This was originally posted on the Kafila blog. As always, posting material does not imply agreement.

Re-booting Communism Or Slavoj Zizek and the End of Philosophy – I

Today, 13 March, a whole galaxy of philosophers and theorists got together for a three-day conference “On The Idea of Communism” under the auspices of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, London University. The Conference opened to a jam-packed hall where all tickets had sold out (no jokes, this was a ticketed show where the likes of Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek, Jean Luc-Nancy, Toni Negri, Jacques Ranciere, Terry Eagleton and many many others are to perform on the ‘idea of communism’). The huge Logan hall with a capacity of about 800-900 was so packed that the organizers had made arrangements for video streaming in another neighbouring hall – and that too was half full! Very encouraging in these bleak days.

The conference began in the afternoon with brief opening remarks by Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek. Badiou made his general point (see below) about the continuing relevance of the ‘communist hypothesis’. Staid and philosopherly. And then, Zizek. Clearly, in the five brief minutes he spoke, he was the star – a rock star playing to the gallery and the gallery responding to him as it would to Michael Jackson (who, one of the organizers said was being given a run for his money by the communist conference, or so the Guardian said!). As a matter of fact Zizek and his audience seemed already tied in a bond of performing for each other. This once post-marxist but now relapsed marxist philosopher-theorist thundered, gesticulating with eavery word he spoke: “We must resist the temptation to act. We must refuse being told that children are dying of hunger in Africa or in the slums of India, for this is the philosophy of the present times. They don’t want us to think.” And he went on, amidst cheers from a hysterical audience, “We must do, you must do what Lenin did in 1915, after the war broke out, after th failure of the Social Democratic parties. He went to the library and started to read Hegel’s Logic. And this conference should be our moment of reading Hegel’s Logic. How much polemic is compressed in this one statement was of course evident only to Zizek followers, for he was not just making the simple point about reading and thinking as opposed to mindless ‘doing’ that is the mantra of our times; he was also polemiciizing against all kinds of anti-Hegelians: Althusserians, postmarxists like Laclau and Mouffe, poststructuralists, Deleuzians and so on.

The background to the conference is an ongoing exchange between Alain Badiou and Zizek on the idea of communism. Badiou’s piece which kickstarted this debate appeared in the New Left Review shortly after Sarkozy’s electoral victory in France. In itself a very ordinary piece, it seems to have quickly become a major reference point for Left-wing discussions as it argued – courageously in this day and age – for the continued relevance of the communist idea. Badiou argued in this piece that Communism (or what he calls the communist hypothesis whose history stretches from the revolt of Spartacus to the present) was still relevant today. It was relevant however as a regulative ideal, not as a programme and that many of its earlier beliefs (like the party-form) had become redundant. Enter, at this point, the priest of Ljubliana, the new postmodern Stalin. Zizek, it may be recalled, rapidly reinvented himself after his initial post-marxist forays into theory. He took up cudgels on behalf of Marxism and revolution, claimed to ‘repeat Lenin’ and unabashedly claimed that the Truth of Marxism is only visible from the truly proletarian standpoint! Lest I be misunderstood, I quote here from the man himself: “Lenin’s wager — today, in our era of postmodern relativism, more actual than ever — is that universal truth and partisanship, the gesture of taking sides, are not only not mutually exclusive, but condition each other: in a concrete situation, its UNIVERSAL truth can only be articulated from a thoroughly PARTISAN position — truth is by definition one-sided.” This ccould well be said of Islam or Hindutva – that its ‘universal truth’ can only be articulated or grasped through the partisan standpoint of the believer. And this is merely one of the many such statements that Zizek has made including his infamous ‘plea for Leninist intolerance’.

How could this Zizek accept the mild philosopherli-ness of Badiou’s position? So, he entered into a debate with Badiou. Communism as a mere horizon, without a programme? Isn’t this a mere Kantian regulative ideal? Truth to tell, Badiou’s piece itself is pretty orthodox, philosophically speaking, but Professor Zizek would have none of that. Communism is a programme, he had proclaimed. And the backdrop for the present conference was set up.

Today’s sessions had three presentations: Michael Hardt of Empire and Multitude fame, Bruno Bosteels, editor of Diacritics and Peter Hallward. Hardt’s presentsation was the only one that actually dealt with the ‘real world’ of contemporary capitalism and spoke about the new conflicts between two forms of property – material and scarce property versus immaterial and reproducible property. Hardt argued that some passages in Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts also talk about conflict between two forms of property – immobile like land versus the new capitalist property embodied in the commodity form. He underlined the need to understand the political econ0my dimensions of contemporary transformations as also to recognize how capitalism was once again bringing forth its own ‘grave-diggers’. For an otherwise sophisticated presentation, it was strange that Hardt did not find it necessary to even refer to what happened to the earlier grave-diggers and whose grave was eventually dug! Partly this was the consequence of the atmosphere that prevailed there in a mehfil of the faithful.

Other presentations were disappointing. Bruno Bosteel’s because it was an orthodox restatement of the marxist-leninist position, despite repeated gestures to philosphers’ like Delueze, Agamben or Foucault. Peter Hallward’s entire presentation was fixated on the experience of the French revolution and Rousseau, Saint-Just and the Jacobins. At the end of the day, one marvelled at this discussion on communism in the twenty-first century which could conduct itself entirely with reference to a certain textual tradition and a certain European history. The idea of communism, if it has to have any relevance at all, can hardly be elaborated without reference to the ‘real movements’ of our times. The conference also displayed virtually no awareness of the fact that in our times, issues were much more complicated than mere capital-labour conflicts. Take for instance the new Left wing formation in South America where the indigenous leadership has led the re-emergence of the Left, represnting interests of indigenous people, cocoa growers and on issues such as water privatization. Islam and Empire constitute yet another pole of the contemporary which was far away from the miinds of both the speakers and the audience who asked questions (except one questioner). At which point I turned to take a look at the composition of the audience. Not one black in the audience. Some sprinkling of East Asians (four of five) and some South Asians in similar numbers.

The question then: Does this composition say something about the direction in which our thought is going? Does the radicalism of the white liberal have anything to offer to the non-white? Some years ago I had heard Alain Badiou speak in Princeton. There the audience was not communist. And it was not a ticketed show but free. There were Palestinians, north Africans and many others in the hall and Cornell West on the dias. Badiou, the French radical philosopher found himself beseiged after his talk – during the question answer session. Badiou had spoken grandly of why “9/11 was not an Event becuase it did not enunciate anything new” – a particularly Badiouan notion of event this. Half an hour into his talk, he was smuggling in old universalisms into his exposition, representing 9/11 as Evil. A woman student, possibly Palestinian, got up to ask him why then was Osama bin Laden considered a hero among a large number of people across the world. (By the way, I had been told just a few days ago by Sinclair Thomson of New York University, who had just returned from Bolivia that pictures of bin Laden and Che Guevara could be seen together in many places in the Bolivian capital.) Badiou, ably assisted by Cornell West tried in vain to answer her, giving rise to more and more questions in the process till someone asked: ”What then does your universalism say regarding this complete lack of ability to understand the other?”

No such questioning or interrogation was possible today. It was a comfortable gathering of similar people – brought up in the same traditions. The only other person who was to attend but was not allowed to because he had a single-entry visa in the US (so Zizek informed the audience) was Wang Hui from China. One wonders however, what a single token presence of Wang Hui could have done to the direction of the conference. (Jean Luc Nancy could not eventually attend as he was unwell.)

At the end of the first day, it already seems that for all the sophisticated philosophical language that was being used, most participants simply wanted to re-boot the machine – as though it was just an initialization problem! Maybe the software itself needs rewriting? That thought seems far from most people gathered for the conference.

Related posts:

1. Zizek on our situation — and communism
2. How can communism come to be?

Avakian’s Assessment of Thomas Jefferson:
A Critical Reading

By Pavel Andreyev

Pavel Alexeyev is an historian and specialist on religion with a long acquaintance with the RCPand other Maoist organizations.

The Revolutionary Communist Party describes Bob Avakian’s latest essay, Communism and Jeffersonian Democracy, as an “unsparing critique of the history…of American society” and is promoting it with the same urgency it devoted to the author’s Away With All Gods!earlier this year… What follows is a contribution to a critique, addressing approximately the first quarter of the work (dealing with Jefferson, his life and thought) rather than a review of the entirety. I’ll raise some questions about how we should relate to historical facts, the issue of “progress” or “directionality” in history, and the evaluation of individuals in historical periods far removed from us. In AWAG!Avakian remarks provocatively that if Jesus were alive today we wouldn’t and shouldn’t like him very much (mainly because he accepted slavery). Similarly he would like us to dislike Thomas Jefferson, whom he depicts as a cynical, demagogic, slave-owning oppressor. But his depiction of the individual (whatever its own merits) is less the issue than the use of this depiction to broadly characterize and explain over two centuries of “Jeffersonian democracy.”

Web version: part 1, part 2,  part 3

pdf pamphelt version

Related posts:

1. Avakian on Jefferson: A Critical Reading part 1
2. Avakian on Jefferson: A Critical Reading Part 2
3. Avakian on Jefferson: A Critical Reading Part 3

This is the third and final part of this series. The author writes: The Revolutionary Communist Party describes Bob Avakian’s latest essay, Communism and Jeffersonian Democracy, as an “unsparing critique of the history…of American society.” Having “engaged” Away With All Gods! six months ago, I’d like to respond to this seriously as well.

by Pavel Andreyev

Jefferson as (Eighteenth-Century, Bourgeois) Rebel

One can observe with Aptheker that the American Revolution did not transform the new country’s society. But the model of government established with the Constitution of 1787 was a significant advance in the construction of bourgeois democracy and influenced the French constitutions of 1789 and 1791, among many others.

Isn’t it important to recall that more than any U.S. leader, Jefferson embraced the French Revolution, the greatest and most influential of bourgeois-democratic revolutions? Even as his colleagues’ enthusiasm waned after the public executions of the French king and queen, Jefferson maintained a revolutionary perspective. He asked in 1793, has “ever such a prize [been] won with so little innocent blood?” He declared that while he regretted the deaths of innocents, “rather than it [the French Revolution] should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam and an Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than as it now is.”

Shays Rebellion

We can roll our eyes at this statement, which seems, in fact, excessive. But how many other North Americans in positions of influence, or persons of influence anywhere in the world, would have expressed that kind of passionate revolutionary sentiment in 1793? In 1776 Jefferson wrote,

“The oppressed should rebel, and they will continue to rebel and raise disturbance until their civil rights are fully restored to them and all partial distinctions, exclusions and incapacitations are removed.”

In January 1787, while ambassador to France, he responded from Paris to reports about Shays’ Rebellion in western Massachusetts. This was in its principal aspect a revolt of poor yeomen against high debt, high taxes, and property qualifications for voting.[31]

Jefferson wrote:

“I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. Unsuccessful rebellions, indeed, generally establish the encroachments on the rights of the people which have produced them. An observation of this truth should render honest republican governors so mild in their punishment of rebellions as not to discourage them too much. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government… God forbid that there should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion… The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”

This is significant. Is he not saying “It’s right to rebel” — at least for whites of his class, and maybe some others?

Jefferson didn’t concede that right to slaves, although in a letter to James Monroe in 1800 (when Jefferson was vice president) he seemed to waffle on the point. He referred to the slaves involved in the Gabriel Prosser Revolt in Virginia as being one “of the two parties” involved in a conflict, having “rights” like the other party (the slave-owners) and having been “unsuccessful” in obtaining their ends. [32] (One thinks of Marx’s famous dictum, “Between equal rights, force decides.”) [33] Jefferson recommended against “a policy of revenge” against captured slave leaders, ten of whom having been condemned to death were reprieved and banished from the state. [34]

Jefferson undoubtedly believed in Black inferiority, at a time when the leading scholars of his world expressed that belief.[35] And if there were paternalistic aspects to his treatment of his domestic slaves, he employed brutal overseers of his field slaves, dozens of whom attempted to escape. [36]

There are contradictions between and within his words and deeds.

This is the case with his relationship to Native Americans as well: on the one hand, an apparent genuine respect for the indigenous people that extended into an academic study of native vocabularies; on the other, a determined policy to remove Native Americans to the west of the Mississippi. All that needs to be honestly assessed. But the assessment of the historical actor shouldn’t end there, and there’s no good reason to demand a “rupture” with a figure whom Howard Zinn calls “an enlightened, thoughtful individual.” [37]

Upholding Bourgeois Revolutionaries as Historical Figures

One can to an extent “uphold” and “extol” a bourgeois revolutionary for the principal aspects of the historical role he or she played.[38] We can note that Jefferson wasn’t as forward-looking as a Tom Paine or a Maximilien Robespierre, although he was arguably more progressive than, say, the early bourgeois revolutionary Oliver Cromwell. [39]

How should twenty-first century revolutionaries relate to any of these people? We can’t just say they were members of a ruling class in some historically constructed class system and leave it at that. In the 1640s Cromwell led a revolution that, in Engels’ words, “provides the exact model for the French one of 1789.” Engels thought he was “Robespierre and Napoleon rolled into one.” Yet Cromwell was guilty, as Engels notes, of “barbarities” in Ireland on a horrific scale. [40] That said, it wouldn’t make sense to reject and condemn him (or Jefferson) for NOT being what he couldn’t have been — a proletarian revolutionary and internationalist — and for living in the period and class society that he did. [41]

We can approach the American Revolution and Jeffersonian Democracy reproachfully, emphasizing what they weren’t and what they didn’t do. Or we can assess them (maybe even respect them) for what they were: a limited bourgeois-democratic revolution and ideology corresponding to a still nascent, dynamic capitalism that had (for a time) an ongoing and largely positive influence in the Americas and world.

As late as January 1865 Karl Marx wrote to Abraham Lincoln on behalf of the International Workingmen’s Association, “From the commencement of the titanic American strife [outbreak of the Civil War] the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class.” [42]

(It might be relevant to mention here that when, in the 1989 epic Civil War film Glory — about the all-Black 54 Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry — director Edward Zwick depicted a Black soldier hoisting the U.S. flag over Ft. Wagner, the Revolutionary Worker defended this. At that time [1863], the writer argued, the U.S. flag meant something different than it means today!) What should we make of this? That Marx (and Lenin, quoted above) was confused about U.S. history? That they were unaware that, steeped in the slavery-tainted Jeffersonian democracy from the outset, that star-spangled banner could in no way ever represent any kind of historical progress? Was Marx stubbornly clinging to a bourgeois-democratic outlook?

Avakian’s “unsparing critique” would seem to indicate so. But such a critique makes no sense.

The RCP maintains that its chair is “one of those special leaders who transformed the world in which he lived.” Forgive me if I don’t see that great-leader quality in his recent talks. And I don’t see the dialectics. Lenin while reading and delightedly engaging the long dead thinker Hegel (a contemporary of Jefferson) once wrote, “Dialectical idealism is closer to intelligent materialism than metaphysical, undeveloped, dead, crude, rigid materialism.”[43] Lenin’s words were aimed at some of the Marxists of his time.

Give me the clear, nuanced, radical mind and eloquent pen of a Jefferson any day — over the affectations of “science” found in the transcribed sermons of Bob Avakian.

Footnote

[31] See the discussion in Zinn, pp. 91-95

[32] Quoted in Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: International Publishers, 1974), p. 224

[33] Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production (New York: International Publishers, 1967), p. 225

[34] Aptheker (1974), p. 219

[35] It’s interesting, though, that he read and respected the German physician Johann Friedrich Blumenbach who had written that Africans were the equals of whites “concerning healthy faculties of understanding, excellent natural talents and mental capacities.”

[36] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/jefferson/interviews/stanton.html

[37] Zinn, p. 89

[38] Abigail Adams for example was arguably a female bourgeois revolutionary.

[39] For an appraisal of Cromwell by the important British Marxist historian Christopher Hill, see God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1990)
[40"> Marx-Engels Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), vol. 3, p. 469 (from Vorwärts, vol. 70, 1844)

[41] Might we not as well criticize pre-Neolithic humans for failing to develop agriculture? History is all about the evolution of forces and relations of production and the roles individuals play within constraining matrices.

[42] http://marxists.anu.edu.au/history/international/iwma/documents/1864/lincoln-letter.htm

[43] V. I. Lenin, Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), vol. 38, p. 277

Related posts:

1. Avakian on Jefferson: A Critical Reading Part 2
2. Avakian on Jefferson: A Critical Reading part 1
3. Pavel Andreyev: Avakian’s Assessment of Thomas Jefferson: A Critical Reading

Is human history directionally oriented? Does it point toward the overcoming of class society? This is one question — a contentious one — raised in the following, the third and final part of this essay written for Kasama. The first two parts are here and here.

Why historical materialism matters, 3

by Eddy Laing

Economic Base, Political-Ideological Superstructure and the Need for Revolution

In their historical analysis, Marx and Engels specifically noted and partly described several types of societies that have existed over the past two thousand years, primarily citing the Mediterranean and Europe. Tribal societies, slave societies, feudal societies, and capitalist societies have each been characterized by distinctive but generalizable economic relationships and technologies (e.g. estate agriculture using slave labor together with small-scale handicraft production) and ideo-political superstructures (Roman or common law, literature and music, religions and customs, etc.) In every stratified society, the dominant class exerts hegemonic control over the rest of society, including over intellectual life, aspirations, and the ability of subaltern strata to express ideas independent of that dominant, ruling class narrative. The proletariat (and every other non-dominant class) is not only expropriated economically; they are expropriated in every aspect of culture including their intellectual life. Consider, for example, how the ruling class narrative defines popular discussions of ‘democracy’, ‘dictatorship’, ‘violence’, ‘peace’, ‘terrorism’, ‘economic crisis’, and so on.

The oppressed classes’ struggle – as individuals and in groups – not just against the surface phenomenon of economic conditions, they push up against all of these other types of subjugation too, although often without awareness of the real nature of the contradiction or of potential outcomes. Within the system of class divisions, the boundaries of oppression – just like the actual composition of the classes – shift over time, depending upon the resistance of the oppressed, the rate of success/failure of the social economy, the relative political/military strength of the classes facing each other, and environmental conditions. Bourgeois revolutions often set out to overturn the hereditary rights that characterized earlier class societies, and replace those with the so-called ‘inalienable rights of man.’ Yet, as the history of the last 350 years shows, social status remains inheritably constrained (but not completely fixed) within capitalism; through inheritable property; through the bourgeois family; through literacy and a stratified education system; through acculturation in literature and arts; through national/ethnic oppression and racism, and so on.50 As Marx and Engels observed, “class in its turn assumes an independent existence against the individuals, so that the latter find their conditions of life predetermined, and have their position in life and hence their personal development assigned to them by their class, thus becoming subsumed under it.” This “subjection of the separate individuals to the division of labor … can only be removed by the abolition of private property and of labor [i.e. the sale of labor-power] itself.”51 In other words, class societies reproduce themselves by reproducing the classes of social practices on which that mode of life is based.

Based on their analysis of historical succession, Marx and Engels theorized that class society was itself historical; that the blind necessity that had driven all prior class societies was being eclipsed by the current capabilities of social reproduction; and that therefore exploitative capitalist society could and should be brought to an end by the revolutionary class struggle of the proletariat. This struggle, aimed immediately at the capitalist state, must account for all the other components of the social superstructure and not only production relationships.

“The alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; the revolution is necessary therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.”52

As 20th C. history shows, while an essential and great leap, the revolutionary transformation of the superstructure requires much more than ‘smashing the state’ and establishing a new regime of workers or their representatives. It is increasingly evident that the revolutionary transformation of all social relationships (economic, political and ideological) must be the program for the entire period of socialist transition. Short of that type of movement, the economic relationships at the outset of socialist reconstruction not only bear “the birth marks of the old society,”53 they stand in active opposition to moving forward: an extensive division of labor; wage scales and the exchange of labor-power; various forms of small-scale production and commerce; the administration of public property, etc.

In order to create a society that has rid itself of the ‘muck of ages’ we need to refashion all of the ways in which we interact with each other; transform all of the social relationships upon which society is based. This is not just a matter of enacting laws or restructuring the economy, although those are enabling actions from which we must start. This again speaks to the relationship between being and thinking; between the ways society is organized and functions and the ways we conceptualize each other. We cannot re-conceptualize ourselves without changing the ways in which we live; we cannot change those social relationships without re-conceptualizing our peers and ourselves.

Is Human History Directionally Orientated?

Marx wrote to Joseph Weydermeyer that “no credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes or the struggle between them … what I did new was to prove: 1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular historical phases of the development of production, 2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, 3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.”54

This has led some to view socialist revolution and the demise of capitalism as inevitable and bound to occur, under the pressure of its own internal contradictions. There are indeed fundamental contradictions inherent in capitalist societies, not the least of which are those internal contradictions between exploitation and accumulation, between the proletarian and capitalist classes. However, patterns and trends in social history do not necessarily indicate all potential or future actions; human societies are inherently dynamic and variable, even – perhaps especially – when large numbers of its members attempt to act in concert, such as classes struggling to become conscious of their collective and strategic interests.

Engels spoke to social contingency in his notes on Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, and is worth citing at length here. “In spite of the consciously desired aims of all individuals, accident apparently reigns on the surface. That which is willed happens but rarely; in the majority of instances the numerous desired ends cross and conflict with one another, or these ends themselves are from the outset incapable of realization, or the means of attaining them are insufficient. … The ends of the actions are intended, but the results which actually follow from these actions are not intended; or when they do seem to correspond to the end intended, they ultimately have consequences quite other than those intended. … Men make their own history, whatever its outcome may be, in that each person follows his own consciously desired end, and it is precisely the resultant of these many wills operating in different directions, and of their manifold effects upon the outer world, that constitutes history.”55

The struggle for communist society is a struggle to overcome and do away with all of the inequalities that arise from the historic divisions of society and the division of labor. As the struggle between classes is fought out through every social relationship, it creates further potential for revolutionary transformation of all social relationships. The object of the socialist revolution is not simply an equal (or even generally-increased) distribution of the social product – such an equity between sellers and buyers can only reproduce the old social relations of capitalist exchange56 – rather, the object must be the creation of new and non-exploitative social relationships in every field of activity. Most importantly, this applies to the proletariat itself, which must “rid itself of everything that still clings to it from its previous position in society.”57

Instead of life’s work as compulsory and alienated (so many units of labor-power within a capital process), communism envisions emancipatory ‘life’s work’ unfettered of narrow economic relationships. To arrive at that mode of life, we need to reorganize society beyond the narrow confines of the “bourgeois right,”58 beyond an ‘equality’ grounded in commodity exchange and which masks the relationships among people with relationships between things. As Marx and Engels envisioned it, classless society enables the full realization of individuals through the full realization of society as a whole. In capitalist society, the prime objective for the worker is the sale of her labor-power for purposes directed by capital. Even one’s ‘free (unpaid) time’ and compensatory (in lieu of truly self-directed) activities are narrowly defined by capitalist relations, such as the periodic ‘freedom’ to purchase – or more often, borrow against – ‘non-essential’ consumer goods, make a holiday excursion, etc. As Marx and Engels envisioned it, communist society is one where “each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, [since] society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow.”59 This vision of the future suggests but cannot propose specific solutions to every form of social contradiction, and it certainly strains an imagination subsumed in the present-day ideologies of late capitalism and the age-old traditions of class society. (e.g., how can everyone be competent or enabled to engage in every type of activity?) However, the scope and sociality of this vision stands exactly opposed to all of the brutality, muck and ennui of imperialist society, with its ruling class of loathsome parasites.

The oppressed can make their own history only through overcoming the ‘dead hand of the past’ – ideologies and practices that perpetuate exploitation and oppression. Historical materialism is an essential tool for decrypting those social practices. Especially important to the theory is the observation that “it is not a question so much of the motives of single individuals, however eminent, as of those motives which set in motion great masses, whole peoples, and again whole classes of people in each people. … Everything which sets men in motion must go through their minds; but what form it will take in the mind will depend very much on the circumstances.”60 We are who we are through our social practices and our socially transformative capabilities arise from that sociality, especially as class struggle.

Up through the mid-19th century, materialist philosophy had largely been constrained by mechanistic and reductionist interpretations: the world as an aggregate of things, each with a cause and effect. Marx and Engels liberated materialism from this conundrum by applying dialectical analysis; instead of a series of isolates, the physical world and human society were revealed as complex webs of interactive processes. Within the web of human culture is the communist project, based on the premise that overthrowing capitalism and building a new form of society is historically possible; the proletariat can act in that direction because of its position as a class within the matrices of contemporary social relationships. Our actions are generally deliberate, but not ‘inevitable’ or automatic, and often produce unanticipated consequences. For all of that, by acting we are transformative of society, the world and ourselves.

Of course, the advent of dialectical historical materialism [HM] has not meant the demise of idealist and subjectivist modes of thought. It did however expand the proletarian class struggle – already taking place over economic and political relationships – into the realm of philosophy and within the ideological superstructure more broadly. In that way, by providing a framework for interpreting the world, HM dialectically enables the communist hypothesis to change it. The manifestations of this ideological struggle (such as against idealism and subjectivism) are of critical importance for those struggling to revolutionize society.

For example, in their examination and analysis of society, Marx and Engels adopted the approach of isolating and dissecting various social relationships in their phenomenal forms – such as labor-power, surplus-value, constant capital, economic base, political and ideological superstructure – in order to describe internal features and specific categories of interaction. These specific features were examined by Marx in order to understand society as a whole process, as a ‘rich totality of many relations.’

“It seems to be correct to begin with the real and the concrete, with the real precondition, thus to begin, in economics, with e.g. the population, which is the foundation and the subject of the entire social act of production. However, on closer examination this proves false. The population is an abstraction if I leave out, for example, the classes of which it is composed. These classes in turn are an empty phrase if I am not familiar with the elements on which they rest. e.g. wage labour, capital, etc. These latter in turn presuppose exchange, division of labour, prices, etc. For example, capital is nothing without wage labour, without value, money, price etc. Thus, if I were to begin with the population, this would be a chaotic conception [Vorstellung] of the whole, and I would then, by means of further determination, move analytically towards ever more simple concepts [Begriff], from the imagined concrete towards ever thinner abstractions until I had arrived at the simplest determinations. From there the journey would have to be retraced until I had finally arrived at the population again, but this time not as the chaotic conception of a whole, but as a rich totality of many determinations and relations.”61

This approach remains vulnerable to one-sided and reductionist interpretations and, indeed, some activists have made those types of mistakes; adopting mechanical and atomized perspectives — over that of capitalism as a matrix of international process — fragmenting the relationships between economics, politics and ideology in the near-term revolutionary class struggle and as they affect the longer struggle for communism. Those misinterpretations have had harmful and often disastrous effects. For example, various conceptualizations of socialism have been advanced over the past century which give priority to productive capacity, types of technology, or amounts of output as the ‘key link’ for creating socialism and for revolutionizing society, substituting these for the truly key objectives of socialist revolution: the radical transformations of all economic, political and ideological social relationships. Similarly, various visions of anti-capitalist social change center on organizing incremental economic oppositions to individual capital formations, policies or capitalists in place of advancing the struggle to challenge all of the oppressive and exploitative social relationships inherent in capitalist society, including and especially the character of the state. Within the ranks of the proletarian movement, the failure to recognize and accurately advance the struggle over key matters of ideology, of materialist dialectics, as well as of the analysis of specific socio-political moments, contributed to the reversals of socialism in the USSR and China, and to the misdirection of many revolutionary movements in other countries worldwide.62 Our practical and theoretical work today is very much grounded in those past practices – successes and failures – and on the struggle to accurately assess them.

As current events continually remind us, the social world is not frozen, waiting for the oppressed and exploited to seize the day. The outrages and atrocities of capitalism are an ongoing assault on the great majority of the people of the world and on the planet itself. The clock is always ticking. For us, the project for the future will only advance if we assume among our component tasks the critical opposition to such mechanistic and ‘metaphysical’ conceptualizations and the further critical development of dialectical, revolutionizing, historical materialist practice and theory.

Notes

[Abbreviations for multi-volume book sets: MECW = Marx and Engels Collected Works; MESW = Marx and Engels Selected Works; LCW = V.I. Lenin Collected Works]

50 Studies of education practices in the US have shown that a large majority of low-income and ethnic-minority students are regularly placed in ‘low-skilled’ educational tracks. c.f. Condron, D. J. 2007. Stratification and Educational Sorting: Explaining Ascriptive Inequalities in Early Childhood Reading Group Placement. Social Problems 54(1): 139-160.
51 The German Ideology. p. 77.
52 The German Ideology. p. 53.
53 Marx, K. 1969/1875. Critique of the Gotha Programme. MESW Vol. 3. Moscow. p. 17.
54 Marx, K. 1969. Letter to J. Weydermeyer in New York. 5 March 1852. MESW Vol. 1. Moscow. p. 528.
55 Engels, F. 1969/1888. Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy. MESW Vol. 3. p. 366.
56 Where “he, who before was the money-owner, now strides in front as capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his labourer.” Capital Vol. 1 p. 172.
57 The German Ideology. p. 88.
58 Critique of the Gotha Programme. p. 18.
59 The German Ideology. p. 47.
60 Ludwig Feuerbach. p. 367.
61 Grundrisse. p. 107-108.
62 c.f. Ely, M. 1980. Slipping into Darkness, ‘Left’ economism, the CPUSA, and the Trade Union Unity League (1929 – 1935). Revolution 5(2-3).

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Why historical materialism matters, 2

by Eddy Laing

The Core of Culture is the Mode of Production

Every human society, regardless of its simplicity or complexity, coheres around modes of activity that solve the prerequisites of food, shelter, clothing and other basic physical and ideological needs. Generally, modes of production are comprised of the activities through which the group provides for this subsistence and reproduction, including the rules, customs, techniques, beliefs, and other ideas that have arisen from and in turn enable those basic activities, such as how those activities are communicated across generations and geography.

Marx described the capitalist mode of production as distinguished by two characteristics. First, the social product takes the form of commodities (a useful product of human labor created for exchange), and second, the aim of production is the creation of surplus-value (the value created by labor beyond its cost as labor-power), which is appropriated as interest, ground rent and profit by capitalists.33 In this mode of production, the capitalists direct the kinds of social production and how the social surplus (the surplus-labor of the society as a whole) will be used as they compete to exchange commodities in various markets. Within this type of economy, human labor is one of the commodities produced and traded. The proletarian sells her labor-power for wages with which she feeds, clothes and shelters herself and her dependants, and thereby lives to work another day (and create more surplus-value for the capitalists).

This does not mean that only one mode of production is possible in any society.

Social practices are dynamic and human culture is constantly in process. For example, during the 12th and 13th centuries and continuing into the 18th, mercantile and small-scale productive capitalism co-existed with feudal agrarianism in much of Europe. Likewise, in some aboriginal North American societies observed during the 18th and 19th centuries, as well as among some Amazonian groups in the 20th, hunting/gathering co-exist with crop cultivation. In addition, from the 15th until the late 19th centuries, slave labor was essential to large-scale Euro-American capitalist farming and natural resource extraction in the Western Hemisphere. Nonetheless, within a given society at a specific period in time, one mode is dominant “whose relations thus assign rank and influence to the others. It is a general illumination which bathes all the other colours and modifies their particularity.”34

The transformative quality of human culture both requires and enables the ensemble of ideological activities that explain, reproduce and challenge the underlying social practices of the society. We are not only capable of symbolizing; we require language, other sound and visual expression to enable our consciousness and our sociality. Our cultures are matrices of social practices. In order to operationalize a mode of life (hunting, cultivating, manufacturing, singing, painting, storytelling, writing) we cooperatively invent tools and techniques, which further transform our shared existence. All of this requires semiotic mediation – the expression and internalization of ideas – and that social interactivity in turn promotes new knowledge and expressions (words, meanings, etc.).

Early human advances in cognition were most likely confronted with many practical obstacles, not the least of which was recognizing cognition as the rationalization and internalization of social practice.35 Consequently, in the course of thinking about themselves and the world, people developed belief systems and ‘world views’, some of which were partially accurate or largely inaccurate. For example, long ago humans observed various manifestations of seasonality and learned to track the passing of time in order to predict their requirements for migratory hunting, agriculture, ceremonies, and other activity planning. Thus were created lunar and solar calendars. In various ancient societies, supernatural forces were assumed responsible for many of the phenomena being observed; the sun, the moon, major rivers, certain marine mammals, were ascribed with motive force. Coincidence was confused with causality, and successful predictions in one circumstance (seasonality as applied to cultivation) were sometimes generalized into ideological systems (the sun as an omnipotent god) in order to explain other phenomenon. We can recognize similar gaps between being and understanding in contemporary capitalist society, for example, ascribing the processes of economic exchange to supra-social ‘market forces,’ or the fetishism of commodities in which “a definite social relation between men assumes … the fantastic form of a relation between things.” 36

Our awareness is created through our interactions with the rest of the world, but it can never be fully aligned to it: first, because material reality is expansive and continually changing and second, because our thinking is a symbolic interpretation, an abstraction formed from that reality. A hallmark of human cognition is ‘predictive thinking’ and being able to form hypotheses that describe probable events or outcomes. We can’t actually ‘see into the future’; we anticipate based on prior experience.

Division of Labor and Social Stratification

As far as is known, within nearly every society to date, regardless of the mode, production has been engaged according to a division of labor. The regular production of a surplus enables such a division – more is collected or produced than is consumed by those collecting or producing it – and reciprocally, a division of labor may enable producing a surplus by concentrating specific skills on specific social functions. Alternately, if the band, ethno-unit or society is unable to maintain a productive surplus, it typically collapses (rather than contract to a less complex productive mode) and its members die out, migrate, or merge as bands with other groups.37 In just the last few decades, we have seen societies and state forms that have ‘failed,’ dissolved, been annexed or partitioned, and of course, throughout recorded history many states have been formed or dissolved because of social revolution or inter-state warfare.

Turning again to ethnography in search of historically analogous examples, at least some recent societies that have been primarily engaged in a combination of cultivation and hunting have done so through a division of labor between hunters and cultivators, reinforced with customs, rules, and other specialized behaviors that were developed and transmitted according to that division.38 In addition to expressly productive tasks, a division of labor also developed between manual activities and ideological tasks, such as conducted by shamans, priests or medicine societies. These specializations were required to ensure the life and growth of the group; to develop specific practices, such as birthing, dying, hunting, cultivating and symbolizing; to innovate new practices, such as plant or animal domestication; and to communicate specific practices as knowledge, especially across generations.

The first division of labor within human ethno-units was likely between women and men and may have arisen from one of the qualities of human biological dimorphism; within a given breeding population group of our species, males are typically larger than females. This hypothesis contradicts some well-known earlier assertions following L. H. Morgan39 who hypothesized that early human societies practiced a ‘primitive communalism’ in which labor was equally shared. Arguments contra Morgan have been proposed by various anthropologists who cite the behaviors of closely related hominids (as mentioned earlier). Others refer to analogous social relations as recorded by ethnographers over the past ┼ 200 years, such as J. H. Moore’s 1978 survey of Human Relations Area Files40 for evidence of exploitation of women by men in hunting and gathering societies. The only examples Moore found of ‘agalitarian’ societies – where there was no indication of such exploitation – were four groups who live or lived in marginal ecological zones that did not support a regular productive surplus (such as the Arctic coast and the North American Great Basin). However, those marginal zones were inhabited only after exploitative societies had fully occupied the more productive areas. Moore further argued that the subjugation of women provided a cultural model for the subjugation of men.41

Regardless of the moment and practice of origin, the differentiation of labor very early in human social history suggests the production of some amount of surplus. On that basis, societies cleaved according to provision and task. Those divisions would have promoted or reinforced in-group and cross-generational knowledge and technology transfer apropos to cultivation, hunting, healing, tool making, etc. As noted earlier, recorded oral histories of many hunter-gatherer societies describe divisions between hunters and cultivators and between mental and manual activities. Those ethnographies (as well as other data, such as archaeological evidence) also suggest that those two divisions are linked, and that within the resulting strata further hierarchy, primary leaders, and inter-strata conflicts emerged shortly thereafter. These earliest divisions provide the starting points for later and more complex stratification. Out of this process, sections of society come to be ‘fixed’ in their social relationships as classes that are comprised of specific relationship types, distinct from other classes. In many societies, these class definitions are transferred across generations, as heredity. Stratification also promotes – and increasingly requires in order to reproduce those relationships – the further development of an ideological and political superstructure, which soon comes to direct every aspect of the society’s activities.

“The division of labor implies from the outset the division of the conditions of labor, of tools and materials, and thus the fragmentation of accumulated capital among different owners, and thus, also, the fragmentation between capital and labor, and the different forms of property itself.”42 It is in this division of labor (including the division between town and countryside) that private property and class distinctions are based. Marx and Engels considered this essential to understanding the dynamics of class society as well as to understanding how to create a new kind of society, free of class distinctions, exploitation and oppression.

Stratification Produces Class Struggle

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” With this statement in the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels introduced their analysis that through all of human history “oppressor and oppressed stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on a now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.” 43

The division of societies into distinct classes is enabled by the economic exploitation of subaltern classes by the dominant class: slave by master, serf by landlord, proletarian by capitalist. These classes exist as social contradictions. There is dialectical unity between the opposing classes in such a society; one requires the other, but this is not a static relationship. The dominant class exists at the economic, political and ideological expense of the subaltern class. The economic disadvantage is generally evident in the respective life-ways of the opposed classes. The political disadvantage is evident in the nature of the laws and customs that promote those disadvantages. Ideologically, the ruling classes have free rein (by law as well as by economic control) to dominate the intellectual life of the society through philosophies, aesthetics, traditions and other sentiments that champion their position as elites and justify the subjugation of the other class. Beyond that fact, the ruling class also expropriates the symbolic innovations of the subaltern groups; the visual art, music, dance, poetry, prose and song created by the oppressed often become property of the dominant class in the intellectual market.44

This socio-political contention between strata and classes is grounded in the division of society according to labor that, as proposed earlier, emerged first between men and women and between mental and manual labor. Here, the reciprocity between different forms of social practice is critically important. The division of labor as it has evolved is not incidental much less inconsequential to the society; it is a requisite component of the social order and its continued existence.

Without devising solutions to shared necessities – such as how to hunt most effectively, what plants to cultivate and when or how to attend to the sick and dying – the band cannot survive and thrive. Over time, these shared practices are explained and encoded as ideology. Knowledge is not acquired in the abstract or equally by all members of the group concurrently; as a process, it proceeds unevenly among individuals and is intentionally withheld or shared. Those discrepancies, transferred across generations, eventually come to comprise distinct ideological systems shared within specific sub-groups, strata or classes.

Given the burden of knowledge acquisition and transfer, especially for the many tens of thousands of years before the advent of writing, specialization of activity was both vitally important and subject to tremendous pressures. Nature (climate, weather, geology, biology) appeared as mysterious and dominating forces. Predation by other animals was always present. An unsuccessful collection or hunt could produce internal strife over causes and results, under the constant specter of starvation. The spontaneous emergence of division morphed into codifications deemed necessary for survival and which came to be perceived as complementary to the conditions of life, as ‘natural’ as nature itself. From this process emerge concepts of medicine, taboo, morality, ethics, etc.

These ideological practices are tethered to how the society is structured and functions. The anthropologist Leslie White pithily noted that “religion is, at bottom, an affair of the emotions,”45 but emotions – affective responses – are an interpretation of the real world. Marriage traditions and incest taboos promote exogamy46 which can foster productivity by the group (by expanding its size) and reinforce peaceful coexistence with neighboring groups in their mutual use of resources (for hunting, cultivation, etc.). Origin stories explain in-group distinctions and traditions and thus promote social cohesion.

These interactions work in reverse as well. Shocks to the lifeways of the society call into question the ideologies that support and promote those lifeways. The 19th century encroachment of the US Army and European settlers onto the North American Plains undermined the status and role of the traditional Cheyenne clan system of Council Chiefs, prompting its replacement by the Soldier Chiefs.47 The economic dislocations and prolonged slaughter of the First World War, combined with subaltern demands for peace and bread and land, prompted the overthrow of the 300 year-old Romanov dynasty and its replacement by a revolutionary socialist government.48 In both cases, long-standing ideological support for the traditional order was overturned in favor of new worldviews.

The struggle within societies between strata and classes, and which appears to erupt more or less ‘spontaneously,’ takes as its starting point any of a wide variety of practices in politics, ideologies and/or economics. In times of acute social crisis, any aspect of how society operates is liable to be interrogated, and at such times, “(new) beginnings are to be seen literally on all sides.”49

Notes

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[Abbreviations for multi-volume book sets: MECW = Marx and Engels Collected Works; MESW = Marx and Engels Selected Works; LCW = V.I. Lenin Collected Works]

<!–[if gte mso 9]> Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 <![endif]–><!–[if gte mso 9]> <![endif]–> 33 Marx, K. 1967. Capital. Vol. 3. New York. p. 879-880.

34 Marx, K. 1973. Grundrisse. New York. p. 107-108.

<!–[if gte mso 9]> Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 <![endif]–><!–[if gte mso 9]> <![endif]–> 35 A related illustration might be the schizophrenic perceiving their own thoughts to be external voices. c.f. Fernyhough, C. 2004. Alien voices and inner dialogue: towards a developmental account of auditory verbal hallucinations. New Ideas in Psychology 22(1): 49-68.

36 Capital, Vol. 1. p. 77.

37 c.f. Diamond, J. 2005. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York. Viking.

38 Ethnography is rich on this topic, but an illustrative sample would be: Sharrock, S. R. 1974. Crees, Cree-Assiniboines, and Assiniboines: Interethnic Social Organization on the Far Northern Plains. Ethnohistory 21(2): 95-122. Moore, J. H. 1974. Cheyenne Political History, 1820-1894. Ethnohistory 21(4): 329-359. Southall, A. 1976. Nuer and Dinka Are People: Ecology, Ethnicity and Logical Possibility. Man 11(4): 463-491. Moore, J. H. 1994. Putting Anthropology Back Together Again. American Anthropolgist 96(4): 925-948. Masco, J. 1995. “It is a Strict Law That Bids Us Dance”: Cosmologies, Colonialism, Death, and Ritual Authority in the Kwakwaka’wakw Potlatch, 1849 to 1922. Comparative Studies in Society and History 37(1): 41-75.

39 Morgan’s survey Ancient Society (1877) is cited by Engels throughout The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.

40 HRAF is a collaborative archive at Yale University that catalogues worldwide ethnographic data.

41 Moore. ‘Exploitation of Women’.

42 The German Ideology. p. 86.

43 Marx, K. and F. Engels. 1969/1848. Manifesto of the Communist Party. MESW Vol. 1. Moscow. p. 109.

44 This is obviously the case in many fields of intellectual activity, where patents, copyright and other contracts assign ‘intellectual property’ rights to the employer, not the intellectual employee.

45 White, L. A. 1926. An Anthropological Approach to the Emotional Factors in Religion. The Journal of Philosophy 23(20): 546-554.

46 White, L. A. 1948. The Definition and Prohibition of Incest. American Anthropologist 50(3): 416-435.

47 Moore. ‘Cheyenne Political History’.

48 c.f. Lenin, V.I. 1964/1917. Lessons of the Revolution. LCW Vol. 25. Moscow.

49 Lenin, V.I. 1964/1920. ‘Left-wing’ Communism – An infantile disorder. LCW Vol. 31. Moscow. p. 101.

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We all probably know that one of Marx and Engels’ great accomplishments is often said to be the creation of something called historical materialism, or in their own phrase, “the materialist conception of history.” What is this conception? What is the particularity of this approach to history, and how is it connected to revolutionary change?

In this essay, written for Kasama, Eddy Laing seeks to answer these questions, using not only the works of Marx and Engels, but more recent findings and research in anthropology and social sciences.

This is the first of three parts.

Why historical materialism matters, 1

by Eddy Laing

At the core of Marxism is the methodology of historical materialism (HM), which “regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence.” 1 As developed by Marx and Engels, the dialectical materialist conception of history is not just an interpretation of the world; it is a guide to active transformation and “in its essence critical and revolutionary.”2

Of course, it can be argued that any study of history is necessarily a study of social development. Unlike histories defined by the acts of presidents, generals, bankers or other elites, and measured against the Idea, or Moment or other ideological abstractions, historical materialism proceeds from an analysis of how society as a whole functions, “starting with the material production of life itself and comprehending the form of intercourse connected with and created by this mode of production.”3 In other words, historical materialism is a study of societies as they really are — as diverse and complex assemblies of people with various needs and aspirations. In order to do that, we need to examine society in all its stages and component reciprocal actions; how people make their lives, enact the state (laws, governance), and conduct themselves ideologically through religion, philosophy, ethics, morality, art, literature, music, etc. These activities and expressions are in fact social practices and, taken together, form the cultural matrix of the given society.

In 1848, Europe was still emerging from the centuries-long hold of feudalism and monarchism. From that vantage point, Marx and Engels had a palpable sense of the old social formations — dying but not yet dead — as well as the newly emerging ones, especially a rising class of proletarians for whom social revolution was on the immediate agenda.4 Thus, Marx and Engels developed their framework in active opposition to the idealism which, then as now, reinforced the dominant narratives of the day. And it was through that struggle that they were able to stand Hegel’s dialectical method ‘right side up’ and develop a science of the general laws of motion of the external world and of human thought, so that the real world was approached as the source of ideas, and not the other way around.5

HM proceeds from the hypothesis that our social being produces our consciousness; how we think and what we think are construed from our collaborations and communication with others. We devise our ways of life through networks of economic, political, and ideological social relationships, which we usually call ‘society.’ This sociality is a defining characteristic of humans; we could not exist, much less create culture, outside our social practices. Furthermore, the reciprocal interaction of our thinking and being is transformative; through our social practices we intentionally — and unintentionally in some cases — change our conditions of life, including how and what we think.

In this way, we produce our history, not as a recurring series of equivalent events, but as ongoing transformative experiences. Thus, human cultural history is oriented; it is a continuum of social practices that intersect in a complex matrix and which extend from and build upon collective past practices. How we live today is not how people lived two hundred or two thousand or two hundred thousand years ago. Neither are societies identical; each contains its own specificity and history. That said, how we live today is based in some part on how we have lived in the past and societies often share features that are built from similar social practices. An analogy can be drawn from biology: natural history is oriented in its evolution in that new species derive from species, body plans and organs that already exist, not according to a metaphysical system of phylogenetic progress. Furthermore, as biology, geology, astrophysics, and other sciences have subsequently shown, all life on this planet and all matter in the universe have histories too.

Orientation — the continuum of formative practices — does not preclude accident or obviate contingency. Social development is inexorable through time, but not in regard to its structure. Societies are what we make them to be, but we operate “under circumstance directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.”6 Societies arise according to specific conditions of material life, and as history demonstrates, they continue to undergo various subtle and dramatic changes over time: technologies are invented and become obsolete, forms of symbolization are transformed and deprecated, shared knowledge (oral or written) of the world is gained, forgotten or destroyed. As history also demonstrates emphatically, when the functional conditions of life of enough members of a society come into sharp conflict with how that society is directed or organized, resolutions are found in climactic and sudden events, often pitting one section against another, or pitting all against nature. Mass migrations, epidemics, wars and revolutions are all examples of resolving events.

Marx and Engels first presented their ‘materialist conception of history’ in polemics against the ‘idealist conception of history’ espoused by certain academic Hegelians7 and Ludwig Feuerbach. Starting with those polemics and specifically with The German Ideology, written in 1847, historical materialism provides a bright red thread running through their subsequent decades of collaboration, as demonstrated in their many practical applications: The Manifesto of the Communist Party; Capital; The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Boneparte; The Civil War in France; Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State; and their many other investigations of history, contemporary society and the struggle for socialism.

Since all scientific theories are developed from fact, my intent here is to illustrate the validity of HM by drawing on the empirical evidence of human social history: anthropology, psychology, archaeology, and other social sciences. Marx’s own study of the history of law and philosophy provided him with a starting point (e.g. the ideological and political superstructure of societies) for developing this theory, and his extensive study of capitalism, using England as its primary data set, is summarized in his famous critique.8 However, the data available today is more extensive than that obtainable in 1847 or 1867.

I do not presume to exhaust this subject, which is not possible in any event. Neither am I interested in compiling a set of rules or formulas or mechanistic ‘just so’ statements. What I do hope to accomplish is a cogent explanation of key theses within the HM methodology and an exploration of certain misconceptions, in the spirit of “revolutionizing the existing world, of practically coming to grips with and changing the things found in existence.”9

Humans as Social Animals

More than a simple statement of fact, we are animals and so we have a natural history. Our species, Homo sapiens, is a sub-set of the Hominidae family within the Primates order. We share a common ancestral species with and are most closely related to other hominids — chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans. Those animals (with the possible exception of Borneo orangutans) as well as the Old World monkeys and some other primates are social-banding creatures from which we can infer that earliest members of our species also lived that way. Early humans in Eastern Africa very likely lived in groups that jointly gathered food, secured shelter and biologically reproduced. It is also likely that early human bands observed some form of internal hierarchy aligned with age and sex. Based on ethnographic analogy, it is reasonable to suggest that the exploitation of female and juvenile labor emerged early as expressions of such a hierarchy,10, 11, 12 and rudimentary manifestations of exploitive practice have been observed among collateral species 13,14,15,16 (e.g. adult males aggressively taking food that has been gathered by females or juveniles).

Successful population groups are by definition those that solve the problems of maintenance and reproduction of the group, which of course takes place in relation to the group’s environment. This is a necessary quality for biological evolution, and it is a necessary quality of social evolution.17 Functional groups are able to cooperate and are multi-generational. They have a need to communicate and they have learned behavior that can be shared among peers and with the younger generation. It is in these functions that we can begin to discriminate the capabilities of humans from those of other hominids. Very significantly, comparative observations of humans and other great apes show that the human infants display a capacity for understanding shared intentions. In other words, as part of our cognitive development we learn — before we can speak — that other humans are agents with whom we can cooperate.18,19,20,21

It is in the course of cooperation that we learn vocabulary and other cultural information. As everyday events show us, speech acquisition is an on-going social practice. We are continually encountering — and inventing — new words and new meanings for words. While infant vocalization may begin as signaling, it rather quickly evolves into something more. We are not learning a set of signals when we acquire speech.22 Rather, our speech is comprised of a logically formed and extensible system of symbols.23 Here again, we are the only animal known to be capable of symbolizing and symbolic recursion.24 Taken together, these capabilities enable an expandable matrix of social practices, which reciprocally comprise intra-group social relationships.

“The production of life, both of one’s own labour and of the fresh life in procreation, now appears as a twofold relation: on the one hand as a natural, on the other as a social relation — social in the sense that it denotes the co-operation of several individuals, no matter under what conditions, in what manner and to what end. It follows from this that a certain mode of production, or industrial stage is always combined with a certain mode of co-operation, or social stage, and this mode of co-operation is itself a ‘productive force’.”25

Modern society has developed — over several thousand generations — from those beginnings. As our social history illustrates, those specific capacities do not prescribe one type or direction for our cultural evolution. Our capacity for shared intentionality, for example, has not obviated social conflict; our ability to create tools produced Zyklon B and the H-bomb. Social contradictions do not result simply because we are not as ‘wise’ as our taxon sapiens suggests, but they do demonstrate the innovative variability inherent in our transformative actions.

Thought and Social Practice

The phenomenon of consciousness has been the object of speculation — what is it, how does it happen — throughout written history. A well-known Zen koan frames the subject-object question by asking whether the dreamer is a man or a butterfly, but an entomologist might point out that the Lepidoptera nervous system is too primitive to support memory. Historical materialism, developed in opposition to philosophical idealism, answers this question directly: it is not human consciousness that produces our being; it is our social being which produces our consciousness.

This statement should not be interpreted to mean only that the brain is an organ for thought or memory, or that thoughts are simply biochemical signals transmitted through a central nervous system. Although it is required for and enables thinking and memory, the physiology of the brain is not thinking. Brains do not produce symbols or memories from within. Thinking proceeds from interactions with others. The dialectical materialist psychologist Lev Vygotsky and his colleagues conducted path-breaking investigations of cognition during the revolutionary 1920s in Russia, demonstrating that cognitive ability develops through social interaction.26 Human infants learn how to learn through dialogic exchange with others. Thus, we are not born ‘human’; we are made so through our interactions. We continue to acquire knowledge throughout our lives by internalizing direct and indirect shared experience, through social practices, including those of semiotic mediation — the forms through which we communicate with each other. 27,28,29 In this process, we create our thoughts: as memories of dialogic experiences, as physical perceptions, and through a process of comparison and association that we sometimes experience as an ’inner monologue.’30

This assumes still greater significance when we consider the full history of our species. Humans migrated out from Africa in perhaps several waves, reaching across Asia as well as into Europe, out onto the Pacific, across the Bering Sea, and the length of the Western Hemisphere. This in itself demonstrates a range of transformative and transmitted behaviors that enabled ‘success’ in a tremendously wide range of habitats — from the African savannah to the Arctic tundra, from the Tibetan plateau to the Amazonian basin. While human presence has created habitat opportunities for fellow travelers (rodents and domestic cats are two examples), no other animal has demonstrated such a capacity for adapting to widely different climates and habitat.

Humans have not only responded to the environment, we have learned to remake it. The earliest details of how we learned are lost to the oral histories of the thousands of generations who came before the advent of written language about 5,000 years ago. Relying on their oral folklore our distant ancestors learned to predict climate and seasons, learned to control fire, learned to cultivate plants, learned to domesticate certain mammals, learned to create their own shelter, and with various other assembled skills and affinities eventually stepped into a more settled world; produced by their own hands and minds in dialogue with each other.

An ongoing argument within anthropology for most of the last century has been whether the breadth of human culture has been mainly a process of diffusion — the communication of practices from one group to another — or independent invention responding to specific similar or distinct conditions of life. Writing, for example, is thought to have developed independently in at least two cultures (Mayan and Sumerian) and possibly others (Indus), based on distinct glyphic systems and proto-grammars. Other examples can be inferred from the invention of crop cultivation, for while varieties of the same grains might be transplanted to different locales with similar climate (for example from east to west or vice versa), the same transfer would not be successful when moving longitudinally (south-north) or across elevations (into or out of significantly different climate zones).31 It would appear that both the social, interactive practices of innovation and of interchange are foundational to human cultural history, and have been employed by various — distinct and related — population groups at different times and in different places.32

Notes

<!–[if gte mso 9]> Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 <![endif]–><!–[if gte mso 9]> <![endif]–>

[Abbreviations for multi-volume book sets: MECW = Marx and Engels Collected Works; MESW = Marx and Engels Selected Works; LCW = V.I. Lenin Collected Works]

1 Marx, K. 1967/1867. Capital. Vol. 1. New York. p 29.

2 Capital. Vol. 1. p 29.

3 Marx, K. and F. Engels. 1976/1848. The German Ideology. MECW 5. New York. p 53.

4 Describing 1848, Engels wrote “the Paris uprising found its echo in the victorious insurrections in Vienna, Milan and Berlin; when the whole of Europe right up to the Russian frontier was swept into the movement.” see Marx, K. 1969/1850. The Class Struggles in France. MESW Vol. 1. Moscow. p. 189.

5 Capital. Vol. 1. p. 29. See also: Engels, F. 1969/1886. Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy. MESW Vol. 3. Moscow. esp. Part IV on Marx.

6 Marx, K. 1969/1869. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Boneparte. MESW Vol. 1. Moscow. p. 398.

7 German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel was a very strong influence for Marx and other radical thinkers of the day.

8 Capital, Vol. 1. p. 19.

9 The German Ideology. p 38.

10 Moore, J. H. 1977. The Evolution of Exploitation. Critique of Anthropology 2(8): 33-48.

11 Moore, J. H. 1978. The Exploitation of Women in Evolutionary Perspective. Critique of Anthropology 3(9-10): 83-100.

12 Terray, E. and J. S. Kahn. 1979. On Exploitation: Elements of an Autocritique. Critique of Anthropology 4(13-14): 29-39.

13 Brennan, J. and J. Anderson. 1988. Varying responses to feeding competition in a group of rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta). Primates 29(3): 353-360.

14 Starin, E. D. 2006. Patterns of food transfer in temminck’s red colobus. Aggressive Behavior 32(3): 181-186.

15 Whiten, A. and C. P. van Schaik. 2007. The evolution of animal ‘cultures’ and social intelligence. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 362(1480): 603-620.

16 Cheney, D., R. Seyfarth, B. Smuts. 1986. Social relationships and social cognition in nonhuman primates. Science 234(4782): 1361-1366.

17 By evolution, I mean simply ‘the change in properties of populations of organisms over time’ as per Ernst Mayr.

18 Tomasello, M. 2001. Cultural Transmission: A View from Chimpanzees and Human Infants. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 32(2): 135-146.

19 Tomasello, M., M. Carpenter, J. Call, T. Behne, and H. Moll. 2005. Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28(05): 675-691.

20 Herrmann, E., J. Call, M. V. Hernández-Lloreda, B. Hare, M. Tomasello. 2007. Humans Have Evolved Specialized Skills of Social Cognition: The Cultural Intelligence Hypothesis. Science 317(5843): 1360-1366.

21 Tomasello, M. and H. Rakoczy. 2003. What Makes Human Cognition Unique? From Individual to Shared to Collective Intentionality. Mind & Language 18(2): 121-147.

22 Wertsch, J. V. 1985. Vygotsky and the Social Formation of Mind. Cambridge and London, Harvard University Press.

23 Vygotsky, L. 1986. Thought and Language. Cambridge, MIT Press. p. 68-95.

24 Hauser, M. D., N. Chomsky, et al. 2002. The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve? Science 298(5598): 1569-1579.

25 The German Ideology. p 43.

26 Vygotsky. Thought and Language. p. 68-95.

27 Moll, H. and M. Tomasello. 2007. Cooperation and human cognition: the Vygotskian intelligence hypothesis. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 362(1480): 639-648.

28 Fernyhough, C. 1996. The dialogic mind: A dialogic approach to the higher mental functions. New Ideas in Psychology 14(1): 47-62.

29 Wertsch, J. V. and P. Tulviste. 1992. L. S. Vygotsky and Contemporary Developmental Psychology. Developmental Psychology 28(4): 548-557.

30 Vygotsky. Thought and Language. p. 210-256.

31 Several examples are discussed in Diamond, J. 1997. Guns, Germs, and Steel. New York, W.W. Norton.

32 For tens of thousands of years this may also have involved interchange between Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis, another, somewhat earlier species of humans who also populated areas of Africa and Eurasia. c.f. Mellars, P. 1988. The Origins and Dispersal of Modern Humans. Current Anthropology 29(1): 186-188.

http://kasamaproject.org/2009/02/12/historical-materialism-1historical-materialism-1/

Related posts:

1. Eddy Laing: Why Historical Materialism Matters

Nando wrote the following piece as a commentary on Stephen Mauldin’s Badiou 101 for the RCP,USA.

By Nando Sims

Clarity writes a single sentence comment:

“It should be made crystal clear that Badiou has explicitly renounced any adherance to Marxism as a system of thought.

This raises a question of fact, but also a more interesting question of method.

On the question of fact, David gets right to the point:

“Whether Badiou has – explicitly – renounced Marxism as a system of thought, I don’t know. It is obvious however that his that his thought is only tangentially related to what traditionally has been known as ‘Marxism’.”

Of course, that depends on how you define Marxist. Some suggest that our definition of Marxism should allow Badiou’s work to fit inside. But for now, my reading suggests that Badiou’s writings are not an elaboration, application, or development of Marxism-as-I-understand-it.

Badiou is developing a different philosophy — emerging out of a history of Maoism. This is a communist theory, but seems clearly not Marxist.

Next Question: What Do We Have to Learn?

Now that initial observation still leaves us with the less obvious question of method. What do we DO with a communist philosophy that is not Marxist?

And why, for example, does Clarity think this has to be “crystal clear”?

As a child, I would come back from play and sometimes have just met a new friend. My European grandmother (who would visit from time to time) would always ask “Is he Protestant or Catholic?” She thought it had to be crystal clear. She never said why she asked that question. But that too was crystal clear. For her, some crucial lines were already drawn (and had been drawn for centuries).

For me the more important question is: What do we have to learn from this work? What do communists and revolutionaries have to learn from this non-Marxist communist philosopher?

And it is (of course) just a subset of the larger question: What do we have to learn from anyone?

And there is a related more political question: What openings can a non-Marxist communist philosopher help make, what space and hearing in this world can he help generate, for communist revolution generally?

There is one position that says (simply): We have nothing to learn.

It works like this: We have our form of Marxism, it answers the key questions of philosophy (and politics and more), and if someone backs up, and over several decades tries to make a new run at communist philosophy, we have nothing to learn here. On the contrary, it is harmful. It is inherently a false start from the beginning. And to the extent that it comes up with something new, different from Marxism — well, it can only be false, misleading, distracting, confusing.

Why talk about Badiou, when there is so much within Marxism we have not talked about yet? Why welcome young intellectuals coming to a form of communism through Badiou (it is asked jealously) when we have our guys who are so clearly underappreciated?

It is the kind of framework that (I assume) leads Arthur to write after John’s post:

“I haven’t read Badiou or Zizek and scanning previous related threads has not inclined me towards taking the trouble. This review does convince me to at least take a look, though its still not a high priority for me and will take some time.”

And then to bob up half a day later and write:

“I’ve now spent a few hours on Badiou and Zizek (mainly Zizek because less boring). Not convinced the quickie does extract an essence. Equally unconvinced there’s much of an essence to extract at all.”

(It is like saying, “I’ve been in Thailand half an hour now. Christ, this place sucks.” Or, “I spent the afternoon studying Buddhism, why would anyone embrace this stuff?” Or “I read an essay on Marx in high school, what a loser!” I particularly enjoy that Arthur spend a couple of hours with both Badiou and Zizek — why waste time when you can squeeze out two verdicts in one afternoon!)

And I imagine many people reading this are aware of how influential that kind of closed thinking is among people who consider themselves communist rebels (and even “scientific”). It is why Clarity didn’t feel the need to say more than one sentence. He didn’t need supplement his statement of “the fact” with any discussion of its implication — because the implication is in the air, in the religious training.

And this is why (I believe) Stephen sweetly asks “Do you think there is a ‘Marxism’ that is a closed system of thought?”

Because if you are embedded within a closed system (even if you label it “Marxism”), then all you need to know about Badiou is whether he is your kind of Marxist or not.What else do we really need to know? Right?

If your playmate is the wrong religion, no good can come of this.

Blinking in the Bright Light of the Outside World

I have a rather different view.

When I left the RCP, I did not know who Badiou was. I don’t believe i had heard of him. I had heard of Zizek for only one reason: he had written an introduction to a book featuring Avakian. Obviously I popped out of a political culture where a very narrow sliver of Marxism is promoted as a closed system.

After spending more than a few hours over the last years reading (not just one or two philosophers — but generally catching up on a whole world of thinking) like I was some communist Rip Van Winkle… I discovered (yes) that Badiou is not a Marxist (that took about fifteen minutes). I also discovered that I am rather unlikely to become a “Badiouist” in any sense — i have some rather deep differences in both politics and philosophy with his work (which emerge in a primitive way at my still primitive level of engagement).

But I have also found parts of his work, insights, new ways of thinking, approaches — that are very thought-provoking and perhaps valuable. I don’t have final verdicts on this (my thoughts are still being “provoked”) and I am in no particular rush to reach final verdicts. I am much more in the stage of absorbing and thinking about this — and preparing to discuss here on Kasama.

But I am far enough along that i want to deal with this question of method.

Is This a Matter of Privilege

Bob H writes:

“I’m curious why the Kasama site has given such prominence to Badiou and Zizeck. While I find Zizeck’s essays thought-provoking and original, I don’t get a sense of a major paradigm shift in theory. Is it because Avakian has dismissed “the Derridas” that continental thought attracts ex-RCPers?…So I’m curious about the basis for the rather privileged position that Zizeck and Badiou get from the site moderators as key towards a new synthesis. It doesn’t seem to be because of a superiority of predictive or explanatory power of their theoretical structures. Or am I missing something obvious here?”

This is a fair question.

First, I think there is a misunderstanding: I don’t believe there is any intention to “privilege” either Zizek or Badiou.

What we are fighting for here is merely the right to creatively engage the thinking of our time. And this is a fight against a very cloistered and dogmatic conception of Marxism and of how Marxism develops. It is a fight that is necessary merely to clear the ground for a serious discussion of what our communist theory should be, and what role the works of many different contributors will be.

That fight has broken out both over Badiou, and over the Nepali Maoists — and so (here on Kasama) we are addressing larger issues by discussing the rather sordid assault on Badiou and the Nepali Maoists.

And (to be clear) we are addressing the polemics of the RCP not because they (or their specific polemics) are influential. They are not. But because there is within those polemics an articulation of inherited dogmatic views that have been and are quite influential among communists world wide (and here I don’t mean just Maoists either).

There is a whole legacy of narrowness that needs to break down if we are to make any progress.

And it is not surprising that the fight has broken out over Badiou and the Nepali Maoists:

Badiou has opened a door, inviting a new generati0n of intellectuals to re-engage the “Communist Hypothesis” in the midst of a sudden global capitalist crisis. And the Nepali Maoists have emerged as the first communist movement to congeal a broad popular support and bring its revolution to the brink of (possibly) seizing power.

The first reintroduces philosophical consideration of communism in the public realms of theory, and the second reintroduces a political communism with the dignity of immediate and practical actuality.

And, for dogmatic communists who have lived cut off from creativity or mass engagement — all of this gives rise to confusion, fear and even jealousy.

We will have to engage both Badiou and the Nepali Maoists critically (and many others I won’t list…) in the process of forging a new communist coherency. We will have to engage our own inherited communism too, deeply. And the experience of socialist revolution in the 20th century (which Badiou one-sidedly considers “failure”).

And so, our momentary focus this week here on Kasama is not an attempt to stack the outcome by privileging a few thinkers from the start. It is a particularly sharp engagement over Badiou and the Nepali Maoists because those are two of the places this larger fight has broken out.

We will also have to engage those who have been introduced to a philosophical communism by Badiou and Zizek and others — but who have not yet considered the necessity of fusing the “idea of communism” with the living class struggle for power and liberation.

The Bushiness of Marxism

One of the issues here is the very right to engage someone like Badiou.

In the mind of some (expressed in our discussions here and in the polemic of the RCP) Badiou and those “like” him can be easily identified as “harmful” and therefore quickly lightly. And the method is on display. And underlying this, is an assumption that there is really no need to step outside a very very narrow framework to learn and assumilate from others– and to challenge our own deeply held views.

When the history and development of communist theory is explained — its family tree often is presented as rather linear. Most family trees are bushy. But modern Marxism is described as if it is a rather straight-line descent: Marx to Engels to Lenin to Stalin to Mao (and beyond). And each thinker supposedly took the inherited Marxism of his day, and applied it to new conditions and developed a new “contribution” to the ongoing development.

And this is not just a theory of history, but a model offered to the rest of us. Because (by extension) we are supposed to take our most current, inherited-form of Marxism (as a whole, as a given, in its most advanced “synthesis”) and appreciate it, and go out and promote it (not something else). And defend it against “deviations” which always appear, like the devil, lurking at every hand, in so so many forms.

But in fact, this history and model is impoverished.

Just one place to unravel that is to ask: How much of Mao’s innovations to communist theory came by bringing in traditional Chinese thinking into Marxism (especially on dialectics, but not just there)? How much of Mao’s thinking was influenced by the powerful currents of pragmatism that shaped his generation of Chinese revolutionaries (in the 1920s)? And how much was Mao Zedong’s synthesis a collective process?

Or another question: What was the influence of Althusser or world-system theorists on the 60s generation of American Maoists? Or of Stephen Jay Gould in the decision by some American Maoists to reject the “inevitabilism” that is so strong within inherited Marxism? Or Jorge Palacios of the Chilean Maoists — what was his contribution to the creative spots of “Conquer the World”? What was the debt to the communists of Peru on the question of building urban political base areas (a la Raucana) or the idea to treat “combativity” as a school of revolution? And what is the methodological result of not routinely making such influences explicit — in how we view the creation of communist theory?

Or let’s ask: What was the attitude of Marx and Engels toward the non-marxist thinkers of their time — Darwin, for example. They polemicized with the non-Marxist communist theorist Duhring, but hailed the non-Marxist communist philosopher Dietzgen for his independent work.

Just a few examples…. among many. But you find out that Marxism is in fact more bushy and complex in its descent — not just a linear hand-off from each genius-of-the-epoch to his successor.

And what you discover is that Marxism (at least when it is creative) is not closed — even though some of its histories (like Mao’s Immortal Contributions, or Harvest of Dragons) treat it that way — as a road with three or four main “milestones” each defined by the name of one great thinker.

And we can also ask: what happens when Marxism is treated non-creatively — as if it were a closed system?

There are anecdotes where Soviet scientists were asked to refute Bohr’s quantum physics and Einstein’s theory of relativity — because (the logic said) these theories contradict our existing version of dialectical materialism, so they must be wrong, so it is the job of communist scientists to refute them. And the implications of suggesting that they could NOT be refuted in this way were dangerous. Scientists who opposed Lysenko’s official “Marxist” (and false) theory of biology did not fare well.

You can enclose your thought in a bubble, and venture out to demand that it be made “crystal clear” whether this or that thinker is a Marxist — because (if you are enclosed in a bubble you call “Marxism”) that is the only question that really matters, right?

What if Marx Had Not Created Marxism….?

A thought experiment: If Marx had not given communist theory a major starting foundation (if he had died as a child, for example)…. what would communist theory have come to look like? If communist theory had not initially emerged in Germany (influenced by Hegel and Feuerbach and the whole stream of philosophy that Marx studied), but had (instead) emerged in say Japan, or South Africa, or China, what would it look like? If it has not emerged in a single robust form in the nineteenth century, but taken a number of sharply competing forms and philosophies….. what would our assumptions be?

There is accident and contingency in the world.

And I suspect that if communist theory had emerged somewhere else, it might have looked radically different. It still would have been (one way or another) a communist theory, it would be grappling with the same world (the same realities, the same historical epoch, the same planet, the same structures of economics and society). But it might well have looked different in many (even fundamental ways) — even while the objective nature of reality would have inevitably pulled its development toward some similar themes (classes, the nature of capitalism, the quetions of transition to a new society globally, etc.)

And, in some ways, reading Badiou has been like reading a communist theory that feels as if it comes from a different water fountain. The familiar is unfamilar, the assumed is suddenly not assumed.

Of course, that is not literally true: Badiou is part of the same broad river of philosophy that Marx swam in. And Badiou did not emerge separate from modern Marxism (but out of a long engagement with Marxism in its French Maoist forms.)

But Badiou proposes a theory of “multiple of multiples” where Marxism has posited a theory of dialectics. He has proposed a theory of event where Marxism has groped for a theory of conjuncture. He has posited a concept of different “truth processes,” where some forms of marxism have announced a series of increasingly more scientific syntheses. (And like any work of translation — you discover that the concepts and words aren’t “equivalent” or parallel — you can’t just conceive of it as a series of comparable discrete fragments to compare and contrast.)

And, to me, this is not a binary situation where we either become Badiouists or else reject Badiou as un-marxist. (What an impoverished view of our options that is!) When Einstein emerged in physics, we were not forced to drop Marxism and become Einsteinians — and that is really not the question when we study Einstein (or string theory). And that binary view of things has (in many ways) impeded the ability of some communists to learn from developments in others spheres (like natural science) or the work of other non-Marxist thinkers in political and philosophical spheres, or even the work of Marxists who are not in the line of linear descent (how many know about Vigotsky?).

The question really is: at a moment where our particular inherited Marxisms are showing strains, and revealing some real voids and problems… what can we learn here from other engagements with communism and the revolutionary process? How do we actually learn from communism’s own history? Do we intend to have a creative approach to Marxism itself or not?

No related posts.

Dear Professor Badiou:
About the RCP Assault on Alain Badiou, Philosophy & (Ultimately) Communism Itself

By Bill Martin

Before we say more about this RCP polemic (“Why Alain Badiou is a Rousseauist… And Why We Should Not Be“) the first thing that needs to be said is that its guiding principle is:

“Who needs this shit? Bob Avakian has the New Synthesis, and that’s the end of the matter. Either get on board with that or you’re going down the wrong road.”

The second harsh thing that needs to be said is this polemic is an act of stupidity and irresponsibility against communism itself.

It is also an act of stupidity and irresponsibility against philosophy, theory, and critical thought. And we need to understand better how an act such as this, in being such an act against philosophy, etc., is an act against communism.

None of this, absolutely none of this, has anything to do with whether the polemic (or Bob Avakian) is right and Badiou is wrong on any particular point.

Neither should we get caught up too much in taking the polemic as setting any kind of agenda for the discussion of Badiou’s work and the ways that this work might help us in reconception and regroupment. There are plenty of good commentaries on Badiou’s work out there that do not deign to only, finally, notice the work of this outstanding philosopher and “post-Maoist” of our time when it comes time to knock him down, and with no appreciation whatsoever for the openings that he has created.

It may seem insignificant, or far less significant, to discuss this polemic, or Badiou’s philosophy, much further in light of the even more recent discussions around Nepal (basically, the Nepal material coming a couple of weeks after the polemic). But there is a sense in which this is all of a piece, the piece being not BA’s New Synthesis, and, furthermore, other things lighting up the sky, such as the Idea of Communism conference, and developments in Nepal, and, for that matter, the fact that the Bush regime was “driven out” without the central role being played by Bob Avakian (BA), the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), or World Can’t Wait (WCW), and none of these things are foregrounding the New Synthesis, either. The narrow world of the RCP is closing in upon itself even further, and there is an inability to ask why this happening; instead there is an essentially conservative, capitulatory reaction.

This polemic ought to make those of us who care about the future livid.

It’s just worse-than-worthless stuff when all you can do with contemporary philosophy is to jump out with a polemic that is motivated by no kind of actual intellectual or even political curiosity. Not all of us find Badiou’s ideas exciting, important, and even exhilarating, but some of us do (and I do). But what is more at stake is that the perspective behind this polemic is one where that would not even be a possibility, it is ruled out in advance. And that is deplorable, and it should be called out for being the complete crock of shit that it is.

As for lessons that we ought to learn from this, among those of us who are looking for the next steps in Marxism, and even the next steps in Maoism and post-Maoism, I want to take this moment to state this in a sharp and harsh form. Not everyone here is going to be convinced by my claim that we still have much to learn from Immanuel Kant. Not everyone here is going to be convinced by Badiou’s philosophy, and its sense that we still have a good deal to learn from Plato, Spinoza, and Rousseau. But for the people who simply dismiss this idea, that we still have much to learn from philosophers who came before Marx, these people in essence are dismissing the communist project.

Avakian’s Away With All Gods! is a fantastic display of contempt for intellectual work, an approach proudly defended in the recent excerpt of a talk by BA (“On the role of communist leadership …”) where he defends his “methodology” of self-referencing and talks about all of the books that he has read. This polemic on Badiou furthers this contempt.

I’ll just put things very simply: communism is good, and nothing good can come from such an approach, whether this approach is applied by the RCP or by other know-nothing, anti-intellectual “socialists.”

But I will save the larger development of these arguments for other posts. Among other things I will argue that “enough of Badiou is right” (and that we communists would be very irresponsible in not taking up these ideas), while I also have some questions for Badiou on points where I disagree with him or perhaps simply do not understand him.

One reason why I will save these arguments for other posts and other topics is that I think our main response to this polemic ought to be,

“Dear Professor Badiou, we hope that you will not think, if you even happen to see this RCP Polemic, that it represents the views of all revolutionary communists in the United States; unfortunately, however, the main trend of Maoism in the U.S. has come to this sorry state and dead end. Fortunately, there are some ideas in your philosophy that will help us understand this point of saturation and even ‘disaster,’ and we also are open to exploring your philosophy, and the theoretical work of others, in attempting to forge a path beyond this impasse. Thank you for your outstanding contributions.”

Rearguard and Ugly

One assumes that this polemic was put together by a writing group; I suppose it doesn’t really matter, though I bristle a bit at the fact that it is put out there “anonymously,” that seems a bit smarmy to me. The timing of the thing is clearly meant to be coincide with the Idea of Communism conference, where Badiou was something of the centerpiece, though of course there were other important thinkers there as well. What an ugly thing to do, and what a rearguard sort of “contribution” to this whole scene. I have not yet heard any reports of the presentation that Raymond Lotta made in London at the time of the conference, does anyone know if what was presented was some version of this polemic? Again, very rearguard and ugly.

When I had my massive argument with the person I have previously referred to as a Leading Party Member at the end of May 2008 (as described in my first Kasama post, “Going forward from here”), I continually challenged this person to just come out and say that the history of philosophy prior to Marx is basically worthless, and that philosophy outside of the narrow MLM/BA canon is worthless. I was begging this person to come to his senses in terms of basic intellectual integrity. This polemic, unfortunately, is some kind of answer on these issues.

Certainly one could say, “they know not what they do”—or, again, to put it harshly, they don’t have a bloody clue.

But BA and the remaining members of the RCP, if they weren’t just sycophants to begin with (for it is very clear that the idea that “Communists are rebels” was dropped from the program some time ago), have willfully placed themselves beyond the possibility of getting a clue. I have respect for what some of these people used to be, and I still have some (sentimental perhaps) hope and wish that some of these people will break with their present, ever-deepening impasse, but perhaps those who have remained have just decided that all they know to do at this point is to go down with the ship.

As a general point, and in the context of some of the study some of us have recently undertaken on the work of Louis Althusser, we might discuss further whether the “polemical mode” is a good way to carry forward work in philosophy or in other intellectual endeavors. Ironically, Badiou defends the role of polemic, and he cites Kant in this. I recognize that sometimes it is necessary to engage in a “war of ideas” (polemos is the Greek word for “war”), and certainly I think it can be good to present certain ideas with a certain “edge.” At the very least, however, one might think that there is something wrong with the initial engagement with a major figure taking this form, starting with a typically ridiculous title of the form, “N is an x, and we shouldn’t be that.” Again, deplorable.

This polemic, however, is not only an initial engagement with Badiou, it is the first extended engagement with any major figure in the history of philosophy or contemporary philosophy in many years. This in itself is a statement on philosophy.

The term, “engagement,” is used loosely here, especially as the whole point of the polemic is to ensure that people who probably hadn’t even heard of Badiou until quite recently are inoculated against any impulse toward actual engagement with Badiou or any other major figure in philosophy.

This is also the whole point of the labeling (“Rousseauist”) in the title of the polemic—since we especially know there is nothing to be learned from any philosopher before Marx. Furthermore, how can there be an engagement, when the whole approach is “shut it down,” rather than “open it up”? Again, it is a very conservative reaction, and indeed it is also merely a “reaction.”

While I’m laying it on, let me characterize the foregoing in two further ways:

First, if you have to jack yourself up to believe that you are really the only person or group putting forward the only really new and revolutionary synthesis, then you will get into a mindset where, frankly, you wouldn’t be able to recognize something new and valuable even if it bit you on the ass. Indeed, other new things will appear merely threatening.

Second, one place where Bob Avakian is a lot like Stalin, and less like Marx, Lenin, and Mao, but also a lot like other trends of economistic Marxism, is in viewing the whole history of philosophy as one big pile of crap. Again, this is represented very well by the fact that Badiou is now being discussed with people who only recently heard of Badiou, by people and for people who wish they never had heard of Badiou. It is simply orthodoxy and economism, and we would do well, even those of us who don’t want to spend much more time discussing Bob Avakian or the RCP, understanding how this is the case and what sorts of dynamics lead in this direction.

Asked To Engage He Who Does Not Engage

With this polemic, we are once again being asked to engage with he who does not engage. There are two related points to be raised here, as concerns how the rest of us who are attempting to reconceive and regroup should proceed.

First, I think there is a real question of “standing” that ought to be addressed. For one thing, it is clearly the point of this polemic that it doesn’t really matter what Badiou thinks, or what he has to offer, or what questions he opens up; the real deal is that BA has laid down the new science, there for the taking. Now, whoever wrote this polemic did a little more homework than BA generally does (which isn’t saying much, and there is more to this than just a long list of books one has read), but the point is the same: Badiou is wrong because Avakian is right.

But this leads to the second point:

If Badiou is wrong, he is wrong in his many systematically developed books, and in his systematic, rigorous, and expansive written work (this is a repetitive way of making the point, but I not only want to make the point, I want to rub it in).

If BA is “right,” he is right in his mostly non-systematic, non-rigorous, self-referential talks. I used to think this was acceptable (though not preferable) up to a point, when there seemed to be a context for it, a Maoist current that was opening itself up to learning from many sources.

To the extent that was ever a reality, it was shut down, and then one finds oneself going back to works such as the Democracy book and others from that period, and asking why we should spend any time with them when there are other works by figures such as Sartre, Althusser, Derrida, and Badiou (and many more) that give us more than enough to do.

So, now, it seems we need to have a discussion of the ideas of Badiou. And, for that matter, especially thanks to the ideas and provocations of Badiou and Zizek, here is the possibility for breaking through with the idea of communism! Who should get a seat at the table of these discussions? On what basis would we say anymore that BA or others from the RCP have anything to contribute? The way that they think they can just come into debates where they have made no substantive contribution and have shown no ability to learn from others (and to apply the “John Stuart Mill principle” and all of the stuff that at least looked good in those Skybreak essays) looks to everyone else to be simultaneously silly and authoritarian. Nothing good can come of this approach—and, again, communism is good.

For our part, let’s do engage with others and give them a good reason to engage with us.

Needing to Reconceive and Regroup

Simply in recognizing that revolutionary communism needs to reconceive and regroup an advance has been made.

The RCP reached a point where, in order to continue to make a contribution, it needed to make a fundamental advance, and it was not able to do this. The main reason for this is objective, in the sense that they were working from within a paradigm that was played out. But there are some subjective factors as well, which shaped the inability to break with an exhausted paradigm. In grappling with the “communist hypothesis” we need to go further in understanding these dynamics.

My point, regarding intellectual work, is that there is a model here that has to be negated—and I frankly wish that some of the people who post at Kasama would go further in negating this model. Certainly we don’t want to shut down the enthusiasm anyone, anyone whosoever, might have for contributing to the theoretical project. At the same time, we need to be able to carry forward theoretical work on a high level, informed by contemporary developments and analyses.

I still think there is something to Engels’s formula of the most advanced “socialist” experience—under which he also included syndicalism and utopian communitarianism, philosophy, and political economy, just leaving aside the French, German, and English parts; what he called “English” was for the most part actually Scots, anyway!

This is a hard nut to crack, it’s not clear that it’s ever really been done. We need to think more about why it might be significant that BA and the RCP did pretty well, and sometimes very significantly well, with at least some aspects of the “French” and “English” parts of this work (the summing up of experience and political economy), but for the most part very poorly with the “German” (philosophical) part, and indeed worse than poorly for the most part, seeing the work of historical or contemporary philosophers as mostly something against which to erect barricades. The present barricade, and its circumstances (where the polemic against Badiou is in some sense also a polemic against the Nepali Maoists), is again representative of foolishness and irresponsibility and a merely reactive mindset, but we would be remiss if we don’t take this opportunity to learn some lessons about methodology and the role of philosophy in anything that might really be a new synthesis.

Not a Deep Enough Break

By way of conclusion, we might spend a moment with at least one little part of the polemic, the part that sets out three possibilities for the next wave of revolutionary activity.

“What are the correct and incorrect lessons to be drawn from the rich experience of this first wave of socialist revolutions? What is the framework for the new stage of communism, for going forward in this project for the emancipation of humanity? Is Marxism, communism, still valid as a science? In the most fundamental sense, the question comes down to this: can you make revolution in today’s world, a genuinely emancipating communist revolution—or is that not possible, or even desirable, anymore?

“As described in Communism: The Beginning of a New Stage, A Manifesto from the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA there are three main and essential responses to this moment.

“First, there are those who religiously cling to the experience and theory of the first wave of socialist revolution of the 20th century—not summing up problems and shortcomings, not moving forward, but circling the wagons.

“Second, there are those who reject real scientific analysis of the contradictions of the socialist transition and distance themselves from the unprecedented breakthroughs in human emancipation represented by the Bolshevik and Chinese revolutions. They look for inspiration and orientation even further back into the past–to the 18th century and the proclaimed democratic and egalitarian ideals and social models of the bourgeois epoch and to theorists like Rousseau, Kant, and Jefferson. In some cases, they discard the very term communism; in other cases, they affix the label “communism” to a political project that situates itself firmly within the bounds of bourgeois-democratic principles.

“Third, there is what Bob Avakian has been doing. He is not only the leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, which has its sights set on the revolutionary seizure of power and the radical transformation of society, but is also a visionary theorist. Since the defeat of the Chinese revolution in 1976, he has been applying himself to the challenges of making revolution in today’s world, acting on the understanding that communist revolution is the only way out of the madness and horror that is social existence on this planet. (pp.2-3)”

Let’s take this in the order first, third, and second; in other words, first the dogmatists, then BA, then Badiou.

The problem is not really that there are a lot of people out there simply clinging tenaciously to the Soviet and Chinese experiences (or Cuban, Algerian, etc., for that matter). The way this first category should have been framed is that there are many socialists who sum up the first wave of proletarian revolutions as showing us that it is a mistake to try to break with an economist perspective, and that what we need instead is a better worked-out version of such a perspective.

I’ll deal with these questions at length in a discussion of economism, but let us say that we know this perspective well in the interventions here at the Kasama site, most eloquently developed by Carl Davidson and most systematically developed in the work that Carl repeatedly recommends, that of David Schweickart. I know Prof. Schweickart fairly well, he is not a dogmatist, in fact he is a very sophisticated thinker—and I want to add that he is, in my experience, a kind and caring person. I could see some of his economic models as playing a helpful role in a socialist society, but, again, I will take that up at length in my post on economism. But the point is that Prof. Schweickart is an avowed utilitarian, he affirms many John Stuart Mill principles.

Apart from discussing these issues more directly, the main point is that BA’s New Synthesis doesn’t really break with it.

In terms of continuity and discontinuity, the NS is more continuous with the experiences of the first wave (as is said directly in the polemic: “principally continuity”), and it doesn’t give us enough that is either new or a synthesis. Again, I would say that BA was up against an objective arc or trajectory and its exhaustion, and up against certain subjective factors, including a certain anti-intellectualism and intellectual laziness hiding behind a shallow critique of “academic niceties.”

If BA really had a new synthesis, he ought to be able to enter into fruitful conversation with others who are also attempting to forge ahead, but clearly he is not able to do this. Instead, he clings tenaciously to what he knows or thinks he knows, and after awhile it is all so swirled up in a sea of self-references that no one ought to consider what is coming out of the process a “theoretical project,” quite apart from academic niceties.

More to the point—because I do think Avakian is a smart guy, that’s not what’s at issue—is a certain habit of mind, reinforced over many years of experience in the RCP, and many decades of experience in the ICM, that prides itself on narrowness in the name of materialism. Not to get all psychoanalytic or even new-agey here, but there is a pathology to grabbing too hard, and there is a need, for the sake of both materialism and emancipatory projects, to let go a bit.

It has been pointed out to me by Kasama Project people who were closer to the RCP than I was that this mindset is also linked to failure, and that it represents a kind of capitulation:

“If we can’t do anything else, we must at least promote the work and leadership of Bob Avakian well.”

Is Our Needed Synthesis a Philosophy or a Science?

Once again let us underline two questions about science, or perhaps three.

What would Marxism be as a “science,” especially given how much science has been done since the time of Marx? (Incidentally, it is important that, among the figures mentioned in the polemic that Badiou is “going back to,” we do not find Georg Cantor; perhaps this will be found in a subsequent installment of the polemic, but surely this would complicate simply summing up Badiou as a “Rousseauist”?)

What is “science,” exactly, and does it give us everything, in every way, that we need for revolutionary communist theory and practice? For example, are there real ethical questions, and is there a science or a purely scientific mode of inquiry that gives us the answers to such questions? What about questions of art? Is art a substantive part of the human experience and possibilities for liberation and flourishing? Can questions of art and aesthetics be sorted out in a purely “scientific” way?

Lastly (among these questions), and the only point in having to say this once again is that the RCP keeps putting it forward as if they are really saying something, you don’t get to science, systematicity, rigor, or vision by declaration or fiat. There have been many insights over the years from Bob Avakian and the RCP, and some good historical analysis, some of it even pathbreaking, and some good work in political economy; I don’t see the point in minimizing these things, though they meant one thing in the context of an organization and activism that had some vibrancy to it, and they mean another thing in the context of an organization and leadership that was not able to make the necessary transition to a new level of theoretical and practical activity.

Does anyone doubt that the reason for “science and vision by declaration” is that this whole “new synthesis” hasn’t really come together?

Furthermore, and perhaps again to wax a bit psychoanalytic (superficially so, I realize), isn’t this the real motivation for tearing Badiou down, that BA doesn’t really have the new synthesis, combined with an abiding faith on the part of BA and those who remain in the RCP that only BA could have it.

Thus this dismal, grind-it-out-to-the-verdict, prooftexting and cherry-picking polemic against Badiou. This should make us angry, livid even, but it is also just sad.

However, even while we are correctly expressing anger at this stupid irresponsibility, let us underline one methodological point that needs much more discussion, and again it has to do with philosophy.

In the final analysis, is our Marxism, or better our revolutionary communism, our needed new synthesis (or even simply our new patchwork or “crazy quilt” of analyses that speaks to the way the world is today) that is going to help us radically change the world, a philosophy or a science?

We need science, we need scientific work and many avenues of scientific investigation (in other words, we need not only science, we need the many different sciences, plural)—does anyone really dispute that? But do we need art (and, again, the many different fields of artistic endeavor, and even the many fields of art theory and criticism)? Do we need love? Do we need politics, especially where the emergence of a true event in politics is something in the manner of an intervention, one that is essentially (if also in some sense not “absolutely”) underdetermined?

We could have a very fruitful debate around whether these are the only categories where events are possible, and so on, though of course we won’t have any such discussion in the case where our only interest in Badiou’s philosophy is to shut it down. Badiou’s work does a great deal more to help us with these issues than does chanting the mantra of “science” with very little (if any) real science to go with it.

The larger point is that the core of a truly new synthesis needs to be philosophy, not “science,” and, if you do it the other way around, you will not only be anti-philosophical and dismissive of the contributions of philosophy and philosophers (including, ultimately, the philosophical contributions of Marx, Lenin, and Mao — because, once you have the new science, you can kick away the old science), you will not understand the contributions of science in the proper context, either.

Bad Methodology

In the paragraph that goes more directly to Badiou, we see the usual use of the term “like.” This betokens very bad methodology. “Theorists like Rousseau, Kant, and Jefferson,” as with other non-helpful groupings such as “postmodern philosophers like Derrida” (or is it like “the Derridas”?), is just a way of not having to do some philosophical work and grapple with ideas.

Of course, it all works fine if we’ve already got the assurance that no thinkers before Marx have anything to teach us, and especially no philosophers since Marx have anything to teach us if they are outside of the narrow MLM/BA canon.

Anyone who has read Badiou knows that he hasn’t distanced himself from the Bolshevik Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, the Cultural Revolution, or Lenin or Mao.

Indeed, some of his ideas are very helpful for understanding what it might mean to say that these contributions are “saturated” and that it is time for a new synthesis, without setting aside a basic fidelity to these experiences. There is still a difference between what can be carried forward in our present efforts, and that which was not revolutionary to begin with.

As for analyzing the experience of the first wave, sure, I have some questions for Badiou’s particular claims and his broader framework, but there is a lot to be learned from it, too—just as, for instance, there is a lot to be learned from Sartre’s analysis of the Stalin period in Critique of Dialectical Reason, Vol. 2, and in the remarks on “survivals” in Althusser’s For Marx and Reading Capital. And there is a lot to be learned on this point from Mao’s Critique of Soviet Economics and Avakian’s Conquer the World?

But isn’t the point that we need all the help we can get in understanding the horrible mess that socialism became under Stalin, and that people of good will should come together on this work? We need to understand better why it is significant that this polemic contains not the least bit of good will.

The approach of this polemic instead reminds me of those so-called “Christians” who are mostly concerned with identifying the people who are going to hell, and I can’t help but recall BA’s bizarre piece on how “most of the time, even communists aren’t communists.” He didn’t mention himself in that regard, and the implication is that, all alone in this world Bob Avakian is the one communist who is a communist all the time, and he is the thread by which communism hangs in our time. It should go without saying that, if you begin with such a standard, no one else is going to measure up. But then you find yourself saying “we” shouldn’t be “Rousseauists” to people for whom the question means nothing, because it is ruled out in advance that there might be some reason to read Rousseau today. Nothing good can come from this.

It’s silly, anyway, to mainly identify Badiou with Rousseau—for the crime of thinking we might still learn a thing or two from Rousseau (and as if Marx didn’t)—when he is most often identified with Plato and the fulfillment of a certain “dream” of Plato by Cantor and the development of set theory and the idea of infinity.

How Badiou’s view that “mathematics is ontology” could be materialist or Marxist is an interesting question. It’s a question that I’m still trying to understand myself—and when I encounter some of these very smart people who are working in a concentrated way in Badiou’s philosophy, or, for that matter who have worked in set theory and mathematics more generally, I ask for their help in getting some insight into this question.

One important point is that W. V. Quine (no Marxist, for sure!) argued that sets have to be accepted into ontology because sets are necessary for doing scientific work. However, one thing that I would say is materialist about what Badiou is doing here (and Quine for that matter) is that his proposals open many questions, whereas Avakian’s half-baked, fragmentary, positivist, “truth is correspondence with reality” line not only shuts down questions, that is its aim.

We can argue with Badiou’s ideas, that’s part of what makes them materialist. There’s no arguing with BA’s crude notion of truth, with which he is “intoxicated” (as he put it), that’s what makes his theoretical enterprise “idealist,” and not in any good way. There is nowhere to go from there, and the people who are persisting in this line are indeed going nowhere.

Is Badiou a “Marxist”?

Well, members of L’Organisation Politique, of which Badiou is a leader, are referred to as “Modern Marxists.” It’s true that Badiou’s Marxism might be called one of “pure politics,” as Slavoj Zizek puts it in The Parallax View. Badiou’s rejection of economism goes so far as to reject the whole language of “interests,” a language that motivates most of what calls itself Marxism, including that of Bob Avakian. But wouldn’t we want to engage with this argument in a non-sectarian way, especially if we are interested in a non-economistic Marxism?

Is Badiou a “Maoist” or “post-Maoist”?

Bruno Bosteels makes a convincing case for the latter in his article, “Post-Maoism: Badiou and Politics.” Certainly Badiou continues to refer to various points in his philosophy that he takes to be “profoundly Maoist,” and his philosophy gives us a philosophical basis for both retaining a fidelity to Mao and the experience of Maoism and for recognizing that “it is absolutely necessary to invent a new political discipline.” This last is from the conclusion to an interview with Tzuchien Tho, conducted for the 2007 publication of The Concept of Model, in English translation, almost forty years after its original publication in French; the entire interview is very good, but of particular significance to our present concerns is this concluding section, where Badiou goes from discussing mathematics as ontology to answering the question, “Is there a Maoist theme there?” Badiou responds, “Yes, Maoist in a very deep sense.”

But again, the point is not simply whether we agree or not at every point with how Badiou develops these themes; there are many, Maoist or otherwise, who would take issue with the analysis that follows Badiou’s affirmation of a very deep Maoist theme. However, the real question is this: beyond Marxism or Leninism or Maoism, Badiou is working toward a renewal of the communist hypothesis. If we care about communism, we need to engage productively and critically with this work. Why would we not want to do this?

Related posts:

1. Stephen Mauldin: Badiou 101 for the RCP,USA

Stephen Mauldin has been living and working in China, and has maintained a keen interest in revolutionary developments in Nepal, as well as in developments in revolutionary thinking, particularly that of Badiou, Zizek and others.

He blogs here and here as Stefandov. In a recent entry he writes about the RCP’s recent release of both an polemical exchange over difference with the Maoists in Nepal and draft excerpts from their developing polemic against Alain Badiou:

“I was really struck by the fact that the Nepal Maoists and the philosophy of Badiou have become my main points of interest over the last few years and the RCPUSA has chosen precisely these two elements in the development of 21st Century communism about which we should have the most fear.”

Following is his response to the RCP’s recent burst of polemics. Stephen will soon be traveling to Nepal, and we look forward to his reports from there.

by Stephen David Mauldin

In 2005-6 I first went to Nepal. The Maoists had finally succeeded in forming a coalition with several of the parliamentarian factions and armed conflict had ended. Since then Royal forces became the National Army and the Maoists PLA has stayed in cantonment. The Nepal monarchy has been dismantled over time and the Maoists then gained majority control of the new government, a mandate gained by election. A key issue remains: the integration of the NA with the PLA. The question then as now, is if the radical socialist policies envisioned by the Maoists at the onset of armed conflict can or will be finally implemented. Some fear the Maoists are merely engaging in a tactical process aimed at ending parliamentarian government and creating a communist party state. Others, even among Maoist supporters, fear a merely reformist “Maoist” controlled country that leaves Nepal once again subjected to an elite class within the coordinates of global capitalist power structures.

Many Kasama participants already know this basic background, but I am trying to situate why I am writing this. I am not a seasoned communist but as my study of the Maoist movement continued I have become a serious student. I have studied philosophy most of my life. With this background and a new focus on communism in Nepal , my course of investigation brought me to the communist philosophy of Alain Badiou. Only in recent years have Badiou’s writings been translated to English. That he has now been widely read and appreciated is evidenced by the recent Birkbeck conference most of us followed at Kasama.

So for me the twin interests have been Badiou and the Nepal revolution of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) or the Maobadi as they are known. I was really struck by the fact that it is precisely these two developments in 21st century communism the RCPUSA has targeted in their recent aggressive polemics.

Let me say immediately that I am not going to go much into a detailed analysis of the polemics to construct a thorough rebuttal. This is to be a relative short piece with a certain specific tactic.

It started as a comment to the extensive discussion on the topic at Kasama. The moderators there, John Steele and Mike Ely found it interesting and requested me to develop something further. I appreciate the opportunity to contribute. I take for granted many readers have already become somewhat familiar with the polemic against the Maoists as it has been made available on Kasama and the commentary and analysis by readers has been voluminous. I understand that now the plan is to open more in-depth critical review of the attack on Badiou. My tactic is to simply point to the jugular vein in the RCP’s Badiou polemic.

Each section of the polemic is replete with quotes employed from Karl Marx supplemented by the wisdoms of RCP commander Bob Avakian. Every section is well salted with exhortations against the evils of capitalism. I am sure all of us abhor these evils as well, without resorting to such hyperbole.

However, at the end of each of the several sections of the polemic, we do get an original statement from the authors and these together comprise the heart of their polemic stripped of all the window dressing. From this we find they do not grasp the essential nature of Badiou’s philosophy. Beginning at the end of the final section, the end of the document as a whole:

“Alain Badiou’s ‘egalitarian maxim proper to every politics of emancipation’ does not offer a pathway of moving beyond the narrow horizon of bourgeois right—nor open the possibility of eliminating the bases for class society, commodity production, and exploitative and oppressive relations. It is stuck in bourgeois society.”

This is the final conclusion and the very essence of the attack: Badiou is no more than a throwback to Rousseau, about who the authors construct a criticism.

The next step is supposed to show Badiou’s published thoughts on the French Revolution are basically the same as Rousseau’s. Unfortunately, they have not understood Badiou. The polemic conflates the two thinkers mainly on Badiou’s statement about the “egalitarian maxim” as it is defined in Badiou’s conception of the “communist hypothesis.” The polemic has a long part about the former, but very little about the definition of the latter by Badiou.

To this I would like to supply Badiou’s statement of the “communist hypothesis” from an article on Sarkozy written sometime before his (Badiou’s) now famous attack on the president in the latest book:

“What is the communist hypothesis? In its generic sense, given in its canonic Manifesto, ‘communist’ means, first, that the logic of class—the fundamental subordination of labour to a dominant class, the arrangement that has persisted since Antiquity—is not inevitable; it can be overcome. The communist hypothesis is that a different collective organization is practicable, one that will eliminate the inequality of wealth and even the division of labour. The private appropriation of massive fortunes and their transmission by inheritance will disappear. The existence of a coercive state, separate from civil society, will no longer appear a necessity: a long process of reorganization based on a free association of producers will see it withering away.”

Badiou is clear, the argument of the communist hypothesis has persisted since antiquity. Indeed, reading Badiou he finds traces of the history of the hypothesis as far back as Spartacus!

The polemic wants communism in a much narrower range: born with Marx and culminated at Avakian. They could have made their straw man much older than Rousseau. The more important thing about the definition of the hypothesis is the use of tense: “it can be overcome,” “will eliminate the inequality,” “will no longer appear,” and “will see it withering away.” What is said here is that the coming to be of communism has been with us a long time and continues now. The critical element in Badiou’s philosophy beyond the ken of the writers of the polemic is that the actualization of communism is a process involving belief in the hypothesis which will be shown to have been true. The key concepts of Badiou philosophy, the “Event” and the “Truth Procedure” are very much involved with expression in the future anterior tense.

Again, the polemic is clearly focused on the question of Badiou’s “egalitarian maxim” axiomatic. The thread of its argument leads back to the key statement ending the second to last section:

“Yes, people have a capacity for truth (a criterion of equality for Badiou) but exactly in consequence of the divides and inequalities in society, this capacity does not translate in spontaneous gravitation towards or embrace of truth.”

If “people” (by this they mean everybody) spontaneously embraced truth, then that truth whatever it may be would not be something humanity failed to embrace. Obviously Badiou is not indicating that rather oxymoronic or catch-22 idea of social relations. The “criterion of equality” is based on the “capacity for truth” not its spontaneous embrace.

What is missing is a comprehension of Badiou’s philosophy of the “Event” and the “Truth Process.”

If, and this means if, a genuine “Event” occurs engendering a “Truth’” it results in a novel situation. By this is meant the pre-existing situation is transformed over a period of time, and this is the “Truth Process.” This is a “performative” requirement: individuals’ acting in allegiance to what they believe is a novel truth may manifest the capacity to actualize it in social relations. That an “Event” has produced a radical change in the situation is realized in the future anterior.

The communist hypothesis is marked by events, historically the most significant of which has been the advent of Marxism, Leninism and Maoism which has engendered allegiance among revolutionaries and seen subsequent struggles in practice including May ’68 and the Cultural Revolution and several insurgencies in different parts of the world.

For Badiou this allegiance could be said to be a faith, atheistic of course, and even an embrace of truth in a quite different sense than asserted by the polemic.

A lack of understanding of Badiou in the polemic is seen to have continued from the conclusion of the third to last section of the polemic as we follow the thread back from the polemics final conclusion:

“With his ‘communist hypothesis,’ Alain Badiou conflates the radical upsurges, social upheaval, and enthusiasm of the popular masses during the French Revolution with the communist revolution to overturn the bourgeois order and to create a new world.”

Actually Badiou presents the idea of revolutionary phases in the communist revolution. First, listen how Badiou positions the state of the communist hypothesis at the start of the 21st century (excerpts from the same single article):

“In many respects we are closer today to the questions of the 19th century than to the revolutionary history of the 20th. A wide variety of 19th-century phenomena are reappearing: vast zones of poverty, widening inequalities, politics dissolved into the ‘service of wealth’, the nihilism of large sections of the young, the servility of much of the intelligentsia; the cramped, besieged experimentalism of a few groups seeking ways to express the communist hypothesis . . . Which is no doubt why, as in the 19th century, it is not the victory of the hypothesis which is at stake today, but the conditions of its existence. This is our task, during the reactionary interlude that now prevails: through the combination of thought processes—always global, or universal, in character—and political experience, always local or singular, yet transmissible, to renew the existence of the communist hypothesis, in our consciousness and on the ground.”

So we come at last to the beginning of the polemic:

“Alain Badiou is driven to a framework of understanding of the ‘problem’ confronting humanity and its ‘solution’ that corresponds to the class position and class outlook of a very definite segment of society, the radicalized petty bourgeoisie. He sees the problem of vast inequalities, but does not follow through to the taproots of exploitation in the economic base of society; he sees the solution as a ‘pure Idea of equality’ in the political realm…”

The polemic tries to tell us Badiou is stuck in a sequence beginning with Rousseau and culminating presently with the radicalized petty bourgeoisie.

Actually, to put it in terms something like the way Badiou employs set-theory, the RCPUSA is circumscribed by a set situation made up of dogmatic elements, demonstrating the inadequacy of their party for 21st century communism because all they have is their rigid conclusions and anything else is revisionist. Badiou says there is always a multiplicity of elements exceeding those of set situations. There is always the potential for novelty in the scope of our present understanding of how communism, or the egalitarian maxim, may manifest.

We are all students of the situation here. We don’t need authoritarian masters of the RCPUSA insisting they have the final form of communism. They have a theoretical stance; that is all.

Unlike the Maobadi, for example, they have no significant basis in practice, no practice in the context of holding state power, as the Maobadi have done in their base areas, and the Maobadi are now struggling for on a countrywide basis. Neither does Badiou of course, but Badiou’s theoretical stance is open and asserts “what remains is to determine the point at which we now find ourselves in the history of the communist hypothesis.”

This may be what we can look for in learning from the Maoist revolution in Nepal. This would include examining the theoretical struggles among the Maoists themselves – which are very interesting and instructive.

That is enough on the polemic and what its essential weakness is – all from a single article from Badiou. However, there is another Badiou article I wish to quote in conclusion and in saying something more regarding the Maobadi.

Badiou takes up a single sentence from Mao in the piece entitled An Essential Philosophical Thesis: “It Is Right to Rebel against the Reactionaries.”

Mao said in 1939:

“Marxism consists of thousands of truths, but they all boil down to one, ‘It is right to rebel!’ For thousands of years it has been said that it was right to oppress, it was right to exploit and it was wrong to rebel. This old verdict was only reversed with the appearance of Marxism. And from this truth there follows resistance, struggle, the fight for socialism.”

Mao’s quote was republished in the late 1960s, with the key phrase refined to read “It is right to rebel against reactionaries!” This became a central slogan of the Cultural Revolution and of Maoism generally.

In Badiou’s piece he writes:

” This phrase, which appears so simple, is at the same time rather mysterious: how is it conceivable that Marx’s enormous theoretical enterprise, with its ceaselessly and scrupulously reworked and recast analyses, can be concentrated in a single maxim.. And what is this maxim? Are we dealing with an observation, summarizing the Marxist analysis of objective contradictions, the ineluctable confrontation of revolution and counterrevolution? Is it a directive oriented toward the subjective mobilization of revolutionary forces? Is Marxist truth the following: one rebels, one is right? Or is it rather: one must rebel? The two, perhaps, and even more the spiraling movement from the one to the other, real rebellion (objective force) being enriched and returning on itself in the consciousness of its rightness or reason (subjective force).. 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.. 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…”

So the real reactionaries are those whose destruction is legitimized by theory. Of course revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries each have theories. We need to decide which is which. Badiou’s philosophy offers a living and creative mode engendering novel development of the communist hypothesis. The truth of the hypothesis cannot really be said to exist until it is manifest on the planet as a whole, this would be its full development. The revolution in Nepal may be such an event whose truth process may establish that an early manifestation of communism for the 21st century has occurred. That’s why we might study it and speak of it with others and in so doing participate in allegiance to a truth process. We may be wrong in having faith in the Maobadi, but this does not ultimately matter because the core of that faith is in the communist hypothesis itself.

Related posts:

1. Bill Martin: Dear Professor Badiou… About That RCP Assault

Jefferson in the Sioux's Black Hills

This is the second of a three-part series written for Kasama.

The author writes in Part 1: ”The Revolutionary Communist Party describes Bob Avakian’s latest essay, Communism and Jeffersonian Democracy, as an ‘unsparing critique of the history…of American society.’ Having ‘engaged’ Away With All Gods! six months ago, I’d like to respond to this seriously as well.”

by Pavel Andreyev

Misunderstanding the Louisiana Purchase

“In reality,” Avakian declares, “Jefferson’s agrarian society turned out to be a society based on slavery and ruled by slaveowners.” This overstatement ignores the sections of U.S. society that were in fact based on yeoman agriculture. [22]

But Avakian proceeds undeterred:

“One striking example that a number of people have pointed to in this regard is the Louisiana Purchase (the purchase by the United States government of the Louisiana Territory from the French in 1803).”

Notice the fuzziness of the wording: “in this regard” Avakian isn’t merely noting what all American historians recognize — that parts of the Louisiana Territory became slave states.

 Avakian is broadly hinting without having to be too specific that Jefferson purchased the territory with the expansion of slavery in mind. Note too that this is in fact the only example he gives to substantiate the allegation that “Jefferson consistently acted in the interests of the…slaveholding class.” And note that while he peppers his talk with references to Isaac Kramnick, R. Laurence Moore, Edmund S. Morgan, and David Brion Davis on Jefferson’s ideas and questions of race in Virginia, he cites no scholar on this topic of the Louisiana Purchase whatsoever.

Avakian continues:

“Having suffered significant military setbacks—and dramatically so in the attempt to put down the armed rebellion of slaves in Haiti which had been initiated under the leadership of Toussaint L’Ouverture—Napoleon Bonaparte, ruler of France, reckoned that he couldn’t easily hold on to this territory in the Americas, and so Jefferson, then President of the United States, stepped in to quickly grab up this territory. In this he acted primarily in the interests of the slaveowners and in order to spread the slaveowning system into the new territories acquired through this act—not to develop an agrarian society based on a multitude of small farmers. This is just one example of many that could be cited which clearly illustrate that Jefferson consistently acted in the interests of the slaveowning class—in conflict with the interests not only of the slaves but also of the yeoman in the South, as well as the rising capitalist class centered in the North.” [23] [emph. added]

Avakian doesn’t mention that Jefferson’s intention was actually far more limited. He wanted the U.S. to purchase the port of New Orleans, which had recently passed from the Spanish to the French. At the head of the Mississippi River, this port was vital to the provisioning of territories claimed by the U.S. west of the Appalachian Mountains. Since Napoleon’s France — overextended militarily in Europe, facing defeat at the hands of slave rebels in its colony of Haiti — was in need of hard cash, it is quite understandable why Jefferson would engage in negotiations for a transfer of sovereignty over New Orleans.

The expansion of slavery was not the motive.

The motive indeed was the supply of goods to the yeomen — that class idealized by Jefferson — settling in the expanding frontier. (These small farmers, it must be noted, were expanding at the expense of those already there. We need to always recognize that the U.S. was built on the two pillars of genocidal “Indian removal” and slavery. But the specific issue here is not the nature of white settlement but the historical causality behind the acquisition of the Louisiana Territory, which Avakian simply gets wrong.)

Mr. Jefferson’s Lost Cause

U.S. negotiators James Monroe and Robert Livingston had been instructed to offer as much as $ 10 million for the port and did not expect that the French would offer the entire Louisiana Territory to the U.S. for $ 15 million. The deal, that is, fell into their lap.

But Jefferson was in fact ambivalent about signing the agreement with France. His Federalist opponents argued that the purchase was unwise and required Congressional assent, and he himself questioned whether he as president even had the constitutional authority to authorize the transfer. But he did authorize it, and the agreement was ratified by Congress.

Did he do so “primarily…to spread the slaveholding system”? I doubt any historian specializing in this period of U.S. history would suggest that was Jefferson’s principal motive. Indeed Howard Zinn, whom the RCP seems to appreciate, emphasizes Jefferson’s belief that some Native American tribes could be relocated there.[24] Slavery had been practiced in what became the state of Louisiana in 1812 under the Spanish and French, and continued to be practiced when the region was added to the U.S. The same was the case with Mississippi (made a state in 1817).

But Jefferson, eleven years after leaving office, strongly opposed the 1820 “Missouri Compromise” that expanded slavery beyond Louisiana to what became the states of Missouri (1821) and Arkansas (1836) within the territory purchased from France. He wrote that “like a fire bell in the night, [it] awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union.”

Jefferson didn’t in fact, Avakian’s claim notwithstanding, want to see “the slaveholding system” expanded in the U.S. and indeed thought its expansion likely to tear the republic apart.

In a footnote, Avakian cites Roger G. Kennedy’s Mr. Jefferson’s Lost Cause as evidence that Jefferson wasn’t really serious about promoting the interests of yeomen but rather furthering the interests of slave-owners. Actually, what Kennedy concludes is that Jefferson as president didn’t fight hard enough against slave-owners’ interests, although it’s questionable given the powers of the chief executive in the political framework of the time he could have possibly prevailed. He portrays Jefferson sympathetically as a “Hamlet” guilty of “timidity” rather than an eager proponent of slave-owners’ interests. [25]

Slavery the Key to Jefferson’s Political Fortunes?

Avakian continues:

“[W]ith regard to Jefferson himself, not only his economic status but also his political fortunes, including his election to the presidency, depended on slavery, and in particular the ‘three-fifths’ provision in the Constitution of the United States…”

This refers to the three-fifths provision of disproportionate electoral representation adopted in 1787: Article I, Section. 2: Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons. “Other persons” here plainly refers to slaves. Leaders of the Southern states wanted all their slaves counted in order to boost their number of Congressional seats, while the Northerners wished to keep the South’s representation at a minimum. By a political compromise (that Jefferson actually didn’t have much to do with), the Southern states (more specifically, the wealthy whites within them) wound up with less representation in the Congress than they would have liked and more than the Northern states would have liked by virtue of the fact that three-fifths the number of slaves were counted for tax and representation purposes.

Historian Garry Wills whom Avakian cites argues Jefferson might have lost the presidential election of 1800 if the slave states hadn’t been given disproportionate representation as a result of this provision. [26] But UCLA historian Joyce Appleby argues:

“The three-fifths provision was not the only compromise affecting the democratic vote. The most enduring gives every state a two vote bonus in the Electoral College for their senators. Had the two vote bonus been eliminated and slaves not counted at all, the outcome would probably have been a one vote victory for Jefferson.”[27]

Jefferson

To say that Jefferson’s election “depended upon slavery” and insinuate that he was personally happy about slavery is (again) a stretch. But Avakian, more bent upon iconoclasm than cautious weighing of evidence and historical objectivity, doesn’t seem to mind.

So how did Jefferson, father of the “Jeffersonian democracy” that Avakian contemptuously dismisses, relate to the phenomenon of slavery so central to Virginian realities from his childhood?

He was, as we all know, a slave-owner. (Avakian’s tone of moral outrage at this fact would be more appropriate if he were addressing people learning this for the first time. As it is, he seems to almost be “talking down” to his audience.) Jefferson owned about 200 slaves and probably had children by one of them, Sarah Hemings. He inherited 52 slaves from his father, and 135 more in 1774 from his father-in-law. Although he didn’t engage in commercial slave trading for profit, he sold many to wipe out inherited debt.

On occasion Jefferson purchased slaves from other owners to keep them united with spouses that he owned. “Nobody feels more strongly than I do,” he wrote in 1807, “the desire to make all practicable sacrifices to keep man and wife together who have imprudently married out of their respective families.” (“Families” here refers to plantations, and “those marrying out” to slaves who’d partnered with those owned by other masters who might relocate them arbitrarily.) In that year he purchased the wife of his blacksmith Moses so that the two might remain together. It is well known that Jefferson was deeply conflicted in his own mind about the institution of slavery. He questioned it, the way he questioned a lot of things, including religion.[28 ] As mentioned above, as a member of the Virginian legislature Jefferson proposed slavery’s abolition. He attacked slavery not only in his draft of the Declaration of Independence but in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1781) and many other writings.

In the Notes he suggests that “the spirit…of the slave [is] rising from the dust…I hope preparing, under the auspices of heaven, for a total emancipation…” He expressed hope that this would take place “with the consent of the masters, rather than by their extirpation.” He of course wrote as a master who could imagine his own class’s “extirpation” at the hands of those seeking “total emancipation.”

Jefferson proposed the Ordinance of 1784, including a clause that slavery be prohibited in the land between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River (Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee and Kentucky). When a single vote in Congress defeated the ordinance, Jefferson declared in a letter to Jean Nicholas de Meunier in 1786, “The voice of a single individual … would have prevented this abominable crime from spreading itself over the new country. Thus we see the fate of millions unborn hanging on the tongue of one man, and Heaven was silent in that awful moment!” [29]

Slavery: A Hideous Blot

Jefferson’s personal letters meanwhile indicate a genuine sense of guilt and unease about the existence of slavery in the new republic.

At various points Jefferson called slavery an “abominable crime,” “moral depravity,” and a “hideous blot.” In a letter to de Meunier he wonders whether the “God of justice” will end slavery “by diffusing light and liberality among [the slaves’] oppressors,” or by “His exterminating thunder” (i.e., the annihilation of the slave-owners by the oppressed). All this implies that, had his fellow-slave-owners agreed to end the “peculiar institution,” Jefferson would have gladly let go of it as well. But they didn’t, and he didn’t. Well this is indeed a “hideous blot” on Jefferson’s own historical reputation! Moral qualms don’t absolve Jefferson from the guilt applying to his entire class.

But can we not say further that slave ownership is a blot on any slaveowner, anytime and anywhere in world history since slavery began some 6000 years ago or so? This includes not just some of the leading figures in societies where slavery was the dominant form of class exploitation, like ancient Greece and Rome, but figures in medieval Europe (where Carolingian kings, Viking chieftains, and Venetian doges owned slaves) and in the early modern and modern periods as well.

Within that historical category of slave-owners, there are some who, to borrow the language of Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto “played a most revolutionary part.” We need to distinguish between someone like Julius Caesar, head of the “populares” faction in ancient Rome, and his opponent Cicero (whom Engels called “the most contemptible scoundrel in history”).[30] And we need to distinguish between Jefferson and fellow Virginian George Fitzhugh, a genuine propagandist for slavery.

We can’t end the discussion of a historical figure’s significance by noting that he or she owned slaves, or owned estates worked by serfs bound to the soil, or profited from the labor-power of wage-workers. We need, that is, to try to be dispassionate, objective historical materialists.

We can condemn Jefferson for his hypocrisy, and his moral weakness. He placed his personal financial situation ahead of his (all too abstract and passive) stand against slavery, once it was clear that slavery would remain pervasive in his state. But details — such as the fact that he sometimes declined to emancipate slaves due to the fact that Virginian law required that such people be evicted from the state — are not unimportant. Avakian does not make a convincing case that Jefferson acted “consistently” and “primarily” to serve slave-owners’ interests but rather offers a good example of the instrumentalist distortion of history (if not indignant posturing).

Next in Part 3: Jefferson as (Eighteenth-Century, Bourgeois) Rebel

Footnotes

[22] Shouldn’t one note that—along with some sections of the south—the largely agrarian society in Massachusetts (including Maine), Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire, New York (including Vermont), and New Jersey was not “based on slavery” and “ruled by slaveowners”? Are such details unimportant?

[23] Avakian earlier notes (accurately) how Jefferson idealized the yeoman or small independent farmer as the bulwark of the Republic. Here he attempts to demonstrate hypocrisy on Jefferson’s part and suggest that he was actually more interested in advancing the interests of slave-owners than the yeomen.

Avakian calls the contrast between Jefferson’s emphasis on the yeoman and his supposed higher loyalty to fellow slave-owners one of three “ironies” in Jefferson’s position. The second is his belief that “the yeomen…had to be led” by intellectuals such as himself. Avakian is concerned to distinguish Jefferson’s opinion from Lenin’s view that the working class requires a party to lead it and bring it revolutionary consciousness “from without” (although he doesn’t really develop the point). The “third irony” Avakian posits is that yeoman-based society would have led to emergence of elites anyway, in part due to variations in the productivity of the land they cultivated. But while Jefferson may have been naïve about the historical possibilities of capitalism, it’s hard to find “irony” in that naïveté. Rather there is a consistent idealism, and no hint of a secret agenda to advance the cause of slavery.

[24] Zinn, p. 126

[25] Roger G. Kennedy, Mr. Jefferson’s Lost Cause: Land, Farmers, Slavery and the Louisiana Purchase (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), esp. pp. 239-41. (The title of the book itself indicates Kennedy’s sense of Jefferson’s motives.) One might also note the comment of one reviewer that “Jefferson did not see, as Kennedy does, that the interests of the small freeholders he claimed to champion and the great planters were inimical to one another.” Leonard J. Sadosky, in The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 61, no. 3 (July 2004)

[26] Garry Wills, Negro President: Jefferson and the Slave Power (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 2003), pp. 62-72. It should by the way be noted that Wills, as Avakian noted many years ago, is a big admirer of Jefferson. See Avakian, Democracy: Can’t We Do Better Than That? (Chicago: Banner Press, 1986), p. 105, note 18

[27] http://www.hoover.org/multimedia/uk/2993311.html

[28] Jefferson is the only president out of 43 who was not, and did not claim to be, a Christian. In a famous letter to his nephew, he urged him to “question with boldness even the existence of God.” He dismissed much of the Bible as myth, describing the ethical content of Jesus’ sayings as a “diamond” in a “dunghill” of unbelievable narrative. One wonders why Avakian, given his campaign against “Christian fascism” and religion in general, doesn’t factor this into an historical analysis of Jefferson.

[29] Boyd, Julian P., Charles T. Cullen, John Catanzariti, Barbara B. Oberg, et al, eds. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950-), vol. 10, p. 58

[30] Quoted by Michael Parenti, The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People’s History of Ancient Rome (New York: The New Press, 2003)

Related posts:

1. Pavel Andreyev: Avakian’s Assessment of Thomas Jefferson: A Critical Reading
2. Avakian on Jefferson: A Critical Reading part 1
3. Avakian on Jefferson: A Critical Reading Part 3