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Christianity and the Revolutionary Origins of the Jesus Movement

Lydia Apolinar, Alexander Gallus, and Ryan Tool pay tribute to the revolutionary and plebeian origins of Christianity. 

A total of 2 billion people will celebrate the holiday of Christmas this year, including over 90% of Americans. Two thousand and twenty years, according to the now universal Gregorian calendar, have passed since the birth of Jesus Christ in the Roman-occupied Kingdom of Judea. For Marxists, matters of religion have never been trivial, not least because many of the workers that must be reached with the ‘good news’ of communism retain religious faith. The doctrine of Christianity has been distorted throughout history by the ruling classes, and a fight to clarify its true revolutionary origins should be seen as important in the struggle for the popularization of scientific socialism. 

One thing that is clear about the Bible is that it is full of contradictions. From Paul’s initial rendering to its modern interpretations, which often completely ignore the more radical biblical concepts, there has been an extended drift away from the working-class origins of the Jesus movement. Less focused on relaying accurate historical accounts, the Church’s own historians’ main focus was on effectiveness and not truth. Peter Wollen’s interesting 1971 article,  republished yesterday in Sidecar, Was Christ a Collaborator, argues that Jesus was no revolutionary but rather a collaborator with the Romans and a supporter of slavery; this seems not only contradictory with the many original scriptures, but the makeup of the early followers of Christ themselves, many of whom were former slaves, guerrilla fighters, and of the poor. Wollen bases this view on the “numerous [recorded] parables” handed down over time. For as many scriptures as you can find of Jesus and the early Jesus cult promoting a life lived in the communist fashion, you can find just as many telling people to be good slaves to their masters and subjects of their ruling state. Build the communist community but “render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s”1 and make peace with the Roman oppressors. 

So many contradictions, interpolations, and cherry-picked quotes from a vast body of work can make one see in the holy texts whatever is convenient to one’s own class position or worldview. Much like the many different sects of communists and socialists today, the dissident Jewish religious sects in Ancient Rome would spend much of their time arguing about very small theoretical minutia, such as: What is the essence of the Holy Trinity? Are they all separate but equal parts of God, like the U.S. branches of government, or are they all just one thing? One wins the argument by how many Biblical scriptures can be shouted at the opposition, while in the end coming to everything and nothing at the same time. 

To really understand the Jesus movement one needs to look closely at the historical period surrounding the events. As far away in time as it was, the first century AD is more similar to the world today than one might initially think: a vast empire ruled by the propertied classes, wantonly dominating other peoples, faced with the resistance of the plebeian classes, and particularly of colonized people. Rome was an empire that stretched from Portugal in the West to Turkey in the East. The Germanic hordes lay across the Danube, Roman units fought against the rebellious Scots and Northern tribesmen of Britain, while more storms were brewing in Jerusalem. Roman society was in a constant battle to expand its territories and further exploit their conquered peoples, mainly through enslavement and taxation. Jerusalem was at the center of the Jewish people’s struggles, although many Jews lived abroad in places like Alexandria (where about 25% of the population was Jewish) where there were also Jewish rebellions. Much like the modern left, Jewish religious organizations were marked by their countless splits and sectism. In the Talmud one can even find a quip that resembles a joke about the modern left: “Israel did not go into captivity until there had come into existence 24 varieties of sectaries”.2 

Of course, the sects’ differences in philosophies masked the real differences in the social relations between people. Take as an example the differences between the zealots, Pharisees, Essenes, and Sadducees. While the lower classes were centered around the former three, the minority upper class was centered around the powerful Sadducees. The poorest sects around the zealots and Essenes had a philosophy that the will of the people was unfree. Being alienated and downtrodden by society, they felt whatever happened to them, bad or good, was predetermined by God and felt as if they had no control over their lives. 

The Pharisees, who comprised a mixture of plebeian/peasant base and what could be considered a middle class, had the view that the will was free but followed a predetermined path. Sadducees, who made up almost exclusively a rich, powerful clerical ruling class based around the Temple in Jerusalem, thought the will was free and blamed the lower classes under their feet for being in their position because of some moral failing. Using the same foundational texts, different ideological groups coinciding with different social classes come to very different conclusions. 

The problem only gets bigger when faced with the fact that the New Testament is a collection of prophecies, parables, fables, speeches, etc., that were written decades after the supposed events happened. Due to the proletarian nature of the original community, nothing would be written down for years and would only travel by word of mouth until those with upper-class backgrounds started to join the Jesus religion. Even then, the later versions of the earlier stories written down started to have upper-class ideology seep into them. For instance, Karl Kautsky in his Foundations of Christianity calls the book of Matthew the “Book of contradictions”, and contrasts it with the earlier more revolutionary scriptures. Any sense of class hatred towards the rich was revised and stamped out. In the earlier book of Luke, Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount reads: 

“Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are ye that hunger now: for ye shall be filled. Blessed are ye that weep now: for ye shall laugh … But woe unto you that are rich! for ye have received your consolation. Woe unto you that are full! for ye shall hunger. Woe unto you that laugh now! for ye shall mourn and weep.” 

The Sermon on the Mount according to the later book of Matthew, however, says: 

“Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven … Blessed are they, which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.” 

Blessed are the poor turns into the poor in spirit, and blessed are the hungry turns into blessed are those that hunger for righteousness. And all of that woeing unto those that are rich? Matthew seems to have conveniently forgotten about that part of Jesus’s speech. Revisions such as these thoroughly corrupted and in fact inverted the message of the original community. The concept of “morality” itself thereby morphed from a gospel of social revolutionary critique and struggle against palpable and earthly conditions, into a critique of the virtue or sin of the individual.  

Whereas some atheist, agnostic, and deist thinkers, notably Bertrand Russell, have questioned the existence of Jesus as a historical personage, Jack Conrad maintains that there were many “saviors, or messiahs (i.e. ‘christs’ in the Greek tongue) in 1st century Palestine”. Considering the tumultuous circumstances of the century, which featured a tremendous Jewish revolution in AD 66, this makes sense. Jesus likely was one among many– and perhaps an amalgamation of several such leaders. The important thing is that Jesus was not an isolated individual with unprecedented claims of being the Messiah; the kind of apocalyptic revolutionary movement he led was one of many that emerged amidst increasingly volatile social conditions. 

In fact, as the English historian Edward Gibbon writes in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, pagan and Jewish sources contemporary to the time of Jesus found him unworthy of mention. Gibbon writes that “at Jesus’s death, according to the Christian tradition, the whole earth, or at least all Palestine, was in darkness for three hours. This took place in the days of the elder Pliny, who devoted a special chapter of his Natural History to eclipses; but of this eclipse he says nothing”.3 Instead, historians like the pro-Roman Jewish aristocrat Flavius Josephus lumped Jesus and his followers, the Nazoreans, in with countless other left-wing Jewish sects he referred to as “bandits” and “brigands”.4 

Jerusalem was the center of Jewish life because of Solomon’s Temple. Jews from across the Roman Empire sent caravans of gold, silver, animals to be sacrificed, and whatever else they could as an offering to the Temple. The Temple was ruled by the high priests who were almost exclusively of the Sadducee mindset. They were mostly puppets in bed with the Romans. Although they were strongly attached to their identity as Jews, and in an abstract sense opposed to Roman rule, the threat from below of popular rebellion of the apocalyptic, communistic sects of the Jewish poor were more threatening to the aristocratic Sadduccees than the Romans were. In practice, this aristocratic priestly class was rightly regarded as complicit with the Roman oppressors by the zealots/Sicarii and what would later become the Nazoreans, the revolutionary grouping around Jesus. While a common laborer might not see much to lose in a rebellion against Rome, the high priests had their lives along with their wealth and influence to consider. According to Jack Conrad’s 2013 book Fantastic Reality, around 1500 priests received the tithes, with a smaller portion receiving the lion’s share of them.5  Collaboration with the Romans was an evil that they readily accepted in the face of popular rebellion from the lower classes. 

The Essenes were an ascetic sect that lived in highly organized communities in which they shared all property in common. Widely regarded as the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls, they observed strict Jewish law and a monastic and withdrawn existence. However, this does not mean that they were politically neutral. They did not practice the kind of quietism often associated with asceticism, and instead played an active role in resistance to the Romans and took part in the revolution of AD 66. Though also strictly religious Jews, the zealots differed from the Essenes in that rather than taking part in a monastic lifestyle, they resembled a guerrilla movement dedicated to combatting the Romans and their aristocratic collaborators. They were also distinct in that they espoused a form of republicanism. 

The Sicarii were a splinter group of zealots particularly feared by the Romans and Roman collaborators. They are often referred to as ‘dagger men’, as their preferred tactic in their resistance to Roman rule was to approach a Roman official or a collaborator in a crowded place, such as a market or festival, and quickly stab them before retreating into the crowd. The group that surrounded Jesus, the Nazoreans, was an apocalyptic revolutionary sect distinct from the zealots/Sicarii and the Essenes– they were not monastic like the Essenes, and they were not republican guerilla fighters like the zealots. But they were part of the same general political/religious movement, and as Conrad notes, “at least five of Jesus’s so-called twelve disciples were associated with, or came from, the ranks of the freedom fighters [zealots] and retained guerilla nicknames”.6

These religious sects were concerned first and foremost with the real world circumstances, which actually lent credence to the mysticism they surrounded themselves in. The mysticism of each group acted as a moral justification for its resistance to the much larger and more powerful forces of the Roman occupation. The Romans were more powerful, but they lacked moral righteousness, and the Jewish sects believed that their moral righteousness would eventually lead the Jewish lower classes to victory in spite of all odds. In this context it makes sense that so many of these sects took on a messianic aspect, in which a leader claims to be the predicted Jewish messiah. Jesus, for example, in addition to referring to himself as the messiah, considered himself and was considered by his followers as “king of the Jews,” a title which was then rewritten out of the New Testament as it was considered far too earthly and political. The New Testament writers/rewriters focus on the supposedly otherworldly titles of messiah and “christ,” although these too are tied inextricably to the political climate and the moral justification they gave to leaders of the revolutionary movement.7 

Christianity, essentially a creation of Paul, was watered down to make itself more palatable to the Roman rulers. The Jesus movement, however, were not Christians but Jewish revolutionaries oppressed by the Romans. They followed strict Jewish law and customs, while a figure such as Paul promoted the violation of basic dietary laws and instructed converts to feel free to “eat any meat from the market” and enrich themselves in a way that was entirely contrary to the principles of the left-wing Jewish sects of the lower classes, from which the Jesus movement emerged. Completely antithetical to a Christian like Paul was the figure of James the Just, Jesus’s brother. 

 James’s existence is covered up and minimized throughout the New Testament for several reasons; that Jesus would have a biological brother grounded him in an earthly existence, and contradicted the cult of Mary as a perpetual virgin– “the more ethereal Jesus is made, the more James sticks out like a sore thumb”.8 But James was also suppressed because of his adherence to the class struggle ideology of the Nazoreans, promising retribution for the wealthy and the oppressors, leading early Christian theologians like Eusebius to question the authenticity of the only document evidencing James’s existence in the New Testament. The rhetoric of class struggle and retribution was alien to this third-century historian, as the image of Christ as the docile spiritual figure who recommended that his followers ”resist not evil” was already firmly entrenched in the Christian imagination.9

Like the Jewish revolutionary movement of the first century AD, the left today is splintered into countless factions, sects, and groups which at first glance stand little chance against the Empire or upper classes. Like them, while we might consider ourselves part of the same ‘broad movement’, many of us still insist on being part of separate organizations as a result of factional disputes, minute theoretical disagreements, and dedication to numerous little messiahs. Of course, not all lessons from the Jewish revolutionaries against Rome should be purely negative. We need the kind of moral passion and righteousness that guided these groups and which directly inspired the socialist party-movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A large part of the struggle to build a socialist mass party is building up that kind of strength, dedication, and confidence among the proletariat. The struggle for class leadership, however, is not one of a single messiah that will guide us out of the darkness and into the light, but of countless proletarian leaders who embody this messianic spirit. When the proletariat is aware of its collective power, no divine intervention is needed for us to win. 

From the Book of James 5:1-7:

“Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you. Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days. Look! The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves on the day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the innocent one, who was not opposing you. Be patient, then, brothers and sisters, until the Lord’s coming.”

 

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The Zhenotdel and Women’s Emancipation in the Central Asian Republics with Anne McShane

Donald and Lydia join human rights lawyer and fellow Marxist Anne McShane to discuss her recent PhD thesis on the Zhenotdel, the women’s department of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. They discuss the origins of the Zhenotdel,  how it attempted to solve the shortcomings of the women’s movement in the second international and its role in women’s liberation after the October Revolution. The conversation then pivots to the specific focus of Anne’s thesis: the changing role the Zhenotdel played in women’s emancipation in the Central Asian Republics. They discuss how the Zhenotdel related to and incorporated indigenous women into organizing, the Central Committee’s takeover of Zhenotdel policy that resulted in the hujum campaign of mass unveiling and the disastrous reaction that followed, how this campaign can be contextualized within the rise of Stalinist policies. They end the episode with the final dissolution of the Zhetnodel in 1930 and the sanitization of Nadezhda Krupskaya’s figure.

Anne’s research interest is in women’s liberation. Check out her Weekly Worker pieces among which we highlight: A barometer of Progress, Soviet Russia and Women’s emancipation, The Will to Liberate and How Women’s Protests Launched the Revolution. Her PhD thesis can be found in the University of Glasgow’s repository.

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The Materialism of Warm-Stream Marxism: Ernst Bloch on Ibn Sina

Daniel Tutt writes on German Marxist Ernst Bloch’s engagement with the Islamic scholar Ibn Sina and its potential for revitalizing materialist philosophy. 

Detail from ‘The Meeting of the Theologians’ by Abd Allah Musawwir, mid-16th century.

The Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch was marginalized in his own time, branded a renegade idealist by the Stalinist regime, exiled in America from the Nazi war machine, and barred from the Frankfurt School for views that were “too communist.” But his thought has continued to gather interest in 21st century Marxist and philosophical circles due to both the reemergence of theological interest within Marxist thought, and a turn to speculative materialism in continental philosophy starting in the early 2000s. Although his works The Spirit of Utopia (1918) and The Principle of Hope (1954) are widely read today, a number of his most important works remain untranslated from German. This untranslated corpus includes his three-volume Das Materialismusproblem that examines both the history of materialism and Bloch’s innovative synthesis of Hegel, Schelling, and Marx.

Among Marxists Bloch is well-known for his writings on the idea of utopia. Bloch analyzes historically this concept in pre-capitalist religious egalitarian movements such as Thomas Müntzer’s medieval peasant’s rebellion, and in social formations that reflect partial and anticipatory consciousness of emancipation. How Bloch theorizes utopia and the principle of hope from a distinctive Marxist and historical materialist orientation is best understood by a distinction he offers in Principle of Hope, a book written in exile in America. There, he posits two dominant strains of Marxism: the cold-stream and warm-stream. The cold-stream is analytical and concerned with the unmasking of ideologies and the disenchantment of metaphysical illusion, that is, a ruthless critique of existing oppression. The warm-stream is the “liberating intention and materialistically humane, humanely materialistic real tendency, towards whose goal all these disenchantments are undertaken.”1

Bloch theorizes the two strains not as separate poles working in isolation, but as a necessary synthesis. He insisted that the coldness and warmth of concrete anticipation taken together ensure that “neither the path in itself, nor the goal in itself, are held apart from one another undialectically.”2 Bloch thus sought to embed historical materialism in these two streams while recognizing that the warm-stream was often ignored and marginalized in Marxist practice from  Marx’s own time to the present. We should understand these two strains as both an epistemological and a praxis-based distinction. Unlike the analytic cold-stream, which is often exclusively concerned with economic analysis, the warm-stream is concerned with the ways in which the “debased, enslaved, abandoned and belittled human beings” make appeals of emancipation. The warm-stream points to what he calls a “homeland of identity, in which neither man behaves towards the world, nor the world behaves towards man, as if towards a stranger.”3 The warm-stream is thus the utopian revolutionary imagination which can only be fully achieved from the vantage point of a classless society.4

The warm-stream can also be read as a form of secular religious conversion involving a commitment to human emancipation. Such an idea of Marxism as a conversionary experience is articulated by the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s in You Must Change Your Life (2009). Here Sloterdijk argues revolutionary socialist and communist movements proposed a model of conversion based on the necessity of man to develop a new awareness of the ‘vertical axis.’ Playing on the immanent-transcendent distinction, Sloterdijk names the vertical axis that axis by which the sacred, like the transcendent, is concerned with occupying what religious belief formerly occupied. The communist revolutionary is not concerned with furthering morality as religious morality understood it, rather, as Sartre said, “true morality is a permanent conversion into revolutionary action.” Such a conversion into revolutionary action is occupying the same axis that religious conversion and religious truth formerly occupied. Sloterdijk analyzes the October Revolution in Russia as an event that turned revolution into a spiritual event. While conversion typically means spiritually re-setting one’s life, revolution means redesigning the world from zero; and the Bolsheviks combined these two forms in a spiritual revolutionary conversion. But, according to Sloterdijk, revolutionary conversion is no longer efficacious after May ’68 because revolutionary movements have continually failed to transform everyday life. Thus, to “become a Marxist” or to gain a commitment to revolutionary action no longer not implies the same consequences precisely because revolutionary change has become an individualized ascetic routine unable to produce a fundamental revolutionary event or overthrow of existing conditions. Sloterdijk’s idea of communism as an ascetic life practice akin to religious conversion is compatible with Bloch’s idea of the warm-stream as the collective yearning towards emancipation implicit in historical religious movements.

Materialism and the Warm-Stream

Warm-stream Marxism is concerned with collective movements of emancipation and with understanding the upsurge of human freedom not as a completed state, but with a linking of this desire to a consideration of matter in a perpetually transformed state. The function of matter and materialism within warm-stream Marxist thought is in many ways the launching point of Bloch’s speculative philosophical thought. Cat Moir, in her superb book on Bloch’s materialism Ernst Bloch’s Speculative Materialism, shows how Bloch in his trilogy “Das Materialismusproblem” develops a concept of matter as the self-realizing impersonal agent of nature. According to Moir,  this untranslated work is a bridge to understanding Bloch’s more widely read work on utopia and the Principle of Hope. Moir shows how for Bloch the very possibility of utopia resides in matter itself, and how human beings as “matter-become-conscious” beings are capable of realizing it.

Ernst Bloch

Bloch’s wider work on materialism was never translated into English due to Stalinist censorship, and because of the assumption amongst many party functionaries that Bloch’s materialism was idealist. Moir shows how Bloch’s materialism was far more complicated than this accusation, and that while he argued that rethinking materialism must be begun again and again, he insisted that any consideration of materialism must involve “inviting all kinds of earlier voices,” including idealist thinkers from Plato and Avicenna to Kant and Hegel. Bloch perceived Hegel’s synthesis of substance and subject as resulting in an idealist fantasy world of pure anamnesis, and he thus refuted such a synthesis by isolating substance (matter) as a fundamentally incomplete process. In his later work Bloch accuses Hegel’s system of excluding real possibility, of thinking possibility as tied up with past historical cycles such that what we come to know must already have existed prior to our knowledge of it. It was this sense that Hegel’s dialectic and wider philosophical system foreclosed real possibility that led Bloch to consider Schelling’s ontology more closely, and to also engage in a genealogy on matter and materialism that stretched back to pre-Aristotelian Greek philosophers. Bloch’s materialism was open to idealist strains of thought—Schelling, Aristotle, Ibn Sina and Hegel—and he read metaphysical and mystical traditions as supportive of egalitarian conceptions of the cosmos and humanity. As the prominent translator and commentator on Bloch Peter Thompson argues, this interest in religious metaphysics was Bloch’s attempt to “search for the materialist base within the metaphysical apprehension of the religious worldview.”5

In the recently translated work Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left (2019), originally written as an appendix to his work on materialism, Doctrines of matter, preparations of its finality and openness, Bloch finds in Avicenna (the common European name given to the Islamic philosopher Ibn Sina) a crucial origin point to leftwing and emancipatory thought. In what follows, I aim to describe Bloch’s interest in Ibn Sina by shedding greater light on who Ibn Sina was for Islamic thought and for philosophy writ large, as well as to identify some of the important themes his thought offers to the tradition of warm-stream Marxism.

Ibn Sina’s Metaphysis and Wider Importance 

Ibn Sina’s metaphysics and influence on Islamic and Occidental thought is nothing less than extraordinarily significant. Philosophically, Ibn Sina fuses Aristotle with Neoplatonism, arguing that existence is an accident and, as such, there is no existence implied in any essence. If a thing does not exist, it does not have an essence to cause it. By extension, before a thing exists it does not have a nature (or pre-determined essence) to determine it. Ibn Sina argues that existence is accidental to essence and therefore no contingent being is rid of contingency. The only self-sufficient being is God and from God’s self-sufficiency stems the contingency of the world, for nothing else could be necessary. Lenn E. Goodman, a well-known commentator on Ibn Sina shows how his idea of the cosmos was based on a theory of predestination even though he adopts a view that all matter is contingent. That is, there is still a necessary being (God) which determines the universe, although existence is radically contingent. Goodman argues the emphasis Ibn Sina placed on necessity amidst radical contingency resulted in a profound set of misunderstandings with other Islamic theological and philosophical critics. For example, the Ash’arite school argued that all causal determinations are vertical and external: every leaf that falls from the tree is determined by God. But in Ibn Sina’s view, God allows created beings to determine events for themselves.6

Ibn Sina

Ibn Sina also put forward a Platonic concept of God as one who is perfect and therefore beyond sensory experience, and combined this argument with an ontological argument based on a necessary absolute ontic7 existence of God. Since matter cannot exist without form, Ibn Sina argues that the matter of the world is eternal. But although matter is eternal, existence is an accident, which means that essence is not implied in anything necessarily. Because existence is prior to essence—both logically and ontologically—God bestows existence on things, that is, God gives form to matter but matter is mediated by the Aristotelian idea of the “Active Intellect.” Ibn Sina has a nontemporal view of creation based on the absolute act of creation—just like existence is contingent, so too is creation. Through man’s rational faculties and capacity for reflection and speculation humans can enter into a rational recognition of necessity. As Goodman writes: 

The life that animates the heavens and becomes the paradigm and ultimate engine or energizer of the processes of nature is the product of the rational recognition of necessity.8

 Ibn Sina’s metaphysics are thus radical in their emphasis on the incomplete and permanent contingency of matter and existence, as well as in the way he theorizes the Active Intellect as a source of the emanation of a communal collective truth that links man’s rational contemplation to God. Ibn Sina’s metaphysics are based on the metaphysical proposition of a synthesis of eternity with contingency, and as we will see when we turn to Bloch, much of this is in line with Bloch’s metaphysics. Although Bloch conflates Ibn Sina with Ibn Rushd (Averroes), a later and important Muslim philosopher, it is important to note that Ibn Rushd objected to Ibn Sina’s more radical idea of contingency. Ibn Rushd argued that contingency of all beings must be understood by the reference to an idea of causality if it is to reach the implication of an external cause for the object we see before us, because otherwise we have an infinite regress of causes.

Outside of Ibn Sina’s metaphysics, it is worth noting that Ibn Sina’s influence is widespread although a matter of some controversy amongst scholars. For example, in the recent masterwork by Islamic scholar and the late academic Shahab Ahmed, What is Islam: The Importance of Being Islamic, Ibn Sina is presented as “the man who effectively defined God for Muslims.”9 Ahmed identifies Ibn Sina as the thinker who emerges in the far east of the Islamic empire (modern-day Uzbekistan) in the 10th century (350 years after the Prophet Muhammad died) and grows to become the seminal theologian-philosopher that defined the “Balkans to Bengal complex” of Islamic societies. The Balkans to Bengal complex was a distinctive social and cultural expression of Islamic civilization that spanned a geographical territory and imprinted an entirely novel form of Islamic community, with Ibn Sina’s contribution to this complex being fundamental. 

For Ibn Sina, the soul does not live on after death, but is purely a vegetative state; a natural organ. As a result, the eternal torture of the soul, held to be a doctrine in much of Islamic theology, is off the table as is eternal damnation. This idea led to a new concept of the self as formulated through self-knowledge. Ibn Sina’s work grew so much esteem that the elite educated classes adopted the study of philosophy within the madrassah educational system largely due to his influence. Ibn Sina’s influence also opened an entirely new way of thinking about the role of wisdom hikmah in relation to the divine. Hikmah became a source for navigating universal truths in societies of Muslims. Philosophical wisdom was both the enactment of practical rules and theoretical rules consonant with those values. Ahmed writes: 

Ibn Sīnā conceptualized God as the sole Necessary Existent (wājib al-wujūd) upon which all other existents are necessarily contingent. It is this philosophers’ conceptualization of God that became the  operative concept of the Divinity taught in madrasahs to students of theology via the standard introductory textbook on logic, physics, and metaphysics which was taught to students in madrasahs in cities and towns throughout the vast region from the Balkans to Bengal in the rough period 1350–1850, and which was tellingly entitled Hidāyat al-ḥikmah, or Guide to Ḥikmah.10 

The Aristotelian Left 

Unlike Aristotle, who sees matter as passive and inert, Ibn Sina views matter as possibility in the sense of a complete disposition to receive forms. He argues that philosophical truth contains the truth just as does the Qur’an, but it is hidden behind a veil.11 Allah (God) is the inflowing of nature itself for Ibn Sina, and based on his idea of contingent matter he sees the whole of nature with an accent of monist tension. For Bloch, Ibn Sina discovers something seminal in Aristotle’s Metaphysics and gives birth to the “Aristotelian left”, because he posits that matter is a natural and dynamic (dyname) thing. This “left” is unlike the Aristotelian “right”, which is most notably represented by St. Thomas Aquinas who refused to think of matter as capable of changing itself. From the premise of matter as a fundamentally contingent and dynamic process, Ibn Sina would develop a theory of the Active Intellect beyond an idea of mere individual moral reflection, but as part of a process of universal reason connected to the community. 

Bloch notes that Ibn Sina understands the “unity of the human intellect and the unity of active reason” and this understanding posed a profound challenge to both Christianity and to Islamic orthodoxies because it portended the application of this principle beyond the bounds of the religious community. Ibn Sina thus opens the way for a radical form of tolerance across communities by his idea of the Active Intellect. Bloch further observes that the influence this universal reason had on influencing a “new pathos of tolerance” is connected to his idea of the warm-stream horizon of hope we identified earlier. It is also connected to Thomas Müntzer, who declared human freedom on the basis of the new universal reason.  

The most technical contribution Ibn Sina made to philosophy was thus what he said about the wider matter-form debate within Aristotlian scholarship. It is clear that Aristotle’s idea of matter was one that taught matter was in the first place something completely indeterminate and unformed, itself uncreated, but out of which all things can be created. What Ibn Sina gives to Aristotle’s idea of matter is the “notion of ferment, self-creation and the sheer incompleteness of this possibility.”12 This insight loosens the bonds between being and matter and enables the philosopher to think of the explication of the world out of itself. This immanent view of matter and the possibility of worldly redemption is far afield from the right-wing Aristotelians under St. Thomas who posited “a fully transcendent theism of pure spirit.”13 Aquinas removes that which realizes forms itself (entelechy) and relegates this act to an exclusive gift of the divine Act-Being, the Being of realization, and subordinates it to the totally transcendental. Influenced by Neoplatonism, Ibn Sina secured the contingent existence of things from a necessary divine being, and as such his vision of the cosmos is one in which God allows the universe to remain radically contingent. Aquinas, on the other hand, says that the essence of God can be nothing other than his being, guided under the maxim, “I will be what I will be.” This conservative metaphysics makes becoming devoid of any future dimensions. Ibn Sina thus made way for philosophers such as Spinoza who would argue that the essence of religion is not dogma, but praxis in the world.

Since matter conditions everything in Ibn Sina’s metaphysics, matter is both potential and potent. Matter has to move, due to its innate propensity towards the realization of that which is not-yet become. This idea of matter is hugely influential on warm-stream Marxist thought in two ways: firstly, it enables an aesthetic idea of realism and artmaking quite distinct from socialist realism of Bloch’s time. As Karam AbuSehly has shown, Bloch’s reading of Ibn Sina influences his own ideas of aesthetic realism, where attention is paid to the object in itself, unlike in idealist aesthetics.14 In addition to influencing Bloch’s theories of aesthetics and realism, Ibn Sina’s concept of matter also influenced his ideas on utopia. If utopia is fundamentally covered in darkness in the sense that it cannot be pictured; it cannot be named. It is the thing that is missing, and accordingly utopia puts matter in motion for its realization and the realization of itself. The philosophical and materialist genealogy Bloch provides us is an indispensable resource for understanding the warm-stream of Marxist emancipation, and it helps us broaden our relations to religious discourse both historically and in the world today.

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Marx Beyond the Mystics

Continuing our theme of exploring the relationship between religion and socialism, Peter Claassen argues that the influence of Christian Mysticism on Hegel impacted the thought of Karl Marx.

“The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.” Karl Marx – Capital Volume 1

One of the most misunderstood parts of Marxism is its relationship and debt to Christianity. Much has been said about Marx and Hegel’s relationship, what it means for the dialectic to be mystifying, his relationship to Hegel’s understanding of history, and so forth. However, worse than this is the sheer lack of discussion around Marx, utopian socialism, and Christianity. While some have commented upon Marxism as a form of millenarian Christianity, including members of the far-right like Mircea Eliade, there has been little discussion within the far-left, save for a few like Ernst Bloch and Roland Boer. In this essay, we will go through the ways in which Marx through Hegel and others owes a significant debt to various forms of Christian mysticism, and the ways in which his work parallels those works. Specifically, we will look at his early works like the Paris Manuscripts and the critique of Hegel’s Political Philosophy, where we find these ideas very clearly expressed, as well as in Engels’ later work on Utopian Socialism. This will be coupled with an explanation of why Marx thinks that Hegel is a mystic, and what that means for his demystification of the dialectic. What we will discover is that Marx has a deep and ongoing debt to mystical currents in Christianity, as mediated both by Hegel and by the utopian socialists, and that this seems to be understood in part by figures such as Lenin.  

We must start by asking what it means for something to be the rational kernel of something else, i.e., what does it mean for the dialectic to be the rational kernel of Hegelian mysticism? To understand this, we must come to understand what Hegel’s mysticism is, and his relationship to mysticism in general. Glenn Alexander Magee has written a brilliant exposition of what Hegel’s mysticism is, in relation to the Hermetic Tradition. To condense 200+ pages into a short space, Hegel believed in extra-sensory perception, conversed with friends over the nature of magic,1 publicly aligned himself with German mystic reactionary Franz von Baader,2 was accused by Schelling of stealing his entire philosophy from Jakob Boehme,3 a Lutheran peasant mystic,4 and, most outlandishly, believed in a kind of Earth Spirit.5 This, however, is less interesting than Magee’s exposition of Hegel’s relationship to these prior mystics, namely that Hegel’s speculative philosophy, that is to say his dialectical method, is most comparable to mythopoetic thinking, stripped of its sensuous quality,6 as Hegel himself argues is the failing of Boehme.7 Most tellingly of all however is Hegel’s belief that magic is a lower form of philosophy.8 What all this leads us to conclude is that Hegel understands his philosophy to be higher elevation, or more accurately articulation, of what the mystics had already grasped. If we use the language of Marx, Hegel understands that he is recovering the speculative kernel of sensuous mysticism. However, it is important here to note that Hegel’s dialectic is understood as holding up a mirror to the Absolute, God, by which he/it can comprehend itself as Hegel says “it is the exposition, and in fact the self-exposition, of the absolute and only a display of what it is.”9 Further, the actual motor off which Hegel’s dialectic runs is not “the grasping of opposites” or even “immanent critique” but what can only be described as the logic of supersession, with the two prior ideas being mere subsections of this. The logic of supersession is, namely, that two seeming opposites can be grasped together internal to their own movement and reveal themselves to subsist in a third, for example, Being and Nothing are in fact moments of Becoming, as coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be.10 This concept is thoroughly mystical; while Magee points out we do find it in Judaism,11 the most obvious example of this is the Christian notion of how Christianity supersedes prior religions, namely Judaism and paganism. As Christ says, “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill.”12 This logic itself is found in God, where God gives rise to his other, the world, but through Christ reconciles himself to the world giving rise to the Holy Spirit, which is the inner bond of love between Christ, God and the Spirit itself. As such the very core of Hegel’s system, the logic of supersession, the thing off which the whole machine runs, is thoroughly mystical in origin. 

Naturally, we must now ask what is Marx doing to Hegel, if Hegel himself is demystifying the mystics? In short, Marx understands himself as taking Hegel’s system further than Hegel himself could. The most obvious rejection would be the belief in extrasensory perception, world spirits and similar “entities”; however, even here we find a pronounced Hegelianism. Specifically, the only way “the rational kernel” can be interpreted is the concept of speculative philosophy as such. Therefore,  what Marx supersedes is the sensuous mystical elements of Hegel’s philosophy, in favor of the rational kernel, namely speculation as applied to matter. 

“My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of “the Idea,” he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of “the Idea.” With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.”13

Here precisely Marx betrays his consummate Hegelianism, for as Magee points out the very term speculative philosophy, qua Hegel, is about the reflection of God back into himself, through the activity of the philosopher, hence why Hegel considers himself to be writing an autobiography of the Absolute, the Unconditioned. As Cyril Smith has correctly noted, the purpose here of Marx is not to form another theory, but to strike down all theories, and do nothing other than translate the material world into the forms of personal thought.14

It should however be noted that within Hegel scholarship there exists a significant debate over whether Hegel can be counted as “metaphysical”.15 This seemingly arcane debate however has serious importance for the interpretation of Marx. The key relevance here is that the opposition in Hegelianism between metaphysical and non-metaphysical Hegels is the question of if Hegel is arguing for a new super-being. Non-metaphysical Hegelians attack their opposition as positing that Hegel is arguing for wondrous new entities with bizarre properties, a demiurge. By comparison, the metaphysical Hegelians argue that what he is discussing in concepts like the Idea, or the Absolute, is reality in itself. As such his Absolute is not God as understood in popular culture, a kind of impish Superman.16 Rather the Absolute is the Unconditioned. This of course is where the description of pantheism comes from, as if God is the Unconditioned then all reality must in some sense be a manifestation of he/she/it. 

The importance of this discussion, however, comes when we realize that Engels specifically distinguishes Aristotle and ancient Greek philosophy from “metaphysics”, saying that Aristotle, “the most encyclopaedic of [the Greek philosophers]), had already analyzed the most essential forms of dialectic thought”, and that further Hegel is not a metaphysician.17 As Hegel clearly says, “In both (Philosophy and Religion) the object is Truth, in that supreme sense in which God and God only is the Truth.”18 However this God can no longer be understood as a God simply beyond us, a demiurge beyond, but rather as the unconditioned truth of reality.19 Marx strangely seems to have almost stumbled into Hegel’s position by attacking a crude metaphysical reading of Hegel, wherein the Idea is simply a demiurge, a superman. As such in opposing the Idea as demiurge he has bizarrely actually hit upon Hegel’s true position. Whether this is a mere rhetorical flourish is unclear. 

As such, I agree then with Smith that Marx is not interested in then proposing simply another ideology, rather he is proposing the dissolution of all ideology, all theory as such, and rather simply attempting to tie himself to reality as such. His “dialectical materialism” would then be more dialectical than materialist, for the very reason that the interest is in the method, which as Engels clearly indicates Aristotle more readily grasps than the metaphysicians and materialists, ala Locke. 20 It is the method that Lenin clearly is drawn to, in his Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism, and he again clearly understands this point of dialectics as a form of speculation, that is to say reflection of the objective social fact, sans distortion or interpretation. 21 However, if Marx is then maintaining the rational kernel, it must be noted that this rational kernel is still speculative philosophy, a doctrine that ultimately emerges from European mysticism. The important part here to note then is that this doctrine of the mystics, if taken up within the dialectical process, and taking Hegel further than he could take himself, would necessarily render Marx more mystical and more Hegelian than Hegel himself, in the same fashion that Hegel’s de-sensualizing of the mystics made him more mystical than the mystics. Precisely, in superseding Hegel with respect to Hegel’s mysticism, extra-sensory perception, and so forth, Marx preserves the essential core of Hegel’s mysticism, speculative philosophy, and thus is more Hegelian than Hegel, more mystical than the mystics. 

The issue for any would-be interpreter of Marx is where this leaves him in relation to God. He clearly understands the Idea/Absolute and so forth as a kind of demiurge, which they are not, and he is proclaiming his loyalty to a philosophical system which requires God, because it is nothing other than God’s self-exposition. If this system is to make sense we are forced basically to fall back to Marx’s Spinozism,22 and accept that what dialectics is reflecting back into itself is the material world as such, so in essence Marx can only be distinct from Hegel in so far as his Absolute is Spinoza’s substance, or matter as one might put it. This itself is ironically betrayed in the name “dialectical materialism”, which one might better call “speculative materialism” in contrast to Hegel’s “speculative idealism” (though this is separate from Quentin Meillassoux’s use of the same term). What dialectical materialism as a term reveals, specifically, is that this is dialectics as applied to matter, that is to say speculative philosophy applied to the material world as such, or as Marx says “the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought”. 

Having come to understand that Marx sees himself as doing to Hegel what Hegel did to prior mystics, there then comes the question of the relationship between scientific socialism and utopian socialism. Immediately we must grasp that the type of science here cannot mean a kind of natural science, as Engels says in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific: 

“The analysis of Nature into its individual parts, the grouping of the different natural processes and objects in definite classes, the study of the internal anatomy of organized bodies in their manifold forms — these were the fundamental conditions of the gigantic strides in our knowledge of Nature that have been made during the last 400 years. But this method of work has also left us as legacy the habit of observing natural objects and processes in isolation, apart from their connection with the vast whole; of observing them in repose, not in motion; as constraints, not as essentially variables; in their death, not in their life. And when this way of looking at things was transferred by Bacon and Locke from natural science to philosophy, it begot the narrow, metaphysical mode of thought peculiar to the last century.”23

Thus the “real basis” from which we make “a science of Socialism”24 cannot simply be the kind of positivist social science of the modern-day, as a system of division and breaking down. Rather, as Engels makes clear the basis is dialectics; however, having gone through Hegel, Magee, and Engels it should at this point be explicit that dialectics is the “operating system” of European mysticism, which emerges from ancient Greek philosophy. One might almost imagine it better to translate Wissenschaftlicher Sozialismus as ‘Hermetic Socialism’ to convey the necessity of this point.  The scientific method of scientific socialism is dialectics, and dialectics is nothing other than the method of the mystics. 

Having been brought now to this point, we must then ask: if the dialectical method taken from Hegel is mysticism stripped of its extraneous elements, what then is the distinction between scientific socialism and utopian socialism? Engels again provides the answer: 

“Although Hegel was — with Saint-Simon — the most encyclopaedic mind of his time, yet he was limited, first, by the necessary limited extent of his own knowledge and, second, by the limited extent and depth of the knowledge and conceptions of his age.”25

“And although, upon the whole, the bourgeoisie, in their struggle with the nobility, could claim to represent at the same time the interests of the different working-classes of that period, yet in every great bourgeois movement there were independent outbursts of that class which was the forerunner, more or less developed, of the modern proletariat. For example, at the time of the German Reformation and the Peasants’ War, the Anabaptists and Thomas Müntzer; in the great English Revolution, the Levellers; in the great French Revolution, Babeuf.”26

“One thing is common to all three. Not one of them appears as a representative of the interests of that proletariat which historical development had, in the meantime, produced. Like the French philosophers, they do not claim to emancipate a particular class to begin with, but all humanity at once.”27 

In short, the failure of the utopian socialists is the failure to center themselves upon the proletariat. This is of course the same failure that Marx places at the feet of Hegel. Hegel in his alienation cannot see the possibility of communism, and thus imagines the highest order as being the Prussian state.28 For their part the utopian socialists fail not because of their vision, but because they do not see the means of delivering the emancipation of all of humanity, namely that this is only possible through the proletariat, and so want all of society to rise. It is important here now to note that these utopians were also explicitly mystics, and that the visions they presented of communist society were explicitly mystical. However, this is not what Engels criticizes them for, and thinks that this mysticism is a mere epiphenomenon of the failure to center themselves upon the proletariat. Further, Engels recognizes in Fourier a “masterly” use of the dialectical method.29 

Further, the mysticism of the utopians was extreme. Owen, Fourier, and Saint-Simon were all deeply mystical. All of them believed in one form of extra-sensory perception or another,30 and Saint-Simon openly called for a new hierarchical and mystical Christianity, as Engels notes.31 Fourier famously believed that the seas would turn into lemonade, but more interestingly he has a vision of the reconciliation of man and beast, or with the emergence of species like Anti-Lions, pacifistic animals that would emerge with the development of human civilization. This vision however is not abandoned by Marx, rather as he discusses in the Paris Manuscripts, communism as such is the reconciliation of men with nature, where nature is understood to be the inorganic body of man.32 This is the core of what Fourier is proposing, the exterior mystical form of Fourier’s position, namely that animals and humans, now in conflict, would with the coming of communism be reconciled, is still contained within the notion that nature is the inorganic body of man, which in class society we are alienated from. 

Apocalypse 42. A new heaven and new earth. Revelation 21 v 29. Borcht. Phillip Medhurst Collection

However, it is necessary to elaborate on the specific connections between communism and the kind of mystical Christianity from which utopian socialism openly emerges. First, we have the mystical understanding of the New Earth and soteriology. Marx and Fourier’s visions of communism clearly parallel the vision of the New Earth, that is the earth after the second coming, as seen in  Eastern Orthodox Christianity, wherein man shall serve as the cosmic priesthood for a totally recreated world, in which a new covenant between man and beast is created and all shall be with God.33 Fourier’s vision wherein society is reorganized into a series of pseudo-monasteries34 further parallels the famous vision of Joachim de Fiore, who envisaged the world to come as a contemplative one, in which all would be monks.35 This vision parallels the vision of communism as presented in the Paris Manuscripts, wherein nature is man’s inorganic body, and the coming of communism is the overcoming of alienation, man from man and man from nature: 

“Physically man lives only on these products of nature, whether they appear in the form of food, heating, clothes, a dwelling, etc. The universality of man appears in practice precisely in the universality which makes all nature his inorganic body – both inasmuch as nature is (1) his direct means of life, and (2) the material, the object, and the instrument of his life activity. Nature is man’s inorganic body – nature, that is, insofar as it is not itself human body.  Man lives on nature – means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die.  That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.”36

Further Marx writes that:

“Communism  as  the  positive  transcendence  of  private  property  as  human  self-estrangement, and  therefore  as  the  real  appropriation  of  the  human  essence  by  and  for  man;  communism  therefore  as  the  complete  return  of  man  to  himself  as  a  social  (i.e.,  human)  being  –  a  return  accomplished  consciously  and  embracing  the  entire  wealth  of  previous  development.  This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals  naturalism;  it  is  the  genuine  resolution  of  the  conflict  between  man  and  nature  and between man and man – the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.”37

This again betrays the relationship between communism and Christian eschatology, where, as we find in Eastern Orthodoxy, the coming of the New Earth is in a certain sense a return, in the same way that higher stage communism is a return to primitive communism, and so too is the New Jerusalem a return to the Garden of Eden. The difference between Man in the Garden and Man in the New Jerusalem is that the new Man will have knowledge of good and evil. The process of alienation was necessary precisely because it is through alienation Man has come to know himself.38 As such the return to communism as at the same time an advance. The analogy that we find is that for Marx, alienation is functionally identical to sin, or to use the Greek hamartia, to miss the mark. However, sin should not be understood as simply a violation of God’s law; rather, sin properly understood is separation from God, which ultimately is separation from one’s own nature39 as made in the image of God, and from our fellow man, through transgression of his person. This again is identical to Marx’s understanding of alienation, wherein alienated existence is not simply alienation from yourself, but alienation from your fellow man, and alienation from the world.40 Further, the insistence upon man’s nature as socially creative labor, must be understood as an attack upon Hegel’s Lutheranism. Here Marx disagrees with the doctrine of Sola Fide, i.e. that we can come to reconcile ourselves with God through belief alone, but rather it is necessary that we must act to reconcile ourselves to God. This is almost identical to the Eastern Orthodox doctrine of theosis, that reconciliation with God must be a process of activity and purgation.41 

What however is more telling is Marx’s remark that Communism is “the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence”. For most western Theists God is an ontologically simple being, in that He has no distinction between his existence and his essence, following from Aristotle and Aquinas.42 The only being in whom the strife between existence and essence is resolved is God. Marx’s position then that communism is the resolution of the distinction between existence and essence is tantamount to the belief that communism is the state of sainthood, wherein the saint has subsumed themselves into God, ceasing to exist as a self-sufficient entity in their unity with God.43 It should then be clear that the only way to interpret Marx’s understanding of communism is as a demystified or stripped away account of salvation and eschatology within Christianity, as mediated by utopian socialism. Now one could argue that this is to be found in other religious traditions, which it is. However, it is unclear that Marx or Engels had much contact with those traditions, while they had extensive contact with Christianity. 

The linkage however does not cease there. The basic Augustinian thesis, that the Church is the City of God on Earth, already present in this world,44 prior to the end of the world, is preserved in Marx. The specific attack that Marx has upon the utopians should be understood first and foremost as an Augustinian attack upon them. As Camatte correctly points out the essential characteristic of the proletariat is that it is revolutionary; what it means to be revolutionary however is participation in the Gemeinwesen, the material human community, that is organized through the Party.45 As Marx says, “The head of this emancipation is philosophy, its heart the proletariat”.46 So too must we understand that the issue of the utopians was their imagining of communism as a beyond, to which all society must be raised,47 rather than the true position, namely that communism is nothing other than unalienated life as such. Communism precisely cannot be defeated because communism as such is nothing other than the inner truth of all class society. However, it is only under capitalism that communism can be achieved because it is under capitalism that class struggle, that is the struggle against alienation and oppression, is at its purest. Augustine’s attack upon the pagans was against their belief that the sack of Rome showed the failure of the Church; rather he correctly pointed out that the Church quite simply cannot be destroyed.48 The Church as such is imperishable, and cannot be overcome or corrupted or destroyed. Thus we observe that in Marx’s attack upon the Utopians, namely in their imagining of Communism as a beyond, he charges them with failing to see the tool by which communism will be achieved, or in other words, that the path to the City of God is through the Church.49 It is only through the triumph of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which is in its core truth already communism, and as Camatte correctly reads, is also the party, that we can be delivered to communism. 

Finally, it is necessary to consider the nature, purpose, and role of the militant. The rejection of the cult of personality by Marx must be understood as nothing other than the assertion of the ultimately clerical nature of the militant. This is found consistently within the works of the great revolutionary leaders. As Trotsky says, “the Bolsheviks appear in relation to the democrats and social-democrats of all hues as did the Jesuits in relation to the peaceful ecclesiastical hierarchy”,50 and as Marx says, “such was my aversion to the personality cult … I never allowed one of these [honors] to enter the domain of publicity”.51 The basic assertion here is nothing other than that of Saint Gregory the Great in naming himself Servus Servorum Dei, slave of the slaves of God,52 or when Christ asserts, “And whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant”.53 The essential point here is that the militant does not seek to speak for themselves. As Camatte points out, scientific socialism is not the work of an individual, but rather it is the work of the species.54 So too are the priests properly conceived, no longer living for themselves but for the group. This is the essential characteristic of the militant, as well as the theoretician, who at the end of the day must also himself be a militant. The militant does not seek to act for themselves but for humanity as such, and it is in this way that he becomes reconciled with his nature, and ultimately with reality. By understanding that the nature that is within himself is the species-being of man, as socially creative labor, he comes to understand that to overcome alienation is submission to the species as such. However, as has been pointed out before, the goal by which the liberation of the species, that is, the ending of alienation, is achieved is through the proletariat. The proletariat in its revolutionary nature harnesses the species-being of man, and the role of the militant is to sacrifice himself for this purpose. As such the task of the militant is nothing other than the organization of the proletariat; they are in this sense nothing but a conduit through which the proletariat, and thus humanity as such, acts. In the same fashion, the priest is nothing other than the conduit by which the Holy Spirit acts. The militant is against the cult of personality precisely because the cult fails to understand the proper function of the militant, that the militant does not live for themselves but for the species and the proletariat; they have no honor in themselves apart from their function. 

This brings us finally to what Marx sees as the issue with religion. The famous quotation of the opium of the masses does us well here. The very fault with religion is the same as was identified with social democracy, that in being an easing of pain it distracts from the ultimate necessity of class struggle, from the struggle to overcome alienation. It as a vehicle is unable to achieve its ultimate end, i.e. communism, that is the end of alienation, both of man from man and man from nature. This, however, is not atheism, for as Marx himself notes, socialism is at once the overcoming of religion and atheism.55 In the same way, Christianity understands itself as being the overcoming of both Judaism and paganism. Where the pagans insisted on the plurality of Gods, the Jews insisted upon the singularity of existence, and thus the singularity of God; Christianity understood itself as overcoming both of these and recognizing the diversity in unity that is the triune God. The same is true of socialism. Socialism stands in relation to atheism as atheism to religion and has overcome both, precisely because it recognizes that the relation is no longer man to God, as with religion, nor man to himself, as with atheism, but with man to his nature and to nature itself. Thus, even in Marx’s anti-religious moments, he reveals the ways in which he is deeply influenced by utopian socialism and its origins in Christianity. However, what further complicates the idea that Marx should simply be read as an atheist is his declaration that communism is “the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence”. As has been discussed prior this seriously threatens the idea that Marx is an atheist in the same fashion that even Feuerbach is an atheist, rather, in a Hegelian fashion, he seeks to overcome the failures of both atheism and religion. In the same way that a Christian is more Platonic than the Platonists, and more Jewish than the Jews, since Christianity has overcome both, scientific socialism is then more religious than the religious, and more atheist than the atheists. 

A Russian icon from the Novgorod school The Raising of Lazarus, 15th century. 72 x 60 cm. The Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain.

To conclude, I would draw attention to the examples of the Biblical prophets, and their attitude towards God. As Isaiah says “Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I. Send me!”.56 Here we see the basic characteristic of Marx, namely the desire not to speak for one’s self, but rather to simply become the mouthpiece by which the species, or God, speaks. Smeared with coal, Marx and Isaiah’s lips are united precisely in their collective proclamation of man’s unity with man and nature. Having gone through these sources it should be clear that what Marx is aiming to do is to correctly formulate the doctrines that religion at its most religious holds to, namely when it is aiming to overcome the alienation of man from man and man from nature. However, this must be understood within the context of Marx’s debt to Hegel and utopian socialism, for separate from this connection the very structure of Marx’s overcoming fails to make sense and loses all coherence.

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Freedom in Death: Liberalism and the Apocalypse

Medway Baker calls for uncompromising faith in the cause of communism in the face of a capitalist civilization that is destroying humanity. 

Hurricanes ravage shores and flatten communities. Floods sweep away people and submerge houses. Plagues decimate families and destroy solidarity. Famines devour the young and the old. The sun scorches the earth, the creatures of the land and the sea are driven into extinction, children waste away, the elderly are cooped up like livestock to wait for the end. This is the world that the liberal order has wrought. 

Liberalism will lead us all to death. But at least we’ll be free. 

We are living in the end times. The opportunity for compromise and reform is long over. All that’s left to us is to struggle for a new world, for the kingdom of heaven on earth. Without the struggle for the final aim, we may as well consign ourselves to hell. So let us struggle.

The ruling class will be judged for their sins

Life versus Liberalism

The first angel sounded, and there followed hail and fire mingled with blood, and they were cast upon the earth: and the third part of trees was burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up.

And the second angel sounded, and as it were a great mountain burning with fire was cast into the sea: and the third part of the sea became blood;

And the third part of the creatures which were in the sea, and had life, died; and the third part of the ships were destroyed.

And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters;

And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.1

The COVID-19 crisis is a tragic, but highly visible example of the crisis of liberalism. While “illiberal” countries such as China, Vietnam, and Egypt have managed to contain the virus and take care of their infected in a humane manner, the so-called “free” liberal democracies were shamefully slow to react. The United States epitomises the liberal approach to the crisis: downplaying the virus, failing to contain the spread until it’s too late, refusing to care for the sick, all in the name of keeping the economy running, until panic seized the population and it became necessary for the state to step in and salvage the situation. This approach was always unsustainable, but the short-sighted liberal bourgeoisie is able to see only one thing: immediate profits. 

When it was already too late, Donald Trump banned travel between the US and Europe, deepening the economic crisis while failing to effectively address the problem of the virus’s spread within the US. The working people of America have been left for too long with no answers, no tests, and no treatment. Hundreds of thousands are sick, many without even knowing it, and the virus is being transmitted to thousands more day by day. Thousands are already dying, and many more will continue to die. And liberal capitalism will do nothing to stop it, except what’s necessary to protect profits. 

The result, paradoxically, is an increasingly authoritarian response, which nevertheless fails to establish limits on individuals’ activities in such a way as to prevent the spread of the virus. Nationalist, militarist rhetoric and the expansion of the police state will continue to rise alongside liberal individualism. All state action is undertaken in the name of defending profit. Protecting the people is not only secondary—it is only a concern insofar as it’s required to keep the economy running. This is the essence of liberalism: freedom for the ruling class, oppression and death for the people. 

Individual freedoms are paramount! But not the freedom of humane care, the freedom to self-quarantine without fear of penury, the freedom of staying alive. We will be free in death—we may not survive, but at least commerce won’t have been restricted. At least we’ll still have the freedom to go out into public, to get infected and infect others; bosses retain the freedom to fire workers for staying home, landlords the freedom to evict tenants who can’t pay their rent. This is the meaning of freedom under liberalism. Liberal freedom is death. 

The types of crazed individualistic responses we’ve seen, with people buying truckloads of toilet paper and hand sanitizer, are symptomatic of the hegemonic liberal consciousness. It’s everyone for themself in this world: hoarding has spiked, leaving the poor and the vulnerable with nothing; people are buying up hand sanitizer in order to resell it for quadruple the price. Young, healthy people seem not to care about getting the virus, because their risk of death is so low; they don’t care that they might infect the old or the sick, that they might bring about another human’s death. Liberalism is alienation. It is the veneration of the self above all, and the destruction of a harmonious society which cares for its members. In the words of the arch-liberal Margaret Thatcher: 

“There is no such thing [as society]! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour and life is a reciprocal business…”2

Liberal individualism at work

The essence of liberal freedom is not democracy, not the rule of the people, but the freedom of the slaveholders, the landlords, the financiers.3 Personal liberty, according to the logic of the market, requires dominance over others. The ultimate freedom-through-dominance is, of course, condemning others to death in the name of your personal wellbeing, in the name of your own enjoyment and profits. Whether this is manifested in hoarding and thus preventing others from accessing the goods they need; or in choosing not to self-isolate during a pandemic and thus infecting the vulnerable; or in waging imperialist war in pursuit of profit; or in destroying the biosphere in the name of capitalist accumulation—the result is the same: murder in the name of personal liberty. 

The climate crisis is another, though less obviously pressing, example of liberalism’s death drive. Even as they proclaim a moral commitment to sustainability and protecting the environment, liberal leaders, such as Canada’s Justin Trudeau, continue to buttress fossil fuel industries, even going so far as to exercise military force to protect these destructive extractive projects. Liberalism’s moral commitments matter for nothing if it continues to drag us all into the hell of climate apocalypse, in the name of freedom and compromise. Down with liberal freedom! Down with compromise! 

Only the people can save the people! The people united and aware will crush the virus!

Death versus Communism

And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works.

And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works.

And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death.

And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire.4

The people will judge the wicked. The righteous, the labourers, those who built the world and who will save it from destruction, will destroy our enemies and cast them into the eternal flames. This is the only way to preserve life. We have seen that liberalism—capitalist freedoms and the principle of compromise—will lead us all into the apocalypse. The world will be born anew, but only after a long, hard struggle. We must go to war. War against liberalism, war against compromise, war against death. 

“Revolution is the war of liberty against its enemies,” said Robespierre, that great fighter for the people. “Revolutionary government owes good citizens full national protection; to enemies of the people it owes nothing but death.”5 In order to secure life and liberty for the people, we must bring death to our enemies, who would rather the rule of death than the rule of the people. The time for compromise is long over: as Bukharin said in 1917, on the battle for Moscow in October, 

“Those who call for a compromise are like Metropolitan Platon in Moscow, who came to the soviet and with tears in his eyes implored us to stop the bloodshed. We think firm measures are necessary…. This is the epoch of dictatorship and we shall sweep away with an iron broom everything that deserves to be swept away.”6  

In order to win the war against the apocalypse, we must refuse all half-measures, all compromises, all popular fronts with liberals and “progressives”. These people are not prepared to take the necessary steps to protect life and liberty. At best they are unreliable allies who will desert at the first sign of trouble; at worst, they are our deadly enemies. They will be judged for their betrayal, and they will be destroyed. “Our problem,” as Trotsky elucidated in 1920, “is not the destruction of human life, but its preservation. But as we have to struggle for the preservation of human life with arms in our hands, it leads to the destruction of human life…. The enemy must be made harmless, and in wartime this means that he must be destroyed.”7

Are we not at war for our very survival as a species? Even the bourgeois politicians and press no longer shy away from comparing the COVID-19 crisis to war. But we communists take this principle even further: we are not only at war against the virus, we are at war against the destruction of our planet, against the suicide of our species—against death itself! 

The revolutionary poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, while in mourning following Lenin’s death, wrote that “‘Lenin’ and ‘Death’—are foes. / ‘Lenin’ and ‘Life’—comrades.”8 This is not mere poetic flourish, but rather distils the essence of the communist mission. Similarly, the architect Konstantin Melnikov, who designed Lenin’s sarcophagus, proclaimed that “the revolutionary Russian people… possess the power of resurrection and will exercise it by endowing their leader with immortality.”9 

Of course we don’t propose that communism will bring about literal, personal immortality. But it will defeat death in a far more profound, truly liberatory fashion: “In communism,” said the Italian communist Amadeo Bordiga, 

“the identity of the individual and his fate with their species is re-won, after destroying within it all the limits of family, race, and nation. This victory puts an end to all fear of personal death and with it every cult of the living and the dead, society being organised for the first time around well-being and joy and the reduction of sorrow, suffering, and sacrifice to a rational minimum”. 

He admired ancient civilizations such as the Inca, who, he claimed, 

“recognised the flow of life in that same energy which the Sun radiates on the planet and which flows through the arteries of a living man, and which becomes unity and love in the whole species, which, until it falls into the superstition of an individual soul with its sanctimonious balance sheet of give and take, the superstructure of monetary venality, does not fear death and knows personal death as nothing other than a hymn of joy and a fecund contribution to the life of humanity.”10

The freedom of communism is the joy of contributing to something greater than oneself, to a greater human cause, to life as a whole. The freedom of liberalism is the murder of humanity in the name of personal gain. Under the guise of upholding individual liberty, capital will sacrifice countless individuals on the altar of profit. Our liberals are all too happy to let millions die if it means keeping the market afloat—indeed, they not only leave the poor to the mercy of the virus and the catastrophic effects of climate change, they actively destroy other nations in order to maintain their position in the global hierarchy! 

Trotsky sums up this predicament succinctly: “To make the individual sacred we must destroy the social order which crucifies him. And this problem can only be solved by blood and iron.”11

Placing the needs of the collective over those of the individual, so that each individual can truly be free: this is the meaning of communism. This can only be accomplished with democratic central planning. Even undemocratic planned systems are more capable of mitigating the crisis than the chaos of liberalism. Imagine what could be possible with the full capacities of humanity unleashed, through the power of the Plan, through the harmonious dialectic between the center and the outer nodes, all directed towards the needs of the Social Body. 

Communism means life. Communism means immanentizing the eschaton. Communism means the conquest of chaos, the defeat of entropy, the victory of order and freedom. 

Hope and Revolution

For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.

For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God.

For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope,

Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.

For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.

And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.

For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for?12

Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Bolshevik revolutionary and first People’s Commissar for Education, wrote that “scientific socialism is the most religious of all religions, and the true Social Democrat is the most deeply religious of all human beings.”13 Although this seems to resemble a common liberal accusation against Marxism—that it is a dogmatic, scriptural, inflexible ideology of dangerous zealots—Lunacharsky, to borrow a turn of phrase, turned this notion on its head. Yes, he says, Marxism is a religion; but what is the essence of religion? Is it dogmatism, adherence to scripture, inflexibility? No! he says. Then, is it belief in the supernatural, blind adherence to an unprovable notion? No! By religion, Lunacharsky means “rather the emotive, collective, utopian, and very human elements of religion.”14 

For Lunacharsky, then, religion is the fundamental belief in something greater than oneself, which drives one to participate in a greater cause. This was a feeling shared by virtually all revolutionaries, although Lenin was highly critical of Lunacharsky’s analysis. For instance, Trotsky proclaimed in 1901: 

“Dum spiro spero! [As long as I breathe, I hope!] … As long as I breathe, I shall fight for the future, that radiant future in which man, strong and beautiful, will become master of the drifting stream of his history and will direct it towards the boundless horizon of beauty, joy, and happiness!”15 

Nearly four decades later, even while proclaiming his staunch atheism, he would reiterate, “I shall die with unshaken faith in the communist future. This faith in man and in his future gives me even now such power of resistance as cannot be given by any religion.”16 

What is this if not that same enthusiasm identified by Lunacharsky, when he said that “religion is enthusiasm and ‘without enthusiasm it is not given to man to create anything great’”17? Marxism is the religion of the oppressed, the only truly revolutionary religion remaining. It is the religion of collective action for the construction of a new, truly liberated society. “The personal understanding of the value of life only in connection with a grand sweep of collective life—that is the religious feeling of Marx.”18 

By contrast, Lunacharsky attributed scripturalism and doctrinal inflexibility to Plekhanov, and by extension to Menshevism. He saw many of the problems of the Bolsheviks, too, as deriving from Plekhanovism.19 This mechanistic attitude was a distortion of Marxism which ignored the true spirit of the communist mission. 

For Lunacharsky, it is not cold, hard science which motivates communists to pursue the cause. Yes, a scientific understanding of the world, of class, of political economy, of revolution and all the rest is essential to fulfilling the mission which we have assigned ourselves. But it is not the facts which drive us to devote our lives to the cause; it is a spiritual commitment, to humanity and to life as a whole. Communists are motivated by a “deeply emotional impulse of the soul.”20 As Roland Boer summarises, “the key to Marxism [for Lunacharsky] was… a synthesis of science and irrepressible enthusiasm.”21

Much like a religious zealot (and in the same spirit as Trotsky), Lunacharsky impresses upon us the inevitability of struggle, of sacrifice, of suffering on the road to liberation; but he refuses to let this stop him, because he knows that at the end of the road awaits the kingdom of God. “Things are hard for us now,” he admits, “we have to go up to the neck in blood and filth, but after our Revolution, as after every great revolution, a wave of creative power will come a new, beautiful, fragrant art will blossom.”22 

It is this promise that drives us, even though we know that we may not live to see it ourselves. Communists’ devotion is to humanity, not our own persons; our god is the humanity which may yet exist, but which cannot exist under the oppressive condition of class society. This is the essence of his theory of “God-building”. Humanity is not yet divine; it is the future, liberated humanity which we worship, and our worship consists precisely in bringing about this dream of a future society, in taking hold of our own destiny as a species. In Lunacharsky’s own words: 

“Our ideal is the image of man, of man like a god, in relation to whom we are all raw material only, merely ingots waiting to be given shape, living ingots that bear their own ideal within themselves.”23

Communists are defined by our faith in a dream. Our dream is life, liberated from the shackles imposed on it by nature. Our mission is to materialize this dream, and this can only be accomplished through the struggle against the conditions which shackle us. Our mission is war, war waged in the name of peace, freedom, harmony, life—“holy war”, as Trotsky described it.24 It is our faith which allows us to get up every morning, despite the hardships we face, and to struggle for our dream. Without our dream, we have nothing to accomplish except cold, dry analysis. Without our faith, we have no means by which to make our dream come true.

Conclusion

The liberals have proven themselves incapable of solving the crises that face us today, from climate change to COVID-19. On the contrary, they more often than not exacerbate the crises, due to the anarchic nature of the market and the antisocial profit drive to which they are enslaved. The only way out is to mobilize for war, and the only way to accomplish this is by breaking with the liberals, those suicidal maniacs who would sooner drive us into extinction than cut into their profits. Only the workers, impelled by their faith in the communist future, can deliver humanity from the death spiral to which the liberals have condemned us. 

Neither can the illiberal right deliver us from our impending extinction. While they may succeed in subordinating the profit drive to the needs of “the nation” or “the family”, they cannot resolve the fundamental crisis which is leading us to the slaughter. That would require overcoming capital entirely, and this is not something that they are willing to do. In our fight against liberalism, we must steadfastly refuse to cede ground to the right. Given the chance, they would destroy us without a second thought. We must show them the same treatment.25  

What is necessary to deal with the crisis is a fully international response. The peoples of the world must unite in action, and this is not a step that the bourgeoisie is able to take. They are impelled by the logic of capital to pursue national, imperial interests. We must break with the bourgeoisie to build international solidarity, and respond as a species to our impending doom. 

Liberalism offers us freedom in death. The right offers us bondage in life. Communism offers us salvation and godhood. 

Let us unite, workers, across the world! Let us mobilize for war! Let us go to battle against the virus, against the climate crisis, against the anarchy of the market! Let us decapitate capital, defeat decay, and destroy death! 

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The Invisible Landscape: Tracing the Spiritualist Utopianism of Nineteenth-Century America

Edmund Berger explores the hidden history of Utopian Socialism and its close relationship with cultures of esoteric spirituality in the nineteenth-century United States. 

Robert Owen’s New Harmony, Indiana

Take the highway east from Cincinnati, Ohio, and in no time the city with its lights and skyscrapers will fade in the rearview mirror, the dense concrete world giving way to the sporadic outcroppings of suburban life and then the wide openness of the American rural landscape. Lanes will be subtracted one by one until only two remain, one going in each direction, and to the north will be small rolling hills and to the south, snaking along the road, the waters of the Ohio River. Around forty miles or so and one will pass through a small town – an “unincorporated community”, as the US census puts it – with the curious name of ‘Utopia’. Blink and you’ll miss it: a few houses, a gas station, a historical marker. Get out and walk around and you might come across a hole in the group lined with ancient cut rocks; it’s the entrance to an underground church, one of the last traces indicating that Utopia was a major crossroads in what we might describe as America’s invisible landscape.

I have to confess to having pilfered this term from elsewhere. It’s actually the name of a book, published in 1975, by famed psychonauts Terence and Dennis McKenna. They use it to describe “an alien dimension all around us” that we can obtain glimpses of, if only obliquely, through tools such as mystical practices and the use of hallucinogenic drugs.1 This seems like a far cry from somewhere like Utopia, Ohio – but it seems appropriate to me on several levels. On one level, it’s because the history that produced Utopia is utterly alien to the experience of American life as we know it today, and actively challenges many of the core presuppositions that are currently baked into the construct of American identity. On another level, this alien world comes far closer to the turbulent slipspace that the McKenna brothers moved in: interweaving zones of fantastical possibilities encounters with spirits and an active eschatological element.

Something that becomes quickly recognizable about the invisible landscape is the elusiveness of a starting point. Unfolding across time and space in a way that denies a clear historical shape, it remains impervious to a fixed narrative. It is instead a bewildering strand of minor histories and counter-histories, unexpected slippages and surprising convergences – but if one is to pick a spot to act as an anchor, and for us here Utopia is just such a spot, then certain lines become clearer. From this forgotten location in Ohio, we unwind, as one is oft to do in tracking American history, back to the mythologized Old World – and in this case, France, and in particular, to the figure of Charles Fourier.

Fourier wore many paradoxical hats: he was a revolutionary who disdained the French revolution, a mystic committed to secularism, and a perverse sociologist who offered a utopian vision of socialism based on the idea of harmonic balance, liberated libidos, and the transvaluation of the toil of labor into play. According to Herbert Marcuse, Fourier’s labyrinthine output was a prefiguration of the unruly imagination of the surrealists – and it was this unruly imagination, he suggested, that in turn anticipated a communistic world to come.2 But whereas Marcuse was writing right at the transition from the 1950s to the 60s, seeing this Fourierist future coming into view in the collision of a then-embryonic counterculture and rampant industrial automation, Fourier himself organized his socialism from a complex cosmology. This entailed the existence of a dozen passions that ruled across several scales, ranging from the planets themselves down to individual humans. From the passions, a varied typology emerged based on the various attractions and repulsions of these passions.

A truly harmonious society, one in line with the agenda of a designer-God, could emerge in the proper balancing of the passions – and to this end, Fourier proposed what he called associations. Each association would have a limited number of people which he determined via his kabbalistic grid of typologies and were to be organized in large mansion-houses that he dubbed phalansteries (a combination of the French words for ‘phalanx’ and ‘monastery’). The phalanstery was to be self-operating, but only partially autonomous. At the summit of this grand social order existed a World Congress of Phalanxes, capable of coordinating between the various communities.

Fourierism arrived in America by way of a young writer and socialist by the name of Albert Brisbane. A New Yorker by birth, he had traveled to Europe to study philosophy, and through a circuitous route found himself under the direct tutelage of Fourier. At the end of the 1830s he was back in the States, where he promoted Fourierist thought via several organs: through the New York Tribune (whose founder, Horace Greenley, he had converted to Fourierism), with the creation of a Fourierist Society, authorship several books such as 1840s The Social Destiny of Man, and a periodical called The Phalanx. Fourierist thought was on the move, soon spreading outwards from New York and towards the west, where it set in motion a series of experiments in communal living organized around the principle of the phalansteries. Over thirty such experiments occurred during the movement’s peak in the 1840s, and a series of ‘Industrial Congresses’ were held to coordinate efforts between the nascent associations. This was not, however, the only outlet for the Fourierist wave. As Carl Guarneri charts in his masterful The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America, there was a deeper-rooted integration of independent Fourierists, “[n]ondenominational utopian socialist churches”, “cooperative stores and urban communes” and the rising labor movement.3

Utopia’s origins lay precisely in the momentous push of the America Fourierist movement. In 1844, a group of citizens from Cincinnati arrived in this isolated spot of land to construct the Clermont Phalanx (named for the county that Utopia is located within). With the purchasing of 1140 acres of land, the great – and short-lived – experiment began:

Agriculture was to be the principle occupation of the association, although the various trades – blacksmithing, shoemaking, carpentry, brushmaking, and some of the lighter trades – were encouraged, and shops provided for those who were so engaged. Each member was assigned some congenial occupation by the council, and was expected to labor cheerfully to increase the common wealth.4

The mansion-house that Fourier envisioned was built, realized as a large two-story building sporting some thirty rooms. The efforts were, however, unrealized; like so many of the experiments in associationism that took place in that decade, the Clermont Phalanx would crumble within a few years. With mounting debt, a series of interpersonal disputes that erupted into lawsuits, and crops ruined by the Ohio River’s floods, the Phalanx closed up shop in 1846, and the land was split among three different parties. A small portion went to a local farmer, a portion that would eventually become Utopia proper went to another group of socialist, and a third, closer to the banks of the Ohio, to a group of spiritualists.

The people who founded Utopia have an interesting history in their own right. Among their ranks was an individual by the name of Josiah Warren, who earlier had been a member of a commune in Indiana called New Harmony. This was an experiment in collective living staged by the British socialist reformer Robert Owen, whose ideas were making a similar transit across the American landscape, though having predated the Fouriests by some years. Following his stint in New Harmony, Warren had gone to Cincinnati and opened the ‘Time Store’ – a general store that only dealt in a new form of money, a kind of labor note attached to the time that it took to produce the good in question. At some point, he returned to New Harmony to open a second Time Store, while also developing a philosophy of “equitable commerce” and “individual sovereignty”.5 Utopia, assembled not only from the ruins of the Clermont Phalanx but also from some of its members, was intended to be a prolonged experiment in these principles.

Not all of the individuals turned up in Utopia. Others shuffled to the south to join up with the spiritualist commune, which was led by a rather nomadic character by the name of John O. Wattles. Wattles was no stranger to communal efforts: he had previously been involved in establishing a collective in Logan County, Ohio, known as the Prairie Home Community. Like the Clermont Phalanx, it was an attempt at establishing a Fourierist association – but it was also a hotbed for a whole host of odd beliefs and esoteric sciences, with one visitor later recounting that he was “surprised to hear rude-looking men, almost ragged, plowing, fence-making, and in like employments, converse so freely upon Phrenology, Physiology, Magnetism, Hydropathy…”.6 Given the spiritualist-inclinations of the new group in Clermont County, we can assume that a similarly heady cocktail was swirling in the air.

The Clermont Phalanx had collapsed from internal problems, the spiritualist commune ending in tragedy. For reasons unknown, the group decided to move the Fourierist’s mansion, stone by stone, closer to the river’s edge. Their work was carried out throughout December in the year 1847, as an immense winter storm bore down upon them. The events that followed are recounted in detail in The History of Clermont County:

The rain and snow had been falling for several days, and on the 12th of December the banks of the river were full to overflowing, while the area of the building was steadily filling with water. Notwithstanding these dangerous appearances the moving continued (as the temporary buildings were uncomfortable), even after boats were necessary to reach the new house; but late in the afternoon of December 13th this work was suspended, and as far as is known 34 persons were at time sheltered under the roof of the new building. Among these were a number of new young people, not members of the community, who had been attracted by the moving, and it was proposed to while away the evening with a dance. While this was in progress, about eight o’clock, the walls of the building fell, crushing many to death, and others in the confusion were drowned. Seventeen lives were lost, many being strangers in the neighborhood, having but recently joined the community… This disaster, occurring at night in a terrible storm, struck terror to the hearts of the people, and the history of the community from its inception to its calamitous close is the most tragic event that has even occurred in the county.7

Regardless of the ultimate failure of the Fourierists, or the tragic events that befell the spiritualists, this entire episode illustrates the various threads that weave the fabric of the invisible landscape – namely, this intermingling of, on the one side, a radical sense of politics geared towards the transfiguration of lived experience, and on the other, things that we today would identify as being under the rubric of the ‘occult’. While it might seem like only a coincidence in location, this episode emerges from a wider web of connections and convergences. We’ve already seen that Wattle was involved in the Prairie Home Community, a Fourierist association that blended communal living with the esoteric. He was also involved, however, in a mysterious group in Cincinnati called the Spiritual Brotherhood, and it was from here that the plans to start the doomed community were born. As one writer from the period describes them:

There is a Society in this City [Cincinnati] which goes by the name of Spiritual Brotherhood. It is small, but made up of respectable and intelligent persons, so far as we know. They have held meetings about two years, and they are chiefly distinguished by teaching that man can hold communion with the spirits of another world, if he conform to all the physical and moral laws.8

This Spiritual Brotherhood remains little-known, and documentation surrounding their activities is scarce, but from what can be gleamed it becomes clear that they were quite active in not only local but national politics. One associate of the Brotherhood happened to be Warren Chase, a leading Fourierist, and president of a phalanx in Ceresco, Wisconsin. He certainly had an eye towards the spiritual and the occult. Even before arriving in Ceresco he undertook studies into the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg and examined Mesmerism, the therapeutic art of ‘animal magnetism’ that was believed to open conduits that allowed communication with the dead. These activities prompted him to organize a spiritualist study group at Ceresco that was in direct contact with the Brotherhood.9

This wasn’t the extent of Chase’s activities: he was a delegate to the conventions of the National Reform Association (NRA), an early advocate of land reform (based on the principle of “Equal Right to Land”), women’s suffrage and abolitionism, and later appears as having been involved the series of National Industrial Congresses that the NRA organized across the 1840s and 50s. In 1849, when the Congress began to organize its annual gathering, it was determined that Cincinnati would serve as an excellent location – and the Spiritual Brotherhood stepped up to act as the organizer.10

Grasping the odd nature of this series sort of convergences requires broadening our view of this invisible landscape a bit and look at spiritualism more directly. Popular histories tend to trace spiritualism to the revolutionary year of 1848, although the location was not a tumultuous European landscape haunted by the specter of communism, but the quiet town of Hydesville, New York. This is where two young sisters by the name of Maggie and Kate Fox allegedly made contact with a spirit that they nicknamed “Mr. Splitfoot”. They communicated with Mr. Splitfoot – later ‘identified’ as a murdered peddler named Charles B. Rosna – by interpreting ‘rappings’ or knocks on the wooden walls and floorboards as responses to questions posed by curious onlookers. The Fox sisters were soon veritable celebrities and could be found hosting public séances and the like to demonstrate their powers as mediums.

There’s a direct line between the Fox sisters and the uptake of spiritualism by communitarian socialists and radical reformers.11 Amy and Isaac Post were close friends of the Fox family, and as radical Quakers, were actively involved in early abolitionist and women’s suffrage movements. The Quakers already had a deep history of Christian mysticism.  Stretching back to the late 1700s, there was a consistent involvement in various forms of folk magic and divination, much to the dismay of the society’s leadership. Through the Posts, belief in and practice of spiritualism spread rapidly through the Quakers, and beyond them, to the various radical reformist movements with which they were intertwined.

This is one path that spiritualism took, but there are others. In the volume of his History of Spiritualism, Arthur Conan Doyle suggests an earlier genesis of spiritualism, having tracked it back to the writings and experiences of Emanuel Swedenborg in the mid-1700s. A scientist, theologian and mystic, Swedenborg professed the ability to not only speak to the spirits of the departed but also to have actually traveled to their world beyond ours, which “consisted of a number of different spheres representing the various shades of luminosity and happiness, each of us going to that which our spiritual condition has fitted for us”.12 There’s a clear correspondence between these proto-spiritualist practices and ‘theory of correspondences’ that marked Swedenborg’s overarching theological cosmology, where there exist a series of planes, ranging from the spiritual to the material, through which God’s love flows. But what’s more is the existence of direct parallels between objects and forces in these planes: “…the sun in our natural world is a reflection of the sun in the spiritual world. By observing the way the heat and light of our sun interact with nature as we experience it through our senses, we can start to understand how love and wisdom work in the world of our inner spirit”.13

Swedenborgianism became an active force in America, with a church dedicated to his doctrines opening in Baltimore in 1793. The influence of this doctrine, however, spread further than just distinctly Swedenborgian churches, with ripples being felt in Quaker communities, in the writings of the Transcendentalists, and in the Mormon theology of Joseph Smith. The Rappites, an eschatologically-minded religious group that organized a communal society in Pennsylvania called Harmony, was influenced in no small part by Swedenborg, with founder Johann Georg Rapp having been influenced by the seer (as Swedenborg was often called) and other Christian mystics such as Jakob Bohme. The Rappites, in turn, helped form the very infrastructure of American communitarian socialism: it was the land and buildings of their second community in the state of Indiana, named New Harmony, that was sold to Robert Owen to carry out his own communistic experiment (as we’ve already seen, this is where the journey of Josiah Warren, the ostensible founder of Utopia, Ohio, began). To add extra dimensions to this already complicated web, when Owen arrived in Cincinnati in 1824, he found that a local community of Swedenborgians were “the only ones prepared to understand and put into practice his socialistic theories, many of which seemed closely akin to the ‘Heavenly Teachings’”.

Swedenborg’s theology, with its hermetic architecture and movement towards spiritualism, also mingled freely with the inner-workings of the American Fourierists. Ralph Waldo Emerson – who, while not a Fourierist, was familiar with them (and eventually came to regard them critically) – once wrote that “[o]ne could not but be struck with strange coincidence betwist Fourier and Swedenborg”; according to Carl Guarneri, this observation planted the seeds of the idea of compatibility between the two in the minds of Christian Fourierists.14 Several works on this topic soon followed, bearing meandering titles and even more meandering prose. One such work was Charles Hempel’s The True Organization of the New Church, as Indicated in the Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg and Demonstrated by Charles Fourier, published in 1848. For Hempel, Fourier and Swedenborg were but two sides of the same coin. “The doctrine of these two great men cannot remain separated”, he wrote. “Their union constitutes the union of Science and Religion”.15

A practitioner of mesmerism using animal magnetism on a woman who responds with convulsions. Wood engraving. Mesmer, Franz Anton 1734-1815.

One final strand leading into spiritualism that is worth baring mention of is that of Mesmerism, a therapeutic practice based on the principles of “animal magnetism” that, whilst having its origins in an attempt at Enlightenment science, quickly became integrated into occult and religious tendencies. Mesmerism takes us back to France, to 1778, when “Franz Anton Mesmer arrived in Paris and proclaimed his discovery of a superfine fluid that penetrated and surrounded all bodies”.16 Operating from the basis of Newtonian physics – but smuggling in through the backdoor the “doctrine of cosmic fluid” that can be tracked across the Hermetic continuum running Paracelsus down through Robert Fludd – Mesmer determined that this fluid was, in fact, the force that explained gravity.17 As gravity works across all spheres of existence, from the motion of the planets to those of individual bodies, he soon drew a connection between the movements of this supposed fluid and physical and psychic ailments.

“Mesmerism”, as it came to be called, involved the use of magnets to manipulate the superfine fluid within the body to cure it. Using a wand, a practitioner would ‘direct’ the fluid. Confirmation came, for Mesmer, not in the proof of the fluid’s existence, but in the trances, fits, and convulsions that his patients often underwent. Nonetheless, the scientific community of Paris regarded Mesmer’s work as fraudulent pseudoscience, and he remained consistently barred to the margins. It was here, however, that Mesmerism was taken up by a variety of cultural movements, many of them mystical in nature. According to Nicholas Goodrich-Clarke, a large Swedenborgian institution in Stockholm took a deep interest in Mesmerism and viewed the odd babblings that the patients often engaged in during their trance states as communication with the dead.18 Jean-Baptiste Willermoz, a figure immersed in the world of Masonry, Rosicrucianism, and alchemy, went further and experimented with Mesmerism in hopes that it would unveil the divine, pure condition that marked human life before the Fall. Others still utilized Mesmerism as a means to induce automatic writing, which was often regarded, particularly by figures like Willermoz, as the communication with the souls of the dead or with angels.

Curiously, Mesmerism seems to have borne some influence on Fourier. Both worked off the assumption that they were continuing Newton’s work, and each posed some sort of cosmological force: the ‘superfine fluid’ for Mesmer and the twelve passions for Fourier. Both alluded to notions of ‘universal harmony’ – and it was in the pages of a journal led by Pierre Ballanche, a mystic and counterrevolutionary figure who was actively engaged in Mesmerism, that Fourier first debuted his system.19

Mesmerism arrived in America during the early 1830s by way of one Charles Poyen, who right from the start was integrating the practices of animal magnetism with reformist movements like abolitionism.20 He was, in some sense, laying the direct groundwork for the spiritualism that would explode in the wake of the Fox sister’s supposed communication with the dead; as Emma Britten, writing in 1870, described,

In all principle cities of the Union, gentlemen distinguished for their literary abilities, progressive opinions, or prominence in public affairs, have graduated from the study of the study of magnetism and clairvoyance to become adherents to the cause of Spiritualism, whilst many of the best mediums – especially the trance speakers and magnetic operators – have taken their first degree in Spiritualism, president in 1825 as experimentalists in the phenomena of mesmerism.21

A particularly poignant convergence of various threads takes place in the experience of Anna Parsons, a practitioner of what was known as ‘psychometrics’ or ‘soul measuring’. It was a direct outgrowth from spiritualism: the psychometrist worked on the magnetic and electrical impulses that were seen as flowing through the individual, but whereas mesmerism was initially intended (but by no means limited to) therapeutic practices, psychometry’s goal was “the development and exercise of the divine faculties in man”.22 Parsons, as it happened, practiced psychometry from her station in Brook Farm – a communal experiment that was located just outside of Boston, Massachusetts that had come to be organized as a Fourierist association.23 There, her psychometric practices slid directly into spiritualism. In one notable experience, she encountered the spirit of Fourier himself and reportedly carried out a conversation with him.24

Other leading Fourierists who were engaged with mesmerism, psychometry, and spiritualism were Thomas and Mary Gove Nichols. Thomas Nichols himself had been the student of Charles Poyen and had demonstrated aptitude in the mesmeric art by healing his mentor, while his wife, Mary, was an active medium and involved in hydropathy, or as it is more commonly known today, ‘water-cures’ (it is worth pointing out that the two were married in a Swedenborgian ceremony).25 The two had lived for a time in an experimental community in New York called Modern Times, which had been founded by Josiah and his friend Stephen Pearl Andrews26, before relocating to Cincinnati, where they became immersed in the circles linking together spiritualism and radical reformism – namely, women’s suffrage. Between 1856 and 1857 they moved north to a small town in Ohio called Yellow Springs and set up a community of their own dedicated to hydropathy called the Memnonia Institute. Memnonia was cast in a millenarian shade; the Nichols held that the project of their Institute would aid in the realization of a “Harmonic Society on Earth”.27 This is a clue to profoundly Fouriest orientation of the Memnonia Institute, and indeed, the two chose April 7th, 1857 – Fourier’s birthday – as the date for the project’s formal opening.

What cuts across this different threads – communal experimentation, (mystical) Christianity, radical reformist politics, and spiritualism – is, at the base, the belief that a new epoch was dawning, and that these elements and their interweaving made up the fabric of this emergent world. Joseph Rodes Buchanan, an ardent promoter of spiritualism and psychometry, described mesmeric practices as a component in the emergence of a  ‘new civilization’. Many of the Christian sects that took up spiritualist beliefs in this period descended from the Radical Reformation in Europe, which saw the parallel emergence of a host of eschatological expectations. Flowing across to the Atlantic to the Americas, this seeded the activities of groups like the Rappites, and before them the Society of the Woman in the Wilderness (a quasi-monastic communitarian experiment that portended the Second Coming in the year 1694) and the Ephrata Cloister (somewhat of a split from the Society of the Woman in the Wilderness that integrated itself with the Seventh-Day Adventists, producing a mystical heralding of an imminent ‘Eternal Sabbath’ that would see the “whole Restauration of all things”).28 Even the secular Robert Owen readily adopted a millenarian tone. In an 1825 speech to American politicians – including President John Quincy Adams – he described how the emerging communal experiments were “commenc[ing] a new empire of peace and goodwill to men… the state of virtue, intelligence, enjoyment, and happiness which has been foretold by the sages of the past would at some point become the lot of the human race”.29

As we saw above, Fourierists like the Nichols also slotted into this continuum via their rhetoric of a new ‘harmonic age’, but this tendency was overt even decades before the founding of the Memnomia Institute. Consider the following from the minutes of the 1844 General of the Friends of Association in the United, recorded and published in an issue of The Phalanx:

It would be doing injustice to this occasion, not to open our discussion of the Principles of Social Reorganization, by an expression of feelings with which we have come up, from far and near, to this assembly. It is but giving voice to to what is working in the hearts of those now present, and thousands whose sympathies are at this moment with us over our whole land, to say, this is a Religious Meeting. Our end is to God’s will, not our own; to obey the command of Providence, not to follow the leadings of human fancies. We stand today as we believe amid the dawn of a New Era of Humanity…30

In many respects, the slow creep of millenarianist thought reverberates across the whole of the American experiment. The New World has always been understood not only in terms of space, but in terms of time, and especially in a New Time that breaks with everything that came before. Around the time of his third voyage, Christopher Columbus penned his Book of Prophecies, which foretold a series of events that set in motion the Second Coming. He readily adopted the classic idea of the ‘world-emperor’ or the ‘last king’ whose reign would immediately presage Christ’s return, and in his monarchist backers he thought he had identified exactly who would play this role. Moving in similar waters was John Dee and his eschatological vision of a world empire that came before the Biblical apocalypse. The New World was central to this vision: believing that the mythological King Arthur and the Welsh prince Madoc had visited the Americas, Dee held that Britain maintained a spiritual right to the land. As Jason Louv points out, the similarities between Columbus and Dee are not mere coincidences – Dee’s schemes for the future were but a Protestantization of the Catholic traditions that Columbus was drawing upon.31 But while many of the utopian socialist and associationist currents sketched above drew from similar sources, they lacked the distinct monarchist and even aristocratic character that a Columbus or a Dee posited. Their millenarianism was often what we might today describe as exhibiting a populist orientation.

Millenarianism is a concept that is regarded with considerable disrepute. Besides the common images that it brings to mind – doomsday cultists, survivalist fringe, the specter of violence and dire prophecies of imminent catastrophe – there are the arguments put forward by people like Norman Cohn. In The Pursuit of the Millennium, Cohn argues that millenarian groups, particularly those that made up the actively revolutionary side of the Radical Reformation, are the direct antecedents to the slew of totalitarians that shaped the course of the twentieth century. From Thomas Muntzer, whose oft-cited declaration of omnia sunt communia! has been identified by some as the prefiguration of communism, we arrive at the Stalins and the Hitlers.32

It was the Situationists, who can be regarded as something like second or third cousins of our American utopians – they were resolutely Marxist, but remained perpetually haunted by the ghost of Fourier – who took measures to flip Cohn’s script. In Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and Raoul Vaneigem’s The Movement of the Free Spirit (a work that, it must be said, was penned after his expulsion from the Situationist International, yet remains continuous with his earlier concerns), the revolutionary dimensions of millenarian thought is re-affirmed. For Debord, the inversion of Cohn took place through the classic Marxist analysis of Christianity that originated with Engels and Kautsky which held that the revolutionary strains of religion were expressions of class struggle in a period in which ‘class consciousness’ as such could not be articulated.33 Vaneigem, on the other hand, slips more towards the surrealist debt that Debord hoped to hold at bay. “The most radical element of the movement of the Free Spirit”, he wrote, “had to do with an alchemy of individual fulfillment, in which the creation of a superior state (the all-important ‘perfection’) was achieved by a gradual relinquishment of the economy’s hold over individuals”.34

There is a remarkable correspondence between the Situationists and the line coursing through Marcuse’s work that we cited out the outset, and it makes sense: the constellation of Fourier, surrealism, and Marx is common to each. “Imagination is about to reclaim its rights”, wrote Marcuse, filtering the great discovery of the surrealists through Freud.35 This is the same as what Vaneigem called the poetry of revolution, an alchemical art that transforms the “basest metals of daily life into gold”.36 It too, therefore, shares the suppressed millenarian position, being a politics that aims above all else at a profound and sweeping transfiguration. But while there is a future orientation, it also appears, ever so uncannily, as a strange echo of a succession of moments in the past, not in Europe, but in nineteenth-century America, where imagination did indeed strain to reclaim its rights in the form of strange sciences, mystical religion, and a struggle to live a utopian life. Sometimes it ended in tragedy, like the spirituals who fell to the Ohio River’s currents, and most of the time is simply crumbled away. Yet the imprint still remains.

All that is left of these moments now are just echoes, the ghostly sound of this other, alien landscape whispering across time and space. Echoes reverberating out from scattered traces tucked away in the cracks and crevices of an America now consolidated and fixed in its aimless spiral – and yet, at the same time, they are cracks and crevices, obscured by-ways and old roads, that sit plainly in sight if one only knows where to look.

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Terrestrial Shamanism against the Exterminist Leviathan

Renato Flores argues that a grand narrative is needed to unify and mobilize the exploited and oppressed against an exterminist world order. 

Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany by Werner Tübke

I

The permanent news cycle paralyzes us. We wait in an anxious manner for the next push notification containing the latest breaking news item. It further spells our doom as a species. We share it on social media, screaming to the void that we are all doomed. We are validated. Tally up a few likes, regain some sanity, and wait for the next notification. International politics is predominantly reduced to a spectator sport and we can only watch in despair at how our side is losing: Bolivia, Corbyn, and the inaction on climate change after the Australian fires. Dreams of Fully Automated Luxury Communism (FALC) remain a fanciful hope for an earthly heaven, and not a practical political program. Instead, utopias are confronted by cruel reality. We are stuck on Spaceship Earth accelerating towards the dystopian future of exterminism outlined in the book Four Futures: neither the overcoming of scarcity nor the conquest of equality.1 

Already, the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse appear lined up and ready to head the exterministic state: Trump, Bolsonaro, Modi and Johnson. But these four are far from the final product Capital needs to keep on going, and in some ways are just throwbacks to an older era. For example, Bolsonaro has received wide attention for his role promoting settler-colonialism in the Amazon. But in the Americas, accumulation by dispossession is centuries old and cannot be understood as a new phenomenon. The future state that Capital needs is darker. One that manages a society where there are not enough resources to go around, provided the economic and power structure stays the same. One where climate change and the limits of ecology mean capitalism cannot appropriate Cheap Nature to keep on reinventing itself.2 One where there is a population surplus that must be first pacified and eventually disposed of to ensure the stability of the system. 

The combination of falling rates of profit, and a falling capacity to appropriate natural surpluses leads to surplus population. This concept was originally introduced by Marx, and is specific to an economic system. Because Cheap Nature is no longer as cheap, and production is overcapitalized, the wheels of capitalism are stalling. Within this framework, stating that there is a population surplus is simply reframing the fact that labor-power is being (over)produced in such quantities that capital cannot accomodate for a profitable use of it. The wage fund which would correspond to “normal” capitalist operation cannot pay the social reproduction costs. This means that the labor supply must be reduced, that is, the workers must be disposed of. 

It is necessary to distinguish the concept of surplus population in an economic system from the Malthusian “overpopulation” argument that has been around for some time. The latter is a thinly-veiled racist red herring that basically states: (1) there are too many people on Earth; (2) we have gone beyond Earth’s carrying capacity, and (3) to return to sustainability we have to drastically reduce the population. This is often done by encouraging poor and racialized people to have less children. Because it is logically simple, distributes the blame equally among all of us, and does not challenge the power structure, it is repeatedly promoted and given intellectual currency. But this argument fails to acknowledge that most damage to the environment is done by a fraction of the world’s population. These people, who mainly reside within the imperial core, unsustainably enjoy what was best theorized by Brand and Wissen as the imperial mode of living.3 The imperial mode of living relies on “the unlimited appropriation of resources, a disproportionate claim to global and local ecosystem sinks, and cheap labor from elsewhere”. If this imperial mode of living were substituted with a more rational and ecologically sound system of food and commodity production, more than enough resources exist on Earth to provide a decent living for all. 

With respect to surplus labor, the concept can bend in many directions. In a positive manner it promises freedom from toil. The automation utopians refer to “peak horse”, a real phenomenon: when cars were introduced, fewer horses were needed to draw carts around.4 Because of the declining demand for horse work, their population reached a peak in the early 20th century and declined after. The analogy is drawn to humans: it has become clear that the capitalist system cannot adequately employ large sections of the population, because these sections cannot contribute to profitability. In the global imperial centers, people remain underemployed in jobs which could perfectly be replaced by robots, or even eliminated. With this, the techno-utopians jump at the idea that advances in technology indicate that we have reached “peak humans” needed for production of essential commodities. Automation means that in the future we will need to work less. We will be in a post-scarcity society, and we will find a way of sharing the toils of labor adequately.

What the proponents of FALC fail to consider is that with automation, the surplus population might just as well be ignored or left to die. This is not a future designed by the Malthusian Thanos, the archvillain of the Avengers, who wanted to kill off half of the population selected at random. Instead, it will involve the isolation and elimination of the most vulnerable who no longer serve a purpose. The surplus population in the peripheries keeps on growing, becoming increasingly informalized and displaced from production, and at the same time forced to live in destitute housing, as Mike Davis studies in Planet of Slums. For millions of people, the costs of social reproduction aren’t being met, and they are either relying on the extended family and remittances from abroad, or simply waiting to die. On an individual basis, they can risk their lives to migrate towards the centers of capitalism. But the numbers are insufficient to provide structural relief. “Strong” borders make sure that the surplus population of the global South stays there, so transnational companies can reap the benefits of cheap labor.5

Instead of providing a fully automated future, the state returns to its basic skeleton of coercion and parasitism. And coercion can devolve into getting rid of the nuisance population that demands the means to live, but often has little to fight back with. There are several examples of this happening in history. The prime one is the recent fate of the Palestinians: in the 90s, due to the collapse of the USSR, a large number of Soviet Jews emigrated to Israel. They replaced the Palestinians at the lowest level of the Israeli class pyramid. This was very advantageous to Israeli capitalism, as it substituted cheap Palestinian labor, which had recently engaged in campaigns of civil resistance like strikes and boycotts, for more reliable workers. Palestinians were pushed out of the economy and slowly confined to their open-air prisons, which at the same time severely hurt their ability to engage in nonviolent campaigns.

An objection could be raised: Israel is not just a capitalist state, it is a settler-colonial state which attempts to erase Palestinians. Indeed, watching the working class in the Global North repeatedly vote to protect its privileges, it is tempting to adopt a “third-worldist” approach and deny that these classes are revolutionary at all, and that the potential for revolution lies in the Global South. However, these dynamics are barely contained to the centers of capitalism. Another current example is the role of Black people in Brazil. Brazil is similar to the United States in that it has a large black population directly descended from slaves. After emancipation, they were left in rural areas where opportunities did not abound. They chose to move towards the large cities (a Southward pattern in Brazil). In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, their homes were demolished, and they were forced into neighborhoods full of informal housing: the favelas, which grew steadily during the 20th century. Their inhabitants often worked informal jobs, but as Brazil’s economic situation worsened, they were pushed out of the economy and into progressively worse jobs and even the criminal market. To deal with this, the police are increasingly empowered to indiscriminately enact violence, to deal with crime resulting from these transactions. In a racist society, this results in thousands killed at the hands of the police yearly. 

So far, the picture painted does not differ much from the current situation in the United States, where police routinely kill people of color and walk away free. The murder of black councilwoman Marielle Franco is not that different from the murder of Black Lives Matter activists in the United States, if one sets aside the visibility of Marielle. But this would miss the point- more and more the quiet parts are said and acted out loud. Instead of Bolsonaro, who has his hands dirty in Marielle’s murder even if he denies it, we should be looking at another Brazilian politician. Rio governor Wilson Witzel was elected in 2018 on a platform of slaughtering “drug gangsters”. He has basically given carte blanche to the police to shoot on sight, and has proposed shutting down access completely to certain favelas. Witzel does this to wide applause, and it is not hard to imagine his reelection. 

In the case of Brazil, racism comes into play, and is weaponized. But there are other examples of exterministic politicians who do not force themselves into office in the Global South, but are elected. One of the most infamous is Filipino president Rodrigo Duterte, who won the national election on a platform of slaughtering “drug-dealers”. Before jumping to the national stage, Duterte was the mayor of the city of Davao, and served seven terms. The emphasis here is placed on the fact that despite being known to command death squads, he was repeatedly re-elected as mayor. Later, he was promoted to the national stage, where he won a national election with 39% of the vote out of an 81% turnout. This is the barbarism which Rosa Luxemburg warned us about, with voters clearly electing barbarism. In the exterministic future which awaits us we will have more figures like Duterte and Witzel, who will openly shoot the increasing number of marginalized people to protect an ever decreasing community of the free who enthusiastically vote for them. 

In the United States, the stage is set for something worse than Trump. Frank Rizzo, the police chief-turned-mayor of Philadelphia who supervised the MOVE bombing provides a historical example which was ultimately contained to just a mayoral position. The system produces many Rizzos, as a glance at any police “union” shows. Finding the cracks where stress will first concentrate in the US is not hard. Black and brown communities, both within the US and trying to access it will be prime cannon fodder. One just has to read history, or even the present news, to find that the list of affronts against them is long. However, the way the COVID-19 pandemic is being handled, and the inaction on climate change in the face of the fires in Australia, make it clear that the ruling classes do not care about any of us, and will do nothing to protect us from devastation if it inconveniences the death march of profit. The Climate Leviathan, an authoritarian planetary government led by a liberal consensus to adequately address climate change will never happen.6 The future where many Climate Behemoth states led by populist right-wingers, which simply refuse to deal with the structural problems of ecological destruction and population surplus, are much more likely. We are seeing this around the world, even in the centers of capitalism: rather than address the fires, the prime minister of Australia decided to outlaw climate boycotts. The time of monsters is coming.

II

Faced with this depressing prospect, how do we begin to organize? Postmodernism has repeatedly tried to kill grand narratives, while at the same time claiming the end of history has been reached. The underlying message was that class struggle is off the table. And it worked, for a while. But the house of cards is collapsing. The actually existing left is not prepared for the collapse of capitalism, often stuck in debates on theory that appear very important, but in practice make little difference in how they relate to the working class. Old-time socialists are disoriented as they face a working-class subjected to decades of ideological conditioning. They often forget that this is not the 20th century, and the same propaganda will not work. 

We are missing both a unifying ethics of sacrifice and collectivity, and a sense of how merciless and brutal our enemies can be. Until this is regained, the confines of ideology channel rebellion into a simple solution- giving our powers to a terrestrial shaman, through the sacred ritual of the ballot box. The shaman knows how to interface between the world of the commoners and the sacred world of the political. He or she can lead us to salvation if we trust and follow his lead.

Frida Kahlo, Moses, 1945

 

The shaman once again comes to ask us for our strength. We need to push him using all our might past the portal to take the sacred altar. Donations are requested, and we open our wallets. The most ardent canvass and phonebank to share the good news of “democratic socialism”. We study Salvador Allende and think, “well this time it could work, the US cannot coup itself?” And even if half the box of oranges is rotten, we believe that the bottom half must be good to eat. Once we get our shaman into office, he will be able to interface between the sacred and the common as long as we keep giving him our powers, delivering us to the utopia. Other kinds of shamans also draw from the collective, but our strength in numbers must be greater. We just need to show it in the ballot box.

But many cannot give their power through the ballot box ritual. And the other, darker shamans do not play fair. They control the tempo of the battle, and can cast their message across time and space much better. After all, the ruling class would rather have a dark shaman who doesn’t threaten its power than a red sorcerer who threatens capitalists profits. Our shaman plays by the rules of the game, and the most destructive weapons end up being unleashed by one side only. Even when backed by messianaic movements, Corbyn played fair, and lost. Sanders played fair in 2016, and also lost. Lula played fair, and was imprisoned to prevent his electoral candidacy. It remains to be seen what will become of the Sanders 2020 campaign, but the box of oranges is looking rotten. The dark shamans are able to weaponize our differences, to persuade others to give them powers. Our powers do not lie in the ballot box or within the constitutional framework at all. Until we achieve a grand narrative which not only includes all of us, the dispossessed, but speaks to all of us too, we are bound to lose again and again. Understanding this involves transcending the shamanistic and legalistic individual view to a collective, religious view of our historic mission of redemption and change. 

I would be accused, fairly, of abusing the metaphor when describing the current state of politics. But narratives can be the best way to get a point across. We often make sense of the world around us with the use of metaphors and imaginary creatures. Our fears are often turned into monsters, and fear of monsters provokes hatred. The Right knows how to transform the Other into the monster: the Jew, the immigrant, the Muslim, the black, the LGBTQ… all of them ruining our society. They are deviants and criminals, and once we get rid of them, we will all be more prosperous. This narrative crystallizes a dominant group. It legitimizes the exterminist state, delineating the “us” from the “them”. It propels our bright leader to power not just through the gun but also through the ballot box. Because “they” are sabotaging us, we are not doing as well as we should. And when the left lacks the power to counter this monster-making with its own mythmaking, it can feel immobilized. Coexist stickers are not sufficient to unify a mass, and without a collective vision, as people like Elizabeth Warren are discovering, policy proposals amount to nothing.

We could try and play the same game of monsters. But the power of demonic imagery in the hands of the dispossessed is somewhat limited unless it is deployed as part of a wider struggle. At its minimum, it serves as a substitution used to relate to capitalism when it becomes something sublime and out of our control. In this disorientation, the structures of power are often reimagined through the imagery of monsters. This has a long history both in England and the Netherlands in the centuries of the ascendant bourgeoise, and has seen use in Haiti through the image of zombie-slaves.7 It is also present  in contemporary Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa, as each endures massive “structural adjustments” where the commons are privatized.8 

Monsters have served as valuable storytelling devices for progressives. Thomas Paine laid bare how the aristocracy was a cannibal system, in which aside from the first-born male everything else was discarded.9 In Frankenstein, the abilities of the new ruling class to lay claim to subaltern bodies and forming a monster provides a metaphor for the new factory system. Even before the Marxist analysis of capitalism, it was clear that the new proletariat of the nineteenth century was something historically distinct. The gothic, understood as the world of the desolate and macabre, was used to efficiently drive the political message home. It is not enough to understand something, dispossession must be felt. The warm strain of politics must be activated when the cold one is not enough, and as David McNally pointed out, they are still used in the Global South. While McNally focuses mainly on contemporary Sub-Saharan novels, he glances over the most effective present day example of this weaponizing: Sendero Luminoso’s use of the image of the pishtaco, a monster who would kill the children to rob them of their body fat so it could sell it in the market. Sendero was able to racialize the pishtaco as a white colonizer, and sow even more distrust of the Amerindians towards the white NGO workers. It was a key part of their Peruvian-flavoured Marxist story-telling.

At its best, Marxism with Gothic flavor appeals to the subconscious, making us feel the injustice, teaching us a primal instinct of repulsion to capitalism. It makes us gaze at the Monsters of the Market and understand that Capital lies behind them. Since his early correspondence with Ruge, Marx noted that he needed to “awaken the world from the dream of it­self”. Marx’s Gothic imagery in Capital and the Eighteenth Brumaire was a way of telling the story of capitalism, and the conflict between bourgeoisie and proletariat, in a way that spoke to us directly, and mobilized us. The description of Capital as a vampire remains as memorable as ever. 

Walter Benjamin took this much further.10 He wrote mainly in the interwar period- a time when psychoanalysis was a buzzword, and Lukacs had only recently published History and Class Consciousness in an attempt to link the subjective to the objective. It was also a time when the fascist monster was growing. Benjamin stressed the importance of imagery and revelation in bridging the gap between individuals and the collective understanding of capital. He brought insights from psychoanalysis into Marxism, and sought to break the hold of religion by means of what he called profane illumination– by intoxicating us with imagery to reach a revelation which inspires us. Heavily influenced by his Judaism, Benjamin sought out the historical memory for inspiration. By glancing at the Angelus Novus we understand that we must fight for the victims of Capital, to deliver a justice dedicated to their memory. In today’s world, we have no lack of sites to illuminate us: the lynching memorials; Standing Rock; the mass graves of the Paris communards or those of the Spanish Civil War; the river Rosa Luxemburg was thrown into; The Palace of La Moneda in Chile where Allende was murdered; the streets of the Soweto and Tlatelolco massacres; and of course the horrors of Auschwitz. The memory of the dispossessed stretches across time and space, waiting for justice. 

Angelus Novus, Paul Klee, 1920

III

Thomas Paine was not just trying to describe the kings as monsters, from which nothing could be expected except “miseries and crimes”.11 Paine also wrote, and attempted to put into practice, a political program for a better world. The formation of a mythology for the proletariat has been an integral part of the success of movements across the world. As Paine and Marx understood, gothicness is just the beginning. It gives us a way to tell a story which unveils the malice of our enemies, but we still require a positive force, a force of collectivity and millennialism to bring us together. Even the most mild form of leftist “othering”, the narrative of the 1%, presupposes the idea of a 99% that shares interests, and brings people together through their common dispossession.

Finding gaps in which Marxist ideology can be inserted has been one of the central research programs of Western Marxism. In essence, it articulates the Marxist view of the links between base and superstructure in a way that activates feelings, and the irrationality of being willing to suffer and die for a political program. The defeat of revolution in Western Europe came about from the strength of bourgeois ideology. It was able to perpetuate its hegemony. When the time came, there were not enough people willing to break their chains simultaneously. Many have written on this problem: Gramsci, Althusser and the Frankfurt School to name a few. After the Second World War, the golden age of capitalism provided a decent living for the working class in the centers of capitalism. Cultural critique or critiques of alienation were not enough to break the hold of the capitalist cultural hegemony. It could serve to identify weak points in societal cohesion, but it was never enough to inspire and guide a revolution. The Frankfurt School is an example of how critical theory can be divorced from practice when it is not grounded in class struggle. 

Liberation theology provides a counterpoint of what is possible when class struggle advances ideology even within a reactionary institution like the Catholic Church. Taking inspiration from the Bible, religious figures reinterpreted passages that warned about the idolatry of money. Priests articulated how capitalism does not match the underlying values of society, and so were able to speak in the language of the people without abandoning their faith. Liberation theology set alight the underlying tensions present in many countries, and was particularly effective in mobilizing people in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Brazil. It was only defeated by an unholy combination of the Vatican and US imperialism, and has been replaced by religious faiths with a counter-revolutionary ethos.

Today, pessimism is warranted. To the historical defeat in the centers of Capitalism, we must add the collapse of the Eastern Bloc as well as the century of Latin American tragedies, where only Venezuela and Cuba barely hang on. Under a deluge of ideology the masses have abandoned liberatory faiths and embraced anti-communist worldviews. Socialism in our lifetime appears impossible, and the totems of revolution we hold dear have changed. This generation no longer venerates Che the way previous generations did. Che was not just a martyr who gave up a comfortable life for the cause— he was also someone who won. In this time of darkness, the voluntarism of a Che Guevara, who not only demanded, but exemplified a new type of person, a person who could challenge the US empire with dozens of “Vietnams”, fades away.  

For a short while some heroic victories happened: US imperialism was forced to retreat from Southeast Asia and Nicaragua by guerillas. But this did not last. Today we look to more tragic figures like Rosa Luxemburg, and celebrate her supposed penchant for the spontaneity of the masses. We wait for the unplanned revolution, forgetting that Rosa was a tireless party organizer. A symptom indicating that we do not know where to begin. Somehow mass demonstrations against Trump and other right-wing populists are supposed to lead to a revolution, even when their politics are at best confused and the protestors hardly united by a material base. Those who praise spontaneity forget that groundwork has to be patiently lain, and even the most simple strike action requires tight organization. It is a wild dream to think that a social media hashtag will lead to the toppling of extremely resilient structures. 

IV

Culture changes rapidly. As E.P. Thompson relates in his Making of the English Working Class, the pre-revolutionary wave of the late 1700s took root mainly through two mechanisms: the establishment of the Correspondence Societies and the Dissenting churches. Unlike the French one, the second English revolution never took place as it faced a stronger ruling class. This ruling class acted to break these societies, and the story of the late 1790s culminates in the Despard execution of 1803. During the early 1800s, a counter-revolutionary culture war was also taking place. A new faith of poor and rich alike was disseminated, while serving the cultural hegemony of the ruling classes: Wesleyan Methodism. Encouraged and financed by the upper classes, it was a denomination that emphasized social order. This picture resembles the birth, growth and defeat of Liberation Theology in Latin America. The streets and mountains where Catholic priests would lay their lives are today full of the churches which have propelled extremist politicians to power in Colombia and Brazil. 

But English history offers us hope. The counter-revolution did not last forever, it was only a temporary sleep. The misery which caused movements to arise remained. After the cultural counter-revolutionary offensive wore off, Methodist churches provided an individual locus for community outside the official sanctioned channels. This was not the high Anglican church but a rough community center. Methodism would breed Luddites and Painites within its ranks. It became a path through which other rebels would rise up the ranks and use their organizing skills and access to the community to launch new counter-hegemonic offences. Some Methodist preachers became preachers of class consciousness, and explained how the values laid out by the church were opposite to those of Capital. They became involved first in the Luddite movement, and later in the growing Trade Union movement, over which they came into conflict with the church hierarchy. Chartists and Trade Unionists alike benefited from the organizer school that was the Methodist Church.12

Portrayal of the Luddites

Providing places where the dispossessed can come together and find their commonality is of utmost importance to the present socialist movement. Working-class ideology must be produced and reproduced. The German and Austrian Social Democratic parties of the late 1800s and early 1900s understood this, and built schools, sports clubs and all sorts of facilities in proletarian neighborhoods, which laid down the foundations for their success. While we might stare at the proliferation of churches in the American continent, and see them as a lost cause, the material roots that gave origin to liberation theology and many other working-class movements like the Poor People’s Campaign of Martin Luther King Jr. are still there, and will not disappear anytime soon. These communities will surely undergo re-radicalization. 

V

Shamans and totems provide an initial bridge to radicalizing people, because they break their social conditioning. But in the long run we cannot rely on the shamans because, even if they recognize that their power comes from us, we are tempted into the lie that without them we are nothing, and this gives them undue control over the movement. In fact, the opposite is true. They are nothing without us. Socialism is about collectivity, much more a religion than a magic. Magic is always a private thing, while religion relies on collective experience.

Today it is hard to ignore that religious feelings abound in the community that follows the terrestrial shamans. Bernie Sanders’ supporters do not care if the man is flawed, or if the odds are stacked against him. What matters is the process that brings them together towards political power. Their recipe is insufficient: the community needs to learn that their power lies not in their vote, but in their ability to stop the economy if they wish. By bringing people together in the same spaces, they are laying down the seeds for something bigger. The dispossessed need to realize that they already are bigger than the shaman who leads them. Shamanic movements suffer from the domination of a person. We can relate to this person, but he or she can have too much control over the movement and in crucial moments can initiate its downfall. Sendero Luminoso disintegrated after Abimael Guzman went from the invincible Inca Sun to a man behind bars. It was not their terrible treatment of other leftists within their territory, but the shattering of the shaman that ended them. We should ensure that a movement does not base itself on a leader but produces organic leadership. Otherwise tragedy awaits: Chavismo could survive Chavez because he actively trusted and followed the masses. Lula’s Sebastianism required the masses to follow instead of lead, which left the Brazilian Left disoriented and defeated, a situation that worsened after the personalist “Lula livre” demand was won.

The odds facing Lenin, Mao, Castro and Ho Chi Minh were never good. And the odds facing us today might be even worse. But by looking at history we can learn how they were able to unify, motivate and mobilize the people behind their program with grand narratives. These narratives are mixed and intertwined with religion, even if they are subconsciously secular versions of the prevailing faith. Demonstrating how the values of people do not correspond to the social system is a great weapon in the hands of organizers. Like Paulo Freire and Amilcar Cabral recognized, rearticulating and recreating our own culture is inherently revolutionary. The bridge to turn religions of the dispossessed into socialist movements is very buildable. In the West, Bloch understood this the best. In Latin America, Mariategui’s theorization surely had an influence on both liberation theology and Sendero Luminoso. 

The history of revolution is plagued by millennialism. From those who died in the German Peasant War demanding omnia sunt communia during the Reformation, to the North Koreans inspired to fight against unthinkable odds by Juche, a thinly-concealed revolutionary Cheondoism13, religion serves as an inspiration. Any serious revolutionary should explore his local culture, and weaponize cultural cues to show the dispossessed how to stand together, and make us aware that we’re all in the same fight. Of course, not all cultures and icons are built the same: for example, American nationalism is hardly redeemable, tied as it is to white supremacy. But most icons are mixed, with Chavez’s reclamation of Bolivar as a positive example. Whatever the case, inspiration is needed to break social conditioning, reinstall a collective ethic, and defeat the exterminists. 

This comes through understanding that the revolutionary fights for a terrestrial paradise, and makes the highest of wagers to do so. In today’s world, where religion remains the last relief of the masses, utopia and brotherhood blend in as a starting point. Religion has two sociological functions: integrating communities, and resisting change. The latter can be a double-edged sword, serving both a counter-revolutionary purpose and a revolutionary one, when people feel their entire livelihoods are being swept from underneath them. It is not strange to see that many revolutionary movements against accumulation by dispossession end up triggering religious feelings. There are many examples, from the earliest records of the new faiths sweeping Europe during the Reformation in the German Peasant War, to 17th century England, to more current examples across the world. It is hardly surprising that the hardest enemies of late-stage capitalism are indigenous people fighting for their lives. The rallying cry during the Standing Rock protests was to “kill the black snake”, the pipeline threatening water. The cosmovision in which water is life proved itself revolutionary when faced with settler-colonialism. It was armed to face the monsters of the market, and able to unify the dispossessed. We would be fools to ignore it.

 

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On Hasidic Jews, Anti-Semitism and Non-Profits

In light of recent antisemitic attacks, Lane Silberstein gives perspective on political divisions and class contradictions within the Jewish community, particularly Hasidic Jews. 

Amid the frustrations and struggles of so-called “late capitalism” a very old capitalist problem has again come to the fore: antisemitism. Last month there were nine antisemitic attacks in New York City and the surrounding area in the span of one week, with the bulk of them targeting ultra-orthodox Jewish communities. Understanding and approaching this reality is confusing not only for gentiles, but also for well-meaning liberal, leftist and secular Jews, most of whom are isolated from these communities. I’ve lived in New York for ten years and been Jewish much longer. As a Jewish socialist, I hope that these preliminary thoughts and resources can spur further discussion and action.

To be clear, I am not Hasidic. I am not really religious at all. In the wake of this recent attack, Hasidim are speaking out and writing moving pieces that I encourage people to read. More effort needs to be made to translate the robust Yiddish press that circulates among Hasidim. My knowledge of Hasidim is sorely lacking, based on readings and some personal interactions. I am also conflating “Hasidic” with ultra-orthodox, which historically is not accurate; when Hasidim emerged in the late 18th century, they were opposed by other Orthodox leaders. Today, there are many ultra-orthodox Jews who trace their lineage to the misnagdim of Lithuania. Among Hasidim, there are many groups, often called courts, that trace their history to specific geographic locations. Their politics vary: I remember being at a Menorah lighting several years ago put on by Chabad, a group known for outreach to non-Hasidic Jews. At this time, Trump had moved the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, so the event was dedicated to him. Chabad is also known for their “mitzvah tanks,” the buses on New York street corners that give out ritual items — they started calling the buses that after Israeli armor dominated the 6 Day War. Most other Hasidim are anti-Zionist. 

What I can offer readers, however, is insight into the bourgeois world of Jewish liberals, their relationship to capitalism, nationalism and whiteness, which affects how they feel about Hasidim. One of the biggest conflicts for Jewish socialists is the discrepancy between our lives and the power of the “Jewish establishment,” a vast conglomeration comprised mostly of nonprofits with budgets in the billions of dollars. They operate independently, and some of them have tiny budgets, and they collaborate on occasion; but as a whole, they function to uphold the status quo and buttress against socialist organizing. Many socialists have written about the “nonprofit industrial complex,” as it is often called. Recently, the left’s conflict with the Jewish establishment has centered around Zionism and the establishment’s inability to end the occupation of Palestine — but it’s clear they are equally unable to address relationships between Jews and people of color, to adequately embrace Jews of color, and even to understand and tackle antisemitism. 

With these recent attacks, it would be a good opportunity for liberal Jewish nonprofits to donate to Hasidic causes, but many of these mainstream Jewish organizations feel the need to pay their directors six figures, so it’s unlikely they will be able to free up those funds. The history of (Jewish) nonprofits is based on a fundamentally orientalist relationship between bourgeois Western European Jews and poorer Eastern European Jewish refugees. (You will often hear about tense relationships between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews; a lot of that can be traced back to condescension between Ashkenazi Jews and other Ashkenazi Jews). That said, contemporary nonprofits are another way for the bourgeoisie to remain aloof from both the working class and Hasidim, while claiming they have solutions to our problems. The Jewish establishment has spent decades not building ties to working-class Jews, Hasidic or otherwise. Were these connections between nonprofits to be built, they would happen on a board member-to-board member, bourgeois-to-bourgeois level, and reaffirm the power of Hasidic elites as well as non-profit hegemony. 

The path forward relies on working-class Jews from all backgrounds building connections on our own, and a good way to start is with the OTD (“off the derech”/lit. not following the path, i.e. ex religious) crowd. These Jews, often young and LGBTQ, have left their tight-knit families at great personal risk. Occasionally, high profile suicides will make the news. Groups like Footsteps, which helped produce the Netflix documentary “One Of Us,” do outreach and provide resources to OTD Jews, but their model is fundamentally individual, and not based on building power against Hasidic elites or raising class consciousness. Another group, Yaffed, is pushing New York politicians to adopt stronger oversight of Yeshivas’ educational programming, who do not teach adequate math, science, and English. DSA and other electoral organizations should endorse candidates who follow Yaffed’s recommendations.

Detailing the history of Hasidic Judaism is a task so complex that it has required the recent publication of a nearly 900-page book. The authors write,

From its beginnings, Hasidism was far more than an intellectual movement. It was also a set of bodily practices, including praying, storytelling, singing, dancing, eating, all performed within the frame of the reciprocal relationship between rebbe [leader] and Hasid [follower]. The very physicality of Hasidism played an enormous role in transforming it from an elite to a popular movement. Despite all of the traditional elements one finds in Hasidism, this concatenation of ideas and practices was something entirely new in Jewish history, a movement of mass religiosity that would take its place side by side with more secular movements as part of the complex phenomenon of Jewish modernity. 

Building ties with practicing Hasidim will be a long and difficult undertaking, because this internal social network remains incredibly strong, and is able to provide them with not only psychological and emotional community ties, but material sustenance like housing and food. Hasidim try as much as possible to isolate themselves, and distrust outsiders: “it is impossible to think of Hasidism without its use of new weapons against secular culture.” Their penchant for speaking Yiddish is part of this. Imagine being born in the US but never learning proper English, an “immigrant to your own country,” as Footsteps often says. White supremacy, patriarchy, and faith in their corrupt leaders are strong. Considering the hand-wringing about the “white working class”, organizing Hasidim is a very American problem. The distrust that Hasidim have towards liberal groups like Footsteps and Yaffed (whose founder receives death threats) means the work for socialists will be especially hard. 

Overall, Hasidim live in poverty. While many of them do work, it’s often for little pay in retail. Their cost of living is high: kosher food, dowries, and expensive private education. Latinx workers led a strike in 2017 at B&H Photo, which is owned by Hasidim; working-class Hasidim could have joined the workers against the owners, but this did not happen, and the strike was defeated. Many Hasidim rely on food stamps. Amid the antisemitism scandals around Corbyn and Labour, he was defended by ultra-orthodox Jews who valued his support for social welfare. 

I predict that Hasidim will welcome greater police presence, who to my knowledge have good relations with their own informal police, the shomrim. They will not really care about the waste of resources. Maintaining our solidarity with those already targeted by the state is of utmost importance and will be difficult – think of how ultra-orthodox anti-Zionism is not really based in solidarity with Palestinians. Again, liberal Jewish institutions are useless in this. They trust the police (collaborating with the police seems to be the ADL’s whole raison d’etre). When the police fail and inevitably start working with open white supremacists, we will see how the Jewish establishment responds. 

Theoretically, I believe it is worth differentiating between fascist attacks (e.g. Tree of Life massacre) and attacks whose motivations are rooted in neighborhood-specific contexts. In Jersey City, where an attack took place, Hasidim were making recent moves, displacing long-time residents. For Brooklyn, studying the history of relationships between Hasidim and people of color is necessary. The Crown Heights riots and the general trend of gentrification are relevant. Jimmy McMillan, who became famous in 2010 for his “the rent is too damn high” speeches, held antisemitic views. But if a black person’s only interaction with Jews is one in which the latter is a landlord, this is a different conversation from fascist antisemitism that posits Jews are letting in too many immigrants and fomenting white genocide, and one James Baldwin writes about with characteristic sensitivity and insight. However, while it appears that a black man perpetrated the recent Monsey attack, local Republicans there ran an ad in August warning of “Jewish takeover” Rockland County. The conflation by certain members of the commentariat between “black” and “leftist” are not even worth addressing; they are racist and have an obvious political motivation. But we are seeing a dangerous mix of social issues, and it will be all the more important for Jews to show up to anti-racist organizing, such as prison and police reform. 

I’m also thinking right now of liberal and conservative Jews’ nationalistic feelings for the US, which are not uncomplicated. On the one hand, they think this country is unique in its opportunity for Jewish success (that is, they ignore whiteness); but they’ve also had that latent Zionist paranoia where, at any moment, gentiles will turn on us. Maybe they will start to see that this country is built on racism and colonization and isn’t actually safe for any vulnerable group. The relative success of white Jews, however, blocks some of us from realizing that antisemitism is fundamentally about a relationship to capital. Suffice to say that liberal Jewish analysis of antisemitism as something unending and “just a part of society” is as useless as Orthodox Jews blaming Jewish assimilation or Zionism for the Holocaust. Antisemitism forces Jews to share a fate while we do not all share interests. The linking of fate with interest is the meaning of solidarity; only in socialism can there be true solidarity.  

What else is next? This might sound crass, but a Jewish president who delivers well-liked universal programs could help stem antisemitism. Bernie wrote a widely-read article about combating antisemitism directly, although it relied on the action of state agencies, and was met with criticism, including my own. Expanding the rights of tenants and fighting gentrification could also curb awkward feelings about Jews, but neither the Jewish establishment nor Hasidim are invested in this fight. With the possibility of another war in the Middle East, this time with one of Israel’s enemies, the potential for diaspora Jews to be blamed is always there. Anti-imperialism is part of the fight against antisemitism. 

At the same time, what’s happening now is showing us the need to be prepared, because a Jewish president, while good in the long-run, in my opinion, will result in more immediate backlash. I’m not of the mind that uniting as Jews, that is, on the basis of identity, is what’s crucial right now, as my overview of relevant power relations has hopefully made clear. Jewish identity is being constantly redefined and deployed for political means. But antisemitism is a problem for the working class, and capitalism will not be defeated until antisemitism is. Overcoming differences that have put in place by the non-profit industrial complex and elitists will be key, because the only thing that will protect us, and build connections for the future, is solidarity and defense of the working class. 

Further reading: 

 

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Faith, Family and Folk: Against the Trad Left

Donald Parkinson takes issue with the calls for a “socially conservative leftism” that have increased in popularity since Jeremy Corbyn’s defeat in the UK election. 

Socially conservative, economically leftist 

The recent UK election has been a test of faith for many. Seeing countless working-class people vote for a gang of pedophiles, who want to cut the NHS in the name of nationalism, is a dark sign for Marxists who are invested in class politics as the pathway to an emancipated world. Regardless of how one feels about social-democracy or bourgeois elections, this was a defeat for the left. Nationalism triumphed over classical working-class politics attempting a return to the national stage. 

The defeat of Jeremy Corbyn by Brexit has been seen as validation for an ideology that can be described in short as “socially conservative, economically leftist.” The argument goes as follows: given the choice between economic redistribution and nationalism, the working class has chosen nationalism. Therefore the left needs to embrace nationalism along with all the other parochial “forces of habit” found in the working class if they want to win. A recent example is the advocacy group Blue Labour, which at least gives an honest argument for these politics without obfuscation. 

Blue Labour argues that the politics of social conservatism aligned with economic leftism has a new majority, a silent majority if you will. It calls for a politics that is “Internationalist and European” but “not globalist, nor universalist nor cosmopolitan.” It calls for embracing the parochial against the universalist in the name of resisting the commodification of labor, not unlike the “Reactionary Socialism” maligned by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Yet instead of arguing for a return to feudalism, Blue Labour wants to return to a Fordist economy where the family and nation are stabilized by a protectionist social order. 

This argument is given theoretical justification in a paper by Steve Hall and Simon Winlow. Hall and Winlow paint a historical picture of the British Left as a sort of battle waged by middle-class reformers trying to enforce a cosmopolitan morality on a socially conservative working class. According to Hall and Winlow, these reformers were first found in organizations like the Reform League and Fabians, entering the Labour Party to force their middle-class ideals on the workers’ movement. Fair enough, but Hall and Winlow accuse Engels of wanting to destroy working-class life to open the space for socialism, and claim the Soviet Union was inspirational to the Fabians because it was “yet another system imposed upon the working class by a middle-class vanguard.” 

Then the article ventures into the territory of rightist conspiracy theories about “Cultural Marxism”, claiming that the Frankfurt School and the post-structuralist academics were merely a continuation of these middle-class reformers. Here we find a narrative best expounded by Christopher Lasch in his seminal Revolt of the Elites, in which middle-class technocrats try to impose social engineering on a wholesome “common people”, people with a healthy instinct of revulsion towards top-down social engineering. This is a worldview where anyone who strives to fight for socially progressive ideas amongst the working class is inherently a “middle-class outsider” trying to force their ways upon the righteous common folk. 

This is also a worldview that has been bubbling under the surface since Marxist theorists like Michel Clouscard and Christopher Lasch critiqued what they saw as a narcissistic and libertine superstructure that reinforced and served modern capitalism, particularly after 1968. Today figures like Angela Nagle and Aimee Terese repeat similar critiques to an online audience.  A common target is open borders and LGBTQ politics, and appeals are made for the left to make peace with the social-conservatism that (supposedly) dominates the working class. At the same time, Tucker Carlson calls attention to a potential electoral majority that is “culturally conservative and economically populist”, which can challenge a “state religion of woke politics” and the “elite left”. In the journal American Affairs, formerly pro-Trump, a more intellectual case is more for this kind of politics. A general political trend seems to be emerging in both the left and the right, basing itself on the premise that organizing the working class and challenging liberal capitalism means turning to social conservatism and even embracing traditional values. To quote a tweet from the leftist podcaster Sean P. McCarthy: 

Seems to me like religion, family, and the nation state are all things that give people a sense of community and duty counter to the alienation and loneliness of late stage capitalism and the left should probably shut up about abolishing them and let people enjoy things. 

In this, we see three of the main categories that the left is supposed to make peace with. Religion, family, and nation-state have long been critiqued by the left as an ideological fetishism and forms of oppression and alienation. This is not some deviation of a “postmodern cultural turn”, as some like to claim in an attempt to appeal to an earlier form of leftism where class issues were at the forefront. The Bolsheviks included figures like Alexandra Kollontai, who sought to overcome the bourgeois family while her comrades called for a radical internationalism that aimed to make no compromise with national chauvinism. These positions are a continuation of the radical enlightenment convictions baked into Marxism that critiques all oppressive superstitions that limit human potential. Yet with the left losing harder than ever, many think that it’s time to give up on these convictions. They think it is time to make peace with and even start appealing to what is essentially reactionary tradition in the name of building a movement that will effectively challenge neoliberal capitalism, both economically and culturally.

We can call this tendency “traditionalist leftism”, or “trad leftism” for short. It is a form of populism that sees the working classes as inherently morally correct no matter how organized or politically conscious. To even see social backwardness as a phenomenon among the working class to be challenged is to capitulate to a petty-bourgeois moralism more concerned with abstract universalism than the direct needs of workers. The working class is scared of migrants, alienated by trans people, and annoyed by the feminists who seek to guilt them for desiring a stable family life, the argument goes. To oppose these attitudes is to play the role of the middle-class reformer who seeks to impose progressive values on the workers against their will. As a result, the trad leftists implicitly call for a program of strong borders and strong families along with a paternalistic welfare state, sometimes flirting with an embrace of religion. After all, wasn’t Stalin himself opposed to homosexuality, making concessions to the Orthodox Church? 

In a previous article, I argued against similar logic, albeit one that was less outright in favor of chauvinism, by arguing that a politics of economism that focuses purely on the bread-and-butter is anti-Marxist rather than authentically Marxist. Yet to simply appeal to “true Marxism” to show why the trad leftists are wrong helps us little when most people don’t consider themselves Marxists in the first place. Moralizing or calling people Strasserites won’t help us either. Instead, we need strong political arguments as to why an economist “leftism” that appeals to nation, family, and church is not the answer to the problems facing us today, especially for when we engage with working-class communities that themselves hold conservative sentiments.  

Nation

Let us begin with the issue of the nation. Blue Labour argues that a politics that “opposes borders and the idea of the nation… cannot develop an alternative story of democratic nationhood, nor one about belonging, nor about international relations.” The underlying premise here is that it is only through nationalism and the nation-state that a democratic polity can be constructed, and since a democratic polity is necessary for leftist politics leftists must embrace the nation. This entails embracing border control to limit migration and putting “our own workers first.” It is a political logic that aims to affirm the nation-state as a protective shield against the power of the global market, with neoliberal capitalism a contradiction between national sovereignty and globalization. Outright Marxists like Wolfgang Streck have made these sorts of claims, arguing for a distinction between “people of the state” and “people of the market” to assert that without a strong national community there is no possibility of opposing capitalism. 

Following this logic, various leftists like Angela Nagle and Paul Cockshott have argued that leftists should welcome rather than oppose immigration controls. Ultimately this argument follows an unspoken premise that right-wing nationalists have been repeating since the dawn of the nation-state, which is that social programs rely on an ethnically homogenous community. Therefore, if leftists want to rebuild a welfare state ravaged by neo-liberalism they have no choice but to become advocates of a strong nation-state to preserve the homogeneity of the nation in the face of immigration. And the longer they wait to do this, the longer they will lose like Jeremy Corbyn.

Blue Labour argue that rejecting the national can only mean embracing an “abstract universalism” as opposed to a concrete and actually existing national community. From this abstract universalism, one can only fail to actually form a working-class polity. Yet what the argument seems to forget is that nation-states themselves at one point were merely abstract universalism. The French Revolution developed the modern nation through a notion of universal citizenship that sought to ensure the rights of man, and to form the nation-state a disparate collection of agrarian communities had to be mobilized in the name of these rights. Through a process of political mobilization and organization, the abstract nation was made into a concrete political reality, centralizing different communities under a representative government with rights, duties, and a common language.

If it was possible to do this for the original nation-state then it is also possible to take an abstract internationalism and turn it into a concrete polity. The Second International began such a project, building a working-class culture that oriented itself around a “demonstration culture”, which sought to build a sense of international community among a federation of national parties.1 By organizing the working class around principles of solidarity with workers of all nations and forming transnational institutions, it is possible to build a democratic community that is not rooted in a particular nation. This isn’t going to be easy; the Second International ultimately succumbed to nationalism. Yet to say that only the nation provides a basis for building a democratic community is to surrender to the path of least resistance and ignore the possibilities contained in history. 

If we aim to build this international community of proletarians, we must oppose immigration controls. As Donna Gabaccia shows in her work Militants and Migrants, the process of migration has been key in the formation of transnational working-class communities.2 To say that immigration controls are necessary because the nation is the only way workers can form a political community is to impose conditions that make transnational working-class communities more difficult to form.

Another issue with embracing the nation-state is that we are entering a global crisis of climate change that simply cannot be addressed on the national level. Developing the kind of response needed to the potential catastrophe on the horizon is going to require cooperation beyond the national level and working towards a global planned economy. The alternative is that nations compete to have the least disastrous downfall, protecting their respective populations from the worst while shutting out those suffering like a sinking lifeboat. It is imperative that humanity moves beyond the nation-state if it is going to survive. 

Family 

“Abolition of the family” has long been a controversial position amongst communists, prompting Marx and Engels to have to address it in the Communist Manifesto when defending themselves from right-wing attacks. The response of Marx and Engels was to point out that the family was already withering away in the face of capitalism for much of the proletariat, an observation that is made today by the trad leftists to argue that an embrace of family values is the logical conclusion of anti-capitalist politics. 

I will concede to the trad leftists that “abolish the family” is not exactly a winning slogan. This is not because it scares workers but because it doesn’t effectively communicate what we are aiming for. We should be more precise in our language, and set our sights more specifically on patriarchy. It is the dependence of women on husbands and of children on their parents that we wish to do away with, not the cohabitation of kinship and the emotional support that comes with it. Of course, there are some leftists like Sophie Lewis who see a future beyond the family based on universal surrogacy, a vision that seems more designed to troll the trad leftists than as a genuine political program. Such visions are genuinely alienating, yet their existence does not require an equally contrarian response that affirms the traditional family. 

According to Christopher Lasch, the family is a “haven in a heartless world”. If social life is reduced to pure economic competition between atomized individuals, then the family, for those lucky enough to still have one, is one of the few forms of community they have. There is no doubt that the destruction of the family by capitalism with nothing to replace it is quite grim and psychically horrifying. Yet it is mistaken to idealize the family as an escape from the impersonal alienation of the market, when for many people the family is itself a form of personal and direct alienation. Not everyone lives in a world where their family is their friend; in many cases, one’s family can be their worst enemy. We can do better than valorizing one form of alienation in response to another. 

Rather than returning to the family in the face of its destruction under capitalism, we should seek to create a world where the haven of the family is not necessary. Rather than a society full of broken families, we need a society where someone without a family can thrive as well as someone with family intact. This is what “abolishing the family” truly means: to end the economic relations of dependence of wives and children on the patriarch so that kinship is based on voluntary relationships of genuine love and community. This would entail not ending the ability of parents to raise their children, but instead giving children the option to leave their families if they are abusive, while retaining support networks beyond the misery of foster care. It would mean ending the unpaid domestic labor of women that reproduces the nuclear family, by socializing this work and removing its gendered connotations.

This is not to mention that a reassertion of family values could only be done through a turn towards a vile culture of patriarchy. We must understand that patriarchy is not simply an attitude of men, but a historically derived mode of production with institutional forms according to which the wife and children are the property of the father and perform what is essentially slave labor to reproduce the household as an economic unit. To turn back to the traditional family would require empowering this economic unit by reinforcing the conditions under which women are essentially the property of their husbands. Until the trad left is willing to own up to this and describe the measures they will take to accomplish this, their gloating about family values is merely subcultural posturing. 

Religion 

The issue of religion is hardly cut and dry. Religious belief has been an ideological force for mobilizing the vilest of reactionary movements, such as the Iron Guard in Romania or the current rightist coup in Bolivia. Yet at the same time, religious sentiment has been used to mobilize those on the side of socialism and decolonization, such as Catholic Liberation Theology or Muslim National Communism. It could be argued that a policy of secularism rather than militant atheism is preferable, with militant atheism having done more harm than good for the Communist project by alienating potential sympathizers. 

Yet for the trad left the question of religion goes beyond the question of whether someone can hold religious beliefs while also being a good communist militant. For much of the trad left an embrace of religion is coupled with a turn towards social-conservatism. It is obvious why; embracing a social-conservative viewpoint is impossible without distorting Marxism. Within religious doctrines, one can find an ethical appeal to justify taking up the reactionary viewpoints they see in the working class. There is also a communitarian and collectivist element to religion that, like the family, can serve as a “haven in a heartless world” which can be counterposed to atomizing liberal individualism. Another factor is the lack of an (at least explicit) ethical framework in Marxism, a belief system that exists as counterposed to utopian socialists who aimed to build socialism on the foundation of ethical ideals.

Examples of socialists turning to Catholicism or other religious tendencies are primarily niche phenomena on Twitter, but there are some more famous examples, like Catholic Elizabeth Bruenig, known for her anti-abortion stance. An attempt to articulate such a politics programmatically can be found in the “Tradinista Manifesto”, written by “a small party of young Christian socialists committed to traditional orthodoxy, to a politics of virtue and the common good, and to the destruction of capitalism, and its replacement by a truly social political economy.” 

The Tradinista Manifesto is essentially an internet shitpost with no historical importance. I only turn to it as a good example of the contradictory nature of the social-conservative left and problems with turning to religious values as a counter to liberal capitalism. It begins by asserting that Christ is king and that the polity should, therefore, promote the teachings of the Church, “autonomous but not fully separate from the Church”. What we have here seems to be a sort of light theocracy, albeit a theocracy that is supposed to promote economic justice. The vision of economic justice here is a sort of Proudhonism, not dissimilar to Catholic distributism. Class society is to be eradicated while property rights are also asserted. The solution is the promotion of worker cooperatives, everyone becoming a property owner. How this vision is supposed to be feasible given the development of modern productive forces is left to the imagination. 

Even more contradictory is the simultaneous rejection and promotion of sexual conservatism. Our Catholic authors claim to be against “Racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and similar forms of oppression” yet at the same time claim that “Marriage and family life should be specially supported by the polity to promote the common good” while also taking a “pro-life” stance against abortion. This is a stance that may make sense to the religious idealist, but to a Marxist it is nonsensical. According to Engels, the wife was the first form of private property and the institution of the family is the economic basis upon which the oppression of women rests. Such a position is like calling for the abolition of obesity while supporting the fast-food industry. 

This contradiction captures the very bind that the trad socialists find themselves in. In calling for left-wing economics and social conservative cultural values, they fail to recognize that social conservative values only have purchase because of the division of society into classes and the various forms of oppression that accompany them. People turn to various traditional structures like the family and religion partly because they serve as shelters from the worst aspects of capitalist society. There is, of course, the force of habit that these attitudes have instilled in people which often dies hard. Yet it is unbelievable that a strengthening of the family would be a feature of a world where economic equality was the norm, unless women were systematically excluded from this norm in order to avoid granting them economic independence. Authentically ending class society therefore entails ending patriarchy.

We also find here a problem with trying to base politics on religion in general, as a religious ethics tends to be based on a priori claims that are not subject to further questioning and therefore must be held to. Alexander Bogdanov referred to this as “authoritarian causality,” a type of thinking that holds causality to be rooted in a greater power that exists before all other causes.3  Religious traditions see the work of god or gods as this final cause and therefore hold ethics to stem from these gods, making them unquestionable. This means that a collective and democratic understanding of what defines the “good life” is out of the question, since this answer is already taken as an item of faith.4 So when the Tradinsitas attempt to construct a left-wing politics for the modern world, they are forced to adhere to the Catholic Church’s dogma of being against abortion while simultaneously claming to be against misogyny, resulting in an incoherent politics. 

Despite these contradictions, the desire for an ethical grounding beyond the scientific analysis of history provided by Marxism is real. It is my opinion that for us communists, ethical nihilism is not a tenable position. A basic ethical worldview is needed. Perhaps we can find this in the ethics of classical republicanism, a discourse that was implicit in the entire early socialist movement that Marx and Engels were embedded in. Or, maybe Lunacharksy’s “god-building” is the solution, wherein the wake of the old religions’ destruction humanity must build a new religious system devoid of superstition, which can provide a moral grounding for humanity. Such a moral grounding must be universalist and based in reason, not in a traditional creed that isn’t subject to further questioning. Regardless of how one feels about these ideas, turning to the old religious dogmas is not a solution to the problem, even on pragmatic grounds. One’s religious sentiments are very much rooted in their own upbringing and personal experiences, and cannot unify the masses of wage workers around a common human task of overcoming class society. A pluralistic approach that allows for the participation of religious socialists in a greater movement, unified around a truly universalist radicalism, is preferable. 

Is liberal capitalism inherently socially progressive? 

It is a common talking point of the trad left that capitalism destroys all the patriarchal and traditional bonds of the old communities, creating an atomized liberal individual who can be exploited by capital. Julius Evola, the ultimate philosopher of traditionalism, famously said that capitalism is just as subversive as communism. With this there can be no real disagreement. Yet this premise is taken a step further with the argument that to truly be opposed to capital means to affirm these traditional forms and protect them from erosion by capitalism. To be socially progressive, they say, is only to do the work of capitalism for the capitalists, and the left is nothing more than a vanguard of liberalism as long as it maintains an opposition to social conservatism. 

The idea that capitalism is inherently socially progressive and antagonistic to social conservatism should be held up to closer scrutiny. This brings us to the theories of Karl Polanyi and his notion of the “Double movement.”5 According to Polanyi, capitalism is unique because of its tendency to subsume all elements of social life to the nexus of market exchange, alienating all that was once inalienable. Focusing on 19th Century England, Polanyi discussed the transformation of “natural” communities, in which land and labor had an inherent worth that was mediated through relations of personal duty and obligation, where now these are objects of abstract exchange. Where labor was once mediated by tradition and custom it now carries a price tag, subject to the whims of market anarchy. As Karl Marx would say, “all that is solid melts into air.” 

In Polanyi’s vision this movement of capital to subsume all that exists outside of it inevitably triggers a countermovement to protect social order from this corrosion, as the market will eventually destroy the foundations upon which it functions. This countermovement can take many forms, from national protectionism to communitarianism to the welfare state. Against the atomization of humanity into sellable commodities there is an assertion of social solidarities that aim to restore what was destroyed. The countermovement is seen as external to the logic of the market, yet at the same time necessary for its functioning if society is not to fall into a war of all against all. 

Polanyi would make an excellent theorist for the trad left, as using his framework one could call for a reassertion of the family, nation and church as social solidarities to provide the foundation of a countermovement against neoliberal capitalism. Yet by identifying capitalism solely with the logic of the market and social disintegration, Polanyi overestimates how much these countermovements are actually outside of capital. He sets up a situation where any reaction to capitalism will be inherently conservative, defending and reasserting the traditional ways of life that are disrupted by capitalism. Yet what if the movement of capital and the countermovement against it, the double movement, are internal to capitalism, rather than the latter being external to it? 

Melinda Cooper, in her work Family Values, develops exactly this critique by looking at the role of the family in the history of neoliberalism. Drawing on the work of Wendy Brown, Cooper argues that neoliberalism and neoconservatism both need to be understood as a greater dialectic within capitalism. To do this, she focuses on the role of family in policy and discourse from both neoliberals and neoconservatives, showing how both political tendencies were invested in the maintenance of the family as the basis of a society based on market contracts. Neoliberals like Gary S. Becker and Milton Friedman used concern over the disruption of the family by welfare as a reason to promote the welfare reform, not simply as a matter of cost-cutting, but as a way to promote the equilibrium of the family as a sound basis for the equilibrium of the market.6 This throws into question the understanding of neoliberalism as having an inherently socially progressive superstructure of hedonistic sexual liberation from the family. Milton and Rose Friedman would write in their book Tyranny of the Status Quo that

If we are right that the tide is turning, that public opinion is shifting away from a belief in big government and away from the doctrine of social responsibility, then that change…will tend to restore a belief in individual responsibility by strengthening the family and reestablishing its traditional role.7 

For the neoliberals, the family was a spontaneous order that would develop when set free from the distortions of welfare and provide a basis upon which the market could flourish. Neoliberal welfare reforms aimed to make the family rather than the state absorb the cost of externalities, which meant that welfare reforms aimed for more than just budget trimming, but also for enforcing family morality. For neoconservatives, the family was something to be actively protected that required intervention from the state. When the family didn’t develop as a spontaneous order due to neoliberal reforms, neoconservatism as a political force was necessary to reassert the family as a countermovement. Cooper summarizes the relationship of the two ideologies to the family as follows:

If neoliberals were adamant that the economic obligations of family should be enforced even when the legal and affective bonds of kinship had broken down, social conservatives were intent on actively rekindling the family as a moral institution based on the unpaid labor of love. Both agreed, however, that the private family (rather than the state) should serve as the primary source of economic security.8


Neoliberalism and neoconservatism can be seen as an example of how Polanyi’s double movement is a dialectic internal to capitalism itself, with countermovements that aim to reassert what is destroyed by market forces acting to facilitate the reproduction of capitalism as a whole. As a result, countermovements that assert the family or nation as protective shields against the worst aspects of capitalism do not offer a way out of capitalism; they instead act to stabilize it. Furthermore, market liberalism does not necessarily entail a social progressive superstructure. The capitalist zealots most intent on subsuming all life to the market have seen an important role for family life, even if they leave its promotion to other political forces. Seeing the rise of alternative lifestyles and sexualities as simply a superstructural expression of neoliberalism is ultimately too simplistic and ignores how social conservatism synchronizes with neoliberalism. 

What is necessary is an emancipatory alternative to class society itself that can transcend the dialectic of market liberalism and social conservatism, rather than assert one side of it against the other. The destruction of village and family life in capitalism nonetheless creates a community of the proletariat which is engaged in collective labor in the workplace and community, fostering the potential for a new community that is not rooted in parochial ways of life. The formation of this community through transnational alliances as a political collectivity allows for a way forward, beyond the atomization of the market and patriarchal nationalism alike. 

Is the working-class naturally conservative? 

Many of those who would make arguments similar to Blue Labour may not themselves have much attachment to the traditional family or nationalism, but think that the left simply needs to abandon social progressivism out of a pragmatic need to appeal to the working class. This notion is based on the premise that the working class is “naturally socially conservative” and that mobilizing them for the purpose of economic redistribution should take precedence over struggles for the ‘recognition’ of marginalized peoples. 

This notion can be found in a recent overview of the most recent work of Thomas Piketty by Jan Rovny. According to Rovny, the pattern of voting in which lower-income brackets voted for the left while upper brackets voted for the “Merchant right” has been disrupted by the process of neoliberal deindustrialization. While the wealthiest still vote for the right wing, the constituency of the left parties is no longer the working class but middle-class professionals, often referred to as the PMC (professional-managerial class). Now what remains of the working class is picked up by right-wing populist parties, in a reversal of the political realignment of the early 20th century when political parties with a working-class base had socially progressive agendas. 

The explanation as to why the socially progressive left was able to win over the working class is that the old equivalent of the Brahmin left (examples given are Jean Jaurès and Léon Blum) were able to push against the inherent social conservatism of the working class. These middle class intellectuals “translated working class authoritarian tendencies into a fight for universalistic social progress” and “replaced nationalistic tendencies of the working classes with socialist internationalism”. Rovny takes issue with Piketty’s optimism that this can happen again for two reasons: for one, the left cannot square the economic interests of the working class with progressive middle-class intellectuals, and furthermore right-wing populists are able to meet the economic interests of the working class without the added baggage of social progressivism. 

The problem with this argument is that it naturalizes both the social conservatism of the working class and the social progressivism of the middle-class professionals. Working-class social conservatism is not a “natural” result of their spontaneous life experiences but a product of the institutions that dominate their lives. Right-wing demagogues in the media and other institutions such as churches actively fight to win ideological domination over the working class and channel economic grievances into chauvinistic attitudes. Working-class conservatism is not a natural inherent quality of the working class, but something they are socialized into by political actors who actively struggle for domination over everyday life. It is something historically and institutionally determined, not “natural”. 

Social progressivism among the professional stratum is a similar phenomenon, also something historically and institutionally determined. This social progressivism is related to the fact that this stratum serves the role of ideologically justifying the rule of the capitalist class. The “woke” ideology of this stratum is a product of the role they play as HR managers for a capitalist order that aims to nakedly exploit the global proletariat and manage the imperialist order, while still presenting itself as progressive by offering economic opportunity for marginalized people. Their social progressivism is designed to leave as much room as possible for capitalism to function while ensuring that it preserves opportunities for those who were previously left out. If capitalism loses the need for a socially progressive mask then we can expect to see this stratum embrace a nakedly reactionary chauvinism. 

This understanding of the petty-bourgeois professional as inherently socially progressive with the working class as inherently socially conservative puts us in a position where any attempt to fight for genuine communist politics can only be understood as middle-class wankers trying to beat an alien ideology into the working class. It is also just as condescending to the working class as the middle-class liberals that the trad left rightfully condemn because it assumes the working class is too narrow-minded to embrace a universalist and progressive worldview. The truth is that the working class has no institutions of its own in much of the world right now, and therefore cannot be said to have an ideology of its own. As a result, it is a plaything of socially reactionary and socially progressive sections of the ruling class. 

The lesson here is that we need to struggle against both social conservative demagogues who preach to the working class as well as the woke professional stratum and expose their hypocrisy. If the right can dominate the social life of the working class through its institutions and win them to its own platform, then the left can as well. It has been done before, and there is no need to square their economic interests with those of salaried professionals. This struggle has to take place in the realm of politics as well as the terrain of everyday life. It will certainly be an uphill battle, given the domination of our enemies and the unwillingness of the left to actually build a working-class base. We cannot put faith in the working class to spontaneously take up an emancipatory communist politics, nor can we surrender emancipatory communist politics to win easy support by playing to people’s prejudices. There will be many defeats on the way, like the one we saw in the UK. But to give in is not an option; we have to fight for the truth and not sacrifice our principles because of demoralization and a desire for easy victories. 

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Ali Shariati: Ideologue of the Iranian Revolution

Lydia Apolinar writes on Ali Shariati and his use and misuse during the Iranian Revolution. 

One of Ali Shariati’s principal influences, Frantz Fanon, once wrote him a letter that conveyed both admiration for the Iranian sociologist’s work and apprehension toward his use of religion as the basis for anti-colonial struggle. While acknowledging Islam’s capacity to act as a progressive force against colonialism, he wrote that if leftist intellectuals like Shariati were unable to “breathe this spirit into the weary body of the Muslim orient,” they risked instead contributing to a revival of traditionalism and sectarianism that could “divert … a ‘nation in becoming’ from its ideal future, bringing it closer to its past.”1 The historian Ervand Abrahamian made a similar criticism years after Shariati’s death and the 1979 revolution: “It is significant that Shariati did not even pose the major question that was to trouble his disciples during the Islamic Revolution—the question of whether one could initiate a rebellion under the banner of religion and yet keep the leadership of that rebellion out of the hands of the traditional-minded religious authorities”.2

Shariati, often called the “ideologue of the Iranian Revolution,” developed an eclectic ideology that combined secular philosophical and leftist influences like Fanon, Sartre, Marx, Catholic liberation theology, and the symbolism and language of Shi’ite Islam. He envisioned Shi’ite Islam as a truly emancipatory ideology that, rather than looking back nostalgically at an archaic past, could be used to create a socialist future; an association of believers who, rather than looking inward and thinking only of salvation and the next world, would strive to achieve the monotheistic ideal of a classless society on earth. As much as he was an enemy of monarchy and imperialism, he was also no friend of the clergy, whom he viewed as reducing Islam to a set of unchanging rules and dry, meaningless rituals. His unique ideology inspired students and intellectuals—many of whom sacrificed their lives in guerrilla organizations—to revolutionary action and is worth examination in depth, particularly because of his co-option by the Islamic Republic in spite of his irreconcilable differences with conservative Islamism. Shariati’s synthesis of Islam and Marxism failed to prevent the domination and takeover of the revolution by clerical conservatives, and, as Fanon and Abrahamian observed, can be said to have unwittingly strengthened them against the secular leftists. 

Ali Shariati was born in 1933 in Kahak, a village in northeastern Iran, to a family of clerics and small landowners. His father was a teacher and an Islamic scholar who engaged him in the religious left from an early age, having opened in 1947 the Center for the Propagation of Islamic Truths, an Islamic organization which took a strong nationalist stance in the late 40s and 50s and became involved in the movement for the nationalization of oil. Shariati studied at the Teachers’ Training College in Mashhad, where he became more aware of the class divisions in Iran and the struggle of the expanding urban working class, read a diverse selection of philosophers and political writers, and wrote essays that outlined an immature version of the ideas he would devote his life to.3 

Following his first arrest for his political activity, Shariati spent many years in Paris, where he completed his PhD at the Sorbonne. There he spent time with other exiled Iranian intellectuals and helped to found the Freedom Movement of Iran. He also came into contact with figures like Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon (whose books he translated).  He attended lectures by French orientalists, whose work on Islam and Islamic mysticism influenced him deeply. Particularly interesting was his engagement with the Catholic left, something he would later avoid mention of. Shariati attended lectures by prominent Catholic thinkers like Louis Massignon—whom he once described as the single most important influence on him—and Roger Garaudy, and read Esprit, a Catholic journal that supported national liberation and frequently featured Marxist writers.4  

Shariati conceived of the intelligentsia as a political class that, with its educated distance from society, could act as a mediator, the leaders of a “superstructure” that would necessarily transform the mode of production. He shared this position with Mojahedin of Iran (not to be confused with the completely unrelated Mojahedin of Afghanistan; this organization, known by the initials MEK, exists today as a bizarre personality cult favored by U.S. conservatives, but was an interesting and important group in the 60s and 70s). Though he was never directly involved with them, Shariati’s thought was the main ideological influence on the organization, which was mainly composed of the university-educated from petit-bourgeois families. Shariati’s view of the intelligentsia was influenced by Georges Gurvitch, the French sociologist who founded the “school of dialectical sociology” according to which “history was made not by economic classes, but by ‘conscious classes.’”5 The idea of the class struggle featured prominently in Shariati’s work, but primarily as a struggle between political rather than economic classes: in Iran, the only class which could lead the revolution was the intelligentsia, who, with their enlightened, progressive understanding of Islam, would bring society toward true monotheism. Upon his return to Iran, Shariati was immediately arrested and spent several weeks in prison. When he was released, he began to teach at the University of Mashhad. He would later move to Tehran, where he frequently gave wildly popular lectures at the Hosseiniye Ershad Institute, a non-traditionalist religious institution of which he became the central figure. 

The idea of “true monotheism” is one Shariati discussed in Religion v. Religion, a book comprising two of his lectures at the Hosseiniye Ershad given in the summer of 1970. This text is in part an attack on secularists who saw the primary conflict in the world and particularly in Iran as being between religion and atheism, or non-religion. Non-religion, he argued, was a new phenomenon, and mostly irrelevant until recently. Religion had always shaped the lives of human beings, and the struggle had always been the most intense within religion itself. He simplified the various religions into two—the religion of monotheism and the religion of “multitheism.” He maintained that it was impossible to separate a religion from its political and social implications, and discussed religion mainly with these implications in mind.

According to Shariati, the religion of multitheism was distinguished by its conservatism. Though many multitheists believed in one creator deity, they also found necessary a multitude of lesser gods that were, in contrast to the universal God of monotheism, confined to specific groups of people based on gender, ethnicity, and most drastically, social and economic class. The work of the multitheist was to convince the poor and oppressed person that “‘I am connected to a lower class not only because my essence is lowly, but because my god is lower than the gods of other races’”.6 He termed multitheism a “religion of legitimation” because it had always worked to legitimize the social classes of the societies in which it appeared, and argued that monotheism was not only the belief in a single God, but also the eternal striving for unity and equality. Since human beings were all the creations of a universal God, there was no natural or sacred justification for domination, whether by the privileged classes over the oppressed classes (a vaguely defined term which variously included and excluded the traditional petite bourgeoisie) or by the core nations over those in the periphery. 

Shariati’s conception of multitheism was not limited to the literal belief in multiple gods. He claimed that “throughout history, the work of the religious leaders has been to preserve the religion of multitheism … often by assuming the name of monotheism”.7 While these religious leaders upheld the most superficial monotheism, they worked to preserve the classes that existed in multitheistic society, and those that arose after, making one’s class (and the right to private property) something sacred—the will of God. Shariati viewed the will of God as ultimately inevitable, but he asserted that this will could only be carried out by conscious human beings—and that God’s will was the end of class society. For him, a true believer was not necessarily a Muslim devoted to the formal aspects of religious adherance, such as praying and fasting; true belief was about action. An atheist who brought society closer to the monotheistic ideal could in some cases be preferable to a religious person who was in reality a multitheist in disguise. 

A similar essay of his, “Red Shi’ism v. Black Shi’ism,” was another critique of the conservative and apolitical clergy. In this work, Shariati wrote of his conception of the revolutionary nature of Islam in general and Shi’ite Islam in particular. “Islam is the religion which makes its appearance in the history of mankind with the ‘no’ of Muhammad”—the “no” to polytheism and endless tribal warfare on the Arabian peninsula. “Shi’ism is the Islam which distinguishes itself and determines its direction with the ‘no’ of the great Ali”.8 Shi’a Muslims have always placed particular importance on Hussain, the grandson of the Prophet, and on his martyrdom—Hussain was killed in battle against an Umayyad caliph viewed by many Muslims as unjust and un-pious. In another essay on martyrdom, Shariati wrote that 

“Hussain’s meaning becomes clear when we understand his relationship to that flow of movements which we have discussed in earlier lectures which historically begins with Abraham. This meaning should be made clear and Hussain’s revolution must be interpreted. To view Hussain and the battle of Karbala as isolated from historical and social circumstances would force us, as indeed it has for many of us, to view the man and the event purely as an unfortunate, if not tragic occurrence in the past and some­thing for us to merely cry about (and we certainly do continue to cry) rather than as an eternal and transcendent phenomenon. To separate Karbala and Hussain from their historical and ideological context is to dissect a living body, to remove only a part of it and to examine it in exclusion of the living system of the body.”9 

The question that arose for Shariati was of what to emphasize—Hussain, the man, and his action, which could be considered a model for martyrs in the guerrilla movements, or the simple tragedy of his martyrdom? 

In “Islamology,” Shariati sought to define what he meant when he said that Islam must become not only a religion but an ideology. He gave the example of a physicist who followed a particular ideology, whose approach to physics was part of the whole, encompassed by a systematic worldview. Islam had to take on a similar role for the Muslim sociologist, because “all of the views on economics, sociology, religion, philosophy, and even on art and literature … have a cause and effect relationship to each other.”10 Without ideology, history was nothing but a meaningless mass of facts, the “lies that people have agreed upon.” He admonished sociologists who attempted to be non-ideological and apolitical, which he viewed as both impossible and undesirable. Islam offered both a systematic framework within which to analyze history and positive prescriptions for immediate political changes, and it was up to Islamic intellectuals to discover what they were and implement them. 

Shariati on the left

In this text, Shariati used the word “utopia” in a positive sense, and defended it against socialists who mocked it as non-materialist and unscientific. He wrote that utopia “is the ideal society that one conceives of in one’s own mind [and] desires and struggles for so that human society takes that form. All philosophies, religions and human beings have a different type of utopia in their minds. Paradise is the utopia or ideal society in the mind of a religious man. Plato’s utopia was the ideal city for the aristocratic Greeks and intellectuals of his age. The City of God of St. Augustine … are all ideal societies … Essentially, the existence of an imaginary society proves that the human being is always moving from the ‘present situation’ to a more ‘desirable situation,’ whether it be imaginary, scientific, the utopia of Plato or the classless society of Marx”.11 This ideal society would also need its “ideal citizen,” a prototype of a human being who has reached the highest possible potential. An important part of progress would be to encourage people to actively aspire to this height. According to Shariati (who had a strained relationship with Iranian Marxists), “even Marxism, which is based on ‘materialism’ and which, as our intellectuals explain it, views the human being as an economic animal, speaks about a ‘total human being’ who has not become imperfect, paralyzed, cut into pieces or alienated. He has not been made insane by the system or been metamorphosed … He is neither a master nor a slave”.12 An example he gave of an “ideal human being” in Islam was Abu Dharr al-Ghifari al-Kinani, an early Muslim who protested corruption and accumulation of wealth and agitated for a more fair distribution of wealth, and who Shariati saw as the first Islamic socialist.13  

In some ways Shariati’s thought was a reaction to Marxism, an answer to its criticisms of religion and an attempt to create an independent Islamic socialism. Many of Shariati’s ideas came from Marx, and he often took Marxist terms and imbued them with religious meanings, as he simultaneously gave to theological terms meanings that resembled Marxist concepts. Shariati’s relationship to Marxism was complicated: though in his youth he had praised certain authors as “Muslim Marxists,” in his later years he was frequently critical of Marxism.14 He certainly admired Marx as a social scientist, but took issue with aspects of his philosophy and approach to history and politics. He seemed to view Marxism, or at least the Iranian Marxists, as reducing the analysis of human history to a narrow economic determinism and as dismissing spiritual concerns as “non-materialist.” The work in which Shariati most thoroughly criticized Marxism, Marxism and Other Western Fallacies, is of questionable authenticity; a collection of early essays and lectures, it was published many years after they were written, against his wishes, in a state-run journal.15 In the text, he criticized liberalism, existentialism, and Marxism for their “materialistic” conception of humanism, which opposed God under the false belief that He was anti-human—which may have been true of western Christianity, but had nothing to do with Islam, which was founded on the unity of God and humanity—and dismissed Marxism as yet another “western fallacy,” another European ideology imposed on Iran.16 One of the Shah’s favored tactics was to play Islam and Marxism against each other, and an outright denunciation of Marxism by Shariati, who had been critical but not unwilling to work with and support Marxists in their shared struggle, was of great use to the monarchy. 

Shi’ite Islam had always been more formally structured and centralized than Sunni Islam. This was partially because, unlike most Sunni schools of jurisprudence, the Ja’fari school (the Twelver Shi’i school of jurisprudence) left open the door to ijtihad, or the use of independent reasoning in the interpretation of Islamic texts, usually in regards to legal questions. In order to maintain a degree of consistency and order in the faith, this privilege was reserved for Islamic scholars of the highest order, or marja al-taqlid. A Shi’i follower could choose among these formally recognized experts, who sometimes differed in their interpretations, but were obliged to choose one and follow his judgments absolutely. Shariati recognized the need for intellectual authority, but wanted to expand the privilege of ijtihad to intellectuals in general, and potentially also to ordinary Muslims who were creative and thoughtful enough to participate in the process. His concept of ijtihad also referred to much more than legal rulings and prescriptions on personal behavior—it entailed a process of refiguring the meaning of Islam in its entirety and its relation to modern problems. 

Another idea of importance to Shariati was martyrdom, an ideal that was essential to the Iranian guerrilla groups, both Islamic and socialist. Taking inspiration at once from Shi’a doctrine and from the insurrectionary anarchist concept of “propaganda of the deed,” these various groups—the Muslim Mojahedin and their Marxist-Leninist splinter group Peykar, the Marxist Fedayeen, and others—may have had serious theoretical and practical disagreements, but they were united in their veneration of martyrdom. With the exception of occasional efforts, in the face of failure and continuous fatalities, to move towards organizing mass movements, these groups focused on operations they knew to be suicidal and risky assassinations. Shariati was not directly involved in any of the guerrilla movements—he called himself “emotionally and spiritually weak” for that reason—but provided most of the theory upon which the Muslim Mojahedin based their existence, and passionately praised martyrdom in a collection of lectures, Martyrdom: Arise and Bear Witness. His respect for the ideal of martyrdom brought him to the height of emotion, and according to him it had a vital significance to Shi’a and Iranian culture: “The story of martyrdom and that which martyrdom challenges is so sensitive, so belovedly exciting that it pulls the spirit towards the fire. It paralyzes logic. It weakens speech. It even makes thinking difficult. Martyrdom is a mixture of a refined love and a deep, complex wisdom. One cannot express these two at the same time and so, as a result, one cannot do them justice. In order to understand the meaning of martyrdom, the ideological school from which it takes its meaning, its expression and its value should be clarified. In European countries, the word martyr stems from ‘mortal’ which means ‘death’ or ‘to die.’17 One of the basic principles in Islam (and in particular in Shi’ite culture), however, is ‘sacrifice and bear witness.’ So instead of martyrdom, i.e. death, it essentially means ‘life’, ‘evi­dence’, ‘testify’, ‘certify.’ These words, martyrdom and bearing witness, show the differences which exist between the vision of Shi’ite Islamic culture and the other cultures of the world.” Martyrdom was not the tragic end of an individual life, but rather the complete commitment of that life to a cause, belief, or idea—the highest honor one could achieve, it was not a “means, but a goal in itself”.

Seeking martyrdom was not viable as a political strategy, however. The Mojahedin experienced a continuous loss of its membership, and though they were popular among university students, they failed to appeal strongly to the working class. Their combination of anti-monarchy radicalism and Shi’a tradition appealed particularly to the university-educated from traditional bourgeois, devout families, while Marxism was more popular among the urban working class and oil workers in the south. Among the traditional bourgeoisie themselves, they may have had some appeal with their emphasis on Shi’ism, but they insulted the “sacred right to private property” and were at best ambivalent, and often hostile, toward the clergy, who the bazaar shop owners looked to as the traditional leaders of their communities.18 Though they were influential in 1979, the Mojahedin would have benefited from focusing on mass organization rather than propaganda of the deed.

The Shah’s government lacked firm foundations in the social classes of Iran. Though it generally favored large industrial capitalists, particularly in its extensive development plans, it initially dealt with the inflationary economic crisis of the 70s by arresting well-known “industrial feudalists” in an anti-profiteering campaign which “caused schizophrenia among rich entrepreneurs. On the one hand they benefited from the socioeconomic system … on the other hand they suffered from the political system, which placed their wealth and futures in the hands of one man.”19 The Resurgence Party, which held hegemonic power after 1975 as the country’s only legal political party, attempted to appeal to the left, declaring an intention to synthesize socialism and capitalism in its path toward the success of the White Revolution. In its anti-profiteering campaign, it quickly refocused its energy from large capitalists to the small bourgeoisie, the latter of which complained that the government, in imposing strict price controls on basic commodities and organizing “inspectorate teams” to wage a “merciless crusade against profiteers,” was beginning to resemble a Communist one, and the White Revolution a Red one. The anti-profiteering campaign ignited the anger of the small bourgeoisie, while the government’s war against traditional culture simultaneously offended their conservative sensibilities. Guild Courts sentenced hundreds of thousands of businessmen, and imprisoned around 8,000. In the face of this harsh treatment, the conservative small bourgeoisie began to speak of revolution.20 

Of course, the Shah’s government was not communist, and for all its show of anti-profiteering, it repressed the working class more consistently and with far greater brutality. Since the 1953 CIA-orchestrated coup that overthrew Mohammad Mossadegh, the popular nationalist politician who represented the struggle for the nationalization of the oil industry, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi regained the absolute power his father held before his abdication in 1941. In the period between 1953 and 1978, the communist and largely working-class Tudeh Party was banned, many of its members arrested and over 40 leading members executed, socialist newspapers made illegal, and all independent unions replaced with unions under the direct control of the state. The working class was left largely unorganized and its struggle confined to sporadic illegal strikes.21 As anti-monarchy demonstrations escalated, however, and the government’s grip on power grew weaker, socialist organizations resumed their activities. This was also in the midst of the recession the government engineered to deal with inflation, which led to rising unemployment and falling wages. The Shah reacted to the demands of the working class in a televised press conference that became notorious: “This is intolerable. Those who do not work, we shall take them by the tail and throw them out like mice. He who does not do his job properly is betraying not only his conscience but his patriotic duty … I remember a few years ago a mason … was prepared to work a whole day for a mere meal.”22 The response to the government’s harsh labor policy was an enormous increase of strikes and demonstrations. Striking workers brought the country to an economic halt, with strikes especially prevalent in oil, communications, heavy industries, and power plants.23 The working class, repressed into dormancy since 1953, took its place in the summer of 1978 at the center of the revolution.

Though the 1979 revolution was made by a diverse group of Marxists, Islamists, and Islamic socialists—students, workers, and small bourgeoisie—Khomeini and his group of clerical conservatives took control in the years that followed, consolidating power completely by 1981. This happened for a number of reasons. First of all, Khomeini had a stronger base among the traditional bourgeoisie than Shariati had in any mass segment of society. Also, though he was openly and fervidly anti-communist, Khomeini was a careful politician who managed to endear himself to, or at least to avoid open confrontation with, all the various sides of the opposition, including Marxists who attempted to represent a left alternative within the new Islamic political order (with the exception of a few of the communist guerrilla groups). When asked by another cleric to condemn Shariati’s irreverently anti-clerical speeches at the Hosseiniye Ershad, Khomeini refused, having been well aware of the latter’s popularity. He avoided addressing sensitive and divisive issues such as women’s rights, and rather than revealing the socially conservative positions which would later become the focus of the Islamic Republic’s policy, instead made vague proclamations about the triumph of the masses, or of the suffering of the wretched, borrowing language from Shariati and Fanon. He appealed to the working class while simultaneously promising to protect private property. Khomeini attempted to be everything to everyone, at once a progressive and a guardian of tradition, and was remarkably successful in doing so.24 

The attitude of the Mojahedin to Khomeini was confused and contradictory. They could not entirely resist his charismatic appeal, and continuously sought the advantage of an alliance with such an influential religious figure. Though at the time he wouldn’t publicly condemn the Mojahedin, Khomeini received them coldly when a contingent came to visit him in Iraq, advising them to purify themselves from socialist delusions and return to true Islam.25 In spite of this experience, the Mojahedin remained ambivalent toward Khomeini until after his power was consolidated. 

Secular leftist organizations remained equally ambivalent, with the Tudeh Party offering its support for the Islamic Republic in its early years. Workers’ councils were formed from the strike committees of the revolution, and by the time of its victory, all major industrial plants were under their control. Initially, most of the councils supported the Islamic Republic, and adhered to Khomeini’s back-to-work decree. However, tensions began to form early on as the working class demanded radical change—an immediate improvement of working conditions and wages, nationalization of industry, workers’ participation in management—while the country’s new leaders were content to stick to the status quo. Following the fall of Bazargan’s provisional government, the councils wouldn’t back down and refused to become mere appendages of the new state, and were replaced with “Islamic Councils” which “while creating an atmosphere of terror in the workplace, moved towards a thorough-going indoctrination of workers”.26 Workers suffered terribly through the long war with Iraq, with longer hours and lower wages imposed on them, as well as mandatory war fundraising and involuntary transfer to the front. The new Labor Law, passed after years of deliberation, was even more reactionary than that of the Shah when it came to the right of workers to organize. 

Having died in 1977 at only 43—supposedly of a heart attack, though many suspected SAVAK was responsible—Shariati never saw the revolution he helped to shape. After extensive persecution and repeated attempts at reconciliation, in the early to mid 1980s the Mojahedin changed their position to one of militant opposition to the Islamic Republic. After organizing mass demonstrations which failed to effectively challenge the new regime, they retreated into exile, where they became increasingly insular and intense in their cult of personality around Massoud Rajavi. The organization went on to support Saddam Hussein in the Iran–Iraq war, a decision that led most Iranians to distrust them deeply, and continued to carry out terrorist attacks and assassinations while becoming increasingly alienated from the population. 

Today, a street in Tehran is named after Shariati, and “no one loved Khomeini so dearly as he did,” according to Supreme Leader Khamenei.27 Yet Shariati’s vision of Islam as a theology of liberation differed dramatically from the reactionary politics of the Islamic Republic, and one wonders whether he would have survived the mass executions of the early 1980s, in which so many leftist revolutionaries died. Though his is not the ideology of the Islamic Republic, it was an indispensable part of the Iranian Revolution—an inspiration to the millions of workers and students who participated in a revolution that was much more complex and dynamic than the caricature all too common in the West of a mob of mullahs angry at social progress. At once a Muslim and a socialist, Shariati was a formidable rival of conservative Islamism; in his thought was a genuine liberation theology in which “the enlightened soul is the person who is conscious of his ‘human condition’ in his historical and social setting, and whose awareness necessarily gives him a sense of social responsibility.”28