Qing Dynasty painting depicting Confucius presenting Buddha to Laozi

By Shaun Tan

China-US Focus

Many people are familiar with the Western canon, those core works of literature, history, and philosophy that are considered essential to the study of the subject. In the West, students of literature read Shakespeare and Cervantes, students of history read Herodotus and Thucydides, and students of philosophy read Plato and Aristotle. This canon is considered an integral part of Western civilization, and has shaped thinkers, artists, and statesmen for generations.

Yet few outside China know much about the Chinese canon, a canon that is as rich and valuable as its Western counterpart, that has been revered and reviled at different points in Chinese history, and which may be the key to consolidating the Chinese Communist Party’s authority – or destroying it.

In the field of literature, it includes what’s known as “the four great books,” The Water Margin, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, The Journey to the West, and Dream of the Red Chamber.

The Water Margin features 108 heroes who, renouncing a corrupt and unjust Song Dynasty, form a band of outlaws and live, Robin Hood-style, in a marsh, righting wrongs and defending the weak in accordance with their own (extremely violent) code of honor. It explores the theme of a just insurgency, with the heroes choosing to serve “the will of heaven” over the Song rule of law.

The Romance of the Three Kingdoms is a historical novel, and follows the breakup of the Han Dynasty into three warring kingdoms. It relates the battles and the intrigues as the three kingdoms vie for supremacy. Its characters show strategic brilliance, nobility, and valor, but also hubris, stupidity, and self-destructive envy, in short, the full spectrum of human nature amidst triumph and disaster.

The Journey to the West is a fantastical account of the monk Tripitaka’s journey to bring Buddhism from India to China, in the company of an anarchic fighting monkey, a lustful pig demon, and a fearsome sand demon, and the adventures they have on the way. The central theme of the comic novel is the tension between temptation and virtue, between passion and discipline, as the heroes strive (or fail) to live up to Buddhist ideals.

The greatest of the four is Dream of the Red Chamber. This novel follows the doomed romance of the protagonist Baoyu with his cousin Daiyu amidst the decline and revival of the illustrious Jia family. Its excellence lies in its execution, in its witty and spirited characters, in its colorful depiction of life inside a great house peopled by relatives and servants and the complex, shifting relations between them. It is a meditation on the meaning of life, as Baoyu is caught between his natural romanticism, the stern Confucianism of his father, and the Buddhist detachment born of suffering and enlightenment. Blurring the lines between reality and illusion, it is a bittersweet tribute to youth and youth’s end.

In the field of history, the Records of the Grand Historian are widely regarded as the greatest classical work of history. Written by Sima Qian, the Records cover over two thousand years of Chinese history. Depicting rulers with all their virtues and vices, it’s the primary means by which we know of many of them today.

The Chinese philosophical canon begins with Confucius. Far from the patron saint of Asian authoritarianism, as he is so often made out to be by opportunistic Asian dictators and clueless Western commentators, Confucius actually counseled balance, reciprocal obligations between ruler and ruled, and integrity in the face of unjust authority.

Other canonical Chinese philosophers range from Mencius, who expanded on Confucius’ teachings, to the Hobbesian Han Feizi of the Legalist tradition, to the metaphysical Zhuangzi.

Perceptions of this canon changed through Chinese history. Novels were traditionally viewed with disdain, and deemed unworthy of serious study, but they were beloved by the general public, who often passed them on orally. From the time of the Tang Dynasty, scholars wrote commentaries on Sima Qian’s Records. Most of all, the Confucian texts were placed at the center of an education, as ambitious Chinese boys had to write essays on them in the all-important civil service examinations, and Confucian philosophy spread through the masses orally.

The fall of the last dynasty in the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 and the New Culture Movement after changed all that, though. The Chinese canon fell into disfavor, as it was associated with the “weak and backward past” that had left China at the mercy of Western powers.

The Communist takeover in 1949 saw this canon excised from public life. The tales of cavorting maidens were deemed decadent, the accounts of emperors were deemed counterrevolutionary, and Confucius was deemed the philosopher of reactionary feudalism. No longer were these things taught in schools or reenacted on the stage (although many parents continued to teach them to their children in private). Instead, Mao Zedong substituted his Little Red Book and revolutionary works like Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, along with the philosophy of Marx and Lenin. This came to a head with the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), when Red Guards declared war on “old ideas,” burned books en masse— many of them Chinese classics— and even desecrated Confucius’ tomb. Whilst the canon continued to be taught in schools in Taiwan and Hong Kong, for many years it seemed to vanish from the land of its birth.

The irony was that Mao himself had a great appreciation for the canon. Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who visited Mao in Beijing in 1972, described the chairman’s study thus: “Manuscripts lined bookshelves along every wall; books covered the table and the floor; it looked more like the retreat of a scholar than the audience room of the all-powerful leader of the world’s most populous nation.” Mao’s collection included classical Chinese poetry, The Water Margin, and even Dream of the Red Chamber, which he boasted of having read five times. What he enjoyed privately, he denied to everyone else.

After the death of Mao and the end of the Cultural Revolution, however, the canon was slowly revived, and it began to be taught in schools again. Today, students in China learn the Chinese classics from early years all the way to university. President Xi Jinping laces his speeches with quotes by Mencius, and in 2014 he made a pilgrimage to Confucius’ hometown in Qufu. “The classics should be set in students’ minds,” he said, “so they become the genes of Chinese national culture.”

Why this renewed enthusiasm for the canon?

Many point to the enormous changes in Chinese society since Deng Xiaoping began opening and reforming the country in 1978. As fortunes rose with the embrace of capitalism, commitment to Communist values dwindled, such that few Chinese today take them seriously. Chinese policymakers worry about a populace driven only by materialism and without a moral compass.

“As communism gradually [loses] its luster, China finds herself trapped in a moral vacuum,” says Kwok Ching Chow, Professor of Chinese at Hong Kong Baptist University. “It is only logical that the Chinese government would turn back to traditional culture, which is rich in morals and ethics.”

The absence of any genuine loyalty to Chinese Communism also leaves many people without a strong sense of national identity. Restoring the canon, therefore, also serves a unifying function, explains Bryan Van Norden, head of philosophy at Yale-NUS College, and author of Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto. “Xi is trying to reintroduce the traditional canon…to give people a group identity as ‘Chinese,’” he says.

It’s a logical decision, and Chinese should certainly cheer the return of their canon to its proper place, but this move presents risks of its own for the CCP. The Party, after all, is the definitive authority on Chinese Communist doctrine, but the same cannot be said of Chinese canonical works, which can be interpreted in different ways by different people.

A parallel here is the Reformation. For centuries, the Pope, seen as God’s representative on Earth, was the ultimate authority on Christianity, and salvation could only be obtained through the priests and churches he sanctioned. When Martin Luther began preaching that the last word on Christianity was not the Pope, but the Bible, which could be read and interpreted by anyone, he caused a revolt against the Vatican and a schism within the faith. Similarly, if the source of values in China is no longer the CCP, but the Chinese canon, which anyone can read and interpret for himself, what might this mean for the Party’s authority?

And how might Chinese people interpret these canonical works? Will they see the revolutionary CCP as the virtuous rebels in The Water Margin, or more like the corrupt and unjust Song Dynasty they resisted? Will they see Xi Jinping as one of the benevolent emperors in Sima Qian’s histories, or more like the tyrant Qin Shi Huang? Will they see him as the kind of worthy ruler Confucius counseled serving, or an unworthy one who should be shunned?

“Xi hopes [to revive the canon] so that he and the Communist Party can maintain strict control over the Chinese people,” says Van Norden. “The danger, though, is that generations of intellectuals have found in these same texts the resources to challenge the status quo. Confucius and Mencius were both insistent critics of the governments of their eras. Perhaps Xi is unleashing forces he may not be able to control?”

Perhaps that’s what Chinese authorities feared when in 2011 they surreptitiously removed the 31-foot statue of Confucius from near Tiananmen Square – just four months after they had unveiled it there.
A loose canon like China’s is an uncertain tool for social control.

Shaun Tan is a writer based in Hong Kong. His writing has appeared in Quartz, The Diplomat, and the Malay Mail Online. He enjoys reading, playing tennis, and talking about himself in the third-person.

The Chinese Canon

A totally non-exhaustive list of Chinese canonical works is provided below.

Literature

Novels

The Four Great Books:
Shi Naian, The Water Margin
Luo Guanzhong, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms
Journey to the West
Cao Xueqin and Gao E, Dream of the Red Chamber
The Golden Lotus
Wu Jingzi, The Scholars
 
Plays

Wang Shifu, The Story of the Western Wing
Tang Xianzu, The Peony Pavillion
Hong Sheng, The Palace of Eternal Life
Kong Shangren, The Peach Blossom Fan
 
Poems

Li Bai
Du Fu
The Songs of the South
Wen Xuan
For an introduction, see:
C. T. Hsia, The Classic Chinese Novel: A Critical Introduction
Anthology of Chinese Literature, Volumes I and II, edited by Cyril Birch
 
History

Sima Qian, Records of the Grand Historian
 
Philosophy

Confucian

Confucius, The Analects, The Great Learning, The Doctrine of the Mean
Mencius
The Five Classics:
The Classic of Poetry
The Book of Documents
The Book of Rites
The I Ching
The Spring and Autumn Annals
 
Legalist

Han Feizi
 
Buddhist

Huineng, The Platform Sutra
 
Daoist

Laozi, Daodejing
Zhuangzi

When Cold War philosophy tied rational choice theory to scientific method, it embedded the free-market mindset in US society

By John McCumber

Aeon Magazine

McCumber is professor of Germanic Languages at the University of California, Los Angeles. His latest book is The Philosophy Scare: The Politics of Reason in the Early Cold War (2016).

The chancellor of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) was worried. It was May 1954, and UCLA had been independent of Berkeley for just two years. Now its Office of Public Information had learned that the Hearst-owned Los Angeles Examiner was preparing one or more articles on communist infiltration at the university. The news was hardly surprising. UCLA, sometimes called the ‘little Red schoolhouse in Westwood’, was considered to be a prime example of communist infiltration of universities in the United States; an article in The Saturday Evening Post in October 1950 had identified it as providing ‘a case history of what has been done at many schools’.

The chancellor, Raymond B Allen, scheduled an interview with a ‘Mr Carrington’ – apparently Richard A Carrington, the paper’s publisher – and solicited some talking points from Andrew Hamilton of the Information Office. They included the following: ‘Through the cooperation of our police department, our faculty and our student body, we have always defeated such [subversive] attempts. We have done this quietly and without fanfare – but most effectively.’ Whether Allen actually used these words or not, his strategy worked. Scribbled on Hamilton’s talking points, in Allen’s handwriting, are the jubilant words ‘All is OK – will tell you.’

Allen’s victory ultimately did him little good. Unlike other UCLA administrators, he is nowhere commemorated on the Westwood campus, having suddenly left office in 1959, after seven years in his post, just ahead of a football scandal. The fact remains that he was UCLA’s first chancellor, the premier academic Red hunter of the Joseph McCarthy era – and one of the most important US philosophers of the mid-20th century.

This is hard to see today, when philosophy is considered one of academia’s more remote backwaters. But as the country emerged from the Second World War, things were different. John Dewey and other pragmatists were still central figures in US intellectual life, attempting to summon the better angels of American nature in the service, as one of Dewey’s most influential titles had it, of ‘democracy and education’. In this they were continuing one of US philosophy’s oldest traditions, that of educating students and the general public to appreciate their place in a larger order of values. But they had reconceived the nature of that order: where previous generations of US philosophers had understood it as divinely ordained, the pragmatists had come to see it as a social order. This attracted suspicion from conservative religious groups, who kept sharp eyes on philosophy departments on the grounds that they were the only place in the universities where atheism might be taught (Dewey’s associate Max Otto resigned a visiting chair at UCLA after being outed as an atheist by the Examiner). As communism began its postwar spread across eastern Europe, this scrutiny intensified into a nationwide crusade against communism and, as the UCLA campus paper The Daily Bruin put it, ‘anything which might faintly resemble it’.

And that was not the only political pressure on philosophy at the time. Another, more intellectual, came from the philosophical attractiveness of Marxism, which was rapidly winning converts not only in Europe but in Africa and Asia as well. The view that class struggle in Western countries would inevitably lead, via the pseudoscientific ‘iron laws’ of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, to worldwide communist domination was foreign to Marx himself. But it provided a ‘scientific’ veneer for Soviet great-power interests, and people all over the world were accepting it as a coherent explanation for the Depression, the Second World War and ongoing poverty. As the political philosopher S M Amadae has shown in Rationalising Capitalist Democracy (2003), many Western intellectuals at the time did not think that capitalism had anything to compete with this. A new philosophy was needed, one that provided what the nuanced approaches of pragmatism could not: an uncompromising vindication of free markets and contested elections.

The McCarthyite pressure, at first, was the stronger. To fight the witch-hunters, universities needed to do exactly what Allen told the Examiner that UCLA was doing: quickly and quietly identify communists on campus and remove them from teaching positions. There was, however, a problem with this: wasn’t it censorship? And wasn’t censorship what we were supposed to be fighting against?

It was Allen himself who solved this problem when, as president of the University of Washington in 1948-49, he had to fire two communists who had done nothing wrong except join the Communist Party. Joseph Butterworth, whose field was medieval literature, was not considered particularly subversive. But Herbert Phillips was a philosophy professor. He not only taught the work of Karl Marx, but began every course by informing the students that he was a committed Marxist, and inviting them to judge his teaching in light of that fact. This meant that he could not be ‘subverting’ his students – they knew exactly what they were getting. Allen nevertheless came under heavy pressure to fire him.

Allen’s justification for doing this became known across the country as the ‘Allen Formula’. The core of it ran like this: members of the Communist Party have abandoned reason, the impartial search for truth, and merely parrot the Moscow line. They should not be allowed to teach, not because they are Marxists – that would indeed be censorship – but because they are incompetent. The Formula did not end there, however. It had to be thoroughly argued and rigorously pervasive, because it had to appeal to a highly informed and critical audience: university professors, whose cooperation was essential to rooting out the subversives in their midst. Ad hoc invocations of the ‘search for truth’ would not suffice. It had to be shown what the search for truth – reason itself – really was. Allen’s ‘formula’ thus became philosophical in nature.

Conveniently, rationality was now a matter of following clear rules that went beyond individual disciplines

Like the logical positivists of his day, Allen identified reason with science, which he defined in terms of a narrow version of the ‘scientific method’, according to which it consists in formulating and testing hypotheses. This applied, he claimed in a 1953 interview with The Daily Bruin, even in ‘the realm of the moral and spiritual life’: Buddha under the banyan tree, Moses on Sinai, and Jesus in the desert were all, it appears, formulating hypotheses and designing experiments to test them.

The Allen Formula gave universities two things they desperately needed: a quick-and-dirty way to identify ‘incompetents’, and a rationale for their speedy exclusion from academia. Since rationality applies to all human activities, the Formula could be used against professors who, like Butterworth, were competent in their own disciplines, but whose views in other fields (such as politics) had not been formulated ‘scientifically’. Moreover, and conveniently, rationality was now a matter of following clear rules that went beyond individual disciplines. This meant that whether someone was ‘competent’ or not could be handed over to what Allen called members of ‘the tough, hard-headed world of affairs’ – in practice, administrators and trustees – rather than left to professors actually conversant with the suspect’s field. Professors thus found themselves freed from having to deal with cases of suspected subversion. Small wonder that, according to the historian Ellen Schrecker, Allen’s actions, and his rationale for them, set a precedent for universities across the country, and catapulted Allen himself to national fame – and to a new job at UCLA.

The Allen Formula was administered, at UCLA and elsewhere in California, through something called the California Plan. Imitated to varying degrees in other states, the Plan required the head of every institution of higher education in California, public and private, to send the name of every job candidate at their institution for vetting by the state senate’s committee on un-American activities. The committee would then consult its database of subversives and inform the university whether the candidate was in it. What to do next was, officially, up to the university; but the committee’s policy was that if an identified subversive was actually hired, it would go public, issuing subpoenas and holding hearings. As Schrecker notes in No Ivory Tower (1986), no college could hope to deal with such publicity, so the Plan effectively gave the committee ‘a veto over every single academic appointment in the state of California’.

The California Plan was supplemented at the University of California by a memo in April 1952 from President Robert G Sproul to department chairs and other administrative officers, directing departments to canvass the publications of job candidates to make sure that they ‘prohibited the employment of persons whose commitments or obligations to any organisation, communist or other, prejudiced impartial scholarship and teaching and the free pursuit of truth’. As the language here makes clear, it is not merely communists who are the problem, but anyone who is not ‘impartial’. Sproul, like other academics, followed the Allen Formula.

This official emphasis on scientific impartiality excluded adherents of a number of influential philosophical approaches from employment in California. Non-communist Marxists whose beliefs reposed on readings of history rather than on logic and mathematics were said to have abandoned what was rapidly defined as philosophy’s ancient concern with strict objectivity in favour of what Allen called ‘leading parades’. Existentialists and phenomenologists did not follow the experimental method (and the former tended to be atheists as well). Many pragmatists did not even believe that there was a single scientific method: true to their name, they believed that scientific enquiry should be free to apply whatever procedures worked. Moreover, whether a method ‘worked’ or not in a given case should be a matter of its social benefit, a dangerously collectivist standard in those difficult days. It was far safer to see the scientific enterprise as what Allen called it in Communism and Academic Freedom (1949): a ‘timeless, selfless quest of truth’.

We will never know the number of job candidates who lost their careers before they even started

The California Plan operated in the greatest secrecy. Ending someone’s career in public required extensive justification, multiple hearings, and due process, all of which could provoke damaging public outcries. The need for secrecy also explains why the Plan emphasised preventing hires rather than rooting out subversives already in teaching positions. As the committee noted in its annual report for 1953, professors already on campus had networks of friends and supporters. Efforts to remove them often produced loud backlashes which, in the committee’s view, invariably benefitted the Communist Party.

According to its advocates, the Plan was a great success. In March 1952, 10 months after it was implemented, the committee’s staffer, Richard Combs, estimated that it had prevented about one academic hire per day in the state. The next year, Allen himself declared that ‘so far, the arrangement is working to mutual advantage’.

As long as Allen remained chancellor, the Plan’s secrecy was successfully maintained at UCLA. Two years after he left, however, attacks resumed: the anthropologist John Greenway was fired in 1961 for suggesting that the Roman Catholic Mass exhibited traces of cannibalism. Three years after that, the philosopher Patrick Wilson was denounced by leading Los Angeles clergymen for the way he taught philosophy of religion. The seven years of silence while Allen served as chancellor at UCLA are testimony to his, and the Plan’s, success at tamping down controversy. We will never know, of course, the number of job candidates who lost their careers before they even started.

Things took a different turn at the university’s other campus, Berkeley. Unlike Allen, Berkeley’s chancellor, Clark Kerr, refused to cooperate with the Plan – with the result that, unbeknown to Kerr, a university security officer named William Wadman took it over. Wadman’s view of his job went well beyond merely forwarding the names of job candidates. It amounted to a general political policing of the faculty, and this attracted national attention. In March 1954, after Wadman’s activities became public, an article in the far-off Harvard Crimson quoted Richard Combs: ‘If, after looking over charges against a professor and investigating them, Wadman thinks the man should be removed, he goes to the state committee and discusses the case. If the … committee agrees with him, the information is passed on to the president of the university [Sproul], who calls for the professor’s resignation.’

The initiative in this arrangement clearly belonged to Wadman. The committee itself was known to be rabidly anti-communist and eager to justify its existence by capturing ‘subversives’, while Sproul’s assent to its findings is portrayed as virtually automatic. The Crimson article goes on to summarise Combs as saying that ‘any professor in the college – not merely those in classified research – can be dealt with in this manner’. Which means, if true, that every professor in the college – not just those in classified research – owed his job to the benign disregard, at least, of Wadman.

As all this was happening, US academics also faced the task of coming up with a philosophical antidote to Marxism. Rational choice theory, developed at the RAND Corporation in the late 1940s, was a plausible candidate. It holds that people make (or should make) choices rationally by ranking the alternatives presented to them with regard to the mathematical properties of transitivity and completeness. They then choose the alternative that maximises their utility, advancing their relevant goals at minimal cost. Each individual is solely responsible for her preferences and goals, so rational choice theory takes a strongly individualistic view of human life. The ‘iron laws of history’ have no place here, and large-scale historical forces, such as social classes and revolutions, do not really exist except as shorthand for lots of people making up their minds. To patriotic US intellectuals, rational choice theory thus held great promise as a weapon in the Cold War of ideas.

But it needed work. Its formulation at RAND had been keyed to the empirical contexts of market choice and voting behaviour, but the kind of Marxism it was supposed to fight – basically, Stalinism – did not accept either free markets or contested elections as core components of human society. Rational choice theory therefore had to be elevated from an empirical theory covering certain empirical contexts into a normative theory of the proper operation of the human mind itself. It had to become a universal philosophy. Only then could it justify the US’ self-assumed global mission of bringing free elections and free markets to the entire world.

Scientific method was already installed as coextensive with reason itself – philosophically by the logical positivists, and politically by the Allen Formula. All that was needed was to tie rational choice to the scientific method. This was accomplished paradigmatically by the UCLA philosopher Hans Reichenbach’s book The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (1951). In a crucial paragraph, Reichenbach wrote:

a set of observational facts will always fit more than one theory … The inductive inference is used to confer upon each of these theories a degree of probability, and the most probable theory is then accepted.

Facts always underdetermine theories, and this requires scientists to choose from an array of alternative theories, under a preference for highest probability. Science thus becomes a series of rational choices. Which meant that by 1951 there was a unified intellectual response to the two pressures: appeals to science fought the domestic subversives, and when science was integrated with rational choice theory it entered the global conflict. The battle was on, and what I call Cold War philosophy began its career, not only in fighting the Cold War of ideas, but in structuring US universities – and US society.

To be sure, interest in the California Plan seems to have petered out well before California’s anti-communist senate committee was disbanded in 1971. Even before then, the Plan was not entirely successful, as witnessed by the hiring in 1964 of the Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse to the philosophy department at the University of California, San Diego. That hiring was not without problems, however; public outcries against Marcuse culminated, in 1968, in armed guards, organised by his graduate students, spending the night in his living room.

Many countries, of course have meritocracies – but few pin them as tightly to rational choice as the US does

But to say that with the waning of McCarthyism Cold War philosophy itself vanished from the scene is far too simplistic. The Cold War lasted until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, and Cold War philosophy is still with us today. Thus, humanists long ago abandoned McCarthy-era attempts to subject their work to scientific method (as New Criticism was held to do). But in universities at large, intellectual respectability still tends to follow the sciences.

Cold War philosophy also continues to structure US society at large. Consider the widespread use of multiple-choice tests for tracking students. Whether one takes an ACT or a SAT, one is basically being tested on one’s ability to choose, quickly and accurately, from a presented array of alternative answers – under a preference, of course, for agreement with the test designers. Rational choice thus became the key to one’s placement in the national meritocracy, as illustrated by what I call the ‘40’s test’: if you know that someone has got 440, 540, 640 or 740 on the SATs (under the scoring system in effect until March 2016), you usually know a lot about their subsequent life. Someone who scored a 440, for example, likely attended a community college or no college, and worked at a relatively humble job. Someone with a 740 was usually accepted into an elite university and had much grander opportunities. Many countries, of course have meritocracies – but few pin them as tightly to rational choice as the US does.

Cold War philosophy also influences US society through its ethics. Its main ethical implication is somewhat hidden, because Cold War philosophy inherits from rational choice theory a proclamation of ethical neutrality: a person’s preferences and goals are not subjected to moral evaluation. As far as rational choice theory is concerned, it doesn’t matter if I want to end world hunger, pass the bar, or buy myself a nice private jet; I make my choices the same way. Similarly for Cold War philosophy – but it also has an ethical imperative that concerns not ends but means. However laudable or nefarious my goals might be, I will be better able to achieve them if I have two things: wealth and power. We therefore derive an ‘ethical’ imperative: whatever else you want to do, increase your wealth and power!

Results of this are easily seen in today’s universities. Academic units that enable individuals to become wealthy and powerful (business schools, law schools) or stay that way (medical schools) are extravagantly funded; units that do not (humanities departments) are on tight rations. Also on tight rations nationwide are facilities that help individuals become wealthy and powerful but do not convey competitive advantage on them because they are open to all or most: highways, bridges, dams, airports, and so on.

Seventy years after the Cold War began, and almost 30 after it ended, Cold War philosophy also continues to affect US politics. The Right holds that if reason itself is rooted in market choice, then business skills must transfer smoothly into all other domains, including governance – an explicit principle of the Trump administration. On the Left, meritocracy rules: all three of Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominees attended law school at either Harvard (as Obama himself did) or Yale (as Hillary Clinton did). The view that choice solves all problems is evident in the White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s presentation of the Republican vision for US health care, at his press briefing last March 23: ‘We’ve lost consumer choice … The idea is to instil choice back into the market.’

Part of the reason for Cold War philosophy’s continuing dominance is that though it is really a philosophy, proffering a normative and universal theory of correct reasoning, it has never been directly confronted on a philosophical level. Its concern with promulgating free markets and contested elections gave it homes in departments of economics and political science, where it thrives today. Philosophers, for their part, have until recently occupied themselves mainly with apolitical fields such as logic, metaphysics and epistemology.

On a philosophical level, however, Cold War philosophy has some obvious problems. Its ‘ethics’, for example, is not a traditional philosophical ethics at all. From Plato to the pragmatists, philosophical ethics has concerned the integration of the individual into a wider moral universe, whether divine (as in Platonic ethics) or social (as in the pragmatists). This is explicitly rejected by Cold War philosophy’s individualism and moral neutrality as regards to ends. Where Adam Smith had all sorts of arguments as to why greed was socially beneficial, Cold War ethics dispenses with them in favour of Gordon Gekko’s simple ‘Greed is good.’

Another problem with Cold War philosophy’s ethics concerns what I will call ‘disidentification’. Whatever I choose has at least one alternative; otherwise there would be no choice. But if I identify myself at the outset with any of my plurality of alternatives, I cannot choose any alternative to it; doing that would end my identity and be suicidal, physically or morally. Therefore, any alternative I consider in the course of making a rational decision is something I can walk away from and still be me. This is not an issue for rational choice theory, which concerns cases where my identity is not at stake, such as choosing which brand of toothpaste to buy, or (usually) which candidate to vote for. But when rational choice theory becomes Cold War philosophy, it applies to everything, and everything about me becomes a matter of choice.

Free markets are wonderful tools for enhancing human life; so are MRIs: but both need proper installation and tending

This in turn leads me to abandon my own identity, in the following way: suppose that what I am choosing is my religion, and that my alternatives are Catholicism and Hinduism. If I am already a Catholic, however, Hinduism cannot be a serious alternative, because one’s religion is (usually) part of one’s identity. If I am to choose between Catholicism and Hinduism, I must put both at a distance. I must ‘disidentify’ with them. And since Cold War philosophy bids us to take this stance on all things, at the limit the moral agent must be disidentified from everything, and can have no other fundamental identity than being a rational chooser, ie someone who first orders her preferences according to transitivity and completeness, and then opts for the highest utility. That is a pretty thin identity. Everyone has certain characteristics that they simply cannot or will not relinquish under any circumstances. What else is there to live for?

The widespread success of rational choice theory, coupled with the problems of Cold War philosophy, suggests that the problem lies in what differentiates the two: Cold War philosophy’s claim, inherited from Allen, to universal, and indeed sole, validity as an account of human reason. If we look at the history of philosophy, reason has been many things. For the Greeks, it was basically the capacity to grasp universals – to see present givens as instantiations of underlying structures. For René Descartes, it was the ability to provide an a priori and so ‘unshakable’ foundation for beliefs. For Immanuel Kant, it was the ability to generalise conceptions to the maximum, which provided the foundation for the absoluteness of the moral law. Similarly, freedom has not always been merely a matter of choice. For Aristotle, you act freely, are responsible for an action, when you desire to perform that action and your reason tells you it is the correct action in the circumstances. To act freely is thus to act from your entire moral being. This idea, that freedom is really the capacity for complete self-expression, is summed up in Hegel’s pithy remark that true freedom is the apprehension of necessity: it is to understand, in a particular situation, what it is that you have to do in order to be you.

None of this suggests that we should stop valuing freedom of choice. But we should stop assuming that making choices amounts to freedom itself, or that making them rationally is the whole job of human reason. Freedom of choice, like free markets and contested elections, is valuable only when situated within wider horizons of value. Divorced from them, it becomes first absolute and then disastrous. Free markets, for example, are wonderful tools for enhancing human life. So are MRIs; but you can’t just drop an MRI on a street corner and expect it to function. Both kinds of device require proper installation and constant tending. The penalties for ignoring this became evident in the financial crisis of 2008.

The absolutising of things such as freedom of choice – the view that free markets and contested elections suffice for a good society – is a view that came into prominence with the early Cold War, when the proliferation of choices was our main contrast with Soviet Marxism. In reality, there is much more to a good society than the affordance of maximum choice to its citizens. With market fundamentalism dominating the US government, and with phantasms being paraded in the media under the sobriquet of ‘alternative facts’ that you can choose or reject, forgetfulness of the McCarthy era and the Cold War philosophy it spawned is no longer a rational option.

By Lauren Langman

Introduction

The progressive social movements of 2011, followed by the rise of Left parties such as Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain, can be best understood as what Herbert Marcuse called the Great Refusal: rejections and contestations of domination reflecting a variety of grievances stemming from the multiple legitimation crises of contemporary capitalism. As Jürgen Habermas argued, the multiple legitimation crises of the capitalist system migrate to lifeworld, the realms of subjectivity and motivation that evoke strong emotions such as anger, anxiety, and indignation that dispose social mobilizations.[1] What is especially evident as a goal of these movements is the quest for dignity as rooted in an emancipatory, philosophical, anthropological critique of alienation, domination, and suffering pioneered by the Frankfurt School—quite cogently argued in Marcuse’s analysis of Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts.[2] But grievances and emotions do not lead to sustained social movements; there must be recruitment, organizing and organization building, leadership, strategy, tactics, and vision. The Frankfurt School’s critique of domination can be complemented by Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony in which “organic intellectuals” understand how the system operates (with due attention to the salience of the cultural barriers to change), while also proffering counterhegemonic narratives, organizing subalterns, and initiating “wars of position.” A critical perspective on contemporary social movements provides a politically informed critique with visions of utopian possibility in which membership in democratic, egalitarian, identity-granting/recognizing communities of meaning allows for, indeed fosters, community, agency, creative self-realization, and the dignity of all.

I. Ideology, Hegemony, and Domination

Why do the vast majority of people “willingly assent” to the domination by the few, despite vast economic inequalities, growing hardships, and the thwarting of the self? This has long been one of the central questions for the Frankfurt School’s critique of ideology and character structure in which authority becomes embedded within the self, making possible uncritical acceptance and conformity. These insights provide the rich understanding of the conditions of our age, especially of those that enable (or thwart) emancipatory social movements.

The grievances that result from the contradictions and adversities of neoliberal capitalism need to be articulated by intellectually informed, radical activists. Quite independently of the Frankfurt School, a parallel line of analysis and critique was developed by Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Communist theoretician and organizer who conceptualized “hegemony” as the ideological control of culture, which produces the “willing assent” to the domination of the “historic bloc” (the capitalists) and through which the “naturalization” of the historically arbitrary is presented as normal, natural, and in the best interests of all.[3] For Gramsci, the critique of hegemony and the development of counterhegemonic ideologies and organizational practices are the tasks of “organic intellectuals” who understand the role of culture in sustaining domination. They understand the ways in which the dominant culture thwarts political and social change, which in turn necessitates a cultural rebellion, mediated through the “wars of position” in which counterhegemonic discourses would overcome cultural barriers and the “normality” of social existing arrangements in order to achieve social transformation. One of the major tactics for such organization is so-called “popular education,” which enables people to understand how ruling class privileges are based on the exploitation of the masses. Gramsci’s analysis complements the Frankfurt School’s critiques, while his experiences as an activist provide insights and tools to envision and, indeed, make possible an alternative kind of society.

A. Critical Theory

1. The Psychological Foundations of Politics

The Frankfurt School brought psychoanalysis into the critique of domination. From Wilhelm Reich and Erich Fromm, they subsequently developed a political psychology in which authoritarianism, an aspect of character acquired in childhood, made possible the embrace of conservative, indeed reactionary politics.[4] The understanding of the superego as internalized authority, showed that people would passionately submit to “powerful,” authoritative leaders in order to gain their love and assuage feelings of anxiety, loneliness, powerlessness, and meaninglessness.[5] Thus, authoritarians are psychologically disposed to embrace the elite’s political agendas that stress toughness, determination, and power. Authoritarianism is typically coupled with a sadomasochistic need to dominate, denigrate, and feel contempt toward the weak and the helpless, and authoritarians typically project aggression toward the out-groups (paranoia).

The early Frankfurt School studies of authoritarianism showed how these authoritarian character structures resonated with fascist propaganda and ideology. In a number of books, papers and empirical studies of working-class Germans, and a large postwar study of Americans, authoritarianism was shown to be highly correlated with the conservative to reactionary political positions that glorified authority, denigrated subordinates, and projected anger and aggression toward the out-groups, especially racial minorities and Jews. Authoritarians are thus generally patriarchal, homophobic, and racist, in addition to being highly conventional, conformist, and maintaining a rigid, black–white, either–or, cognitive stance. The enduring significance of these studies can be seen in the contemporary work of Robert Altemeyer.[6] We might also note that, in many ways, these studies of authoritarianism anticipated some of the recent approaches in cognitive psychology and emotion research.

Nevertheless, while being a crucial aspect of political beliefs and actions, authoritarianism is only a part of the story of the internalization of various ideologies. Following what has been said, it is absolutely essential to underline the fact that people’s political beliefs are not shaped by rational considerations, logic, or evidence. Rather, the character structure and the patterning of various needs and desires shape the ways in which people perceive the world, evaluate events, and choose actions. For Gramsci, the ideological control of culture shaped the production of ideology to produce the “willing assent” to domination. But, without a theory of psychodynamics, he could not explain the motivation of people to assent to their own subordination. In 1930, Freud provides the first hint, claiming that the values, norms and laws of society that demand sexual repression and obedience to social dictates, are mediated through the identification with parents, and become sedimented within the superego.[7] People subsequently develop identities that have been ideologically crafted, but not under the circumstances of their own choosing. The identities of prior generations, shaped by earlier authority relationships, weigh down upon the individual to colonize his/her consciousness and desires in the way that the values of the ruling classes/hegemonic blocs become internalized as essential parts of the individual’s identity and values.[8] That this is not a rational process is also made evident by the studies of authoritarianism and anti-Semitism mentioned above.

One function of ideologies is to alleviate anxieties over uncertainties in this world and, perhaps, over getting into the next world. Moreover, the maintenance of group ties through conformity to group norms and values can be a source of powerful attachments as well as a basis for self-esteem, but this in turn leads to conformity, “groupthink,” and what Marcuse called “one-dimensional thought.” Thus, ideologies are not simply explanations of social reality or misrepresentations of social reality that both mystify and sustain the power of the ruling classes. Rather, ideologies and values are essential components of one’s identity, which has both conscious and unconscious components that are closely intertwined with powerful feelings and emotions. Assent to hegemonic ideologies and/or social arrangements rests upon emotional configurations. As Fromm put it:

The fact that ideas have an emotional matrix is of the utmost importance because it is the key to the understanding of the spirit of a culture. Different societies or classes within a society have a specific character, and on its basis different ideas develop and become powerful.[9]

Fromm continues:

Our analysis of Protestant and Calvinist doctrines has shown that those ideas were powerful forces within the adherents of the new religion, because they appealed to needs and anxieties that were present in the character structure of the people to whom they were addressed. In other words, ideas can become powerful forces, but only to the extent to which they are answers to specific human needs prominent in a given social character.

Not only thinking and feeling are determined by man’s character structure but also his actions…. The actions of a normal person appear to be determined only by rational considerations and the necessities of reality. However, with the new tools of observation that psychoanalysis offers, we can recognize that so-called rational behavior is largely determined by the character structure.[10]

Within Marx’s critique of alienation, there is an implicit social psychological theory of emotions and desire. More specifically, alienated labor estranges workers from their work and the products of that work, rendering people powerless, their lives meaningless, objectified, dehumanized, estranged from others as well as from their own potential creative self-realization (the inherent tendencies of what Marx called a “species being”).

In more modern parlance, alienation frustrates fundamental needs for: (1) attachments to others and communal belonging, (2) a sense of agency and empowerment, (3) social recognition, and (4) fulfillment of one’s potentials as a human being—aware of one’s capacity as a being that can anticipate and shape one’s own future. The various frustrations and deprivations of capitalism thwart fundamental human needs for respect, recognition, and dignity.[11] Alienated labor creates warped expressions of selfhood. The fundamental moral imperative of Marx revealed how capitalism truncated human capacities for community, freedom, and self-realization and how a postcapitalist social order could enable the self-realization and dignity of all.[12]

Political values, beliefs, and understandings are not based on evidence, logic, or rationality but on emotions, feelings, and identities. This important insight, part and parcel of the Frankfurt School’s understandings of fascism, xenophobia, and anti-Semitism, has been rediscovered by various academic psychologists. People embrace various ideologies because such ideologies, much as Durkheim said about religion, provide people with a sense of solidarity and connection. Ideologies provide people with a sense of agency and empowerment. By incorporating a person into a valorized group, ideologies provide individuals with a sense of dignity and purpose. Thus, the legacy of Marx’s critique of alienation, refracted through a critical psychodynamic prism pioneered by the Frankfurt School, provides us with an understanding of the affinity between the character structure and the embrace of an ideology.

The recent work of George Lakoff has shown how different political orientations rest upon the notions of morality, which reflect the values, role models, and child-rearing practices of one’s early family life (seen as a model for society).[13] The “strict father” pattern fosters a morality based on a competitive orientation and in turn the necessity for strength, toughness, and independence in order to survive in a tough, dangerous world. There is an intolerant, if not punitive, orientation to those who appear to be weak and/or dependent. Conversely, the “nurturant parent” orientation fosters caring, sharing, compassion, and empathy, while creative self-fulfillment is its most important value. But political ideologies rest on more than the gratification of particular desires and, perhaps equally important, is that ideologies depend on restricting contradictory information, barring arguments, facts, evidence, and data that might undermine the given ideology. Insofar as an ideology is an essential part of one’s identity, people actively ward off challenges to it. Ideologies provide a variety of gratifications, not the least of which is to minimize anxiety by organizing reality and providing a sense of meaning to one’s life. Various defense mechanisms protect one’s identity and enable one to function in everyday life.

The first line of defense is denial, the flat-out rejection of evidence or values contrary to one’s ideology. Whether the issue is the single-payer healthcare system, global warming, racial and/or gender superiority, or heteronormativity, the denial of contravening evidence serves to protect one’s self-esteem and dignity, which, in turn, leads the person to reject and/or discredit any information inconsistent with one’s ideology and identity. Closely tied to denial is displacement- deflecting a challenge and/or directing it to an unworthy target. Finally, cognitive dissonance works to eliminate challenges or inconsistencies to one’s beliefs and values. Collectively, such defenses reinforce “one-dimensional thought” and in turn reproduce subjugation to the status quo.

2. Consumer Society: One-Dimensional Thought, New Sensibilities, and Great Refusals

In 1964, writing at a time of growing affluence, Marcuse noted that the working classes, especially better paid skilled workers, had internalized the “artificial needs” fostered by capitalism and satisfied through consumerism and were thereby incorporated into the consumer society, anchored through consumption-based identities and enjoying mass-mediated escapism provided by the culture industries, while embracing “one-dimensional thought,” devoid of critical reflection. Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man offered a comprehensive analysis of the postwar growth of the consumer society, which was aided and abetted by the promises of growing material abundance as providing the “good life,” which included good sex and promises of ever more prosperity.[14] For Marcuse, behind the goods and goodies of mass consumption was alienation, shallowness, the thwarting of creativity and self-fulfillment. No longer was alienation simply the product of wage labor, but an intrinsic aspect of consumer capitalism. While the writers and poets of the “beat generation” of the 1950s critiqued the complacency, conformity, banality, and superficiality of the dominant culture, Marcuse moved beyond that observation to locate the problem in the intertwining of consumer capitalism and “one-dimensional thought.” Moreover, he claimed that understanding the role of dialectics, contradiction, and negation—amidst conditions of oppression—fostered a “new sensibility” critical of capitalism in general and its many forms of domination, including its production of “artificial needs” that could never be satisfied.

Marcuse’s critique resonated with and was informed young college students and marginalized youth activists in or from the ghettos of racialized minorities. The times called for the Great Refusal—rejections of the system of capitalist domination, white supremacy, patriarchy, inequality, and social injustice that characterized the 1960s. Marcuse’s formulations connected with the civil rights and antiwar movements, feminism, anticolonialism, as well as struggles for sexual freedom, environmental protection, and gay liberation. Meanwhile, hippie movements rejected repressive asceticism and publicly articulated their critique by extolling drugs and sex and rock ’n roll. Marcuse was deemed the guru of these movements and considered especially dangerous by the reactionary forces. Like Socrates, he was accused of corrupting youth; but instead of taking hemlock, he became the intellectual inspiration for progressive scholars and young activists—an influence that endures to the present.

3. Legitimation Crises

How do we move from the critique of the present and the visions of the possible to social mobilizations? Habermas offered a systematic theory of legitimation crises that occur when there are failures in the objective “steering mechanisms” of the systems of advanced capitalist societies.[15] There may be crises of: (1) the economy that produces and distributes goods and services, (2) the political system that sustains the legitimacy of the whole, and (3) social integration secured by ideology and the state. System integration depends on the mechanisms of domination (e.g., the state and the mass media). Social integration and solidarity, as parts of the lifeworld, depend on normative structures—value systems that express norms and identity as well as secure loyalty and cohesion. Each form of integration possesses distinct logics and, in turn, a different kind of rationality. Social integration comes through socialization and the creation of meaningful “lifeworlds,” namely a culture/ideology that legitimates the social system and provides individuals with personal meaning. In contemporary societies, the logic of the state and the market has "migrated" into the subjective and "colonized the lifeworld.” Thus legitimation has subjective consequences in the “lifeworlds” where social and political identities are experienced and performed.

Social movements emerge at the intersections of the system and the lifeworld. Demands for justice and emotional reactions, often in the form of moral shocks, are responses to crises; anger, anxiety, and/or indignation become the triggers that impel and propel social movements.[16] But emotional reactions do not lead to social movements per se. The crisis-engendered collective emotions must be interpreted within the existing frames, or the emergent new frames, that resonate with the actor’s social location, networks, identity, character structure, and values to impel joining or creating the organizations of actors where alternative understandings, visions, and even identities can be negotiated whilst actors engage in collective struggles toward social change. This can be seen as an attempt to retain or recreate meaningful, gratifying identities and lifestyles at the levels of social integration rather than redistribution.

a. The Economic Aspect: The recent crises must be understood as structural crises in which the “steering mechanisms" of capitalism failed. Neoliberalism, with its disdain for state controls and regulations, celebrating the “freedom of the marketplace,” led to the 2007-2008 collapse of financial markets. The dreams of short-term profits based on speculation turned into nightmares. When the subprime mortgage crisis hit, the financial bubble burst, and the stock market plummeted. This was followed by a wave of bankruptcies and, in turn, devastating layoffs and unemployment for many workers, especially the vulnerable “precariat.” The monetary value of many pension funds evaporated. Economic stagnation followed. The meltdown led many ordinary people to question the very legitimacy of neoliberal capitalism. Although, according to many statistical measures, the economy has “recovered,” stock markets are up, construction is up as well as new car sales, a closer inspection reveals that income growth has been stagnant and that the majority of new jobs are at lower levels of skill and pay. With affordable housing on the decline and student loans escalating, approximately one-third of college students now live at home with their parents.[17]

b. The Political Aspect: The political system attempts to regulate the economic system in order to make possible the profit-making of the elites and the legitimacy of global capital, while minimizing the negative trends that may lead to discontent, protest, and domestic disturbances and/or upheavals. Capitalist states face a twofold problem of maintaining the profitability of the monopoly sector and the low-wage competitive sector while sustaining the legitimacy of the system by providing citizens with infrastructure and entitlements that maintain both economic growth (profits) and promote social peace and harmony. These two main functions are often contradictory insofar as the state must appear “neutral.”[18] The modern state serves to control markets in such a way as to minimize volatility and secure the general conditions of capital accumulation, but, at the same time, it needs to tax the citizenry to provide functioning infrastructure and social benefits. Moreover, in the time of financial crisis, the state is the only institution with the resources to deal with its consequences.

The legitimacy of the US state, and many others across the world, was challenged by the meltdown and subsequent bailouts that helped the elites who had rigged the system. In 2011, the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protesters chanted, “The banks got bailed out, we got sold out.” While the economy was stabilized at great cost to the vast majority of people, the result was a “global slump,” with high unemployment, especially for the young. The state was seen as boosting the profits of “the 1%”—the epithet for the wealthy elite and powerful during OWS. The protests in the squares, streets, and other public sites were directed against the governments and challenged their legitimacy. More often than not, they were met with ruthless violence that quelled the protests for the time being, but, at the same time, also inspired future mobilizations. Nevertheless, it should be noted that in some cases, as evidenced, for example, in the rise of Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain, organic intellectuals can organize discontent, fashion political movements, and gain political power.[19] Perhaps the same discontent, progressive mobilization, and hope have found their expression in the strong support for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign by many in the US, notwithstanding the very low historical odds for a left-wing outsider to get a presidential nomination, let alone win the election.

c. The Cultural Aspect: The cultural system of meanings, values, norms and interpretations of reality express the identity of the society, regulate conduct and maintain cohesion and integration. The values of every society are shaped by the ruling classes to sustain their power. But today we see questions about the cultural values that underpin enormous wealth for the elites. Today, large numbers of youth, perhaps as many as 50 percent, have become much more sympathetic to socialism, especially since the equation of socialism with the long past eras of Stalin or Mao falls upon deaf ears. The protests and mobilizations seek more than economic redress, millions of youth seek a major social/cultural transformation informed by the visions of an alternative system based upon human needs, democratic communities, and careers that provide individual self-realization, creativity and dignity.

d. The Utopian Aspect: Movements depend on the shared interpretations of reality and the frameworks which explain the causes and consequences of adversities as well as the goals to be attained and the strategies to attain them. Marx generally rejected “Utopian socialism” as such, but emancipatory possibilities came with the transcendence of private property, namely the cultivation of artistry, caring, creativity, curiosity, empathy, faith, honor, humor, love, sensitivity, and other virtues celebrated by healthy, life-appreciating people everywhere.^[20] Utopian values contain the critique of the contradictions of capitalism, which thwarts their realization, since promoting human good would cut profits. As Jacoby pointed out there is a vital legacy of “messianic utopianism” in critical theory that envisions more than a just, egalitarian, democratic version of contemporary society, but a radical transformation of society into the post capitalist forms in which private property is longer the defining feature.[21] The utopianism found in Martin Buber, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse, is imperative for understanding contemporary movements. But this Utopia is not so much spelled out, but is rather a critique of domination, anchored within the character structure, embodied within the state institutions, and valorized by hegemonic ideologies. When moving from necessity to freedom, human fulfillment can take place in various forms which cannot be specified nor predicted in advance. Utopian goals require locating the desirable within the dialectic of the undesirable, namely, within the conditions created by existing political/hegemonic ideologies which entail their own negation. The overcoming of alienation and domination would transform work from being the necessity for bare survival to being the expression of human creativity and fulfillment that would enable the free development of each and the free development of all.

B. Hegemony

Following Marcuse’s notions of “one-dimensional thought”, “new sensibilities” and “great refusals” and Habermas’ theory of legitimation crises, Gramsci’s theory of hegemony complements the critical theory tradition in explaining how hegemony, in the mode of the ideological control of culture, fosters the willing assent to the power and domination of the given historic bloc. Today, neoliberalism as an ideology valorizes and celebrates the financial, political, and intellectual elites. Hegemony normalizes the historically arbitrary, renders domination natural, normal, and in the “best interests of all”, and thereby sustains the political/economic power of particular historic blocs. It is just “common sense,” as opposed to that which, for Gramsci, is the "folklore" of philosophy and may assume countless different forms, but, for the most part, is fragmentary, incoherent, and inconsequential. On the other hand, hegemonic ideologies serve to buttress power and prevent critical thought/action and thereby sustain domination.

Intellectuals, teachers, professors, journalists, novelists, artists, religious leaders, and others, drawn from the coalitions of groups that share the common interest in holding on to power, generally collude in creating and articulating a more or less integrated hegemonic ideology. This begins with the “expert” advice over child-rearing values and practices, school curricula, religion, mass media, especially the news and popular culture, as well as the high culture that collectively and systematically produces worldviews and understandings that legitimate existing class relations and political leadership. “National themes” in collective celebrations and rituals affirm and augment the current society, glorifying its governance and its leaders past and present. Dissenters are marginalized as traitors and pathological characters, as deviant and bizarre. Gramsci’s analysis enables us to bridge critique and alternative visions with praxis as philosophically informed political activity. This is why he called his work “the philosophy of praxis.”

But how and why do people assent to values, worldviews, and understandings that are the basis of their domination and subjugation? While Gramsci was a Communist organizer, he was however quite critical of the economism of the Party. He placed more emphasis on the subjectivity of the worker and the collective will of the masses, which unfortunately had been colonized and corrupted by hegemonic ideologies. These ideologies impacted the structures and processes of socialization to produce general worldviews, values, and understandings that masked the ways in which the system operates. To understand the willing part of the “willing assent,” the Frankfurt School provided a critical social psychology of emotions, explaining how ideologies were actively internalized and incorporated within the individual character, self, and identity. They provided the motivational basis for: (1) the “willing assent” to domination based on the colonized feelings, emotions, and desires that became the intrinsic components of character structure, and (2) the cognitive processes that led to the active denial of the validity of alternative claims and the denigration of the claimants.

In other words, people employ what has been called “motivated reasoning” to accept certain “information” or “evidence” that is consistent with their own values and colonized identities, while rejecting and denying what is inconsistent  with their beliefs and self-images. Thus, identity acts as either a facilitator or a barrier to particular worldviews, cognitive frameworks and understandings which in turn motivate both reasoning and action. The shaping of the character structure generally serves the political and economic interests of the elites, but it also engenders human suffering which in turn may foster resistance and contestation. Capitalist domination alienates and frustrates basic human needs for community, agency, recognition, and self-fulfillment. This contradiction between the demands of the system and the thwarting of human fulfillment, experienced in the times of crises, becomes the opening for counterhegemonic mobilization.

C. Counterhegemony

How do we mediate between critique and action? Domination fosters resistance, but how does resistance get organized and channeled to foster social change? “Organic intellectuals” from subordinated classes, often themselves the victims of the adversities of capital, find themselves in strategically significant positions for organizing resistance. By bent of character, experience, and formal or informal education or training, they become aware of the contradictions in the system, particularly the chasm between the hegemonic ideology crafted by the elites and the actual life conditions for the subalterns who “willingly assent” to being dominated.

According to Gramsci, the “organic intellectual” acquires the type of critical education typically reserved for the elites. Moreover, having roots and ties to the subordinate classes, he or she is aware of the experienced, if not articulated, ambivalence of subaltern classes and, in turn, the extent to which they may be open to, or resistant toward, counterhegemonic discourses. As Chris Hedges put it:

No revolt can succeed without professional revolutionists who live outside the formal structures of society. They are financially insecure. They dedicate their lives to fomenting radical change. They do not invest energy in appealing to power to reform. They are prepared to break the law. They, more than others, recognize the fragility of the structures of authority. They are embraced by a vision that makes compromise impossible. Revolution is their full-time occupation. And no revolution is possible without them, largely unseen by the wider society, they have severed themselves from the formal structures of power. They have formed collectives and nascent organizations dedicated to overthrowing the corporate state. All revolutionary upheavals are built by these entities.[22]

Few academics have the background, the required experience, organizational skills, and/or available time for the nitty-gritty of social organization and mobilization. Nevertheless, the analyses and critiques of political and economic domination, and the deconstruction of hegemonic ideologies are extremely important tasks and become absolutely necessary antecedents for developing counterhegemonic narratives. Scholars as varied as Georg Simmel, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Frantz Fanon have talked about the “dual consciousness,” the ability to navigate between different, often contradictory, worldviews and social networks. The realms of critique and political activism come together in fashioning counterhegemonic discourses, alternative visions, and the critical understandings of the nature of social reality as well as engaging in the ideological struggles that make actual political transformation possible.

Typically, intellectuals, especially those trained formally or informally in critical theorizing, may understand the world in far more complex ways than many ordinary people. The “organic intellectual,” coming from the subaltern classes, is in a different position to influence subalterns than is the elite scholar. He or she better understands the lifeworld of the workers and knows how to encourage them to comprehend their situation and envision the alternatives. He or she also has a legitimacy in their eyes that an outsider would have to work hard to earn. For Gramsci, every person is an implicit intellectual, a “naïve” philosopher, who tries to make sense out of his or her world. Moreover, at some level, most people become aware of the gap between the dominant culture (ideology) and the actual conditions of their lives. That dissonance creates openings for contestation, especially when crises render the legitimacy of the system problematic. Organic intellectuals understand that the political struggles must begin with the demystification of the dominant ideology. This is why the most significant part of their work consists of organizing so-called “wars of position” in which hegemonic ideologies are challenged through “popular education” that offers not only critique but also a counterhegemonic discourse. Organic intellectuals, as the bearers of counterhegemonic visions, illuminate the contradictions of class, power, and dominant ideologies and articulate alternatives that have the potential of transforming mass consciousness deadened by the sirens’ song of capitalist consumerism.

Contradictions are especially evident during times of crisis when people become more receptive to critique and alternative visions. During crises, people may withdraw their loyalty from the existing social order, creating spaces for alternative views, values, understandings, and even identities. They may become more receptive to organic intellectuals who enable people to see through the contradictions, illusions, and distortions of hegemonic ideologies and better understand their own circumstances.

As Gramsci found out, due to the passivity and fatalism of the Italian workers and their embrace of Catholicism, there were major cultural barriers to the embrace of communism. “Social transformation is a function of the creative role of the masses and of the political ability to articulate a revolutionary consciousness.”[23] From this point of view, the role of organic intellectuals becomes crucial, as the subjective barriers for the development of radical subjectivity among the mass of workers are immense. As Gramsci writes, “Every revolution has been preceded by an intense labor of criticism, by the diffusion of culture and the spread of ideas amongst masses of men.”[24] As Fabio de Nardis and Loris Caruso well summarize, “The basic themes of his writings, therefore, concern the clear rejection of mechanistic and economistic interpretations of Marx’s doctrine and the adherence to a fully historicist and humanist form of Marxism. Marxism is for Gramsci not only an economic science, but first and foremost a worldview that points to an intellectual and moral reform of society.”^[25]

Social transformation then depends on a prior cultural transformation of consciousness that overcomes the existing ideology of the status quo in order to enable a different kind of political economy and social organization.

If the revolution is primarily a process of cultural reform, then both intellectuals and the party, interacting with the popular masses, must work toward the development of a political consciousness and a collective will, corresponding to the elaboration of a historically rooted ideology of transformation. If the aim is the revolutionary seizure of power, it is also true that the subaltern classes, in order to be successful, must work towards creating the conditions for transformation, aiming to be an ideologically hegemonic class well before becoming the dominant social group.^[26]

According to Gramsci, culture is the terrain for revolutionary struggle, where the “wars of position” are necessary before the “wars of maneuver.” A “war of position” is a process which “slowly builds up the strength of the social foundations of a new state” by “creating alternative institutions or alternative intellectual resources within existing society.”[27] Organic intellectuals, understanding the salience of the dominant culture, are essential for organizing workers, and organic intellectuals must be in a dialectical relationship with the mass of workers. “How classes live” determines how people view their worlds, act within them, and perhaps, most importantly, “shapes their ability to imagine how [the world] can be changed, and whether they can see such changes as feasible or desirable.”[28]

Thus instead of offering workers economics or history lessons, organic intellectuals provide alternative cultural understandings that undermine and erode the received understandings (e.g., “common sense”) that sustains the system. They open possibilities for imagining alternatives by showing what people’s lives might be like in a more equitable, democratic, and just society and contrasting that with the existing society where everyday life is a struggle and is without the possibilities of genuine freedom, transcendence, and self-fulfillment, in addition to being torn asunder by episodic crises.

“Organic intellectuals” understand the underlying resentment that workers may have about the system, but which they are reluctant to articulate due to the fear of being ostracized by others and the anxiety that might come from an uncertain future. The key repressive strength of religion qua hegemonic ideology is that it sustains solidarity and assuages anxiety and hence acts as a barrier against social change. This is why the initial task of "organic intellectuals" is the formulation of counterhegemonic discourses that not only critique the existing hegemonic frameworks, but also suggest other, more fulfilling alternatives. Organizing successful resistance requires a long and difficult struggle because the focus of the struggle are centuries-old cultural frameworks.

Much of Gramsci’s work refers to workers, trade unions, and factory councils at the time when production was predominantly Fordist. Conditions changed. For Marcuse, writing three decades later, the stimulating agents of progressive change are more likely to be the young people, students, and marginalized minorities. And, at this time, another fifty years later, it appears that the growing precariat, which includes the same marginalized groups mentioned by Marcuse, can spearhead social and political change. By their very existence, the members of the precariat question the legitimacy of the system as well as the legitimacy of political leaders who are either indifferent to popular concerns, or openly hostile, repressive, and violent.

During the recent mobilizations, some activist groups called themselves the “indignant ones.” This is why some scholars claimed that the quest and demand for recognition and dignity is more significant for the occupiers/activists than material gain.[29] The struggles in the cultural and ideological realm are more salient for the rebels of today than the purely material issues.

II. Contesting Domination

A. From Grievances to Action

Hierarchical societies generate dissatisfaction and discontent. One of the functions of hegemonic ideologies is to suppress, normalize, and mollify the alienated masses. This has been seen in the functioning of religion as an “opiate.” Unlike the premodern modes of production, capitalism, as Marx has shown, requires a constant change, the so-called “creative destruction” to gain ever greater profits; however, the constant change in production, transportation, communication, finance, entertainment, and leisure generates dysfunctions and crises. The Fordist mode of production created vast wealth and, eventually, organized resistance articulated by trade union movements brought into existence the relatively affluent working class; however, as Marcuse noted in One-Dimensional Man, the working class was increasingly diverted from radicalism by the consumerist ideology of mass culture, which eroded its class consciousness and revolutionary potential.

Due to the processes of globalization and the emergence of digital technologies, with post-Fordist flexible production based on the “just in time” arrival of components, automation, and/or import substitution, many jobs—on the basis of which the working class built its affluence— disappeared. At the same time, the anti-union campaigns were successful, leading to the erosion of living standards for most workers who either became unemployed or were forced to take low-paying jobs. This generated a great deal of anger and resentment, and dominant, hegemonic intellectuals attempted to shift the blame on the victims of the system, such as racial minorities and undocumented workers as well as on supposedly liberal government policies. This was soon followed by the financial crisis of 2007-2008 and the wave of repressive austerity and retrenchment policies, which gave rise to the 2011 progressive mobilizations across the world. Millions took to the streets and protested, but there has been very little immediate structural change of significance, though change may come.[30]

B. The Party—Organize or Perish

In the 1930s, when Gramsci wrote his major works, the Communist Party was the only significant political organization dedicated to the fundamental transformation of capitalism. While communist or socialist parties were not the major actors in the various uprisings in recent years, in some cases they did play important roles, especially in the 2010-2011 Tunisian uprising and the election of a secular government in December 2014. Why was that the case? Tunisia, a former French colony, was a relatively secular country and had a vibrant civil society with a number of progressive nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and social movement organizations (SMOs), especially labor unions and women’s organizations. Its universities were secular and included extensive liberal arts programs, quite unlike the universities of many other countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), in which education is either largely technical or, more often, religious.[31]

Thus, in Tunisia, after many years of stagnation, ever growing inequality, hardships and dissatisfaction with the government, compounded by the WikiLeaks’ revelations of corruption of the ruling Ben Ali family, the self-immolation of a fruit peddler became the catalyst for massive demonstrations in Tunisia and then elsewhere. The bulk of the demonstrators were the young people. Broad coalitions quickly formed thanks in large part to the existing networks of progressive organizations and the widespread use of the Internet. From this example, we can conclude that a social movement requires not only "organic intellectuals" and counterhegemonic discourses, but also social organizations with dedicated, professional revolutionaries fully committed to long-term struggles to achieve social and political change. Absent such organizations and leadership, we have the passions of Occupy as well as its brief history.

C. Virtual Public Spheres

Organizing social movements today is both more difficult as well as easier than in the past. The potential actors of today—college students, minorities, and certain members of the precariat—have much more diverse class positions and are generally more geographically dispersed. Today’s college students who take liberal arts and social science classes are likely to be exposed to a variety of critical perspectives, even in those cases when the professors are not especially radical.

Moreover, the importance of the Internet should be stressed, especially in so far as the Internet enables the proliferation of a number of “virtual public spheres,” providing a great deal of critical, up-to-date information as well as the space for various debates.[32] The Internet made possible the formation of the variety of transnational activist networks and “internetworked social movements.”[33] In the 2011 uprisings, for instance, computers, cell phones, tablets, and social media played important roles in organizing and directing the mobilizations and occupations in real-time: activists received information about where to gather and what routes to avoid, and they were able to act in concert even if they numbered tens of thousands. While it is true that the movements in each country had some unique features, the Internet was able to keep millions informed and connected across the globe.

D. Digital Memory

Even though the uprisings of 2010-2011 have waned and receded from public attention, it is evident that these mobilizations are far from being forgotten. There now exist online thousands of blogs, websites, and YouTube videos in which the critiques and analyses by various progressive and radical intellectuals remain accessible. There are also many websites that present well-informed, cogent, radical critiques of the capitalist status quo.[34] Moreover, the ongoing critical analyses provided by radical public intellectuals, such as Noam Chomsky, Cornel West, Chris Hedges, Richard Wolff, and Naomi Klein, are only a mouse click or app button away. These analyses and critiques, unlike the mass media reports of the civil rights, feminist, and antiwar movements of the 1960s, are relatively free of corporate control and censorship.

E. Cohort Flow

As one surveys the political landscape of the US and beyond, the conditions for a sustained political rebellion from the Left appear almost nonexistent. As Gramsci said, these are times that bring the “pessimism of the intellect,” but demand the “optimism of the will.” The reactionary forces of the populist Right, coupled with the fundamentalist evangelicals and neoliberal technocratic elites, seem formidable. Throughout the European Union, various right-wing, if not openly fascist, organizations are growing. Where the Left has gained strength, for example in Latin America and in Southern Europe, it is presently being challenged and disciplined by austerity and reaction.

The wealth and seeming influence of global capital and the near invisibility of strong radical organizations can no doubt give rise to pessimism. Because such pessimism itself precludes the possibilities of change, current conditions require a more critical examination. For Gramsci, the old system is dying, but the new cannot yet be born. This is why we have to move beyond the prevailing pessimism and envision utopian alternatives in the tradition of Marx, Fromm, and Marcuse. The growing inequality and the rising precariat, together with the speculative essence of finance capital, are the harbingers of further crises. Young people and minority communities have borne the brunt of the adverse consequences of neoliberalism in general and the subsequent economic implosion during and in the aftermath of the 2007-2008 crisis. In many European countries, youth unemployment is nearly 50 percent. Approximately 30 percent of college students move back home after finishing their studies, unable to afford rent, college loans, and the essentials of what is considered a “normal” lifestyle.[35] As has been noted by scholars such as Marcuse and Habermas, such youth are the primary agents for social and political change.

What is to be done? The critique of domination is the essential task for “organic intellectuals” who mediate between critical theories and political praxis. They critique the cultural realms such as religion, education, liberal-democratic ideology and media, which mask the domination of capital and sustain hegemony. They organize and wage “wars of position” where an emancipatory critique articulates hope and the vision of a society where caring and sharing displace greed and indifference; where love and community trump anger, hatred, and exclusion; where creative self-fulfillment displaces banal conformity; and, where people find dignity, instead of humiliation.

But how does this happen? We should consider the importance of generational change, observed by Mannheim almost a century ago.[36] The social, political, and economic context of every generation shapes its worldview and endures as each cohort ages, matures, and becomes the mainstream of society. While each generation may itself be exposed to very different conditions, what is especially evident today is how the younger generations seem to be notably more progressive as evidenced by their support for government intervention into the economy. Half of American youth support socialism. Contemporary youth have become racially tolerant, open to differences of gender and sexual orientation, and embrace diverse lifestyles ranging from gay marriage to cohabitation to puffing weed.

Moreover, some of these values are responses to the fundamental changes in the character structure fostered by new social realities. Growing numbers of young people are not simply aware of the adverse conditions of their lives, but are especially receptive to the arguments and analyses of various progressive “organic intellectuals.” Many have given up on the existing political system in favor of an amorphous, but democratic anarchism.[37] This is a good starting point, because it exposes youth to counterhegemonic critiques and alternatives, and encourages them to enter various activist communities.

Conclusion: Whither Mobilization?

As Marx revealed, capitalism rests upon inherent contradictions of ownership and ever changing market factors resulting in inevitable crises. Yet class reproduction over time, notwithstanding crises, is maintained by the combination of ideological justifications, character structures, and emotional dispositions to consent. Nevertheless, amidst crises, we often see various kinds of resistance from sabotage to retreatist forms of cultural escapism; moreover, longstanding grievances may erupt, fostering progressive social movements from below seeking ameliorative social changes ranging from reforms to uprisings and revolutions.

The recent cycle of mobilizations—generated in the wake of the 2007-2008 financial crisis—confirms the historical pattern: (1) when existing class relationships and elite leadership prove dysfunctional, corrupt, or both, and/or (2) when their legitimating ideologies (promising inclusion and a “glorious” future) are in conflict with actual realities of fragmentation and conflict and/or declining wealth and power, then mobilizations may ensue.

Current conditions (e.g., rising inequality, austerity, bleak job prospects for youth) are fostering fundamental changes in the character structure, subjective values, and aspirations. Much like in the 1960’s, many young people today feel alienated from the capitalist system and its dehumanizing culture of competition, shallow consumerism, endless war, and inordinate waste. Unlike the 1960’s, however, we now face economic stagnation and, for most people, the first genuine encounter with “inverted totalitarianism.”^[38] These factors give rise to widespread anger and indignation, which in turn may lead to openness to change and receptivity for the traditions of dialectical critique, including the critical insights of Marx and Marcuse.

The primary task for contemporary “organic intellectuals” is to keep the critical tradition alive and adapt it to our times. Progressive change must begin with the multidimensional critique that is as much concerned with the critique of the prevailing domination as with offering imaginative visions of alternative futures. Such a change will require many dedicated “organic intellectuals” to organize and mobilize the “wars of position” in order to transform the capitalist culture of greed, selfish profit-making, blatant inequality, discrimination, and environmental destruction. The winds of change are blowing, though, admittedly, progressive mobilizations are still weak relative to the power of economic and political opposition. What is certain, however, is that the Frankfurt School’s critical approach to capitalist hegemony, focusing as much on the cultural and psychological aspects as on the political and economic, as elaborated in the works of Fromm and Marcuse, and when brought together with the activist counterhegemonic analysis and strategies of Gramsci, provide us with the needed “optimism of the will.”

[1]

[1] See Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975; Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action: Lifeworld and System (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985).

[2] Herbert Marcuse “The Foundations of Historical Materialism” in The Essential Marcuse: Selected Writings of Philosopher and Social Critic Herbert Marcuse, ed. Andrew Feenberg and William Leiss (1932; Boston: Beacon Press, 2007). See Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, ed. Dick J. Struik, trans. Martin Milligan (1844; New York: International Publishers, 1964).

[3] Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971).

[4] While lacking a theory developmental psychology, Gramsci did note the importance of early childhood as the period in which cultural values were learned.

[5] Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1941).

[6] Robert Altemeyer, “The Authoritarians” (unpublished manuscript, 2006),

http://members.shaw.ca/jeanaltemeyer/drbob/TheAuthoritarians.pdf.

[7] Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (1930; New York: W. W. Norton, 2005).

[8] The superego and authority relations were central in the work of Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno.

[9] Fromm, Escape from Freedom, 277-78.

[10] Ibid., 279-80 (emphasis in original).

[11] Lauren Langman, “Political Economy and the Normative: Marx on Human Nature and the Quest for Dignity,” in Constructing Marxist Ethics, ed. Michael Thompson (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 43-65.; Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb,  Hidden Injuries of Class (New York: Knopf, 1972).

[12] Langman, “Political Economy and the Normative.”

[13] George Lakoff, The All New Don’t Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate (White River Junction, VT: Charles Green Publishing, 2014).

[14] Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964).

[15] Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975).

[16] James Jaspers, The Art of Moral Protest: Culture, Biography, and Creativity in Social Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

[17] “In 2012, 36% of the nation’s young adults ages 18 to 31—the so-called Millennial generation—were living in their parents’ home, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data. This is the highest share in at least four decades and represents a slow but steady increase over the 32% of their same-aged counterparts who were living at home prior to the Great Recession in 2007 and the 34% doing so when it officially ended in 2009. A record total of 21.6 million Millennials lived in their parents’ home in 2012, up from 18.5 million of their same aged counterparts in 2007.” Richard Fry, “A Rising Share of Young Adults Live in Their Parents’ Home: A Record 21.6 Million in 2012,” Social and Demographic Trends, Pew Research Center, August 1, 2013, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/08/01/a-rising-share-of-young-adults-live-in-their-parents-home/. “In fact, the nation’s 18- to 34-year-olds are less likely to be living independently of their families and establishing their own households today than they were in the depths of the Great Recession.” Richard Fry, “More Millennials Living With Family Despite Improved Job Market,” Social and Demographic Trends, Pew Research Center, July 29, 2015, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/07/29/more-millennials-living-with-family-despite-improved-job-market/.

[18] James O’Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1973).

[19] It remains an open question as to how effective Syriza has been in so far as the terms of the Greek bailout are still dictated by the Troika and the long-run consequences impossible to predict from this vantage point.

[20] Arthur Shostak, interview by Lane Jennings and Cindy Wagner, “The Futurist Interviews Arthur Shostak,” Future Times, posted on November 28, 2001, http://www.wfs.org/node/350.

[21] Russell Jacoby, Picture Imperfect (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).

[22] Chris Hedges, “Why We Need Professional Revolutionists,” Truthdig, November 24, 2014, http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/why_we_need_professional_revolutionists_20141123.

[23] Fabio de Nardis and Loris Caruso, “Political Crisis and Social Transformation in Antonio Gramsci. Elements for a Sociology of Political Praxis,” International Journal of Humanities and Social Science 1, no. 6 (June 2011): 14.

[24] Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Political Writings, 1910-1920 (New York: International Publishers, 1977), 12.

[25] De Nardis and Caruso, “Political Crisis and Social Transformation in Antonio Gramsci,” 14.

[26] Ibid., 14.

[27] Robert Cox, “Gramsci, Hegemony and International Relations: An Essay in Method,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 12, no. 2 (1983): 162-75.

[28] Kate Crehan, Gramsci, Culture and Anthropology (London: Pluto, 2002), 71.

[29] Tova Benski and Lauren Langman, eds., “From Indignation to Occupation: A New Wave of Global Mobilization,” Current Sociology 61, no. 4, monograph 2 (July 2013); Manuel Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2012).

[30] In Tunisia, there was democratization of governance, but not the economy. In Chile and Québec, tuition hikes were rescinded, without any fundamental changes in the nature of governance. Syriza, as we noted, came to power in Greece in January 2015, when its party chairman Alexis Tsipras became Prime Minister, but Syriza has not radically changed economic policies. Nevertheless its Spanish cousin, Podemos, is likely to win the 2015 election in Spain.

[31] Neither the US nor the EU will intervene to defend freedom and democracy in any country unless that country possesses geopolitically important raw materials and resources. Tunisia is the case in point.

[32] Lauren Langman, “From Virtual Public Spheres to Global Justice: A Critical Theory of Internetworked Social Movements,” Sociological Theory 23, no. 1 (2005): 42–74.

[33] Ibid.

[34] See, for example, AlterNet, http://www.alternet.org/; Democracy Now!, http://www.democracynow.org/; Occupy Wall Street, occupy.org; Popular Resistance, https://www.popularresistance.org/; Real News Network, http://therealnews.com/t2/; Truthdig, http://www.truthdig.com/; Truthout, http://www.truth-out.org/.

[35] See note 17.

[36] Karl Mannheim, “The Problem of Generations,” in Essays in the Sociology of Knowledge (1926; London: Routledge, 1952), 276-322.

[37] At the time of this writing, in late 2015, large numbers of youth are flocking to support US Senator Bernie Sanders in his campaign to become the Democratic presidential nominee. His critiques of the injustices of the capitalist system seem to have hit some very responsive chords, and his rallies have attracted tens of thousands of people. Whether he will succeed in gaining the nomination is far from certain, but the enthusiasm and size of the crowds supporting him do suggest that more and more people in the US support fundamental political and social changes; however, whether such transformation can be achieved through the Democratic Party remains very questionable.

[38] The basic contradiction of capitalism is the class-based ownership of private property and competing interests between labor and capital; however, there are also other contradictions: ideologies of freedom, equality, and brotherhood mask domination, inequality, and antagonisms between classes. Capital extolls democracy while actual power is wielded by the financial elites that control the State—what Wolin has called “inverted totalitarianism.” Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).

Black Panther liberation school, a main instrument of counter-hegemony.

Section IV of Towards the War of Position:

Gramsci in Continuity and Rupture  with Marxism-Leninism

[Full document available as PDF download HERE]

By Amil K.
Revolutionary Initiative / Canada

Sept 10, 2013 – The main concern of the prison notebooks is the development of “the philosophy of praxis”1 with the aim of rejuvenating communist strategy in light of the failures and setbacks in Gramsci’s period. However fragmentary the passages of the notebooks are, they compose a totalizing system of thought in which a major focal point is the question of strategy. While there is so much more to the prison notebooks in terms of Gramsci’s intellectual contributions than questions of class war and strategy – hence, the Gramsci being a treasure trove for liberal academics – many of the notes point back to what Gramsci calls the war of position. But this concept can only be appreciated by unpacking some of the conceptual apparatus built up around it throughout the prison notebooks, which includes concepts such as the historical bloc; the ‘analysis of situations’; hegemony; Gramsci’s concept of philosophy and the organic intellectual; his distinct notion of the Party;and finally, his explanation of civil society.

Understanding the Historical Bloc

One of the core concepts of Gramsci’s prison notebooks is the ‘historical bloc’. While the term is only scarcely mentioned in the prison notebooks, given the concept’s role in framing much of Gramsci’s conceptual apparatus it can be argued that Gramsci’s prison notebooks are a long-running elaboration of the concept. There is no section dedicated to the historical bloc, only a couple short passages:

    Concept of ‘historical bloc’, i.e. unity between nature and spirit (structure and superstructure) unity of opposites and of distincts (137).

Structures and superstructures form an ‘historical bloc’. That is to say the complex, contradictory and discordant ensemble of the superstructures is the reflection of the ensemble of the social relations of production (366).

If I may take the liberty to flesh this out somewhat, in light of my reading of the prison notebooks, the historical bloc is the organic but contradictory unity between the dominant and subaltern social groups in a given historical period, the relations of which are historically emergent and need to be understood as such in order to understand the nature of the relations among these social groups in the present. Whereas ‘nature’ here is considered relatively fixed and generally changes only over much longer periods, the ‘Spirit’ is the contradictory unity between structural and super-structural elements in a bloc of time. On the one hand, the concept of the historical bloc is a rather orthodox reformulation of Marx’s historical materialism, a principle thesis of which Gramsci paraphrases at certain points throughout the prison notebooks: “1. That no social formation disappears as long as the productive forces which have developed within it still find room for further forward movement; that a society does not set itself tasks for whose solution the necessary conditions have not already been incubated” (106).

On the other hand, Gramsci’s elaboration of the architecture of the historic bloc (without actually referencing the term) throughout the prison notebooks reveals an awareness of the incredibly dynamic and ever-shifting character of the relationships among the “discordant…ensemble of the social relations of production” (366). The acute awareness of the dynamism at play amongst various levels of relations of force is a feature of Gramsci’s thinking that makes his analyses of history so penetrating and his overall method of historical and political analysis such a force of rejuvenation for “the philosophy of praxis” and the communist movement. Of particular importance for Gramsci, and for any communist movement, is a comprehensive study of the oppressed and exploited classes within their own historical bloc.

In his note “History of the Subaltern Classes: Methodological Criteria”, Gramsci provides a schema for what such a historical reconnaissance actually consists of when it comes to the “subaltern classes.” Whereas the historical unity of the ruling classes is realized in the State (and therefore its historical development can be traced through the development of the State as well),

    The subaltern classes, by definition, are not unified and cannot unite until they are able to become a “State”: their history, therefore, is intertwined with that of civil society, and thereby with the history of States and groups of States. Hence it is necessary to study: 1. The objective formation of subaltern social groups, by developments and transformations occurring in the sphere of economic production; their quantitative diffusion and their origins in pre-existing social groups, whose mentality, ideology, and aims they conserve for a time; 2. their active or passive affiliation to the dominant social formation, their attempts to influence the programmes of these formations in order to press claims of their own… 3. the birth of new parties of the dominant groups, intended to conserve the assent of the subaltern groups and to maintain control over them; 4. the formations which the subaltern groups themselves produce, in order to press claims of a limited and partial character; 5. those new formations which assert the autonomy of the subaltern groups, but within the old framework; 6. those formations which assert the integral autonomy (52).

This schematic outline for studying the subaltern is a major component for understanding the historical bloc. This method of historical analysis is the means by which a communist formation ultimately determines whether or not a favourable situation exists for the subaltern social groups to accumulate revolutionary forces and whether the situation is favourable to them becoming the ruling class at a given conjuncture of history; in other words, the essence of this historiographical method reduces to the question of whether the situation is favourable for revolution in the present historical bloc.

The factor driving the dynamism within Gramsci’s historical schema ultimately reduces into a question of the development of the mode of production. As Gramsci reiterates in his outlining of the concept of the passive revolution,

    No formation disappears as long as the productive forces which have developed within it still find room for further forward movement; 2. that a society does not set itself tasks for whose solution the necessary conditions have not already been incubated, etc. It goes without saying that these principles must first be developed critically in all their implications, and purged of every residue of mechanism and fatalism. They must therefore be referred back to the description of the three fundamental moments into which a ‘situation’ or an equilibrium of forces can be distinguished, with the greatest possible stress on the second moment (equilibrium of political forces), and especially on the third moment (politico-military equilibrium) (106-7).

Here, Gramsci directly links his method of historical analysis to an elaboration of the philosophy of praxis that he provides in his note “Analysis of situations.” The implicit statement here is that the object of the study of history and an account of the historical bloc is to grasp the situation, and the various levels of force that make up a given situation.

Grasping ‘the situation’ and Relations of Force at Three Levels

In his explication of the notion of ‘a situation’ the contours of a theory of revolution begin to emerge which distinguishes Gramsci from communist strategies overly focused upon what he calls the rapid war of siege/war of maneuver. Gramsci directly critiques Trotsky’s concept of ‘permanent revolution’, Luxemburg’s advocacy of the mass strike, and syndicalism’s methods in general for each for overestimating the capacity of the war of maneuver (238) to overwhelm bourgeois power and all of them being laden with notions of spontaneity because – as we shall see in further elucidations of Gramsci’ notions on state and civil society below – they misidentify the locus of power of the bourgeoisie, at least in the case of the more advanced capitalist countries where civil society is more advanced. A proper analysis of a situation is a precondition for revealing the objective conditions for or against the revolution.

“The study of how ‘situations’ should be analyzed,” Gramsci tells us, is to “establish the various levels of the relations of forces,” and this, ultimately, is what constitutes the “elementary exposition of the science and art of politics” (175). Such an analysis of the situation, Gramsci tells us, is the basis for formulation of the strategic plan with a strategy and tactics, for propaganda and agitation, for developing the command structure, organization of the armed forces, and resolving other questions pertaining to organizational structure (175).

Once one has resolved “the problem of the relations between structure and superstructure” – in other words, the nature of the contradictions in the structure of society and the trajectory of their development – one can proceed to correctly analyze the role of the forces that are active in the history of a particular period. However, one must also be able to distinguish between the organic (or structural) and the conjunctural crises, which differ from one another by virtue of being long-term crises consisting of basic contradiction in the structure of society versus the conjunctural phenomenon arising from “occasional, immediate, and almost accidental” movements in the superstructure (177). “A common error in historico-political analysis consists in an inability to find the correct relation between what is organic and what is conjunctural,” and Gramsci warns that such lines of research are “most serious in the art of politics, when it is not reconstructing past history but the construction of present and future history which is at stake” (178-9). What this reconstruction consists of is a determination of the immediate relations of force that define the situation.

Gramsci defines three levels of relations of force, beginning from the most structural and proceeding into the superstructural. The first is the relation of social forces, which is

    closely linked to the structure, objective, independent of human will and which can be measured with the systems of the exact or physical sciences… By studying these fundamental data it is possible to discover whether in a particular society there exist the necessary and sufficient conditions for its transformation (181).

The development of any clash of political or military forces will originate from contradictions at this level.

The subsequent moment is the relation of political forces, “in other words, an evaluation of the degree of homogeneity, self-awareness, and organisation attained by the various social classes” (181). By way of example pulled from elsewhere in the prison notebooks, Gramsci’s methodological criteria for conducting historical research into the subaltern classes – points four through to six, which deal with the political formations created by the subaltern classes, ranging from those limited to pressing their claims in a limited manner and in dependence upon the bourgeoisie all the way up to an integral and revolutionary way – are methods by which one can determine the level of political forces of the subaltern classes (52).

Despite the overthrow of immensely popular liberation theology priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide twice in a decade by U.S.-led imperialism, and in spite of the collective punishment meted out to the Haitian people for electing a left-leaning and mildly anti-imperialist President, for years after the 2004 occupation the Haitian masses remained militant and mobilized. But Aristide never supported arming the people during his term, nor after he was overthrown. Neither was his political party, Lavalas, willing to build an armed struggle after the 2004 occupation, despite armed resistance from the urban masses in Haiti’s largest slums, such as Cité de Soleil. The struggle of the Haitian people for the last two decades has been a case of having the relation of social forces on their side, and having political forces strong enough to outmaneuver the tiny pro-imperialist elite in any liberal electoral contest, but tragically not having the arms to defend their interests and, in the spirit of Dessalines and L’Ouverture, carry forward the 1804 Haitian revolution.

Despite the overthrow of immensely popular liberation theology priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide twice in a decade by U.S.-led imperialism, and in spite of the collective punishment meted out to the Haitian people for electing a left-leaning and mildly anti-imperialist President, for years after the 2004 occupation the Haitian masses remained militant and mobilized. But Aristide never supported arming the people during his term, nor after he was overthrown. Neither was his political party, Lavalas, willing to build an armed struggle after the 2004 occupation, despite armed resistance from the urban masses in Haiti’s largest slums, such as Cité de Soleil.

The struggle of the Haitian people for the last two decades has been a case of having the relation of social forces on their side, and having political forces strong enough to outmaneuver the tiny pro-imperialist elite in any liberal electoral contest, but tragically not having the arms to defend their interests and, in the spirit of Dessalines and L’Ouverture, carry forward the 1804 Haitian revolution.

The third moment is the relation of military forces, which Gramsci breaks down further into military forces and politico-military forces, which become decisive for the subordinate social classes if and only when all three levels of relations of forces exist in the favour of the subaltern social classes and are seized upon by the social, political, and military actors they have constituted. Of course, oppressed people can take armed action without the social and political relations of forces being favourable. But these are always defeated and are easily dismissed as acts of terrorism (no matter the actual content of the armed act) if the political forces are not sufficiently capable of defending the armed actions. But if the social, political, and military relations of force are indeed favourable and sufficiently mature, then what it means for a situation to be seized upon is as follows:

    The decisive element in every situation is the permanently organised and long-prepared force which can be put into the field when it is judged that a situation is favourable (and it can be favourable only in so far as such a force exists, and is full of fighting spirit). Therefore the essential task is that of systematically and patiently ensuring that this force is formed, developed, and rendered ever more homogeneous, compact, and self-aware (185).

We support the people armed… but armed by who? At their own initiative and with their own resources, or backed and armed by the imperialists? U.S.-led imperialism has been trying to tip the military balance of power in Syria for two years in favour of the Free Syrian Army, over which it has worked to exercise greater and greater influence, especially through regional allies. But winning in a military balance of power is not a revolution. As Gramsci’s relations of force clarify, a revolution is made when the subaltern classes have the social, political, and military relations of force in their favour, and seize upon them. What social classes and which political forces are animating the civil war from within Syria? Is this Syria’s revolutionary situation? Or is the temporary military balance of power being propped up by imperialism?

What we have here, in an abstract and simple outline, is an historical-materialist analysis of how to determine if and how to make a revolution and under what conditions can the conscious intervention of the vanguard forces of the historically progressive classes be successful in providing leadership to a revolution. Revolution does not consist of the momentary numerical superiority of the masses in a mass strike or an insurrection – that is, momentarily favourable military relations of force – but relations of force that correspond to every level of relations of force. And for the political relations of force to be in the favour of the proletariat and its allies in countries under circumstances where bourgeois power extends beyond the formal institutions of government and State, its leading forces must do more than muster an army for a pitched battle and a day’s victory.

This formulation is a sharp critique of the way insurrection came to be conceived within the Communist International, the worst expression of which was Trotsky’s ‘permanent revolution’.2 But it is also a much sharper formulation of how to perform a general analysis of a situation than that offered by Lenin. Lenin defined a revolutionary situation as one in which the ruling class could no longer go on ruling the same way, when the suffering of the masses had reached an intolerable level, and when, consequently, the masses burst into political activity (Lenin 1915). But this definition neither differentiates between structural or conjunctural crises, nor does it offer precision in the analysis of relations of forces that Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis revealed to be necessary.

To fully appreciate how Gramsci’s theory of revolution goes beyond Lenin’s foundational but historically- and contextually-limited articulation, one must further understand Gramsci’s theory of the state and civil society. For the historically progressive forces to actually prevail in an objectively favourable situation, the question of leadership must be correctly posed and correctly answered; which brings us to Gramsci’s concepts of hegemony, the role of intellectuals, and his conceptualization of the Party. With these concepts at hand, we can gain a fuller appreciation of Gramsci’s idea of revolutionary strategy – the war of position.

Hegemony: Coercion & Consent

Beginning first with the question of hegemony: Dominant social groups maintain their power in two distinct ways: through domination / coercion, and through intellectual-moral leadership / consent. Dominant social groups dominate the classes with which they have an antagonistic relationship by liquidating or subjugating them through armed force (57); but they lead “kindred and allied groups” by providing moral and intellectual direction. So long as the productive forces still have room for greater development under a given mode of production, the dominant social groups can maintain their hegemony by making leadership primary and domination secondary. But an organic crisis – which consists of the shifting of the social composition of society, the classes and the relations among them – will engender crises in leadership as the dominant social groups rely more heavily upon coercion to subdue their antagonists and even formerly allied classes.

What is Philosophy and who is the ‘Organic Intellectual’

The place of intellectuals in ruling class hegemony is through diffusion of its moral and intellectual culture. Gramsci understands that there is not a direct correspondence between the ruling social groups and its intellectual functionaries, but that the latter are dependent on the former for their existence and serve them accordingly: “The intellectuals are the dominant group’s ‘deputies’ exercising the subaltern functions of social hegemony and political government,” for which they are compensated. Gramsci includes the work of such intellectuals within the overall operation and power of the ruling class, not outside of it.

It should be said at this point that Gramsci sees each and every person as a philosopher, albeit whose capacity to think independently relates to the dynamics of the overall situation, the most important question of which is: Has a given class produced the political forces to think and act independently, and to what extent are these forces developed?

Gramsci sees each human being as a philosopher, since every person has a conception of the world. For Gramsci, there is no pure philosophy, but “various philosophies or conceptions of the world exist” (326). As for those philosophies that are disconnected from the people, elite intellectual cultures of and in support of the dominant social classes, Gramsci asks:

    Is a philosophical movement properly so called when it is devoted to creating a specialised culture among restricted intellectual groups, or rather when, and only when, in the process of elaborating a form of thought superior to ‘common sense’ and coherent on a scientific plane, it never forgets to remain in contact with the ‘simple’ and indeed finds in this contact the source of the problems it sets out to study and to resolve? Only by this contact does a philosophy become ‘historical’, purify itself of intellectualistic elements of an individual character and become ‘life’ (330).

In contrast to these philosophies, “the philosophy of praxis does not tend to leave the ‘simple’ in their primitive philosophy of common sense, but rather to lead them to a higher conception of life… to construct an intellectual-moral bloc which can make politically possible the intellectual progress of the mass and not only of small intellectual groups” (333). Gramsci is clear in his position that for the communist movement such an intellectual élite – while its effect must be diffuse and hegemonic – is not an unorganized and undisciplined current. Rather it is the Party that is the “elaborator of new integral and totalitarian [i.e. unified and all-absorbing] intelligentsias and the crucibles where the unification of theory and practice, understood as a real historical process, takes place” (335). The need for such a unified if dynamic intellectual current leads Gramsci to clear reject parties on the “pattern of the British Labour Party” in favour of the Leninist/Bolshevik vanguard model. However, as we should see further below, the deeply democratic and pedagogical tasks of the communist party should not be overlooked in Gramsci’s thinking.

The intellectual work of such an intellectual-moral bloc includes: (1) the repetition of its basic arguments; and (2) to raise the intellectual level of the masses and to raise new intellectuals directly out of the masses. These intellectuals raised from the ranks of the exploited and oppressed masses are what Gramsci called organic intellectuals, and small, ‘independent’ intellectual currents cannot take up the task of seriously cultivating this sort of leadership. This can only be taken up by the Party, or a Party of sorts.

The Party: the consciousness of a class

At this point it is worthwhile to briefly consider what exactly is a Party. Generally, the word Party invokes the idea of an electoral formation, united by a program sufficient to unite its functionaries, candidates, elected members, rank-and-file membership and sufficiently united to present itself to a wider electorate. But this is only a very specific form of a Party – the electoral Party – and not the general sort that Gramsci brings our attention to.

Gramsci’s Modern Prince offers a general historical theorization of parties in order to better situate the particular tasks of the party of the proletariat. The history of the political party is not the history of electoralism or the party construed in such narrow terms, but rather the history of the social classes themselves. With politics theorized at a superstructural level as being a reflection of contradictions in the fundamental structure of society, parties appear all throughout history where we find basic class contradictions in the structure of society. The history of political parties is not the history of its founders or leading intellectual thinkers, but rather the intricate network of relations with which the party is attached to and organizes its social class.

The Black Panther Party succeeded like no other revolutionary organization in its era – arguably in the whole of the twentieth century America – in the recruitment of this “mass element.” However, the breakneck speed of the organization’s growth overwhelmed its capacity to preserve the unity of its cadre, that “principle cohesive element” when faced with repression and counter-intelligence.

The Black Panther Party succeeded like no other revolutionary organization in its era – arguably in the whole of the twentieth century America – in the recruitment of this “mass element.” However, the breakneck speed of the organization’s growth overwhelmed its capacity to preserve the unity of its cadre – that “principle cohesive element” – when faced with repression and counter-intelligence.

Gramsci argues that all parties have (1) a mass element “whose participation takes the form of discipline and loyalty, rather than any creative spirit or organizational ability (2) a cadre element, “the principal cohesive element,” without which the former would “scatter into an impotent diaspora and vanish into nothing”; and (3) “an intermediate element, which articulates the first element with the second and maintains contact between them (152-3). This schematic outline of the Party form is offered as a matter of objective historical fact, one that the communist party must observe if it is to succeed in its task. The distinction with the Communist Party is that it represents a class whose historical mission is to abolish class distinctions altogether.

That Gramsci had a distinctly Leninist view on the party, but a Leninist view nonetheless, is evident from this hierarchical structuring of the Party and the tasks that it must be prepared to confront. Of particular interest to Gramsci concerning the various strata of the party is how these strata must be organized to guard against destruction. Gramsci argues that firstly, an iron conviction must prevail amongst the various strata that a solution has been found to the historical problems faced by its class. Gramsci’s views on philosophy clarify that such an iron conviction is not based on dogma, but on the development of a philosophy of praxis that actually addresses the problems of the masses and adequately reflects the contours of the historical bloc. Without this ‘iron discipline,’ the intermediate strata cannot be formed. But this philosophy of praxis, as we have seen in the foregoing analysis on philosophy, is not a simplified Marxism. Gramsci was a harsh critic of crude materialism and economism, and understood the dangers of such an articulation of Marxism included losing its connection with a top layer of intellectuals that it needed to bring under its hegemony (164).

Gramsci uses the metaphor of the “modern prince,” building on Machiavelli’s concept of the Prince, to stand in for the role required of the communist party to develop a national-popular will, not a will developed around an individual, but a collective will of the popular masses: “The protagonist of the new Prince could not in the modern epoch be an individual hero, but only the political party” (147).

The State and Civil Society

In March 1927, the General Labor Union in Shanghai, under direction of the Chinese Communist Party, launched a general strike and an armed insurrection of some 600,000 workers (image to left) against the warlords and in support of the approaching Revolutionary Nationalist Army led by the Kuomintang, which the communists were members of. While praising the unions publicly, Chiang Kai-shek proceeded to secretly raise a paramilitary force with support from the bourgeoisie and the criminal underworld to drown the communist forces in their own blood. During the Winnipeg General Strike in the summer of 1919, workers inspired by the Russian revolution completely took control of the city (image to left). While the local ruling elites and the Canadian government completely lost political power for a span of weeks within the city, the Citizens’ Committee of One Thousand (image to right) – a secretive organization of Winnipeg’s bourgeoisie created – was created to maintain the unity of its class and counter the revolutionary advances. This was organization served as the main liaise to coordinate the military response which by the Canadian government which ended the strike in late June 1919.

During the Winnipeg General Strike in the summer of 1919, workers inspired by the Russian revolution completely took control of the city (image to left). While the local ruling elites and the Canadian government completely lost political power for a span of weeks within the city, the Citizens’ Committee of One Thousand (image to right) – a secretive organization of Winnipeg’s bourgeoisie created – was created to maintain the unity of its class and counter the revolutionary advances, and finally, facilitate the Canadian state’s quasi-military repression of the strike in late June 1919.

Returning to the question of the state and civil society, Gramsci’s definition of the State is not limited to “formal political society,” which includes the official organs of the State, but instead “the State is the entire complex of practical and theoretical activities with which the ruling class not only justifies and maintains its dominance, but manages to win the active consent of those over whom it rules” (244). In other words, a theorization of the State must include those organs of bourgeois power that are outside official bourgeois-democratic state organs – the mere “outer ditch” of bourgeois power – to include the exercise of bourgeois domination of civil society, where bourgeois power is constituted “in a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks” (238).

Therefore, based on the foregoing explication of Gramsci’s conceptualizations of the historical bloc, relations of force and the analysis of situations, philosophy, the organic intellectual, the Party, and the State and civil society, we can develop a fuller appreciation of Gramsci’s understanding of revolutionary strategy.

War of Position vs. War of Maneuver

Gramsci warned that “in political struggle one should not ape the methods of the ruling class, or one will fall into easy ambushes” (232). Reflecting on the postwar situation in Italy, Gramsci warns in the prison notebooks of trying to counter the illegal private armed organizations of the ruling classes with similar commando-like tactics:

    It is stupid to believe that when one is confronted by illegal private action one can counterpose to it another similar action – in other words, combat commando tactics by means of commando tactics… The class factor leads to a fundamental difference: a class which has to work fixed hours every day cannot have permanent and specialised assault organizations – as can a class which has ample financial resources and all of whose members are not tied down by fixed work (232).3

Gramsci also dismisses the rapid war of movement / war of manoeuvre as a strategy for the proletariat by focusing on Luxemburg’s conceptualization of the mass strike, wherein

    the immediate economic element (crises, etc.) is seen as the field artillery which in war opens a breach in the enemy’s defenses – a breach sufficient for one’s own troops to rush in and obtain a definitive (strategic) victory… This view was a form of iron economic determinism, with the aggravating factor that it was conceived of as operating with lightning speed in time and space. It was thus out and out historical mysticism (233).

The Muslim Brotherhood: Political Islam may not be a friend of the revolutionary communist movement, but the Muslim Brotherhood’s power in Egypt today reflects decades and decades of political Islam’s construction of a counter-power from within Egyptian society.

The Muslim Brotherhood: Political Islam may not be a friend of the revolutionary communist movement, but the Muslim Brotherhood’s power in Egypt today reflects decades and decades of construction of a counter-power in ideological, social, political, and potentially military terms.

For the modern proletariat, however, it is the war of position that is the strategy for proletarian revolution – a protracted revolutionary strategy (more on the parallels with Mao’s protracted people’s war in Part II of this paper). With the failed attempts at proletarian revolutions in the early 1920s weighing heavily upon Gramsci’s conscience, he recognized that “in the case of the most advanced States, where ‘civil society’ has become a very complex structure and one which is resistant to the catastrophic ‘incursions’ of the immediate economic element (crises, depressions, etc.)” then the proletarian revolution must focus its strategy on carving out power within “the superstructures of civil society” which are “like the trench-systems of modern warfare” (235). In light of the ICM’s failures, Gramsci had the hindsight to recognize and boldness to state “a crisis cannot give the attacking forces the ability to organize with lightning speed in time and in space; still less can it endow them with fighting spirit” (235). This is an argument against spontaneity. It sometimes seems like “a fierce artillery attack seemed to have destroyed the enemy’s entire defensive system, whereas in fact it had only destroyed the outer perimeter… The same happens in politics, during great economic crises” (235). Therefore, Gramsci warns, those elements of bourgeois civil society that constituted strong defensive ramparts must be closely studied. Gramsci’s entire conception of philosophy and the role of the party is arguably worked out in relation to the ideological and cultural defensive ramparts of the bourgeoisie that must be ruptured.

Even though only some of these men have formal political power, all of them exercise the power of their class beyond instruments of the State. From top-left, running clockwise: Clinton kickin’ it with some celebrity golfers; Ayatollah Ali Khamenei leading Eid al-Fitr prayers in Tehran; some exuberant priests; and the founders of Kony 2012 posing with the imperialist-backed so-called Sudan People’s Liberation Army. Seriously, WTF!? What North American could pose with a grenade-launcher with a real people’s army, and not find herself/himself convicted with a life’s worth of terrorism charges? But bourgeois white dudes can pose with reactionary paramilitary forces on any given weekend. Not only will these parasites go away after the revolution, much of their base of power will survive it and will have yet to be destroyed.

Even though only some of these men have formal political power, all of them exercise the power of their class (in their own distinct ways) beyond the instruments of the State. From top-left, running clockwise: Clinton kickin’ it with some celebrity golfers; Ayatollah Ali Khamenei leading Eid al-Fitr prayers in Tehran; some exuberant priests; and the founders of Kony 2012 posing with the imperialist-backed so-called Sudan People’s Liberation Army. Seriously, WTF!? What North American could pose with a grenade-launcher with a real people’s army, and not find herself/himself convicted with a life’s worth of terrorism charges? But bourgeois white dudes can pose with reactionary paramilitary forces on any given weekend. Not only will these parasites go away after the revolution, much of their base of power will survive it and will have yet to be destroyed.

Gramsci’s sees the Russian revolution to have corresponded to a war of maneuver – a successful one at that. But he is concerned that to the extent that “1917 has been studied – [it has been only] from superficial and banal viewpoints” (235). Gramsci accuses Trotsky’s formulation of the permanent revolution as constituting a “reflection of the theory of the war of maneuver” (236), which Gramsci views in hindsight as having been inappropriate for the postwar situation. Whereas Trotsky upheld the universality of the “frontal attack in a period in which it only produced defeats,” Gramsci views the postwar situation as having been one wherein the shift to the war of position was necessary, a strategic shift which Lenin understood: “Illich understood that a change was necessary from the war of manoeuvre applied victoriously in the East in 1917, to a war of position which was the only form possible in the West” (237).

Therefore, the war of position, undertaken and led by a proletarian revolutionary vanguard Party on the basis of the criteria outlined above, is the only strategic approach Gramsci viewed as feasible for revolution in the imperialist countries of his day. The task of future communist parties would have to be to identify the openings and necessary points of intervention within ‘civil society’ wherein the communist party could make its interventions and entrench itself for the long battle for ‘terrain’ within the matrices of bourgeois society. This isn’t an argument for operating exclusively or even mainly within the hegemony of bourgeois society, such as through its institutions; but rather to rupture those institutions by building up a dual power of the popular classes.

In the face of the failures of European communist parties in the early 1920s, Gramsci recognized that a more formidable proletarian counter-hegemony was required in advance of an insurrectionary moment, and that only these advanced preparations could consolidate the dictatorship of the proletariat post-revolution. Posed as such, revolutionary strategy can be understood as a continuous process of accumulating revolutionary forces that is punctuated with the rupture of revolution, or revolutions. In other words, a protracted war of position would have to precede the rapid war of maneuver. In revolutionary communist theory today, I believe that this conception bears some similarity with the protracted peoples war strategies of the Revolutionary Communist Party of Canada – though much remains unclear to me about their strategic formulation – and especially that of the new Communist Party of Italy (nPCI). For the nPCI in particular, insurrection is conceptualized as necessary but only as a momentary tactical maneuver within a wider protracted popular war. Without intending to split hairs in the ICM today, we should seriously consider whether Gramsci’s war of position is a more clear and correct articulation of what our tasks are in the imperialist countries today. Gramsci’s strategic framework was specifically developed with the hegemony of the imperialist bourgeoisies in mind, and the term war of position has the added benefit of clearing up confusions and strawman arguments that are easy to make about the idea of PPW in an imperialist country. However, the working out of these ideas – Gramsci in comparison to Mao Tse-Tung’s thought in particular and the modern conceptions of PPW in general – is the main object of Part II of this essay.

Concluding Thoughts: Is Gramsci a launching point for reconceptualizing communist strategy today?

The war of position is never actually applied to the context of Italy, or anywhere else in the imperialist countries, for that matter. Although, the PCI develops a substantial armed apparatus in the early 1940s before the fall of Mussolini, it is disarmed, and under American occupation and in the postwar period, the PCI played a leading role in Europe in blazing a trail of parliamentarism and reformism that comes to be known as ‘Eurocommunism’. With the center of gravity of the international communist movement (ICM) having completed its shift to the third world by the end of world war two, the parties of the ICM in the imperialist countries never seriously take up Gramsci’s ideas. Mao Tse-Tung is (rightfully) looked to as the leading strategic thinker in the International Communist Movement after 1960, this at a time when the name of Gramsci remained obscure for most communists.

In Part II of this essay, I will explore what I believe to be the striking similarities between Gramsci’s reconceptualizing communist strategy and that of Mao and the Chinese revolution. The answers that each gives to the question of Marxism-Leninism’s limitations in the 1920s are strikingly similar, however different and particularized to their very different contexts.

Gramsci went from leading a rapidly expanding revolutionary Party to having virtually unlimited time and undivided attention to reflect on and write on first-hand experiences. As tragic as his imprisonment – and a decade later, his death – were, most revolutionary leaders in Gramsci’s position would have never had that opportunity to comprehensively assess their first-hand experiences. They would have been too busy organizing, or they would have been dead. This is the source of value in Gramsci’s prison notebooks. Let’s make use of them.

Gramsci went from being in the whirlwind of leading a rapidly expanding revolutionary Party to the solitary experience of incarceration, having virtually unlimited time and undivided attention to reflect on and write on first-hand experiences. As tragic as his imprisonment – and a decade later, his death – were, most revolutionary leaders in Gramsci’s position would have never had that opportunity to comprehensively assess their first-hand experiences. They would have been too busy organizing, or they would have been dead. This is the source of value in Gramsci’s prison notebooks. Let’s make use of them.

To reiterate, Gramsci’s prison notebooks constitute a major rejuvenation of revolutionary Marxism, or the ‘philosophy of praxis’. While upholding many of the applicable and valid elements of Marxism-Leninism, Gramsci substantially revises and breaks with elements of orthodoxy that proved disastrous and tragic in their application within the Comintern. Gramsci’s theoretical contributions range from questions of historical materialism, the party form, state and civil society, philosophy, and revolutionary strategy, albeit in a fragmentary unity. Although Gramsci’s prison sentence would claim his health and ultimately his life, it’s doubtful that this level of theoretical development would have been possible without an extended period of solitude that he faced. All the other communist leaders of Gramsci’s caliber would generally have been killed or too pre-occupied with the day-to-day tasks of developing the communist party to embark upon the huge and necessary intellectual project that Gramsci commenced. We owe it to the communist movement, to ourselves, and to the liberation of all oppressed and exploited peoples to return to Gramsci, and take what we must from his contributions. But first, let us consider Gramsci alongside Mao…

We hope for Part II of this long-running exploration of Gramsci and Mao to be ready sometime in 2014. The working title for that piece is “Protracted People’s War and the War of Position: Parallel Ruptures of Mao and Gramsci with Leninism?”

__________________________________________________

1Gramsci referred to Marxism as the philosophy of praxis, perhaps to evade the prison censors, but just as likely because he understood the philosophy itself was more than and beyond Marx the individual.

2 Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution quite simply advocates for the revolution to continue on the offensive indefinitely until world revolution has been achieved, which was the stand-point of Trotsky at the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The historical necessity to consolidate socialist society to ensure the salvation of a revolution has always been considered the ‘Stalinist’ deviation of ‘socialism in one country,’ painting all revolutions with a single brush and failing to differentiate between countries that have actually abandoned communist internationalism and those undergoing a stage of socialist consolidation.

3This is an important observation for the industrial proletariat in the imperialist countries, and clearly not one formulated for, say, conditions of a society of a largely rural peasant population, wherein Mao would develop the idea of protracted people’s war.

The Specter of Authoritarianism and the Future of the Left: An Interview With Henry A. Giroux

By CJ Polychroniou,

Truthout | Interview  – 08 June 2014

Henry A. Giroux (Screengrab via Disposable Life / Vimeo)"The commanding institutions of society in many countries, including the United States, are now in the hands of powerful corporate interests, the financial elite and right-wing bigots whose strangulating control over politics renders democracy corrupt and dysfunctional," says Henry A. Giroux.

To read more articles by C. J. Polychroniou, Henry A. Giroux and other authors in the Public Intellectual Project, click here.

C. J. Polychroniou, for Truthout: It is widely believed that the advanced liberal societies are suffering a crisis of democracy, a view you share wholeheartedly, although the empirical research, with its positivist bias, tends to be more cautious. In what ways is there less democracy today in places like the United States than there was, say, 20 or 30 years ago?

Henry A. Giroux: What we have seen in the United States and a number of other countries since the 1970s is the emergence of a savage form of free market fundamentalism, often called neoliberalism, in which there is not only a deep distrust of public values, public goods and public institutions but the embrace of a market ideology that accelerates the power of the financial elite and big business while gutting those formative cultures and institutions necessary for a democracy to survive.

"Neoliberal societies, in general, are in a state of war – a war waged by the financial and political elite against youth, low-income groups, the elderly, poor minorities of color, the unemployed, immigrants and others now considered disposable."

The commanding institutions of society in many countries, including the United States, are now in the hands of powerful corporate interests, the financial elite and right-wing bigots whose strangulating control over politics renders democracy corrupt and dysfunctional. Of course, what is unique about the United States is that the social contract and social wage are subject to a powerful assault by the right-wing politicians and anti-public intellectuals from both political parties. Those public spheres and institutions that support social provisions, the public good and keep public value alive are under sustained attack. Such attacks have not only produced a range of policies that have expanded the misery, suffering and hardships of millions of people, but have also put into place a growing culture of cruelty in which those who suffer the misfortunes of poverty, unemployment, low skill jobs, homelessness and other social problems are the object of both humiliation and scorn.

Neoliberal societies, in general, are in a state of war – a war waged by the financial and political elite against youth, low-income groups, the elderly, poor minorities of color, the unemployed, immigrants and others now considered disposable. Liberty and freedom are now reduced to fodder for inane commercials or empty slogans used to equate capitalism with democracy. At the same time, liberty and civil rights are being dismantled while state violence and institutional racism is now spreading throughout the culture like wildfire, especially with regards to police harassment of young black and brown youth. A persistent racism can also be seen in the attack on voting rights laws, the mass incarceration of African-American males, and the overt racism that has become prominent among right-wing Republicans and Tea Party types, most of which is aimed at President Obama.

At the same time, women’s reproductive rights are under assault and there is an ongoing attack on immigrants. Education at all levels is being defunded and defined as a site of training rather than as a site of critical thought, dialogue and critical pedagogy. In addition, democracy has withered under the emergence of a national security and permanent warfare state. This is evident not only in endless wars abroad, but also in the passing of a series of laws such as the Patriot Act, the Military Commission Act, the National Defense Authorization Act, and many others laws that shred due process and give the executive branch the right to hold prisoners indefinitely without charge or a trial, authorize a presidential kill list and conduct warrantless wiretaps. Of course, both [former President George W.] Bush and Obama claimed the right to kill any citizens considered to be a terrorist or who have come to the aid of terrorism. In addition, targeted assassinations are now carried out by drones that are more and more killing innocent children, adults and bystanders.

Another index of America’s slide into barbarism and authoritarianism is the rise of the racial punishing state with its school-to prison pipeline, criminalization of a range of social problems, a massive incarceration system, militarization of local police forces and its use of ongoing state violence against youthful dissenters. The prison has now become the model for a type of punishment creep that has impacted upon public schools where young children are arrested for violating something as trivial as doodling on a desk or violating a dress code. Under the dictates of the punishing state, incarceration has become the default solution for every social problem, regardless of how minor it may be. Discordant interactions between teacher and student, however petty, are not treated as a criminal offense. The long arm of punishment creep is also evident in a number of social services where poor people are put under constant surveillance and punished for minor infractions. It is also manifest in the militarization of everyday life with its endless celebration of military, police and religious institutions, all of which are held in high esteem by the American public, in spite of their undeniably authoritarian nature.

"The US has launched an attack not only on the practice of justice and democracy itself, but on the very idea of justice and democracy."

As Edward Snowden made clear, the hidden registers of authoritarianism have come to light in a trove of exposed NSA documents which affirm that the US has become a national security-surveillance state illegally gathering massive amounts of information from diverse sources on citizens who are not guilty of any crimes. To justify such lawlessness, the American public is told that the rendering moot of civil liberties is justified in the name of security and defense against potential terrorists and other threats. In reality, what is being defended is the security of the state and the concentration of economic and political power in the hands of the controlling political and corporate elites.

The real threat, in this case, is the American people and the possibility of their outrage and potential action against such dangerous Orwellian modes of surveillance. What is at risk and must be prevented at all costs is the possibility of dominant power and its machinery of civil and social death from becoming visible. There is also the shameful exercise under Bush, and to a lesser degree under Obama, of state sanctioned torture coupled with a refusal on the part of the government to prosecute those CIA agents and others who willfully engaged in systemic abuses that constitute war crimes. What this list amounts to is the undeniable fact that in the last 40 years, the US has launched an attack not only on the practice of justice and democracy itself, but on the very idea of justice and democracy.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the realm of politics. Money now drives politics in the United States and a number of other countries. Congress and both major political parties have sold themselves to corporate power. Campaigns are largely financed by the financial elite, such as the right wing Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson, major defense corporations such as Lockheed Martin, and major financial institutions such as Goldman Sachs. As a recent Princeton University report pointed out, policy in Washington, DC has nothing to do with the wishes of the people but is almost completely determined by the wealthy, big corporations and a corrupt class of bankers and hedge fund managers made even easier thanks to Citizens United and a number of other laws being enacted by a conservative Supreme Court majority. Hence, it should come as no surprise that Princeton University researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page came to the conclusion that that the United States is basically an oligarchy where power is wielded by a small number of elites.

In other words, you do not think we have an existential crisis of democracy, the result of an economic crisis, with unforeseen and unintended consequences, but an actual corrosion of democracy, with calculated effects? Is this correct?

I think we have both. Not only has democracy been undermined and transformed into a form of authoritarianism unique to the 21st century, but there is also an existential crisis that is evident in the despair, depoliticization and crisis of subjectivity that has overtaken much of the population, particularly since 9/11 and the economic crisis of 2007. The economic crisis is not matched by a crisis of ideas and many people have surrendered to a neoliberal ideology that limits their sense of agency by defining them primarily as consumers, subjects them to a pervasive culture of fear, blames them for problems that are not of their doing, and leads them to believe that violence is the only mediating force available to them, just the pleasure quotient is colonized and leads people to assume that the spectacle of violence is the only way in which they can feel anything anymore. The existential crisis is further intensified in the brutal and degrading manner in which those marginalized by poverty, joblessness, and other constructed forms of misery are demeaned and humiliated in the dominant discourse of conservatives and other right-wing fundamentalists. Despair now disavows politics and turns into a kind of sadomasochistic knot seeking a kind of revenge on those deemed disposable, while demeaning those who thrive in such an emotional wasteland.

"Self-interest has become more important than the general interest and common good."

How else to interpret polls that show that a majority of Americans support the death penalty, government surveillance, drone warfare, the prison-industrial complex and zero tolerance policies that punish children. Trust, honor, intimacy, compassion and caring for others are now viewed as liabilities, just as self-interest has become more important than the general interest and common good. Selfishness, self-interest and an unchecked celebration of individualism have become, as Joseph E. Stiglitz has argued, "the ultimate form of selflessness." One consequence of neoliberalism is that it makes a virtue of producing a collective existential crisis, a crisis of agency and subjectivity, one that saps democracy of its vitality. There is nothing about this crisis that suggests it is unrelated to the internal working of casino capitalism. The economic crisis intensified its worse dimensions, but the source of the crisis lies in the roots of neoliberalism, particularly since its inception since the 1970s when social democracy proved unable to curb the crisis of capitalism and economics became the driving force of politics.

In your writings, you refer frequently to the specter of authoritarianism. Are you envisioning Western liberal democracies turning to authoritarian-style capitalism as in China, Russia, Singapore and Malaysia, to "friendly fascism" or to oligarchic democracy?

Each country will develop its own form of authoritarianism rooted in the historical, pedagogical and cultural traditions best suited for it to reproduce itself. In the US, there will be an increase in military-style repression to deal with the inevitable economic, ecological, political crisis that will intensify under the new authoritarianism. In this instance, the appeal will largely be to security, reinforced by a culture of fear and an intensified appeal to nationalism. At the same time, this "hard war" against the American people will be supplemented by a "soft war" produced with the aid of the new electronic technologies of surveillance and control, but there will also be a full-fledged effort through the use of the pedagogical practices of various cultural apparatuses, extending from the schools and older forms of media, on the one hand, to the new media and digital modes of communication, on the other, to produce elements of the authoritarian personality while crushing as much as possible any form of collective dissent and struggle. State sovereignty has been replaced by corporate sovereignty and this constitutes what might be called a new form of totalitarianism that Michael Halberstam once stated, "haunts the modern ideal of political emancipation."

"State sovereignty has been replaced by corporate sovereignty and this constitutes what might be called a new form of totalitarianism."

As Chris Hedges has argued, "There is no national institution left that can accurately be described as democratic." What is unique about this form of authoritarianism is that it is driven by a criminal class of powerful financial and political elites who refuse to make political concessions. The new elites have no allegiances to nation-states and don’t care about the damage they do to workers, the environment or the rest of humanity. They are unhinged sociopaths, far removed from what the Occupy Movement called the 99%. They are the new, gated class who float above national boundaries, laws and forms of regulation. They are a global elite whose task is to transform all nation-states into instruments to enrich their wealth and power. The new authoritarianism is not just tantamount to a crisis of democracy; it is also about the limits now being placed on the very meaning of politics and the erasure of those institutions capable of producing critical, engaged and socially responsible agents.

The role of neoliberalism in reducing democracy and destroying public values is an undeniable fact as the economics of neoliberal capitalism seek to establish the supremacy of corporate and market values over all political and social values. Many of your books represent a systematic attack on the neoliberal project. Do you treat neoliberalism as a policy paradigm congruent with a certain stage in the evolution of capitalism or as a particular philosophy of capitalism?

Neoliberalism is both an updated and more ruthless stage in predatory capitalism and its search for the consolidations of class power globally, buttressed by the free market fundamentalism made famous by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, without any regard for the social contract. As Robert McChesney has argued, it is classical liberalism with the gloves off or shall we say liberalism without the guilt – a more predatory form of market fundamentalism that is as ruthless as it is orthodox in its disregard for democracy.

The old liberalism believed in social provisions and partly pressed the claims for social and economic justice. Neoliberalism considers the discourse of equality, justice and democracy quaint, if not dangerous, and must be either trivialized, turned into its Orwellian opposite or eviscerated from public life. It certainly represents more than an intensification of classical liberalism and in that sense it represents a confluence, a historical conjuncture in which the most ruthless elements of capitalism have come together to create something new and more predatory, amplified by the financialization of capital and the development of a mode of corporate sovereignty that takes no prisoners.

Some years ago, in an attempt to analyze the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, you invented the term "the politics of disposability." Do you consider "disposability" to be a systemic element of global neoliberal capitalism?

Neoliberalism’s war against the social state has produced new forms of collateral damage. As security nets are destroyed and social bonds undermined, casino capitalism relies on a version of social Darwinism to both punish its citizens and legitimate its politics of exclusion [and] violence, and convince people that the new normal is a constant state of fear, insecurity and precarity. By individualizing the social, all social problems and their effects are coded as individual character flaws, a lack of individual responsibility, and often a form of pathology. Life is now a war zone and as such the number of people considered disposable has grown exponentially and this includes low income whites, poor minorities, immigrants, the unemployed, the homeless and a range of people who are viewed as a liability to capital and its endless predatory quest for power and profits.

"Life is now a war zone and as such the number of people considered disposable has grown exponentially."

Under the regime of neoliberalism, Americans now live in a society where ever-expanding segments of the population are subject to being spied on, considered potential terrorists and subject to a mode of state and corporate lawlessness in which the arrogance of power knows no limits. As American society becomes increasingly militarized and political concessions become relics of a long abandoned welfare state, hollowed out to serve the interests of global markets, the collective sense of ethical imagination and social responsibility towards those who are vulnerable or in need of care has become the central source of societal scourge. What has emerged under the regime of neoliberalism is a notion of disposability in which entire populations are now considered excess, relegated to zones of social death and abandonment, surveillance and incarceration. The death-haunted politics of disposability is a systemic element of neoliberal capitalism actively engaged in forms of asset stripping as is evident in the wave of austerity policies at work in North America and Europe.

The politics of disposability is also one of neoliberalism’s most powerful organizing principles rendering millions who are suffering under its market-driven policies and practices as excess, rendered redundant according to the laws of a market that wages violence against the 99% for the benefit of the new financial elite. Disposable populations are now consigned to zones of terminal exclusion, inhabiting a space of social and civil death. These are students, unemployed youth and members of the working poor as well as the middle class who have no resources, jobs or hope. They are the voiceless and powerless who represent the ghostly presence of the moral vacuity and criminogenic nature of neoliberalism. The growing ranks of those considered disposable are also its greatest fear and potential threat. What is particularly distinctive about this neoliberal historical conjuncture is the way in which young people, particularly low-income and poor minority youth, are increasingly denied any place in an already weakened social contract and the degree to which they are no longer seen as central to how the many neoliberal societies define their future.

Adjusting themselves to the neoliberal reality, universities worldwide are turning increasingly toward corporate management models and marketization. What impact are these shifts likely to have on the traditional role of the university as a public sphere?

The increasing corporatization of higher education poses a dire threat to its role as a democratic public sphere and a vital site where students can learn to address important social issues, be self-reflective and learn the knowledge, values and ideas central to deepening and expanding the capacities they need to be engaged and critical agents. Under neoliberalism, higher education is dangerous because it has the potential to educate young people to think critically and learn how to hold power accountable. Unfortunately, with the rise of the corporate university which now defines all aspects of governing, curriculum, financial matters and a host of other academic policies, education is now largely about training, creating an elite class of managers, and eviscerating those forms of knowledge that conjure up what might be considered dangerous forms of moral witnessing and collective political action.

Any subject or mode of knowledge that does not serve the instrumental needs of capital is rendered disposable, suggesting that the only value of any worth is exchange value; the only pedagogical practice of any value must be reduced to a commercial transaction. The corporate university is the ultimate expression of a disimagination machine, which employs a top-down authoritarian style of power, mimics a business culture, infantilizes students by treating them as consumers, and depoliticizes faculty by removing them from all forms of governance. As William Boardman argues, the destruction of higher education "by the forces of commerce and authoritarian politics is a sad illustration of how the democratic ethos (educate everyone to their capacity, for free) has given way to exploitation (turning students into a profit center that has the serendipitous benefit of feeding inequality)."

"Any subject or mode of knowledge that does not serve the instrumental needs of capital is rendered disposable."

Particularly disturbing here is the corporate university’s attempt to wage a war on higher education by reducing the overwhelming number of faculty to part-time help with no power, benefits or security. Many part-time and non-tenured faculty in the United States qualify for food stamps and are living slightly above the poverty level. The slow death of the university as a center of critique, a fundamental source of civic education and a crucial public good make available the fundamental framework for the emergence of a formative culture that produces and legitimates an authoritarian society. The corporatization of higher education constitutes a serious strike against democracy and gives rise to the kind of thoughtlessness that Hanna Arendt believed was at the core of totalitarianism.

A glimpse of such thoughtlessness was on display recently at Rutgers University when the university offered an honorary degree to Condoleezza Rice, while offering to pay her $35,000 and to pay her to give a commencement speech. There is no honor in giving such a prestigious degree to a war criminal. Too many universities have become captives of corporate power. For instance, New York University, in its attempt to expand the reach of neoliberal academic globalization, constructed a campus in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, in which, as The New York Times pointed out, workers were beaten and deported for going on strike, forced to pay recruitment fees that added up to a year’s wages, and had their passports held in order to squelch dissent. But, then again, higher education is now firmly entrenched in what President Eisenhower once called the military-industrial-academic complex.

What role does popular culture play in contemporary democratic life?

Popular culture is largely colonized by corporations and is increasingly used to reproduce a culture of consumerism, stupidity and illiteracy. Mainstream popular culture is a distraction and disimagination machine in which mass emotions are channeled towards an attraction for spectacles while suffocating all vestiges of the imagination, promoting the idea that any act of critical thinking is an act of stupidity and offering up the illusion of agency through gimmicks like voting on American Idol. What is crucial to remember about popular culture is that it is not simply about entertainment; it also functions to produce particular desires, subjectivities and identities. It has become one of the most important and powerful sites of education or what I have called an oppressive form of public pedagogy. Film, television, talk radio, video games, newspapers, social networks and online media do not merely entertain us; they are also teaching machines that offer interpretations of the world and largely function to produce a public with limited political horizons. They both titillate and create a mass sensibility that is conducive to maintaining a certain level of consent while legitimating the dominant values, ideologies, power relations and policies that maintain regimes of neoliberalism.

"Market culture functions largely to turn people into consumers, suggesting that the only obligation of citizenship is to shop."

There are a number of registers through which popular culture produces a subject willing to become complicit with their own oppression. Celebrity culture collapses the public into the private and reinforces a certain level of stupidity. Surveillance culture undermines notions of privacy and is largely interested in locking people into strangulating orbits of privatization and atomization. A militarized popular culture offers up the spectacle of violence and a hyper-masculine image of agency as both a site of entertainment and as a mediating force through which to solve all problems. Violence now becomes the most important element of power and mediating force in shaping social relationships. Market culture functions largely to turn people into consumers, suggesting that the only obligation of citizenship is to shop. This is largely a way to depoliticize the population and distract them from recognizing their capacities as critically engaged agents and to empty out any notion of politics that would demand thoughtfulness, social responsibility and the demands of civic courage.

There is also a subversive side to popular culture as Stuart Hall implied when he argued that the left "has no sense of politics being educative, of politics changing the way people see things." In a similar fashion, the late Pierre Bourdieu argued that the left "has underestimated the symbolic and pedagogical dimensions of struggle and have not always forged appropriate weapons to fight on this front."Both theorists were pointing in part to the failure of the left to take seriously the political unconscious and the need to use alternative media, theater, online journals and news outlets. At the same time, there is enormous pedagogical value in bringing attention in the rare oppositional representations offered within the dominant media. In this instance, popular culture can be a powerful resource to map and critically engage the everyday, mobilize alternative narratives to capitalism, activate those needs vital to producing more critical and compassionate modes of subjectivity. Film, television, news programs, social media and other instruments of culture can be used to make education central to a politics that is emancipatory and utterly committed to developing a democratic, formative culture.

At stake here is the need for progressives to not only understand popular culture and its cultural apparatuses as modes of dominant ideology but to also take popular culture seriously as a tool to revive the radical imagination and to make education central to politics so as to change the way people think, desire and dream. Stanley Aronowitz is right in arguing that "education would be one of the crucial tasks of a radical political formation" and would need to launch a comprehensive educational program extending from the creation of online journals and magazines to the development of alternative schools. Everything must be done to offer an educational and political counter-offensive to what Cornelius Castoriadis called "the shameful degradation of the critical function."

While we speak of a crisis in democracy, some writers speak of a crisis in neoliberalism, probably influenced by the recent global crisis in neoliberal capitalism. Do you believe that neoliberalism is in a crisis?

I think it is more appropriate to argue that neoliberalism creates and thrives on crises. Crises provide the opening for radical neoliberal reforms, for suspending all government regulations, and for building support for extreme policies that under normal conditions would not be allowed to be put in place. One only has to think about Hurricane Katrina and how the Bush administration used to destroy the public school system and replace it with charter schools. Or how 9/11 offered up an opportunity for going to war with Iraq and drastically curtailing civil liberties that benefitted the rich and powerful defense corporations.

The "retreat of the intellectuals" is not a recent phenomenon, yet it has become quite pervasive, partly due to the collapse of socialism and partly due to the marketization of contemporary society as well as the neoliberal restructuring of the university. In your view, how critical is the "retreat of the intellectuals" to the struggle for radical social change?

The seriousness of the retreat of intellectuals from addressing important social issues, aiding social movements and using their knowledge to create a critical formative culture cannot be overstated. Unfortunately, the retreat of the intellectuals in the struggle against neoliberalism and other forms of domination is now matched by the rise of anti-public intellectuals who have sold themselves to corporate power. More specifically, neoliberalism has created not only a vast apparatus of pedagogical relations that privileges deregulation, privatization, commodification and the militarization of everyday life, but also an army of anti-public intellectuals who function largely in the interest of the financial elite. Rather than show what is wrong with democracy, they do everything they can to destroy it. These intellectuals are bought and sold by the financial elite and are nothing more than ideological puppets using their skills to destroy the social contract, critical thought and all those social institutions capable of constructing non-commodified values and democratic public spheres.

"Intellectuals have a responsibility to connect their work to important social issues, work with popular movements and engage in the shaping of policies that benefit all people and not simply a few."

They are the enemies of democracy and are crucial in creating subjectivities and values that buy into the notion that capital rather than people are the subject of history and that consuming is the only obligation of citizenship. Their goal is to normalize the ideologies, modes of governance and policies that reproduce massive inequities and suffering for the many, and exorbitant and dangerous privileges for the corporate and financial elite. Moreover, such intellectuals are symptomic of the fact that neoliberalism represents a new historical conjuncture in which cultural institutions and political power have taken on a whole new life in shaping politics. What this suggests is that the left in its various registers has to create its own public intellectuals in higher education, the alternative media and all of those spaces where meaning circulates. Intellectuals have a responsibility to connect their work to important social issues, work with popular movements and engage in the shaping of policies that benefit all people and not simply a few.

At the heart of this suggestion is the need to recognize that ideas matter in the battle against authoritarianism and that pedagogy must be central to any viable notion of politics and collective struggle. Public intellectuals have an obligation to work for global peace, individual freedom, care of others, economic justice and democratic participation, especially at a time of legitimized violence and tyranny. I completely agree with the late Pierre Bourdieu when he insisted that there is enormous political importance "to defend the possibility and necessity of the intellectual, who is firstly critical of the existing state of affairs. There is no genuine democracy without genuine opposing critical power." The very notion of being an engaged public intellectual is neither foreign to nor a violation of what it means to be an academic scholar, but central to its very definition. Put simply, academics have a duty to enter into the public sphere unafraid to take positions and generate controversy, functioning as moral witnesses, raising political awareness and making connections to those elements of power and politics often hidden from public view.

One final question. Are you optimistic about the future of the left and of progressive politics in general?

It is impossible to be on the left and at the same time surrender to the normalization of a dystopian vision. One has to be optimistic, but also realistic. This means that there is no room for a kind of romanticized utopianism. Instead, one has to be motivated by a faith in the willingness of young people principally to fight for a future in which dignity, equality and justice matter and at the same time recognize the forces that are preventing such a struggle. More specifically, hope has to be fed by the need for collective action. Power is never completely on the side of domination and resistance is not a luxury but a necessity.

"Power is never completely on the side of domination and resistance is not a luxury but a necessity."

As Stanley Aronowitz has argued the left has to engage the issue of economic inequality, overcome its fragmentation, develop an international social formation for radical democracy and the defense of the public good, undertake ways to finance itself, take seriously the educative nature of politics and the need to change the way people think, and develop a comprehensive notion of politics and a vision to match. History is open, though the gates are closing fast. The issue for me personally is not whether I am pessimistic, but how am I going to use whatever intellectual resources I have to make it harder to prevent various events and problems from getting worse while at the same time struggling for a society in which the promise of democracy appears on the horizon of possibility.

(Photo: Arcady/Shutterstock)

By Kyle Chayka

Pacific Standard, May 28, 2014

“To the disappointment of my friends … I seem to have become a Marxist public intellectual,” begins the introduction of the novelist (and erstwhile Marxist public intellectual) Benjamin Kunkel’s new book, Utopia or Bust: A Guide to the Present Crisis. The short collection of essays introduces readers to a clutch of writers, economists, and philosophers who are pioneering what Kunkel sees as the next generation of Marxism, a rejuvenated wave of political thought focused on providing an alternative to the ideology of neoliberalism and the “going capitalist crisis,” which, to Kunkel’s eyes as well as those of a number of other observers, is a visible failure that will only fail harder in the future.

“Most of my youth went by during the end of history,” Kunkel continues, referencing Francis Fukuyama’s 1990s formulation that Western liberal democracy constituted a final step toward a peaceful, level world without conflict (spoiler: It didn’t). That end of history, Kunkel writes, “has itself now come to an end.” He structures his depiction of this post-non-apocalyptic purgatory around two decisive events: 9/11 and the financial crisis. The former knocked Western hegemony off the seemingly inexorable victory that Fukuyama prophesied while the latter underlined the global economy’s ballooning inequality, prompting new social movements like Occupy and disenfranchising the young generation, of which Kunkel is both a leader and a chronicler (see his gently mocking portrayal in New York magazine for a depiction of that role). “It will probably be decisive that capitalism has forfeited the allegiance of many people who are today under thirty,” he writes.

While unemployment remains in the double digits, corporations sit on trillions of dollars in cash, Kunkel explains. This run-up in both capital and labor is the “present crisis” of the book’s title—the problem is that while capitalism creates an ongoing expansion of the two, the world is increasingly unable to turn the capital factors and labor into profit at the same rate that it used to, like a factory with a broken-down assembly line. Income from capital is reproducing faster than income from profit, breeding inequality. So what should be done to solve this problem?

Marxish dumps Marx’s difficult teleology in which socialism inevitably triumphs over capitalism, or “capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation.”

Kunkel’s book doesn’t quite propose answers; his next volume will, he promises. “The essays attempt no original contribution to Marxist, or what you might call Marxish, thought,” he writes. “They simply offer basic introductions” on the way to the “minimum utopian program” that society needs to implement in the face of rampant, exploitative capitalism.

THE “MARXISH” COINAGE IS a good way of referring to this next-generation critical political thought being put into practice by the left, a kind of functional Marxism. Marxish dumps Marx’s difficult teleology in which socialism inevitably triumphs over capitalism, or “capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation.” Instead, thinkers like Kunkel and his subjects are using Marxism as a tool to deconstruct and mitigate the destructive effects of capitalism as we see them occurring in the world today.

The Marxish milieu has come to the fore lately in a collection of journals and magazines widely regarded as the forefront of contemporary intellectual writing in the United States. The thrice-yearly journal n+1, of which Kunkel is a co-founder, provided space for Marxish criticism, produced a broadsheet during the heyday of Occupy, and has served as an incubator for books about the financial crisis, office environments, and hipsters. The magazine also produces posters emblazoned with the suitably tongue-in-cheek-or-is-it slogan “Utopia in our time.”

If n+1 isn’t expressly political, Jacobin magazine (Kunkel is a contributing editor) and The New Inquiry, a Web-based journal, make it more explicit. Jacobin is “a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture.” Lately, it has made an impact with popular essays like Miya Tokumitsu’s “In the Name of Love,” taking down uncompensated labor made socially prestigious. The New Inquiry aims its critical barbs at pop culture, exploring the the political and economic subtexts of books, films, and television—see Bijan Stephen’s riff on rap and economics, “Capital Flows.”

Verso Books, which also co-published Utopia or Bust, is a branch of New Left Review, an influential political magazine launched in 1960. Along with Dissent, an older magazine founded in 1954 by a group of intellectuals including Norman Mailer and Meyer Schapiro that has been picking up steam lately by featuring younger writers, it represents the heritage of an older generation of leftist publishing projects. Together, these platforms offer not only a way to communicate these refreshed ideas to the wider world, but, perhaps more importantly, they give the new political generation a chance to connect with each other, to debate and solidify their ideas in public.

IF KUNKEL AND HIS cohort represent the rising tide of Marxish thought, they already have their conversation-starter. Thomas Piketty is a French economist whose recent book Capital in the Twenty-First Century is making headlines in mainstream media, selling out across the country, and making its author a household name all while openly name-checking Marx with its title. Piketty’s main argument—that capital is profitably reproducing faster than labor, thus rampantly increasing inequality—dovetails with Kunkel’s concerns and backs up the claim that inequality has pushed disenfranchised youth to consider Marxism anew. But Piketty isn’t necessarily Marxist, or even Marxish. Rather than a manifesto for change, his book has become a shibboleth that different political groups interpret in ways that reinforce their own ideologies.

Piketty hasn’t really read Marx, he told The New Republic, which argues that he has. The Financial Times argues that Piketty’s data is bad, but the consensus remains that the trend Piketty defines holds true. Other say that Piketty is at heart a capitalist. Conservatives deem this sudden popularity a “new Marxism,” or perhaps a “decaf Marxism,” a wolf dressed in the clothing of a milquetoast French academic.

It’s telling that though many debate who Piketty is, there are few quibbles over his thesis of inequality—the vital issue that’s behind a wide swath of political activity from Occupy to the Tea Party. What’s left to argue over is if inequality is fundamentally good or bad for society. If we conclude that widening the economic divide between rich and poor is not helping anyone, then why not try out Kunkel’s Marxish argument that neoliberalism has failed to become a final answer and we have to find a provisional alternative to outright capitalism? In the midst of our ongoing crisis, it’s not like we have much to lose.

Kyle Chayka is a freelance technology and culture writer living in Brooklyn. Follow him on Twitter @chaykak.

Robin Small

Karl Marx: The Revolutionary as Educator

Springer, New York, 2013. 85pp., £44.99

Reviewed by Patrick Ainley

This book meets a need illustrated by a recent poster advertising a meeting for students at the London University Institute of Education that asked ‘Who was Karl Marx?’

Such is the repetitive diet of Foucauldianism, augmented by the latest academic fashion for Deleuze and Guattari, that even postgraduate students of education are unaware that Marx was, as this book begins by asserting, ‘an important educational thinker’.

Although Marx wrote before the modern state school system was established, Small states ‘He is the greatest theorist of the society that gave rise to schools as we know them – and this is the society we still live in’ (1). As he adds, Marx wrote for people who needed to find out what was wrong with the society they lived in, and how to change it for the better, and so he was also an educator. More importantly, ‘Marx is an educator for us. He challenges us to develop our capacity to think critically about our own society’ (2). This is the seminal Marx presented in this book.

Robin Small, a philosopher of education at Auckland University who has previously written Marx and Education (Ashgate, 2005), is well qualified to introduce new readers to Marx’s revolutionary education in the concise form intended by Springer’s series on ‘Key Thinkers in Education’, edited by Paul Gibbs, in which each chapter is separately downloadable, although the overall price – in virtual form or hard covers – is exorbitant. Hopefully, however, the book will make its way into libraries, because it is an introduction to Marx’s life as well as to his thought. So Small begins with Marx’s own education at the Trier Gymnasium, quoting Marx’s prize-winning essay `Thoughts of a Youth on Choosing a Vocation’, which insists ‘worth can be assured only by a profession in which we are not servile tools, but in which we act independently in our own sphere’ (5). Then, in Bonn and Berlin Universities, Small introduces the ideas of Bauer, Feuerbach and Stirner, which influenced Dr Marx before ‘the theoretical mind, once liberated in itself, turns into practical energy’ (quoted 9) in the form of ‘Marx as Journalist’.

Small details particularly Marx’s debate with Stirner, who ‘wrote on education from a teacher’s standpoint’ (21), and with Feuerbach, taking ‘education’ in the third ‘thesis’ on Feuerbach ‘in a wide sense, to include all the influences that determine human development’ (19), like enculturation in the German term Bildung. Here ‘Marx is emphasizing a critical thinking which is also self-critical’ (24). Then in his first works with Engels, Marx breaks with Bauer to found ‘the theory later known as “historical materialism” [which] centres on a distinction between the “base” and “superstructure”’ (25), with education a part of the superstructure. ‘This is the basis on which Marx is able to advance proposals for school reform. He can acknowledge the limits to what can be achieved within a capitalist society, yet still look for opportunities for an education that runs ahead of the present state of things’ (27).

Thus in The Communist Manifesto Marx proposes ‘Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c, &c.’ What Marx meant by this in relation to the debate over factory schools and over state education as well as the curriculum, Small traces in Marx’s contributions to the educational programme of the First International. Here he ‘emphasized the need for working within the existing social order, while at the same time arguing against … education by the state’, and for ‘a system of state regulation without “interference”’, ‘citing as an example the decentralized public school system of Massachusetts’ (57). Marx and Engels were also impressed by the educational reforms of the Paris Commune, which ‘confirmed that a socialist revolution could not simply take over existing state power but would have to set up an entirely new apparatus of government’ (58). So, they advocated a polytechnic curriculum, which ‘imparts the general principles of all processes of production’, like Corbon’s enseignement professionel, which ‘rethought the idea of technical education’ to take advantage of the positive side of flexibility, so that workers can move from one branch of industry as desired, rather than spending their lives in ‘life-long repetition of one and the same trivial operation’ (66).

Meanwhile, Marx’s daughters enrolled in a relatively conventional academic schooling at the South Hampstead College for Ladies, where their father was rather proud of their achievements, but complained repeatedly about the fees! ‘None of this’, Small comments, ‘would have suited Eleanor Marx particularly’, as she was ‘the most like her father in personality – energetic and independent, with a strong rebellious spirit’ (53).

Having seen how Marx responded to the educational issues of his time, Small asks what we can learn from him now that education has become the principal legitimator of social inequality, and a prime means of social control over prolonged youth. ‘Simply repeating what he says … will not be enough … we have to bring our own thinking to the task’ (70). Small focuses on two central topics: the school in today’s society, and the teaching force. (It is a pity he does not extend this discussion to further and higher education, as the age of education has extended to schoolify these institutions.) ‘To rescue education from the influence of the ruling class’, as The Communist Manifesto urges, Marx resists restricting the curriculum to subjects supposedly protected from ideological influences; rather he sees the need to counteract them, together with tradition and habit. These are all instances of ideology, but ‘not simply deceptions imposed on some passive audience. They are grounded in experience and this is the source of their strength and persistence’ (73). ‘Marx located education within “practical social relations” rather than with art, religion and philosophy in the higher regions of the social “superstructure”.’ Education is thus in dynamic interaction with the economic base. As he puts it, ‘education produces labour capacity’, just as health care maintains or restores the ability to work, so that, as Small comments, ‘While the school may be a location where ideology is passed on, that is not its main function’. This avoids ‘the simplistic view that public education in capitalist society is an elaborate conspiracy to spread false beliefs’ (74).

At the present time, that of the so-called ‘knowledge economy’ and ‘information society’, specialised expertise is crucial to the creation of new wealth, as well as itself being a commodity. As Small points out, ‘In one draft for Capital, Marx speaks of the “general intellect” or “social mind” – that is, the sum of society’s scientific understanding and expertise – as being a means of production in its own right … As Marx puts it, the general progress and accumulation of society’s knowledge “is appropriated gratis by capital”’ (74); ‘At this point, invention becomes a business, and the application of science to immediate production itself becomes a factor determining and soliciting science’ (75). Institutionalised education is bound up with this development, but Marx adds that education distributes knowledge unequally to different classes, as it perverts what ought to be a public good into private knowledge. The modern state has turned public education into a quasi-market, which is ‘free’ only within narrow boundaries, so that promises of equal opportunities and access for all cannot be realised.

This process of marketisation entails what Small calls a ‘redefinition of the “ideological castes”’ (79). This is being imposed in a different historical context from that in which a rising bourgeoisie sought to establish its power, giving rise to Adam Smith’s distinction between unproductive labour, associated with older forms of production for use, and productive labour realised in the instance of the schoolmaster ‘belabouring the heads of his scholars’, because the proprietor has invested his capital in a teaching factory instead of a sausage one. Small comments:

The labour of teachers appears as an overhead expense. That is, it is necessary to keep the whole system going, but not identifiable as adding value directly to commodities … The issue is not just about keeping costs (which here means wages) down. It is about what kind of work teachers are doing – and what kind of work they understand themselves as doing. (80)

Small approaches this is by asking, in conclusion, whether teaching is a professional occupation.

The Manifesto rejoices that ‘The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-labourers’. And Small comments, ‘For teachers the employer may be the state rather than a private school owner, but the same conditions of work apply’ (82), before cautioning that ‘this is not the last word’, because Marx and Engels add, ‘Bourgeois society reproduces in its own form everything against which it had fought in feudal or absolutist form’. So we need to ask, are the ancient vocations – ‘the free professions’, as they are called in German – of doctor, lawyer and priest, being reproduced in a new form, so that the professional model is extended in this new form to new occupational roles? As well as ‘general intellect’, there is what Marx calls ‘general industriousness’ (looking and being busy, like Dickens’s Mr Panks), which the culture of professionalism values, along with a sense of personal responsibility. ‘In Marxian language’, Small comments, ‘this looks like a typical ideological mindset that not only presents a false picture of social reality but also acts to the disadvantage of those who adopt it’ (83).

The de-professionalisation of teaching, along with other professional occupations, as they intermingle in inter-professional working with standardised and simplified para-professions, is analogous to the de-skilling inflicted on industrial craft workers in the 1970s and ’80s. It involves also a loss of autonomous judgement and control over what was an example of what Marx called ‘free activity’, like the often-cited case of artistic expression, but more directly social, with collegiality as its form of solidarity, ‘even if professions tend at the same time to be quite hierarchical in terms of specialized expertise’ (85). It may be, therefore, that these forms of solidarity can be defended and extended rather than abandoned – as suggested by Magali Sarfatti Larson in the conclusion to her 1977 Marxist analysis of The Rise of Professionalism. Like general schooling, leading to graduation as citizen and worker ‘fit for a variety of labours’, re-vocationalised higher education, in which students have a sense of induction to practise in a field of real application – including the academic profession – might be the means for professional workers, in solidarity with other workers, to find ways of claiming and realising the full human potential of all work. ‘But perhaps’, concludes Small, ‘this is where Marx’s assistance runs out and we have to make our own decisions’ (85).

1 March 2014

About the reviewer

Patrick Ainley

Patrick Ainley is author with Martin Allen of Lost Generation? New strategies for youth and education (London: Continuum 2010). They blog at at radicaled.wordpress.com

Can Frances Fox Piven’s theory of disruptive power create the next Occupy?

Frances Fox Piven at at a national teach-in at Judson Memorial Church in New York in 2011. (© Pat Arnow)

By Mark Engler and Paul Engler

Waging Nonviolence, May 7, 2014

Social movements can be fast, and they can be slow.

Mostly, the work of social change is a slow process. It involves patiently building movement institutions, cultivating leadership, organizing campaigns and leveraging power to secure small gains. If you want to see your efforts produce results, it helps to have a long-term commitment.

And yet, sometimes things move more quickly. Every once in a while we see outbreaks of mass protest, periods of peak activity when the accepted rules of political affairs seem to be suspended. As one sociologist writes, these are extraordinary moments when ordinary people “rise up in anger and hope, defy the rules that ordinarily govern their lives, and, by doing so, disrupt the workings of the institutions in which they are enmeshed.” The impact of these uprisings can be profound. “The drama of such events, combined with the disorder that results, propels new issues to the center of political debate” and drives forward reforms as panicked “political leaders try to restore order.”

These are the words of Frances Fox Piven, the 81-year-old Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Sociology at the City University of New York Graduate Center. As co-author, with Richard Cloward, of the classic 1977 treatise, Poor People’s Movements, Piven has made landmark contributions to the study of how people who lack both financial resources and influence in conventional politics can nevertheless create momentous revolts. Few scholars have done as much to describe how widespread disruptive action can change history, and few have offered more provocative suggestions about the times when movements — instead of crawling forward with incremental demands — can break into full sprint.

In recent years, Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring have created renewed interest in such moments of unusual activity. These uprisings have spawned discussion about how activists might provoke and guide other periods of intensive unrest, and also how these mobilizations can complement longer-term organizing. Those coming out of traditions of strategic nonviolence and “civil resistance,” in particular, can find striking parallels between their methods for sparking insurgency and Piven’s theory of disruptive power.

Zuccotti Park is now quiet. The small, sanitized plaza in lower Manhattan has long since returned to being a place where a few employees in the financial district take their lunch. But when it was the home of the founding Occupy encampment, Poor People’s Movements was one of the most fitting titles to be found on the shelves of its free library. And for those interested in refilling America’s public plazas with defiant citizens, the book continues to offer insights difficult to find elsewhere in the literature on social movements.

—

In 2010, when Fox News host Glenn Beck revealed to America what he imagined was a vast left-wing conspiracy to take over the nation, he identified a few select individuals as presenting particularly grave threats to faith, family and fatherland. At the root of the “tree of radicalism and revolution” that Beck unveiled for viewers, he placed Saul Alinsky, the godfather of modern community organizing. The trunk of the tree, meanwhile, he labeled with two names: Piven and Cloward. From there, the tree branched off in several directions. Out of Piven and Cloward’s ideas, according to Beck, grew such sinister offshoots as ACORN, ex-Weatherman Bill Ayers, and even the radical-in-chief himself, Barack Obama. Although Piven was in her late 70s at the time, Beck argued that she was not merely “an enemy of the Constitution,” but one of the “nine most dangerous people in the world.”

Glenn Beck’s “Tree of Revolution.” (The Glenn Beck Show)

Beck’s theories about the left, of course, contained too many errors and unfounded leaps to easily enumerate. Nevertheless, he was correct to identify both Alinsky and Piven as groundbreaking social movement thinkers. Where he went wrong was in concluding that they were part of a unified and malevolent scheme. In truth, while Piven and Alinsky have similar commitments to radical democracy, they represent opposite ends of a spectrum of beliefs about how grassroots advocates create change.

Alinsky was a guru in the art of the slow, incremental building of community groups. Piven, in contrast, has become a leading defender of unruly mass protest, undertaken outside the structure of any formal organization.

Piven’s ideas were influenced by her early organizing experiences. She grew up in the 1930s in Jackson Heights, Queens, a child of working-class parents who had emigrated from Belarus and who struggled to adjust to life in America. As a precocious 15-year-old, she earned a scholarship to attend the University of Chicago. But, by her own account, Piven was not a serious student at that point, avoiding reading and relying on multiple choice to pass courses. She spent most of her time waitressing at late-night restaurants such as Hobby House and Stouffer’s, hustling to cover the living expenses not provided for in her tuition scholarship.

In the early 1960s Piven moved back to New York City. It was only after working as a researcher and helping to support rent strikes with the Mobilization for Youth, an early anti-poverty group on the Lower East Side, that she was ultimately hired to teach at Columbia University’s school of social work. At the Mobilization for Youth she also met sociologist Richard Cloward, who became her husband and lifelong collaborator. (Cloward passed away in 2001.)

In one of their first major articles together, written in 1963, Piven and Cloward made an argument that reflected what they had observed at the Mobilization. They contended that, since “the poor have few resources for regular political influence,” their ability to create social change depends on the disruptive power of tactics such as “militant boycotts, sit-ins, traffic tie-ups, and rent strikes.” Protest movements, they explained, gain real leverage only by causing “commotion among bureaucrats, excitement in the media, dismay among influential segments of the community, and strain for political leaders.”

Piven has been refining and elaborating this thesis ever since. Indeed, it was only after a decade and a half of further work that the argument would make its most controversial appearance, in 1977′s Poor People’s Movements. In the still-young world of academic social movement theory, this book would be recognized as a daring and original intervention — and also, in many ways, as a heresy.

—

Today social movement theory is a well-established area of focus within sociology and political science. In the 1970s, however, it was just barely gaining a foothold in the academy. Stanford professor Doug McAdam tells the story of how, as a student activist in the late 1960s, he sought out classes on social movements at his university, searching the catalogue of the political science department. None were listed. When he finally did find discussion of movement activism, it took place in a very different setting than he had expected: namely, in a course on Abnormal Psychology.

At the time, McAdam writes, “movement participation was seen not as a form of rational political behavior but a reflection of aberrant personality types and irrational forms of ‘crowd behavior.’” Post-World War II theorists, adherents of the “pluralist” and “collective behavior” schools, believed that the U.S. political system was at least reasonably responsive to all groups with grievances to voice. Thus, any sensible person could advance their interests through the “proper channels” of representative politics. Most influential academics, McAdam explains, regarded outside movements as “typically unnecessary and generally ineffective;” when protests did appear, they represented “dysfunctional responses to the breakdown of social order.” As Piven and Cloward put it in a 1991 essay, movements were seen “as mindless eruptions lacking either coherence or continuity with organized social life.”

In the 1970s, this view began losing its hold. Graduate schools became infused with a generation of New Left scholars who had direct ties to civil rights, antiwar and women’s liberation movements. Coming from a more sympathetic standpoint, they sought to explain social movements as rational forms of collective action. Protests would now be seen as politics by other means for people who had been shut out of the system. A leading strain of thought that emerged in this milieu was known as resource mobilization theory.

Scholars in the resource mobilization school put social movement organizations at the center of their understanding of how protest groups affect change. As McAdam and W. Richard Scott write, resource mobilization theorists “stressed that movements, if they are to be sustained for any length of time, require some form of organization: leadership, administrative structure, incentives for participation, and a means for acquiring resources and support.” This view synced with the experience of organizers outside the university. In many respects, resource mobilization served as an academic analog to Alinsky’s vision of building power through the steady, persistent creation of community organization. It was also consistent with the structure-based organizing of the labor movement.

With their newly established approach, resource mobilization scholars produced compelling research, for example, into how Southern churches provided a vital infrastructure for the civil rights movement. Their viewpoint gradually gained ground. By the early 1980s, “resource mobilization had become a dominant background paradigm for sociologists studying social movements,” writes political scientist Sidney Tarrow. Although other theories have since come into favor, McAdam and Hilary Schaffer Boudet argue that the biases and emphases of resource mobilization still guide “the lion’s share of work in the field.”

—

When Piven and Cloward published Poor People’s Movements in 1977, its ideas about disruptive power — which were not rooted in formal social movement organizations — represented a direct challenge to leading strains of academic theory. More than that, they also clashed with much of the actual organizing taking place in the country. As the authors wrote in an introduction to their 1979 paperback edition, the book’s “critique of organizational efforts offended central tenets of left doctrine.”

Piven and Cloward mounted their heterodox assault by means of four detailed case studies. These involved some of the more significant protest movements in 20th century America: the movement of unemployed workers early in the Great Depression, the industrial strikes that gave rise to the CIO later in the 1930s, the civil rights movement in the South in the 1950s and 60s, and the activism of the National Welfare Rights Organization in the 1960s and 70s. As Piven would later summarize their conclusions, the experience of these revolts “showed that poor people could achieve little through the routines of conventional electoral and interest group politics.” Therefore, what was left to them as their key tool “was what we called disruption, the breakdowns that resulted when people defied the rules and institutional routines that ordinarily governed life.”

A structure-based organizer such as Saul Alinsky would not disagree with the idea of using boisterous action to make a stink. After all, he was a great showman and tactician of disorderly troublemaking. But Alinsky would have sharply parted ways with Piven and Cloward on the need for organization to support change. Poor People’s Movements irked both resource mobilization theorists and on-the-ground activists by contending that not only did formal structures fail to produce disruptive outbreaks, but that these structures actually detracted from mass protest when it did occur.

Piven and Cloward’s case studies offered a take on past movements that was very different than standard accounts. Of the labor activism that exploded during the Great Depression, they write that, contrary to the most cherished beliefs of union organizers, “For the most part strikes, demonstrations, and sit-downs spread during the mid-1930s despite existing unions rather than because of them.” Their studies showed that “with virtually no exceptions, the union leaders worked to limit strikes, not to escalate them.” Likewise, in the civil rights movement, “defiant blacks forced concessions as a result of the disruptive effects of mass civil disobedience” — not through formal organization.

Piven and Cloward acknowledged that such conclusions failed “to conform to doctrinal prescriptions regarding constituencies, strategies and demands.” Nevertheless, they wrote, no doubt aware they were picking a fight, that “popular insurgency does not proceed by someone else’s rules or hopes; it has its own logic and direction.”

Poor People’s Movements offered a variety of reasons why, when people were roused to indignation and moved to defy authority, “Organizers not only failed to seize the opportunity presented by the rise of unrest, they typically acted in ways that blunted or curbed the disruptive force which lower-class people were sometimes able to mobilize.” Most centrally, the organizers in their case studies opted against escalating the mass protests “because they [were] preoccupied with trying to build and sustain embryonic formal organizations in the sure conviction that these organizations [would] enlarge and become powerful.”

Across the four different movements that Piven and Cloward examined, organizers showed similar instincts — and these instincts betrayed them. The organizers viewed formal structures as essential, seeing them as necessary for marshaling collective resources, enabling strategic decision-making and ensuring institutional continuity. But what the organizers did not appreciate was that, while bureaucratic institutions may have positives, they also bring constraints. Because organizations have to worry about self-preservation, they become adverse to risk-taking. Because they enjoy some access to formal avenues of power, they tend to overestimate what they can accomplish from inside the system. As a result, they forget the disruptive energy that propelled them to power to begin with, and so they often end up playing a counter-productive role. As Piven says of the labor movement, “Mass strikes lead to unions. But unions are not the big generators of mass strikes.”

Poor People’s Movements also made an argument about the pace of change, challenging the idea that gains for the poor were won through steady, incremental effort. Piven and Cloward emphasized that, whatever course of action they take, the ability of organizers to shape history is limited. Adopting a type of neo-Marxist structuralism common in the period — one that looked to find economic and political causes underlying social phenomena — they argued that popular uprising “flows from historically specific circumstances.” The routines of daily life, the habits of obedience people develop, and the threat of reprisals against those who act out all function to keep disruptive potentials in check most of the time.

Periods when the poor do become defiant are exceptional, but they also have a defining impact. Piven and Cloward saw history as being punctuated by disruptive outbreaks. Instead of change occurring gradually, they believed, it came in bursts — through “Big Bang” moments, as Piven calls them in her 2006 book, Challenging Authority. Such a period can erupt quickly, but then fade just as rapidly. While its reverberations within the political system have lasting significance, “insurgency is always short-lived,” Piven and Cloward explain. “Once it subsides and the people leave the streets, most of the organizations which it temporarily threw up… simply fade away.”

—

Frances Fox Piven in 1979. (Smith College/Gil Vasquez)

There are not many books written in 1977 that feel more resonant when read in the wake of Occupy and the Arab Spring than Poor People’s Movements. The book is visionary in recognizing the explosive potential of bottom-up defiance, and, at times, seems almost prophetic in anticipating the course of the new millennium’s early uprisings. In recent years, we have witnessed live case studies of disruptive power in action, and they have produced reverberations large and small throughout different parts of the world.

But while, on one hand, Poor People’s Movements appears to encourage such mass mobilization, it stubbornly refuses, on the other, to serve as a guidebook for future action. In fact, in asserting that even activists’ best-laid plans — more often than not — are doomed to failure, it threatens to rob people of their agency altogether.

If, as Piven and Cloward argue, “protest wells up in response to momentous changes in the institutional order” and “is not created by organizers or leaders,” what are those seeking social change to do with themselves?

While Poor People’s Movements was quickly recognized as a milestone in its field, the book also provoked some strongly negative reactions. One review dubbed it an “anti-organizational philippic;” another denounced the volume as a call for “blind militancy,” hardly better than the Abnormal Psychology it aimed to replace. Even readers who read with a more sympathetic eye were left to wonder how activists could act on its insights.

Looking at Piven’s wider career helps to give context to this issue — and also stakes out some middle ground. Even as Poor People’s Movements, full of polemical contentions, makes momentum-driven mobilizing and long-term structure building seem more mutually exclusive than they need to be, the scholar’s life as a politically engaged citizen has exhibited considerably more nuance.

First, it is worth noting that, at the time that Piven and Cloward were researching Poor People’s Movements, the U.S. labor movement was as large and bureaucratic as at any time in its history. Unions were major supporters of U.S. Cold War foreign policy, putting them at odds with the New Left. Criticism of the ossifying character of big labor was hardly rare in progressive writing of the period. Yet even then, Poor People’s Movements acknowledges the importance of unions in defending against the erosion of gains won by protest movements during moments of peak mobilization. Over the past decades, Piven has been a consistent supporter of labor’s more scrappy and militant organizing factions.

Piven and Cloward were themselves involved in significant organizational advocacy. In the 1980s, the two formed an organization called Human SERVE (Human Service Employees Registration and Voters Education) to promote mass voter registration in low-income communities. Their work was instrumental in securing passage of the Voter Registration Act of 1993, also known as the “Motor Voter Act,” which allowed people to register to vote in welfare agencies and when getting drivers’ licenses. When President Clinton signed the bill into law, Piven spoke at the White House ceremony.

She has also had warm relations with Alinskyite groups. In 1984, Cloward and Piven wrote the foreword to Roots of Power: A Manual for Grassroots Organizing by veteran activist Lee Staples, praising the work as “an exemplary exposition of the knowledge and skills that grow out of community organizing.” More recently, Piven celebrated ACORN as “the largest and most effective representative of poor and minority people in this country” lamenting that the right’s successful attacks against the organization produced an immense loss.

All of these things suggest that, even in Piven’s view, movement organizations can make important contributions. That these contributions are distinct from the type of mass uprisings that exert disruptive power only means that different groups of movement participants might specialize in different types of dissident activity.

Although it does not emphasize the point, Poor People’s Movements makes a telling distinction between “mobilizing” and “organizing.” Piven and Cloward write, “disruptive strategy does not require that people affiliate with an organization and participate regularly. Rather, it requires that masses of people be mobilized to engage in disruptive action.” While such mobilizing may take place outside the bounds of mass membership groups, it need not be regarded as spontaneous. Instead, skilled practitioners can have a hand a making it happen — provided that these mobilizers understand their role differently than structure-based organizers.

Piven and Cloward point to Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Council, or SCLC, as an example of a group that carried out this type of mobilizing work. Critics have long argued that the SCLC — by moving from city to city, producing media frenzies, and leaving locals to clean up the mess they left behind — did not do enough to cultivate lasting indigenous leadership. Piven and Cloward defend King on this point. They acknowledge that the SCLC “did not build local organizations to obtain local victories,” but they argue that this was intentional. The group’s method was different, and not without its strengths. King and his lieutenants “clearly attempted to create a series of disruptions to which the federal government would have to respond,” Piven and Cloward explain. “And that strategy succeeded” — creating pressure for national legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 more effectively than could local organization alone.

—

In its conclusion, Poor People’s Movements offers a qualified call to arms: “One can never predict with certainty when the ‘heavings and rumblings of the social foundations’ will force up large-scale defiance,” Piven and Cloward write. “But if organizers and leaders want to help those movements emerge, they must always proceed as if protest were possible. They may fail. The time may not be right. But then, they may sometimes succeed.”

This is a reasonably hopeful note upon which to end. Still, activists can be forgiven if they find Poor People’s Movement‘s advice to be frustratingly vague. In a later essay, Piven and Cloward note: “Saul Alinsky said organizers must rub raw the sores of discontent, but that does not tell us which sores, or whose sores, or how to inflame them, or what to suggest people should do when they are ready to move into action.” This is well put. And yet, most often, Piven and Cloward are even one step further removed from any direct guidance of social movements.

Because of this, it has been left to others to provide more practical insights into how to orchestrate disruptive protest. Fortunately, the world of social movement thinking is now experiencing a renaissance on this front.

Activists reared in the school of strategic nonviolence, or “civil resistance” — a lineage which grows from the work of Gene Sharp — represent one leading group that is taking up questions of how disruptive outbursts can be sparked and guided. Their tradition recognizes both conditions and skills as relevant in shaping mass mobilization. These practitioners would acknowledge, as Piven writes, that there are “major ways protest movements are shaped by institutional conditions,” and that the effectiveness of organizers is often “circumscribed by forces they [do] not control.” However, this only makes it more important that activists refine their skills for addressing the aspects of mobilization they can influence. These skills include the ability to recognize when the terrain for protest is fertile, the talent for staging creative and provocative acts of civil disobedience, and the capacity for intelligently escalating once a mobilization is underway.

A rich field of study is emerging to explore these issues. Piven’s work offers something valuable to it: a bridge between emerging ideas about civil resistance and more established currents of social movement theory.

Others, including people from Alinskyite schools who have been inspired by the mass mobilizations of recent years, are also considering how traditional community organizing models can be expanded. They are demonstrating that the study of momentum-driven mobilization does not rule out appreciation of what can be accomplished through building institutional structures. Moreover, a focus on disruption does not require that activists wait around until the next “Big Bang” moment in world history arrives before endeavoring to take action. Even smaller-scale disruptions — mobilizations at the level of one city or one campus — can have significant impact.

The lasting legacy of Poor People’s Movements is that, in providing a counter-balance to traditional ideas about organizing, it opens the door for more inventive analysis of movement strategies. Recognition of mobilizing and organizing as two distinct forms of action allows for dialogue between different schools of thought — and it ultimately creates the possibility of synthesis. For veterans of Occupy and the Arab Spring, the topic of how explosive short-term mobilization might be combined with long-term organizing that can institutionalize gains and make movements more sustainable is an exciting one. Indeed, many believe that discussion of it is essential for future social movements.

Their hope is in the possibility of integration — between momentum and structure, between fast and slow.

—

Mark Engler is a senior analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus, an editorial board member at Dissent, and a contributing editor at Yes! Magazine. Paul Engler is founding director of the Center for the Working Poor, in Los Angeles. They are writing a book about the evolution of political nonviolence. They can be reached via the website www.DemocracyUprising.com.

Youth rebellion in the ‘banlieues’ of Paris

Contemporary Politics and the Crisis of the Negative

Interview by Filippo Del Lucchese and Jason Smith

FILIPPO DEL LUCCHESE and JASON SMITH: We would like to begin by asking you to clarify the relation between philosophy and politics. What do you mean when you speak, for example, of a militant philosophy?

ALAIN BADIOU: Since its beginnings, philosophy’s relationship to the political has been fundamental. It’s not something invented by modernity. Plato’s central work is called The Republic, and it is entirely devoted to questions of the city or polis. This link has remained fundamental throughout the history of philosophy. But I think there are two basic ways of structuring this relationship.

The first way assigns philosophy the responsibility for finding a foundation for the political. Philosophy is called upon to reconstruct the political on the basis of this foundation. This current argues that it is possible to locate, for every politics, an ethical norm and that philosophy should first have the task of reconstructing or naming this norm and then of judging the relation between this norm and the multiplicity of political practices. In this sense, then, what opens the relation between philosophy and politics is the idea of a foundation as well as an ethical conception of the political. But there is a second orientation that is completely different. This current maintains that in a certain sense politics is primary and that the political exists without, before, and differently from philosophy. The political would be what I call a condition of philosophy. In this case, the relation between philosophy and politics would be, in a certain sense, retroactive. That is, it would be a relation in which philosophy would situate itself within political conflicts in order to clarify them. Today, in the extremely obscure situation that is the general system of contemporary politics, philosophy can attempt to clarify the situation without having any pretense to creating it. Philosophy has as its condition and horizon the concrete situation of different political practices, and it will try, within these conditions, to find instruments of clarification, legitimation, and so on. This current takes seriously the idea that politics is itself an autonomy of thought, that it is a collective practice with an intelligence all its own.

It is quite clear that today the question is particularly difficult because we are no longer in a situation in which there is a clear distinction between two opposed political orientations—as was the case in the twentieth century. Not everyone agreed on what the exact nature of these opposed politics was, but everyone agreed there was an opposition between a classical democratic bourgeois politics and another, revolutionary, option. Among the revolutionaries, we debated spiritedly and even violently what, exactly, the true way was but not the existence itself of this global opposition. Today there is no agreement concerning the existence of a fundamental opposition of this sort, and as a result the link between philosophy and politics has become more complex and more obscure. But, fundamentally, it’s the same task. Philosophy tries to clarify what I call the multiple situation of concrete politics and to legitimate the choices made in this space.

DEL LUCCHESE and SMITH: So you see your own philosophical interventions as taking place within this new situation that you describe as “more complex and more obscure” than the classical confrontation between two opposed political orientations?

BADIOU: Definitely. As a result, I see my philosophy as an inheritor of the great contestatory movements of the sixties. In fact, my philosophy emerged out of these movements. It is a philosophy of commitment, of engagement, with a certain fidelity to Sartre, if you like, or to Marxism.

What counts is that the intellectual is engaged in politics and commits to or takes the side of the people and the workers. I move in that tradition. My philosophy tries to keep alive, as best it can (it is not always easy), the idea that there is a real alternative to the dominant politics and that we are not obliged to rally around the consensus that ultimately consists in the unity of global capitalism and the representative, democratic state. I would say, then, that I work under the condition of the situation of political actuality, with the goal of keeping alive, philosophically, the idea of the possibility or opening of a politics I would call a politics of emancipation—but that could also be called a radical or revolutionary politics, terms that today are debatable but that represent all the same a possibility other than the dominant one.

DEL LUCCHESE and SMITH: You mention Sartre in this context where the name Althusser might have been expected. What is your relation to the Althusserian tradition?

BADIOU: The Althusserian tradition is extremely important, and I’ve devoted several texts to Althusser. If I mention Sartre it is simply because my philosophical youth was Sartrean before my encounter with Althusser. I think the Althusserian current was a particularly important one because it gave a new life and force to the link between philosophy and politics and in a less idealist mode—that is, a relation that no longer passed through the form of consciousness. In Sartre, of course, we still find the classical model of the intellectual understood primarily in terms of consciousness—an intellectual must make contact with the struggle and the workers’ organizations, be they the unions or the communist parties. Althusser’s greatness is found in the fact that he proposed a new schema in which the relation between philosophy and politics no longer passed through the psychology of the form of consciousness as it still did with Sartre. Althusser begins with the conviction that philosophy intervenes in the intellectual space of politics. When he proposes the formula “philosophy is the organization of class struggle in theory,” what does he mean? That class struggle exists and that philosophy certainly didn’t invent it. It exists and cuts across intellectual choices. Within the struggle between these choices, philosophy has a special role. It is to intervene and therefore to name, norm, classify, and finally choose in the field of intellectual or theoretical class struggle. Sartre and Althusser are very different, even opposed. But you can reconcile them on one point, namely, that philosophy is nothing if it is not linked to political commitment.

DEL LUCCHESE and SMITH: You have called yourself a “communist in the generic sense.” But you have also constantly underlined the inability of classical Marxist theory to produce a truly communist politics. How can “communism” today be the “common name” that opens the future?

BADIOU: I think it is necessary to distinguish Marxism from communism. I don’t think it is absolutely necessary to keep the word communism. But I like this word a lot. I like it because it designates the general idea of a society and of a world in which the principle of equality is dominant, a world no longer structured by classical social relations—those of wealth, the division of labor, segregation, persecution by the state, sexual difference, and so on. That is, for me, what communism is. Communism in the generic sense simply means that everyone is equal to everyone else within the multiplicity and diversity of social functions. I am still absolutely convinced of the necessity of a radical critique of the division of labor. I believe this is what is rational and what is just. There is no reason why a street sweeper should be hounded by the state and poorly paid while intellectuals in their libraries are honored and at peace—and generally well paid. It’s absurd. What I call communism is the end of this absurdity. It’s the idea of a society that will find a principle of existence that would be entirely “subtracted” from the crushing weight of the relations of power and wealth and therefore another distribution of human activity. It’s in this sense that I am a communist. And I struggle against all those who tell me this is impossible, that inequality is the nature of things and men as well. Sartre says somewhere that if this communist idea did not exist, humanity would not be much better than apes, not much better than a pile of ants.

Marxism, however, is something else—above all when it is a question of the Marxist practices of organization and concrete politics. These practices have given us astounding results, like the possibility of a victorious popular insurrection in 1917 or the possibility of an entirely new organization of workers and peasants in the form of the Chinese popular army. But if we take what Lenin called the “ABCs of Communism,” namely, that the masses are divided into classes, the classes are represented by parties, and the parties directed by leaders—well, this is still a great idea, but today it is not useful at all. The organization of the masses is still the fundamental issue. But if you take the disorganized masses of global capitalism as a starting point, you cannot assume that the masses are divided into classes.

DEL LUCCHESE and SMITH: You argue for a “politics without party” and a new model of “organization.” How do you distinguish them, and why? And what is the relation between politics and the state today?

BADIOU: The question of organization is still a question of fundamental importance, even for those who maintain that politics shouldn’t be organized at all, as is the case for the great anarchist tradition. The name organization designates the collective dimension of political action. We know that organization can take the form of a movement, party, union, or what have you. It’s a great tradition. Today, however, we’re in a situation in which the long-dominant model of the class party, of the Leninist avant-garde party (in an aesthetic sense as well), is saturated. It’s exhausted. My evaluation of the Leninist party is that it was a model whose function was to make a victorious insurrection possible. Lenin was obsessed by the bloody failures of the worker insurrections of the nineteenth century—especially the Paris Commune. This was the first experience of the dictatorship of the proletariat, to use Lenin’s language, and it was a bloody failure. It failed because the movement was undisciplined, divided, and powerless. Lenin therefore advised that there be a high degree of centralization of worker power in a party that would be able to lead and organize the class. And he proved, on the question of organization at least, that it was a good idea. The revolution of 1917 was the first victorious insurrection in the history of humanity. This is why it has such an enormous historical importance—a step had been taken. After the many worker revolts of the previous century, all of which had been crushed with an extraordinary and bloody brutality, the Leninist model finally made possible a victorious revolution.

This model, however, didn’t offer much more. With regard to the question of the state and power, of the duration of the power of the state, the model of the party-state ended up showing serious limitations, whether it be what the Trotskyists called the tendency to bureaucratization, what the anarchists identified with state terrorism, or the Maoists with revisionism. None of that is important here. It’s clear that the party-state was a failure. From the point of view of taking power, the party was victorious. But not from the perspective of exercising power. So we are in a phase that is or should be beyond the question of the party as a model of organization. That model solved the problems of the nineteenth century, but we have to solve those of the twenty-first.

The form of organization today should be, in my opinion, less directly articulated with or by the question of the state and power. The model of the centralized party made possible a new form of power that was nothing less than the power of the party itself. We are now at what I call a distance from the state. This is first of all because the question of power is no longer immediate; nowhere does a “taking power” in the insurrectional sense seem possible today. We should search for a new form. My friends and I in L’Organisation politique call this a politics without party. This is a completely descriptive, negative, characterization of the situation. It simply means that we do not want to enter into a form of organization that is entirely articulated with the state. Both the insurrectional form of the party and today’s electoral form are articulations by state power. In both cases, the party is subordinated to the question of power and the state. I think we have to break with this subordination and, ultimately, engage political organization (whatever form it may take) in political processes that are independent of—“subtracted” from—the power of the state. Unlike the insurrectional form of the party, this politics of subtraction is no longer immediately destructive, antagonistic, or militarized.

I think the Leninist party was at bottom a military model. And for good reason. This is not a criticism. Lenin was obsessed with one question: how does one win the war? The question of discipline is therefore fundamental, just as it is for an army. You cannot win the war if people do whatever they like, if there is no unity and so on. The problem for emancipatory politics today, however, is to invent a nonmilitary model of discipline. We need a popular discipline. I would even say, as I have many times, that “those who have nothing have only their discipline.” The poor, those with no financial or military means, those with no power—all they have is their discipline, their capacity to act together. This discipline is already a form of organization. The question is whether all discipline can be reduced to a military model, the model that dominated the first part of the twentieth century. How can we find, invent, exercise, or experiment with—today, after all, is an age of experimentation—a nonmilitary discipline?

DEL LUCCHESE and SMITH: Can you explain a bit more what you mean by “distance from the state”?

BADIOU: “At a distance from the state” signifies that a politics is not structured or polarized along the agenda and timelines fixed by the state. Those dates, for example, when the state decides to call an election, or to intervene in some conflict, declare war on another state. Or when the state claims that an economic crisis makes this or that course of action impossible. These are all examples of what I call convocations by the state, where the state sets the agenda and controls the timing of political events. Distance from the state means you act with a sufficient independence from the state and what it deems to be important or not, who it decides should or should not be addressed. This distance protects political practices from being oriented, structured, and polarized by the state. This is why, moreover, I do not think it is particularly important to participate in the electoral process. It has nothing to do with what Lenin called left-wing communism. This process is simply not interesting. First of all because it represents, for now at least, no veritable perspective on the future—there is no way, in this framework and by these means, that fundamental orientations can be modified. But, more importantly, this process organizes a reorientation toward the state and its decisions. It restricts political independence. Distance from the state therefore means that the political process and its decisions should be undertaken in full independence from the state and what it deems important, what it decides to impose as the framework of the political. I understand state here in the large sense, including the government, the media, and even those who make economic decisions. When you allow the political process to be dominated by the state, you’ve already lost the game because you’ve abdicated in advance your own political independence.

DEL LUCCHESE and SMITH: The electoral timeline seems, nevertheless, to play a certain role in your conception of politics. After all, you wrote a text specifically addressing the recent French referendum on the proposed European constitution.

BADIOU: You’re right. My position is not a dogmatic one. But, in general, the electoral horizon has no real interest. The example you mention is particularly striking. The No to the referendum, in fact, had no importance at all. The majority of the French declared themselves to be against the constitution. What happened? The government didn’t fall, the president didn’t resign, the socialists ended up nominating a candidate who was in favor of the Yes, and so on. Little by little, the influence of the French No vote, seemingly so spectacular, was next to nothing. And the reason is that the referendum was called for by the state; the voters were convoked by the state. The politicians on both the Left and the Right had already, and for various reasons, agreed on the Yes, despite the opposition of the majority (this opposition, in turn, had multiple reasons and brought together the extreme Left and the extreme Right). This is a good example, in fact, of what I would call not so much the inexistent but rather the inactive nature of this type of political intervention. That said, nonparticipation in elections is not an important political principle for me. More important is succeeding in creating an organization independent of the state.

DEL LUCCHESE and SMITH: In your recent book, Le Siècle, you seem to indicate the necessity to make a transition from what you call a politics of “destruction” (which you identify with “fraternal violence” and “terrorist nihilism”) to a politics of “subtraction.” Can you explain the nature of this distinction in your work?

BADIOU: Here, again, the question is at once philosophical and political, strictly linked to the problem of critique and negation. From a philosophical point of view, the symbol for all this was for a long time the relation between Hegel and Marx. For Marx, the dialectical conception of negation defined the relation between philosophy and politics—what used to be called the problem of dialectical materialism. Just as the party, which was once the victorious form of insurrection, is today outdated, so too is the dialectical theory of negation. It can no longer articulate a living link between philosophy and politics. In trying to clarify the political situation, we also need to search for a new formulation of the problem of critique and negation. I think that it is necessary, above all in the field of political action, to go beyond the concept of a negation taken solely in its destructive and properly negative aspect. Contrary to Hegel, for whom the negation of the negation produces a new affirmation, I think we must assert that today negativity, properly speaking, does not create anything new. It destroys the old, of course, but does not give rise to a new creation.

DEL LUCCHESE and SMITH: It seems, though, the “big Other” of Hegelian dialectics is Spinoza’s ontology. How do you use Spinoza in the context of this critique of Hegelian dialectical logic?

BADIOU: The distinction between negation and affirmation in my discourse can, in a certain sense, be traced back to Spinoza. The encounter with Spinoza takes place because of our contemporary need to produce a non-Hegelian category of negation. But my problem with Spinoza is with the ontological foundation of his thought, in which there is still an excessive potency of the One. He is an author whose magnificent propositions I often cite: for example, that a free man thinks of nothing less than death or that the wisest man is the one most recognizant of others. These are magnificent formulations. But at the ontological level—Spinoza’s ontology is one of the great non-Hegelian constructions—I think the play between the multiple and the One leans a bit too much to the side of the One. The schema of the infinite plurality of attributes and the expressivity of the multiplicity of modes is, as far as I am concerned, not enough to account for contemporary multiplicity.

DEL LUCCHESE and SMITH: You’ve spoken about the philosophical implications of this distinction between destruction and subtraction. But how do these articulations function at the political level, in terms of political practice?

BADIOU: On the political side, every revolutionary or emancipatory politics will have to be a certain adjustment or calibration between the properly negative part of negation and the part I call subtractive. A subtraction that is no longer dependent on the dominant laws of the political reality of a situation. It is irreducible, however, to the destruction of these laws as well. A subtraction might well leave the laws of the situation intact. What subtraction does is bring about a point of autonomy. It’s a negation, but it cannot be identified with the properly destructive part of negation. Throughout the Marxist and Leninist revolutionary tradition of the twentieth century, the prevailing idea was that destruction alone was capable of opening a new history, founding a new man, and so on. Mao himself said: “No construction without destruction.” Our problem today is that the destructive part of negation is no longer, in and of itself, capable of producing the new. We need an originary subtraction capable of creating a new space of independence and autonomy from the dominant laws of the situation. A subtraction, therefore, is neither derived from nor a consequence of destruction as such. If we are to propose a new articulation between destruction and subtraction, we have to develop a new type of negation or critique, one that differs from the dialectical model of class struggle in its historical signification.

I think it is possible to observe important symptoms of this crisis of negation today. What I call a weak negation, the reduction of politics to democratic opposition, can be understood as a subtraction that has become so detached from destructive negation that it can no longer be distinguished from what Habermas calls consensus. On the other hand, we are also witnessing a desperate attempt to maintain destruction as a pure figure of creation and the new. This symptom often has a religious and nihilistic dimension. In fact, the internal disjunction of negation—the severing of destruction from subtraction—has resulted in a war that in the West is referred to as the war on terrorism and, on the side of the terrorists themselves, a war on the West, the infidels, and so on.

DEL LUCCHESE and SMITH: If today you disqualify any emancipatory dimension for a politics of destruction, what then is the place reserved for violence in politics?

BADIOU: Here, again, we touch upon the link between philosophy and politics. I maintain that today it is a question of creating independent spaces in such a way that the question of violence takes a defensive turn. In this sense, all the possible forms and experiences become interesting. The first phase of the Zapatista movement is a concrete example of this defensive dimension of violence. But there are many other examples. Perhaps the first figure of this type is found in the initial sequence of the anti-Soviet movement in Poland, at the beginning of the 1980s. It was a workers’ movement, and it was not, in fact, nonviolent; they used the strike, for example, as a weapon to pressure the government in negotiations. This was a situation in which the workers had complete control of the factories. This phase didn’t last very long, in part due to external factors, like the influence of the church and Jaruzelski’s coup d’e´tat. But this was a moment in which it was possible to glimpse, however briefly, a new dialectic between the means of actions that were classically understood to be negative—the strike, demonstrations, and so on—and something like the creation of a space of autonomy in the factories. The objective was not to take power, to replace an existing power, but to force the state to invent a new relation with the workers. However brief it may have been, this experiment was very interesting. Interesting because it did not follow the classical model of a brutal confrontation between the movement and the state. It was the organization of a differentiated space—immanent, but differentiated—in view of constituting a political site whose collective rule was one of political debate rather than subordination to the questions and agenda of state power.

It is impossible, then, to say that we can exclude all recourse to violence. Take, for example, the phenomenon of Hezbollah and the July 2006 war in Lebanon. The pretextual nature of Israel’s aggression was clear; they set out to destroy an entire country because one soldier was taken prisoner. Without wanting a frontal war, Hezbollah was fortunately able to exercise an effective, consistent resistance that turned the Israeli aggression into a fiasco. What is striking about this movement, however, is its difficult relation with the state. Here, we come back to the question of organization. Hezbollah is competing for state power, while nevertheless not reproducing an insurrectional model. They remain in a state of semidissidence and conflictual alliance with the state. In any case, it is clear that every form of negation, including its most extreme, violent forms, can be mobilized in the defense or protection of a new singularity. It is necessary, then, to have a new articulation of the destructive and subtractive parts of negation so that destruction or violence appears in the form of a protective force, capable of defending something created through a movement of subtraction. This idea was probably already present in the figure of the revolutionary base during the Chinese revolution. Mao wrote things like this concerning the role of the army, even if he also developed a strategy that was still oriented toward the seizure of state power. But the relation between armed force—the force of destruction—and popular organization was already complex at this moment, where the role of the army was assigned political tasks in addition to its task of protecting the popular organization.

DEL LUCCHESE and SMITH: In your recent Logiques des mondes, you speak of political Islamism in terms that associate it with the category of fascism. This formulation is classical enough and can be found as often on the Right as on the Left. But is it possible to understand the successes of Hezbollah and the Iraqi armed resistance in terms of a merely local dispute? In the case of Hezbollah in particular, is it possible to see a novel form of political organization taking place under the sign of—but not reducible to—a theological articulation of the political?

BADIOU:: When I speak of Islamism, Islamist terrorism, fascist groups of a religious character, and so on, I am not referring to large popular organizations like Hezbollah or Hamas or even the many groups that support the current Iranian state. We are speaking of an extremely complex world, composed of figures that are at the same time national and popular. This is not the case with al-Qaeda, which is partially a production of the West itself. The groups I am referring to represent a pure and separate figure of destruction and practice a terrorism that is nonsituated, in which there is absolutely no possibility of glimpsing any constructive figure. The attacks of September 11, for example, were not accompanied by any political discourse addressed to the entire world or with any declaration of war; such declarations are the condition for politics. What we have instead is a violent destabilization whose concept is ungraspable. The only declarations that followed the event were completely rooted in a religious particularism that I read as exclusively negative. I won’t have anything to do with this type of practice.

I don’t confuse this phenomenon with the theological character of certain mass organizations like Hezbollah in the Middle East. But I do think that the fact that the organizations that are the most active and most rooted in the “people” are of this type is part of what I have been calling the contemporary crisis of negation. In this case, religion presents itself as the surrogate for something else that has not been found, something that should be universalizable, should be able to uproot itself from the particularity of the religious. It is for this reason, I think, that Marx still seems so current. Communism, according to Marx, is essentially internationalist in character. With religious dogmatism, in this case with Shia Islam, we are confronted with a collective messianism that I know and recognize is quite powerful but that is, finally, intrinsically limited. We need to consider these phenomena on their own terms but also understand their limitations. I think these movements represent a passage that bears witness, in a very vivid way, to the limits of our thought on the problems of the negative, critique, and political organization. We have to assume this passage, saluting its vigor (I am quite happy that the organized and popular force of Hezbollah was able to successfully block the Israeli aggression) as well as understanding that, if these “solutions” function within local contexts, there are fundamental limitations with respect to the possibility of universalizing these experiences. This is difficult, but necessary. And I maintain that the current situation is a result of the interruption or breaking down of the revolutionary movement in general in the 1980s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the absence of any renewal of Marxism. The examples of popular organization we know today are, therefore, either extremely experimental and localized (like the Zapatista movement) or theologico-political (like Hezbollah). The contemporary diversity of orientations, with all their sectarianism and particularism, was already present in Marx’s time as well, in the least revolutionary periods of the first half of the nineteenth century. And it is probably typical of periods in which it becomes necessary to open a new history, as is our own situation. All these experiences and experiments, then, including those that might seem a little strange or foreign, strong but limited as they are, must be taken into consideration.

DEL LUCCHESE and SMITH: Unlike many of your colleagues, you felt it necessary to make an intervention in Le Monde on the subject of the revolt of the French banlieues. Your verdict: “You have the riots you deserve.” What, today, on the eve of the presidential election, is the “postcolonial” situation of the French banlieues? More generally, how do you see the relationship between politics and violence in the “banlieue-monde—what Mike Davis has recently called a “planet of slums”—that is in the process of globalizing itself in the twenty-first century?

BADIOU: Here we encounter a problem that we might call, in the Leninist tradition, the problem of the masses. That is, how can the political come to really organize or be present among the great masses of the planet? The fundamental problem is how we might enter into relations with this gigantic mass, with a population that is disorganized and chaotic, poor and deprived of everything, and often prey to criminal organizations, religious messianisms, and unchecked destructive violence. This is the calling and task of every contemporary emancipatory politics. After all, we are speaking of billions of people; address this problem or our horizon will remain too narrow. In the nineteenth century, the problem was the arrival of the new proletarian masses on the political scene; in the twentieth century, it was the political emancipation of colonized peoples. In the first case we have the workers’ movement, the Paris Commune, and, finally, the revolution of 1917; in the second, the wars of national liberation, Algeria, Vietnam, and the Chinese popular war. But today we can no longer speak either of the working masses, forged in the discipline of the factory, or of the peasant masses, localized and organized on the basis of agrarian relations. The masses we speak of are profoundly atomized by capitalism. They are, for the most part, delivered over to conditions of existence that are precarious and chaotic. They are a collective figure that still has no name. The category of the subproletariat doesn’t work in this case, since that category still presupposes the existence of an organized proletariat—which, in this case, does not exist. These masses are not organized according to the traditional categories of class, and so for the moment they are more or less entirely abandoned to the nihilism of capitalism.

Here the link with the French banlieues becomes clear. The distinction between the Third World and the developed countries is increasingly less important. We have our Third World within the developed states. This is why the so-called question of immigration has become so important for us. The United States, for example, this nation of immigrants, is today constructing a wall and reinforcing its border security system against immigration, an action largely agreed upon by the Democrats—not necessarily concerning the wall but the need for a substantial increase in the border patrol. In France, this rhetoric has poisoned political life for some time now. It feeds the extreme Right, but, ultimately, the Left always aligns itself with this rhetoric. It’s a very interesting phenomenon because it shows that these destructured masses, poor and deprived of everything, situated in a nonproletarianized urban environment, constitute one of the principal horizons of the politics to come. These masses, therefore, are an important factor in the phenomenon of globalization. The true globalization, today, would be found in the organization of these masses—on a worldwide scale, if possible—whose conditions of existence are essentially the same. Whoever lives in the banlieues of Bamako or Shanghai is not essentially different from someone who lives in the banlieues of Paris or the ghettos of Chicago. They might be poorer and in worse conditions, but they are not essentially different. Their political existence is characterized by a distance from the state—from the state and its clients, the dominant classes but also the middle classes, all of whom strive to maintain this distance. On this political problem, I have only fragmentary ideas. It’s a question that is as difficult as the problem of organizing workers in the nineteenth century. I am convinced it is the fundamental problem today.

There have been important political experiments in this field—with the sans-papiers in France, for example. But this is only one part of a problem that is extremely vast. We have no relations with the young people in revolt in the banlieues. It is once again a dimension of the crisis of negation. We should absolutely be able to think a subtractive form, however minimal, for this type of population. The sans-papiers, for example, should have some form of minimal workers’ organization, since they often work in restaurants or in construction. This is why it is possible to make some progress in their struggle. Another path that is open and important is the problem of gender, with the women of the banlieues, who have very specific responsibilities in the social structures of these neighborhoods. Some progress has been made there. But for the most part the problem is still extremely difficult. The efforts of the “altermondialiste” movement, for example, have been undertaken on an extremely narrow social base; they never touched upon the broad, popular masses of the entire world. It is, really, a petit-bourgeois movement, even if I salute them in their activity. But its organizational capacity at the most fundamental level of the global situation is extremely limited.

DEL LUCCHESE and SMITH: Staying with the idea of subtraction and the global character of the situation it represents, is it possible to conceive of the gesture of migration itself as a subtractive or political one, insofar as it implies putting one’s own life at risk in order to imagine and construct a new possibility of life?

BADIOU: Yes, without a doubt a subtractive gesture. But I would define it as prepolitical. This is made clear by the difficulty immigrants have articulating a political voice in the countries to which they immigrate. The gesture no doubt implies a predisposition to politics; it has elements of risk, displacement, and departure. It’s a gesture similar to that of the workers of the twentieth century who came to the North and its factories from the countryside, though today it is from Africa rather than the south of Italy. It is, therefore, a gesture of subtraction from conditions of poverty, local but diffused on a planetary scale. Those who take this kind of risk can be politicized. What’s different and even more complicated is the case of the young people who are born in the country their parents immigrated to, for example in France. They have a divided subjectivity. On the one hand, these people are excluded from political life. But, on the other hand, they themselves have not made this gesture, with all the risks it implies. A part of the population is ready to do what it takes to remain there, even if this means exposing themselves to submission, corruption, and so on. The revolts of November 2005, therefore, are very significant, but nothing came from them. They remain a bitter and negative experience, an experience of abandon; the young people of the banlieues were left to themselves, with no opening to anyone else. This cannot be political. To return to Spinoza, the situation is no doubt one in which the masses have sunken into what he calls sadness, in which the negative aspect prevails. The political, instead, is always a trajectory toward someone different. And it is an essential condition. In both directions at once. After May ’68, I myself set out to engage workers in an exchange that required both of us to assume this type of trajectory toward someone else. This is missing with the youths of the banlieues, shut up in a collective isolation. Things will probably change, but for the moment this is the reason why nothing came of these revolts. And, for the moment, all they can do is revolt. The repetition of these revolts—as was the case in the large cities of the U.S. in the 1960s—cannot be creative of any politics.

DEL LUCCHESE and SMITH: You mentioned the banlieues of Bamako, Shanghai, and Paris. But there are two other banlieues that, for various reasons and with specific characteristics, are today in flames: Hezbollah’s southern suburbs of Beirut and the Sadr movement’s in east Baghdad. In both cases, we find a massive Shiite population, often having arrived through a process of internal migration from the south of Lebanon or Iraq, that is experimenting with new forms of social and political organization as well as a specifically armed dimension. Is it possible to include these two suburbs in the global phenomenon you’ve been discussing?

BADIOU: Absolutely. It’s even possible to say that the young people living in these banlieues have worked out a solution for themselves. But these are not young people that have been abandoned to themselves. They have leaders. And they have found, in a certain sense, one form of solution to the problems we have been discussing, namely, how can the young and the poor, those who live in the suburbs and ghettos of large cities, become politically organized? To do that, they had to open a dialogue and accept the organization of certain intellectuals, certain “wise” men; the Shiite leaders, after all, are a bit like philosophers who have become activists. But there is an internal limitation to these movements, bound as they are to religious particularity. It is not even a matter of religion in general, since Robespierre, after all, was the proponent of an abstract god. The problem is particularity. To return to your question, then, I would say that across the globe we can recognize a common situation in which gigantic masses of humans are abandoned to the banlieues and ghettos of large cities, and where the old principles of proletarian organization are no longer effective. All the experiments must be examined close-up, including those practiced by Hezbollah in the south of Beirut or by Moktada al-Sadr in east Baghdad. The problem, in each case, is this: what will their relation to the state be? We don’t yet know what decisions they will make.

—Los Angeles, 7 Feb. 2007

Published in Critical Inquiry / Summer 2008