By Prabhat Patnaik

At first sight no two persons could have been more dissimilar.  One was a Cambridge don, with more than one foot in the British government; a supporter of the Liberal Party, staunchly opposed to the Bolshevik Revolution; an aesthete and a member of the Bloomsbury Group; a life peer in imperial Britain, and a solid, if sensitive, member of the British establishment.  The other was a Russian revolutionary, spending years in exile in acute penury, immersed in bitter conflicts among the émigrés, until suddenly confronted with a revolutionary uprising whose strivings and possibilities he comprehended with such clarity that he came to lead it, facing a civil war, a typhus epidemic, and an assassination attempt that ultimately claimed his life.

The secure tranquillity of the life of the one contrasted sharply with the tempestuous violence that continuously haunted the life of the other.  What could these two have in common?

For a start each felt a deep intellectual respect for the other, despite their political differences.  In his report to the second congress of the Communist International, having called John Maynard Keynes “a British bourgeois pacifist”, “a petit bourgeois philistine” and “an implacable enemy of Bolshevism”, V.I. Lenin went on to base his entire thesis about why conditions were ripe for a world revolution on Keynes’s analysis in The Economic Consequences of the Peace.  He even paid Keynes the compliment that “nobody had written about the condition of capitalism better than Keynes”.  Keynes, on his part, not only referred in several places to Lenin’s “brilliance”, but, in this same book, said apropos of inflation: “Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency; . . . Lenin was certainly right.”

But mutual intellectual respect among bitter adversaries is neither unusual nor particularly remarkable.  What is really common to both these thinkers is their belief that the hegemony of finance in the period of maturity of capitalism had brought about a denouement where it became impossible for the system to go on as before.  Of course each had his own understanding of why finance had made capitalism impossible, and each had his own reading of where to go from there.  But the belief that a sheer continuity of the existing order was no longer possible was common to both.

Keynes saw the hegemony of finance as saddling capitalism with such extraordinarily high levels of unemployment that people, he feared, would not for long tolerate such an inhumane system.  Under this hegemony, speculation was no longer a mere bubble on a steady stream of enterprise, but became a torrent that buffeted enterprise around. 

This became particularly so after the prop that had sustained 19th-century capitalism, namely the pushing of the frontier, had reached its limits.  Not only did employment get determined largely by the whims and caprices of speculators, but in the absence of this prop would remain much higher than before, of which the Great Depression was a manifestation.  He wanted the system to become more humane in order to survive the challenge of socialism.  And this it could do by ensuring, through systematic State intervention in demand management, that the level of employment was made independent of the whims and caprices of financial speculators.

Lenin by contrast saw finance capital as striving everywhere for domination and for the acquisition of “economic territory” at the expense of rivals.  Hence the rivalry between different “national” finance capitals (belonging to big “nations”), each backed by “its” State, would henceforth take the form of bloody inter-imperialist wars, of which the First World War was a manifestation.  Escape from this predicament was possible only by overthrowing the entire system of finance-dominated capitalism and by ushering in socialism.

The turn of events was such that the ideas of both these thinkers were tried out in practice, a fate denied to most and another element that is common to both.  Keynes’s proposal for State intervention in demand management in capitalist economies had few takers in the beginning, a fact that allowed the Great Depression to persist outside of the fascist countries right until the eve of the war when military preparations against the threat of fascism finally pulled up levels of employment and activity.  But in the post-war period, with the balance of class strength shifting in favour of the working class across the advanced capitalist world, of which the emergence of social democracy was a manifestation, State intervention in demand management got institutionalized, producing the so-called “Golden Age of capitalism”.  And as regards Lenin, the response generated by his call for the overthrow of capitalism, the Bolshevik Revolution and the formation of the Communist International, the struggle of the Soviet Union against fascism, its contribution to post-war decolonization and the spread of socialism, constitute together the epic saga of the 20th century.

But, again by an irony that unites both these thinkers, the historical experiments unleashed by them, despite remarkable early promise, could not reach successful fruition.  The process of globalization of finance made the nation state that was supposed to override the whims and caprices of finance, subservient precisely to these very whims and caprices for fear of capital flight; as a result we have the current bizarre spectacle of capitalist countries enacting one after another ‘austerity measures’ in the midst of a recession, which will only accentuate the recession.  Keynes would be turning in his grave at this absurd course of events.  Likewise, the Soviet Union founded under Lenin’s leadership no longer exists; communist parties, barring a few, have dwindled into insignificance; the socialist credentials of China and Vietnam are barely visible and have to be established by the committed few through elaborate theoretical and statistical exercises; and a question mark hovers over the fate of Cuba, buffeted by imperialism.  Those who invoke either Keynes or Lenin today are few and far between.

Does this mean then that the projects of both Keynes and Lenin are equally passé?  The answer is no, and this constitutes the big contrast between the two.  Because Lenin’s project was grand, nothing short of bringing about a wholly new world order, the like of which mankind had only dreamt of but never seen, and that too against the bitterest possible opposition from the propertied classes, he was acutely aware of the prospects of the failure of his particular experiment.  In fact, after Soviet power had lasted three months, he had remarked gleefully: “We have lasted longer than the Paris Commune!”  Because of the grandeur of his project the possibility of the failure of his particular experiment was anticipated by Lenin.  But not so with Keynes.

Since his objective was to defend the system of private property against socialism, he not only expected no systematic opposition from the propertied classes, but even attributed whatever opposition he actually encountered from them to mere intellectual failure on their part.  After all, if demand management by the State increased the level of activity and employment in the economy, then that would benefit both the workers (through larger employment) and the capitalists (through larger profits).  So the predicament of late capitalism was one from which, if one had the correct intellectual comprehension, one could improve everybody’s condition.  What Keynes did not see is that State intervention in capitalism is something which sets off a dialectic of its own that ultimately subverts the domination of capital over labour.  Not that Great Depression-levels of mass unemployment are necessary for capitalism but the elimination of such levels of mass unemployment through State intervention undermines the social legitimacy of the system.  The setback to Lenin’s project would not have surprised Lenin; the setback to Keynes’s would have surprised Keynes.  Lenin’s project will be revived, but not Keynes’s, except as a staging post in the march towards Lenin’s goal.

- Prabhat Patnaik is a Marxist economist in India

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There are many points of interest pertaining to the development of Marxist philosophy in contemporary China. This paper will focus on the following areas and problems: the debate about the criterion of truth; Marxist philosophical textbook reform; the inquiry into the human agent and subjectivity; Marxism and Confucianism; Deng Xiaoping’s theory; and the socialist market economic system. Let’s start with the debate about the criterion of truth, for this is the historical starting-point of contemporary Marxist philosophy in China.

1. The Debate about the Criterion of Truth

Academically, the real development of Marxist philosophy in contemporary China started in 1978. In that year, China’s intellectual life witnessed a great event. People in every walk of life were engaged in a debate: What is the criterion of truth?

Initially, the debate was related to the political struggle and the ideological debates within the Chinese Communist Party. Chairman Mao Zedong died in 1976, and the Cultural Revolution was officially declared to be ended. However, in ideology nothing seems to change much. The Chair of the Communist Party at that time was handpicked by Mao. As a way to maintain his position, he insisted on the doctrine of the “two whatevers”: (1) whatever policy decisions Mao had made must be firmly upheld; (2) whatever instructions Mao had given must be followed unswervingly. Hence, for the opposite faction, led by Deng Xiaoping (who was purged by Mao in 1975) to come back to power, it was necessary to break these “two whatevers.”

On May 11, 1978, a prominent Chinese newspaper, the Guangming Daily, published an article entitled “Practice Is the Only Criterion for Judging the Truth,” signed by “the Special Commentator.” The article argued that for all forms of knowledge, including Marxism, the nature of their truth must be judged and proved by practice. All scientific knowledge, including Marxism, should be amenable to revision, supplementation, and development in practice, in accordance with the specific conditions under which it is to be applied. This paper was widely echoed and provoked lively discussions throughout China. These led to a consensus that it is practice, not Mao’s words, that can tell us what is right and what is wrong. The immediate consequence of this great debate was that the advocates of the “two whatevers” lost their power, and Deng Xiaoping regained his power and started the Chinese economic reform. In contrast to the “two whatevers,” Deng’s motto is, “It does not matter whether a cat is black or white; as long as it can catch mice, it is a good cat.”

However, the debate has had a far-reaching influence on Chinese social science, in particular, on the study of Marxism itself. Since the Communist party came to power in 1949, Marxism, and its Chinese representative, Mao Zedong’s thought, has been regarded as the absolute and as a completed truth system. The only role philosophers could play¾and were required to play¾was to prove the rightness or truth of Marxism and Mao’s theory. Only political leaders, actually only Mao himself, could establish new truth and develop Marxism. Just as philosophy was the handmaiden of theology in the medieval West, so in China philosophy became the servant of Mao’s politics. Any question or criticism put to Marxism and Mao’s theory was regarded as a political challenge. For Mao, the most important thing that Marxist philosophy can teach is its theory of class struggle and the theory of proletarian dictatorship. Mao’s philosophy actually became a kind of “Struggle Philosophy.”

Now the debate about the criterion of truth and the establishment of practice as that criterion broke this myth of Marxism and of Mao’s theory. Marxism became a subject that could be reflected upon, examined, renewed, and developed. The truth-criterion discussion of 1978 was indeed a movement of enlightenment, a movement of thought liberation. It paved the way for contemporary China’s economic development, and it also paved the way for any possible new contributions to Marxism. It used to be the case that one could only “insist” on Marxism; now we could “develop” Marxism, and many now believed that only by developing Marxist philosophy could one really insist on it. It used to be the case that academic philosophy was always subordinate to the leaders’ thought and did not have any independent status. Since 1978, however, philosophical research has won a relatively independent academic position.

2. Reform of the Philosophical Textbook

The immediate effect of these developments for Chinese Marxism was the publication of new editions of the Marxist textbook. One would think that a new edition of a textbook is a matter of pedagogy, of the teaching of philosophy, rather than a matter of philosophical development, or development in philosophical thought. This is not the case in China, however.  For, generally speaking, it is only the Marxism embodied in the textbook that is regarded as the orthodox Marxism, the “true” Marxism that should be learned. A change in the textbook means therefore a change of attitude towards Marxism. To a great extent, the changes of the textbook mirror the situation of Marxist philosophical research.  To get a new edition of the Marxist textbook published, what is essential is not the approval of the referees, but that of the government. Now the situation has changed significantly, yet the reform and reconstruction of the official textbook is still regarded as an important aspect of the progress of Marxist philosophy.

Until 1978, the main textbook of Marxist philosophy in China was Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism (edited by Ai Siqi, the former leader of the Party School of the Communist Party). Its contents and structure were basically transplanted and transferred from the textbook of Marxist philosophy in the former Soviet Union, and it was deeply influenced by Stalinist dogmatism. Though political relations between the Soviet Union and China were broken in the early 1960s, this type of official philosophical textbook had remained unchanged.

Since 1978, Chinese philosophers have introduced important modifications or re-formulations to different aspects and levels of Marxist philosophy.

First, breaking away from the constraint of the traditional textbook, they returned to the original works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. Many concepts have been redefined, such as matter, consciousness, existence, spirit, static, motion, ideals, struggle, social existence, social consciousness, knowledge, truth, practice. Various basic views and positions were re-evaluated, such as, “the basic problem of philosophy,”  “the challenge of epistemological skepticism,” “the relationship between dialectics and metaphysics,” “the relationship between materialism and idealism,” “the basic contradictions in human society,” “epistemological methods,” and so on. Some Marxist theories were abandoned, whereas others were re-formulated.

Second, many new concepts and views, mainly derived from Western philosophy and/or sciences, were introduced into the Marxist philosophic textbook, including concepts such as: subject and subjectivity, object and objectivity, medium, element, structure, function, information, feedback, control, social system, social organism, purpose, emotion, will, cognitive model, thinking world, value, evaluation, and so on; and views such as:  “the idealist way and the practical way of human understanding of the World”; “the interactive law between subject and object”; “the farsightedness, selection, and creativity of human cognition”; “subjective principle and the system principle in cognition”; “the unity of truth and value”, “the concrete and historical unity among Truth, Good, and Beauty.” Some new research methods were transplanted, and applied to Marxist philosophical research, for example, the methods of genetic theory, atomic analysis, constructive explanation, and functional analysis.

Third, many new domains have been explored, and many new branches have been introduced and developed, for example, axiology, theory of practice, philosophical methodology, philosophical anthropology, the theory of social organisms, the theory of social control, the genetic theory of cognition, the theory of cognitive evolution, philosophy of man, philosophy of science, philosophy of humanities and social science, scientific epistemology, social epistemology, philosophy of daily life, feminist philosophy, philosophy of environment and ecology, and so on.

These philosophical achievements provided the new foundation to the textbook reform and reconstruction of Marxism in China. There are many textbooks with different outlooks. I would like to mention briefly the following four that are the most influential.

a. Dialectic Materialism and Historical Materialism, editor-in-chief, Xiao Qian, a professor at the People’s University of China. The book maintains the main structure of Ai Siqi’s textbook but thoroughly absorbs the new achievements of the sciences. It includes sub-divisions such as materialism, dialectics, and epistemology, theory of society and history, and methodology. It is the most influential textbook of Marxist philosophy in China. The problem of this book is that some of the new contents of the philosophy could not find their suitable place in the old system.

b. The Basic Principles of Marxist Philosophy, chief editor, Gao Qinghai, a professor at Jilin University. It is based on the historical development of Western philosophy and of Marxist philosophy. The major strength of the book lies in its attempt to locate the historical sources of the main philosophical concepts and its emphasis on understanding Marxist philosophy historically. The problem of this book is its difficulty in distinguishing the content of Marxist philosophy from that of Western philosophy. The other problem is that it is too historical, and somewhat weak in the construction of philosophical arguments.

c. Professor Huang Danshen, of Beijing University, tries to compile a system of Marxist philosophy according to his understanding of Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks. The structure of his textbook system is based on 36 pairs of concepts. Since Lenin’s philosophical notebooks are his reading notes on Hegel’s Logic, Huang’s plan carries the obvious influence of Hegel’s philosophy. The other problem of his system is that 36 pairs of concepts are not enough to include all aspects of philosophy.

d. Professor Xia Zhentao of the People’s University of China, and Ouyang Kang [the present author], a professor at Wuhan University, have created another new system of Marxist philosophy according to their understanding to Karl Marx’s “Practical Materialism.” We understand that the major characteristic of Marxist philosophy is its emphasis on “practice.” This is also the basic point of difference between Marxist and non-Marxist philosophy. It is a fact that Karl Marx never called his philosophy dialectical materialism or historical materialism; instead he referred to it as “Practical Materialism” in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844). His most famous sentence was the one that appeared on his tombstone: “Philosophers only explain the world, but the problem is to change it.” Based on Marx’s ideas, we developed a comprehensive understanding of the concept of “practice” and redefined the nature of Marxist philosophy as a kind of Dialectical, Historical, Humanistic, and Practical Materialism. Marxist philosophy is a philosophy of the relationship between Man and the World. The highest function of Marxist philosophy is to help people to recognize, to understand, to evaluate, to control, to develop, and to deal with this relationship more rationally and more efficiently. The new outlook of Marxist philosophy will be a kind of new Subjective-Methodological system.

At the present time, the reform and the reconstruction of the textbook of Marxist philosophy is still going on. We believe that further developments of Marxist philosophy in China should be individualized and personalized, rather than following a unified pattern. Different Marxist philosophers should be encouraged to develop their own philosophical systems based on their own understanding of Marxist philosophy, and they should use their special research methodology.          

3. Exploring the Human Agent and Subjectivity

In the past, human beings had little standing in Chinese Marxist philosophy. Even when the notion of man was mentioned occasionally, it mainly referred to the collective, group, class and nation, but not to the individual. This has been criticized as “stressing nature but forgetting man” – i.e., stressing the collective man but forgetting the individual person. Now it is agreed that the individual human being should be the main topic of Marxist philosophy.

With the publication of Marx’s newly discovered  Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts,* Chinese philosophers have become more interested in the problems of humanism and alienation. Some claim that the individual human being should be the starting point of Marxist philosophy. Others think that problems of the individual human being should be the highest target, the primary task, the central subject-matter and the final destination of Marxist philosophy. Still others suggest that humanism can be included in Marxism if it is defined as a basis for ethical consideration. The discussion, however, suffered a setback in the anti-liberalism movement of 1984.

Another related topic is subjectivity. Both subject and object are new concepts of Chinese Marxist philosophy that did not appear in the old philosophical textbook. In the 1980s, discussion of this issue was not limited to Marxist philosophy, but was also found in the literatures of critical theory, ethics, aesthetics, and so on. Why were Chinese intellectuals so interested in the problems of subject, subjectivity, and the subjective principle? The answer is that in discussing subjectivity, the central philosophical position of the individual human being could be established. There are many different positions in the inquiry into subjectivity. Some argue against it on the ground that to emphasize subjectivity would lead to the denial of cognitive objectivity. Others, on the other hand, push the subjective principle to the extreme of advocating an absolute free will. My M.A. thesis is entitled “On Subjective Ability,” and I have published many papers on this topic. I believe that the subjective movement in contemporary Chinese philosophy was actually a thought liberation movement.

In May 1997, Professor Huang Danshen of Beijing University organized a National Association of the Philosophy of Man, which held its first conference in Beijing. The Philosophy of Man has become a very hot topic in China today. One strong feature is to connect this topic with the new outlook of Marxist philosophy. Some claim that the Philosophy of Man is the hallmark of contemporary Marxist philosophy. Others think that the Philosophy of Man is only a part of Marxist philosophy. Nevertheless, the efforts to establish the Philosophy of Man have stimulated much philosophical research and have greatly extended the development of Marxist philosophy in China.

4. Marxist Philosophy and Confucianism

How should Marxist philosophy deal with its relationship to the traditional Chinese value system?           

The controversy between traditionalism and anti-traditionalism has been hot in modern China for many decades. Since the New Cultural Movement of May 4, 1919, anti-traditionalism was the main trend. To some, revolution means rejecting traditional Chinese culture, especially Confucianism. Mao Zedong was deeply influenced by traditional Chinese culture in his early years. But one of the most important aims of his Cultural Revolution was to get rid of Confucianism, and even of all traditional Chinese culture. Traditional Chinese culture is regarded as an obstacle to China’s modernization. Others looked down upon Chinese philosophy, and believed that Chinese philosophy was not mature, and that it lacked logic. They admired only Western civilization and philosophy. Meanwhile, the more traditionally-minded scholars insisted that Chinese culture and philosophy should be the mainstream in China. Now the problem is whether it is possible to combine Marxist philosophy with traditional Chinese culture. Can Marxist philosophy be developed without learning from Chinese culture and philosophy? How can Marxist philosophy become intrinsic to contemporary Chinese culture? How can Marxist philosophy find its foundation and roots in Chinese soil?Almost all Chinese philosophers now realize the necessity of combining Marxist philosophy and traditional Chinese philosophy. Integrating Chinese philosophy and culture into Marxist philosophy is the necessary way to develop Marxist philosophy in China. It is also the necessary way to discover and recognize the contemporary meaning of traditional Chinese culture and philosophy.  There are many positive elements in traditional Chinese culture and philosophy that may be profitably absorbed into Marxist philosophy. Here we briefly list some of them:           

The idea of the unity of Man and Heaven (Nature)
Now our entire world is deeply involved in the ecological controversy surrounding the relationship between Man and Nature. The sharp opposition between man and nature has been characteristic of much traditional Western culture and philosophy, and Marxism itself is a product of that tradition. To find possible ways to achieve a harmony of man and nature has from the beginning been a basic theme in traditional Chinese philosophy. Chinese philosophers insisted that nature is to be regarded not as the slave of man but as the equal partner in human life and in the formation of humanity. Man should stay on good terms with nature. Human beings should respect and protect nature. To protect nature is to protect the necessary environment of human life. Traditional Chinese philosophy is full of ecological insights and anticipations.  The same ecological concerns can be found in Karl Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts.   
The outlook and method of the Mean (Zhong Yong).
The Mean, also called “the Impartiality” or “the Doctrine of the Mean,” is the Middle Way.  Epistemologically, the method of the Mean seeks to master the object in a complete and rounded way by avoiding any kind of extreme, excess, and partiality. In the context of social life, the Middle Way prescribes that each human being should form his own judgment regardless of the opinions of others. 

Harmony among peoples
Chinese philosophy emphasizes peace and harmony among peoples and condemns irrational and unnecessary conflicts and unjust wars. Chinese philosophers insisted that human beings should respect and help each other. And their harmonious relationship is to be based on the common understanding of virtues. Rulers should treat their people as they treat their children. To show respect to the old and to protect youth were regarded as the basic virtues in ancient China. Traditional Chinese virtues, such as diligence and filial piety, have their contemporary meanings in today’s human life and should become the intrinsic content of Marxist ethics.

Recently there have been heated discussions on Asian Values in the East and also in the West.. It is generally agreed that Confucianism is the main core of Asian values, which include in particular “Family Values.”   Many Chinese philosophers believe that the teachings of traditional Chinese philosophy could still be applicable to human life today.  They retain their relevance in contemporary world culture.
5. Deng Xiaoping Theory

Deng Xiaoping theory is regarded as the new stage and new outlook of Marxist philosophy in contemporary China. It is the guiding ideology in building Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. Deng’s thought has been intensively studied.

I think that the most important contributions of Deng Xiaoping theory lie in the liberation of the human spirit in contemporary China. The core and key point of Deng’s theory is “emancipating the mind” and “seeking truth from facts.”  Seeking truth from facts is the quintessence of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought. Deng emphasized this in 1978 and used it to counter the “two whatevers,” thus opening up a new area for China. It was called the first Spirit Liberation Movement in China.  After the political incidents in 1989, there were some arguments about where China should go, especially whether China should continue its reform and open policy. Deng stressed the emancipation of the mind in his trip to South China in 1992. This affirmation cleared up many important misconceptions about Socialism, and advanced the reform to a new stage. This was called the second Spirit Liberation Movement, which initiated the socialist market system in China. After Deng’s death, there have been some debates regarding his theory and practice. Secretary-General Jiang Zemin and the central committee of CPC stressed these two aspects again in its 15th National Congress in September 1997. This was regarded as the third Spirit Liberation in today’s China.

Deng Xiaoping’s other important contribution to Marxist philosophy is to establish a new criterion for socialist theories. He claimed that the fundamental questions we should ask about socialism are what socialism is and how to build it. He raised three fundamental criteria for judging a proposal or a policy: whether it is favorable for promoting growth of the productive forces in a socialist society, whether it is favorable for increasing the overall strength of the socialist state, and whether it is favorable for raising the people’s living standards. The criteria were called the “three favorables.”  By these three value criteria, people could actually evaluate all social policy and social administration and could judge between right and wrong and between good and bad.

Deng Xiaoping theory is a system with rich contents. He has greatly contributed to the contemporary development of China. His philosophical ideas give us enlightenment although they do not complete the development of Marxist philosophy in China. Deng’s theory itself should be developed in time.

6. Marxism and Chinese Socialist Market System

One special and current problem facing Chinese Marxist philosophers is how Marxist philosophy answers the challenges of constructing a socialist market economic system in China. In the past 20 years, the economic system in China has been changed from the central planning system via planned commercial system to a socialist free market system. The economy has developed rapidly. The new market system has thrown all traditional disciplines, such as philosophy, literature, and history into turmoil. As everyone knows, Marxism in China had a privileged political position in the planning of the social system. Now Marxist philosophical research has become a kind of academic research. The authority of Marxist philosophy can only be based on its content and function, depending on whether it is recognized by society. Marxist philosophers stand on the same level as other scholars. It is not only a kind of challenge but also a fair competition. This situation forces and stimulates Marxist philosophers in China to do their work better than ever. It is the motivating force underlying the development of Marxist philosophy as an academic discipline.

The socialist market economy, as a part of Chinese Marxism, is both a heritage and a development of Marxist economics. In our prior understanding of Marxism, socialism is the opposite of capitalism. The basic nature of capitalism is private ownership, free market economic system, and wealth distribution according to the ownership of capital. As the opposite of capitalism, the basic nature of socialism lies in the public ownership of capital, planned economic system, and wealth distribution according to work. The former Soviet Union, some Eastern European countries, and China had tried for many years to follow these criteria for socialism, and the consequence is not good at all. This situation led the Chinese Communist Party to re-think and re-understand Marx and Engels, especially the ideas of their later years. If one inquires more deeply into why they contrasted socialism with capitalism, one will discover that in their understanding, the highest goal of socialism is to create the higher productive forces, to get rid of social inequality, to destroy poverty, and to make all social groups richer. Socialism is thus a more advanced system than capitalism. But these ideas are not easy to actualize. Each country has to find its own effective and possible way according to its own history and reality. Only when your socialist theory succeeds can it be proved to be true socialism, and only then can your practice be accepted and followed by your people. Otherwise socialism will have no reason and no power to attract the people. Here we should insist that practice is the only criterion to judge the truth of socialism and of Marxism.

The Chinese socialist market economic system is based on following arguments.           

1). Marxist socialism is not a kind of dogma but an active and practical movement. The highest goal of socialism is to develop productive forces in the most effective way. The basic doctrine of socialism is to enrich all members of society. To meet its goals, the development models of socialism in the world are not universal and unique but variable and multiple. In different countries, socialism requires different models and different ways. This is a necessary way to realize and to develop socialist theory.

2). The market, as an economic form, is neutral in relation to political and ideological systems. The market system does not belong only to capitalism but can also be used by socialism. Today’s world is basically a global market economic system. Any individual country should consciously join in the world market system if they want to become a member of international society rather than being isolated. This also applies to China.

3). It is impossible to complete the transition from capitalism to communism in one step. There are some middle stages between them. Socialism is a middle stage in the transitional process. It should contain the characteristics of these two societies.

4). The Socialist free market system with Chinese Characteristics is a new development of Chinese Marxism. On the one hand, it insists that the highest aims of socialism are to develop the productive forces and to enrich people’s lives to the greatest extent. On the other hand, it fits with the down-to-earth situation of contemporary China.

5). It has been proven through many years’ unsuccessful practice in China before 1978 that the pure central planning economic system was a way neither to develop productive forces nor to raise the people’s living standard. The fastest continuous economic development in China since 1978, especially since 1992, has strongly proved the benefits of the socialist market system.

Reference

Ai Siqi ed.: Dialectic Materialism and Historical Materialism, People’s Press, Beijing, 1970.

The Special Commentator: “Practice Is the Only Criterion for Judging the Truth”, Guang-ming Daily, May 11, 1978.

Gao Qinghai: The Basic Principles of Marxist Philosophy, Jilin Press, Changchun 1989.

Xiaoqian etc. ed. The Basic Principles of Marxist Philosophy, The Chinese People’s University Press, Beijing, 1992.
Ouyang Kang: An Introduction to Social Epistemology, China Social Science Press, Beijing, 1990.

Ouyang Kang: The Methodology of Philosophy Research, Wuhan University Press, Wuhan, 1998.

Ouyang Kang: From the Discussion of Truth Criterion to the Construction of the New Morphology of Marxist Philosophy, TIANJING SOCIAL SCIENCES, 1998(6)

The author: Prof. Dr. Ouyang Kang, Dean of the School of Humanities, Head of the Department of Philosophy, Wuhan University, Wuhan, Hubei 430072, P. R. China, Tel/Fax +86-27-87882755 , Email: kouyang@whu.edu.cn.

*[Ed. note: Although Marx’s 1844 manuscripts were first published in 1932 (in Berlin), it was not until 1979 that they were published in China.]

Marcuse’s optimism, that the alienating effect of commodification could be overcome, greatly influenced the 1960s counterculture

‘How was it, Marcuse asked, that the totalizing administered state, which he saw at work in western societies, got away with it?’ Photograph: Associated Press

By Peter Thompson

The Guardian, UK

April 15, 2013 – When the student generation took off in the 1960s across Europe, in Germany at least it was Herbert Marcuse who had the greatest influence. This is because whereas Adorno, with his highly pessimistic philosophical statements about historical development, could talk about a negative progression of humanity from the "slingshot to the megaton bomb", Marcuse continued to maintain a more optimistic view of what could be achieved. Indeed, when 1968 happened, Marcuse said that he was happy to say that all of their theories had been proved completely wrong. Also, Marcuse wrote in a far more accessible way about the ways in which philosophy and politics were intertwined.

Whereas the French structural Marxist philosopher Lois Althusser had been at pains to draw a clear dividing line between early and late Marx, Marcuse maintained that the themes of the early works of Marx, concerned as they were with estrangement and alienation, were carried over and indeed deepened in the later, more economic texts. As he puts it: "if we look more closely at the description of alienated labour [in Marx] we make a remarkable discovery: what is here described is not merely an economic matter. It is the alienation of man, the devaluation of life, the perversion and loss of human reality. In the relevant passage, Marx identifies it as follows: ‘the concept of alienated labour, ie of alienated man, of estranged labour, of estranged life, of estranged man.’"

Marcuse linked economic exploitation and the commodification of human labour with a wider concern about the ways in which generalised commodity production (Marx’s basic description of a capitalist society) was at one and the same time creating a massive surplus of wealth through economic and technological development and an acceleration of the process of reducing humanity down to the level of a mere cog in the machine of that production.

How was it, Marcuse asked, that the totalising administered state, which he saw at work in western societies, got away with it? It did this through what he called "repressive tolerance". This is the theory that in order to control people more effectively it is necessary to give them what they need in material terms as well as to let them have what they think they need in cultural, political and social terms.

Parliamentary democracy, he maintains for example, is merely a sham, a game played out in order to give the impression that people have a say in the way that society works. Behind this facade however, he maintained that the same old powers were still at work and, indeed, that through their tolerance of dissent, debate, apparent cultural and political freedom had managed to refine and increase their exploitation of human labour power without anyone really noticing.

Constitutional liberty and equality was all very well, he argued, but if it simply masked institutionalised inequality then it was worse than useless. As he put it in One-Dimensional Man: "Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves. Free choice among a wide variety of goods and services does not signify freedom if these goods and services sustain social controls over a life of toil and fear – that is, if they sustain alienation. And the spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy; it only testifies to the efficacy of the controls."

This instrumentalisation of humanity could only be reversed, Marcuse maintained, by challenging the social processes which had led the governing value system to change from pleasure, joy, play and receptiveness to delayed satisfaction, the restraint of pleasure, work, productiveness and security.

Drawing on Freud, he maintained that this switch from the pleasure principle to the reality principle was stunting human potential just at the point where the objective economic conditions for human liberation had reached their high point. Again, this is where Marxist historical materialism is married up with the dialectic – and he sees the two as inseparable – by pointing out that the switch from the pleasure principle to the reality principle was absolutely necessary for the development of civilisation but that, in the process, the Eros of human fulfilment had to be sublimated.

In this dialectical sense, civilisation is both a negative and a positive step forward. However, the positive civilising process cannot be seen as the end of the dialectic, what Francis Fukuyama later called "the end of history", as long as the dialectic of human liberation was incomplete. As he puts it: "the true positive is the society of the future and therefore beyond definition and determination, while the existing positive is that which must be surmounted."

It is easy to see how this forward-looking and optimistic philosophy could appeal to the political radicalism of the 1960s generation, and how the call for the liberation of humanity as both individual and collective could help to unleash new social movements who no longer had any faith in the ability of the traditional and conservative parties of the left to bring about significant political change in either east or west.

Next week I shall track back to take a look at the work of Walter Benjamin, the lost prophet of the Frankfurt School.

Adorno and Horkheimer wrote this key text during their wartime exile, arriving at a pessimistic view of our place in a false system

Theodor W Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightment is ‘perhaps the central text of the Frankfurt school’. Photographs: Getty Images

By Peter Thompson

The Guardian, UK

April 8, 2013 – The Frankfurt school came together and developed its theories in a world left shattered by the first world war. The Weimar Republic was essentially a shell-shocked society in which many of the old certainties had been smashed to pieces. Worse than that, nothing had arisen from the ruins to give anyone any hope for the future.

As liberal democracy failed and Weimar spiralled down into Nazism, this school of almost entirely Jewish-Marxist intellectuals were forced to flee a country which had turned against them for reasons of both race and politics. One of their most cherished members, Walter Benjamin, killed himself in 1940 on the French-Spanish border, an act which threw many of the remaining members into even greater depression.

Changing their country more often than they changed their shoes, as Bertolt Brecht put it, they ended up in the US during the Hitler years and although this was a refuge for them, it was not a society they felt had anything to offer humanity. Ernst Bloch described the US as "a cul-de-sac lit by neon lights" – almost a template for a David Lynch film – and they felt that a society obligated to the pursuit of individualised happiness was the epitome of a world of shallow and inauthentic surfaces and insincerity. In one of the most famous aphorisms from Minima Moralia, published in 1951, philosopher Theodor W Adorno says that it is not possible to live a true life in a false system.

Most important in this context, the thinkers of the Frankfurt school did not draw a great distinction between various forms of capitalism, be they consumerist democracies or fascist dictatorships. Although the surface appearance of oppressive mechanisms were obviously different, for them, the underlying rule of capital was the same.

Dialectic of Enlightenment, perhaps the central text of the Frankfurt school, was written by Adorno and Max Horkheimer during these years in exile. It arrives at a pessimistic view of what can be done against a false system which, through the "culture industry", constantly creates a false consciousness about the world around us based on myths and distortions deliberately spread in order to benefit the ruling class.

This is, of course, not peculiar to capitalism, but in capitalism it finds its full commodified form so that we become the willing consumers and reproducers of our own alienation by becoming consumers rather than producers of culture. It is probably a good thing that they didn’t live to see The X Factor and OK! magazine. For Adorno and Horkheimer, authentic culture is not simply to be equated with high culture, which is equally commodified. Authentic culture directly resists commodification and punishes audiences for expecting to be entertained.

Leading on from the theory of negative dialectics, Dialectic of Enlightenment argues that enlightenment values themselves are not automatically progressive and that the potentially liberating process of the unfolding of human freedom, as Hegel and indeed Marx posited it, is undermined by our enslavement within the totality of capitalist social relations.

Their view is that fascism, Stalinism and consumer capitalism all produced the widespread socialisation of the means of production and the corporatisation of the economy, with a central role for the state. This convergence had done away with the worst excesses of class exploitation and replaced it with a sort of social complicity between the classes undergirded by recourse to mythologies and ideological control.

This control is exercised not only through direct repression but through the apparently non-ideological aspects of our everyday lives, in particular the ways in which modernity encourages us to fulfil and pursue our desires rather than have them crushed and controlled. Here, de Sade is brought in along with Nietzsche to demonstrate how modernity and the Enlightenment have brought about the transvaluation of all values and undermined all traditions. Marx also noted that in capitalism "all that is solid melts into air". What is often misunderstood on this point is that the Frankfurt School were not the cause of the apparent breakdown of social values but were drawing attention to the way in which capitalism was ineluctably smashing up the old certainties. At the same time as making us enjoy the experience as an extension of our libido we also feel guilty about and transfer the blame for it onto anyone but ourselves.

In an ironic twist, the Frankfurt School, which identified this mechanism of blaming, now functions as the guilty men for those who seek someone to blame.

In the section on antisemitism they explain the ways in which myths about Jews are used by both fascism and liberal democracies to create an outsider group which can be blamed for all problems. This culminates in the Nazi theory that the world is being dominated by a Jewish conspiracy in which rich Jewish bankers finance the communists in order to bring about the dominance of finance capital over good old traditional national productivist values.

Freud is brought in here to say that hatred of the other (in this case Jews, but it can be any other group) is actually a way to mask jealousy of what they have, not in terms of wealth, but in their identifiable collective traditions and apparent social cohesion, which they maintain while the "host" nation rots away around them. Fascism is thus successful not because it is repressive but because it permits and encourages our deepest desires to find the culprit for our own complicity.

‘Adorno criticised Hegel, above, for presenting a positive and affirmative dialectic in which ‘everything that is real is rational’.’

By Peter Thompson

The Guardian, UK

April 1, 2013 – Already in the comments about the first instalment of this series, a problem of traditions has emerged. For a predominantly Anglo-Saxon audience, raised in the empirical and positivist tradition, understanding a group of thinkers schooled in speculative Hegelianism and Marxist dialectics is always going to require a leap of faith. This is also compounded by the fact that the largely monoglot Anglo-Saxon tradition has to work with translations of these thinkers, which are not always the best that can be achieved.

For example, terms such as Wissenschaft and Geist traditionally get translated into "science" and "spirit", apparently irreconcilable opposites, whereas in philosophical terms the difference between the two is much less marked. In fact, you might argue that in the original German they could both be translated as "knowledge", albeit different types of knowledge bounded by speculation. When it comes to the Frankfurt school, the Anglo-Saxon tradition is confronted with all of its worst nightmares in one torrid night of speculative muscle flexing.

Theodor Adorno opens his treatise on negative dialectics with the statement that "[it] is a phrase that flouts tradition. As early as Plato, dialectics meant to achieve something positive by means of negation; the thought figure of the ‘negation of the negation’ later became the succinct term. This book seeks to free dialectics from such affirmative traits without reducing its determinacy." In other words, he asks us to reject the idea that the outcome of the dialectic will always be positive but that we do so without leaving the dialectic behind as an explanatory model. We simply have to make it an open rather than a closed process.

In Hegel the dialectic is widely seen as the means by which, through contradiction and tension, human history represents the unfolding of human freedom as the expression of the Weltgeist, or world spirit. Each age has its own zeitgeist (a sort of temporal appearance on Earth as the expression of the absolute – Christ as God come to Earth, if you like) but each of those ages is linked and taken up into (aufgehoben) the next succeeding one. Thus history is not just "one fucking thing after another", as Alan Bennett has it, but a gradual accretion through contradiction of the necessary stages for the fulfilment of the absolute. As Ernst Bloch pointed out, werden, or "becoming", was Hegel’s password and history was simply the process of becoming. The dialectic was thus the way to understand an old idea first put forward by Heraclitus that everything is constantly in flux, or panta rhei, that the basic condition of the world is change and not stability. But change towards what?

In Hegel it is the absolute and in Hegel’s most famous follower, Marx, it becomes the liberation of humanity in some form of communist society achieved by the conscious action of the proletariat in overcoming the final dialectical hurdle by abolishing the ruling class and thereby, logically, itself. The Marxist dialectic replaces the idealist Geist of a period working in mysterious ways with the concrete materialist class struggle as the engine of history, constantly present and constituting history as such.

As early as the end of the 19th century, this Marxist analysis had become "Hegelianised" in the sense that it was increasingly presented as an automatic and inevitable fulfilment of a preordained path. Adorno criticised Hegel for giving rise to this by presenting a positive and affirmative dialectic in which "everything that is real is rational", in that everything that comes about must contribute in some way to the workings of the absolute. To use a technical term, this means that in Hegel there is an "identity of identity and non-identity". In more ordinary language, Hegel is arguing that existence as a whole constitutes a unity of all opposites, in which everything has its place and that the tension between these opposites gradually resolves itself into pre-existing whole.

Negative dialectics turns this on its head and says that there is a "non-identity of identity and non-identity" or that existence is incomplete, that it has a hole in it where the whole should be, that history is not the simple unfolding of some preordained noumenal realm and that existence is therefore "ontologically incomplete". It is here that we find the link between Marx and Freud because, where Marx talks about the objective material factors at work in history that condition our consciousness (being determines consciousness) even though we are not necessarily conscious of them, Freud argues that it is our objective unconscious being, of which we are equally unaware, that determines our conscious thoughts. The latent content of our dreams is therefore equated with the latent but as yet unrealised possibilities in human history (see Marx’s letter to Ruge in my previous column).

Adorno’s negative dialectics are designed to open up these as yet unrealised possibilities at both the micro and the macro level, at the level of individual as well as collective psychology in order to overcome both individual and social suffering. It is the very contradiction between what is and what might be that allows us to overstep the boundaries with which we are constantly presented in order to create our endpoint, rather than simply sleepwalk towards it. This means that we move from necessity to contingency. In negative dialectics there is no necessity for things to turn out in a certain way, and the future-orientated teleology that Adorno claimed Hegel followed is replaced with retrospective teleology in which we can only see that what has happened to get us to where we are had to happen to get us there, but that there was no necessity for it happen in that way. Human beings are a product of evolution but evolution is not there to create human beings. Walter Benjamin famously expressed this as the angel of history moving backwards into the future with the debris of history piling up around his feet. Negative dialectics are, in the end then, open dialectics conditioned by contingent events and not by a pre-given endpoint.

Next week I will look at how this works out in terms of an attempt to break out of the snow globe of western consumer capitalism. If you want to do some reading in preparation I would suggest the Dialectic of Enlightenment.

The Frankfurt school united Marx and Freud to become the most influential thinkers of the 20th century left. The respectable right are suspicious, and the far right loathes them. An ongoing series, others will follow.

‘Anders Behring Breivik is the perfect example of the authoritarian personality Theodor Adorno wrote about.’ Photograph: Heiko Junge/AFP/Getty Images

By Peter Thompson

The Guardian, UK, March 25, 2013

When Anders Breivik launched his murderous attack in Norway in July 2011, he left behind a rambling manifesto which attacked not only what he saw as Europe’s Islamicisation but also its undermining by the cultural Marxism of the Frankfurt school. So what is the Frankfurt school? Has its influence has been as deep as Breivik feared and many of the rest of us have hoped?

Many will have heard of the most prominent names from that tradition: Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse and Max Horkheimer, but its reach goes much further, taking in many of the 20th century’s most important continental philosophers and socio-political developments.

The Frankfurt school was officially called the Institute for Social Research and was attached to the University of Frankfurt but functioned as an independent group of Marxist intellectuals who sought, under the leadership of Felix Weil, to expand Marxist thought beyond what had become a somewhat dogmatic and reductionist tradition increasingly dominated by both Stalinism and social democracy. Most famously they sought to marry up a combination of Marxist social analysis with Freudian psychoanalytical theories, searching for the roots of what made people tick in modern consumer capitalist society as well as what made people turn to fascism in the 1930s.

The Frankfurt school went back to Marx’s early theoretical works from the 1840s and tapped into his more humanist impulses found in the German-French Annals and in his correspondence with Arnold Ruge. It is in these early writings that we find many of Marx’s most important writings on the role of religion in history and society. His ideas about the way materialism worked in the world were still being formulated and he had not yet become the economic theoretician he was later known as. It is not that Marx left ideas of religion behind after these early years, but he felt he had dealt with them properly and could move on to more tangible affairs. In a letter to Arnold Ruge in 1842 he wrote:

"Our motto must be: reform of consciousness not through dogmas, but by analysing the mystical consciousness that is unintelligible to itself, whether it manifests itself in a religious or a political form. It will then become evident that the world has long dreamed of possessing something of which it has only to be conscious in order to possess it in reality. It will become evident that it is not a question of drawing a great mental dividing line between past and future, but of realising the thoughts of the past. Lastly, it will become evident that mankind is not beginning a new work, but is consciously carrying into effect its old work."

But the idea that what was required was a reform of consciousness which had become unintelligible to itself is the central working principle of the Frankfurt school. Religious thought, which Marx saw as a part of false consciousness, was to be combated not by a full frontal attack in some sort of Dawkins-like crusade, but by removing the social conditions that created it. Marx was, therefore, not an atheist. Indeed he said of the term atheism that it "reminds one of children, assuring everyone who is ready to listen to them that they are not afraid of the bogey man". But the Frankfurt school did not believe that this reform of consciousness could come about simply by changing the socio-economic base of capitalist society. Religion was, for them, not only the opium of the people, but also a repository of hope that had become unintelligible to itself.

Freud comes into the equation here because these critical theorists thought that his categories of id, superego and ego, which were constantly interacting as the basis of the human psyche, fitted well with the Marxist dialectic of historical struggle and resolution. If societies moved forward historically as the result of class struggle, then individuals were constantly dealing with a struggle between the reality of the world around them and what they thought about that world. Paradoxically, the Frankfurt school saw this as necessary because of the relative success of capitalism rather than its imminent collapse, as the more dogmatic Marxists proclaimed (and indeed continue to proclaim). How was it, they argued, that the great mass of people could be sucked into complicity with their own exploitation? With the emergence of fascism in the 1920s and 30s the question became even more urgent. What led educated people to throw their lot in with the barbarism of fascism? This, for them, was the ultimate in false consciousness. One of the most influential works of the Frankfurt school to deal with this phenomenon was The Authoritarian Personality, a work that purported to be a study of prejudice and that documented the ways in which people, as individuals, were motivated to think and act as they do in a social context, to form in-groups and to exclude others to the point of genocidal extermination.

Paradoxically it is that great enemy of the Frankfurt school, Breivik, who is the perfect example of the authoritarian personality Adorno wrote about: obsessed with the apparent decline of traditional standards, unable to cope with change, trapped in a hatred of all those not deemed part of the in-group and prepared to take action to "defend" tradition against degeneracy. More worryingly, especially set against the rise of groups like Golden Dawn in Greece and widespread trends towards the fear of Islam in mainstream society, Adorno maintained that "personality patterns that have been dismissed as ‘pathological’ because they were not in keeping with the most common manifest trends or the most dominant ideals within a society, have, on closer investigation, turned out to be but exaggerations of what was almost universal below the surface in that society. What is ‘pathological’ today may, with changing social conditions, become the dominant trend of tomorrow."

interview with Hugo Moldiz, Bolivian Marxist

Hugo Moldiz interviewed by Coral Wynter and Jim McIlroy

April 24, 2013 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — Hugo Moldiz is a respected Marxist journalist and author living in La Paz. He has written several books, including Bolivia in the Times of Evo, published by Ocean Sur in 2009. He is editor of the weekly La Epoca and has also contributed many articles to the magazine America XXI. We interviewed him during a recent visit to La Paz, Bolivia. Translation from the Spanish by Coral Wynter.

* * *

What is the significance of the election of an Indigenous president in Bolivia?

The very fact of the election of an Indian to the highest level of government, to the presidency, was a revolutionary act. This may not mean so much in other parts of the world, but when we understand the nature of the social formation in Bolivia, it is very significant. This is due to the way the republic was established [in 1825] and its development based on the past colonial period, involving the development of forms of capitalist control over work and the stealing of our natural resources (the source of the original capital).

Successive governments further entrenched this by the almost total exclusion of the majority of people, the Indigenous people, from political participation. It was a double exclusion for the Indigenous people — from political power as well as from participation in society. If you want to look at it in class terms and also from the point of view of the national culture, capitalism in countries like Bolivia has been sustained by colonialism. Thus from this perspective, the arrival of Evo Morales was very significant and resulted from the emergence of an Indigenous, peasant and popular movement and the formation of a new power bloc that is moving to displace the old power structure.

What is the proportion of Indigenous people among the overall population of Bolivia?

In the last census in 2001, 64% of the Bolivian population was recognised as Indigenous. The proportion could be even higher because, before the victory of Evo Morales, before the inclusion process, the Indigenous and peasant movement was only just emerging. From about 2000, or even a little before, there was a process of construction of collectives, of an increase of Indigenous self-esteem. In the previous census of 1991, there was a minimal percentage of Indians who considered themselves Indigenous. This happened not only because the census didn’t ask the question whether people identified as Indigenous. On top of this, people of Indigenous origin viewed the census as an instrument of oppression in society.

For Indians who lived in the city, they considered themselves anything but Indian, because the word “Indio” was a bad word. If I were Indian, I had to present an identity card as an Indian, which would not open doors for me, but rather close them.

I think in this census [which was held on November 21, 2012], the number of people who identify as Indian will be more than 64%. When we speak of “Indio”, we are not just speaking of peasants: we are talking about the Indigenous people. Peasant is a concept of class: we are talking about Indigenous people who live in both rural and urban areas.

In addition, we are going to see the planning of the economy in the period up to 2025. A second major aim is to have a better distribution of national wealth. Until now, the distribution of wealth in Bolivia has been regulated by the number of people who live in a certain area. Today the proposal is to change that criterion, or at least complement it, to establish a better basis for access to basic services, which is one of the 2025 objectives of the president.

What changes has the pursuit of policies against neoliberalism brought in the Bolivian economy?

It is very difficult to sustain the thesis that the government of Evo Morales is a neoliberal government. But some, from the more extreme left, maintain this idea. One of the important features of neoliberalism has been, rather than the absence of the state, the clear role of the state in neoliberal policy. In the first place, the state delivers our natural resources to the transnationals, into private hands and the hands of the foreign capitalists. In reality, neoliberalism reduces the national economy in a country like Bolivia. With Evo Morales we have a model that is not neoliberal, but a different economic model that still has some features of neoliberalism. We need to see the state return to an instrument with huge involvement in the economy. We have so far achieved about 40%, but we always need to analyse the point of departure. And in this country, the state had previously been reduced to no more than 10% participation in the economy. So we have significantly recuperated the role of the state.

Also, there is a process under way of re-appropriating our natural resources. This is quite different to neoliberalism. There is the reconstruction of the internal market, which was destroyed by the neoliberal model over many years. There was a process of depreciation of our national currency, the bolivar. A country like Ecuador, which previously converted to US dollars and also now has a left-wing government, faces many difficulties returning to a national currency. Here, the value of the national currency has been increased, which gives a measure of protection to the workers. Another characteristic of neoliberalism is flexibility of payment to the workers. In Bolivia, it has not yet improved as much as we want, but still the state took legal measures to protect the rights of labour.

The social security system is currently being expanded. During the period of neoliberalism, as in other countries, instead of funding going to social security, it was privatised and handed over to AFPs [private pension funds]. The AFPs cheated on payments, or did what they wanted with the money without any controls. There was no guarantee that the workers would receive their proper social security or could carry it over. And there were many people who had never been able to access social security or had very little.

The Morales government has reformed social security and those who earn the most support a common fund based on a percentage of income, which guarantees a retirement income to a person, according the number of years they have worked. It still doesn’t cover informal workers. That will be the second step, for workers who haven’t achieved enough points to have a dignified retirement. Retirement age is currently 65, but soon this will be reduced to 55 years.

For single mothers and widows, there are various bonuses. All the elderly receive a dignified income, including those who have a retirement fund. There are also extras for parents with children, for those of school age and for pregnant women. I know in some countries of Europe, this is not a novelty. But the USA and Europe have robbed so much wealth from Latin America, our people live like semi-slaves. We know that the social gains are limited so far. They would be very small payments compared to Europe. But these measures have been very important in Bolivia.

Bolivia has taken a leading role in the international environment movement, giving legal rights to Pachamama, Mother Earth. What is your opinion on this issue?

I think that the support for the Bolivian revolution, the Indigenous movement, MAS [Movement for Socialism] and Evo Morales and the fight by our people is not just for a better society in Bolivia. No, it’s for a better world and that means support from all of society for the revolution and the re-evaluation of nature. But not with the logic of capitalism, because capital also gives value to nature, but it gives the same value to nature as it gives to the forces of labour, an exchange value that will generate a profit. We need another value in the form of life.

At the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, we were obliged to guarantee the generation of employment. But this also obliges us to try to overcome the limitations of nature. Therefore, this necessitates a change in our fight for emancipation. Emancipation has a humanist basis. Clearly, neither Marx nor the 19th century philosophers can be blamed for not fully foreseeing the problems of the environment and nature. Today in the fight for a better world, we cannot disconnect or separate human beings from nature. You have to liberate both, emancipate both. In particular, this is very important for Indigenous people. For Indigenous society, this idea stumbles against the reality of the world. This reality, from the time of the invasion of the Europeans, has determined the conditions of our countries that provide the raw materials to the West. For countries like Mexico, Bolivia and many more, our economy has been based on plantations and the exploitation of our natural resources. This role in the world economy has to change.

This change, which many comrades don’t understand and are therefore critical of, cannot be implemented by Bolivia alone. This is a worldwide struggle, or at least continental, at this stage. And neither can it be done overnight. But we can see it on the horizon, because of the level of the fight.

The communist horizon was opened up by Karl Marx. Marx didn’t see it in his time and couldn’t predict a time of communism, but he opened up the communist horizon. The vision of another possible world, the vision of all of us wishing to live well, has opened up. We don’t know when or how we are going to construct this world of living well. It would be the complementarity between humanity and nature. But in all ways, it implies change.

There is no science, no social science, that does not consider the theme of nature, inside its own knowledge base. For myself, I cannot see a political economy that does not take into account the theme of nature. This is also one of the themes of Marx. When Marx in the Grundisse says, the “land is the extension of the human body, of the community”, what is described is the deepening relationship between human beings and the land. What has happened in Bolivia is a discussion, with some foolish academics thinking they have just discovered this problem today. Evo puts a lot of importance on Pachamama.

Pachamama is not a mad, esoteric ideology. Why do we love Pachamama? Pachamama involves a religiosity which is very materialistic. It is not Christianity, nor Catholicism, nor it is idealistic. It’s materialistic, because Pachamama is the land. It is what you eat, it is the extension of your body. This is what gives it importance. You have to give “rights” to Mother Nature. The Ecuadoran constitution does not contain formal recognition of these rights as in the Bolivian constitution, but it is evident in the political thinking in that country.

There appear to be a lot of challenges at present in Bolivia, with issues such as divisions in the mineworkers’ organisations, among Indigenous communities over the road through the forest and the recent blockade of the highways. How is the Morales government handling these issues?

The nature of the conflicts with the Evo Morales government are different to the nature of the conflicts with previous governments. The common denominator is that they are conflicts, but we must uncover a little more information about the nature of these disputes. In the time of the governments prior to Evo, the main fight was against the bourgeoisie by all of the communities for a share of the economy. In general, since the bourgeoisie had the resources of the government, along with the state, this fight over the surplus was won by the bourgeoisie and the dominant classes in this country.

Now the fight for the surplus wealth is almost horizontal. It is not those below fighting those above. It is not vertical. Today, the fight is for an equal share of the cake. We all want to eat a larger slice of the cake. This in itself is not bad because it implies a process of empowerment of the people in the country. This empowerment was not possible without the new constitution.

The constitution gave the communities many rights. For the first time, our new constitution, via a constituent assembly in January 2009, recognised the rights of the collective. Our constitution previously only recognised the rights of the individual, liberty of expression, civil rights and political rights. Our new constitution now does not deny these rights of the individual, but also recognises the rights of the collective. This gives a lot of power to the people and the people are using this power. Because today the contradictions are between state sovereignty and collective rights. The people want so many rights, which even includes wanting to devour their own state, overcoming the national authority. In reality, this creates an interesting situation. It is neither good nor bad in itself. It will oblige us to look for new mechanisms or scenarios of expression. If we analyse this purely in terms of how the state conducts itself in the traditional way, it appears people are confronting the government and the government doesn’t control anything.

But it is not really like that. It is more complicated. It appears we have a process in which the people are confronting Evo Morales. But the truth is not that at all. Because transport strikes we have experienced, the mining strike against the co-operatives are temporary. When the elections come around, these two sectors will end up voting for and supporting Evo Morales. For this reason, you have to take care against being frightened by the conflicts. At times, the bourgeoisie and the communications media at the service of the bourgeoisie try to amplify and distort the nature of these conflicts and talk about a different reality.

We are not going to find in Marx or Lenin, nor in the reading of small stones, nor in the wrinkles of grandparents, the recipe to go forward. We will only find this recipe in the course of the journey. There are no recipes for socialism. There are the great thinkers, great trains of thought, but no recipe. Not by Marx nor Lenin nor Che (I am a Guevarist. I am a member of the National Liberation Army or ELN, that Che founded).

Che called the programs of these founders of political economy manuals for how to make bricks. There were many errors in the Soviet Union. The Soviet leaders after Lenin removed the elements of creative Marxism. There are great ideas for sure, but at times contradictory, because, on the one side, we are creating a new state and, on the other, the old state continues. Therefore as everything is related socially, if it is constructed badly, this state is going to end up re-consolidating the old state. It is going to undermine the new state.

Our revolution is fundamentally non-violent. This is an advantage, but also it is a problem. If the revolution imposed violence, it would be easier to overcome certain things in terms of construction of the new state. What we must do is change structures and work in parallel. Dismantle the old and create the new. There are problems, clashes, stoppages, bad treatment. The process has many contradictions.

Why were the highways blocked by two different communities [in the lead-up to the national census in mid November, 2012]?

The money shared between the municipal councils in Bolivia is calculated in part by the number of people in a municipality. Therefore, if municipality A, say Villa Tunari, is put into municipality B, say Colomi, it becomes a problem of boundaries. We are going to change that, but the government hasn’t confirmed this yet. The solution is not to distribute the money simply on the basis of the number of people who live in a municipality. That method is not correct. It’s better to distribute the money on the basis of fair access to basic necessities. We believe that in 2025, the whole country will have access to basic services: light, water, telephone, internet (because it is now one of the basic services), housing and sewerage. This is socialism: that everybody has access to all these things. On the other hand, it is not fair to give resources to one city where there are already some services and not to invest in other places where there are no resources. The criterion should be to prioritise those municipalities that don’t yet have basic services.

What basic improvements have taken place in the economy, with regard to the standard of living and the rights of the people, under the Morales government?

This is a government that has increased workers’ salaries much more than any other. During the 20 years when neoliberal governments increased salaries, the maximum was 3%, but only for public servants and not for private business. They used to leave open the negotiations between the private sector and workers. Evo made it obligatory to raise the minimum wage for workers in private business as well as the state sector. Second, the average annual increase under the Morales government has been around 8-10%. Third, other sources of work have emerged.

The state has recovered control of the economy, so that the number of workers in recovered companies has also increased. These include the nationalisations of the oil industry, the tin mine at Huanuni, the tin smelter at Vinto owned by Glencore [a Swiss-based company], the telecommunications company, Entel and the major generators of electricity. This means more resources for the state and also increases the sources of work. Nevertheless, neoliberalism was so bad in this country, that so far we still haven’t resolved a lot of problems.

The government doesn’t have a magic wand, by which it can employ everybody instantly. There are hard realities that we must touch on: the reality of the world is that of change in the domain of work, and this has changed a lot. We need to discuss what this implies for the process of revolutionary transformation.

It is very difficult for a revolutionary government to be capable of guaranteeing work for everybody in the state or the private sector. We have to think about this. What is the importance of the economy within the community? How can we produce collectively? How can we also appropriate the results of our work for ourselves? How do we generate new mechanisms of exchange? In some areas we can do this without the mediation of money. It’s possible.

In the province of Comanche in La Paz, there are communities that mediate exchange without money. It’s a relationship of trueque [barter]. They are an Aymara Indigenous community. Perhaps there is another way of doing things. How can we de-commercialise this relationship that we have in the capitalist economy? This is an important topic for the workers and the peasants.

The big problem is the workers sometimes do not protest so much against neoliberalism, but against Evo Morales, which at times is not justified. But at the same time, I think it’s good because they are pressuring the state, because all states tend to be conservative. So it is positive pressure against the state.

What is the strength of the right-wing and separatist movement, under the name Media Luna, opposing the Morales government and what are their tactics at present?

The Media Luna doesn’t exist now. The Media Luna was a political plan of the ultraright wing in the provinces of Santa Cruz, Beni, Pan de Tarija and Sucre, that is four departments and a city. They intended to divide the country between western Bolivia and the east. They wanted a coup d’état in Bolivia. They wanted to remove Evo Morales from the government. This was not clear in the first moments of their action, but they planned to take over the presidential palace. This action proved to be impossible in practice.

The idea was to divide the country and occupy half of the territory, including with armed groups. This would have been only temporary and later, a second move was to be the intervention of the United Nations, the Blue Helmets of the UN. We all know the UN is an extension of the Security Council, run by the USA. This was the model of the coup they were thinking of during the first term of the Morales government in 2006.

It was defeated in 2008. Now this right wing doesn’t exist. The government now has a lot of influence in Tarija, Santa Cruz and Pando, where the governor is aligned with Morales. We have elections next in Beni, where the government will probably win.[1] The concept of Media Luna does not exist. This came about in the first period of government, but is now defeated.

Now, the second question is about the state of the right wing generally. In terms of a political party it does not exist, either. It is defeated and fragmented. Those who are playing the role of the right-wing parties and an opposition are the mass media and the communications industry. The right wing don’t have a viable candidate and do not have a viable project. And, as in Venezuela, the opposition’s own leaders don’t dare speak against the changes. They are “in agreement” with the changes. Capriles did the same in Venezuela. But in Bolivia they are very fragmented. I think it is not a big problem for the Morales government.

The army is maintaining its loyalty to the government. The police in one sector tried to generate a coup d’état scenario, similar to what occurred in Ecuador. But then the military inserted themselves. And finally, there was a new victory for the government, but also for the social movements, who demonstrated in their thousands in the city of La Paz. Many of us spent those days in the streets without sleeping. Huge crowds of people came and went, masses of peasants coming from El Alto, in their thousands and thousands and they spread throughout the city of La Paz, until the city was absolutely full.

Talking of Media Luna, if today there is a city where racism has surged along with the spirit of conservatism, it is the city of La Paz, not Santa Cruz. La Paz is the centre of racism and rejection of the Morales government. The US has never stopped intervening. The USA organised and financed the Bolivian opposition openly, absolutely disgracefully, during the first Morales government. During Morales’ second term, until today, it keeps doing it but much more secretly.

There are statements from President Obama against Bolivia and Brazil, which are very aggressive. We have been decertified in the fight against narcotrafficking, when among the Andean countries, we are the country that has most reduced the area given to coca-leaf production. The Andean Community has certified that our country is where the most number of operations against drugs have been carried out. [Former] US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton was always referring to the bad aspects of our relationship with Iran, our bad deeds in relation to Cuba, etc.

So the USA maintains a foreign policy that is pretty aggressive against Bolivia, as well as Venezuela. In the march by the Indigenous for Dignity, opposing the construction of the highway in Beni, some Indigenous people mobilised against Evo, but they were financed by the NGOs and the resources of the US government. There is a very active presence of the USA in Bolivia.

The development of the Bolivarian Alternative for Latin America (ALBA) is crucial to the growing unity of progressive countries in Latin America. How do you see this process developing?

Latin America is a laboratory where we are doing many new things. The small corner of the world about which Karl Marx spoke in Europe in the 19th century is Latin America today. We don’t know how we are going to come out of these experiments. But until now, we can say after almost 200 years, we are in a good period, although surrounded by dangers.

But I think Latin America is not the same today as in the past. The triumph of the Cuban Revolution marked the beginning of a new stage. This was the third emancipation in Latin America. The third emancipation is my reclassification of the history of Latin America. The other two were the Indigenous resistance and the 19th century independence struggles against Spain. So this third upsurge came about with revolutionary Cuba.

When it appeared the world went into obscurity with the fall of the Soviet Union, it wasn’t long, after only a few years, before Latin America emerged offering a ray of hope. This became a beacon of hope because of the generalised fight against imperialism by the social movements of the Latin American revolution.

I cannot analyse politically the Zapatistas in the decade of the 1990s, but we found three things to confirm the rising up of Latin America.

1. The rise of the Zapatistas in Mexico in 1994.

2. The emergence of the peasants and Indigenous peoples of Bolivia and Ecuador, constructing their own political instruments.

3. The victory of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela in 1998.

These three events denoted a favourable political situation. Although the Zapatistas did not triumph in terms of taking state power, their fight and their ideas are an example of another social movement. One cannot say it meant nothing. In historical context, I am not a Zapatista. But to understand what is happening in Latin America, you have to look at the Zapatistas’ revolt objectively, including its impact on what is occurring now in Bolivia.

For this reason, we need to overcome the model dictating that there is only one choice of paths, either through capitalism or through socialism in simple terms. We need to look at various models revealing other means of transformation. There is a debate here in Latin America about various projects of emancipation, not only one. It’s not important if it is called “Socialism of the 21st century”, as in Venezuela, or another name. In Ecuador it is Vivir Bien [Live Well]; in Bolivia it’s communitarian socialism, but they are different projects for emancipation. They are not equal. But they have commonalities, similar ties connecting the models. They have various means of articulation.

I think that the Zapatismo had more impact outside Mexico than inside. This is important because of its influence in a globalised, unipolar world.

The fall of the Soviet Union destroyed our dreams. But the positive side of this negative event was that it forced Latin Americans to think with our own brains. The left in Latin America thought from the viewpoint of Europe. They thought only of the working class of Karl Marx, but it was a Eurocentric vision. Since if you were not part of the working class, you didn’t play a role. It was a distorted interpretation of Marx.

The Trotskyist left and the Stalinist forces in Latin America did a lot of damage to the struggle of our people because they translated mechanically and automatically what Marx thought about Europe to Latin America. And they took out its creative essence. I was always against treating Marxism solely as a science. But included in this, many on the left also took out its scientific content. They converted it into a bible.

The “Marxists” are partly to blame for why today so many Indigenous people, including in this country, do not believe in socialism. How are we going to believe in Marxism and socialism if it doesn’t take into account the Indigenous people? “Official” Marxism did not involve the peasants or the Indigenous. I have been a Marxist for many years, but you must give Marxism its true character. You can’t say it’s just a social science, because that destroys its creative character and its ability to transform society.

Now we have the struggle of the Indigenous people in Ecuador and in Bolivia. We believe in communal socialism. Others believe in Vivir Bien and it would be absurd to try to counterpose those projects. When we talk about them, we can only describe them in broad terms. There is not only one universal class system. This is what Marx thought. This is not the fault of Marx because he thought the world would develop like this. He did analyse the underdeveloped countries, but this society was at the periphery.

We are in an extraordinary time in Latin America because we are advancing from a stage where some of us have taken power, but also where there are strong social movements. At present, not all the people have their own governments. There are states where people don’t have a revolutionary government, but they are advancing, like Argentina, Brazil, the students in Chile, outside of the state.

It’s clear that our revolutionary processes in Bolivia, Venezuela and Ecuador will not advance unless they go forward in their internal struggles, in the strength of their peoples’ movements. Because we have to live in this world, whether we like it or not. The progressive governments of Cristina Kirchner de Fernandez in Argentina and the government of Brazil are also helping us advance. We know that these governments have profound internal contradictions in their societies, not just the same as ours. Without us though, there would also be a problem for them. They would have worse governments. But internationally, they have constructed a geopolitics which is marking out a clear separation from the USA. We could say that Latin America is “Latin Americanising” and emerging in its own right. Our fight against imperialism is important. ALBA has had a greater political impact than in creating new models of trade. Still, ALBA is making improvements. ALBA is an alternative mechanism of integration, although as a commercial and economic unit, I still think it is limited. But then ALBA as a symbol and example of correct policy is worth far more than as a mechanism for commercial exchange. Without ALBA, there would be no community of Latin America and the Caribbean; without ALBA there would be no UNASUR. Therefore ALBA is playing an important role.

What is your vision of the future of Bolivia in the next decade?

We don’t know what is going to happen. All we know is that, each day, Latin America and Bolivia are in the struggle. Each day, we don’t know if we are going to live or die tomorrow. We are confronting the most powerful imperialism in the world. Capitalism is growing and I do not want to say it is dead.

Today, capitalism is carrying out a new wave of colonising the world. It is beginning in Africa and in part of Asia and for this reason Bolivia and other countries have had some relief.

Capitalism is creating new forms of primitive accumulation. They are “accumulating by dispossession”. Where are the great natural resources today in the world? Latin America and Africa. The imperialists are invading Africa directly, militarily. They are not doing this to us so far. But I don’t want to say they will not do it. The majority of drinkable water is in Latin America and the US needs fresh water. The greatest reserves of lithium, the forests, the plants that produce oxygen, the best medicinal plants and the sources of biodiversity are in Latin America.

Imperialism is starting in Africa, but they want to get back into Latin America. How many people are aware of this? Very few. We don’t know what would happen in Latin America if the imperialists began an invasion. Fortunately, we have a bit of time.

What is your message to Australians and the need for international solidarity with Bolivia and the rest of Latin America?

In the 20th century, Latin America followed the example of the struggles of the people of Europe, the socialist countries of Europe. With this experience in mind, what can we say? Develop all possible forms of solidarity with Bolivia, Venezuela and Ecuador, and with Latin America in general. Latin America is a laboratory of struggles. I don’t want to say merely follow our example because it would be an act of pedantry. To think that Latin America has the solution for the whole world: that is what we thought about the Soviet Union.

You have to struggle as well. Everybody has to fight against capitalism all over the world. Your struggle, wherever possible in the circumstances of Australia, will help the process in Latin America. In military terms, the enemy is currently distracted from its goal. The enemy right now is concentrating its forces in Africa and Latin America. If Europe fights and the Australian continent fights, this also will favour us. Because it obliges the enemy to focus on other problems besides us.

Note

[1] The Morales candidate lost, but increased the vote for MAS.

An Examination of Hardt and Negri’s Postmodern Mistakes

By Sean Sayers
Practice & Text, Nanjing University

ABSTRACT

Work in advanced industrial society is changing rapidly. According to Hardt and Negri industrial labour that produces material goods is being superseded by new post-industrial forms of work. These cannot be comprehended by Marx’s account of labour which is based on an industrial model. New concepts of `immaterial’ labour and `biopolitical’ production are needed. This paper criticizes these arguments from a Marxist perspective. Marx’s account of labour is explained, and Hardt and Negri’s criticisms of it are shown to be mistaken. Their account of post-industrial labour, it is argued, is confused and unhelpful. Properly understood and suitably developed Marx’s theory continues to provide a more satisfactory basis for understanding the nature of work in the modern world.

10 October 2006

In recent years the character of work in advanced industrial society has been changing rapidly. Production is being automated and computerized. The factory operated by massed workers is being superseded. Industrial labour is ceasing to be the dominant form of work. Work in offices that used to require intellectual skills is now done by computers. With the enormous growth of jobs in the service sector and the increasing use of information technology, new kinds of work are being created.

These changes are often summed up by saying that these societies are moving from the industrial to the post-industrial stage. In some important respects this notion is highly questionable. Arguably, the economic system is still industrial, but it now operates on a global scale. If industry is ceasing to be the predominant form of work in Western Europe and North America, that is mainly because it is being relocated to other parts of the world in a new global division of labour.

Nevertheless, it is beyond dispute that work is changing. With the widespread use of computers and information technology new kinds of work have developed. Hardt and Negri’s (2000; 2005) attempt to theorize these changes has been particularly influential. The older industrial forms of labour which produced material goods, they argue, are no longer dominant. They are being superseded by new `immaterial’ forms of work involved in the media, management, public relations, information technology, the caring professions, etc.. Jobs in these areas do not make material products, rather they produce ideas, images and other symbolic and cultural contents, and they create and alter social relations. They are `biopolitical’ activities which produce `subjectivities’ and human relations rather than material goods.

Hardt and Negri situated their thought within the Marxist tradition. However, they maintain, Marx’s ideas need to be rethought in the light of the new conditions of post-industrial society.  Marx takes material production as the paradigm of work, his concept of labour is based on an industrial model. In order to describe the new post-industrial forms of work, Marx’s account must be supplemented with the concepts of `immaterial’ labour and `biopolitical’ production.

My aim in this paper is to criticize these ideas. First I will explain Marx’s account of labour and show that Hardt and Negri’s criticisms are based on a fundamental misreading of his thought. Then I will argue that Hardt and Negri’s own account is confused and unhelpful. Properly understood and suitably developed Marx’s concept of labour continues to provide a more satisfactory basis for understanding the nature of work in the modern world.

I MARX’S CONCEPT OF LABOUR

According to Marx, labour is an intentional activity designed to produce a change in the material world. In his early writings, he conceives of work as a process of `objectification’ through which labour is `embodied and made material in an object’ (1975, 324). Later he describes labour as activity through which human beings give form to materials and thus realize themselves in the world. In the labour-process

. . . man’s activity, with the help of the instruments of labour, effects an alteration, designed from the commencement, in the material worked upon. The process disappears in the product, the latter is a use-value, Nature’s material adapted by a change of form to the wants of man. Labour has incorporated itself with its subject: the former is materialized, the latter transformed. (Marx, 1961, 180)

This account is often taken to assume a `productivist’ model that regards work which creates a material product as the paradigm for all work. It is much criticized on this basis. Hardt and Negri along with many others point out that many kinds of work do not seem to fit this picture, some with which Marx was familiar, others that have newly developed.

There are two versions of the view that Marx has a `productivist’ model of the labour process. Some, like Hardt and Negri (2000, 255-256, 292; 2005, 140-142), accuse him of presupposing an industrial idea of labour. Others, by contrast, maintain that Marx’s ideas are based on the paradigm of craft or even artistic work.  In either case, the productivist account is treated either as self-evident (Adams, 1991) or as a `plausible’ reading of Marx’s language and imagery (Habermas, 1987; Benton, 1989). These interpretations are superficial and unsatisfactory. Marx’s theory of labour is not self-evident, nor is it based upon mere metaphors or images. It is a central element of a systematic philosophical theory of the relation of human beings to nature in which the concept of labour plays a fundamental role.

This theory is never stated explicitly by Marx. Although he discusses the general character of labour in a number of places, he does not fully spell out his philosophical presuppositions (Marx, 1975; 1973; 1961; Marx and Engels, 1970). These are derived from Hegel. Hegelian assumptions underlie his thinking about labour, not only in his early writings where they are clearly evident, but throughout his work. For a valid understanding of Marx’s concept of labour, as I shall demonstrate, it is essential to see it in this Hegelian context.  However, the critics I am discussing do not take this background into account. When Marx’s thought is restored to its proper context and interpreted in this light it becomes evident that the charge that he is in the grip of a `productivist’ paradigm is misconceived and unjustified. On the contrary, it is rather these critics who see all labour in these terms and project them onto Marx.

In particular, the theory that labour is a process of `objectification’ and a form giving activity has a Hegelian origin. This concept of labour is central to Hegel’s philosophy. According to Hegel labour is a distinctively human (`spiritual’) activity. Through it human beings satisfy their needs in a way that is fundamentally different to that of other animals. Non-human animals are purely natural creatures. They are driven by their immediate appetites. They satisfy their needs immediately, by devouring what is directly present in their environment. The object is simply negated and annihilated in the process. Appetites arise again, and the process repeats itself. Natural life is sustained, but no development occurs.

Human labour by contrast creates a mediated relation to our natural appetites and to surrounding nature. Work is not driven by immediate instinct. In doing it we do not simply devour and negate the object. On the contrary, gratification must be deferred while we labour to create a product for consumption only later. Through work, moreover, we fashion and shape the object, and give it a human form. We thus `duplicate’ ourselves in the world.

Through this process we establish a relation to the natural world and to our own natural desires which is mediated through work. We objectify ourselves in our product, and come to recognize our powers, embodied in the world. We develop as reflective, self-conscious beings. Moreover, Hegel maintains (1977, 118), relations with others are a necessary condition for these developments. Labour is not a purely instrumental activity to meet only individual needs, it is always and necessarily a social activity. It involves and sustains relations with others.

These ideas are taken over and developed by Marx (Sayers, 2003; 2007). They apply not only to industrial or craft work, or to any other specific type of work, but to work in all its forms, as Hegel makes clear in the following passage.

In empirical contexts, this giving of form may assume the most varied shapes. The field which I cultivate is thereby given form. As far as the inorganic realm is concerned, I do not always give it form directly. If, for example, I build a windmill, I have not given form to the air, but I have constructed a form in order to utilize the air . . . Even the fact that I conserve game may be regarded as a way of imparting form, for it is a mode of conduct calculated to preserve the object in question. The training of animals is, of course, a more direct way of giving them form, and I play a greater role in this process. (Hegel, 1991, §56A, 86)

Hegel here treats all these different kinds of work as form giving activities in the sense that they are all ways of imparting form to matter. `Productivist’ types of work which create a material product, such as craft and manufacture, figure as particular kinds of labour, but it is quite clear that Hegel is not trying to assimilate all work to this model. On the contrary, he is emphasizing the great variety of forms that it may take. Its result need not be the creation of a material product, it may also be intended to conserve an object, to change the character of animals or people, to transform social relations, etc..

The wider purpose of Hegel’s theory is to give a systematic account of the different forms of labour; and this is part of a still larger theme. One of Hegel’s most fruitful and suggestive ideas is that subject and object change and develop in relation to each other. He thus questions the enlightenment idea that a fixed and given subject faces a separate and distinct external world. As the activity of the subject develops, so the object to which the subject relates develops and changes too.

This is the organizing principle of Hegel’s account of labour.  He conceives of different kinds of labour as different forms of relation of subject to object (nature).  In characteristic fashion, moreover, the different forms of labour are arranged on an ascending scale according to the degree of mediation that they establish between subject and object. Marx draws extensively on these ideas. They provide an indispensable key to understanding Marx’s account of labour, as I will now argue.

Direct Appropriation

The simplest form of work, involving the most immediate relation to nature, is direct appropriation from nature, as in hunting, fishing, or the gathering of plants, etc. In work of this kind, nature is taken as it is immediately given. This is the limiting case, still close to unmediated, natural appropriation in that it does not involve transformation of the object in itself. However, such work is a distinctively human rather than a purely natural and unmediated form of activity in that, in its human form, it is intentional, socially organized and usually involves the use of tools or weapons.

Benton argues that such labour cannot be fitted into Marx’s account (1961, 180, quoted above).

The conversion of the `subject [i.e., object] of labour’ into a use-value cannot be adequately described as `Nature’s material adapted by a change of form to the wants of man’. This conversion is rather a matter of selecting, extracting and relocating elements of the natural environment so as to put them at the disposal of other practices (of production or consumption). These primary labour-processes, then, appropriate but do not transform. (Benton, 1989, 69, see also Grundmann, 1991; Benton, 1992, 59ff)

This is not correct.  Such labour does transform the object. Appropriation is a kind of transformation, it is wrong to oppose these as though they were exclusive of each other. According to Marx, direct appropriation transforms the object in that it separates it from nature.  The object is thus made useable: it is caught and killed, plucked, extracted, moved, etc.. Labour is thereby embodied and objectified in it through a change of form.

It might be objected that a mere change of place affects only the object’s `external’ relations and does not alter the thing itself. This objection assumes that an object’s external relations are not part of its being. This view is questioned by Hegelian and Marxist philosophy which is often described as a philosophy of `internal relations’ for this reason` (Sayers, 1990; Ollman, 1971). In the context of economic life the fact that game or fish have been caught makes a great deal of difference: `a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush’.

Agriculture

As productive activity develops our relation to nature alters and subject and object are changed. This is a crucial theme in Hegel that is taken over and developed by Marx. It is overlooked by Benton, Habermas, Hardt and Negri and many other writers. With the development of agriculture we no longer relate to nature as a mere given, we cease to be entirely dependent on the contingencies of what is immediately present. By keeping and breeding animals, by collecting and planting seeds, tilling the soil and gathering crops, we actively arrange the natural environment to meet our needs. Thus we begin the process of freeing ourselves from passive dependence on natural contingency.

Furthermore, in agriculture, our relation to nature is mediated through previous work. Agriculture employs raw materials that are themselves the results of previous labour (seeds, cultivated land, livestock, etc.), and which are then used to create useful products (crops, animals), as well as the materials for future production. In the process, it satisfies not only present needs, it necessitates planning for the future and determining future needs. In these ways, agriculture involves a more mediated and developed relation of subject and object than direct appropriation.

Benton argues that agriculture is another case that does not fit the productivist model that he attributes to Marx. The products of farming are not created by forming the object but grow on their own. `Human labour does not bring about the transformation of seed to plant to crop, but secures optimal conditions for an organic transformation to occur by itself. Contrast this with the carpenter who works with tools to change the form of a piece of wood’ (Benton, 1992, 60). Agriculture, he maintains, is primarily `a labour of sustaining, regulating and reproducing, rather than transforming’ (Benton, 1989, 67-68).

Both Hegel and Marx are of course aware that farming depends on natural processes, but they do not regard this as conflicting with the view that agricultural work is a formative activity. In thinking that it must do, again Benton is taking the notion of form giving activity to refer specifically to work which creates a material product. This is a misreading of this concept, as I have stressed. For both Hegel and Marx agriculture is `formative’ in that we realize our purposes in nature by means of it. It involves the control of natural conditions and processes for human ends. Although it uses natural processes in doing so, its results are not the products of such processes alone, as Benton at times appears to suggest; rather they are use values that embody human labour.

Craft and Industry

Craft work involves a further development of our relation to the object of labour and to nature.  By comparison with agriculture, craft is less reliant on natural processes and less dependent on natural contingencies. It involves the creation of a material product by the direct activity of the worker. It is thus a directly formative activity. Nevertheless, as I have been arguing, it is not the only kind of formative activity. What differentiates it is that the worker uses his or her own skills to form the object from raw materials that are themselves the products of previous labour.

Craft work is the basis upon which industry develops. Under the impact of capitalism, first the division of labour and then the character of the labour process itself is transformed. There are two distinct phases to this process. The first involves what Marx (1976, 1019-1023, 1025-1034) terms the `formal subsumption’ of labour under capital. The traditional methods of work are not altered, but the social organization of work, the division of labour, is transformed.

With the introduction of machinery, the labour process itself is altered. This is what Marx (1976, 1023-1025, 1034-1028) calls the `real subsumption’ of labour under capital. In craft production, the worker controls the tool. In industrial production, the tool is taken out of the worker’s hands and operated by the machine. The craft element is progressively eliminated from the labour process (Marx, 1973, 705), the industrial factory is created. Subject and object are again changed.

Moreover, with the transition from handicraft to manufacture and industry, labour becomes an intrinsically cooperative and social process. The product ceases to be something that the worker creates individually, it becomes the collective result of collective activity (Marx, 1973, 709). The scale of production also increases enormously. Production is no longer designed to meet particular and local needs, it becomes what Hegel (1991, §204, 236) calls a `universal’ process aimed at satisfying `universal’ needs by means of market exchange using the `universal’ medium of money. Thus both activity and product become more abstract and universal, and the relation of subject to object in work is further mediated and distanced.

The increasingly universal character of work is also a central theme in Marx’s account. Craft labour is rooted in particularity. It involves specialized processes and skills tied to particular materials and products. Its products are designed to satisfy individual and local needs. Industry does away with these limitations. `What characterizes the division of labour in the automatic workshop is that labour has there completely lost its specialized character… The automatic workshop wipes out specialists and craft-idiocy’ (Marx, 1978, 138).

With the introduction of machinery, work is reduced to routine and mechanical operations dictated by the machine, or to the feeding, minding and maintaining of machines. However, the industrialization and mechanization of work prepares the way for still fuller forms of automation. The more mechanical work becomes, the more it can be taken over by machines altogether. In the end, the human being can `step aside’ and install machines in his place.

In this way, through the development of industry, the relation of worker to product becomes increasingly mediated and distanced. The labour process ceases to involve the direct transformation of the object by the worker. The craft element is almost entirely removed from the work activity itself. In the production process, machines act on their own, nature acts upon itself. Human purposes are realized through the use of science and technology and the application of knowledge. The craft model of production becomes less and less appropriate. However, that is not to say that the notion of labour as a form giving activity is rendered inapplicable. On the contrary, industrial production is still formative in the sense in which Hegel and Marx understand this notion, in that it is intentional activity that results in the giving of form to materials and that creates use values that embody human labour.

Universal Work

Industry creates a highly mediated and abstract relation of the worker to nature and to the social world. Work become increasingly distant from the direct production process as such, and the product is no longer related in a direct way to the satisfaction of particular needs. However, even automated industry is not the final stage of the process of development that I have been tracing. For modern industrial society has spawned entirely new kinds of work that seem to have no relation at all to the creation of material products or the satisfaction of material needs. These include commercial, administrative and other kinds of service work. Such work has become increasingly significant in modern society.

Hegel and Marx witnessed the beginning of these developments. Hegel treats commerce as a type of work essentially connected with and subordinated to manufacturing industry. However, he regards public administration and education as distinct spheres which involve the universal work of a separate class of civil and public servants. Such work is universal in that it is abstracted from the creation of particular objects to meet particular material needs. Furthermore, it is the outcome of the exercise of universal, intellectual and rational powers. Marx also sees such work as employing intellectual abilities and creating a more universal and abstract relation between the worker and the object, even though, of course, Marx has a quite different understanding of social class and rejects the Hegelian idea of a `universal’ class.

Commerce, administration and service work do not have direct material products, yet both Hegel and Marx include these sorts of work under the heading of formative activities, and bring them within the same theoretical framework as other kinds of work. As economic activity grows from a local to an industrial scale, a separate administrative and commercial sphere is required to manage it. Mechanisms of administration, distribution and exchange are needed to organize production, and to maintain the connections between producers and consumers. Commercial, administrative and service work are formative activities in that they create and sustain these economic and social relations.

II POST-INDUSTRIAL WORK

How do these ideas stand up today with the great changes in work since Hegel and Marx’s time? As we have seen, Hardt and Negri argue that Marx’s concept of labour is a product of the industrial society that was emerging at the time. It must now be rethought. What sort of rethinking is needed? Hardt and Negri are not clear about this. At times they suggest that their project is to develop and extend Marx’s theory to comprehend work and politics in post-industrial society. They portray mechanization and automation as the paths along which industry has been developing since its inception, in the way that I have been arguing. Post-industrial forms of work using computers merely continue and extend this process, further distancing the worker from the object of work and making work more abstract and less specialized.

At other times and more commonly, however, they suggest that post-industrial forms of work are completely novel and necessitate a radically new theoretical approach. Marx’s account of labour, they imply, presupposes a productivist model based on the industrial factory which is ceasing to apply. Industry is being superseded by the `immaterial’ production of the information economy (Hardt and Negri, 2005, 107-115). New `immaterial’ forms of labour are becoming predominant.

Hardt and Negri have taken the concept of `immaterial labour’ from Lazzarato (1996) and extended it to become central to their account of post-industrial society.  Immaterial labour, like all labour, they acknowledge, involves material activity: what makes it `immaterial’ is its product. Lazzarato (1996, 133) defines it as `the labor that produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity’. According to Hardt and Negri (2005, 108), it creates `immaterial products, such as knowledge, information, communication, a relationship, or an emotional response’. Labour of this kind, these writers argue, is quite different from the material production on which Marx’s theories are supposedly based. It makes not just objects but `subjectivities’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000, 32). It is `biopolitical production, the production of social life itself, in which the economic, the political, and the cultural increasingly overlap and invest one another’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000, xiii).

These ideas have considerable initial appeal and plausibility. However, when they are examined in more detail, problems soon become evident. Precisely what kinds of work are these concepts referring to? Hardt and Negri’s account is hazy and shifting. In Empire, they distinguish three types of immaterial labour.

The first is involved in an industrial production that has been informationalized and has incorporated communication technologies in a way that transforms the production process itself… Second is the immaterial labour of analytical and symbolic tasks … A third type … involves the production and manipulation of affect. (Hardt and Negri, 2000, 293)

More recently, the first of kind of work on this list has been dropped (Hardt and Negri, 2005, 108). Quite rightly so. Although the use of computer control in manufacturing industry involves information technology, it is misleading to describe it as `immaterial’ labour. The fact that many aspects of car production, for example, are now automated and computerized, does not mean that car making has ceased to be a material process, or that car workers are no longer engaged in material production. Although machines now do the work and shop floor workers no longer `get their hands dirty’, nevertheless, by controlling these machines, they still have material effects and produce material goods. Their work is still material and formative in character.

Symbolic Labour

Hardt and Negri no longer include computerized industrial work under the heading of immaterial labour. That leaves two `principle forms’ of such work: `symbolic’ or intellectual labour and `affective’ labour, dealing with feelings or attitudes.  Both are types of immaterial labour, they maintain, in the sense they do not have material products nor are they designed to meet material needs. For this reason also such work seems to fall outside Marx’s model of work as formative activity.

Symbolic work is primarily intellectual or artistic. It `produces ideas, symbols, codes, texts, linguistic figures, images, and other such products’ (Hardt and Negri, 2005, 108). It includes computer programming, graphic design, various sorts of media work, work in advertising and public relations, etc.. Work of this kind, it is true, does not directly create a material product. In this respect it resembles commercial, administrative and other kinds of service work. However, it is wrong to think that a new category of immaterial labour is needed to comprehend it. The error here is to imagine that `symbolic’ work of this sort has no material result and that only work which directly creates a tangible product, like industry or craft, is material activity. It is not the case that symbolic work creates only symbols or ideas: products that are purely subjective and intangible. All labour operates by intentionally transforming matter in some way, as Marx maintains. Symbolic labour is no exception: it involves making marks on paper, making sounds, creating electronic impulses in a computer system, or whatever. Only in this way is such activity objectified and realized as labour. In this way, all labour is material.

Economically speaking, symbolic work is not primarily concerned with creating a material product as such, but rather with the realization of value through distribution, exchange, marketing, etc.. However, it is important to see that these activities are essential to the processes of material production in a developed industrial economy. They are needed in order to establish, maintain and facilitate the economic and social relations required for production. A modern economy cannot function without managers, accountants, computer programmers, designers, etc.. Their work does not directly create a material product, nevertheless it has material effects which produce and reproduce social and economic relations and alter consciousness.

In this way, there is also an immaterial aspect to such labour, as Hardt and Negri maintain. However, the same is true for other kinds of work as well. All labour has an immaterial as well as a material aspect. For all labour takes place in a context of social relations. In altering the material world, labour at the same time sustains and alters these social relations. In the process, it affects – creates, alters – subjectivities. All labour, it must be stressed, does this. It is not peculiar to a special sort of `immaterial’ labour or `biopolitical’ activity alone.

Social relations are just as much produced by men as linen, flax, etc. . . In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. . . The same men who establish their social relations in conformity with the material productivity, produce also principles, ideas, and categories, in conformity with their social relations. (Marx, 1978, 103)

In a quite different way, Marx’s account is also criticized by Habermas (1972, chapter 2; 1996). He conceives of work as a purely instrumental activity to meet individual needs, and he treats the sphere of communicative action and social interaction as a separate and autonomous realm. The result is a dualistic distinction between work on the one side and the sphere of social relations (communicative action and social interaction) on the other.

Hardt and Negri (2000, 404-405) criticize Habermas for thus `compartmentalizing’ work and communicative action into separate spheres. In the post-industrial period with the development of immaterial labour, they argue, work has become `biopolitical’ and essentially communicative and social in character. By separating social relations from the sphere of work, Habermas detaches them from their real, material basis and idealizes them.

This criticism of Habermas is valid as far as it goes but it should be taken further, for it applies to his account of labour and social relations quite generally. By restricting their argument to `immaterial’ labour only, Hardt and Negri end up reproducing a dualism between material and immaterial activity of the sort that they criticize in Habermas. All human labour is social and necessarily involves a communicative element; and at the same time all human social relations are rooted in material labour. This is Marx’s theory, and neither Hardt and Negri nor Habermas presents a valid critique of it.

Affective Labour

There are similar problems with the account that Hardt and Negri give of the second form of immaterial labour they distinguish, `affective’ labour. This is `labor that produces or manipulates affects such as a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, or passion. One can recognize affective labor, for example in the work of legal assistants, flight attendants, and fast food workers (service with a smile)’ (Hardt and Negri, 2005, 108). Such affective labour also includes caring and helping work. According to Hardt and Negri this is a further form of `immaterial’ labour that cannot be accounted for by Marx since it has no material product.

To support their case they appeal to Hannah Arendt’s philosophy. She maintains that there is a fundamental distinction between what she calls `labour’ and `work’ which Marx fails to make. What she terms `labour’ is activity to satisfy immediate consumption needs. It is concerned primarily with the maintenance of natural life, it creates no lasting products. Arendt’s main examples of such labour are cleaning, cooking and other forms of housework, but her account applies to other kinds of service work as well. Hardt and Negri’s `affective’ labour is `labour’ in this sense. What Arendt calls `work’, by contrast, makes an enduring object for `use’ rather than for immediate consumption. It thereby creates a `world’. Arendt criticizes Marx for treating all productive activity in terms applicable only to `work’ in this specific sense, and hence for ignoring the fact that much productive activity is devoted to `labour’ which has no enduring product.

Again we must avoid thinking that only work which results in a material product counts as work or form giving activity for Marx. This is at the basis of both Arendt’s and Hardt and Negri’s criticisms of him. It is wrong to imagine that Arendt’s `labour’, or Hardt and Negri’s `affective’ labour have no products. Such work operates, as does all labour, by intentionally forming matter and altering the material environment in some way, including through speech and other forms of communicative action. It does not simply disappear, it is objectified in the world, it creates use values.

Affective labour is necessary in order to establish and maintain economic and social relations. Housework is needed to create and maintain a home, education to produce socialized individuals. Receptionists, social workers, cleaners, shop workers, etc., are needed to maintain social and economic relations in a modern economy. None of these activities directly creates a material product, yet they are formative activities and modes of objectification nonetheless. As with the other kinds of so-called `immaterial’ production discussed earlier, they have material results which serve to produce and reproduce social relations and subjectivity. Hardt and Negri are aware of some of the problems with the concept of immaterial labour to which I have been pointing. The `labor involved in all immaterial production’, they admit,

‘…remains material . . . What is immaterial is its product. We recognize that immaterial labor is a very ambiguous term in this regard. It might be better to understand [it] . . . as `biopolitical labor’, that is, labor that creates not only material goods but also relationships and ultimately social life itself. (Hardt and Negri, 2005, 109)

The concept of `biopolitical’ labour does not resolves these problems, they go deeper than Hardt and Negri appreciate. As I have argued, just as all immaterial labour necessarily involves material activity, so all material labour has an immaterial aspect, in that it alters not only the material immediately worked upon but also social relations and subjectivity. There is no clear distinction between material and immaterial labour in this respect. Resort to the concept of `biopolitical’ activity is no help. The same point applies. All productive activity is `biopolitical’ to some degree in that all labour transforms relationships and social life. In this way all labour is ultimately a form of self-creation.  In short the notion of `biopolitical’ activity is no more satisfactory than that of `immaterial’ labour as a way to distinguish post-industrial forms of work.

III POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS

Hardt and Negri are right to argue that work has changed radically since the industrial revolution. Despite the initial plausibility of their account, however, their categories of immaterial labour and biopolitical activity are little help in understanding these changes. Properly understood and suitably developed, Marx’s theory of work as objectification and form giving activity provides a more satisfactory and illuminating conceptual framework for understanding the nature of work, including its new post-industrial forms. According to this theory, different types of labour involve different degrees of mediation in our relation to nature ranging from the most immediate relationship of direct appropriation to the most abstract and universal kinds of work. This is primarily a logical sequence rather than a historical one (though historical changes are associated with it). In Hegel’s case, there is also an ethical and political dimension to his account. With the development of our relation to nature through labour comes the emergence of self-consciousness from immediate natural conditions towards a developed, reflective and mediated state and with that a growth of freedom.

It is not immediately clear whether Marx adopts a similar perspective. His theory of labour is developed in an economic context. In purely economic terms, Marx does not differentiate between different kinds of labour, still less make a hierarchy of them. Like other classical economists, in the labour theory of value he equates different forms of labour together as `abstract’ labour. This may appear to suggest that he does not rank different kinds of work morally or politically. But that is not the case: there is clearly an evaluative dimension to Marx’s theory. The writers I have been discussing all criticize it in this respect, and they are not wrong to do so. However, they all fail to take account of the Hegelian dimension to Marx’s thought and so misunderstand its implications. The view that Marx’s account relies on a `romantically transfigured prototype of handicraft activity’ is a complete misconception. Marx rejects the craft ideal. He is scornful of the `idiocy’ and small mindedness engendered by handicraft work (Marx, 1978, 138). His critical attitude is grounded on the account of the labour process that I have been describing which sees craft work as a limited and purely individual activity, aimed at the satisfaction of particular and local needs.

For Marx, the coming of industry means a liberation from these constraints. This is the positive aspect of its development. However, the change from craft to industrial production takes place under the contradictory conditions of capitalism in which the pressure towards universality inherent in industry comes into conflict with the system of private ownership and the free market in which it develops. The result is the `devastation caused by a social anarchy which turns every economic progress into a social calamity’ (Marx, 1961, 487). In the longer term, however, the coming of industry means the elimination of brute physical effort and the reduction of repetitious and mechanical toil. Work becomes more productive, rational, and universal, hence `more worthy of … human nature’ (Marx, 1971, 820).

These points about Marx’s thought are widely understood. In view of them, Marxism is often interpreted as a philosophy rooted in industrial conditions that idealizes industrial labour and the industrial working class. This is Hardt and Negri’s position. However, the reading that I have been proposing suggests a different view. Marx is a historical thinker. At the time he was writing, industry was becoming the predominant form of production and the industrial proletariat was emerging as the most advanced political force. But social and human development have moved on. Hardt and Negri are right to insist that Marx’s ideas must be rethought and developed to take account of this.

Marxism should not be seen as eternally linked to an industrial perspective. Indeed, its underlying philosophy suggests that industry is not the highest development of our productive and creative powers. It points to higher forms of labour, beyond industry, in more universal kinds of work. Hegel assigns this mainly to a universal class of civil servants. This is not Marx’s idea. Marx envisages the eventual emergence of forms of work in which the universal tendencies of modern industry are realized, and in which,

‘…the detail-worker of to-day, crippled by one and the same trivial operation, and thus reduced to the mere fragment of a man, [will be replaced] by the fully developed individual, fit for a variety of labours … to whom the different social functions he performs, are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural and acquired powers. (Marx, 1961, 488)

It is all too easy to dismiss this as a utopian dream, but that would be a mistake. Aspects of it are already coming true, though within the contradictory conditions of capitalism. In post-industrial society, as Hardt and Negri (2000, 285) observe, `jobs for the most part are highly mobile and involve flexible skills… They are characterized in general by the central role played by knowledge, information, affect and communication’. In more favourable conditions, such work might extend our universal, rational and creative powers. It could become something we do not only because we are forced by economic necessity but as a free activity. This is Marx’s ideal.

[This] can only consist in socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favorable to, and worthy of, their human nature. (Marx, 1971, 820)

Such work is a universal, rational (i.e., `scientific’ in a broad sense), self-conscious, collective kind of creative activity: conscious self-production and self creation.  As I have argued, Marx’s concept of labour, properly understood, continues to provide a more helpful than the concepts of immaterial labour and biopolitical production for understanding these developments.

Notes

References

Adams, William 1991. "Aesthetics: Liberating the Senses." Pp. 246-274 in T. Carver, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Marx. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Benton, Ted 1989. "Marxism and Natural Limits: An Ecological Critique and Reconstruction." New Left Review: 178, 51-86.
Benton, Ted 1992. "Ecology, Socialism and the Mastery of Nature." New Left Review: 194, 55-74.

Grundmann, Reiner 1991. "The Ecological Challenge to Marxism." New Left Review: 187, 103-120.

Habermas, Jurgen 1972. Knowledge and Human Interests. London: Heinemann.

Habermas, Jurgen 1987. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. F.G. Lawrence. Cambridge: Polity.

Habermas, Jurgen 1996. "Labor and Interaction: Remarks on Hegel’s Jena Philosophy of Mind." Pp. 123-148 in J. O’neill, ed., Hegel’s Dialectic of Desire and Recognition. Albany NY: SUNY Press.

Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri 2000. Empire. Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard University Press.

Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri 2005. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. London: Hamish Hamilton.

Hegel, G.W.F. 1975. Aesthetics, trans. T.M. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Hegel, G.W.F. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Hegel, G.W.F. 1983. Hegel and the Human Spirit, trans. L. Rauch. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
Hegel, G.W.F. 1988. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. One-Volume Edition. The Lectures of 1827, trans. R.F. Brown P.C. Hodgson and J.M. Stewart. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Hegel, G.W.F. 1991. Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H.B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hegel, G.W.F. 1997. Lectures on Natural Right and Political Science, trans. J.M. Stewart and P.C. Hodgson. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 1979. System of Ethical Life (1802/3) and First Philosophy of Spirit (Part Iii of the System of Speculative Philosophy 1803/4), trans. H.S. Harris and T.M. Knox. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Lazzarato, Maurizio 1996. "Immaterial Labor." Pp. 133-147 in P. Virno and M. Hardt, eds, Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Marx, K. 1976. "The Result of the Immediate Process of Production." Pp. 941-1048, Capital, 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Marx, Karl 1961. Capital, I, trans. S. Moore and E. Aveling. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House.

Marx, Karl 1971. Capital, III. Moscow: Progress.

Marx, Karl 1973. Grundrisse, trans. M. Nicolaus. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Marx, Karl 1975. "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844." Pp. 279-400, Early Writings. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Marx, Karl 1978. The Poverty of Philosophy. Peking: Foreign Languages Press.

Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels 1970. The German Ideology Part I. New York: International Publishers.

Ollman, Bertell 1971. Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society. Cambridge: University Press.

Sayers, Sean 1990. "Marxism and the Dialectical Method: A Critique of G.A. Cohen." Pp. 140-168 in S. Sayers and P. Osborne, eds, Socialism, Feminism and Philosophy: A Radical Philosophy Reader. London: Routledge.
Sayers, Sean 2003. "Creative Activity and Alienation in Hegel and Marx." Historical Materialism, 11: 1, 107-128. Sayers, Sean 2007. "Individual and Society in Marx and Hegel." Science & Society, forthcoming.

KEYWORDS labour, work, Marx, Hardt and Negri, immaterial labour, biopolitical production, post-industrial society

CONTACT INFORMATION Sean Sayers, Professor of Philosophy, School of European Culture and Languages, Cornwallis Building, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent CT2 7NF, England Tel.  +44 (0)1227 827513 (direct line); +44 (0)1227 764000 (switchboard) Email: S.P.Sayers@kent.ac.uk Web: http://www.kent.ac.uk/secl/philosophy/Staff/sayers.htm

Marathon Bombing, Sadness and Anger

By Bill Fletcher, Jr.

billfletcherjr.com

April 16, 2013  – I lived in the Boston area for 18 years.  The Marathon was something that i accepted as part of what it meant to live in Boston, though i was not moved by it.  But it was comfortable.

I could not believe it this afternoon when i heard about the bombing.  Like many other people i went through immediate denial.  I did not want to believe that it actually had happened.  Someone had to have made a mistake, i thought.  But then there was no denying it.

I was amazed by the first responders.  It was not just the official responders, but civilians in the area who came to the aid of those injured. Bostonians can and will come through in a crisis.  I have seen it before, and we will probably be forced to see it again.

Yet i found myself thinking that we in the USA believe that these terrorist actions are either new or exceptional, at least for us in this country.  We have, of course, heard about state-sponsored or non-state actor terrorism overseas.  The Rwanda genocide; Israeli attacks on Gaza; the list goes on.  We, in the USA, are always stunned, however, when it happens to us because we believe that somehow we are an exception to this madness.  We are not.

But it is also important to remember that there is a long history of homegrown terrorism in the USA.  I am not talking about those who have become jihaddists.  I am thinking more about the Ku Klux Klan, or Aryan Nation, or Black Guard.  The terror that groups like these perpetrated over years was often ignored in large parts of mainstream USA but was central to the experiences of those of us of color and those of us who chose different political directions.

We do not know who was behind the Marathon bombings.  It could have been someone completely insane.  It might have been motivated by domestic or international political matters.  In any case it was carried out by a sociopath and has, at least as of this moment, killed at least three people, wounded dozens, and destroyed the lives of probably hundreds of people.

The Boston Marathon will never be the same.  Boston will never be the same.  And today we share so much in common with victims around the world of state-sponsored terrorism and the actions of terrorist groups who have decided that there is a percentage in killing civilians, as reprehensible as most of us may find it.

My heart is with the families of the dead and wounded, and hoping for a speedy recovery of the wounded.

i also hope for the capture of the criminals who carried out this 2013 Boston massacre.  May they never again see the light of day.

______________

Terrorism and Privilege: Understanding the Power of Whiteness

By Tim Wise

TimeWise.org

April 16, 2013 – As the nation weeps for the victims of the horrific bombing in Boston yesterday, one searches for lessons amid the carnage, and finds few. That violence is unacceptable stands out as one, sure. That hatred — for humanity, for life, or whatever else might have animated the bomber or bombers — is never the source of constructive human action seems like a reasonably close second.

But I dare say there is more; a much less obvious and far more uncomfortable lesson, which many are loathe to learn, but which an event such as this makes readily apparent, and which we must acknowledge, no matter how painful.

It is a lesson about race, about whiteness, and specifically, about white privilege.

I know you don’t want to hear it. But I don’t much care. So here goes.

White privilege is knowing that even if the Boston Marathon bomber turns out to be white, his or her identity will not result in white folks generally being singled out for suspicion by law enforcement, or the TSA, or the FBI.

White privilege is knowing that even if the bomber turns out to be white, no one will call for whites to be profiled as terrorists as a result, subjected to special screening, or threatened with deportation.

White privilege is knowing that if the bomber turns out to be white, he or she will be viewed as an exception to an otherwise non-white rule, an aberration, an anomaly, and that he or she will be able to join the ranks of Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols and Ted Kaczynski and Eric Rudolph and Joe Stack and George Metesky and Byron De La Beckwith and Bobby Frank Cherry and Thomas Blanton and Herman Frank Cash and Robert Chambliss and James von Brunn and Robert Mathews and David Lane and Michael F. Griffin and Paul Hill and John Salvi and James Kopp and Luke Helder and James David Adkisson and Scott Roeder and Shelley Shannon and Dennis Mahon and Wade Michael Page and Byron Williams and Kevin Harpham and William Krar and Judith Bruey and Edward Feltus and Raymond Kirk Dillard and Adam Lynn Cunningham and Bonnell Hughes and Randall Garrett Cole and James Ray McElroy and Michael Gorbey and Daniel Cowart and Paul Schlesselman and Frederick Thomas and Paul Ross Evans and Matt Goldsby and Jimmy Simmons and Kathy Simmons and Kaye Wiggins and Patricia Hughes and Jeremy Dunahoe and David McMenemy and Bobby Joe Rogers and Francis Grady and Demetrius Van Crocker and Floyd Raymond Looker and Derek Mathew Shrout, among the pantheon of white people who engage in (or have plotted) politically motivated violence meant to terrorize and kill, but whose actions result in the assumption of absolutely nothing about white people generally, or white Christians in particular.

And white privilege is being able to know nothing about the crimes committed by most of the terrorists listed above — indeed, never to have so much as heard most of their names — let alone to make assumptions about the role that their racial or ethnic identity may have played in their crimes.

White privilege is knowing that if the Boston bomber turns out to be white, we  will not be asked to denounce him or her, so as to prove our own loyalties to the common national good. It is knowing that the next time a cop sees one of us standing on the sidewalk cheering on runners in a marathon, that cop will say exactly nothing to us as a result.

White privilege is knowing that if you are a white student from Nebraska — as opposed to, say, a student from Saudi Arabia — that no one, and I mean no one would think it important to detain and question you in the wake of a bombing such as the one at the Boston Marathon.

And white privilege is knowing that if this bomber turns out to be white, the United States government will not bomb whatever corn field or mountain town or stale suburb from which said bomber came, just to ensure that others like him or her don’t get any ideas. And if he turns out to be a member of the Irish Republican Army we won’t bomb Belfast. And if he’s an Italian American Catholic we won’t bomb the Vatican.

In short, white privilege is the thing that allows you (if you’re white) — and me — to view tragic events like this as merely horrific, and from the perspective of pure and innocent victims, rather than having to wonder, and to look over one’s shoulder, and to ask even if only in hushed tones, whether those we pass on the street might think that somehow we were involved.

It is the source of our unearned innocence and the cause of others’ unjustified oppression.

That is all. And it matters.

April 4, 2013

By Ronald Dworkin

New York Review of Books

Before he died on February 14, Ronald Dworkin sent to The New York Review a text of his new book, Religion Without God, to be published by Harvard University Press later this year. We publish here an excerpt from the first chapter. —The Editors

The familiar stark divide between people of religion and without religion is too crude. Many millions of people who count themselves atheists have convictions and experiences very like and just as profound as those that believers count as religious. They say that though they do not believe in a “personal” god, they nevertheless believe in a “force” in the universe “greater than we are.” They feel an inescapable responsibility to live their lives well, with due respect for the lives of others; they take pride in a life they think well lived and suffer sometimes inconsolable regret at a life they think, in retrospect, wasted. They find the Grand Canyon not just arresting but breathtakingly and eerily wonderful. They are not simply interested in the latest discoveries about the vast universe but enthralled by them. These are not, for them, just a matter of immediate sensuous and otherwise inexplicable response. They express a conviction that the force and wonder they sense are real, just as real as planets or pain, that moral truth and natural wonder do not simply evoke awe but call for it.

There are famous and poetic expressions of the same set of attitudes. Albert Einstein said that though an atheist he was a deeply religious man:

To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong in the ranks of devoutly religious men.¹

Percy Bysshe Shelley declared himself an atheist who nevertheless felt that “The awful shadow of some unseen Power/Floats though unseen among us….”² Philosophers, historians, and sociologists of religion have insisted on an account of religious experience that finds a place for religious atheism. William James said that one of the two essentials of religion is a sense of fundamentality: that there are “things in the universe,” as he put it, “that throw the last stone.”³ Theists have a god for that role, but an atheist can think that the importance of living well throws the last stone, that there is nothing more basic on which that responsibility rests or needs to rest.

Judges often have to decide what “religion” means for legal purposes. For example, the American Supreme Court had to decide whether, when Congress provided a “conscientious objection” exemption from military service for men whose religion would not allow them to serve, an atheist whose moral convictions also prohibited service qualified for the objection. It decided that he did qualify.⁴ The Court, called upon to interpret the Constitution’s guarantee of “free exercise of religion” in another case, declared that many religions flourish in the United States that do not recognize a god, including something the Court called “secular humanism.”⁵ Ordinary people, moreover, have come to use “religion” in contexts having nothing to do with either gods or ineffable forces. They say that Americans make a religion of their Constitution, and that for some people baseball is a religion. These latter uses of “religion” are only metaphorical, to be sure, but they seem parasitic not on beliefs about God but rather on deep commitments more generally.

So the phrase “religious atheism,” however surprising, is not an oxymoron; religion is not restricted to theism just as a matter of what words mean. But the phrase might still be thought confusing. Would it not be better, for the sake of clarity, to reserve “religion” for theism and then to say that Einstein, Shelley, and the others are “sensitive” or “spiritual” atheists? But on a second look, expanding the territory of religion improves clarity by making plain the importance of what is shared across that territory. Richard Dawkins says that Einstein’s language is “destructively misleading” because clarity demands a sharp distinction between a belief that the universe is governed by fundamental physical laws, which Dawkins thought Einstein meant, and a belief that it is governed by something “supernatural,” which Dawkins thinks the word “religion” suggests.

But Einstein meant much more than that the universe is organized around fundamental physical laws; indeed his view I quoted is, in one important sense, an endorsement of the supernatural. The beauty and sublimity he said we could reach only as a feeble reflection are not part of nature; they are something beyond nature that cannot be grasped even by finally understanding the most fundamental of physical laws. It was Einstein’s faith that some transcendental and objective value permeates the universe, value that is neither a natural phenomenon nor a subjective reaction to natural phenomena. That is what led him to insist on his own religiosity. No other description, he thought, could better capture the character of his faith.

So we should let Einstein have his self-description, the scholars their broad categories, the judges their interpretations. Religion, we should say, does not necessarily mean a belief in God. But then, granted that someone can be religious without believing in a god, what does being religious mean? What is the difference between a religious attitude toward the world and a nonreligious attitude? That is hard to answer because “religion” is an interpretive concept. That is, people who use the concept do not agree about precisely what it means: when they use it they are taking a stand about what it should mean. Einstein may well have had something different in mind when he called himself religious than William James did when he classified certain experiences as religious or the Supreme Court justices did when they said that atheistic beliefs could qualify as religious. So we should consider our question in that spirit. What account of religion would it be most revealing to adopt?

We must turn to this challenge almost immediately. But we should pause to notice the background against which we consider the issue. Religious war is, like cancer, a curse of our species. People kill each other, around the world, because they hate each other’s gods. In less violent places like America they fight mainly in politics, at every level from national elections to local school board meetings. The fiercest battles are then not between different sects of godly religion but between zealous believers and those atheists they regard as immoral heathens who cannot be trusted and whose growing numbers threaten the moral health and integrity of the political community.

The zealots have great political power in America now, at least for the present. The so-called religious right is a voting bloc still eagerly courted. The political power of religion has provoked, predictably, an opposite—though hardly equal—reaction. Militant atheism, though politically inert, is now a great commercial success. No one who called himself an atheist could be elected to any important office in America, but Richard Dawkins’s book The God Delusion (2006) has sold millions of copies here, and dozens of other books that condemn religion as superstition crowd bookstores. Books ridiculing God were once, decades ago, rare. Religion meant a Bible and no one thought it worth the trouble to point out the endless errors of the biblical account of creation. No more. Scholars devote careers to refuting what once seemed, among those who enthusiastically buy their books, too silly to refute.

If we can separate God from religion—if we can come to understand what the religious point of view really is and why it does not require or assume a supernatural person—then we may be able to lower, at least, the temperature of these battles by separating questions of science from questions of value. The new religious wars are now really culture wars. They are not just about scientific history—about what best accounts for the development of the human species, for instance—but more fundamentally about the meaning of human life and what living well means.

As we shall see, logic requires a separation between the scientific and value parts of orthodox godly religion. When we separate these properly we discover that they are fully independent: the value part does not depend—cannot depend—on any god’s existence or history. If we accept this, then we formidably shrink both the size and the importance of the wars. They would no longer be culture wars. This ambition is utopian: violent and nonviolent religious wars reflect hatreds deeper than philosophy can address. But a little philosophy might help.

What Is Religion? The Metaphysical Core

What, then, should we count as a religious attitude? I will try to provide a reasonably abstract and hence ecumenical account. The religious attitude accepts the full, independent reality of value. It accepts the objective truth of two central judgments about value. The first holds that human life has objective meaning or importance. Each person has an innate and inescapable responsibility to try to make his life a successful one: that means living well, accepting ethical responsibilities to oneself as well as moral responsibilities to others, not just if we happen to think this important but because it is in itself important whether we think so or not.

The second holds that what we call “nature”—the universe as a whole and in all its parts—is not just a matter of fact but is itself sublime: something of intrinsic value and wonder. Together these two comprehensive value judgments declare inherent value in both dimensions of human life: biological and biographical. We are part of nature because we have a physical being and duration: nature is the locus and nutrient of our physical lives. We are apart from nature because we are conscious of ourselves as making a life and must make decisions that, taken together, determine what life we have made.

For many people religion includes much more than those two values: for many theists it also includes obligations of worship, for instance. But I shall take these two—life’s intrinsic meaning and nature’s intrinsic beauty—as paradigms of a fully religious attitude to life. These are not convictions that one can isolate from the rest of one’s life. They engage a whole personality. They permeate experience: they generate pride, remorse, and thrill. Mystery is an important part of that thrill. William James said that

like love, like wrath, like hope, ambition, jealousy, like every other instinctive eagerness and impulse, [religion] adds to life an enchantment which is not rationally or logically deducible from anything else.⁶

The enchantment is the discovery of transcendental value in what seems otherwise transient and dead.

But how can religious atheists know what they claim about the various values they embrace? How can they be in touch with the world of value to check the perhaps fanciful claim in which they invest so much emotion? Believers have the authority of a god for their convictions; atheists seem to pluck theirs out of the air. We need to explore a bit the metaphysics of value.

The religious attitude rejects naturalism, which is one name for the very popular metaphysical theory that nothing is real except what can be studied by the natural sciences, including psychology. That is, nothing exists that is neither matter nor mind; there is really, fundamentally, no such thing as a good life or justice or cruelty or beauty. Richard Dawkins spoke for naturalists when he suggested the scientists’ proper reply to people who, criticizing naturalism, endlessly quote Hamlet: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” “Yes,” Dawkins replied, “but we’re working on it.”⁷

Some naturalists are nihilists: they say that values are only illusions. Other naturalists accept that in some sense values exist, but they define them so as to deny them any independent existence: they make them depend entirely on people’s thoughts or reactions. They say, for instance, that describing someone’s behavior as good or right only means that, as a matter of fact, the lives of more people will be pleasant if everyone behaves in that way. Or that saying a painting is beautiful only means that in general people take pleasure in looking at it.

The religious attitude rejects all forms of naturalism. It insists that values are real and fundamental, not just manifestations of something else; they are as real as trees or pain. It also rejects a very different theory we might call grounded realism. This position, also popular among philosophers, holds that values are real and that our value judgments can be objectively true—but only on the assumption, which might be wrong, that we have good reason, apart from our own confidence in our value judgments, to think that we have the capacity to discover truths about value.

There are many forms of grounded realism: one is a form of theism that traces our capacity for value judgment to a god. (I shall shortly argue that this supposed grounding goes in the wrong direction.) They all agree that, if value judgment can ever be sound, there must be some independent reason to think that people have a capacity for sound moral judgment—independent because it does not itself rely on that capacity. That makes the status of value hostage to biology or metaphysics. Suppose we find undeniable evidence that we hold the moral convictions we do only because they were evolutionarily adaptive, which certainly did not require them to be true. Then, on this view, we would have no reason to think that cruelty is really wrong. If we think it is, then we must think we have some other way of being “in touch with” moral truth.

The religious attitude insists on a much more fundamental divorce between the world of value and facts about our natural history or our psychological susceptibilities. Nothing could impeach our judgment that cruelty is wrong except a good moral argument that cruelty is not after all wrong. We ask: What reason do we have for supposing that we have the capacity for sound value judgment? Ungrounded realism answers: the only possible reason we could have—we reflect responsibly on our moral convictions and find them persuasive. We think them true, and we therefore think we have the capacity to find the truth. How can we reject the hypothesis that all our convictions about value are only mutually supporting illusions? Ungrounded realism answers: we understand that hypothesis in the only way that makes it intelligible. It suggests that we do not have an adequate moral case for any of our moral judgments. We refute that suggestion by making moral arguments for some of our moral judgments.

The religious attitude, to repeat, insists on the full independence of value: the world of value is self-contained and self-certifying. Does that disqualify the religious attitude on grounds of circularity? Notice that there is no finally noncircular way to certify our capacity to find truth of any kind in any intellectual domain. We rely on experiment and observation to certify our judgments in science. But experiment and observation are reliable only in virtue of the truth of basic assumptions about causation and optics that we rely on science itself, and nothing more basic, to certify. And of course our judgments about the nature of the external world all depend, even more fundamentally, on a universally shared assumption that there is an external world, an assumption that science cannot itself certify.

We find it impossible not to believe the elementary truths of mathematics and, when we understand them, the astonishingly complex truths that mathematicians have proved. But we cannot demonstrate either the elementary truths or the methods of mathematical demonstration from outside mathematics. We feel that we do not need any independent certification: we know we have an innate capacity for logic and mathematical truth. But how do we know we have that capacity? Only because we form beliefs in these domains that we simply cannot, however we try, disown. So we must have such a capacity.

We might say: we accept our most basic scientific and mathematical capacities finally as a matter of faith. The religious attitude insists that we embrace our values in the same way: finally as a matter of faith as well. There is a striking difference. We have generally agreed standards of good scientific argument and valid mathematical demonstration; but we have no agreed standards for moral or other forms of reasoning about value. On the contrary, we disagree markedly about goodness, right, beauty, and justice. Does that mean that we have an external certification of our capacities for science and mathematics that we lack in the domain of value?

No, because interpersonal agreement is not an external certification in any domain. The principles of scientific method, including the need for interpersonal confirmation of observation, are justified only by the science these methods have produced. As I said, everything in science, including the importance of shared observation, hangs together: it rests on nothing outside science itself. Logic and mathematics are different still. Consensus about the validity of a complex mathematical argument is in no way evidence of that validity. What if—unimaginable horror—the human race ceased to agree about valid mathematical or logical arguments? It would fall into terminal decline, but no one would have any good reason, along the way, to doubt that five and seven make twelve. Value is different still. If value is objective, then consensus about a particular value judgment is irrelevant to its truth or anyone’s responsibility in thinking it true, and experience shows, for better or worse, that the human community can survive great discord about moral or ethical or aesthetic truth. For the religious attitude, disagreement is a red herring.

I said, just now, that the religious attitude rests finally on faith. I said that mainly to point out that science and mathematics are, in the same way, matters of faith as well. In each domain we accept felt, inescapable conviction rather than the benediction of some independent means of verification as the final arbiter of what we are entitled responsibly to believe. This kind of faith is not just passive acceptance of the conceptual truth that we cannot justify our science or our logic or our values without appealing to science or logic or value. It is a positive affirmation of the reality of these worlds and of our confidence that though each of our judgments may be wrong we are entitled to think them right if we have reflected on them responsibly enough.

In the special case of value, however, faith means something more, because our convictions about value are emotional commitments as well and, whatever tests of coherence and internal support they survive, they must feel right in an emotional way as well. They must have a grip on one’s whole personality. Theologians often say that religious faith is a sui generis experience of conviction. Rudolf Otto, in his markedly influential book, The Idea of the Holy, called the experience “numinous” and said it was a kind of “faith-knowledge.”⁸ I mean to suggest that convictions of value are also complex, sui generis, emotional experiences. As we will see [in a later section of the new book, Religion Without God], when scientists confront the unimaginable vastness of space and the astounding complexity of atomic particles they have an emotional reaction that matches Otto’s description surprisingly well. Indeed many of them use the very term “numinous” to describe what they feel. They find the universe awe-inspiring and deserving of a kind of emotional response that at least borders on trembling.

But of course I do not mean, in speaking of faith, that the fact that a moral conviction survives reflection is itself an argument for that conviction. A conviction of truth is a psychological fact and only a value judgment can argue for the conviction’s truth. And of course I do not mean that value judgments are in the end only subjective. Our felt conviction that cruelty is wrong is a conviction that cruelty is really wrong; we cannot have that conviction without thinking that it is objectively true. Acknowledging the role of felt, irresistible conviction in our experience of value just recognizes the fact that we have such convictions, that they can survive responsible reflection, and that we then have no reason at all, short of further evidence or argument, to doubt their truth.

You may think that if all we can do to defend value judgments is appeal to other value judgments, and then finally to declare faith in the whole set of judgments, then our claims to objective truth are just whistles in the dark. But this challenge, however familiar, is not an argument against the religious worldview. It is only a rejection of that worldview. It denies the basic tenets of the religious attitude: it produces, at best, a standoff. You just do not have the religious point of view.

Religious Science and Religious Value

I have already suggested reasons why we should treat the attitude I have been describing as religious and recognize the possibility of religious atheism. We hope better to understand why so many people declare that they have a sense of value, mystery, and purpose in life in spite of their atheism rather than in addition to their atheism: why they associate their values with those of conventional religion in that way. We also hope to produce an account of religion that we can use to interpret the widespread conviction that people have special rights to religious freedom. [That is one of the projects of the new book.]

I want now to explore another, more complex, reason for treating the attitude I describe as religious. Theists assume that their value realism is grounded realism. God, they think, has provided and certifies their perception of value: of the responsibilities of life and the wonders of the universe. In fact, however, their realism must finally be ungrounded. It is the radical independence of value from history, including divine history, that makes their faith defensible.

The heart of my argument is the following assumption. The conventional, theistic religions with which most of us are most familiar—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—have two parts: a science part and a value part. The science part offers answers to important factual questions about the birth and history of the universe, the origin of human life, and whether or not people survive their own death. That part declares that an all-powerful and all-knowing god created the universe, judges human lives, guarantees an afterlife, and responds to prayer.

Of course I do not mean that these religions offer what we count as scientific arguments for the existence and career of their god. I mean only that this part of many religions makes claims about matters of fact and about historical and contemporary causes and effects. Some believers do defend these claims with what they take to be scientific arguments; others profess to believe them as a matter of faith or through the evidence of sacred texts. I call them all scientific in virtue of their content, not their defense.

The value part of a conventional theistic religion offers a variety of convictions about how people should live and what they should value. Some of these are godly commitments, that is, commitments that are parasitic on and make no sense without the assumption of a god. Godly convictions declare duties of worship, prayer, and obedience to the god the religion endorses. But other religious values are not, in that way, godly: they are at least formally independent of any god. The two paradigm religious values I identified are in that way independent. Religious atheists do not believe in a god and so reject the science of conventional religions and the godly commitments, like a duty of ritual worship, that are parasitic on that part. But they accept that it matters objectively how a human life goes and that everyone has an innate, inalienable ethical responsibility to try to live as well as possible in his circumstances. They accept that nature is not just a matter of particles thrown together in a very long history but something of intrinsic wonder and beauty.

The science part of conventional religion cannot ground the value part because—to put it briefly at first—these are conceptually independent. Human life cannot have any kind of meaning or value just because a loving god exists. The universe cannot be intrinsically beautiful just because it was created to be beautiful. Any judgment about meaning in human life or wonder in nature relies ultimately not only on descriptive truth, no matter how exalted or mysterious, but finally on more fundamental value judgments. There is no direct bridge from any story about the creation of the firmament, or the heavens and earth, or the animals of the sea and the land, or the delights of Heaven, or the fires of Hell, or the parting of any sea or the raising of any dead, to the enduring value of friendship and family or the importance of charity or the sublimity of a sunset or the appropriateness of awe in the face of the universe or even a duty of reverence for a creator god.

I am not arguing, against the science of the traditional Abrahamic religions, that there is no personal god who made the heavens and loves its creatures. I claim only that such a god’s existence cannot in itself make a difference to the truth of any religious values. If a god exists, perhaps he can send people to Heaven or Hell. But he cannot of his own will create right answers to moral questions or instill the universe with a glory it would not otherwise have. A god’s existence or character can only figure in the defense of such values as a fact that makes some different, independent background value judgment pertinent; it can only figure, that is, as a minor premise. Of course, a belief in a god can shape a person’s life dramatically. Whether and how it does this depends on the character of the supposed god and the depth of commitment to that god. An obvious and crude case: someone who believes he will go to Hell if he displeases a god will very likely lead a different life from someone who does not have any such belief. But whether what displeases a god is morally wrong is not up to that god.

I am now relying on an important conceptual principle that we might call “Hume’s principle” because it was defended by that eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher. This principle insists that one cannot support a value judgment—an ethical or moral or aesthetic claim—just by establishing some scientific fact about how the world is or was or will be. Something else is always necessary: a background value judgment that shows why the scientific fact is relevant and has that consequence. Yes, whenever I see that someone is in pain, or threatened with danger, I have a moral responsibility to help if I can. Just the plain fact of pain or danger appears to generate, all by itself, a moral duty. But the appearance is deceptive: the pain and danger would not generate a moral duty unless it was also true, as a matter of background moral truth, that people have a general duty to relieve or prevent suffering. Very often, as in this case, the background principle is too obvious to need stating or even thinking. But it must still be there, and it must still really connect the ordinary judgment with the more concrete moral or ethical or aesthetic judgment it is supposed to support.

I agree that the existence of a personal god—a supernatural, all-powerful, omniscient, and loving being—is a very exotic kind of scientific fact. But it is still a scientific fact and it still requires a pertinent background moral principle to have any impact on value judgments. That is important because those background value judgments can only themselves be defended—to the extent they can be defended at all—by locating them in a larger network of values each of which draws on and justifies the others. They can only be defended, as my account of the religious attitude insists, within the overall scheme of value.

So a god’s existence can be shown to be either necessary or sufficient to justify a particular conviction of value only if some independent background principle explains why. We might well be convinced of some such principle. We might think, for instance, that the sacrifice of God’s son on the Cross gives us a responsibility of gratitude to honor the principles for which He died. Or that we owe the deference to the god who created us that we owe a parent, except that our deference to that god must be unlimited and unstinting. Believers will have no trouble constructing other such principles. But the principles they cite, whatever they are, must have independent force seen only as claims of morality or some other department of value. Theists must have an independent faith in some such principle; it is that principle, rather than just the divine events or other facts they claim pertinent, that they must find they cannot but believe. What divides godly and godless religion—the science of godly religion—is not as important as the faith in value that unites them.

Copyright ©2013 by Ronald Dworkin

1. 1

   Albert Einstein, in Living Philosophies: The Reflections of Some Eminent Men and Women of Our Time, edited by Clifton Fadiman (Doubleday, 1990), p. 6. ↩

2. 2

   “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” (1816). ↩

3. 3

   William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (Longmans, Green, and Co., 1896), p. 25. ↩

4. 4

   United States v. Seeger, 380 US 163 (1965). ↩

5. 5

   Torcaso v. Watkins, 367 US 488 (1961), fn. 11: “Among religions in this country which do not teach what would generally be considered a belief in the existence of God are Buddhism, Taoism, Ethical Culture, Secular Humanism and others. See Washington Ethical Society v. District of Columbia, 101 US App. D.C. 371, 249 F. 2d 127; Fellowship of Humanity v. County of Alameda, 153 Cal. App. 2d 673, 315 P. 2d 394; II Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences 293; 4 Encyclopaedia Britannica (1957 ed.) 325–327; 21 id., at 797; Archer, Faiths Men Live By (2d ed. revised by Purinton) 120–138, 254–313; 1961 World Almanac 695, 712; Year Book of American Churches for 1961, at 29, 47.” ↩

6. 6

   William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (The Modern Library, 1902), p. 47. ↩

7. 7

   Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder (Houghton Mifflin, 1998), p. xi. ↩

8. 8

   Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, translated by John W. Harvey (Oxford University Press, 1923). Originally published in German in 1917. ↩

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