Blogging Žižek: Introduction

This post will serve as an introduction to and index of a series of posts where I blog though Žižek’s monumental new book, Less than Nothing.  I am doing this in conjunction with another series, Blogging Badiou, where I blog my way through Alain Badiou’s work, mainly Being and Event and Logics of Worlds.  This approach will allow me to (hopefully) notice and build connections between the works I might not have picked up otherwise.  Ambitious, to be sure, but even if I fail this should be a rewarding adventure.

The Monstrosity of Christ

So I just finished reading The Monstrosity of Christ, a dialogue between Slavoj Žižek and “radical orthodox” theologian John Milbank.  While the debate is ostensibly about what theologians call “christology” (the study of the nature of Jesus), in reality it ends up being of deeper metaphysical and philosophical significance.  Indeed, Jesus doesn’t really come up much at all.

For the uninitiated, Žižek is a Hegelian Marxist who uses Lacanian psychoanalysis, known for his cultural critique, counterintuitive arguments, and personal eccentricities.  I didn’t used to be a fan, but I’ve grown to like him more and more recently, especially as I’ve found myself more often having to defend a dialectical approach to philosophy as such against assaults by both outsiders (mostly scientistic “naturalists”) and crypto-liberals within the Marxist left.  In recent years he has taken an Ernst Bloch like turn, taking Christian theology and “inverting” it in order to develop his complex atheism.  For Žižek, “only an atheist can be a true believer.”

If Žižek ironically appropriates theology for communism and atheism, Milbank outdoes him in this arena of ironic intellectual borrowing.  Radical othodoxy is essentially a hyper-reactionary movement which wants to return to a feudal-esque state of affairs, where the Church is supreme and theology is “queen of the sciences.”  What sets Radical Orthodoxy apart from your typical idiotic troglodyte reactionary (such as the “New Natural Lawyers”) is that it uses radical, usually leftist (sometimes postmodern and sometimes post-postmodern/Marxist) critiques of contemporary civilization – liberal individualism, capitalism, the capitalist state – for the purposes of the other side of history.  It attempts to hijack the critical arsenal of those who are pushing towards the future mode of production (socialism) in the interests of one that has since passed (feudalism).

What Milbank does is attempt to set up a dichotomy between dialectics, represented by Žižek, and his own analogical metaphysics, a theological co-opting of materialism in the form of a fairly Thomistic metaphysics.  Milbank funnily enough what we’d call an orthodox Thomist (yet) inasmuch as he is a strong occasionalist, denying absolutely the ability of entities to interact at all without God.   Žižek rightfully calls Milbank out for adopting this stance, defending it with what is essentially an elaborate version of the “God did it” argument, as the hypocritical occasionalists of old also did.

In Milbank’s eyes, the Hegelian dialectic, despite its mystical shell, is the apotheosis of reason if separated from the transcendent – in other words, of secular reason.  It is thus crucial to Milbank’s project that he discredit it, and to do so, he funnily enough mobilizes Alain Badiou’s thought on multiplicity.  For Milbank, the paradoxical existence of God is one of absolute relation – it is the “something more” in the multiplicty of multiplicities .  Whether or not this is possible – whether a proper understanding of Badiou necessarily precludes God – is something I’ll deal with when I blog about Badiou at length.  The point is that Milbank thinks that the paradox which Badiou presents in Being and Event is sufficient to allow him to both destroy Žižek’s dialectics and to make the “transcendental leap” himself.

It’s very important to note, however, that Badiou’s paradox does not logically ground Milbank’s transcendent, and Milbank admits as much.  What Milbank does think, however, is that Badiou’s paradox doesn’t ground either his or Žižek’s position; it simply allows him to choose to believe in the transcendent.  The choice to adopt one position or the other must bring in other areas, primarily politics, history, and morality.  This is why Milbank usually argues for his position in these terms – because in his mind, neither atheism no God can be “demonstrated” purely ontologically.  Unfortunately for Milbank, this puts him in trouble, because it is exactly in these domains that Christianity, particularly Radical Orthodoxy, fails miserably compared to Marxism.  If Milbank is right about the choice between his position and Žižek’s ultimately being a matter of politics and history, then Milbank is doomed.  It is at these moments that Žižek savages Milbank, correctly pointing out and criticizing his “soft fascism,” his awkward and misunderstanding reading of the history of philosophy, and the like.  Milbank’s position just ends up degenerating into a theological imperialism, a disturbing, dogmatic, and ultimately near pseudo-intellectual dismissal of everyone who disagrees with him or the Catholic church.  As John D. Caputo, a postmodernist hermeneutic theologian puts it:

Milbank and the authors who swim around him in the “school” of “Radical Orthodoxy” flatter themselves with the insufferable conceit that the entire world may be divided into either medieval Thomistic metaphysicians — or nihilists!

Even if we take Milbank at face value, I think he loses this one to Žižek.  Suppose we accept his notion that Badiou’s paradox “grounds” neither God nor atheism (which I don’t agree with, in fact – I think Badiou’s position implies a radical post-theist/post-atheist nontheism, not indecision, by necessity, which I will discuss when I blog at length about Badiou), which is where most of his intellectual heavy lifting is done.  Even if we accept this first stage of Milbank’s argument full-stop, we are then by his own admission forced to move to other considerations, areas where Milbank’s Catholicism just gets demolished.  It’s really impressive to see a figure like Milbank, who earlier in the book had seemed so intimidating with his extensive knowledge of contemporary philosophy as well as obscure philosophy, flounder when Žižek grabs his (wrong, in my opinion) dilemma by the horns and stares Milbank in the eyes.

Ranting about analytic philosophy

Analytic philosophy is so myopically obsessed with solving problems, that it doesn’t place sufficient effort into developing an understanding of the context in which the problem is embedded and the schema from which is emerges. Perhaps a problem can’t be solved by the schema that generates it?

In the case of atheism-theism, it couldn’t POSSIBLY be that the very schema which confronts one with a problem of whether this transcendent (usually, there are immanent theisms) being exists or not is itself problematic and needs to be abandoned. No, we should just keep publishing books! I’m sure the “market of ideas” will sort things out eventually!

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to log in to PhilPapers to see what the current consensus is among analytic philosophers. I need to know what beliefs I should blog about next week.  *gasp* A majority of analytic philosophers specializing in philosophy of religion believe in God!  I’m having an existential crisis, I need to post this on freethoughtblogs.

By the way, I want to make it perfectly clear that I am attacking many popular sites and have no shame about doing so.

Marxism and materialism: part 1

Epicurus, the greatest ancient Greek materialist philosopher

Any Marxist knows that one of the key features of Marxism is that it is materialist, this word being used in the philosophical sense, i.e. not a shallow focus on material goods.  At one level this is a really simple idea  – “being causes consciousness” in the last instance, as the famous dictum goes.  But   at another level, this is really quite an ambiguous idea.  What does materialism mean?  And, just as importantly, what has it meant and what should it mean?

Marx’s writings don’t – at least explicitly –  give us a lot to go on as far as his idea of materialism is concerned.  We know that Marx was critical of what he called “contemplative” (what Engels calls “mechanical”) materialism, and we have a lot of negative/indirect resources in the form of Marx’s critiques of Hegel.  What can we glean from what we have concerning Marx’s view, which is not of course the end of the story, as Marx’s writings aren’t some kind if holy scripture.  Marxism is a living project.

There are, as I see it, three broad ways we can usually classify materialism through most of its history:

  • Practical materialism: Emphasizes concrete social practice, says that ideas emerge from such social practice.
  • Epistemological/methodological materialism: In the process of inquiry, operating under the assumption that all things have material explanations, in the last instance, such as in natural science.
  • Ontological materialism: The idea that everything that exists is constitutively “material” in its nature.

The most important materialism for Marx is historical materialism, his historiography and method of social inquiry, and inasmuch as this method is materialist, the emphasis seems to be on practical materialism, while Engels focused his attention on the latter two.  This isn’t to suggest that Marx wouldn’t have endorsed Engels’ philosophy, or that there is some radical break between the two thinkers, as is popular among many “academic Marxists.”  I am simply saying what implications can be drawn from that individuals’ authored texts.

A later photo of Karl Marx

Leaving aside several possible controversies for now (such as the extent of a real division between ontological and epistemological materialism), let’s move to Engels, where materialism as a philosophical view is treated much more extensively.  Engels is pretty clearly committed to ontological materialism, as he thinks materialism is an idea that applies universally (rather than particularly), and to reality itself.  This is a pretty clear answer to the classical ontological question, what is the nature of being? “Material, in the last instance,” replies Engels, with the “in the last instance” indicating the dialectical and non-reductive nature of that materialism.  Right now my goal is not to assess the relative merits of these various past conceptions of materialism, so let’s move on.

Marx and Engels, together, as they should be

The next major theorist of materialism, in terms of real innovation, was Lenin, with his Materialism and Empirio-Criticism and his Philosophical Notebooks.  While there was a lot of important Marxist materialist work done prior to Lenin (Plekhanov, Kautsky, etc.), these were more elaborations and systematization of views found in Marx and particularly Engels than it was highly original work; Engels was doing most of the philosophical heavy-lifting prior to Lenin, at least in my view.  Lenin is focused particularly on epistemological materialism, materialism as a form of thought.  Again, this isn’t to say he wouldn’t have endorsed ontological materialism, but he was preoccupied in Materialism and Empirio-criticism with attacking empirio-criticism, (very roughly) a sort of positivism that was taking hold among some of Lenin’s comrades, such as Bogdanov.

The first edition cover of Materialism and Empirio-criticism, published under the pseudonym V.I. Ilyin.

It is after this that the debate surrounding the relationship between Marxism and materialism gets a lot more complicated.  In 1923, Georg  Lukács, a major Hungarian communist thinker, published the monumental History and Class Consciousness.  It is difficult to understate the importance of this book, for it inaugurated the tradition of “Western Marxism,” in part a reaction to “official” Soviet Marxism.  After the turbulence of the first decades of the 20th century for the communist movement (the failure of the German revolution and the subsequent isolation of the Soviet Union, among other events), Lukács emphasized the dialectical, Hegelian side of Marx against the materialist side which was emphasized in the Second and eventually Third Internationals.

An analysis of Western Marxism as a phenomenon could take up a whole book, and in fact has taken up an excellent such book, Considerations on Western Marxism by Perry Anderson, which I highly recommend.  Regardless, in the Cold War years, the investigation into Marxist materialism entered a foggy and relatively unproductive phase.  In “the West,” Western Marxism reigned, retreating into universities and flinging cultural criticism from the ivory tower, while in “the East,” a relatively mechanical and shallow view of materialism similar to that in Engels’ Dialectics of Nature prevailed (Anti-Dühring is infinitely superior in my opinion).  There were exceptions to this trend on both sides of the iron curtain.  In “the West,” Louis Althusser with his anti-humanist structural Marxism made many important contributions to our understanding of the relationship between structure and conjuncture, Marxism and science, and most crucially critiques of the extreme Lukács-derived humanist Marxism, Roy Bhaskar (trained as an analytic philosopher) made critical contributions to Marxist philosophy of science, which is particularly important for our topic here, as did the admittedly Hegelian Marxist Alfred Schmidt with his The Concept of Nature in Marx.

Louis Althusser

I also happen to think that though he is not in the full-on Marxist camp, Gilles Deleuze produced crucial work n Materialism, but anyway, moving on.  In “the East,” Mao Tse-tung’s On Practice was a crucial contribution to our understanding of “practical materialism,” while for ontological and epistemological materialism, the work of Soviet thinkers like Evald Ilyenkov remain sadly under-appreciated in Western academia.  But, to return to where we started, there was still a relative dearth of Marxist materialism answering the central question at the heart of all this debate, the elephant in the room; what does it mean for something to be “material?”

There are a few answers to this question that are immediately apparent which I think are inadequate.  These days, one of the most intuitive answers seems to be physicalism.  This isn’t the same as “physicalism” in economics, which is an important concept for Marxism.  This is a specifically ontological view, which says that reality is ultimately made of those entities described by fundamental physics, whatever they happen to be at the moment.  It is worth noting here that even though I reject physicalism, it is a view that is often misunderstood by idiot mystics who think that quantum mechanics is somehow problematic for materialism.  Unless we understand “matter” to mean “really really small balls of baryonic matter,” like in Democritus, quantum mechanics is completely unproblematic insofar as materialism is concerned (whether it is problematic for reductive, non-dialectical materialism is another question).

This view, physicalism, is overall dominant within Anglophone analytic philosophy.  It is essentially the idea that “the physical” is the ultimate nature of being qua being, and takes two major forms.  The first, which I find much weaker intellectually, is reductive physicalism, the idea that all things can be reduced to physical things, or, in obnoxiously analytic language (sorry everyone), that all propositions are ultimately reducible to physical propositions.  The non-physical is just the composite of the physical, and usually doesn’t have ontological status.  The second version, which I admittedly find stronger, is so-called “supervenience physicalism.”  Despite the fancy analytic language, it’s really a simple idea.  Basically, all the physical facts “fix” all the non-physical facts, but the the non-physical facts are not reducible to the physical facts.  That is, there cannot be a change in the set of non-physical facts without a corresponding change in the set of physical facts, but the former cannot be “dissolved” and are not mere composites of the latter.

There are many problems I have with this view, not the least of which is my disapproval of analytic philosophy in general (I’m a recovering analytic philosopher myself, my background is originally in Quine, Wittgenstein, Frege, Searle, Dennett, Kripke, Strawson, Davidson, etc.).  While I won’t launch into detail here, I see no reason to accept physicalism.  The usual argument put forward usually boils down to an appeal to the history of science, where vital-force-type explanations gradually got replaced with explanations which can supposedly be reduced to physical ones.  Biology is reducible to chemistry is reducible to physics, so the usual hierarchy goes.  However, I have so many problems with the assumptions involved here that I don’t know where to even begin in building enough common ground from which to launch a critique.  First, I think the direction of reduction is totally arbitrary outside of the historical/institutional weight that physics carries (not to bash physics, I’m a student of physics myself).  From the perspective of an electron, why wouldn’t we say that their world is “fixed” by virtue of their organic relations to the totality, or at least organic system, of which they are a moment?  In other words, isn’t some physical entity, like an electron, defined partly through its relation to non-electrons?  It is what it is partly by virtue of what it is not.  This applies in general to the relationship between part and whole; one does not make sense without the other, and neither is “ultimate” in the last instance (Badiou’s notion of a multiplicity of multiplicities, “the one is not,” is crucial” here.)  This is basic dialectics, but arguing this to an analytic philosopher is usually futile.

Hegel, showing vulgar philosophers who’s boss since 1770

There is also the assumption that biology, chemistry, and physics exhaust “real science,” a corrosive and insidious positivism/scientism.  Lastly, there are problematic assumptions regarding the nature of scientific explanations.  Do not mistake me for an enemy of science here – I’m a scientific realist, not a postmodernist.  But there is often a conflating of “explanation” with prediction, of information in the probabilistic sense with knowledge/meaning, and a crude empiricism and/or falsificationism, the latter being especially prevalent.  Similar criticisms apply to conceptions of “the material” as “those sorts of things described by the natural sciences,” even if non-reductive.

In part 2, I will continue with my brief criticisms of various approaches to materialism that have been attempted both by Marxists and some others, and then lay out what I think is the best way to move forwards.

Dialectics, religion, and the new atheists

One of the debates which now rages intensely among different sections of the mainstream is that between atheism and theism, a debate that usually manifests itself in terms of naturalistic analytic atheists like Daniel Dennett, Alex Rosenberg, Keith Parsons, etc. squaring off against conservative Christian apologists who crank out medieval syllogisms.  As a recovering New Atheist/analytic naturalist myself, I remember how seriously people took this debate, as if the fate of the world rested on the outcome of some tussle over some minor point on page whatever of Aquinas’ Summa.

Now I’m of the opinion that most of what passes for “philosophy” in the mainstream English-speaking mainstream (think Quine, Putnam, Sellars, Kripke, Searle, etc.) is shallow and naive; clever versions of stupid arguments defending stupid ideas with a massive dose of lack of self-awareness on the side.  Really, you have to try to be as oblivious to the dialectic of text and context as most Anglophone philosophers are.  However, I can elaborate on my problems with most mainstream philosophy (I include the resurgent Christian conservatism as mainstream, since despite their claims of persecution and minority status, they sure get a lot of publicity, funding, etc.) in another post.  Here I’d like to focus on the more socially relevant atheism-theism conflict.

It hasn’t been long enough for me, when I stumble upon the writings of one of the figures associated with this debate, to not have my reflexive tendency to argue on my old analytic terms.  But in general, and deliberately, I am finding the whole debate sillier and sillier, because both positions are increasingly striking me as absurd in light of history.  On the one hand, the arguments put forth by the analytic theists of today, those triumphantly declaring the resurgent victory of God (usually a specifically conservative Evangelical or Catholic God, a God of the privileged individuals which this ideology serves)  are laughable.  They are paper tigers, naked emperors.  In the words of one of my favorite bloggers:

they use their medieval cleverness to mock those who understand the world better than they ever could.

They literally are more or less taking medieval scholastic syllogisms like the “ontological argument,” dressing them up in a bunch of unnecessary and useless formalism and/or a bunch of misleading citations of science and calling it knockdown and revolutionary!  It’s as funny as the declaration of Papal Infallibility; an expression of real weakness and growing irrelevance.  For indeed, far more powerful than any cute syllogism is the glacial force of history rendering one irrelevant, outmoded.  It’s the philosophical equivalent of the way neoclassical economics takes a bunch of relatively simple (failed) attempts to respond to Marx (think Boehm-Bawerk, Bortkiwiecz, etc.) and dressing them up in advanced mathematics.  It doesn’t make the ideas any better, just like the laughably bad and disingenuous attempts to co-opt information theory by creationists.  Just because you can say “Kolmogorov complexity” doesn’t mean Epicurus’, Hume’s, and others’ takedowns of design logic aren’t just as powerful.  In fact, if anything the attempts to respond to these various foundational critiques (of religion by philosophers, of Marx by marginalist economists) have gotten worse over time; Boehm-Bawerk is much better than a hack like Hayek (a “Hayhack,” if you will).

On the other hand you have the New Atheists, who are basically doing the same thing with Hume and/or the French materialists like d’Holbach.  Feuerbach was infinitely better than these guys, and Marx’s views grew partly out of an effective critique of Feuerbach!  Hell, Marx is still considered one of the better interpreters of Epicurus (in his doctoral dissertation), one of the earliest thinkers in the tradition into which I’d place the New Atheists (though, if I were being a nitpicky academic type I might say most of them are now closer to Democritus in their views, e.g. reductive physicalist ontologies).

Now, what does this have to do with the dialectics I mentioned in my title?  Well, though I should probably detail this a lot more in a paper, I basically think a total nontheism – a post-theism as some commentators call it – is the necessary and correct position to take.  What do I mean?  Basically, theism-as-such has a ton of premises and assumptions built into it, concerning the nature of argument, the nature of being, the nature of cause, the understanding of language, etc.  The very fact that atheism-as-such can engage the arguments of philosophical theists so directly shows that the two positions are much closer than they think.  Atheism-as-such is in a way just inverted theism.  To be differentiated merely over the purported existence or non-existence of some entity means the two positions must share enough common basis to be differentiated solely by this question.  The atheist-as-such takes saying “there is no god” to have roughly the same function that saying “there is a God” does, just with “not-god” being God.  It shares theism’s truth table while flipping all the truth values.

This is a unity of opposites, and we need a way to resolve the contradiction, the tension, between these views, and that synthesis is to move wholly beyond the theistic way of thinking in the first place.  The atheist-as-such answers the question “does god exist?” with a no, but we should reject the question.  This is what Marx seems to do in his Theses on Feuerbach; Feuerbach’s humanist atheism is the antithesis of theism-as-such, but there are still tensions within the view (internal contradictions) and tensions between it and theism-as-such that are unresolved.  Marx thus transcends the dichotomy of the two purely passive views.  It is worth noting that this is not the same as pitiful “agnosticism,” arbitrary compromise.  For indeed the banal notion that “we should just move closer to the middle” is a symptom of liberal ideology.  This post-theism (and by necessity post-atheism) is far more radical in its rejection of the “theologising[sic] intellect,” to quote Marx, as the atheist-as-such is at the end of the day nothing more than an atheologian.

Moral outrage and honest learning

In my defenses of various historical events pertaining to communism – Mao’s China, the Russian Revolution – I unsurprisingly encounter the usual banal opposition.  At least some non-communists are willing to learn, to journey with me into the historical work and debates surrounding these events.  I’ll of course reference historians like R.W. Davies, J. Arch Getty, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Mobo Gao, and others.

But what infuriates me is when people aren’t really interested in learning at all.  They just know that Mao killed absurd numbers of people, and any attempt to argue otherwise is met with indignant scoffing, as if Holocaust denial and serious analysis of the history of the 20th century communist movement were at all comparable (of course, liberals are at pains to push fascism and communism together under the vague and ineffectual term “totalitarianism”).  They somehow feel proud of themselves for resisting actual history and upholding their mythology.

Of course, those who are opposed to communism would try to dodge the successes of the movement, but what is actually much more infuriating is the attitude betrayed by the fact that by the same token, they have little interest in a serious analysis of the failures of the movement so far.  In this way, even their “moral” outrage is disingenuous, for instead honestly investigating what failures occurred and why (such as the human disaster during agricultural collectivization in Stalin’s USSR) so that we can avoid them in the future, they just want to discredit communism.  Opposing communism is first in their mind, and “moral” outrage and claimed desire to avoid failure and suffering in the future is at best secondary or at worst completely feigned.

As a communist, I want to take a nuanced look at, say, the millions of deaths during soviet agricultural collectivization, not just to counter absurd comparisons of the USSR to Hitler’s Germany and ridiculously inflated death toll claims, but to learn what went wrong so it won’t happen again.  Those who reject such serious inquiry could at heart care less about saving and improving lives, but just want to crush the red menace.

Right-wingers and conversation stoppers

An interesting tactic I’ve noticed among right-wingers is to attempt to shut down the whole conversation, and this crosses topic lines.  This isn’t just among the “stupid” right-wingers either, but even amongst rightist “intellectuals,” the type that Amazon reviewers tend to heap praise on (has anyone else noticed the right-wing slant of the Amazon reviewer populace?)  Some particularly fascinating/infuriating examples:

-Paul Johnson in his book Intellectuals tries to claim that (left wing) intellectuals had questionable personal lives and that therefore we shouldn’t listen to them, and this book has its praises sung in reactionary quarters.  Putting aside the massive factual errors and blatant falsifications (check out the review in the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies here) his thesis is not really supported beyond its shock value.  Despite all the bluster, he never really answers the question of why we shouldn’t trust the ideas of people whose personal lives are suspect (even if he gets this latter bit factually wrong to begin with).  Furthermore, who exactly gets to decide what counts as a “suspect” personal life?  Doesn’t that require some ideas?  Finally, Johnson’s omission of all but one right-wing intellectual (Evelyn Waugh) is telling.  Why not write about Milton Friedman, Thomas Carlyle, Joseph de Maistre, Edmund Burke, William F. Buckley, Michael Oakeshott, Ayn Rand, Alasdair MacIntyre, Roger Scruton, Robert George, John Finnis, Cornelius van Til, Gordon Clark, Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, Martin Luther…I could go on?  In a final ironic twist, by his own thesis we should find Christianity suspect, given the “questionable” (by his own standards) conduct of so many members of the clergy.

-I have many times heard the claim that the whole (yes, all of it) of modernity is a rationalization of sexual immorality.  Well shit, if everything I believe and everything I do is just to justify the fact I like to fuck, our conversation is pretty much over isn’t it?  I’ve heard things along this line from supposed “intelligent” (I use the term with many implicit qualifiers) reactionaries, like the philosopher Bill Vallicella.

-In the book Faith of the Fatherless, a right-wing psychologist tries to use Freudian psychoanalysis (which, might I add is vastly inferior to Lacanian analysis 😉 ) to demonstrate that atheism is the result of having a bad and/or distant father.  Not only is there more cherry-picking of examples, but the contortions the author goes through to try (and fail) to maintain some semblance of coherence are really astounding to witness.  For example, in explaining Ayn Rand’s atheism (Rand greatly admired and had a good relationship with her father), he simply falls back on the fact that Rand’s father was also a skeptic.  In the case of good ‘ol Marx, he claims that Marx rejected his father’s lifestyle (bourgeois), so that counts, even if Marx’s upbringing was good and the two shared a good relationship.  And in the case of theists who did have bad relationships with their fathers , the author says that it’s okay because they sought out father figures!   Finally, the book ignores huge swaths of the population in places like China, Russia, Denmark, the Czech Republic (and many other countries) that are atheist.  I suppose these people all these people had bad fathers.  All several million of them.

-The common claim that the upheavals of the 1960s were just people rebelling against their parents.  Of course this explains all the revolution around the world at this time (national liberation movement leaders just didn’t want to eat their veggies!), the uprising of women of all ages, of adult queers and people of color, the workers rising up in France in May ’68.  I’m sure those steel workers had just started listening to the 60s equivalent of My Chemical Romance and dyeing their hair.

The insipid nature of these ideas aside, I notice a common undercurrent running through many such ideas, one that fits well with the understanding of reactionaries that I’ve come to have.  All of them seem to ask, in an exasperated tone, “why won’t you just submit?”  It’s not just a tone of intense factual disagreement, like a string theorist arguing with a loop quantum theorist (sorry for the cosmology references folks, only one in this post, I promise) but a lamenting of the fact that people just aren’t submitting anymore.  The leftist historian Corey Robin has what I think is the best analysis of the reactionary mind out there (the book is actually called The Reactionary Mind, read it!) describing it as a meditation on having lost power once had.  To someone who is in a position of relative power in society (by virtue primarily of their class, but also race, sex, sexuality, etc.) of course their power is going to seem natural.  Ideology emerges from the concrete conditions of life, as a way of making sense of the world.  To someone who was in a position of power relative to much of society (or at least were sycophants who had come to see their interests as lying with such people), a shift in this order, a destabilizing of these relations of power, will appear nothing short of unnatural and insane.  Indeed, all the reasons people will have for destabilizing the order will appear to the reactionary as “rationalizations” inasmuch as their own position appears simply natural.

While sometimes exceptional examples of such individuals can transcend their position of power and join the side of the proletariat, this is rare.  For such figures, their objective interests lie either with the status quo or a status quo that has since passed, and most of them will remain on that side.  As the philosopher Alain Badiou would say, there is a certain “this-sidedness” to truth, and as Mao says “it is always right to rebel against the reactionaries.”

Idealism, voelkischness, and working class politics

Marx and Mussolini

Karl Marx (left) and Benito Mussolini (right)

Fascism and socialist symbols

One of the political/historical problems that is consistently problematic for bourgeois theorists is providing an analysis of fascism; what it is and how to fight it, to appropriate Trotsky’s famous subtitle.  I’m going to focus on the “what it is” for now though.

From a Marxist point of view, the question of fascism is a relatively simple one to answer.  Fascism is a last-ditch consolidation of the capitalist mode of production in the face of an immediate and powerful socialist challenge.  It will use ideological bombardment, significant changes to the status quo, plenty of brute force, and even socialist rhetoric to preserve the essentially capitalist economic structure.

Since fascism is a response to a powerful socialist challenge, and since as Marxists we know that the proletariat is the revolutionary subject, any fascist response to such a challenge will have to somehow safely redirect the energy and demands of the working class into safe outlets.  The main ideological weapon in this mission is class-collaborationism.  Fascism seeks ultimately to defeat the socialist challenge by trying to make class cease to be a salient category, usually in favor of “the nation,” so-called blood and honor.  But unless there is already a strong material pretext for nationalism and/or class consciousness is already at a fairly low level, fascism is going to need another tool to redirect the proletariat’s momentum indirectly.

It does this by appropriating the rhetoric of socialism, and handing out token reforms of capitalism to placate the workers.  Here I’m going to specifically examine rhetoric about “the working class,” a strategy often used by conservatives and reactionaries in countries that aren’t necessarily full-on fascist (yet).

The objective working class and the abstracted “working class”

The support by communists of the working class, our taking of its side in the war of history, comes from our having correctly discerned its general trajectory, its historical movement, and our understanding of what this working class is stems from our analysis of productive relations; the working class is a dialectical moment in the organic totality that is society.  The subjective beliefs of many members of the working class at a given time and in a given place are, therefore, largely irrelevant, and certainly do not impinge on our support for the working class as a world-historical entity.

One of the most potent ways that reactionaries mitigate the socialist challenge is by creating a subtly idealist inversion of this analysis.  Rhetoric of support for the working class is maintained, but with a change in what “the working class” means.  ”The working class” is turned from a concrete, material factor in the structure of society into a thin abstraction, an idealized “working class” that really resembles little of the actual “working class,” and deliberately excludes many members of it (queer people, people of color, and women primarily).  Instead of subjective beliefs, cultural practices etc. of the working class at any one time and place being largely irrelevant, such secondary characteristics are made the defining feature of the “working class.”

“Working class” comes to be a sort of mythology which plays off anxiety generated by legitimate contradictions in the capitalist system.  Since there really is a material antagonism between the interests of the bourgeoisie and the interests of the proletariat, if a mythology is created that pits the morally uncomplicated (white, heterosexual, male) worker against effete and decadent elites, it is little surprise that the legitimately oppressed worker would, offered only this dichotomy, come to identify with the former rather than the latter.  Of course, by defining “working class” according to such a mythology and redirecting the workers’ power into dividing themselves at a superstructural level, the bourgeoisie at worst can obscure the proletariat’s actual status/historical role, and at best can even wield the material force of those grabbed by such a mythology as a battering ram to bolster their own status, then leaving the workers to rot once their dirty work has been done.

Voelkischness and the communist movement

This is one of the reasons that building solidarity between workers of all sexes, gender identities, colors, and sexualities is so critical, for it is the knife that will cut through the haze of the bourgeoisie’s mythological “working class” archetype, defined by income and taste and cultural practice rather than objective status.

There are certain elements on the left, and they were sadly common in the socialist movements of many more backwards countries (not to blame them, they cannot magically completely transcend the conditions which capitalism has imposed upon them), who in a certain ultraleftist misunderstanding of the idea “no struggle but the class struggle” take it to mean that all other issues of oppression should be ignored, or at least but on the backburner until socialism has been brought about.  While they are right to fear degenerating into opportunism and liberal identity politics, their approach in practice means they often end up becoming supremely un-materialist, and buying into the voelkisch bourgeois mythological “working class” rather than the actual working class.  They recoil at calls for sexual liberation, for gender liberation, for true racial solidarity and consistent internationalism as examples of “bourgeois decadence,” leaving aside the fact that this is supremely undialectical and makes not even an effort at a historical materialist argument in its favor.  What exactly “bourgeois decadence” is and how it can be identified is rarely offered, instead falling into a trap which weakens their movement in the long term. Thus, ultraleftism comes full circle and locks hands with opportunism.

This is not to say that movements which make this error can never have successes, far from it.  Furthermore, not all examples of backwards positions on some of these issues are evidence of this ultraleftism/opportunism.  For example, many communist parties in underdeveloped and materially backwards nations, victims of the ruthlessness of global capitalism and imperialism, will have positions that while extremely progressive in their national contexts, will appear reactionary or insufficiently progressive with regards to certain questions.  That is acceptable and understandable, as we are all just people embedded in a historically specific context and ultimately still limited by it in some ways.  Friedrich Engels, for example, was quite hostile to the early calls for homosexual emancipation by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in Germany, but while we can rightfully criticize him for being wrong, we should keep in mind that he was writing in the 19th century.  As Marx eloquently put it:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

-Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

This does not mean, however, that we can or should let these nightmares operate unchecked, for the sake of expediency.  A perfect example is the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), who in the wake of a heroic and bloody people’s war seized a great victory for that country’s workers (though it must be noted that their task is far from complete).  Up until about 5 or 6 years ago, the CPN(M) held the position that homosexuality was an example of bourgeois decadence.  But through a combination of the friendly criticism/critical support of their comrades and their own concrete experience in fighting for and with the people, they reversed their position and are now making gains for LGBT people that would have been inconceivable under the royalist government, and indeed were inconceivable in the region at all at any time in the near future to most bourgeois observers.  Walking the line between opportunism and dogmatism is difficult, else successful socialist revolution would be easier.  But the correct line can only be, sad as many internet communists who buy into thevoelkisch image of the working class may be to hear it, gained through extended revolutionary practice, not bashing queers on message boards.

A brief introduction to dual power

NPA Philippines

The New People’s Army, the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines

One of the theoretical advances of Marxism over previous socialisms was that it identified the need for the working class to seize state power; to overthrow the bourgeois state.  But how is this to be done?

Too often, communists assume that the answer is just to synthesize a “formula” from some revolution or another (most commonly the Russian Revolution, followed by the Chinese Revolution) and then reapply this formula at all times and places.  Any failures are then traced to the fact that we weren’t faithful enough to the “true” way of communism.  This tendency is particularly common among Trotskyists, with Hoxhaists (such as the American Party of Labor) being the second worst.  But, to paraphrase Lenin, this is not thinking, this is learning words.

Returning to the question at hand, what is the nature of this bourgeois “state” that we seek to challenge?  While the Marxist analysis is more nuanced, for our purposes here, Max Weber’s famous definition will suffice; an entity that possesses a monopoly on the “legitimate” use of force in a given territory.  To challenge the state, then, is somehow to break this singular hold; to tear to shreds the ruling class’ sole claim to the use of force by establishing a dual power, another social nexus which can set itself up as an alternative and thereby delegitimize the bourgeois state’s claim to exclusive power.

As Perry Anderson, professor of History and Sociology at UCLA (The University of California at Los Angeles) argues, there are three main ways to break the ruling class’s hold on the exclusive claim to force.  The first is that which was employed in the Russian Revolution; to take out the bourgeois state with a quick, direct strike when that state is severely weakened by war.

The October Revolution 1917

The 1917 October Revolution

One should immediately see the problem that most “orthodox” Leninist parties encounter; these are not the concrete conditions in most countries, and thus trying to emulate the Russian Revolution tit-for-tat is a hopeless strategy at best, and at worst a kind of veil for petty-bourgeois idealism and crypto-liberalism, dismissing any attempts at organizing a revolutionary movement based on an analysis of the concrete conditions (such as the heroic people’s movements in India, Nepal, and the Philippines) as “not what the bolsheviks did.”  However, there are countries where this strategy could work (Pakistan comes to mind).

The next option is to erect a “counter-state” within the borders of the existing state, and whittle away at the latter’s legitimacy by building alternative/illicit social institutions that gradually decrease the people’s dependency on the bourgeois state, while also both protecting these alternative arrangements and challenging the bourgeois state’s monopoly on force through establishing its own military force.  This is the theory at the core of the “people’s war” strategy popular among Maoists in developing nations, and it serves them very well there.  However, while some U.S. Maoists still suggest it is possible to wage a protracted people’s war in the South, I think this is unlikely.  The strategy is simply not a good one to apply to advanced, urban, postindustrial capitalist nations, as the experiences of the Red Army Faction, the Baader-Meinhof group, and the Weather Underground should have taught us.

The Chinese Revolution

The Chinese Revolution

There two main reasons for this.  First, the military apparatus in this countries is often going to just be too powerful and pervasive to mount a direct challenge.  Second, when the country is as physically developed and urbanized, an attempt at guerrilla warfare will probably backfire, degenerating into individual terrorism and just alienating the people.

What then should we do in such nations?  The bolshevik strategy requires specific conjunctural features that our situation lacks, while the people’s war strategy requires structural conditions that we don’t meet.  It is here that a study of bourgeois revolutions, particularly the French revolution is useful, situating our perspective in the work of Antonio Gramsci.  In such societies, a naked challenge to power will not only be ineffective because of the state’s military power, but because such states rule primarily through ideological hegemony.  Just like the bourgeois revolutionaries of the French revolution went to the salons of the aristocracy to taunt them with ideas of revolution, so we must seek to build a “counterhegemonic bloc” within the existing society.  The French revolutionaries did not retreat to the countryside to build an alternative social space next to the existing one, but they built new social “bubbles” within the old social space, and changed practices within it.

Antonio Gramsci

Antonio Gramsci, Italian communist theorist of hegemony, counterhegemony, ideology, and radical intellectuals

You might notice that there are many parallels to the people’s war strategy here, and its true; there are many important parallels, which is why if I had to pin myself in a tendency I’d call myself a Maoist.  However, there are a few key differences.  The first is that while the people’s war strategy does set up a dual power “within” the existing state, this is only insofar as it is in the same geographic area that the state lays claim to.  Part of the whole point is that it is building a counter state alongside the existing state, sharing only its physical border.  The counterhegemonic bloc, on the other hand, develops the seeds of the new society within the social apparatus of the existing society, using counterhegemonic practices and ideas which subvert the ruling class from within through resistance to the status quo.  It is civil disobedience with the “civil” aspect becoming optional.

In a future post, I hope to explore the lessons of the French revolution for socialist revolution and the ideas of Gramsci more in a future post.  I will also examine the failure of the German revolution in the early 20th century and compare and contrast it to the Russian revolution in an effort to identify structural and conjunctural differences between them in order to help frame the creation of a synthesis of Mao’s ideas and Gramsci’s concept of counterhegemony which can guide us in 21st century revolution in the developed world.