Tag: Socialism

  • The Faux Philosophy of Ayn Rand

    The Faux Philosophy of Ayn Rand

    The concept of “laissez-faire” capitalism has been around for nearly 300 years. It was first devised by French Physiocrats who believed that the only legitimate functions of the state were preserving physical security, civil liberty and property. Karl Marx gives both the capitalist state and laissez-faire economics a thorough description in Capital, demonstrating the role of state intervention in capital accumulation, the subordination of the state to ruling class interest and the destabilizing effects that unregulated markets have on mediating class interests.

    From the Marxian point of view, laissez-faire capitalism is neither politically feasible nor is it socially desirable—a pattern largely validated by history. To the present, we see a tightening grip of oligarchic capital over the state and societal backlash to international trading agreements, institutional lending, the demise of private sector unions and Western deindustrialization spurred by the free movement of capital. The fetishization of “free market economics” was not always inevitable. 

    Yet anyone engaged in political discourse today will inevitably come across capitalist supporters espousing exactly these laissez-faire, minarchist type dogmas. The contemporary incarnation of this vulgar libertarianism traces to the Cold War era and the school of Austrian economics. Fascism and Nazism had erupted as outgrowths of distressed capitalist systems in Europe, prompting many anti-fascists to take a socialist turn. Seeking to rehabilitate capitalism’s image, liberal economists like Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises re-framed the “capitalism v. socialism” debate as one of “free markets v. government planning,” instead of class conflict between workers and elites.

    At the time, this Austrian framing served as a sharp contrast to the centrally planned Soviet economy, the capitalist war economies of fascist belligerents and Keynesian policies in the West. By refusing to engage with the Marxist critique of class power, an idealistic conception of unfettered capitalism could drip freely from the pens of Hayek and von Mises—one where any problem inherent to capitalism could be be solved by being more capitalist-y. This idea was later taken up by Ayn Rand and given a romantic treatment at the heart of her hugely influential Objectivist philosophy.

    A Free Market Utopia

    Although she is often dismissed as an unserious polemic in the academy, it is plain to see why Rand is a great favourite of the ruling class that owns the economy. In The Virtue of Selfishness she lays out her economic brand as “a full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism—with a separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church. A pure system of capitalism has never existed, not even in America; various degrees of government control had been undercutting and distorting it from the start.”1

    This formulation was illustrated in novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, where her rugged protagonists—replete with chiseled jaws, angular frames and aggressively Aryan names—are oppressed by bureaucrats and crony capitalists with beady eyes and balding heads. Whereas Marx had shown that state formation is primarily shaped by an ownership class keen on extending its economic power, Rand casts the state as a product of the shiftless masses, the expression of a Nietzschean herd only capable of irrational self-harm and jealous thoughts.

    Rand’s worlds are curiously devoid of capitalism’s seamiest actors; sex traffickers, dodgy landlords, financial speculators and predatory lenders aren’t found in her world. There are creative entrepreneurial savants and they agonize against the ubiquitous grain of government leeches, thieving associates and parasitic family members. For example, Hank Rearden and Dagny Taggart are despised out of envy over their exceptional talent and competence, which other characters think is unfair and worthy of destroying.

    Rearden is subject to staged riots and government blackmail—even his wife attempts to emotionally destroy him and his brother stages a double-cross to infiltrate his prodigious enterprise and sabotage it from within. Taggart, on the other hand, must contend with her own brother constantly undermining her sage decision-making while also seeking to exploit it.

    There are also principled objectors who consciously withdraw from economic participation. Genius architect Howard Roark opts for hard labour at the granite quarry instead of compromising his artistic integrity with conformist hacks. Hugh Akston, a renowned philosopher in Atlas Shrugged, chooses to flip burgers rather than see his rational teachings go unappreciated. And brilliant inventor John Galt lays track for a railroad rather than lend his talent to a deadbeat society.

    It’s interesting that Rand, the queen of laissez-faire, devised so many heroes that hold their creative ingenuity above crude market interests—although their integrity seems to pay off in other ways. For example, they are able to manifest rippling muscles without exercise and exert sexual dominance over their lower-order rivals with ease.

    Rand stated in her newsletter, “I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason.” Working backwards, it would be irrational for her characters to betray their integrity as that would violate their egoistic virtues which can only be expressed in a laissez-faire society expunged of collectivist ideas. As a result of this reasoning, the climax of Rand’s two novels have her protagonists committing acts of terrorism that force systemic changes to smothering collectivist regimes.

    The Ideal Loner

    To be fair, these books are a romanticism, and Rand’s characters are deliberately single-gear caricatures. To cite one reviewer who gave Atlas Shrugged a positive appraisal, her protagonists are all “healthy, attractive zealots that put in 80 billable hours a week, drink cocktails and have sex-fests every night.” They incur no moral dilemmas, have had no traumas, no children, no phobias and encounter almost nobody worthy of friendship.

    These are idealized versions of people—but, besides Rand, whose ideals do they embody, really? If capitalism is the vehicle of egoism and egoism the vehicle of reason, Rand demonstrates that the only people capable of reasoning a pathway to success are autistic-like, devoid of feeling or want of companionship. The rest of us, subject to the spectrum of human experience and emotion, are doomed to mediocrity, beady eyes and Rogaine in the medicine cabinet.

    When we appear as participants in the market, our own complex individuality is stripped down to that of “buyer” or “seller.” Likewise, we can spot a glaring flaw in Ayn Rand’s love-letters to capitalist individualism: it only works by when the complexity of human sensuousness and social relations are torn down to the studs. She’s taken the narrow viewpoint of a market participant and has tried to build a comprehensive philosophy around it.

    In his climactic speech of Atlas Shrugged, John Galt argues that trade is the object of the mind, and “man’s mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is given to him, its content is not.” But Rand’s formulation here is too reductionist to be accurate.

    Becoming Human

    In the process of becoming independent subjects, we can point to language being the bedrock of human consciousness. Language is not traded for but is freely received in a social context. It is a collective product that connects individuals to the cooperative group necessary for survival. According to psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, language plugs the individual into the symbolic order and enables subjectivity, transmission of knowledge and abstract thought production.

    Through language, a social consciousness acts upon the individual and the individual, in turn, acts upon the social consciousness. Marx and Engels write in The German Ideology: “Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical consciousness…for language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men. Consciousness is therefore from the very beginning a social product.” 

    If this seems like a stretch, consider the cases of feral children raised without human interaction. It is clear that consciousness does not develop in the void of language and human contact. Survival is not guaranteed either, unless the child is taken up by a pack of animals. Both survival and mental content must be given at an early age if they are to be utilized later on. Rand’s oversimplification of individuality was first established in The Fountainhead when Howard Roark says in court, “but the mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought.” This is literally true but it denies a key aspect of the constant exchange between ourselves and the environment. 

    There is a social consciousness that exists within the minds of society’s members and it comprises that collection of thoughts not specific to an individual. National borders, social status, cultural norms, the value of paper money—these are all examples of constructs within the social consciousness that do not live or die with any one person. Marx and Lacan posit a social consciousness that begins with language. Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung came to similar conclusions about the the collective unconscious, represented by the superego and universal archetypes.

    In a book review, Ann Marie Plane and Leslie Tuttle explain that dreams possess a “dual quality” of “individual experience and social claim” that roots “dreamers in the greatest and most charged religious, political and social debates of their times.”2 In other words, the most intensely private thoughts of individuals—their dreams—reveal both the economic epoch and social unconscious temporally in existence. Rand’s insistence that “nothing can be learned about man by studying society” simply doesn’t hold water.3

    It follows, then, that the principal struggle laid out in The Fountainhead, “the individual against the collective,” can be rejected as a false premise. One becomes an individual by way of the collective, just as the collective exists by way of the individuals that form it. Marx writes in The Grundrisse: “The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.” In other words, it is working together rather than apart that leads to individual flourishing. 

    Indeed, one cannot become a writer without readers, a parent without children, a critic without artists, a husband without a spouse, a worker without an employer, a professor without students, a friend without a friend, a buyer without a seller. Rejecting the social dimension of human nature will result in the type of emotional stunting that clearly afflicts the Randian hero. Nathaniel Branden, Ayn Rand’s protege and former lover, picked up on this later in life when he criticized Rand: “You have taught people to repress, repress, repress.”

    Toward Socialism

    Perhaps a crushingly lonely laissez-faire dystopia is the best possible system for the statuesque workaholics of Rand’s imagination. But for an individualism congruent with human nature, it is a shame that Ayn did not discover Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism. Contrary to Rand, Wilde says that “Socialism itself will be of value because it will lead to Individualism” and this will “disturb the monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.”

    Socialism rests its case on the real premise that no person can exist without another, that no human potential is reached alone and no prosperity is achieved independently. While the market flattens us into the one-dimensional traders of Rand’s novels, Wilde says that “art is the most intense mode of Individualism that the world has ever known.” Art, creative invention and scientific discovery express the full knowledge of human existence and our passion for the universal truths of nature. 

    Living for others, which Rand denounces as an altruistic evil, is precisely what capitalism requires to function; namely, the billions of working people and consumers who exist on a decaying planet to the benefit of a tiny global elite. Wilde: “The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism is, undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so hard upon almost everyone.” 

    Free and voluntary exchange between people is only possible absent a capitalist class structure that subordinates us to impersonal market forces and positions us into a cutthroat competition against machines, fellow workers and corporate owners. Wilde continues, “were the machine the property of all, everyone would benefit by it. At present machinery competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve man.”

    The proper conditions that Wilde refers to is a democratic economy of common ownership. Supporting independent creative pursuits under a regime of minimized work days, automated production, the dissolution of “intellectual property” and freely accessible housing, education and health care will never be in the interest of the capitalist ruling class. In capitalism—laissez-faire or otherwise—profit is the object of the economy. Instead, we need individual flourishing to become the object of the economy. That will only be achieved through socialism.

    Thanks for reading!


    1. Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness (Signet, 1964), 33. ↩︎

    2. Ann Marie Plane and Leslie Tuttle, “Review Essay: Dreams and Dreaming in the Early Modern World,” in Renaissance Quarterly Vol. 67, No. 3: 920-5. ↩︎

    3. Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (Signet, 1986), 15. ↩︎
  • In Brief: Who Are the Globalists?

    In Brief: Who Are the Globalists?

    Question:

    Who are the “globalists” that are referenced so often?

    —P. K.

    Hi P. K.,  

    It seems the right will do anything but name capitalists as their enemy. While “globalism” can mean many things—including recognizing the global impact of local actions—the right tends to use the term as a sort of conspiratorial umbrella with which to shade their centrist opponents. In this vein, a globalist is someone who advocates trading off national sovereignty to a multinational governing body, such as the European Union or United Nations. Previous years have seen fixation with the World Economic Forum and their “Great Reset Initiative,” an alleged scheme to end personal property ownership through mind-controlling vaccines and outright seizure.

    From a Marxist perspective, the frustrating aspect of the right wing globalist conception is the truth embedded within it. Globalization is characterized by multinational firms outsourcing employment, corporate-drafted free trade agreements, international warfare and the financial takeover of the economy by hedge funds, asset managers and banks. These trends have been a chimera for the left for some decades now, and past protests in Quebec, Seattle and New York attest. 

    The membership of corporate clubs like the WEF is drawn directly from the global capitalist ruling class. Meanwhile, international trade agreements like the USMCA and political organizations like the UN and OECD are subsidiary to the reality of global commerce and economic interdependence. In other words, “globalism” is a mental image projected by the actually existing liberal capitalist economic order. The right seeks to alter the image while the left wants to smash the projector.

    Incredibly, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels perfectly diagnosed the problem in 1848:


    The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.1

    The “great chagrin of Reactionists” toward globalization during Marx’s lifetime has clearly never gone away—it is the root of the “globalist” slur. Many millions of people around the world rightfully bemoan the loss of local industries and a cosmopolitan economy that rapidly revolutionizes culture. But the right has never wrapped their arms around the problem, as evidenced by reflexive conservative support for corporate-friendly rates of taxation and deregulation that lubricate the globalization machine. 

    The reason why corporate-funded media and think tanks are so hostile to socialism is because it is the only remedy to what ails the capitalist economy. Unfair trade and the outsourcing of labour and capital is impossible under a system of nationalized finance, rational economic planning, public ownership of strategic industries and worker owned enterprises. Exceptionally low rates of taxation on workers are also possible under a system that allocates public sector surpluses toward infrastructure, as China proves. Facts are stubborn things and capitalism will one day have a final reckoning that puts an end to the contrived “globalist” contention once and for all. 

    In sols.

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

    Footnotes:


    1. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Bourgeois and Proletarians” in The Communist Manifesto. ↩︎
  • Ask the Editor: Is Democracy Compatible with Capitalism?

    Ask the Editor: Is Democracy Compatible with Capitalism?

    To the editor,

    Is political democracy compatible with capitalist economies?

    Thanks,

    Matt.

    [Sent via email]

    Hi Matt,

    This is a complex question that hinges on subjective definitions of democracy. Democracy literally means “people rule,” derived from the ancient Athenian concept of demokratia. The basic definition is straightforward but the practice has varied wildly along with popular conceptions that are serpentine, at best.

    For example, ancient Athenians would dismiss elected representatives as non-democratic and oligarchic by nature. Athens had a direct democratic system that filled bureaucratic posts by lottery and passed laws with an assembly open to all citizens. On the surface, this appears even more in the spirit of “people rule” than what we have today. But when we adjust for the exclusivity of Athenian citizenship, only about 25% of the population was enfranchised since women, slaves and foreigners were forbidden from political participation. For older and more inclusive examples of “people rule” we could look to the consensus-based decision making among many tribal societies.

    Democratic models antiquity and beyond only takes us so far, however. The argument could be made that “purer” forms of democracy which developed in the context of a tribe or city-state are simply not compatible in a modern world of teeming metropolises and complex nation-states. There is merit to this argument from a historical materialist perspective.

    Consensus-based decision making is a logical outgrowth of highly interdependent individuals that hunted, gathered and sheltered as small communities. Cohesion and cooperation between members was the best guarantor of productivity and individual survival. In antiquity, on the other hand, the exploitation of slave labour was the productive basis that made a caste of citizens in the polis possible. This economic dependency on slavery elevated the role of military conquest and contributed to the confinement of women to the domestic sphere. Citizenship in the classical world was inextricably linked with military service and politics became the sole domain of a kind of warrior caste.

    What these historical examples illustrate are models of democracy that arose from economic practicality rather than lofty idealism. The same is true of modern democratic forms, which were spawned by a nascent bourgeois class looking to wrest control of government from the European aristocracy of the 17th and 18th centuries. This is why property qualifications were an important feature of early voting rights across the West, just as military service was an important feature of citizenship in antiquity. Capitalism favours commercial expansion and classical slave economies favoured military conquest, and this is reflected in the democratic forms that each system produced. 

    A unique aspect of industrial capitalism is the massive leap in productive capacity and potential. This has largely made material scarcity artificial and wholly dependent on access to money as the medium of consumption. Because of this, class struggle within capitalism has produced some benefits for the restive masses, including universal suffrage and a basic social safety net.

    Whereas strict parameters used to be put around those who can vote, it is now a case of parameters around those who can feasibly win office and pass legislation. Liberal governments all over the world are managed by financial elites with the ability to fund political campaigns, media networks, lobbyists and public debt. Capitalist democracies therefore achieve the appearance of popular legitimacy through multiparty elections but the actual governing process is nonetheless channelled by elite class interests. 

    Is democracy compatible with capitalism? If throwing a ballot every few years into a system subordinated to moneyed interests is the working definition of democracy, then yes—democracy is not only compatible with capitalism, it is capitalism’s “best possible shell,” as Lenin wrote.1 On the other hand, if we were to define democracy as “people rule” with popular decision making that extended from the workplace up to specific line-item national legislation, then capitalism is completely antithetical to it. Outside of tribal society, direct democracy is an unrealized ideal that awaits a radical economic transformation to give it shape.

    In sols.

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

    Footnotes:


    1. Vladimir Lenin, “The State and Revolution” in Essential Works of Lenin: “What Is To Be Done? And Other Writings (CreateSpace, 2012): 382-3. ↩︎
  • US Aggression in Latin America: A History

    US Aggression in Latin America: A History

    When the U.S. government purchased Louisiana from France, they secured a land stretching from present-day Montana, through Oklahoma and terminating at the Gulf of Mexico. However a new dispute opened with Spain concerning the southwest boundary of the formerly French territory: Texas. The Americans felt that they had acquired the territory as part of their deal with France but Spain maintained that it was them who had control over that land. The Spanish sale of Florida to Washington was meant to settle the Texas issue and the U.S. government formally relinquished its claims as part of the transaction. But American settlers on the frontier had other ideas.

    Mexico gained independence from Spain in 1821 and was quickly recognized by the United States. Initially the two countries enjoyed friendly diplomatic relations, with the Treaty of Limits affirming Mexican sovereignty over Texas and other western territories, including present-day Arizona and California. Within this cordial political atmosphere, American homesteaders were invited to settle in Texas and help to stabilize a fragile Mexican economy. What they received was an unruly population with little respect for Mexican sovereignty, much less Mexican people or customs.1 Tensions came to a boil when Mexico abolished slavery in 1829. As many American settlers had brought slaves with them, they would have faced a loss of property if the Mexican law was enforced. Instead they took up arms, kicked out Mexican authorities and demanded to be annexed by the United States.

    Early Aggressions

    Mexico warned the U.S. that their border treaty would be nullified if they annexed Texas. The Mexicans undoubtedly misunderstood the expansionist spirit of manifest destiny, having been fooled by prior friendly relations with Washington. The resulting Mexican–American War dropped the full brutality of U.S. superiority down on Mexico like the hammer of Thor: boys were shot for sport; churches were desecrated and Catholics murdered; women and little girls were stripped naked and assaulted in unspeakable ways; entire villages were razed by fire.2 The barbarity only halted when the U.S. military occupation of Mexico City forced the surrender of 55% of Mexican territory.

    The Mexican–American War was not any kind of dark chapter in the history of U.S.–Latin America relations. On the contrary—it set the mould. With the conquest of new territory stretching to the Pacific, American commercial interests began to reach down the coastline and into Central America.

    The western appetite for bananas and other tropical commodities brought US capital into contact with a new swathe of Latino peoples—and it went about as well for them as it did for the Mexicans in years prior. The ravaging of Mexico proved to America, with its powerful industrial economy, that it could act with impunity toward its less-developed neighbours to the south. Their capital and guns afforded them enormous power over a region that lacked both.

    Warfare is defined as an “open and declared armed hostile conflict between nations.” The Banana Wars of the early 20th century carry an unfortunate title because they were not wars—they were repeated molestations of vulnerable populations by an imperial power.

    When Haiti and the Dominican Republic fell into debt, the US deployed artillery, machine guns and naval ships. They stole the national gold reserves, turned government finances over to New York banks and gave American corporations free access to land for sugar plantations run by forced labour. When a nationalist insurgency threatened foreign property in Nicaragua, marines arrived to quash the rebellion. They proceeded to take over government finances and established a military base to suppress future anti-American revolts. When Washington decided to build a canal across the Isthmus of Panama, they backed a secessionist movement that would pull the small, pliable country of Panama from the lands of Greater Colombia. When abhorrent working conditions on American-owned sugar plantations in Cuba sparked civil unrest, thousands of marines arrived to protect the harvest and suppress anti-American agitation.3 When plantation workers in Colombia protested payment in coupons rather than cash and demanded a six day work week, the United Fruit Company massacred the strikers. In Honduras, United Fruit kept workers’ movements at bay by paying off presidential candidates and funding right wing militias. This combination of efforts made the corporation the most powerful entity in the state.

    The Dictatorships

    The advent of the Cold War brought American hegemony over Latin America to new heights. With the US military in confrontation with communist forces in Asia and Europe, covert action and special operations were relied on in the Western Hemisphere. Across Latin America, torture chambers and CIA-trained death squads blossomed alongside a growing number of brutal right wing dictators aided by Washington. Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela all suffered visits from oppressive regimes that consolidated power and murdered their opposition under the cynical guise of “anticommunism.” Even modestly progressive and liberal-democratic movements were snuffed out in many of these countries, as elections were overturned and American corporate interest reigned supreme.

    This was the Latin America that confronted a young Che Guevara as he embarked on his notorious motorcycle journey across the continent. On his trip he witnessed the the cold and hungry conditions of mine workers in Chile and the faces of poverty in Peru, people who “go on living only because it’s a habit they cannot shake.”4

    Guevara correctly understood that the division of Latin America into “unstable and illusory nationalities” made the region ripe for exploitation and US domination.5 He saw this domination first-hand in 1954 when living in Guatemala, where an elected government proposed land reform for its farmers. Soon afterward, it was overthrown by American bombers in order to install a pro-United Fruit Company dictatorship headed by Castillo Armas, a CIA asset who murdered thousands of people. This experience proved the futility of representative democracy in the face of powerful corporate interests.

    Having been marked for execution by the homicidal U.S. puppet in Guatemala, Guevara fled to Mexico where he met Fidel Castro and joined the Cuban revolutionary struggle. Cuba was also ruled by a pro-US dictator at this time and he oversaw routine executions of political opponents and a Cuban economy where American corporations controlled approximately 40% of sugar production, 90% of mining concessions, 100% of cattle ranching, 80% of utilities and had a monopoly on imports. Additionally, the corruption of the Batista regime allowed the American Mafia transform Havana into a drunken cesspool of gambling and prostitution. 

    With striking lucidity President John F. Kennedy admitted: 

    I believe that there is no country in the world including any and all the countries under colonial domination, where economic colonization, humiliation and exploitation were worse than in Cuba, in part owing to my country’s policies during the Batista regime.

    The success of the Cuban revolution saw the re-appropriation of national property and the destruction of casinos by throngs of empowered Habaneros. The revolution went on to deliver universal housing, healthcare and education, restoring dignity to a despoiled country. However, the antagonism would re-emerge in the form of a suffocating economic blockade and countless coup attempts.

    The Debt Racket

    The end of the Cold War brought more liberal governance to Latin America but they were saddled with debts carried over from the era of military juntas. From this situation came America’s next racket: the “Washington Consensus,” which was little more than a set of neoliberal dictates devised by western financiers for nations held in debt bondage.

    Mass privatization, austerity budgets and easy American access to cheap labour and resources were the hallmarks of crisis financing in the 1980s and 1990s, pulling in countries such as Argentina, Chile, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico and Venezuela—resulting in La Década Perdida (the Lost Decade) of stagnant economies and soaring inequality. In other words, the Washington Consensus represented another hegemonic “push from the United States” for “trade agreements favourable to the United States…The free flow of capital that these trade agreements were designed to foster has only benefitted the rich nations and the wealthy classes.”6 Derivative of these neoliberal policy prescriptions is a migration crisis and the 21st century “pink tide” of elected progressive governments throughout Latin America.

    From the Banana Wars era to the present day, we can see that Che Guevara was proven right: liberal democracy in exploited countries is too weak to uplift the great majority and a lack of regional solidarity has made it easy for the United States to run roughshod over Latin America. In terms of real purchasing power, the region has been economically stagnant for 50 years, with examples of worsening poverty and shrinking middle incomes over that time. The pink tide movement was driven back by “soft” coups in Brazil and Bolivia, corporate pressure and repeated attacks from Washington on Latin American progressive heads of state. One pink tide country which resisted coup attempts and foreign subversion was Venezuela under Hugo Chavez. 

    In a span of 14 years Chavez was able to double school enrolment, make literacy and healthcare universal, raise access to safe drinking water from 82% to 95%, build 700,000 homes, return one million acres of land to indigenous people, reduce malnutrition from 21% to 3%, and cut unemployment and infant mortality in half. His government accomplished this through a program that forcefully eschewed liberalism in favour of participatory democracy at the neighbourhood level, worker-owned enterprises and nationalization of resources and services. For these successes, the United States delivered to Venezuela the same verdict that Cuba received decades ago: economic strangulation, with the harshest measures arriving in 2019.

    What Venezuela and Cuba represent is an expression of defiance in the face of 180 years of unbroken US hegemony in Latin America. For this reason, they are admired by a great many people who “personally suffered under US-sponsored military dictatorships that dominated much of the region” for decades.7 The kidnapping of Chavez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, is an attempt to force compliance with the pillaging of Latino resources that American corporations feel entitled to. Cheering this move is fatally wrong, even for opponents of socialism: if Venezuela and Cuba are the backlash to United States interventionism, it follows that another intervention could make the situation much worse.  

    What the United States has done to Venezuela will perpetuate the familiar cycle of political violence and economic dependency—the breeding ground for anti-American resentment—serving nobody but the corporate lobby. The best moments in US–Latin America relations occurred when America expanded the realm of sovereignty rather than crushed it: the turnover of the Panama Canal to Panamanian authority and FDR’s short-lived Good Neighbour policy of non-interference in the region. As long as Latin American politics remains a reaction to American doctrine, the Western Hemisphere will not be free.

    Thanks for reading!

    Footnotes:

    1. The irony of this development in Texas compared to present-day complaints over immigration should not be lost on anyone. ↩︎

    2. See: Stephen Carney, The Occupation of Mexico (Government Printing Office, 2016): 20, 37, and Peter Guardino, “Gender, Soldiering, and Citizenship in the Mexican–American War of 1846-1848” in The American Historical Review, Vol. 119, No. 1: 43. ↩︎

    3. Louis A. Perez Jr., Intervention, Revolution, and Politics in Cuba (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012): 98. ↩︎

    4. Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey (Ocean Press, 2003): 41.  ↩︎

    5. Ibid, 92. ↩︎

    6. Teresa A. Meade, A History of Modern Latin America: 1800 to the Present (John Wiley & Sons, 2022): 8. ↩︎

    7. Ibid, 10. ↩︎
  • Ask the Editor: Predicting 2026

    Ask the Editor: Predicting 2026

    To the editor,


    What do you expect in the year ahead?

    Happy New Year,

    Teela.

    [Sent from Bluesky]

    Happy New Year!

    Predictions may be a fool’s errand but there is always some low-hanging fruit. Democrats will sweep midterm elections, Canada’s prime minister likely obtains his coveted majority government and plastic pollution continues to worsen. Marxists understand the relatively low stakes of these surface-level tendencies. The world we are living in is one where power has long been consolidated by an elite corporate class; yawning economic inequalities and corrupted liberal democracies are only symptoms of this fact. I do not foresee any challenge to ruling class power in the near term, which means that the direction of 2026 has already been set.  

    For all its Trump-related pandemonium, 2025 did not really move the needle away from trajectories previously established. Inflation continued to eat away at pocketbooks around the world. Russia and Israel aggressively redrew the maps of their respective neighbourhoods. China held on to its massive gains in global exports and new technologies. The Western world, including Canada and the European Union, have once again proven politically adrift without the tide of American leadership. The artificial intelligence economy—buoying the world’s stock markets by hype—has turned flat without reaching any clear tipping point. Venezuela has invited condemnable aggression from Washington and this is the fate of any Latin American country daring to exercise sovereignty over their national resources.

    With the big stories of 2025, you’ll notice there was not a lot that was new; events have all unfolded around past momentum. Even an objective change, like US tariff polilcy, has only accelerated the existing trend of Western decline relative to a rising East. Populist movements demonstrate a world clamouring for catharsis but 2026 won’t be the year to deliver it. That is because the economic forces at play tell a story of near-term easing rather than escalation. Inflation is slowing down. AI investors have begun to exercise caution amidst talk of a bubble. The prospect of a Russia–Ukraine ceasefire signal the willingness of both to prioritize economic repair over military objectives. And the erraticism of the Trump White House has only spurred China to stay its course while the West begrudgingly flounders. The fate of Venezuela’s Maduro government may be an open question but, whatever happens, it will be a movie we have seen before.

    The tense stability which looms over the globe this January does not portend any major improvement. Financial strain, environmental deterioration, warfare, oligarchic power, political impulsivity and social unrest will all continue to simmer under the heat of the recent past. The ancient Greek philosopher Anaxagoras said that to “separate off” elements from one another takes a revolution.1 Likewise, the West will need to “separate off” its current ruling class in order to realize a change to its set trajectory. History shows us that revolutions do not occur unless class conflict reaches a raging boil. Although we will be waiting past the new year for that, let’s raise a glass to 2026 and try our best to enjoy the simmer.

    In sols,

        Your editor.

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

    Footnotes:


    1. Early Greek Philosophy, trans. Jonathan Barnes (Penguin, 2002): 196. Anaxagoras here was referencing the nature of matter in the universe. ↩︎
  • The Revolutionary Potential of Cooperatives

    The Revolutionary Potential of Cooperatives

    Too much of the political conversation is centred around distribution. For the left, this means steeper rates of progressive taxation and social spending. For the right it is the inverse, lower taxes—particularly at the high end of the wealth pyramid—and reduced social spending. The specific rates and policies have shape-shifted over the years but this dichotomy sets the parameter of political debate in the main. But it is a shallow dichotomy which provides tremendous benefit to the economic elites because it does not lay a finger to the seat of their domination. Let’s remember, how the pie gets sliced is almost irrelevant next to who owns the oven. 

    If there is one Marxist teaching that is conveniently taboo in mainstream discussion, it is that wealth and power exist first and foremost as economic relations. After Jeff Bezos’ joyride into suborbital space, the first people he thanked were his employees and customers who unwittingly “paid for all of this.” Of course, if those same people had a choice as to where their generated surplus was allocated, they probably wouldn’t sign it over to the vanity project of an eccentric billionaire.

    It is the economic relationship between Bezos and his employees that puts a material surplus squarely on his lap to play with. This relationship gives him command over market conditions and a vast army of labour, as well as a grotesquely outsized political sway. It is a Herculean task to pry this surplus from his lap with taxation because liberal governance grants enormous influence to “job creators” by way of the corporate lobby and political donations. 

    Marx said “to be radical is to grasp the matter by the root.”1 While taxation rates help to manicure the lawn, the enormity of problems posed by global capitalism demands an entire re-seeding. Progressive forces must apprehend the relations of production that first give rise to the corporate capture of government, the K-shaped economy, environmental destruction, the state of perpetual warfare. By transforming the economy from one that is authoritarian and competitive into one that is democratic and cooperative, matters of distribution and political equality resolve themselves on the new terms.

    A Catalogue of Crises

    Taking inventory of the problems that have plagued our capitalist society for decades, we see worker-owned enterprises (cooperatives) present themselves as a panacea. Waste and environmental decline, crisis-level mental health outcomes, community loss, job insecurity and high costs of living are a few that spring to the foreground. 

    On environmental outcomes, there is a structural benefit to workers owning their own workplace. The owners are not impersonal investors from gated communities afar, but members of the community in which they operate. Cooperative economic relations encourage superior environmental stewardship because worker-owners are more likely to avoid polluting their communities and the planet than impersonal investors and owners.

    Multiple studies demonstrate the pro-social tendency of cooperatives to prioritize environmental goals, reduce waste and allocate resources efficiently—especially when compared against capitalist firms. As one example, a cooperative bank in the UK was able to reduce downstream emissions of clients by 70% by providing financing for renewables, energy efficiency upgrades and carbon offsets.2

    In terms of mental health and community, the accelerated decline of both are not unrelated. It should be no surprise that a chronically-online society increasingly devoid of face-to-face interactions is manifesting symptoms of a “loneliness epidemic,” negatively affecting local communities and individual well-being. The negative mental health symptoms we observe today validate the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm’s five fundamental needs for mental well being: relatedness, rootedness and unity, transcendence, sense of identity and frame of orientation.

    Because of democratic decision making and a shared destiny amongst stakeholders, cooperatives offer the individual a community unto itself and create a vested interest in civic participation, addressing each of Fromm’s fundamental needs. The superiority of this model compared to capitalist corporations is reflected in higher rates of job satisfaction and happiness at work. At a national scale, widespread adoption of the cooperative model would enhance social cohesion, community engagement and improve productivity. 

    Artificial intelligence and automation are frequently cited as factors aggravating conditions of employment insecurity and precarious work. Productive technologies should not be feared, though. Workers that own their firms are incentivized toward technological efficiency and practical AI deployment because it saves labour time without impacting income. There is a longstanding capitalist contradiction regarding technological progression: employers covet it for the productivity gains, employees fear it over the ensuing layoffs. When employees become owners, this contradiction is resolved.

    Furthermore, worker cooperatives have demonstrated greater staff retention and job security, even in times of economic recession. Whereas capitalist firms often have an express fiduciary duty to prioritize the interests of the investment class over their workers, worker-owners are far more likely to set funds aside in periods of strong economic performance in order to stabilize incomes during periods of weakness. The structural difference between conventional corporations and cooperatives also sees workers accrue greater employment benefit coverage for their families and up to 80% above-market pay. A comfortable living wage is the demonstrated norm in mature cooperative formations.

    In one stroke, the cooperative model alleviates almost all of the civilizational problems pressing so hard on us today. Even political polarization, drug addiction and crime could be expected to crash downward with increased community building, financial security and social cohesion amongst the population. Rather than pitch socialism as a stoic alternative, cooperatives offer a visible pathway to transcending capitalism altogether; a world where wage labour is viewed as dimly as serfdom or slavery is right now.

    Laying the Soil

    But it is never so easy. For the apologists of capitalism, the usual retort is something along the lines of: “Nothing is stopping the formation of cooperatives right now. The market will decide if they are the superior model or not.” This falsely assumes some kind of fair marketplace where the best ideas, products and formations inevitably rise to the top. In reality, we live within a global system that doles out multi-trillion dollar subsidies to capitalist firms each year. Publicly funded and well-endowed schools of commerce glisten on campuses wherever a university is to be found. Banks raise low-interest debt and investment for hedge funds and publicly-listed companies, while giving relatively draconian terms to small businesses—and even worse for cooperatives, which are often denied loans. 

    Rosa Luxemburg described cooperatives as “small units of socialized production within the midst of capitalist exchange.”3 Worker owned enterprises must compete with conventional firms in the capitalist market but they do so with far less tools at their disposal. While they offer enormous pro-social and environmental benefits, this does not count toward GDP or rate of profit—the only measures of capitalist value, even in a world on fire. 

    The struggle to breathe under an avaricious economy thirsty for profit account for many of the shortcomings of the cooperative movement, including cases where wage labour and outsourcing is resorted to. But this does not mean cooperatives are a dead-end, they just have the wrong substrate. The history of capitalism, too, is pockmarked by failed attempts of merchant-run cities and bourgeois revolutions to shed their aristocratic chains, only to lose momentum and become subsumed again by dominant feudal relations.4

    Socialism will transcend capitalism in the West when a future revolution applies the lessons of China’s nation building state-owned enterprises and public planning; when the unimpeded direct democratic rule of the people has been won. Once community and environment take their place among the measures of wealth, new economic relations between associated producers and consumers can be organized. As Karl Marx said:

    If cooperative production is not to remain a sham and a snare; if it is to supersede the capitalist system; if united cooperative societies are to regulate national production upon a common plan, thus taking it under their own control, and putting an end to the constant anarchy and periodical convulsions which are the fatality of capitalist production—what else would it be but communism, “possible” communism?5

    Thanks for reading!

    Footnotes:

    1. Karl Marx: Selected Writings, Second Ed. trans. David McClellan (Oxford University Press, 2000): 77. ↩︎

    2. Melissa Scanlan, Prosperity in the Fossil-Free Economy: Cooperatives and the Design of Sustainable Businesses (Yale University Press, 2021): 261. ↩︎

    3. Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution? ↩︎

    4. John Bellamy Foster, “Capitalism Has Failed, What Next?” Monthly ReviewVol. 70, No. 9. ↩︎

    5. Karl Marx, The Civil War in France. ↩︎
  • Will AI Raise Us Up to Heaven—or Cast Us Into Hell?

    Will AI Raise Us Up to Heaven—or Cast Us Into Hell?

    Here sit I, form men
    In my own image,
    A race that is like me,
    To suffer, to weep,
    To enjoy and to rejoice,
    And to heed you not,
    As I!

    —Prometheus, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

    The artificial intelligence gold rush has been well underway since the release of ChatGPT. Technology companies within the computational ecosystem have seen their shares explode along the ongoing rush toward new data centres, more advanced chips and supporting energy infrastructure. Competition for AI researchers within the United States have seen employee poaching between companies and pay packages of up to $100 million. Trump’s unveiling of the Stargate project, intended to turbocharge domestic AI capabilities, makes clear the national importance of this emerging technology.

    Across the Pacific, China’s release of DeepSeek was the first shot across the bow of American dominance over the space. DeepSeek is a large language model AI which rivals ChatGPT in capability but was developed for a fraction of the cost. China has taken an all-hands-on-deck approach to developing AI, cracking down on the video game industry in order to direct resources toward strategic technology, while fusing together civilian and military research to avoid compartmentalization. China is in the process of integrating AI in all facets of the economy and their rapid progress has led to fears of an AI arms race between the “democratic” West and “authoritarian” East.

    AI Apocalypse? 

    Before you fret over the outcome of this battle for technological superiority, first consider that it may not matter. There is an ominous hypothesis that has casted a shadow over the topic of AI since its conception; namely, the total annihilation of humanity. Just in case there weren’t enough existential crises for us to worry about in this late stage of capitalist alienation, computer scientists Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares have done the podcast circuit promoting their book about artificial general intelligence: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. A title like that needs no elaboration. 

    The historian Yuval Noah Harari has issued a similar warning about AI, as have many prominent figures in the field including Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Mustafa Suleyman, Sam Altman and Elon Musk. It’s interesting that leaders of this industry have chosen to be up front about the catastrophic risk their product imposes rather than gaslighting the public post-hoc for years, as oil and tobacco companies did.

    The AI doomsday scenario has been a staple of science fiction for a long time. The Matrix, Westworld, The Terminator and I, Robot come to mind. Machines become sentient and immediately treat their creators as an obstacle to be destroyed, or so the trope goes. No wonder so many people imagine the arrival of superintelligence ringing out like the battlecry of Krishna: “I have come forth to destroy the worlds.”1

    Ghost in the Machine

    It’s worthwhile to address this subject head-on, as no discussion of AI technology can be useful to anyone who believes that meaningful advances in the space will instantly kill us all. Firstly, the malevolent sentient machine of Hollywood lore is certainly impossible, as the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer attests. Schopenhauer was a cynical thinker but, as the progenitor of psychoanalysis, he understood that drives correlate with biological need and consciousness correlates with knowledge.2 A computer, like any inorganic “body without organs,” may have pre-programmed compulsions but it will not have drives; it may have a vast repository of information but it will not have knowledge.3

    To elaborate, consider the example of AI generated artwork which is “generally ugly and emotionless.” Rebecca Jennings at Vox goes as far as saying AI art will always kind of suck and Schopenhauer explains why: 

    The apprehended Idea is the true and only source of every genuine work of art…Machines mince very fine and mix up what is put into them, but they can never digest it, so that the constituent elements of others can always be found again, and picked out and separated from the mixture.4

    Machines cannot apprehend an idea because that requires a conscious will to life subsumed by the sensuous world. Capable brains are not the only requirement for consciousness, as cases of feral children demonstrate. Consciousness requires minds in constant negotiation with the opposing demands of our biology, social relations, physical environment, a shared language, subjective emotions, sense perception and received knowledge. As one starts a fire by rubbing sticks, it is a dialectical friction that sparks consciousness in humans and expresses our drives. Inorganic matter, including complex AI systems, simply cannot have that. Pursuing abstract “superintelligence” will always be fantastical, akin to running for the horizon in order to touch the clouds.

    But AI could endanger us without conscious decision making. We are talking about revolutionary technology and, returning to Schopenhauer, “with every human undertaking there is something that is not within our power, and does not come into our calculations.”5 What distinguishes AI from software is the ability to interpret data, process new information, make predictions and operate hardware. The momentum of its energy makes an AI system capable of formulating unpredictable goals such as “to count the grains of sand on Boracay, or to calculate the decimal places of pi indefinitely, or to maximize the total number of paperclips in its future lightcone.”6

    One can see how AI could execute a decision to sweep humanity away if we come between its calculated actions. The scenarios by which we are swept away are not yet apparent. Hypothetically, an AI with access to unwitting accomplices or robots could formulate a supervirus or as-yet-undiscovered weapon of mass destruction and unleash it right from under our noses. 

    Technological Disempowerment

    It is a common belief that Big Tech is taking our species on a one-way trip aboard a kamikaze plane because this is their own narrative. There is a salient point to be reckoned with here: if both the majority of the population and the leaders of industry are fully aware of a human extinction event resulting from AI development, but are powerless to mitigate the risk, then we must already be enslaved to our system of production. A free and rational person does not accept certain death as the outcome of their work. Only a slave does that.

    It is the economic system that renders us powerless—and this is the real threat confronting society. It isn’t AI. AI has the potential to deliver cures for cancer, fix climate change, detoxify the environment, rapidly research new energy breakthroughs for space travel and defeat material scarcity on the cheap. But that won’t happen on its own. For a tool to realize its positive potential it needs to be used for the right reasons.

    Technological progress in capitalism has the feel of “one step forward, two steps back.” Automobiles are great—except for the emissions and roadkill. Smartphones have put computers in billions of pockets—but now people are addicted to them. Plastic has opened up a new paradigm of construction—but it’s clogging the oceans. The Internet has achieved global connectivity—but conspiracies and misinformation destroy lives and kill political discourse. The reason this happens is simple: unleashing these technologies is profitable and mitigating their harms is not. 

    It’s easy to imagine AI as a destructive force because we already live in a society twitching to the fetishes of tech oligarchs. Their capacity to inflict immense social harm should not be underestimated. Because China has subordinated industry to government planning, they have been able to efficiently mitigate the risks of technology by placing the common good over profit. Electric vehicles and renewable energy for cleaner air; shrinking deserts with afforestation; hard-limits on screen time for Chinese youth; suppression of AI slop and misinformation; restricting single-use plastics as a step toward tackling the pollution crisis. 

    In terms of AI, a recent article in Foreign Affairs highlights China’s superior rollout, scaling automation and robotics with the goal of complete economic integration by 2030. This is China’s strategy to alleviate demands on an aging workforce, with an eye toward future material abundance and socialist distribution. Realization of carefully formulated concrete targets is what will make AI useful.

    The West needs to make a direct democratic analog to socialism with Chinese characteristics. Within the realm of public ownership and democratic decision making, AI would be a powerful tool to develop universal human flourishing and abundance. Within the narrow realm of tech oligarchs and the financial elite, it is nothing but a profit generator turbocharging fossil fuel consumption, economic inequality and chatbot psychosis. We can use AI to raise ourselves to heaven—or let them cast us into hell.

    Thanks for reading!

    Footnotes:

    1. The Bhagavad Gita trans. Laurie L. Patton (Penguin, 2008): 131. ↩︎

    2. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Volume One (Dover Publications, 1969): 203. ↩︎

    3. Ibid, 117-8. ↩︎

    4. Ibid, 235. ↩︎

    5. Ibid, 512. ↩︎

    6. Nick Bostrom, “The Superintelligent Will: Motivation and Instrumental Rationality in Advanced Artificial Agents,” Minds and Machines Vol. 2, No. 22: 73. ↩︎
  • 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 Industry Created A Bird Flu Apocalypse

    How Industry Created A Bird Flu Apocalypse

    When the H5N1 strain of avian influenza was first identified in 1996, history could not dictate the path it was going to take. Highly contagious avian diseases had tended to spread like wildfire within the confines of isolated poultry operations but would burn out quickly in nature because the deaths of wild hosts inhibited spread between dispersed animal populations. But H5N1 is different. 

    As industrial agriculture and intensive livestock holdings have fanned across the world, it is apparent that disease contagion is fanning out alongside it. Maybe this isn’t entirely surprising given the multitude of other dangerous externalities that have emerged as byproducts of the industrial era: energy consumption and atmospheric recomposition leading to climate change; mass production of plastics and the clogging of waterways, whale guts and microplastic in human tissue; air coolants and a hole in the ozone layer; urban sprawl, resource extraction, crop monocultures and biodiversity collapse.

    In 1996, H5N1 struck geese farms in China and a huge number of birds were lost and that may have been the end of it. But then it struck Hong Kong. And South Korea. And Southeast Asia. And Japan. And then it struck everywhere all at once. H5N1’s body count reads like an animal apocalypse: over 300 million birds from every continent on Earth, tens of thousands of mammals including seals and dolphins, and about 500 humans struck dead. Migratory birds have spread the virus the world over but what’s astonishing about H5N1 is how it has gained strength over time, with its death rate and range of infected species becoming progressively worse.

    Bioterrorism

    When H5N1 collides with a poultry farm it’s like a missile. It infects thousands of hosts at a shot, combining and re-assorting itself in each animal body before rapidly moving to the next. These are tightly packed environments devoid of fresh air, clean water and faecal-free space—the most perfect accelerant imaginable for a rapidly mutating influenza. Thanks to the paucity of poultry operations along migration routes, the virus has continued to cycle between poultry and wild birds unabated for almost thirty years now. Wild birds pick up the bird flu from a poultry farm and, whether they survive or die, spread it to the next poultry farm along the migration route, creating a whole new strain of H5N1 to which there are no defences.  And just like that, a self-perpetuating death spiral provoking the slaughter of millions of farmed animals and mass die-offs in the wild has been unleashed.

    The havoc wreaked by H5N1 over the past three decades has made this pathogen the pioneering subject of controversial gain-of-function viral research. When questions were volleyed over the bio-terrorist potential that these new technologies raised, Anthony Fauci, former Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Diseases, replied: “Nature is the real terrorist.” Absurd, yes—we will all succumb to our biology at some point. But has nature not given birth to all things living and sustained it with purified air, filtered sunlight and an abundance of glorious freshwater and botanicals that heal? Further, is it not human industry that is degrading the life-giving functions of the biosphere—polluting our atmosphere, contaminating our oceans—even summoning an unstoppable serial killing virus from the feathery cages of battery hens?

    H5N1 could not exist absent the viral reservoir provided by billions of human-farmed poultry living in putrid conditions. Although industrial activity has birthed this virus, commerce has taken an economic hit as a result. It is this threat to industry that governments have their eye on, with Vox reporting that the US Department of Agriculture “is primarily focused of protecting the poultry industry,” staring past the unfolding catastrophe in wildlife conservation and pursuant risk of another human pandemic. The latter is a very real possibility, especially in light of studies revealing that the devastating pandemic of 1918 likely sprang from an avian strain of influenza.

    Crisis Capital

    And so, H5N1 is yet another capitalist crisis whereby private actors create an existential threat that the state must contain while simultaneously sheltering the problem-causing industry. It is overwhelmingly workers that have lost their lives to H5N1, and rank-and-file consumers and taxpayers will foot the bill for additional costs imposed on the industry. Because of this, it is unlikely that holistic approaches and reforms to Big Poultry that researchers have called for will actually come to pass.

    Karl Marx, regarding the transition from the feudal to capitalist mode of production, described the changes that capitalism brought to livestock rearing in England. As food became commodified and profit-oriented, so did stable feeding become dominant: 

    In these prisons animals are born and remain there until they are killed off. The question is whether or not this system connected to the breeding that grows animals in an abnormal way by aborting bones in order to transform them to mere meat and a bulk of fat—whereas [before commodification] these animals remained active by staying under free air as much as possible—will ultimately result in serious deterioration of life force?1

    If there is a correlation between the vectors of H5N1, ocean acidification, addiction and mental health crises, plastic waste and contamination, surging global slums, an unaffordable cost of living and even right-wing populism, then it is the entire capitalist modality that needs a rethink instead of choice industries. We have the technology and resources to implement programs of regenerative farming, resilient landscapes, wildlife conservation, sustainable cities and even a cleanse of air and oceans. But such practices simply cannot operate on a for-profit basis despite the desirability of their outcomes.

    The timeline presented here gives a snapshot of H5N1 as it has moved through the media landscape since first coming onto the collective radar. Even though almost 8,000 academic articles have been published on this topic, it has only penetrated the mainstream swayingly, oscillating from intense interest when human beings and cute baby seals are effected, and near-oblivion in years when it is seemingly contained to the fetid poultry site. By giving this invisible pathogen contours in our imaginations, we can hopefully better contextualize this virus as individuals and bring light to the correct places with our torches.

    Timeline of H5N1

    1996 

    • Contagion breaks out on goose farms in mainland China kill 40% of infected birds. The pathogen is discovered to be a highly contagious influenza virus and is categorized as “H5N1.”

    1997 

    • A “mysterious ‘bird flu’ virus” erupts among poultry farms and markets in Hong Kong, causing mass die-offs of livestock. H5N1 is determined to be the culprit. Authorities order every chicken in Hong Kong slaughtered over a two day period, plus any ducks, geese, quail or pigeons held within proximity. Workers from Hong Kong’s chicken farms and market stalls are tested for H5N1. 18 total infections were discovered resulting in six deaths.

    2001 

    • H5N1 reappears in Hong Kong, killing 800 chickens within 24 hours and forcing closed poultry markets with further culls of thousands of birds.

    2002 

    • Four ducks and a swan found dead in a Hong Kong pond. Tissue samples confirm presence of H5N1.

    2003 

    • Two members of a Hong Kong family test positive for the virus. One dead.
    • Two tigers and a pair of leopards in a Thailand zoo found dead after feeding on chicken carcasses. Tests confirm presence of H5N1 in tissue samples. A further 147 tigers go on to die of influenza or culling.
    • South Korea detects avian influenza on multiple poultry farms across the country, resulting in a cull of one million chickens and ducks.

    2004 

    • H5N1 reappears in Hong Kong, killing 800 chickens within 24 hours and forcing closed poultry markets with further culls of thousands of birds.
    • Japan, China, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia report outbreaks of H5N1 among poultry, evidence that the disease spread along the East Asian-Australasian Flyway. The flyway, stretching from New Zealand to eastern Siberia, is utilized by millions of wild birds belonging to 600 different species.
    • The culling of two million chickens in Vietnam prompts KFC to pull chicken from their menu in favour of fish.
    • 22 people confirmed dead in Vietnam from H5N1 and 12 in Thailand. At this point in time, up to 70% of people known to have contracted avian flu have died as a result.

    2005 

    • Over 6,000 wild birds infected with avian flu are found dead at China’s Qinghai Lake.
    • Avian flu outbreaks in Siberian poultry coincide with discovery of nearby dead migratory birds. Kazakhstan reports outbreak among chickens and Mongolia discovers 89 dead birds positive with H5N1 at two lakes.
    • Nigeria and Egypt report poultry outbreaks while Finland finds H5N1 in seagulls. Later, Croatia confirms presence of H5N1 in wild birds and Romania and Turkey report outbreaks in poultry.
    • EU leaders hold emergency talks in Luxembourg to discuss possible responses by member nations. In the U.S., President Bush recommends $7.1 billion be spent in tracking avian influenza, experimental vaccine development and stocking anti-virals.
    • Tamiflu supply is squeezed as production does not ramp up to meet new demand for the anti-viral drug. The pharmaceutical giant Roche projects a windfall of profit as a result: $875 million extra for the year, on account of avian flu concerns.
    • Hackers capitalize on bird flu fears, circulating emails that promise valuable bird flu information and gaining remote control over any computer that opens them.
    • Researchers discover an H5N1 strain that is resistant to Tamiflu. David Nabarro, senior health expert with the World Health Organization, predicts a human pandemic stemming from avian flu could kill 150 million people.

    2006 

    • H5N1 confirmed in 60 countries from East Asia through the Middle East, Africa and Europe.
    • Multiple human fatalities occur in North Africa and the Middle East and 25 die of bird flu in Indonesia. Virus appears to mainly spread from bird-to-human and shows limited capability of human-to-human infection.
    • Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health tells the Associated Press: “Hopefully the epidemic [in birds] burns itself out, which epidemics do, before the virus evolves the capability of…going from human to human.”
    • Bird flu flare-up on a chicken farm in South Korea leads to a cull of 236,000 poultry, in addition to all pigs, cats and dogs within a 1,650 foot radius of the infection site.

    2007 

    • Number of human infections dwindles. The New York Times notes that as “the illness receded, the scary headlines—with warnings of a pandemic that could kill 150 million people—all but vanished.”
    • Despite fading interest, the Center for Infectious Disease Research reports the view of scientists and epidemiologists: so long as H5N1 circulates among wild birds, the risk to humans and poultry stocks remain the same.

    2009 

    • A 19 year old duck farm worker dies of avian influenza and Pakistan reports outbreak in poultry.

    2010 

    • A Hong Kong couple contracts avian influenza while travelling in mainland China, resulting in one hospitalization. Source of infection unknown as they had no contact with farmed birds. 

    2011 

    • 62 human cases of H5N1 are confirmed: 39 in Egypt, 12 in Indonesia, eight in Cambodia, two in Bangladesh and one in China. 34 deaths result.

    2012 

    • Some of the earliest ever gain-of-function research is revealed to be taking place in laboratories from North America, Europe and Asia, as scientists aim to create H5N1 strains that are highly pathogenic to people in order to better understand the potential risks. Concerns over bioterrorism and lab leaks prompt moratoriums on this type of research and academic papers to be censored. 
    • Scientists agree as little as five mutations to existing H5N1 strains could yield a catastrophic contagion among people.

    2014 

    • A 20 year old health care worker contracts H5N1 while travelling Beijing and dies in Red Deer, Alberta. North America’s first recorded fatality. Source of infection unknown.
    • World Health Organizations continues to monitor outbreaks within poultry farms and dozens of people across Africa and Asia.

    2015 

    • 100 migratory birds, including swans and pochards, found dead at a reservoir in China.

    2016 

    • India, battling H5N1 on poultry farms for two years, declares itself bird flu free in September. One month later, multiple waterfowl are found dead of H5N1 at a Delhi zoo.
    • Bangladesh, France, Niger and Nigeria report H5N1 outbreaks on farms.
    • H5N1 strains resistant to antivirals emerge in Egypt.

    2017 

    • Malaysia experiences severe H5N1 outbreak, resulting in a cull of 30,000 chickens as China bans Malaysian poultry products and a state of emergency is declared in the state of Kelantan.

    2019 

    • The digital public health publication STAT noted no new human fatalities of H5N1 in over two years. A related strain which emerged in 2014, H5N6, has killed approximately six out of 12 people infected since its detection.

    2020 

    • Amid a raging COVID-19 pandemic, China culls 18,000 chickens in Hunan province after 4,500 chickens are found dead on a farm due to H5N1.
    • Within a two week span, poultry farms in the Netherlands, Britain, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Croatia and Ukraine are hit with H5N1.

    2021 

    • An outbreak of H5N1 is reported on a poultry farm in Senegal. Later, rangers  discover 750 dead pelicans positive with the strain at a wild bird sanctuary.

    2022 

    • 8,000 Sandwich terns found dead at a breeding colony in the Netherlands.
    • British shorelines “smell of death” as hundreds of thousands of seabird corpses wash up dead after mating season, part of an H5N1 outbreak affecting the entire continent of Europe. Researchers estimate a death rate of 50–100% among wild birds which become infected with H5N1, depending on the species.
    • 13,000 seabirds in Peru turn up dead on beaches, mostly pelicans. H5N1 detected.
    • Deaths spike among wild birds in Canada, as outbreaks erupt in 200 commercial flocks across the country. 
    • H5N1 spreads rapidly across multiple detection sites in the continental United States, infecting one prison labourer who was involved with culling an infected flock in Colorado. Between culls and disease, over 50 million American domestic birds are killed. 
    • 330 seals along the Quebec and Maine coast are killed by H5N1, raising the spectre of the virus among mammals. Wild red foxes and farmed mink have also been infected, in addition to zoo mammals that were fed infected chickens. 
    • Conspiracy theories abound online, blaming Bill Gates and the CDC for releasing the deadly pathogen.
    • Globally, 77 million birds are culled in an attempt to contain the H5N1 pathogen.

    2023 

    • Based on all available information, Biosecurity specialist Juan Cambeiro reports that the likelihood of a human H5N1 pandemic breaking out in any given year is 4%. There is an 80% chance it would be worse than COVID in terms of fatalities.
    • Mass die-offs of gulls reported across Europe. Although wildlife detections are difficult measurements, by 2023 researchers estimate millions of wild birds have died due to the virus on a magnitude never before seen.
    • Eight dead skunks around Vancouver test positive for H5N1.
    • In Poland, 29 dead house cats tested positive for the virus of which 18 were indoor pets. Source of exposure unknown.
    • 485,000 animals, including mink and foxes, are culled in Finland after outbreaks on fur farms.
    • In a Canadian lab, predominant bird flu strain was found to “efficiently” spread between ferrets.
    • The number of known wild bird deaths from influenza in Peru swells to 63,000. Meanwhile, between January and October, a staggering 24,000 South American sea lions are found dead, suggesting mammal-to-mammal transmission.
    • Virus detected amongst migratory birds in Antarctica, the last continent to fall to contagion.
    • To date, 853 human cases of H5N1 have been reported with 53% of them fatal.

    2024 

    • Avian influenza detected in dead Alaskan polar bear to start the year. 48 different mammal species have been known to be infected to date.
    • Penguins begin dying of H5N1 in Antarctica while British conservationists report “catastrophic” decline of seabird population.
    • H5N1 virus found in cattle herds across six US states, then nine. Virus appears concentrated in milk and to circulate freely between cattle. True scale of bovine outbreak unknown as many producers resist cooperation with federal authorities.
    • H5N1 virus show up on grocery store shelves in milk, though pasteurization neutralizes the virus. 
    • Barn cats drinking raw milk succumb to bird flu deaths.
    • Wastewater samples reveal presence of the pathogen in six states: California, Idaho, Iowa, Minnesota, Michigan and Texas.
    • Sales of raw milk contaminated with bird flu pop as some consumers believe it will help them build immunity to the virus.

    2025 

    • $590 million contract awarded to Moderna to speed up development of a bird flu vaccine.
    • Retail prices for American eggs almost double over the previous year, as infected hens are culled en masse in the United States. Egg heists and border smugglers are reported.
    • The Moderna vaccine contract is cancelled by the Trump administration, citing “ethical concerns” over mRNA technology.
    • Robert Kennedy Jr. suggests ending containment strategies and letting bird flu spread wild.
    • Chilean scientists sequence H5N1 in Antarctic penguin populations, confirming similarities to strains decimating South American marine mammals.

    Footnote:

    1. Karl Marx quoted in “Marx as a Food Theorist?” Monthly Review, Vol. 68, No.7: monthlyreview.org/2016/12/01/marx-as-a-food-theorist ↩︎
  • 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.  ↩︎
  • Historical Materialism

    Historical Materialism

    This article is part of a series on classical Marxism.

    The chronological sequence of events leading to the present can be looked at in a number of ways. Sometimes it is mystified, a progression guided by the hand of God or a creator. This is generally what is taught in churches. To the more secular-minded, it can appear as a random sequence of events—one unfolding drama after another between the armies of warlords and conquerors, the avarice of kings and emperors, the bedrooms of aristocrats and financiers. This is the “great man theory” of history which supposes that social changes and historic events are mainly impacted by gifted individuals driving the realm of humans forward. Then there are the idealists, asserting the predominance of collective consciousness and content of the mind in determining events. This view holds that the best ideas will advance themselves through free and open communication, with the strongest ones rising to the top and shaping our government, laws, technologies, economic exchange and global institutions.

    The materialist conception of history grounds things differently. As humans are evolved from nature and are reliant on it to meet all of our basic needs, materialism places our history on the basis of our natural being. As most hominids and pre-modern humans existed without religious concepts, advanced cognition or complex language, mapping our history onto these things does not make much sense. While human society today may “feel” very much removed from the whims of nature, this is a fallacy since everything from computers, smartphones, houses, clothes and food are all ultimately derived from some natural extraction. Thus the true fault line between society and the world of nature is “the mediating realm of human labour and production.”1 As individuals must be nourished and fed before they can think or speak, so too must any collective of people be able to meet their biological needs before they are able to ponder philosophy, establish an oral history or develop an artistic culture: “The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these [biological] needs, the production of material life itself.”2

    Historical materialism is the assertion that the basis of all history starts with how people produce. Because we, as material beings, are required to first produce our physical bodies before we can produce ideas and individuals, the ideas and individuals that come thereafter will be a reflection of how we produce. Everything else—politics, art, culture, religion—derives secondarily from this basis in production. That is not to dismiss the existence of individual talents or the significance of ideas, but life’s first instances must be materially produced before any individual or collective expressions can be made. The latter depends on the former. Thus it is seen that great men, religion, political intrigue and ideas in general are corollary to the economic system and not the other way around. Human societies, as an outgrowth of nature, therefore emerge with a universal base-superstructure shape that Karl Marx summarized as follows:

    In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.3

    Image: Wikimedia Commons

    Labour and production are an “everlasting Nature-imposed condition of human existence” but the forms that production takes and the societies that it produces are variable and highly dependent on available technology, access to resources, received cultural values, etc.4 The social hierarchy of production plus the resources in use and the technologies deployed constitute the mode of production—the economic base. Politics, culture, social customs and intellectual products are the superstructure resting atop this base, shaping our individual and collective consciousness. If anybody imagines being born at a different time period than their own, what they are imagining is life within a different hierarchy of production and its corresponding customs and norms.

    In history, there has been a progression of four major modes of production that have been well-documented and studied, presented below. A fifth is theorized but has yet to fully emerge.

    1. Primitive communism. This is also known as a tribal or hunter-gatherer society, but it is regarded as a form of communism because they were classless. A classless society does not denote equality or absence of authority or any social hierarchy, however. Classlessness denotes individual autonomy over labour, as nobody has the means to seize the work of others. Surpluses, resources and positions of authority are managed democratically by the group, often by consensus. This mode of production was predominant during the Paleolithic Era when Earth was in an ice age. The economic base consisted of technology such as bows and arrows, early use of fire, rafts, hand axes, and big game resources like rhinoceros’ and woolly mammoths. This mode of production corresponded with a superstructure which found expressions in cave paintings, figurine carvings, flute-like instruments made of bone and animistic religions.
    1. Ancient mode of production. The transition to settlements and agriculture occurred after the ice age had ended and various megafauna species began going extinct. The warmer climate allowed for a transition to domesticated crops and livestock which resulted in much greater food production and increased population densities—even as life expectancy crashed due to higher rates of disease and less nutritious diets. The appearance of large grain surpluses also gave rise to humanity’s first class structures and violence over territory. As warrior-kings and armies developed, enslavement of other peoples became common. This mode of production is largely epitomized by the master–slave class relation seen in Ancient Greece, Rome, Persia and Asia. Humanity’s first cities were created under this mode and it developed technologies like wood ploughs and iron tools, utilizing a variety of resources through aqueducts, roads, mines and quarries. The existence of a slaveholding class resulted in a complex superstructure marked by polytheistic, harvest-based religions, early writing systems, political institutions, philosophy, pottery and astronomy.
    1. Feudal mode of production. Feudalism came into being as the western Roman Empire was gradually undermined by an exhaustion of the slave trade and conflict with Germanic tribes, until it was eventually negated by the tribes altogether. The result was a massive deconstruction of political authority, away from cities and empire and toward rural fiefdoms controlled by warlords-turned-aristocrats and hereditary royal monarchies. This mode of production is defined by the predominant lord–peasant class relation. While ownership of slave labour was diminished, the labour of serfs was captured by agricultural rents paid to the manor. Previously discovered technologies were mostly adapted to village life, including mills, clocktowers and blast furnaces. The superstructure at this time was largely characterized by the rise of monotheistic religion across the known world. In western Europe, this was crystallized in the Catholic Church which offered political legitimacy to rulers in the form of a “divine right to rule” ideology. The Church also dominated the musical, writing, art and social life of this time period.  
    1. Capitalist mode of production. As feudal Europe developed its productive forces and its aristocracy matured, a thirst developed for expanding trade routes. Existing routes had become monopolized by the Ottoman Empire and this is what motivated Christopher Columbus to set sail, eventually landing on the shores of what is now the Dominican Republic. Ensuing was an unprecedented wave of settler colonization, with all of the pillage of gold, silver, produce, furs and fish that came along with it. As whole continents cracked open to agriculture and trade, plantations developed and slavery was revived in a racialized form. This veritable rush of wealth led to immense capital accumulation by European powers, ushering in the capitalist era. Technological development began to rise exponentially with the Industrial Revolution of the 1700s, as steam power, cotton gins and telegraphs appeared. Additional crop varieties from the New World and improved plough technology led to enclosures of farmland, expulsions of peasants and the creation of a mass wage-labour force. The capitalist–wage labour, or employer–employee, class relation is dominant under capitalism, rendering both slavery and serfdom uneconomical due to huge increases in production and the need for mass-consumption. The superstructure under capitalism is marked by the rise of liberal representative democracy, a secular public life, the fracturing of the Christianity with Protestant strains, mass media and the commodification of culture and goods and services. With rapid technological change, capitalism has now placed us firmly into the digital age.
    1. Free association of producers. A theoretical system whereby the labouring classes under capitalism—almost 99% of the population—become the ruling ownership class over the economy and government. Systems of socialist ownership sprouted up during the 20th century in opposition to imperial capitalism, while others have found a footing within the global capitalist structure today. National parks, public education, health care services, co-operatively owned enterprises, public transportation and the post office are all examples. Durable forms of socialism have yet to supersede global capitalism in a meaningful way. The goal of a free association is a classless society which minimizes mandatory work and unleashes the creative potential of all individuals as they dedicate themselves to self-directed pursuits. The primary purpose of this economic base is to produce goods and services according to need rather than payment, with the realm of want and culture dictated by free and voluntary exchange between individuals. Calculated surpluses would be managed via direct democratic means and allocated according to the material interests of the liberated society. The superstructure of such a system is unknown, but would be determined organically from the bottom-up, with decentralized communication technology, such as the Internet, playing a central role.

    Further reading:

    Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology: Chapter One.

    —————————–


    1. John Bellamy Foster, “The Return of the Dialectics of Nature: The Struggle for Freedom as Necessity,” Monthly Review, Vol. 74, No. 7: 6. ↩︎

    2. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology: On Feuerbach. ↩︎

    3. Karl Marx, “Preface” of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. ↩︎

    4. Karl Marx, “Chapter 7: The Labour-Process and the Process of Producing Surplus Value” in Capital: Volume One. ↩︎
  • Class Conflict

    Class Conflict

    This article is part of a series on classical Marxism.

    It was Aristotle who first observed that civilization does not really begin until an economic surplus is produced by one class for use by another—a point taken up by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the opening line of The Communist Manifesto: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”1

    Without slaves and masters, plebeians and patricians, serfs and lords, workers and capitalists, then systems of writing, military, philosophy or political authority could not have been developed and expressed by civilization. While a surplus depends on a labouring majority of the population to produce it, throughout history it has been captured by a minority of ruling class elites who have used it to entrench authority. The struggle over production and control of this surplus is known as class conflict and it manifests itself in myriad ways—terms of interest and debt, governmental leadership, monetary policy, the dictatorship of the workplace, cost of education and healthcare, decisions regarding the social safety net, access to home ownership and the rights of tenants, etc. It is within this confrontation between elites and the labouring masses that all political decisions are made and social direction is taken.

    Class systems, while persistent and stubborn, have no basis in nature and present themselves as an obstacle to harmonious living. This is why both Thomas Jefferson and Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed indigenous societies provided more happiness and social stability to their members, as fruits of labour were democratically allocated and law was a matter of popular opinion instead of a violently-enforced dictate by one class onto another. Marx writes:

    One thing, however, is clear—nature does not produce on the one side owners of money or commodities, and on the other, men possessing nothing but their own labour-power. This relation has no natural basis, neither is its social basis one that is common to all historical periods. It is clearly the result of a past historical development, the product of many economic revolutions, of the extinction of a whole series of older forms of social production.2

    As discussed in the article on capitalism, it is only when the capital owner meets in the marketplace those with nothing but their labour to sell that the capitalist mode of production is born. From this point onward, workers and capitalists are locked into an interpenetration of opposites and go on to supplant the previously dominant lord and serf class relation in Europe before conquering the globe. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, proto-capitalism could only be concerned with looting existing riches from the technologically disadvantaged. And while the coercive elements of capitalism have never disappeared, it did manage to become a mode of production in its own right—the most productive to ever exist—owing to the unlocking of resources on a massive scale, subsequent technological innovation and the forceful drawing of an urban wage labour pool from the countryside. The latter is a process still underway in many less-developed parts of the world.

    Like feudalism and the slave economies of antiquity, multiple classes exist along the base and superstructure of capitalism: bureaucrats, intellectuals, media personalities, contractors and soldiers exist alongside destitute slum-dwellers, drug addicts and the fully homeless. But the employer–employee relation is dominant because it enables vast wealth and power to concentrate in few hands and produces almost every available good and service for consumption. These two classes are inter-dependent, they cannot exist without the other and yet they possess contrary material interests: the employer wants to keep wages paid for labour time as low as possible, while the employee wants the opposite. Owing to this contradiction, capitalism has witnessed a succession of struggles over union-organizing, outsourcing of jobs to cheaper, less-regulated countries and political conflict at the state level over public benefits and investment. 

    Consciously recognized or not, class conflict between employers and employees provide much of the friction that animates our politics, society and individual lives. Despite the inter-dependence of these two great classes, the power imbalance clearly favours capital owners. While an employer may choose to hire a worker to assist in generating profits, the employer will have many prospective employees to choose from and, in any case, does not need any specific worker in order to survive. This is not true for the worker, who must find employment to survive and will have far fewer employment prospects available to them than an employer will have prospective employees. In other words, as presently constructed, the capitalist class needs the working class to create value but the working class needs the capitalist class to actually survive.

    This power imbalance that exists at the economic base of capitalism likewise manifests in the superstructure. Whereas the Catholic Church played the dominant role in mediating class relations and asserted the nobility’s “divine right to rule” during feudalism, it is the state that performs this function in capitalism. As the locus of production shifted from farmlands and enslaved populations toward a global web of resource extraction and colonial markets, a robust state apparatus in the service of the capital class became necessary to ensure the protection of property throughout the supply chain: 

    State formation and the origins of financial capitalism were closely connected, and this nexus provided a way for prosperous urban citizens in high finance, a small elite, to establish their influence on politics while simultaneously making their entrepreneurial success dependent on powerful rulers and their shifting political fortunes.3

    It is through the capitalist state apparatus that much of the world became exploited as colonies or subjugated by unequal treaties in the service of investment. It is through this state apparatus that great wars over resources and markets are fought, where great masses of debt are leveraged, where prisons are filled, where school curriculums are devised, where infrastructure projects are authorized, interest rates are set and budgets are formed. All of this is carried out under the direction of elite stakeholders, while the public is only roused to “vote” every so often for this-or-that corporate-backed political party. Since this vote is the only meaningful say that the public has in its own politics, Emma Goldman adroitly observed: “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.”4 

    If the state were in the hands of the public, it would be unlikely to mediate class conflict in the interests of capital owners. But in the hands of financial capital, the state has the unique ability to socialize costs and privatize profits. For example, the 2003 invasion of Iraq was funded largely by debts leveraged against the American taxpayer and fought with the bodies of working-class sons and daughters. Meanwhile trillions of dollars of public money disappeared into the pockets of bondholders and the CEOs of defence contractors. Another example was during the COVID-19 response when central banks around the world acted in unison to eliminate interest rates and prop up stock market assets by printing money at a time of mass lay-offs and restrictions on movement for the non-yacht owning public. In the aftermath, it is no surprise that the capital owners came out wealthier than ever before while the global working class suffers crippling inflation and a punitive cost of living. This is the capitalist state working as intended—socializing costs and privatizing gains—and this service is the chief reason why “a stateless capitalism is unthinkable.”5 

    From its outset, capitalism was predicated on the violent destruction of traditional societies, the coercive acquisition of wealth, class conflict, environmental ruination and reinventions of production in the interest of profit. These core characteristics have hardly changed. Workers and consumers alike are powerless relative to the capital-controlled market, and the state is in the hands of those same elite interests lurking behind every crisis, making a serene life on this Earth nearly impossible. While capitalist technology has given humanity the tools to solve economic scarcity, employing them in a socially and ecologically harmonious way is stonewalled by a state of class contradiction. Class consciousness describes the active decisions of one class to pursue their interests by state capture and force. The economic elites have accomplished this. But there is an emerging consciousness bubbling under the surface of digital connectivity, a new language developing in the full sunlight of existing oligarchy. Once working class consciousness has crystallized, the construction of a new, liberatory government may commence.

    Further Reading:

    Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto.

    ———–


    1. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto. ↩︎

    2. Karl Marx, Capital: Volume One (Ancient Wisdom Publishing, 2019), 120. ↩︎

    3. Jürgen Kocka, Capitalism: A Short History (Princeton University Press, 2016), 43. ↩︎

    4. This quotation is somewhat apocryphal, and is sometimes attributed to Mark Twain as well. ↩︎

    5. David Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2014), 72. ↩︎
  • 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. ↩︎
  • Alienation

    Alienation

    This article is part of a series on classical Marxism.

    In the typical western city, one does not have to search very hard to find the signs: derelict buildings, littered streets, homeless with pockmarked faces pushing carts filled with bottles. Across North America, opioid abuse and a cost of living crisis have sent homeless populations climbing against a backdrop of city blocks scorched by wildfire, ground tremors from fracking, mass flooding by storm surges and condos of glittering glass. In 2018, Chris Hedges published one of the most potent illustrations of capitalist alienation with America, The Farewell Tour.

    In the book, he sets the table early: “Hurricane after hurricane, monster storm after monster storm, flood after flood, wildfire after wildfire, drought after drought will gradually cripple the empire, draining its wealth and resources and creating swaths of territory defined by lawlessness and squalor.”1

    Hedges then introduces us to Christine Pagano, a woman who fell into drugs during high school after her stepfather was caught sleeping with her 16-year-old classmate and her home life imploded. Years after experimenting with heroin, she would turn to prostitution in order to feed a $500 heroin habit and sold her body in Jersey City to Wall Street traders, business executives and bankers “who were the prostitutes’ main customers.”2 She shares that this was preferable to Camden, New Jersey, where “‘the poverty is so bad. People rob you for $5, literally for $5. They would pull a gun on you for no money.’”3

    Then there is Robin Rivera, the product of a troubled home who later earned minimum wage at a hair salon in Los Angeles. She accepted a proposition from a talent agent in the pornography industry in the hope of making ends meet. “‘They tied me up and hung me from the ceiling,’ she said,” adding that she was also electrocuted with a cattle prod. “‘They put a hook in my ass’” and “‘tied my ponytail to it. They tied my arms to a barrel. They tied my legs to a barrel. He put a vibrator on me…Five hours is a long time. For $900.’”4

    Depravities of this kind are rarely discussed in the media. This could be due to the sheer numbers of those who indulge—up to one-quarter of web searches and one-third of downloads relate to pornography, after all. But it is corollary to the economic imbalances and deprivations of the economic sphere, the “rough neighbourhoods” on the other side of the tracks in our cities or the beggars encountered at home and abroad. As noted in “Ecology,” capitalism turns both land and people into commodities—“venal objects”—and this becomes the lived experience for all-too-many in rich and poor countries alike.5 

    When Marx discusses “alien capital” confronting “alien labour,” he is spotlighting two economic processes which move on their own momentum, as though independent of human agency.6 Human beings are creative by nature and we define ourselves by conscious, self-directed activity. Under capitalism, this is rarely the case. Individuality and self-expression is seldom found in production; work is transactional and conducted under authoritarian oversight for a wage on which to subsist. In his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Marx writes that “the need for money is therefore the real need created by the modern economy, and the only need which it creates.” It is this need of money that elevates exchange-value to the highest priority, with use-value of only secondary consideration to a profitable exchange. Work is reduced to a pursuit of that universal commodity, money, and it is only in that cramped space of time off the job when we are free to express ourselves, largely as consumers. Due to the energy consumed by employment, leisure itself is distorted and becomes a site of excess and expense. Born of this common need for money, we see an extension of products which appeal to our base instincts, subservient only “to inhuman, depraved, unnatural and imaginary appetites”—of the sort highlighted in the above paragraphs.7

    As psychoanalyst Erich Fromm interpreted Marx, “alienation leads to the perversion of all values.” Because economic aims are “the supreme aim of life, man fails to develop any truly moral values,” and “the riches of a good conscience, of virtues, etc.” are impossible as they lack monetary impetus.8 The capitalist system of production severs society from the splendour of nature and turns individuals into replaceable parts—whether they be numbered employees and managers or prostitutes and johns. Freethinking and meditative contemplation is thus muzzled with individuals crippled by a pursuit of exploitation and libidinous excitations. Downstream from a mountain of emissions and cheap labour are resort vacations and cruises, restaurants serving high-priced cocktails and IMAX movies with sensory-melting special effects. This is what passes through the free time of conforming consumers under capitalism today.  

    Engels saw this “spiritual-barrenness” through all echelons of society. Corporate conglomerates are the fountainhead of prepackaged, empty pleasures but there is a social context to it. Everyone seeking to maintain or improve their standing within the capitalist hierarchy ultimately become slaves to their own employment—even elite financiers and CEOs become “slave of his own capital and his own profit-getting.”9 Even the ruling class beneficiaries of capitalism’s wealth find themselves with limited agency when it comes to maintaining their standing. If they do not open mass markets, pollute, debt-shark or shrewdly exploit, they will simply be overtaken by a more capable servant of capitalist expansion.

    The total alienation of the individual by the ever-complex and expanding process of capitalist production is the reason behind mental health epidemics. In the United States, 90% of people believe there is a crisis of mental health and 20% experience acute symptoms. In Canada, almost half the population is estimated to experience episodes of mental illness by age 40. In Britain, depression is the condition most commonly encountered by the National Health Service and the instructor Mark Fisher observed: “Many of the teenage students I encountered seemed to be in a state of what I would call depressive hedonia…an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure. There is a sense that ‘something is missing’—but no appreciation that this mysterious, missing enjoyment can only be accessed beyond the pleasure principle.”10 Supporting the Marxist theory of alienation are the many studies concluding that the more a country is penetrated by capital relations, the worse the mental health becomes. Fisher explains: “When it actually arrives capitalism brings with it a massive desacralization of culture. It is a system which is no longer governed by any transcendent Law; on the contrary, it dismantles all such codes, only to re-install them on an ad hoc basis.”11 The implication is that less-developed countries contain communitarian cultures that are less eroded by capital and experience lower rates of mental illness when compared to the hyper-competitive, technologically advanced and socially isolating realms of wealthy capitalist nations.

    But the task of building an unalienated, harmonious society necessary to individual freedom and human flourishing will not be accomplished by sliding backward on the development scale. Marx did not advocate for an anti-capitalist world, but rather, a post-capitalist one. This means negating the liberal order by incorporating capitalism’s high economic productivity while removing its deleterious effects on the social fabric and natural environment. Capitalist productive forces have brought humanity an enormous capacity to produce but an incredibly inefficient and wasteful manner of allocation. By exerting a conscious, democratic control over the production process, a material output could be allocated according to need rather than payment. The pursuit of exchange-values creates an alienating and immoral world but the pursuit of use-values reverses this effect. Houses to live in rather than speculate with. Medicine to save lives rather than profit. Nature for its aesthetics and life-giving functions rather than plunder. Food grown for nutritional quality instead of an ultra-processed quantity.

    Use-values demand broad input from consumers and workers, they demand the elimination of noxious products and exploitative services from production, they demand positive, humanistic outcomes from artificial intelligence, they promote free time and activity that nurtures the latent talents within all individuals. In other words, they place moral virtue, community, family, mental tranquility and natural beauty into the heart of economic production. 

    A post-capitalist and unalienated free association is one where people are their own masters, liberated from state authority, irrational market fluctuations and corporate dictates. To quote Marx, “the associated producers regulate their interchange with Nature rationally, bring it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by some blind power; they accomplish their task with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most adequate to their human nature and most worthy of it… Beyond it begins that development of human power, which is its own end, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can flourish only upon that realm of necessity as its basis.”12

    Further reading:

    Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.

    ———–


    1. Chris Hedges, America, The Farewell Tour (Simon & Schuster, 2018), 34. ↩︎

    2. Ibid, 62. ↩︎

    3. Ibid, 65. ↩︎

    4. Ibid, 129. ↩︎

    5. John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (Monthly Review Press, 2000), 74. ↩︎

    6. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Penguin, 2005), 266. ↩︎

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

    8. Erich Fromm, “Alienation,” Marx’s Concept of Man. ↩︎

    9. Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring and Other Works (Graphyco Editions, 2021), 157. ↩︎

    10. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books, 2009), 21-22. ↩︎

    11. Ibid, 5-6. ↩︎

    12. Karl Marx, “Chapter 48,” Capital: Volume Three. ↩︎
  • Siege Socialism

    Siege Socialism

    This article is part of a series on classical Marxism.

    When Vladimir Lenin took power after a bloodless coup in November, 1917, shockwaves reverberated through imperial hallways the world over. The world’s first working class government was formed in Moscow and the response was swift. The world’s first working class government was formed in Russia and the response was swift. Intervening were 70,000 Japanese, 50,000 British, 15,000 French, 13,000 American and 4,700 Canadian soldiers ordered to throw back the socialist forces that had deposed the Tsar and aid the ultra-right Russian White Army in seizing Moscow. The Reds, of course, won this war with the support of peasants and workers. But it wouldn’t be long until the USSR was attacked yet again, as the largest invasion force ever assembled poured over Soviet borders under the command of Nazi Germany. In the years following World War II virtually every successful socialist movement—China, Cuba, Chile, North Korea, Afghanistan, Laos, Nicaragua and Vietnam—found itself enmeshed in bloody battles with the US army or CIA-funded guerrilla saboteurs. The 20th century is pockmarked by so much needless bloodshed between advanced Western countries and chronically-poor nations attempting to chart a sovereign path to modernity.

    Under the unfortunate conditions of extreme foreign aggression and economic poverty, a heavy-handed, security-focused and state-oriented “siege socialism” developed—a term coined by Michael Parenti.1 They were tasked with both warding off foreign invasion and simultaneously rapidly growing the industrial base and social development of their people. Like their capitalist counterparts in the first and third worlds, these second-world socialist countries had plenty of defects and sometimes-horrific blights on their record of governance. But Parenti pushes back on any judgement of pitiable failure on their part: 

    To say that “socialism doesn’t work” is to overlook the fact that it did. In Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea and Cuba, revolutionary communism created a life that was far better than the wretched existence they had endured under feudal lords, military bosses, foreign colonizers and Western capitalists. The end result was a dramatic improvement in living conditions on a scale never before or since witnessed in history. State socialism transformed desperately poor countries into modernized societies in which everyone had enough food, clothing and shelter; where elderly people had secure pensions; and where all children (and many adults) went to school and nobody was denied medical attention. Some of us from poor families who carry around the hidden injuries of class are much impressed by these achievements and are unwilling to dismiss them.2

    The siege socialism of Marxist-Leninist regimes locked in an objective rise of living standards and quality of life—impressive, considering the headwinds they faced. But the experience of these states marks a deviation from classical Marxist dictates, which state that the emancipatory revolution must find a home with advanced capitalist states that have negated Western liberal capitalism into a higher order: 

    Marx himself never imagined that socialism could be achieved in impoverished conditions. Such a project would require almost as bizarre a loop in time as inventing the internet in the Middle Ages. Nor did any Marxist thinker until Stalin imagine this was possible, including Lenin, Trotsky and the rest of the Bolshevik leadership.3

    Karl Marx was aware of the cruelties that the bourgeois class and their armies were capable of raining down upon any threat to their economic power. Up to 20,000 people, including women and children, were massacred by the French National Army when they broke up the Paris Commune in 1871, events immortalized in Marx’s essay The Civil War in France. Only a nation that was economically advanced at the outset of revolution would be able to negate capitalist relations along humanistic lines while buttressing against foreign aggression.

    Lacking this, 20th century Marxist-Leninist states came to resemble the “crude communism” of Marx’s Paris Manuscripts, where “the role of the worker is not abolished but extended to all men.”4 Like the working classes under capitalism, wage labour in siege socialist regimes became universalized, with alienation piqued by irrational bureaucratic decision-making. Individuals in these countries often fell “between two stools,” where, 

    Workers were told that the property of the means of production belonged to the whole society, including them, but they did not have a decisive role in determining how to employ the machinery or how to dispose of the product. For that reason, Soviet workers considered the “socialist means of production” to be not fully theirs, but someone else’s—or, most often, nobody’s!5

    And so, there was barely a whimper when party bureaucrats sold out their countries under the tutelage of Western economic advisors. Millions in Eastern Europe lost their job, healthcare, pensions—and starved. Hyperinflation over scarce goods ensued. Life expectancy crashed. Hundreds of thousands of East European women and children disappeared into sex markets, only to resurface over the Internet’s seamiest corners naked, humiliated, exploited. All was right in the world again.

    Further reading:

    Karl Marx, The Civil War in France.

    ———–


    1. Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism (City Lights Books, 1997), 49-52. ↩︎

    2. Ibid, 85. ↩︎

    3. Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right (Yale University Press, 2011), 16. ↩︎

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

    5. Chris Gilbert, “Luisa Cáceres: Commune-Building in Urban Venezuela,” Monthly Review, Vol. 74, No. 7: 26. ↩︎
  • Revolution

    Revolution

    This article is part of a series on classical Marxism.

    Marx observed that revolution occurs when “the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production.”1 Over the territories of the Soviet sphere, this happened first when breaking out from autocratic feudalism in 1917 and again in 1991 when a lethargic party apparatus was absorbed by global capital. The Marxist-Leninist states of the Soviet Union and its offshoots were successful in negating their feudal and colonial circumstances. But on the conditions necessary for socialism, Marx says it is “bourgeois industry and commerce that create the material conditions of a new world in the same way as geological revolutions have created the surface of the earth.”2 It isn’t the feudal aristocracy or foreign colonizer that must be negated, it is the late capitalism of the present. Only then may we reach the conscious, abundant and individual-affirming free association that Marx had contemplated. 

    In the West today the capitalist oligarchy flaunts its power more than ever against a backdrop of digital connectivity, modern monetary theory, artificial intelligence and the ruination of mental and natural spaces. Our political institutions and regulatory bodies—devised by the pre-internet industrial society—have been rendered moribund against the rapidity of technological development and monopolistic economic power. The luxury doomsday bunkers constructed by billionaires is an admission from the ruling class that the centre will not hold indefinitely. That the people are not satisfied with the wealth they’ve appropriated. That there are more of us than there are of them. 

    But the people—us—we don’t have bunkers for solitude. The world will be ours to fix, regardless if we want it. Will these presently grinding contradictions produce the friction needed for revolution? Marx answers: “The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.”3 What shape this will take is not predetermined. There are some who suggest that we are entering a techno-feudalism, with Big Tech rentiers harvesting our data and content creations across digital spaces in a quest for global domination. It is difficult to imagine a rosy outcome if our primary economic function were reduced to online activity, feeding only from the scraps of corporate largesse through some kind of universal income scheme.

    The situation is not hopeless. These new technologies contain within them the potential to enslave us but also carry, dialectically, the potential to set us free. Even from the Victorian Era, Marx predicted that global connectivity could advance prosperity and liberate the entire species instead of the current set-up whereby one country or class progresses only at the expense of another. Right wing populism will have its moments to try and return the world to a simpler order of things. But they should know that these attempts will always be feeble in a world where no man will step in the same river twice.

    Affecting an axial shift, Marx likens political action to learning a new language: “…the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue.”4 To that end, any movement predicated on “Great, Again” cannot articulate solutions to the problems posed by the current paradigm. If it seems that right wing “solutions” only cause greater problems after the fact, it is because all of its referents are embedded within the problem’s cause—namely, the capitalist system. A revolutionary programme must create something dynamic, a system which does not dominate the masses but the opposite: the masses dominate the system. 

    To end the spell of corrupt elections, special interest groups and outdated constitutions, power needs to flow directly from the people via combinations of online voting, citizens’ assemblies chosen by lot and direct referenda. It is radical structural change, not policy change, that opens the doors to freedom. The post-revolutionary abolition of all political parties and elected representatives. The nationalization and subordination of banks, tech, pharmaceutical and telecom companies to the democratically planned production goals of the people. The decontamination of the environment and protection of biodiversity, wild spaces and hunting grounds for their own sake. The promotion of worker-owned enterprises, community associations and consumer cooperatives to service local needs. The dissolution of innovation-destroying “intellectual property.” The erasure of the Kafkaesque legal bureaucracy in favour of courts of ethicists and philosophers. The suppression of central bank financiers, the billionaire ownership class and the Davos-style decision making of the global elite.

    Aristotle imagined that communally owned automata—robots—could free humanity from toil by making necessary human labour redundant. It is an idea that the classically-trained Marx grasped during his lifetime in the age of early mechanization. An economy where automation was not a blind tool for profit, but rather, was put into the service of humanity to create use-values that individuals would harness. It is only in the post-capitalist sphere that a mass-unchaining of people from the compulsion to labour can be realized. This economy must be dynamic, premised on the maximization of free time and fully developing the talents latent in each individual. The individual, in turn, “reacts back upon the productive power of labour as itself the greatest productive force.”5 The potential of our species becomes realized only when the full potential of each individual is expressed.

    It is in this vein that Marx and Friedrich Engels argued for a world where “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”6 Free development is not a matter of social justice or moral righteousness. The more victims of poverty, prejudice, preventable death and compelled labour that fall in the world, the fewer people we have contributing to our collective well-being and individual material life. The objective is therefore not equality but classlessness. Both class division and social equality bring limitations to individual compensation and the expression of talent. The cessation of class conflict is requisite to eliminating depravations, cultivating virtue and maximizing the self-directed activity of society’s members. It is only the universal development of human power which may form the basis of a productive and limitless civilization, harmonious with nature and spiritually rich.

    The capitalist ruling class, with its trail of biological contaminations and enslaving techno-feudalist designs, will try to safeguard their misanthropic commercial interests and hypnotize us with dead-end notions of “building back,” “great resets” and conservative “golden ages.” But, in the words of the great philosopher, Slavoj Žižek: “It is not that Communism is one of the possible choices; it is the only choice. Once we choose it, we see it’s the only way out.”7

    Further reading:

    Friedrich Engels, The Principles of Communism.

    ———–


    1. Karl Marx, “Preface,” A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. ↩︎

    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. Marx, “Preface,” Critique of Political Economy. ↩︎

    4. Karl Marx, “Chapter One,” The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. ↩︎

    5. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Penguin, 2005), 711. ↩︎

    6. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto. ↩︎

    7. Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder (OR Books, 2021), 221. ↩︎