestry were “K” strategists. Rushton was swiftly and widely criticized for using heinously inappropriate and racist lines of evidence and reasoning, from a scholarly and ethical perspective.
19.↩ Helen Fisher, “‘Wilson,’ They Said, ‘Your All Wet!,’” The New York Times, October 16, 1994, www.nytimes.com.
20.↩ R. D. Davis, “Academic Standards in Medical Schools,” The New England Journal of Medicine 294, no. 20 (May 13, 1976): 1118–19, ​​doi.org.

https://mronline.org/2022/02/11/the-las ... coundrels/

I had long had the greatest respect for much of Wilson's earlier work, between ants, island zoogeography and the sociobiology of insects there ought to have been a Nobel. But it was always clear that he was an unredeemed petty bourgeois product of the small town South. His 'biophelia' was feel-good conceit that I cottoned to for a minute, but that's all. It is the application of his invertebrate sociobiology to a very different mammalian species that is completely reprehensible. Besides his background it is the uber-reductionist tendencies of Western Science which facilitates such bad science. Many of his generalizations about social animals are correct but to generalize human behavior on the species level as no different than that of ants disregards the fact that we are able to store and process information in a non-genetic manner, that we have the ability to alter our behavior far beyond the capabilities of the species he has worked with that is the game changer. For better or worse look around you, consider the last 20 thousand years. Do you see the difference between humans and ants? Have you cannibalize your grandmother or exposed a defective infant lately? And one day we won't have wage slavery either. Progress is not inevitable, but with some attention it can be likely. Wilson denies this and that is deplorable.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Fri Feb 18, 2022 2:50 pm

I think this article a good rejoinder to the anti-vax/covid measures that the infantile left has been promoting.

Image
Giorgio Agamben

“When all you have is a hammer…”: why Agamben’s ideas were bound to lead to this
Posted Feb 17, 2022 by Steven Colatrella

Originally published: The International Marxist-Humanist (February 8, 2022 )

Summary: Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s attack on public health measures during COVID-19 is linked to undialectical perspectives rooted in Nietzsche, and contrasted to other thinkers like Toni Negri, Naomi Klein, and Peter Linebaugh–Editors

Padua, Italy — When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The Italian political philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, who for decades has warned us about the seemingly unstoppable ability and will of even democratic states to impose a “state of exception”–a state of emergency powers overriding all law, constitutional restraints, and citizen or human rights–has now become the most sophisticated spokesperson for the anti-vax and other forces opposed to the public health restrictions due to the COVID-19 virus crisis. He has founded an intellectual group opposed to the restrictions, public health measures, vaccination requirements and other actions taken by public officials to combat the spread of the virus and its lethality.

Agamben is one of the most influential philosophers of recent years, and he was especially “hot” and in fashion during the Bush/War on Terror years after 9/11, when his analysis seemed to help explain the restrictions on constitutional and human rights. Agamben has many admirers, and his work has influenced that of many in and out of academia. His recent insistence, however, that the entire Covid pandemic is a manufactured crisis, whose true intent has been to impose a “biopolitical” regime that “reduces us all to mere biophysical existence”, making us into “lemmings” who, bending to the will of state power and direction have been stripped of all ethical, moral and cultural traits, leading us to stand naked in front of the sovereign, willing to accept the destruction of our liberties for the sake of presumed security, has led many to wonder whether his current stance throws light–or better shadow–on his previous work which has been so widely celebrated.

Since in 2011 I wrote and got published a lengthy attack on Agamben and his work,1 an essay I wrote when he was at the height of his popularity and his work at its most in fashion, I have to say that I saw something like this coming from a mile away, and think this seeming turn to the irrational Agamben was entirely predictable. But the problem with being a no-name independent scholar and activist publishing in a fine, reputable but hardly widely-read and followed journal an attack on the work of an intellectual superstar, is that you don’t have the impact you wish you had. So only now are people wondering what went wrong with Agamben. To which, the only reply is: nothing, his work was always wrongheaded. I hope to briefly explain why here.

Agamben is known mainly for his concept of the “state of exception” and for arguing, and seeming to demonstrate empirically, that the overriding of all constitutional or legal limits by state power has become the norm, not a “crisis” or a “state of emergency” but a sort of permanent state of emergency. So crushing of human and legal rights by reference to some crisis or emergency is the principal form of government–or better governance in the world today, including in the western democratic states. He uses categories from the Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt to show how sovereignty is essentially the power to impose one’s will on others, that is, the power of the state or of its executive branch to declare a state of emergency at will and use that situation to put society into a Hobbesian state of nature–one where law does not yet exist, because law itself must be based on a prior condition in which law is made in the first place so that other laws can be fashioned based on this “constituent power”. Constituent power is a concept of Schmitt’s that the Italian autonomist Marxist Toni Negri has used with some creativity to describe the potential founding of new societies by social movements and revolutions, but which for Schmitt and Agamben instead describes the true power of the state that precedes law and constitutions, that power that makes law and constitutions in the first place, and so is mainly a menace, not a possibility, for popular forces. For Negri, this is the moment of revolution, when a movement is in a position to become the new order of society. For Agamben, it is instead the moment of state power that reveals the state’s real essence, as raw power to impose its will, the Leviathan of Hobbes. In the face of that state power, all of us, citizens and refugees alike, are mere Homo Sacer–an ancient Roman category that referred to persons who had no rights, nor any right to have rights, who could be killed with impunity. For Agamben, the Jews in the Nazi camps are the prototype of the human condition for all today.

I criticized Agamben ten years ago in my article of the time, and hold to my criticisms today, on the grounds of his not addressing any history or relationship of the state to capitalism and its processes, and of not addressing in any way the long history of struggles against capitalist expropriation and exploitation–the anti-slavery movement, the anti-colonial movements, the movements for women’s equality and the working class movements, as well as the democratization–partial as it is–of state power. By ignoring capitalism and the struggle against it, Agamben ignores the experiences of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, of colonized peoples, of women, of slaves and of proletarians, whose survival under capitalism is always contingent. Ignoring these central experiences of the modern world enables him to treat the states of emergency around the world and historically that are so important to him as more novel and more urgent and as new norms. Instead, as my list of social actors shows, the experience of being homo sacer in one form or another–of the very state he is warning us about, has in fact been the main experience of the majority of people around the world for centuries. And, until recently, with the end of slavery, advances in women’s rights, labor unions, democratization and advanced welfare state and social democracies, it has been the experience of the majority of people in every society since the rise of classes. I think these criticisms of his work still hold today, even before his recent seeming descent into madness over vaccinations, Covid restrictions and public health measures, positions I see as entirely in keeping with and consistent with his previous work, indeed their logical trajectory and outcome.

But it is the contrast of his work with that of Toni Negri’s on the shared concept of constituent power that I think can best show what problem is at the heart of not just both their work, but that of an entire field of works by various authors, of which Agamben is merely currently the worst and most extreme example.

Negri sees the state of exception as a potential moment of revolutionary reconstitution of society as a whole, to paraphrase the Communist Manifesto, Agamben as the moment of greatest peril, as the expression of a state power whose guarantees to citizens of their rights is worth no more than the paper it is written on, since those rights can be annulled at will at any moment and apparently are being so as the new norm across the world.

Each, we see, has a one-sided view of the whole thing, and of the relationships involved. What is missing, in other words, is any dialectic in either of their analyses, though to be fair Negri’s work does utilize dialectics in other ways in its analysis of the relationship of social movements, capitalism and state forms. But not in seeing the side of constituent power that Agamben sees and vice-versa. In each case, missing is an opposing side, or even an interlocutor, and so no dialectic is possible. Put differently, with Agamben, there is no vision of what victory would constitute or look like, and with Negri, the possibility of defeat never really enters the picture or the analysis. The role of ruling classes opposing the movements Negri theorizes, most usefully is his master work Potere costituente, translated into English and published by the University of Minnesota Press as Insurgencies, or that of the pre-existing state institutions in re-shaping the efforts of revolutionary movements plays no or little role in his otherwise often admirable work. And the role of movements for democratizing the state, ending or abolishing concrete historical forms of “homo sacer” such as slavery, Native American genocide, the worst oppressions of patriarchy, colonial occupations, child labor, the conditions of labor before the ten-hour and eight-hour movements and so on, do not play any role at all in Agamben’s work. Not even the European Resistance to the very Nazi occupations and states of exception that are the center of his view of the modern state makes an appearance.

In my article of ten years ago, and still today, I contrast these one-sided accounts with two other works, in my view more useful for our needs in the service of struggles today. One is that of Naomi Klein, in her bestseller Shock Doctrine, and the other is the work of Peter Linebaugh in his Magna Carta Manifesto. The dialectic in Klein’s work is that the struggles that gave rise to social democracy, the end of colonialism and apartheid, and to even the welfare state elements of Stalinist regimes are what capital is working to overcome through neoliberalism–privatization, deregulation, governance by central banks and openness to capital markets and global markets for goods. Since these policies are deeply unpopular, a state of emergency of some sort or another, permitting “shock therapy”–a swift reorganization of the economy in favor of capital, is needed. So Agamben’s states of exception are directly the result of the class struggle and a particular capitalist strategy to overcome working class, democratic and popular opposition. It happens because nothing else would enable the reforms that shift the balance of power in favor of capitalism. And it is needed, because capitalism finds itself in crisis or facing eventual crisis if profit rates cannot be increased through these neoliberal mechanisms.

For Linebaugh, our legal rights, our constitutional rights, have an economic basis in access to subsistence and in control of common lands and common goods. When these are expropriated, our legal rights do become, or risk becoming if a new form of class struggle does not emerge to protect them, merely the paper they are written on. Our rights and freedoms, which Agamben is so concerned about, always risk becoming dead letters, except when struggles and movements emerge to defend them, movements and struggles for whom the legal rights are tools. But movements and struggles for whom the real objective is the concrete meeting of needs and control over or access to common goods and resources we need for our lives, and guarantees and access to subsistence. These analyses by Linebaugh and Klein are light-years ahead of those of Agamben on the very question that tortures him and informs his whole body of work, because in each there is a dialectic at work–the struggle between capitalist forces and those of people defending their access to livelihoods and needs. The form of the state, its policies, and its institutions, and the balance of power between these in the formal constitutions of states–and in what Negri usefully calls the material constitutions–are both the outcome of, and themselves actors in these struggles.

Historic struggles against states of exception, be they antislavery or anticolonialism, the resistance to capitalist coups in Chile in 1973 (unsuccessful) or Venezuela in 2002 (successful) or Honduras or Brazil in recent years, or even the seizure of the Bastille by the people of Paris on July 14, 1789 to prevent Louis XVI’s attempt at a state of exception, all these are nowhere to be found in Agamben’s view of the world. Yet WE need to know about these cases, who the actors were, what they wanted and why, how and why they succeeded or failed.

Marxists Humanists and readers here of course, don’t need me to tell them how important to an analysis dialectics are, but I would like to show how lacking a dialectic in social and political analysis leads directly to Agamben’s disastrous current project of anti-vax, anti-public health measures in the face of a pandemic that has taken millions of lives around the world. The point is, that lack of a dialectic has been a central part of his work all along, and not only of his. So I will conclude after the analysis of Agamben’s accusations regarding Covid requirements with a comment on some other recently fashionable thinkers and political stances.

All Agamben has is a hammer: the state is bad, it is Nietzsche’s Will to Power personified, its “biopolitics” (Foucault) is deadly in nature and reduces us to bare life, naked homo sacer stripped of ethical, moral, legal and cultural features before it, requiring us to do everything for mere survival, especially now when it requires us to stay home, or get a vaccine, or wear a mask, or not interact with each other. As if this reduction of human being’s cultural and ethical characteristics to “mere worker”–a means to an end were not already a primary feature of capitalism as Marx showed as long ago as his manuscripts on Alienation in 1844. But Agamben’s state is entirely one-sided: it is only repression.

As Hal Draper showed in his monumental Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, the state takes on basic and necessary public functions–community collective defense, roads, schools, law and a judicial system–that will exist in any society or community of any kind–as paradoxically Graeber and Wengrow’s recent celebrated work The Dawn of Everything demonstrates. In a class society, however, the state, under the primary influence of the dominant class and defending its interests, will carry out these basic functions in a distorted way, in a way that both carries them out and enhances the wealth and power of the ruling class and the inequalities of wealth and power in society as whole, at least more often than not. When the two conflict, the struggle between classes, within the state and across society as a whole decides which will win out. The state’s legitimacy is bound up with its ability to carry out these essential functions for society, and its failure to do so can lead to it, or at least its leaders, losing the support of society’s larger membership, something that the Chinese “Mandate of Heaven” being lost due to inability to provide for people during famines, floods or earthquakes, the dangers to the Egyptian Pharaohs if they failed to organize the Nile flooding and agricultural adequately, and even George W. Bush’s failure to secure New Orleans from the Mississippi’s overflowing the levees, stand as examples of. So, there is a dialectic within the state: legitimate social functions versus state power qua ruling class power. And on the side of legitimate social functions stand the social and physical needs of the non-ruling class part of the population. This conflict is at least as old as Hammurabi’s Code, which both protected the poor, widows, orphans and slaves, and codified the class power and privilege of nobles. With the rise of democracy, this struggle becomes even more central, as structural and institutional pressure by popular forces are also written into the form and content of the state, even as capitalist power and dominance are as well. Thus, the dialectic inherent to the state in a class society is directly tied to the class struggle in society itself. With the rise of democracy, this dialectic is now written into the relationships between the institutions of the state themselves. Some agencies, institutions and actors lean toward basic social functions, and are more directly linked to and under the pressure of popular needs and demands. Others are more well-sheltered from popular pressure and democratic power–this is where Klein’s emphasis on the role of shifting decision-making to Central Banks for instance is important–leaning toward a more one-sided preoccupation with ruling class and capitalist interests.

Thus, during a crisis such as the Covid crisis, we should turn our attention to these dialectics–is capital taking advantage of a crisis to further its project of privatizing wealth and power and public policy?–an issue at the center of Klein’s work on “disaster capitalism” but nowhere to be found in Agamben; are capitalists profiting off the now vital and emergency needs of people in the face of a public health catastrophe? Are the restrictions that a basic and necessary social function of the state–the protection of society and its members in the face of a natural or public health disaster–designed and implemented in a way that is appropriate to the crisis and its resolution? Can the state act as an organizer of production and distribution of basic necessities such as medical products and implements, and if so, will it do so with an eye toward production for use or for exchange and capital accumulation? Are policies designed and implemented in ways that are fair and equitable and take into account the needs of various social actors–teachers and students and parents, workers and employers, health providers and patients, the marginalized and the majority, or are they clearly or subtly means of only favoring the interests of, and shifting of power to, employers, large firms versus small business, the rich and well-connected? These are the kinds of questions we need to, and have every right to ask.

But if instead one has no sense of these dialectics within and between the state, civil society and social classes and actors, then one cannot see the reality of the pandemic. To see the pandemic as real means to see that some public health measures are called for, as well as some changes in individual and collective behavior for the period of the crisis, realizing that merely because extreme measures are needed temporarily, they are not necessarily–and indeed are not intended–to be permanent. States of emergency over short-term natural disasters are a frequent occurrence, but are usually lifted as soon as the hurricane, flood, fire or earthquake is over or its consequences have been sufficiently cleaned up. At times public interest would be better served by prolonging states of emergency lifted too quickly in order to satisfy business interests. Other times, they are lifted too slowly, as the concerns of everyday people are not listened to and taken into account. And legitimate struggles and protests may ensue in these cases and sometimes do. Indeed, in some extreme cases, the state utterly fails in its social obligations and allows people to suffer from such emergencies without assuming emergency powers to help, or even doing so, but then not really helping. But if there is no such dialectic within the state as a complex entity, between legitimate public power in the service of social needs, and the distortion of these powers and their use due to the influence of dominant class interests and power, then all one sees is the bad state imposing its will. The pandemic itself has to be, according to the already existing logic of Agamben’s work, wished away as non-existent, since any emergency or crisis must be manufactured by the state as an excuse to impose a state of exception. And this is what Agamben claims, in ever-escalating and insulting rhetoric, is happening now and has been for the past two years.

Thus, Agamben refers to “The Invention of a Pandemic” (www.quodlibet.it ) in a widely-read article of February 2020, at the start of the Covid impact in Italy, which was the first country outside of China to have a major wave of Coronavirus cases. Comparing the virus to the flu, and downplaying its dangers, Agamben accused Italian media of “spreading a climate of panic”. He has more recently claimed in on Twitter that “Today in my country measures are applied against “anti-vaxxers” that are 10X (ten times) more restrictive than the fascist legislation of 1938 against ‘non-Aryans’” (twitter.com )– by which he means Mussolini’s anti-Semitic laws that led tens of thousands of Italian Jews to the death camps. A more insulting and false set of claims would be hard to imagine, and here Agamben’s rhetoric is at one with that of the American far right, not something we would expect from a supposedly left-wing philosopher. In November 2020 in a talk with students in Venice, Agamben claimed that these restrictions are bringing humanity “towards extinction–if not physical at least ethical and political”. (www.quodlibet.it). I would be tempted to suggest that Agamben, in clinging to his February 2020 view, based on early information and misinformation as to the real nature of the virus and its impact, is engaging in what Hegel termed “Understanding”–maintain rigid fidelity to categories based on old realities that they no longer explain under newer conditions. But for Hegel, Understanding did correspond to reality, was a right or least useful way of explaining or defining phenomena at one time at least. Instead, in the case of Agamben, all we have is what in Organizational Behavior is called “anchoring”–sticking with your initial way of understanding something that is happening, and not changing your view when more or new information comes about, because you have already made up your mind.

To claim that the efforts to stop the spread of, and reduce or end the fatalities it has caused and continues to cause lack ethical, political, moral, cultural, or even religious characteristics from a humanist point of view, as Agamben does, is sheer madness and falsehood. The vast majority of the population in every country has recognized the ethical need to vaccinate oneself and to wear masks and engage in social distancing. This reality is something we should find cause of hope and cautious optimism in–an affirmation of basic ethical concerns overriding even economic interests and needs. This extended even to the patience with which populations around the world accepted total or near total lockdowns–NOT as Agamben claims, because we are lemmings, an echo of the “sheeple” insult by the U.S. right to those who act to protect others and themselves, but out of a sense of ethics born of a sense of collective belonging and interdependence.

And though predictably capital has lobbied hard, used its influence and in general has done all it could as a class interest to reopen business, and to continue to have work done in very unsafe conditions, the majority around the world have made clear that they want workplaces and classrooms to be safe. In many cases, as in the mass refusal that has come to be known as the Great Resignation in the U.S. and UK, millions of workers have stayed home, quit jobs, or refused to take new ones if they are not satisfied as to the conditions, including the public health ones. In other words, most people–even if hardly unaware that government can be repressive or unfair or corrupt–are aware of the two-sidedness of the state–that in this case it is at least to a great extent acting in the legitimate public interest of protecting public health and lives. People get angry at corruption, but stop at traffic lights. There is a difference. Where people aside from the anti-vax minority have made demands, these have been completely legitimate demands that if one’s workplace or small business must shut down directly as a government policy, that compensation be made to keep people’s livelihoods protected; that parents needing to work at home have their privacy protected from employers; that schools be made safe and opened whenever possible, and so on. These demands reflect the clear understanding that the crisis must not be used to expropriate or exploit their work and small businesses by capital, while accepting the legitimate side of state policy in the public interest. Such demands led to job and payroll guarantees in Denmark, the UK and elsewhere and the–even if minimalist–direct payments by the U.S. government to citizens to provide some income, as well as rent and student debt moratoriums. Public pressure has led even to the Italian government’s distribution of small funds to certain categories of unprotected workers and self-employed people, and some job protections here. And in Italy and elsewhere demands were made on the EU to act as a legitimate public power and provide aid, materials for health care, and money to Eurozone countries that can’t produce their own currency, demanding in other words that it be more than a mere institutionalization of the power of finance capital.

What Agamben and others could usefully be doing instead is making clear the danger of the finally arriving EU funds to Italy being turned over primarily to the banks and large corporations and corrupt political organizations. The near-unanimous consensus among ruling class spokespeople is that former EU Central Bank President Mario Draghi, now Italy’s unelected prime minister is a genius, a wizard, the zeitgeist on a white horse. But his government seems determined to distribute the EU funds and most likely to the class forces that Draghi has represented all his professional life. Here indeed we have an example of the capitalist interests overriding, or seeking to override, the legitimate public functions of the state in a crisis. Draghi replaced a popular and elected government that, whatever its errors and failings had, under Giuseppe Conte, guided the country through the worst with palpable compassion and empathy, and with continual communication and responses to the public and press. the Draghi government has already lowered taxes on the very rich, and seems prepared to be the “executive committee of the bourgeoisie as a whole.” But even in this case, popular outrage was reflected in the decision of Italy’s parliament not to make Draghi the next President of the Republic, Italy’s head of state. To ignore popular struggles, to ignore the dialectics of society and state, will lead one into trouble every time. Agamben seems unconcerned with the real threats to democracy of technocratic governance in the interests of capital, on one side, and the rising and growing fascist threat–one that he is either knowingly or unwittingly feeding with his stance on Covid restrictions–on the other, and their mutual reinforcement. Instead, his attacks are on the legitimate role of the state in protecting public health and the ethical actions and legitimate class demands of the people. These latter are manifested most people abiding by the requirements of being vaccinated, and of having the “Green Pass” confirming one’s vaccination status as a requirement to be in public restaurants and on public transportation, and living with the requirements to wear masks and social distance. All while demanding that state policies meet economic needs arising from these restrictions, and not protect privileged sectors instead.

But Agamben should also, I believe, be seen in a wider context of a number of influential thinkers that sees the state as the main, indeed usually the only threat to liberty and human well-being, to the exclusion of the dynamics of capitalism, or at least playing down the role of the latter. Each of these has a one-sided view of the state, based either loosely, or closely, either unconsciously and indirectly or consciously and directly on the ahistorical Nietzschean will to power, or on a one-sided view of the state as entirely and exclusively capitalist in form and content. This field stretches from Foucault’s biopolitics with its concern about the state being ever more involved in questions of health care, science, housing, employment and livelihoods with the rise of the welfare states, a view that deeply informs Agamben’s, to John Holloway’s call to avoid the state at all costs as an entirely capitalist enterprise, and to change society exclusively by not taking power, to Guattari and Deleuze’s writings that ignore the longest part of human history of hunters and gatherers and egalitarian societies, but then go on to theorize state power ahistorically on the basis of the questionable category “nomadism”, to Raul Zibechi’s writings on Latin American social movements, James Scott’s anthropology of grain-based societies, and Graeber and Wengrow’s recent bestseller. All see the state as only bad. A default anarchism has taken hold of a considerable part of the intellectual left in recent years and while we must gain what we can from the insights that these present us with, we need to see that such one-sidedness, such lack of dialectic, can only lead one to grave errors. Agamben has not gone mad recently, his work was always flawed, and he is not alone. We need better theoretical ways of understanding what is happening, and the ways things are; ones that see the all-sidedness of crises, struggles, states, societies, institutions and ideas, that can grasp what Marx called “the ensemble of social relations”. We can only hope that those who have instead decided to guide themselves by such deeply wrong ideas about ethics, public health and public authority, democracy and freedom, will not lose their lives in the process to this still dangerous and terrible pandemic is indeed very real, nor cost the lives of others.

Addendum: As I was writing this article, the crisis in Canada grew, such that, on Saturday February 6, 2022, the mayor of the capital city of Ottawa declared a state of emergency, in response to a blockade and mass occupation of the city’s streets by mostly self-employed truckers and right wing, including openly neo-Nazi militants, protesting requirements that truckers entering the country from the United States, where Covid remains rampant, and other public health measures, including mask wearing. The protesters have been threatening and harassing neighborhood residents, entering shops maskless en masse, forcing many to remain shut and essentially keeping a large part of the population of the nation’s capital hostages, shut up in their homes fearing for their safety. The protests have spread to Quebec City and Toronto. For Agamben, the danger is the declaration of a state of emergency. In reality, the danger, to the health and physical safety of the people living in these cities, and to Canadian democracy and the freedoms enjoyed by Canada’s people, is to the very forces Agamben now justifies openly, and with whom his analysis was always in danger of justifying: the fascists threat of a few thousand aggressive and violent activists who demand a right to put the lives of others in danger, the right to have no concern for the lives and safety of others, and who refuse even the most innocuous limits on their personal license and activities, regardless of the consequences for other people or for society. Just as in the time of Lincoln and the U.S. Civil War, a state of emergency is the recognition of reality: a genuine threat to democratic government that needs to be addressed by organized self-defense of society by society, a concept lacking in Agamben, and most of the other thinkers criticized above.

The people of Canada, or anywhere else, we, have a right to resist this will to power by a fascist minority, through collective struggle, through the use of law and institutions, through self-organization, and yes, if necessary through the use of force organized collectively in democratic states and public authorities in defense of democracy and of our collective lives and well-being. That is no state of exception, that is legitimate popular government. And if we need to go beyond it to an even more democratic, more egalitarian system, we will do so while dialectically maintaining the good in what we have already won through centuries of popular struggle, or not at all.

Notes:
↩ Available through the following sites: www.jceps.com ; www.academia.edu

https://mronline.org/2022/02/17/when-al ... -a-hammer/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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