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Matter in motion: Dialectical philosophy’s role in science
Originally published: Advanced Science News on March 15, 2024 by Kieran Schlegel-O'Brien (more by Advanced Science News) | (Posted Apr 17, 2024)

In this second article in a series on philosophy and science, we take a look at dialectics and its relevance to understanding change in the natural world.

Part 1 https://mronline.org/2024/04/16/materialism-matters/

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” So said Heraclitus over two-and-a-half thousand years ago. An ancient Ionian philosopher, Heraclitus is most well-known for his philosophy of flux, or change, a philosophy that has found various expressions throughout world history, and in modern times has come to be called dialectics.

What Heraclitus meant by this was that flux and motion are fundamental aspects of matter, and more importantly that contradictions abound within nature. Everything both is and is not. You cannot step into the “same” river twice because the water has moved and isn’t the same water you stepped into previously.

The same is true for the person in Heraclitus’ quote. The human body, like all organisms, is in a state of constant change–cells die and new cells are reproduced all the time. What we eat gets metabolized and the chemicals and minerals in our food replaces those already making up our cells.

You do not notice these changes on a day-to-day level, but on a long-enough time scale, it could be that most, if not all, of the atoms that made up you a couple of decades ago have all been replaced. In a chemical sense, you are physically a completely different person to who you were then, yet at the same time, you are obviously the same person.

This is the essence of the philosophy of dialectics, and arising from this state of flux come certain contradictions, which together give rise to new qualities.

Dialectics and materialism
As mentioned in the previous article, the German philosopher Hegel, influenced by Heraclitus, brought dialectics back into Western philosophy in the 19th century, which became highly influential and found new meaning when later coupled with materialist philosophy–known as dialectical materialism.

Dialectical materialism is often met with skepticism and hostility due to its association with the later German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who were directly influenced by Hegel and considered themselves dialectical materialists. But I think this skepticism is premature.

In my view, detractors of dialectical materialism often object to Marx and Engels’ application of this philosophical method to the study of human society and human history, things which the detractors believe cannot be understood in a scientific way, and therefore discredit dialectical materialism in general. However, whatever your views on this point—and the question of whether we can actually scientifically study and understand society and history is not the subject of this article–this criticism overlooks the applicability of dialectical materialism to the natural sciences.

Where mechanical materialism–the deterministic and clock-work view of the Universe during the Enlightenment–hit a dead-end, dialectical materialism carried materialism forward and enriched materialist philosophy with a more advanced, holistic view of the world, taking into account and embracing contradictions in nature rather than ignoring or seeing them as a problem.

Contradiction and conflict
The first law of dialectics, worked out by Hegel, explores the concept of “the unity and conflict of opposites”. We have already touched upon this first law with the example given by Heraclitus. Other examples of contradictions and opposites in nature include hot and cold, positive and negative, the two magnetic poles of north and south, cause and effect, part and whole, and life and death.

None of these things can be described or understood, or in some cases even exist, without the existence or acknowledgement of their opposites. The contradiction and conflict of the part and whole is also of particular importance to the natural sciences.

For example, let’s look at water. Water is made up of H2 O molecules. These molecular “parts” make up the “whole”, which we call water. However, looking at each individual part in isolation, they are in many ways completely different to water. Water is wet, but a single H2 O molecule is not. The property, or quality, of “wetness” only exists when H2 O molecules come together and organize themselves. In other words the property of wetness is a result of the relationship of individual water molecules interacting with each other and organizing themselves in a particular way.

This holistic and dialectal approach to understanding the world stands in contradiction to another aspect of science, which would eventually prove to have its limits: reductionism. That is, in studying the natural world through observation and experiment, it was tempting to see things in isolation and in their component parts, rather than as part of the context of their environment and development–things were understood to be nothing more than the sum of their parts.

This was particularly true in biology and anatomy. Whilst the reductionist method helped shine light on our understanding of how the body works, it nevertheless on its own leads us into an incomplete understanding of biology.

At the turn of this century, there was a wave of reductionist thinking and hopes surrounding the Human Genome Project, with scientists and the media talking about us being able to discover the gene for pretty much everything. There were races to find the gene for criminal behavior, the gene for creative talent, or the gene for high intelligence. Perhaps unsurprisingly, such pursuits came up short.

With apologies to the proponents of “the selfish gene”, a living organism is more than just what’s encoded in its DNA. It is also more than just the tissues and organs for which these genes code and which make it up. A living organism is a thing in and of its self. It is the cumulative product of all these individual parts–the genes, the organs, the tissues–developing and interacting together to produce an organism with properties and qualities, which its individual parts do not possess on their own.

Modern geneticists and biologists are moving away from the over-simplified, reductionist view of life, and recognize that genes and the organism to which they belong have a complicated interplay that cannot be described by genes alone as described above.

Epigenetics and the recognition of external factors also affecting a living organism’s development are a welcome recognition of reductionism’s limits, and I would say also show a move (perhaps unconsciously) to a dialectic way of thinking and understanding within the biological sciences.

I mentioned that dialectics is the philosophy of change within matter, but it would be incorrect to take a completely one-sided view and claim that matter is constantly in a state of change. There exist of course periods of stasis and equilibrium. This seems to contradict the whole notion of dialectics, but the second law of dialectics—the passage of quantitative changes into qualitative changes–helps to overcome this contradiction.

Quantity into quality
The fields of chaos theory, emergence, and complexity are perhaps the most powerful discoveries which vindicate this next fundamental law of dialectics.

The relatively new science of “emergence”–the idea that some properties emerge from within the inner workings of a particular system whose constituent parts do not possess such properties–is essentially the laws of dialectics written in the language of mathematics and physics.

From avalanches to earthquakes, phase transitions to the death of stars, nature is abound with examples of this process of change. That is, small, sometimes imperceptible changes to a system take place over a period of time without much noticeable happening until a critical point is reached when the system undergoes a qualitative change.

Let’s look again at water. As is well known, from between 0 and 100 °C, water is qualitatively the same. It may feel hotter or colder depending on its temperature, but it remains a liquid and behaves generally in the same way whether it is at 1 °C or 99 °C. The quantitative change in this example is adding heat to the water to increase its temperature, which suddenly, at 100 °C, causes a qualitative change to the water in the form of it boiling and turning into steam. This is known as a phase transition and of course applies not just to water. What is perhaps not so well known is that such a process of change is a perfect example of dialectics in action.

Change therefore does not always take place gradually and evenly, but rather often in leaps and bounds, and in a lot of cases, is a product of dialectics’ first law of contradiction and conflict within a system.

The theory of evolution has been greatly enriched by appreciating these laws of dialectics. In the decades since the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, evolution was thought to be a slow and gradual process whereby species, via natural selection, undergo small changes from one generation to the next until eventually, so much change has occurred that a new species has evolved.

The problem with this view of evolution was the fossil record, which showed a worrying lack of “intermediates” between species. It appeared that the transition from one species to another was a fast and sudden process.

In the 1970s, evolutionary biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge came up with the theory of punctuated equilibrium. This theory states that species can be stable for long periods of time and find an equilibrium in their environment and ecology, and these periods of equilibrium are “punctuated” by sudden changes leading to the rise of new species. These changes could be due to external, environmental factors or a mutation in their genes which gives rise to such an advantageous trait that that gene propagates through the population in a relatively short space of time.

One of the most famous examples of this process is the Cambrian explosion, when just over half a billion years ago, life took a sudden leap with an “explosion” in diversity and evolution of new species and phyla and complex organisms, breaking out of the hundreds of millions of years prior when all life on Earth was simple and mostly unicellular.

Punctuated equilibrium remains controversial in some circles and there is by no means a consensus on what the correct model of evolution is, but in my view, the theory of Gould and Eldredge is the best yet in explaining why the fossil record looks like the way it is: evolution is a dialectical process, not a gradualist one.

It is also worth noting that Gould was a conscious dialectical materialist and used dialectical materialism as a heuristic approach to his science. Perhaps without his dialectical thinking and worldview, he may not have come to this theory of evolution based on the evidence at hand.

The negation of the negation
Evolution by natural selection shows us dialectics at play. The third law of dialectics, the negation of the negation, also finds expression in biological and evolutionary change quite nicely.

This term sounds quite strange and abstract, and is best illustrated with an example–and biology provides us with plenty.

Consider an acorn and an oak tree. From a dialectical perspective, they are both the same and different things. The same, since an oak tree grows from an acorn and an oak tree produces more acorns, and different since an acorn and an oak tree are clearly two distinct things. From a scientific perspective, this can be explained, of course, by the fact an acorn and an oak tree share the same DNA; they are the same organism at different stages in its development and lifecycle.

The negation of the negation alludes to the fact that in this example, the destruction or negation of one thing gives rise to something new, which itself also develops and changes, until that is negated in place of something new but on a higher level.

Under the right physical and environmental conditions, an acorn will germinate and grow into an oak sapling. The acorn no longer exists, it has been “negated”, and in its place has grown a tree. At a certain point, that tree will bear fruit and produce not one acorn, but many more acorns over its lifetime.

When the tree finally dies–when it is also negated–the multitude of acorns it produced will have produced many more oak trees. When we add evolution to this analogy, this multitude of new acorns and trees are the “higher level” referred to in the previous paragraph: the negation of the negation has come full circle, but the new acorns are not identical to the original, but have new mutations, new features, and in the long run, may even give rise to a new species of oak tree better adapted to its environment.

The negation of the negation also highlights one further aspect of dialectical processes, which is that some things have a tendency to turn into their opposites. This applies in some ways to all three laws of dialectics.

We see such phenomena in wider systems with many interconnecting and inter-relating parts. In the history of life on Earth, photosynthetic organisms evolved first, and their byproduct—molecular oxygen—was toxic to life. But when life evolved bacteria that utilized oxygen for its own metabolism, oxygen stopped being a toxin for a whole branch of organisms, and now we cannot imagine life on Earth without it.

Where the previous article in this series showed how materialism, as opposed to idealism, is the correct starting point for science and the understanding of nature, I have tried in this article to show how dialectics —in conjunction with materialism–is an appropriate philosophy and worldview to have when dealing with the science of change within nature.

But I think Stephen Jay Gould put it best in his essay “Nurturing Nature”, published in his book An Urchin in the Storm: Essays about Books and Ideas, when he wrote:

[…] dialectical thinking should be taken more seriously by Western scholars […] When presented as guidelines for a philosophy of change, not as dogmatic precepts true by fiat, the three classical laws of dialectics embody a holistic vision that views change as interaction among components of complete systems and sees the components themselves not as a priori entities, but as both products and inputs to the system.

Thus, the law of ‘interpenetrating opposites’ records the inextricable interdependence of components; the ‘transformation of quantity to quality’ defends a systems-based view of change that translates incremental inputs into alterations of state; and the ‘negation of negation’ describes the direction given to history because complex systems cannot revert exactly to previous states.

In the next and final article, we’ll look at some of the most recent ideas in science and show how they too shed light on the dialectical nature of the Universe. We’ll see how dialectical thinking could point towards the answers to the big questions in modern science.

https://mronline.org/2024/04/17/matter-in-motion/

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On the Marxist critique of Heidegger
Originally published: Philosophy in Crisis on April 21, 2024 by Carlos L. Garrido (more by Philosophy in Crisis) (Posted Apr 23, 2024)

Martin Heidegger is undoubtedly one of the most creative and influential philosophers of the 20th century. Virtually all areas of philosophy, along with many other disciplines as well, have had to tackle in one form or another the questions he poses, and the insights he provides. His work grasped the zeitgeist of the 1930s and 40s for most of continental philosophy. It is a tour de force Marxist philosophers must face head on. Simply calling it ‘bourgeois,’ ‘Nazi’, or the expression of the middle-class state of being in post WW1 Germany is not enough. While it is important to situate Heidegger in his proper historical and class context, and while it is essential to show the Nazism and antisemitism he was undoubtedly committed to for a significant period of his life, this is insufficient to defeat the thought of this giant.

Other leftist scholars have already made tremendous inroads in this area. Since at least the publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, but especially now with the publication of Richard Wolin’s recent text, Heidegger in Ruins, the intimate connection between Heidegger and Nazism is indisputable—even though many, including those working within his Gesamtausgabe (collected works), have tried to paper over it. Certainly, to borrow an expression Domenico Losurdo uses to describe Nietzsche scholarship, there has pervaded a “hermeneutic of innocence” in Heideggerian scholarship which tries to divorce his work from the essentially political context that embeds it. Its political horizon, its class basis, its connection with Nazism, these are all things any Marxist discussion on Heidegger should include. But we must ask, is this enough to ‘defeat’ Heidegger? If he was simply a ‘Nazi,’ why hasn’t he, like Emmanual Faye suggests, been taken off philosophy shelves and put next to Goebbels?1

Why have so many leftist scholars in the Global South and East, thinkers aware of Heidegger’s Nazism, turned in various parts of their work to Heidegger for insights? Unlike the tradition of Western Marxism, where the eclecticism is intimately connected to a politics that throws on the support of imperialism a radical veneer, a lot of these scholars are fervent critics of U.S. imperialism and have stood for decades on the side of socialist construction. Why does, for instance, the late Bolivian Marxist, Juan Jose Bautista Segales, find that he can incorporate insights from Heidegger’s critique of modernity into the process of understanding the dimensions of the indigenous struggle for socialism, a struggle that must, necessarily, tarry with the question of capitalist modernity? Why does the Brazilian theologian, Leonardo Boff, one of the founders of the radical, Christian Socialist liberation theology tendency, central to so many socialist and anti-imperialist struggles in Latin American, turn to Heidegger to discuss the question of care in ethics?

In his Prison Notebooks Antonio Gramsci reminds us that:

A new science proves its efficacy and vitality when it demonstrates that it is capable of confronting the great champions of the tendencies opposed to it and when it either resolves by its own means the vital questions which they have posed or demonstrates, in peremptory fashion, that these questions are false problems.2

Gramsci would go on to lambast Nikolai Bukharin, in part, for failing to address in his ‘Manual’ the critics of Marxism in their utmost coherence, i.e., for failing to deal with the best bourgeois philosophy and science had to offer, opting instead to obtaining the quick victories one gets when they challenge an opponent of a lower caliber. Gramsci says that while reading Bukharin’s text, “one has the impression of someone who cannot sleep for the moonlight and who struggles to massacre the fireflies in the belief that by so doing he will make the brightness lessen or disappear.”3

Unfortunately, a similar fatal flaw can be observed in the traditional Marxist-Leninist critiques of Heidegger. Far from engaging with him honestly and comprehensively, we have opted for quick victories based on dismissals of his thought as petty-bourgeois, subjectivist, Nazi, etc. While components of this critique are certainly true, they are not enough—i.e., they are not worthy of proper Marxist-Leninist critique. Yes, Marx, Engels, and Lenin name-called their opponents and spoke of the class positions and subsequent political interests they often spoke from—but in conjunction with this was always a thorough demolishing of their arguments along the kind described by Gramsci previously. Additionally, how these thinkers expressed in their work and concerns a class position was something that was proved, i.e., there was a concrete study of the relationship between the base and superstructure, between the class the thinker represents and the ideas they enunciate. This refined analysis has often been missing in our tradition’s treatment of Heidegger. Far too often conclusions that have to be proven are accepted simply at face value. As R. T. De George, who did an umbrella study of Marxist-Leninist writing on Heidegger up until the mid-1960s, argued,

The failure of Marxist criticism of Heidegger, as well as of other Western philosophers, is not necessarily that it has been wrong; but rather that most of it has been shallow, polemical, beside the point, and poor Marxism. Marxist criticism is difficult. Marxist-Leninist criticism has become too easy. It would perhaps be too much to ask that Marxists follow Lenin’s advice and criticize not in the manner of Feuerbach but in the manner of Hegel, i.e. not by merely rejecting views but by correcting them “deepening, generalizing, and extending them, showing the connection and transitions of each and every concept”. But this presumably is what Marxist and Marxist Leninist philosophy should do.4

De George is, of course, not a Marxist. But he is right to call us out on this shortcoming. In doing so he is being a good ideological enemy, an enemy that, to use an obscene American expression, wants us to get our shit together.

In the 20th century, the best inroads into the Marxist-Leninist critique of Heidegger would be made by Georg Lukács, who situates him within the irrationalism of the imperialist period in his seminal Destruction of Reason. Here Lukács is correct about what it takes to carry forth this critique in a proper Marxist manner. He writes:

To reveal [a thinker’s] social genesis and function is of the greatest importance, but in itself by no means sufficient. Granted, the objectivity of progress will suffice correctly to condemn as reactionary an individual phenomenon or orientation. But a really Marxist-Leninist critique of reactionary philosophy cannot permit itself to stop at this. Rather it must show in real terms, in the philosophical material itself, the philosophical falsity and the distortion of basic philosophical questions, the negation of philosophy’s achievements and so on… To this extent, an immanent critique is a justified and indeed indispensable element in the portrayal and exposure of reactionary tendencies in philosophy. The classic Marxist authors have constantly used it. Engels, for example, in his Anti-Duhring and Lenin in his Empirio-Criticism. To reject immanent criticism as one element in an overall survey also embracing social genesis and function, class characteristics, exploration of the true nature of society and so on is bound to lead to a philosophical sectarianism, to the attitude that everything which is axiomatic to a conscious Marxist-Leninist is also immediately obvious to his readers…[Therefore, while] the antithesis between the various bourgeois ideologies and the achievements of dialectical and historical materialism is the self-evident foundation of our treatment and critique of the subject-matter, [we must still] prove in factual, philosophical terms the inner incoherence, contradictoriness, etc., of the separate philosophies [as] also unavoidable if one wants to illustrate their reactionary character in a truly concrete way.5

This is precisely the task that Lukács sets for himself in this monumental text. However, as he tells us, it is a task that cannot possibly be completed in one book, even an 800 page one. The Heidegger section, for instance, is a mere 25 pages. Even shorter is his treatment of Heidegger in Existentialism or Marxism, published a few years after. Nonetheless, it is on the basis of this limited work that a proper Marxist-Leninist critique of Heidegger can be developed.



Lukács tells us that with Heidegger phenomenology “turned into the ideology of the agony of individualism in the imperialist period.”6 He performed a “terminological camouflaging of subjective idealism,” a “transference of purely subjective-idealist positions into objective (i.e., pseudo-objective) ones.”7 His “ontological materiality” and claims to concreteness “remained purely declarative,” dominated through and through by irrationalistic arbitrariness and an “epistemological hocus pocus.”8 Even in the aspects of his thought that are ‘historical’, what is operative, Lukács argues, is the “transformation of real history into a mythified pseudo-history.”9 In Heidegger the “Husserlian tendency towards a strictly scientific approach,” intuitivist and irrationalist though it might have been in its own right, had now “faded completely.”10 Philosophy’s task was “to keep investigation open by means of questions.”11 The discipline is turned into a big question rigamarole centered on a question of Being that had already been answered by the discipline more than a century prior in Hegel’ Science of Logic, where it was shown, in its indeterminacy, to be indistinguishable from nothing, impelling us to move beyond pure being into being as coming to be and seizing to be, being as becoming, determinate being, and all the subsequent categories unfolded out of these in the Logic.

The context which situates the rise of Heidegger, Lukács writes, is akin to the post-1848 context which saw the rise of Soren Kierkegaard’s romantic individualist agony: “Kierkegaard’s philosophy was aimed against the bourgeois idea of progress, against Hegel’s idealist dialectics, whereas the renovators of existential philosophy [i.e., Heidegger and et. al.] were already principally at odds with Marxism, although this seldom found overt and direct expression in their writings.”12 This mood of despair, for Lukács, produced like it had decades prior, an “ideology of the saddest philistinism, of fear and trembling, of anxiety” which “was precisely the socio-psychological reason for the influence of Heidegger and Jaspers” on the eve of Hitler’s seizure of power.13 It was a “yearning to rescue naked existence from universal collapse.”14 Philosophically it was marked by an attempt at ‘third ways’ beyond idealism and materialism and rationalism and irrationalism, but in each instance, idealism and irrationalism ultimately showed their dominance.

While his phenomenology and ontology were, in Lukács’s words, little more than “abstractly mythicizing” a “vitalistic anthropology with an objectivistic mask,”15 it nonetheless provided, he admits, an “often grippingly interesting description of intellectual philistinism during the crisis of the imperialist period.”16 In his phenomenological description of the inauthenticity of everyday existence, pervaded by Verfallensein, a state of falling prey, we come under the “anonymous dominance of das Man” (the one or they).17 Lukács argues that Heidegger’s detailed description of this fallen state “constitute the strongest and most suggestive part of Being and Time, and in all likelihood they formed the basis of the book’s broad and profound effect… [It is] here, with the tools of phenomenology, [that] Heidegger [gives] a series of interesting images taken from the inner life, from the worldview of the dissolute bourgeois mind of the post-war years.”18 While he was fundamentally unable to understand the socio-historical causes that grounded such experience, Lukács holds that the value of his account is seen in the fact that it “provides—on the descriptive level—a genuine and true-to-life picture of those conscious reflexes which the reality of the post-war imperialist capitalism triggered off in those unable or unwilling to surpass what they experienced in their individual existence and to go further towards objectivity, i.e., towards exploring the socio-historical causes of their experiences.”19

Here Heidegger follows to the T the tradition of irrationalism which preceded him and of which he becomes a central figure of in the 20th century. As Lukács writes in Existentialism or Marxism:

In times of the crisis of imperialism, when everything is unstable, everything is in disarray, when the bourgeois intelligentsia is forced to observe, as the next day refutes what seemed indestructible today, it is faced with a choice. It must admit either its own defeat or the defeat of reason. The first path means recognizing your inability to comprehend reality in thought. Here it would be the turn of reason, but it is from this rationality that bourgeois thinking must withdraw. It is impossible to recognize this defeat from a bourgeois standpoint, for that would mean a transition to the camp of socialism. Therefore, at the crossroads, the bourgeois intelligentsia must choose a different path; it must proclaim the collapse of reason.20

While the scope of the work leads Lukács to sometimes move too quick in his critique of Heidegger, his situating of him in the tradition of irrationalism and its rejection of the enlightenment is a thread that must be picked up and developed by Marxist scholarship on Heidegger. The best place I have seen this done is in Domenico Losurdo’s Heidegger and the Ideology of War, published first in Italian in 1991, and in English a decade after. Here it is lucidly shown how Heidegger and the Nazis inherit the Kreigsideology (War ideology) of the post-WW1 period, rooted in a mythical Gemeinschaft (community) inhibited by an equally dubious notion of fate (Schicksal) and a fetish of death and its proximity as central to authentic life. Reason, which is tied to civilization and society (Gesellschaft), is lambasted for tearing communal bonds and breaking from the community’s destiny.21 The enlightenment, the French Revolution, and Marxism, which takes the rational kernel of the former to their historical and logical conclusion, are necessarily condemned.22

The rejection of modernity and the Enlightenment has been a fad in Western academia for decades. Heidegger alone is not to blame. But he is, as a fellow traveler of the tradition of irrationalism, a key voice in the anti-modernity and anti-Enlightenment discourse. The Enlightenment, although imperfect and filled with contradictions, brought with it the notion of a universal humanity that we all share in as rational creatures, that provides for us the ability to see and fight for progress in history. It represented the thought of the bourgeoisie in its most progressive moment, before it undeniably turns into a force of reaction after the 1848 revolutions. The universalist ideals of the enlightenment have been given concrete content through the various progressive struggles of the last three centuries—from the American revolution to the French to the Haitian and to the socialist and anti-colonial revolutions of the 20th century. Those who have stood against it have been the forces of reaction—those who deny our common humanity in favor of tribalism (usually of a hierarchical and supremacist kind). It has been the reactionary and conservative forces who have historically rejected the use of reason and the notion of progress, since both of these can provide challenges to the ruling order… an order which can become the object of critique through reason, and which can be shown, through an appeal to the progressive dialectical unfolding of history (or, in Martin Luther King Jr.’s words, through the arch of the moral universe that bends towards justice) to be just a moment in humanity’s development towards greater freedom.



Central to any Marxist critique of Heidegger, then, is also considering how this foundational rejection of the enlightenment—necessary for bourgeois philosophical irrationalism and its turn towards indirect apologetics of the system—takes alternative forms after Heidegger. John Bellamy Foster has done important work in this area, showing how currents dominating contemporary social sciences in Academia like postmodernism, post-Marxism, post-colonialism, post-humanism, etc. all share a foundation in philosophical irrationalism and its indirect apologetics of the dominant order.23 Although with certain downfalls, the work of Susan Neiman in Left is Not Woke also does a swell job in showing how the tribalism central to contemporary wokeism is fundamentally rooted in the reactionary, anti-modernist and anti-enlightenment tradition which Heidegger is a central figure of. For all the claims to being ‘woke’, this dominant ideology in the liberal wing of capital is deeply ignorant of the reactionary philosophical foundations underlaying their worldview—a worldview that serves to reinforce the dominant order under the delusion that it is waging an emancipatory attack on it.

A Marxist critique of Heidegger, therefore, must also contain an awareness of how the tradition he works through has seeped into the Academic and activist left, often giving its deeply reactionary philosophical foundation a seemingly progressive gloss. For this we must also study the work of our colleague Gabriel Rockhill, who outlines the political economy of knowledge that has facilitated and promoted this eclecticism to counter the genuine communist left.

In sum, while necessary, exposing Heidegger’s Nazism and his thought’s class basis is insufficient to defeating him. As Gramsci and Lukács have argued, we must also beat these monumental figures of contemporary bourgeois thought in the realm of ideas as well—showing how the problems they pose are baseless, or how the response they provide to real problems are insufficient. These are things that must be shown, not just taken axiomatically for granted simply because we understand the Marxist worldview to be the most advanced humanity has given rise to. If in questions of ethics or meta-historical narratives comrades of the left (like the two I previously mentioned) turn to Heidegger, it is not sufficient to just lambast them for taking partial insights from a problematic thinker. We must also inquire into what deficiency is there in our answering—or even asking—of the problem that led them to turn to Heidegger. How can the Marxist worldview extend itself to commenting concretely on every possible topic of intellectual inquiry such that the need to turn to Heidegger, or any other bourgeois thinker, is superfluous for those within our tradition.

This requires an explicit turn away from the Western Marxism accepted in the Academy. This so called ‘Marxism’, imbued with postmodernist sensibilities, cringes at the description of Marxism as an all-encompassing worldview. They wish to limit Marxism to the sphere of history and social analysis, rejecting the dialectics of nature and the fruitful insights the dialectical materialist worldview can provide in any sphere of investigation. In China, where Marxism-Leninism has been able to develop relatively peacefully since at least 1949, the tendency is towards the contrary. The more fields the Marxist worldview can be present in the merrier. I would like to conclude with a quote from Cheng Enfu’s China’s Economic Dialectic,

Marxism is a telescope through which we can clearly see the trends according to which reality develops, and a microscope through which we can see its crucial details. It is a set of night-vision goggles through which we can see light and hope in the darkness, a set of diving goggles through which we can see things at a deeper level, a fluoroscope through which we can see into the nature of the matter beyond the level of appearance, and a megaloscope through which we can make sense of blurred images. Marxism is a reflector through which we can see the truth behind things, a polygonal mirror that enables us to see the diversity and unity of opposites, an asymptotic mirror that allows us to see things near and far with multiple focal points and a monster-revealing mirror in which, if we have sharp eyes, we can see mistakes clearly.24

This should help to get us to see Marxism as an all-encompassing worldview. A worldview which, as Lenin told the Young Communists in 1921, absorbs and develops upon the “knowledge of all the treasures created by mankind.”25 When we are successful in this task, the need for anyone in the camp of the genuine progressive forces to turn to Heidegger or any other bourgeois thinker would be superfluous, since they would find a much more concretely explicated account for their inquiry within the tradition itself… or, at the very least, the tools to do so themselves ready-to-hand (pun intended).

Notes:
1.↩ Gregory Fried, “A Letter to Emmanuel Faye,” in Confronting Heidegger: A Critical Dialogue on Politics and Philosophy (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2020), 5
2.↩ Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 2014), 433.
3.↩ Ibid.
4.↩ R. T. De George, “Heidegger and the Marxists,” Studies in Soviet Thought, 5(4) (1965), 294.
5.↩ Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason (New York: Verso, 2021), 5-6.
6.↩ Ibid.,489.
7.↩ Ibid., 496, 494.
8.↩ Ibid., 495-6, 493.
9.↩ Georg Lukács, “Heidegger Redivivus,” in Existentialismus oder Marxismus. Retrieved through Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/archive//lukac ... degger.htm
10.↩ Lukács, Destruction of Reason, 497.
11.↩ Ibid. 498.
12.↩ Ibid. 491.
13.↩ Ibid.
14.↩ Ibid., 493.
15.↩ Ibid., 498, 497.
16.↩ Ibid., 498.
17.↩ Ibid., 498-9.
18.↩ Ibid., 500.
19.↩ Ibid.
20.↩ Georg Lukács, “The Crisis of Bourgeois Philosophy,” in Existentialismus oder Marxismus. Retrieved through Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs ... osophy.htm
21.↩ Domenico Losurdo, Heidegger and The Ideology of War: Community, Death, and the West (New York: Humanity Books, 2001), 15-40.
22.↩ I am happy to see my friend, Colin Bodayle, recently take this task up. I have known no other Marxist who has studied Heidegger’s work as closely as he has (and in the original German). For more, see the series titled “Why the Left Should Reject Heidegger’s Thought,” published through the Midwestern Marx Institute for Marxist Theory and Political Analysis. Part one is here: https://www.midwesternmarx.com/articles ... in-bodayle
23.↩ John Bellamy Foster, “The New Irrationalism,” Monthly Review 74(9) (February 2023): https://monthlyreview.org/2023/02/01/th ... tionalism/
24.↩ Cheng Enfu, China’s Economic Dialectic: The Original Aspiration of Reform (New York: International Publishers, 2019), 20.
25.4↩ V. I. Lenin, “The Task of the Youth Leagues,” in Collected Works Vol. 31 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), 287.

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