"What about the over 100 million people who died because of this man’s philosophy?!" (read above)

 

What is this shit? This number is so inflated that the head of whoever says this will blow up like a bad party balloon! Some people might have died not so much because of "his philosophy" but because under the thumb of despotic royalty, people were primed to resist the idea of equality. As well some despots used the idea to become sadistic about control. But, far more people died because of Luther and the Catholic pope than because Marx expressed some ideas about workers not being treated like slaves. Such respect of "ordinary" people was actually picked by FDR who died before his "second bill of right" designed to enshrine similar views, ever saw the day.

Free markets are designed to benefit the strong against the weak, and to promote monopolies ahead of diversity. This is why Christ chased the merchants from the temple...

 

Gus is an atheist and not a marxist per se, but in favour of demolishing the rabid hypocrisy from our present crop of thieves in power.

 

Every year, states and local governments give economic-development incentives to companies to the tune of between $45 billion and $80 billion. Why such a wide range? It’s not sloppy research; it’s because many of these subsidies are not public.

For the known subsidies, such as Maryland’s recent $8.5 billion incentive bid for Amazon’s second headquarters, the support includes cash grants for company relocations, subsidized land, forgiving company taxes on everything from property taxes to sales taxes and investments in infrastructure for the company. Maryland is even offering to give 5.75 percent of each worker’s salary back to the company, which is the maximum state income tax rate for individuals. Employees will pay taxes that will be routed back to Amazon.

To be clear, Maryland isn’t a model of transparency. Its offer is known not because the state made its bid public, but because these extreme incentives required special legislation. The legislature didn’t call it the Amazon Bill. They called it the Prime Act, which is a tortured acronym from “Promoting ext-Raordinary Innovation in Maryland’s Economy Program.” The bill was revealed only after an initial offer was made to the company.

 

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/24/opinion/amazon-hq2-incentives-taxes.html

China's "Helmsman" President Xi Jinping wants the 1.4 billion people he leads to enthusiastically embrace the teachings of German philosopher Karl Marx, as part of a broader revival of the Communist Party.

China's strongman leader will make a speech to celebrate Marx's 200th birthday on Friday, and recently marked the 170th anniversary of his seminal work, The Communist Manifesto, by encouraging senior leaders "to grasp the power of the truth of Marxism".

To further celebrate China's favourite Western philosopher, the state broadcaster has been carrying a special five-part program called Marx is Correct, in which Communist Party scholars lecture an audience of teenagers about traditional socialist doctrine.

read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-05-04/china-xi-jinping-is-pushing-a-marx...

 

Stuart Jeffries

The other day I stood at the grave of Karl Marx in Highgate cemetery in north London, wondering if he has anything say to us today, 200 years after his birth, on 5 May 1818. “Workers of all lands unite,” reads the tombstone. But they haven’t – the solidarity of the exploited, which Marx took to be necessary to end capitalism, scarcely exists.

“What the bourgeoisie produces, above all, are its own gravediggers,” he and Friedrich Engels wrote 170 years ago in The Communist Manifesto. “Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.” Not really: capitalism today is rampant. In the kind of historical irony that the philosopher Hegel called the cunning of reason, capitalism has even co-opted its gravediggers to keep it alive: China, the world’s biggest socialist society (if only ostensibly) supplies capitalist enterprises with cheap labour that undercuts other workers around the world.

So is Marx finished? Not at all. For me, what makes Marx worth reading now is not his Panglossian prognoses, but his still resonant diagnoses. For instance, he and Engels foresaw how globalisation would work. “In place of the old wants,” they wrote, “satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes.” That’s why Chinese workers make products we never conceived would exist, let alone that we would covet, and that would convert us into politically quiescent, borderline sociopathic, sleepwalking narcissists. That’s right – I’m talking about iPhones.

I find it hard to read the first few pages of The Communist Manifesto without thinking that I live in the world he and Engels described. “Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.” We inhabit a world just like that, only more intensely than Marx and Engels dared imagine. For me, these words don’t just capture how Uber, Deliveroo and the other virtuosos of the gig economy chip away at values and standards to make a fast buck, but also how the planet is relentlessly despoiled in order to satisfy tax-avoiding shareholders.

Consider, as the Marxist professor David Harvey did recently, São Paulo: a city whose economic base is a car industry that produces vehicles that spend hours in traffic jams, polluting streets and isolating individuals from each other – a potent emblem of how free-market economies are inimical to the real needs of real people.

Marx didn’t foresee Facebook, but he grasped the essentials of Mark Zuckerberg’s business model, certainly better than American senators did at last month’s congressional hearings. “The bourgeoisie,” Marx and Engels wrote, beautifully, “has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self- interest, than callous ‘cash payment’. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.”

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/05/karl-marx-200th-bi...

 

The conclusion of this article is a bit glib...

"That remains the challenge. We need Marx to help us understand the state we’re in, though that is only a prelude to the bigger struggle, for which his writings are less helpful: namely, how to get out of it."

"the cunning of reason?"  How to get out if it? Yes, this is one of the aspect in what I call "The Age of Deceit". We lie with brilliance... and we'll never get out of it, except through a major trauma... Take your pick: world war, revolution, natural disaster (aka global warming), all engendered by our carelessness, etc...

You can hardly blame Russian President Vladimir Putin for enjoying a “told you so moment”. He lately reminded European leaders that their all-out spat with the United States is what happens when you are too deferential to American hegemonic ambitions.

This predicament is just what the Russian leader had warned against almost 10 years ago in a famous speech he delivered in Munich on growing global disorder.

Last week, during his nationally televised marathon Q and A with Russian citizens, Putin referred to the unprecedented trade tariffs that President Trump is slapping on European states.

Rightly, Putin said those penalties were effectively a form of economic sanctions imposed by Washington on its supposed allies.

Putin hinted that the Europeans were now getting a taste of the noxious medicine that has been doled out to Russia by Western powers which have inflicted sanctions on Moscow over dubious allegations concerning the nearly four-year-old Ukraine conflict.

The acrimonious fallout from Trump's de facto trade war with Europe, Canada and Japan was all-too apparent during the testy G7 summit held this weekend in Quebec.

READ MORE: G7 Summit: Trump Trying to Prevent US From Losing 'Superpower' Status – Analyst

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau decried American "illegal" trade measures, while French President Emmanuel Macron jettisoned his earlier "bromance" with Trump to declare that the group of Western industrialized countries plus Japan may reformat as the "G6" without the US, in order to counteract Washington's "hegemony".

Speaking on behalf of the European bloc, Donald Tusk, the European Council President, expressed his frustration at Washington's increasing disdain for multilateralism by saying that under Trump the United States is destroying the "rules-based global order".

 

But hold on a moment. Let's go back to the landmark speech made by Putin in 2007 at the Munich Security Conference. More than a decade ago, the Russian leader delivered a blistering, prescient warning back then, when he said that American hegemonic ambitions of unipolar power would inevitably disrupt the global balance.

As far back as 2007, Putin explicitly admonished that Washington's drive for unrivaled global dominance would end up bringing chaos to international law and order. This was during the heyday of post-9/11 US-led wars in the Middle East, which the European states all-too deferentially went along with despite these wars being illegal and unleashing ongoing global problems of terrorism and refugee crises.

READ MORE: As Relevant as Ever: Why Trump Needs to Take Putin's 2007 Munich Speech to Heart

Putin's essential lesson in Munich more than 10 years ago was that the world order of multilateralism and diplomacy could not withstand the assault of a would-be hegemon, whether that is the US or any other power.

Today, the Russian president's analysis has been vindicated, as can be seen from the shock among the Europeans and Canadians at being treated like nothing more than minions by an American bully.

Washington under Trump is showing its true colors towards supposed "allies". For Washington, there is evidently no such thing as allies, only clients, who must do the bidding of American capitalism and imperialism. Any dissent is not tolerated, under pain of economic retribution, which the Europeans and Canada in particular are now getting a bitter taste of.

The contrast between the fractious G7 and the parallel summit taking place in China this weekend could not be more instructive.

Over the weekend, President Xi Jinping warmly welcomed Putin and the leaders of Iran, India, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan to the annual Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) meeting.

Putin was honored with a medal of friendship and described by President Xi as his best ally. All SCO delegates underlined the strategic importance of fraternal cooperation and multilateralism — the exact opposite of the debacle taking place at the G7 in Canada.

In those two events, we see two diametric visions of global relations. The G7 is all about American bullying for unipolar dominance. Whereas the SCO heralds a new world of multipolar partnership. The former is a recipe for conflict and war; the latter is the way forward for joint prosperity, development and peaceful coexistence.

Ironically, however, the incumbent European powers still don't seem to fully get it.

Admittedly, to a certain degree, their bruised interests and sensitivities seem to demonstrate a realization that they are being used and abused by Washington's hegemonic desires. The Europeans and Canada are huffing and puffing with chagrin and talking about "asserting themselves" without America.

Nevertheless, despite all the huffing and puffing, the Western minions still don't seem to get it.

READ MORE: This is First Time G7 Is So Controversial, Opposed to US – Academic

Paradoxically, it was Trump who said before the G7 summit that Russia should be readmitted to the forum. Previously, Russia was a member of what was the G8, but following the Ukraine crisis in 2014, the other members kicked Moscow out of the club, leveling unfair allegations that Russia had destabilized Ukraine and "annexed" Crimea.

At least Trump seems to have looked beyond that dubious affair, and hence called for Russia to be "at the negotiating table" of a reformed G8.

 

For their part, European leaders don't seem to have come to their senses. Apart from the dissenting voice of the new Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, the EU bloc rejected Trump's conciliatory offer to Russia. Germany's Merkel, France's Macron and the others said that relations would not be normalized with Russia "until Crimea was returned to Ukraine".

The Europeans are hanging themselves by their own irrational petard over the spurious Ukraine issue.

Ukraine was, by far, much more destabilized by Washington and the EU's unlawful interference than anything Russia has done. The people of Crimea voted in a legal referendum to join the Russian Federation. Europe needs to get over that illusion and stop making its futile demands on Russia.

The fact is that the EU has inflicted vast damage to its member state economies by sheepishly going along with a US-led NATO agenda of hostility towards Russia. The Europeans have slavishly aped Washington's sanctions against Moscow for no sound reason, only based on hollow and demeaning claims about Russian "interference" and "aggression".

More than 10 years after he told them so, European leaders are slowly realizing what Putin was warning about American bullying, unipolar dominance and its arrogant "exceptionalism".

The operative word here is "slowly". Europeans — the mainstay governments and Brussels establishment that is — still haven't copped on that they are being played for minions and fools by Washington, as is evidenced by their irrational views about Russia and Ukraine.

European leaders — apart from Italy and a few emerging others — are still trapped within a servile transAtlantic role towards American imperialism. It is doubtful that the EU establishment as currently comprised will ever break out of its subservience towards Washington, despite being kicked around by the Americans.

That's why the Kremlin's response this weekend to Trump's "offer" of readmitting Russia to the G8 was spot on.

 

Russia cooly said, "we are focusing on other formats". That can be taken to mean the SCO, the Eurasian Economic Union and the broader project of building a multipolar global order. Forums, that is, which are based on fraternal cooperation and genuine solidarity, not bullying and unilateral expedience.

In its existing form, the G7 is a bunch of losers. It's a retrogressive world view, not progressive. Russia is better off without.

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/columnists/201806091065264434-putin-g7-sco-summits/

Celebrity chef and television presenter Anthony Bourdain has died by suicide. The 61-year-old was found dead in his hotel room in Strasbourg, France, where he was filming an episode of his CNN program “Parts Unknown.” During one episode of his show, he traveled to Gaza. In 2014, he won an award from the Muslim Public Affairs Council. In his acceptance speech, he said, “The world has visited many terrible things on the Palestinian people, none more shameful than robbing them of their basic humanity.”

 

Read more:

https://www.democracynow.org/2018/6/8/

 

In Gaza, thousands of Palestinians have resumed protests against the Israeli blockade. Israeli soldiers have killed at least 119 Palestinians and wounded more than 13,000 more since the Palestinians’ nonviolent Great March of Return protests began on March 30. A week ago today, Israeli forces shot dead Palestinian medic Razan al-Najjar as she was helping evacuate wounded Palestinians at a protest near the separation fence between Israel and Gaza. At the time of her killing, she was wearing a white medical coat and a medical ID card. The following day, thousands of people poured into the streets of Gaza to attend her funeral. Her killing has also sparked international outrage. Earlier this week, the Israeli military said Israeli snipers had not intentionally shot at Razan. But the Israeli military is now facing widespread criticism after it released a short video Thursday, that was heavily edited, in efforts to claim the slain medic was acting as a “human shield” for Hamas when she was shot dead by an Israeli sniper exactly one week ago. We speak to Muhammad Shehada, writer and activist from the Gaza Strip and a student of development studies at Lund University in Sweden.

 

Read more:

https://www.democracynow.org/2018/6/8/

From Rod Dreher;

 

This is not the kind of letter you get every day. I’m not using the reader’s name here, but he included it in the post:

I read your recent article, “Seminary Confidential”, which was shared by a couple of my facebook friends. I have some familiarity with your work and I agree with a lot of it. I would like to offer a different perspective from that of your other readers.

Because, you see, I am a Marxist.

And the reason I need to speak up is because the same cancer that is eating away at you is also eating away at us. Time and time again I see conservative sources that I respect talking about Marxism in the same breath as (to use some quotes from your student correspondent):

“First, they fully bought into the primacy of the autonomous individual. You are untethered from all social and biological relationships and constraints that you do not willfully choose. Anything you feel is good and should be celebrated by society. You are unbounded by any moral constraint except the consent of other autonomous individuals.”

“It has been applied to gender, to sexuality, to race, even to colonialism. It has given us the fields of Queer Theory, Postcolonialism, and Whiteness Studies, among others.”

“You can see how nicely CT dovetails with autonomous individualism: you are morally excellent if you embrace all your identities and liberate yourself and others from the shackles of the oppressors (systemic white, capitalistic, patriarchal heteronormativity).”

“One group says that truth exists, humans are sinful, our actions must be conformed to God, and that society and systems help us obtain those ends. The other says that truth either doesn’t exist or is dependent on the subjective experience of the individual…”

This… is Marxism? Radical subjectivist individualism… is Marxism? Believing that there is no truth, that subjective individual experiences are the measure of all things, that you (an individual) should “embrace all your identities” and “liberate yourself” – all this is Marxism? A system of thought which denies objective reality and proclaims the individual will as supreme arbiter of the universe, being regarded as not just compatible with Marxism, but as *being* Marxism, somehow! O, how far we have fallen.

It is of course true that Critical Theory originates from Marxism, and that all these ideas were indeed promoted at first by thinkers who began as Marxists. But only in the same sense that Mormonism originates from Christianity and was created by a man who began as a Christian.

Marxism is a philosophy rooted in materialism, indeed even radical materialism. The original 19th century Marxists were, as you know, roundly criticized and caricatured as historical determinists. They believed that human society operates according to certain laws as immutable as the laws of physics, and furthermore that they had discovered what those laws were. Later Marxists (including myself) seriously doubt the claim that we have actually *discovered* all those laws, but you can’t really be any kind of Marxist without believing that those laws *exist*, that we know at least a few of them at least to some extent, and that, in principle, all of them can eventually be discovered.

Marxism is compatible with a lot of things — I’m certainly not one of those people who deny the label of “Marxist” to those who disagree with me — but radical subjectivist individualism is almost the precise polar opposite of Marxist philosophy. The whole point of Marx is that the machine of human society and history operates a certain way regardless of what you think or feel, that “matter determines consciousness” and not the other way around, and that everything that happens in society (including oppression) has ultimately economic causes.

Marxism doesn’t validate anyone’s feelings. Marxism says that your feelings are determined by the objective material conditions of your life.

Now the reason I am insisting on this is because the Critical Theory that you see taking over Christianity has taken over our movement first, and drove it into the ground. It is not Marxism, although it may be considered a parasite upon Marxism. It does originate from among us — it began with a group of Marxists (the Frankfurt School) trying to answer the question of why no communist revolutions happened in the West, and their answer was that subjective individual experiences are more powerful than traditional Marxism believed. A few decades later this evolved into the view that subjective individual experiences are all-powerful and objective material conditions are irrelevant.

In other words, it basically evolved into the view that Marxism was wrong about everything (they wouldn’t necessarily put it this way, but this is what it actually implies). And this view took over the Western left some time between the 1960s and the end of the Cold War. Cheered on, I might add, by those on the right who were all too eager to promote anything that was critical of traditional Marxism.

This had political consequences. Oppression — which was originally defined by Marxism as an objective economic phenomenon, where some people get less wealth than they justly deserve and others get more than they justly deserve — became re-defined as a matter of subjective experience. Now, to be oppressed simply meant to *feel* oppressed. This led to a retreat from practical political thinking. You can redistribute wealth, but you can’t redistribute feelings. All you can do is tell the people responsible for the bad feelings that they should feel guilty about their privilege. So here we are today, with a left-wing political culture more interested in telling white male college students to feel bad than in actually improving the material conditions of the working class. It’s a disaster.

Inequality — objective, economic, material inequality — is higher than at any point since the 1920s. Global corporations are stronger than ever. By any objective metric of success, we are losing. Badly. Consumerism, individualism and hedonism are winning, but by some strange alchemy people on both the right and the left have come to believe that a pro-gay ad campaign by a multinational corporation represents a triumph for “the left” or for “Marxism”.

So this Marxist wishes you godspeed in your fight against radical subjectivist individualism. You are not fighting us, but rather a common enemy that defeated us first. We may not have much in common in our worldviews, but one thing we DO have in common is a belief in the primacy of objective reality over subjective experience.

Also, attacking religion was the worst mistake we ever made. We foolishly believed that, in the absence of faith in an afterlife, people would turn to working altruistically to build paradise on Earth. In fact, it turns out that they become selfish hedonists instead, and they care less, not more, about improving general human life on Earth. I wish we could ask for your forgiveness collectively, but I can only ask it for myself. Your side has always been right about the importance of faith and family to a healthy community (which is something we want as well). Capitalism, on the other hand, is your enemy as much as it is ours.

 

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/cultural-marxism-enemy-of...

 

 

Faith in god has been displace nonetheless with various other illusions that have a lot to do with nonsense, rather than scientific curiosity. Marxism got defeated by greed, god and guns — and sociopathy, wherever it appears in which ever political construct... It was not a mistake to eliminate faith but it could have been a problem to create hierarchical structures that could be corrupted by all the elements above — greed, god, guns, sociopathy — which are the principal virtues of capitalism.

 

Read from top.

Story Transcript

This is a rush transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Worker: We’re going to stand together on May 1st. We’re going to come together and we’re going to protest. We don’t want to do this. We’re being forced to do this. We’re not protected, we’re not paid correctly, meaning there is no sick time leave or paid sick time or hazard pay.

Jaisal Noor: Welcome to the Real News. I’m Jaisal Noor. There’s no crisis the powerful won’t exploit and despite the enormous challenges, workers are continuing to organize and fight back. And have called for a general strike on May 1st. As the staggering death toll from the coronavirus pandemic continues to grow and working people are not only facing the health impacts but economic devastation as well. An unemployment rate unmatched since the Great Depression with at least one in seven workers now seeking jobless benefits. Half of those have been unable to secure assistance according to a survey by the Economic Policy Institute. Millions unable to pay rent or mortgages with no assistance in sight and governors seeking to reopen their economies against the advice of public health experts and threatening to punish workers who refuse to return to work.

Well now joining us to discuss this is a top labor reporter who was on the beat before it was cool. Sarah Jaffe is a reporting fellow at the Type Media Center and the author of Necessary Trouble, Americans and Revolt, and the forthcoming Work Won’t Love You Back. Thanks so much for joining us.

Sarah Jaffe: Thanks for having me.

Jaisal Noor: So workers are facing unprecedented challenges, there’s record unemployment numbers and many of those who have work, especially low income people of color, have to work in dangerous conditions. What are you hearing right now?

Sarah Jaffe: I’m hearing from workers who are scared, who are mad, who are laid off and struggling to figure out how they’re going to pay the bills and who are going to work in terrible conditions. And some of them are actually winning some concessions from the boss.

Jaisal Noor: Yeah. So can you talk about what that looks like?

Sarah Jaffe: It looks like a lot of different things right now. We’re in this moment where a lot of the traditional organizing tactics don’t work so much because people who actually respect the lockdown, which I’m sure we’ll get to that point later, are trying to stay apart from one another. So things like normal mass protests don’t look the same anymore. However, what we learned is that it’s really, really striking to see sort of perfectly socially distanced actions from workers ranging from nurses who are demanding more personal protective equipment, to the workers at GE plants who are demanding to make more personal protective equipment. And of course the strike still works.

Jaisal Noor: And those GE workers you talked about are really striking because they were demanding their workers create protective gear, sorry the factories create protective gear. Something Trump has the power to do. Something he’s used to help create his wall. And now he’s ordered the reopening of meat processing facilities, which have been hotbeds for the coronavirus pandemic, because, similar to other workplaces, it’s impossible to socially distance. But he hasn’t used that same power to, which some of the nurses have been demanding for for weeks and months now to use PPE. Can you talk more about that?

Sarah Jaffe: Yeah, exactly. So we’ve seen healthcare workers calling over and over again for the government to use the Defense Production Act, which allows them to basically requisition production to create protective equipment, to create ventilators, to create other sorts of healthcare things that would actually save lives during this crisis. And they’ve done that a little bit by now. Trump has used it in limited capacity and mostly, as an article I was reading this morning said, for places that were already doing it. So we’re seeing the call is coming from workers over and over again to use this.

And instead, after the CEO of Tyson foods took out, a full page ad in the New York times, suddenly Trump is mandating, under the Defense Production Act, that meat processing plants, where there have been documented outbreaks of the virus. I mean we should really stress that these are places that already are spreading the virus and they’re spreading it to the workers. But there’s a long history of us being quite aware that the conditions in meat packing plants, in particular going back to Upton Sinclair, that affects the cleanliness of the food we eat. I don’t know if you all want to be ordering some Tyson chicken with the side of coronavirus, but I sure don’t.

And so that’s what they’re doing and that case it’s essentially, you know, demanding, forcing, pressuring workers back to work. In situations like that strikes are forbidden, although once again, you can’t actually stop people from striking. You can fire them for it, but you can’t really forced them to go into work unless they’re in prison, which is a whole other situation we could talk about for probably years in this crisis. So to see where the government’s priorities are, it’s essentially keeping certain corporations profitable rather than making sure that we have the actual life-saving equipment that people, including if we wanted to keep those meat processing workers safe, those workers, the equipment that they would need.

Jaisal Noor: And just the level of profits that some of these big CEOs are seeing, it’s just truly astounding. I think Jeff Bezos, he’s already earned something like an extra $18 billion since this crisis started. And so the workers we’re talking about are the people that often work for these big CEOs. And it’s just striking to see how little has been done to hold these big corporations accountable. They’ve been given a blank check from the stimulus up to $6 trillion with few, if any, strings attached. Yet working people have gotten a pittance from this. Talk about, there’s mounting pressure now on Democrats to actually get some for working people, which are supposed to be their base. These are the people that are going to need to show up in November if Democrats are going to take back the White House, in a sense.

Sarah Jaffe: If we’re going to have an election. Well that’s a whole other story too. Yeah. Talking about Jeff Bezos, right? Jeff Bezos owns Amazon, which owns Whole Foods, which are two of the companies where workers are calling for strikes on Friday. I don’t know how big their strikes are going to be because this organizing is all really new and mostly again, taking place in unprecedented ways. We’re looking at organizing that’s happening online, on Zoom calls, Facebook groups, which is not, it’s not brand new, but it has been something that is both been used dramatically, in the case of worker-organizing at Walmart over the last several years, but also, sometimes with limited success. Still though we’ve seen workers walk out at Amazon’s factory or not factories, excuse me, Amazon doesn’t have a factory. Warehouses, distribution centers. Not just in this country but in France.

My friend Cole Stangler, who’s now reporting from France had a piece today in the New York times about the way that they’ve managed to bring Amazon to the table in France. Now of course in France and other European countries, they have what’s called sectoral bargaining, which means the companies are sort of forced by the government to deal with the workers’ representatives. That we don’t have here. We could have here. We’ve had sort of something similar to it at some point and it might be something that, if the Democrats cared about working people, thinking about ways to implement it might be a good idea. Again, leaving election alone for now.

Jaisal Noor: Yeah, and I’m glad you brought up France because, from what I read, in France Amazon has been ordered to stop shipping non-essential goods, which seems like a common sense demand right now. So that’s something that’s happened in France and I think courts were involved in that as well. So it’s those common sense basic demands you’re hearing from the workers, but not really hearing from that many elected officials. And something we were talking about off-camera is how the press has given far more attention to these reopened protests, which we know are backed by the dark money of the Koch donor network and demanding to reopen the economy when public health experts are saying this is going to cause new outbreaks. And we’re already seeing that in places in Tennessee where there’s been outbreaks after these protests have happened. Talk about what we know about who’s behind these and now there’s governors saying if workers don’t return to work, they’re going to get punished as well.

Sarah Jaffe: Yeah. I think there’s a few important things to unpack here. One of course, is that our unemployment system, as you mentioned, is designed to make sure people work. So you don’t get unemployment normally if you quit, you don’t get unemployment normally if you’re fired for cause. You get unemployment if you were laid off through no fault of your own. They’ve loosened that a little bit depending on the state with the coronavirus unemployment package that was passed through Congress, but it’s still quite difficult to get unemployment. As you mentioned at the beginning, only about half the people who have been laid off have been able to access it and that’s before these States like Georgia are trying to reopen, right? And what that means is that workers are no longer considered doing the right thing if they stay home. Suddenly they’re supposed to go back to work and they can get kicked off of those unemployment benefits if they do not go to work, take the first job that is offered, all of that stuff.

The other thing about these protests, right, is that it’s sort of like the tea party, right? This was during the financial crisis, with the resulting recession in 2008, 2009 the first big protest that we seemed to see were coming from the right and it was backed by the same kinds of people that, as far as we know are backing these protests now. And it’s sort of all wrapped up in this idea of freedom being you can buy whatever you want. Which is a particularly American definition of freedom and one that, as you mentioned, the workers at places like Amazon and Walmart are saying like, “Please don’t shop for unnecessary things right now.”

And the other thing about that definition of freedom is that it is, as historian Greg Grandin put it in his recent book, The End of the Myth, which is some great coronavirus reading if you’re bored right now. He argues that Americans’ understanding of freedom is sort of this understanding of, of not being restrained in what we do. And that that kind of lack of restraint has often meant the freedom to oppress other people. So when you look at somebody holding up a sign that says, “I want a haircut,” or, “Why can’t I buy XYZ thing?” What they’re demanding is that somebody else has to go to work in order to do what they want to be done. They are still sort of demanding the freedom to oppress other people. And what we know from the statistics on the essential workers who are currently working and the service industry more broadly is that the people who will be forced back into these unsafe conditions are largely black and brown. A lot of them are immigrants and a lot of them are women.

Jaisal Noor: And finally, you’ve been following the labor movement, organized labor for some time now. Where does organized labor stand in this moment? Have you been encouraged by some of the actions they’re taking or are they also in a really difficult space without a lot of political power at this point?

Yeah, I mean nobody I think would have said that the American labor movement was in a strong place at the beginning of 2020, right? There are some bright spots, the teachers organizing that has been going on for the last decade. That sort of first popped up in places like Chicago. That has been a really exciting bright spot for the labor movement. The fact that the public sector unions didn’t completely collapse after the Janus decision. That was just about a year ago. That has been a really good sign, but it is also true that a lot of the workers who’ve been laid off belonged to service sector unions. Those unions are in a rough place right now. Some of that is being outweighed by some of their members. Them being essential workers like the United Food Commercial Workers represents a lot of grocery store workers and they have done things like get them hazard pay, which is great, right? You get hazard pay, you can bargain to some degree.

Protective equipment, again, if you can get your hands on it you can bargain sort of safety precautions in the stores, limited amount of people, out-in, things like that. And then of course the thing that’s happening now is just that the calculus of going to work at a kind of lousy job used to be like, “Well it sucks and it doesn’t pay me enough, but it’s something. It’s better than nothing. I can get another job later.” Now, when that lousy job that was maybe okay is also possibly going to get you very sick or kill you, that’s a totally different set of calculations that people have to make. And when you work at say, the Smithfield plant in South Dakota that had hundreds of workers sick and then Trump says, “You got to go to work.” Are you going to go to work? What’s that going to look like? Are you willing to go to that job and who’s going to be willing to take those jobs if the current crop of workers, well A, hundreds of them are sick, but B, they just stopped doing it.

And so there’s a potential moment for a lot of power for working people right now. It’s also a really, really dangerous time where a lot of people are unemployed. And so the labor movement, if it is smart, should be thinking about also how you organize among the unemployed, how we think about and talk about work and the lack of it in a global pandemic. All of these things that we have some understanding of how to talk about, but not in this particular context. And so that’s something we all could be doing with our lockdown.

Well, we know the wealthy, the powerful are exploiting this crisis and the working people have to organize as well. Sarah Jaffe, thanks so much for joining us. Reporting fellow at the Type Media Center, author of Necessary Trouble, Americans in Revolt and the forthcoming Work Won’t Love You Back. Thanks so much.

Sarah Jaffe: Thank you.

Jaisal Noor: And thank you for joining us at the Real News Network.

 

 

Read more:

https://therealnews.com/stories/workers-fighting-back-may-day-strike

 

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An Eco-Revolutionary Tipping Point?

Global Warming, the Two Climate Denials, and the Environmental Proletariat

by Paul Burkett

 

In the summer of 2016, the acceleration of climate change was once again making headlines. In July, the World Meteorological Association announced that the first six months of 2016 had broken all previous global temperature records, with June being the fourteenth month in a row of record heat for both land and oceans and the 378th straight month of temperatures greater than the historical average. Heating has been especially rapid in Arctic regions, where thawing effects are releasing large amounts of methane and carbon dioxide. On July 21, 2016, temperatures at locations in Kuwait and Iraq reached 129oF, the hottest ever recorded in the Eastern Hemisphere. The disruptive effects of bi-polar warming were evident in the unprecedented crossing of the equator by the Northern Hemisphere jet stream, where it merged with the Southern Hemisphere jet stream, further threatening seasonal integrity with unforeseen impacts on weather extremes and the overall climate system.1 Meanwhile a report from the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) described the December 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change as “outdated even before it takes effect,” with climatologists now expecting a global warming of at least 3.4oC (more than double the 1.5oC limit supposedly built into the agreement) even if the promised emissions goals of the nations involved are somehow achieved despite the lack of binding enforcement mechanisms. “The world will still be pumping out 54–56 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent a year by 2030 under current plans, well above the 42 gigatons needed to limit warming to 2 degrees,” according to the UNEP report.2

The historical irony in this situation is hard to miss. Just a couple decades ago, we were told that neoliberal capitalism marked the “end of history.” Now it appears that the system’s ideologues may have been right, but not in the way they envisioned. The system of fossil-fueled neoliberal capitalism is indeed moving toward an end of history, but only in the sense of the end of any historical advance of humanity as a productive, political, and cultural species due to the increasingly barbaric socio-economic and environmental conditions the system creates. There is now no alternative to the end of history as we know it. The sustainable development of human society co-evolving with nature including other species now depends on a definite historical break with capitalism (wage-labor, market competition, production for profit) as the dominant mode of production. That is the main lesson of three recent books: Ian Angus’s Facing the Anthropocene, Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital, and Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything. To solve the climate crisis—which is only part of the broader environmental crisis created by capitalism—competitive, profit-driven production under unequal class control must be replaced with a system in which working people and their communities collectively and democratically regulate production and other interactions with their material and social environment. Sustainable development of people cooperatively co-evolving in a healthy way with other species must replace the profit motive, exploitation, and competition as the motive force in production and in the entire system of material provisioning. To deny that the climate crisis is hardwired into capitalism, and that we need a new system to deal with it, is just as misleading and dangerous as to deny the existence of human-induced global warming. Both forms of climate denial must be overcome in theory and practice.

This lesson was forcibly driven home for me last fall, with the heating-up of the monumental struggle by the Standing Rock Sioux, allied indigenous peoples, and their supporters against the Dakota Access Pipeline. In line with “business as usual,” the mainstream media and President Obama only visibly responded to this struggle (and then tepidly) when demonstrators were physically attacked by the police and corporate security forces live on guerrilla internet broadcasts, followed by the arrival of U.S. military veterans and thousands of others (including some major political and entertainment figures) to support the water protectors. While the corporate media and Obama described the conflict as one over protection of local land and water rights pure and simple, many of the indigenous people and their allies saw it as a struggle to protect the whole earth from an economic system whose imperative to extract fossil fuels for a profit fails to recognize the integrity of the land and its inhabitants as a web of physical, cultural, and spiritual life-forces.3 Another reason everyone should read the aforementioned books is that, taken together, they provide a powerful analysis of the political meaning of apparently localized struggles over land rights such as Standing Rock—further putting the lie to end-of-history thinking. They show that conflicts over pipelines and other fossil-fuel installations can be seen as the cutting edge of an intensifying global class struggle between the dominant sectors of capital and what John Bellamy Foster and others have termed the “environmental proletariat.”4

Although the three books overlap in their coverage of the history and political economy of the climate crisis, they have distinct and complementary analytical vantage points. Angus analyzes global warming through an ecological Marxist interpretation of the Anthropocene, defined by natural scientists as a new epoch of biospheric history in which humans play a leading role in altering global geological processes including the climate.

Malm’s book details the close connections between the burning of fossil fuels (the main source of human-induced climate change) and capitalism’s development of industrial production—a convergence that he terms “fossil capital.” His historical analysis establishes that the fossil fueling of the economy was not driven by generic considerations of scarcity or technical efficiency, but rather by the requirements of exploiting wage-labor, class-monopolization of the benefits of production, and the system’s preference for private competition over social cooperation in the realm of energy use.

Finally, Naomi Klein focuses on the role of neoliberal policies as an enabler of fossil-fueled capitalism and climate change, and as a barrier to sustainable and socially progressive solutions to the climate crisis. She argues that the crisis can be converted into a positive opportunity insofar as it clarifies the clash between capitalist and ecological life-values, but only if we can combat neoliberal capital’s opportunistic use of climate disasters to implement regressive free market and technical “fixes” (including so called climate engineering). Klein describes how environmental proletarians (or, as she terms them, “Blockadians”) are forging innovative combinations of indigenous, communal, feminist, and scientific ways of thinking, as they resist the incursions of oil extraction and transport projects into communal lands and begin the construction of a sustainable alternative to fossil capital.

 

Read more:

https://monthlyreview.org/2017/05/01/an-eco-revolutionary-tipping-point/

The United States is now in a New Cold War with Russia and China, with the focus increasingly on the latter. Where Russia itself is concerned, the onset of the New Cold War was a direct result of the U.S.-led Western imperial strategy during the decades following the demise of the Soviet Union. In the vacuum left by the Soviet disappearance from the world stage, the U.S. grand strategy (as promulgated by Paul Wolfowitz shortly after the Gulf War with Iraq) was directed at a rapid expansion of its sphere of geopolitical dominance, in order to establish it as a permanent unipolar power. This took the form of a series of wars, military interventions, and strongarm political tactics, directed at areas previously contested between the superpowers (including parts of the Middle East), as well as encompassing states that had been in the Soviet geopolitical sphere or previously part of the USSR (John Bellamy Foster, “The New Geopolitics of Empire,” Monthly Review[January 2006]: 9–14). In Europe, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) pushed east into the former “really existing socialist” states, notably through the forcible dismemberment of Yugoslavia (Diana Johnstone, Fool’s Crusade [New York: Monthly Review Press, 2003]). By 2014, NATO had extended its net of influence as far as Ukraine in what had formerly been part of the USSR, now on the Russian border. In the Middle East, the West toppled Iraq and Libya and supported a war on Syria. In 2007, the United States formed Africom, a separate military command for Africa, as it expanded its military operations throughout that continent.

However, this expansion of the U.S. geopolitical sphere eventually suffered a serious setback, faced with a reemerging Russia, once again attaining great power status, this time as a capitalist power under Vladimir Putin. In response to the 2014 NATO-backed political coup in Ukraine, Russia annexed the Crimea (after a plebiscite) and sought to protect Russian nationals in Eastern Ukraine and secure its border with Ukraine through a limited, largely covert intervention. Washington portrayed this as a major act of aggression, justifying increased U.S. sanctions on Russia. In the same period, Russia managed to defeat NATO attempts at toppling Syria.

From the start, the Donald Trump administration sought a détente with Russia, with the object of fomenting a New Cold War with China, which it saw as a greater threat. The Democrats (with the support of the “intelligence community”), however, endeavored to keep the New Cold War with Russia going, accusing Trump of being soft on Putin. At that same time, the Democrats were quick to jump on the anti-China bandwagon as well. The upshot is that the New Cold War has taken the form of a bid for unipolar world power in the twenty-first century by the imperial triad of the United States/Canada, Europe, and Japan, which is being resisted by both China and Russia, which have been forced into what now approaches a defensive alliance. The world is thus faced with a growing danger of war, including the possibility of a global thermonuclear exchange.

Read more:https://monthlyreview.org/2020/12/01/mr-072-07-2020-11_0/

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AN INTERVIEW WITH
HELENA SHEEHAN

 

The COVID-19 pandemic may have been a disaster for humanity, but it’s been a great boon for the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies. Our reliance on Big Pharma for lifesaving vaccines has reminded us how badly we need to understand the links between science, politics, and commercial interests.

For Marxists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these were some of the most important questions to be addressed in their work. The cross-fertilization between Marxism and science had major implications for the development of both.

Helena Sheehan is an emeritus professor at Dublin City University and the author of Marxism and the Philosophy of Science, a book that traces the history of this encounter.

This is an edited transcript from Jacobin’s Long Reads podcast. You can listen to the episode here.

DANIEL FINN

What connection did Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels see between their own work and the developments in the natural sciences at the time?

HELENA SHEEHAN

Marx and Engels were acutely attuned to the science of their day. They saw it as a kind of rolling revelation of the world. They were constantly writing to each other about various discoveries — which were coming very fast in the nineteenth century — and what they meant. They were struck by three discoveries above all.

One was the discovery of cellular structure, which they thought demonstrated the unity of the organic world. Then there was the discovery of the law of conservation and transformation of energy, which they thought revealed nature as a continuous and dynamic process. But most of all, there was the discovery of the evolution of species, which they saw as demonstrating the natural origins of natural history. They were particularly enthusiastic about Darwinism and the implications of evolution in both the natural world and the historical sphere.

Marx and Engels saw science as a kind of rolling revelation of the world.

This took place amid a massive shift in mood, as the nineteenth century witnessed a general transition from seeing the world as a static and timeless order of nature to viewing nature as more of a developmental and temporal process. As part of this, and within this whole atmosphere, Marx and Engels pushed the theory of evolution of species further into a theory of the evolution of everything. They explored the implications of this in formulating a philosophy that came to be called dialectical materialism.

 

DANIEL FINN

What were the most significant arguments that Engels made in his work Dialectics of Nature?

HELENA SHEEHAN

Dialectics of Nature was a posthumously published, unfinished manuscript by Engels, which he meant to be a major work elucidating the philosophical implications of the natural sciences. When he died, parts of it were fully written, while other parts were sketchy. Some of the science has been superseded. On the other hand, some of what Engels wrote anticipated scientific discoveries that only came later.

The core of Dialectics of Nature was its methodology, which was an epistemology and ontology of a new materialism — a materialism that was dynamic and fluid, one that saw the world as an interconnected totality, as opposed to an older materialism that was static, mechanistic, and reductionist. The epistemology and ontology were also in contrast to various idealist tendencies.

DANIEL FINN

There are two separate arguments that could be made — and have been made — about the attempt by Engels to extend the scope of Marxism beyond the limits of human history. One is to say that you simply can’t come up with any general principles that would apply to the history of the universe and also to human history. The second is to say that the particular set of principles that Engels did come up with were unhelpful and misconceived. What’s your opinion of those two arguments?

HELENA SHEEHAN

I disagree with both arguments. I think it’s impossible to think coherently, or even to live coherently, without working out a comprehensive worldview that encompasses everything. Marx and Engels believed this. They repudiated the idea that there was one basis for science and another for life.

Although some later Marxists tried to blend Marxism with various other philosophies, such as neo-Kantianism, with its sharp dividing line between nature and history, the mainstream of Marxism with which I identify has held on to a more holistic approach in thinking about both the natural world and human history. Those pulling in the other direction — I’m referring here to the Austro-Marxists, the Frankfurt School, the Yugoslav Praxis school, and much of the 1960s New Left — have tended to align natural science with positivism and to leave natural science to the positivists.

However, the best of Marxism, I think, from Marx and Engels on, developed a critique of positivism as well as a nonpositivist philosophy of science. I believe that politics needs to be grounded in a worldview that’s coherent and comprehensive and empirical, and I believe that science is crucial to this, as the cutting edge of empirically grounded knowledge.

Of course, people sometimes get involved in politics on the basis of particular issues, and we can work with people with whom we disagree on other questions. But I think that we need an intellectual tradition and a political movement that pulls it all together. As I discovered in my own journey, and as I hope I conveyed in Marxism and the Philosophy of Science, there’s a brilliant intellectual tradition tied to a political movement that has been doing this, and that’s Marxism.

DANIEL FINN

What were the main trends in Soviet philosophy and science during the first decade of the revolution, and how did they interact?

 

HELENA SHEEHAN

I found this period very exciting when I discovered it and began researching it. In the first decade of the revolution, there were debates about absolutely everything: about industrialization strategy and its relation to the collectivization of agriculture; about nationalities policy; about the nature of the state and the status of law under socialism; about the liberation of women, the future of the family, and free love; about avant-garde art and architecture; about various educational theories; about the idea of proletarian culture.

There were debates within every academic discipline, which also obviously involved debates about philosophy, science, and the philosophy of science. The most interesting debates of all were those among the Bolsheviks themselves. The debate about philosophy of science was a complex philosophical and political struggle, with much higher stakes than most intellectual debates.

J. D. Bernal saw Marxism as extending the scientific method to the whole range of phenomena, from the smallest particle to the whole shape of human history.

At one level, there was a debate about the relative emphasis on Hegel and more generally about the history of philosophy versus the stress on the natural sciences. There were accusations, on the one side, of reversion to idealism or, on the other side, of reversion to mechanistic materialism, both of which had been superseded by Marxism.

There’s always been a tension in Marxist philosophy throughout the history of Marxism, but this debate was supercharged by its implications in complex historical currents and a complex struggle for power within the USSR. In 1931, there was a closing down of these debates and a push to accept one position in all of these different debates as the Marxist position. It was not only a matter of who was making the most convincing arguments in these debates, or who would get university positions or be on editorial boards. It was also a matter of who might be purged.

In philosophy, a group of young philosophers went to Joseph Stalin. Their position was a kind of synthesis between the two positions, which I believe made sense philosophically. But it was also complicated by ambition and opportunism, as is often the case. When I was in Moscow doing research on this, I interviewed Mark Mitin, who was the most prominent of these young philosophers. He argued that the philosophical debates didn’t have political consequences, although my research told me otherwise.

But what’s important about these debates is to see them in a wider context. In my book, I dealt with the whole cluster of debates, particularly this one in the area of philosophy, as well as the other debates in the natural sciences, which involved many factors swirling around each other. Of course, the one in biology was particularly fierce and consequential.

DANIEL FINN

What impact did the Soviet delegation that came to London in 1931 for a scientific conference have on the development of British science?

HELENA SHEEHAN

The appearance of a Soviet delegation at the Second International Congress of the History of Science in London in 1931 was the first appearance by any Soviet delegation at a major international academic congress. For this reason alone, it created quite a stir, not only at the congress itself but also in the mass media at the time. A book called Science at the Crossroads also came out of this, where the Soviet papers were published. It was translated into many languages and many editions and circulated all over the world. In fact, it can still be read today.

The delegation was led by Nikolai Bukharin, who was once a contender to succeed Vladimir Lenin. His appearance at the 1931 congress was midway down his trajectory, in terms of his position in the Soviet power structure. Bukharin and the others came forward at this congress with a fresh and vigorous proclamation of Marxism as an integrating philosophy that made more sense of science than anything else on the horizon.

It had a lasting impact, particularly on the Left. Some of the scientists who were present, such as J. D. Bernal, Joseph Needham, and others, were major figures, not only in British science but also in international science at the time.

DANIEL FINN

What did J. D. Bernal and J. B. S. Haldane in particular take from Marxism for their scientific work? How did they understand the relationship between politics, philosophy, and science?

HELENA SHEEHAN

What they took from Marxism was philosophical integrality and social purpose, based on Marxism as the key to integrating the various results of the natural sciences to form a coherent picture of the natural world, and then beyond that, for connecting nature to history and science to political economy. Both Bernal and Haldane wrote massive philosophical and historical works about science, as well as continuing their leading role in basic scientific research and organizing a movement for social responsibility in science.

Bernal saw Marxism as extending the scientific method to the whole range of phenomena, from the smallest particle to the whole shape of human history. He saw science as a social activity that was integrally tied to the whole spectrum of other social activities: economic, political, cultural, philosophical. He contrasted science under capitalism with science under socialism. Bernal believed that the frustration of science was an inescapable feature of the capitalist mode of production, and that science could only achieve its full potential under socialism.

Haldane also had a synthesizing approach extending beyond science, reaching for a theory of everything, from the beginning of time to the end of the world. He found this in Marxism. He saw Marxism as a scientific method applied to society, extending the unity to all knowledge, analyzing the same basic processes in nature and society. For Haldane, as for Bernal, there was no hermetic boundary between science and politics. He believed that those who thought otherwise were deluded. On one occasion, he said that even if the professors left politics alone, politics wouldn’t leave the professors alone.

DANIEL FINN

You’ve argued that Christopher Caldwell, who wasn’t a professional scientist, made a strikingly original contribution to the philosophy of science in his book The Crisis in Physics. What were some of the key points that Caldwell put across?

 

HELENA SHEEHAN

Caldwell was an autodidact. Not only was he not a professional scientist; he also wasn’t an academic, and he didn’t even attend university. He was a loner for most of his short life, but he read voluminously, and was relentlessly searching for a coherent and comprehensive worldview, which he, too, ultimately found in Marxism. He didn’t simply take it off the shelf: he made it his own in a fresh and original way across many areas, encompassing not only science but also philosophy and culture.

Christopher Caldwell addressed the theoretical fragmentation that he found in all disciplines and argued that it was rooted in a crisis in bourgeois culture.

He also joined the Communist Party and threw himself into party work. He went to fight in the Spanish Civil War, where he died. It was a terrible loss to Marxism that this brilliant figure died so young. I feel very mournful every time I think about him, which is quite often.

Caldwell wrote with great clarity, passion, and profundity, and with the same sort of integrality as Bernal and Haldane. He addressed the theoretical fragmentation that he found in all disciplines and argued that it was rooted in a crisis in bourgeois culture. He said that at the root of that culture’s most basic thought patterns was the subject-object dichotomy, which had its basis in the social division of labor — in the separation of the class that generated the dominant ideology from the class that actively engaged with nature.

Caldwell thought that this distorted art, science, psychology, philosophy, economics, and indeed all social relations. He argued that while there had been great empirical advances in genetics, evolution, quantum mechanics, and other fields, at the same time, however, there was an inability to synthesize the meaning of these discoveries.

He analyzed the crisis in physics in terms of the metaphysics of physics. Caldwell displayed an acute grasp of theoretical physics — in particular the tensions between relativity and quantum theory. He argued that physics was advancing along the empirical front and generating a growing body of knowledge that could not be fitted into the existing theoretical frameworks and was rent by the same dualisms as all other intellectual disciplines.

He also analyzed the crisis in biology and the tensions between genetics and evolution, between heredity and development, equally brilliantly. He really was an extraordinary figure.

DANIEL FINN

What impact did the purges under Stalin have on the Soviet scientific community, including some of those who had gone to London in 1931?

HELENA SHEEHAN

It was tragic for Soviet science and for Soviet society. Soviet society became engulfed in a terrible spiral where truth-seeking seriousness was caught up with compulsion, paranoia, ignorance, slander, revenge, deceit, and indeed a brutal struggle for political power. Several of those who so fervently stood up for Marxism at the 1931 congress — Bukharin, Boris Hessen, Nikolai Vavilov — were portrayed as conspiring against the revolution, and perished in the purges.

The purges are often put down to Stalin becoming a megalomaniac, which I don’t deny. But I don’t think that this is a sufficient explanation. I think it is necessary to understand the complex forces in motion, the monumental nature of what the Soviet Union was trying to achieve, particularly in the period of the first five-year plan, the massive obstacles in their path, and the frenzy that resulted from this cauldron.

DANIEL FINN

What was the nature of what became the infamous Lysenko controversy in Soviet biology?

HELENA SHEEHAN

It was part of that monumental struggle and the resulting frenzy. The Lysenko controversy is often portrayed as a cautionary tale against ideological interference in science, but I don’t see it that way. The relation of ideology to science is complex: eliminating ideology to get pure science is not possible or even desirable, in my opinion.

The controversy has to be understood in terms of what forces were in motion at the time. First of all, there were the tensions in mainstream international science between genetics and evolution. The contemporary synthesis between genetics and evolution, which we take for granted now, was not in place then. As well as the particular tensions and problems in the international science of 1920s and ’30s, there was a wider, more long-term tension between heredity and environment. This was the question of how much of what we are is due to heredity and how much of it is determined by our environment — nature versus nurture — which is still an ongoing debate.

Eliminating ideology to get pure science is not possible or even desirable.

There was also a whole history, which played into this particular set of debates, of ideological positioning, associating the Right with one pole and the Left with the other. This played out in a very forceful way in the Soviet Union. On top of these international intellectual tensions, there were specific tensions in Soviet intellectual life. There was a need to create a new Soviet intelligentsia, the problem of how to deal with bourgeois expertise, the challenges of meeting the very ambitious targets of the first five-year plan — especially the question of how to raise the productivity of Soviet agriculture.

Trofim Lysenko walked into these swirling tensions. He was a Ukrainian agronomist who came to prominence with an agricultural technique called “vernalization” that allowed winter crops to be generated from summer planting. He pushed forward from this to articulate a whole theory of biology, which was basically a theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics and a denunciation of genetics. In terms of international science, it was essentially a Lamarckist position versus a Mendelian one.

This coincided with the frenzy of the purges, and the Soviet authorities proclaimed the Lysenkoist position to be the correct Marxist position in biology, with tragic consequences for science and scientists, and particularly for genetics and geneticists. Vavilov, who I previously mentioned, was an internationally renowned geneticist and one of those who came to the 1931 congress in London. He perished in the purges.

DANIEL FINN

What do you think are the most important legacies from this historical period for the way that we think about science and about politics today?

 

HELENA SHEEHAN

I think what has weathered every storm are the core concepts of Marxism in its approach to science. There have been many debates about Marxism vis-à-vis other approaches, but as I see it, having studied all these debates, both the ones before I came onto the scene and those that have unfolded during my own lifetime, I believe that nothing makes so much sense of science as Marxism. Indeed, nothing makes so much sense of everything as Marxism.

I want to say clearly just what is distinctive about Marxism as a philosophy of science. It is materialist in the sense of explaining the natural world in terms of natural forces and not supernatural powers. It is dialectical in the sense of being evolutionary, processive, and developmental. It is radically contextual and relational in seeing everything that exists within an interacting web of forces in which it is embedded. It is empiricist without being positivist or reductionist. It is rationalist without being idealist. It is coherent and comprehensive while being empirically grounded.

In its basic concepts, Marxism is still the most coherent, comprehensive, and well-grounded philosophy on the horizon.

It is an integral philosophy. It is a way of seeing the world in terms of a complex pattern of intersecting processes, where others see it only as disconnected and static particulars. It is a way of revealing how all forces in motion are products of a pattern of historical development shaped by a mode of production. It sees science as socially constructed, but at the same time as an empirically grounded revelation of the natural world.

Throughout the whole period of its history, Marxism rises and falls in its status and in its influence. The period now is not a particularly high point. However, I think that there is a revival of Marxist philosophy of science in response to the exigencies of ecological crisis and also in response to the current pandemic, which is still playing out. By the way, although there’s an atmosphere of the pandemic being over, this particular one isn’t. One point that is being reinforced by anyone who has dealt seriously with this pandemic, most of whom were Marxists, is that the conditions are still there for future pandemics.

I think that Marxism is as relevant and as important today as it ever was — perhaps even more so. I think that Marxism needs to be constantly updated and developed to move forward. I always thought that there were areas where it was weak, such as psychology, although the foundations were there to make it superior to any other contending positions in psychology. But even in areas where it was most developed, such as political economy, the world is constantly changing — indeed it is doing so at an ever-accelerating rate.

There’s always much to do. I think that Marxism has showed itself to have that kind of dynamic capacity, and it is still developing further. I think that in its basic concepts, it is still the most coherent, comprehensive, and well-grounded philosophy on the horizon. Whether or not it is popular, it is right, and I still see it as the unsurpassed philosophy of our time.

Helena Sheehan is emeritus professor at Dublin City University. She is the author of Marxism and the Philosophy of Science and Navigating the Zeitgeist.

Daniel Finn is the features editor at Jacobin. He is the author of One Man’s Terrorist: A Political History of the IRA.

 

 

READ MORE:

https://jacobin.com/2022/08/marxism-philosophy-of-science-marx-materialism-ussr

 

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PLEASE NOTE THAT GUS DOES NOT SUBSCRIBE TO THE THEORY THAT POLITICS IS A SCIENCE. POLITICS IS AN ART FORM IN WHICH THE PARAMETERS ARE DEFINED BY THE "USERS", AND NOT BY COSMIC OBSERVATIONS......

 

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