Tag: Engels

  • Marx and Shakespeare: Hamlet’s Alienation

    Marx and Shakespeare: Hamlet’s Alienation

    But orderly to end where I begun,
    Our wills and fates do so contrary run
    That our devices still are overthrown
    Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.

    —Player King, Act 3, Scene 2.

    Hamlet is William Shakespeare’s most studied play, owing to its layered themes and rich rhetorical devices. It is a literary work drawn on by John Milton for Paradise Lost, it helped Sigmund Freud to develop his theory of Oedipus complex and inspired and two compositions from Pyotr Tchaikovsky. Karl Marx’s deep appreciation of Shakespeare is well known, and Hamlet is a work that he directly references in his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.1

    The Play’s the Thing

    Hamlet almost exclusively takes place at Elsinore Castle in Denmark, which is a real place and one of the Renaissance era’s most prominent. Shakespeare was a product of the Renaissance era, and this setting is crucial to contextualizing many of Shakespeare’s plays because it sits on the demarcation line between the Middle Ages and modernity, between superstition and reason, between feudalism and liberalism, between religion and science, between the aristocracy and commerce. The tensions of this era are very important to understanding Hamlet’s inner conflict, just as it is important to understanding the romance between Romeo and Juliet or the racial attitudes embedded in Othello.

    In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels wrote:

    Thus it is quite obvious from the start that there exists a materialistic connection of men with one another, which is determined by their needs and their mode of production, and which is as old as men themselves. this connection is ever taking on new forms, and thus presents a “history” independently of the existence of any political or religious nonsense which would hold men together on its own.2

    In most of Renaissance Europe, the aristocracy maintained a monopoly on political power, derived from ownership over lands worked by a large peasantry. The rise of an urban merchant class figures heavily in some of Shakespeare’s plays, but in Hamlet we are concerned only with the palace intrigue at the top of the Danish royal hierarchy. There is a multiplicity of love triangles, petty schemes from palace courtiers, eavesdroppers and personal grievances that must constitute trivial drama in comparison to the hardship of life for many of the era. In the grand movement of history, palace intrigue is little more than the “political nonsense” that Marx identified.

    The Apparition Comes

    At the outset, the story establishes that Prince Hamlet’s father has died and his Queen mother had hastily remarried with his uncle Claudius who then consolidated the Danish nobility behind his rule. This turn of events has Hamlet already deeply unsettled and melancholy, exacerbated by a visit from his father’s ghost who wanders the Earth while in spiritual Purgatory. The ghost reveals to Hamlet that he was victim of a “murder most foul, strange and unnatural” by the poison of his brother Claudius.3

    Apparitions, witches, potions and magic were accepted forces of nature in Shakespeare’s time and come regularly into his plays as plot devices guiding a character’s arc. Whereas today uncertainty over someone’s cause of death could be resolved by a medical autopsy or forensic crime scene investigation, Hamlet could only shelter under his suspicions until he was contacted from beyond the grave. 

    But the ghost’s revelation confronts Hamlet with demands on his position. In the aristocratic world of hereditary privilege—so far from modern law and commerce—kinship largely determined one’s station in life. Notions attached to honour and nobility depended heavily on defence of kin, and there was no legal authority that Hamlet could appeal to; indeed, his corrupted family was the legal authority.

    Hamlet understands what is expected from the son of a slain father but revenge is complicated by the aristocratic hierarchy of which he is merely a component part. With a murdered father, a mother joined in marriage with the killer and childhood friends in the service of his usurping uncle, Hamlet finds himself completely alienated from the social relations that grant him his identity as a prince. 

    The ensuing conflict of the play is an internal struggle to overcome this experienced alienation, immortalized by Hamlet’s famous speech: 

    To be, or not to be, that is the question:

    Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

    The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

    Or to take arms against a sea of troubles

    And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep,

    No more; and by a sleep to say we end

    The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

    That flesh is heir to: ’tis a consummation

    Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;

    To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub:

    For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,

    When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

    Must give us pause—there’s the respect

    That makes calamity of so long life.

    For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

    Th’oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,

    The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay,

    When he himself might his quietus make

    With a bare bodkin?

    This speech could be rephrased “to live or not to live?” If Hamlet chooses to live as his father’s son by seeking revenge against King Claudius he will certainly perish in the process. On the other hand, he cannot bear an existence as an obedient prince under these circumstances. To live his proper life is a death sentence but to avoid death he must surrender life.

    The Readiness is All

    There is a duality that opens up here between Hamlet’s blood instincts and his social status as a prince. Marx described alienation as characteristic to humanity’s estrangement from productive activity and the reduction of social relations to class standing, when “man feels that he is acting freely only in his animal functions—eating, drinking, and procreating—while in his human functions, he is nothing more than an animal.”4

    As he is estranged from his family and friends by the revelation of his uncle’s homicide and arrogation of the throne, Hamlet ponders his alienated state: “What is a man
    If his chief good and market of his time
    Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.” 

    It is Ophelia that bears the brunt of Hamlet’s dislocation, his rage against the animalistic propensity toward violence and sex. While they had been engaged in a genuine courtship prior to the events of the play, she becomes “the focus of his disgust with the whole sexual process.”5

    Seeing the characteristics of his being stripped of all virtue, Hamlet dismisses any love he once had for Ophelia as brutish lust and he condemns her to a lifetime of abstinence: “If thou dost marry, I’ll give thee this plague for thy dowry: be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny. Get thee to a nunnery. Go, farewell.”

    For Marx, alienation will ultimately be resolved when we take conscious control of our circumstances, when we reconcile our productive activity with both our individual selves and species-being. Hamlet’s internal conflict is resolved when he encounters the army of the crown prince of Norway, Fortinbras, on the march through Danish territory. Hamlet’s father had killed Fortinbras’ father in a duel decades earlier and the Norwegian prince had finally arrived to seek his just revenge.

    Hamlet then grasps the unity of opposing forces; to be an obedient prince is the same as to be his father’s son; to be in love is to be lustful; to live is the same as to die; to be is not to be.6 Before throwing himself, his mother and his uncle to their doom, he says: “There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Let be.”

    Thanks for reading!


    1. For more on Marx’s personal interest in Shakespeare, see Erich Fromm, “Marx’s Concept of Socialism” in Marx’s Concept of Man (Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1961). ↩︎

    2. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (Martino Publishing, 2011): 18-19. ↩︎

    3. The “most foul” and “unnatural” aspects of the murder lie in it being committed by Claudius against his own flesh and blood. ↩︎

    4. Karl Marx, “The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844” in Essential Writings of Karl Marx (Red and Black Publishers, 2010): 91. ↩︎

    5. Harold Jenkins, ed., Hamlet (Arden Shakespeare, 1982):151. ↩︎

    6. This is an observation in advace of the famous thought experiment, Schrödinger’s cat. ↩︎
  • We Are Ruled by a Lord of the Flies

    We Are Ruled by a Lord of the Flies

    “Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill! You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close! I’m the reason why things are what they are.”

    —William Golding, Lord of the Flies.

    For anyone thinking that Putin had overstepped boundaries when he invaded Ukraine, it turns out he was only ahead of the curve. Since that time we’ve had genocidal warfare visit Palestine, a president kidnapped from Venezuela, a starvation blockade imposed on Cuba and a criminal aerial bombardment come to Iran. Multiple crimes, in other words, and committed by successive presidential administrations of the West’s flagship state. No wonder the United Nations Secretary-General recently denounced international relations as a “law of the jungle.”

    The Jungle Book

    It must be a vestige of colonial history that conjures images of undulating spear tips and blood-stained fur whenever the jungle is invoked. This sort of iconography probably accounts for the jungle island setting of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, the story about a group of schoolboys who get marooned during a military evacuation amidst a nuclear war. Initially, the boys are quite “civilized.” They elect a chief, hold orderly assemblies using a conch shell and maintain a signal fire to attract rescuers. But it doesn’t take long for these trappings of civilization to melt away under the tropical heat. Conflict divides the boys when the signal fire goes out and the hunting of a pig arouses primitive instincts, culminating in a spree of orgiastic violence. The aggressive faction of boys consumes the other by way of floggings and outright murder, and they eventually set the island on fire in an effort to flush out their first elected chief. 

    The great pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus wrote: “Fire of all things is the judge and ravisher.” We see this in Lord of the Flies, with the signal fire representing civilized order and the brush fire representing the desperate plunge into chaos and savagery. Golding possessed a cynical view of human nature that sees people animated by sadistic impulses in the service of selfish interests and power. This is a common position on human nature, also articulated by Chinese legalist philosophy and Thomas Hobbes’ “war of all against all” that characterizes life in a state of nature. Sigmund Freud adopted this position in his later writings as well, asserting the existence of a “primary mutual hostility of human beings” which civilization must tame by setting “limits to man’s aggressive instincts.”1

    One commonality between Golding, Hobbes, Freud and the Chinese legalists is that they were all heavily influenced by the demoniacal experience of warfare.2 Witnessing first-hand the human capacity for violence leaves scars on the human psyche that are well documented. Through allegory, Golding asserts that Satan’s captain, Beelzebub—the Lord of the Flies—is not an external supernatural force, but is actually a force inside us, a force within. Freud appeals to the death instinct in order to explain human aggression, similar to Hobbes and the legalists who view aggression as a simple fact of our nature. 

    Human Nature?

    Once that view of human nature is accepted, it is explained that human beings enter a social contract and form civilization as a refuge from our own terrifying base instincts. Violence and corruption in the world can be chalked up to inherently brutal instincts that inevitably infect all of our carefully designed social institutions and best laid plans. Although civilization can never be perfect, it remains the thin red line between orderly society and the violent anarchy of nature.

    The only problem with that argument is that it isn’t true. There is real world evidence that rejects the cynics and supports a view that humans are naturally cooperative rather than hostile: in 1965 a group of six teenage boys from Tonga found themselves stranded on a remote Pacific island. Far from descending into an orgy of violence, they built shelter and divided chores. They worked together and planted a garden, hunted feral chickens, collected rainwater in deadwood and rotated cooking duties. They maintained a fire and strummed a makeshift guitar and sang songs in the evenings to lift their mood. 

    The experience of the Tongan castaways gels with Raymond Kelly’s “Prehistoric warlessness” hypothesis, asserting that conflict and violence between human groups was virtually non-existent up until the Neolithic Revolution.3 That does not mean that there were no instances of homicide or executions within groups—nobody has that answer—but systematic warfare was simply not a feature of the Paleolithic economy that dominated human evolution for hundreds of thousands of years. This is because incredibly low population densities, combined with relatively high natural abundance, provided no incentive for humans to engage in inter-tribal violence.

    In our actual state of nature, warfare offered little gain in terms of resources but had the potential to destroy both warring parties with only a few casualties on both sides. It was therefore preferential to seek new territories on which to hunt and gather rather than fight over them. This is what explains human migrations out of Africa and our species’ rapid spread around the globe. 

    In a footnote, Karl Marx argues that philosophers “must first deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch.”4 Our human nature in general demands that we eat, drink, breathe, shelter, reproduce, etc. Modern human behaviour, such as language, art, music, abstract thought, planning and tool making arose to meet those needs. We can recognize that the universal behavioural traits of humans could not have been achievable in a Hobbesian “war of all against all” state of nature—every one of them required positive social intercourse in order to become characteristic of our species. It follows that cooperation in the context of low population density and relative natural abundance was the state of nature that defined our prehistoric evolution and are suggestive of “human nature in general.”

    Civilization of Corruption

    On the other side of the ledger is “human nature as modified in each historical epoch.” While our general characteristics concretized during the epoch of primitive communism, the expression of human behaviour began to vary wildly as environmental changes led to sedentary living, resource scarcity and class divisions that gradually permeating the social structure. The biological demands on human beings led us to developing a potential for many behavioural expressions—including turning our hunting spears on one another. But this potential for warfare and organized violence went unfulfilled until population growth and sedentism made it an economic necessity for one group to defend territory against another. From the Neolithic Revolution onward, a technological arms race and complex division of labour emerged to satisfy our biological needs. The resulting base and superstructure is history.

    Jean-Jacques Rousseau rightly scolded Hobbes for taking modern, “civilized” people and ascribing their flaws to nature.5 The philosophical question is this: does human nature corrupt civilization or does civilization corrupt human nature? Marx and Rousseau affirmed the latter, and that is also where the preponderance of anthropological evidence lies. It is not our nature that commands a world plagued by corruption, greed, ecological destruction and warfare. Indeed, our ability to recognize these things as defects affirms a natural revulsion towards them. Although we have the capacity for greed and violence, we also have instincts that lead us toward love, generosity and cooperation. 

    Resource scarcity has prodded human beings into unleashing some of their worst potentialities. The good news about our current capitalist mode of production is that scarcity has become largely artificial by way of tremendous leaps in productive technology. It is entirely possible to defeat scarcity with a new, cooperative mode of production that finally unleashes our best potentialities. Until then, we are ruled by a Lord of the Flies, but not in the way that Golding imagined. The Lord of the Flies is not an internal, but an external force; an alien process of capital accumulation and rigged market forces that determines our class standing and incentivizes our worst behaviours.

    Thanks for reading!

    Footnotes:

    1. Sigmund Freud, The Freud Reader edited by Peter Gay (W.W. Norton, 1989): 750. ↩︎

    2. Specifically World War II, the English Civil War, World War I and the Warring States period of China, respectively. ↩︎

    3. Raymond C. Kelly, “The evolution of lethal intergroup violence,” in PNASVol. 102, No. 43: 15294-15298. ↩︎

    4. Karl Marx, “Conversion of Surplus-Value into Capital” in Capital, Vol. One. He is specifically critical of utilitarians here, pointing out the utility of human behaviour can vary wildly depending on the mode of production available. ↩︎

    5. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men (Online Library, 2008): 23. ↩︎
  • Liberal Democracy is a Sham

    Liberal Democracy is a Sham

    The concept of civilizational decline has been a staple of the far-right at least since the rise of fascism in Europe a century ago. While the right has always fixed its consternation with fast moving cultural changes and the erosion of “traditional values,” they are ideologically incapable of linking their grievances to the capitalist economic system that constantly revolutionizes our way of life.1 But the first quarter of the 21st century has had the experience of successive wars and economic crises and political realignments against the backdrop of a rising China. The anti-capitalist left has therefore embraced the decline narrative, given the extraordinary challenges of environmental deterioration and affordability amidst a rising concentration of wealth and power into the hands of an elite western oligarchy. Throw in the demoralizing Epstein revelations and a rupture to the political order by a berserk President Trump and even western liberals are acknowledging decline.

    If there is one shibboleth of the West that deserves scrutiny at this moment in history, it is liberal democracy. Liberal democracy has been the veneer over western capitalism; a moral ornament obscuring the ransacking of colonies around the world and used to coordinate a unified western response to competition from emergent powers. This has not always been a bad thing—the alliance between liberal capitalist states and the Soviet Union was fruitful in tearing down Nazi Germany, for example.

    In the period post-World War II, western liberal countries could lay claim to progressive achievements on the home front—such as civil rights, accessible education and affordable housing—even while supporting many heinous regimes abroad. Free speech and multiparty elections appeared as great strengths under a regime of centralized news media that gave citizens a common information platform, while high union membership in domestic manufacturing ensured a reasonable distribution of profits.

    Today that regime has changed. Private sector unions have fallen off a cliff and the digital age has turned media consumption into a “Choose Your Own Adventure” story. In a dialectical reversal, yesterday’s free speech and partisan competition have become forces that propel their own demise: conspiratorial misinformation, foreign subversion, online mobs of neo-Nazis, unchecked corporate power, the ascent of dictatorial right-wing populists into office. While smartphone apps and AI models rush out like a waterfall, public infrastructure is achingly slow to build. In Canada it can take 41 years to cut the ribbon on a simple light rail transport—to say nothing of badly needed doctors, schools, energy generation and bridges. The refusal to scrutinize liberal democracy out of some fear that its only alternative is dictatorship must be admonished because capitalism has already put us on an openly authoritarian trajectory with accelerating speed. If the democratic veneer that the West has placed over its society is no longer compatible with the communications technology and global economic structure in existence today, then it is high time to say so.

    Washington’s Warning

    In his farewell address, the first president of the United States foresaw exactly why liberal democracy would cease to function. George Washington argued that partisanship would fragment the common interest into competing factions. A citizenry that identified with a political party rather than the country would lose its principles; they would fail to identify policies affecting the common interest and concern themselves only with gaining power at the next instance. Political parties turn society against itself and create countries within countries: “Thus the policy and will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.” In the partisan political environment, Washington said, jealousies prevail and a “spirit of revenge” takes over, clearing the way for “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men” to take over on the back of “foreign influence and corruption.”

    Trump rally
    “I’d rather be a Russian than a Democrat.” George Washington warned that partisan animosity would destroy national unity and invite the foreign subversion of national interests.

    The body politic is now terminally ill with the viruses that Washington identified centuries ago. Liberal societies divided by political allegiance has turned the digital space into a playground for foreign actors. While weaker countries like Georgia and the Philippines are sites of proxy wars between East and West influence, the president of the United States openly accepts foreign bribes and Canadian separatists collaborate with agitators from the U.S. government. Elections have turned into sports matches where the politicians are the players, the voters are the fans and corporate CEOs own the teams.

    The Brexit referendum was dominated by Britain’s wealthiest individuals and the OECD has already acknowledged that capital interests have saturated public discourse through industry-funded think tanks, lobbying and direct corporate political advertising. Representative government is powerless to reverse these trends because it is baked into the system; whoever holds power has necessarily benefitted from the existing framework or they wouldn’t be in office. Major reforms therefore hold little incentive but face massive pushback from an elite minority eager to retain its influence. 

    Contemporary liberal governance aligns with Washington’s description of “a frightful despotism” that negates the common interest in favour of permanent minority rule. In Canada, pollution reduction measures have been rolled back while oil companies have received billions in new subsidies—despite a two-thirds majority favouring clean energy and climate protection. A full three-quarters of Canadians give failing grades to their government in assisting with the cost of living crisis. The Canadian government does not possess the tools to meaningfully direct economic outcomes and the majority of people are plunged daily into the hazards of the market. Meanwhile, Canada’s central bank receives no input from labour or consumer stakeholders and the CEO-drenched Business Council of Canada has emerged as the prime minister’s top advisor.

    When majority opinion is fragmented between multiple elected parties, it is only economic elites who maintain consistent influence through successive governments. In the United States, this is especially true; studies analyzing popular opinion and political legislation have concluded that average Americans “have practically zero influence on government policy.”

    On policy, Democrats, Independents and Republicans agree with each other far more often than not. Large majorities in the United States favour public health insurance, ending the embargo of Cuba, ending mass incarceration, avoiding confrontation with Iran and Venezuela, reducing military expenditures, cutting support for Israel and adopting a pro-Main Street economic approach. Yet this is ignored by administration after administration resulting in rock-bottom public trust in government. As little as 17% of Americans trust their government “to do what is right most of the time.”

    A United States that was subordinated to the popular will of Americans would immediately be a gentler, more sustainable global power with an economy that doesn’t cannabilize its own people for profits. But a government anchored by popular opinion would hurt margins across multiple industries—which is a red line for the capitalist regime. Partisan competition therefore exists to exploit wedge issues and keep the democratic majority as far from power as possible.

    Toward a People’s Democracy

    In The State and Revolution, Lenin described liberal democracy as “the best possible political shell for capitalism” because it allows corporate oligarchs to establish their power “so securely, so firmly, that no change of persons, institutions or parties in the bourgeois democratic republic can shake it.”2 The western dictatorship of capital donned respectable attire for the purposes of winning hearts and minds during the Cold War. But since the dissolution of the Soviet Union it has shed its clothes once again.

    Although the People’s Republic of China is derided in the mainstream as an authoritarian country, their decision-making process gathers more input from their citizens than most western countries do. Through online platforms, opinion polling, surveys, telephone hotlines and direct elections of local officials, the people of China give their local governments long lists of actionable items and provide guidance to the strategic Five Year Plans that have modernized their country at warp speed. This does not mean many aspects of the Chinese political system would be palatable to western society but it does expose the arbitrary criteria by which one country is deemed “democratic” while another is smeared as “authoritarian.” After all, if the “democratic” label can apply to a country that grants its citizens zero input in legislation and locks up more of its own people than any other in history, what good is the label? 

    The object of liberal democracy represents a major barrier to class consciousness, even among the left. A misplaced faith in this unworkable system has led to disastrous outcomes for the economic security of western workers; for the debt loads of governments; for slums of the Global South; for the biosphere. This is not a world designed by the democratic majority. To earn the label of democracy, the West must rethink the utility of career politicians making decisions on behalf of the population. Corporate influence must be ruthlessly suppressed and a public sector economy servile to the material wants and needs of the democratic majority must be constructed. With the commanding heights of the economy under public control, fertile ground for cooperative enterprises can finally be laid. 

    If a one party state is a bridge too far, we should consider alternative power structures that could exalt the great mass of working people over special interest groups. For example, power could be vested to non-partisan people’s assemblies chosen by lot. Such assemblies would supervise the bureaucracy and hire expert panels that implement the laws and economic plans determined by direct referenda. It is this, direct democracy, that reconciles the people with their government instead of alienating them from it.

    Contrary to the musings of thinkers like John Stuart Mill, the “tyranny of the majority” is not a historical reality. Every tyranny in history has rested on minority power and the forfeiture of rights to elites. Capital interests have co-opted the democratic title and deformed the concept beyond recognition. But liberal government must be viewed as an enemy in the struggle against elite power. As Marx and Engels said, “the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy.”3 As things now stand, that “battle of democracy” has yet to begin.

    Thanks for reading!

    Footnotes:

    1. Recalling Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto (Arcturus Publishing, 2017): 37. “Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.” ↩︎

    2. Vladimir Lenin, “The State and Revolution” in Essential Works of Lenin: “What Is To Be Done? And Other Writings (CreateSpace, 2012): 382-3. ↩︎

    3. Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, 85. ↩︎
  • Ask the Editor: The Demonic Nature of Global Rearmament

    Ask the Editor: The Demonic Nature of Global Rearmament

    To the editor,



    There are huge increases to military budgets around the world and a lot of talk about a wider war with Russia, conflict with China over Taiwan and the “Donroe Doctrine” in the Western Hemisphere. Are countries preparing for  World War III?

    Thank you,

    Kyle.

    [Sent by email]

    Hi Kyle,

    The situations in Ukraine, Venezuela and Iran demonstrate an aggressive push for hegemonic consolidation: the U.S. is determined to put all of Latin America into a stranglehold and knockout Israel’s last major stronghold of resistance in the Middle East, while Europe is now tasked with keeping Russia out of their sphere. Throw in the rise of China, and these developments have the world starting to resemble the European balance of power that collapsed into World War I.

    In a world balancing on the weight of military strength, countries are compelled to invest in armaments or be tossed from the scale. Japan has rubber stamped a record-setting military budget and Taiwan has done the same. Canada wants to triple its military spending; Australia is under pressure to raise theirs by 75%. India, Germany and France all have proposals to double their military spending, with Emmanuel Macron adding: “To be free in this world we must be feared. To be feared we must be powerful.” Without parsing what that means to the freedom of those cowering in fear, Trump seems to agree with Macron by proposing a 50% increase to America’s already-whopping $1 trillion military budget. His proposed $1.5 trillion military spend doesn’t sound like a peacetime budget—that’s a budget for war. 

    In this political context, worrying about World War III is not unreasonable. Against a similar arms race backdrop in 19th century Europe, Friedrich Engels predicted World War I:

    I imagine that the plan is not to push things to extremities, to more than a sham war. But once the first shot is fired, control ceases, the horse can take the bit between its teeth…Eight to ten million soldiers will massacre one another and in doing so devour the whole of Europe until they have stripped it barer than any swarm of locusts has ever done.1

    Bombing countries like Iran or kidnapping the presidents of countries like Venezuela might not get us there. But desensitization to this uptick of radical interventionism makes a miscalculation more likely, as happened between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Serbia once upon a time.

    The timing of this global rearmament could not be worse, given the present state of the environment and the residue of an inflationary crisis already aggravated by global conflict. Marx held complex views about the role of the military within the broader capitalist economy, but in the Grundrisse he noted: “The impact of war is self-evident, since economically it is exactly the same as if the nation were to drop part of its capital into the ocean.”2 Warfare vanquishes the resources that could be used to build an economy of human flourishing into plumes of blood and fire. In a competitive world of amplified scarcity such as it is, the proliferation of advanced weaponry and nuclear bombs adhere to a quest for economic dominance—consequences to human survival be damned.

    The ominous parallels between the first world war and a possible third recall Freud’s compulsion to repeat: we live in a neurotic civilization containing “a demonic character” whereby repressed traumas override the pleasure principle and are revisited again and again and again in order to “re-encounter our identity.”3 Given the violent and domineering history of capitalism, revisiting past demons in a nuclear-armed multipolar world would be nothing short of biblical.

    In sols,

        Your editor.

    Send your questions to the Reclamation: editor@thereclamation.co

    Footnotes:


    1. There was an estimated 8.8 million military deaths during World War I, making Engels’ prediction exceptionally accurate. A further 6–13 million civilian casualties are estimated, resembling that “swarm of locusts” stripping Europe bare. ↩︎

    2. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Penguin, 2005): 129. ↩︎

    3. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Broadview Press, 2011): 74-75. ↩︎
  • Ask the Editor: “Why Was Charlie Kirk So Popular?”

    Ask the Editor: “Why Was Charlie Kirk So Popular?”

    Dear editor,


    The coverage has been wall-to-wall ever since the recent assassination of Charlie Kirk. I understand it is a tragedy to lose a young family man to homicide. Politics is very divided now. Despite this, people are getting fired for criticizing Kirk’s politics. With everything happening in the world, I did not see this escalating so much. I had only heard of Charlie Kirk and Turning Points USA in passing before this happened but now I realize that he was big in the Trump world. Why was he so popular to begin with?

    Thanks,

    Davey STL.

    Dear Davey,

    In western representative democracies, politics has literally become a bloodsport. Despite this, the range of issues being debated are actually very narrow. There is always a centrist liberal party and a right wing conservative party and both of them want to maximize returns for wealthy donors above all. There is some discussion about foreign policy, tweaks to government distribution and emotional social issues. That’s about it. In Canada, we have a corporate stooge for prime minister. He campaigned as some kind of progressive nation-builder but he has been anything but in government. 

    Right wing donors in the United States, under the guise of “libertarianism,” are particularly focused on unshackling themselves from environmental protections and labour laws while gaining tax loopholes and subsidies. These ideas aren’t very saleable in the perfunctory elections that take place every couple of years and that’s where activists like Charlie Kirk come in.

    Kirk found a couple of wealthy patrons for his Turning Point organization when he was about 18 years old: Bill Montgomery and Foster Friess. They plugged him into the obscenely vast and well-funded right wing donor network that elevated him to star-status on the right. He built his brand identity by debating liberal college students for a wider audience. In one produced for Jubilee Media, there were five topics discussed: abortion, gender studies, trans-women, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) hires and affirmative action. Nothing about corporate power, environmental protection, financial monopolies or the military-industrial complex—the issues that will actually impact the future well-being of society. And that’s the point. Noam Chomsky: 

    The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.1

    When Marx and Engels wrote “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas”—they weren’t talking about the “ideas” paraded about by Joe Rogan, CNN or Charlie Kirk. They were talking about those that can’t be questioned.

    The ruling class lost a talented propagandist, a powerful distractor. Kirk should not have been murdered. It is a tragic loss for his family and his assassination will play right into the hands of his own talking points. After all, if he can be killed over the things he said, those things must now seem really important. 

    In sols,

        Your editor.

    Send your questions to the Reclamation: editor@thereclamation.co

    Footnotes:


    1. Noam Chomsky, The Common Good (Odonian Press, 1998): 43. ↩︎
  • Understanding Chinese Socialism

    Understanding Chinese Socialism

    China is one of the most misunderstood countries in the West for all of the predictable reasons: the far-away geography, the curious culture, the unfamiliar politics, the ferocious economy. It is either portrayed as a one-dimensional menace to democracies or, less often, as the last hope to save the biosphere or the Global South. China can be the rigid communist or the wild capitalist—it only depends on the point of view of the observer. Dan Wang is the latest to re-cast China, an engineering state in contrast to the lawyerly society of the United States. He hit the shore of this discovery when it occurred to him that many of America’s founding fathers were lawyers and Deng Xiaoping had promoted a lot of engineers in the 1980s. According to Wang, this is the reason why China builds a lot more stuff than the U.S. today. But he’s wrong.

    What Wang discovered is only a basic difference between Marxist-Leninist societies and liberal capitalist ones. The Soviet Union was dominated by engineers, as China and Vietnam are today. Even Cuba has been described as “a society of engineers.” Conversely, western bourgeois revolutions were all dominated by those with legal backgrounds; Thomas Jefferson in the U.S., Oliver Cromwell in Britain, Maximilien Robespierre in France—to name only the most notorious. The first prime ministers of Canada, Australia and India were also lawyers. But if the American “lawyerly society” was able to out-build and outproduce the Soviet engineering state, why can’t it do the same against the Chinese?

    The answer has little to do with lawyers or engineers and everything to do with economics and governing ideology. Whereas the American commitment to capitalist class power led it directly into a deindustrialized, cannibalistic financial economy, China’s commitment to building socialism led it to becoming the greatest workshop in human history, in command of entire supply chains and advanced technology. America had built a great industrial power by the early twentieth century and organized labour had won considerable political power throughout the New Deal and Cold War eras. But this unravelled almost the moment the Cold War wound down. The disciplining of the western workforce was inevitable in an economic system pursuing profit for the sake of profit, and it arrived in the form of offshore manufacturing, real estate speculation, vulture capitalism, super-exploited migrant labor and intensified corporate lobbying. 

    Marxism-Leninism in China

    China, meanwhile, was an accident of epic proportions. Whereas other Marxist-Leninist states in the Soviet bloc were successfully marginalized from the global capitalist economy, the U.S. under Nixon and Kissinger embraced China in a successful effort to defeat Moscow by exploiting the Sino-Soviet split. Successive presidential administrations gambled that global capitalism would so thoroughly corrupt Chinese socialist aspirations that the country would abandon Marxist thought altogether. This has turned out to be a bad bet if the words of paramount leader Xi Jinping are any indication: “If we deviate from or abandon Marxism, our Party would lose its soul and direction. On the fundamental issue of upholding the guiding role of Marxism, we must maintain unswerving resolve, never wavering at any time or under any circumstances.”

    Statements like this from Chinese leadership mystify western audiences, both left and right. Too many people view socialism through the narrow paradigm of the Soviet system or left wing politics at home and conclude that China has hopelessly deviated from Marxist theory. But what if it is the western left that is aimless and the Soviets who were forced to deviate? Western politics is so saturated with capital that even nominally “progressive” forces don’t understand the corporate interests being served by mass migration crises and obsessional identity politics. And the Soviet Union, facing multiple foreign invasions at the outset, rapidly nationalized most of its economy and placed it under a central command in order to first stave off European aggression and then counter American containment strategies. The Soviet Union was able to achieve incredibly high levels of human development and military superpower status, but balancing these two priorities against western counter-pressure proved unsustainable over the long haul.

    China pursued somewhat similar policies to the Soviets until American rapprochement came in 1972, when Nixon visited Mao. Imperial pressure against China was lifted, culminating in large amounts of western commercial investment by 1979 and a U.S. State Department upgrade for China to “friendly, developing nation.” This is where the great misunderstanding of China began: for the left, China was seen as selling out the socialist movement to imperialists and for the right, China was increasingly seen as a nascent capitalist champion. Neither side was completely right or wrong.

    China did embrace capitalist investment in a way that was not geopolitically possible for other Marxist-Leninist states. The private sector of China is notoriously wild and cutthroat. At the same time this does not represent a reversal of the Marxist course in China, as originally charted by Mao. Consider the Chinese flag: four small stars representing the national bourgeoisie, petit bourgeoisie, the working class and the peasantry. Mao, while fiercely antagonistic toward rent-extracting landlords, had a different understanding of China’s domestic capitalists: 

    The national bourgeoisie differs from the imperialists, the landlords and the bureaucrat-capitalists. The contradiction between the national bourgeoisie and the working class is one between exploiter and exploited, and is by nature antagonistic. But in the concrete conditions of China, this antagonistic contradiction between the two classes, if properly handled, can be transformed into a non-antagonistic one and be resolved by peaceful methods.1

    In Marxist theory, capitalism is seen as a major progressive advance over the feudal mode of production. When Mao came to power, China was largely a feudal state. For this reason Mao favoured China’s capitalist elements over the landlords of the feudal order. Mao proposed a five-tiered structure of ownership during China’s transition phase which has been applied throughout the country: state-owned enterprises, cooperative land ownership, individually owned businesses, private corporations and public-private partnerships. The Communist Party of China, while it bristles under imperialism, has always recognized this classical Marxist principle: capitalism is the mother of socialism, not its enemy. Karl Marx: 

    The bourgeois period of history has to create the material basis of the new world—on the one hand universal intercourse founded upon the mutual dependency of mankind, and the means of that intercourse; on the other hand, the development of the productive powers of man and the transformation of material production into a scientific domination of natural agencies. Bourgeois industry and commerce create these material conditions of a new world in the same way as geological revolutions have created the surface of the earth. When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch, the markets of the world and the modern powers of production and subjected them to the common control of the most advanced peoples, then only will human progress cease to resemble that hideous pagan idol who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain.2

    Having built a mass-party of over 100 million members, the CPC believes that China has already completed its great social revolution and have set themselves the task of mastering “the results of the bourgeois epoch.” In Building Socialism with a Specifically Chinese Character, Deng Xiaoping describes foreign investment as “a major supplement in the building of socialism,” with the goal of “highly developed productive forces and an overwhelming abundance of material wealth.” This is a redux of Engels, who said that the forces of production “must be multiplied to the extent necessary for the creation of a communal society” before private property can be abolished.3

    Whereas the advanced capitalist countries were able to develop their productive forces through a historical process involving colonial extraction, debt bondage, slavery and corporate-driven markets, China is doing the same with a combination of foreign capital investment, state owned enterprises, domestic start-ups and state-dominated markets operating under the umbrella of five year plans and consultative democracy. 

    The Limits to Capital

    Since the dawn of civilization, Marx noted, the property relations of an economy eventually become barriers to the further advancement of technology and production.4 In feudalism, there was only so much progress that was possible in an economy dominated by illiterate subsistence farmers paying rent to lords. The limits inherent to the feudal order are what eventually provoked daring exploration missions leading to the discovery of the Americas, European mercantilism, the plantation economy and subsequent Industrial Revolution. 

    As industry has progressed, it has gradually given way to rent-seeking financial monopolies and Big Tech companies which are posing enormous barriers to production in western economies. Even our Gross Domestic Product (GDP) data can no longer be trusted, as the economist Michael Hudson explains: “Bank penalties and fees are now counted toward GDP rather than as an economic cost. GDP accounting is now a travesty that credits finance as producing a product rather than zero-sum transfer payments.”5 Our system cannot solve this problem because our system is the problem—and no quantity of Trumpian neofascist rebellions will change the fundamental contours of the western economy. Only a revolution can do that.

    Post-revolutionary China, on the other hand, has seen enough to avoid these pitfalls. Financial capital currently plays an important role allocating resources toward innovation and productivity but, left to its own devices, it will devolve into debt predation, real estate speculation and inflating unproductive assets like stocks and cryptocurrencies. According to Marxian economics, money has a price but only production can create objective value. Banks in China are state owned and directed to fulfill the five year plans that build their country. Salaries and compensation for financial service managers have been reigned in and regulatory frameworks ensure that Chinese hedge funds invest in domestic products like DeepSeek rather than asset prices. It’s been said that the West can never produce like China and this is why.

    Projects from state owned enterprises, clockwise from left: Raffles City, Huajiang Grand Canyon Bridge, China Energy Engineering Corporation. The public sector can build according to use rather than profit.

    Marx and Engels supported free trade and industrial competition as a means of provoking technological revolution and working class development.6 China has used both instruments to build out world-leading high speed rail, renewable energy infrastructure, electric vehicles, high tech skyscrapers and record-setting bridges. Unlike capitalist countries that over-promise and under-deliver on almost everything, China’s public sector consistently beats its own targets. They have a working class of 772 million people, of which 500 million are considered middle class. But the contradictions created by technological change, fluctuations in value and financially ruinous competition often spur crises, and these crises promote changes to economic relations and political orientation. 

    Socialism with Chinese Characteristics

    For China, crises precede expansion of the public sector. Banking, land and resources are already under socialized ownership. Further, there are 362,000 state owned enterprises in the country comprising 60% of total market capitalization. With many people forecasting future economic turbulence, economists Minqi Li and Lingyi Wei see a China that is well-positioned to: 

    Either take over the remaining capitalist enterprises or invest in new socially owned enterprises to replace the bankrupt capitalist enterprises. Eventually, this could pave the way for social control over economic surplus, to be used for the free development of all individuals in manners to be determined by democratic decisions.7

    Throughout their work, Marx and Engels stressed the need to not simply oppose capitalism but to go beyond it.8 Neither the workers’ state of the Soviet Union nor the welfare states of western nations have actualized this concept.9 By prioritizing production over distribution, China is doing exactly what Marx outlined in his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and Engels in his Principles of Communism: driving the forces of capitalist production to their technological limit before crossing the barricade that capitalist relations inevitably impose.

    The colossal solar plants, hydro dams and wind farms that China is constructing are not just for show. They are the building blocks of a fully-automated robotic economy powered by the Sun. Under social ownership, an advanced economy of this type makes class distinctions extinct. It makes economic democracy viable, free development of individuals possible and the Communist Party unnecessary—as Mao envisioned.10

    In America, plantation slavery funded industrial capitalism and industrial capitalism, in turn, made slavery obsolete. In China, capitalism is funding a high-tech socialist economy and socialism, in turn, will make capitalism obsolete. Marx wrote in The Poverty of Philosophy: “The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.”11 China finishes the thought: “And the socially-owned robot gives you society without class.”  

    Thanks for reading!

    Footnotes:

    1. Mao Zedong, On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People. ↩︎

    2. Karl Marx, “The Future Results of British Rule in India,” Dispatches for the New York Tribune: Selected Journalism of Karl Marx (Penguin, 2007), 125. ↩︎

    3. Friedrich Engels, The Principles of Communism. ↩︎

    4. Karl Marx, “Preface” of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: “At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or—this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms—with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto.” ↩︎

    5. Michael Hudson, “Finance Capitalism versus Industrial Capitalism: The Rentier Resurgence and Takeover,” in Review of Radical Political Economics, Vol. 53, No. 4: 12. ↩︎

    6. Karl Marx, Capital Volume II (Penguin, 1992): 250. ↩︎

    7. Minqi Li and Lingyi Wei, “Surplus Absorption, Secular Stagnation & the Transition to Socialism in China,” in Monthly Review Vol. 76, No. 5: 25. ↩︎

    8. In particular, see Karl Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and Friedrich Engels’ The Principles of Communism. ↩︎

    9. Erich Fromm, “Marx’s Concept of Socialism” in Marx’s Concept of Man: “Marx, the man who every year read all the works of Aeschylus and Shakespeare, who brought to life in himself the greatest works of human thought, would never have dreamt that his idea of socialism could be interpreted as having as its aim the well-fed and well-clad “welfare” or “workers’” state.  ↩︎

    10. Mao Zedong, On Contradiction and On Practice (Midnight Press, 2023): 47. “To build the Communist Party is in fact to prepare the conditions to eliminate the party and all parties.” ↩︎

    11. Karl Marx, “The Metaphysics of Political Economy” in The Poverty of Philosophy. ↩︎
  • How Trump’s Tariffs Cement A New World Order

    How Trump’s Tariffs Cement A New World Order

    There must be no doubt that the transformation of constitutional conservatism into a politics of populist reaction is attributable to the rapid societal changes of the past two decades. The ubiquitousness of smart phones, the totality of social media information, the sharp visibility of immigrant and LGBT populations, cultural backlash against perceived “woke” authoritarianism and the economic tumult of subprime mortgages and COVID have all contributed to this transformation. Throw in several years of historic inflation and the world now sits in the barrel of a second Trump presidency, much more aggressive than the last.

    For the Marxist school, Trump’s re-ascendance was mighty predictable. Within the milieu of the aforementioned social changes, we have artificial intelligence revaluing labour and China revolutionizing global trade and renewable energy and “people seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before.” According to Marx, it is in times like these when many people “anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, in order to present this new scene in world history [with] time-honoured disguise and borrowed language.”1

    The early returns of the second Trump administration have given us time-honoured symbolism in spades—military parades, the return of Mount McKinley and the freshly minted Gulf of America. The mass deportation orders are an echo of Eisenhower’s cringily-named “Operation Wetback” and Trump’s economic policy rests on an antiquated foundation of import duties, also known as tariffs.

    Past and Present

    American tariffs on imports now reach heights not seen in a century and this is very on-brand with Trump’s glorification of the past. 100 years ago, tariffs were a staple of independent governments looking to do two things at once: efficiently collect tax revenues at shipping ports while sheltering burgeoning industries from outside competition. Generally speaking, items that could be supplied domestically were subject to a tariff, while important raw materials supporting other industries might be exempt. Then came the Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930 that blanketed imports with an effective tariff rate of 47%. This sparked a global retaliation that froze international trade just as the West entered the Great Depression. The presidential administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt began winding down many of these tariffs through bilateral deals shortly after taking office—but with so little capital circulating after a period of deflation, the harmful effects did not really reverse until the conclusion of World War II. From that point onward, the United States promoted a low-tariff, liberalized trade regime between capitalist countries.

    The American posture on liberal trade was upheld through successive administrations but the current Trump White House has folded it in dramatic fashion. But how do these tariffs stack against the historical record?

    We can see that the earliest application of tariffs were used to efficiently gather taxes at ports without the need for a sophisticated bureaucracy capable of calculating sales and income taxes. These tariffs do not appear to have had any disastrous consequences for the economy at the time—bearing in mind that this economy was much more simple and agrarian compared to today. Under the Smoot-Hawley Act, the American economy was much more industrialized and complex compared to years prior, and the tariffs were much steeper. It is seen as disastrous but only in hindsight; during the desperation of economic depression, throwing up a barrier to the outflow of capital made intuitive sense.

    Trump’s rapidly evolving tariff regime does not overlay neatly on either of these historical examples. On the one hand, the effective tariff rate at the time of writing is 18.6%—quite mild compared to the Smoot-Hawley rate of 47%. On the other hand, the American economy is more complex than ever, with commodity production and financial capital often crossing dozens of borders before valorization. In the simple, low-tax colonial economies that were developing in the Americas over a century ago, tariffs were not so imposing. But dropping duties onto supply chains that were established during an era of liberalized trade is bound to cause blockages to the existing circulation of productive and financial capital. This will suppress consumption but the full extent remains to be seen. 

    A novelty between past tariff regimes and the Trump tariffs is the strategy inherent to each. Trump’s tariffs do not seem to amount to any sort of regime or logic—there is clearly an impulse to apply them universally, but the rates are up and down on a whim. Canada is threatened with tariffs over plans to recognize a Palestinian state. Brazil gets slammed with a 50% rate for court proceedings against the former president. India, likewise, is slapped with an identical 50% rate for buying Russian oil—while Russia’s other customers in Europe and China receive no consequences. Resulting is a geopolitical shot string, and the consequences to American hegemony will take years to reckon with. Suffice to say, the only constancy to Trump’s approach is uncertainty itself—and that’s the one thing multinational conglomerates and their army of lobbyists loathe.

    Why Tariffs?

    But Trump, consummate capitalist that he is, would not maximize market uncertainty or collapse American hegemony or create capital blockages and suppress consumption intentionally. In fact, the Trump White House believes that tariffs will have the opposite effects from those listed here: capital will consolidate at home, jobs and domestic consumption will boom and American hegemony will rejuvenate, the world dancing to Washington’s ultimatums, the market nurtured under the eagle’s wing. So how does this play out?

    As with most everything concerning the motion of capitalism, Marx and Engels addressed this question of duties back in the Victorian era. Engels: 


    Protection is at best an endless screw, and you never know when you have done with it. By protecting one industry, you directly or indirectly hurt all others, and have therefore to protect them too…By taxing raw materials, it raises the price of the articles manufactured from them; by taxing food, it raises the price of labour. In both ways, it places the manufacturer at a disadvantage compared to his foreign competitor.

    We see this observation playing out in real time. Food costs are up over the early months of the Trump administration and will increase further with tariffs. Producer inflation is soaring as the cost of economic inputs rise. Automakers are shedding billions, largely due to tariffs on necessary steel and aluminum. For the crown jewel in American capitalism’s catalogue of death—the F-35 stealth fighter—prices have rocketed upward thanks to the higher cost of raw materials. No sooner does Trump clamour for weapons sales and he raises the price of everything across the entire defence industry!

    Marx, likewise, saw free trade as hastening a country’s “accumulation and concentration of capital” with workers being hurt by  “greater use of machinery” in production. What this has meant for the United States is a bloated credit and debt system, a largely automated manufacturing sector and an abundance of monopolistic financial firms and multinational conglomerates that export their capital around the world looking to realize profits in the American market. It’s as if Trump’s tariffs are meant to throw wrenches into the wheels of the economy that are turning well, while doing nothing to jumpstart the others. The motivation for American protectionism is similar to what Engels described in England in 1888: “She is relatively losing ground, while her rivals are making progress.” America is losing its sole superpower status and “it is to stave off this impending fate that Protection, scarcely disguised under the veil of ‘fair trade’ and retaliatory tariffs, is now invoked with such fervour.”

    Wither the Empire?

    When Trump opened a trade war against China during his first term, the Chinese looked outward. Since U.S. tariffs came into effect in 2018, the value of Chinese exports has increased by 50%, they became the top automotive seller in the world and they are the top trading partner to 150 countries.  Now that Trump has launched a trade war against the entire world, China sees an even greater opportunity.  They have unilaterally implemented a zero-tariff policy for all of the world’s least developed countries plus the entire continent of Africa. As students of Marxian economics, China has taken steps to suppress the financial capital system that has ravaged the American Main Street, instead directing investments into the productive sectors of their economy and expanding its global Belt-and-Road Initiative. China has made moves to bolster trade with India, Vietnam, the European Union and Britain, while strengthening relations with Latin America and the rest of the Global South. Renewable energy and automation technologies—key pillars of a future socialist economy—are progressing at rapid speed. China is almost single-handedly lowering global emissions while the West languishes under the shock of American protectionism. 

    What are the future results of Trump’s tariffs? We will not know in the near term. Trump may not even live long enough to find out. But he probably won’t like the answer.

    Thanks for reading!

    Footnotes:

    1. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. ↩︎
  • The Psycho-Capitalist Dystopia of “Alien”

    The Psycho-Capitalist Dystopia of “Alien”

    There is something elemental to the vastness of outer space with its infinity of stars and planets and eternal unknowns that lend off-planet stories a conspicuously epic quality. After all, this is the realm of gods and titans, Zarathustra and Siddartha, heaven and angels, Star Trek and Star Wars. Even on the small screen there is Battlestar Galactica, motored by existential warfare, the fate of the entire species in the hands of one starship’s crew.

    Ridley Scott’s Alien blows in from the spindrift of ancient cosmology and the modern space opera, an oddity considering the spartan scope of the story. The premises of the original Alien trilogy require little imagination for today’s audience situated in the capitalist society. In the original, there is the blue collar crew of the Nostromo, tugging 20,000,000 tons of mineral ore to Earth. In the sequel, Aliens, the United States Colonial Marine Corps are sent to an extraterrestrial corporate outpost on a relief operation. And Alien 3 takes place on a prison planet. There is nothing glamorous or awe-inspiring around the cosmos in this franchise—it is a place for the utilitarian, for the rugged, for the criminally deranged. Nothing we can’t find on present-day Earth.

    The Masterpiece

    Alien sets an understated tone for the two that follow. There are installments outside the original trilogy that deviate from this mould—and they suffer for it. But the 1979 classic had first built the resonance with a mass audience that was required for the future sequels to be developed. The film opens with views of the Nostromo and the mountainous ore refinery it stages as cargo. The seven member crew awaken from stasis—hypersleep, to cope with the years-long interstellar voyages. The crew believe they are nearing Earth but we soon learn that their ship’s operating system has awakened them on a company order to investigate a mysterious transmission emanating from a moon they are passing by.

    Right away we see that capitalist class relations are integral to this plot; while the crew is reluctant to undertake such a dangerous assignment, they are ultimately compelled to do so under threat of “total forfeiture of shares.” At one point Dallas, the captain, bluntly states that the only “standard procedure is to do what the hell they tell you to do.”

    The imbalance of power is clear. If the crew refused to comply, the Weyland-Yutani corporation might lose an opportunity to profit but the crew would have to surrender their income, all for naught their many years spent aboard the starship. Even more lopsided, the crew is forced to risk their lives to investigate a potentially lucrative discovery while any proprietary claims would be held by Weyland-Yutani. The Marxist view on wage labour comes into focus: “The worker in capitalist society becomes dehumanized, regarded by the capitalists as simply another piece of equipment which is necessary for the production of profit. The workers become less than human…since they are forced to sell their lives in order to ‘make a living.’”1

    The film taps our collective anxiety that the unquenchable profit-motive underpinning our economy has lead us to transgress boundaries that were not meant to be crossed. Nuclear accidents, ocean acidification, weapons of mass destruction, the hole in the ozone layer, microplastics permeating our bloodstreams, viral lab leaks, artificial intelligence run amok—there is no shortage of potential disasters pending in a world of blind capitalist production. Films such as Planet of the Apes, The Terminator, The Day After Tomorrow and 28 Days Later all play on this collective fear.

    In Alien, it takes shape after three crew members disembark from their ship and discover an extraneous vessel crashed into the rocky surface of the moon. Upon entering, they first find a dead extra-terrestrial pilot, and next, a hull “full of leathery objects…like eggs or something.” A spider-like creature erupts from an egg and sizzles through Kane’s visor, attaching itself to his face. 

    In his Poetics, Aristotle finds that “every tragedy falls into two parts—Complication and Unravelling.”2 The complication occurs early, when the Nostromo receives the radio transmission and is forced by Weyland-Yutani to dock on a moon of a gas giant in the Zeta Reticuli star system. The unravelling occurs after the spider-like creature—a facehugger—has fallen from Kane’s head, the crew sitting down to one last meal before returning to stasis. This is a famously gruesome scene where a parasitic organism explodes from Kane’s chest in a geyser of blood. The fate of the ship is essentially sealed at this moment. Weyland-Yutani demands the return of the alien at the expense of the workers’ lives and the rapidly-growing parasitoid picks off the remaining crew one-by-one, able to turn them into eggs and begin its ghastly lifecycle anew.

    The Horror

    Deductions about many plot elements of this film can only be made at the point of unravelling when this parasite, this xenomorph, is unleashed on the crew of the Nostromo. First, it is clear that we are not watching a science fiction so much as a horror. The vacuum of outer space is a sublime backdrop for a horror film because the muteness of the void approximates the silence of death and non-existence. The producers understood this and created the artful tagline: “In space no one can hear you scream.” 

    Another visible element concerns the derelict alien ship containing the eggs. While the ship did not reach its intended destination, the deadly cargo must have had a destructive purpose all along, with the eggs intended to be dropped as bombs on an unassuming indigenous population—xenomorphs being the ultimate bioweapon. This bioweapon doesn’t merely kill its targets; it impregnates them, it is birthed by them and it destroys them in the voracious service of replicating its species. In Hinduism there is Shiva, the paradoxical god of both creation and destruction who simultaneously creates and destroys the universe in a cosmic dance.3 An element of divinity, of fetishization, is put forward which is further alluded to in the prequel film Prometheus. 

    The xenomorph was expressly designed by Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger with strong sexual overtones: a phallic head and a drooling vagina dentata for jaws. This represents the male fear of castration while the impregnating facehugger leaping from the egg evokes rape. The unity of creation and destruction—of reproduction and death—is given a modern form in Alien although it is not a new concept. Religious allegory aside, Sigmund Freud discovers this unity at the psychoanalytic level and likens the release of sexual orgasm to dying itself: “This accounts for how similar the state following complete sexual gratification is to dying, and for the fact that in lower animals death and the procreative act coincide.”4 For Freud, the death drive innate to living things appears as “aggression and destruction” when it is turned toward the external world.5

    The Mythology

    The xenomorph is the physical embodiment of the death drive, a product of “alien interspecies rape” and the death of its host.6 The aggression and destruction projected outward is total and directly avails its life instincts and reproduction. The android, Ash, in the film describes it as the “perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.” It necessarily takes up the most extremely rapacious form of both life and death, its species pullulating ceaselessly over a mountain of blood-stained corpses and shattered rib cages. 

    In feudal Europe it was believed that demonic incubi and succubi would sexually attack people as they slept with repeated interactions resulting in death. In antiquity this attribute is seen in satyrs and various demi-gods, and in the nomadic society it is seen in mystic and impetuous animals in nature. There is a primordial fear of death and sex working here and its cultural expression is determined by the economic mode of production that situates society. This exemplifies what Marx and Engels say in The German Ideology, that it is “material production” that alters the existence of people, including “their thinking and the products of their thinking.” 

    What Giger, Scott and O’Bannon created with Alien is a space-age capitalist interpretation of the demonic, sexually violent archetype. It is no coincidence that workers, grunt soldiers and prisoners bear the weight of deadly encounters with the parasites in the original trilogy and always under the orders of the soulless Weyland-Yutani corporation. Taking the metaphor further, the xenomorphs symbolize the overwhelming totality of capitalism itself: they flourish by devouring their two sources of wealth, nature and human beings.7

    Thanks for reading!

    Footnotes:

    1.  “Editor’s Preface” in Essential Writings of Karl Marx (Red and Black Publishers, 2010), 16. ↩︎

    2. Aristotle, “Selections from Poetics,” in Art and Interpretation: An Anthology of Readings in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art (Broadview Press, 1998), 34. ↩︎

    3. John M. Koller, Oriental Philosophies, Second Edition (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1985), 111-2. ↩︎

    4. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Broadview Editions, 2011), 113. ↩︎

    5. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (Broadview Editions, 2016), 91. ↩︎

    6. Screenwriter Dan O’Bannon described Alien as a movie about “alien interspecies rape.” www.buzzfeed.com/alisonwillmore/19-movie-monsters-that-look-like-penises-and-vaginas ↩︎

    7. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume One. Paraphrasing: “Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth — the soil and the labourer.” ↩︎
  • Dialectics

    Dialectics

    This article is part of a series on classical Marxism.

    When Heraclitus said, “no man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man,” he was emphasizing the permanency of an unyielding process of change through time. Time does not pass calmly forward—it is forceful, obliterating the present and fossilizing the past, with all matter standing as its witness. The essence of this perpetual motion found in nature is what dialectical materialism seeks to grasp as a framework for the analysis of everything in the universe, from the tiniest atoms to the largest stars. Put simply, dialectics is the study of change.

    The first thing to establish is that the laws of nature—including the speed of light, gravitational attraction, conservation of energy, etc.—were woven into the universe at its inception. Current science holds that our universe was born from immense countervailing forces: a sub-atomic singularity of infinite density and infinite heat that erupted in a Big Bang.1 In dialectical terms, countervailing forces are referred to as contradictions and contradiction not only set the universe in motion, but they provide the friction that keeps it moving. For example, we see our solar system locked in an orbital tug of war between the gravities of planets and their Sun, cosmic collisions that send whole worlds spinning and tensions between galactic megastructures in a universe that has been inflating outward since the start.

    Human societies, though notoriously difficult for the subjective observer to predict, must adhere to natural laws of motion and change all the same: “The reason is that nature and society are not different realities, but are co-evolving existences, in which society is asymmetrically dependent upon the larger natural world of which it is a part.”2 This realization is what gave impetus to Karl Marx’s ingenious application of Hegel’s abstract dialectical method to the concrete, material world in which we live. He described the motion of human societies as elliptical, as in a spiral galaxy or solar system: “For instance, it is a contradiction to depict one body as constantly falling towards another, and as, at the same time, constantly flying away from it. The ellipse is a form of motion which, while allowing this contradiction to go on, at the same time reconciles it.”3 Progress is thus neither linear nor obvious, since change is the product of conflict and creation is the outcome of destruction.

    Although Marx did not formally codify the dialectical method he used to present his work in Capital and Grundrisse, his long-time collaborator Friedrich Engels did summarize three main ontological principles:

    • The transformation of quantity into quality. Also known as a phase transition, this occurs when an accumulation of some input reaches a tipping point, creating something new. For example, liquid water will turn into steam once a quantity of heat has been reached. Or, in outer space, a molecular gas cloud will gradually accrete into a ball and ignite the fusion of a star once a certain threshold of gas and dust have amassed together. In human societies, quantities—of technologies, climate changes, population densities, natural resources and capital accumulation—have led to changes in the quality of society, as seen during the Neolithic Revolution, rise of ancient empires, feudalism and Industrial Revolution. In the contemporary period, changes to quantities are occurring at an exceptionally fast pace, with consequences to quality still unknown.
    • Interpenetration of opposites. This refers to two elements that are simultaneously opposite one another and interdependent on the opposition in order to exist. For example, light cannot exist without dark or heat without cold. Magnetism relies on the opposition between north and south poles to create a magnetic field and magnetic monopoles simply do not exist. In human society, this phenomenon is most poignantly observed with economic classes. While classless association has been the norm in human evolutionary development, classes themselves can only exist in relation to others. For example, a slave owner cannot exist without slaves. Nor can a landlord exist without tenants or a capitalist without workers. Even the much-discussed “middle class” implies, by mere mention, the existence of an “upper” and “lower” class in relation to it. The interaction of these various classes, their interpenetration with one another, is what accounts for the dynamism of society.
    • The negation of the negation. As mentioned in the opening paragraph, time fossilizes the past, it embeds history into the present and carries it forward into the future. When a cloud of gas and dust collapses into a star, the gas and dust are not deleted from existence but, rather, transformed into something new and complex. The gas cloud is negated by the star, and the star is eventually negated by a supernova—a stellar explosion of heavy metals and oxygen and helium back into space. Through a process of negation, a gas cloud is thus transformed into the planetary building blocks of the universe. On Earth, life forms are constantly negated by their own evolution into something else better adapted to actually existing environmental conditions, such as dinosaurs into birds. The past is found to mediate the present in all circumstances, however. While some dinosaurs evolved into birds, apes into hominids or flowering plants into fruit-bearing ones, the parameters of these evolutionary negations is set by the physical properties received from the past. This is why grass cannot evolve into an amphibian and humans cannot evolve into lizards. 

    In terms of human social development, it was the advent of sedentary living, private property and class structure which negated the classless tribal societies that conditioned human evolution for hundreds of thousands of years. The negation of class society by a higher-order classless association is made possible by technological progress and the human desire for cooperation, leisure and self-directed activity—desires embedded in the present that are received from our collective past. As a molecular gas cloud is transformed into heavy metals, the free association of humanity’s tribal past may be transformed into a technologically advanced, classless and abundant global civilization.

    Cooperation is a carryover from our collective prehistory—the primordial pillar to our monumental success as a species. Class society perverts this tendency toward cooperation by placing the majority of humans into the service of an elite ownership class—with side effects of violent competition and a degraded biosphere that threatens our existence. It is the negation of classes and the fomenting of universal cooperation innate within us that provides the dialectical basis for a peaceful and healthy free association of producers.

    Further reading: 

    Friedrich Engels, Dialectics of Nature.

    —————


    1. Singularities of this nature are also posited to exist at the centre of black holes, leading some scientists to speculate that black holes serve as a point of origin for our universe and infinite more. ↩︎

    2. John Bellamy Foster, “The Return of the Dialectics of Nature: The Struggle for Freedom as Necessity,” Monthly Review, Vol. 74, No. 7: 13. ↩︎

    3. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume One (Ancient Wisdom Publications, 2019), 198.  ↩︎
  • Ecology

    Ecology

    This article is part of a series on classical Marxism.

    The relation of organic beings to their environment has always been one of give-and-take. While nature furnishes the conditions that organisms need to survive, it has also manufactured hazardous weather events, predators, diseases and landscapes that spell certain death. In concordance, a healthy ecosystem begins with the soil required for vegetation, which in turn supports a pyramid of animal and insect populations. All things living return, lifeless, to the soil and start the cycle anew. But this metabolism can be disturbed. Overpopulation of one species relative to others, tectonic shifts and volcanic explosions, atmospheric composition, hydrological changes and, infamously, asteroid strikes from outer space—any of these things open up a metabolic rift in the ecological cycle that result in mass extinctions and a phase transition of the environmental regime.

      Since the last ice age ended with the Younger Dryas, humanity has struggled to find metabolic concordance with its environment as new modes of production and class conflict arose. Friedrich Engels observed: 

    The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture they were laying the basis for the present forlorn state of those countries. When the Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests on the southern slopes, they had no inkling that by doing so they were cutting at the roots of the dairy industry of their region; they had still less inkling that they were thereby depriving their mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year and making possible for them to pour still more furious torrents on the plains during the rainy season. Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature—but that we with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst and that all our mastery of it consist in the fact that we have the advantage of all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.1

    We can recognize that classless hunter-gatherer societies had a mode of production that could have lasted forever as it was technologically-bound to the necessity of sustainable resource consumption and replenishment. But a metabolic rift emerges at the outset of settlement, private property and class division. The soil is tilled, the population proliferates, wildlife is suppressed, waste and nutrients become dislocated by urbanization. While the ancients are forgiven for their lack of foresight toward unintended environmental consequences, the present situation reveals a unique contradiction: while capitalism affords us the science to decode nature’s laws, its momentum denies us the ability to abide them in any rational way.

    The expansionary logic of capitalist production is driven by market competition, the quest for profits and the dominance of exchange-value over use-value in economic relations. As labour and nature are the source of all values in capitalism, they are squeezed mercilessly for the surplus that sweats from their pores.2 The result is an economic system of deeply deformed priorities. Because the use-value of something is only evaluated in terms of what it can exchanged for, the capitalist economic system is unable to price a breathable atmosphere, a healthy ocean, an intact rainforest or an endangered species. On the contrary, minimizing production costs for the sake of profit dictates active harm to the ecosystems that underpin our biological existence. The reason why microplastics float free in our bloodstreams and millions of Amazonian acres disappear annually is because there is no profitable exchange that restricts the use of plastic or spares billions of trees from cattle ranches and sugarcane plantations. While the use-value of a livable biosphere is obvious, within the confines capitalist production both nature and people become venal objects, subordinate and abused.3  

    The systemic nature of environmental challenges are important here, lest one chalk them up to moral failings or inadequate education. For example, it is a consequence of capitalist production that every year 54 billion tons of annual emissions enter the atmosphere and 20 million tons of plastic flow into oceans. But this does not represent “a moral deficit of individual capitalists. They are obliged to follow such behaviour due to competition with other capitalists if they want to survive as capitalists. The decision to act in accordance with that blind drive appears rational.”4 Any attempt from the civil society to legislate better practices will likewise be met with a well-funded wall of oligarchic political resistance, rendering so much effort futile. And the emissions spewed into the atmosphere and plastic dumped into the oceans accelerates, each year more than the last, expanding in lockstep with the capitalist system itself. This is to say nothing of the emptying of aquifers, global deforestation, the hole in the ozone layer, acidifying oceans and the mass extinction of species simultaneously in motion.

    While Marx identified extreme disturbances in the Earth’s ecological metabolism due to industrial production, he did not view the metabolic rift as something unique to the capitalist mode as it is a common feature of all class societies, including the feudal and ancient slave economies. What capitalism has done is elevate the rift to the level of existential threat and, through a process of technological advance, it poses an opportunity to resolve global class conflict altogether. Classlessness, he writes, 

    is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man—the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.5

    To understand his conclusion, we can look to the long-simmering crisis of climate change as it relates to ruling class power. On the one hand, we have a faction of the ruling class which profits directly from fossil fuel combustion and has spent billions of dollars to propagandize the population into believing that there is no consequence to the 53 billion tons of nitrous oxide, methane and carbon dioxide emitted annually. This faction is seen prominently in the Koch Industries and ExxonMobils of the world.  Then there is the other faction of elites who ostensibly recognize the problem while hypocritically living lavish, emission-intensive lifestyles, pursuing egoistic conquests of outer space and contradictory public policy. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg fit into this category, with the latter repeatedly calling for action on climate change while treating himself to a 387-foot super yacht that spews 40 tons of carbon dioxide per hour at cruising speed. 

    Under the auspices of a ruling class engaged either in denialism or outright hypocrisy, what wisdom is the working public supposed to gather from any attempt to manage emissions? Emissions reduction is contextualized either as a outright conspiracy theory or an undue demand to sacrifice yet more of the economic pie—a pie which they produce and receive crumbs to eat.

    As it stands, “the emissions of the world’s millionaires alone would deplete 72 percent of the remaining carbon budget for staying with the 1.5°C [warming] limit,” but there is no talk of capping the individual emissions of the global elite.6 No action can be taken against an elite capitalist class at the helm of the political levers and in control of economic production. And still, 

    the consequences of not reducing emissions on the scale proposed by the IPCC would be calamitous. A 2°C increase could cause the Antarctic ice sheets to disintegrate resulting in up to a nine-meter rise in sea levels. A temperature increase of three degrees could raise sea levels by 25 meters, endangering world food production. This, as well as the melting of the Himalayan glaciers, could result in billions of climate refugees. An increase in carbon dioxide concentrations of 550 parts per million, a 4°C temperature increase, could raise sea levels by as much as seventy-five meters, inundating most coastal areas.7

    Imagine asking billions of working people and their progeny to risk all this disaster so that a meagre 1.5 percent of the world’s population may enjoy a plush existence, unfettered. This is the flex of ruling class power.

    It remains that a technologically advanced economy need not fly within the narrow horizon of commodified nature toward a ruthless pursuit of profit. New value forms can be discovered and asserted. The use-values of a liberated working class will include clean air and water, artistic and scientific progress, a free wild, medical discovery, creative innovation, automated production, leisure and abundance. Our 200,000-year history has shown that ecological ruin and ruling class power is not a feature of our species but an aberration to our story.

    Further reading: 

    Anita Waters, “Marx on the metabolic rift,” Monthly Review Online.

    —————


    1. Friedrich Engels quoted in John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (Monthly Review Press, 2000), 236. ↩︎

    2. Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program. ↩︎

    3. Foster, Marx’s Ecology, 74. ↩︎

    4. Kohei Saito, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy (Monthly Review Press, 2017), 125. ↩︎

    5. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. ↩︎

    6. Matthias Schmelzer and Elena Hofferberth, “Democratic Planning for Degrowth,” Monthly Review, Vol. 75, No.4: 149. ↩︎

    7. Kent Klitgaard, “Planning Degrowth,” Monthly Review, Vol. 75, No. 3: 87. ↩︎