Zizek spoke October 26 at St Mark’s Bookshop in Manhattan. What follows is not the complete talk, but some interesting parts. Reprinted from impose (with a few corrections),  where the complete transcript can be found.

Bill Clinton says ominously, “because your demands create a vacuum, and if you don’t bring quickly concrete proposals which will fill in this vacuum, who knows who will fill in this vacuum?” But at this point, I claim, precisely we should maintain this openness in all ominous directions. We don’t need dialogue with those in power. We need critical dialogue with ourselves. We need time to think. We effectively don’t know. And nobody knows. On the one hand we should reject the cheap — because Mao was never so stupid — psuedo-Maoist idea, “Learn from the people, people know”. No, they don’t know. Do we intellectuals know? Also, we don’t know. I mean, any intellectual who says, “Okay, people now have some confused ideas, oh I have a ready and precise plan of what to do,” they are bluffing. We don’t know where we are.

But I think that this openness is precisely what is great about these protests. It means that precisely a certain vacuum open the fundamental dissatisfactions in the system. The vacuum simply means open space for thinking, for new freedom, and so on. Let’s not fill in this vacuum too quickly.

Zizek speaks at St. Mark’s Bookshop

So, while the standard reaction of the Wall Street itself against the protest is the expected, vulgar bullshitting, I want to draw your attention to a more intelligent, but I think even more disgusting reaction; a critical rejection of Wall Street; a very liberal, sophisticated one: it was done a couple of days ago by Anne Applebaum, you know, the lady who wrote a book on gulag and so on. Again, it’s a very sophisticated argumentation. She even, in a slightly tasteless but almost convincing way, she [?] the [?] Monty Python film, The Life of Brian, where this Brian, the new Christ figure shouts to the people, “You are free individuals!” and then all of them shout, together as a crowd, “Yes we are free individuals!”; claiming that my functioning of repetition reminds her of that.

Okay, but nonetheless I claim… her reaction to it, and I will just read you two long paragraphs; I think they are worth quoting. It’s ideology at its purest, precisely in the way they make her argumentation appear convincing.

So again, the basis of Applebaum’s reasoning is the idea that the Wall Street type protests around the world are:

similar in their lack of focus, in their confused nature, and above all in their refusal to engage with existing democratic institutions. In New York, marchers chanted, “This is what democracy looks like,” but actually, this isn’t what democracy looks like. This is what freedom of speech looks like. Democracy looks a lot more boring. Democracy requires institutions, elections, political parties, rules, laws, a judiciary and many unglamorous, time-consuming activities...

“Yet,” she goes on:

in one sense, the international Occupy movement’s failure to produce sound legislative proposals is understandable: Both the sources of the global economic crisis and the solutions to it lie, by definition, outside the competence of local and national politicians…

The emergence of an international protest movement without a coherent program is therefore not an accident: It reflects a deeper crisis, one without an obvious solution. Democracy is based on the rule of law. Democracy works only within distinct borders and among people who feel themselves to be part of the same nation. A “global community” cannot be a national democracy. And a national democracy cannot command the allegiance of a billion-dollar global hedge fund, with its headquarters in a tax haven and its employees scattered around the world.

Unlike the Egyptians in Tahrir Square, to whom the New York protesters openly (and ridiculously) compare themselves, we have democratic institutions in the Western world. They are designed to reflect, at least crudely, the desire for political change within a given nation. But they cannot cope with the desire for global political change, nor can they control things that happen outside their borders. Although I still believe in globalization’s economic and spiritual benefits — along with open borders, freedom of movement and free trade — globalization has clearly begun to undermine the legitimacy of Western democracies.

“Global” activists, if they are not careful, will accelerate that decline. Protesters in London shout,“We need to have a process!” Well, they already have a process: It’s called the British political system. And if they don’t figure out how to use it, they’ll simply weaken it further.

End of quote. For this, in my universe, you go to gulag. Why? Let me explain. Firstly, the first thing to note, you notice how Applebaum reduces Tahrir Square protests to the calls of Western-style democracy. It’s as if, you know, they really want what we already have here. Once we do this, it of course becomes ridiculous to compare the Wall Street protests to the Egyptian event. How can protestors here demand what we already have? That is to say, democratic institutions? What is there lost from view — that’s why I oppose this idea — is the general discontent with the global capitalist system which obviously acquires different here and there. So I again claim that she misses the point.

Different as they are, protests here, in Southern Europe, in Egypt, whatever; what unites them is they’re precisely not political in the narrow sense of more democracy, or whatever. They signal a kind of a shared global discontent with their capitalistic system. And now I come to the crucial point: the most shocking part for me of Applebaum’s argumentation, a truly weird gap in her line of reasoning occurs at the end of the passage I read to you. After conceding that the catastrophic economic consequences of global capitalist financial dealings are due to their international character out of control of democratic mechanisms, she remembered to make this point clear: what happens at the level of international capital is simply out of control of democratic mechanisms. And she draws from this the necessary conclusion. Here, we should agree with her, I quote it again: “Globalization” — she means capitalist globalization — “has clearly begun to undermine the legitimacy of Western democracies.”

Because again, things happen there which are out of control of at least normal, the way we have them, democratic processes. Okay, so far, we can agree because I claim this is precisely what the protestors are drawing attention to, that global capitalism undermines potentially democracy.  But instead of drawing the only logical, further conclusion that we should start thinking about how to expand democracy beyond its state multi-party political forum, which obviously leaves out destructive consequences of economic life; instead of this, Applebaum performs a weird turnaround and she shifts the blame on protestors themselves who raise these questions.

Her last paragraph deserves to be read again. Listen.

“Global” activists, if they are not careful, will accelerate that decline. Protesters in London shout,“We need to have a process!” Well, they already have a process: It’s called the British political system. And if they don’t figure out how to use it, they’ll simply weaken it further.

End of quote. So her logic is, since global economy is outside the scope of democratic politics, any attempt to expand democracy to be will only accelerate the decline of democracy. What then can we do? Remember, she says, we should engage in the existing political system. But wait a minute. Paragraph above, she says that precisely this system cannot do the job. So it’s very strange, her conclusion. Her conclusion is basically we cannot do anything. We have our democracy. If you buy it, you have to accept that global capital movement and so on are outside its scope. If you try something more, democracy no longer functions. But it is here I claim that you should go to the end. To the end, even in anti-capitalism.

There is no lack of anti-capitalism today. We are even witnessing an overload of the critique of the hours of capitalism. Books, newspaper, in-depth investigations, TV reports. You know, you cannot open a newspaper without reading this company is polluting environment, corrupted bankers continue to get fat bonuses while their banks are saved by public money, sweatshops in the third world where children work over time and so on.

There is, however, a catch to all this overflow of critique of capitalism. What is, as a rule, not in question in this critique is the democratic, liberal political frame of fighting against these excesses. The explicit or implicit goal is to democratize capitalism. By this it’s meant not to think deeply about our democracy, but simply to extend our standard notion of politics, party politics, representative democracy into more interventionist one. Extend democratic control of economy through the pressure of the public media, parliamentary inquiry, harsher laws, honest police investigations, and so on. But never questioning the democratic institutional framework of our state of law. This remains the sacred cow even when we are dealing with the most radical forms of this, I call it, ethical anti-capitalism — Seattle movement, Porto Allegre, and so on. I think their moralism, like greedy bankers, dishonest companies, is a sign of their weakness.

It is here that Marxist key insight remains valid today, I claim, more than ever. For Marx, and this is for me the true lesson of Wall Street protests, the question of freedom should not be located primarily into the political sphere proper: Does a country has free elections? Are the judges independent? Is the press free from hidden pressures? Are human rights respected? And the similar list of questions, different independent Western institutions apply when they want to pronounce a judgment on a country.

The key to actual freedom rather resides in the apolitical, what appears to be apolitical. Network of social relations. From the market to the family where the change needed if we want an actual improvement is not political reform but a change in apolitical social relations of production.

So Anne Applebaum is right. We do not vote about who owns what, about relations in a factory and so on. All this is left to process outside the political sphere proper. And it is illusory to expect that one can effectively change things by simply extending our parliamentary democracy into this sphere, for example, by organizing democratic banks under people’s control. Radical changes in this domain should be made outside the sphere of legal rights. Such democratic procedures, of course, can play a very positive role. No matter how radical their anti-capitalism is, the solution they seek resides in applying representative democratic mechanisms but again, and Applebaum is right, they live out of control; the economic sphere proper and so on.

In this sense only, don’t misunderstand here, I think that Alain Badiou was right in his claim that today — it sounds terrible — the name of the enemy, he wrote once, is not capitalism, empire, exploitation or anything similar, the name of the enemy today is democracy. Now you will say, “ha ha, now we got you, totalitarian!” or whatever. No no no, I claim, what he only wanted to say is that our too blind attachment to formal democratic party state mechanism prevents our approaching a true problem. So again, I think what Applebaum accepts as the fact, “We can’t do anything, that’s it”. This precisely I claim is the starting point of the deep dissatisfaction which exploded in all anti-Wall Street protests. This precisely they feel that we have certain political multi-party system, obviously we are witnessing dangerous, even catastrophic phenomena in economy, and it’s obviously that this type of democratic system, the way it is now, cannot do the work; because it implies precisely this duality which is very nicely emphasized in Applebaum, between political sphere where we are all free but we have to follow the procedures, proper democratic procedures and so on, and economics sphere of private relations, whatever, which is left out. It is obvious that the urgent task today is precisely to find a way to control or to regulate — I don’t like the word ‘control’ here — precisely that sphere without of course returning to old 20th century totalitarian notions and practices.

So I think what Applebaum is complaining about, “Oh these protests are not clearly formulated, they don’t know what they want.” Let’s return briefly to psychoanalysis. This is a typical dialogue between a patriarchal husband and a hysterical wife, you know. The wife complains, of course in a confused way, and the standard male chauvinist answer is, “say clearly what do you want?” This is of course oppression at its purest. It means “either shut up or formulate it in my terms.”

Preserving the Vacuum

Bill Clinton said this very nice in a sympathetic reaction to Wall Street protestors — which is why I claim Bill Clinton practices clinching; you know what is clinching, you embrace the enemy no? Like we should talk and so on but show us, tell us, give us concrete proposals, what do you want? Well my simple answer is that — and Bill Clinton says ominously, “because your demands create a vacuum, and if you don’t bring quickly concrete proposals which will fill in this vacuum, who knows who will fill in this vacuum?” But at this point, I claim, precisely we should maintain this openness in all ominous directions. We don’t need dialogue with those in power. We need critical dialogue with ourselves. We need time to think. We effectively don’t know. And nobody knows. On the one hand we should reject the cheap — because Mao was never so stupid — psuedo-Maoist idea, “Learn from the people, people know”. No, they don’t know. Do we intellectuals know? Also, we don’t know. I mean, any intellectual who says, “Okay, people now have some confused ideas, oh I have a ready and precise plan of what to do,” they are bluffing. We don’t know where we are.

But I think that this openness is precisely what is great about these protests. It means that precisely a certain vacuum open the fundamental dissatisfactions in the system. The vacuum simply means open space for thinking, for new freedom, and so on. Let’s not fill in this vacuum too quickly. Because the only way to fill it in is either by stupid utopian thinking — “we should have a Leninist party back” or whatever — or with this pragmatic approach: “raise the taxes for the rich by 2%” or whatever. Okay, nothing against this second one, first of all. But my god, this is not the solution, you know what I mean? The system is in crisis, the important thing is precisely that vacuum is open. And if some people experience this as terror, something violent, “Look they don’t want to even talk with us.” Yes, precisely I like this ominous dimension, you know? “You want to talk with us. No thanks.” At this point, no dialogue. We have to keep the situation open.

So who knows then?, if neither intellectuals nor so-called ordinary people know. What I would like here to propose a solution. No, not a solution, just a metaphor.  In a book that I advise you to buy, it’s my favorite Soviet writer who was of course a dissident practically not published, and you have back there, I think, on a table some New York Public Library books or whatever, I bought here a week ago, a book on some kind of special discount. It’s a book by Andrei Platonov, an incredible Russian writer, which has afterword by John Berger, well known European progressive writer. In referring to all these protests, although he referred to older protests, but I think he gives a wonderful analysis. Here is what he says, I quote: “The multitudes” — here I don’t like it, it has to be censored, it sounds too much Negri:

The multitudes have answers to questions which have not yet been posed, and they have the capacity to outlive the walls. 

The questions are not yet asked because to do so requires words and concepts which ring true, and those currently being used to name events have been rendered meaningless: Democracy, Liberty, Productivity, etc.

With new concepts the questions will soon be posed, for history involves precisely such a process of questioning. Soon? Within a generation.

Who has the answer and who the question?

What I like in this idea is not that it turns around the usual relationship between intellectual vanguard and ordinary people; “ordinary people are stupid, oh we are not.” According to this vision, “Oh we don’t know what we want. We ask the question to the intellectual, he will provide answers.” Here, you make notice, it’s the opposite. It’s really as in psychoanalytic treatment. Ordinary people have the answers, they even are the answers. Like a symptom. What they don’t know is the proper question to which they are an answer. This is what maybe we intellectuals know. You know, we should refer here to a wonderful point by Claude Lévi-Strauss, apropos the prohibition of incest. Where he says, no, prohibition of incest is not an enigma in the sense of we don’t know what it is. He says, prohibition of incest is an answer, but we don’t know to what question it is an answer. And I think this is how, if we approach in this way the protests, I think we intellectuals should not patronize those immediate non-intellectual protestors. We should — the worst patronization would be to celebrate them as ‘oooh, the wisdom of ordinary people’, like, you know, Mao in late fifties in China. ‘Go and learn from farmers’ and so on. You know, whenever a leader tells you this, it always means “Learn from the people, but we in the central committee of the party know better than the people what the people really want” or whatever. So, no, do not patronize the people.

Start asking critical questions, like Udi Aloni, who is now somewhere to stab me into my back, I think, draw my attention to this famous 99%. We are 99%, you the enemies are 1%. The point is not only like how many of Americans would really recognize the protestors as 99%. What is more interesting for me is that, Who are these 99%? Not Wall Street. Are they Wall Street protestors? Probably they are. But I raise the question, Are they ready to recognize that the true 99% are not only they, dissatisfied Americans, but the poor starving, I don’t know, in Somalia, in Congo, all around the world. These are the true 99%.

For example, if you want a battle, I’m not saying we should now just listen to its other silences and do nothing. There are battles to be fought. But nonetheless, my message is: time for thinking. Be patient.

And again, the crucial thing is to avoid this duality of either “oh we just have a good time, forget consequences” or this call for cheap pragmatism. What is important is that that taboo is broken. We know the system is potentially in a serious crisis. At the same time we know that the 20th century is over not only in the mechanic calendar sense. Which is to say that the 20th century solution — Stalinist communism, the traditional democracy and so on — don’t work. There is work to be done and I think only this refined interaction between educated intellectuals and so called ordinary people, where again we should not, absolutely not act as the ones — as we say in Lacanian theory — subjects supposed to know. All we can do is provide the tools to formulate the right questions. And with this interaction with those apparently formless demands from the people, maybe there is a hope that something new will emerge. Because, you know, what always — I repeat this always, I’m sorry, some of you already know these phrases; what terrifies me is this idea of “oh now we have a wonderful carnival.” Yeah but screw it, what interests me is the day after. My primordial fear is that the movement will slowly disperse and then what? Ten years after you will meet with your friends, drink bear, and “oh my God, what a wonderful time did we have there but now I have to go back to my banking job now.” Someone has to imagine. The process of thinking has to begin. So again, it’s patience. It’s precisely — sorry, for some of you may be obscene — what in Christianity they call the work of love, which is slow, patient, hard work.

A new era

So again, this is all I can offer you. This slow work, where we avoid this false leftist melancholy, which is a very comfortable position of enjoying your situation. I’m here a puritan, you know. Okay, I’m a puritan also protestant in the sense that, you know, my favorite rule about sexuality is the protestant one. As they say, ‘Everything is permitted as long as you feel guilty about it.’ But what I’m saying is that it’s really this eager carnivalesque or melancholic pleasure in pain. Like I already see some of my friends who say, Oh my god, I see Wall Street, they are already tired, it will be over. You know this, this is typical melancholy; they are still there, demonstrating; these people already cannot conceal their joy at imagining how beautiful it will be to be sad when it will be over.

Work, work, this is the good protestant attitude. Work, work. Don’t be afraid of words like work, discipline, community and so on. We should take all this from the right wingers. Don’t allow enemy to take from you to determine the terrain of the struggle. People think today that if you mention work, discipline, soldiers, fight, ‘Oh you’re a neo-fascist.’ No, are you aware that this idea of workers in uniforms marching in discipline; sorry to tell you, Hitler took this from social democracy. And maybe it’s time for us to get it back. Don’t allow the enemy — this is so important today; Don’t allow the enemy to blackmail you in the sense of determining the terrain of the struggle. We shouldn’t decide in opposition to the enemy.

So again, there is room for cautious optimism. With all problems I know dangers are always on the horizon. But remember nonetheless a new era is here. A certain taboo fell down. People are accepting the fact that we don’t live in the world of Pelican Brief and All the President’s Men, where they’re very anti-capitalists but the guilty are a couple of corrupted managers, CEO’s, politicians.. and then we get rid of these guys and everything will be okay. No, the problem is in the system, and we have to start to think, bearing in mind the tragic experience of 20th century. So in other words, at least I can say as a philosopher, we live in maybe potentially tragic times, but there is more than enough job for us philosophers. It’s our time. Thank you very much.

Related posts:

1. Zizek on our situation — and communism
2. Zizek and Badiou

blowing across this globalized world, from Tunisia to Egypt to Greece to Spain to Occupy Wall Street. How do the theoretical investigations of this site relate to this, to what’s new and emerging? 

This question of the emergence of novelty, of understanding this very changing world so as to help to change it fundamentally, has always been central to this site. And some pivotal issues of the Occupy movement (Who are the 1%? for example) have been explored here as well.

At the urging of Mike Ely from Kasama, we’ve put together a guide to some important writings on khukuri, organized by topic:

What is current the structure of global capital? See essays concerning a transnational capitalist class (TNC) — truly the global 1% (or less) – by Leslie Sklair, by William Robinson, Jerry Harris, and by William K. Carroll, as well as in the recent piece on global corporate networks.

How do we analyze the present crisis, and how do we go forward from it? See this by David Harvey, as well as essays by Don Hamerquist, on the crisis of both capitalism and the left, and hollow states in a time of austerity and chaos, and John Steele’s notes from a conference devoted to this subject.

What is the relevance of Marxism today? This important question is explored in this essay by Vern Gray and in these by John Steele:

Our Relation to Revolutionary Tradition;

We Need a Politics We Haven’t Got;

and To what extent is revolutionary theory detachable?

as well as Bill Martin’s extensive essay Into the Wild.

How can we understand the present historical moment in a way that can also prepare us for the eruption of something new? And what is the relevance of the contemporary thinker Alain Badiou?

John Steele has written a series of essays: Another take on revolutionary theory; on Badiou and the event; Revolutionary fidelity and the radically new; on Badiou’s political value; and on Badiou’s Maoism.

Relatedly, there is J. Ramsey’s essay addressing the question.

And see these by Don Hamerquist: Barack, Badiou, and Bilal-al-hasan; and “…that which in them divides itself from the old”.

(And here too, Bill Martin, in the essay cited above.)

Finally, in terms of understanding the “new wind,” although this is a topic we’ll have more on, for now it’s worth noting an essay by Don Hamerquist on the earlier parts of this sequence.

Related posts:

1. Could the present crisis be an opening to communism?
2. Financialization and hegemony
3. Marxism, politics, and evil, part 2

The talk was obviously given several years ago, and was originally published in lacanian ink 29 (Spring 2007). It is republished here from the symptom.

My proposal will be in three parts.  First, a very short ontological part.  What is our concept of being qua being?  The answer will be: multiple, a multiplicity.  Second, what is our concept of the localization of something which is?  What is being-there? The answer will be: a transcendental field, without subject.  Third, what is existence? The answer will be: the degree of something’s identity to itself in a world is its existence in this world.

Towards a New Concept of Existence

Alain Badiou

No related posts.

The following is republished here from the symptom.

Our task is thus to remain faithful to this eternal Idea of communism: to the egalitarian spirit kept alive over thousands of years in revolts and utopian dreams. The problem is how to avoid the choice between radical social uprisings which end in defeat, unable to stabilize themselves in a new order, and the retreat into an ideal displaced to a domain outside social reality.

……

Our situation is the very opposite of the classical twentieth-century predicament in which the Left knew what it had to do, but simply had to wait patiently for the opportunity to offer itself. Today, we do not know what we have to do, but we have to act now, because the consequences of inaction could be catastrophic. We will have to risk taking steps into the abyss of the New in totally inappropriate situations….

Communism is today not the name of a solution but the name of a problem….

Why the Idea and Why Communism?

Slavoj Zizek

The Left is facing the difficult task of emphasizing that we are dealing withpolitical economy—that there is nothing “natural” in the present crisis, that the existing global economic system relies on a series of political decisions—while simultaneously acknowledging that, insofar as we remain within the capitalist system, violating its rules will indeed cause economic breakdown, since the system obeys a pseudo-natural logic of its own. So, although we are clearly entering a new phase of enhanced exploitation, facilitated by global market conditions (outsourcing, etc.), we should also bear in mind that this is not the result of an evil plot by capitalists, but an urgency imposed by the functioning of the system itself, always on the brink of financial collapse. For this reason, what is now required is not a moralizing critique of capitalism, but the full re-affirmation of the Idea of communism.

The Idea of communism, as elaborated by Badiou, remains a Kantian regulative idea lacking any mediation with historical reality. Badiou emphatically rejects any such mediation as a regression to an historicist evolutionism which betrays the purity of the Idea, reducing it to a positive order of Being (the Revolution conceived as a moment of the positive historical process). This Kantian mode of reference effectively allows us to characterize Badiou’s deployment of the “communist hypothesis” as a Kritik der reinen Kommunismus. As such, it invites us to repeat the passage from Kant to Hegel—to re-conceive the Idea of communism as an Idea in the Hegelian sense, that is, as an Idea which is in the process of its own actualization. The Idea that “makes itself what it is” is thus no longer a concept opposed to reality as its lifeless shadow, but one which gives reality and existence to itself. Recall Hegel’s infamous “idealist” formula according to which Spirit is its own result, the product of itself. Such statements usually provoke sarcastic “materialist” comments (“so it is not actual people who think and realize ideas, but Spirit itself, which, like Baron Munchhausen, pulls itself up by its own hair . . .”). But consider, for example, a religious Idea which catches the spirit of the masses and becomes a major historical force? In a way, is this not a case of an Idea actualizing itself, becoming a “product of itself”? Does it not, in a kind of closed loop, motivate people to fight for it and to realize it? What the notion of the Idea as a product of itself makes visible is thus not a process of idealist self-engendering, but the materialist fact that an Idea exists only in and through the activity of the individuals engaged with it and motivated by it. What we have here is emphatically not the kind of historicist/evolutionist position that Badiou rejects, but something much more radical: an insight into how historical reality itself is not a positive order, but a “not-all” which points towards its own future. It is this inclusion of the future as the gap in the present order that renders the latter “not- all,” ontologically incomplete, and thus explodes the self-enclosure of the historicist/evolutionary process. In short, it is this gap which enables us to distinguish historicity proper from historicism.

Why, then, the Idea of communism? For three reasons, which echo the Lacanian triad of the I-S-R: at the Imaginary level, because it is necessary to maintain continuity with the long tradition of radical millenarian and egalitarian rebellions; at the Symbolic level, because we need to determine the precise conditions under which, in each historical epoch, the space for communism may be opened up; finally, at the level of the Real, because we must assume the harshness of what Badiou calls the eternal communist invariants (egalitarian justice, voluntarism, terror, “trust in the people”). Such an Idea of communism is clearly opposed to socialism, which is precisely not an Idea, but a vague communitarian notion applicable to all kinds of organic social bonds, from spiritualized ideas of solidarity (“we are all part of the same body”) right up to fascist corporatism. The Really Existing Socialist states were precisely that: positively existing states, whereas communism is in its very notion anti-statist.

Where does this eternal communist Idea come from? Is it part of human nature, or, as Habermasians propose, an ethical premise (of equality or reciprocal recognition) inscribed into the universal symbolic order? Its eternal character cannot, after all, be accounted for by specific historical conditions. The key to resolving this problem is to focus on that against which the communist Idea rebels: namely, the hierarchical social body whose ideology was first formulated in great sacred texts such as The Book of Manu. As was demonstrated by Louis Dumont in his Homo hierarchicus, social hierarchy is always inconsistent, that is, its very structure relies on a paradoxical reversal (the higher sphere is, of course, higher than the lower, but, within the lower order, the lower is higher than the higher) on account of which the social hierarchy can never fully encompass all its elements. It is this constitutive inconsistency that gives birth to what Rancière calls “the part of no-part,” that singular element which remains out of place in the hierarchical order, and, as such, functions as a singular universal, giving body to the universality of the society in question. The communist Idea, then, is the eternal demand co-substantial with this element that lacks its proper place in the social hierarchy (“we are nothing, and we want to be all”).

Our task is thus to remain faithful to this eternal Idea of communism: to the egalitarian spirit kept alive over thousands of years in revolts and utopian dreams, in radical movements from Spartacus to Thomas Müntzer, including within the great religions (Buddhism versus Hinduism, Daoism or Legalism versus Confucianism, etc.). The problem is how to avoid the choice between radical social uprisings which end in defeat, unable to stabilize themselves in a new order, and the retreat into an ideal displaced to a domain outside social reality (for Buddhism we are all equal—in nirvana). It is here that the originality of Western thought becomes clear, particularly in its three great historical ruptures: Greek philosophy’s break with the mythical universe; Christianity’s break with the pagan universe; and modern democracy’s break with traditional authority. In each case, the egalitarian spirit is transposed into a new positive order (limited, but nonetheless actual).

In short, the wager of Western thought is that radical negativity (whose first and immediate expression is egalitarian terror) is not condemned to being expressed in short ecstatic outbursts after which things are returned to normal. On the contrary, radical negativity, as the undermining of every traditional hierarchy, has the potential to articulate itself in a positive order within which it acquires the stability of a new form of life. Such is the meaning of the Holy Spirit in Christianity: faith can not only be expressed in, but also exists as, the collective of believers. And this faith is itself based on “terror,” as indicated by Christ’s insistence that he brings a sword, not peace, that whoever does not hate his father and mother is not a true follower, and so on. The content of this terror thus involves the rejection of all traditional hierarchical and community ties, with the wager that a different collective link is possible—an egalitarian bond between believers connected by agape as political love.

Democracy itself provides another example of such an egalitarian link based on terror. As Claude Lefort notes, the democratic axiom is that the place of power is empty, that there is no one directly qualified for the vacancy, either by tradition, charisma, or leadership qualities. This is why, before democracy can enter the stage, terror has to do its work, forever dissociating the place of power from any natural or directly qualified pretender: the gap between this place and those who temporarily occupy it must be maintained at all costs. This is also why Hegel’s deduction of the monarchy can be given a democratic supplement: Hegel insists on the monarch as the “irrational” (i.e. contingent) head of state precisely in order to keep the summit of state power apart from the expertise embodied in the state bureaucracy. While the bureaucrats are chosen on account of their abilities and qualifications, the king is the king by birth— that is, ultimately, he is chosen by lot, on account of natural contingency. The danger Hegel was trying to avoid here exploded a century later in Stalinist bureaucracy, which was precisely the rule of (Communist) experts: Stalin is not a figure of a master, but the one who “really knows,” an expert in all imaginable fields, from economy to linguistics, from biology to philosophy.

We can well imagine a democratic procedure maintaining the same gap on account of the irreducible moment of contingency in every electoral result: far from being a limitation, the fact that elections do not pretend to select the most qualified person is what protects them from the totalitarian temptation (which is why, as was already clear to the Ancient Greeks, choosing rulers by lot is the most democratic form of selection). That is to say, as Lefort has again demonstrated, the achievement of democracy is to turn what for traditional authoritarian power is the moment of greatest crisis—the moment of transition from one master to another, the panic- inducing instant at which “the throne is empty”—into the very source of its strength: democratic elections thus represent the passage through that zero-point at which the complex network of social links is dissolved into a purely quantitative multiplicity of individuals whose votes are mechanically counted. The moment of terror, of the dissolution of all hierarchical links, is thereby re-enacted and transformed into the foundation of a new and stable political order.

Measured by his own standards of what a rational state should be, Hegel was thus perhaps wrong to fear universal democratic suffrage (see his nervous rejection of the English Reform Bill in 1832. It is precisely democracy (universal suffrage) which, much more appropriately than Hegel’s own State of estates, performs the “magic” trick of converting radical negativity into a new political order: in democracy, the negativity of terror (the destruction of everyone who pretends to identify with the place of power), is aufgehobenand turned into the positive form of the democratic procedure.

From democracy to —

The question today, now that we know the limitations of that formal procedure, is whether we can imagine a step further in this process whereby egalitarian negativity reverts into a new positive order. We should look for traces of such an order in different domains, including in scientific communities. The way the CERN community functions is indicative here: in an almost utopian manner, individual efforts are undertaken in a collective non-hierarchical spirit, and dedication to the scientific cause (to recreate the conditions of the Big Bang) far outweighs any material considerations. But are such traces, no matter how sublime, merely that—marginal traces?

In his intervention at the 2010 Marxism conference in London (organized by the Socialist Workers’ Party), Alex Callinicos evoked his dream of a future communist society in which there would be museums of capitalism, displaying to the public the artifacts of this irrational and inhuman social formation. The unintended irony of this dream is that today, the only museums of this kind are museums of Communism, displaying its horrors. So, again, what to do in such a situation? Two years before his death, when it became clear that there would be no immediate European revolution, and that the idea of building socialism in one country was nonsense, Lenin wrote: “What if the complete hopelessness of the situation, by stimulating the efforts of the workers and peasants tenfold, offered us the opportunity to create the fundamental requisites of civilization in a different way from that of the West European countries?”[1]

Is this not the predicament of the Morales government in Bolivia, of the (former) Aristide government in Haiti, of the Maoist government in Nepal? They came to power through “fair” democratic elections, rather than insurrection, but having gained power, they exerted it in a way which was (partially, at least) “non-statist”: directly mobilizing their grassroots supporters, by-passing the Party-State network. Their situation is “objectively” hopeless: the whole drift of history is against them, they cannot rely on any “objective tendencies” pushing in their direction, all they can do is to improvise, do what they can in a desperate situation. Nevertheless, does this not give them a unique freedom? (And are we—the contemporary Left—not in exactly the same situation?) It is tempting to apply here the old distinction between “freedom from” and “freedom for”: does their freedom from History (with its laws and objective tendencies) not sustain their freedom for creative experimenting? In their activity, they can rely only on the collective will of their supporters.

According to Badiou, “The model of the centralized party made possible a new form of power that was nothing less than the power of the party itself. We are now at what I call a ‘distance from the State.’ This is first of all because the question of power is no longer ‘immediate’: nowhere does a ‘taking power’ in the insurrectional sense seem possible today.”[2] But does this not rely on an all too simple alternative? What about heroically assuming whatever power may be available—in the full awareness that the “objective conditions” are not “mature” enough for radical change— and, against the grain, do what one can?

Let us return to the situation in Greece in the summer of 2010, when popular discontent brought about the delegitimization of the entire political class and the country approached a power vacuum. Had there been any chance for the Left to take over state power, what could it have done in such a situation of “complete hopelessness”? Of course (if we may permit ourselves this personification), the capitalist system would have gleefully allowed the Left to take over, if only to ensure that Greece ended up in a state of economic chaos which would then serve as a severe lesson to others. Nevertheless, despite such dangers, wherever an opening for taking power does arise, the Left should seize the opportunity and confront the problems head-on, making the best of a bad situation (in the case of Greece: renegotiating the debt, mobilizing European solidarity and popular support for its predicament). The tragedy of politics is that there will never be a “good” moment to seize power: the opportunity will always offer itself at the worst possible moment (characterized by economic fiasco, ecological catastrophe, civil unrest, etc.), when the ruling political class has lost its legitimacy and the fascist-populist threat lurks in the background. For example, the Scandinavian countries, while continuing to maintain high levels of social equality and a powerful Welfare State, also score very well on global competitiveness: proof that “generous, relatively egalitarian welfare states should not be seen as utopias or protected enclaves, but can also be highly competitive participants in the world market. In other words, even within the parameters of global capitalism there are many degrees of freedom for radical social alternatives.”[3]

Engendering monsters

Perhaps the most succinct characterization of the epoch which began with the First World War is the well-known phrase attributed to Gramsci: “The old world is dying away, and the new world struggles to come forth: now is the time of monsters.” Were Fascism and Stalinism not the twin monsters of the twentieth century, the one emerging out of the old world’s desperate attempts to survive, the other out of a misbegotten endeavor to build a new one? And what about the monsters we are engendering now, propelled by techno-gnostic dreams of a biogenetically controlled society? All the consequences should be drawn from this paradox: perhaps there is no direct passage to the New, at least not in the way we imagined it, and monsters necessarily emerge in any attempt to force that passage.

One sign of a new rise of this monstrosity is that the ruling classes seem less and less able to rule, even in their own interests. Take the fate of Christians in the Middle East. Over the last two millennia, they have survived a series of calamities, from the end of the Roman Empire through defeat in crusades, the decolonization of the Arab countries, the Khomeini revolution in Iran, etc.—with the notable exception of Saudi Arabia, the main US ally in this region, where there are no autochthonous Christians. In Iraq, there were approximately one million of them under Saddam, leading exactly the same lives as other Iraqi subjects, with one of them, Tariq Aziz, even occupying the high post of foreign minister and becoming Saddam’s confidante. But then, something weird happened to Iraqi Christians, a true catastrophe—a Christian army occupied (or liberated, if you want) Iraq.

The Christian occupation army dissolved the secular Iraqi army and thus left the streets open to Muslim fundamentalist militias to terrorize both each other and the Christians. No wonder roughly half of Iraq’s Christians soon left the country, preferring even the terrorist-supporting Syria to a liberated Iraq under Christian military control. In 2010, things took a turn for the worse. Tariq Aziz, who had survived the previous trials, was condemned by a Shia court to death by hanging for his “perse- cution of Muslim parties” (i.e., his fight against Muslim fundamentalism) under Saddam. Bomb attacks on Christians and their churches followed one after the other, leaving dozens dead, so that finally, in early November 2010, the Baghdad archbishop Atanasios Davud appealed to his flock to leave Iraq: “Christians have to leave the beloved country of our ancestors and escape the intended ethnic cleansing. This is still better than getting killed one after the other.” And to dot the i, as it were, that same month it was reported that al Maliki had been confirmed as Iraqi prime minister thanks to Iranian support. So the result of the US intervention is that Iran, the prime agent of the axis of Evil, is edging closer to dominating Iraq politically.

US policy is thus definitively approaching a stage of madness, and not only in terms of domestic policy (as the Tea Party proposes to fight the national debt by lowering taxes, i.e., by raising the debt—one cannot but recall here Stalin’s well-known thesis that, in the Soviet Union, the state was withering away through the strengthening of its organs, especially its organs of police repression). In foreign policy also, the spread of Western Judeo-Christian values is organized by creating conditions which lead to the expulsion of Christians (who, maybe, could move to Iran . . .). This is definitely not a clash of civilizations, but a true dialogue and cooperation between the US and the Muslim fundamentalists.[4]

Our situation is thus the very opposite of the classical twentieth-century predicament in which the Left knew what it had to do (establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, etc.), but simply had to wait patiently for the opportunity to offer itself. Today, we do not know what we have to do, but we have to act now, because the consequences of inaction could be catastrophic. We will have to risk taking steps into the abyss of the New in totally inappropriate situations; we will have to reinvent aspects of the New just in order to maintain what was good in the Old (education, healthcare, etc.).

The journal in which Gramsci published his writings in the early 1920s was called L’Ordine nuovo (The New Order)—a title which was later appropriated by the extreme Right. Rather than seeing this later appropriation as revealing the “truth” of Gramsci’s use of the title—abandoning it as running counter to the rebellious freedom of an authentic Left—we should return to it as an index of the hard problem of defining the new order any revolution will have to establish after its success. In short, our times can be characterized as none other than Stalin characterized the atom bomb: not for those with weak nerves.

Communism is today not the name of a solution but the name of a problem: the problem of the commons in all its dimensions—the commons of nature as the substance of our life, the problem of our biogenetic commons, the problem of our cultural commons (“intellectual property”), and, last but not least, the problem of the commons as that universal space of humanity from which no one should be excluded. Whatever the solution might be, it will have to solve this problem.

NOTES

[1] Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 33, p. 479.

[2] Filippo Del Lucchese and Jason Smith, “‘We Need a Popular Discipline’: Contemporary Politics and the Crisis of the Negative.” Interview with Alain Badiou, Los Angeles, 7/2/2007. All unmarked quotes that follow are from the manuscript of this interview.

[3] Göran Therborn, “The Killing Fields of Inequality,” in From Linnaeus to the Future(s), Göteborg: Linnaeus University Press 2010, p. 190.

[4]I rely here on the analysis of Ervin Hkladniuk-Milharcic, Ljubljana.

Related posts:

1. How can communism come to be?
2. On The Idea Of Communism: Communism 2.0?
3. Zizek: Preserve the vacuum

Communism as actual

Bosteels begins by talking about the Idea of communism as a Kantian regulatory idea (a framing which Badiou broaches, and then seemingly retreats from, in The Idea of Communism), brings in Hegel on actuality as well as Marx’s statement in the German Ideology that communism is the real or actual movement which abolishes the present state of things, and then brings forward his own aim or hope:

The point is somehow to perceive communism not as a utopian not-yet for which reality will always fail to offer an adequate match, but as something which is always already here, in every moment of refusal of private appropriation, and in every act of collective reappropriation. (39)

All of this in the book’s Introduction. In the chapters, as said, he examines particular thinkers – Alberto Moreiras, Roberto Esposito, Jacques Ranciere, Alvaro Garcia Linera, of course Alain Badiou, and the inevitable Slavoj Zizek (in particular the last four) – with the aim, he says. of asking whether their proposals “open up a perspective for the actualization of communism.” In all of these he shows himself to be a very sensitive critic (see in particular the chapter on Zizek: “In Search of the Act,” obviously much expanded and revised since its original 2001 version). And whatever the original context of these essays (all of which have been revised for their appearance here) it becomes clear in reading them that this question – what he’s calling “the actuality of communism” – has been for some time one of Bosteels’ most basic concerns.

It’s in the last chapter (the fifth), though, reworking the final section of his contribution to the 2009 London “Idea of Communism” conference, and here titled “The Actuality of Communism,” that this concern comes to a certain sort of crux. The chapter is a meditation on the writings – and career – of Alvaro Garcia Linera, who as mentioned above has gone from guerrilla fighter to Vice President of Bolivia.

After a few pages outlining some themes from Garcia Linera’s work, Bosteels draws two conclusions with regard to our tasks in the present era. The first concerns actively continuing to historicize the communist hypothesis, and in particular carrying it “beyond the confines of Western Europe and the ex-Soviet Union.” (238) Drawing from Badiou’s work on communism as Idea and hypothesis, Bosteels continues,

The key concept in this regard is not the orthodox one of stages and transitions in a linear dialectical periodization but rather that of the different aleatory sequences of the communist hypothesis in a strictly immanent determination, with all that this entails in terms of the assessment of failures…and of the legacy of unsolved problems handed down from one sequence to the other.

The second task (and one that directly speaks to Bosteels’ concern with “speculative leftism”), involves the realization that

Communism must not only be rehistoricized outside all suppositions of historical necessity and stageism, it must also be actualized and organized as the real movement that abolishes the present state of things….Communism must again find inscription in a concrete body, the collective flesh and thought of an internationalist political subjectivity.

Returning to Garcia Linera, and taking up specifically his thinking concerning his entering the state and its relation to the ‘communist horizon’ which he invokes, Bosteels quotes him as aiming “to support as much as possible the unfolding of society’s autonomous capacities.” (247) Socialism, he says,

Is not the ideal to which destiny will have to be adjusted by force; it is above all the practical movement of the common struggles of living labor in communitarian form to recuperate its expropriated capacities. (252)

I will not pursue Bosteels’ examination of some of Garcia Linera’s reasoning and the disputes to which they may give rise. But a general admonition (as it were) by Bosteels, characteristic of his outlook and approach, is worth quoting:

I would argue that we need to avoid two extreme and equally nefarious answers: on the one hand, the wholesale condemnation of all such articulations of the communist hypothesis and the State…; and, on the other, the relativist conclusion that what may be bad for Paris or Bologna may be good for Kathmandu or Cochabamba…. We have use for neither blind and arrogant universalism nor abject and ultimately patronizing culturalism. Instead what is needed is a comprehensive and collective rethinking…of the links between communism, the history and theory of the State, and the history and theory of modes of political organization. (248)

Concluding

In the book’s “Conclusion,” Bosteels seeks to draw out multiple conclusions, particularly concerning the relation of politics to philosophy, to history, and to morality:

As might be expected, Bosteels seeks to rein in the overweening pretensions of philosophy, which he believes has often, in Europe in recent decades, taken its own reflections on politics to be politics:

My goal is to instill a degree of modesty and realism in the reflection concerning politics and philosophy. (274)

With regard to history, Bosteels is even more modestly cautionary and corrective. At present, he says with reference to Badiou and Zizek, “this recourse to the eternal, the invariant, or the ahistorical can certainly be justified, given the depoliticizing effects of the call constantly to historicize…. (277)

Whereas dissolving the supposedly natural and eternal into the historical (as Marx and others did) may once have been liberatory,

Today, the drive to historicize everything is rather part and parcel of late capitalist ideology as such, as is the emphasis on difference, flux, and multiplicity. (277)

And yet:

And yet, given the equally pressing need to avoid lapsing into an ultraleftist purification of communism outside of any given time and place, I would also want to argue for a dialectical articulation of the nonhistorical with concrete analyses of the historicity of leftist, socialist, and communist politics. (278)

Bosteels’ third conclusion, he says, “involves the effects of a growing moralization of politics,” which has “tended to rephrase questions of power and strategy in the melodramatic vocabulary of Good and Evil.” (279)

Here again, while in accord with the necessity of escaping “the pseudopolitical rhetoric of moral outrage and indignation,” this cannot be effected through seeking “a return to pure politics outside of morality, history, economics, or the social.” (282) This sort of “Gnosticism or Manichaeism” as Bosteels calls it here, is of course precisely the sort of speculative leftism against which he has earlier aimed his fire.

What Bosteels proposes against such speculative leftism, though, is “not to adopt the attitude of the Marxist-Leninst-Maoist thought police” by denouncing it as an infantile disorder or the like, but rather that we go forward as a “communism of communisms” in which speculative leftism can have a sort of corrective place (serving as “a constant source of revitalization”) – an “actuality of communism in which there is room for movements and hypotheses no less than for tactics and strategy.” (283)

Finally – and this will be his fourth conclusion –

Communism cannot and will not be actual without also being international…. This means that we cannot let Western European history lessons…determine the agenda for the rest of the world. It also suggests…that we look elsewhere for models or counter-models to put to the test the hypothesis of the actuality of communism. (284, 286-7)

What do we need?

We might say, then, that what Bosteels is arguing for is a politics, or a specifically political thinking, which is which is taken up from a perspective which is in/of the world, historically situated, and internationalist.

He wants a little less philosophy and a little more politics in the concrete (and a lot less Eurocentrism) than he finds among current European left-radical thinkers. He wants a communism which has roots in what is actual and not simply ideal (and certainly not the stance of “the beautiful soul relying on its ineffectiveness as proof of its moral superiority over and above politics as usual” [127-8]).

He believes that communists should be able to see and think the actuality of communism in the world today – the seeds, the roots, the stirrings, the actual potential. That communists should be able to think and see a connection between communism and the world today – and not one which derives from the ideality of philosophy or the majesterial presence of a master thinker.

It would be hard to dissent from this desire and this belief, and difficult to deny that Bosteels has a point with regard to the theorists he examines. Who hasn’t grumbled, winced or cursed at the apparent over-theoreticism and esotericism of many of these thinkers? And, whatever the merits of Garcia Linera, Eurocentrism is a charge that hits home.

However.

A major question must be whether in fact it is speculative leftism which is our main danger today – the chief pitfall for communists or political radicals more broadly. This seems, sometimes, to be Bosteels’ position.

To answer this question, everything will depend on the context. But for most of “the left,” even “the radical left” (and particularly in this country) it seems that this diagnosis does not fit at all.

From the standpoint of movement activism, theoreticism and speculative leftism are not even on the horizon. “Enough talk about theory and doctrinal differences, let’s do something,” with practice far predominating over any sort of theory, is strongly characteristic in my experience. And in the US generally, with its deep legacy of pragmatism and anti-intellectualism, succumbing to the rightist temptation of union and Democratic politics is the characteristic vice, not over-involvement in a theoretical point of view.

Among the organized “hard left” too, rituals of dogma notwithstanding, speculative leftism is hardly a danger; here too, rather, various forms of rightist practice, movementism, and actionism predominate. Even the academic left at present tends far more strongly toward social democracy (including in its theorizing), than toward anything describable as speculative leftism.

But as a critique and diagnosis of a specific intellectual environment – a certain (important!) current of European and especially French politico-philosophical thinking – Bosteels’ analysis of speculative leftism is quite valuable. Respectful and written with care and close attention to details of text and argument, I like it a lot and I think Bosteels has articulated a problem and danger within this current, which tends toward surfacing even among those who (like Ranciere and Badiou) explicitly wish to avoid  it.

What about khukuri?

The charge of over-emphasis of theory has been sometimes raised against this site, with its slogan of radical reconception of revolutionary theory. What about practice? Is Khukuri dedicated to the proposition that the solution to our problems lies simply in the realm of theory?

Well – the fact that khukuri is a site dedicated to theory doesn’t imply on anyone’s part that theory is the only thing needed. But it is true, I believe, that without a basic reconception of revolutionary theory we can’t go forward. It’s an absolutely necessary part, in the present era, of the project of human emancipation. Necessary, although obviously not sufficient.

Our needs again

Practice – this is basic — is not only necessary but primary, in an overall sense. “The overthrow of all existing social conditions” (to quote the Manifesto) is not accomplished – actually accomplished – in the realm of theory. “The weapon of criticism,” to quote the wellknown passage from early Marx, “obviously cannot replace the criticism of weapons. Material force must be overthrown by material force.”

Of course the next sentence is: “But theory also becomes a material force once it has gripped the masses,”  bringing in the theory/practice, idea/matter dialectic (to use those old simplistic terms for a moment). It’s tempting to conclude that the theoretical task is to create that theory which will grip the masses, and in an overall sense that’s true. (And it’s a ready index of our present impoverishment that there is no such theory at present – no truly emancipatory theory which has gripped and become embodied in the struggles of the masses).

But it’s also true that it’s vain to think that one can enter a future period of intense social struggle with the needed theory already in place. A new emancipatory synthesis, a new path, a theoretical structure which actually grips the masses, will undoubtedly arise only in the context of a new mass practice. What do we do in the meantime? Wait for something new to arise? Well, yes, partly and in some sense. But in the meantime no one is preaching complete abstention from practice (not me, anyway).

But is “practice” so straightforward? “Just do something” is worse than useless as a political recommendation – that’s pretty obvious to all, I’m sure. Do what, and where (there are many possible fields of action), and how?

It’s easy enough to say that whatever one does, it needs to be revolutionary, not reformist practice. But what are the forms of revolutionary practice today? I submit that this is a question without a clear answer at all. Not to sit on our hands, but in my view what’s needed is deep and wide-ranging experimentation with new forms and new venues of practice.

Practical experimentation and theoretical reconception – if I could propose a slogan, that would be it.

And to return to the latter:

The taking assessment of our position, thinking in a deep and exploratory way about how a new revolutionary current might arise, understanding the structure and dynamics of capitalism and its classes as they exist now, really taking clear-eyed stock of our history, of the history of emancipatory movements and institutions – all these are theoretical tasks that cry out to be done. Nor are they simply interesting projects – “yeah, it would be nice if we had all that”; these are pressing revolutionary tasks. It’s certainly not clear to me how we can possibly get our bearings at present, and not simply engage in the mindless repetition of everything we’ve done before, without this sort of theoretical work.

To give one variation of something Zizek has recently often admonished: “Don’t just do something – Think!”

Related posts:

1. Zizek on our situation — and communism
2. What is Badiou’s communism?
3. On The Idea Of Communism: Communism 2.0?

Creating Space for Communist Re-Emergence: Approaching Badiou

By J. Ramsey

I would like to begin by thanking the Platypus Affiliated Society, the organizers of the conference, as well as Chris Cutrone for organizing this panel, and inviting me—inviting us—to speak with you today. I do not at all take it for granted that there are groups of people who come together to share views and engage in thoughtful discussion about capitalism, marxism, communism, and the path to human emancipation…. Ours is an age—and in particular, the US, is a society—where the very existence of what Badiou calls the Communist Hypothesis is in no way guaranteed. In this context, the very idea of Communism –indeed the very idea of Big Ideas!—needs to be defended, nurtured, and deliberately developed. And so it is important that we not take forums like this conference, or each other, our fellow-travellers on this revolutionary road, for granted.

The Platypus panel description we were given asks several questions. They are certainly not exhaustive of the topic of Badiou, (post) Maoism, or Communism. But they do seem to me to be a reasonable, if not the only, place to start. I want to use my time, in part, to deepen and unpack, just the first of the really quite loaded questions that were put to us.

First, we are asked by the blurb, “How does the prominence of Alain Badiou’s approach to communism speak to the present historical moment and its emancipatory possibilities?”

This question like many questions has embedded within it a number of aspects. 1. The prominence of Badiou’s thought. 2. Badiou’s approach to communism. And how each of those relates to: 3. The present historical moment. 4. And its emancipatory possibilities. 1.2.3.4. + aspects. Each of these aspects brings forth another question, complex in and of itself—questions that deserve full treatment in themselves—among them: 1. What is the prominence of Badiou’s thought today? 2. What is the nature of Badiou’s approach to communism? 3. What is the best way to understand the present historical moment? 4. And what are the emancipatory possibilities within in this moment? Finally, 5. How does Badiou’s thought relate to #3 and #4 , to the contemporary moment and its emancipatory possibilities?

In this paper I would like to take a stab at just the first couple of these, beginning with:

1. How prominent is Alain Badiou’s thought today, and what is the nature of this prominence?

At a minimum, Badiou’s rise to prominence would seem to signal a growing open-ness—at least in academic circles—to the issue of communism, or at least to the radical opposition to capitalism, which is to say, a waning of certain cold war era prohibitions, a fading of the “end of history” Fukuyama-ist haze that has blanketed academia for so long. Badiou’s prominence, at least within humanities, English, and philosophy departments would likewise appear to signal a certain moving beyond the limits of what is often called “postmodernist” discourse, with its fetishization of plurality, irony and uncertainty, its privileging of difference, and its ethics of respecting the Other at a distance, even at the expense of meaningful intervention…His “prominence” suggests a re-emerging interest in questions of unity, universality, truth (with a capital T), and politics (with a capital P), as well as thinking in terms of transforming inherited situations in fundamental ways, rather than ‘subversively’ playing on their hybrid margins. It’s also worth considering the radical difference between Badiou and say the empirical approach of Noam Chomsky, an invaluable thinker whose critical work of exposing the system’s crimes is still haunted, nonetheless, by a prohibition on thinking “Big Ideas.” As already noted, Badiou identifies this prohibition as one of the symptoms of our time, as well as one of the major obstacles to breaking out of the present capitalist system. In my view, these developments are largely positive!

Of course Badiou’s prominence is not the only sign of this moment’s open-ness to Big Ideas, or to communism in particular. A recent Rasmussen poll for instance found that 11% of “likely voters” in the US found Communism “more moral” than the current US political and economic system. Breaking down these numbers (for their “Platinum members only”) the pollsters found that 26-7% of 18-29 year olds interviewed reported that communism was both moral and that it worked better than the current US system. (And keep in mind here of course that “likely voters” tend to be wealthier and, by definition, more committed to the political existing system than, say, non-voters, let alone say, non-citizens, or the un-documented.) To me these are exciting and encouraging numbers. To what extent are Badiou and the discourse around him and other emerging philosophers of communism have contributed to this support vs. merely benefited from it in increased attention and readership?… It is difficult to say.

But what does seem likely to me is that aside from matters of direct influence, many of these people who are now reporting themselves as in favor of communism, are likely coming at communism, like Badiou, in new and what may appear to us as “strange” ways, not primarily through a reading of Marx’s Capital, but through other vectors of discourse, experience, reflection, and influence. (Though undoubtedly in many cases Marx or Marxism continue to play an important role, as well they should.)….

This brings us to the second question within the given question:

2. What is Alain Badiou’s approach to communism?

I would start by noting an assumption that is built into this question. Namely, that there is only one singular Badiou-ist approach to communism. While I haven’t yet read let alone made a close study of Badiou’s complete oeuvre, I have read enough to learn that there is, in fact, more than one Badiou—as there is more than one Marx for that matter! There are tensions, competing trajectories, and changes that move through Badiou’s work, regarding many elements of his philosophy, including several that are quite directly linked to communism and to politics.

I do not mean to throw open the door to a kind of textual indeterminacy, as if we can “never generalize about Badiou because he is not even identical with himself.” Rather I aim to suggest that in dealing with Badiou—or other complex thinkers such as Hegel, Marx, Lenin, Adorno, or Mao—we would do better to imagine Badiou’s work as a kind of layered terrain, a textual topology with which we best familiarize ourselves before pronouncing a totalizing judgment, that is, if we want to stand a chance of entering that terrain, to grapple with Badiou seriously, and/or to engage students of Badiou in a meaningful way.

For example, in reading Bruno Bosteels recent essay (“The Leftist Hypothesis” from the Idea of Communism book, based on talks from the Birkbeck conference), it becomes clear that there are differences between Badiou of the early 1980s and the Badiou of today, as regards, for starters, such “fundamental concepts of Marxism” as class struggle, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and revolution. Similarly in his 1969 essay “Outline of a Beginning,” curiously reprinted in the middle of Badiou’s most recent book, The Communist Hypothesis, (in a section entitled “We Are Still Contemporaries of May 1968,”) Badiou appears very much open to the notion of something like a maoist party of “a new type,” one that puts into practice the mass line, (“from the masses to the masses”) with cadre dialectically engaging mass movements, in a process of movement party mutual transformation. A Party that continually struggles against bureaucratization, ossification, as well as fragmentation and anarchic isolation—a party that would incorporate the very mass friction it encounters as the means of its radical renewal and transformation, as well as the masses’ (self)transformation. For this Badiou of 1969 or even of 1982, “the party-state” is not simply “exhausted,” as it appears in much later work (though even here there are variations and competing tendencies).

For instance consider Badiou’s rather sympathetic description of the notion of the Party as it was grasped by Marx and for that matter, Lenin (from his book Metapolitics): “It is crucial to emphasize,” Badiou states, “that for Marx of Lenin, who are both in agreement on this point, the real characteristic of the party is not its firmness, but rather its porosity to the event, its dispersive flexibility in the face of unforeseeable circumstances.” To quote a long passage that Bosteels finds in Badiou on this point:

Rather than referring to a dense, bound faction of the working class…the party refers to an unfixable omnipresence, whose proper function is less to represent class than to de-limit it by ensuring it is equal to everything that history presents as improbably and excessive in respect to the rigidity of interests, whether material or national. Thus, the communists embody the unbound multiplicity of consciousness, its anticipatory aspect, and therefore the precariousness of the bond, rather than its firmness.” (Metapolitics, 71).

Tracing the development of Badiou’s thought into his later writings, in relationship and in contrast to these writings of the 1980s and 1990s, Bosteels (in “The Leftist Hypothesis” essay) asks, skeptically, but not dismissively: “What happens when of these four fundamental concepts [class struggle, the dictatorship of the proletariat, revolution, and communism] only communism is retained?…Moreover…what are we to make of Badiou’s recent calls for the complete separation of the communist hypothesis both from the party form of politics and from the figure of the State”? (Bosteels, 50). We too should raise and pursue such critical questions. Note: they are not simply rhetorical questions aimed as disqualifying Badiou’s project as anathema to Marxism or “true communism,” but, rather, real questions that demand investigation and clarification. That is: If we cannot rely solely on the concept of class struggle producing a revolutionary communist subject, (the party being the official, and even historically destined leader of that struggle) then where might—where will, where must—such communist subjectivity come from? Similarly if the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat—as embodied in a socialist state—has proven historically to not in itself adequate to guaranteeing the progress of the revolutionary transformation of capitalism, through socialism to communism, then what new concepts and new forms are necessary and available to us to prepare the way for this radical transition? Considering a history of socialist states that have had difficulty “withering away,” how ought communists to relate to the notion of “socialism” today?

Moreover, we might ask (in ways that challenge Badiou): Does reckoning with the limitation of these “fundamental” concepts of Marxism to date necessitate their retirement (as “exhausted”), or merely their revision, reconception, or perhaps their being supplemented by other additional concepts and organizational forms? And if so, what are these concepts and forms? What in these concepts is still worth fighting for and reclaiming, albeit “against the current” of the times? Moreover we should ask to what extent has Badiou carried out the investigation of past communist events and sequences necessary to justify these rather bold theoretical generalizations? To what extent does our understanding of these previous sequences support, confirm, complicate, or contradict Badiou’s conclusions?

Personally, I should note, that while my thinking has been provoked on Badiou this point, I have yet to be convinced by Badiou’s more recent conclusion (which derives from Sylvian Lazarus, as I understand it) that the “Party-State” form of emancipatory politics is totally “exhausted.” In my estimation the quite informative and thought-provoking historical examination that Badiou gives the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China—Badiou’s prime example for the exhaustion of the party-state organization as a communist form of politics—does not provide a conclusive evidentiary basis that could justify the rather universalizing conclusions he then draws about politics in general.

At the same time, I unite with Badiou when he writes (in the Communist Hypothesis) that Mao remains the name of a problem we still face; that is the contradiction between maintaining power for a revolutionary order on the one hand, and unleashing further emancipatory currents that threaten to destabilize even the main institutions of that new order, on the other. I can at least unite with Badiou in that it is clear to me that the problem of the communist party must be thought again, whether or not we retain this name “party” in the end at all.

These days Badiou continues to reconsider and reframe his position with respect to the state. For instance, as Bosteels has pointed out, Badiou’s essay “The Idea of Communism,” in its published book form, differs subtly but importantly from the talk version of the essay he delivered at the Birkbeck conference some months prior. At the conference Badiou put forth his frequently quoted point about the “party-state” being “exhausted.” Yet, in the published version Badiou argues that it may still be possible for the Idea of Communism to include a projected figure of ‘another state’ so long as this post-capitalist state to come is on the one hand, subtracted from the present State and secondly is figured so that it’s essence is to “wither away” (CH 248).

I don’t mean to wade too deeply into this particular—and important– thicket of the Party-State. The main point here is that both historically, and even in our present moment, Badiou’s thinking is an active and developing project, one that—as Bosteels has sugggseted, is still subject to the pressure and effect of ideological struggle. Indeed, as Badiou himself argues, we are in a time of political experimentation, the experience and summation of which then ought—indeed must—be figured back into theoretical constructions. To do otherwise would be to fall into dogmatism.

But to get back to the issue of what communism means for Badiou.

Badiou offers several different Communist concepts, each of which have a distinct meaning and position within his thought, the main being:

What he calls “generic communism”

What he calls The Communist Hypothesis

And also what he calls The Idea of Communism

To get at the meaning of the first two concepts, we might do well to quote the following passage, from The Meaning of Sarkozy, one of Badiou’s most recent books.

In its generic sense, ‘communist’ means first of all, in a negative sense—as we can read in its canonical text The Communist Manifesto—that the logic of classes, of the fundamental subordination of people who actually work for a dominant class, can be overcome. This arrangement, which has been that of history ever since antiquity, is not inevitable. Consequently, the oligarchic powers of those who possess wealth and organize its circulation, crystallized in the might of states, is not inescapable (98).

As Badiou continues, moving to the second concept:

The communist hypothesis is that a different collective organization is practicable, one that will eliminate the inequality of wealth and even the division of labor; every individual will be a ‘multi-purpose worker,’ and in particular people will circulate between manual and intellectual work, as well as between town and country. The private appropriation of monstrous fortunes and their transmission by inheritance will disappear. The existence of a coercive state separate from civil society, with its military and police, will no longer seem a self-evident necessity. There will be, Marx tells us—and he saw this point as his major contribution—after a brief sequence of ‘proletarian dictatorship’ charged with destroying the remains of the old world, a long sequence of reorganization on the basis of a ‘free association’ of producers and creators, which will make possible a ‘withering away’ of the state. (98-99).

Generic communism here appears as an actuality of resistance. The actuality of this resistance and rebellion then makes possible the self-consciousness of that historical movement: the communist hypothesis. From this point on, for Badiou it becomes possible—at least in partial and fragmentary ways—to raise the issue of communism as a question and a problem to be solved, in its own right.

To offer a few further reflections on this passage: It is statement about possibility; and about the non-necessity of the current order of things. It is not to be confused with the hopefully hopelessly vague World Social Forum slogan that “Another World is Possible” in some clear and positive sense, as if the “alternative” is simply there for the taking (without a major revolutionary reckoning that involves the negation and overcoming of many aspects of the present situation). It is a statement aiming to deprive the ruling capitalist order of classes and states of its aura as ‘natural’ and ‘inevitable.’ That aims to clear the ideological fog that obscures the path(s) forward: Things do not have to be this way. We can make the world on new foundations.

There is more that we might say about even this short passage, namely its emphasis on the transformation of society not simply in terms of overcoming wealth inequality but also the division of labor, and in particular the division between mental and manual labor, and between town and country. (The debt to Marx and to Mao here are unmistakable.) Badiou, contrary to his critics is not simply calling for some radical egalitarian democracy of a “pre-marxian” sort.

The communist hypothesis for Badiou is a projected negation of the present conditions, and a posited horizon, not only to be strived towards but to be used as a critical—what he calls a “heuristic”—a Kantian “regulatory idea”; a means of “produce lines of demarcation between different forms of politics” that contend in the actuality of the present. It is not itself a path to be followed but a kind of lens, a perspective through which to evaluate and to decide between paths that present themselves. As he writes, “By and large, a particular political sequence is either compatible with these principles or opposed to them, in which case it is reactionary. Communism in this sense is a heuristic hypothesis that is very frequently used in political argument, even if the word itself does not appear.”

As Badiou elaborates on this point, with rhetorical flair:

If it is still true, as Sartre said, that ‘every anti-communist is a swine’, it is because any political sequence that, in its principles or lack of them, stands in formal contradiction with the communist hypothesis in its generic sense, has to be judged as opposed to the emancipation of the whole of humanity, and thus to the properly human destiny of humanity. Whoever does not illuminate the coming-to-be of humanity with the communist hypothesis—whatever words they use, as such words matter little—reduces humanity, as far as its collective becoming is concerned, to animality. As we know, the contemporary—that is, the capitalist name of this animality—is ‘competition’. The war dictated by self-interest, and nothing more. (Meaning of Sarkozy, 99-100).

Indeed, for Badiou, capitalism strives to make ‘animals’ of us all.

Badiou’s framing of the communism in terms of the Communist Hypothesis, of course, draws an analogy between the historical struggle to achieve communism and the proof of a mathematical theorem. I see at least three implications of this framing: 1) It suggests an approach of testing and experimenting, of persistent inquiry rather than doctrinal certitude; 2) In contrast with, say the language of Manifestation, to frame communism as a hypothesis emphasizes the importance of thought and learning in communism’s emergence; communism is not something whose emergence is simply immanent to the dynamics of capitalism and the class struggle, though its possibility is suggested—and its hypothesis established—for Badiou even by pre-modern slave uprisings like Spartacus, etc. The working out of communism is something that requires abstraction and reflection, as well as conscious testing in theory and practice. 3) By speaking of Communism as a hypothesis, Badiou reframes previous (unsuccessful) attempts at achieving communism as merely the “prehistory of the proof of the hypothesis.” Failure, and the summing up and learning from failure, through close and situated analysis of those sequences, is absolutely crucial, to any scientific endeavor. Certainly for an experiment to fail, or rather to produce negative results, does not impugn the project as a whole. Past failures are nothing to be ashamed of, so long as you learn from them and persist in the proof! Indeed, they are often necessary to bring about the rare and precious positive breakthroughs. Likewise with the history of the communist movement.

I will at this point bring in a fourth aspect which seems to me more of a danger implicit in this hypothesis framing. Namely 4) that the mathematical rhetoric here may lead some to read Badiou as suggesting that the problems and questions of communism can be resolved solely within the context of controlled laboratory experiments, or through theoretical abstractions shared at conferences like these (or via websites even). Certainly, in academic contexts many a thinker—Marx himself for one—has been domesticated in this way, divorced from practice that engages the world beyond the seminar table. But is this tendency one that Badiou seeks to encourage? I would say no. For alongside the imperative to learn from the failures of the communist movements and socialist states of the past, and to draw abstract and universal lessons from these studies, Badiou also calls us to examine the partial successes and failures of contemporary political movements whose actual politics and ideology are far from communist.

As he writes, for instance, “Today we need to investigate the real nature of the link to the people from the standpoint of the universal lessons to be drawn, of organizations limited by their religious allegiance: Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine. We should also pay attention to the countless worker uprisings in China, and the actions of the ‘Maoists’ in India and Nepal. The list is by no means closed” (Sarkozy, 111). The point here I want to underscore is that alongside Badiou’s mobilization of the communist hypothesis (and the communist Idea, to be discussed further below) and his emphasis on abstractions and subjective dynamics, is a perhaps less pronounced, but equally important imperative to investigate political situations past and present, with an eye to how the new communist sequence can be helped forth.

The Idea of Communism

Badiou’s Idea of Communism, which he describes as more of an operation—I might suggest projection or even project—than a fixed “utopian ideal,” has a distinct meaning, related but different from The Communist Hypothesis. Basically, it is the operation through which an individual becomes Subject to a communist Truth-process, symbolically bridging the gap between the singularity of particular political practices and the great historic collective project of human emancipation. If the Communist Hypothesis aims to open our eyes and help us see the possibilities and lessons of the past and present more clearly, than the Communist Idea, is an essentially subjective operation, one that makes the individual communist subject a part of something bigger than him/herself. To quote Badiou, at several key points:

An Idea is the possibility for an individual to understand that his or her participation in a singular political process…is also , in a certain way, a historical decision. Thanks to the Idea, the individual, realizes his or her belonging as an element of a new Subject, realizes his or her belonging to the movement of History (Communist Hypothesis, 235).

In other words, the communist Idea is the imaginary operation whereby an individual subjectivation projects a fragment of the political real into the symbolic narrative of History. (CH, 239).

The Idea is a historical anchoring of everything elusive, slippery and evanescent in the becoming of a truth. But it can only be so if it admits as its own real this aleatory, elusive, slippery, evanescent, dimension (CH, 247).

The role of this Idea is to support that individual’s incorporation into the discipline of a truth procedure, to authorize the individual, in his or her own eyes, to go beyond the Statist constraints of mere survival by becoming a part of the body-of-truth, or subjectivizable body (CH, 252).

In short, Badiou asks us to anchor communist subjectivity in the imagination, not in the necessities of history. The state of being a communist subject is not, for Badiou, something that can be reduced to, or read off of objective determinants, whether of class position, or party affiliation—certainly not just by adding the adjective “communist” to some pre-existing or half-thought practice or organization. It is not something organic or stable or something guaranteed but something that is sustained only so long as the communist Idea is operative. It is not guaranteed by History, which remains an imagined projected narrative, albeit a necessary one, if we are collectively to think, and through our thoughts, and actions supported by those thoughts, to actualize global human emancipation.

We may hear in Badiou’s language here a certain secularized communist recasting of Christian communion. Through the operation of the Idea we become aware of our potential to join our individual self as part of a larger greater body of truth, and a movement of History. Contrary to a certain vulgar secularism, within our age of cynicism, I find, this notion of the Communist Idea of interest as a way to simultaneously (on the one hand) en-courage and sustain the fidelity of lonely and depression-visited radical anti-capitalists in a moment of Sarkozys and Obamas. At the same time it is a notion that encourages rather than squelches local experiments in political practice. For no practice can be deemed in itself in advance to be “communist” or “non-communist” based on simply its location or its immediate import; it is the way that practice is bound up with and mediated by, and becomes a site of the idea operation of communism that they will have become communist. The Idea remains an Idea not a certainty. Just as a hypothesis demands proof in practice.

Which then brings us to the final two questions in the assigned blurb:

3+4) What is the nature of the “present historical moment”? And what are its “emancipatory possibilities?”

I might reverse this question and instead ask : What are some of the things that stand in the way of the emergence of a movement capable of cultivating, organizing, and mobilizing these emancipatory possibilities?

A quick list comes to mind:

Fragmentation, pessimism, isolation

The TINA notion that “there is no alternative” to the capitalist system

Cynicism and nihilism (both on and beyond the left)

Dogmatism and Sectarianism (including a fetishization of or premature dismissals of tactics and forms)

Facile anti-communist dismissals of actually existing communists movements, past and present

I would argue that Badiou offers us perspectives and approaches, and a spirit of enthusiastic engagement , that can play a role in helping us in addressing all of the above weaknesses. No magic bullet. But an element of the mix!

**

In closing, a few notes on an additional question put to us by Platypus and by Chris Cutrone:

“How does Badiou’s conception of communism relate to the history of Marxism in the 20th century, with its roots in the 19th century?

As is well known, Badiou places particular emphasis and pays close attention to the moments of the Paris Commune, and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, as well as May 1968.

He places great emphasis on learning from failure. Failure not as it was “doomed from the start” but as it was worked through in actual historical experience, theory and practice.

He places a particular focus on Mao as a name that still embodies a the practical-theoretical knot of the communist movement, even today, namely: How to build an organization that is massive and powerful enough to overthrow the present order, to sustain state power (in a capitalist-imperialist world), and yet is able to stave off ossification, bureaucratization, capitalist roaders—to remain a revolutionary agent encouraging, not suppressing the initiative of ‘spontaneous’ mass organization and social transformation.

Obviously, we are not in the position of picking up where Mao left off….The practical question for us is not “what could or should have Mao or the revolutionary cadre in China have done to transform their possibilities in the 60s or 70s?” But how to organize NOW in light of the limits and the tangles that communist revolutionaries come up against in the past.

To briefly and provocatively conclude: what I take from Badiou in this vein is the necessity for us today to conceive of communist revolution as from the start—not simply after supplanting the present state power—a cultural revolution. We need not just a revolutionary party, but a revolutionary people. For which we need revolutionary intellectuals and activists who sink deep roots in the people not simply to build a core of cadre oriented towards exposing and eventually overthrowing of the current state power as well as the construction of a new and different one, but whose aim is to stir up and support emancipatory ideas and practices so as to cultivate new cultural and social spaces that can now prepare the field, so that we have a shot of avoiding those pitfalls that have constrained and even toppled those who have come before us.

Related posts:

1. How can communism come to be?
2. On The Idea Of Communism: Communism 2.0?
3. Zizek on our situation — and communism

Class Truth — An Essential Concept: Part 3

by Vern Gray

Interpreting or Contemplating the World, and Changing It

Class truth is part of both; how it relates to changing the world is sometimes overlooked. It is instructive to review what Marx had to say on the relationship between contemplation or interpretation, on the one hand, and an active orientation toward changing the world:

I: The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism—that of Feuerbach included—is that the thing [Gegenstand], reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object [Objekt] or of contemplation [Anschauung], but not as human sensuous activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence it happened that the active side, in contradistinction to materialism, was developed by idealism—but only abstractly, since, of course, idealism does not know real, sensuous activity as such.

IX. The highest point attained by contemplative materialism, that is, materialism which does not understand sensuousness as practical activity, is the contemplation of single individuals in ‘civil society.’

XI. The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it. (62)

Contemplative and mechanical materialism form a unity in which consciousness plays only a reflective, passive role in its relation to the world. The idea that first we can learn everything on a contemplative, class-free, pure-scientific level and then we can apply it to change reality is similar to Engels’s definition of freedom in which one only “recognizes necessity,” and then later, having learned about and appreciated it, one can “act according to it.” It doesn’t see that learning about and changing the world are interactive and mutually dependent all along the way.

Case study: taking another look at the Bush aide

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend—but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’ (63)

The epistemological point here is that when the bourgeoisie has the initiative, it can create its own class truths. Within a considerable domain, and for some appreciable time, this can remain true, even though the bourgeoisie’s outlook is idealist, and even if it is faith-based. It can also be true within a considerable domain even if the bourgeoisie does encounter, as it inevitably does, obstacles in its effort to enforce its global dominance. The constriction of its geostrategic options does not invalidate the epistemological point.

The question of which class has the initiative in a time of flux, especially a revolutionary situation, gives special relevance to the concept of class truth in such times. In the early years following the Russian revolution, Lenin wrote: “It is one of our basic tasks to contrapose our own truth to bourgeois ‘truth,’ and win its recognition.” (64) Lenin’s statement captures an important part of the class struggle, with each class struggling to change reality in ways characteristic of that class, and in doing so, to create new class truths. Especially in dynamic conditions, as during a revolutionary period, it is impossible for either class to assume a position that is equivalent to that of the other in regard to changing, and learning from, reality. No “scientific appraisals” can fully bridge that gulf.

The distinct social position, vantage point (not “god’s eye view”) and transformative capacity of the proletariat

The proletariat is in the position to discern various truths that the bourgeoisie cannot, because of the ways in which the latter is affected by the split between mental and manual labor, its ideological blinders, its resistance to any transformation of the world that is not in its own image, and so on. (65)

The China scholar John Bryan Starr offers these comments on Mao’s epistemology:

In addition to the tests of validity and relevance as a means of ranking ideas there is, as we have seen, a third test that emerges from the implications of Mao’s argument: that is, there is a ranking of ideas based on characteristics of the observer-actors who perceive, conceptualize, and put them into practice. All observers, in Mao’s epistemological system, are not necessarily equal, and thus the products of all processes of cognition are not equally valid. Because, as we have seen, the role of observer is linked to that of actor, and because all praxis, as Mao saw it, has a political content, the criteria for legitimacy of observers in his epistemological system are the same criteria by which legitimacy is measured in the political sphere. . . . (66)

This applies, I think, in an overall sense and at the level of classes or large groups, but because Starr does not distinguish between classes and individuals, his formulation also leads to one of the wrong lines about class truth that influenced the GPCR, namely, the idea that the mere fact of being part of the proletariat makes one’s perceptions, judgments, and theories more valid than any of those of the bourgeoisie (see below).

Facts, Truths, and Theories

If truth consisted only of facts, then the differences between bourgeois and proletarian truths would be radically reduced.

How is truth different from facts?

If truths were reducible to and basically equivalent to facts, then the Chinese revisionists’ interpretation of “seek truth from facts” would be correct. Mao had a more dialectical conception. Thus the question of how the relationship between truth and facts is understood has a class aspect.

But let’s pause for a moment and consider what a fact is—the lowly fact, which seldom gets its philosophical due. I understand it to pertain to a discrete, specific, and sometimes very limited part (the “factoid”) of objective reality, to be an aspect of what actually is. A fact exists even if there is no consciousness that is aware of that fact. Thus an essential part of the definition of truth—the existence of the subject—is absent from the definition of fact. Further, a fact usually refers to only certain occurrences or subtypes of physical matter and not to things on a large scale. This is in contrast to the broader applicability or validity of many kinds of truth. (67)

Steele has written, “Our truths are also of various sorts: the field of truths (unlike Thomas Friedman’s world) is not flat, and just to say that ‘truth is truth’ is profoundly falsifying. For among truths there are many permutations and levels—more superficial truths and those that are deeper; truths with a higher degree of relativity and truths that are more absolute; contingent and necessary truths. . . .”

With regard to theories, he has also written, “First: high-level theories (Einstein’s theory of relativity, Marx and Engels’s theory of historical development, etc.) neither arise from, nor are confirmed or refuted by, direct experience or observation or even an extensive correlation of observations. Theory requires a leap, a leap which is relative to the experiences and observations out of which it comes—it is relative to a set of empirical data, we might say—but is not determined or necessitated by those data (or any other).” (68)

In the 1920s, measurements of the diffraction (bending) of light during a solar eclipse supported Einstein’s general theory of relativity. But they did not prove the entire theory, and had they turned out differently, they would not have refuted the whole theory either. What the measurements did show was that Einstein’s theory was more accurate than Newton’s in predicting the amount by which the light would bend in the presence of a gravitational field. True, if Einstein’s theory had repeatedly made incorrect predictions, it would have been understood to apply to some more limited part of objective reality, but to suppose that the entire theory was wrong, “refuted” by these measurements, would be wrong. It remains true that it gets at a deeper level of physical reality than does Newton’s theory, resolving some of the contradictions in the latter and providing a basis for a broader range of successful explanations and predictions. (69)

Structure of truth

John Steele discusses the “flattening” of truths down to one level, as well as the conflation of facts and truth. As an example, he discusses the relationship of the sphere of circulation of commodities, as the surface phenomenon, to phenomena in the sphere of production, which is the underlying reality of the capitalist economy:

The point Marx is making is that these ‘phenomenal forms’ [meaning: commodity circulation, the wage-form, and others] are indeed phenomena of our social life, that is, real aspects of the surface of bourgeois society, in which people meet as individuals and carry on exchanges with each other (and in this respect the worker appears as simply another individual with a commodity, his own labor-power, to exchange). This surface corresponds to the sphere of the circulation of commodities, in which equal value is, on average, exchanged for equal value. . . .

Marx’s aim in Capital is to unearth the essence of capitalism, going beyond the sphere of circulation to that of production, showing that the free and equal exchange of commodities has as its presupposition and basis class exploitation of proletarian by capitalist, and that the ‘free individuals’ who populate the surface are secondary to the basic social workings of the sphere of production and the social whole.

But we need to also see that this surface is not an illusion. It is part of the environment in which we live and function. The truths of this sphere, with its spontaneous notions of individual freedom, equality, and property, have truth in their direct relation with the phenomena of circulation of commodities—but they also express, in distorted or inverted form, the underlying social relations of production. The truths of this sphere, then (to use the metaphor of surface and depth), at once correlate directly with the surface phenomena while they simultaneously distort, hide, and express the dynamics of what lies beneath.

One point here is that there are many different levels of truths, and the relation they bear to one another can be very complex and twisted. (And once again the insipid inadequacy of ‘truth is truth’ and ‘truth itself is objective’ is clear.) But what does this have to do with class truth?

Just this: these ‘truths of the surface,’ in Marx’s view, are the class truths of the bourgeoisie, in the sense that they are the building blocks of the dominant ideology, the ruling ideas, of the social formation in which the bourgeoisie is the dominant or ruling class, that is, capitalism.

History and Truth

“Timeless truth”

It is sometimes maintained that “truth is not socially or historically determined,” meaning that if something occurred in the past, then a correct interpretation of what happened must be the same for everyone in all subsequent societies regardless of the nature of their societies, their class position, etc. This view emphasizes what truth was in the past, that is, it privileges things that cannot be altered by human activity in the present. However, truths about the past can be understood only to the extent that people can change things in the present and then make a projection backward in time. How they will do that, and how well they will do it, will be dependent on the historical situation in which they are embedded, as well as its class determinants. Thus, since truth is a correspondence between consciousness and the objective world, and not merely the objective world, that truth will be socially and historically conditioned (note: conditioned but not determined).

Second, true statements about what happened in the past concern things that were themselves often socially and historically conditioned. That past events occurred as they did, and that they can therefore be learned about later even if they can no longer be changed, are truths that are embedded in history.

Perhaps even more clearly, social and historical factors do enter in to which new realities and new truths can be created today. This argument applies, I believe, to all truths except for mathematical truths and perhaps a few other types of truth (investigating that is a question for another time).

In politics and economics, there are some truths that have great generality. Some of these would include that oppression breeds resistance; that socialism can avoid many of the crises to which capitalism is prone; and that in war, people and not weapons are decisive. Yet even these are historically conditioned and not eternal. For example, none of them would have force in a communist society.

John Steele’s analysis of the historical character of truth stands in stark contrast to the idea of “timeless truth”:

For Marx, on the contrary, these categories [of bourgeois economic life] are both historical, and stamped with a class character. The critique of classical (bourgeois) political economy can only be made as part of the critique of the social formation of which it is the (ideological) science. A necessary condition for thoroughly understanding the dynamics of capitalism is to understand it as a social form which was born and will die. (In the Afterword to the second German edition of Capital, Marx characterizes this way of proceeding as dialectic, which in its rational form ‘includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up.’)

Also, “. . . truth and practice are historical and social. The truths we come to know, and our practices, are never just ours individually, because we are always acting, and knowing, in a social context. Historical too: human beings forge truths, we might say in an echo of Marx in a different context, but not in circumstances of their own choosing. We never ‘start from scratch,’ but within a public, social, historical context of truths and knowledges, which we reproduce or transform.”

History is a struggle over what social, natural, and ideological truths will be created and how they will be understood. These processes involved in truth-making and truth-understanding are interwoven in history.

Terry Eagleton disagrees with this view:

“. . . States of affairs are historically shifting, but true statements about them are not. If it is true today that capitalism is an unjust form of life, then the claim will still be valid long after the system has passed away. It has not ceased to be true that Ireland entered into a union with Britain in 1800 simply because it is no longer 1800.” (70) Eagleton goes on to compare and contrast truth, value, and beauty.

While Eagleton wants to distinguish truth from value, arguing elsewhere in his essay that only truth stands above history, as an example he gives a statement concerning the injustice of capitalism. But it would seem that in his system, justice—in an ethical rather than a juridical sense—would be subsumed under value, not truth. Leaving aside this curious misstep in which he would seem to contradict himself, there is a question about why Eagleton would restrict truth statements to statements about what happened in the past. His standpoint does not address the fact that the statement “capitalism is the most widespread system in the world” was not true in 1800, but is true today, yet in the future may once again no longer be true. Similarly, the statement that “England will become the leading colonial power in India in the next fifty years” was true in 1800 but is not true today, not simply because Britain is otherwise occupied today but because that colonization has already happened and thus cannot happen (for the first time) in the next fifty years.

Eagleton, in effect, “devalorizes” statements about the present, the historical present, and the future, calling them “statements about what is the case” rather than truths. Truth itself is conceived as contemplative and timeless. Eagleton’s  position is also, and most emphatically, invalid in regard to statements whose truth depends on the outcome of major social conflicts or economic processes that have indeterminate outcomes, ones in which the struggles of different class actors are decisive and the question of which class holds the upper hand can remain unsettled for a relatively long historical period. Thus, which truths will be created is generally not a predetermined matter.

Suppose, however, that we agree to set aside all those contingent truths that more or less fall into the category of what Eagleton refers to as “statements about what is the case.” Does what remains—the larger, more general truths, which encompass many more facts and a broader range of conditions, and characterize reality at deeper levels—consist of “timeless truths”?

I don’t think so. Again, setting aside some of the more contingent truths about capitalism—relative details such as when Britain colonized India—let’s look at some of the more general truths about capitalism. Capitalism is based on generalized commodity production. Throughout its history it has been characterized much of the time by crises, war (in a broad range of circumstances), economic and social polarization between classes, destruction of the natural environment, and again, in many of the more developed economies, monopolization, the growth of unproductive sectors of the economy, financialization, and so forth. Are these timeless truths, or, on the contrary, do they arise at particular stages of social and economic development? Even commodity production in general, which lays the basis for capitalism as labor power itself becomes a commodity, arises only during a certain historical epoch. Was it predestined that capitalism would arise? Or was it the product of an actual economic, political, and ideological development?

If capitalism were not to arise, then all the “big truths” associated with its various main features would not arise either. It seems to me that this is the principal consideration regarding whether these big truths are timeless. It is a secondary consideration that, once having arisen, it remains true that they have arisen (even if they are reversed now and again), as in Eagleton’s view.

In effect, Eagleton creates a world in which a comparison of static situations is the province of truth, whereas any statements written in the context of changing realities somehow do not merit consideration as truths. In this way, he repeats the bourgeois-metaphysical approach to history. The role of humans, and in particular, classes, in bringing new truths into being is not considered, nor is the fact that all changes in society have a historical basis. People make history, but they do not make it any way they please, since the concrete possibilities in each epoch are historically configured. (71)

Some things that are not true at a given time will potentially be true in the future. For example, it is not true in the real world today that communism is superior to capitalism (assuming we can agree on what we mean by “superior”—more equitable, more liberating of humans’ ability to flourish, more environmentally sustainable, and so forth) for the simple reason that communism itself does not exist. There are various objective and subjective conditions in today’s world that would have to be profoundly different before communism could exist. The objective conditions comprise both social (human-made, including both material and ideal) and natural conditions. One of the necessary conditions in the sphere of ideas is that people share some basic conception of what a future communist society would be like, of why it would be a better world, and are willing to struggle to bring it into being. As their struggle advances, the ideal superiority of communism becomes more palpable. But the communist world remains only potentially better until it is brought into being or the process of bringing it into being reaches a certain level.

A given set of natural conditions sets the broad framework for what kind of societies can exist. A major question today is whether natural conditions on Earth will develop in such a way as to allow the thriving, or even the survival, of human society, including the possibility of a communist society, in the future. At this time there is no guarantee that this will ever be true—on this planet, in this solar system and galaxy. (72)

On “Political Truth”

The relation of class truth to political truth is roughly analogous to that between class and party. To muddy one distinction is to collapse the other. Class truth becomes subsumed under political truth, and the masses are replaced as an agent of history by the party.

I think it is important to understand the terms class truth and political truth in very different ways. Only classes can create class truths, whereas political movements and organizations create political truths. Class truth is more fundamental; it is the class-mediated relation of subject to object, particularly evident in dynamic situations; it is the transformation of objective reality (as well as subjective reality) and thus of the truth, especially in society but also in some cases in nature. Political truth, by contrast, is a matter of how the truth is understood by political movements and organizations, often as concentrated in political parties; in the case of bourgeois and opportunist organizations, which is the only sense in which I will use the term political truth it in this paper, it often means the instrumentalist manipulation of the truth, its biased reformulation and distortion or use of outright lies to serve political objectives.

Lenin contrasts the party and the proletariat in his description of the conditions necessary for an insurrection. The first condition he identifies is that “to be successful, insurrection must rely not upon conspiracy and not upon a party, but upon the advanced class.” (73) A revolution creates a new class reality, and without the proletariat’s active role, there is no possibility of leading the people to create this reality; no party alone can do it.

On “Individual Truth” and “Subjective Narrative”

The progressive intelligentsia and academic Marxism

To uphold a correct conception of class truth does not mean denying the importance of combating subjectivism and criticizing the identity politics that is sometimes associated with it. On the one hand this is very important in the academy:

The tide began to turn against truth, and in postmodernism’s favor, in the late 1970s. It was then that French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault first boldly put truth in scare quotes. ‘“Truth”‘, he declared, ‘is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements. . . .’ No longer would ‘the true’ be understood, as it had for millennia, as that which is ‘in accordance with fact or reality’. From now on, for a growing and influential sector of the intelligentsia, the true would be posed as a problem to be solved.

Surrender the possibility of truth, and one surrenders too the possibility of comparing the way things are with the way things ought to be. . . .

Far from being a small or insignificant movement, postmodernism is now the primary field of knowledge for the education of the critical intelligentsia in the United States. It is the leading theoretical tendency on the terrains of about two dozen different disciplines, subfields, and areas of study. (74)

And on the other hand, what exists in the academy is, to a significant degree, a reflection of broader trends in society. In the mass culture of countries like the USA, with all its individualism and subjectivity, it is particularly important to struggle against the relativist notion of “individual truth,” even while it is right to unite politically with many of the progressive forces that subscribe to some version of this epistemology. (75)

Strengths and Weaknesses of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) Regarding Class Truth

The Chinese revolutionaries led by Mao Tsetung had an understanding of the question of class truth that I believe to have been basically correct, although it had important secondary weaknesses.

These Maoist revolutionaries wrote: “Just when we began the counter-offensive against the wild attacks of the bourgeoisie, the authors of the Report raised the slogan: ‘Everyone is equal before the truth.’ This is a bourgeois slogan. Completely negating the class nature of truth, they use this slogan to protect the bourgeoisie and oppose the proletariat, oppose Marxism-Leninism and oppose Mao Tsetung Thought.” (76)

The revolutionaries were right. Everyone is not “equal before the truth,” because people—and in particular classes—have, on the whole, a different relationship to reality, and so in an overall sense, although not with respect to every particular truth, they have a different relationship to the truth. Again, this is valid at the level of classes but not for every individual.

They also wrote: “Truth has a class character. There have never been truths commonly regarded as ‘indisputable’ by all classes in the field of social science.” (77)

While this statement is principally true, it requires some examination. First, use of the word indisputable emphasizes that the classes cannot come to agreement on how to interpret the social sciences and does not explicitly refer to the different social realities that they create, which is the principal basis for their differing attitudes toward what is or is not disputable. Second, the statement denies that there are any truths whatsoever in the social sciences that are upheld (held to be indisputable) by both classes, which is not true. For example, Marx himself recognized that bourgeois historians had described the historical development of the class struggle; Lenin pointed out that the doctrine of the class struggle was acceptable to the bourgeoisie. (78) Finally, the Chinese revolutionaries’ statement does not refer to class truths in the natural sciences. But without recognizing the existence of class truths in natural science, one cannot correctly identify the basis for class truths in social science either.

It should also be noted that the terms of discussion about truth were clouded by other positions that the revolutionaries adopted. One was the idea that “truth is the relationship between facts.” (79) There is an aspect of this that is correct, going against the “flattening” of truths and recognizing that truths are conceptually different from facts. However, in this definition of truth, consciousness and the subject have disappeared, which, as we have seen, undercuts an understanding of class truth. The revisionists seized on this view of truth to say that the truth was “out there” for anyone to understand, using so-called “classless” methods of investigation, and to divert attention from ideological and political line.

A related matter is that the Chinese revolutionaries emphasized, in the main correctly, the importance of class position and class background in influencing one’s outlook and relationship to social reality. This orientation was explicitly reflected in the revolutionary film made during the GPCR, Breaking with Old Ideas, and, to repeat, is largely correct if understood at the level of classes rather than every individual. (80)

On the other hand, one of the philosophical-political errors of the revolutionaries during the GPCR was a general failure to recognize the extent to which other classes aside from the proletariat, and sometimes not even part of the masses, might have a correct understanding of particular truths. The sum total of these other classes’ understanding of truth was conflated with their knowledge of particular truths: since they were “off” in general, then they must be “off” in the particular. Mao knew the importance of learning from everyone. (80) But he was not always successful in making this the common understanding of the masses, even in the GPCR, and it was not the working perspective of the vast majority of written materials about theoretical questions, which relied overwhelmingly on MLM and Chinese sources. This played into the idea that “the truth is what we believe”—since everything the bourgeoisie believes is false. It impoverished theoretical development in several spheres, and politically, it contributed to driving many people who were potential allies into becoming supporters of the revisionists.

In summary, the Chinese Maoists left a mainly correct legacy regarding class truth, one that we should uphold overall and build on, but with some important criticisms. The main thing is to develop our understanding far beyond what our predecessors were able to achieve.

* * * * *

In summary: to repudiate class truth means to sever practice from theory and marginalize the dynamic role of the conscious subject. To imagine that the class outlook and activity of the proletariat are far removed from the content of truth and the scientific methods for finding it in tandem with changing the world—this amounts to an acceptance and freezing of existing conditions, in which the rightness of revolution is so distant from its realization.

Going up against such a pessimistic misconception of the world is a correct understanding of class truth—one that understands the relationship between knowing the world and changing it as a process that is qualitatively different for different classes, and on that basis, supports the conscious, independent political activity of the proletariat and affirms its ability to create the most fundamental new class realities—and class truths.

Notes

(62) “Theses on Feuerbach,” in Marx Engels Selected Works, vol. 1, 14–15.

(63) Ron Suskind, “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004. The point of the aide’s statement is that you (the reality-based people) can “interpret” the world while my people continue to change it. In effect, that is this Bush aide’s “spin” on Marx.

(64) “Speech Delivered at an All-Russia Conference of Political Education Workers of Gubernia and Uyezd Education Departments,” November 3, 1920; marxists.org, cited in Nine Letters, #4.

(65) Some people’s views amount to the idea that since Lenin and Mao believed in class truth, then to a degree, they must have “forgotten” about the objective world!—Lenin, who wrote Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, a book grounded in the epistemological significance of the objective world; and Mao, who led the Chinese people’s war for more than twenty years, during the course of which he, and the troops and masses whom he led, faced a continual life-and-death situation that required that they have a deep knowledge of objective reality.

(66) Continuing the Revolution: The Political Thought of Mao, 70.

(67) Interestingly, none of the “Marxist” philosophical dictionaries—traditional communist, modern revisionist, or neo-Marxist—that I have cited elsewhere in this paper bothers to define a fact.

(68) The designations “relative” and “absolute,” as well as “necessary” and “contingent,” are themselves relative to the relationships between and among contradictions and to the structure of reality, or, to put it differently, they depend on the context. These questions are part of another discussion.

(69) Theory is not reducible to observations, refutations, or correlations, but there has to be some support from these. Otherwise, how is a correct theory to be distinguished from a false one? Mere internal consistency? Robustness of the theory in generating hypotheses? (To be clear: the “fertility” of a theory is not sufficient, but it is very important and at times decisive. Thus according to the astrophysicist Rocky Kolb, giving a lecture at the University of Chicago in 2007, Copernicus’s theory of planetary motion supplanted Ptolemy’s, not because it produced more accurate calculations of that motion—it did not—but because it served as the basis for more hypotheses that led to further theoretical development.) This interpretation would be a form of coherence theory. At the least, a scientific theory requires amendments and revisions that are grounded in reality. Particularly in the natural sciences, but to a lesser extent in the social sciences as well, the point of a theory is also to make predictions—which may be of a probabilistic nature. Despite all this, the notion that a theory can be “fasified” in the direct way that a particular consequence of that theory may be—that is, shown to be contrary to fact—is a sign that facts, truths, and theories have all been thrown into the same mishmash.

(70) “On Telling the Truth,” in Socialist Register 2006, 275–76.

(71) I have not seen an argument that, in my view, successfully explains how the view that all truths are “timeless” or ahistorical can be squared with historical materialism.

(72) In my review of Bill Martin’s Ethical Marxism, I agree with him that communism is not inevitable but argue that there is a “bifurcated inevitability” in today’s world: either communism will be achieved, or else there will be ecocide. See http://www.khukuritheory.net/ethical-marxism/.

(73) “Marxism and Insurrection,” in Collected Works, vol. 26, 22. One major measure of the real damage done by political truth in the history of the ICM concerns the Great Purges in the USSR. If the purges are not summed up, then a form of political truth is perpetuated.

(74) John Sanbonmatsu, “Postmodernism and the Corruption of the Academic Intelligentsia,” in Socialist Register 2006, 196, 197, 199.

(75) This is not to deny that new truths are often first discovered by individuals. But if they are to be socially significant, they must be grasped by broader segments of society. Also, individuals are powerless to create new truths or transform social conditions on the scales that classes can.

(76) “Circular of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, May 16, 1966,” in Important Documents on the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China.

(77) Shanghai Revolutionary Mass Criticism Writing Group, “Who Transforms Whom? A Comment on Kairov’s ‘Pedagogy,’” Peking Review, March 6, 1970, 11, cited in Nine Letters, #4.

(78) See Marx, Letter to Joseph Weydemeyer, March 5, 1852, in Marx Engels Selected Correspondence, 64; and Lenin, The State and Revolution, in Collected Works, vol. 25, 411.

(79) During the people’s war, Mao had written that “’Facts’ are all the things that exist objectively, ‘truth’ means their internal relations, that is, the laws governing them. . . .” “Reform Our Study,” in Selected Works, vol. III, 22. Again, the revisionists were able to twist the meaning and political significance of Mao’s statement because it did not explicitly point out the role of the class subject in creating, and arriving at, the truth.

(80) However, the film has been quite controversial among communists. In one scene, the decisive criterion for admitting a worker to the college is that his hands are calloused from heavy labor. But this in itself, it is objected by critics of the film, is not proof that he has more understanding of the truth, or more inclination to put it at the service of the people. Yes . . . and so? One can only expect likelihoods in these matters, not certainties. Similarly, is being a person of color in the USA today a valid reason for admission to a college? Does the fact that it does “not necessarily” mean that an individual has more of a grasp of reality, or an orientation of “taking it back to the community,” mean that it is not a valid criterion for deciding whether a candidate should be admitted, and even a relatively major reason rather than just an occasional tie-breaker? In my opinion, these arguments that would put emphasis on the fact that, in the one instance having a class background and position as part of the exploited class, and in the other instance being a member of an oppressed nationality, cannot be decisive in every individual case, are arguments that uphold aspects of the “classless” viewpoint—but are ultimately and in the real world, not classless at all. Beyond that, in the scene in Breaking with Old Ideas about admission to the college, the film is clearly dealing with the question of a class, and a representative of a class, rather than with the question of particular individuals. Could Breaking with Old Ideas do better? Perhaps, but it would have to do so in a way that does not allow the correctness of the philosophy to destroy the power of the art.

On the other hand, the film handles the question of science, in particular science that does not have an immediate application in the class struggle or the struggle for production, narrowly and dogmatically. The basic position of the film on this particular question is not the correct formulation that “Marxism embraces but does not replace natural science” but rather that Marxism can replace natural science, or at the very least, those parts of natural science, perhaps even major parts, that are irrelevant to immediate material needs: intellectual pursuits are always trumped by the requirements of production. This comes out most sharply in the blurring of the question of whether it is worthwhile to learn about horses that are not native to the region, with the necessity of refusing to take an exam because of the urgency of saving the crops. Were the young people being trained to have a broader education and be able to run the state, or only to be better peasants and activists in their community?

(81) This is abundantly clear from reading his speeches, such as those gathered in Chairman Mao Talks to the People, but also in Nixon’s memoirs.

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Related posts:

1. On the concept of class truth – I
2. On the concept of class truth – II

Class Truth — An Essential Concept: Part 2

by Vern Gray

Class Truths in the Natural Sciences

It has often been assumed that, among the various spheres of thought, only the social sciences, the arts, and philosophy have a class character; and as will be discussed below, this was also an influential view among the Chinese revolutionaries. It has much deeper roots in Marxism, however, particularly in strands outside the MLM one. In their book Ecological Rift, John Bellamy Foster et al. point out how a theoretical and practical wall was erected between the natural and social sciences by many Marxists. One of the most prominent proponents of such a view was the communist theoretician Georgi Lukács. (26) But “official” Marxism in the USSR was little better on this question. During the Stalin period, while there was a certain understanding of how Marxism could both learn from and guide the natural sciences, an incorrect overall line was in command and was enforced vis-à-vis parts of physics, genetics, psychology, and other sciences. After Khrushchev came to power, a theory of “pure natural science” coexisted with a dogmatic understanding of dialectical materialism.

Contradictions in “natural reality” do not “die out” when one moves into the sphere of social reality; the reverse is also true. (27) Consequently one cannot “sequester” class truths in the social sciences, and there are inevitably elements of reality in nature and of truths in the natural sciences that have a class character (this also occurs for other reasons internal to the natural world). It is arguable that if it can be shown that class truths exist in the natural world, their existence in the social world becomes all the more definite.

Mao says, “In class society everyone lives as a member of a particular class, and every kind of thinking, without exception, is stamped with the brand of a class.” (28) It is important to note that Mao says “every kind of thinking” rather than “every thought.” This is a point that might be argued, but a declaration that every discrete thought has a class character overdetermines and incorrectly specifies the nature of many thoughts. I believe it is correct to say that the class character of various “kinds of thinking” exists at more inclusive levels—more general theories, for example (including what Smolin calls “theories of principle”) rather than all specific ideas, although there are indeed many ideas that do have a class character.

In any event, in Mao’s view, the class character of every kind of thinking applies across the board—to philosophy, social science, the arts, and also—a matter of controversy for some—natural science.

Marx and Engels’s correspondence in the period following the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species shows that, while they upheld it as a great scientific achievement, they nonetheless had a sharp understanding of how Darwin’s thinking had been influenced by bourgeois ideas, including, in particular, those of Thomas Malthus concerning the supposed inevitability of overpopulation in comparison to the level of food resources. (29) Scientists in the twentieth century—the vast majority of them upholding Darwin’s basic theory—have produced broader critiques of Darwin’s ideas regarding such issues as the one-sided emphasis on competition (the “struggle for existence”) over cooperation or coevolution, the individual organism as the only possible unit of selection, exclusively gradual change, an exaggerated role for adaptations, and so on. (30)

Not only are natural sciences influenced and penetrated by various kinds of class ideology, but in addition, the natural realities that they study can have a class character. This is perhaps most evident in the ecosphere. For example, consider the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, probably the most important factor in global warming. These gases include carbon dioxide, which is produced not only through natural cycles but by burning coal, oil, natural gas, and wood. It is estimated that when the Industrial Revolution started in the mid-1700s, the global atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide was 280 parts per million (ppm). Today it is about 370 ppm. (31) Although there are natural factors, as shown by the pre–Industrial Revolution level, the substantial increase over the past 250 years cannot be explained without reference to economic development, especially capitalist development, which, obviously, has had a class character. The increase in carbon dioxide concentration is not an inevitable result of economic development in general, but it has been and largely is unavoidable under capitalism. The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is thus an example of a class reality.

All the natural sciences have a class aspect, to one extent or another, some more than others, even if some will say that that’s not true, for example, of “real scientific physics,” which is understood to be, not physics as it has actually developed, but an idealized construct whose content has by definition somehow been distilled of all class influence. But nevertheless, it has been cogently argued, if in a beginning way, that physics does have some class content. (32) As we continue with an analysis of such disciplines as psychology, sociology, anthropology, and economics, there can be no doubt about their class character in capitalist society. But according to the “standard argument,” this is not true of physics, chemistry, astronomy, etc., and only becomes true somewhere along the way in the “hierarchy” of sciences—in the social sciences—although, of course, it is difficult to say just where.

Unfortunately for this argument, for any complex system, there are different parts of it that can be studied from the perspective of different sciences. Take an issue in public health, for example. What and where are the genetic-causal boundaries of a cancerous organ, and where are the economic, the social, the environmental ones? It is notoriously difficult to parse this. The question of whether, or to what extent, a “classless” science, as opposed to a “class-based” science, is seen as the dominant one in coming to an understanding of cancer is in significant measure a matter of choice of the reference frame. But (a) how to make that choice is itself always partly a class matter, (b) trying to restrict the understanding to the insights of the relevant (and supposedly “classless”) portions of the sciences is a serious error, (c) where one reference frame begins and another ends is indeterminate, and therefore (d) the supposed “impenetrable boundary” between “class-infected” social science and “pure” natural science is porous, meaning that both assume a class character to one degree or another.

Subject, Object, and the “Scientific Disappearance” of the Subject

Even when the existence of the philosophical subject is recognized—and it frequently is not when there is the crude equation of reality and truth—there can be a way of treating the subject that is so abstracted from social and historical factors, and in particular, from class, that for all practical purposes the subject disappears. Another way this is done is through a rigid separation of consciousness from the “objective world.” Often that world, with all conscious and even organic elements in general cleansed out of it, is treated as one big machine. In this way, there is an operating fraternity between two different worldviews—a unity of idealism and mechanical materialism.

The idea of nature as a machine, cut off from consciousness, runs through the history of bourgeois natural science, beginning most notably with Descartes in the 1600s and continuing through Newton and on to the present. During its heyday this view inspired an approach that achieved some tremendous breakthroughs in science, especially in physics. But by the nineteenth century it was exerting a backward pull, preventing the development of a more dialectical understanding of nature. Sometimes even the human brain was depicted as a machine, with consciousness reduced to a set of more or less efficient mechanical operations.

Mechanical materialism has had an impact on Marxism as well. Conceptions of nature, society, a communist party, and even individual persons as machines have sometimes been dominant, often coexisting with a consciousness that is ripped out of its material context. (33) A one-sided and distorted emphasis on the scientific aspects of Marxism is sometimes an important part of this.

Let’s look briefly at some of the ways this “disappearance of the subject” runs through different fields.

Epistemology: As I argued above, reflection theory, consistently carried out, tends to go along with a denial of class truth, since it downplays the activity and initiative of the subject. Without a subject, there are no class realities, and there is no truth whatsoever; whereas class truth depends on the existence both of class reality and of truth in general. Slavoj Zizek analyzes the relation of subject and object in Lenin’s early philosophy as follows:

“The problem with Lenin’s ‘theory of reflection’ lies in its implicit idealism: its compulsive insistence on the independent existence of material reality outside consciousness is to be read as a symptomatic displacement, destined to conceal the fact that consciousness itself is implicitly posed as external to the reality it ‘reflects.’ . . . [In this theory] only a consciousness observing the reality from the outside would see the whole of reality ‘the way it really is’ . . . just as a mirror can reflect an object perfectly only if it is external to it. . . . The point is not that there is an independent reality out there, outside myself; the point is that I myself am ‘out here,’ part of that reality.” (34)

Terry Eagleton makes a somewhat different but related point about the “position of the observer”: “. . . situatedness and radical critique belong together. One must be, as they say, in a position to know—which is why, say, women or poor peasants or the victims of Western imperialism know more of the truth of their condition than their masters. If they were standing nowhere at all, which is what some mistakenly take objectivity to mean, they would know nothing whatsoever. Nothing is as blind as a God’s eye view. Not everyone is so situated as to be capable of objective judgements. One can usually tell those who are not from the way they place the term objectivity in scare quotes. . . .” (35) It’s possible for an individual, or a group—though not a class!—to change position, but it’s not possible not to have a position, one from which we speak and engage in an active practice that becomes the basis of our changing, and knowing, reality.

Engels, in one of his most general (and dialectical) summations of natural science, countered a narrow “objectivism” by calling attention to the role of the subject and practice: “Natural science, like philosophy, has hitherto entirely neglected the influence of men’s activity on their thought; both know only nature on the one hand and thought on the other. But it is precisely the alteration of nature by men, not solely nature as such, which is the most essential and immediate basis of human thought, and it is in the measure that man has learned to change nature that his intelligence has increased.” (36)

Physics: The early twentieth-century communist Christopher Caudwell wrote about the divorce of subjective reality and objective reality in the bourgeois worldview, which arose from the division of labor in capitalist society and ran through all fields:

“In the main, therefore, physicists and philosophers share a general bourgeois world-view, in which the physicists concentrate on developing one department, that of matter, or objective reality, and the philosophers that of mind, or subjective reality. The bourgeois philosophy of subjective reality cannot escape from the standpoint of idealism or conceptualism. Hence bourgeois ideology, in all fields, reveals this cleavage between subjective reality and objective reality as a struggle or contradiction between mechanism and idealism, matter and mind, causality and free will. This is the notorious subject-object relation, the most famous problem in bourgeois thought.” (37)

A decade or so earlier, the development of quantum physics had brought the problem of “the subject” into physical theory in new and unexpected ways. How they were to be understood philosophically sparked intense investigation and sharp debate, which continues, but the old “objectivism” has been transcended. (38)

Cosmology: Lee Smolin, projecting trends in cosmological theory, has written: “Among the things we had to struggle with were the implications of the fact that the observer in quantum cosmology is inside the universe. The problem is that in all the usual interpretations of quantum theory the observer is assumed to be outside the system. That cannot be so in cosmology. This is our principle and, as I’ve emphasized before, this is the whole point. If we do not take it into account, whatever we may do is not relevant to a real theory of cosmology.” (39)

Biology: In evolution theory, Richard Lewontin, challenging the dominant “adaptationist” paradigm, has emphasized the active role of organisms in creating their own micro-environments, as opposed to a one-way flow of determination from the environment to the individual organism, a view that was one of the key components of the early twentieth-century “modern synthesis” among evolutionists: “[T]he claim that the environment of an organism is causally independent of the organism, and that changes in the environment are autonomous and independent of changes in the species itself, is clearly wrong. It is bad biology, and every ecologist and evolutionary biologist knows that it is bad biology. The metaphor of adaptation, while once an important heuristic for building evolutionary theory, is now an impediment to a real understanding of the evolutionary process and needs to be replaced by another. Although all metaphors are dangerous, the actual process of evolution seems best captured by the process of construction.” (40)

Psychology: A minimization of human consciousness is built into many psychological experiments. A major methodological problem, whether in the lab or in society (“social psychology”), is that, in an effort to reduce the number of variables at play, the psychologists are confined to studying relatively simple problems in which the number of interacting individuals is limited, the information and the behavioral options available to test subjects are similarly limited (and supposedly, of clear signification), the time span over which the test takes place is relatively short, and so forth. In other words, many of the aspects of human behavior that make it particularly complex, multilayered, environmentally sensitive, and modifiable by learning are, in effect, designed out of the experiments. In this filtering process, which increases the experimenters’ control and seems to make results less ambiguous, much of what makes humans specifically human is often also lost.

According to behaviorism, one of the most influential schools of bourgeois psychology in the United States in the twentieth century, externally observable and measurable behavior provides the only scientific basis for understanding the psychological functioning of humans as well as animals in general. Behaviors can be reinforced or attenuated based on the manipulation of objective variables, but there is no necessity, or basis, to invoke any particular internal processes. Any talk of mind, consciousness, feelings, and other subjective notions cannot provide any valid data and should therefore be dispensed with. The upshot is a theory that emphasizes a one-sided, mechanical focus on external conditions and their control. Such a theory has obvious utility for slotting people into their assigned places in the social order.

Two famous experiments illustrate the tendency to deny or downplay the influence of the subject—in these cases, the psychologists themselves—and the extremely negative consequences these experimental approaches had. In the early 1960s, Stanley Milgram created a set-up in which one group of college students were misled into believing that—so as to advance the cause of scientific psychology—they were administering dangerously powerful electroshocks to another group of students. Unbeknownst to the first group, the shocks were not really occurring, but the second group had been instructed to behave as though they were indeed being shocked. As Milgram had his experimenters tell the first group that the voltage was being increased from one trial to the next, they recorded whether those students would continue to “press the button,” even when they believed the students in the second group were being shocked. The findings? Most students in the first group would, overriding their own moral concerns as stated later, obey the experimenters and do as they were told, even if they thought it meant they were torturing the other students. This is where the problem is usually left in the standard textbook interpretation.

What is never mentioned is that the torture in this experiment was not all phony. It was the students in the first group—the ones administering the “shocks”—who were being psychologically tortured by being made to believe that they had been complicit in torture. But this larger truth is wiped out of the reports and the textbooks that follow them because the role of the experimenters—the real “subjects” in the experiment—is itself largely expunged from the summation. (41)

Journalism: It is a familiar tenet of Maoism that one cannot best understand political realities, the class struggle, and revolution without participating in movements to change society. The issues involved raise questions about the relation of subject to object, of theory to practice, and in particular, of the concept of “objectivity” in bourgeois society. In the words of the British journalist James Cameron:

“I cannot remember how often I’ve been challenged, especially in America, for disregarding the fundamental tenet of honest journalism, which is objectivity. This argument has arisen over the years, but of course it reached a fortissimo—long years after this—when I had been to Hanoi, and returned obsessed with the notion that I had no professional justification left if I did not at least try to make the point that North Viet Nam, despite all official arguments to the contrary, was inhabited by human beings. The Americans could insist that they were a race of dedicated card-carrying Marxist monsters, and the Chinese could insist that they were simon-pure heroes to a man; both statements were ludicrous; as I had seen them they appeared to differ in no perceptible way from anyone else, and that to destroy their country and their lives with high explosive and petroleum jelly was no way to cure them of their defects, which in any case seemed to centre on a tenacious and obstinate belief in their own right to live. This conclusion, when expressed in printed or television journalism, was generally held to be, if not downright mischievous, then certainly ‘non-objective’, within the terms of reference of a newspaper man, on the grounds that it was proclaimed as a point of view, and one moreover that denied a great many accepted truths. To this of course there could be no answer whatever, except that objectivity in some circumstances is both meaningless and impossible. I still do not see how a reporter attempting to define a situation involving some sort of ethical conflict can do it with sufficient neutrality to fulfill some arbitrary concept of ‘objectivity.’ It never occurred to me, in such a situation, to be other than subjective, and as obviously so as I could manage to be. I may not always have been satisfactorily balanced; I always tended to argue that objectivity was of less importance than the truth, and that the reporter whose technique was informed by no opinion lacked a very serious dimension.” (42)

What we see in this example is some of the ways that one’s position in society and in relation to social change affect the actual content of truth. It is not a matter of how well one can come to correct conclusions by applying classless investigative methods so as to understand an “independent” reality, and then later, in a separate process, using the knowledge gained in partisan efforts to effect change, such as by writing an article.

I think the crux of the matter is that the classes do, and must, interact with reality differently. This causes each class to have a different set of perceptions of what is actually true and lays the basis for the development of different conceptual understandings about what is true (and, ultimately, about what is truth). These understandings are then returned to practice, in ways characteristic of the different classes, which leads to the creation of different class realities.

Theory and Practice

One of the important points here is that a fallacious overemphasis on theory to the belittlement of practice, or on indirect knowledge as opposed to direct knowledge, can result in a view of truth that is cut off from the perspective and activity of specific classes in its origins, nature, and content.

Direct and indirect knowledge

Mao says: “All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience. But one cannot have direct experience of everything; as a matter of fact, most of our knowledge comes from indirect experience, for example, all knowledge from past times and foreign lands. . . . Hence a man’s knowledge consists only of two parts, that which comes from direct experience and that which comes from indirect experience. Moreover, what is indirect experience for me is direct experience for other people. Consequently, considered as a whole, knowledge of any kind is inseparable from direct experience.” (43)

Lenin makes a similar point: “In order to understand, it is necessary empirically to begin understanding, study, to rise from empiricism to the universal. In order to learn to swim, it is necessary to get into the water.” (44)

To put a greater emphasis on direct knowledge is, overall, to put greater emphasis on practice. Lenin says, “Practice is higher than (theoretical) knowledge, for it has not only the dignity of universality, but also of immediate actuality.” (45) This is not the same as saying that one cannot have valid knowledge of revolution without having led a successful revolution. Someone can have some insights, even certain profound and very valuable insights, about MLM theory and the history of the ICM, without leading a revolution; to deny this would be to deny the role of indirect knowledge, or of the fact that most of our knowledge is indirect. However, when practice is very limited, and conditions have changed in various significant respects since an appreciable body of practical experience in the revolutionary movement was acquired, then there are definite limits to what can be known indirectly. All the major innovators of MLM played very significant roles in actual revolutionary movements that changed the world in profound ways; obviously, Marx and Engels did not lead successful revolutions, but they did participate in such movements and gain such experience, and it was a critical factor in their ability to make their theoretical contributions. (46)

Absolute and Relative

What is meant by “absolute truth”? In a Soviet philosophical dictionary from the 1960s, absolute truth is defined as “(1) complete, exhaustive knowledge of reality, and (2) knowledge that will not be refuted in the future.” (47) Lenin held, in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, that “absolute truth results from the sum-total of relative truths in the course of their development” and that relative truth “contains an element of absolute truth. . . .” (48) It does not follow from these ideas, as noted earlier, that all of reality is knowable.

Is there a determinate objective world that constitutes absolute reality, and is the inexhaustible approach to absolute truth possible?

In Materialism and Empirio-Criticism Lenin maintains, as seen above, that people can approach absolute truth ever more closely, but this is really an assertion rather than a consequence of any scientific theory. The physicist David Bohm disagreed, partly on the grounds that the universe is infinite. (49) There is also the consideration that even the most basic laws of physical reality can undergo change, including by (but not necessarily restricted to) evolving fundamental (physical) constants. (50) The geneticist J.B.S. Haldane said that the universe was “not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” (51) It is also possible that the universe is evolving faster than our understanding of it can. These difficulties still exist even with multiple observers, and even if they agree. In these situations, truth does not reside in some sort of average of perceptions (or measurements).

Matters are further complicated by quantum-mechanical considerations. Brian Greene addresses the interpretation of quantum mechanics that says that reality is probabilistic even before the observer or experimenter interacts with it and thus causes the “wave function” to collapse to definite parameters. (52)

What all this illustrates is that it is necessary to re-evaluate the concept of absolute truth in light of advances in physics, including relativity, quantum theory, and some of the newer theories. There is a two-way dialectic between materialist dialectics and natural science, in which advances in each should impact the development of the other. In the main, although this has been true with respect to particular problems, it has not been the case in an overall sense for many decades.

The absolute within the relative

Lenin says, “For objective dialectics there is an absolute within the relative. For subjectivism and sophistry the relative is only relative and excludes the absolute.” (53) John Steele offers an analogy: “When I look out the window my perception of the street and buildings is relative to my perspective and position, and there’s no perspective-free looking at the scene. But this doesn’t mean that the perspectives cannot be related to one another, or that one is not more inclusive or adequate than another.” And the possibility of relating the perspectives to one another rests on the objective existence of things in the street. In certain contexts, the different perspectives can reflect class differences among the viewers, but this does not imply that (a) the reality of the things seen exists only in the mind of the observers, or that (b) there are no actually existing things.

However, the crux of the question of class truth, as summarized earlier in the description of the second meaning of class truth, concerns the possibility of changing the scene that the perspectives are part of and creating new truths. The latter are not different relative truths comprising parts of an already existing fixed truth but are new elements of a reality that make possible the creation of further new truths. In certain contexts, these are class truths.

Thus, in my view, there are different aspects of the conception of absolute truth, some of which may survive scrutiny in light of developments in natural science as well as our understanding of epistemology, and in particular, the subject-object dialectic; and others of which likely will have to be discarded because they may one-sidedly conceive of the objective world as a fixed entity toward which the conscious subject must simply adjust itself rather than (also) changing it.

Stasis and Motion

Understanding class truth is impossible if one thinks in terms of a static world.

The real dynamics of changing and knowing the world

In many of the natural sciences, the precision of measurement and calculation makes it possible for different classes to agree about aspects of objective reality. This agreement breaks down, however, with complex, interactive systems such as those in ecology as well as many of the social sciences.

It is not merely a question of the relationship between a thing at a particular time and place and what the different classes, carrying out a correct scientific methodology, would find to be true of it, that is, of being; it is also a matter of the relationship between different classes and how they interact with objective reality differently, and how they can create different truths that have a class character, that is, of becoming. To put it another way, it is not only a question of what is true at any given moment but of what will become true (specifically, the probabilities of different possible future outcomes) as a result of different classes’ activity. Take, once again, the question of polls: depending on which questions are asked, reflecting choices flowing from a class’s outlook and methodology, different answers will be obtained. And this is not merely a question of reshuffling a fixed deck in different ways, as in “we’ll find only those parts of what’s already out there that we already believe” (often true, but not my point here), but of how the polls create different outcomes; and that process of changing reality, how it’s changed and where it’s going, does have a class character. In other words, it’s not just a question of which aspects of a reality that’s already there we will discover (the “purely objective” reality that we will perceive or “measure”) but of which aspects will be realized or actualized, which ones will actually assume primacy.

With regard to bourgeois class truths, they should not be dismissed on the grounds that the bourgeoisie’s approach to social science is not really scientific; in an overall sense it is not, but with regard to many particulars it is: they ask certain questions, engage in certain activities, and get certain results. Their interpretation of them may fairly obviously be wrong (arising from their outlook or methodology—even though, of course, in many cases their interpretation may be correct), but they nonetheless have left an actual imprint on objective reality.

This viewpoint, which gets back to Lenin’s observation about “creating the objective world” in his Philosophical Notebooks, understands truth in its dynamism rather than as something that exists at any slice of time, which everyone can step back from, use the same methods toward, and not change in any important ways that are class-influenced, thus arriving at the same facts or data.

The idea involved with the denial of the class character of truth is that social processes can be frozen so that different classes have the ability to resituate themselves in different situations and repeat their experiments under controlled conditions until they “get it right.” If both classes can come to the same results, then there is no class aspect to the truth they arrive at. This idea is never correct, but it becomes sheer fantasy in a revolutionary situation, in which all factors in the situation—the different classes with their subjective activity, as well as the objective situation—are in rapid flux.

A general point about bourgeois social science: as a rule, it seeks to learn something about reality while causing only minimal, controlled changes in the object. By contrast, the overall purpose of Marxist revolutionary social science is to change multiple aspects or factors to a maximum extent in the course of changing the world—not to “control conditions” (except in limited, particular ways, so as to learn certain relative truths in service of the overall struggle to transform the world). (54)

Reality is always changing and we come to know it only by changing it. Each class brings a distinctive type of truth into being, based on a new objective reality; different classes do not stand in the same relation to this truth; they understand and act on it in contrasting ways. All this gives rise to “truth in motion,” and that motion (or process) has a class character. But the bourgeoisie, especially once it is no longer a progressive class, has a tendency to see things metaphysically—statically, and with different things being considered in isolation. As a result, it is not able to correctly understand complex, dynamic processes of social change. To understand class truth, one has to break with metaphysical illusions about the nature of things and recognize their “changingness.”

According to a theory of static truth, it is possible to bring changes in reality, or at least the parts of it that are being considered, to a stop so that everyone can plant their feet on the ground in the same place, physically and socially speaking; abstract from their class outlook and methodology; do nothing to disturb the object (hence the optimal situation from this point of view is studying what has already happened); make the same measurements by using the same measuring devices; and—surprise!—come to the same conclusions about what has happened (note: this can never apply in the same way or with the same force to what is happening or what will happen). This is the sum and substance of the theory that all truths are timeless (and thus also classless). (55)

This is not a world where the most essential characteristic of what is true is that its components and parameters change, general truths are dynamic, and there is a subject-object interaction in which all manner of truths change through the course of history, with new ones arising and others passing away.

And just as surely, this world is not the real world. Consider the well-known example of the date of Napoleon’s death, discussed by Engels in Anti-Dühring. Even the fact that Napoleon died on such-and-such a day, while it may be indisputable, was socially and historically conditioned; had the French army triumphed in the war against Russia, the rest of his life, including the date of and circumstances surrounding his death, would have been different. But beyond that, this kind of simple, factual truth is not representative of more complex truths that cannot be fixed at a given place and time.

Case study: measuring yardage in football

In a football game, officials can call timeout, bring out the chains, and determine whether there has been a first down. Increasingly, there is the use of recorded replays, which may come to be accepted in baseball as well. However, in real revolutionary processes, there is a limited applicability of this approach. In general, one class can create truths that it takes some time for the other class to comprehend and assess. While that investigation is going on, the first class may go forward to create other class truths. The class that has the initiative races ahead; at no point does the other class have the same relationship to the dynamic as the initiating class has. This type of temporal unevenness between the classes in their ability to “measure” changes is an aspect of class truth in the real world of complex processes, in which no one can call “timeout.”

Probability and Necessity

Probability is often bound up with the dynamic role of the subject and with openings for that role to be expressed. A probabilistic model is more consistent with a correct conception of class truth than is a deterministic model.

Probabilistic knowledge is certainly not always “less true” than certain knowledge. Whether it is a fully developed knowledge depends on the substance, scale, and context of what is being considered.

Why is the revolutionary process characterized by probability? Is this different in a revolutionary situation?

In response to the erroneous argument that, as John Steele characterizes it, “only a sense of certainty will provide the basis for revolutionary action; to point to the relative aspect of relative truths is to turn aside from revolution,” he writes the following:

“During a time of upsurge, when people are bursting the bounds of the normal social order, there is a need to act with utter conviction. The choices at such times present themselves, and must be presented, with great clarity, and that clarity needs to be sharpened and insisted upon. It is a time of yes or no, not ‘well, on the one hand . . . .’ Alain Badiou speaks of the need to become the passionate militant of a truth-process in the wake of what he will call an Event. This can be seen as the need to insist upon an aspect of absoluteness in a clearly perceived truth.

“But what do we do when we are not in a situation of upsurge, when we are not making our choices in the wake of an Event, when the parameters of revolutionary action are not clear? In short, how to do revolutionary work in today’s situation?” This is a big question for us today, but here I want to focus on how questions, and choices, are posed in a revolutionary situation.

It is true that in a revolutionary situation, it is necessary to act with conviction. But this does not mean that the relative truths are transformed into absolute ones, at least in the sense of certainty. In fact, Mao says that “War is the highest form of struggle for resolving contradictions. (56) He also says that “the phenomenon of war is more elusive and is characterized by greater uncertainty than any other social phenomenon, in other words, that it is more a matter of ‘probability’.” (57) Thus revolutionary conviction arises at such junctures, not from certainty about the outcome of different courses of action, but from seeing the sharply bifurcating nature of reality, and understanding that the revolutionary forces have an enhanced ability to create new truths, including class truths, and to change what is true overall. (58)

Class Truth Integrates Truth and Value

In his essay on Mao’s famous statement that the basic truth of Marxism is that “It is right to rebel against reactionaries!” Alain Badiou discusses the relationship of truth and value in this passage: “We are already handed something essential here: every Marxist statement is—in a single, dividing movement—observation and directive. As a concentrate of real practice, it equals its movement in order to return to it. Since all that is draws its being only from its becoming, equally, theory as knowledge of what is has being only by moving toward that of which it is the theory. Every knowledge is orientation, every description is prescription. The sentence, ‘it is right to rebel against the reactionaries,’ bears witness to this more than any other. In it we find expressed the fact that Marxism, prior to being the full-fledged science of social formation, is the distillate of what rebellion demands: that one consider it right, that reason be rendered to it. Marxism is both a taking sides and the systematization of a partisan experience. The existence of a science of social formations bears no interest for the masses unless it reflects and concentrates their real revolutionary movement. Marxism must be conceived as the accumulated wisdom of popular revolutions, the reason they engender, the fixation and detailing of their target. Mao Zedong’s sentence clearly situates rebellion as the originary place of correct ideas, and reactionaries as those whose destruction is legitimated by theory. Mao’s sentence situates Marxist truth within the unity of theory and practice. Marxist truth is that from which rebellion draws its rightness, its reason, to demolish the enemy. It repudiates any equality in the face of truth. In a single movement, which is knowledge in its specific division into description and directive, it judges, pronounces the sentence, and immerses itself in its execution. Rebels possess knowledge, according to their aforementioned essential movement, their power and their duty: to annihilate the reactionaries. Marx’s Capital does not say anything different: the proletarians are right to violently overthrow the capitalists. Marxist truth is not a conciliatory truth. It is, in and of itself, dictatorship and, if need be, terror.” (59)

The concept of class truth requires the unity of truth and value. The attempt to rend one from the other, done in the name of “objectivity,” amounts to a defense of bourgeois thought.

As Badiou notes, Mao’s statement clearly upholds the unity of truth and value. If one holds a reflection theory of truth, it is impossible to agree with this, since it is revolutionary practice, not reflection, that creates the unity of value and truth. But the relationship between truth and value has a lot to do with class truth as well: because, in class society, key values have a class character—and surely whether it is right to rebel against reactionaries is one of them—then it follows that Mao is saying that the basic truth of Marxism, to which all the others “boil down,” has a class character. That is a statement of class truth, right at the core of Maoism. Mao never repudiated his statement; nearly thirty years after he made it, during the GPCR, the words “against reactionaries” were appended, but the truth/value unity of the original was retained.

A common view among Western scientists and philosophers is that there is no way to derive a value from a truth (and vice versa). To try to do so is to fall into what is called the “naturalistic fallacy.” Prominent scientists who adhere to this view have included the physicist Steven Weinberg, the biologist/paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, and the neurologist Gerald Edelman. Accepting the split between truth and value, although it is often done with the best of intentions, with an aim of freeing science from oppressive political control or religious dogma, ends up serving the bourgeoisie and its “classless truth.” If, contrary to this kind of thinking, there is a unity between truth and value, including an extensive interpenetration and “bound-upness,” then one side—value—cannot have a class character if the other—truth—does not. (60)

Partisanship and the struggle for truth

The proletariat’s position in class society, its outlook, and its scientific methodology do make it better able to arrive at the truth than the bourgeoisie is. But the position, outlook, and methodology must be seen as being linked up with the class struggle. The search for the truth is a struggle for the truth, and in class society, that struggle has a class character. How could one seriously say that Frederick Douglass’s learning to read—which he did under conditions of illegality in the antebellum South, and which was essential to his ability to search for and arrive at the truth as well as to create new truths—was not part of the class struggle!

Defending “pure science” and tailing the progressive intelligentsia

While dialectical materialism is the only thoroughgoing and consistent materialism, there are many other forms of materialism, some of which are in accord with significant parts of reality and have played a progressive role throughout history. For Marxists, though, it is essential to maintain the distinction between dialectical materialism and other forms of materialism, and to oppose efforts to downplay or ignore their difference.

Lenin insisted on maintaining the difference. He refers in various places to the “naïve materialism” of the scientists. At times, he draws a very sharp line of demarcation. He refuses to tail behind the professors theoretically. (61)

Notes

(26) However, commenting several decades later on the original version of his most well-known book, History and Class Consciousness, Lukács retracted his earlier views: “The book’s most striking feature is that, contrary to the subjective intentions of its author, objectively it falls in with a tendency in the history of Marxism that has taken many different forms. All of them have one thing in common, whether they like it or not and irrespective of their philosophical origins or their political effects: they strike at the very roots of Marxian ontology. I refer to the tendency to view Marxism exclusively as a theory of society, as social philosophy, and hence to ignore or repudiate it as a theory of nature. . . . it is demonstrable that it is the materialist view of nature that brings about the really radical separation of the bourgeois and socialist outlooks. The failure to grasp this blurs philosophical debate and e.g. prevents the clear elaboration of the Marxist concept of praxis.” History and Class Consciousness [1967 edition], xvi.

(27) This is actually a contentious issue, with many Marxists maintaining that dialectics does not apply to the natural world. I believe the theoretical question needs to be approached from this angle: is motion itself a contradiction? If it is, then since motion of various kinds is ubiquitous in both natural and social reality, dialectics must be inherent in both spheres.

(28) On Practice, in Selected Readings, 66.

(29) Engels had written a short critique of Malthus’s theory of population in the 1840s. See “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy,” in Marx and Engels on the Population Bomb, ed. Ronald Meek, 56–63. His critiques of aspects of Origin of Species are found, for example, in a letter to Pyotr Lavrovich (1875) in Marx Engels Selected Correspondence, 283–84, as well as in Dialectics of Nature, 208–10.

(30) See, for example, the writings of Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould.

(31) See “Greenhouse Gases: Frequently Asked Questions,” National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration National Climate Data Center, Feb. 23, 2010, http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/gases.html.

(32) In this connection, Christopher Caudwell’s The Crisis in Physics remains one of the most thought-provoking works. In general, arguments for the class character of physics proceed along two tracks: (a) a dialectical materialist one, which addresses the nature of physical reality and how the dominance of idealist and metaphysical philosophies has interfered with a correct understanding of it, and (b) a historical materialist one, according to which the types of practical (economic, technological, etc.) problems physics has concerned itself with have shaped the relative emphasis given to different aspects of physical theory and thus colored it overall.

(33) Bob Avakian’s model of a communist party—in practice, the core of its leadership—as a “team of scientists” on the one side, and on the other, basic members of the party as “seeding machines,” comes to mind. Theoretically, treating people as machines means failing to make the distinction between living and dead labor—and which of these is dominant in society marks the fundamental distinction between socialism and capitalism, a view once developed in the RCP’s 1983 debate about the nature of the Soviet Union.

(34) Revolution at the Gates, 179–80.

(35) “On Telling the Truth,” in Socialist Register 2006, ed. Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, 282.

(36) Dialectics of Nature, 172.

(37) The Crisis in Physics, 30–31.

(38) For some helpful summaries, see the books by Herbert, Greene, and Bohm. A discussion of the relationship between materialist dialectics and quantum physics must be taken up elsewhere.

(39) Three Roads to Quantum Gravity, 40–41.

(40) The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment, 48.

(41) For an account of Milgram’s experiment, see Thomas Blass, The Man Who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram. The Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo carried out an experiment in the early 1970s in which one group of students was incarcerated in cells in a basement lab, and another group was told they were prison guards and were to maintain order. Before long, the “guards” were acting like actual, cruel, authoritarian guards in a capitalist prison. Zimbardo, like Milgram, tended to “forget” or conceptually minimize the role of the experimenter. It was only many years later, during the Iraq War, that Zimbardo began to see the scientific flaws and moral issues in the experimental design and of the larger social context in which it was embedded, as he spoke out against the role of American torturers in the war. See his The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil.

(42) James Cameron, Point of Departure, cited in Studs Terkel, Touch and Go, 202–3.

(43) On Practice, in Selected Readings, 71–72.

(44) Philosophical Notebooks, in Collected Works, vol. 38, 205.

(45) Ibid., 213.

(46) When the RCP’s new Constitution was published in 2008, it contained a new formulation by Bob Avakian regarding the “theory/practice/theory dynamic”: “There is a back-and-forth interaction between the development of line and the transformation of the world that drives this whole process. This is the theory/practice/theory dynamic, and it is the heart of party life.” Avakian’s description of this dynamic is as follows: “proceeding at any given time on the basis of our theory and line, as determined collectively and through the structures, channels and processes of the party; extracting lessons from our practice and raising these up to the level of theoretical abstraction, but also drawing from many other sources (including the thinking and insights of others), and applying the scientific outlook and method of communism, dialectical materialism, to repeatedly synthesize all this to a higher level, in the development of and through the wrangling over theory and line—which is then returned to and carried out in practice, on what should be a deepened and enriched basis. And on . . . and on . . . and on . . .” I want to call attention here to the fact that while a party’s own practice is correctly referred to as only one of the sources of knowledge, there is only a vague reference to “extracting lessons” from it. After a new line is formulated, the party “carries it out” in practice. There is no sense here that the party’s line is being tested in practice or that it is being determined whether it corresponds to the objective world. With this weak link between practice and theory, it is not at all clear how or why the theoretical line “should be” deepened and enriched.

Contrast all this with Mao’s explanation of the relation of practice to theory, in which practice is clearly principal overall and is the site where it is seen whether ideas accurately anticipate, or predict, the actual results of practice: “Marxist philosophy holds that the most important problem does not lie in understanding the laws of the objective world and thus being able to explain it, but in applying the knowledge of these laws actively to change the world. . . . The knowledge which grasps the laws of the world must be redirected to the practice of changing the world. . . . This is the process of testing and developing theory, the continuation of the whole process of cognition. The problem of whether theory corresponds to objective reality is not, and cannot be, completely solved in the movement of knowledge from the perceptual to the rational, mentioned above. The only way to solve this problem completely is to redirect rational knowledge to social practice, apply theory to practice and see whether it can achieve the objectives one has in mind. . . ” (On Practice, in Selected Readings, 76–77).

Mao also says: “Often, correct knowledge can be arrived at only after many repetitions of the process . . . leading from practice to knowledge and then back to practice. Such is the Marxist theory of knowledge, the dialectical materialist theory of knowledge” (“Where Do Correct Ideas Come From?” in Selected Readings, 503).

The distinction between Mao’s “practice/theory/practice” dialectic and Avakian’s “theory/practice/theory” dynamic may be compared to that which Marx drew between the circulation of commodities on the one hand, and the transformation of money into capital on the other. His notation for the former was “C–M–C” and for the latter “M–C–M.” (See Capital, vol. 1, chapter III, section 2a, “The Metamorphosis of Commodities,” and chapter IV, “The General Formula for Capital.”) It is clear that in cycles of this kind, what one takes as the starting and ending point is not at all arbitrary.

I believe that these points also demonstrate the fallacy of any argument that could be made about how even though practice may be principal in society overall, it is not principal for the party because of its operating more in the province of theory and indirect knowledge. The fact is that Avakian’s starting point is “theory,” and in his “dynamic,” the most important role of practice is to provide the party with—grist for more theory.

(47) “Truth, Absolute and Relative,” in A Dictionary of Philosophy, ed. M. Rosenthal and P. Yudin.

(48) Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, in Collected Works, vol. 14, 305.

(49) David Bohm, writing in the late 1950s, holds that “With regard to nature as a whole, however, it cannot be said that this continual process of disclosure of errors in our theories is leading us through a series of successive approximations that converges on some fixed and limited goal, which constitutes an absolute truth. For as science progresses, we find that the process of uncovering the errors in previous theories continually points towards the existence of more and more new kinds of things, which were not significant in contexts and conditions studied up to a certain point in the development of our researches, but which may be of crucial importance in new contexts and conditions. As a result, the goal of an absolute truth that applies in all possible contexts and conditions keeps on receding beyond the new horizons that appear before us as we continue our studies of the inexhaustible characteristics of nature in more and more detail and in more and more different ways. It is true that there is nothing in the structure of the universe that could prevent us from eventually coming in these studies to know about any given thing. Indeed, as our understanding of the reciprocal relationships between things grows better, we will be able to make more and more kinds of measurements which probe deeper and deeper into the structure of the universe and which reach out further and further from the particular region of space and time in which our existence is centred. For these relationships will enable us to infer the character of things that are on different levels or far away from us, on the basis of experiments and observations on things that are on our level and which are in the domain of the space and time that is immediately accessible to us. Thus, any given kind of thing is, in principle, knowable. On the other hand, no matter how far even the whole of humanity may progress in any specified period of time, however long, it cannot reach or even approach a complete, perfect, and unconditional knowledge of reality as a whole.” Causality and Chance in Modern Physics, 167–68.

(50) Paul Dirac put forward this idea in the 1920s. A theory about the evolution of fundamental constants is developed by Lee Smolin in The Life of the Cosmos. Brian Greene, in The Hidden Reality, notes that entirely different laws may be operative in different universes.

(51) Possible Worlds and Other Papers, 286.

(52) Feynman’s view of the inevitable “disturbance” of a state of affairs by the experimenter is given in his description of the “double slit” interference experiment; see Lectures, vol. 1, 37-11. Greene characterizes this view as one that has largely been superseded; in fact, for Feynman it is the experimenter that introduces an element of uncertainty into an experimental situation, whereas for Greene, and most quantum physicists today, it is the experimenter whose measurement effects a definite result in a probabilistic quantum environment. But even on the view that it is measurement that collapses a multiplicity of possibilities into one actual outcome, it is still true that that measurement has altered the pre-existing situation, and that this alteration is a requirement of gaining knowledge. Greene summarizes a number of different interpretations of the quantum measurement problem in The Fabric of the Cosmos, 202–13. In The Hidden Reality, he poses the intriguing, and unresolved, question of why, when experiments into a reality characterized by probabilistic mathematics are actually conducted, only one outcome is produced. Nevertheless, this is conceptually different from classical reflection theory’s understanding of objective reality as having a definite state irrespective of any interaction with an observer.

(53) Philosophical Notebooks, in Collected Works, vol. 38, 360.

(54) In the theory of democratic centralism, the party seeks to perform a sort of modified, large-scale, semi-controlled experiment in which the “control” is the consistently applied line of the party, and the variables are the range of conditions it encounters. Whether or to what extent this can actually be done is part of a different discussion.

(55) Again, this does not imply that all truths have a class character, for example, mathematical truths, which I am not addressing here, although it should be said in passing that there are entire fields of applied mathematics whose content (not merely their application) does have a class character.

(56) “Problems of Strategy in China’s Revolutionary War,” in Selected Works, vol. I, 180.

(57) “On Protracted War,” in Selected Works, vol. II, ¶81.

(58) To avoid some possible misconceptions: what I am arguing in this paper is not that there is some direct connection between the probabilistic nature of reality at the quantum level, and the role of probability in various macroscopic contexts (such as those summarized by Mao with regard to warfare). The discussion of probability in this paper has two main features:

First, at the quantum level, it is necessary to make changes in reality in order to learn about it. This is also true at the macro level. Both spheres are addressed in Mao’s statement about how it is necessary to change the pear by tasting it in order to know anything about it. As I am defining the different theories of truth in this paper, this goes against reflection theory but it supports correspondence theory. And the interdependence and mutual determination of subject and object is often best conceived of as being probabilistic.

Second, many physicists and philosophers of science believe that quantum reality is probabilistic in and of itself, prior to any measurement by the experimenter. This contrasts with Lenin’s view (in his theory of reflection put forward in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism) that objective reality has a definite state (even though it changes over time, it has a definite state at any moment) whose reflection in human consciousness can become increasingly accurate over time, without limit.

Thus there is not a “continuum of probability” from the quantum level to some larger macro context such as exists in complex, dynamic systems. There is, so to speak, an intermediate domain which is more characterized by necessity and is described by Newtonian physics and various particular sciences. It is clear that this kind of layered conception was not Lenin’s view, at least as of 1908.

To summarize, I do not wish to imply any facile correspondence between probability at the quantum level and in various macro contexts—a false equation that has been made by many philosophers and theologians ever since quantum physics was first formulated. Such an equation has often been thought, erroneously, to be the basis of human freedom.

(59) “An Essential Philosophical Thesis: ‘It is Right to Rebel against the Reactionaries.’” For more analysis of the unity of truth and value, see Part II of my essay, “On Some Questions Provoked by a Reading of Bill Martin’s Ethical Marxism,” at http://www.khukuritheory.net/ethical-marxism/.

(60) As a kind of revisionist “scientism”—the idea that Marxism should adopt all the assumptions and methods of the natural sciences (with an erroneous understanding of those assumptions and methods)—has taken hold in the RCP in recent years, it has more explicitly promoted the severance of truth and value. It is interesting that Avakian accepts some basic assumptions of bourgeois thought regarding the possibility of a split between truth and value, including the alleged distinction between “what is good for humanity” and “what ought to happen,” and holds that this can be resolved only on the basis of proletarian partisanship. However, the idea that “what ought to happen” could be anything other than “what is good for humanity” (and life overall on the planet; for purposes of this discussion, that extension is inessential) is not sustainable over time, socially or environmentally. This is not fundamentally because of class partisanship. Elsewhere Avakian contradicts this statement: “Once more, the correctness, or incorrectness, of a particular ideology—whether or not it corresponds to reality—is something which can be objectively determined, and that determination is not reducible to—and is not in essence—a matter of class struggle.” See Ruminations and Wranglings, section on “Communism as a Science—Not a ‘Scientific Ideology.’” But if the correctness of an ideology (as “distinct from” its incorrectness) is not essentially a matter of class struggle, then the correctness of an ethical system that generates judgments about what ought to happen (as opposed to what is good for humanity) cannot be essentially a matter of partisanship. On the other hand, there is a whole category of truths that are created through class struggle, and to the extent that the correctness of an ideology depends on those truths, then whether it is correct is, in essence, a matter of class struggle.

In the same talk, Avakian attempts to separate science and ethics by removing science from ideology, so that the latter becomes only a worldview and a set of values, and theory stands to the side. Theory, including scientific theory, is not a part of ideology, he now says. But somehow ideology is a part of science: he says that communism overall is a science, and since communist ideology is part of communism, it follows that the ideology is part of the science. And yet none of the science is part of the ideology! Try making sense of that with a Venn diagram.

The unity of truth and value implies a close relationship between theory and ideology. For two decades, Avakian said that theory was the dynamic element in ideology. As of his Ruminations paper in 2008, ideology now consisted only of morality and class viewpoint, and theory was excluded. This goes along with the consolidation of a wrong line on truth and value as well as on class truth.

(61) Although, it may be argued, he sometimes “overdoes” it.

In the early 2000s the RCP was an initiator of a campaign to “defend science.” While this had a progressive aspect, it was never clearly explained why science should be seen as being “on the defensive,” or in particular, why evolution, which was upheld by the vast majority of scientists, and which was winning some important battles in the sphere of textbook adoptions (while losing others), should be considered to be on the defensive. Why not an offensive? Or, if it were to be argued (erroneously) that the progressive forces who upheld evolution were on the defensive politically because the Christian fascists enjoyed so much political hegemony, then why not call for a political defensive but also an ideological offensive? Waging an ideological offensive would be a central part of any strategy that did not “underestimate the reactionary forces”—really and not just rhetorically—and took them on seriously. But a party cannot see the need or possibility of doing this if it is not really propagating communist ideology in the first place.

It is on only a very few pages of her book The Science of Evolution and the Myth of Creationism that Ardea Skybreak puts forward a very scant, superficial, and tepid discussion of dialectical materialism. There is no effort throughout the book to apply it to Darwinian theory or any natural science, in the way that Marxists and some radical biologists—but not “most biologists”—have for more than 150 years.

Related posts:

1. On the concept of class truth – I
2. On the concept of class truth – III

Following is the first part of an essay by Vern Gray on this question. The second and third installments will appear over the next couple of days.

Class Truth — An Essential Concept: Part 1

by Vern Gray

The significance, meaning, and evaluation of the concept of “class truth” is an important theoretical issue for communists. At root the question has to do with the relationship between knowing the world and changing it. It has a relation as well to the history of the positions of the international communist movement (ICM) on this and related philosophical and political questions, and how that history is summed up. An incorrect assessment of the errors of that movement has become the basis for a different, “new” (but actually old) set of errors.

In one of several contradictory sets of theses, the old ICM held that the proletariat had no interest in perpetuating any form of exploitation or oppression; and by the same token it had no interest in maintaining any illusions. Yet it came to interpret the class interests of the proletariat in such a way as to ensure that some illusions would be maintained and others created. In this way those conceived interests were allowed, time and again, to override the truth.

Given this history, some have felt that it is necessary to return to what is essentially a pre-Marxist viewpoint (although they would deny this), in which all truths exist independently of classes and class struggle. In this view, the content of truth is to be discovered and deepened by classless and “scientific” means and methods. These classless truths can then, as part of a separate process, be wielded by the revolutionary forces in their battles to transform society. According to this logic, since the content of the truths themselves cannot—virtually by definition—be “infected” by any class perspective, the proletariat is thereby safeguarded against the unwitting distortion or subordination of those truths to serve its own conceived class interests.

This view is not only illusory, it does not really rise above the old dogma of the ICM. My aim in this paper will be to show, in a beginning way, how and why this is so.

The idea of class truth is sometimes dismissed on the grounds that “objective truth is what it is, regardless of what one class or another may think about it.” Now this is a curious objection, since the question of truth in general does not turn on what anyone thinks about particular truths or putative truths. And this is the case irrespective of classes or the question of class truth. Therefore, an objection that simply substitutes “one class or another” for “anyone” has not really added anything new. In other words, the typical argument that is offered against a false notion of class truth has achieved nothing more than the more general argument against a false notion of truth. It has not ruled out the possibility of a valid concept of class truth; it has not even addressed it.

The real problem with the critics’ position on class truth is that they ask the wrong question. Of course, we are not assured that we know what is true if we just hold to our opinions and do not put them to the test. Nor can we be assured of what is false. We certainly can’t be assured that we know what is true, or that our beliefs are necessarily true, simply in virtue of our class position. To determine whether something is true, there has to be some way of verifying it; we have to actively engage with it, entering into a relationship of mutual changing and being changed that goes beyond mere contemplation. This same standard, which applies to truth in general, should also apply to class truth.

But for a broad range of truths—although not all of them—there is no valid reason to suppose that different classes are able to enter into this sort of mutual relationship with the world in the same or equivalent ways. Neither is it right to assume that one class, observing the situation “from the outside,” can fully appreciate the changing relationship with the world that another class enters into. This is especially the case during a time of sweeping societal transformations, but the same considerations are important during “normal times” as well. Something along these lines is what I would take to be the “truth of class truth.”

Let us say at the very least that the concept of class truth must have more content, and more importance, than its detractors imagine. It should get a fresh examination, free from unexamined assumptions, false conceptions of “objectivity” and “science,” and simplistic slogans.

The concept of class truth, while it is an important philosophical concept in its own right, is interconnected with many other philosophical issues. To understand class truth, we have to establish some basic, beginning familiarity with these other issues. They include a series of relationships—between reality and truth; truth and class truth; changing reality and knowing reality; the social sciences and the natural sciences; subject and object; stasis and motion; truth and value; class truth, political truth, and subjective narrative; and others. I will spend some time discussing natural sciences, more than usual in this kind of paper. But it will help lay the foundation for some insights into class truth.

Of course it will only be possible in this paper to sketch out these issues and suggest some initial approaches, analyses, and assessments. But even a beginning effort of this kind shows that the question of class truth is situated in a matrix of many other important and long-debated philosophical issues. While we should criticize the ways in which the ICM has addressed class truth, we need to be even more critical of the ways in which it has handled many of these other philosophical questions.

Indeed, errors in approaching these other questions have led to errors in the understanding of class truth, sometimes taking the form of insisting on dogmatic formulations and at other times of settling for a muddle. Nevertheless, some communists, both historically and today, have been better on these issues. In this paper, I will argue that denying the validity of class truth is part of an overall metaphysical worldview that is unable to understand the world scientifically, much less change it.

The “class truth question” relates closely to revolutionary politics. It is instructive to see some of the ways it played out in the history of the Soviet Union and China, especially during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) in China, as well as of the principal revolutionary organization in the United States influenced by the GPCR, the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). In the political sphere, some important issues related to the concept of class truth concern the relationships between the party and the masses; communism and the intelligentsia; reform and revolution; and class background and position in relation to the ability to grasp and articulate the truth about politics.

Again, the purpose of this paper is not to lay out some fully worked-out theory about these philosophical and political issues. My own understanding is in transition, and I certainly don’t have a clear understanding of everything. I anticipate that there are a number of things here that may strike some readers as unjustified assertions. I believe that they are defensible, but developing a more complete argument would require a much longer paper. My purpose in this piece is to put some issues on the table, map out some questions and perspectives, summarize some initial work, and suggest an approach toward further investigation. I hope for discussion and written exchanges, for I think their role in this effort will be central.

Reality

The basic tenet of philosophical materialism is the objectivity of the world, meaning simply that the universe exists, has existed, and will exist, independently of any consciousness. Knowledge of the truth of the world’s existence does not depend on knowledge of any of its particular features. Even if major features of the world’s nature are not known, it is known that it exists. In this connection, we should note Lenin’s view that “the sole ‘property’ of matter with whose recognition philosophical materialism is bound up is the property of being an objective reality, of existing outside of mind.” (1) Matter in this philosophical sense is distinct from any physical conception of matter; a common definition of physical matter as something that “has mass and occupies space” is not implied. Materialism does not depend on the existence of matter in any particular form as opposed to another (say, matter versus energy, or matter versus antimatter, or dark matter versus ordinary matter), or indeed on any form of physical matter whatsoever.

In this paper I will assume only two things about matter: First, it undergoes continual change that is driven by the unity and struggle of contradictions. Second, it tends to be organized into various configurations, aggregations, and structures that are themselves subject to change, coming into existence and passing away. In my view, these are the core principles of dialectical materialism, or as I prefer to call it, materialist dialectics. (2) For the purposes of this paper, there will be no other general characteristics assigned to matter, and in particular, no assumption that it takes any of the forms traditionally associated with it, or that are correctly associated with it in certain specified contexts. It follows that, on this view, there is no fundamental difference between matter in the natural and social realms, which is an important consideration for some aspects of the class truth question as well as for materialist dialectics more generally.

Truth

Truth is different from reality; treating the two as equivalent means abstracting from the subject and denying the possibility of class truth

John Steele (in an unpublished paper of which I will make a certain amount of use here) has written:

Marxism has an engaged notion of truth. Truth is not ‘out there,’ waiting to be ‘discovered.’ Truth is made, not born, not found. (3) To quote from the Theses on Feuerbach: ‘The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth, i.e., the reality and power, the this-sidedness [Diesseitigkeit] of his thinking, in practice.’ . . .

The question turns, of course, on the meaning of made. Truth is forged (made, created) through interaction with the world (through practice). Truths don’t exist beforehand, but arise out of that interaction. Obviously this doesn’t mean you can make true whatever you desire to be, or think should be, true. To declare truth is not to make truth, even though truth is made. . . .

There are things that follow from the fact that truth is made. (And there are things that don’t.) There is no ‘objective truth’ already there. Whatever objectivity we achieve is just that: achieved and forged, not discovered. If truth arises through interaction with the world—human interaction—then there is no truth that is not made by human beings, and there is no truth other than from the human perspective, the perspective of human beings, living historically and enmeshed in the world. (There is no perspective outside the world, no god-viewpoint outside of creation and time.) If all truth is human truth (leaving aside the question of other intelligent life in the cosmos), then there would be no truths had not human beings come into existence; the world of course would be there in whatever shape and configuration it would take, but without consciousness as an interactive part of this world, no truths would be formed and forged. . . .

We forge truths through practice. The criterion of their being true (what makes them true) is their relation to the world. Our method of knowing and testing their truth again involves, in the end, practice. . . .

In the Nine Letters we point out that our ideas emerge, quoting Engels, ‘from individual human beings with their extremely limited thought.’ Letter 4 continues: ‘Truth is not just “out there” like a ripened fruit waiting to be plucked and delivered whole.’ Truths have to be won and developed through struggle, and this struggle very often has a class character. The truths that emerge—partial, relative truths, to be sure—are also stamped with a class character. (4)

I think that what Steele says here is generally correct, and points to what I want to develop in this paper. But before moving to the question of class truth specifically, we should look a little more at truth in general. Understanding the concept of truth is necessary for understanding the concept of class truth. If there is no well-grounded, dialectical theory of truth, then there cannot be a valid theory of class truth either. The attempt to “skip over” the general question of truth, and go to class truth directly, undercuts the possibility of attaining a thorough understanding of class truth—and is one of the tactics adopted by some of its critics. (5)

Theories of Truth

My discussion of class truth is based on the view that the subject (the individual subject of consciousness that acquires knowledge) and the object (anything perceived, imagined, conceived, or thought about, toward which the consciousness of the subject may be directed) (6) are both included in a larger context, and that truth is a correspondence between subject and object in which each comes into a relationship with the other of changing and being changed. The relative degree to which there are changes in the subject and changes in the object can vary greatly. In the process of forging truths, consciousness comes to more closely, or accurately, correspond to the world, and the conscious subject also transforms aspects of the world. This is a version of correspondence theory.

My discussion does not utilize or assume the correctness of a reflection theory, that is, a theory that defines truth as a reflection in consciousness of the external world. So as to make a clear and simple distinction from correspondence theory, I will define a reflection theory as one in which only the subject and its consciousness changes, whereas changes made in the object by the subject are not a part of the formation of truths but are part of a separate, later process in which the subject puts its ideas into practice. (7) Another theory of truth that is not accepted or utilized in this paper is coherence theory, which I will define as one in which the subject may come to have internally consistent, broadly explanatory knowledge whose correspondence with the object is largely not, or at least not necessarily, verified or verifiable. I will briefly discuss these three theories, and in particular, I will focus on the fact that reflection theory, as defined here, stands in the way of gaining a better understanding of class truth.

Reflection theory

In his first major, and most well-known, philosophical work, Lenin wrote: “Matter is a philosophical category denoting the objective reality which is given to man by his sensations, and which is copied, photographed and reflected by our sensations, while existing independently of them.” (8) He also wrote: “From the standpoint of modern materialism, i.e., Marxism, the limits of approximation of our knowledge to objective, absolute truth are historically conditional, but the existence of such truth is unconditional, and the fact that we are approaching nearer to it is also unconditional.” (9) There are two questions here regarding what the status of our relative knowledge is: can it give us a fully accurate knowledge of any particular aspect of the world; and can it approach more closely, without limit, a complete, accurate picture of the world as a whole.

We should note that Lenin wrote Materialism and Empirio-Criticism roughly one hundred years ago. Among many in the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist (MLM) movement, the views he expressed in it assumed the character of unchallengeable authority—even though there is evidence that Lenin himself was beginning to move beyond them in various ways during the following decade. We ought to subject his views to analysis in light of further work done since he formulated them, in both philosophy and science. If we do so, we find that, in light of advances in physics, neurology, and other sciences, as well as epistemology, it is necessary to restructure our understanding of materialism in ways that better accord with the nature of the world, including the nature and role of consciousness.

In regard to Lenin’s first point—whether human consciousness can form fully accurate “photographic” views of any aspect of the objective world—it is useful to examine what Jonah Lehrer has written: (10)

So far, the story of sight has been about what we actually sense: the light and lines detected by the retina and early stages of the visual cortex. These are our feed-forward projections. They represent the external world of reflected photons. And while seeing begins with these impressions, it quickly moves beyond their vague suggestions. After all, the practical human brain is not interested in a camera-like truth; it just wants the scene to make sense. From the earliest levels of visual processing in the brain up to the final polished image, coherence and contrast are stressed, often at the expense of accuracy.

Neuroscientists now know that what we end up seeing is highly influenced by something called top-down processing, a term that describes the way cortical brain layers project down and influence (corrupt, some might say) our actual sensations. After the inputs of the eye enter the brain, they are immediately sent along two separate pathways, one of which is fast and one of which is slow. The fast pathway quickly transmits a coarse and blurry picture to our prefrontal cortex, a brain region involved in conscious thought. Meanwhile, the slow pathway takes a meandering route through the visual cortex, which begins meticulously analyzing and refining the lines of light. The slow image arrives in the prefrontal cortex about fifty milliseconds after the fast image.

Why does the mind see everything twice? Because our visual cortex needs help. After the prefrontal cortex receives its imprecise picture, the ‘top’ of the brain quickly decides what the ‘bottom’ has seen and begins doctoring the sensory data. Form is imposed . . . ; the outside world is forced to conform to our expectations. If these interpretations are removed, our reality becomes unrecognizable. The light just isn’t enough. . . .

. . . the mind is not a mirror. The Gestaltists set out to prove that the process of seeing alters the world we observe. Like Immanuel Kant, their philosophical precursor, they argued that much of what was thought of as being out there—in our sensations of the outside world—actually came from in here, from inside the mind. (‘The imagination,’ Kant wrote, ‘is a necessary ingredient of perception itself.’) . . .

Modern neuroscientific studies of the visual cortex have confirmed the intuitions of Cézanne and the Gestaltists: visual experience transcends visual sensations. (11)

Lehrer, summarizing the results of a substantial body of work in psychology and neurology, challenges the idea that the relative truths that rest on a foundation of human sensations are fully accurate, or, in certain ways, can be. This limitation may be overcome to a degree, but not fully, by various measurement apparatuses. The fact that such apparatuses can form, for example, more realistic visual images of the objective world does not obviate the fact that the “imperfect” human eye and brain must see and interpret those images.

Regarding Lenin’s second point, as to whether relative truths can approach a complete, accurate picture of objective reality, Roy Bhaskar has written:

In any discussion of materialism there lurks the problem of the definition of matter. For Marx’s practical materialism, which is restricted to the social sphere (including of course natural science) and where ‘matter’ is to be understood in the sense of ‘social practice’, no particular difficulty arises. But from Engels on, Marxist materialism has more global pretensions, and the difficulty now appears that if a material thing is regarded as a perduring [lasting] occupant of space capable of being perceptually identified and re-identified, then many objects of scientific knowledge, although dependent for their identification upon material things, are patently immaterial. Clearly if one distinguishes scientific and philosophical ontologies, such considerations need not, as Lenin recognized, refute philosophical materialism. But what then is its content? Some materialists have subscribed to the idea of the exhaustive knowability of the world by science. But what grounds could there be for this? Such cognitive triumphalism seems an anthropocentric, and hence idealist, conceit. (12)

Bhaskar’s comments address the question of whether humans, even if they can know many things, can approach a full knowledge of the world as a whole. The term knowability might be taken to mean either that humans can know everything, or that they can know any thing, that is, that any particular thing might, in principle, be knowable, even if not everything can be. Lenin’s view was that anything could be known, even if not everything could ever be known; but that by knowing an unlimited series of particular truths, humans could approach a knowledge of everything to a greater and greater degree of accuracy.

But Lenin’s view of knowability can be challenged from a number of standpoints. I will not discuss them in any detail here, but they are of various kinds, including (a) the limitations imposed by the uncertainty principle in quantum theory, (b) the imperfections of the human brain and sense organs, which are products of an evolutionary process that did not require that they be perfect, (c) the infinity of the universe, in extent and complexity, and (d) the distinct possibility that parts of it may be inaccessible to humans. (13)

More generally, the idea that “everything can be known” does not allow for the possibility that our knowledge about some things may take the form of knowing that they cannot be known (at least by those having the limitations of humans).  I will return to some of these points below in the discussion of physics.

Correspondence theory

According to Bhaskar, “In the writings of Marx and Engels (a) ‘truth’ normally means ‘correspondence with reality’, while (b) the criterion for evaluating truth-claims normally is, or involves, human practice; i.e. Marx and Engels subscribe to a classical (Aristotelian) concept, and a practicist criterion of truth.

‘Correspondence’ in the Marxist tradition has usually been interpreted under the metaphor of ‘reflection’ or some kindred notion. This notion enters Marxist epistemology at two levels. Marx talks of both (a) the immediate forms and (b) the inner or underlying essence of objects being ‘reflected’, but whereas what is involved at (a) is an explanatory postulate or methodological starting-point, at (b) it is a norm of descriptive or scientific adequacy. Thus whereas at (a), Marx criticizes vulgar economy for merely reflecting the direct form of manifestation of essential relations (letter to Engels, 27 June 1867), his concern at (b) is precisely with the production in thought of an adequate representation or ‘reflection’ of their inner connection—a task which involves theoretical work and conceptual transformation, not a simple passive replication of reality. Note that a ‘reflection’, as normally understood, is both (1) of something which exists independently of it and (2) produced in accordance with certain principles of projection or representative conventions. If (1) is the realist element, (2) is consistent with a practicist emphasis and the idea that there are no unmediated representations of reality. . . . (14)

This understanding of reflection is clearly more complex than Lenin’s concept of matter as being “copied, photographed, and reflected by our sensations,” in that it encompasses the process of conceptualization.

Several years after he wrote Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, however, after making a thorough study of Hegel’s dialectics and an extensive range of philosophical and scientific works, Lenin wrote: “Man’s consciousness not only reflects the objective world, but creates it.” (15)

Lenin was pointing out that the subject can transform the object, and that this has implications for epistemology. His statement begins to capture the “other side” of the mutual interaction between changes in consciousness and changes in the external world. (16) About a quarter-century later, Mao formulated his famous synthesis about the dialectic of knowing and doing: “If you want knowledge, you must take part in the practice of changing reality. If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself. If you want to know the structure and properties of the atom, you must make physical and chemical experiments to change the state of the atom. If you want to know the theory and methods of revolution, you must take part in revolution.” (17) Not only could the subject make changes in the object, but these were necessary if the subject was to become conscious of any truths about the object.

Summarizing the development of Lenin’s thinking about epistemology, Kevin Anderson has written:

I would like to look at Lenin’s increasing rejection of crude reflection theory, another point of rupture with his perspectives of 1908 [when he wrote Materialism and Empirio-Criticism]. The most explicit evidence for this move is a statement near the end of Lenin’s Hegel notebooks: ‘Man’s cognition not only reflects the objective world, but creates it’. This is an example of an active, critical, revolutionary appropriation of Hegel’s idealism. Here the cognition embodied in revolutionary theory is not only the reflection of material conditions. It is also a reaching beyond those conditions, toward the creation of a new world, one free of the dehumanized social relations of capitalism. Nor does the side materialism or reflection get priority ‘in the last analysis’ here. If anything, the flow of the sentence leads in the opposite direction, moving us from the limitations of a reflection theory to the notion that ideas, concepts can ‘create’ the objective world. (18)

Coherence theory

The coherence theory of truth is a theory of knowledge that maintains that “truth is a property primarily applicable to any extensive body of consistent propositions, and derivatively, applicable to any one proposition in such a system by virtue of its part in the system.” (19) A version of coherence theory is an aspect of a correct theory of knowledge, but it is not fundamental in the way that correspondence theory is. This distinction has importance for scientific theories. Arriving at a consistent theory is an important goal of science, and evidence of the truth of some propositions within a theory is their consistency with other, established propositions. But it goes beyond coherence theory to note that among these propositions there must be at least some of them that are supported by observation and experiment.

In other words, the conceptual coherence of a scientific theory does not replace the requirement for some correspondence with the world, in which at least some parts of the theory, though not all, must be verifiable. This requirement marks a demarcation between scientific theories and entirely subjective and pragmatic philosophical theories. The physicist Richard Feynman has summarized this point as follows:

Another thing that people have emphasized since quantum mechanics was developed is the idea that we should not speak about those things which we cannot measure. (Actually relativity theory also said this.) Unless a thing can be defined by measurement, it has no place in a theory. And since an accurate value of the momentum of a localized particle cannot be defined by measurement it therefore has no place in the theory. The idea that this is what was the matter with classical theory is a false position. It is a careless analysis of the situation. Just because we cannot measure position and momentum precisely does not a priori mean that we cannot talk about them. It only means that we need not talk about them. The situation in the sciences is this: A concept or an idea which cannot be measured or cannot be referred directly to experiment may or may not be useful. It need not exist in a theory. In other words, suppose we compare the classical theory of the world with the quantum theory of the world, and suppose that it is true experimentally that we can measure position and momentum only imprecisely. The question is whether the ideas of the exact position of a particle and the exact momentum of a particle are valid or not. The classical theory admits the ideas; the quantum theory does not. . . . It is always good to know which ideas cannot be checked directly, but it is not necessary to remove them all. It is not true that we can pursue science completely by using only those concepts which are directly subject to experiment. (20)

While there is a correct aspect to coherence theory that has relevance to scientific theories, the critics of class truth try to use the other side of coherence theory—that nothing in a particular body of consistent ideas must necessarily correspond to the objective world—to attack the notion of class truth and bolster their views. They maintain that the idea of class truth boils down to an arbitrary assertion of the truth of a set of ideas anyone may choose to hold that, although they may be internally consistent, and may be claimed to be “useful” by whoever holds them, do not meet the standard of correspondence to the real world, lack scientific validity, and constitute mere subjectivism. But this criticism of class truth misses the mark because a valid concept of class truth does not rely on coherence theory.

Class Truth

Throughout this paper, for simplicity’s sake, I am going to consider a world in which there are only two classes—the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. This has no bearing on the content of the discussion, because everything can easily be extended to a situation in which there are more classes.

In addition, I want to note that the existence of class truth depends only on the general nature and existence of truth, and the general nature and existence of classes. Thus even if it were true, as some maintain, that the class configuration of society has changed so much that the proletariat can no longer be said to exist, or is no longer a revolutionary class, or for some other reason no longer has the social significance it once had, the validity of a general concept of class truth would still not be called into question.

According to the CIA Factbook, in 2007, the top 10 percent in Brazil in terms of household income made 43 percent of the country’s total income, while the bottom 10 percent made only 1.1 percent of the total income. (21) (The distribution of wealth, in distinction from income, was even more unequal.) For decades, the country has had one of the most unequal income distributions in the world. This is a clear example of what I will call a class reality—a reality that has a class character. It would seem that even the critics of class truth would have to agree. It is unavoidable if one’s views are fact-based.

The critics of class truth would also, on the whole, agree with the statement that each class has its own particular class consciousness. This has been a common concept in the history of Marxism and virtually no would-be Marxists have seen fit to challenge it.

If the critics also hold that truth is a correspondence between reality and consciousness, then it would seem to follow that they are claiming that the correspondence between a class reality and a class consciousness, which would be the condition of many truths, somehow results in a truth that does not itself have a class character. The logic behind this peculiar idea is something they have not chosen to reveal.

Meanings of class truth

To state it once: My position is not that all truths have a class character. In one of the sillier “refutations” of class truth, someone says, “2 + 2 = 4. It doesn’t matter what class you’re a member of; that’s still true.” And if there were some world in which that weren’t true, presumably it wouldn’t be a result of class factors. Fair enough; but not a point that touches what I am arguing for.

Again, and less abstractly: Earth is approximately 93 million miles from the Sun. This is something that can be determined according to a set of scientific procedures about which different classes—not every member of them, perhaps, but that is irrelevant here—will agree. Class is not relevant to the truth of this idea. (22)

I will concede, then, that there are “nonclass truths” as well as class truths. So what is meant by “class truths”? I suggest that they are of two broad categories:

Established truths that can be most fully (or, in some cases, exclusively) known by one class. In capitalist society, because of its position, the proletariat is the class most able to know and understand many truths, including ones that it has created as well as ones that the capitalist class has created. The proletariat, with its class position, experience, outlook, and ideology, is best able to comprehend these truths, and may be the only class able to understand them completely. There are other, usually more limited truths that the bourgeoisie, because of its class position, may be able to or at any rate does know best, although it may be arguable whether they thoroughly understand many of them. (23)

New truths, especially those arising from changes in reality resulting from one class’s activity, that may or may not be knowable by the other class. In this meaning, which is more fundamental, each class can create new class realities, which become the basis of new class truths. Both classes can comprehend certain new class realities, although again, the proletariat can understand them most fully, often most immediately, and they often elude comprehension by the bourgeoisie.

The key distinction here is that whereas certain realities can be created only by one class, or more precisely, if one class has relative dominance over the other with respect to what can cause those realities to come into being, there are other realities that can be created only by the other class. In particular, because of where it is situated, how it is organized with regard to production and more generally in society, its class outlook and method, and so forth, the proletariat is able to create realities, and comprehend many others, that the bourgeoisie cannot. These realities, and the truths that correspond to them, have a class character.

Class truths can be articulated and understood only from a class position. And this is not simply a matter of “different interpretations,” but of the different character of what can and cannot be known from different class viewpoints.

Further, there are truths that can only be created and understood from a specific class position. It is important to recognize the changing of conditions, as well as the theorization about or articulation of them, as being intrinsic to class truth. In fact, if all that were meant by class truth is that two classes have, and can only attain, a different knowledge of the same reality, then it could be maintained that this is only a matter of a difference between the relative truths that each class can grasp, whereas the absolute truth—understood in static terms, and conflated with objective reality—remains classless. I do not believe this is a valid argument, although for some, it does have an air of plausibility. However, if one considers the second meaning of class truth, in which each class has a different ability to create new class realities, then new elements of class reality arise with respect to which the classes have a different relationship. There ceases to be any static, objective reality to which each class’s consciousness can be independently compared, and the difference between the classes’ relationship to the new realities has an absolute aspect rather than only a relative one.

Also, the process of arriving at truth is not smooth sailing, particularly if the realities and the truths at hand are contested by the different classes and the situation is dynamic and complex. In whatever sphere, including the natural sciences, truth develops in the struggle against falsehood.

The theory that no truths have a class character is a product of contemplative materialism. It assumes a metaphysical separation between the subject and the object, and posits that it is possible to learn about the world without changing it. It denies that the ways in which reality is changed by a class have a class specificity. Perhaps above all, it fails to understand that subject and object form part of a larger reality that must both undergo changes as the basis of any learning that is going on.

The critics of the concept of class truth suppose that somehow in the process of learning, which results in a greater degree of correspondence between subject and object than previously, even though the subject in a class society has a class outlook and methodology, and even though the object also may have a class character—despite all that, the correspondence between them—truth—has no class character. This theory acquires currency in the communist movement under conditions in which the subject—which might be a revolutionary party or a nominally revolutionary party—has little or no experience in changing reality, social conditions and bourgeois rule are relatively stable, and bourgeois ideas have hegemony.

Case study: Attila commissions a poll (cartoon by William Steig in The New Yorker, December 31, 1955 )

In the course of making and recording his findings, Attila’s pollster is not merely discovering a truth that already existed. He is, as he learns about the world, also changing it, and is being changed. The woman in her hut is being changed by the experience of the poll; for example, she has learned something about how polls are conducted and, perhaps, how to give prudent answers. Or perhaps she has been influenced by the “superstitious awe of the state”: the pollster may have acquired an image of greater candor, concern for the people, and dedication to finding the facts. The ruling class has acquired greater ideological legitimacy, producing a negative effect on the possibilities of social change. But instead of that, the woman may have gotten a deeper understanding of the depths of the state’s ignorance and deceit. She may even have gotten some new insight into how to build an underground network of resistance to Attila. During and in the aftermath of the poll, truths that have a class character have been created on both sides of the class divide.

It would be impossible for a revolutionary to conduct this poll in the same way; the questions asked, the answers gained, the understanding gained, and, of course, the uses to which the poll could and would be put, would all be different, changing the world in different ways from how Attila’s forces can as a result of their poll. Even if the revolutionary pollster asked the same questions, everything else would be different. The woman, too, would learn different lessons, changing her, and subsequently others, in a different way. Who conducts the poll determines not only what information is acquired—this is perhaps readily apparent—but also determines the nature of various other changes that will occur, including during the poll. Different class realities are changed, and different class truths are created. It is fallacious to differentiate the class methodologies and content of the two different class polls without recognizing that they have changed reality in contrasting ways, both during the taking of the poll and afterward. The results of the poll are what they are, no matter what either class thinks or does? Hardly. (24)

Class realities

Again, just as it is necessary not to conflate truth and reality, class truth and class reality must not be confused. By class realities I mean things and processes having a class character or partially class character (typically bound up with a nonclass character). Since many realities have aspects that have a class character and others that do not, it takes work to disentangle them conceptually.

False notions of class truth

Mike Ely’s Nine Letters points out: “. . . the communist notion of class truth is not ‘whatever we believe is true and whatever the bourgeoisie believes is not.’ Nor is it ‘we create our reality by declaring our truths, while the bourgeoisie creates its reality through its truths.’ Nor is it ‘whatever serves our cause is true, whatever doesn’t serve our cause should be treated as untrue.’” This is all correct, and it is highly significant that the Nine Letters have been unjustly slandered for the position they take on class truth.

The decisive thing in class truth is not a declaration, belief, or utility. It is that classes have different relationships to the world—their material situations, consciousness, and thus their ability to grasp and change reality all differ.

It does a great disservice to the truth to hold that false conceptions are all that class truth consists of. But this in no way minimizes the importance of understanding the nature of the incorrect ideas about class truth that have had currency in the ICM and the great harm they have done to the revolutionary cause.

There are many instructive examples of this. It is not my aim in this paper to go into detail about all the effects of wrong conceptions of class truth that have been held by communists who have believed in it, but a few historical consequences of the idea that the truth can be equated with what is (or seems to be) of service to the revolutionary cause should be noted. Often this has taken the form of a voluntarist triumphalism—the unjustified belief that if the people and the party hold to their dogma, then victory is assured. This sort of orientation—the unmerited certainty of winning, and the idea that the world will bend to the beliefs and preferences of the revolutionaries—has had disastrous results. Some of the worst examples include the policies of the German communist party during the period of the ascension of Nazism in the early 1930s; the class collaboration of the Indonesian party preceding the counterrevolutionary coup in 1965; and the general line of those who, in a world that has greatly changed since the revolutionary high tide of the 1960s, persist in believing that the basic contradictions in the world continue to have the same configuration as in that decade—an illusion from which incorrect strategy and organizational forms flow.

Answering some questions about class truth

What’s wrong with the idea that what’s true is true, regardless of whether the bourgeoisie or the proletariat say so? This argument was briefly addressed in the introduction. It is correct that while either class may make some claim about truth, it ain’t necessarily so. But that does not refute a valid concept of class truth. The theory of class truth does not founder just because both classes share an inability to make something true simply by believing or asserting that it is true. Asking what difference it makes what one class or another think (in the sense of how they contemplate the world) is posing the wrong question. The real question is: how does each class engage with a given idea in practice, and what is unique to each class as it does so. If the truth of an idea is verified or created in substantively different ways in the practice of different classes, then there is a class truth.

Why is it that the bourgeoisie cannot recognize many class truths? At root, it is a matter of whether they can enter into a relationship with those truths such that they can recognize and verify them. On the whole, this is not possible for the bourgeois class to do in various contexts (although for individuals and relatively small groups it may be). Without the ability to establish a certain kind of relationship with the relevant parts of the world, the bourgeoisie cannot know these truths. How different classes would measure or interpret different truths at a particular time—in conditions of stasis or simple, predictable motion—and whether they could come to agreement about them, is a secondary matter, although in many instances they could not come to agreement even in those conditions and the idea that they could is fundamentally flawed.

Why can’t the bourgeoisie make the changes in reality that give rise to many class truths? Again, it is constitutionally unable to do so; it cannot create some of these class truths any more than it could build a communist society. If it seeks to change the realities that correspond to those truths, it cannot do so except in accordance with its own class characteristics. Then it creates truths, often bourgeois class truths, that are different from the truths that existed prior to the bourgeoisie’s intervention. What is true is often a matter of the creation of new truths by different classes that are situated differently in society, have different class interests, and establish the different truths by practicing their different class methodologies and applying their different class ideologies.

Why can’t the bourgeoisie just “step into the shoes” of the proletariat and recognize or create the same truths—using the “classless” scientific approach and method? (25) Of course we are speaking here of the class, not of individuals, who can “cross over” and become class traitors, as do some members of the bourgeoisie who come to an understanding of the overall movement of history, as Marx and Engels noted in the Communist Manifesto. But the class as a whole cannot “cross over”; even if they could, reality would have outstripped them. If the bourgeoisie as a class could assume the same relationship to reality that the proletariat does, then it would be withering away as a class in an all-round sense.

Notes

(1) Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, in Collected Works, vol. 14, 260.

(2) The import of this terminological distinction, about which I will not make a big deal in this paper, is twofold: first, it highlights the point that dialectics is the central feature of matter, consciousness, and their interrelationship; second, it demarcates what I think is a basically sound philosophical conception from the sterile and dogmatic “diamat” of the Third International.

(3) Note that it is not only truth, but the reality of the objective world, that is changed through practice, whether in more sweeping or more incremental ways. I will develop this point more.

(4) Except as otherwise noted, quotations from Steele are from his unpublished paper about class truth, written in 2008. References to the Nine Letters are to Nine Letters to Our Comrades: Getting Beyond Avakian’s New Synthesis, by Mike Ely. Again, Steele’s argument about what he refers to as “making truth” depends on changing reality.

(5) I recognize that there are many understandings of “truth” held across the broad spectrum of Marxists. I will address some of these later in this paper.

(6) See Dagobert Runes, ed., Dictionary of Philosophy, and Howard Selsam, Handbook of Philosophy.

(7) In other words, the subject’s activity with respect to truth in reflection theory as I am defining it here can be a matter of politics but not epistemology. It is important to note that reflection as discussed by Marx was not so simple, as Roy Bhaskar has summarized; see the section of this paper on correspondence theory. However, Lenin’s reflection theory did have the features I describe here, although those features are not exhaustive of it: they include the tenets that the subject “stands outside” the objective world; that there is essentially a one-way determination of the subject’s sensations by the object, without any reciprocal influence that creates new truths; that the objective world has a definite state at any time; and that the subject’s knowledge of it can become ever more accurate, without limit. I am defining reflection theory here in such a way as to accentuate its differences with important elements of correspondence theory.

(8) Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, in Collected Works, vol. 14, 130.

(9) Ibid., 136.

(10) I am citing Lehrer’s book because it is accessible, well written, and interesting, and because it addresses a broad range of questions in natural science, literature, and art. Part of the book’s argument is that scientific truth cannot capture all of reality—Lehrer cites consciousness as an example, distinguishing it from the neural correlates or underpinnings of consciousness—and that artistic truth usually precedes and anticipates scientific truth. The book has various important weaknesses, such as its general failure to discuss social and historical reality and how they affect human perceptions and thought. These weaknesses do not, however, invalidate Lehrer’s particular argument that I am citing here.

(11) Proust Was a Neuroscientist, 107–8, 116–17.

(12) “Materialism,” in A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, ed. Tom Bottomore, 372.

(13) The idea of infinite complexity is often challenged by invoking the ideas that all changes are lawlike and that fundamental physical laws have mathematical beauty and so are ultimately simple. The cosmologist Lee Smolin is among those who have called attention to, and questioned, the latter idea, arguing that the principal criterion for deciding whether a scientific theory is valid is whether it is supported by actual observations and experimental results, whereas aesthetic considerations, while important, are secondary. See The Trouble with Physics, chapter 2. Is the idea that scientific laws should seem simple to humans another form of anthropocentrism?

In a discussion of different meanings of “the universe,” Brian Greene refers to the possibility of “separate realms, ones that are partly or fully, temporarily or permanently, inaccessible to us.” See The Hidden Reality, 4.

(14) Roy Bhaskar, “Truth,” in A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, 550. It is not explicit in Marx that the changing of concepts requires, at some levels, changing the world. In his Theses on Feuerbach, Marx says that the latter is “the point,” but his epistemological formulations are not quite the same as Mao’s succinct summary that in order to know anything, it is necessary to change it.

(15) Philosophical Notebooks, in Collected Works, vol. 38, 212. It is significant that during the entire period of the Comintern, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism was published and popularized and taken as Lenin’s last word, as well as dialectical materialism’s last word, on epistemological questions, whereas the Philosophical Notebooks were seldom if ever referred to. The more thoroughly dialectical standpoint of the Notebooks evidently did not accord with the philosophical line that the Comintern leadership understood and wanted to propagate. Curiously, even a non-Comintern Marxist and scholar of Hegel such as Herbert Marcuse, in his critique in Soviet Marxism (1958), made no mention of the Notebooks.

(16) Lenin did not develop this point further in his philosophical work, which was interrupted by the world war and then the Russian revolution. During the final decade of his life, although circumstances prevented him from doing more theoretical work about the impact of consciousness on the objective world, Lenin participated in the practical-political process of actually creating a new world.

(17) On Practice, in Selected Readings, 71. It is noteworthy that RCP chairman Bob Avakian, in Making Revolution, Emancipating Humanity, paraphrases Mao’s statement, saying that “. . . to learn about the pear you have to change it by eating it. . . .“ But then in the following sentence, this has become “It is a fact that you do change reality by investigating it.“ That was not Mao‘s point, which was that you can only investigate reality by changing it. With a characteristic idealist distortion, Avakian has reversed the principal and secondary aspects of the relationship between changing reality and learning about it. In essence, he is saying, “It is a fact that you do taste the pear by learning about it.”

Throughout this paper, my explicit comments on Avakian’s and the RCP’s philosophical positions will be contained in these endnotes. To clarify a methodological point: not all of Avakian’s positions on philosophy are incorrect, and some of them are sharply in contradiction with the ones I focus on here. But I believe it is important to break with his entire philosophical framework, which is central to his “New Synthesis.” Eclecticism is a characteristic of revisionist philosophy. We need to engage in critical struggle against it, not conciliation with those aspects of it that are correct.

(18) “The Rediscovery and Persistence of the Dialectic in Philosophy and in World Politics,” in Lenin Reloaded, 127–28. Situating the question at a level of large-scale historical process, Anderson is making the point that working toward the goal of transforming social reality can make it possible to have a different understanding of that reality, which then feeds into further transformation. Mao’s related point is more general—not only does the possibility of large-scale revolutionary change stimulate the mind to find the ways to cause changes in the objective world, but so can other undertakings on many levels, including changing the atom, for example. Anderson cites a translation of Lenin’s work that uses the term cognition rather than consciousness.

(19) Runes, ed., A Dictionary of Philosophy.

(20) Lectures on Physics, vol. 1, 38-8ff. Feynman’s argument is correct in that it points out that not all concepts in a scientific theory need be directly measurable; but it is incorrect in that it accepts a general position that concepts that are not measurable need not be included in the theory, that is, that the theory would be just as good without them and that whether they are included in the theory depends on whether they happen to be useful—almost on convenience. This viewpoint is in contrast with Lenin’s correct view of abstraction: “The abstraction of matter, of a law of nature, the abstraction of value, etc., in short all scientific (correct, serious, not absurd) abstractions reflect nature more deeply, truly and completely” than particular facts, perceptions, measurable entities, etc. See Philosophical Notebooks, in Collected Works, vol. 38, 171.

(21) https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/br.html

(22) In choosing this example from astronomy, I do not imply that all truths in the natural sciences lack a class character; far from it. In a somewhat more complicated example, the discussant knocks on a table and utters a similar formula: “This is a table; that doesn’t depend on what class you’re in.” However, the table does have a class character, arising from the purposes with which it was conceived, how it was produced, its cost of production, how it was marketed, how it is used and in accordance with what conceptions of utility and aesthetics, and who gets to sit at it. Class truths are associated with these class realities.

(23) In addition, there are some class truths—class truths in the sense that they are truths about aspects of reality that do have a class character—about which different classes may agree under certain conditions. These conditions are ones in which, at least in the short term, either none of the classes can change the reality, or they can only change it in the same ways; and their different class positions do not lead to their having a different understanding of the aspects of reality in question. Thus there is, for example, no substantial disagreement between the classes about the existence of economic “lopsidedness” in the world, even while they disagree about its causes and remedies (or whether anything can or should be done about it). This standpoint disagrees with the dominant view among the revolutionaries in China during the socialist period, which is addressed later in this paper.

(24) Although the bourgeoisie as a class cannot conduct polls that reach the same conclusions as those done by revolutionaries, create the same truths, or have the same effects, it is true that on occasion a bourgeois poll, designed to make available the best information about certain questions, can have a more contradictory character. One of the clearest examples of the nature of a bourgeois poll that “asked some of the right questions” and thus did not conceal some of the revolutionary elements of reality in the way that most bourgeois polls do is cited by Philip Foner: “A nationwide poll of black people in the United States, conducted by Louis Harris for Time magazine (published on March 30, 1970, in a special issue of Time which for the first time devoted virtually an entire issue to one subject) revealed that while ‘the vast majority want to work through the existing system’ to further their position, 9% of the black people across the country, more than two million black Americans, count themselves as ‘revolutionaries,’ and believe that only a ‘readiness to use violence will ever get them equality.’ The poll showed that the number of those who believe that the blacks ‘will probably have to resort to violence to win rights,’ had risen from 21% in 1966 to 31% in 1970. The finding also disclosed that while 75% of blacks admired the NAACP ‘a great deal,’ 25% had this view of the Black Panthers.” See The Black Panthers Speak, xiv.

(25) An analogy to physics is instructive. When Einstein formulated his special theory of relativity, with its conclusion that observers in different frames of reference could disagree about the order of events, and further, that there was no preferred frame of reference, many people were incredulous. How could it be that there was no single reality concerning the order of events? It was counterintuitive to think that observers could not come to an agreement. But this objection turned out to be based on a metaphysical idea that ignored the various physical effects of relative velocities, particularly when they are very high. Because of the relative motion between observers in the two reference frames, there is in fact no way that they can come to the same conclusions about the order of some (although not all) events. This analogy does not have all of the same features as the questions posed by class truth, of course, but it is interesting for what it suggests about the erroneous notion that since there is supposedly one common objective reality permeating both classes’ reference frames (even if it may be interpreted or “measured” better or worse, more dialectically or less so, etc.), then truth must be the same in both frames.

Related posts:

1. On the concept of class truth – II
2. On the concept of class truth – III

This is the question which Joshua Mostafa approaches in the following essay (originally appearing on the Overland blog in three parts, here, here, and here), finally relating it to a philosophical need. The themes here are closely related to the purposes of this site,and I invite discussion.

Return of the real

by Joshua Mostafa

I. “Enlightened false consciousness”

In the face of looming environmental catastrophe, we seem unable to resist the temptation to bury our heads in the sand. The feeble results of the Cancún summit last month, in which world leaders yet again kicked the can down the road, were hardly unexpected, but depressing nonetheless. Enormous and powerful interests defend the status quo; equal and opposite political will is required to effect the radical change needed. Climate change deniers have no serious arguments against the overwhelming consensus among climatologists, but all they need to do is to muddy the waters sufficiently to undermine public trust in the science, and thus sap that necessary political will. For any less politicised topic, they would be rightly ignored as cranks and green-inkers. The fact that they are not, and routinely given access to the media in the interests of ‘impartiality’ represents something not only disheartening but deeply unsettling. Clive Hamilton, writing in Overland last year, describes the problem:

While the politicisation of the ABC over the Iraq War, multiculturalism, Aboriginal policy and so on was lamentable, the ABCs’ contribution to the erosion of public confidence in climate science had another dimension, an epistemological one. It reflected a decision to relativise science itself.

Such decisions are dangerously radical. They reflect a disrespect for truth, not in some transcendent or ultimate sense, but the practical, workaday respect we have for reality that prevents us from embracing wishful thinking and fantasy as a guide to action. The direct cause – ‘strong pressure from senior management’, as Hamilton puts it – itself requires explanation in terms of both interests and the intellectual climate. Under what circumstances do we blind ourselves to inconvenient facts of the highest stakes possible: species survival?

As far as interests go, it’s a no-brainer: those of corporations dependent for their profits on the massive rate of carbon emissions continuing without restriction. But we on the Left should not get too comfortable pointing the finger. When we consider the epistemological conditions – the kinds of thoughts we have about knowledge itself, the way we discuss it, and our understanding of the bases on which we acquire and validate it – in which such a move is possible, we cannot entirely absolve ourselves from blame. It may be the Right carrying out the attack, but, as Bruno Latour wrote in 2004, ‘like weapons smuggled through a fuzzy border to the wrong party, these are our weapons nonetheless. In spite of all the deformations, it is easy to recognise, still burnt in the steel, our trademark: Made in Criticalland’. These weapons are ideology critique, anti-fetishism, theories of the social construction of knowledge, discourse analysis. It is only in retrospect, as the American Tea Party act out their miserable parody of protest, that we can see the tragic trajectory of the first iteration by the darkly farcical aspect of the second.

Again, we can attempt to disavow our implication in the slippery slope to relativism by finding easy targets: deconstruction, postmodernism, bourgeois degeneracy. But it was Marx who rehabilitated and legitimised the use of ad hominem arguments in theorising false consciousness, and the critique of bourgeois ideology; Adorno and Gramsci who turned the scorching flame of critique to the cultural sphere. Critical theory has challenged conventional thinking by hollowing out the ground from under it. But it has also eroded the common ground on which we all stand. In a case like ours today, Latour observes:

the danger would no longer be coming from an excessive confidence in ideological arguments posturing as matters of fact—as we have learned to combat so efficiently in the past—but from an excessive distrust of good matters of fact disguised as bad ideological biases! While we spent years trying to detect the real prejudices hidden behind the appearance of objective statements, do we now have to reveal the real objective and incontrovertible facts hidden behind the illusion of prejudices? And yet entire Ph.D. programs are still running to make sure that good American kids are learning the hard way that facts are made up, that there is no such thing as natural, unmediated, unbiased access to truth, that we are always prisoners of language, that we always speak from a particular standpoint, and so on, while dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives.

Latour is not, of course, suggesting that the big bad world revealed by critical theory is too much for us, or that we should take comfort in the old illusions. He argues that, like generals fighting the last war instead of the one facing them, we have failed to evaluate, strategically, the efficacy and consequences of our modes of operation, our tactics, and our methods. Iconoclasm produces only Pyrrhic victory: ‘the Zeus of Critique rules absolutely, to be sure, but over a desert.’

How have we arrived, then, at this impasse? Peter Sloterdijk, in his book Critique of Cynical Reason, describes the route we have taken. It is almost three centuries since the Enlightenment began its assault on certainties of all kinds – theological, political, social, psychological – but its promise of emancipation has been realised only patchily. In different ways, liberalism, social democracy and communism have all disappointed. The disposition of the modern mind, if it does not retreat into wilful stupidity and reactionary conservatism, tends to melancholy and cynicism. Sloterdijk names this condition ‘enlightened false consciousness’; the name itself implies a certain cynicism in its self-contradiction.

Before the destructive machinations of power and capital, we find ourselves impotent, and compromised by our own complicity in the system. Our days are numbered, and we have lost our faith in medicine. Revolution, the most powerful remedy available, has been known to kill the patient altogether; reform is merely palliative care. It is hard not to feel trapped and helpless. In order to live our lives and feed ourselves we must buy goods whose production is contributing to environmental destruction, pay tax that goes towards buying bombs, and perform some kind of senseless job whose real function – whatever its ostensible one – is to generate surplus value for shareholders we’re never likely even to meet. The capitalo-parliamentary system precludes meaningful political diversity except at the margins, in minor parties with no power, an exercise in tokenism, a sideshow that allows the mainstream to claim that the full spectrum is present while ensuring that the parties representing different aspects of moneyed elite interest continue taking their turns at the levers of power.

So what are we left with? Critique is a way of retreating and retrenching, to maintain a degree of distance both from the world we inhabit and the life we lead. We are, each of us, so compromised by our involvement in a deeply cynical society, that critique becomes more a matter of psychic self-defence than an instrument of political change. One can pick over the old bones of ideology, pull apart this or that piece of discourse, and take a dismal pleasure in our own cleverness and freedom from illusion; but it is an empty cleverness and a bitter freedom without agency.

Practical critique is protest, dissent, resistance. Against injustice, and a trend across the industrialised world to roll back hard-won liberties, to dismantle and marketise public services, resistance is worthwhile and necessary. But it is also reactive, and as such, uninspiring: if people do not rally en masse to the cause of damage limitation, we cannot be entirely surprised. The global financial crisis has shown neoliberalism to be bankrupt morally, intellectually and economically. Yet there was no rush to the Left, just a cynical shrug of the shoulders. ‘Perhaps the most striking feature of the 2008 crisis so far,’ Susan Watkins wrote last year, ‘has been its combination of economic turmoil and political stasis’. This is what Sloterdijk means by ‘enlightened false consciousness’ – we know the system is breaking under its own contradictions, that it is driving us toward destruction, yet we act as if we do not know this, as if we are willing participants in the system: working and shopping, shopping and working. In a state of enlightened false consciousness, we need something other than critique to escape the duality of external bad faith (we live as if we are happy to be mere worker-consumers) and of inner detachment – because critique only deepens the ironic distance between our minds and our lives.

II. “Keeping ‘em honest”

In yesterday’s post, I argued that critique is a double-edged sword: a necessary aspect of political struggle, but one that, in combination with social atomisation and lack of political agency, deepens our alienation and contributes to a cycle of cynicism and bad faith. How then, do we extricate ourselves from this impasse?

Sloterdijk proposes that ideology critique is the heir to a rich satirical tradition dating back to Diogenes, which he calls kynicism, to differentiate from modern cynicism. Kynicism is a form of critique that ‘goes beyond theoretical repudiation. It does not speak against idealism, it lives against it’. Rather than constructing counter-arguments to Platonic idealism, Diogenes would respond with lewd physicality, smearing faeces and masturbating in public. His answer to Socrates’ definition of humans as ‘featherless bipeds’ was to bring a plucked chicken to the academy and announce it as a man.

It is this ‘lost cheekiness’, Sloterdijk suggests, that is missing in today’s critique. Like kynicism and satire, ideology critique succeeds by unmasking, by stripping away illusions. But in its attempt to be serious, in dispensing with laughter, something vital was lost: ‘it has given up its life as satire, in order to win its position in books as “theory”.’

Perhaps, then, the rumbustious energy of satire can catch the popular imagination in ways that critique, that dry voice in the wilderness of academia, cannot? One cannot help thinking of Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, a satirical cable TV news revue. Stewart skewers not only the obvious Republican targets, but also the craven Democrats and their habit of pre-emptively ceding ground to their opponents. Last year, after mounting a quasi-political rally that stretched the boundaries of satire, he gave an unusually serious interview on MSNBC, and discussed his attitude to the media’s role in political life:

Maybe there is a way to not engage in the idea—not to accept the premise…that we are all on the axis of left / right. Maybe there’s a different premise. And I don’t mean that in the way of partisanship, I mean it in the way of—they cover politics, politics is a Democratic and Republican and game. It is left / right. But then you begin to confuse everything [sic] through that same conflict. I think the conflict that would be more appropriate for a news channel, is corruption / non-corruption… [Anderson Cooper]’s got a bit on his show called ‘Keeping em honest’. Which is just so funny to me, because…it’d be like if I had a new segment called ‘Telling jokes to an audience.’ It just felt…like, isn’t that what this whole thing is?

For now, let’s bracket the obvious rejoinders (there is no leftwing party in the money-saturated American political system, the axis runs from centre-right to rabid; he conflates partisan conflict with ideological conflict; a proper critique of corruption is necessarily political). The most significant limitation to Stewart’s position is precisely what gives his show its impact: the act of unmasking. In this respect, it is no different from ideology critique – it’s just funnier.

This is a limitation in two ways. First, while such unmasking can damage the powerful by exposing their hypocrisy, it does not build anything up. In fact, it can itself act as a pressure valve that helps people’s frustrations dissipate. As satirical TV writer Armando Iannuchi put it in an interview on the BBC: ‘Because we have such a strong satirical tradition in the UK, we don’t have one of protest. Which is why, when we see students chucking fire extinguishers around, we’re quite shocked. We throw flour and water and eggs at politicians instead of bricks.’

Second, satire also has a more serious problem that makes it far less radical than critique: it focuses on the folly or knavery of individuals. While there is no shortage of malign and cretinous politicians, to frame the situation in terms of integrity or corruption, by its very apoliticality elides more serious and endemic problems at the level of economy, polity and social relations. But it is hard to imagine political satire that goes beyond sending up hypocrisy, stupidity or pomposity, and still manages to be funny. World-systems analysis doesn’t usually come with a good punchline.

So Sloterdijk’s critique of Critique is devastating, but the kynicism he advocates does not move us forward. Perhaps there is something common to both that is at fault. In a recent debate in Eurozine, Benedict Seymour makes a point about negation in Marxism that could be applied to Sloterdijk’s kynicism, but also (and more significantly) to critical theory in general:

I think one of the key things in Marxism is the emphasis on negativity. You can see how bogus the Stalinist-Communist model is in its tendency to fall back on the bourgeois habit of projecting utopias and then trying to approximate to them. Which, strangely enough, is parallel to the average working life of the exploited proletarian. You must meet the target, you must fulfil the five year plan—always a utopia. I think Marxism is anti-utopian in that respect; we start with what we’ve got and we negate it. Having said that, you can imagine a few basic negations: value, the market, exchange, production for exchange; all of these things are obsolete and a check on human social reproduction. That’s one way of putting it. The world just cannot take much more of this, the environment cannot take more of this; that is again the negative argument.

Seymour approves of this emphasis on negativity, but we need only consider Walter Benjamin’s maxim ‘every fascism is an index of a failed revolution’ to see the problem. Disaffection with the neoliberal mainstream need not draw people to the Left. To make a negative argument without positing a viable alternative is corrosive; just as likely to benefit the far Right, and make their latest venomous cocktail seem more palatable, whatever the toxicity of its ingredients: crude economic populism, scapegoating, conspiracy theory. The critical apparatus is of course vital, but on its own it constitutes a wilfully fractured reason, self-lobotomised and, in its unwillingness to put its own cards on the table, excessively cautious to the point of intellectual cowardice. In the shadow of history, especially after the stagnation and collapse of the Soviet Union, the retreat to critique and the shunning of so-called ‘master narratives’ as inherently oppressive are understandable. But we cannot go on breaking things down forever without building anything of our own. This is Latour’s point:

The critic is not the one who debunks, but the one who assembles. The critic is not the one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of the naïve believers, but the one who offers the participants arenas in which to gather. The critic is not the one who alternates haphazardly between antifetishism and positivism like the drunk iconoclast drawn by Goya, but the one for whom, if something is constructed, then it means it is fragile and thus in great need of care and caution.

This emphasis on iconoclasm and critique makes sense only if we put the cart of ideas before the horse of reality. By insisting on the mutual dependence of perception and reality, we have neutered the radicalism of Marx’s ‘the point is not to describe the world, but to change it’. If the world is the way it is because of ideology, it makes sense to concentrate one’s efforts on dismantling the ideology that props the world up: one can change the world by changing the way we think about it. (Marx himself, a committed materialist, would have disapproved of such wishful thinking, unmoored from economics; but the way his and Engels’ The German Ideology demolished the naïve thinking of their peers has a relish and venom that prefigures the efforts of later critical theory; a neat separation of Marx from his followers is not entirely tenable here.) Decades of critical theory later, we have applied a plethora of critiques everywhere we look. We have problematised, subverted, deconstructed and deterritorialised the banal illusions of common sense until we no longer know which way is up; but the reality of power and capital grind on unabated.

One despondent reaction is that our mistake was to underestimate capitalism’s capacity to co-opt everything – to sell Che t-shirts and ‘green’ product lines, to mutate with the circumstances, to depend on the entrepreneurial self-interest of its human agents as an endless supply of ingenuity. But this is merely to buy into the hype. The economic crisis was a reminder that there is nothing infallible in the ‘invisible hand’ that economists like to misquote from Adam Smith. Infinite growth will come a cropper at some point on a finite planet. It is a matter of how, and when. It is hard to exaggerate the stakes of this question: whether the correction to our current ecologically suicidal course occurs by myopic selfishness and the resulting global disaster, or if by action based on collective self-interest, backed up by a healthy respect for facts, we can walk back from the brink.

III.  The Speculative Turn

Renewal and reinvigoration has never been more urgent for the Left, yet with a few exceptions, mostly in Latin America, it is everywhere in retreat and on the defensive. A serious intellectual realignment – while of course not sufficient – is necessary. It is my contention, as I’ve argued in the two previous posts, that we need to move beyond our obsessions with language and semantics, and the critique of ideas. For this to happen we need a radical change in intellectual climate; a change that may, at last, be underway.

The anthology The Speculative Turn (available in paperback or for free download) brings together essays from many different and sometimes opposing materialist and realist positions, that nonetheless reject what speculative realist Quentin Meillassoux has dubbed the dominant paradigm of the twentieth century, ‘correlationism’, in which reality appears, as the introduction puts it, ‘only as the correlate of human thought’. That such philosophy is ill-equipped to understand science may be a problem only for philosophers; that it enables the erosion of public confidence in the very real and dangerous facts that threaten our existence, and undermines the arguments for emancipatory politics and ecological sustainability, is a problem that affects us all:

In the face of the looming ecological catastrophe, and the increasing infiltration of technology into the everyday world (including our own bodies), it is not clear that the anti-realist position is equipped to face up to these developments. The danger is that the dominant anti-realist strain of continental philosophy has not only reached a point of decreasing returns, but that it now actively limits the capacities of philosophy in our time…. This general anti-realist trend has manifested itself in continental philosophy in a number of ways, but especially through preoccupation with such issues as death and finitude, an aversion to science, a focus on language, culture, and subjectivity to the detriment of material factors, an anthropocentric stance towards nature, a relinquishing of the search for absolutes, and an acquiescence to the specific conditions of our historical thrownness. We might also point to the lack of genuine and effective political action in continental philosophy—arguably a result of the ‘cultural’ turn taken by Marxism, and the increased focus on textual and ideological critique at the expense of the economic realm.

For a non-philosopher like myself, it is sometimes hard going to follow these fast-moving currents, but something new is opening up in the field of contemporary thought. After decades of critical engagement with sign, text, discourse and culture, the shift of focus to the real is like switching morphine for adrenaline.

One of the most important distinctions between the ‘correlationist’ mainstream standpoint and speculative realism is the restoration of ontology (the study of what is) to a central position, rather than privileging epistemology (the study of knowledge). Successive schools of thought have emphasised epistemology, while metaphysical speculation came to be seen as naive, confused and irrelevant (as in Wittgenstein’s dictum ‘About that which we cannot speak, we must be silent’). As epistemology came to be seen to have primacy over ontology, the distinction between things in themselves and things as they are for us is collapsed: a process that began with Kant but has become increasingly solipsistic over time. As the sciences opened our understanding to a universe whose vastness we struggle to comprehend, the humanities locked us back into the narrow confines of discourse, the subject, and the sign. Peter Hallward puts it in The Speculative Turn:

Correlationism figures here as a sort of counter-revolution that emerged in philosophy as it tried, with and after Kant, to come to terms with the uncomfortably disruptive implications of Galileo, Descartes and the scientific revolution. Post-Copernican science had opened the door to the ‘great outdoors’: Kant’s own so-called ‘Copernican turn’ should be best understood as a Ptolemaic attempt to slam this door shut.

The political consequences are enormous, and mostly bad. Thinking about the world as a consumer turns it into one huge repository of resources for us, and of significance only in terms of how best they can best be exploited, is what has sent us hurtling towards extinction. To change course, we need to think about the non-human world in a radically different way.

Prioritising knowledge over being has automatically inflated the importance of critique. Timothy Morton describes the syndrome in typically vivid style:

If you’ve ever been in this kind of argument, you’ll know how intense it can get. Going meta is a great way to sneer at someone. You remove the rug from underneath the other’s feet. Their mere immediacy is always false. It’s the deep structure, the numinous background, the possibility of the possibility of the horizon of the event of being, that is more real, or better, or just more rhetorically effective, than anything else. In this mode, the egg of potentiality comes before the chicken of the actual.

Restoring ontology to its proper place stops the game of ‘going meta’, of which ideology critique is a symptom, dead in its tracks. Speculative realism turns correlationist thought on its head, exposing the insistence that any discussion of territory is actually a discussion about a map of that territory, as an empty and indefensible game of words. As Meillassoux points out in After Finitude, if we interpret the activity of science as a discourse that is ultimately centred on the human subject, we miss the whole point (see also Ray Brassier’s essay in Collapse), and fall into the ‘epistemic fallacy’ that Roy Bhaskar describes in A Realist Theory of Science: ‘it is not the character of science that imposes a determinate pattern or order on the world; but the order of the world that … makes possible the cluster of activities we call “science”.’

The relevance of this move to political issues, we can see in a post like this from Larval Subjects, in which Levi Bryant (one of The Speculative Turn’s editors) draws the distinction between the actual state of things, and our experience of them, in relation to class:

The question, then, of how we experience or are conscious of class is distinct from the question of how class exists…. Class can exist and function just fine without anyone identifying with a class or being aware that they are caught up within the mechanisms of class. How else could so many act contrary to their class interests, going so far as to even deny that class exists, if this weren’t the case?… Here the issue is similar to the one Morton raises with respect to climate as a hyperobject. Part of the problem with climate is precisely because, as withdrawn, we aren’t even aware of its existence and therefore are unable to act on it. We are aware of weather without being aware of climate. Climate requires a sort of leap and a detective work that ferrets out all sorts of traces. So too in the case of class.

By now, I hope it is obvious that, while grounded in philosophy, the move away from correlationism has profound consequences for political thought. I’ll quote once more from The Speculative Turn, this time from the essay by Isabelle Stengers, writing about the imperialist implications of vulgar scientistic dogmatism à la Dawkins:

It would be a catastrophic mistake, I believe, to recognize the importance of Vandana Shiva’s struggle against capitalism while associating her protest against the paradigm of contemporary biology with words like holistic, traditional or romantic. Hers is a call not for ‘an other science’, but for a relevant science, a science that would actively take into account the knowledge associated with those agricultural practices that are in the process of being destroyed in the name of progress…. The thesis I am defending—that materialism should be divorced from (academic) eliminativism in order to connect with struggle—does not deny that elimination may have been utterly relevant, when it entailed struggling against the allied powers of state and church, for instance. Today, however, the situation has changed. Elimination has become the very tool of power. It is not only a tool for capitalism, but also for what I would call, together with Hilary Rose, ‘bad science’.

One does not have to subscribe to any particular school of realist or materialist thought to see that our current circumstances urgently call for new ways of thinking the real; to broaden the scope of analysis from discourse and ideology to the actors – human and non-human, individual and collective – in our world and its becoming; to go beyond critique, and begin to build. The Speculative Turn is an important step on that journey. It’s free: go download.

Mentioned in this essay (in order of appearance):

Latour, Bruno 2004, ‘Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’, Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2, pp. 225–248.

Sloterdijk, Peter 1987, Critique of Cynical Reason, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

Watkins, Susan 2010, ‘Shifting Sands’, New Left Review 61, pp. 5–27

Pehe, Jirí, and Benedict Seymour 2010, ‘The critical divide. Marxism: Radical alternative or totalitarian relic?’, Eurozine.

Bhaskar, Roy 2008, A Realist Theory of Science 3rd edn, Verso, London.

Brassier, Ray 2007, ‘The Enigma of Realism: On Quentin Meillassoux’s “After Finitude”’, Collapse II, pp. 15–45.

Bryant, Levi, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, eds 2011, The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, re:press, Melbourne.

Meillassoux, Quentin 2008, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, Continuum, London.

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