Orientation
What is politics?

Nine Questions for Determining What is Politics
In Part I of my article Seven Theories of Politics I posed ten questions for narrowing down what the range for defining what is politics.

Temporal reach

How far back into human history does politics go? Does politics go back to pre-state societies? Or does politics begin with state societies? Is politics possible before there were political parties?

Cross species scope

Is politics confined to the human species or does it ooze into the life of other species? If so, which ones? If politics crosses species, is it social species that are political? Is it possible to have animal societies which are social such as lions or wolves, but not political? Does a species need to be social to be political? Is being social a necessary but not sufficient condition for politics? Is being social a necessary and sufficient condition for politics? Or is being social neither a necessary nor sufficient condition? In other words, is it possible for a non-social species to have political relationships?

How much does evolutionary biology impact politics?

At a macro level, how does natural adaptation impact human politics? In terms of men and women, how much does sexual selection determine politics? At the micro level, how much do genetics and brain chemistry determine the level and the interest and skill in politics? Or is politics primarily a creature of the socio-historical level of reality?

Spatial reach

Where does politics take place? Many political scientists limit politics to what is taking place within states. Is that casting the net too narrowly? Can there be politics through discussions in private  space? Is it politics when I get into a discussion about the viability of capitalism while I am at the unemployment line waiting for my check? Are there politics within families? Are there politics between lovers? Or are politics only about public affairs?

Am I being political if I ask my partner if she wants to go to the movies and propose a movie and she agrees to both proposals, is spontaneous agreement political? Suppose she said she wants to go to a movie but prefers another movie. We debate about it, and one of us persuades the other. Has the discussion become political? Suppose you and I are riding bicycles. We reach a crossroads where we have to decide whether to turn left or right. We each want to go in a different direction. Is the process of deciding this political?

Political agency

Who does politics? Is politics done only by politicians? If I argue with my neighbor about police brutality in my neighborhood, are my neighbor and I political beings in this discussion? Do I become political only when I vote on the issue in the next election? Do I become political when I bring police brutality to a town hall meeting next month? Or is the only person who is political the mayor who decides whether or not to make it part of his platform for his campaign next month?

What is the relationship between politics and power?

Can you have politics without having power? Can you have power without having politics? If power and politics are related, in what way? Are politics and power interchangeable? Is one a means to another? Is power the means and politics is the end? Is politics the means and power the end?

Politics, force and coercion

Let’s go back to this movie issue. Suppose Sandy has been drinking, and in the past she has been bad-tempered to her partner. She starts drinking while they are deciding on a movie. Sandy’s partner starts worrying and gives in to the movie Sandy wants to watch prematurely to avoid the risk of being yelled at. Is that politics?

This example is a small slice of a larger issue: what is the relationship between politics and force or the threat of force? Is violence an inherent part of politics or is politics what you do to win someone over without being violent?  Some political theorists like Bernard Crick say that politics is the art of compromising when you know you cannot get what you want. Others say that the whole political system is based on violence because the entire class system is based on exploitation and force. All attempts to change things must come up against this militaristic force which protects the rulers. Some say that the only force is political and that the state is the ultimate political actor because it has, in Weber’s words, a monopoly on the means of violence.

Interdisciplinary span of politics

How (if at all) is politics related to economics? What is the relationship between technology and politics?  Does the economy dictate politics? Does politics determine economics? Does technology determine politics or does politics determine technology? The same question could be asked about religion or mass media.

What, if any, is the relationship between theories of politics and political ideologies?

Is there a relationship between a consistent set of answers to these questions and whether you are a liberal or conservative? How will the answers of social democrats, communists and fascists be different than that of either anarchists on the left or libertarian capitalists on the right?

As it turns out, the field of cross-cultural politics I will be discussing gives very narrow answers to these questions and therefore leaves a great deal out.

• Temporal reach – narrow, starts with class societies and leaves out tribal societies
• Cross-species – narrow, limits it to the human species
• Is politics biological? Narrow, politics is limited to the social, psychological
• Spatial reach – narrow, limited to what happens in states
• Political agency—limited to what politicians do, no one else
• Relationship between politics and power, wide, used interchangeably
• How is politics related to force or coercion? Narrow, understates force
• Interdisciplinary span of politics – narrow, it excludes economics
• Theories of politics and ideology -narrow, it tries to make politics scientific and above ideology

In Part II of my article, I identity seven theories of politics:

Old Institutionalists

Civil Republicans

• Weberian political sociologists
• Marxian political scientists
• Rational choice theorists
• Radical feminists
• Bio-evolutionary

All the answers comparative politics gives to those questions primarily come from two schools, the old institutionalists and rational choice theorists. They pretty much leave out the other five schools.

Connection to past articles
About three years ago I wrote four articles about the ideological nature of political science. One article Anti-Communist Political Science: Propaganda for the Capitalist State was primarily about political science as it is practiced in the United States (not Europe). The second article, Invasion of the Body Snatchers connects political science to neo-classical economics and shows how both support each other while blocking out an integrated approach called political economy. In my third article Dictatorship and Democracy I expose how Mordor political scientists were quite interested in dictatorships both in Europe and even within the United States in the 1930s. On the other hand, their interpretation of democracy was thin and lacked any subsistence. Lastly, my piece Totalitarian Anti-Communism showed the manipulation of the use of the word “Totalitarian” from the 1930s into the late 20th century. However, there is one topic that I did not cover in much detail and that is the subject of comparative politics. I did discuss it a bit in the last part of my first article but not in any depth. I would especially like to write about it now because while the field of comparative politics is not taken seriously outside the United States because its political manipulation is well-known, it still serves as propaganda for war and imperialism within the United States. It is as part of Yankee self-propaganda that discussing the field of comparative politics is still worth an analysis.

Sources for my criticisms of comparative politics
Sources for my criticisms of comparative politics are as follows. Ronald Chilcote wrote a very good criticism of comparative politics from a Marxian point of view. He was especially good at exposing the ideological nature in the field. For example he pointed out the connection between the social sciences and the CIA. Ido Oren was also really excellent at showing the connection between modernization theorists and the promotion of US foreign policy. Michael Latham’s book Modernization as Ideology reveals how modernization theory was behind JFK’s international anti-communist program, Alliance for Progress. Lastly, Irene Gendzier’s book Development Against Democracy explains how the word “development” was used by comparative politics involved in foreign policy to railroad countries on the capitalist periphery away from socialist and communist transition programs.

Where are we going?
In this article I will show eight foundational problems with comparative politics:

• Its characterization of capitalist societies as democratic;
• Its characterization of states as governing rather than ruling;
• Its relative exclusion of propaganda from political communication in the West;
• Its ignoring the presence of how capitalism undermines political relations;
• Its ignoring of the Secret Service and the rest of deep state in political decision-making processes;
• Its blanket characterization of socialism with authoritarian;
• Its neglect of anarchism as a legitimate part of socialism;
• Its treatment of nation-states as autonomous and not determined by alliances and between larger, more powerful states and transnational capitalists.

Oligarchies vs Democracy

Those of you who were unlucky enough to take a political science class might have been exposed to a cross-cultural version of the same thing. I refer to the field of comparative politics. The first thing that struck my eye in looking at the table of contents of a college textbook on comparative politics was the different types of rule. According to mainstream theorists, there are only two kinds of rule, democratic and authoritarian. The United States and Western Europe are deemed “democratic” whereas Russia, China and Iran are deemed authoritarian.

The unpopularity of democracy in the West until the 20th century
One problem with this formulation is that it fails to address the unpopularity of democracy in Yankee history itself, not only among conservatives but liberals as well all the way to the end of the 19th century. In the 19thcentury when liberalism really took hold as a political ideology, liberals were not interested in democracy, and considered it “mob rule”. Most industrialized countries did not have the right to vote at the end of the 19th century. Back then farmer populist parties and socialist parties took their democracy seriously, bringing economics into it. The result was a “substantive democracy” championed by Charles Merriman and Charles Beard in the 1930s. But the rise of fascism and communism had shaken liberal confidence in the natural sympathy between democracy and capitalism. So in the 1940s Joseph Schumpeter introduced a weakened form of democracy as simply the circulation of elite politicians  that people choose between. The procedural democracy of Robert Dahl of the 1950s involved choosing between these elites through voting. There was nothing about economics.

In his book Strong Democracy, Benjamin Barber distinguishes “thick democracy” from the “thin democracy” of Dahl. My point is by the standards of thick democracy few if any Western countries are democratic. To call them democratic serves the ideological purposes of cold warriors and their desire to fight communism. Since democracy is a loaded virtue word, and authoritarian is a loaded vice word, a cold war opposition between the two is built into the entire field of comparative politics.

How many parties make a democracy?
What is striking is the criteria for what constitutes democracy when it comes to political parties. For comparative politics, a single party rule constitutes authoritarian rule. But the addition of just one more party, as in the American political system, we suddenly then have a democracy. Countries with many parties including most of Europe are also constituted as democracies. Aristotle argued that there were 3 forms of rule – monarchy, oligarchy and democracy. Oligarchy is the rule of the few. Given the actual nature of who controls the elections in the United States, it is most reasonable to say the United States and Western Europe are oligarchies, ruled by the ruling class, the upper class and the upper middle class. Taken together this is about 20% of the population, hardly a democracy. In the United States most of middle class, working class and poor have no representation and yet the country is called democratic.

One party – authoritarian

Two parties – democratic

Many parties – democratic

In other words, the difference between one and two parties is greater than the difference between two parties and many parties. In fact, the implication of those who defend the two-party system is that having many parties can be confusing and unwieldly. So we wind up with the two parties of the United States as a kind center of stability. This is so despite the fact that for about the last 50 years, forty percent or more people in the United States do not vote. Is this a sign that democracy in the United States doesn’t work? Not at all. Those who don’t vote are dismissed as ignorant, apathetic or pathological in some way. The reason people don’t vote is simply because neither party represents their interest is never present. When voting tallies are presented, the number of people who don’t vote is rarely presented. Voting tallies are presented like 50% vs 49% for the two parties as if that constituted all the people who could have voted. In fact, in the actual tallies the winning party gets 30% of the vote. The loser gets 29%. What is ignored is the highest tally: 40% who don’t vote. This is democracy? What we have here is an oligarchy. But in comparative politics, democracy is not a process that actually exists but a self-congratulating ideology for the ruling capitalist oligarchs who control both parties.

Governing vs Ruling
In comparative politics, “governing” is a taken for granted term for Western capitalist societies. “Ruling” is saved for countries suspected of not being democratic, like “authoritarian” countries. I prefer to take the governing word very seriously as it is used in cybernetic systems. Governing in cybernetic systems means steering a system which includes goals, communication within the system, adaptation to the environment, feedback systems which allow for adjustment and few forward system which results in planning. The human heart is a “governor” of the human body. By these standards the only type of society in which there was governing was the egalitarian politics of hunting and gathering societies. Simple horticulture societies in these societies decision-making was collective. They adapted and moved when the ecology dictated a change.

For the last 5,000 years, complex political systems had rulers. This means that political goals were rarely carried out, communication systems were blocked and muddled by self-interested bureaucracies. Adaptations to the environment were slowed down by the machinations of the short-term thinking of ruling classes. Feedback systems were ignored such as extreme weather and pollution. Feed forward mechanisms were clogged by myopic ruling classes who couldn’t think three months ahead – if that. In Joseph Tainter’s book The Collapse of Complex Societies he describes how inept the ruling classes can be. Calling complex societies “governing” is ridiculous when compared to hunting and gathering societies which prevailed for 90% of human history. We are ruled by oligarchies and this should be reflected in any political field that considers itself scientific.

The Exclusion of Propaganda from Political Communication in the West
In part, the reason we have the illusion of democracy and a governing class rather than rulers of an oligarchy is because of Western propaganda. There are many textbooks describing propaganda in the West. If you like videos more than books, check out Adam Curtis’ documentary, The Century of the Self. This video demonstrates how 100 years of psychological propaganda in the person of Edward Bernays and the brainwashing in the work of Ewen Cameron controlled the Mordor public. Despite this, the only mention of propaganda in my comparative politics textbook is when it comes of “authoritarian” regimes. No surprises here.

Comparative Politics Ignores Capitalism
Following the tradition of Mordor social sciences, just as political science excludes economics while neoclassical economics ignores politics, comparative politics ignores the economic system of capitalism when it discusses Western politics. They ignore economic exchange and act as if politics was merely system of law, voting, institutional systems of bureaucracies and foreign policies. Without saying so, countries that count as “democratic” have capitalist exchanges. The field of comparative politics theorists act as if there was a natural, unremarkable relationship between capitalism and democracy. But as Rueschemeyer, Stephens and Stephens have described in their book Capitalist Development and Democracy, it was not the capitalist merchants that brought representative democracy to the West, but the working class. Capitalist economic exchanges should be foundational to understanding political systems. Yet in my comparative poetics textbook that I’m reading, “political economy” is buried in the last chapter of the book.

Two reasons why capitalism should be included in politics
Capitalism should be foundational to politics because countries that have counted as politically “underdeveloped” have become so because of capitalist imperialism, as Gunder Frank pointed out decades ago. At the same time capitalist societies should be foundational to politics because it was under capitalist crisis that fascism emerged. The political ideology of fascism can never be understood without its roots in capitalism. There has never been fascism in human history before capitalism and there has never been fascism without the presence of capitalism.

The Deep State and International Pressure Groups are not Included in the Decision-making Processes of Politics

Supposedly, democratically elected leaders of political parties govern their populations by carrying out “the will of the people”. I am countering this by saying these politicians represent the will of the oligarchs who rule over people. But the oligarchs do not just use political leaders to carry out their will. Besides capitalists that politicians have to answer to, there are agencies such as the FBI, the CIA as well as international pressure groups such as AIPAC, Five Eyes, and NED. None of these groups are mentioned in my comparative politics textbook as involving political decision making. The textbook on Political Psychology in International Relations writes as if political leaders make decisions for their nation by themselves. It is only in “authoritarian” societies that bureaucracies, revolutionary factions and terrorist groups come into play that constrain the decision-making will of the official political leaders.

Authoritarian Politics is Synonymous With Socialism 

When it comes to the West the field of comparative politics ignores the fact that its ruling oligarchy is run by capitalism. However, they have no problem declaring that authoritarian politics goes with a socialist “command economy”. Western countries that became socialist, such as Sweden and Norway, are presented as socialist democracies only because the presence of a market or capitalism. This made the naturally socialist authoritarian states more democratic.

Most military dictatorships are capitalists

Advocates of comparative politics ignore the fact that military dictatorships are often attempts by capitalists to hold on to power in the face of socialist uprisings. Most dictatorships are not socialist, but capitalist installations. In the case of socialism, the textbook cases that are trotted out are the old Soviet Union, Cuba or China. These countries have oligarchies as well. But whether or not they are more authoritarian than the capitalist West is much more complex than it first appears. Theories of comparative politics play down or ignore the relentless international class war any socialist system has to endure on a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis at the hands of the heads of state in the West along with their capitalist rulers. Capitalists in the West act as if the whole world is their private property. They treat any elected national leader (even if not a socialist) who has the nerve to set their own agenda for international trade as an enemy. All socialist leaders have to treat most any oppositional party in their country as potentially a tool of international capital. The extent to which socialist countries are authoritarian has a great deal to do with the pressure they experience from international capital.

What about “totalitarian”? 

Fortunately, this Cold War vice word is now internationally  discredited. However, the use of the term totalitarian to characterize socialist or communist countries, leaves out at least the following. If we grant that Sweden and Norway were once socialist, there has never been a socialist country with an advanced technology, communication systems, or advanced science. These societies have never had the ability to control the messages sent out to the population so that people were all thinking the same thing at the same time due to centralized control of propaganda. It is only advanced capitalist countries that have the capacity to do this. For example, Mordor’s media has roughly five corporations that all send out the same propaganda message in the case of Israel. People are severely punished by the police for supporting the Palestinians. All third parties in Mordor are blacked out. They cannot get into the “debates”. My point is that because of its control over mass media, capitalist control of the state is much closer to real totalitarianism than anything Stalin or Orwell ever dreamed up. The Soviet Union and China are poor countries. Their communist parties have no centralized control over their entire nation state. Peasants in both countries made up their own mind as to what was happening. Only in Mordor do you hear the same anti-working-class slogans against health care, or “welfare queens” from New York to San Francisco, from Houston Texas to Missoula in Montana. This is the power political propaganda holds to be internalized by people who imagine they are making up their own minds.

Comparative Politics Ignores Anarchism as Part of Socialism
The claim that all socialism is authoritarian ignores the 180-year history of the anarchist movement and its leaders from Proudhon to Bakunin to Malatesta, Kropotkin, to Lucy Parsons, Emma Goldman to Durruti. Anarchism was no intellectual movement. It was followed by thousands of people who fought in and out of labor unions and in the Russian and Spanish revolutions. This negligence on the part of comparative political theorists is ironic given that anarchism at its best is the purist form of democracy – direct democracy. If comparative political theorists understood the scale that the anarchists organized during the Spanish revolution of 1936-1939, they would be ashamed to think that what goes on in Western societies has anything to do with democracy, at least comparatively speaking.

Comparative Politics Ignores the International Pressures Within Larger States or Alliances Between other States

Comparative politics acts as if political decisions begin and end at national borders and with only official political leaders. But today’s nation-states have formed alliances with other nation-states. They have agreements about where they or won’t all act together. In the West we have the alliance of United States, England and Israel. None of those countries enacts a political decision by themselves. The same is true with China, Russia and Iran. Nation-states are interdependent, not independent actors.

Conclusion

I began this article with nine foundational questions of what politics is. I described how narrowly the field of comparative politics is in answering these questions. Then I identified seven theories of politics and showed how each of the seven theories of politics answers these nine questions differently. As it turned out, the field of political science uses only two of the seven theories: old institutionalism as rational choice theory.

Then I embedded within this article other articles I had written about how anticommunist domestic political science and neoclassical economics are in their studies and how international political science (comparative politics) is in carrying on that tradition. After that I named eight areas in which comparative politics are weak, including:

• Its propagandistic use of the word “democracy”. I claim that no state society on this planet is democratic. They are oligarchies.
• Its propagandistic use of the world governance. I identify with a cybernetic definition of governance, using the heart as an example. With this as criteria, no state system in the world governs a society. They all rule, not govern.
• Comparative politics over-emphasizes the use of propaganda in “authoritarian” societies while barely even mentioning propaganda in capitalist ruling  oligarchies.
• Comparative politics does not successfully integrate capitalism into the comparative systems it analyzes . One textbook tacks it on as a last chapter.
• Comparative politics ignores the power of the institutions of the deep state and transnational capitalists in determining the decision-making capacities of politicians.
• Its treatment of the term “authoritarian” is more or less synonymous with socialism. It plays down the existence of socialism in Scandinavian countries and communal councils in Venezuela.
• Lastly, the use of the term “totalitarian” to depict Soviet Union, China and Cuba is completely false. In the case of the Soviet Union and China they were too poor to have a centralized state that could reach down to every peasant village and bombard them with propaganda. The foundation for this totalitarian state is a centralized media apparatus, mass transportation, a country that was electrified. Paradoxically it is Mordor’s control over its mass media where we see the closest approximation to totalitarianism.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

AKD’s presidential victory tickles and excites the election watchers for various reasons.  He does not hail from any of the dynastic families that have treated rule and the presidential office as electoral real estate and aristocratic privilege. The fall of the Rajapaksa family, propelled by mass protests against President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s misrule in 2022, showed that the public had, at least for the time, tired of that tradition.

Not only is the new president outside the traditional orbit of rule and favour; he heads a political grouping known as the National People’s Power (NPP), a colourfully motley combination of trade unions, civil society members, women’s groups and students.  But the throbbing core of the group is the Janatha Vimukhti Peramuna (JVP), which boasts a mere three members in the 225-member parliament.

The resume of the JVP is colourfully cluttered and, in keeping with Sri Lankan political history, spattered with its fair share of blood.  It was founded in 1965 in the mould of a Marxist-Leninist party and led by Rohana Wijeweera.  It mounted, without success, two insurrections – in 1971 and between 1987 and 1989.  On both occasions, thousands died in the violence that followed, including Wijeweera and many party leaders, adding to the enormous toll that would follow in the civil war between the Sinhalese majority and the secessionist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.

It is also worth noting that the seduction of Marxism, just to add a level of complexity to matters, was not confined to the JVP.  The Tamil resistance had itself found it appealing.  A assessment from the Central Intelligence Agency from March 1986 offers the casual remark that “all major insurgent organizations claim allegiance to Marxism” with the qualification that “most active groups are motivated principally by ethnic rivalry with the majority Sinhalese.”  None had a clear political program “other than gaining Columbo’s recognition for a traditional homeland and a Tamil right to self-determination.”

By the time Dissanayake was cutting his teeth in local politics, the JVP was another beast, having been reconstituted by Somawansa Amarasinghe as an organisation keen to move into the arena of ballots rather than the field of armed struggle.  Dissanayake is very much a product of that change.  “We need to establish a new clean political culture … We will do the utmost to win back the people’s respect and trust in the political system.”

In a statement, Dissanayake was a picture of modest, if necessary, acknowledgment.  He praised the collective effort behind his victory, one being a consequence of the multitude.  “This achievement is not the result of any single person’s work, but the collective effort of hundreds of thousands of you.  Your commitment has brought us this far, and for that, I am deeply grateful.  This victory belongs to all of us.”

The unavoidable issue of racial fractiousness in the country is also mentioned.  “The unity of Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims and all Sri Lankans is the bedrock of this new beginning.”  How the new administration navigates such traditionally poisoned waters will be a matter of interest and challenge, not least given the Sinhala nationalist rhetoric embraced by the JVP, notably towards the Tamil Tigers.

Pundits are also wondering where the new leader might position himself on foreign relations.  There is the matter of India’s unavoidably dominant role, a point that riles Dassanayake.  His preference, and a point he has repeatedly made, is self-sufficiency and economic sovereignty.  But India has a market worth US$6.7 billion whereas China, a more favoured country by the new president, comes in at US$2 billion.

On economics, a traditional, if modest program of nationalisation is being put forth by the JVP within the NPP, notably on such areas as utilities.  A wealth redistribution policy is on the table, including progressive, efficient taxation while a production model to encourage self-sufficiency, notably on important food products, is envisaged.  Greater spending is proposed in education and health care.

The issue of dealing with international lenders is particularly pressing, notably in dealing with the International Monetary Fund, which approved a US$2.9 billion bailout to the previous government on extracting the standard promises of austerity.  “We expect to discuss debt restructuring with the relevant parties and complete the process quickly and obtain the funds,” promises Dissanayake. That said, the governor of the Central Bank and the secretary to the ministry of finance, both important figures in implementing the austerity measures, have remained.

In coming to power, AKD has eschewed demagogic self-confidence.  “I have said before that I am not a magician – I am an ordinary citizen.  There are things I know and don’t know.  My aim is to gather those with the knowledge and skills to help lift this country.”  In the febrile atmosphere that is Sri Lankan politics, that admission is a humble, if realistic one.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Orientation

Why study crowds, masses and movements?

It is tempting to imagine that as socialists we must know a great deal about crowds, masses, and in medieval thought individual meant inseparable, that is indivisible. People were defined as individuals by reference to the groups of which they were members. Group membership defined their very identity as individual units. Farr treats individualism as a product of the Renaissance and Reformation, stressing the emerging traditions of religious, political and economic liberalism. However, unlike Farr, Ivana Markova argues that it was monasticism and chivalry that contributed most towards strengthening the development of individualism in feudal society. Nikolai Berdyaev has pointed out that the individualism of the Renaissance and Humanism brought man to the limit of his ability to withstand the uncertainty and loneliness into which the Renaissance and Humanism threw him.

With the rise of capitalism, the concept of the individual came to be divorced from its original intrinsic connection with the social community. This tendency can be seen in the work of Hobbes, Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill. In psychology, individualism became connected to the Associationist theory of John Locke and the hedonistic psychology and utilitarian theory of Jeremy Bentham and James Mill. Individuals came to be treated in isolation and abstraction. Individualism in its most extreme form is present in social Darwinism in the 1870s in the work of Herbert Spencer who was much more influential in the US than he was in Britain. This individualism continued with pragmatism in the late 19th and 20th centuries and with behaviorism beginning just before World War I.

The majority of the main issues to which psychology is addressing itself has been concern with the isolated individual rather than the individual as a member of a particular social group. With the aggregate of strangers thrown together in lab experiments this became the setting in which social psychologists explored what social life was supposed to be about. What is missing is the social psychology of real groups that an individual was part of, including occupational groups, church groups or extended families. These are called “reference” groups.

Reference groups

So far, the social-individual dialectic has been understood as a group mind (crowd psychology) or a social contract (individualism). The third way to put a frame around the social-individual polarity is to think of society not as a group mind but as a reference group. According to JD Greenwood (What Ever Happened to the Social in Social Psychology) the term “reference group” was introduced by Hymen and then developed in 1951 by Newcombe. An individual’s reference groups were ongoing groups with whom the individual has a commitment and history with and whose norms they are loyal to. They had shared norms and differentiated roles and they met in the same time and place. Social psychologists who represent this school included William McDougall, Omar Sheriff, William Thomas and Solomon Asch. These theorists claim that understanding social life should begin with reference groups with whom the individual has a foundation, not strangers with whom one has no commitment or history.

Reference groups are contrasted to aggregates of strangers who are thrown together for an experiment. Aggregates are statistical groups. Reference group theory also argued against conceiving of the social life as a mystical social mind hovering above individuals. The early psychologist William McDougall embraced this socially embodied individuality of the communitarians. He thought that the social groups were the source of individuality. McDougall rejected both the social mind theories of group super-individuality and also opposed social aggregate theory. This intrinsic form of group identity was followed by Baldwin, Cooley, Mead and Goffman.

For crowd or social mind theorists individuals think, feel and act differently in the physical presence of other individuals than they do in physical isolation from other individuals. For collective mind theorists like Le Bon, the mechanism of influence is grounded in hypnosis, imitation and contagion. For reference group theorists, social psychological-states are distinct from individual psychological states but not separate from them. Social life in any concrete case is the mind of an individual in a social group. Historically, in the philosophy reference group, the tradition of the individual as being socially embedded is in the philosophy of Vico and in the idealist philosophy of Hegel, Green and Royce.

Why was reference group theory lost in the shuffle?

Greenwood asks why the original form of the social in American psychology was abandoned. He gives two reasons:

• It became associated with crowd theories about the emergent properties of supra-individual group minds. This was against the beliefs of those committed to empiricism, experimentalism and individualist social psychology.
• It challenged principles of autonomy and rationality – the moral and political individualism most common in American psychology.

Demonization of Collective Life

Interestingly, around the same time individualism was understood in its most extreme form, any kind of group life or collective behavior was treated as if:

• it was completely separate from the individual; and,
• it contained all the negative tendencies such as irresponsibility, irrationality, violence and pleasure-seeking animality.

There was the tendency of some American social psychologists to follow Le Bon and Tarde in equating social behavior with the irrational and emotional behavior of crowds. Le Bon and Tarde completely overlooked and suppressed the altruistic picture of the behavior of collectivities perpetuated by crowd theorists.

Between the first and second World War the empiricist behaviorism of Floyd Allport argued there is nothing in the social world that is not first in the minds and actions of individuals. Allport maintained that social phenomena can be explained only in terms of psychological phenomena of individuals (opposite of Durkheim). Other behaviorists besides Allport denied that when people come together to create a social world, whatever the result, it is no more than the sum of individual wills. Crowds do not have a nervous system or an introspective faculty.

The following table is a summary which contrasts the three ways social psychologists have contrasted the nature of the relationship between the individual and society.

 Three Ways to Understand the Relationship Between Society and Individual

Right-Wing Crowd Psychology: Crowds as Super-Minds

How to understand crowds

Philosophers of conventional sociology at the end of the 19th century thought that crowds were not a separate or new phenomenon. Rather they were seen as fleeting gatherings outside of social institutions which resulted in temporary chaos between social classes. Émile Durkheim and Marx emphasized reason or class interest to explain why people gathered in crowds to begin with. Liberal politics saw the masses as an epiphenomenon which would pass away as education, technology and a more just distribution of wealth would even things out. Crowds were still equated with the general population and not considered “mobs”. Liberals saw gatherings as no more than a collection of individuals.

Whether conservative or liberal, mainstream philosophers of sociology were social Darwinists whose ideas of a liberal society were of individuals who took care of themselves. “Crowd” psychologists claimed Darwinian evolution showed that progress was a slow process and any sudden changes based on strikes or armed conflict was a throwback to pre-modern times. Crowds were like Herbert Spencer’s undifferentiated matter. Crowd psychologists perceived crowds in a much more sinister light.

Crowd psychologists were united in rejecting sociological theories such like Durkheim and Marx because they felt they left out the emotions and unconscious motivation of people. If you could not depend on what people intended, then was what is really driving them below the level of consciousness? Crowd psychology was interested in the behavior of crowds, the behavior of leaders and the relationships between them. Crowds were here to stay and the sooner we understand them the better. For crowd psychologists individuals were both more than and less than the sum of their parts. Until the 1960s social psychologists accepted right-wing crowd theory even though it was not based on any research. (Social Psychology, Delamater, Myers, Collett; David Miller Introduction to Collective Behavior and Collective Action). Please see my article for more detail about crowd psychologists. Ruling Class Fears of the Day of Reckoning: Historical Causes for the Biases Against Crowds

Left-Wing Crowd Theory: Crowds as reference groups

Up until the 1960s social psychologists continued to examine crowds in an unfavorable light following the thinking of Taine, Sighele and Le Bon. To the extent they tolerated collectivities at all they followed research on mass public opinion. But in the early 1960’s Carl Couch began to have his students study the work of George Rudé on the French Revolution which showed crowds in a more favorable light. Crowds were workers, not criminals, and the behavior of workers was somewhere in between derelict and heroic.

From collective behavior to collective action

In 1968 Clark McPhail began to take his students into situations where crowds had assembled and got them to engage in participatory research. Later, in 1997 he took a team of over sixty trained observers to a very large “Stand in the Gap” rally of the Promise Keepers on the National Mall in Washington DC. They used paper, pen, film and videotape to record people’s activities at political as well as sports and religious events. This was something that early crowd theorists never had done. The results challenged all seven of the myths I described in my previous article. The myths are:

• Irrationality
• Emotionality
• Suggestibility – mindless behavior
• Destructiveness
• Spontaneity
• Anonymity
• Unanimity of purpose

McPhail tried to indicate this difference by distancing himself from the word “crowds”, calling collectivities “gatherings.”

McPhail classifies gathering according to their behavioral composition. The most inclusive category is that of prosaic gatherers, where behavior is simple – shoppers at malls, people waiting in lines for rides, at amusements parks, gatherings at store openings and spectators at fires and arrests. Less common are demonstration gathering – political demonstrations, sports rallies and worship services… Even less common …are state ceremonial gatherings such as inaugurations, royal weddings and state funerals. (Intro to Collective Behavior, 43) 

Meanwhile theorists who studied social movements pointed out that up until now all theories of collectivities saw crowds either acting as solitary individuals or reacting to circumstances outside themselves. For scholars such as Charles Tilley, William Gamson, McAdam and Lipsky, people who considered themselves part of social movements, come into a crowd with a plan. Any major demonstration against a war requires months of planning on the part of the organizers. Secondly, being in a crowd and acting in a crowd is not an end in itself, but a means to gather more people to swell the movement long after the particular crowd disperses. Because of this, movement scholars began to change the name of their study from “collective behavior’ (which is more passive) to “collective action”.

Within the field of social movements there were two tendencies. “Political process” theory is interested in how people come to frame their discontent into ideas. What is it in the nature of some negative events which makes people put up with them, and what is it about negative events that make them seem abusive? In other words, what events will make people more likely to throw down the gauntlet?

“Resource mobilization theory” tries to answer the question of how movements succeed through networks of movement organizations. What kind of material resources are necessary and sufficient in order to succeed?

Right-Wing vs Left-wing Theories of Crowds

Spontaneous vs planning

There are roughly six theories on crowd psychology – two conservative, two liberal and two radical. However, for our purposes we will contrast them between conservative and radical theories. Collective behavior theories are conservative because they focus on a crowd’s reaction to events – which are often spontaneous. Collective action theories emphasize what crowds do to initiate activity and these activities often involve planning.

The difference between crowds and everyday life

A second major difference between the theories is that conservative collective behavior theories think there are some major qualitative differences between how people act in crowds and how they are in everyday life. They imagine that crowds bring out a degenerative side of people. They would look approvingly at William Golding’s book Lord of the Fliesand and say that is what happens in crowds. Collective action theorists think that there is no qualitative difference between how people act in crowds and how they are in everyday life. Whatever there is that is sinister in human behavior it is just as likely to happen in everyday life.

How unified are crowds?

Conservative theories of crowd behavior imagine that the individuality of people melts down in crowds and the crowd is easily unified because people are easily emotionally involved. This is  because crowds exert a hypnotic effect which then spreads like contagion. Theories of collective action argue that the individuality that people have when they enter a crowd stays with them during the events that happen in crowds.  People disagree about actions to be taken and crowds can remain divided. It takes real work and skill for leaders of collective action to unify a crowd.

Masses vs movements

Theories of collective behavior are most at home studying masses. Masses are people who are not necessarily located in the same space, but which are happening at the same time. Examples are fads, rumors, urban legends, fashions, crazes and mass hysteria. The most famous case of mass hysteria was Orson Wells’ radio broadcast of Martians having landed.

Mass behavior doesn’t bring out the best in people. People are shown to be petty, superficial, acquisitive and easily aroused. However, collective action theorists tend to study crowds in more serious circumstances as part of movements. Movements are actions that might take place in present time and space but also at different times and different places. Movements can be cross-cultural and historical. Protests, strikes, work-stoppages and boycotts are inclusive of crowds and yet go beyond them.

Sports crowds, natural disasters and riots

Both collective behavior theorists and collective action theorists study sports crowds, natural disasters and riots but come to very different conclusions about them. Collective behavior theorists might focus on hooligans in sporting events and violence both between fans as well as collective frustration resulting from the outcome of a game. When it comes to natural disasters, conservative collective behaviorists will focus on the looting of stores and sexual violence as well as stealing between the victims of disasters. As for riots, conservatives will usually focus on damage to property, the chaos of revolutionary situations and the lack of order. This way of thinking about things is perpetrated by mass-hysteria theory which is based on class fear of the lower classes rather than objective research that has been done.

Collective action theories shine a more favorable light on sporting crowds, natural disasters and riots and they have the research that backs it up. Collective action theorists will marvel at the amount of spontaneous order that occurs in baseball games when tens of thousands of people take the train to a game, watch and enjoy the game peacefully and take the train home without any police intervention needed.

As for natural disasters, research clearly shows that natural disasters tend to  bring out the altruistic, pro-social side of people, far more often than they bring out the selfish side. Lastly, collective action contains two pieces of research that must be deeply disturbing to conservative crowd theorists. The first is that the most common instigator of violence in riots are the police. More times than not the presence of police with the threat of coercion and use of force amplifies a tense situation rather than cools it out. The second piece of research shows that riots get results. Though people are endlessly told to vote or to write to your member of Congress, it is after riots that the authorities somehow find the time and money to right wrongs. The Watts riots of 1967 is an example.

Who is drawn to crowds?

Collective behavior theorists with their negative view of crowds naturally think that only unsavory troublemakers are drawn to them. They believe these people are emotionally unstable or even criminals. No self-respecting member of the middle or upper-middle class would tolerate being in a crowd for long. Theorists of collective action point out that there is no particular type of group or individual that is drawn to a crowd. It is true that middle and upper-middle class people would more easily separate from crowds by driving a car. Cars and money can bypass traveling on buses and trains. However, the difference is much less extreme than collective behavior theorists make it seem to be. When it comes to natural disasters while poorer people are likely to be trapped in poorly built homes or buildings, upper middle-class people have also been the victims of floods, fires, tornadoes, hurricanes and earthquakes.

Collectivities and human nature

Conservative collective behavior theorists imagine that crowds bring out only the worst in people, a selfish, desperate and violent side. Collective action theorists say that crowds tend to bring out more extremes of behavior both for better and for worse. Groups and individuals bring out what is most moderate in people. In crowd situations people can be more extreme: selfish and violent on one hand or more altruistic and heroic on the other.

Who determines norms?

Contrary to conservative collective behavior theorists who might say all norms vanish as a person goes from a group to a crowd, moderate, liberal theories of crowds such as emergent norm theories argue that group norms emerge spontaneously as the situation dictates. Collective action theorists argue that in the case of social movements, the leaders initiate norms which are created and imposed by crowd monitors from within the protest movement itself. There may be an expectation from within the movement not to break bank windows or throw rocks. In fact, people who do these things may be labeled FBI agents.

Are members of crowds rootless or do they already have communities?

Collective behavior theorists imagine that the only people who join crowds are rootless individuals drawn to a crowd because they lack community. On the contrary, collective action theories say most people come to crowds with friends, families and sometimes with neighbors. People are not desperately seeking a community. They already have one but just want to expand those communities.

How much monitoring of crowd behavior goes on?

Liberal crowd theorist Herbert Blumer argued that crowds do not monitor their behavior. His circular reaction theory claimed that emotions feed on each other rather and get stuck in an amplifying groove, creating a snowballing effect. Social interaction theorist Clark McPhail points out from his research that crowds do monitor and interpret what is happening, talk to each other about what is going on and change the direction or movement of the crowd as they go.

Are crowds rational?

“No!” say the collective behavior theorists. The size of crowds, their anonymity and lack of continuity makes a crowd act more irrationally because of the noise and emotional euphoria. Collective action theories disagree. Crowds are just as capable of groups and individuals of behaving rationally. Perhaps the best example of this is how orderly and graceful people are at the 5 PM rush hour as they navigate walking towards train stations on foot, weaving in and around others, barely touching them. Another example is how most of the time people assemble and leave going to concerts in an orderly fashion without police presence. Disorderly crowd behavior is the exception to the rule. Newspapers with their slogan “if it bleeds it leads” only point out extremes of crowd behavior. Who ever heard of a news headline, “42,000 People at Yankee Stadium Arrive Home From the Train Station With no Incidence of Violence”?

Crowds as super-minds vs crowds as reference groups

Let us return to the three ways the relationship between society and individual can be understood. The perspective of crowds as collective behavior corresponds to crowds as having a super-mind. This is because crowds are understood as deeply irrational, with emotions easily aroused and easily spread (contagion). Crowds consist of suspicious strangers who easily melt down through hypnosis, imitation and regression.

Crowds as collective action corresponds to crowds as reference groups. Why? Because people in crowds consist of reference occupational groups, religious groups and neighbors from the same region. These folks carry the same values into crowds they had in reference groups. Thus, they bring with them their shared history and values which is not so easily thrown off kilter when they celebrate as part of a crowd in a victory in a sports game or while attending a music concert. They’re sharing norms and differentiated roles which come to the fore in emergency situations such as natural disasters.

Theoretical perspectives

The most conservative collective behavior theories are mass hysteria theories which were supported by Orrin Klapp. Mass hysteria theories also harken back to the right-wing crowd theorists  such as Taine, Sighele and Le Bon. More moderate theories are that of Gabriel Tarde, Herbert Blumer and David Park. Liberal theories include Smelser’s value-added theory and Turner and Killian emergent norm theory. Clark McPhail really blew the roof off of conservative and moderate crowd theory with his social interactionist defense of crowds as purposive, focused, creative and for the most part non-violent. Radical crowd theories include the resource mobilization theory of JD McCarthy and Mayer N. Zald. Political process theory of McAdam, Gamson and Lipsky both have their focus on social movements.

How good is the research?

All crowd research is not just about the present. Georg Rule opened the door with archival research on the French revolutionary crowds. Charles Tilly did the same thing for the 500 years of European revolutions. Gamson did some ingenious work on social protests about what works and what doesn’t work. There have also been participant observations of religious cults (John Lofland), UFO cults and the current Tea Party movement.

Unfortunately, theories of collective behavior do not have comparable research methods. They mostly rely on conservative ruling class fears of crowds which shows up in newspaper anecdotes, reports by the authorities such as police reports and eyewitness accounts which are notoriously unreliable. Please see the table below for more vivid comparisons of the two theories.

Conclusion

I began this article by posing the question of how to think of the relationship between individual and society. One is in the image of society as a kind of group mind superimposed over society. The second way is to think of society as an aggregate which is no more than the sum of its parts. The most grounded approach is to understand society as reference groups. In the second part of my article, I do a comparison between crowd theories based on crowds as  a super-mind (collective behavior theories) compared to crowds as reference groups (collective action) theories. Crowds as gatherings are like reference groups applied to macro-social psychology.

Two Perspectives on Crowd Theory

• First published at Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

The post Marxism for Generation Z: Is Barbie Out to Change the World or Just Her Own Life? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Walden Bello.

Orientation

In human life it is clear that we are external nature – we have an affinity with other life forms like primates as real, objective beings. However, we also have an internal nature – a psychology – of mental states, goals, imagination and sexual urges that is internal to us. We know from cosmologists that the natural world goes all the way back to subatomic particles. But how far back does internal nature go?

Nine Ways of Understanding the Body-Mind Problem

Descartes’ mind-body dualism

In the history of philosophy, David Skrbina tells us there are usually six possible modes of interaction between bodies and minds. For purposes of this article, I’ve added three more. Perhaps the most famous is Descartes’ answer depicted as mind-body dualism. Here the mind and the body (or nature) are thought of as two different substances (thought and extension) that interact through the pineal gland. Each substance is subject to its own laws.

Epiphenomenalism and eliminative materialism

Epiphenomenalists such as Santayana or the behaviorists are primarily focused on body or nature. Bodies affect mind, but minds do not affect bodies. Mind is the result of the interaction between the brain and the body. By not being a physical entity the mind has no causal power. It is like a shadow on a wall. Eliminative materialism (or mechanical materialism) takes the body-nature emphasis to an extreme. People like Patricia and Paul Churchland, along with Willard Van Orman Quine, argue that there are only bodies. Mind is an illusion. This philosophy is also called physicalism.

Idealism and neutral monism

Idealists like Plato say that the world is primarily spiritual and matter is a derivative and less real. Spiritual, eternal forms are the archetypes of the world while matter is understood as an inferior copy. The idealist theory of mind holds that mind is really a soul that is distinct from the body and has nothing to do with the brain. The next theory of the mind-body problem is neutral monism. The two extremes of eliminative materialism and idealism are challenged by a third contender. In the hands of first, Spinoza and then Ernest Mach, nature (or the body) and mind are two sides of the same coin. They are the creatures of a third substance which is beyond nature and mind which Spinoza called substance,

Hylozoic monism and pre-established harmony

While physicalists claim that everything is made of matter, hypozoic monists claim that all of what exists is life. They might strive to discover the properties of life that may be found in parts of the world that are considered inanimate. Ernest Haeckel, Fredrick Paulsen and David Bohm were all representatives. But to say all nature is life that does not mean that all of life has mind or psyche. Many forms of life exist without nervous systems that are self-maintaining and self-creative without having any psyche at all. Neither are any of these forms conscious. Much of the natural order is self-regulating without any conscious regulation. Even with human beings, much of our thinking is unconscious and part of the ancestorial brain with no reflection at all.

Leibniz had what was to me the strangest system of mind-body interaction which he called preestablished harmony. The universe consisted of an infinite number of monads (the lowest unit of possible organization). A monad is windowless and is like a living atom. All monads are active and conscious, but they vary in clarity and distinctiveness. Each monad had a final cause or purpose. Leibniz believed that monads do not influence each other. There is a correspondence between each monad’s perceptual state and the conditions of the external world (nature or the body). However, those perceptions can only mirror external events. Neither can cause the other.

Pantheism and emergent evolution

As opposed to materialism, idealism or neutral monism in its starting points all agree that the psyche or the mind is a late development in evolution. Even idealists will say that the soul is given to humanity by God late in His creation. Pantheism opposes all this and states that the mind, soul or spirit goes all the way back in nature – including molecules and subatomic particles. Animists seem to be a kind of pluralist pantheist. They have a more specific claim about the internal structure of matter. Animists claim that not only that every piece of matter has a soul or psyche but that these souls have intentions including rocks, rivers and wind. Animists and pantheists claim that the mind is embedded in nature, right from the beginning.

In emergent evolution, nature undergoes a series of quantitative and qualitative changes. As a result of qualitative change, new levels emerge and mind is added at a certain level of complexity. In emergent evolution the effects of something can be more than the cause as genuine novelty appears. Past a level of complexity, the shear creativity of matter produces new things. While initially the body in the form of the brain impacts the mind, the mind can reciprocally react back on nature or the body. Higher stages, while more complex than lower levels, are still dependent on it.

Neopagan Marxism

Marxian materialists believe the world is composed primarily of matter and that mind is a late development in evolution. The materialist theory of mind has at least two basic assumptions:

• The mind is limited to humans and perhaps higher animals.
• The mind is somehow dependent on the physical substrate of the human brain.

Materialists usually draw the line where mind emerges with the arrival of a central nervous system. As dialectical materialists we understand the mind as an emergent property of matter. As with emergent evolutionists there can be more in the effect than there is in the cause. However, emergent evolutionists say that cosmic evolution can be divided into matter, life and mind. For us the levels are matter, life and society. Societies are what provide for the material conditions (along with the brain) for mind to emerge. For us the brain and the mind are distinct. You need a brain to have a mind but mind is a product of a new layer of nature, society. Without societies there are no minds.

What is My Claim?

We agree with pantheists and animists that nature has an internality far back in cosmic evolution. However, my claim is that pantheists’ claim about internality being composed of minds, spirits and consciousness is coming at internality at too high a level of complexity. Internality is present in more primitive forms such as experience, memory, irritability, circular feedback, metabolism, attraction-aversion and tension between community and individual and in holons. These existed long before consciousness, mental life or psyches emerged in evolution.

Why should you care? As materialists we are in no great rush to tack on consciousness, mentality and psyche into nature to make it respectable. Matter already has a respectability in the form of self-creation and self-maintenance long before mind consciousness or psyche existed.  We sympathize with pantheist views because they see nature as self-regulating and in no need of any extra-cosmic buttinskies. However, we reject their claim that mind goes all the way back or down to subatomic particles. As for animism, Marxist Neopagans feel sympathy that the animists claim every object has soul and intention, because it makes nature creative with purpose rather than being the passive creatures of an all-powerful God. However, we question the existence of souls or that rocks and rivers have intentions.

What is Pantheism?

What is the difference between saying “God is in everything” and “everything is God?” Since most every Christians will imagine God as bodiless, unworldly and spiritual, to say “God is in everything” seems to mean that even disguising body products such as phlegm or feces is somehow spiritual. But if you say everything is God, you are starting with nature as it is immediately, without any prettying up, including phlegm, feces, and decay just as they are materially and elevating it to the spiritual. This kind of God is simply the king of matter and not very noble at all. In pantheism God is identical with all that exists and no more. 

So pantheism is simply an ontological claim about the relationship between nature and God. Now there are two ways of dividing the pantheistic universe. One is to say pantheism is swallowed as a single whole, a kind of king of matter. The other is a kind of riot of pluralistic panpsychism where there are infinite individual centers of psyche-matter. This seems indistinguishable from animism. As David Skrbina writes in his book Panpsychism in the West all things, however defined, possess some mind-like, noetic quality. It says nothing specific about what the nature of what mind is. Neither does it insist on the specific proportionate relationship between matter and mind. It rejects drawing the line where mind begins. It argues for a theory of continuity non-emergence. There can be nothing in the effect that is not in the cause. This makes it both the opposite of both emergence and physicalism.

To many scientists of the early 20^th century, panpsychism was uncomfortably close to the recently discredited theory of vitalism. Virtually all contemporary naturalistic theories of mind are forms of emergentism. They argue that mind is a rare and unique phenomenon that arises under only highly specialized circumstances.

David Skrbina argues there are at least four reasons for studying the relevance of Panpsychism today:

• It offers resolutions to the mind-body problem that dualism and physicalism find intractable.
• It has important ethical consequences, specifically a compassion for nature that comes with ecological values.
• It brings into sharp relief both Descartes mind-body dualism and the physicalism of Hobbes.
• Panpsychism is the most under-analyzed philosophical position in Western philosophy. The last systematic study was performed hundred years ago.

Do We Need to Say Internal Life is Mind, Mentality, Spirituality and Conscious?

When we speak as pantheists what is inside of matter is claimed to be

• Mind
• Mental
• Spiritual
• Conscious
• Soul-like

As I stated in my claim, I think this is coming at internality at too high a level of complexity. This is called the pathetic fallacy. When hard scientists argued that all biological or social phenomenon were “nothing but” chemical or physical processes they were called reductionists. Conversely, when philosophers or sociologists claim that physical phenomenon are really about consciousness or mental phenomenon they commit the pathetic fallacy.

As dialectical materialists we say mind is a property of matter at a very high level of evolution. In fact, the mind is the property of the brain after the brain has been humanized. To claim that all of matter has mind ignores a long history of matter without mind. The same thing is true for consciousness. The word consciousness comes from the Greeks meaning “together knowledge”. Consciousness, at least self-reflective consciousness, is the product of human societies. Other animals may be aware, but since they don’t pool their knowledge, they are not self-conscious. Other animals have mental life where thoughts, feelings and intentions, much of mental life, is not conscious. Lastly, to say that matter is spiritual implies taking an otherworldly dimension into the bargain and one with laws that usually go beyond nature. If it didn’t, we would have no need to call anything spiritual.

Why Does Inanimate Nature Seem to Lack Internality

Skrbina says there are at least four reasons why inanimate objects appear devoid of mind: a) inactivity and inertness; b) lack of freedom and initiative; c) no clear distinction between parts and wholes; and d) lack of purpose. Process philosopher Hartshorne says mechanism and materialism assume that inanimate matter is; a) dead; b) blind; c) uncreative; and d) insentient.

Forms of Internality Without Mind, Consciousness, Mental Life or Soul

Panexperientialism

What is experience? As a result of the impact of external nature we are changed so that some adjustment has been made internally. This does not require consciousness, mental life or the existence of souls or spirits. For example, when I go out running in the morning the result is that physiologically I feel more lively and relaxed. It requires no consciousness or mental life to have that experience. Panexperientialism means all matter experiences. This term was coined by David Ray Griffin, deriving from Whitehead and Hartshorne.

Memory

Humans record experiences through morphological changes in the brain.

Ancient documents such as fossils, rocks and even planetary fragments can be dated with reasonable precision because of the permanent, cumulative record of all things acquired. William James says the whole sea and the whole tree are registers of what has happened to them. Bergson elaborated the philosophy of memory as the decisive factor in a graded transition from matter to mind. Bergson wrote in his first book, Matter and Memory in 1896, of a continuum from matter to life. As Skrbina points out, duration implies time, and in the realm of life this implies memory. Memory grows with the complexity of the organism. Humans have the most memory and memory dwindles as nature becomes more primitive. The most primitive matter has perception without memory. There are both novelty and stability in all aspects of nature. Stability is an aspect of memory.

Irritability

Even in the most primitive forms matter does not passively react in a completely predictable and mechanical way. They become irritable, twisting and turning in unpredictable ways to get away from the initial irritant. This needn’t involve any consciousness, mental life or purpose.

Circular feedback (Bateson)

Gregory Bateson was very aware of the importance of concepts of energy, feedback and information anticipating later development in chaos theory and nonlinear dynamics. Quoting Skrbina, Bateson was adamant that it was the circular feedback system itself that was important as an elementary cybernetic system and its messages. Cybernetic feedback systems pervade nature at all levels of organization from molecular to galactic, anywhere that parts intersect and persist. The exception for him are the fundamental atomic particles because they are without parts and lack the dynamic feedback interrelationships. More complicated systems are more worthy of being called mental systems. Interacting with parts is only a necessary condition of mind, not a sufficient condition. Chalmers agrees with Bateson and concludes that it is reasonable to assign experience an even consciousness to a simple feedback system like a thermostat.

Metabolism

Another characteristic of internal life without bringing up souls, minds or consciousness into the picture is the self-motion of organisms in their ability to learn; their ability to maintain themselves by feedback; repair themselves; elimination of waste; and self-replenishment through the search for resources.

Attraction-aversion (love and strife)

As far back as Empedocles there was a tension between attraction and aversion, or more poetically between love and strife. Hartshorne assessed that pure sympathy would destroy individuality by merging all into one. On the other hand, pure antipathy would not allow for any structure or knowledge at all. All of nature is driven by attraction and aversion. Chardin writes that the universe is driven by forces moving away from the center to the periphery (centrifugal forces stretching out) and centripetal forces moving from the periphery to the center.

Individual vs community

Beginning at the more complex end of mammalian levels of evolution, there is tension between individuals and communities as laid out in primate social life between individual and group selection. Of course, this carries through the entirety of social evolution.

Holons

As Koestler points out in his books The Ghost in the Machine and Janus, virtually every part of nature is both self-assertive in expressing relative autonomy and at the same time must participate in a larger system in which it is a part. Koestler claims this tension goes all the way back in nature. He calls this whole/parts holons.

The Place of Process Philosophers in Panpsychism

For one thing, process philosophy understands time as an ontological category.  It understands space, not as a container of matter but in a dialectical relationship with time on one hand, and matter on the other. As many of you know, the new physics has challenged mechanical descriptions of physical reality when we reach the subatomic level. Because human consciousness is involved in determining whether subatomic matter is a wave or a participle, this new physics created some fissures for process philosophy and panpsychism to nestle into them. The standard view of process philosophy after Whitehead is that atoms, molecules and cells are included among the sentient.

Leibniz, along with Whitehead, Hartshorne and Griffin deny consciousness to inanimate material objects but grant it cells and molecules. Hartshorne openly advocated for panpsychism and was the first western philosopher to extensively employ the term panpsychism. Hartshorne made some interesting distinctions between matter as an aggregate and matter as individuals.

Matter as Individuals vs Matter as an Aggregate

Contrary to popular understanding of animism, in process philosophy tables, rocks and houses do not have consciousness. This is because they are mechanical, predictable and display no unified action. They do not have experience and they have no minds. They are a collection of inorganic objects. On the contrary, from single-celled organisms up to humanity, they have a consciousness because they are individuals with an organic unity, even the atoms from quantum theory. Individuals have spontaneity and are unpredictable. They display unified action or purpose. Individuals have experience. They are like Koestler’s holons. They are a both a part of a larger system and a whole to a smaller system. All aggregates, even though composed of sentient atoms, molecules and cells are not in themselves sentient.

Hartshorne criticizes science for treating objects in nature only as aggregates, not as individuals. The problem that Hartshorne had to explain was why such things as rocks and tables, though composed individual monads, lost their individuality and became aggregates. Skrbina points out that Whitehead names four types of aggregates:

• non-living which is dominated by the average
• vegetable grade – coordinated individuality and the average
• animal grade aggregates which contain both individual organisms and aggregates such as herds
• human grade aggregates such as crowds of individuals

A living aggregate is clearly different from a non-living aggregate but there is no explanation as to how they are different. Skrbina claims that moving into the 21^st  century there are five varieties of panpsychism:

1. quantum mechanics – imitated by Haldane in the 1930s and elaborated by Bohm
2. information theory, Bateson and Chalmers
3. process philosophy – Whitehead, Hartshorne, Griffin
4. part-whole hierarchy – Cardano, Koestler, Wilber
5. nonlinear dynamics – Peirce and Skrbina

The Greeks Had the Right Idea: There is no Independent Psyche in Ancient Greece

In his book True to the Earth, Kadmus writes that in archaic Greece the psyche was not the ultimate organizing principle of the body. The psyche and the body are engaged in a complex partnership rather than a division between chaotic matter on the one hand (the body) and order on the other (psyche). To separate the psyche from the body is to treat the body as an object, which the psyche puts in motion. Kadmus writes that psyche should best be understood as a body within a body. He says what is really going on in nature is the transformation of bodies, rather than the transmigration of souls. This is the transformation from one process to another, whether it be into grains of wheat or waves on the sea.

All bodies live but saying they live does not mean all bodies and minds are self-reflexive consciousness unless we are talking about the most complex forms of evolution on this planet. To focus on the mind and self-consciousness as the foundation of life or natural existence is to engage in a specific kind of anthropomorphic projection backward in time when neither mind nor self-consciousness existed. Most living bodies do not have a psyche.

A focusing psyche in the body does not necessarily mean being conscious

Being aware is something we and our bodies act and do, rather than something that we have or are. The process of paying attention only gets turned into an abstract entity or a property with the development of writing which pushes us to turn verbs and action words into timeless nouns. After all, we act, speak and think only in moments of breakdown. Then we reflect in such a way as to become conscious of these things when there is a problem. To capture the high pagan view of the cosmos, we must resist the urge to turn the action of focusing on something into having awareness. Any time contemporary animism or panpsychism tries to bring in consciousness as the governing force of nature we have fallen into Anthropomorphism and commit the pathetic fallacy.

Conclusion

The article begins by describing nine ways of understanding the body-mind problem including philosophical dualism; epiphenomenalism; physicalism (eliminative materialism); idealism; the preestablished harmony; neutral monism; hylozoic monism; pantheism of Whitehead, Hartshorne and Griffin; and the emergent evolution. Lastly, I briefly include the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels because this is the philosophy of Neopagan Marxism. After brief descriptions of each I spend more time discussing pantheism, since this is a common philosophy of Neopagans.

The purpose of this article is to say that as Neopagan Marxists with an orientation towards process philosophy, we don’t need to attribute mind, consciousness, souls, or mental life into the cosmos from the beginning in order to make an immanent nature self-maintaining and self-creative. We say that internality in nature is present all the way back in nature in pan experience: in memory; irritability; circular feedback; metabolism; attraction-aversion; tension between community and individual; and in holons. Minds, souls and spirits, whether pagans believe in them or not, are emergent properties of human beings at a very high level of evolutionary complexity.

• First published in Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Orientation

How long has capitalism existed? Has it always been with us all the way back to tribal societies or is it a product of the modern age? Is there any pattern to its evolution? Is it cyclic,  spiral-like  or random? What is the nature of capitalist crises? Why does capitalism grow flush in certain parts of the world, die out in others and yet seemingly reignite itself in another part of the world? What can world-systems theory tell us about the current battle between the Anglo-American empire and the multipolarists of China, Russia and Iran?

What is capitalism?

Capitalism is a historical economic system that arose in Europe in the 15^th century.  Over a 600-year period its leading hegemons were first the Italian city-states of Genoa and Venice. In the 17^th century these city-states were superseded by the Netherlands. The British overtook the Dutch in the 18^th century and the United States crowded out the British well before World War I. Capitalism is characterized by a law-enforced right of private property (as opposed to state or community ownership) in the areas of:

• raw materials (land)
• means of production (tools and methods of harnessing energy)
• labor (who uses the tools and the methods of harnessing energy to work on raw materials)
• commodities (finished products and services)
• money which is transformed into capital – stocks, bonds and derivatives
• power settings in which decisions about the economy are made (political settings). These include The National Association of Manufacturers and The Business Round Table. Internationally the Council of Foreign Relations, the World Economic Forum and the G7 are examples.

The purpose of capitalism is to make a profit which is unlimited in scope, protected by law, and if necessary, by the military. According to world-systems theorist Immanuel Wallerstein capitalists derive their profits by two processes:

• broadening its reach, colonizing the periphery counties for its natural resources, inducing it to produce a single cash crop while paying wages far below wages of the workers in the core countries.
• deepening its reach into core countries through increased commodification of previously uncommodified land and labor, automation, withdrawal of investment in military and finance capital

Trends in capitalism

Trends within capitalism over a 600-year period include:

• a tendency towards a concentration of capital
• a tendency to expand around the globe through transnational corporations
• a movement from scattered territories to larger territorial control
• phases in investing in merchant, agricultural (slavery), industrial, military and finance capital which become cycles
• these become Kondratieff waves of expansion and contraction which occur every 55 years.
• the end of a cycle is characterized by bifurcation points, crisis which occur at shorter and shorter intervals
• crises points fuel increasing anti-systemic opposition
• capitalist crises which accumulate to produce both the possibility of abundance, shorter work week and an accumulation of crisis of unresolved problems of previous cycles including ecological devastation
• greater variety of resources

Where are we headed?

I begin my article by comparing world-systems theory to modernization theory across seven categories.  Next, I compare the characteristics of the three zones in world-systems theory – core, periphery and semi-periphery. While we can imagine capitalism over a 600-year period as a movie, we also want to take “snapshots” of the world-system on four separate occasions. Probably the most important part of the article is in describing Giovanni Arrighi’s cycles and spirals of capitalism over the last 600 years up to the close of the 20^th century. In the last section in the piece I identify all the revolutionary changes that are happening to the 21^st century world-system. The battle between the Anglo-American empire and the multipolarists will be framed from a world-systems perspective.

What is World-systems Theory?

In the 1950s, political science and international relations was dominated by an anti-communist “modernization theory”. In the 1960s the conservativism of modernization theory was first challenged by something called “dependency theory” led by Andre Gunder Frank and later by the “world-systems theory” of Immanuel Wallerstein. World-system theories were socialist but they were critical of the state socialism of Russia, China and Cuba. They argued that those countries were state capitalist. They strove to apply Marx’s theory of capitalism to the whole world as opposed to just single nation states as many Marx did. They challenged Lenin’s theory of imperialism as the last stage of capitalism as being too linear. In their perspective, imperialism is part of the end of each of the four cycles and was common for the Italians, the Dutch, the English and now the Yankees.

World-systems theory was criticized by more traditional Marxists like Robert Brenner because he felt they did not emphasize enough the class struggle within nation states. World-systems theory seemed to be more interested in the political economy of the dynamics of three zones (core countries, peripheral countries and the semi-peripheral countries) rather than the class struggle within each zone.  I’ll discuss these zones in detail shortly.

Modernization Theory vs World-systems theory

Are nation-states primarily independent or interdependent?

For modernization theory, nation states are independent and internally driven. The responsibility for their past, present and future direction is strictly determined by their foreign policy. In world-systems theory, nation-states are subordinate to an international system of capitalism and have only relative control over their foreign policy.

Therefore, modernization theorists would look at poor countries in the world (what world-systems theory might call the periphery) and say their poverty was due to a failure to build modern institutions such as science or capitalism. They are dismissed as irrational tribalists marred by superstition. World-systems theorists would say countries on the world periphery are poor because they have been colonized and exploited by the core countries. Because nation-states are understood to be autonomous, capitalists are thought to be loyal patriotic servants of their nation-states. For world-systems theorists, capitalists are the most unpatriotic class of all. They are committed to making profits anywhere in the world. They will feign patriotism when they need foot soldiers to fight wars against other capitalist countries but otherwise they have no loyalties.

What is the relationship between politics and economics?

For modernization theorists’, politics and economics are separate. As you can well see, throughout the 1950s and even after modernization theory was criticized in the 1960s in political science classes, economics was never a serious part of a discussion. It would be like saying political meetings in Congress are strictly determined by the political ideologies of liberalism or conservatism. Money has no part in it. At the same time, the teachers of economics courses act like capitalist economics has no political dimension. This would be like saying the economic decisions of transnational corporations would not be influenced by political turmoil or a revolution in a periphery country in which they had large investments. Speaking internationally, for modernization theory, all wars are about political ideology.

For world-systems theorists, there is only political economy. All economics is political and all political acts have economic aspects to it. For world-systems theory, wars have mostly to do with battles over natural resources. They also can be political but when a socialist country gains power in a war the trade relations become more unfavorable for capitalists.

How is social evolution understood?

Modernization theories imagine social evolution as progress. They say there is something inherently progressive about Western societies that older civilizations such as China and India lack. The wealth produced by capitalist societies is distributed somewhat unevenly because some people work harder than others. All roads in social evolution lead to the West with the pinnacle being Western Europe and the United States. Progress is linear, and modernization theory imagines that tribal societies are just dying to be modernized, blaming themselves for their situation. Modernization theory fails to account for complex societies’ disintegration and going backward (Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies) or Jared Diamond (Why Societies Collapse). Even when socialist societies are industrialized they are not considered modern because state control over the economy and one-party rule lack democracy.

World-systems theory argue that progress in the history of human society has been uneven. They are willing to admit that the egalitarian nature of hunter-gatherers is admirable. They are well aware that an increase in the productive forces through technology, in fact, leads to more work for the lower classes rather than less. While world-systems theory acknowledges the benefits of science and some of the wealth produced by capitalism, it also points out the exploitation and misery it produces for working-class people as a result of class stratification.

Rate and type of change

Generally speaking, modernization theory understands the rate of social change to be gradual, evolutionary and relatively harmonious across social classes. For world-systems theory, like all Marxist theories, political and economic change is sudden, discontinuous, filled with conflict and driven by class struggle. For modernization theory instabilities are temporary and part of “business cycles” which settle back down into equilibrium and homeostasis. For world system theory, capitalist crisis is no static equilibrium model. Capitalism today will turn into a terminal crisis from which it will not recover. Whether it is the tendency of the rate or profit to fall, profit squeeze theory or under-consumption theory, the days of capitalism are numbered.

While for modernization theory all roads start and end in Western Europe and the United States, for world-systems theorists, modernization may have begun in Europe, but it by no means is it likely to stay there. As we can see today, the world-system is shifting operations to China, the new center of the world-economy.

Attitudes towards socialism

As I mentioned before, modernization theorists are anti-communist. The only socialism for modernization theorists is Stalinism. Even when socialist societies industrialize, modernization theorists deny they are a modern system, because they lack bourgeois rights and a two-party system. They see socialist societies as some kind of throwback to Karl Wittfogel’s Orientation Despotism. While world-systems theorists essentially call themselves socialist, they criticize Stalinism as state capitalist, and Cuba and China as bureaucratic states. They look more favorably to Nordic evolutionary socialism, especially Sweden in the 20^th century up to around 1980.

Modernization theory understands capitalism and socialism as two separate systems. It imagines the rebellions of the 1960s as rebellions against socialist regimentation. It has been difficult for them to explain why an entire generation would rebel against the fleshpots of capitalist modernization in Western Europe and the United States. On the other hand, world-systems theorists understand that the existing socialist countries, including the state socialist countries, are part of a broad anti-systemic movement against capitalism which includes the various Leninist parties, social democrats and anarchists.

For modernization theorists’ socialism has been tried and failed. Case closed. They would support Fukuyama’s claim that after the fall of the Soviet Union, history is over and capitalism has won. “Not so fast” say world-systems theorists. Capitalism is 500 years old and has only achieved economic and political dominance in the 19^th century. Socialism is about 170 years old. It is too soon to tell whether socialism is a realistic alternative.

Place and misplace of foreign aid

For modernization theorists aid to poor or peripheral countries may be driven by a combination of self-interest at worst, and at best creating win-win situations. Foreign aid is given in the hopes that with the help of the West poor countries will industrialize, shed their backward ways and become competitive partners. For world- systems theorists the relation between core and peripheral countries is not neutral but imperialistic. Rich countries exploit poor countries for their land and labor and turn them into one crop-producing colonies. As Andre Gunder Frank quipped, the core countries underdeveloped the peripheral countries. Furthermore, world capitalist banks like the World Bank or the IMF do not give loans that will enable peripheral countries to build scientific institutions along with engineers. One reason is because scientists and engineers may discover new resources that might undermine the resources of core countries such as oil. This is one reason why fundamentalist religious institutions always seem to grow in peripheral countries because they are of no threat to capitalism. The CIA always finds money for them.

Theoreticians

As I’ve said, modernization theorists were most prevalent in the 1950s. They included Walt Rostow and Lucian Pye. Daniel Lerner specialized in telling the story of how tribal societies got on the road to modernization. Samuel Huntington is more contemporary with works like The Clash of Civilizations along with Francis Fukuyama, with his book The End of History.

Early world-systems theorists were Oliver Cox who looked at race and caste from an international perspective. Immanuel Wallerstein provided a foundation for world-systems theories, drawing on the work of Fernand Braudel. Christopher Chase-Dunn and Tom Hall extended a world-systems perspective all the way back to tribal societies. Giovanni Arrighi took a deep look at the history of capitalism (to be covered shortly) and Samir Amin has been a kind of watchdog always trying to keep world-systems theory from being too Eurocentric. Beverly Silver made a study of workers movements from a world-systems perspective. Lastly Christopher Chase Dunn and Terry Boswell located the history of workers’ movements over a 600-year period of capitalism, not as isolated in nation-states (as traditional Marxists have done) but as part of the dark side of the cycles and spirals of capitalism.

Characteristics of the Three Zones

In world-systems theory, there are three regions of the world — the core, the periphery and the semi periphery. In the 20^th century the core countries were the wealthy countries of Yankeedom, Western Europe and Japan. The Scandinavian countries are cases of successful state-capitalism. Most of the periphery countries were the heavily colonialized states of Africa. In the semi-periphery were Russia, China, Eastern Europe, most of Latin America and Southeast Asia.

Economics and politics

Contrary to what Marx predicted, there are no countries in the core of the world- system that are socialist. In the semi-periphery there has arisen both capitalist and state socialist societies. Most of the periphery countries are operating with a combination of tribal or state redistributive system combined with exploited low wage workers at the beck-and-call of imperialists in the core.  In terms of political power, core countries have developed their own bourgeois representative systems without any political pressure outside the core. Peripheral countries have the least political power. Many of the core countries have installed dictatorships there in the hopes of controlling peripheral economies. Home-grown leaders of peripheral countries are often anti-imperialist revolutionaries agitating to overthrow imperialism in their country.

Countries in the semi-periphery have a moderate degree of autonomous political power but their elections are closely watched by the deep state in core societies because they have more technological self-rule and could get out of control. In state socialist countries, political power is highly concentrated at the top. Socialist societies cannot afford to have many political parties. Those smaller parties are subject to manipulation by the deep state within core countries which works to overthrow socialism. Because peripheral countries have been exploited by imperialism they are poor. World capitalist banks offer loans at interest rates so high that it is rare for peripheral countries to get out of debt. The loans received from these banks are only for raw materials and for cash crop agriculture. No loans are made for education or building infrastructures.

Energy bases, commodities and wages

The energy bases of core countries are electronic-industrial. The semi-periphery countries are industrial-agricultural while in the periphery they are mostly agricultural or horticulture in the sub-Sahara Africa. The technology in the core countries draws on inanimate sources of energy and machine-based. In the periphery, work is labor intensive using mostly animal and wind power. In the semi-periphery capitalists implement hand-me-down machines from core countries. As might be expected, wages are highest in core countries because unions have been institutionalized. In the periphery, because there is very little industry, there are no unions and it is here where wages are lowest. Typically, workers might work part-time in industry, also working in garment industry, as water carriers, day laborers with some cash crop planting. In the semi-periphery there is some unionization and in state-socialist societies wages might be good.

Commodities and economic policy: free trade vs protective tariffs

Because of their colonial relations with the periphery core counties import raw materials cheaply and export manufactured goods, which are more expensive. In peripheral countries, they export raw materials, mostly cash crops and import goods from the West at higher prices, keeping them in a dependent relationship.

The economic policy of the core countries is “free trade” which, of course, is not free but gives them a license to go wherever they want, exploiting land and labor where there is little or no resistance. Countries in the semi-periphery, when driven by their population or the vision of their leaders, may adopt protective tariffs in the hopes of protecting the growth of their home industries. On the periphery, the economic policy is forced free trade with colonialists. Often one of the major efforts in peripheral liberation movements is to elect leaders who follow protective tariffs to attempt to build up home industries. Semi-periphery countries are somewhat dependent on core countries but they in turn also exploit the periphery to a less extent. These semi-periphery countries use their surplus to invest more in their domestic economy. They export peripheral-like goods to the core and export core goods to the periphery.

Class, race, ethnic and regional conflicts

For most of the 20^th century in the core countries the conflicts between groups were class conflicts and in the United States, race conflicts. However, regional conflicts still smolder in Yankeedom between North and South. In Europe regional loyalties smolder in Spain, Northern Ireland, Belgium among others. The semi-periphery has similar class and regional problems. The periphery is torn apart between tribal loyalties and loyalties to the newly formed states which were once part of national liberation movements.

Role of the military

Lastly, we turn to the role of the military. After two world wars over colonies, core states have agreed not to attack each other and the military is rarely involved in its domestic politics. The military of core countries is mostly employed in attempting to control the political life in the semi-periphery and the periphery. The military in semi-periphery countries is more volatile because core countries are concerned about the domestic policies there since these countries have the resource base – the science and engineers – to undermine the resource base of the core. The military in the semi-periphery gets involved, either as right-wing dictators or to bring in a left-wing military leader such as Hugo Chavez. The most direct military involvement is in the periphery because colonialists want to maintain control of the cheap land and labor they exploit. The military also tries to impose order in clashes within the domestic population between tribes, ethnic groups and state loyalists.

Snapshots of the History of the World-system

In his book An Introduction to the World-system perspective, Thomas Shannon introduces four “snapshots” (maps) of the world-system:

• world-system from 1450-1620 (merchant capital)
• world-system in 1763 (agricultural, slave capitalism)
• world-system in 1900 (industrialization)
• the contemporary world system in 20^th century (finance capital, electronics)

What might be confusing is that the world-system, though it has the “world’ in it, does not mean it is a global society. For most of the history of world-system, the core, periphery and semi periphery only covered part of the globe. The fact is in the world system of 1450-1620 most of the world system was concentrated in Europe – Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, France and England. The periphery consisted of the Scandinavian countries and central and South America. The United States was not even in the world-system while Russia, China and India were part of agricultural empires.

In the 1763 snapshot, the core countries are Great Britain and  France, with the Netherlands, Spain and Portugal slipping into minor core status. The semi-periphery then consisted of the North Italian city-states and Prussia. Thanks to colonialization by the British, the United States and West Africa were now on the periphery of the world system. Poland and Russia were now in the periphery. China and India were still outside the world system.

By 1900 Great Britain and France remained as core countries but they were now joined by late developing Germany and the United States.  By 1900 most of the globe was now in the world-system, with Russia moving to the semi-periphery and China now on the periphery. This was the age of colonialism as all of Africa, China and South America were on the world capitalist periphery.

By the 20^th century the world-system was rocked by two world wars which hollowed out Europe and reduced them to minor core status. The rise of Japan in the late 19^th century and early 20^th century catapulted it into core status. The first three quarters of the 20^th century were the time of Yankeedom. The 20^th century saw the emergence of the first socialist states in Russia, China and Cuba. Russia maintained its semi-peripheral status while Cuba and China continued to be poor and in the periphery of the world-system.

Capitalist Cycles and Their Leading Hegemons

In 1994 Giovanni Arrighi wrote a great book with a bad title, The Long 20^th Century.

The heart of the book is the tracing of the history of capitalism through four cycles. Instead of looking at capitalism as a linear line moving from merchant capitalism to agricultural capitalism, to industrial, to finance capitalism and imperialism, Arrighi analyzed capitalism as a series of four cycles which played themselves out through leading hegemons throughout Europe. Through each cycle there were mercantile, agricultural, industrial and financial phases, but they weren’t all of the same weight.

Italian city-states

For example, the first place the cycles occurred were in the city-states of Genoa and Venice between 1450 and 1640. They made profits based on merchant capital through trading. Being city states, they didn’t make much profit on agriculture and what industry existed was small. However, when their profits were made on finance and wars, that was the end of their power. As we shall see throughout all hegemon rulers, when profits are made on war and finance they are on their way out.

Dutch sea trade

After the Italian wars and the discovery of new trade routes West, the Italian city-states lost their core status. Dutch sea power arose in the 17^th century. Again, the Dutch profits were based on merchant trade but trade on a much larger scale than the Italians. They were led by East Indian and West Indian monopoly companies. There were at least five reasons the Dutch superseded Genoa and Venice.

• scale of operation – the Dutch had greater commercial and financial networks
• financial base of the Dutch monopoly companies are less vulnerable to competing trade countries
• Dutch interest clashed more dramatically with central authorities of medieval world. This drove them to be more independent from religion
• Dutch war-making was superior
• the Dutch had greater state-making capacity

The end of the line for the Dutch was also when money houses became a greater source of profit than trade. Dutch hegemony ended in wars with the English beginning in 1781. England was also a great sea power at this time and were also better colonizers than the Dutch.

The sun never sets on the British empire

The secret to British hegemony in the 19^th century was the industrial revolution. Here profits were made rebuilding cities with railroads and textile factories. While Britain made profits on trade (merchant capital), while it derived profits from cash crops and slavery (agricultural capital), what made it distinct was the industrial revolution and the harnessing of coal and steam. For Britain the end came towards the end of the 19^th century when it shifted its wealth from industry to finance, The British empire was with the wars over colonies with Germany, Italy and Japan.

The American century 1870-1970

The United States made profits off its sea power and its planters made profits on agricultural slavery working with the British. But its greatest profits derived from industry. By the second half of the 19^th century the United States became an industrial powerhouse, competing directly with the British. Besides coal, the oil Barons made a fortune on the railroads in this ascendent phase of capitalism. In the two world wars that followed, the United States became the only core country standing. After World War II it was the sole core power. Between 1948-1970 it peaked.

However, in the 19^th and 20^th centuries capitalist countries were racked by depressions in 1837, 1873 and 1896 and then the Great Depression of 1929-1939. Capitalists in the United States noticed that it was investment in military arms that got the US capitalist economy out of the depression more than Roosevelt’s programs. After World War II, the defense industry became an ongoing investment even in peace-time. Then it began to sell arms around the world to fight communism.

Lastly, investing in finance capital – stocks, bonds and derivatives – gave quicker turn-around profits than investing in industry. Once Japan and Germany had recovered from World War II, the United States faced real competition. Instead of investing in infrastructures, it invested in finance capital. Instead of investing in its workers, it pulled industries out of the United States and relocated in peripheral countries where land and labor were cheap. This was the beginning of the end. So began a 50-year decline.

Trends in the History of Capitalism

From investing in the physical economy to investment in finance

In describing these trends as a whole, Arrighi takes some liberties with Marx’s C-M-C; M-C-M formula. He says that in the ascendant phase of capitalism the M-C moment of capitalism is pronounced. That means that money is invested in commodities, trade, production and expansion. Money is invested in solid material. When a hegemon’s days are numbered C-M commodities are invested in money, the capitalist economy is contracting and capital is invested in finance capital, profits made on stocks and bonds can easily be moved around (liquidity).

Shortening of cycles

The four cycles Arrighi analyzes are not evenly distributed in time across the hegemons. The pace of rise and fall speeds up. The rise and fall of the Italian city-states was 220 years; the United Dutch provinces lasted 180 years; the British heyday lasted 130 years and the United States 100 years from 1873-1973. Meanwhile the cycles do not just end and resume again without accumulating consequences.

Some twentieth century trends

• artificial intelligence which has the potential to shorten the work week
• the opportunity to live longer – thanks to science
• the chance to colonize space
• an increase in rebellion over the centuries including the rise of socialism in the second half of the 19^th century among workers and peasants
• the impact of ecology with increasing pollution and severe weather
• the deterioration of health due to genetically modified foods and pharmaceutical drugs.

Revolution in the World-system in the 21^st Century

Rise of an alliance between semi-periphery countries

When the Soviet Union collapsed around 1990 it looked as if, despite its declining power, Yankeedom would continue to be the hegemon into the 21^st century. But a funny thing happened in the first two decades of the 20^th century. One was the rise of nationalism in Russia under Putin. The other was the emergence of a powerhouse economy in China. This was predicted  by Arrighi in his later book Adam Smith in Beijing and Andre Gunder Frank’s book ReORIENT.

From a world-systems perspective, the rise of a semi-peripheral country like China is no surprise, as world-systems theory has always argued that the semi-periphery countries have the most revolutionary potential. This is because they are wealthy enough to support scientists and engineers who potentially can produce an economic policy separate from the core countries. What seems unprecedented is the alliance of two semi-peripheral countries (Russia and China) with a deep alliance which cuts across military and economic cooperation.

In fact, the rise of BRICS as a challenge to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund is noteworthy because virtually every country in BRICS is a semi-peripheral country. The multipolar world is composed of semi-peripheral countries unified by the New Silk Road. Furthermore, if China continues to grow the way it has been, in the next twenty years it will become the first core country since the beginnings of capitalism not located in the West. Secondly, under the leadership of the Communist Party and state-owned enterprises, China clearly has a socialist end in mind. It would be the first time a core country in the world-system was socialist. Third, China has not pressured Russia, Iran or any country in the multipolar orbit to become socialist. So whatever political and economic tensions might develop in the multipolar world, it is not likely to be the old capitalism vs socialism battle.

The United States and Europe

In the new multipolar world-system, the United States will sink to the status of a semi-peripheral country because its capitalists will not invest in rebuilding its abandoned infrastructure. It is likely to live on as a home of finance capitalists giving loans to other decimated capitalists countries or in supplying military arms to countries which have not joined in the multipolar world. These lost countries could be in South or Central America or in Middle Eastern countries which are not part of the Belt Road initiative.

Europe has been vassal of the United States for 80 years. Up until the last couple of years, Germany was the only European country which was an industrial powerhouse. But this has changed since the US has insisted that Europe abide by its sanctions of Russia. There is not a single European county with the exception of Hungary that has stood up to the United States. As the United States continues its decent from core to semi-periphery, Europe will follow with England being the weakest country. Once it slowly dawns on the European rulers that Yankeedom will not save them, they may attempt to make back-room deals with Russia and China in terms of natural gas and other sources of energy. It might be that in the next 50 years the old European core countries may regain their balance and occupy a semi-peripheral status in the new multipolar system.

The Middle East and South America

To the extent that China can diplomatically integrate Saudi Arabia and Iran and the Middle Eastern countries with oil, they will remain in the semi-periphery of the world’s new multipolar system. Expect Israel to degenerate as Mordor will be less able to help them and they will be surrounded by hostile Arab states with scores to settle. In South America Argentina and Chile will join Brazil in the semi-periphery. Venezuela will finally be spared from Mordor’s intervention and be protected by China as a fellow socialist society.

Global South

The refusal of African states to do the bidding of Mordor against Russia speaks volumes for the end of their hopes to ever get a fair deal from the United States or its financial institutions. There has been an openness to project proposals from China and Russia for building railroads and schools. Some African states like Nigeria or Sudan might, over the course of a generation, build their countries up to a semi-periphery status the way Libya was when Gaddafi was in power.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Part I Who are Some Western Supporters of Multipolarists?

Orientation

Most of us realize there is a major tectonic shift in the world economy from West to East. The multipolar nations are basing their economies on investing in developing the productive forces of science and technology and to better human life. The Belt and Road Initiative is a good example. The West, on the other hand, has made its profits on finance capital and military capitalism. The US defense industry arms the whole world. This economy is in steep decline.

In addition, politically in Mordor (The United States), there is no New Deal liberal party, let alone any significant socialist party. The political ideology of the Anglo-American Empire is centrism. If the forces of The Enlightenment are the West – New Deal liberals and socialists – and wanted to join the movement towards a multipolar world what would its guiding principles look like? Where on the political spectrum would it locate itself?

Since Lyndon LaRouche is someone instrumental in developing an economic policy for multipolarists Russia and India, he might have something to teach the West. To become Western multipolarists, to become Promethean city builders, we must recognize that finance and military capitalists are our enemy. At the same time, we must realize that finance capitalists of the Anglo-American Empire combined with the CIA have shaped a fake opposition to itself in the New Left. Among other things, this article will expose the ways the New Left has served finance capital and the Rockefellers.

My claims for this two-part article are that:

1. In order to join with Multipolarists of the East, forces to the left of the Democratic Party must reorganize their worldview along the lines of The Enlightenment and become city-builders.
2. Lyndon LaRouche and some of the sympathetic organizations such as Rising Tide Foundation are good representations of what a multipolar policy world would look like in the West
3. The political philosophy of the Anglo-American Empire and finance capitalism is centrism and it must be opposed.
4. The forces of Promethean City Builders must dispense with the linear political spectrum and create a new political spectrum which expresses its hopes.
5. For the past 70 years, the anti-communist forces of the Anglo-American empire have shaped a fake opposition, the romantic New Left to oppose the continuation and development of the Enlightenment, the American system and a communist movement.

Part I of this article deals with the first two claims and Part II addresses the last three.

The Western World is Cracking Up

Internationally

If your analytical vision penetrates beyond the surface – the sanctions, the build-up of military bases and the vast financial profits made – the Anglo-American empire is fracturing. Its finance capitalists have nothing to offer the world that can compete with China’s Belt and Road Initiative. It promises the world nothing but weapons to fight wars. As China’s diplomats mediate between Iran and Saudi Arabia, Mordor’splans for dividing West Asia are fracturing. As more and more countries line up to join BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa’s the alternative to the IMF), and the World Bank, Mordor’s allies dwindle. Meanwhile its European “coalition of the willing”, vassals for 80 years, are starting to stir. While some rulers quietly accept the leadership of Mordor, other countries, formerly the heart of the almost defunct European Union, are poking their heads above ground – as in France’s Macron statement in Beijing – and making noises about European autonomy. However, these rulers are also being pushed by the anti-war and anti-NATO elements on both left and right to stop wasting their resources on Ukraine.

Domestically

As Yankeedom engages in several wars at once internationally, domestically it is falling apart. The federal state stands helpless as regions of the country face ecological disasters and extreme cold, heat and tornadoes. Its trains cannot stay on the tracks and its roads and bridges rot from neglect. In a recent survey released by the US army, recruiters say most eligible young men and women cannot pass the physical because they are either overweight or have drug problems. The public education system is so beleaguered that a high school degree is no longer required to teach high school. Rather than invest in the physical or human infrastructures, finance capitalists cannibalize those infrastructures while they make profits on derivatives and stock options which produce no real social goods. As many of you know, there is none better than political economist Michael Hudson at pointing this out. A recent survey indicated that half the American population thinks there will be a civil war and/or secession in two years.

Tectonic Plates Shift Eastward

Like tectonic shifts, the real-world economy is shifting eastward towards China, Russia, Iran and to a lesser extent, India. South American counties are lining up to join the multipolar world, including Argentina and Brazil. In Africa, leaders are trading with the Chinese who are building railroads. Recently Russia has forgiven billions of dollars in debt. Even Mexico, along with 30 other countries, right under the nose of Mordor has applied to BRICS. What are the differences between the Anglo -American empire and the multipolar world of the East? See my table below:

Table A  The international World Divide

The Place of Lyndon LaRouche in the Multipolar World

Tribute to LaRouche by Russian economist Sergei Glazyev

In a recent article, the major Russian economist Sergei Glazyev sent a message of appreciation to the Schiller Institute on what would have been the 100th birthday of Lyndon LaRouche. LaRouche anticipated a disastrous end if finance capital policies continued. Further, he helped Russia to turn around after it was decimated by the neoliberal policies of Boris Yeltsin. I am emphasizing in the quotes below what I think is most important about Glazyev’s tribute:

Already 30 years ago, and perhaps even earlier, Lyndon LaRouche drew attention to the fact that the inflation of financial bubbles, including derivatives bubbles, and the creation of financial pyramid schemes would inevitably bring about the collapse of the world financial system. And he proposed to adopt timely measures to avert that collapse.

Back then he proposed that, instead of pumping up financial bubbles, the world reserve currency emitter-countries, together with their partners and other countries, should invest in building global infrastructure, which would reduce the cost of trade, increase the efficiency of international economic ties, and, overall, contribute to raising connectivity worldwide. [This is precisely China’s and Russia’s policy.] So, he viewed the process of globalization as a process of expanding cooperation among countries, rather than attempts by some countries to exploit others.

As for the liberal globalization that today is leading to the collapse of the world financial system, LaRouche criticized it. He proposed a different model of globalization, based on the principles of physical economy in The Truth of Man and Nature. In particular, the famous project, which he and his wife, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, put forward for international discussion – the so-called Eurasian Land Bridge. This is a splendid and interesting project, which now, after many years, has begun to be implemented through the Chinese Belt and Road initiative, which we support through linking it with the Eurasian Economic Union.

LaRouche’s voice was heard very well. We remember him. In practically all the major countries in the world today that are developing successfully – above all India and China – there are partisans of LaRouche. They have used his thoughts and ideas for creating economic miracles. It is the principles of Physical Economy championed by LaRouche that today underlie the Chinese economic miracles and are there in the foundations of India’s economic development policy. The supporters of LaRouche in those countries exist in a fruitful, very positive and constructive influence on economic policy-shaping in these leading nations of the new world economic paradigm.

LaRouche is hard to pigeonhole politically (stopped 6-7-23)

I have been around leftist movements for over 50 years. During that time, I have watched the socialist left call LaRouche a paranoid fascist and his organization a cult. It has never been easy to think or speak about him in a dialectical manner not only because the anticommunist left demonizes him, but because his followers are often uncritical of him, at least in public. Trying to find a biography of him that is objective is about as easy as looking for an objective biography of the occultist, Gurdjieff. The choices seem to be either as a cynic or true believer. Yet today some of those who have been influenced by LaRouche such as Rising Tide Foundation, have some valuable things to say. As I mentioned, LaRouche’s ideas connect nicely with the new international political configuration that is happening of creating a multipolar world. Lastly, his influence is felt in the left-right strategic alliances that are occurring in Germany and just beginning in the United States. (In the Antiwar rally 2/19/23 and in friendly debates among LaRoucheans, communists and right libertarians.)

Shifts, turns and reversals

Some of you know that LaRouche started out as a Marxist. Under the pen name of Lyn Marcus, he wrote an extraordinary book called Dialectical Economics, which I read twice and on which I took extensive notes. Since I was never an insider of the LaRouche movement, I am unable to track the changes in his political direction in depth in the early 1980s. I know he abandoned Marxism and developed what seemed to me an idealist theory of history, championing Plato. In the 1980s and 1990s he sometimes aligned himself with right-wing movements although it is difficult to see how his own economic system was, as is claimed by leftists, to be fascist.

Defender of western civilization and the Enlightenment

Why do the anarchists and social democrats hate LaRouche? First because he was an unapologetic defender of Western civilization while much of the left became skeptical of these values. Secondly, LaRouche believed that the pattern of social evolution can be claimed to have been progress at a time when the anarchists were championing hunter and gathering societies. Thirdly, the LaRouche movement stood for The Enlightenment against the Romanticism of the New left. He was opposed to most everything the New Left stood for – identity politics, experimental sex, rock music, zero growth and Malthusian population control. With some qualifications, I agree with his criticisms.

Developing the productive forces and moving from necessity to freedom

What LaRouche and his followers are for in at least one aspect is Marxism. They want to develop the productive forces. They strive for a life which shrinks the relationship between freedom and necessity. This means less necessary work and more time for creative thinking and implementation on the productive technologies, including nuclear power. For them, in Marxist terms, the productive forces are industrial capital. The enemy of industrial capitalism is finance capital or slave capitalism which is based on the premise of people learning to do with less (austerity).

Defending the nation-state

Today Laroucheans align themselves the forces of the nation-state building against the forces of globalization, which is supranationalism on the one hand and subnational regionalism on the other. Liberal globalism subordinates nation-states to the free trade dogma of the Anglo-American empire. Any nation-state that elects a leader who wants to develop an autonomous national economic policy will automatically be labelled a tyrannical strong man, and “abuser of human rights”, the new hobby-horse defamatory claim.

Criticisms of LaRouche from a Marxist perspective

Historical struggle is presented as a dualistic process

When LaRouche talks about history, he refers to two forces, the British system and the American system. It seems that the British empire is painted as negative all the way down the line, including assassinations and horrible international machinations to control the world. It would be more dialectical if there were some productive activities the British did to show complexity. That doesn’t mean the British Empire is not guilty of atrocities. It’s also a matter of knowledge that all ruling classes are guilty of this, not just the British. On the other hand, those who support the American system are presented as having no faults. This kind of extreme dualism is one of the reasons I lost interest in LaRouche over the years.

There doesn’t seem to be room for unintended consequences in history

History is presented as if there are no untended consequences. I have not found instances where the clashes between of industrial and finance capital ever produces  any historical results which were not planned. History seems to be the result of the victory of either of these two forces. There is nothing left over or in between. There are no messes. I do not find any instances in which the clash of these two forces resulted in circumstances that were not planned by either. I don’t think either of the protagonists are so powerful that either’s victor simply imposed their will on history. Marx said  humans make history but not as they pleased.

Where is the working class?

LaRouche is very good at locating the class struggles within the ruling classes in both Britain and the United States. However, there have been well over two hundred years of working class struggles in the US between workers and capitalists in cities and farmers and bankers in rural areas. As a Marxist I believe the working class produces most of the wealth of society.  Not mentioning the working class leaves out the overwhelming majority of the population. LaRouche’s analysis would be much richer if the horizontal struggle between the major political actors at the top (American system and British system) were joined by a vertical depiction of the relationship between these elites and the working classes of each country.

How does the existence of almost 200 years of the socialist movement fit into the evolution of the American system?

By roughly the 1870s, socialism and its leaders were serious competitors against both the English supporters of the South and the industrial capitalists of the North. This movement involved thousands of people, yet there is no mention of them. There is no stance taken for or against Marx or Engels or any of their American followers. This is a glaring historical omission.

Is there a capitalist system?

It is very clear that LaRouche advocated for industrial capitalism which means the real economy over finance capitalism. But this contrast is not rooted in the history of capitalism. Marx described how capitalism evolved from barter to the first money forms to the famous emergence money being invested in commodities in order to make more money. LaRouche seems to be arguing for a reversal of the historical movement of capitalism from industrial to financial and then back to industrial. But how would that process be rooted in the already existing history of capitalism in social evolution?  A renaissance in the flowering of the real economy seems to be the result of volunteerism on the part of LaRouche and his followers. It is not grounded in the history of capitalism.

Is there a crisis in capitalism?

Furthermore, there doesn’t seem to be any theory of a capitalist crisis. On page 15 of Michael Roberts’ book The Long Depression, he identifies both Marxist and non-Marxist theories of crisis. On the Marxist side, there is everything from the tendency of the rate of profit to fall to Rosa Luxemburg’s and David Harvey’s theory of underconsumption. When LaRouche wrote his book Dialectical Economics in the late 1970s he had a theory of capitalist crisis somewhat like Rosa Luxemburg’s theory. But my understanding is that when LaRouche left Marxism, he left his theory buried in that book.

Defense of Platonism and Christianity

According to George Johnson in Architects of Fear from Wikipedia:

According to George Johnson, LaRouche saw history as a battle between Platonists, who believe in absolute truth, and Aristotelians, who rely on empirical data. Johnson characterizes LaRouche’s views as follows: the Platonists include figures such as Beethoven, Mozart, Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci, and Leibniz. LaRouche believed that many of the world’s ills result from the dominance of Aristotelianism as embraced by the empirical philosophers such as Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, leading to a culture that favors the empirical over the metaphysical, embraces moral relativism, and seeks to keep the general population uninformed, LaRouche argued, whereas the Aristotelians use psychotherapy, drugs, rock music, jazz, environmentalism, and quantum theory to bring about a new Dark Age in which the world will be ruled by oligarchs. what matters is the Platonic versus Aristotelian outlook.

Lastly, LaRouche unapologetically accepts Platonic Christianity as an evolutionary advance from the polytheism and animism of pre-Christian times. He ignores the entire history of the misery Protestant and Catholic rulers have visited on their own populations with original sin, hatred of the body and fear of hell for starters. Neither does it seem to matter to LaRouche that both Protestants and Catholics persecuted thousands of pagans throughout history.

From LaRouche to the Rising Tide Foundation and the American System

Thanks to the Greanville Post I learned of the work of Matthew Ehret and Cynthia Chung and their Rising Tide Foundation. Influenced by LaRouche, they have excellent lectures, not only on geopolitics but also the arts and the history of science. Matthew Ehret has written a four-volume history of the United States and Cynthia Chung has written a great book called The Empire On Which the Black Sun Never Set. I’d like to share with you some highlights from Volume I of his book.

Clash of the two America’s – the Unfinished Symphony

History of industrial capitalism vs slave and finance capital in the United States

In Volume I of the Unfinished Symphony, Matthew Ehret divides the ruling factions in the United States into two groups: those who supported the British Empire and those who sided with the American system. Contrary to what most of us think, the British Empire was never really kicked out of the United States after the Revolutionary War. The US South continued to be involved with the British slave trade and many resisted fighting in the Revolutionary War.

The British Empire was dead-set against the United States becoming an industrial competitor to Great Britain. They wanted to maintain the US as a dependent country producing commercial agriculture (mostly cotton) for their textile mills. In their efforts to keep the United States under their thumb, the British were against the US establishing tariffs and protecting their industry to build canals and railroads. The British supported “free trade” and opposed Hamilton’s call for a national bank which invested in infrastructure projects. The British also supported the decentralization of banks. Doing the bidding of the British (whether consciously or not) Andrew Jackson cut out infrastructural projects and supported the spread of multiple species of currency which undermined longstanding economic projects.

The leading Americans who stood up for industrialization were Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton and in the 19th century, Abraham Lincoln. The forces of slave capital and finance capital supported the development of Wall Street, the City of London and later, the Bank of Manhattan. The British supported the South’s plea for states’ rights since that weakened the federal governments’ quest to centralize power which was necessary to build a strong nation-state.

As might be expected, the major theoretician of the British system of laissez-faire (let the markets rule) capitalism was Adam Smith. The economists of the American system were Franz List and Harry C. Carey. Believe it or not, there were some Americans who did not look East to Europe for a political vision. Rather, they looked to Russia and China as civilizations worth emulating. They included Charles Sumner, William Seward, William Gilpin and Asa Whitney. They toyed with building a trans-Siberian railroad. Seward purchased Alaska in the hopes of linking it to Russia via a railroad while William Gilpin wanted to build a world land bridge uniting the whole world. He was influenced by the great Alexander von Humboldt. The British deep state forces were embedded in the US Canadian United Empire Loyalists; Eastern establishment families and in Virginian slave-owning aristocrats, including Albert Pike who later was involved with the Ku Klux Klan.

In the case of Russia, the friendly outreach of Gilpin was rewarded. Most people do not know that during the Civil War, Czarist Russia came to the aid of forces of the Union when the British attempted to invade during the Civil War. The Russian Navy blocked the British land invasion on both the East and the West coasts of the United States.

Table B summarizes the relation of the American system against the British empire.

                             Table B American System vs the British Empire

Why are we discussing Rising Tide Foundation? Because it provides a necessary correction to the leftist trashing of all the Founding Fathers and shows there was a very progressive side to some of them. It also describes an American system which is consistent with the multipolar vision of China, Russia and the countries with BRICS.

Conclusion

I began this article using a contrast between the declining Anglo-American empire of the West and the rising Multipolar world of the East. Secondly, I identified Lyndon LaRouche as someone instrumental in developing an economic policy for Russia and India. Yet LaRouche also championed Western values of the Enlightenment, the importance of developing the productive forces of society and defending the nation-state against globalization. LaRouche argued that his ideas about developing the productive forces in Russia and India were also alive and kicking in the United States in what he called “the American system”. I then offered six reservations to his orientation from a Marxist perspective.

Finally, I brought in the work of the Rising Tide foundation and of Matthew Ehret in a book called The Clash of the Two Americas: Volume I: The Unfinished Sympathy. I presented how Matthew’s work demonstrated that there was a progressive tendency among the Founding Fathers and how the American system in the United States is connected to  a multipolar world in the East.

But where do LaRouche and Rising Tide stand on the linear political spectrum? Leftists have called LaRouche a fascist. I commented briefly that this was a ridiculous characterization. Yet who are the allies of the so-called American system, and where are they on the political spectrum? Finally, what is the relationship between LaRouche and the New Left on the political spectrum? We will learn their values are diametrically opposed because the New Left itself was shaped by the arch enemies of LaRouche and Rising Tide – finance capitalists, the Rockefellers and the CIA. We will see in Part II that the linear political spectrum itself is the problem.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

The history of Marxism has a parallel history of counter-Marxism — intellectual currents that posture as the true Marxism.

Even before Marxism came into being as a coherent ideology, Marx and Engels devoted an often-neglected section of their 1848 Communist Manifesto to debunking the existing contenders for true socialism.

As the workers’ movement painfully sought a system of beliefs to animate its response to capitalism, the ideas of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels gradually won over workers, peasants, and the oppressed. It was not an easy victory. Liberalism — the dominant ideology of the capitalist class — served workers and peasants in their fight against absolutist tyranny.

With capitalism and liberal institutions firmly established, anarchism — the ideology of the disgruntled petty-bourgeois — rivalled Marxism for the leadership of the workers’ movement. Contradictorily, embracing extreme individualism and Utopian democracy distilled from capitalism, yet voicing a bitter hatred of capitalist institutions and economic arrangements, the anarchists failed to offer a viable escape from the crushing weight of capitalism.

Once Bolshevism seized power in 1917, the workers’ movement found an example of real-existing-socialism led by real-avowed-Marxists, a powerful beacon for the way forward in the struggle against capitalism. The victory of the Russian Revolution established Marxism as the most promising road for an exploited majority, with Leninism the only successful ideology for revolutionary change and socialism. To this day, Leninism has remained the only proven guide to socialism.

Immediately after the revolution, rival “Marxisms” sprang up.

The failure of subsequent European revolutions outside of Russia, especially Germany, sheared away numerous intellectuals, like Karl Korsch and György Lukács,who imagined a different, supposedly better, path to proletarian revolution. Buoyed by material support from benefactors, university appointments, and the many eager sponsors of class betrayal, critics and detractors of Leninism abounded.

Especially in the West — North America and Europe– where the working class was significant and growing dramatically, dissidence, class betrayal, and opportunism proved disruptive forces in the world Communist movement, forces that capitalist rulers were eager to support. Young people, inexperienced workers, aspiring intellectuals, and the déclassé, were especially vulnerable to the appeal of independence, purity, idealism, and liberal values. Money, career opportunities, and celebrity were readily available to those who were willing to sell these ideas.

Indeed, not every critic of Marxism-Leninism — revolutionary Communism — was or is insincere or without merit, but honesty demands recognition that no real advocate for overthrowing capitalism could achieve prominence, celebrity, or a mainstream soap box in the capitalist West. He or she could be a curiosity or a token for the sake of appearances — a stooge.

Conversely, any intellectual or political figure who does achieve wide-spread prominence or influence cannot represent a serious, existential challenge to capitalism when the road to prominence and influence is patrolled by the guardians of capitalism.

Nonetheless, the workers’ movement has been plagued by divisive ideological trends or fads spawned by independent voices who, wittingly or not, are exploited by and render service to the capitalist class.

In the West, it is almost impossible to be a young radical and not be tempted by a veritable ideological marketplace of putative anti-capitalist or socialist theories, vying with one another for allegiance. Since the demise of unvarnished, real-existing socialism in the Soviet Union and the disorientation of many Communist and Workers’ parties, the competition of ideas has created even more confusion.

Clearly, the working-class movement, the revolutionary socialist movement, needs guidance to avoid distractions, bogus theories, and corrupted ideas. The march of political neophytes through the arcade of specious, fantastic ideas is a great tragedy, especially regarding those ideas posing as Marxist.

*****

Happily, a new generation of Marxist thinkers are challenging the allure of Marxist pretenders, more specifically, those associated with what has come to be called “Western Marxism.” A sympathetic Wikipedia article offers about as accurate a definition of the words as one might want:  “The term denotes a loose collection of theorists who advanced an interpretation of Marxism distinct from both classical and Orthodox Marxism and the Marxism-Leninism of the Soviet Union.” It couldn’t be made clearer: Western Marxism is anything but the Marxism-Leninism that has buttressed worker-engaged revolutionary parties since the time of the Bolshevik revolution!

Marxist historian and journalist, Vijay Prashad, gave a seminar at the Marx Memorial Library on November 21, 2022, in which he excoriated the Western Marxism of the 1980s:

There was a sustained attack on Marxism in this period, led by New Left Books, now Verso Books, in London, which published Hegemony and Socialist Strategy by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in 1985. The book mischievously utilised the work of Antonio Gramsci to make an attack at Marxism, to in fact champion something they called “post-Marxism.” Post-structuralism, post-Marxism, post-colonialism: this became the flavour of academic literature coming out of Western countries from the 1980s… Particularly after the collapse of the Soviet Union there was a great weakness in our ability to fight back against this denigration of Marxism in the name of post-Marxism… When they [Laclau and Mouffe] talk about “agency” and “the subject” and so on, they have basically walked away from the structuring impact of political economy and returned to a pre-Marxist time; they have in fact not gone beyond Marxism but back to a time before Marxism. (“Viewing Decolonization through a Marxist Lens,” published in Communist Review, Winter 2022/2023)

Prashad places the influential works of Hardt and Negri and Deleuze and Guattari in the same post-Marxist mix.

He regrets the multiculturalism turn because it ”basically took the guts out of the anticolonial, anti-racist critique, at the global level you had the arrival of ‘postcolonial’ thought, and also ‘decoloniality’ — in other words, let’s look at power, let’s look at culture, but let’s not look at the political economy that structures everyday life and behavior and reproduces the colonial mentality; that has to be off the table… So, we entered into a kind of academic morass, where Marxism was not, in a sense, permitted to enter.”

Prashad might well have added the intrusion of rational-choice theory into Marxism in the 1980s, an uninvited analysis of Marxist theory through the lens of methodological individualism and liberal egalitarianism. One leading exponent of what came to be called “analytical Marxism” eviscerated the robust Marxist concept of exploitation by proving that if we have inequality as an initial condition, we will quite logically reproduce inequality– a trivial derivation with little relevance to understanding the historically evolved concept of labor exploitation..

Prashad might have noted the continuing influence of postmodern relativism upon Marxist theory in the 1980s and beyond, a denigration of any claim that Marxism is the science of society. For the postmodernist, Marxism can only be, at best, one of several competing interpretations of society, coherent within Marxist circles, but forbidden from making any greater claim for universality. Moreover, the postmodernist denies that there can ever be any valid overarching theory of capitalism, any “metanarrative” that plots a socio-economic system’s trajectory. While its flaws can not be addressed here, the late Marxist historian Ellen Meiksins Wood exposed the academic trend with great clarity.

Another excellent, contemporary critique of Western Marxism can be found in the writings of Marxist author Gabriel Rockhill. Rockhill skillfully and thoroughly discredits the Frankfurt School of neo-Marxism, especially its most celebrated thinkers, Hockheimer, Habermas, Adorno, and Marcuse, exposing their fealty to various sponsors. Those who paid the bills enjoyed sympathetic ideas, an outcome often found with the practitioners of Western Marxism.

Rockhill also does  a scathing exposé of today’s most prominent Marxist poseur, Slavoj Žižek. I was happy to heap praise on Rockhill’s deflation of Žižek’s unmatched ego in an earlier post. Both Rockhill’s unmasking of the Frankfurt School and his destruction of the Žižek cult are essential reading in contesting Western Marxism.

Most recently, philosopher Carlos L. Garrido ambitiously tackles Western Marxism in his book The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (Midwestern Marx Publishing Press, 2023). Central to Garrido’s argument is the notion of a “purity fetish” that is at the core of the Western Marxists’ attack on Marxism-Leninism. This insightful and original thesis indeed captures a feature common to the leading lights of left-wing Western anti-Communism; from Frederich Ebert to Slavoj Žižek, “Marxists” have hypocritically insisted that revolutionaries be held to a higher standard of democratic governance, judicial perfection, non-violence, and policy perfection beyond anything experienced in bourgeois society or to be reasonably expected of a revolutionary society outside of sheer fantasy.

Western Marxists can conveniently overlook capitalism’s history of genocidal, undemocratic, and exploitative sins while excoriating the Fidelistas for settling accounts with a few hundred Batista torturers. They deplore the sweeping changes that Soviet and Chinese Communists implemented in agriculture to overcome the frequent famines that devastated their countries when the changes unfortunately coincided with severe famines, as though great change for the better could evade natural events and tragedy anywhere but in their imagination.

They turn a blind eye to the human costs imposed on humanity by ruling elites’ resistance to great change, while denouncing revolutionaries for seeking that change and risking a better future. Western Marxism diminishes the great accomplishments of real existing socialism, while relentlessly denouncing the errors incurred in socialist construction. Garrido effectively underscores the necessary pains and errors in realizing a new world, in escaping the clutches of ruthless capitalism.

As Garrido notes:

This is the sort of ‘Marxism’ that imperialism appreciates, the type which CIA agent Thomas Braden called “the compatible left.” This is the ‘Marxism’ which functions as the vanguard of controlled counter-hegemony.

He eloquently summarizes:

Socialism for the Western Marxists is, in the words of Marx, a purely scholastic question. They are not interested in real struggle, in changing the world, but in continuously purifying an idea, one that is debated amongst other ivory-tower Marxists and which is used to measure against the real world. The label of ‘socialist’ or ‘Marxist’ is sustained merely as a counter-cultural and edgy identity which exists in the fringes of quotidian society. That is what Marxism is reduced to in the West — a personal identity.

I might add that it is also a commonplace for Western Marxists to invest heavily in other-people’s-socialism. Rather than engaging their own working classes, Western Marxists fight surrogate struggles for socialism through the solidarity movement, picking and choosing the “purest” struggles and debating the merits of various socialisms vicariously.

Garrido elaborates on socialism-as-an-investment-in-identity:

In the context of the hyper-individualist West’s treatment of socialism as a personal identity, the worst thing that may happen for these ‘socialists’ is for socialism to be achieved. That would mean the total destruction of their counter-cultural fringe identity. Their utter estrangement from the working masses of the country may in part be read as an attempt to make socialist ideas fringe enough to never convince working people, and hence, never conquer political power.

The success of socialism would entail a loss of selfhood, a destruction of the socialist-within-capitalism identity. The socialism of the West is grounded on an identity which hates the existing order but hates even more the loss of identity which transcending it would entail.

Garrido’s objectives are not completed with his masterful dissection of Western Marxism. In addition, he devotes great attention to Western Marxism’s critique of the Peoples’ Republic of China (PRC) in a section entitled China and the Purity Fetish of Western Marxism. Of course, he is correct to deplore Western Marxism’s unprincipled collaboration with bourgeois ideologues in attacking every policy or act of Peoples’ China since its revolution in 1949. As with the USSR, any honest, deeply considered estimation of the trajectory of the PRC must — warts and all — see it as a positive in humanity’s necessary transcendence of capitalism.

As anti-imperialists, we must defend the PRC’s right (and other countries’ rights) to choose its own course.

As Marxists, we must defend the Chinese Communist Party’s right to find its own road to socialism.

But Garrido goes further, by mounting an impassioned, but one-sided defense of Chinese socialism. As a militant advocate of the dialectical method, this is an odd departure. As esteemed Marxist R. Palme Dutt argued in the 1960s, the pregnant question for a dialectical materialist is Whither China? not: Does the PRC measure up to some pure Platonic form of socialism? 

A more balanced view of the PRC road would reference the significance of the Communist Party’s overwhelmingly peasant class base in its foundation, its engagement with Chinese nationalism, and the strong voluntarist tendency in Mao Zedong Thought. It would consider the 1960s’ break with the World Communist movement and the rapprochement with the most reactionary elements in US ruling circles in the 1970s, capped by the shameful material support for US and South African surrogates in the liberation wars of Southern Africa. PRC was funding Jonas Savimbi and UNITA while Cuban internationalists were dying fighting them and their apartheid allies. Which suggests the question: Could Peoples’ China do more to help Cuba overcome the US blockade, as did the Soviet Union?

A fair account would address the PRC invasion of Vietnam in 1979 and Peoples’ China’s unwavering defense of the Khmer Rouge. Surely, all these factors play a role in assessing the PRC’s road to socialism.

These uncomfortable facts make it hard to agree with Garrido that the PRC has been “a beacon in the anti-imperialist struggle.”

Of course, today is another matter. My own view is that the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party is “riding the tiger” of a substantial capitalist sector, to use imagery reminiscent of high Maoism. How well they are riding it is in question, but they are indeed riding it. There are many promising developments, but also some that are worrisome.

In any case, the comrades who are critical or skeptical of the Chinese road should not be summarily swept into the dustbin with Western Marxism.

Garrido brings his purity fetish home when he discusses US socialist organizing. He casts a critical eye on the class character of most of the US left, rooting it in the petty-bourgeoisie and the influence of petty-bourgeois ideas. He locates the conveyor for these ideas in academia, the media, and NGOs. Additional material support for petty-bourgeois ideology comes from non-profit corporations and, of course, the Democratic Party.

The petty-bourgeois bias of the US left reinforces its hyper-critical attitude toward movements attempting to actually secure a socialist future. Wherever socialists or socialist-oriented militants tackle the enormous obstacles before them, many on the left will insist that they adhere to courteous liberal standards, an unrealistic demand guaranteeing failure. Garrido mocks the insistence on revolutionary purity: “…the problem is that those things in the real world called socialism were never actually socialism; socialism is really this beautiful idea that exists in a pure form in my head….”

The purity fetish of the middle strata extends to radicals who scorn workers as “backward” or “deplorable.” Garrido counters this purity obsession with a wonderful quote from Lenin: one “can (and must) begin to build socialism, not with abstract human material, or with human material especially prepared by us, but with the human material bequeathed to us by capitalism.”

Regarding the Trump vote and the working class, Garrido scolds the US left:

…they don’t see that what is implicit in that vote is a desire for something new, something which only the socialist movement, not Trump or any bourgeois party, could provide. Instead, they see in this chunk of the working class a bunch of racists bringing forth a ‘fascist’ threat which can only be defeated by giving up on the class struggle and tailing the Democrats. Silly as it may sound, this policy dominates the contemporary communist movement in the U.S.

While not all of the left is guilty of this failure, the charge is not far off the mark.

Finally, Garrido faults much of the US left for its blanket dismissal of progressive trends and achievements in US history. Many leftists debase heroic struggles in US history by painting a portrait of a relentless trajectory of reaction, racism, and imperialism. Garrido correctly sees this as an instantiation of a negative purity fetish– denouncing every page of US history as fatally wanting and inauthentic: “…purity fetish Marxists add on to their futility in developing subjective conditions for revolution by completely disconnecting themselves from the traditions the American masses have come to accept.”

While this is true, it must be remembered that there is always the danger that US history would be celebrated so vigorously that the country’s legacy of cruelty and bloody massacre might be muted by patriotic zeal. During the Popular Front era, for example, Communist leader Earl Browder’s slogan that “Communism is twentieth century Americanism” invested too much social justice in Americanism and too little in Communism.

US history and tradition is contradictory and Marxists should always expose that contradiction– a legacy of both great, historic social change and ugly inhumanity. The country’s origin shares a tragic settler-colonial past with countries like Australia and South Africa in its genocidal treatment of indigenous people. Those same settlers established or tolerated the brutal exploitation of Africans forced into chattel slavery. While we could lay the blame at the doorstep of the US ruling class, it is US history as well.

At the same time, the US revolution was the most radical for its time and every generation produced a consequential movement to correct the failings of the legacy or advance the horizon of social progress. An emancipating civil war, the expansion of suffrage, workers’ gains against corporations, social welfare and insurance, and a host of other milestones mark the peoples’ history.

While writing and reflecting on the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution (Echoes of the Marsellaise), Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm couldn’t help but be struck by the lesser global influence of the earlier US revolution upon nineteenth-century social change. He thought that reformers and revolutionaries of the time could recognize their point of departure “more readily in the Ancien Régime of France than in the free colonists and slave-holders of North America.” Undoubtedly, the stain of the genocide of indigenous peoples and brutal slavery influenced that disposition.

Indeed, Hobsbawn’s observation underscores the contradictory character of the US past. It is not a “purity fetish” that explains this judgment, but the cold, harsh facts of US history.

Nonetheless, it is appropriate for Garrido to remind us of the many revolutionaries — Marx, Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, William Z Foster, Herbert Aptheker, Fidel, and more — who have both drawn inspiration and offered inspiration from the victories of the people as well as the fierce resistance to ruling-class oppression contained in US history. He effectively cites Communist leader Georgi Dimitrov who rejects the practice of national nihilism — the denigration of all expressions of national pride and accomplishment. Within every national identity is an identity to be celebrated in its resistance to oppression and its dedication to a better way of life. Workers must draw national humility from the failures of the past, while drawing national pride from the victories over injustice. A left that attends to only one and not both will fail the working class.

*****

Western Marxism — Marxist scholasticism, disconnected from revolutionary practice — distracts far-too-many well-meaning, hungry-for-change potential allies on the arduous road to socialism. It is heartening to find voices rising to challenge the sterile, obscurantism of this distraction, while defending and promoting the tradition of Marxism-Leninism and Communism. We should encourage and support Marxists like Prashad, Rockhill, and Garrido in conducting this struggle.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Greg Godels.

No one who frequents the dark auditoriums is really an atheist…Whenever there is a white screen in a black room a new religion has been established…We enter into the darkness of an artificial grotto. A luminous dust is projected and dances on a screen. We cross time and space, until some solemn music dissolves the shadows on the screen that has once again become white.

— Edgar Morin, The Stars

Why Cartesians are not Allowed at the Movies

Epistemologically, one of the major characteristics of the western world, at least as far back as the 16th century, is Descartes’ separation between the subject and the object. The objective world is thought to be outside of psychology and is the world of nature and society. To be objective was to be detached and good science means you never let your imagination, emotions or revelries get in the way of your reports. Conversely, the subjective world is what is private, personal and idiosyncratic. This is the world of poets, artists and psychologists. Most everyone in the western world today accepts (if unconsciously) this subject-object separation in everyday life. They would also unconsciously drag it into the movies. But when we go to the movies the subject-object separation becomes blurred. If the outer world was only bio-physical and social – out there – and the inner world was your private life – in here, this epistemology would not explain:

• How fans get could get caught up in a story that it can become like a flashbulb memory. Remember the Marlon Brando scene in the car with his brother during On the Waterfront?
• How fans idolize the stars, begging for autographs, copying their clothing and hairdos, subscribing to movie magazines, and showing up at press conferences.
• How stars get so lost in their roles that they have difficulty being convincing in new roles.
• How stars over-identify with their roles and blur the boundaries between their work as a star and their private life.

The claim of this article is that neither fans nor actors nor actresses act like Cartesians dualists when they participate in a movie production. Rather they enter a world which is pre-subjective and pre-objective.They enter temporarily into a world Lévy–Bruhl called participation mystique.

Lévy–Bruhl and Participation Mystique

Lucien Lévy–Bruhl was a philosophical anthropologist who pointed out that primitives do not see the objective world the way westerners do. He proposed that in their rituals, primitive societies become the animals they are about to hunt or the corn they are attempting to grow. They merge with the objective world. This is what is called “participation”. Experiencing the world temporarily as being one with animals or plants in a magical ritual, included no separation between themselves and their shadows, the living and the dead, self and others. He demonstrated this in three books. I have read: Notebooks on Primitive Mentality, Soul of the Primitive and How Natives Think. In these books Lévy–Bruhl discussed the coexistence of the practical mind and the magical mind, though he emphasized the later.

Magical and Practical Realms in Tribal Societies

For archaic peoples, subjective phenomena are alienated into the objects they are crafting and these become carriers of soul. Archaic hunters practice shooting with extreme precision, but they also cast the image of an animal in preparation for a magical spell. They practice mimetic propitiatory rites to the animal.  There is a combination of practical (practice shooting) and the imaginary (casting a spell). The presence of  archaic language, conduct, masks and ornaments show us that humans, while knowing themselves to be human, still feel caught in the grips of, or even possessed by altered states. This happens in their union with animal, plant, ancestors or by cosmic forces. Participation has always been able to give life and soul to statuettes, marionettes and puppets so why not the movies?

Edgar Morin and Participation Mystique

Here is what Morin thinks is going on in the movies with the fans. The participant  movie goer grows to feel himself embedded in a world that Morin calls “cosmomorphism”. He is embedded in the story and the roles of the stars.

At the other extreme the material world becomes more psychological and animated by passions, desires and human feelings. So participation means the human mind gets lost in the world, losing his subjective boundaries. In the movies it means acquiring the characteristics of the characters as well as to the story of the movie. It becomes the story of the movie-goer’s life. This animation of objects takes us back to the universe of archaic vision. Going to the movies is a modern recreation of participation mystique for actors, actresses and fans as well as for the producers, directors, lighting technicians and all other mediators.

The Magical Basis of Film

Our attachment to movie stars is lot more than simply a vestige of childish or even adolescent preoccupation from which adults are spared. What Edgar Morin means by the initial quote in this article is not that there is a secret theology of monotheism embedded in the imagination of atheists which comes out when watching a movie. It is not monotheistic faith or prayer that is invoked. It is the immediate magic of rites and spells. Magical participation corresponds not only to the pre-objective vision of the world, but also to a pre-subjective stage of humanity. Like Lévy–Bruhl, Morin says subjectivity and objectivity are like twin sisters before becoming dualistic opposites. It is on the tension of their opposition and their continuity – their dialectic – that we must follow them in the cinema.

When people enter the theatre even atheists develop magical participatory states of consciousness as we get lost in the story. Through an act of mimicry, we identify with the various roles of the actors and actresses. Just as in a tribal magical state of consciousness, a good ritual leaves the participants agitated, inspired or drained. Whatever their state of consciousness they were in then, it will not be the same as when they went in. The association between film and archaic magical state of consciousness is no poetic metaphor. Morin points out for educational purposes that people in tribal societies respond much better to film because it has the motion of a ritual rather the static quality of a  photograph or written page. Morin has long been preoccupied by the mythology and magic that lives both underground and next to the reason of everyday life and the rationality of the sciences.

Participation Mystique Identifies Emotions with Weather Conditions

Morin says that the camera is at once a microscope and a magic mirror. The face has become a landscape: it expresses storms at sea, the earth, the town and the factory, revolution, war. Landscapes are states of soul and states of soul landscapes. Often the weather, the ambience and the scenery are in the image of the feelings that animate the characters. We see alternately, then shots of nature and shots of humans, as if an affective symbiosis necessarily connects humanity to prehuman nature. Filmmakers entrust to landscapes the task of expressing states of the soul: rain evokes melancholy; storm evokes torment.

Against Marxist Reductionism

Unlike what Morin might called Marxist reductionism, myth and the imaginary are not just illusionary superstructures, vapors having no real substance and which mystify humanity. Human reality is itself partly imaginary. Morin knew that considering cinema as a mass medium and a sociological phenomenon was necessary, but how to do this without throwing the baby out with the bathwater? He predicted that sociologists would be oblivious to the real aesthetic situation of the experienced participation of the star and the film spectator. Morin claimed that both film critic and spectator live in the cinema and in a state of double consciousness, participating and skeptical. Morin was devoted to analyzing the relationship between stars and movie participants without disenchanting either.

Modern World Disenchants by Splitting the Subjective and the Objective

It is we moderns who split the worlds of the practical and magical worlds. Historical evolution has worked to disassociate the two orders, to circumscribe the dream and the hallucination as nothing more than subjective illusions to be cleaned up by practical perception. But our whole practical world is surrounded with rites and superstition. The cinema affects a kind of resurrection of the archaic. However, the very strong analogies between the cinema and the archaic vision of the world cannot be pursued to the point of identification. Film perception occurs within a consciousness that knows the image is not practical life.

Aesthetics are the Halfway House Between Participation Mystique and Material Reality

The aesthetic vision of the art critic is that of divided consciousness after the split between the objective and subjective worlds has taken place historically. The art critic participates in watching films at a distance, as a skeptic. The aesthetic vision dereifies the magic of the cinema and at the same time differentiates the cinema from archaic vision. But this magic is only in a nascent state and often only in a state of decline. For it is enveloped, broken up and stopped short in its place by a focused consciousness of the critic. It is internalized as sentiment. Ancient magic is ceaselessly reduced to sentiment of the aesthetic.

A Healthy Moviegoer Tames Participation Mystique

Applied to the movies, when movie fans are living a full life, they go to the movies get lost in the plot line and characters but resume their lives afterword. They enjoy the plot line and characters but the plot line and characters do not have them. They are not possessed. Like shaman, stars have charisma. They sooth our body and soul as they move us to soar beyond everyday life and its structures, at least for a couple of hours. Those of us in the audience mentally integrate ourselves with the characters and the plot, suspending judgment and getting lost in another world but coming out the other side.

Neurosis and Projective Identification

When fans are living lives that are not satisfying, they lose themselves long-term in the movies – the storyline and the characters. They are possessed by their own emotional reaction to both the characters and the story. Projective identification is a psychological term for a process whereby:

• A person, say Anthony, disowns feelings he does not want to experience, say jealousy, and projects them outwards.
• It lands in the psychology of the other person, let us say Sandy. Sandy can either reject or accept those disowned feelings.
• If Sandy accepts the feelings, she begins acting like Anthony feels (jealous).
• Anthony is now in a position to accuse Sandy of the jealousy he feels.

In terms of projective identification, the fan throws out their own creativity, charisma and skills and attaches them to the movie character. Since the characters cannot give them direct feedback, all the fans have to go on is the heroism and bravery the character demonstrates in the movie. The fan treats the star as possessing the strength and good qualities that the fan has alienated himself from. Projective identification can bring about identification even with those held in lowly regard, ignored, despised or hated in everyday life. Here the fan throws out their stubbornness, crabbiness and hatred of life on to one of the characters (probably a villain). The character acts in a way that resembles the vices of the fan. The fan then imagines that the villain who oppresses them is making him feel bad.

Projective Identification on the Industry of the Star

In falling in love with a movie star, we project ourselves onto the person and we identify them with ourselves. The corporeal and yet elusive specters on the screen. These shadow personalities the film presents seem to the fan more real more human, more intensely themselves than stars of flesh and blood behind the footlights. Here lies the danger of reification where the star and plot take on a life of its own, where the audience gets lost in the movies and never really comes back to reality. However, we identify not just the psychological side of the personality of the star, but projective identification is built out and dramatized by music, lighting effects, movements and positions of the camera. The stars also have their objective extensions of themselves: photos, trinkets, handkerchiefs, and their houses. Thus projective identification spreads from beings to things. This can lead to fetishization and even cults.

Marxian Projective Identification

Applying projective identification to Marxism is tricky. For Marxists, projective identification does not start with people’s individual or social psychology. It begins with the economic working conditions of workers on the job. Using Bertell Ollman’s definition of alienation, workers are alienated from: a) the products of labor; b) the process of labor; c) other people on the job; d) the power setting in which decisions about work are made; e) alienation from the natural world; and e) alienation from self.

These are the conditions under which workers enter the theatre (and middle class to a lesser extent). The worker enters the theatre with the intension of minimizing the conditions of alienation.

• Workers need a sense of hope that conditions can be better.
• Other people are not such as source of stress for them.
• They may achieve a degree of personal peace.

Now the members of the audience may both project their alienated feelings of fear and hopelessness onto the villains of the movie. The audience member will also project his feeling of hope and lovability onto the stars in the movie. This star-actor then gives the audience back some of what they projected which keeps fans coming back.

The Genesis and Metamorphosis of the Stars

According to Morin, the star concept was born around 1910 out of the fierce competition between the first film companies in the US. The star developed simultaneously with the concentration of capital at the heart of the film industry.  The star, like all capitalist commodities, has a price and this price regularly follows the fluctuations of supply by box office appeal and monitored by the fan mail. The 20^th century made the stars into royalty. In direct proportion to their denial of the traditional actor, the movies have created the star. Stars are born when the actor imposes their personality on the script and these heroes in turn impose their personality on the actor. From this composite a star is born. This star actor then gives the audience back some of what they projected. This is what keep fans coming back.

History of Stars Repeats the History of the Gods

Morin claims that the history of the stars repeats in its own proportions the history of the gods. Before the gods (before the stars) the mythical universe (the screen) was peopled with specters or phantoms endowed with the glamour and magic of the double (animism). Several of these presences have progressively assumed body, substance, have taken form, amplified and flowered into gods and goddesses. Morin says the two major types of gods many be distinguished:

• father gods who are so remote and grandiose that they are projections of human terrors and ambitions. They are too scary for fans to identify themselves with
• son-gods (heroes, or demigods) who are closer to the earth and not so unlike the fan that they can’t be identified with. These are the stars.

At the extreme level of the divine star, involvement is not implying mimetics, either because the star keeps herself at an unvarying distance or the believer feels too humble to reach up. Morin suggests that the actress Mary Pickford was like this kind of goddess. Closer to the earth, the stars become hero-gods. Finally, the star goddesses touch the ground and humanize themselves. The kings were the first to situate themselves on the level with the gods. Then gradually more classes got included and before you knew it everyone was entitled to an afterlife just as everyone was entitled to identify with stars. Stars are mediators between gods and humans, between divine and mortal. They aspire to the conditions of gods and goddesses and attempt to deliver mortals from their infinite misery. The hero is a human being in the process of becoming divine.

Flying too Close to the Ground

The humanizing tendency sometimes reduces the star to the human scale by brushing too closely to everyday life.  For example, stars fly too close to the ground when they perform cheap tricks for commercials and/or play in television game shows like Hollywood Squares.  An internal mechanism must reestablish distance if they are not to lose their star status. A new movie might exalt the star and she recovers altitude. Yet every excess in this direction provokes a recall to realism. As Morin quips, the star system hedgehops between the divide, the heroic and humanity rather than soaring smoothly above our daily life of humans.

Stars are in Danger of Reifying Themselves

Like gods who have gone wrong, stars can also turn into idols in which their identity is frozen in a particular character they play that they do so well they cannot get other parts because the director or producer will not believe them in their new character. Furthermore, the star system extends beyond the screen and the awards. It invades the everyday life of the stars. Hundreds and now perhaps thousands of correspondents are assigned to Hollywood to feed the world news and gossip about the stars and their personal lives. Stars never have a real personal life. They are always on. It’s no accident that Marlon Brando wound up living on his own island.

The Place of the Double

Among primitive humanity, the first self-consciousness is exterior to the self. It is only later that self-consciousness is internalized. The “I” at first is a double revealed and localized in shadows, in reflections, in mirrors and in dreams when the body sleeps. It becomes a spirit when the body dies. Today Morin insists it exists for both the stars, the fans and for everyone else in the roles we play. The star watches this double attach and detach itself from her. She must keep abreast of her double (the star and their personal life), for this is their livelihood.

The image possesses a magic quality of the double, but it is interiorized, nascent and subjectivized. The double possesses the psychological, affective quality of the image, but is alienated and magical. Between these two poles lies a syncretistic, fluid zone that we call the domain of sentiment, of the soul or the heart.

Stars Have Their Own Rites

Stars are not just a mediation between as between a shaman and their participants. Morin says stars also take part in their own rites, such as the Cannes Festival and the Academy Awards when they leave the screen and show themselves publicly. These festivals and awards are a magical site of identification of the magical and the real. They show tangible proof of their incarnation through autographs. These festivals are imagined to be a life of play, a carnival life – disguised, licentious, lavishing photographs, gossip and rumors attaining its fullness and mythic peak at the festivals. Morin says the star system has devoured the international film contests and turned them into international star contests.

For example, the first question put to anyone returning from the Cannes Festivals is not “did you see the directors or producers”, but “which stars did you see?”. “Is she as pretty in real life as she is on the screen?”. The real problem is the confrontation of myth and reality, appearance and essence. Cannes is the mystic site of this identification between the imaginary and the real. Photographers crowd around the square, each carrying on their shoulder the eyes of millions of voyeurs. Morin waxes poetically that the ceremony is an equivalent of the Roman triumph and ascension of the virgin.

Fanatics’ Reification of Stars

At worst, fans have allowed the stars to guide their manners, gestures, poses, attitudes, ecstasies and sighs. A star is capable of undermining existing fads and creating new ones without even trying. The imaginary identification with stars can become so satisfying that real life itself is held in contempt. For example, Morin quotes the regret of a female fan: “Tony, my poor boyfriend, had patiently waited until my aberration to be over”. Star worshippers constitute the idolatry mass of the fans.

Fans Sustain the Star Industry

The star system maintains itself through specialized publications we all know: movie magazines and the stars’ mail. Morin tells us that in the 1940s letters addressed to Hollywood stars was estimated to be several million a year. Morin says that in 1939 one major studio received between fifteen thousand to forty five thousand letters or cards a month. Magazines, photographs, correspondence, clubs, pilgrimages, ceremonies, festivals maintain the cult of stars. Photographs and autographs are the two key fetishes to which are added collections of clippings. According to Morin  photographs are the universal presence-fetishes of the first half of the 20^th century. It is clubs, magazines, correspondence and presents that are processes of divination in action beneath these secular forms. They have replaced the temple, the  bible, litanies and offerings.

Psychology of Fandom

According to Morin, love for the stars is a love without jealousy and without envy. The star and the king are flesh-and-blood creatures infected by their roles. We admire them without envying them; we are not jealous of kings or stars. The fans accept themselves, says Morin, purely and simply as earthworms.

This is not so with stars closer to the ground. Fans are no longer interested in dating their own kind. “I did my hair as much like hers as I could. I wondered what the star would do in any aggregating situation that I was in. When a star died it seemed that a vital part of my imagination died too and my world of dreams was bare. I plan films for him and think up ideas for his radio show. I plan my days as much as possible not to interfere with my listening”. Offerings to the stars include flowers, trinkets, lucky pieces, statuettes, sweaters, animals and dolls. Presents are destined for the star’s body, such as sweaters.  Fetishistic presents (petals, dolls) suggest the bits of natural substances and symbolic offerings that are mingled at the foot of the altars, while the incense of praise smokes on high. One can even discern vestiges of human sacrifice as in the case of a 16-year-old girl who offered Norma Shearer pieces of skin clipped from her own body. Stars become analogous to the tutelary saints or to the guardian angels. “Joan Crawford is my lucky star, I feel she is near me, like a goddess”.

At worst, the fan always desires to consume their god, as in supposed cannibal pasts in which the ancestor was eaten and the totemic feasts in which the sacred animal was devoured. The faithful want to know everything, possess, manipulate and mentally digest the total image of their idol through gossip, rumors, indiscretions and rejections. The journalists of the cinema get caught up in the fanfare or become more interested in the stars than in the films.  Beauty secrets, cosmetics, dietary or aesthetic preferences, travels, expenses, furniture, pets – all are intimate details that become material for the columns. A fan follows the star’s dietary and bodily practice and adopts her makeup, and imitates her clothes. One gal confesses to “curling my boyfriend’s hair in my fingers or stroking his face exactly as I’ve seen my screen favorites do”.

At the same time, just as primitive man confronted with a spirit who has not answered his pleas, fans overwhelm the stars with reproaches when they fail in their duties to respond, advise and console. Lastly the cult of the stars reveals its profoundest meaning at certain moments of collective hysteria such as those provoked by the death of Valentino or James Dean. The star system is fragile and subject to disintegration. There comes a moment when the star grows old and dies or a moment when the fan grows old.

Conclusion

I began the article by suggesting that both movie stars and fans must break with a Cartesian dualistic concept of the objective world on the one hand and the subjective world on the other in order to pull off a successful film. I argued that something like Lévy–Bruhl’s participation mystique must be operating in order for fans and stars to get lost in the movie, do their jobs come away inspired. Healthy fans and actors are able to get lost in the movies, but still emerge from it and go about their lives. More alienated fans and stars are subject to what Morin describes as projective identification. As a Marxist Morin knew that projective identification by itself was too psychological, so I’ve added a sociological dimension to projective identification.

Morin argues that the history of stars repeats the history of the gods and goddesses in mythology in which stars are like heroes mediating between the divine and the human. I discuss two pathologies that stars may experience. When:

• They fly too close to the ground that they cheapen themselves.
• They become drunk with their star identity and consequently have no personal life.

I also discuss fan pathology in which they reify the stars and attribute to them their own alienated creativity, skills, charisma and intelligence. This results in living a vicarious life.

What interested Morin was the contradiction between the modernity of the 20^th century and the archaism of our minds. Attending the cinema was the site where this contradiction played out. He sensed a profound link between the world of cinema and the participation mystique in magical tribal societies. For him, as for many others, the cinema resuscitated the archaic universe of doubles. The cinema is the greatest apostle of animism. From inanimate objects of the specters flickering, now you have a soul in the fluid universe of the cinema.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

The post Marxism and Colonialism: An Interview with Vijay Prashad appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by José Ernesto Novaez.

The changes come amid a far-reaching institutional shake-up as Xi Jinping begins a third and indefinite term in office, concentrating executive power in the hands of Communist Party working groups rather than in the hands of ministers and other administrative officials.

References to Marxism, Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, the thought of Deng Xiaoping and the ideologies of former presidents Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao have all been deleted from the new edition of the document titled “Working Procedures for the State Council” that was published on official websites on March 18.

State Council officials under the leadership of incoming premier Li Qiang are referred solely to the political thought of Xi Jinping, a rulebook that has been edited down from 64 articles to just 43.

While the order to follow the lead of the ruling Communist Party Central Committee with Xi Jinping at the core remains unchanged, officials are also now required to “report any major decisions, major events and important situations” to the Central Committee “in a timely manner.”

Previous references to “administration according to law, seeking truth from facts, democracy, openness, pragmatism and integrity” have gone, as have the requirement for the State Council “to correct illegal or inappropriate administrative actions,” or to “guide and supervise” the bureaucracy.

Mao, Jiang and Hu

Australia-based current affairs commentator Zhang Guangzhong said many of the former powers of the State Council have been transferred to the Central Committee, and that this is reflected in a slimmed-down rulebook.

“This revision of the rules highlights the importance of allegiance to Xi Jinping and seeks to play down the influence of Mao, Jiang and Hu, in a bid [by the party leadership] to take back control of the State Council,” Zhang told Radio Free Asia.

“In this revision of the rulebook, the freedom of the State Council to promulgate policies is limited, while centralization [of leadership] continues,” he said. 

“We [also] see Xi taking a guiding role in the work of the State Council.”

Under Xi’s predecessors, the State Council was typically the domain of the premier, who was charged with the day-to-day running of the country and with formulating economic policy.

The Central Committee last week launched a nationwide disciplinary campaign that will inspect its 96 million members for loyalty to supreme leader Xi Jinping and weed out “black sheep” and “two-faced” officials from positions of power who were put there by rival political factions, under a “working group” run by the party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection.

‘Only one signboard for the party’

Political commentator Huang Changgen said the removal of references to Marxism-Leninism and the political ideologies of Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin from the document strongly suggests that there will be scant room for independent decision-making at the State Council from now on.

“In recent years, the State Council usually had some room to negotiate [with the party leadership], but that’s all gone now,” Huang said, predicting: “Sooner or later, they’ll take those references out of the party charter, too.”

“They are making it clear that there’s only one signboard for the party to follow now – the rest no longer exists, and the [old concept of a group of senior leaders at the] party center is gone too.”

Amendments to the party charter approved during the 20th party congress last October described Xi Jinping’s thought as “the essence of Chinese culture and the spirit of the times,” endorsed his ideology and tasked the party’s 90 million members with “safeguarding” his position as “core” leader.

Former Communist Party school professor Cai Xia said at the time that the amendments effectively turned the party into Xi’s personal “gang,” with its members obliged to uphold his leadership.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Matt Reed.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Gu Ting for RFA Mandarin.

The post Idealism, Materialism, and The Two Sides of Marxism appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Nick Pemberton.

Photograph Source: Doc Searls – CC BY-SA 2.0

There is an international political economy of knowledge production, as ideas and theoretical debates are in many ways determined by material reality. Why is it that some concepts circulate so widely while others are a priori dismissed? Why is it that some seemingly radical frameworks find so much support in U.S. universities, while others are caricatured and demonized with allegedly “radical” justification?

Consider Gabriel Rockhill’s recent research on the erasure of the Marxist foundations of critical theory due to the material circumstances and ideologies of its leaders, who helped the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory “corral critique within the liberal fold,” serving “to recuperate potential radicals within the ideological consensus that a world beyond capitalism and pseudo-democracy is not only impossible but undesirable.”^[1] He documents the material incentives and other mechanisms used to recruit critical theorists into the service of imperialism to form a “compatible, non-communist Left over and against the threat of actually existing socialism.”^[2]

This class war in theory is waged in many forms and on many fronts, one of which is, unfortunately, Black Studies and the Black Radical Tradition, which were forced into the university by the long and increasingly militant struggle led by Marxists and Leninists, Pan-Africanists, Black Nationalists, and other revolutionaries. Within a decade, their revolutionary origins were purged and reduced to culturalism, or “the regime of meaning making in which Blackness is culturally specified and abstracted from material, political economic, and structural conditions of dispossession through statist technologies of antiradicalism.”^[3] Multiple factors facilitated this, from Ford Foundation funding and non-profits to careerism and intra-left divisions. The right-wing turn of Black Studies was and is, I argue, facilitated by Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: The Making of The Black Radical Tradition.

The forces behind Black Studies

The forces creating Black Studies were particular expressions of a global revolutionary struggle, an era from 1945 until the early 1980s when the oppressed classes threw off the shackles of their oppressors, dramatically reshaping the world. The Soviet Union, despite its tremendous losses, came out of the WWII as the second major world power, and the one that liberated or aided in the liberation of peoples in Europe, Africa, and Asia. With the defeat of the European imperialists and the Soviet Union’s aid, a wave of national liberation struggles and revolutions spread like a wildfire in Korea and Vietnam, Cuba and Nicaragua, Angola and Mozambique, Iraq and Syria, Indonesia and Afghanistan. All of these struggles were supported by the Soviet Union which provided economic, political, and military resources.

A global counterrevolution was launched in the late 1980s as global capitalism and white supremacy launched a full-scale counteroffensive against the oppressed classes of the world, whether their governments were socialist, nationalist, or merely unwilling to bow to the United States’ dictates.

Robinson’s Black Marxism was a product of this era of global counterrevolution. This is not to say that he intentionally wrote or designed the book to represent a compromise of revolution without revolution, of course, but that it must be understood in this broader context.

In analyzing Black Studies today, Jonathan Fenderson highlights how culture and ideas become determinant, thereby producing “an African Diaspora essentialism.” Black Marxism circulates so well because its “abandonment of class fits perfectly well with contemporary trends in African American Studies.^[4] This is, perhaps, why the latest release came on the heels of the historic 2020 anti-racist uprisings in the U.S.

Rebellion over Revolution

My critique isn’t to defend the “great” Marx, but to reveal how the arguments and overall conclusions dismiss revolution in favor of general and vague rebellions. The book uses radical phraseology and incorrect critiques of Marxism in the service of culturalism and reformism, corralling the radical origins of Black Studies into liberalism. “The Black Radical Tradition,” for Robinson requires a “break” with Marxism and the history of the revolutionary socialist and national liberation struggles. Marxism served as entry points to Black radicals, but one that was “ultimately unsatisfactory,” which led to “Black radicalism and the discovery of a collective Black resistance inspired by an enduring cultural complex of historical apprehension.”^[5]

In his latest foreword, Robin Kelly tries to rescue the book as a revolutionary text by claiming “is neither Marxist nor anti-Marxist,” but is rather “a dialectical critique of Marxism that turned to the long history of Black revolt… to construct a wholly original theory of revolution. Yet he ends up conceding that “apprehending the Black Radical Tradition required a break with Marx and Engels’s historical materialism.”^[6]

Robinson’s inaccurate retelling of Marx—which includes little engagement with Marx and relies mostly on sectarian and imperialist academic scholarship—supposedly proves that, “at its epistemological substratum, Marxism is a Western construction” whose “philosophical origins are indisputably Western,” as are “its analytical presumptions, its historical perspectives, its points of view.”^[7] It is as if the ideas or conceptions available in England were solely the result of work and history within those borders, as if what happened in those borders wasn’t global, and as if the origins of a theory or particular expression of a theory inevitably tie it to that moment and place and society. More foundationally, of course, no epistemological system or substratum exists outside of the larger totality. By dividing Marxism and the world between the “West” and the rest—or the “West” and the “Black”—Robinson actually reaffirms Eurocentrism, centering the “West” and reducing it to Europe.

Robinson never engages with the theories and works of communists who were Black or of oppressed races or nationalities in the U.S and abroad who, like Lenin and Marx, viewed the Black liberation struggle as the class struggle. In the process, he fixes Marxism into a static theory rather than the living and breathing guide to action that it truly is, which is why the very notion that there is a “white” or “European” Marxism is reactionary and even racist, denying how African and other peoples contributed and continue to contribute to Marxism, from Walter Rodney and Dr. Américo Boavida to Kim Il-Sung and José Carlos Mariátegui. It also rests on a fundamental misreading of Marx’s own work, organizing, and development, which shows his support for anti-colonial rebellions and even his theory that those forces might be the revolutionary vanguard to inspire the socialist revolutions in Britain!^[8]

Marx, Slavery, and Capitalism

Robinson claims slavery was placed what “Marx termed ‘primitive accumulation,’” relegating it to a distant past, “assigning slave labor to some ‘pre-capitalist’ stage of history.”^[9] The alleged inability to link U.S. racial slavery with capitalism discredits historical materialism and “the dialectical of capitalist class struggles.”^[10]

Marx never termed anything “primitive accumulation;” bourgeois political economists did. This is why Part 8 of Capital is titled “The So-Called Primitive Accumulation!” The point of this section, the crux of Capital, is to reveal what the bourgeoisie covered up with its fairytale justifying oppression and exploitation: that the poor are poor because they were lazy and wasteful while the rich are rich because they were smart and hard-working. Marx’s argument is that capital was so advanced in England because of its position as a leading colonial power within the global balance of forces: because of the brutal conquest of territories and peoples, murder and terrorism, slavery, looting, the African slave trade, and much more. He didn’t claim it was finished but that it was a “vicious circle,” meaning that capital must continually produce its preconditions while trying to relegate them to a past time.^[11]

Never did Marx relegate slavery into a pre-history of capitalism. He saw slavery and capital as co-existing and, moreover, as different modes of production that could occupy the same space and time. In the Grundrisse, for example, Marx refers to the United States as the “most developed form of existence of bourgeois society” even though capitalism and slavery were both present.^[12] Both existed as modes of production, as just a few pages earlier Marx clarifies that a country’s production has to be “structured to allow of slave labour, or (as in the southern part of America etc.) a mode of production corresponding to the slave must be created.”^[13]

Robinson merely declares we are “approaching the limits” to “orthodox Marxism” to begin constructing a universal and abstract Black radical tradition, presenting a sweeping picture of a quite vast, numerous, and homogenous Black people, and world history as a struggle between “Blacks and their oppressors.”^[14] Highlighting flashpoints in Black struggles is crucial, but he does this to claim a property essentialized in Blackness or a series of “the African identities of its peoples” about which we learn nothing.^[15] This alone justifies abandoning the Marxist project of revolution for what he, without any shame, calls an “epistemology granted supremacy to metaphysics not the material.”^[16] Culturalism over politics; a new political economy of knowledge.

The “Anti-Communist” Communist Party Member Du Bois

The first to reach these limits is, shockingly, W.E.B. Du Bois, which reveals Robinson’s project isn’t about dividing or building on Marxism, but of divorcing it from the Black struggle. Robinson says Du Bois believed the need for multinational unity were ones “spokesmen for Communism ignored.”^[17] In this narrative, Robinson repeatedly cites Daniel Bell, the same one who participated in the anti-communist American Committee for Cultural Freedom that combatted communist and pro-communist intellectual thought (with CIA funding).^[18] This lets Robinson dismiss Black Reconstruction’s Marxism. Yet Du Bois’ scholars Charisse Burden-Stelly and Gerald Horne note that he was a socialist since the early 1900s and that, “by the 1930s, he had begun to diligently study Marxism-Leninism and to update it with his own insights about the Black experience,” which is why the book is his “Black Marxist tome.”^[19]

Robinson never mentions Du Bois died as a member of the Communist Party to invent a towering Black intellectual increasingly at odds with Marxism. He once mentions Du Bois’ amazement at the Bolshevik Revolution when he first visited in 1927. Due, in large part, to his first-hand experiences with the absence of capitalism and racism in the Soviet Union, Du Bois admired the communist struggle. Black radicals that visited the USSR experienced equality only to return home to an apartheid regime in the U.S.^[20] So firmly did Du Bois support the USSR that he openly defended their intervention to repress the attempted 1956 counterrevolution in Hungary.^[21]

Du Bois, like other Black communists in the U.S. and globally, knew how socialist states helped the oppressed free themselves and the real material gains that resulted, until the Soviet Union’s collapse. They provided educational, military, and other material support to the African continent from Egypt and Libya to Angola, Ghana, and Mozambique.

Perhaps the lesson we learn from the text comes from the absence of the actual material victories of African, Black, and other oppressed classes. This is the most crucial question for us as organizers and intellectuals who want to participate in creating a better world. The origins of a particular theory do not matter; what it has helped us win does. No theory can be proven on paper; that takes practice, and the real gains of the oppressed should guide the production of knowledge.

NOTES

1. Gabriel Rockhill, “Critical and Revolutionary Theory: For the Reinvention of Critique in the Age of Ideological Realignment,” in Domination and Emancipation: Remaking Critique, ed. D. Benson (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), 117-118. ↑

2. Gabriel Rockhill, “The CIA & the Frankfurt School’s Anti-Communism,” The Philosophical Salon (June 2022): < https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-cia-the-frankfurt-schools-anti-communism> (accessed on January 09, 2023). ↑

3. Charisse Burden-Stelly, “Black Studies in the Westernized University,” in Unsettling Eurocentrism in the Westernized University, ed. J. Cupples and R. Grosfoguel (New York: Routledge, 2019), 73). ↑

4. Jonathan Fenderson, “Black Studies Post-Janus,” The Black Scholar 48, no. 4 (2018): 3. ↑

5. Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, 3rd ed. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1983/2020), 5. ↑

6. Robin D.G. Kelley, “Foreword: Why Black Marxism? Why Now? In C.J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, 3^rd ed. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020), xix. ↑

7. Black Marxism, 2. ↑

8. Lucia Pradella, Globalisation and the Critique of Political Economy: New Insights from Marx’s Writings (New York: Routledge, 2015). ↑9

9. Black Marxism, 4. ↑

10. Ibid. ↑

11. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Vol. 1), trans. S. Moore and E. Aveling (New York: International Publishers, 1867/1967), 667. See also Derek R. Ford, Teaching the Actuality of Revolution: Unlearning, Aesthetics, and the Sensations of Struggle (Madison: Iskra, 2023), 27-46. ↑

12. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. M. Nicolaus (New York: Penguin Books, 1939/1973), 104. ↑

13. Ibid., 98. ↑

14. Robinson, Black Marxism, 168. ↑

15. Ibid., 166. ↑

16. Ibid., 169. ↑

17. Ibid., 197. ↑

18. Edward Shils and Peter Coleman, “Remembering the Congress of Cultural Freedom,” Society 46 (2009): 437. ↑

19. Charisse Burden-Stelly and Gerald Horne, W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life in American History (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2019), 203 ↑

20. Peta Lindsay, “Black Bolsheviks and White Lies,” in Storming the Gates: How the Russian Revolution Changed the World, ed. J. Cutter (San Francisco: Liberation Media, 2017). ↑

21. W.E.B. Du Bois. “Socialism and Democracy: A Debate,” The American Socialist January (1957): 6-9. ↑

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Derek Ford.

Image by Hennie Stander.

If there is one message that seemed to surface through last month’s crucial meetings of the Communist Party of China it is continuity. The inference that might best be taken is no significant change from the path on which the party has led China in recent years should be expected.

That path, despite the oft-used slogan “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,” has been a restructuring of the economy toward capitalism, albeit a gradual entry on Chinese terms and keeping the “commanding heights” of the economy in state hands. If we attempt to grasp the meaning of the communiqués and reports issued surrounding the party’s 20th National Congress, it would be better to observe through a holistic lens rather than fixating on personalities.

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The post China talks Marxism, but Still Walks Capitalism appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Pete Dolack.

The post Revolutionary Marxism vs. Chomsky: Reflections on a Recent Interview appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Paul Street.

To understand what Neopagan Marxism is, we need to compare it to other sacred and secular systems in order to understand their similarities and differences. Most Marxists know next to nothing about Neopaganism, and they like it that way. However, the inverse is not necessarily true. The Neopagan movement in Yankeedom largely came out of the feminist sacred movement, which was also political. As we will see, some Neopagans are liberal, but many are radicals. Generally, thanks to Starhawk and Z Budapest, many witches integrate their magical rituals with political activity. As for Marxism, there might be a smattering of Marxists who were pagans, but for the most part, they were isolated and didn’t constitute any identifiable subgroup within Neopaganism. Then, at the turn of the century, feminist Marxist Silvia Federici wrote Caliban and the Witch that brought a Marxist understanding to the witch hunts. More recently, about seven years ago, a practicing Marxist Neopagan named Rhyd Wildermuth began a small publishing house called Gods and Radicals. One of his books was All That is Sacred is Profane: A Pagan Guide to Marxism. In this work, Wildermuth tried to make a Marxian understanding of capitalism understandable to pagans. However, he did not try to make Neopaganism attractive to Marxists. That’s what this article is about.

Overview of Six Theoretical Positions

Table A (Secular and Sacred Belief Systems) shows a full range of six theoretical orientations. The most right-wing of all belief systems are Christian fundamentalists. There are, of course, Jewish and Muslim fundamentalists, but I will go with Christian fundamentalists since I know them best. At the other extreme are what I call ‘evangelical atheists.’ These can be either liberal atheist humanists (like Dawkins, Dennett, Hutchens, and Harris) or typical hardline Marxists. In the middle of the spectrum are three other kinds of Neopagans: Atheopagans, soft polytheists, and hard polytheists. I’ve developed my own neopagan category which I call ‘socio-historical’ paganism, or Neopagan Marxism. My narrative will cover only some of the comparative categories; the table at the end covers the full range of similarities and differences.

How Christian Monotheists Are Different from Scientists, Marxists and Various Types of Pagans

As different as they are, all or most Christian fundamentalists:

• agree to strive for absolute certainty. Spiritual or psychological uncertainly is a sign of sin, that the system is incomplete and/or the work of the devil. All other tendencies accept uncertainty.
• have dualistic and mutually exclusive opposites. All other tendencies are polar and turn into each other at certain points.
• are the most extreme belief system in terms of exclusivity. There is only one path. All other paths are erroneous or demonic. Socialists and various kinds of pagans, on the other hand, have limited plurality between groups. Socialists will argue with other socialists more than with liberals or conservatives. Scientists will argue with each other but not with people who don’t play by the rules of science. Pagans tolerate plurality within the pagan community, but less with Christians or Muslims.
• are the only ones that think the natural world will end in an apocalypse.
• think heaven and hell are literal places we go after death. With the exception of evangelical atheists (who think heaven and hell are illusions) all the rest save sociohistorical Marxists treat heaven and hell as psychological states of mind.
• see God as transcendent and intervening in history. Pagans, hard scientists, and Marxists agree that nature is self-regulating and immanent. All tendencies other than Christian fundamentalists go beyond Kohlberg’s third or fourth stage of morality which claims morality is based on fear of punishment or convention.
• interpret missteps as sin or punishments from God. All the rest think mishaps are due to accident, faulty cognitive interpretations, or explanatory styles, social conditions, or a normal part of learning.
• are extrinsically motivated and driven by the hope of going to heaven in the afterlife. This makes it difficult for them to enjoy the present. Rather they are focused on past sins and future hopes. Other secular or sacred beliefs are either mixed or (as with scientists and Neopagans) are intrinsically motivated and very present-oriented.
• are the least self-reflective and think in the most concrete ways. They don’t think much about how their actions and words affect others. All the rest are self-reflective but for different reasons.
• are also the lowest in mental integration. They are the most likely to cognitively compartmentalize their thoughts and externalize contradictions in their own life by blaming confusion on the work of Satan.
• are likely to have some kind of brain damage, either from PTSD in wars, or domestic abuse from parents, or rape.

How Fundamentalist Monotheists Are Similar to and Different from Hard Polytheists

Next to the monotheist fundamentalists, there are what have been called ‘hard’ polytheists, who believe in the literal independent existence of many gods. There are many differences between monotheists and hard polytheists as the table shows, but they both agree that a) spiritual sources are real, b) minds can exist independent of brains, and c) they both deemphasize the neocortex side of the brain. They mostly just argue over whether the gods are singular or plural.

How Evangelical Atheists Differ from Christian Fundamentalists

It might surprise you to find that, on the extreme left of the spectrum, we have atheists, that I am calling ‘evangelical’. The reasons for this nomenclature are the following: a) they generally ignore that there could be a psychology to belief that mediates what is true or not; b) neither can tolerate that the secular and sacred are both necessary to human life. Each asks us to choose one or the other; c) though they both proselytize, evangelical atheists do so to a narrow audience (educated lay people); d) both are literalists with scientists sometimes being physical reductionists and Christian monotheists taking God as literal rather than metaphorical.

How Evangelical Atheists (Liberal Humanists and Hardline Marxists) Differ from Neopagans

• For evangelical atheists, the real existence of heaven and hell are dismissed as illusions. Various Neopagans agree that the real existence of heaven and hell is not a place. However, they do not dismiss them as illusions. Rather they are psychologically real, in extreme states of enjoyment and pain.
• Because rituals don’t really change the world, scientists and hardline Marxists dismiss ritualism as superstitious nonsense. All Neopagans disagree and argue that mindful rituals are not superstitious.
• For scientists and hardline Marxists, altered states of consciousness induced by sacred experience do not last. Various neopagans claim that altered states are remembered, transformed into art, and have developmental impact, such as in coming-of-age ceremonies.
• The relationship between evangelical scientists, hardline Marxists, and neopagans is lopsided. Many Neopagans support science, but with rare exceptions, scientists dismiss neopaganism and conflate it with monotheism.
• Evangelical scientists say that consciousness is rooted in the brain. Only Atheopagans agree with that. Others say that consciousness is rooted either in society or in the spiritual world.
• Evangelical scientists and hardline Marxists are the ones that emphasize only the neocortex part of the brain. The others either stress all three layers of the brain, or only the limbic and mammalian parts.
• For evangelical scientists or hardline Marxists, ghosts, ancestor spirits, and fairies don’t exist. Most Neopagans look at them as psychological. Hard polytheists and evangelical Christians think they are real.
• Evangelical scientists and hardline Marxists have the company of Atheopagans and sociohistorical psychologists in claiming that humans have not demonstrated scientifically extra-sensory perception. Jungians, hard polytheists, and evangelical Christians believe it exists, but has not been discovered yet.

These eight differences are crucial for understanding the differences between hardline Marxism and the Neopagan sociohistorical Marxism, which I am introducing in this article.

Evangelical Atheists vs Atheopagans

Moving this time from evangelical atheists on the left to Atheopagans (just to the right on the spectrum) there are many important differences.

• Whereas for evangelical atheists, altered states of sacred consciousness are short-term epiphenomenon; for Atheopagans these states are psychologically real, if not physically real, and they endure in the form of books or artwork
• While Atheopagans agree with evangelical atheists (that physical reality pre-dates mind), Atheopagans make room for the imagination while suspending judgment in order to create a good ritual.
• While evangelical atheists deny the value of any religion, Atheopagans believe in a naturalistic religion that is not superstitious.
• While evangelical atheists think all rituals are mumbo jumbo, Atheopagans think that a non-superstitious ritual can be very beneficial. For them, the ritual is more important than the belief.
• Evangelical atheists treat the limbic and mammalian parts of the brain as if they were buried in our animal past (and the less said about them, the better). Human beings at their best are looked at as exclusively using the neocortex. Atheopagan rituals strive to use all three parts of the brain: body, emotion, and mind.

Squabbles Among the Neopagans

In between these two extremes of evangelical Christian fundamentalists and evangelical atheists are four intermediate positions: Atheopaganism, sociohistorical Marxism, soft polytheism, and hard polytheism. Hard polytheists are different from the other three in that:

• gods, goddesses, ghosts, faeries, and ancestor spirits are real independent personalities—not metaphors, sociological projections, nor psychological projections.
• the magic that is practiced for hard polytheists has real effects in the physical world. For the others, magic has psychological and sociological impact only.
• unlike other pagans, hard polytheists might imagine that minds can exist without brains.
• hard polytheists might be more subject to PTSD than Atheopagans and Jungian soft polytheists because there are more working-class people who may have brain damage due to war, domestic violence at home, or rape.
• like soft polytheists (and unlike Atheopagans and Marxists) hard polytheists question whether there is objective truth and are more likely to value subjective experience.

Atheopagans differ from hard and soft polytheists in that: a) the scientific method is far and away the best way to know things; b) the physical world is real and independent of mind; c) gods, spirits, ancestors are not real; d) consciousness is a product of the brain. Soft and hard polytheists think there is consciousness linked to a spirit world not requiring brains.

Soft Polytheists

Next to the hard polytheists are the soft polytheists. These folks think that gods and goddesses are not literally real, but rather an expression of the ‘collective unconscious’. Jungians argue that gods and goddesses are part of the collective human psyche in general that cut across all human societies. There are many Neopagan Jungians, like James Hillman and Jean Shinoda Bolen. The soft polytheists who follow Jung are suspicious of science and are less critical of the history of religion than hard polytheists. Jungians tend to be old-fashioned conservatives, whereas hard polytheists are mostly New Deal liberals (with a modicum of socialism and fascism in certain heathens).

Sociohistorical Neopaganism vs Atheopaganism

Sociohistorical Marxists are in the center, disagreeing with Atheopagans on the left and Jungians to their right. Atheopagans and Marxists agree that science is the best way to know things, and that the gods are not real. But they differ in the following areas:

• altered states are not just psychologically real as Atheopagans say; they are sociologically real, depending on one’s social class. (There is no class dimension to Atheopaganism that I am aware of.)

• while both agree that the understanding of reality should not be literal, Marxists argue that understanding reality is not just the suspending of judgment of an individual. Reality is mediated by the type of society we live in, along with the point in history. Atheopagans are less sensitive that the perception of reality depends on the type of society we live in or the point in history.

• further, they disagree about the nature of consciousness. For Atheopagans, the brain is both a necessary and sufficient condition for consciousness. For Marxists, the brain is a necessary but not sufficient condition for consciousness. To be a sufficient condition, the brain must be engaged in socio-cultural activity. Thus, labor in society creates a mind, and it is the mind that creates consciousness. So far as I know, Atheopagans make no distinction between the brain and the mind.

• Atheopagans want to retain an appreciation of religion, calling it naturalistic religion. Neopagan Marxists want to dispense with religion, calling it the heart of a heartless world, the opium of the people. Neopagan Marxists also understand that the root meaning of the term religion is to bind-back, meaning something was lost. What was lost was egalitarian political-economic relations. All religion is class religion. The alternative to class-based religion is magic, which was prevalent prior to monotheism.

Sociohistorical Neopaganism vs Soft Polytheism

Marxian Neopaganism is critical of Jungian soft polytheism over the nature of consciousness. For Jungians, consciousness is ultimately spiritual (like Plato’s eternal forms). For Marxists, there is no spiritual reality, only a sociohistorical layer around the earth, the noosphere, engaging with the biospheric envelope. Secondly, the collective unconscious lumps the experiences of people in the seven different kinds of society into a universal which flattens the distinctions of the seven kinds of society. For soft polytheists, the methodology for altered states inducements is group or individual guided imagination.  Neopagan Marxists argue that group guided imagination can be part of Marxian practical critical political activity.

What is Sociohistorical Paganism?

Sociohistorical paganism has no inconsistency with the tradition of dialectical materialism. It understands that both nature and society are products of dialectical forces of Darwinian natural selection, combined with chance and (with the emergence of the human species) teleonomy, the internal planning of the human species. It also understands human society as evolving as a result of population pressure and depletion of resources, which drive technological innovation as well as economic and political qualitative leaps. It accepts uncertainty as a way of life. Opposites are understood as polar.  Because of the conflict between opposites, a new higher emergent synthesis comes about. Unlike traditional Marxism, sociohistorical paganism has no factions to argue with and has no need for loading the language. It does not strive to convert anyone.

Those of us who are sociohistorical pagans respect the entire legacy of the work of Marx and Engels. We also feel that their impressions of spirituality were too sweeping. One of their biggest failures was to not treat polytheism, animism, and magic as very different from Christian monotheism. Neopagan Marxism attempts to repair this failure to engage. Sociohistorical Neopaganism is inclusive of all socialist groups, and welcomes dialogue with Atheopagans, soft and hard polytheism, as well as Evangelical atheists (of which hardline Marxists are one type).

We respect the process philosophy of Whitehead, Hartshorne, and David Ray Griffin in their attempt to argue that there is an internality in nature all the way down. This does not make us pan-psychics since we believe there is an internality (what Whitehead called prehensions) long before there was any consciousness in nature. However, we believe with Engels that there is a dialectic in nature that goes all the way back to subatomic particles, and that evolution must be understood as a spiral with ever-new emergent properties emerging from conflict. Western humanities’ conception of heaven and hell are sociological projection of alienated humanity. When and if humanity creates socialism, it will approximate heaven on earth. This will go a long way towards dissolving infantile notions of heaven as a place to be taken care of or a hell as a place to suffer.

Unlike all other groups, sociohistorical pagans are committed to discovering a fifth stage of cognitive development beyond Piaget’s formal operations. Originally called “dialectical operations” by Klaus F. Riegal, preliminary work has been done by Michael Basseches.

(Dialectical Thinking in Adult Development) and Otto Laske (Dialectical Thinking for Integral Leaders)

Sociohistorical Neopagans have big plans for rituals. Following the lead of Starhawk and Z Budapest, sociohistorical paganism wishes to incorporate ritual, not only into specific protests and strikes, but also into an ongoing political practice. In addition, we attempt to do once again what the French revolutionaries did: change calendars and populate them with socialist holidays, socialist birthdays, pilgrimages, and rites of passage. We want to bring theatrical practice and collective imagination to socialism.

Unlike hardline Marxists, we want to live completely in the present. We believe that the choice for anyone joining us is not made from guilt or morality, but simply that as people we are irresistible. People want to be like us and want to be part of what we are cooking up. For us, altered states of consciousness in a magical ritual is not some kind of monolithic experience of all members. Different social classes will have different altered states because of their class position. Rituals producing altered states will be opportunities to work through some of the class conflicts between working-class, middle-class, and upper middle-class participants.

Unlike any other group, our perception of reality will depend on the kind of society we come from and the point in history we live in. As I have said in a previous book, From Earthspirits to Skygods the primitive magic-mythology in tribal societies will be very different from the secondary magic of agricultural states. The difference between the high magic of Renaissance Italy is very different from the low magic of witchcraft.

We work with other pagans’ gods and goddesses psychologically and sociologically, even though for us, they are not ontologically real. Ghosts, ancestor spirits, and earth spirits can be claimed by Atheopagans and Jungians to be psychological projections. For us they are sociological and historical projections of human social life and the differences between classes. The characteristics of the gods and goddesses—that they all have strengths and weaknesses—are projections that are worth working with, with the understanding that there is a danger of reification. The characteristics of the gods and goddesses, their identification as departments of life, should be worked in as part of our socialist plans. So, rituals to the god Hermes could accompany socialist transportation plans. Rituals to Demeter, the goddess of agriculture, accompany the meetings of socialist farmers.

We agree with hardline Marxists that consciousness cannot be reduced to the brain, but we disagree with some other pagans that consciousness is rooted in nature or in a spiritual world. After the existence of the brain and a central nervous system, consciousness arises (as in bonobos and chimps) as the result of toolmaking, social life, and culture that is the inheritance of social animals. However, self-reflective consciousness is the result of the development of a sociohistorical envelope wrapped around the Earth over the biosphere, which Chardin called the noosphere. Self-reflective consciousness is rooted in sociohistorical activity in creating and sustaining the noosphere.

Lastly, historical sacred oppression is very important to us. Like Neopagan feminist witches, we don’t forget nor forgive what Christianity did during the witch hunts. Neither do we forget nor forgive what the Christians did to the Alexandrian library and how the Church terrorized the likes of Bruno, Galileo and Spinoza. We reject any reconciliation with Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and the whole patriarchal 5000-year albatross. Neither are we seduced by Eastern mysticism, whether it be Hindu or Buddhist, cousins of the western patriarchal family. As one feminist titled one of her plays many years ago, Your 5000 Years Are Up. As sociohistorical Neopagans, we neither forgive nor forget. We will treat the rulers of patriarchy with the same sacred hatred as we treat the capitalists in the secular world.

BELIEF SYSTEMS: SECULAR AND SACRED

• First published in Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

PART I

Orientation

Simplistic notions of Domination and Resistance: Polarized Dualities

When we examine the relations between those in power and those who are subordinate, a typical way of framing these relationships is as a duality. On one hand, those in power are ruling using various power bases such as force, coercion, and/or charisma. The impact of these power bases keeps people passive. In fact, some claim that that powerless people come to agree they deserve to be in the position they are in. At the other extreme are open insurrections where the powerless temporarily rebel or even enact a revolution to overthrow those in power. The problem is that there are no in-between stages or a spectrum between pure submission on the one hand and revolution on the other.

From force to coercion

The ultimate basis of domination in complex state societies is force. However, the use of constant force only works in times of conquest or open rebellions. When domination acquires a kind of social continuity, other forms of dominance are set in motion. James C. Scott, in his book Domination and the Arts of Resistance uses his experience as a sheep herder to compare the situation of sheep penned in by an electric fence with the dominant relations in human society.

If sheep are pastured in a field surrounded by a powerful electric fence, they will at first blunder into it and experience the painful shock. Once conditioned to the fence, the sheep will graze at a respectful distance. Occasionally, after working on the fence, I have forgotten to switch on the power again for days at a time, during which the sheep continue to avoid it. The fence continues to have the same associations for them despite the fact that the invisible power has been cut. (48)

In human affairs, this captures the movement from the use of force to coercion or the threat of force. However, the analogy breaks down when we compare the difference between the motivations and actions of sheep and humans.

With sheep we may only assume a constant desire to get to the pasture beyond the fence – it is generally greener on the other side of the fence since they will have grazed everything on their side. With tenants or sharecroppers, we may assume both a constant testing through poaching, pilfering…and a cultural capacity for collective anger and revenge. The point is that the symbols of power, provided that their potency was once experienced may continue to exert influence after they may have lost most or all of their effective power. (48)

The problem with social scientific understandings of power dynamics is that there is not much explanation of what is in between submission and revolution. But James C. Scott argues that rarely can we see a case where an individual slave, untouchable, or serf is being either entirely submissive or entirely insubordinate. In between submission/acceptance and open revolution there are other states of power.

Barrington Moore widens the spectrum between complete submission and revolution by arguing there are two other grades of resistance before the third stage of revolution:

• lower classes criticize some of the dominant stratum for having violated the norms by which they claim to rule;
• the lower classes accuse the entire stratum of failing to observe the principles of its rule;
• the lower classes repudiate the very principles by which the dominant stratum justifies its dominance. This would be to identify with alternatives to the dominant system.

Scott argues that the historical evidence clearly shows that subordinate groups have been capable of revolutionary thought that repudiates existing forms of domination. However, subordinate groups are not born with revolutionary consciousness. They prefer squatting to a defiant land invasion. They prefer evasion of taxes to a tax riot. They would prefer poaching or pilfering to direct appropriation. It is only when these behind-the-scenes measures fail that they might be open to more drastic measures. Scott argues that there is a whole spectrum of resistance that occurs before even the first of Moore’s three gradients, as we shall see shortly.

My presentation of Scott’s work has five parts. In this introductory section, I will discuss three theories of submission, “thick”, “thin” and “paper thin” states of submission. Then I will probe into Scott’s three dimensions of submission including material, status and ideological dimensions. In the second section I will cover what Scott calls the “public transcript“ which is dominated by elites. These forms include things like parades and coronations and control of language. There are also forms of resistance such as the gathering of crowds and how terrifying they were to elites because they were public gatherings of subordinates without authorization. Interpersonal forms of resistance include mocking body language and verbal language including voice intonation and sarcasm. This will conclude Part I of this article.

In Part II I describe Scott’s notion of the hidden transcript. Hidden transcripts require secret social sites in which to discuss, rehearse and resist elites. Elites attempt to minimize this hidden transcript by taking away social sites and attempting to atomize individuals. In the second section of Part II, I discuss two forms of resistance that come out of the hidden transcript. One is social-psychological strategies and the other is the cultural strategies of resistance. In the last section of Part II, I describe Scott’s analysis of how the process of resistance turns into open insubordination. This is the electrifying time when the hidden transcript goes public. The general movement of both articles goes from the public transcript controlled by elites, to hidden transcripts controlled by subordinates to a return to the public transcript, this time controlled by subordinates who are now becoming insubordinate.

Theories of submission

When the upper class has power in everyday life, force is not used directly to keep the lower classes continuing to produce a surplus but by enacting a public display of their submission though speech, gesture and manners. How do we make sense of how this can happen? For liberal pluralists, the absence of significant protest or radical opposition is taken as a sign of lower-class satisfaction with the existing order. John C. Scott disagrees.

Thick and thin forms of submission

At the other extreme of the political spectrum, “fundamentalist” Marxists contend that on a deep level, perhaps on an unconscious level, the lower classes are aware that their position is unjust and in revolutionary situations  will discover what has been buried inside them. According to them, in revolutionary situations the lower classes will become a “class-for-itself”. How do these Marxists explain the consciousness of the lower classes in non-revolutionary situations? They contend that in these times the working class has been convinced that the upper-class justifications for their power are legitimate – and they actively believe in those values. They consent to their position. This is what Marx called “false consciousness” or class-in-itself mind-set. Scott labels these Marxist depictions of the lower classes as a “thick forms of consciousness.” This means that as people become socialized, the mask that they wear to do their job and reproduce hierarchical relations grows slowly onto their face and over the long-haul the face becomes the mask.

I find this term “fundamentalist” useful to describe a scholastic approach of some Marxists to socio-historical issues which rely too heavily on original texts to explain new events in the world and resist dialectical incorporation of new research which has emerged since the text was  written. In addition, there is a denial of the fact that some of Marx’s predictions were simply wrong.

Both liberals and fundamental Marxists agree that the lower classes in their normal conditions are satisfied or have “bought” the existence of class society. More skeptical of this are those left-wing critics who think the lower classes are unhappy with their situation but they think it is natural and inevitable. Instead of being satisfied or yielding consent, they are resigned to their situation. Scott calls this theory “thin” forms of lower-class submission. This is close to what Gaventa calls intimidation or the rule of anticipated reactions. This means the lower classes elect not to challenge elites because they anticipate the sanctions that will be brought against them. It is an estimate of the hopeless odds which discourage a challenge. Zygmunt Bauman sees power relations as being kept intact because alternatives to the current structure are excluded. He says “The dominant culture consists of transforming everything which is not inevitable into the improbable.” Here there is still a mask but it is thinner. The lower classes are less “snowed”.                                                           

Scott’s super-thin forms of submission

From Scott’s research, he thinks there is little evidence for the ideological incorporation of the lower classes and much evidence that the dominant ideology gives support and cohesion to the upper class rather than the lower classes, similar to pep rallies.  For Scott, what both thin and thick forms of consciousness don’t explain is how social change could ever originate from below. Instead, he argues that all these theories miss the disguised and public forms of resistance which are the subject of this essay. Scott says that these “in-between” forms of resistance are predominant in caste, feudal, and, slave societies.

Besides historical study, Scott draws from social reactance theory. Social reactance theory works on the assumption that there is a human desire for freedom and autonomy. When subordinates feel that their subordination is freely chosen, they are most likely to comply. When subordination is perceived as not freely chosen, there is resistance. In persuasive communication studies, when threats are added to a persuasive communication, they reduce the degree of attitude change. In fact, threatened choice alternatively tends to become more attractive. For Scott, there is little chance that acting with a mask will appreciably affect the face of the actor. If it does, there is a better chance the face behind the mask will, in reaction, grow to look less like the mask, rather than more like it. Nevertheless, Scott specifies 3 conditions under which a “paper thin” mask metaphor may be apt:

• when there is a good chance a good many subordinates will eventually come to occupy positions of power. This encourages patience, emulation and explains why age graded systems of domination have such durability; and
• when subordinates are completely atomized, kept under close observation and have no opportunity to talk things over or engage in either public or disguised resistance. This might occur when subordinate groups are divided by geography, culture and language.
• When there is a promise of being set free in return for a record of service and compliance. 

Scott’s work is the study of forms of resistance which exist in everyday life and are not revolutionary but exist as a kind of guerrilla warfare. His studies are drawn from pre-capitalist hierarchical societies including the reports of slaves, serfs, and untouchables. He ignores the specific differences between slave systems in North America or South America as well as differences between agricultural civilizations in China and India and European feudalism. He claims that his analysis has less relevance to forms of domination in industrial capitalist countries such as scientific techniques, bureaucratic rules or capitalist forces of supply and demand. Scott’s work is an attempt to track how struggles of lords and serfs, slave owners and slaves, Brahmins and untouchables are played out under coercive, rather than force conditions in everyday life.

Scott’s three-dimensional theory of subordination and resistance: material (technological and economic) status and ideological

James Scott divides the political economy of domination and submission into three dimensions: material domination and material resistance; status domination and status resistance; and ideological domination and ideological resistance. Please see Table 2 for an overview of how these dimensions play themselves out in dominance and resistance situations. Material domination includes the appropriation of grain, taxes, and labor by agricultural elites. Status domination consists of forcing subordinates to enact their subordination through ritual humiliations, etiquette, demeanor, gestures, verbal language such as “my lord,” or “your highness”. Soft speech levels include who speaks first to whom, codes of eating, dressing, bathing, cultural taste, and who gives way to whom in public.

Status indignities form a social-psychological bridge between the subordinates’ material condition and cultural ideological justifications for why they are in the state they are in. Status indignities are the subjective and inter-subjective experience of being poor and landless. For example, they are in psychological despair because they cannot afford to feed guests on the feast of Ramadan; they are upset by wealthy people who pass him on the village path without uttering a greeting; he cannot bury his parents properly or their daughter will marry late, if at all because she lacks a dowry. The worst indignities are suffered by audiences of those who form the social source for one’s sense of self-esteem – that is closest friends, families, and neighbors. Ideological domination includes whatever religious justifications exist for why the upper classes deserve to be in the position they are in. Scott calls all three dimensions the “public transcript”.

Material resistance is divided into two types, public resistance and disguised resistance (cells 2 and 3 of table 2.) Public material resistance is what you might suspect. The usual tactics used by subordinate groups in reformist or revolutionary situations include petitions, demonstrations, boycotts, strikes, and land invasions. Public status resistance includes insubordinate gestures, postures, and open desecration of status symbols. This might include the victim’s pleasure at seeing superiors dressed down by their superiors. Once this occurs, things are never the same. Public ideological resistance includes counter ideologies which propagate equality, such as liberalism or socialism. They might also include religious heresies of spiritual equality.

The three dimensions of public dominance correspond to what most sociologists and theories of power address. Scott might call this “high politics”. Formal political organization is the realm of elites where resolutions, declarations, and laws are enacted by politicians used in written records, news stories, and law suits.  In countries with a liberal industrial capitalist orientation, an exclusive concern with open political action will capture and normalize some forms of resistance such as petitions, demonstrations, boycotts and group organizing to make them ineffective. Political liberties of speech and association have lowered the risks and difficulty of open political expression.

But in conservative, dictatorship, industrial capitalist societies or in the slave, caste, and feudal societies most people are subjects, not citizens. If high politics is considered to be all of what politics is, then it appears that subordinate groups in these societies lack a political life, unless they engage in strikes, rebellions, or revolutions  – that is, “resistant” politics (second cell).

“Infrapolitics” is the circumspect struggle waged daily by subordinate groups and is like infrared rays, beyond the visible end of the spectrum. If formal political organization is the realm of elites, infrapolitics is the realm of informal leadership of nonelites, of conversation and oral discourse. “Infrapolitics” provides much of the cultural and structural underpinning for the more visible political resistance that may come later. Infrapolitics is a kind of guerrilla warfare where one side advances to see if it its tactics survive or are attacked and if so, with what strength? This is the subject of Scott’s work. He argues that to focus on the visible coastline of high politics misses the continent of infrapolitics.

Forms of disguised infrapolitics fall into three dimensions, material disguised resistance, status disguised resistance and ideological disguised resistance. Together all three are called “the hidden transcript.” Scott’s interest is in the status and ideological dimensions rather than the material dimension of infrapolitics because the material dimension has already been covered by Marxist fundamentalism.

Direct resistance by disguised resisters includes masked appropriations of food or land and anonymous threats. Practices of material disguised resistance include poaching, squatting, desertion, evasions, or fraudulent declarations of the amount of land farmed. In addition, direct resistance can include simple failures to declare land, underpayment, delivery of paddy spoiled by moisture or contaminated with rocks and mud, and foot-dragging. The lower classes can use gullibility and ignorance that are elite stereotypes of them such. These may incluede “laziness” to do less work and resist taxes, land dues, conscription and grain appropriation. In playing dumb, subordinate make creative use of the stereotypes intended to stigmatize them. Refusal to understand is also a form of class struggle.

Status disguised resistance includes what subordinates say and do with each other behind closed doors to counter status insults. This includes rituals of aggression, tales of revenge, gossip, rumor, and the creation of autonomous social sites. Gossip and rumor are designed to have a double meaning. This applies also to folk tales, jokes, songs, rituals, codes, and euphemisms.

Ideological, disguised resistance includes the development of dissident subcultures, millennial religions, myths of social banditry, and the return of the good king, carnival and world-upside down arts and crafts, which was also very powerful. Ideological disguised resistance also has a double meaning such as jokes, euphemisms, and the Br’er Rabbit stories of slaves. Altogether, there are six forms of resistance, three forms of public resistance, and three forms of disguised resistance. The table below helps to differentiate them.

The Public Transcript of Domination and Resistance

The public transcript is the open interaction between subordinates and those who dominate them. The public transcript is the self-portrait of the dominant elites as they would have themselves seen. This can take the form of collective performances such as public displays with little interpersonal interaction and interpersonal performances where there is actual dialogue.

Dominance performances: parades and coronations

Formal ceremonies such as parades, inaugurations, processions, and coronations celebrate and dramatize the rule of dominators. They are choreographed in such a way as to prevent surprises. All parades imply a hierarchical order, a precise gradation of status, with the king at the head and the lowliest at the rear. They are authoritarian gatherings. In formal ceremonies, subordinates only gather when they are authorized.

Rather like iron filings aligned by a powerful magnet, subordinates are gathered in an arrangement and for purposes determined by their superiors…

In a parade, there are no horizontal links among subordinates. Without the hierarchy and authority that knits them into a unit they appear as  mere atoms with no social existence….subordinates are nothing but potatoes in a sack (61-62)

Who are these performances for? At first guess, you might think that coronations serve the purpose of displaying to their subordinates the might and coordination of the dominant. But according to Scott, they are not very successful in doing this. He claims that this domination performances is a kind of self-hypnosis within ruling groups to buck up their courage. The authorities want to create appearance of unanimity among ruling groups. This is why it is very important that ruling classes suppress members of their own class from disagreeing publicly.

Public Transcripts of Domination: Interpersonal

Deferential behavior by subordinates in public interactions includes encouraging smiles, appreciative laughter and conformity in facial expression and gesture. Gender differences in language are interesting here. For example, women use tag questions and a rising tone at the end of a declarative sentence, including the use of hyper-polite tones, linguistic hedges, stammering, and no public joking. (Scott says it is interesting to consider that there are few women comedians.) Subordination and domination are built into the different usages in terms of bodily functions. Scott sites the following examples: “Whereas commoners bathe, the Sultan sprinkles himself; while commoners walk, the Sultan progresses (assuming a smooth, gliding motion); while commoners sleep, the Sultan reclines.” In slave societies, slaves are referred to as boys, whereas whites are referenced as “mister”.

The upper classes also use euphemisms, that is verbal language, gestures, architecture, ritual actions, and public ceremonies to obscure the ultimate force-basis use of rule. For example in terms of language,  “pacification” is used instead of “armed attack and occupation”; “calming” for “confinement by straightjacket”; “capital punishment” for “state execution”; “re-education camps” for “prison for political opponents”; and “trade in ebony wood” for “traffic in slaves”. Scott says when bosses fire workers they say “we had to let them go”, as if workers in question were mercifully released like dogs straining on their leashes.

On the other hand, the practices of their opponents are vilified and presented in categories which delegitimize their opposition. Authorities deny rebels the status of public discourse and try to assimilate their acts into a category that minimizes the political challenge by calling them bandits and criminals, hooligans, or mentally deranged. Religious practices that challenge the corrupt practices of the authorities are labeled heresy, Satanism, or witchcraft.

Public transcripts of resistance: crowds

An unauthorized gathering was potentially threatening. It is so threatening to the upper classes that they call such gatherings “mobs” or “rabble”. In other words, they think people run amok because they have no authorities ruling over them. A gathering is an unauthorized coordination of subordinates by subordinates.

In an agricultural bureaucratic state in the East or a feudal society in the West, the presentation of a petition to the ruler to redress peasant grievances was itself a capital crime.  Gatherings of five or more slaves without the presence of a white observer were forbidden. The authorities were uneasy about the holidays because they lacked the structure of work and brought together large numbers of slaves. This is why there was a law in France in 1838 forbidding public discussion between work peers.

Pubic transcripts of resistance: interpersonal

Those in subordinate positions may refuse to enact submissive facial gestures, make way for elites on the street, or addressing them with mock intonations or exaggerated submissiveness, refusal to laugh at jokes of the upper classes.

Public transcripts of resistance: ideological

Holding the elites’ feet to the fire

Elites cannot do just as they please. Because much of their power is legitimized, they must at least make a passable attempt to perform some valuable social functions. This requires that it must:

• specify the claims to legitimacy it makes;
• develop discursive affirmations it stages for the public transcript;
• identify aspects of power relations it will seek to hide (its dirty linen);
• specify the acts and gestures that will undermine its claim to legitimacy;
• tolerate critiques that are possible within its frame of reference; and
• identify the ideas and actions that will represent a repudiation of profanation of the form of domination in its entirety.

Elites are vulnerable to attack if these conditions are compromised.

For example, in feudalism, honor, noblesseoblige, bravery, and expansive generosity are expected from the aristocrats. The feudal contract would be negated by any conduct that violated these affirmations such as cowardice, petty bargaining, stinginess, the presence of runaway serfs, and failure to physically protect serfs. In the case of the Brahmins, elites would need to possess superior karma, vital ritual services, refinement in manner, presiding at key rites of birth, and observance of taboos are expected.

Return of the Just King

Very often the lower classes play off the king against the aristocracy. It is the king who represents the true interests of the serfs, untouchables, or slaves against the abuses of the nobles. Scott argues that, Lenin notwithstanding, there is simply no evidence that the myth of the Czar promoted political passivity among the peasantry. Furthermore, there is a fair amount of evidence that the myth facilitated peasant resistance. When petitions to the Czar failed, instead of turning on the Czar, serfs then suspected that an imposter, a false czar was on the throne. Under the reign of Catherine II, there were at least 26 pretenders. Pugachev, the leader of one of the greatest peasant rebellions, owed his success in part to his claim to be Czar Peter III. The myth of the czar could transmute the peasantry’s violent resistance to oppression to any act of loyalty to the Crown.

Fundamentalist Marxists, using thick forms of subordinate consciousness, claim that the myth of the kind czar is an ideological creation of the monarchy, then appropriated and reinterpreted by the peasantry. Scott argues that these myths were the joint product of a historic struggle rather like a ferocious argument in which the basic terms – simple peasant, benevolent czar – are shared but in which interpretations follow wildly divergent paths in accordance with vital interests.

Throughout Europe and southeast Asia there are long traditions of the return of a just king. Indian untouchables have imagined that Orthodox Hinduism has hidden sacred texts proving their equality. Slaves have imagined a day when they would be free and slave owners punished for their tyranny. Contrary to Gramsci, radicalism may be less likely to arise among disadvantaged groups who fail to take the dominant ideology seriously because they haven’t yet constructed an alternative.

Summary

Subordination requires a credible performance of humility and deference, while domination requires a performance of haughtiness and mastery. Transgresses of script have more serious consequences for subordinates, and subordinates are closer observers of the dominant because there is more to lose. The same is true for women in relation to men and children and in relation to their parents. People in dominant positions think characteristics of subordinates are inborn, rather than staged for them.

Coming Attractions

Up to now all the resistance offered by subordinates does not include any systematic interpersonal discussion by them. There must be a specific social gathering site, usually in secret where subordinates can speak freely. Secondly, those subordinates must be trustworthy, often members of the same slave master family, kin or neighbors, and have very specific working conditions as we shall see in Part II. We will explore two forms of disguise. Disguising the message and disguising the messenger. What is the place of myth and folktales? Are these stories diversions from revolution or rehearsals for it? Is smashing statues or reversing roles in carnival cathartic releases which then make people more docile or do they provide people with a structure for systematic revolt? Finally, what are the conditions when the hidden transcript of resistance finally turns into a public transcript of insubordination or revolution?

All of this will be covered in Part II.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Orientation:

Question about the where, when, what of power 

Is power something inside a person (an attribute) or a relationship between people? Is power a neutral concept, or does power have a positive or negative charge?  Is power vertical or horizontal? Most of the time it seems that power is hierarchical and can be called power over people. But can there be horizontal power, that is power with people? What is the relationship between power and politics? Is politics a specific form of power or is power a particular form of politics? What is the relationship between power, persuasion, and control? Are they interchangeable? Are they three completely different categories or are they related and overlapping?

What is the relationship between power and authority? Are power and authority opposites? Is power a form of authority or is authority a form of power?  Is all power intentional or can power be exerted unintentionally? What is the relationship between power, wealth, and prestige? Can you be powerful but not be wealthy and prestigious? Can you have wealth and prestige but not have power? What is the difference between potential power and latent power? What is the range of power in terms of the number of people it affects, the variety of tactics used or its depth of intensity?

Resources for this article

The field of political sociology has many very good theories of power. G. William Domhoff has written about how power is produced and distributed in two books about how the ruling class rules Yankeedom.  These books are The Powers That Be and Who Rules America? W. Lawrence Neuman has covered much ground in his textbook Power, State and Society. The Italian Gianfranco Poggi has identified three types of power in his book Forms of Power. Michael Mann has written three volumes on power that have demonstrated a deep historical grounding.  They are called The Sources of Social Power. Peter Morris has developed a theory of power from a philosophical standpoint. Stewart Clegg has written three books on power that I devoured. His work would require way more space than a single article. Robert Alfred and Roger Friedland have developed the richest theory of power from the point of view of six sociological schools. However, for purposes of just getting our feet wet, I will only draw from two books, one by Dennis Wrong, and the other by Steven Lukes.  Wrong’s book is titled Power: Its Forms, Bases and Uses. Lukes’ book is called Power: A Radical View.

This piece will focus on vertical power: when a person or class has power over people to harness energy and labor to get work done. How exactly do they do this?  My article is divided into three parts. The first is the delineation of eleven power bases. The second is a description of the three dimensions of power – pluralist, elitist, and class. I will close by answering the questions that I first posed in the orientation. At least as important, how does it get to be that people come to accept their own submission to power? This will be the subject of my next article.

I Range of power

We need to be able to access the range of power. What is the scope of power? In other words how far in breadth and depth does it cover? How long does it last?  Dennis Wrong identifies three areas of extensiveness, comprehensiveness, and intensiveness.

• Extensiveness has to do with how many people are involved.
• Comprehensiveness is the variety of strategies the powerholder can employ to achieve their outcome.
• Intensity is the range of how far it can used before it loses control over people. This has to do with the degree of coordination (in the case of power with) and subordination (in the case of power over).

Let’s use some examples. In the case of the sadist and masochist, power relations are narrowly extensive but highly comprehensive and intensive power relations. While dictatorial-tyrannical power will wield extensive and intensive power, the difficulty of maintaining the visibility at all times of the behavior of subjects sets limits to the comprehensiveness of its power.

There are three reasons why greater extensiveness of a power relation sets limits on authoritarian comprehensiveness and intensity. The first is the greater the number of subordinates makes for greater difficulty supervising all of their activities. Secondly, the more people it subordinates the more differentiated the chain of command is necessary to control them. Thirdly, the more people are involved the greater the likelihood of wide variation of the population’s attitudes toward the power holder.

II Power bases

By what means does the dominator achieve and maintain power? Let’s begin with the typology of power bases provided offered by Dennis Wrong.  I’ve added a few of my own from some of the sources listed in the orientation section.

1) Force With force, an individual or political group achieves their objectives in the face of another group’s noncompliance by stripping them of the choice between compliance and noncompliance. Force is treating a human subject as if they were a physical object or a biological organism subject to pain or injury. There are two kinds of forces – physical force and psychic force.

1. a) Physical force includes the use of violence, damaging the body. Its purpose is to eliminate people from the scene or prevent them from taking any action at all. Violent force can also involve the denial of food, sleep or on a larger scale, employment. Force can also be non-violent by those resisting to domination. In the case of civil disobedience, resisters use their bodies as physical objects.

1. b) The use of psychic force involves the damages of ideas, emotions, such as verbally insulting, degrading, or the deformation of character. On a group level, this would be ritual degradation, engaging in sorcery or casting a spell. On a less severe scale, nagging and browbeating are instances of psychic violence.

2) Coercion This is a term that is mistakenly used interchangeably with force. Coercion is a threat of the use of force. For example, I am driving on a city street and I see a cop’s flashing lights go on, indicating for me to pull over. I pull over not because I respect the cop’s legitimate authority, but because he has a gun. A man involved with a woman having a domestic quarrel stands up and begins shouting and pointing. This is not force because there is no physical contact. However, there is clearly a threat of force.

Coercion can take the form of symbols such as “Beware of Dog” signs, or gestures such as shaking a fist, swaggering walks, or verbal statements such as “your money or your life”. It can take place as displays such as in military parades or the flourishing of nightsticks. Coercion can succeed without force, such as robbing a bank with a water pistol. In the short run this is the most effective form of power in terms of extensiveness, comprehensiveness, and intensity while requiring the least amount of communication. However, it is high in the cost of material and human resources.

3) Politics This is the control people exert over what, when, where, and how people can and can’t act. An example is parents controlling their kid’s behavior as long as the kid lives at home: “my house, my rules” say the parents. Nation-states control their populations with passports, laws, and statutes.

4) Economic power This kind of power involves control over material resources such as commodities, wages, salaries, tools, natural resources, money, and stocks. The power of a capitalist over a worker is a typical example.

5) Symbolic power As a college teacher I can control my students by the power I have over their grade. Symbolic power is control over certificates, grades, and diplomas.

6) Information control/persuasion This is control over communication, whether face-to-face or through media. This control can be over information content, information sources or how or when information is presented. Propaganda is hard-liner information control, while rhetoric (debate) or dialectic (classroom) are softer means of communication control.

Persuasion deals with changing attitudes (minds) and/or changing actions through the use of rhetoric. Face-to-face persuasion is more up-front rather than behind the scenes.  Persuasion presents itself as an implicitly egalitarian relationship that leaves intact free choice without resorting to either tacit or overt threat to a group. As with all the forms of power before information control, it is irrelevant who the individual is, what the situation is, and the time and place of its occurrence. With information control, persuasion involves far more sensitivity to time, place, and circumstance. Mass persuasion using mass or internet communication is much closer to propaganda.

7) Charisma This form of power is based on the personal qualities of an individual such as charm, theatrical skills, oratory power, being articulate, or having spiritual vision. When applied to cults, charisma is the most unstable form of power because when the leader dies or is revealed to be fallible, whatever has been built falls with him.

8) Sexual resources Here we have the exchange of sexual favors for money, power, or fame. Sexual resources also involve the promise of sex and the manipulation of the other person with the prospects of having sex. So much of dating relationships is all about this.

9) Manipulation Manipulation is one of those words which is over-used and meant to refer to everything from news manipulation, advertising manipulation, or relations between equals. I will define manipulation as exclusively what happens between friends. It involves getting an equal to do something through exposure, distraction, deception, exaggeration, or guilt. In his book Influence, John Cialdini named many of these forms of manipulation which he called exploitation of reciprocity, foot-in the-door, foot-in-the mouth, door-in-the-face, and low-balling.

10) Legitimation This form of power involves the power holder having formal training, degrees, official clothing, badges, and reputation. What makes this form of power so powerful is that those in subordination have internalized the right of a legitimate authority to rule. Legitimacy means authority sanctioned by social structures and respect is given by subordinates (at least initially.) Authors of books and some political figures are examples. Legitimacy is the untested acceptance of another’s judgment.

All forms of power up to legitimacy require that those holding vertical power expend energy. In one case it involves the use of weapons, jails, and concentration camps. In the other wheeling and dealing behind the scenes, as in doing marketing research or advertising campaigns. In the case of mass persuasion, it involves studying how to write a successful political speech. But all these forms of power require constant replenishing of resources.

Using legitimate power may require initial external input through training or schooling, but over the course of generations the authorities can go long stretches without input because the subservient have internalized their authority. The initial input of authority involves the production of ideology of obedience through mass media, education, and religious socialization which people internalize. Once subordinates have internalized this ideology, this form of power is more or less set. Legitimate power is in some ways the most interesting because here the dominated have come to believe that the dominator deserves to be in this position. The extensiveness of legitimate authority is more limited, but it is most reliable in controlling the anticipated reactions of power subjects. Legitimate authority is most efficient in minimizing the need for keeping watch.

Most workers report to their jobs every day because they need the wages (economic power). But their attitude towards their bosses is mostly that their bosses also have legitimate authority. Many have come to believe that their bosses deserve to monopolize tools, resources, and property. When workers are upset, most of the time they demand better working conditions, more pay, and more benefits. They don’t challenge capitalist authority over what gets produced, how much, or by when. This 500-year-old system appears to be eternal and only rarely in revolutionary situations can workers imagine any other way of organizing production.

11) Competency This last form of power involves getting others to do something because of the powerholders demonstrated skills or know-how. The best example of this in the relationship between a doctor and her patient, a lawyer and his client, or a pilot and her passengers.  On the one hand, all these forms of power are legitimate. But unlike most forms of power there are neither guns nor goods that are shown to command obedience. Unlike in persuasive forms of power, with competent authority no evidence is needed. A patient may listen to a doctor’s advice without understanding the rationale. Their authority is imputed, rather than demonstrated. In competent authority, comprehensiveness and intensity are low. Knowledge is not depleted with use, and costs have more to do with equipment. Its basis of knowledge is utilitarian.

An even better form of competency is a hunting leader of an egalitarian hunting and gathering society. Here the leader has no desire to lead but their leadership is insisted upon by the group because of their skills. A story is told by an anthropologist that the prospective leaders have to be dragged out of the bushes. Oftentimes the captain of a baseball team is chosen by the players, the first among equals because of their competency.

III Multiple power bases are used and morph into each other over time

Human motivation is almost always a heterogeneous mix of different, often conflicting impulses which play themselves out over time. Because of this, a stable power relation of some comprehensiveness and intensity is rarely based on a single form of power. Each form of power usually has more than one power base. For example, a college teacher will use symbolic power as primary force but will support it through politics and legitimacy. An employer will use economic power primarily but combine it with political power and information control.

In addition, power bases tend to change over time as relationships develop over time and routine sinks in. For example, in a cult the charismatic power of love for a leader can deteriorate into a simply authoritarian political bureaucratic power when the leader dies. Prison guards initially use force and coercion but over time some prisoners become attached to the guards (the Stockholm syndrome) and might even see the guards as having legitimate power. An occupation that is chosen initially for financial gain (economic power) but may be maintained out of pride of craft (competency) even when the person is making less money. It is in the long-term, self-interest for the powerholder to try to transform might into right, force, and coercion into legitimacy. On the other hand, the dependence of the subordinates’ position in the power relationship will motivate them to come part way to meet the powerholder.

IV Three dimensions of power: pluralist, elite and Marxist

Pluralist

In liberal theories of power, such as that of the political scientist Robert Dahl, the way power is measured is that different actors and different interest groups compete in different areas of interest. Power is purported to be diffused across situations and there is “nothing going on behind the scenes”. Power is neither unstructured nor systematic.  Power is identified with the issues that agenda has set, for example, at a city council meeting. Power is subject to constant dissipation because of the push and pull of different veto groups. The exercise of power is strictly behavioral and observed and the word power is used interchangeably with persuasion.

Contrary to either elitist or Marxist theory, all power does not involve conflict because people gain power through accidents, unintended consequences, or just stating the issue more clearly. At the same time, those successful in a conflict of interest may involve more of their capacity to do things or more consent from others. There may be no struggle at all.

For the pluralists, the wielding of power is decentralized most of the time into several separate and single issues. This is different from elite theories that argue that the issues are connected. The wielding of power is overt and can be seen, as in the action of the leaders at a city council meeting who are limited in deciding on concrete issues in front of everyone. The preferences in a local participation have to do with the uniqueness of particular individuals rather than underlying class interests. Jeremy Bentham argued that preferences are the same as interests and are revealed by market behavior. Everyone is the best judge of their own interest and people are not seen as having illusions about their interests or being short-sighted about them. Interests are more or less revealed by participating in politics. For pluralists, political parties adequately make room for the interests of everyone because class conflict is the exception, not the rule for pluralists. Pluralists have complete confidence that voters are consciously aware of them and can articulate them. For pluralists it is too cynical to propose that people’s interests can be unconscious or that they can be inarticulate and politicians may have to express their interests for them. On a larger scale, pluralists think representative democracy works pretty well. Workers know what they want, can articulate what they want, and their representatives listen to them and carry out their will.

Politically and sociologically pluralists are rooted in the work of Emile Durkheim who believed that the state in capitalist society could allow democratic participation. When the masses explode, revolt, or create revolutionary situations it is a sign of group pathology rather that that the system isn’t working. For pluralists 40-50% of those who don’t vote do so because their will is being carried out by politicians, with their consent. It is not because there was anything wrong with the system or the candidates. Both the parties and the state are socialized to balance group demands and public interest. The image of the state is as a thermostat or referee between competing groups.

Elitist theories of power

Pluralist theories of power are clearly liberal. Class theories of power are straightforwardly Marxian socialist. Elite theory is considerably more complicated. For example, the Italian political theorists of politics – Pareto, Mosca and Michels – are all conservative. They explain political power as a battle of elites and dismiss the masses as apathetic, ignorant, and superstitious. On the other hand, theorists in the centrist tradition of Max Weber are more interested in explaining power in terms of the autonomy of state bureaucracies. On the left, theorists of power like C. Wright Mills, William Domhoff, Bachrach and Baratz analyze the ruling class much more critically than the Italian theorists and they are more hopeful about the power of the lower classes to assert their power. For the most part, we will focus of the elite theory of Bachrach and Bartaz because they directly challenged pluralist Robert Dahl’s description of power.

Elitist theories of power think there is a lot more going on behind the scenes than pluralists do. For both elitists and Marxists, issues are not diffused across social life, and many issues are interconnected. For example, both elitist and Marxist theorists will say that capitalists allow disagreements to be aired publicly around cultural issues of sexuality and religion but the rulers keep economic issues of the viability of capitalism and the gap between the rich and the poor off the table. For elitists and Marxists, there is not a plurality of different issues and different interest groups. Behind the scenes, there are the same few actors and the same few interest groups that prevail across all issues.  The full thrust of power is not exhausted on the floors of city councils over real issues. For example, a city council will argue about where the next place will be that the homeless are dumped off. However, they will not discuss in public why real estate companies have the right to buy up as much property in a city as possible. For elitists, power is not diffused but stored and concentrated in the circulation of elite groups and is not lessened through the push and pull of competing groups.

For elitists, whether competing groups are more or less competent in what they are trying to do or more or less the subject of accident, all power involves conflicts of interests – whether they are overt or covert. Power and persuasion are not interchangeable. For elitists, all power involves force or fraud, as Machiavelli said. Power for elitists involves limiting the decision-making publicly, while political issues are consciously decided upon by individuals behind closed doors. For elitists, interests are far more important than preferences and they are not likely to be revealed publicly, most especially conflicts of interest in politics or economics. Interests are most deeply human, deep, and dark and are far more important than people’s preferences which are guided by conscious motivation. Elite theories allow that people can be mistaken about their interests and often conflicted about their preferences. For elitists, people who don’t vote do not do so because they assent to the available choices. It is because they are apathetic, ignorant and can’t think beyond their own self-interest.

For elite theorists, the state is more concerned with ruling than with governing, and in managing its bureaucracy (in the case of Weber) rather than ensuring the voices of its citizens are heard. While for pluralists’ society is the state, for elitists the state has independence from society and protects its own interests. For elitists, power is not situational, rising and declining. Power is structural and independent of situations, serving its own interest. Power is stored and concentrated in deep state institutions which stay in place as local regimes move in and out. Power is about politics, force, and the threat of force. The population doesn’t steer its own course but is manipulated. Exploitations come from the bottom of the class structure. Because the population is not seen as capable of self-organization, disturbances are short-lived because the lower classes cannot keep their attention focused. Unlike pluralists, those in power do not govern with consent but rule through competition between elites. For elite theorists, the state both manages the interests of the middle and upper classes, but also has an interest of its own.

Marxist theories of power

For Weberian elitists, power rests in the internal bureaucracy of the state, rather than social classes or interest groups. For Marxists, power is wielded by the capitalist class which controls the state and society and exploits the lower classes. Marxist theory is also cultural and psychological in how it distracts the working-class from defending its own interest.

For the capitalists, power would never be shown either at the city level or even at a state level. Capitalists wield power at the national level in the control of both political parties. Marxists argue that while the capitalist class may have differences in foreign policy, within the domestic sphere capitalists agree to keep any third political party from forming and suppress any workers’ movements for higher wages and better working conditions. Both political parties are anti-communist.

How are disruptions of the lower order treated? This depends about whether capitalism is expanding or contracting. If capitalism is developing in prosperous times, capitalists will attempt to entertain, distract, and present reified images of life to get lost in. Here workers will have false consciousness. If the productive forces are contracting capitalists may be more repressive, neglecting infrastructure and begin militarizing the police. Elitists will claim conflicts exist between themselves which eventually subside. For Marxists conflicts are endemic because there are terminal crises in capital which do not subside but spread to other social sectors. For Marxists, unlike liberal elitists, the state cannot manage conflict in the long run because the conflict between the capitalists and workers is much broader and deeper than anything the state can manage. When it comes to local expression of power at the city level the pluralist will fight over the plays of the game, elitists will fight over the rules of the game, while Marxists will challenge the game itself.

Unlike elitists, Marxists don’t think all conflict involves force. Conflict can express itself through smoldering class conflicts which may not require the use of force. In the areas of decision making, the bias of the system can be manifest without any meeting of capitalist minds. For example, many years ago I was on an economic justice committee at a Unitarian Church and we decided to do a campaign to “buy nothing” on Black Friday. We wanted to place an ad in a city newspaper. The first newspaper refused our ad. We went to another one and the same thing happened. When we were turned down for the third time, one member on our committee claimed the newspapers were conspiring against us. Someone else pointed out that there didn’t need to be a conspiracy. Each newspaper separately would be threatened by advertisers with withdrawing their ads if our ad ran. Since advertisers knew what the competing ads were before the paper was published, we could understand that we would be rejected by all capitalist newspapers without any of the copy editors contacting each other at all.

In terms of interests and preferences. Marxists’ theories suggest that working class people are not conscious of their interests (false consciousness) and their interests are shaped by advertisers behind their backs. Marxists must point out to workers what their real interests are because workers have illusions about their interests, such as the prospects of becoming millionaires.

For pluralists, power is exercised through what is resolved on each agenda item. For elites, power is controlled over the decision-making process, of which items are not even on the agenda. For Marxists, power is exercised in convincing the population to take sides which go against their class interests. For example, recognizing that the funding for the police serves their interest more than low-cost housing. Workers are blinded by false consciousness which comes out of TV shows in which cops are brave and heroic individuals. They fail to understand that the police are a domestic state-terrorist organization mobilized to beat up and kill the working class. For Marxists, what it means to have power is to keep people from even articulating grievances which will threaten the economic interest of capitalism. Capitalists, through sports, movies, and nationalism shape workers’ very cognitions and perceptions so that they express their interests in superficial topics that have nothing to do with their own lives. Like elitists, Marxists think that non-socialist political parties cannot seriously improve life for the working class and that political participation in these parties is a waste of time. Capitalists control workers not primarily through force and coercion but through hegemony, in which the workers consent to be ruled through reactance theory. Reactance theory convinces workers that they are freely choosing. Marxists treat social explosions not as signs of pathology as pluralists do. Rather, they are treated as workers breaking through false consciousness and recognize their real interests lie in overthrowing capitalists.  Please see the table at the end of the article for a summary of these and other contrasting points. 

V The what, when, where, and how of power

Now that we have gone through the eleven power bases and the three dimensions of power, we are in a better position to answer the questions initially posed at the beginning of this article.

Is power individual or social?

On the surface, it appears that when it comes to power, one group has it and the other group doesn’t. But this is a mechanical way of thinking about how power is held. Powerholders can be weak and subordinates can be strong. More importantly, in most power situations those who are subordinate are many and those with power are few. This means we must explain how it is that those in a subordinate position allow those with power to rule. When most people are passive, we have to say that those people have some degree of complicity in allowing the small group in power to have their way. This is why power is a social relationship rather than an individual one. Pluralists and Marxists will agree that power is social. Elitists are more likely to think of power as mechanical with elites active and the masses passive. How subordinates allow those with power to rule will be the subject of my next article.

Is power neutral or is it negative or positive?

It is best to think of the word power in a neutral or even positive way rather than as strictly negative or a relationship that could somehow be avoided. After all, power is a collective and necessary process. Power is neutral in the sense that it is a collective exerted action to harness energy to do work in order to: a) mine resources (economic and sexual); b) confer prestige (status); c) coordinate action; and d) plan future collective action. Pluralists are uncomfortable admitting power exists and see it as negative. Elitists will see power as negative but inevitable. Marxists are more likely to see power as negative and positive and hold out that in communist society power will be used positively.

Is power over people or with people?

Most people use the term power to mean power over people. What this leaves out is the possibility that people can organize social relations without hierarchies, as the anarchists have pointed out. In this article the power bases and the dimensions of power have been used to have power over people. However, the power base of competency can be used to promote horizontal power relations. To be clear I will define two kinds of power:

1. Horizontal power—harnessing energy to do work in a way in which all groups control all dimensions of society – technology, economics, politics, and culture. This is most prevalent in egalitarian tribal societies and in some kinds of relationships in industrial capitalist countries. Examples are relations among friends or comrades or collaboration at work between people on the same level. This is power with
2. Vertical power – harnessing energy to do work in a way where one group monopolizes most or all dimensions of society. Vertical power goes with power over

The pluralists of one-dimensional power will think that power is over people and will try to substitute persuasion in their ideal city hall political engagements. For them, the political is situational. Elitists say there is only one kind of power and that is vertical, power over people. Three-dimensional class theorists see power as potentially power with people as part of the emergence of classless societies.

Is politics a specific form of power or is power a particular form of politics

Power and politics are very closely related but they are not interchangeable. As we have seen earlier in this article, politics is one of eleven power bases. Power is the end and politics is the means. Power is collective, exerted action to achieve outcomes. Politics is a means to control what, when, where, and how people move or don’t move throughout time and space. But other forms of power are necessary in order for politics to be successful. This includes force, coercion, legitimacy, and economic incentives. One-dimensional theories of power, being liberal politically, think power is a form of politics and are less willing to consider that power is pervasive so as to include all the other power bases. Two and three-dimensional theories of power claim politics is a means to power.

What is the relationship between power, persuasion, and control?

As we have seen in the section on power bases, persuasion is a particular form of power, and though its methods are less intense than other power bases, all persuasion involves power. However, not all power uses persuasion. Power can use force, coercion, and sexuality in which no appeal to reason is operating. Control is a particular form of power, specifically political. But as I said earlier, politics requires other power bases for it to be successful. Only pluralists hold out for the prospect that persuasion alone can win people over.

What is the relationship between power and authority? Are power and authority opposites? Is power a form of authority or is authority a form of power?

Again, power is the more general category. Authority usually involves the power base of legitimation. However, authority by itself is not enough. As a college teacher, my students might see me as legitimate, yet without the threat of the symbolic power of a grade, I cannot be assured they will listen to me. In addition, power can be asserted without authority. Ten other power bases can be operating in which the power holder will not have authority yet will be successful. Since pluralists tend to be more optimistic about social relations, they are more likely to think the public will listen to legitimate authorities than elitists or Marxists.

Is power intentional or can it be unintentional?

All power is intentional, but there is a difference between acting in order to achieve a certain outcome and achieving it and recognizing that other effects will unavoidably result. However, so long as the effects were foreseen by the actor, even if not aimed at as such, they still seem to count in the theories of Wrong and Lukes as constituting an exercise of power. This is in contrast to unanticipated and unintended effects which are instances where the situation is no longer under the command of those with power.

Some may object and say that intentional efforts to influence others often produce unintended as well as intended results. Unintended results of power should still be the responsibility of the person or group utilizing power. After all a dominating and overprotective mother does not intend to feminize the character of her son, yet this is what often happens. Isn’t she still responsible, regardless of her intentions? The effects others have on us, unintended by and even unknown to them, may influence us more profoundly than direct efforts.

To insist that power can be validly imputed to an actor only when she produces intended and foreseen effects on others does not consider that she may so also produce a wide range of far more significant unintended and unforeseen effects. Effects that are foreseen but not intended count as exercises of power. Those events which are unanticipated and unforeseen are not the responsibility of the power subject. To claim full responsibility for all effects, intended, anticipated and foreseen, unanticipated and unforeseen is to attribute a divine, all-knowing power to the powerholder and make the concept of power strident and unrealistic. Pluralists are most likely to attribute to powerholders good intentions and the negative consequences of their power to accidents or misunderstandings.

Power wealth and privilege

Having power is deeper than having wealth and prestige. Power uses wealth and prestige to maintain itself and achieve its ends. Wealth is a form of economic resources and privilege will usually go with legitimacy or sexual resources. But power can certainly be successful without them, by using some combination of the other power bases.

Potential vs latent power

Potential power and latent power are also very close, but valuable distinctions can be made. Potential power may or may not be used. When it is not used it has no impact on the anticipated reactions of others. An example is a wealthy miser who chooses to conceal his fortune. Another is someone who has a secret arsenal in his cupboard but does not use it. Latent power has anticipated reactions built in which it may have on others without the power holder having issued a command. Both elite and class theories are more likely to be sensitive to these subtleties.

• First published at Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Six of the educators from Ili Pedagogical University in Ghulja (in Chinese, Yining) are being held in detention, including Abdullah Ismail of the Marxism Institute. He was abducted in 2018 and charged with being “two-faced,” the sources said. The CCP uses the term to describe an official or party member who is either corrupt or ideologically disloyal to the party.

The source in Ghulja, who has knowledge of the situation, sent RFA the names and phone numbers of two people who had worked closely with the school on Abdullah Ismail’s case.

When RFA called one of them, a staff member in the school’s Education Department, reluctantly acknowledged that she knew him but refrained from commenting on his situation.

Parhat Kadir, Abdullah Ismail’s former high school classmate who now lives in the Netherlands and is the former chairman of the Dutch East Turkistan Uyghur Union, said Ismail was well-liked in high school, where he was a top student and a skilled soccer player.

“Abdullah was my classmate from first to 10th grade,” he told RFA. “He was an honest and hardworking kid.”

Abdullah Ismail, who was born in 1962 in Ghulja’s Suidong township, was admitted to the Literature Department of the Ili Pedagogical University in 1981, Kadir said. After he graduated four years later, he began teaching at the school.

As secretary of the Marxism Institute, Ismail published research papers on Marxist theory in a number of newspapers and magazines, including the Ili Gazette, the source said.

Ismail later was included on the list of suspicious persons in the school in 2017 when China stepped up its crackdown on Uyghurs by detaining them in “re-education” camps, and had been interrogated intermittently, the source from Ghulja said. He was charged with several criminal charges, though the source did not name them.

The preliminary questioning was conducted by the School Discipline Commission, according to the source who provided the phone number of a disciplinary officer in charge of the investigation that year.

The disciplinary officer confirmed that Ismail had been a member of school administration and was abducted in 2018.

He also said he met the teacher four or five years ago and had sent material he collected during his investigation to the relevant authorities.

“It was in 2017 that I was asked to collect and give his material to the school disciplinary committee,” he told RFA. “He was charged with being a two-faced person.

“He was a member of school administration before being CCP secretary of the Marxism Institute at Ili Pedagogical University,” the disciplinary officer said. “He was the secretary when he was arrested. Nobody knows or nobody told us how many years he was sentenced to [following arrest] in 2018.”

Behtiyar Nasir, deputy inspector general of the World Uyghur Congress, said he attended Ili Pedagogical University in the late 1980s when Ismail was a teacher there. He said Ismail had received a doctorate in philosophy from a university in Beijing.

Translated by RFA’s Uyghur Service. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Shohret Hoshur.

The post Marxism against Marxism appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ben Debney.

Part I – Pre-History of Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

Waking Up

In 2001 Barbara had her awakening to the disasters that capitalism caused. This started as part of the 9/11 events, beginning after the response to the supposed attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. It became immediately clear the US would respond to the attacks with military action against whatever country seemed most vulnerable and had access or proximity to resources, in this case oil. The attacks were supposedly coordinated by al-Qaeda, a radical Islamic group founded by Osama bin Laden and headquartered in Afghanistan. We firmly believed, with documented evidence, that the US attacked Iraq instead even though Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with the attacks. The US wanted control of Iraq because of their large reserves of oil. In fact, they were the second largest oil exporting state at that time.

As soon as the news came of the World Trade Towers being hit, Bruce said that something was fishy. From that time forward Barbara’s political life began. Watching the news was surreal and terrifying. Over and over again, images of the towers collapsing were televised. Talk of war began almost immediately, with George “W” Bush putting the blame on Iraq – with absolutely no proof. What was even more alarming was watching how people reacted to it. So many of them jumped on the bandwagon of war.

Making signs

Shortly after the attack Bruce – who had been a socialist for 30 years – talked Barbara into going to her first demonstration. Together we made signs to bring with us – “No War on Iraq”, “War is not the Answer”. Making the signs was so much fun. We got old cardboard cartons from the grocery stores along with some long lightweight sticks from lumber stores to hold them up. We brainstormed ideas for what to write. Bruce’s signs always had much more content than Barbara’s. Barbara went for the fewer words, the better.

First demonstration

The gathering, or demonstration, was held in Palo Alto, CA, just outside the Stanford University Campus. We had to park our car some distance from the crowd, and Barbara felt self-conscious carrying our signs. A radical political science faculty member, Joel Benin, who was pro-Palestinian, gave an impassioned speech. It was so sane, so true. People around us began chanting and we joined with them – NO WAR – NO WAR. This wasn’t a big demonstration, only a couple of hundred people, but everyone was in agreement that we could see where this drive to war was going, and we wanted to try to stop it. Barbara didn’t fully grasp the full implications of where the US was headed or what would be her involvement in the fight to stop it. Ultimately, that was the beginning of her journey to socialism.

Barbara has already written about much of this in My Journey to Socialism, some of which we’ve quoted here, which began after these attacks. Bruce was so happy to see her waking up.

Attending anti-war demonstrations

We went to anti-war demonstrations in San Francisco and Oakland, chanting “No Blood for Oil”. Many of the demonstrations and meetings were organized by San Francisco ANSWER, an anti-war group formed in San Francisco shortly after 9/11. On March 20, 2003, we marched with tens of thousands of people to protest the war on Iraq that Bush started that very day. We shut down the city. Aside from ANSWER, there seemed to be no large, unified movement to take action against the existing paradigm of US imperialism and capitalism. That is, there was no large movement until the Occupy Wall Street Movement in 2011 which was designed to protest income inequality and the use of influence of money in politics by occupying public spaces.

2004 – 2011 Looking for a Foothold

During this time period, we were searching for the best place for us to fit in and work towards changing the existing capitalist system. We had a book club together, just the two of us. We read and discussed The Best Democracy Money Can Buy by Gregg Palast, Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins, The powers That Be, and Who Rules America, both by G. William Domhoff. We met every other week on the weekends for 2 hours. This helped to develop Barbara’s understanding of capitalism.

In 2008 the economic crash hit almost everyone.  We each lost ¼ of our savings in our IRA accounts, even though we had our money invested in socially responsible companies. Since this was money we hoped to use to supplement Social Security, this was a very personal wake-up call, not just for us, but for many. Were we witnessing the collapse of capitalism, and its effects on ordinary people?

In 2009 we attended a KPFA townhall meeting. KPFA was our local radio station, representing a mix of New Deal liberals and Social Democrats. They featured people like Amy Goodman, Sasha Lilly, C.S. Soong, and Bonnie Faulkner. At that meeting Bruce spoke about why KPFA is supporting the Democratic Party. When the meeting was over, he was approached by a labor organizer who wanted to start an organization to try to coordinate the public education unions. We stayed with this group for about a year, attending meetings about once a month, but nothing ever came of it, so we left.

Part II – 2011 – 2012 – Turning Point – Occupy

Excitement of General Assemblies:

We were happy to see Occupy San Francisco and Occupy Oakland blossom in October of 2011 which lasted until the spring of 2012. We initially attended assemblies at the amphitheater in Frank Ogawa Plaza, right on the doorstep of Oakland City Hall. In San Francisco they were near the Ferry Building and at the bottom of the financial district.

The General Assembly (GA) meetings in both San Francisco and Oakland were electrifying. There were some extremely skilled facilitators. The GAs met every day and discussed how to regulate the public space that they had occupied and integrate the homeless community, which turned out to be a very difficult task. In San Francisco there were people who rode on a ferry that would stop by and watch the meetings. This was a good way to draw people in. Some of the members of the organizing committee of Occupy led tours around the Occupy camp to combat the propaganda against it.

Shutting Down the Port of Oakland

November 2, 2011, Occupy Oakland coordinated to shut down West Coast ports to make a statement that we would not go back to “business as usual”. The shutdown was a way of protesting the treatment of longshoremen and truck drivers, who were forced to work as independent contractors. They were then fired by port owners EGT and Goldman Sachs for wearing union t-shirts. We marched with 200,000 others from Oscar Grant Plaza to the ports. While the ILWU did not openly support the blockade, the rank and file and many former labor leaders did. Clarence Thomas, secretary/treasurer of the ILWU, was fully committed to this blockade, as he had been for many past blockades. We’ll never forget the power of the first speech we heard from him which began – “I’m Clarence Thomas – the REAL Clarence Thomas”. Jack Heyman, also with the ILWU, was another powerful and persuasive speaker.

The Challenges of the Working Committees

We joined some of the committees, but we noticed there was a real gap in ages in the members. The overwhelming majority of people were in their 20s, with the exception of the Committee for Solidarity with Labor. There were virtually no people in their 30s and 40s and only a handful of people like us in our 50s and 60s. We were both working full time and tried to join committees that would work with our schedules, but the organizers kept changing the days and times of the meetings. It seemed like, at best, most of the Occupy participants worked part-time or might have been upper middle-class people whose schedules were more flexible. The committees were not very solid.

People would float in and out. Any group could start a committee – even conservative committees like those who wanted to work with merchants were allowed. Committees were dissolved without letting the Occupy leadership know so you could join a committee and discover that it no longer existed. We found many of the meetings off-track and with members who didn’t have the basic social skills like asking a person “How are you? How are things going?” They lacked skills for building solidarity with strangers like tracking things a person may have told them and following up with a question like “what’s happening with that project you were working on?” They are skills like showing up to meetings on time and remembering to tell others if a meeting is cancelled. The Occupy movement was the best and the worst of anarchism.

Monday Night Occupy Meetings in the Women’s Building

When the police drove Occupy in SF and Oakland away from Oscar Grant Plaza in Oakland and the area outside the Federal Reserve building in SF the Occupy organizers decided to meet indoors. Speakers were arranged every Monday night to talk on various political and economic topics. On average, 50-75 people attended. We noticed how the cliquishness of Occupy in the public are continued into the events in the Women’s Building in SF. Bruce told Barbara that when he was meeting with the organizers of an economic forum that Barbara was standing by herself. Nobody introduced themselves or tried to introduce themselves. These folks were calling themselves socialists and yet they lacked the most elementary friendliness to others who were on the same page. We decided it was then that we felt we needed to stop trying to join other organizations and start our own.

Part III – History of Socialist PBC

2012 – 2014 Building Political Documents and Our Website

We began to develop our own organizational documents, including a manifesto, mission statement, our attitude towards politics, and developed a political practice. At first that seemed like a lot of work to Barbara, and she also wondered how we would get people to join us. We had many meetings, just the two of us, to hash out the development of our perspective. Our main purpose was to provide a forum for exposing capitalism and spread the word to the public.

In spite of this challenging work, the creation of this site was so much fun. The first area we wanted to cover included telling people who we are and what we’re about. It included our mission statement – which was to become one of many eddies for:

• “Exposing the predatory, incompetent, and irrational practices of capitalists to direct human social life.
• Engage in collective political actions that throw a monkey-wrench into and slow down or disrupt the profit-making mechanisms of the system.
• Weave and expand the fabric of a growing body of workplaces under worker self-management.”

Barbara switched from full-time to part-time work, allowing her more time to work on developing our book clubs that were focused on educating people about the reality of capitalism and the havoc it’s wrecked in the world. From 2012-2014 we tried to do outreach by having in-person book groups.

In April 2014 our first step was to create a website, Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism. Through our Occupy contacts we found a wonderful tech guy named Jeremy who, with our input, created the website that we still have today. Our baby was gestating. It was scary for Barbara to learn how to manage a website. While she had considerable work experience using numerous platforms, managing a website is a whole other ballgame. At a ridiculously low cost, Jeremy built our WordPress site. He patiently showed Barbara the basics and was the best tech teacher we have been able to find since then. He never spoke to her in tech-speak. Sadly, he has disappeared from our lives, even though we’ve tried hard to reach him. Since then, we have struggled to find someone to help us with our site, as well as with social media.

In November 2014 we wrote our first post – titled The Collapse of Capitalism. In it you will see that our economic situation has only gotten worse since then. In addition to all the things we listed, we’re now dealing with the economic fallout of Covid, hyper-inflation, and a rush to war with Russia.

We added a slider at the top of our page that, in addition to The Collapse of Capitalism, included the Personal Impact of Crisis. In that section we asked the question “What caused the crisis?” We gave 4 reasons for this. We then proposed “Making adjustments within the system” asking 6 questions of readers. Finally, we asked the question “Are there alternatives”?

The next section was titled Alternatives to Capitalism. We gave examples of workers’ self-management, workers’ control, and worker cooperatives – all of which currently exist and often are more successful than capitalist businesses.

The next section was titled History of Workers’ Councils so readers could see this is not just an unrealistic pipe dream. There is a 150-year history of worker self-management.

Finally, we included a section titled Local Workplace Democracy that allowed readers to learn about some of the local cooperatives in the US.

On our site we included sections on Our Manifesto, Our Process Politics, Our Mission Statement, Calendar of Radical Events, Submission Guidelines, Films, Books, Our Mythological Story, Our Allies, and Getting Involved.

2014 – 2016 Richard Wolff – Democracy at Work

Around the same time, Richard Wolff, the Marxist political economist, began to give public talks about the crisis in capitalism and workplace democracy as an alternative. In one of our book clubs, we began reading his book, Capitalism Hits the Fan. We attended one of several talks by Wolff and met our soon-to-be comrade, K.J. Noh, who was petitioning for some local cause. We asked him to join our book group and he did, adding an international perspective from his own personal experience of growing up in South Korea. We also discovered he was an extraordinary writer. We cited some of his publications on our site. One of the best was “The Economic Myths of Santa Claus“, published in CounterPunch on Christmas day, 2014.

After a year in our book clubs, which drew between 4 and 6 people, K.J. said to us that the book clubs really were not the way to go in this day and age. He said we needed an electronic presence. He recommended 3 newsletters we could write for and said our focus must be international in order to keep his interest. We followed his suggestions, and our website and FB page likes grew.

We also became involved with Richard Wolff’s Democracy at Work project in 2014. This was an organization developed by Richard Wolff that had chapters in numerous cities and states to support and teach people about the theory and viability of worker cooperatives to combat capitalism by democratizing our workplaces. People were either encouraged to study cooperatives, provide educational forums for cooperatives, or even start a cooperative.

Why We Left Democracy at Work

We discovered that Democracy at Work was very loose in its structure. People like us who were long-time socialists were mixed in with people who neither cared nor knew nothing about socialism, and simply wanted to start a small business. Many of the groups throughout the country were uneven in terms of their commitments and we were disappointed that Rick did not take a firmer stand in directing what we were doing. In fact, the management of these groups was left to someone else, and Rick had very little engagement with the groups.

2016-2022 Coming into Our Own

Social Media Ups and Downs – FB and Twitter

Since Jeremy set up our website, we have had consistent problems finding someone to help us. Jeremy was so good at explaining things clearly, teaching us how to create posts and perspectives, add to our pages and change our images. Since that time – in 2014, Barbara has mostly figured stuff out on her own and has become our house techie. WordPress is not a user-friendly platform and learning how to manage it is not obvious or intuitive. We need a professional, who we’ve only recently found, who can help us navigate that.

Someone who earlier helped us enormously was Sameer, who lived close to us in Oakland. He was also great at explaining things in non-tech speak. However, he’s moved on to bigger and more lucrative projects. We’ve since discovered that it’s very hard for technical experts to be able to communicate to non-experts in an understandable way what they’re trying to do – or trying to teach us to do.

Sameer introduced us to Susan Tenby in 2016 – who was able to help us with our social media. She taught us how to make our Facebook and Twitter pages more visible and appealing. We are so lucky to have found Susan. We were a small, community organization trying to get our message out. When we started working with Susan our visibility was very low. Susan did a comprehensive audit of where our social media stood when we started working with her and helped us track its rapid change. We were not getting a whole lot of attention on our website or through our social media. She gave us a crash course on how to turn that around and in a very short period of time our visibility skyrocketed. Each session with her was packed with techniques and ideas we never would have known about.  She’s also terrific at adapting to each individual’s learning style.

Susan also introduced us to Colleen Nagel, an SEO expert and digital marketing. These terms were completely unfamiliar to us. SEO means Search Engine Optimization and is the process used to optimize a website’s technical configuration, content relevance and link popularity so its pages can become easily searchable, more relevant, and popular, and as a consequence, search engines rank them better. In other words, it’s the process of making a website better for search engines, like Google. We began to understand how to make more sense of our analytics, although we’re still struggling to figure out WHY our followers like some of our posts and tweets better than others.

Where we needed help was in translating the analytics into verbal meaning. The deeper step, after understanding what these numbers mean, was to understand the causal dynamics which produce an increase or decrease in viewers and attention span. The next step was to develop a plan for increasing the number of followers after we were able to analyze what’s actually happened up to then. We never felt that we got that help

All of this cost money, of which we didn’t have a lot. We have never asked for donations or “supporters” for our site. Barbara’s income at that time consisted of a small retirement fund, Social Security, and a modest IRA. Bruce worked as an adjunct faculty member. As he’s written in his article “Capitalist Economic Violence Against Road Scholars: Now You’re Hired, Now You’re Not” his income was never completely stable and, of course, they paid adjuncts at a much lower rate than they paid faculty. In fact, today there are adjuncts who are living in their cars because they can’t afford to pay rent. We simply couldn’t afford to pay what Colleen was charging.

We then moved on to 2 more people whose entire focus was to install SEO optics. While we got some help from this, we found that both of them explained things in tech-speak and were not easy to communicate with.

Finally, we tried working with Liz and her sister. Liz was an editor of one of Bruce’s books and claimed to have some technical skills. But she didn’t have a Mac like we do and was not good at explaining things so that wasn’t much help. Her sister did have a Mac and was good at explaining things but worked full time, had small kids and was erratic in her response time.

Flying High

Between 2014 and 2016 we worked hard on learning how to get our message out through Facebook and Twitter. We learned how to “boost” our articles, Facebook’s language for paying them to promote it. We were able to select what type of audience we were trying to reach and where they were likely to be geographically. As we started to boost articles either we or one of our comrades had written, we began getting a lot more attention on Facebook. Our Facebook boosted posts for our articles ranged from 5,000 to 10,000 readers. A couple of them reached 20,000. Between 2016 and 2019 we were getting about 1,000 page likes a year, reaching thousands of people each week. At that point we had gained a total of 3,400 page likes.

Twitter was much slower to get off the ground. We began to understand the importance of hashtags and which hashtags were more likely to get attention. We also came to see the importance of liking, commenting on and retweeting the tweets of people who were following us. Our followers have increased steadily since we’ve been doing this. However, we still lag behind the attention we were getting on Facebook, and we would like to understand why.

Facebook Attempts to Clip Our Wings

In early 2020 Facebook stopped allowing us to boost our articles. The reason they gave was that since we are posting “political content” we must be registered as a political organization with the IRS. As you can imagine, we did not want to do that. When Facebook first started doing this, we were able to mount arguments that not all of our articles were, in fact, political. Well, of course they were, but not “political” in the way they were framing it. After a while, they simply stopped allowing us to boost them at all, no matter what our argument was. About the same time, we noticed that our typical daily reach (how many people saw the article) was shrinking dramatically. Whereas our daily reach used to be in the thousands, they are now in the hundreds. The same thing has happened with our engagements (how many people actually look at our post or click on a link we’ve provided) Our total page likes have gone from an average of 30 a month to less than 10. That’s because the only people who see our posts are the ones who have already liked our page! Our reach now is about one third of what it used to be. We have read that the same dramatic drop happened to World Socialist Website, The Greanville Post, and many other socialist sites.

Our Work Schedules for PBC

Since the very beginning, we each put in a minimum of 15 hours a week, often more, including Saturdays and Sundays. We have 2-hour weekly meetings to discuss what we’ve done during the week and what we want to do for the coming week. We give ourselves “homework”, then report in on the results of that homework at our weekly meetings. We jokingly call these meetings, our “Central Committee” meetings.

We write almost all of our own articles. After editing them and finding images for them we publish them and then also send them to other websites for publication. We have tried to find other comrades to write articles for publication for us also. We wanted to be able to include authors on our site beyond just the two of us. While we did, in fact, get a few people to write for us, it often required a lot of work on our part to help them frame their work. Of course, we did all editing the articles. We publish an average of one article every three weeks.

For our daily posts, every morning Bruce searches for an article online from a number of trusted sources, that usually focuses on the decay of capitalism. We also want very much to spread the word of the success of worker-owned cooperatives to the public. This lets them see that there is a way to work other than for “the man” and create a new society. He writes a post about the article, finds an image to go with it, and then sends it to Barbara. Barbara edits his post, puts it up on our site and shares it to FB and Twitter. We then share that article to our Facebook groups.

We have been doing all of this every day, every week, every month since we began our electronic outreach. This is a joy for us. We call Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism “our baby”. She’s now almost 10 years old and stable. She will be thriving when we can get the technical and social media support we need. When people ask us if we’re retired, we start laughing. Barbara always says she’s working harder than she ever did, she just doesn’t get paid for it! There are few things we would rather spend our time on than Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism.

Thank you for reading our history, and please consider joining us by reading and sharing our articles and posts. Together we are strong. Together we can change the world.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce and Barbara MacLean-Lerro.

Baby Food Makers Kept Selling Products with Arsenic Levels Exceeding FDA-Approved Limits

HEADLINESEP 30, 2021

Baby food manufacturers allowed products contaminated with heavy metals to remain on store shelves — even after dangerous levels of the toxic chemicals were detected in their products. That’s according to a new congressional report released Wednesday, which found baby food makers Gerber and Beech-Nut failed to recall infant rice cereals tested to have arsenic levels above FDA limits.

This is how these felons roll, these dirty rotten propagandists, the smoke and mirrors crowd, the polluters, all those elites and money grubbers:

Going from baby food to land, forests, indigenous rights, we can see more putridity of the White Savior Civilizations (sic) facilitating the land rapists and the water polluters. This is not outrageous in Can/Klan/Ada?

In Canada, a judge has ended an injunction granted to logging company Teal-Jones, which the court says was used to crack down on activists at the Fairy Creek watershed blockade in a way that violated their civil liberties and infringed on press freedom. Police have arrested over 1,000 land defenders, often violently, as they fight to protect the remaining trees in Vancouver Island’s ancient forests. The First Nations-led protest is Canada’s largest act of civil disobedience. Click here to see our coverage of this issue

It’s a simple formula, a simple illustration of how syphilitics the ruling class is, and here, “David Graeber’s bestselling book Debt: The First 5000 Years revolutionised our understanding of the origins of money and the role of debt in human societies. But intellectual revolutions take time, and David’s sudden and untimely death left this revolution unfinished. David’s widow Nika Dubrovsky has established ‘The Fight Club’ to keep David’s unique way of challenging conventional wisdoms alive. Each ‘Fight’ will pit leading advocates of different visions of how society functions against each other. The inaugural fight, to mark the first anniversary of David’s death, is a debate between the renowned economists Thomas Piketty, author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, and Michael Hudson, author of And Forgive Them Their Debts. Thomas Piketty wrote the preface to the tenth anniversary edition of Debt: the First 5000 Years. Michael Hudson’s anthropological research into the origins of money and debt in ancient Sumeria was the basis of much of David’s analysis in that book. Join us for an unmissable encounter between two celebrated and highly influential economic thinkers as they debate: what is money and what is debt? What are the most serious problems of today’s finance-capital economies? And what are the best remedies?”

Finally, the new brisk and slick predators, those capitalists, those impact bond folk, the algorithms, the mining of our minds, bodies, dreams, aspirations. Wrench in the Gears, a long one, with lots of sources to click on to enhance Alison’s work:

This past week someone sent me a paper on augmented cognition. As I read it, a number of pieces clicked for me about earlier research I’d done into executive function. I wanted to preserve the thread, so I captured it in the screen shots below. Follow along to see how grit and resiliency intersect with Metaverse navigation and soul theft.

Also, this week Philadelphia School Superintendent William Hite briefed the Federal Reserve. Listen carefully to hear him setting up human capital bond markets in ed-tech, social emotional learning (SEL), nutrition, and tele-health via public-private partnerships with “philanthropic” predators.

This is accepted behavior, accepted “follow the science” bullshit; accepted state paid for university research; accepted elite school work and disgust? This is what Americans cannot handle:

So, how can lead in Flint’s water be a big deal? Arsenic in baby food? Arresting protestors in Canada? Think about how polluted media are, how broken universities are, and how confused and full of Collective Stockholm Syndrome the public is. This last comment is pretty telling:

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

The reason I wrote this article is to get people excited about the explanatory power of the word “politics” and to make sense of the world and how to change it. In Part I of this article, I brought up some of major confusions over how the word “politics” is used to describe actions as well as to define the word theoretically. I then posed 12 questions that any political theory would have to answer. The questions were:

• Temporal reach: How far back into history does politics go?
• Cross-species scope: Is politics an activity which is confined to the human species?
• Spatial reach: Where is the arena in which politics takes place?
• Political agency: Who does politics? Professionals or everyone?
• Political action: How is politics different from strategies?
• Interpersonal processes: How is politics different from convincing and persuading?
• What is the relationship between politics and power? Does politics drive power or does power drive politics?
• What is the relationship between politics and force or coercion? Are they interchangeable? Are they opposites?
• Interdisciplinary span? To what extent is politics influenced by economics, technology, history?
• What are the forces that shape politics?
• What is the relationship between theories of politics and theories of political sociology?
• What is the relationship between theories of politics and political ideologies?

Lastly, I identified seven political theories. In Part I, I focused on three political theories that occupy the centrist portion of the political spectrum: old institutionalists (mainstream political science), civil republicans and Weberian political economy. In Part II I discuss the remaining four theories: radical feminism and Marxism on the left and Rational Choice Theory and Bio-Evolutionary on the right. At the end of this article, there is a table which summarizes how each of the seven theories answers the twelve questions above.

Marxist political economy

Contradictory nature of politics in Marx

Marx’s notion about politics is contradictory. In some places he lumps together politics with religion, morals, laws and contrasts this to the economic “base”. However, in his more political writing on France, he seems to give politics more importance than in the first formulation above. In a formal sense, Marx thought that politics was a product of class conflict. In this sense, he saw the state as the concentration of political struggle. In a narrow sense, this would exclude egalitarian societies from politics because they didn’t have any classes. Yet Marx was very interested in lack of private property and in the decision-making processes of these societies. But he implies that decisions about property relations and deciding whether or not to move to a new location are not political.

Politics is inseparable from economics

In Part I, we saw institutionalists and civic republicans both accept the separation of politics from economics, and institutionalists think what they are doing is “political science”. We also saw Weberians will not make this separation, claiming that what they are doing is “political economy”.  Yet they will come down more on the side of the importance of politics. When Marx talked about economics, most explicitly in Das Kapital, Grundrisse, and in other works, he also did so out of a tradition called political economy. People like Adam Smith and David Ricardo would never separate economics from the politics of the day. Despite all these qualifications, we can safely say that for Marx there was no such thing as politics without economics. Marx would have heaped scorn on the disciplines of “political science” for ignoring the economy and the economists who pretend there is no politics in economics.

Historical sweep: politics as relative

Marx had the second broadest historical sweep of the evolution of politics because he points to changes from the relations of property going all the way back  from communal, to slave, to feudal, to capitalist property. This broad sweep of politics enabled Marx to see the relativity of politics in a way that institutionalists, civic republicans and even Weberians do not. For Marx, tribal societies practiced no politics because there were no social classes. At the visionary end of Marx’s social vision, under communism there would be no politics because the existence of social classes would be abolished. Unlike any other theoretician of politics Marx believed politics emerged at a certain, relatively recent point in human history and it would wither away at a later point. Marx’s perspective was not only historically depthful but his interdisciplinary reach included not only economics and world history, but also anthropology and sociology.

The state as passive

Both institutionalists and Weberians think that the state is very important for enacting politics, though for very different reasons. With civic republicans, Marx did not think the state was very powerful in its political activity. Marx saw the state as a relatively passive instrument of the capitalist class, its executive committee and its representative bodies as the “talking shop of the bourgeoisie”.

Place of violence in politics

Marx understood all class conflict as violent because there was a struggle between two classes for control over the natural resources, tools, finished products and power settings. The extraction of surplus value from the working class by the capitalist class with state backing gives rise to class struggle. So for Marx, as for Weber, all politics was violent, either using force explicitly or implicitly. At the same time, the forces that shaped politics were the various contradictions within capitalism.  The electoral politics of institutionalists or the civic debates in public of civic republicans do not give a voice to the working class. With Weberians, real politics takes place behind the scenes and these scenes will never include the working class. Political conflicts cannot be resolved democratically because the economic contradictions that underlie the capitalist system are not addressed.

Political sociology and political ideology

In political sociology, there are ‘functional” Marxists who do not make as much of class struggle in the area of politics as they make in trying to understand the economic contradictions of capitalism – its problems of accumulation. Yet there are others who emphasise the importance of how the class struggle impacts the accumulation process and how the contradictions under capitalism cannot be understood without taking this into account. In terms of political ideology, Marxists are all socialists – social democrats, Leninists and council communists – and all claim Marx’s writings though they differ bitterly over the interpretation of his work.

Rational Choice Theory

Neo-classical economics on the prowl of politics

We said earlier that both Institutionalism and civic republicanism accepts the separation of politics and economics as opposed to the Weberian and Marxian claim that they cannot be separated. Rational choice theory:

1. first separates economic behavior from politics; and,
2. takes its theory of economic exchanges and projects it onto politics. There is a kind of political unconscious.

The political realm is a kind of economic market place in which politicians pursue their interests to maximize their benefits and minimize their costs under circumstances where their resources are scarce and wants are many. Rational and collective choice understandings of politics are rooted in neoclassical micro-economics, except they are applied to non-market situations. Gary Becker even tried to apply microeconomic principles of traditional economics to families and human sexual life. He wanted to counter the moralistic, idealistic and romantic beliefs that family and sexual life are supposedly beyond economic calculations.

Unlike institutionalism and republicanism, rational choice theory argues that economically people are self-interested maximizers in their economic exchanges and this is not just a product of capitalism. Rather, they say a desire to “truck, barter and exchange” goes all the way back to hunter-gatherers.

Politics as the management of public goods

For rational choice theorists, the practice of politics is not about the process of governmental goal-setting, decision-making, and monitoring (institutionalists). Neither is it about public debate and compromise to achieve a virtuous outcome (Civic Republicans). Politics is bartering and haggling involving the public, not in a reasoned debate striving towards a collective good, but occurs under very specific public conditions. Based on a Lockean notion of social contract theory, when people are in small groups they behave rationally as individuals. But around issues that involve large groups, there is a danger of collective irrationality. What might those conditions be?

Situations that involve the management of public goods is the arena for politics. This means goods from whose benefits people cannot be excluded, such as clear air, or the conservation of resources. What differentiates political behavior from economic transactions is that in political behavior participants must be far-sighted. What to do about pubic goods does not dissolve after an immediate market exchange. It goes on indefinitely. This requires the presence of institutions and networks. Politics is a kind of market place for regulating the messy collective consequences of trading where the rate of profit is low and the long-term consequences accumulate.

Politicians are like commodities governed by the supply and demands of voting

Rational choice theorists treat politicians as if they were commodities in a market. Just as supply and demand expectations of consumers control the price of commodities, the supply and demand of people’s voting preferences drives the competition between politicians who are driven into and out of office. Rational choice theory believes in liberal democracy not in a political sense, the way the institutionalists do. Rather they believe in an economic democracy where political competition for votes leads to democratic results, just as Adam Smith believed that economic competition leads to social good.

All interpersonal processes like convincing or persuading are really economic exchanges. What would make them political is the presence of public goods. Rational choice theorists do not pay a great deal of attention to political power, because they tend to see political actions as subject to a democratic process of supply and demand. This theory pays little attention to the predominant place collective and cooperative activity – building a bridge, working on a ship – has in human social life.

Politics takes place at the point of exchange

Neoclassical economists claim that capitalists’ profits take place at the point of exchange between capitalist competitors and between individual capitalists and the marketplace. Marxian political economics argue that the most important place where profits are made is at the point of production. This means that it is in the exploitation of the worker. According to Marx, the worker produces far more social wealth – surplus value – than she receives as a wage.

Rational choice theorists ignore political processes that occur before the moment of exchange. That would be in the policy settings of think tanks, upper class social clubs, foundations, and congressional hearings which take place long before voting,  Just as they see economic profits being made at the point of exchange, rather than as Marxists do as at the point of production, so too, they see politics taking place at the point of exchange rather than at the point of political production.  The school of political sociology which fits snugly with rational choice theories are political pluralists. In terms of political ideology, rational choice theory goes best with right-wing libertarians.

Radical Feminist

Critique of the public-private separation of politics from the non-political

Radical feminism goes the furthest of any political theory in how far it carries politics into other areas of human social life. Feminists argue when institutionalists limit politics to the state and its institutions, these accepted boundaries for the arena of politics are not natural self-evident boundaries. Rather, they are the product of past political struggles which resulted in a public-private dichotomy in the first place. For them politics takes place in private settings, such as in families.

Limitations of individualist self

The liberal institutionalists have as its foundation a separate, autonomous, rational and self-subsisting self. This self is not simply describing and reflecting individual-social relations under capitalism, but it appears to be prescribing and structuring relations as if this were the only possible self. Institutionalists ignore the research that in non-capitalist societies, the self is better understood as “collectivist”.

Social contract theory

Once the individualist self is granted, the stage is set for social contract theory. Whether it be Hobbes, Locke or Rousseau, social contract theory starts with the premise that individuals really could subsist in a state of nature but as a calculating rational act, they agree that they would be even better off under social relations than in a “state of nature”. This social contract is required to create both civil society and the state. But even further back into archaic states, radical feminists argued it required sexual contract whereby domestic relations were not understood as political but private.

Capitalist state exploitation of women

Politics has been more exclusively limited to men and more self-consciously masculine than any other social practice. Given that women have conventionally been defined in terms of their relation to what is domestic, this has marginalized women as political actors. The unacknowledged foundation of male public politics is autonomous individuals. Meanwhile, what is ignored is the support and care received from women at home which is a) unpaid, and b) seen as not political. At the same time, the state denies their responsibility to intervene in family disputes. Until recently, it has excluded domestic violence as a category outside its political jurisdiction.

The socio-construction of humanity

Radical feminists reject all social contract theory, and along with Marxists, claim that human beings are social long before we become individuals. Without society, most fundamentally the relationship between mothers and their siblings, there could be no individuality. In fact, there is no such thing as an individual separate from society. It is society that transforms a biological organism – first into a human being and then into an individual. All social relations are political whenever there are resources at stake. Politics is the process by which people organize the production, distribution and use of resources to produce and reproduce their lives.

Gender is political

While agreeing with Weberian and Marxism claims that politics must include economics and history, radical feminist theory insists that the domestic politics of the family and sexuality not be excluded. It is not just in formal settings such as elections or civic debate that politics takes place, but in informal settings as well. The process by which a family decides whether to redecorate the kitchen or go on a vacation is political. When a man takes up two seats on a train with one seat occupied by his bag, and a woman standing up nearby does or does not tell the man to move his bag so she can sit down, that’s politics. When men whistle at women as they go by and women look the other way, that’s politics. Politics is embedded in language. When women end their statements as if they were questions when they are speaking in front of men, that’s politics. When women do emotional work not to appear too smart on a date to keep the man interested, that’s politics.

Power with vs power over people

Unlike all political theory, with the possible exception of Marxism, all power is not hierarchical. There can be power with people, as in egalitarian pre-state societies. There is also power over people as comes is developed in rank and stratified societies.

Power as the process

Generally, feminists are reluctant to make a separation between politics and power as means and end. An egalitarian political process has a good chance of leading to power with people. What feminists are very sensitive to is when a political process over the production, distribution and use of resources and is not egalitarian. When this is the case, it makes power vertical, power over people, no matter how noble the ends. So, when Marxist-Leninists ignore what the working class actually say it needs, when it suppresses the collective creativity of workers self-organizing attempts, its power is always vertical no matter what Leninists say about speaking for the working class.

All strategies are political

While there may be a fine line between strategizing and politics, radical feminists are likely to say it is a safer bet to assume that all strategies are political. Why? Because the cost of assuming some interaction is political when it is really strategic is not nearly as high as mistaking a move someone makes is strategic when it is really political. The same is true with any kind of influence. Convincing, persuading, and negotiating are better understood as a form of subtle politics with bribery, or force at the other extreme. For too long, women have been lulled into what appeared to be cooperative endeavors but were really manipulations of sorts. It is better to assume assertion or even aggression is the norm and then be pleasantly surprised if it turns out otherwise.

Political sociology and political ideology

In terms of political sociology, no school fits it exactly, but the political class model probably comes the closest. When it comes to political ideology, radical feminism is likely to be either social democratic or anarchist.

Biological Evolutionary

Most political theories deny politics exist among non-human species

Up until now, we haven’t addressed the question of the extent to which politics exists outside the human species. Both institutionalism and civic republicanism would explicitly deny that is possible because a) only in state societies can politics exist, or b) politics require reasoned debate which is beyond the reach of any other species. For Weberians, politics requires a state and a monopoly over the use of force which is beyond other animals. For Marxists, since animals do not have social classes (the examples of hierarchies among some of the other animals would not be deemed of the same order as social classes) there would be no politics. Rational choice theory would dismiss the possibility of politics among other animals because the whole basis of politics involves weighing the pros and cons of choices and imagining long-term consequences.

Being a social species with cooperation and sharing makes you a political species

According to Tiger and Fox (Imperial Animal), in order for politics to occur in material production, traveling together in herds and mothers taking care of their young is not enough for politics to take place. There has to be:

1. a) a division of labor and cooperation in the process of providing food, building shelters and providing defense against attack; and,
2. b) sharing of resources.

Since there is little or no division of labor in provisioning in other animal societies, there is no economic sphere in which to ask the question about politics’ relationship to economics.

Politics occurs in the cross-fire where genetics, socio-culture and individual learning conflict

Roger Masters takes it further, arguing that politics is the mechanism by which the human species reconciles conflicts between genetic, socio-cultural and individual learning loyalties. He points out that in any situation there are opportunities:

• to be selfish and only consider yourself, making enemies along the way;
• to look out for your relatives, which is kin selection and which results in nepotism;
• to look out for your friends and forming alliances based on reciprocity; and,
• to look out for strangers regardless of what they give back in return – altruism.

Power is not just about control over material production and control over policy but control over sexual reproduction

What all theories of politics have in common is that it is either a means to power or synonymous with power. Most, if not all, theories of power argue that power has a great deal to do with control over the provisioning of material resources: economics such as food, land, tools, commodities. Most political sciences connect power to control of social policy in the future, and maintaining it practically within its judicial system and police.

However, feminists rightly point out that resources are not just material production. They also include control over sexual resources of reproduction. If we consider that politics is the means of gaining power over the forces of production (economics) and public decision-making and reproduction, then biological evolutionary theory of sexual selection has a great deal to teach us about the  sexual politics of reproduction.

Sex and politics are traditionally separated

What is normally termed “sex” and “politics” are two sides of the same evolutionary coin. Yet what textbook on sexual behavior treats it as a political process? What primer on political science recognized that its subject matter is a derivative of a biological theme as fundamental as the struggle for reproductive success? What politician sees his own compulsive energy as fired by the ancient impulses of sexual competition? What lover sees his sexual process as pride being part of the necessary comportment of the successful mammalian politician? Sex and dominance, reproduction and power are so intimately linked that it is hard to disentangle one from the other when considering sex in its social setting.

Political economy and domestic economy

Unlike other theories of politics, for bioevolutionary politics involves two processes, a political economy and a domestic economy. Political economy involves material provisioning of natural resources to a society. It involves social production. The domestic economy involves sexual provisioning for mating and raising its children. It involves social reproduction.

The beginnings of a domestic economy

For the biological evolutionary perspective, the central political process is the process of sexual selection and sexual selection is based on bonding. A species can get by without much bonding. Flocks, herds, and schools of fish are notable for the interchangeability of their members. But like breeding systems with asexual reproduction, without bonding they restrict their options and reduce the amount of variety on which sexual selection can work. A true social system begins when animals respond differentially to other members of the species as individuals. They begin to select other members for specific kinds of relatively permanent interaction.

Before mammals were political about material resources, they were political about sexual resources. Sexual politics carries into all social species, most completely among chimps (Frans B. M. De Waal), dolphins and to a lesser extent among elephants. When animals form groups, they must organize themselves in terms of mating practices. As a result of fighting, posturing, cooperating, forming alliances and coalitions, males and females organize themselves into hierarchies. These hierarchies have built into them ground rules as to who can and can’t mate with who and under what conditions.

The domestic economy is about genetics, not sex.  While all males get a chance to copulate, only the more dominant get a chance to breed. The more powerful animal gets a better chance to perpetuate himself genetically. The dominate male is more or less sexually indifferent and will often let inferior males mount the females. Everyone copulates, but only dominates propagate. The dominant animal moves more freely, eats better, gets more attention, lives longer, is healthier and less anxious. On the other hand, the death rate among peripheral males at puberty is very high.

Hierarchies are biologically constituted

Bio-evolutionary theory agrees with feminism that family and sexual life is very political. But where most feminists take the existence of these hierarchies as socially and historically constructed and hope one day to abolish them, bio-evolutionary political theory would argue that these hierarchies are not simply products of society but are rooted in biology. The presence of gender stratification may enhance and amplify these hierarchies, but it doesn’t create them.

Furthermore, in response to Marxism, the creation of a communist society with social gender equality may reduce hierarchies but it wouldn’t abolish them, at least for the foreseeable future. Based on dominance hierarchies, the highest in the hierarchies would have access to the best food and the most comfortable nesting. However, that is not the same thing as having control over production. Darwinian political theory would say all social species are doing some kind of political jockeying come mating season.

What is the relationship between politics and natural selection?

There is, of course, competition for resources between species, but that is not political. Politics can only occur within a species in which fight or flight are not fruitful strategies.

The emergence of the state as an unusual problem to be explained

For neo-Darwinian politics, the emergence of the state is not the starting point of politics, but a problem that neither the traditional mechanisms of kin selection theory or reciprocity solves. What ecological, demographic, economic and technological problems arise that make it in the self-interest of most people to accept the subjugation, the asymmetrical production and distribution of resources that the state involves? Roger Masters offers a rational choice answer to the question. He argues that once collective goods emerge there is trade-off most members of society are willing to make between the benefits of irrigation systems, roads, trade, and the end of feuding that makes the subjection and increased alienation worth it.

Political agency, persuasion

There are no professional politicians in the non-human animal kingdom as far as I know, although De Waal makes some amusing cases for some chimps being more political than others. De Waal makes some interesting points about the power of body language to impact others, although sometimes it might be persuasion and sometimes force or the threat of force. I suspect bio-evolutionary politics would define politics as the strategy within a species to mate and maximize genes across generations.

Bio-evolutionary theory in political sociology and political ideology

It is difficult to place biological politics in the field of political sociology. Political managerial might be closest. A knee-jerk reaction of feminists and Marxists would be quickly to tar-and-feather any biological theory as the political ideology of fascists because of the legacy of social Darwinism. But modern bio-evolutionary theorists are generally hip to its past, and are sensitive to the racial and sexual implications it may have. A friend of mine did a survey among evolutionary psychologists to find out what their leanings are in terms of political ideology. In general, they were liberal. There are also a significant number of women in the field of evolutionary psychology who identify themselves as feminists.

Conclusion: Grand Definition of politics

In making a living, we are co-producers. At the very heart of our social existence has always been a wide range of conscious and planned activities involving the purposive use and production of resources for given ends. People in groups could more easily fell trees, and place them across gullies or streams, deploy hunting nets and chase animals into them if they planned together. In the process of planning there are disputes and debates about what policy to follow and how to achieve their aims.

Politics is:

1. as an activity that consists of the process of social goal-setting, decision-making and monitoring activities which produce cooperation, negotiation and conflict; and,
2. as an analysis, politics consists of the study of the provenance, origins, forms, resource allocation (human skills, animate sources of energy, inanimate sources of energy), distribution, and control and consequences of power.

Please see Table A which compares the seven theories of politics across twelve categories of questions. The table closes with each theory’s definition of politics.

• First published at Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Orientation

From Marxism to de Chardin, General Systems Theory to Buckminster Fuller

Around 1975, it dawned on me that the revolutionary times of the 1960s were not coming back. I still considered myself a council communist but I felt something was missing. I thought Marxism needed to be seen within a larger framework. I began to look for a perspective that located societies as part of cosmic evolution. My first stop was Teilhard de Chardin. I was swept away by The Phenomenon of Man and continued with a few of his other books. I found other authors with an evolutionary perspective like Barbara Marx Hubbard’s Conscious Evolution and Gerald Heard’s Five Ages of Man. I was also drawn to General Systems Theory and especially liked Bogdanov’s Tektology because as a Marxist, he framed human societies as another level of cosmic evolution. People like Oliver Reiser (Cosmic Humanism) saw humanity as part of larger globalization of society. Probably most powerfully, I was drawn to the work of Buckminster Fuller. Here was a guy trained in the hard sciences who had a vision of a new society based on the wise use of technology. What all these theories had in common was they were optimistic about the future of humanity. I didn’t care so much at time that there might be contradictions between these theories and those of Marx and Engels. It wasn’t until about five years later that I came to terms with these contradictions.

Flirting with Eastern Mysticism

But that wasn’t the end of it. I soon found myself in the misty waters of New Age mysticism without really realizing it. In 1975, a book came out called The Tao of Physics which was soon followed by another book called The Dancing Wu Li Masters. Both these books were written by physicists who took full advantage of the American counter-cultural swooning over Eastern mysticism. We were told that quantum physics was revealing a sub-atomic world that resembled the teachings of ancient Eastern mysticism. I was not alone among Marxists exploring these realms. My best Marxist friend, who knew more about Marx than anyone I had ever met, had been practicing Yogananda’s form of meditation for years. He joined me to read Capra’s book.

What these New Age physicists were saying was that because subatomic particles were unstable (both a wave and a particle) the observer had to make a “decision” as to which to measure. If you couldn’t decide whether a subatomic particle was a wave or a particle without a state of consciousness, that meant that consciousness was at the heart of matter. We were told that western science has finally caught up with the wise ancients of the East. At a liberal arts, New Age university I taught at, we had a science teacher who taught a class called “Quantum Physics and Eastern Mysticism”. No one in the class was required to take any preliminary physics classes in order to take the class. We had students walking around the campus holding court about the mysteries of quantum mechanics when most of them knew nothing about physics. Here we have the New Age spirituality.

How prevalent is this New Age mysticism?

But why am I writing an article about something that happened 35-40 years ago? Two reasons:

1. To show that the same thing is going on today with New Age gurus still claiming that the New Physics confirms eastern mysticism. Doing a search in Amazon under the word “quantum” I found 30 books on the first page with titles such as Quantum Physics and the Power of the Mind; Quantum Consciousness: Journey Through Other Realms; Quantum Consciousness; The Guide to Experiencing Quantum Psychology; Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness; The Shamanic Path to Quantum Consciousness; Quantum DNA Healing; Merging Spiritually with Quantum Consciousness; Cosmic Consciousness and the Healing with the Quantum Field. All these books are dolled up in colorful, space-age covers.
2. Mystical explanations in physics were also prevalent over 100 years ago. In the late 19th and early 20th century Russia, Lenin battled what he considered mystical ideas about physics that he feared were taking over the Bolshevik party. We will discuss the value and the shortcomings of his attempt to rescue materialism and its theory of mind from the swoon of phenomenology and other idealist theories.

My claim

My claim in this article is that a Vygotskian socio-cultural nature of mind does a better job at combatting mysticism than Lenin’s reflective theory of mind. For this article, I will be referring to Pannekoek’s book Lenin as Philosopher; Victor Stenger’s The Unconscious Quantum: Metaphysics in Modern Physics and Cosmology and David Bakhurst’s book Consciousness and Revolution in Soviet Philosophy: From the Bolsheviks to Evald Ilyenkov.

Types of Philosophy

How do we understand the relationship between sub-atomic quantum physics and how the human mind engages it? Before addressing mystical theories directly, we should review the basic types of philosophy.

Naïve realism

For the overwhelming majority of people in the West, the objective world is independent of the mind. The mind tries to know how the world works by taking pictures of reality and making copies of it. Biophysical nature is comprehensible and existed before mental life emerged. So too, it is claimed the mind is comprehensible and is relatively reliable about recording what really exists in the world.  In philosophy, this double way of making sense of reality and mind is called “naïve realism”. It is only when specialized philosophy gets hold of the relationship between nature and the mind where things get complicated.

Idealism

Various philosophers, in part because their occupation is thinking and reflection, tend to get carried away with the power of mental life. When they ask questions about the relationship between nature and mind, their answers go way beyond naïve realism. Some philosophers like Plato saw the natural world as filled with disorder, complexity, dead ends, and constant change as well as being evil. Plato thought that whatever the ultimate reality was, it was orderly and eternal. When Plato searched for what was orderly and eternal, he found his answers in mathematics. And, of course, mathematics was the product of the collective mind, humanity. So, for Plato, what was ultimately real was mathematics. Plato also believed that this orderly and eternal world was good, beautiful and true. The material world of nature was an imperfect replica of what Plato called the eternal forms.

Many other western philosophers also got carried away with mental life. Some said matter or nature was an illusion, the product of cosmic mind. Others like Spinoza said that there was a single substance from which both nature and the mind were derived. Others like Descartes said that nature and mind were independent substances that interacted with each other. Others said nature and mind were inseparable and that you could know nature as she really is through the mind. Kant said our mind does not take pictures of reality. Rather it superimposes categories of thought on nature, and we can understand nature through the categories. We can never know nature independent of those categories. For Kant we can never know “things-in-themselves”.

Skepticism about mind

Just as philosophers like Plato claimed that nature was not self-evidently true but only an appearance, so too, epistemological philosophers were skeptical that the mind simply took faithful copies of reality. The most extreme form of ancient skepticism claimed we could ever know anything beyond what was in our minds. Later, more moderate skeptics like Bacon, Locke and especially Hume and Berkeley said the mind has built in cognitive biases, prejudices, reasoning errors and language ambiguities that keep humans from seeing things clearly.  What all philosophers would agree on was that both nature and mind were harder to understand than naïve realism would present.

Materialism

There is also a school of philosophers who are called materialists and are in rough agreement with the naïve realist position. Materialists say matter is infinite, uncreated and eternal. It existed before the mind emerged with the brain and it will continue even if mind disappears. People like Democritus, Epicurus and Lucretius had a sophisticated understanding of what matter was. Later emergent evolutionary materialists saw matter as having levels—such as physical, biological, and social. Materialists like Democritus also understood that the senses do not just take pictures of reality. The senses were seen as untrustworthy and needed to be corrected by reason.

Some of the cruder materialists thought of the mind as the secretions of the brain, just as bile is a secretion of the liver. With the slightest injury to the brain everything mental disappears, nothing at all remains in the mind. The material changes in the brain are thought to be the basis of psychology. All action in the surroundings produce changes in the brain and these produce thoughts. There was no distinction between the mind and the brain. There was no sense that society and history created the mind, and that mind mediated what happened between the brain and nature.

19th Century Determinism Crisis and Mystical Predators

Throughout most of the 19th century, scientists thought of nature as being more and more determined by physical laws. Natural events that occurred were the result of both necessity and probability (statistical laws). Nature at the meso level could be perceived through the five senses and matter was thought to be solids or liquids rather than gases. To a physicist, atoms were not abstractions but real, small, invisible particles, sharply limited, exactly alike for every chemical element, with precise qualities of mass and weight.  Concepts were nearly separated and the physical world was a clear system, without contradiction.

However, towards the end of the 19th century, quantum mechanics and relativity theory challenged the deterministic nature of science. Phenomenon were discovered that could be represented only by light, consisting of a stream of so-called quanta, appearing and disappearing through space. Physicists began to suspect that their physical entities, formerly considered reality behind the phenomena, were only images of abstract concepts. When you ask the physicist what it is that moves in such waves or particles, his answer consists of pointing to a mathematical equation. Now mass changes in the state of motion and cannot be separated from energy. Because in quantum mechanics, states of consciousness are inseparably involved in determining whether matter is a wave or a particle, mystics got into the act. “There” they said, “now we see that consciousness is at the root of matter.” It was just a hop, skip and a jump to saying the physical world itself is determined by consciousness.

Today, according to Victor Stenger, the dual nature of subatomic particles and waves is a material reality independent of consciousness. Consciousness is necessary if measurement of either is required. If no measurement is involved, the wave and particle nature is still there. It does not disappear as the mystics like to present. Niels Bohr once said that consciousness has nothing to do with quantum mechanics. The reality of a wave-particle characteristic is not brought into existence by consciousness. It was already there both before and after it is measured.

Ernst Mach

Mach’s original training was as a physicist. He was well read in philosophy, especially Hume and Berkeley, who appealed to sense data and common sense over metaphysical speculation over whether the world was ultimately made of mind or matter. Mach attempted to reduce all scientific and practical concepts including time, and knowing subjects to experiential field of sense data. He rejected as metaphysical and unscientific all forms not grounded in experience. Matter and mind are all derived concepts. The only thing we know directly is experience and all experience consists in sensations. Both objects and subjects are built from sensations. For Mach, the physical and psychical world consist of the same elements, only in a different arrangement. Mach accepted the external world as real, but he felt that the distinction between physics and psychic distinction of materialism was unnecessary metaphysics. His insistence on starting from sense data was done for methodological reasons within science.  He attempted to give methodological priority to positivism’s epistemology over its ontology.

But if matter and mind are never discussed independent of experience, there is a danger that the external world could be theorized as:

1. an unknowable thing in itself;
2. a spiritual idealist world; and,
3. a world having no existence at all apart from the knowing subject.

As Pannekoek says:

Yet there is a certain ambiguity in Mach’s expression on the outer world revealing a manifest propensity towards subjectivism, corresponding to the general mystical turn in the capitalist world.  (106)

Lenin’s defense of materialism

Lenin understood very well that materialism had to be defended against mystical interpretations, and this is what he set out to do in his Materialism and Empirio-Criticism which he wrote in 1909.  He understood that the old deterministic nature of materialism based on the five senses was now a relative, not absolute distinction, depending on the level of reality being dealt. He also had to make sense of the fact that matter and energy was convertible. How can you be a materialist when a physicist is dealing with energy not matter? How do you answer mystical claims that matter has disappeared?

Lenin argued that what matters for materialism is not what the ultimate building block is. What matters is that matter and nature is independent of consciousness. Lenin maintained that the mind makes copies of reality (his theory of reflection) but this copy theory does not mean we have certain knowledge of the world or that mistakes and vagueness cannot occur in our knowing. He just meant that most of the time our copies of reality are good enough to have helped us survive. Lenin felt that the copy theory of the mind was the only out from mysticism.

Pannekoek argues:

Mach’s opinion that causes and effect as well as natural laws do not factually exist in nature but are man-made expressions of observed regularities is said by Lenin to be identical with Kant… To deny the objective existence of these laws means that denial of nature itself. To make man the creator of natural laws means to him to make human mind the creator of the world. (129-130)

Unlike Mach, Lenin argued that the categories of Space and Time were real properties of the objective world and not simply categories of the human mind. Right or wrong, Lenin thought Mach’s system was a rehash of Berkeley’s subjective idealism. Lenin thought Mach confused the problem of the new properties of matter with the old problem of the theory of knowledge. He felt that Marxist philosophers needed to preserve the philosophical function performed by materialism from its scientific role in providing particular explanatory framework for natural phenomena.

Criticism of Lenin

Pannekoek says Lenin accepted Newton’s model that there is absolute space and time. But Einstein refuted absolute time and space which Lenin did not address. Further:

He identified the real objective world with physical matter. Electricity too is objective reality? Is it physical matter? Our sensation shows us light; is it reality but not matter? Photons cannot easily be denoted as a kind of matter. (137)

The problem with Lenin’s copy theory is he gives no detailed discussion of how mental images copy physical objects, nor does he address the traditional objections to naïve realism. He has ignored more skeptical theories and even scientific epistemology about the limits of the mind that developed with Hume and Kant and beyond.

Socio-historical nature of mind

In his rush to defend materialism from being attacked by mysticism, without realizing it, Lenin accepted the same subjective epistemological framework as mystics and mechanical materialists had about the starting point of the mind. The epistemological framework for mystics is with the relationship between a spiritual world and an individual. For mechanical materialists, the relationship is between nature the biological individual. Where mystics and mechanical materialists differ is in the ultimate nature of objective reality. For mystics the ultimate reality is the spiritual world. For mechanical materialists it is biophysical nature. But they agree that subjectivity begins with the individual. For Vygotsky and the socio-historical school, in between the biophysical world and the individual mind is a socio-historical layer of reality. It covers the earth the way the lithosphere and biosphere does. It is akin to Vernadsky and Chardin’s noosphere. It is socio-historical objectivity which engages in an expanding feedback loop with nature. Individual subjectivity emerges from and interacts with the historical-social layer of reality. The individual mind does not engage nature directly, only indirectly.

What Lenin ignored in his epistemology was that the human mind does not engage nature directly. The individual mind does not even become a human mind until it is socialized and historicized. For dialectical materialists like Vygotsky, the human mind is created out of a socio-historical network from birth to death. Vygotsky, Leontiev and Luria claimed that psychological skills first originate through structural, meaningful, cooperative, and recurring through three phases:

• local interpersonal relations between people;
• these skills then get internalized as private; and
• these skills are then reapplied to large social global contexts.

Please see my article on What is Socialist Psychology? for a longer discussion of these phases.

The main function of the mind is externally, not internally, driven. Primarily, the human mind is concerned with the collective engagement of transforming external objects through the laboring process in order to satisfy basic needs. Introspection or self-reflection is the second stage of this process, but it is not the main focus as it is with idealist mysticism.

For dialectical materialists the human mind is a function, not a substance (as it is for mystics) of highly organized material bodies – human beings. To say that the human mind is inseparable from society and history is not to say that other animals do not have minds. What it does mean is that without intense social life and verbal language, their minds are mostly imprisoned in the present. It is the socialization and historization of homo sapiens that is responsible for making the mind a human mind.

Before the emergence of the human mind, mind had an origin in nature, specifically the brain. The brain is an adaptive responsive to rapidly changing nature where instinct was a less and less reliable resource. There are non-social creatures without brains that have no mind. With the emergence of a central nervous system, animals developed brains. But it is only when animals have a social life and brains, that pre-human minds appear. Nature was physical, chemical and biological before the brain or the mind appeared. So, the mind is first a product of nature and later through the social and historical practice of human beings, the mind becomes a coproducer through society and history with nature. For materialists, there is no mind beyond nature, society or history. A dialectical materialist, unlike a mechanical materialist, does not reduce the mind to the brain. While the brain is a necessary condition for the mind, once the mind emerges through its building of a socio-historic layer of nature, mind becomes more than the brain.

 Idealist theories of the mind of everyday people

Contrary to this worldview, consciously or not most people combine a naïve realist picture of reality with idealist theories regarding the mind. They imagine that the human mind is autonomous from society and history. They are convinced the mind is a special property, beyond society and history. They believe that while the human mind may serve partly as an adaptive function in society and history, it is much more than that. Additionally, from the idealist viewpoint, the mind’s most important function is not interpersonal, but personal and self-reflective. Through introspection it can potentially find its real destiny which is to tap its otherworldly source, God. This is done through meditation, prayer, or other spiritual techniques. The idealist theory of individual mind is a product of a religious orientation to life. Please see Table A for a comparison between idealist, mechanical materialist, and socio-historical theories of mind.

Table A

Mystical, Mechanical Materialist, and Socio-Historical Theories of Mind

Why Are New Age Ideas So Popular in Yankeedom: A Socio-historical Checklist

Interest in parts of New Age thinking includes what are called paranormal phenomena such as ESP, clairvoyance, telepathy, astral projection, and homeopathy. In my previous article, The Political Economy of Preternatural Parapsychology I identified twelve materialistic reasons why mystical and New Age ideas are attractive to Yankees, offering hope and escape from the following problems I list here. Please see my previous article for a fuller explanation. Here they are:

• The Decline of living standards in Yankeedom produces psychological reactance. This means parapsychology is devoted to individual freedom because real freedom is in decline.
• Economic, political, and ecological life in the United States seem to be falling apart, and it is difficult for people to understand why.
• There is a sense in which the current political system has little or nothing to do with democracy. There is a belief that the world is run by people behind the scenes.
• Science has not delivered on its promise to make a better life for all.
• People have an increasing sense of their personal lives being out of control with an unpredictable work-life and growing debt.
• Cross-cultural surveys of happiness show people in the United States are not very happy.
• There is a lack of security and unity in personal life and with the family.
• People have trouble finding adventure and mystery in their current work life.
• People in the United States seem so passive compared to people in other countries and are willing to put up with anything.
• People fear death and cling to life at all costs.
• Personal troubles don’t seem to have a single cause. Multiple causation and chance are unsatisfying answers.
• Lack of universal health care makes hospital stays brief and gives doctors scant time to visit with patients.

Conclusion

New Age ideas about the relationship between mysticism and science were hot stuff by the mid-1970s, at least in the San Francisco Bay Area.  My article began with an experiential description of how even a council communist Marxist such as I could get caught up in New Age ideas about the relationship between quantum mechanists and the human mind. Next, I suggested that these New Age ideas have had a long-lasting shelf-life. On the one hand, they are still prevalent 45 years later. On the other hand, mystical ideas about quantum mechanics began over 120 years ago at the end of the 19th century. I also briefly introduced philosophical systems to show what kind of theories mysticism is competing with. I identified the everyday use of what has been called “naïve realism” and contrasted it to idealism (mysticism), materialism, and skepticism.

Most of the article is devoted to understanding how the crisis in physics with quantum mechanics at the end of the 19th century led some physicists such as Ernst Mach to claim that philosophical categories like materialism, idealism, and time and space categories were outdated metaphysical abstractions. All we know is the sense data of our experience. Further, the deterministic nature of science was questioned because the foundation of quantum mechanics is uncertainty and chance. Some of the more scientifically oriented among the Bolsheviks thought Mach had a point.

Lenin had a fit. While Mach was no mystic, Lenin understood quite clearly that a mystical interpretation of quantum mechanics was possible and very dangerous for the forces of socialism to adapt. Because consciousness is an inevitable part of measuring subatomic particles, this led some thinkers to claim that consciousness lies at the heart of matter. Lenin presented his own naïve realism understanding of the relationship between matter and consciousness. It was insensitive to the 18th century philosophical criticisms made of naïve realism by Hume and Kant and, more importantly, Lenin accepted that the epistemology subject was an individual mind.

I contrasted Lenin’s mechanical materialism interpretation of mind with a socio-historical understanding of mind based on the work of Ilyenkov and Vygotsky. In this theory, the individual mind does not directly encounter nature. Individual mental life is mediated through a kind of socio-historical membrane. It is society and history that engage and interact with nature, not the individual. Without socio-history to draw sustenance from, there would be no individual mind.

Lastly, I raised the question of why mystical theories of matter are attractive at all. I argued that this interest is part of New Age thinking that includes what are called paranormal phenomena such as ESP, clairvoyance, telepathy, astral projection, and homeopathy. Using socio-historical analysis from a previous article I offered twelve reasons for their popularity.

• First published at Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Some leftists might reply that it is precisely only by achieving socialism that civilization can save itself from multidimensional collapse. This belief may be true, but if so, the prospects for a decent future have not improved, because the timeline for abolishing capitalism and the timeline by which we must “solve” global warming and ecological collapse do not remotely correspond. There is no prospect for a national, international, or global transition to socialism within the next several decades, decades that are pivotal for addressing ecological crises. In the United States, for example, it took Republican reactionaries almost a century of organizing starting in the 1940s to achieve the power they have now, and this was in a political economy in which they already had considerable power. It isn’t very likely that socialists, hardly a powerful group, will be able to overthrow capitalism on a shorter timeline. If anything, the international process of “revolution” will take much longer. Perhaps not as long as the transition from feudalism to capitalism, but certainly over a century.

It can seem, then, naïve and utopian even to consider the prospects for socialism when we’re confronted with the more urgent and immediate task of sheer survival. However guilty capitalism is of imposing on humanity its current predicament, the fact is that we can make progress in addressing the environmental crisis even in the framework of capitalism; for example, by accelerating the rollout of renewable and nuclear energy, dismantling the fossil fuel industry, regulating pesticides that are contributing to the decimation of insect populations, experimenting with geoengineering, and so on. These goals—and their corollaries, such as defeating centrist and conservative candidates for political office—should be the most urgent priority of left-wing activists for the foreseeable future. If organized human life comes to an end, nothing else matters much.

Nevertheless, we shouldn’t just forget about socialism for now, because it remains a distant goal, a fundamental value, and organizing for it—e.g., “raising the consciousness” of the working class—can improve lives in the short term as well. So it is incumbent on us to think about how we might achieve the distant goal, what strategies promise to be effective, what has gone wrong in the past, and what revisions to Marxist theory are necessary to make sense of past failures. We shouldn’t remain beholden to old slogans and formulations that were the product of very different circumstances than prevail today; we should be willing to rethink revolution from the ground up, so to speak.

I have addressed these matters in a book called Worker Cooperatives and Revolution, and more concisely in various articles and blog posts. Here, I’ll simply present an abbreviated series of “theses” on the subject of revolution that strike me as commonsensical, however heterodox some of them may seem. Their cumulative point is to reorient the Marxian conception of socialist revolution from that of a completely ruptural seizure and overthrow of capitalist states—whether grounded in electoral or insurrectionary measures—followed by a planned and unitary reconstruction of society (the “dictatorship of the proletariat”), to that of a very gradual process of economic and political transformation over many generations, in which the character of the economy changes together with that of the state. The long transition is not peaceful or smooth or blandly “reformist.” It is necessarily riven at all points by violent, quasi-insurrectionary clashes between the working class and the ruling class, between international popular movements seeking to carve out a new society and a capitalist elite seeking to prolong the current one. Given the accumulating popular pressure on a global scale, which among other things will succeed in electing ever more socialists to office, the capitalist state will, in spite of itself, participate to some extent in the construction of new economic relations that is the foundation of constructing a new society—even as the state in other respects continues to violently repress dissenting movements.

But the process of building a new economy will not be exclusively statist (despite the statism of mainstream Marxism going back to Marx himself). Transitions between modes of production take place on more than one plane and are not only “top-down.” In particular, as civilization descends deeper into crisis and government proves inadequate to the task of maintaining social order, the “solidarity economy,” supported by the state, will grow in prominence and functionality. A world of multiform catastrophe will see alternative economic arrangements spring up at all levels, and the strategies of “statist Marxism” will complement, or be complemented by, the “mutual aid” (cooperative, frequently small-scale, semi-interstitial) strategies of anarchism. These two broad traditions of the left, so often at each other’s throats, will finally, in effect, come together to build up a new society in the midst of a collapsing ancien régime. Crisis will, as always, provide opportunity.

1

Successful socialist revolution, meaning the creation of a society that eliminates differential ownership and control of economic resources and instead permits democratic popular control of the economy, has happened nowhere on a large scale or a “permanent” (“post-capitalist”) basis. Whether in Russia, China, Cuba, or elsewhere, the dream of socialism—still less of communism—has never been realized. According to Marxism, indeed, the very fact that these were isolated islands under siege by a capitalist world indicates that they signified something other than socialism, which is, naturally enough, supposed to follow capitalism and exist first and foremost in the “advanced” countries. The fact that these “socialist” experiments ultimately succumbed to capitalism is enough to show that, whatever progress they entailed for their respective populations, they were in some sense, in the long term, revolutionary abortions.

2

Marx was right that there is a kind of “logic” to historical development. Notwithstanding the postmodernist and empiricist shibboleths of contemporary historiography, history isn’t all contingency, particularity, individual agency, and alternative paths that were tragically not taken (because of poor leadership or whatever). Rather, institutional contexts determine that some things are possible or probable and others impossible. Revolutionary voluntarism, the elevation of political will above the painfully protracted, largely “unconscious” dialectical processes of resolution of structural contradictions and subsequent appearance of new, unforeseen conditions that are themselves “resolved” through the ordinary actions of millions of people, is a false (and un-Marxist) theory of social change. If the world didn’t go socialist in the twentieth century, it’s because it couldn’t have: structurally, in the heyday of corporate capitalism (monopoly capitalism, state capitalism, imperialism, whatever one calls it), socialism was impossible.

In short, on the broadest of historical scales, the “hidden meaning” of the past—to use a phrase beloved by Marx—is revealed by the present and future, as probabilities with which the past was pregnant become realities.

3

Marx therefore got the timeline of revolution radically wrong. He did not (and could not) foresee the power of nationalism, the welfare state, Keynesian stimulation of demand, the state’s stabilizing management of the crisis-prone economy, and the like. In fact, we might say that, falling victim to the characteristic over-optimism of Enlightenment thinkers, he mistook the birth pangs of industrial capitalism for its death throes. Only in the neoliberal era has the capitalist mode of production even finished its conquest of the world—which the “dialectical” logic of historical materialism suggests is a necessary precondition for socialism—displacing remaining peasantries from the land and privatizing “state-socialist” economies and state-owned resources. Given the distribution of power during and after the 1970s between the working class and the business class, together with the increasing mobility of capital (a function of the advancing productive forces, thus predictable from historical materialism), neoliberal assaults on postwar working-class gains were, in retrospect, entirely predictable.

4

Despite, or because of, its horrifying destructiveness, neoliberalism potentially can play the role of opening up long-term revolutionary possibilities (even as it presents fascist possibilities as well). Its function of exacerbating class polarization, immiserating the working class, eroding social democracy, ripping up the social fabric, degrading the natural environment, destabilizing the global economy, relatively homogenizing conditions between countries, hollowing out the corporatist nation-state and compromising the integrity of the very (anti-revolutionary) idea of “nationality,” facilitating a global consciousness through electronic media—a consciousness, in the end, of suffering and oppression—and attenuating the middle class (historically a pretty reliable bastion of conservatism): all this in the aggregate serves to stimulate mass protest on a scale that, eventually, the state will find unmanageable.

Fascist repression, it’s true, is very useful, but fascist regimes can hardly remain in power indefinitely in every country. Even just in the U.S., the governmental structure is too vast and federated, and civil society too thick and resilient, for genuine fascism ever to be fully consolidated everywhere, much less made permanent. Repression alone is not a viable solution for the ruling class.

5

Sooner or later, it will be found necessary to make substantive concessions to the masses (while never abandoning repression). Some writers argue that what these will amount to is a revitalization and expansion of social democracy, such a sustained expansion (under the pressure of popular movements) that eventually society will pass from social democracy straight into socialism. This argument, however, runs contrary to the spirit of Marxism, according to which society does not return to previous social formations after they have departed the stage of history. Fully fledged social democracy was appropriate to a time of industrial unionism and limited mobility of capital; it is hard to imagine that an era of unprecedented crisis and decaying nation-states will see humanity resuscitate, globally, a rather “stable” and nationalistic social form, even expanding it relative to its capacity when unions were incomparably stronger than today. While social democratic policies will surely persist and continue to be legislated, the intensifying dysfunction of the nation-state (a social form that is just as transient as others) will necessitate the granting of different kinds of concessions than centralized and expansive social democratic ones.

6

Here, we have to shift for a moment to considering the Marxist theory of revolution. Then we’ll see the significance of the concessions that states will likely be compelled to grant. There is a glaring flaw in Marx’s conceptualization (expressed, for example, in the famous Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy) according to which “an era of social revolution” begins when the dominant mode of production starts to fetter the use and development of the productive forces. The flaw is simply that the notion of “fettering” is semi-meaningless. Philosophers such as G. A. Cohen have grappled with this concept of fettering, but we don’t have to delve into the niceties of analytic philosophy in order to understand that the capitalist mode of production has always both fettered and developed the productive forces—fettered them in the context, for instance, of devastating depressions, disincentives to invest in public goods, artificial obstacles (like intellectual copyright laws) to the diffusion of knowledge, and, in general, a socially irrational distribution of resources; even as in other respects it still develops the productive forces, as with advances in information technology, biotechnology, renewable energy, and so on. In order to be truly meaningful, therefore, this concept of fettering needs revision.

7

The necessary revision is simple: we have to adopt a relative notion of fettering. Rather than an absolute conflict or a contradiction between productive forces and production relations, there is a conflict between two sets of production relations, one of which uses productive forces in a more socially rational and “un-fettering” way than the other. This revision makes the idea of fettering meaningful, even concretely observable. Capitalism, for example, was, in the final analysis, able to triumph over feudalism because it was infinitely better at developing productive forces, such that its agents could accumulate far greater resources (economic, scientific, technological, intellectual, cultural) than the agents of feudalism. The epoch of social revolution, properly speaking, lasted half a millennium, though it was punctuated by dramatic moments of condensed social and political revolution such as the French Revolution.

If the idea of fettering is to apply to a transition between capitalism and socialism, it can be made sense of only through a similar “relative” understanding, according to which a cooperative and democratic mode of production emerges over a prolonged period of time (hopefully not half a millennium) both interstitially and more visibly in the mainstream. As the old anarchic economy succumbs to crisis and stagnation, the emergent “democratic” economy—which does not yet exist today—does a better job of rationally and equitably distributing resources, thereby attracting ever more people to its practices and ideologies. It accumulates greater resources as the old economy continues to demonstrate its appalling injustice and dysfunction.

8

This theoretical framework permits an answer to the old question that has bedeviled so many radicals: why have all attempts at socialist revolution failed? The answer is that they happened in conditions that guaranteed their eventual failure. There was a radical difference between, for example, October 1917 and the French Revolution: in the latter case, capitalist relations and ideologies had already spread over Western Europe and acquired enormous power and legitimacy. The French revolutionaries were beneficiaries of centuries of capitalist evolution—not, indeed, industrial capitalist, but mercantile, agrarian, financial, and petti-bourgeois. This long economic, social, cultural, and political evolution prepared the ground for the victories of 1789–1793. In 1917, on the other hand, there was no socialist economy whatsoever on which to erect a political superstructure (a superstructure that, in turn, would facilitate the further and more unobstructed development of the socialist economy). Even industrial capitalism was barely implanted in Russia, much less socialism. The meaning of 1917 was merely that a group of opportunistic political adventurers led by two near-geniuses (Lenin and Trotsky) took advantage of a desperate wartime situation and the desperation of the populace—much of which, as a result, supported these “adventurers”—to seize power and almost immediately suppress whatever limited democracy existed. The authoritarian, bureaucratic, and brutal regime that, partly in the context of civil war, resulted—and that ultimately led to Stalinism—was about as far from socialism as one can imagine.

It is one of the ironies of the twentieth century that the Bolsheviks both forgot and illustrate a central Marxian dictum: never trust the self-interpretations of historical actors. There is always an objective context and an objective, hidden historical meaning behind the actions of people like Robespierre, Napoleon, or Lenin, a meaning they have no access to because they are caught up in the whirl of events (and, to quote Hegel, the owl of Minerva flies only at dusk, after the events). The fact that Lenin and his comrades were convinced they were establishing socialism is of no more than psychological interest. It is unfortunate that many Marxists today continue to credulously believe them.

9

Said differently, the twentieth-century strategy of “Marxist” revolutionaries to seize the state (whether electorally or in an insurrection) and then carry out a social revolution—by means of a sweeping, “totalizing” political will—is highly un-Marxist. It is idealistic, voluntaristic, and unrealistic: history moves forward slowly, dialectically, “behind the backs” of historical actors, not straightforwardly or transparently through the all-conquering will of a few leaders or a single political party. The basic problem is that if you try to reconstruct society entirely from the top down, you have to contend with all the institutional legacies of capitalism. Relations of coercion and domination condition everything you do, and there is no way to break free of them by means of political or bureaucratic will. While the right state policies can be of enormous help in constructing an economically democratic society, in order for it to be genuinely democratic it cannot come into existence solely through the state. Marxism itself suggests that the state—largely a function of existing economic relations—cannot be socially creative in such a radical way. Instead, there has to be a ferment of creative energy at the grassroots (as there was during the long transition from feudalism to modern capitalism) that builds and builds over generations, laboriously inventing new kinds of institutions in a process that is both, or alternately, obstructed and facilitated by state policies (depending on whether reactionaries or liberals are in power, or, eventually, leftists).

Nearly all attempts at socialist revolution so far have been directed at a statist rupture with the past, and have therefore failed.¹ There is no such thing as a genuine “rupture” in history: if you attempt it, you’ll find that you’re merely reproducing the old authoritarianism, the old hierarchies, the old bureaucratic inefficiencies and injustices, though in new forms.² Rather, the final, culminating stage of the conquest of the state has to take place after a long period of economic gestation, so to speak (again, gestation that has been facilitated by incremental changes in state policies, as during the feudalism-to-capitalism transition), a gestation that serves as the material foundation for the final casting off of capitalist residues in the (by then) already-partially-transformed state.

10

This brings us back to the question of how capitalist elites will deal with the popular discontent that is certain to accumulate globally in the coming decades. Since the political economy that produced social democracy is passing from the scene, other sorts of concessions (in addition to repression) will be necessary. In our time of political reaction it is, admittedly, not very easy to imagine what these might be. But we can guess that, as national governments prove increasingly unable to cope with environmental and social crises, they will permit or even encourage the creation of new institutional forms at local, regional, and eventually national levels. Many of these institutions, such as cooperatives of every type (producer, consumer, housing, banking, etc.), will fall under the category of the solidarity economy, which is committed to the kind of mutual aid that has already been rather prominent in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. Capitalism’s loss of legitimacy will foster the conditions in which people seek more power in their workplaces, in many cases likely taking them over, aided by changes in state policies (such as the active promotion of a cooperative sector to provide employment in a stagnant economy) due in part to the presence of more socialists in government. Other innovations may include a proliferation of public banks, municipal enterprises (again, in part, to provide jobs at a time of raging structural and cyclical unemployment), and even universal basic income.

The subject of what types of “non-reformist reforms”—i.e., reforms that have the potential to serve as stepping-stones to a new economy—governments will be compelled, on pain of complete social collapse, to grant is much too complex to be explored in a brief article. Two points suffice here. First, the usual Marxist critiques of (worker) cooperatives and other ostensibly apolitical, interstitial “anti-capitalist” institutions—such as “mutual aid”—can be answered simply by countering that these are only one part of a very long and multidimensional project that takes place on explicitly political planes too. It is puzzling that so many radicals seem unaware that the transition to a new civilization is an incredibly complex, drawn-out process: for instance, over many generations, emergent institutions like cooperatives network with each other, support each other, accumulate and share resources in an attempt to become ever freer of the competitive, sociopathic logic of the capitalist economy. At the same time, all this grassroots or semi-grassroots activity contributes to building up a counter-hegemony, an anti-capitalist ethos in much of the population. And the resources that are accumulated through cooperative economic activity can be used to help fund political movements whose goal is to further transform the capitalist state and democratize the economy.

Second, the question naturally arises as to why the ruling class will tolerate, or at times even encourage, all this grassroots and statist “experimentation” with non-capitalist institutions. On one level, the answer is just that the history will unfold rather slowly (as history always does—a lesson too often forgotten by revolutionaries), such that at any given time it won’t appear as if some little policy here or there poses an existential threat to capitalism. It will seem that all that is being done is to try to stabilize society and defuse mass discontent by piecemeal reforms (often merely local or regional). Meanwhile, the severity of the worldwide crises—including, inevitably, economic depression, which destroys colossal amounts of wealth and thins the ranks of the obstinate elite—will weaken some of the resistance of the business class to even the more far-reaching policy changes. By the time it becomes clear that capitalism is really on the ropes, it will be too late: too many changes will already have occurred, across the world. Historical time cannot be rewound. The momentum of the global social revolution will, by that point, be unstoppable, not least because only non-capitalist (anti-privatizing, etc.) policies will have any success at addressing ecological and social disaster.

11

The argument that has been sketched here has a couple of implications and a single major presupposition. The presupposition is that civilization will not destroy itself before the historical logic of this long social revolution has had time to unfold. There is no question that the world is in for an extraordinary era of climatic chaos, but—if for a moment we can indulge in optimism—it might transpire that the ecological changes serve to accelerate the necessary reforms by stimulating protest on an absolutely overwhelming scale. Maybe, then, humanity would save itself in the very nick of time. If not, well, we’ll have a grim answer to the old question “Socialism or barbarism?”

One implication of the argument is that there is a kernel of truth in most ideological tendencies on the left, and radicals should therefore temper their squabbling. The old debates between, say, Marxists and anarchists are seen to be narrow, short-sighted, crabbed, doctrinaire, and premised on a false understanding of the timescales in question. If one expects revolution to happen over a couple of decades, then yes, the old sectarian disputes might acquire urgency and make some sense. But if one chooses to be a Marxist rather than a voluntarist, a realist rather than an idealist, one sees that global revolution will take a century or two, and there is temporal room for statist and non-statist strategies of all kinds.

A second implication, less practically important but of interest anyway, is that Marxists going back to the founder himself have misunderstood the prescriptions of historical materialism. There may well be something like a “dictatorship of the proletariat” someday, but, since idealism and voluntarism are false, it will (like the earlier “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie”) happen near the end of the revolutionary epoch, not at the beginning. It is impossible to predict what form the state will take by then, or how the final removal of bourgeois remnants from government will further transform it. What can be known is only that in order to politically oust the ruling class, the working class needs not just numbers but resources, which hitherto it has lacked on the necessary scale. With the gradual—but, of course, contested and violent—spread of a semi-socialist economy alongside (and interacting with) the decadent capitalist one, workers will be able to accumulate the requisite resources to effectually compete against the shrinking business class, electing left-wing representatives and progressively changing the character of the capitalist state.

Meanwhile, in the streets, people will be figuratively manning the barricades, decade after decade, across a world tortured by the greed of the wealthy and the suffering of the masses. All their struggles, surely, will not be in vain.

1. Other reasons for their failure have been operative as well, notably imperialist interference with the revolutionary process. But the effectiveness of such interference has itself shown the inadequacy of an exclusively “ruptural” strategy—the attempt to create socialism by political fiat in a still-overwhelmingly-capitalist world—because core capitalist nations usually find it easy to squash the political revolution when it hasn’t been preceded by generations of socialist institution-building across the globe, including in the heart of the most advanced countries.
2. To repeat, this is the lesson of Marxism itself. We are embedded in the past even when trying to idealistically leap out of it and leave it behind. Insofar as Marx sometimes wrote as if a proletarian dictatorship could virtually “start anew,” enacting whatever policies it wanted and planning a new society as though from a blueprint, he forgot the gist of his own thought.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Chris Wright.

The fourth of John Talbott’s criteria is the need for cultural sustainability: Satisfying our need as human beings to be creative and expressive; to learn, grow, teach and be; to have a diverse, interesting, stimulating and exciting social environment and range of experiences available.
― Christine Connelly, Sustainable Communities: Lessons from Aspiring Eco-Villages

And, we can take what Connelly states in her book to the level of — There is relatively little sharing of facilities, faculties, things, social capital, land, farming, cooperative everything, largely due to the dispersement of collective action capitalism has welded to the capitalist consumer, err, citizen. In one sense, many people in this Western society like the idea of big familial situations, and dispersing extra “things” and extra “time” in a cooperative sense, but the systems of oppression, the systems of dog-eat-dog, the systems of malformed educations and coocoo histories, all of that and the retail mentality AND the psychological fears (real, imagined, post-hypnotically suggested through a debt society) of losing home, health, humanity with the wrong throw of the mortgage and employment dice, we have now mostly a society that is not a sharing society, not a sharing economy, not a cadre of millions who believe in a genuine progress index as a marker of a democracy’s overall health.

But to allude to the title, specifically, I am looking at more and more systems of shutting out the ground-view of things versus the global view, or the international view. I am seeing more and more web sites forgetting the lynch-pin of humanity — the family, the community around a family, and the attempt to create tribes and communities of similar purposes and communities of place. Leftist websites spend countless miles of digital ink repeating what the take is on Imperial power, what the take is on the perversities of the American Chaotic diseases, what the world is in those white nations (sic) of more and more poverty, fencing out solutions and global bullshit tied to hobbling literally China, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and any country where a social contract with the people and the land is emerging. Important, sure, but some of us are Marxists because we look at the ground as a way toward the larger truths.

Keeping it Local for Global Perspectives

The reality is that, like Thoreau, most do not have to travel far geographically or scholastically to understand systems from one example or a limited set of examples. If a community, or town or county can’t stop job-killing, physiology-killing, ecological-killing things/ideologies/processes coming into said community, such as, say, aerial sprays of mountains and valleys and hills that have been razed by industry, then, what sort of hope do people hold out in the larger view that your country will do the right thing with say, oh, Cuba. You know, stopping the plague of economic and financial and shipping sanctions/blockades. You can see in plain view the results of stealing countries’ bank accounts or stopping the shipping of valuable life saving “stuffs.”

So, how can that Lincoln County, OR, attempt to go to the State Supreme Court to lobby these shyster judges to do the right thing — stop the spraying of neurological and gut killing sprays to inhibit the unnatural grown and profusion of noxious weeds and opportunist shrubs and bushes on a part of mother earth that once was a dynamic forest with dynamic species, with shaded creeks, with ground food for subsoil, terrestrial and avian creatures.

I get why web sites that carry leftist news and reports go for the international gut wrenching or elitist view, but we need balance. We need proof of life and hope and action at the human level. We need writers like me to take one example of humanity doing humanity right, and giving it to the world.

That is the world here, for a moment — less than 72 hours on a plot of forest land I happen to own with my sister. Nothing fancy, just 20 acres of white pine and cedar and Douglas fir. Turkeys and bears, and the amazing skies. It is near Pahto, or Mount Adams. What should be wet soil is something like I’d find in Colorado near Durango. Snow for the season, more than one fifth the average snowfall. And there has been no rain since June 17.

We are talking Oregon, in the viewshed of Pahto and Wy’east (Adams and Hood). Things on those 20 acres and my neighbors’ adjoining 75 acres are not right. Fire, as one of the brothers told me, will be — unless climate models change 180 degrees — a bigger and bigger part of the land. The landscape. The people’s trial and tribulations. Throughout the west. Throughout the globe.

As we are in a 24-7 loop of being entertained (distracted) to death with sports, Trump Beatification Syndrome/Trump Derangement Syndrome, the politics of perversity, Corona Crisis Number 999, and all the junk that occupies the brains of Homo Retailopethicus.

Land Ethic

I’ve been coming to this property for going on 30 years. Not regularly since I have lived and worked in such places as El Paso, Spokane, Seattle, Portland, Gladstone, Beaverton, Estacada, Vancouver, and down here on the coast. It is a three and three-quarters of an hour trip from our house on the Pacific (Central Coast) to the place eight miles north of a town called White Salmon.

I met the neighbor landowners, let’s call them Rita and Ron, before they had put down the concrete footings to their house. Now, some 30 years later, they have a garden, tapped into water, have a nice modern house, lots of out buildings, a Cat for grading, and other things to make life in the woods pretty nice. Ron’s got a degree from U of Washington in geography. He is from Seattle. His brother (we’ll call him JW) put in 30 years at Boeing, and he spends time up on some acres he owns next to my property. A motor home that is nothing fancy, a SUV and he has juice, water and a septic system. There is a lot to do, and not a lot to do. He has a condo in Scottsdale, and he has kids in Spokane and Florida. He is living the good life, and it isn’t a huge ecological footprint. He’s a dyed in the wool democrat.

There are robust and real discussions with these two guys and Ron’s wife Rita. She has been married three times, has childhood trauma, had major drug addictions and she is a big time worker, gets things done, and is in recovery. Her gigs include not just taking care of rich people’s linens, scrubbing and cooking. She’s done this sort of work so long that she gets requests from really sick spouses, or individuals. She is there as caretaker, first responder, nutritional coach, travel agent, companion on some of those trips, and navigator for finances, health care concerns, family issues, and more.

Heavy things taking care of people who once were robust, skiers, surfers, outdoors folk, who are now bed-ridden and stroke paralyzed. There are plenty of issues tied to family members of the people she cares for wanting their cut of the goods, and those who want to outright steal from their moms and dads, grannies and papas.

This is a job we call “caring for people” angels. While Rita doesn’t buy into any heaven/hell theme, she jokes about being both an angel of mercy and of death. Many have died on her watch due to advanced stages of cancer, Alzheimer’s, and the like.

I worked as a union organizer in Seattle, for part-time college faculty, but my union, SEIU, was and is all about health care workers. I spent time with women and men in Seattle and surrounding communities who were the licensed caregivers — the care home owners and the care home workers. Those workers are many times employed by the state to work the low paying, hard hours jobs of assisting people, old or young, who are incapable of thriving on their own without help with any number of things. Many of the people I represented in the union did the bathing and the feeding.

What I learned in those microcosms (again, the big picture stuff was always at the forefront in the union, with them beating the drum to support Obama-2 and Insley for WA governor) was again ramifying how mixed up Capitalism is under Democrats or the Demons of Republicanism. In Seattle, post-Occupy where I got to teach a few times in those famous street teach-ins, all of the Trayvon Martin protests, and those against Amazon, the fabric of that disjointed concept of those who have and those who do not have was in plain sight.

The levels of inequity were in plain sight in that backyard of mine. And, those people from African nations, those Latinx, working as personal care support, or CNAs, and those managing houses where the old, tired, sick would end up, now that was yet another lesson, and all the world is a stage was there as the underlying theme in that Diaspora of people from poverty-stricken post (sic) colonial lands, where war and murder by despots were daily concerns. These humble people were/are the caregivers, the end-of-life shepherds for “our” people — citizens.

In so many cases, the people who come from poor countries, they were the only people in the lives of these American citizens who were languishing in their sadness as their families had abandoned them in many instances. Some woman from Somalia, Sudan, Nigeria, there she was, bathing, soothing, singing to and holding the lives of white people who were stuck in a room, slowly or rapidly dying.

Caregivers, and SEIU represented them as a unit. All the training these caregivers have to undergo, at the state and county levels. Black women and men, and those of Muslim faith, in the Seattle area, tending to the lives of the dying, or the developmentally disabled, that is the reality of capitalism as throwaway society. Capitalism of the impersonal, Capitalism of the scam after scam. Each layer of Capitalism is like a tree riddled with termites and beetles and all manner of disease eating it from the inside out.

That’s the real world stage — what a society does to assist the old, young, vulnerable, failing, too weak to move. What a society does to collectively build safety nets, to look at the “all the world as a stage” perspective from a macro lens, in order to widen the scope to the county, regional, national, global level. Rita taking care of super vulnerable people who do not worry about how they are paying for her private services. Aging in place — in these big homes overlooking the Columbia Gorge. Aging at home before all things go south.

In some cases, Rita is their only confidant, their only set of ears and eyes. Twice weekly visits are the only human touch they receive in their lives. Her job is that multiplicity of jobs in a patriarchal disaster capitalism society — nurse, PT provider, social worker, psychologist, taxi service, health navigator, nutritionist, legal consultant, errand person, cook, mover, travel consultant, companion, financial planner, and more. to end up as a symbolic friend and quasi-daughter or sister.

Rita and Ron live a good life out in the woods, with turkeys jumping into the trees, deer coming to the great garden they have, and the seasonal bear pushing over stumps to look for grubs. A riot of hummingbirds. Snakes and lizards. Butterflies we don’t see in suburban areas anymore. And those trees.

Ron works the land, tends to the canopies, looks for crowded trees, or dying ones, and has learned how to shepherd the land so the trees on the property thrive. Canopies where the crowns don’t touch. A better than park-like feel to the land. And now, with the changing precipitation, the nighttime temperatures last week in the nineties, all that desiccating climate heating, we have yet another “world is a stage” with the poor management of the land, the lack of state resources, the lack of collective will to mitigate fire suppression, and how to bring these forests into some manageable fire dampening state.

Yes, Ron is 68, still capable of logging and stacking trees, but his shoulder a few years ago was operated on, and a knee replaced this year. And, just a week ago, a reminder that the other knee will be chopped out with a titanium replacement to come.

Rita and Ron save money, use the Washington state Medicaid system, they are not consumers — Ron saves the old Ford sedan, cannibalize parts from old washers and dryers, and he knows how to tune up chainsaws, and how to build. His degree in geography and his deep regard for American history keep him sane. He likes golf, he plays dozens of types of cards, including Texas Hold’em, and he does Scrabble. He knows the native names of the two mountains in his geographic area.

This is the small fry of America, and a hidden gem. I know for a fact that old aging in place infirm people, or chronically unhoused folk, or people on the more untenable end of the Autism Spectrum, as well as people who do not fit in, who have intellectual disabilities, or those with complex or simple PTSD, would thrive here.

Again, setting up communities that are multi-generational, with residents possessing multiple avocations and occupations, people with varying skills, those who want community big time, and those who need community in their lives to do some checks and balances. Horse therapy, or dogs. Healthcare and PTSD recovery through gardening. Skills of building a tiny home from logs to end product. Designing microhomes that are in kits, packages that a couple could put together. Imagine that, housing people, and getting abandoned farms or degraded farms into the hands of intentional and healing communities.

So, that one 72 hours on the land, my land shared in title with my sister (it’s really never OUR land, now is it), the small things of just regular people spark, again, from this socialist, Marxist, communist, the deep well of experience and deep learning to a much higher ground, something worthy. But imagine, a thousand, or ten thousand farming centered healing communities, with Native American elders/wisdom, with that wounded veteran to farmer ethos, with all the markings of communitarian outposts of real healing and body-mind-spirit functioning. You know, all those yellow buses that are no longer road worthy. Think of them in the millions, taken to some of these places to be stripped, insulated, interior designed, made into HOMES, with amazing artistic touches, in a big circle, like a sunflower, with a community gathering place in the center, commercial kitchen and food processing center, healing center, and arts center. Imagine that, Bezos and Gates and all the other Financial Stormtroopers who have gutted communities from the bottom, up.

Alas, that’s what the small generates — the systems thinking approach to communities, which need food security, water security, direct health care, even living, aging and dying in place. This does work, will work, and should be scaled up to the thousandth degree. But in this scorched earth and scorched body capitalism, nothing can be moved unless there are a thousand lawyers, ten thousand contracts, and one hundred thousand overseers-code enforcers-middlemen/women in the mix, denigrating human agency, deconstructing the value of people and ideas, and destroying hope.

Bear, turkey, deer, on the deck sipping tequila, and the four of us talking about life, aging, the intricacies of lives so different yet here, on this plot of land, with a common humanity beyond just the intercourse of money and exchanges a la capitalism. The land, that is, the mountains and hills, all those animal trails, each tree a testament to these people, Rita and Ron, caring for the place for more than three decades.

Got a Few Million for this Real Solution?

So, the state of affairs is rotten, to the max, in every aspect of Capitalism. Sure, JC and Rita and Ron have a more middle of the row belief in this country’s exceptionalism. They are not versed in Howard Zinn, W.E.B. DuBois, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, and so many others who have pried open this country’s evil roots, it’s so-called founding, and the wars, the expansionism, all of that. It’s much easier to look at the past with rose tinted glasses, and to believe that something was right, with Eisenhauer or Truman, FDR, any of them. That is the limitation of Americans, even good ones like Ron, Rita and JC. Truly, but they are in their own world, so to speak, a bubble, and yes, they get the world around them is harsh, that some (sic) of USA’s policies have kinked up the world. But to have those limits, to not see how the US has always been Murder Incorporated, or that this is Rogue Nation, a nation of chaos, a nation run by CIA-DoD and the secretive cabal of banks-industrialists-AI fuckers.

And, lo and behold, another friend, we’ll call her Betty, sent to me this other chunk of land, in Oregon, near wine country, 205 acres, up for sale, with amazing infrastructure, up for sale for 6.9 million dollars. The possibility of a developer coming into 205 acres, setting the torch for 5 acre dream (sic) homes for the rich, in a planned and gated community of millionaires, well, that is the rush she had to ask me if I had ideas.

Of course, I have ideas. Look at the list above. This place is called Laurelwood — Look at it here. Link.

Here, the low down via the realtor —

• $6,945,000.
• 205 +/-  acres zoned AF-5
• Includes 49 Acre Campus with 6+ Buildings totaling approx. 130,000 SF:
  1. Expansion Hall- Administration Building with Auditorium, Classrooms and Offices
  2. Harmony Hall- Girl’s dorm with 67 rooms, 7 offices, lounge, chapel, commercial kitchen, dining room, bath suites, etc. and attached 3-bedroom Dean’s house
  3. Devotion Hall- Boy’s dorm with 49 rooms (19 rooms need sheetrock finished and painted), apartment with kitchen, bath suites, rec room, lounges, etc. and attached 5-bedroom Dean’s house
  4. Gymnasium/Music Building with Stage
  5. Science Classroom Building with Library
  6. Industrial Arts Building with Auto Shop, Wood Shop and Welding Shop
• Extensive Updates during current ownership include:
  1. Administration Building has newer metal roof, updated windows, new insulation, remodeled auditorium and meeting rooms, new HVAC, electrical service and lighting
  2. New windows, high efficiency hot water system, new HVAC, new kitchen appliances and walk-in refrigerator, insulation, paint, lighting and carpeting in Harmony Hall (Girl’s dorm)
  3. New windows, insulation in 49 rooms plus new sheetrock in 30 rooms of Devotion Hall (Boy’s dorm)
  4. New and repaired roofs and new electrical services
• Domestic water system and sewage system for campus
• Includes separate 4.69 acres (Tax Lot 1301) with Spring and water rights– domestic water source for campus
• Adjacent 151 +/- acres well suited for low density residential development with 30 LA water co-op certificates
• Vineyard soils & Beautiful Views
• South Fork Hill Creek flows through property
• Rural location approximately 14 miles south of Hillsboro near Gaston
• Washington County
• Tax Lots 2400 & 1532, Sec 5, Tax Lots 400, 2400 & 2500, Sec 5c and Tax Lot 1301, Sec 16, T2S, R3W, W.M.

Ahh, the place is now a retreat, in retreat, as the Yoga enthusiasts are old or aging, and the place was closed due to the corona insanity/lockdown, and the people are giving up, and now it’s on the market: It is Ananda of Laurelwood. I present the basic website verbiage:

What Is Ananda?
Ananda is a global movement to help you realize the joy of your own highest Self.

Ananda Oregon
Living Wisdom School
Temple & Teaching Center
Yogananda Gardens
Conscious Aging

Our Inspiration
Paramhansa Yogananda
Swami Kriyananda
Ananda Worldwide
Education for Life

There you have it — water, a spring, land, buildings, the potential of being not just this 205 intentional-healing-farming-tiny home building community, but a model for many others to spread across the land. I know I could get dozens of groups to come to this property for workshops, test kitchen work, growers, even wine producers, horse therapy folk, music healers, and even entomologists to create insect and pollinator fields. Students from the dozens of colleges around the Pacific Northwest, doing projects on aging, on healing, the dog and horse therapy works.

Take a look at this —

So, how do I, well trained, well educated, well versed, find the money? My proposal to Betty is to send a letter to, well, that famous ex-wife, McKenzie Bezos, now McKenzie Scott Tuttle. Billionaire who has pledged to give away half of her wealth, in the billions, tens of billions. Oh, there is Nick Hanauer, and other billionaires, so, imagine, just putting 6.9 million down, owning the property, shelling out for two or three years the monthly upkeep and insurance shit that this property would need while people like me and others build this community, pulling in all those actors, business women and men, the nonprofits, the outside the envelope people who could help design this place as a place of healing.

For me, it is a quick writing prompt, and what follows it that letter to McKenzie Scott Tuttle. First draft. You can never get this to Abigail Disney or Melinda Gates, others, including the Phil Nike Knights. That is Capitalism on steroids — lies, flimflam, propaganda, marketing us to death, layer after layer of buffering, check systems, until good ideas and a good piece of land go the way of the dodo — extinct. This project I could spark into action. I have no problem talking with McKenzie or her handlers with her there, of course. Anyone. There are 2,800 billionaires in the world. Hundreds of philanthropies. A few million angel investors. Collective action and stakeholder building. But the property needs to be held in a trust, a placeholder to allow for a group of people to design its future, to get entrepreneurs involved, to get this thing going so it can be self-sufficient. A model for thousands of other places around the USA and Canada, being scarfed up by the evil ones, the developers.

Below my letter to Scott-Tuttle,  see Nick Hanauer. McKenzie Scott gets wealthier even giving away billions below that. Abigail Disney below that. Below her, the author of Dream Hoarders. Better yet, Michael Parenti on Capitalism below the hoarder talk. Below that, Michael’s son, Christian, speaking about Tropic of Chaos, his book climate chaos/heating fueling violence and war.

Here, my letter to McKenzie Scott Tuttle (Warren Buffett and Bill Gates started the Giving Pledge in 2010. It encourages those billionaires to pledge to give away 50% of their earnings to charity. By 2012, over 81 billionaires joined the Giving Pledge. That number is now over 120 billionaires, as of May 2014, according to the Giving Pledge’s official website.)

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Dear McKenzie Scott-Tuttle:

RE: Satellites of Tierra Firma – Some Look to Mars and the Moon, We Look to Soil Here

& Medicine Wheel of Healing, Growing, Learning, Living

People and land need healing which is all inclusive – holistic.

                 — Allan Savory

 Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.

                — Nelson Mandela

Reverence is an emotion that we can nurture in our very young children, respect is an attitude that we instill in our children as they become school-agers, and responsibility is an act that we inspire in our children as they grow through the middle years and become adolescents.

                — Zoe Weil, p. 42, Above All Be Kind: Raising a Humane Child in Challenging Times

Oh, the naysayers tell me and my cohorts to not even try to break into the foundation you run, that this concept of having Mackenzie Scott Tuttle even interested in becoming a placeholder for an idea, and for this land that a group of visionaries see as an incubation collective space for dreams to become reality.

We place our hopes in your ability to read on and see the vision and plans driving this solicitation, this ask. And it is a big ask.

This is figuratively and literally putting the cart before the horse. Here we have 200 acres, and the vision is retrofitting this center that is already there, Ananda,  into a truly holistic healing center, youth run, for a seven generations resiliency and look forward ethos of learning to steward the land, learning to grow the land, toward biodynamic farming, all mixed in with intergenerational wisdom growing.

We are seeing this, as stated above, as a medicine wheel. A circle of integrative thinking, education, experimentation and overlapping visions of bringing stakeholders from around the Pacific Northwest (and world) into this safe harbor. There are already facilities on this property as you can see from the real estate prospectus. There are 120 rooms in a great building. There are outbuildings, a gymnasium, barns, and spring water.

It is unfortunately up for sale, and the danger there is a developer with a keen eye to massive profits and turning a spiritual and secular place of great healing and medicine wheel potential into “dream homes” for the rich.

Good land turned into a gated community? We are asking your philanthropy to take a deep dive into helping put this property on hold from those nefarious intentions and allow our group to develop this circle of healing – education across disciplines, elder type academy mixed with youth directed programs; farming; food production; micro-home  building and construction facility; trauma informed healing.

Actually, more. Think of this as a community of communities.

Young People Need Hope, a Place (many places) and Leadership and Development

So many young people are done with Industrial and Techno Capitalism. They know deep down there is more to a scoop of soil than a billion bacteria, and they want to be part of healing communities.

We are proposing the Foundation you have set up invest in this property, as a placeholder for our development plan – actually it is an anti-developer plan. This property will be scarfed up for a steal, by, land and housing developers who want McMansions out here in this incredible eco-scape. Just what we do not need in the outlying areas of Portland.  Or in so many other locations across this country.

We are a small group ready to do what we can to get food growers and producers at the table to invest in intellectual and sweat and tears capital to make this 200 acres work as a living community of new farmers, people living and learning on the property, incubating ideas for, we hope, to include a micro-home building project, crops, vineyards, learning centers for farming and preserving, marketing and engaging in food healing.

We come at this with decades around food systems, learning from Via Campesina/o or Marion Nestle, Alice Waters, Winona LaDuke, Rachel Carson. We believe in biomimicry, that is, learning how nature settles scores, survives and thrives. We come at this as deeply concerned about ecological footprints, life cycle analyses, the disposable culture and the planned and marketed obsolescence.

We are also coming at this as educators – earth teachers, who know classrooms in prison like settings, with rows of desks, do not engender creative and solutionaries– young people ready to go into the world, even a small community, with engaged, creative and positive ways to deal with climate chaos and the impending shattering of safety nets, including biological and earth systems “nets” and “webs.”

This property is unique, as all of our earth is. This is firstly Kalapua land, first, and that is the Grande Ronde and Siletz, as well as the Atfalsti, too. We call it Gatson, near Hillsboro, Oregon, but the land is the essence of the spirit givers of this continent before “discovery.”

Rich, in the wine country of the new people to this region, this land is about applying our ethos and yours, Ms. Scott-Tuttle, toward a real healing, a real stewardship and real intergeneration ethos around carrying the wisdom of tribes and growers and educators to the youth. We believe women are at the center of many of the themes already listed – farming, educating, healing, human stewardship.

Think of this project as the cart before the horse because the old system, the horse, was always the money, the source of power, and with power comes strings attached. The people involved in this project are looking to have a multistoried community of farmers, learners, youth learning trades and people skills, as well as elders, both Native and new arrivals, to understand that a farm is more than that, as well as a vineyard is more than the sum of the grapes. It is about a reclaiming of the sacred – soil, air, photosynthesis in a truly sustainable fashion.

The only “green washing” we can imagine this project will carry forth is the washing of the greens, the other harvests, in tubs of clear spring water.

Some of us on this project have traveled to other parts of this continent, and spent time with coffee growers and understand that shade grown coffee and beyond fair trade are the only elements to a truly fair and equitable system. Train the people of the land, who are the true stewards, to not only grow, but to roast and market the bounty. Grow the community with water projects, irrigation, schools, and globalized sharing of people, visitors.

This project needs a placeholder, to keep the land out of the insane real estate market. We will do the rest, we solutionaires. There are so many growers and investment angels who want to be part of the Seventh Generation solution.

Clearly, the lessons for people to be in this 200 acre community, farm-soil-healing satellite, are lessons you, Ms. Scott-Tuttle,  the fiction writer, know, which you capture deftly with Luther Albright. The world for young people in the Pacific Northwest is that crumbling home and crumbling dam of Albright. The healing we need is more than the structures and infrastructure. It is inside, at the heart of the soul of imagination. Some of us on this project are soliciting from your charity a placeholder purchase of the property are tied to the arts, believing STEAM is the only way forward, and that S.T.E.M. is lifeless and dangerous without the A – arts. We believe the true voice of people are those who believe in asking “what should we do” rather than what is currently on superchargers – “What Can We Do?”

We realize that for many young people, politics have failed them. Many youth I speak with and work with, believe this country is in the midst of an empire of chaos in steep decay. Alternatives to the decay is building communities that would fit the model here on 200 acres – agro-ecological farming; nutritional centered living; housing; long-term care assistance; youth directed entrepreneur projects; bringing in local and state businesses leaders to be part of a design from the grassroots up.

The catch for most of the youth we have engaged is —  to paraphrase and level  a composite point,” We are ruled by an elite class of individuals who are completely out of touch with the travails of the average American.” This simple statement is packed full of context and frightening reality for millions of students and adults who feel disconnected and neutered by both government agencies and corporate policies.

First, who wants to be “ruled” by anyone? That we have this class system of elite, middle managers, the elite’s high ranking servicers, and then, the rest of the citizens, the so-called 80 percent who have captured less than the overall 10 percent of “wealth” in this country. The very idea of an elite out of touch, or completely out of touch speaks to an ignorance that is dangerous to the world, to the 80 percent, and also speaks to a possible planned ignorance. That we have millions of amazing people, to include nonprofits, community-led organizations, educational institutions, journalists, and others, who can speak to what those “travails” are, and yet, the elites failing to grasp those challenges, or failing to even acknowledge them, this is what many believe is the decay of this society.

This may not sit well with you or your philanthropy, but we as a group have dozens of years experience working with K12, higher ed, farming groups, social services/mutual aid movements, and have systems thinking in our backgrounds, and we underscore youth and community-driven projects and designs. This medicine wheel/circle land trust we are asking you to consider with a follow up meeting, well, this is the only way to a model-driven set of safety nets to move into some challenging times for this Empire in a world that is no longer USA centric.

We are solutionaries, that is, we look for solutions by taking apart problems and then applying holism and deep experimentation in design, but using tried and proven systems that do work.

Healthy food, healthy relationships to culture, people, nature, healthy work, worthy work, with an eye always on the arts. Just as a farming and tiny home community, where biodynamic farming and food preserving and from nail to roof to complete tiny home design are part and parcel the key elements for this community to thrive under, well, there are no better classrooms and transferable skills.

Some of us have seen youth and adults learn the crafts needed to design, plan, buildings, and market tiny homes that would be used to seed communities that are, again, centered around farming, centered around healing, centered around Native American healing, and local community values. A young woman who finishes the hands-on learning of building a tiny home – with windows, skylights, plumbing, furnishings, electricity ready, all of that which a home entails – is a remarkable, valuable person. All those skills, again, like a medicine wheel, teach deeper lessons, and transferable skills.

This is what this property would also “house.”

All Tied Together – School, Outdoors, People, Action, Solving Food Insecurity and Housing

The should is an educational-farming-entrepreneur-solutions incubator on these 200 acres. Proving that this could be one of a thousand across the land. There are literally thousands of similar properties around the US, within their own cultural-community-ecological-historical milieus, but again, this project is one that Luther Albright would have thrived inside as a “New Engineer for Growing Communities,” as opposed to river-killing dam builder.

Our earthquake is here now, with all measure of tremors and aftershocks —  that is the climate chaos, wildfires, food insecurity, and alas, the New/New Gilded age of deep inequities that are criminal, as you well know, Ms. Scott Tuttle.

Here, the cart (before the horse):  this amazing collective piece of land and buildings with a multiversity of spiritual under girders . The horses are ready, but they need the cart, the home, the fabric of incubation. Those stallions and mares are engaged, ready, who are willing to take a leap of faith here and risk being outside the common paradigm of predatory and consumer-driven capitalism that has put many millions in a highly precarious position.

It’s amazing, the current system of philanthropy which forces more and more people to beg for less and less diverse money for fewer and fewer truly innovative ideas. Funding a project like this is a legacy ad-venture, the exact formula we need (scaled up to a 1,000 different locales) to break the chains of Disaster and Predatory Capitalism. We need that “capital,” the cart, to help those stallions and mares to break for the field of ideas and fresh streams of praxis.

There are any number of ideas for sustainability communities. Co-ops, growers groups, or mixed communities for young and old to exchange knowledge, capacity, growth, sweat equity —  called intergenerational living. This is about a pretty inventive suite of concepts and practices:

• learning spaces, inside and outside
• buildings to develop micro home (unique, easily packaged and ready to put together) manufacturing and R & D
• food systems – farming of sustainable food, herbs and those vines
• husbandry
• learning food systems, from farm to plate
• ceramics, painting, music, dance, theater and writing center
• speakers’ bureau
• farmers,  restaurateurs and harvesters with a stake in the community
• healing center
• Youth directed outdoor education and experiences
• sustainability practicum’s for students
• low income micro home housing
• day care center, early learning center

How does this make any sense to a billionaire, who has devoted her life to “giving away” half of her wealth in her lifetime? Well, we see this project – this land-property – as a legacy for many of the avocations and interests (passions) you have articulated over the years. Your vision and commitment to education and women-centered projects are admirable. This is one of those projects.

There is that emotional and sappy Movie, Field of Dreams, and the statement – “if you build it, they will come.” We have found that over the years teaching in many places – Seattle, Spokane, Portland, El Paso, Auburn, Mexico – that young people and nontraditional students want mentoring, leadership and the tools to be mentors and leaders. They need the cart before the horse can herald in the new ideas, and the new way to a better future. If the classroom and master facilitator allows for open growth, unique student-led ideas and work, well, that person has BUILT the field of dreams from which to grow.

There are so many potentials with this project, and it starts with the land, holding it as a Scott-Tuttle placeholder. From an investment point of view, as long as you have people wrangling other people and professionals to get this satellite of sanity, the medicine wheel with many spokes radiating out and inward, the property increases in monetary value. Land is sacred, but just as sacred are the ideas and the potential that land might germinate and grow. It is the reality of our country – too few control too much. We see it in the infamous “Complex” – not just military, but, Big Pharma, Big Ag, Big Media, Big Business, Big Education, Big Medicine, as well as private prisons, for profit social services, AI , and Big Tech, so called Surveillance Capitalism.  Who in the 80 percent has the funds to purchase a $7 million project?

Big ideas like this cooperative land medicine wheel (a first of many satellites) might be common, but the web of supportive and cohesive things tied to this property is unusual, to say the least. With the failing of small businesses throughout the area, with the food insecurity for women, children and families, with the housing insecurity, added to debt insecurity —  with all those insecurities young and old face, this project could be the light at the end of many tunnels.  We have connections to Oregon Tilth and Latinx Farmers, and large biodynamic vineyards. We have connections to women’s veteran groups, to aging in place experts. We have connections to trauma healers and growers and interested folk who know construction and design. Additionally, the Pacific Northwest, from Puget Sound to Gold Beach, OR, is full of innovators, and those include the dozens of colleges and universities just in these two states – Oregon and Washington. We intend to trawl for investors – farms, food purveyors, wineries, restaurants, schools and various college programmers – to put into this project. A soil plot to test perennial wheat, a al the Land Institute, to Amory Lovins, Novella Carpenter, and so many more, finding a place of integrated living, ag, permaculture and ever-evolving cultural understanding of the finite planet we are on.

We are hopeful, even under the current Sixth Extinction.

It is telling, this entomologist and educator’s perspective after three decades of teaching:

Diana Six, an entomologist for 30 years who teaches at the University of Montana, took her students to Glacier National Park on a field trip and reported the following:

Life doesn’t just deal with this. When I went up Glacier with my students a few weeks ago, the flowers were curling up. At some of the lower elevations, glacier lilies were shriveled, lupins didn’t even open. The flowers should extend for another three weeks and they’re already gone. Any insects or birds that depend upon them, like bees or hummingbirds, are in trouble, their food is gone. Bird populations have just baked… People seem to think of extinctions as some silent, painless statistic. It’s not. You look at birds that can no longer find fish because they’ve moved too far off shore. They’re emaciated; they’re starving to death. We are at the point that there’s nothing untouched.

How contradictory and illustrative that this student experience took place in a “protected national park.”

Referencing how climate change impacts life, Diana said:

Somewhere along the way, I had gone from being an ecologist to a coroner. I am no longer documenting life. I’m describing loss, decline, death.

We are hopeful that our youth can document life on this Medicine Wheel Land Satellite, and instead of  describing “loss, decline, death,”  this one satellite can help individuals to describe resurgence, restoration, holism, and growth. A model, like the one we propose, could be the incubator and inspiration for other similar projects throughout the land. So many empty buildings, so many abandoned farms, so much good land about to be grabbed up by McMansion developers, or those who have no vision toward a resilient and communitarian existence.

We are thinking of a medicine wheel since so many people can utilize the Farm, from horse therapists, to gardening as trauma healers; from alternative medicine experts, to restaurants with a connection to growers. This is Tierra Firma Robusta, for sure, with so much potential to integrate a suite of smart, worldly, localized and educational programs, permanent, long-term, and short in duration.  This would be the linchpin of inspiration, an incubator for similar projects, and we’d make sure that the Philanthropy you head up would be in some form of limelight – imagine, a billionaire placing a property with a deep spiritual history into a land trust of perpetuity. I know another billionaire has purchased farmland and is now the largest farm land holder in the US, but this one here we propose would fit an entirely different model, having nothing to do with industrial farming, genetic engineering and monocultures. Like all good societies, the cornucopia of life and backgrounds and people and land is what makes them dynamic, healthy and resilient, as well as fair.

We propose a grand idea, but we need that field of dreams, that field, that farm, before we can engage a hundred people to be part of this medicine wheel of land healing and hope.

Please let our team discuss this further. Truly, we have both the passion and persistence to get this Medicine Wheel of Healing Farm Community to an unimaginably vibrant level. Will you be part of our field of dreams?

Sincerely,

Paul Haeder

205 +/- Acres southwest of Hillsboro, OR

The Ananda Center at Laurelwood is considered an educational nonprofit. It started as a retreat center with workshops including yoga and energy healing. It also offers a non-credit residential study program and a non-accredited (but state authorized) college offering bachelor and associate degrees and educational certificates.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Videos, as promised:

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

It’s not pretty, for sure, how I go all crazy and fugue like, in the interview (man, the lack of teaching 30 students face to face has turned me into a dervish, nodding, head shaking wacko). But I enjoyed these three socialist interviewers, and while I sort of take over the discussion, and I do have a set of nervous ticks and habits [and I can rationalize those by saying I don’t like looking at a screen, an external camera, and in this episode, I had to prop the smart/dumbphone onto the keyboard since Zoom Doom was cutting out on the computer], I think there are harvestable points the four of us made. Again, thanks to Andy, Kenny and Eduardo for the time capsule moment. The Jab, Star Wars, and the Bubble Net of Digital Gulags.”

It maybe forcing the three into a lumping process, but that is what ideas and brainstorming and plain old historical looks at all the bullshit thrown upon the human race by a sliver of people we call the elite, the beautiful people, the controllers.

It is a fundamental discussion now, we on the left-left, looking at the various nefarious activities, plans and invented narratives the controllers have unfolded in the past, currently and for the future. If it feels like Blade Runner or Minority Report , then it must be somehow in the reality slipstream of our times to actually force us to admit the fact that AI and the fascist billionaire club are looking way beyond the horizon of Miami under water. Way beyond disease and viruses and pathogens.

Here’s a fascist:

In the new world, it is not the big fish which eats the small fish, it’s the fast fish which eats the slow fish.
– Klaus Schwab

And here’s the reality of the USA and other western countries citizens afraid to look in the mirror or at their own controllers:

I talked a lot about books, about authors, even newspapers of old, in this interview. For very good reasons —

There must be something in books, things we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.

— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, page 48

The idea is to drum up and initiate and converge people into conversations, and deep analyses, but without a truckload of books under one’s belt, well, the conversation stays shallow, stays controlled, stays right smack in the center of the mainstream mush media’s lies of omission and submission, the controlling media, the media of government controllers, owned and served by the corporations, and the billionaire class who are nefarious, who are the drivers of destruction and culture. That we have to know Richard Branson of Virgin Galactic might “beat” Jeff Bezos into space as a bug-eyed sociopath billionaire, well, that news takes another breath of sanity away from people consuming it and contemplating it and talking about it as a valiant thing. We have to educate the masses on healing, farming, medicine, aging, self-sufficiency, mutual aid, how to rattle the cages and shake the trees and beat these sons of bitches!

These are more of the perversions of our times, and while I touch upon them in the interview above, well, come on folks — all those billions, all those tax dollars, all those S.T.E.M. graduates, all the time and mental energy with satellite constellations and the macho “I am going into orbit first” bravado, man, if that is not enough to occupy real left-left journalists’ shows and mindsets, then I have no idea what does. Because, we are on a planet of forced starvation, forced feedback loops of no water, depleted soils, ag collapses, rising seas, inundation, no infrastructure, housing issues, war-war-war materials/equipment sales. These human scum above should be, well, tanked. They represent beyond hope, beyond humanity. Playing with space trips, and then, the mega constellation, and the telecoms and corporations tying to internet of things/nano things, all of that, it ties into self-indulgence and massive profits beyond anything Carnegie or Rockefeller of JP Morgan of old could have imagined.

It is about total surveillance and tracking and subjugation of man, woman, flora, fauna.

Tax payers foot the bills — triple or more taxation on everything; paying for infrastructure to supply these felons with everything, from roads to communication to air space; then, all the externalities of the fallout of their predatory and casino capitalism; all the trained/educated men and women coming from tax payer funded schools who end up working for these billionaires, in their companies; all the dead-cultural crap these people are infecting the world with; all the lies of Hollywood and others in media propping them up or even covering their lives and their schemes at the expense of the real stories.

These space programs, trips to the moon, man-womxn in the cans/rockets/shuttles programs, take away from the hard scrabble life stories and struggles of the 90 percent of the global population. We can fix and mitigate and compensate/end a world of nukes, forever chemicals, endocrine disrupters, deforestation, ocean acidification, over-harvesting, bad education, bad farming, and the like, including bad medicine, no medicine and even antibiotic microbial resistance and viruses, and income inequality and so much more, maybe even violence.

But we need to get rid of the billionaires and multi-millionaires! Get rid of despots and lords of war. Because these Bezos and Gates and Branson and Walton, et al. characters are plain ice cold murderers who have TV shots, platforms and stolen trillions from the workers, the tax payers. They are normal, their behavior valorized and we are the chumps, expendables.

*****

“Whitey on the Moon”

A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face and arms began to swell.
(and Whitey’s on the moon)

I can’t pay no doctor bill.
(but Whitey’s on the moon)
Ten years from now I’ll be payin’ still.
(while Whitey’s on the moon)

The man jus’ upped my rent las’ night.
(’cause Whitey’s on the moon)
No hot water, no toilets, no lights.
(but Whitey’s on the moon)

I wonder why he’s uppi’ me?
(’cause Whitey’s on the moon?)
I was already payin’ ‘im fifty a week.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Taxes takin’ my whole damn check,
Junkies makin’ me a nervous wreck,
The price of food is goin’ up,
An’ as if all that shit wasn’t enough

A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face an’ arm began to swell.
(but Whitey’s on the moon)

Was all that money I made las’ year
(for Whitey on the moon?)
How come there ain’t no money here?
(Hm! Whitey’s on the moon)
Y’know I jus’ ’bout had my fill
(of Whitey on the moon)
I think I’ll sen’ these doctor bills,
Airmail special
(to Whitey on the moon)

The post Batty Bioweapons, 5G, and Star Wars first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

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