Leftism Leaves the Bardo State

Despite being a pretty loyal atheist and materialist, I often see interesting analogies between well-worn religious traditions and quite practical issues as a scholar of religion. Maybe this is just through constant exposure to textbooks and archival material at my job. Still, as Paul Veyne (1988) argues in Did the Ancient Greeks Believe in Their Myths?, ancient peoples themselves probably did not take these ideas literally, and rather viewed them as expressing a "deeper" truth blending a legendary past with concrete lessons about life and philosophical points. Ironically, despite its "traditional" pretensions, the whole concept of scriptural literalism/fundamentalism is a quite modern phenomenon, and is detached from any authentic religious tradition (Salafism was only popularized by the 70's, and Christian fundamentalism not much earlier in the 1920's). Buddhism is interesting in its own right as a cosmology, but several interrelated Buddhist philosophical concepts have recently struck me as helpful illustrations of dialectics.

In Vajrayana Buddhism, the bardo (TI: བར་དོ) state confronts all sentient beings between death and rebirth. It is a liminal space where possible future lives unfold before the mind-stream, although constrained by past good or bad karma. Depending on the actions of the being's past life, and countless lives before that, the new birth takes on a different character. Its new realm of existence, which can range from a repeated human birth, a particularly auspicious rebirth as a deva (or deity) or into a hell-realm, is determined by both reflection and meditative practice in the bardo state and the ripening of past karma.

In the decades after the destruction of the Soviet Union in the 90's, I feel like leftism has been in an analogous state. While popular and ideological struggles continued unabated, there was a widely-felt hit to morale and concrete challenges to organization. Many activists did a good amount of reflection and summation on what worked and what was less fruitful, with some choosing to leave the path of revolution and become revisionists. As the Pink Wave in the Global South and Occupy in the North erupted, along with later developments such as the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign and the Black Lives Matter movement, leftism began the process of rebirth (what a Tantric practitioner might call a "bardo of becoming").

In my opinion, the emerging rebirth of leftism is neither a total departure from the past nor an isomorphic replication of Cold War organizational ideas, problems, and conflicts. Rather it includes both continuities and changes. Helpful here may be one of the Buddha's most important philosophical contributions on the secular side of things, his doctrine of no-self (anatman). Unlike the proto-Hindu Brahminic milieu he separated from, the Buddha denied the existence of an unchanging, discrete self that transmigrates between lives. Rather, he argued that what we call the "self" is an arbitrary reification of a number of mental and material processes. These processes are linked from moment to moment, but consist of drastically unrecognizable changes; think of the difference between your body as a child and your body as an adult. While the day-to-day difference may be imperceptible, even the material basis of our consciousness is impermanent.

You are here.

Leftism is replete with demonstrations of no-self, as anyone who has organized for a protracted period will know. An advanced person can degenerate through a personal bardo state, transforming into a defector from revolutionary activity, and a reserved, intermediate middling can likewise develop into an advanced fighter. But more interesting is the broader implication that the whole world is lacks such unchanging identities, the doctrine of emptiness (SK: शून्यता; sunyata). Asked if the entire world is empty of self by one disciple, the Buddha replied, "Empty is the world" (Suttanipata 35:85, IV 54). Just as our ego is only a conventional designation of a fluid dialectical process, organizations and movements should not be mentally reified and taken as unchanging constants.

With emptiness in mind, you can really see the births, deaths, bardo, and rebirths in the people's struggles: hitherto dominant community organizations grow detached from their social base and whither away, and marginal organizations toil in obscurity for years before reorienting themselves and becoming key players. Here the Worker's Party of Belgium (PTB/PVDA) always strikes me as such a favorable rebirth, emerging out of a long period of subcultural anonymity to become a major political party and trendsetter for the whole European Left. Key to this reconstitution was the PTB's 2008 party "renewal" conference that rethought their strategy and outreach to the people. Strengths and weaknesses of their line aside, their auspicious rebirth into a major political force was nonetheless conditioned by their past actions (karma): their decades-long experience in trade unions, community organizing, and mutual aid, even when these activities did not lead to growth in the moment, subtended a greater transformation.

While the Buddha's assertion that "empty is the world" has been mistaken as nihilism by some Westerners, it's actually an affirmation of possibility and hope. As the later Buddhist philosopher Nāgārjuna states:

"For whom emptiness is possible,

Everything is possible.

For whom emptiness is not possible,

Nothing is possible."

(Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 24:14)

If we realize the emptiness of all things, we see latent possibilities that we would otherwise overlook with a dogmatic, reified view of the world as unchanging and permanent. As leftism in the United States leaves its bardo of becoming, 20th century organizations and ideologies have taken on new lives according to their ideology, experience, and material basis. As the karma of their past organizational attitudes constantly comes into fruition, the ones who can see emptiness (seeing dialectically in other words) can build on past victories and transform failures into success through the process of criticism/self-criticism. Excluded are those who deny these fundamental truths, who will find themselves reborn into the same situation or a lower realm of existence.

Review: The Book Of Mormon

Last weekend, I watched Trey Parker and Matt Stone's The Book of Mormon on Broadway with my brother and sister-in-law. While I do consider myself somewhat knowledgeable of Mormonism, having read a few books on early LDS history, most of the mildly amusing trivia I possess on them was accurately jabbered off within the first few moments of the musical itself, as the ancient American prophet Mormon buries the plates of Nephi in Hill Cumorah for Joseph Smith to eventually discover. Thus, I will instead focus on the literary and theoretical underpinnings of Parker and Stone's oeuvre in my review.

       "HELLO!!!!"

 

Mormon follows the Elders Price and Cunningham, two young missionaries, as they embark on their two-year mission to northern Uganda for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Don't let the title "Elder" get anything twisted in terms of their rank-- Joseph Smith's dabbling with Freemasonry (see Fawn M. Brodie's No Man Knows My History) provides for many degrees and attainments for male LDS members, with children becoming priests at around 14 and church elders by 18. To become a bishop in your early 40's or so is also not unusual for the typical Mormon dentist. 

We begin in the Missionary Training Center ("Hello!"), located in Provo, Utah, a city which Parker and Stone elide with Salt Lake City for the sake of the American geographical palette. Here, the missionaries are disciplined into reciting a script for door-to-door proselytizing. The MTC is, of course, the beginning of a classic Durkheimian rite of passage for LDS missionaries. They mortify themselves through a rigorous schedule of prayer, language learning, and collective ritual to prove their detachment from worldly concerns-- one's holiness is directly proportionate to one's abnegation, as Durkheim points out. Elder Price is disappointed in his assignment to the Uganda mission ("Two by Two"), having wanted to work the field of Orlando instead, and finding that the Ugandan mission has failed to convert anyone recently.

As a a bit of an Africanist with past research on Uganda specifically, I think this is a subtle plot hole. Uganda is a deeply religious society which warmly welcomes its extensive connections to Western religious organizations, particularly Anglicanism and Catholicism, although the Pentecostal/Charismatic movement has enjoyed profound success as well. The number of Ugandan LDS adherents is, nevertheless, somewhat slim according to available statistics at just over 20,000, but the indifference towards the missionary's overtures should be taken with some poetic license. Really, it is in secular First World locales like Orlando where LDS missionaries tend to get nowhere, being lucky to win a single baptism during their whole two-year mission, while less developed nations in Africa and Latin America are major vectors of new LDS growth outside of U.S. births.

The Ugandan villagers scoff at Price and Cunningham's cheery, Intermontane Western optimism by pointing out some of the problems confronting both Uganda and many other postcolonial states: political instability, war, famine, and AIDS ("Hasa Diga Eebowai") and curse god in explicit terms. Aside from the nonsensical pseudo-Bantu words in the chorus, I felt like this was a faithful rundown of the crises confronting Uganda, especially around the musical's writing in 2011 when Joseph Kony's militia remained highly active. However, in practice, Ugandans do not respond to these issues by saying "fuck you, god." As mentioned above, they tend to be fervently religious on any quantitative metric, as a Pew poll from around the time Mormon is set demonstrates, with 97% of Ugandan respondents claiming to believe in God. 

As Marx points out, religion is the "aroma" of oppressive social conditions, the "sigh of the oppressed," and yes, "the opiate of the masses." Contrary to the stupid twitter marxists who want to downplay the atheist aspect of Marx in the name of some tired "mass line" idiocy aimed at religious people who they hope to flatter, Marx viewed religion as a thought error and essentially wrong. Following Feuerbach and the post-Kantian/post-Hegelian space of 19th century German discourse, religion for Marx is our misunderstanding of our own power and creativity. When we fail to recognize that humanity is an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent power, we instead externalize and alienate these qualities of ourselves onto an invented god, who then confronts us as an objective, alien force. That is why Marx deems activism and revolution necessary; simply pointing out that God is (obviously) not real is not sufficient to dispel such illusions because they are the continually reproducing superstructural consequence ("aroma") of an oppressive capitalist economy like Uganda's.

So, a second poetic license is taken here by Stone and Parker, although perhaps the Ugandans' apprehension is aimed at the preposterous ideas of Mormonism itself and not religion in general (although "fuck you, god" limits that recourse). When Elder Price expresses his doubts, the other missionaries teach him to consciously deny his instincts and continue on ("Turn it Off"), which does wonderfully capture the spirit of Mormon cognitive dissonance. As Durkheim observes, religion relies on social bonds, being as it is the product of the collective rituals of a community. It's no surprise that missionaries tend to lead not with theology but with the social, inviting recruits over for dinner or a social activity to establish a bond, utilizing parachurch organizations such as youth groups, social media, and summer camps to ensnare and integrate disaffiliated individuals. This makes otherwise implausible supernatural claims easier to swallow for the recruit, as he is already integrated into the social whole. Similarly, it is quite easy for LDS members to "turn it off" when confronted with evidence of Brigham Young's racism or the contemporary church's financial improprieties when the LDS church doubles for them as a source of welfare and rental assistance in a red state, job and career networking, couple matchmaking, and as a community center.

After their failures in enacting the approved script ("All-American Prophet"), Elder Price dejectedly leaves the mission headquarters, requesting a transfer to Orlando, while his companion Elder Cunningham stays behind to teach the newly interested Nabalungi ("Sal Tlay Ka Siti"), who has promised to gather her village and hear out the Mormons just as Price makes his exit. Cunningham, doubtful of his qualifications to teach anyone about the Gospel, decides to go out and do the lessons by himself ("Man Up").  After an initially muted reception, Elder Cunningham deviates from the script, claiming that God and Joseph Smith had pointed messages about AIDS treatment and female mutilation ("Making Things Up Again").

Here, of course, we see the stultifying and oppressive dogma of the Mormon church's bureaucracy shatter in the face of true religion, the truly religious impulse. By reinventing Mormon theology, Elder Cunningham exhibits what Weber would call charismatic authority. Charisma is an essentially revolutionary and subversive form of authority, as a charismatic leader like Cunningham can overturn both traditional leaders and modern legal-rational bureaucracies with his fresh perspective. Every new institution or movement is initially motivated by charismatic leaders who rewrite the rules, and after their demise, their charisma is diluted and routinized in the form of simpleminded and complacent bureaucracies throughout which their power dissipates. Look no further than the ossification of the CPSU after Lenin and Stalin or the sad state of the American left-wing, where no one has any charisma, and instead a bunch of listless bureaucrats drone on in the same routine, patterned scripts which they inherited from the last period of charismatic inspiration on the left (the 60's and 70's). Cunningham breathes new life into Mormonism with his creative appropriation of LDS vocabulary and teachings, sweeping away past rationalizations and striking into the noumenal world with true religious impulse, and the villagers start listening.

Indeed, any remotely interesting reading of Joseph Smith himself locates this prophet not in the world of hucksters or frauds, but as such a charismatic figure in the line of Jesus, Moses, and Muhammad. Smith overturned traditions and tore up well-worn cultural scripts surrounding theology, morality, family structure, and private property in the minds of his followers; by making things up about golden plates and angels, Smith offered an answer to the meaning of life just as accurate as any of the above Abrahamic prophets. Thomas Child's iconic sculpture of Joseph Smith's head on the body of a sphinx in Gilgal Sculpture Gardens captures this perfectly. The sphinx, the guardian of mystery and riddles, represents the noumenal world which we cannot hope to strike into, as Kant reminds us. Joseph Smith's head upon the sphinx represents the limits of rationality in answering any of those mysteries. While the key to the meaning of existence does not literally lie in the LDS priesthood, it should be no surprise that the fundamental poverty of rational thought perennially invites figures like Jesus, Muhammad, Nagarjuna, Zoroaster, and Joseph Smith to restate the ultimate truth of reality.

 

Wow this is deep

After being tortured by his guilty Mormon conscience for abandoning his mission ("Spooky Mormon Hell Dream"), Elder Price decides to redeem himself by confronting General Naked, the warlord terrorizing the village where their mission is headquartered ("I Believe"). Price enters the camp all alone in order to win the general to the Church; here we see the irreducibly irrational dimension of religion, and the very dimension which makes it such a powerful political force. When a duty or activity is elevated to a level of religious importance, it becomes an ethic which one carries out for its own sake, occupying a sacred place beyond the cost-benefit decisions of homo economicus. Weber argued that for Protestants, work itself became such an ethic, citing figures like Ben Franklin who wrote of thrift and industry as a moral duties. Juergensmeyer's classic Terror in the Mind of God finds this irreducible religious element the key difference between religious and irreligious militant groups; just as only something like religion can send a Mormon boy alone into a warlord's camp to preach the Gospel, people are much more likely to fight and die for something of cosmic significance.

Meanwhile, as Elder Price is brutally assaulted by the general after entering the camp, Cunningham and the other missionaries enjoy continued success. First Nabalungi ("Baptize Me") then the rest of the village are baptized into the LDS church under the influence of Elder Cunningham's novel reinventions of LDS theology ("I Am Africa"). Shocked by the sudden reversal of the Northern Ugandan Mission's fortunes, the Mission President arranges a visit to the village-- meanwhile, Elder Price returns and makes up with Elder Cunningham ("Me And You, But Mostly Me" [reprise]). The villagers put on an obscene pageant depicting early Mormon history in the Palmyra-Nauvoo period and the trek to Utah and the Wasatch Front ("Joseph Smith American Moses"). The narrative roughly follows the main points of the history with humorous detours around warlords and AIDS, representing the innovations introduced by Elder Cunningham during his ministry. Stone and Parker's take on the Mormon migration transforms the westward settlement from a literal historical event into a more archetypal exodus from oppressive conditions to the promised land of Salt Lake City. Of course, in contemporary LDS culture, this move is all but made, with Utah elevated to a quasibiblical place of sanctification and destiny, and its invasion celebrated annually on Pioneer Day (while the 4th of July is only halfheartedly used as a vehicle for another family gathering).

Disgusted by the performance, the LDS leaders storm off and shut down the mission, giving Nabalungi a crisis of faith ("Hasa Diga Eebowai" [reprise]), while she is then comforted by the other members of the village who assure her that "Salt Lake City is not a real place, it is a metaphor." This demonstrates the subtle perennialism I believe Stone and Parker intended to communicate with the musical from the start; the whole work reads like two atheists' love letter to the power of myth-making as a means to inspire and mobilize people. Reassured, the villagers confront General Naked as he comes to enforce his demand that all women be circumcised in the village. Price and Cunningham then return, and the general flees, believing them to have risen from the dead and being confronted by the village. The musical ends with a reprise of "Hello," as the followers of Elder Cunningham go out, two-by-two, to spread their new gospel. Religion is remarkably communicable; one of Durkheim's most sublime and underrated insights is the concept of the contagion of the sacred, where one sacred thing tends to infect profane things with its sanctification. For example, adding one drop of holy water to regular water renders all of it holy.

By disobeying the mission president and spreading the modified Mormon gospel, we see just how contagious the sacred is; and, like any other biological agent, it is also evolutionary, and its mutations speciate and populate where there is an opportunity to reproduce. Mormonism itself was a mutation of Methodist Christianity, rapdily spreading adapting to maximally exploit the conditions of the United States during the Second Great Awakening in the 1830's. And, of course, Methodism mutated from Anglicanism, which itself was a lab-leak of the Catholic apostolic succession, which in turn was an unintended speciation of Second Temple Judaism. Stone and Parker finish their opus by reminding us that books have their own fates; it really is irrelevant what the intention of spreading an ideology is, or how a book was meant to be read. What matters is how these cultural materials influence and combine with the social context they infect.

Well, that's all. Definitely give it a watch and/or a listen-- there's more I could cover, but I wanted to just briefly review the main themes here, with the hope that you find it somewhat interesting.

Marxist Structuralism, Structuralist Marxism

Re-reading the Elementary Forms of Religious Life alongside Capital for the theory portion of my comprehensive exams reminded of the many analogies, Rosetta Stones, and subtle comportments between so-called "functionalism" and "conflict theory" in sociology. 

Of course, Marx and Engels themselves recognized that capitalism, while doomed to destroy itself, is also constantly reproduced through ongoing primitive accumulation, proletarianization, and technological advancement. Moreover, the bourgeoisie seizes our very organic embodiment with coercion and ideological persuasion alike, stimulating reproduction and outsourcing the cost of sustaining labor-power to the home. This is why Gramsci called the Russian Revolution a "revolution against Capital", as Capital is the story of the bourgeoisie's planned economy, constantly reproduced although marked by periodic crises of overproduction. 

Marx is rife with functionalism at even a slightly critical appraisal; unemployment functions as a reserve army of labor, religion functions to pacify and refract hopes for a better world. While superficially the destruction of commodities and means of production in a crisis seems bad for the bourgeoisie, this too just pushes the system forward in the short term. 

However, even the "conflict" narrative in Marx can be interpreted functionally on a wide scope. The revolution is just another event in the ongoing life of the social-organism as it develops and metamorphoses. Capitalism is itself functional to communism as a caterpillar is to the moth, dispossessing and concentrating the proletariat, equipping it with all the technology it needs, and educating the movement through the process of "confrontation" until the people have accumulated the organizational, bureaucratic and military experience required to sweep capitalism aside.

Just kiss already.

Far from muting the revolutionary mindset, perceiving the structural-functions of both capitalism and our movements allows for savvy adoption of a range of interesting vocabulary and discoveries from both Durkheim and the rest of the functionalist school. For a protest is both a site of confrontation and of solidarity, and being aware of this dialectic permits one to consciously guide the kind of counter-society and counter-culture which forms through the ritual aspect of protests, meetings, and party conventions.

Issues of social solidarity and ritual are too often papered over in organizing by shabby, unscientific language concerning "community building," that it would be "fun" to grab food together after a protest, or the need to have periodic "fun events." The consequences of dysfunctional solidarity are often individualized/psychologized in terms of "burnout" or being a "good fit" for a group. Worst of all is the misuse of existing scientific language: the tasks of building movement solidarity and a communist counter-society are mislabeled as Lenin's dual power, which actually denotes a military-political state of affairs where the deteriorating capitalist state is beset on all fronts by the militarized people. 

It is Durkheim who can remind us that any organization, movement, or society must reproduce itself through mass rituals of collective effervescence, where our sense of collective belonging is created, renewed, and returned to the individual consciousness. The next time you attend a protest, think not only of its external, confrontational dimension, but its internal function as a ritual where social bonds are created and renewed in the movement. A party convention or local organizational meeting is indeed a talking-shop for conflict, but is also a ritual gathering which should reproduce the group's solidarity. Wheresoever people gather, a culture is produced, and a basic awareness of this Durkheimian insight can guide the formation of culturally rich, socially relevant, coherent movements.

Consider Durkheim's anomie, or the "normlessness" which occurs when someone is loosely connected to the rest of a group or wider society, not sharing its values, adrift and purposeless. Anomie is a perfectly recognizable condition of imperialism, and it drives people either to despair and suicide or to find new centers of collective consciousness to give their lives meaning. Capitalists know this well, encouraging the feel-good depoliticizing mass effervescence of Evangelical idiocy and the ritual gatherings and mass rallies of the right wing. It is communism which should serve as this new moral center, and it should renew its own symbolic universe in its confrontations with the state and consciously through festivals, sports teams, music, and art. This is something that communism knew well in the 30's, where union halls became both forts of revolutionary confrontations and sites of cultural production, sustaining collective belonging and inhibiting anomic drift into the disorganized capitalist alternative. Lessons abound of the need to create a communist counter-institutionalism concentric with expanding conflict--in fact, we will create an organizational-movement culture whether we like it or not, and suffer or benefit according to how attractive it seems relative to the alternatives.

Abdicating Science

In light of the thwarted efforts of socialism in Eastern Europe and a fragmented American Marxist milieu that has missed so many opportunities over the years, the instinct to abandon Marxism for another leftist method and ideology is understandable. There is an attraction in the new and fresh-seemingness of post colonialism, postmodernism, and all of the other "post-" theories because they promise a paradigm shift from a Marxism which is represented as stultifying and dogmatic while preserving a critical, activist edge. In No Humans Involved, poststructuralist Sylvia Wynter writes that Marxism-Leninism cannot "marry its thought to the well-being of the human, rather than only to that of 'Man,'" which is to say a historically contingent ideological concept of the human and human destiny overdetermined by Western and Christian values. Many ex-Marxists argue along these lines, suggesting that the scientific and materialist thinking that Marxists strive for is flawed by Eurocentrism. It cannot account for racism, patriarchy, and the exploitation of nature, these thinkers continue, and it is thus a soteriological quasi-religion with no objective basis in light of its historical failures. There is too much here to address in one blog (for example, such accounts ignore the continued victory of the people of Cuba, North Korea, China, and Vietnam), but I will first address the charge of eurocentrism, then address the charge of failure.

To be fair, there is a workerist strand of Marxism that cannot account for these phenomena, a Marxism relegated to the academy (typified by Fred Block, despite his helpfulness in some ways). Such Marxists confuse placing things on a material, sociohistorical basis with making everything about labor, which I would argue are not synonymous (briefly, for example, patriarchy is certainly a tool of the bourgeoisie in its class struggle against the proletariat, but the struggle for women and LGBTQ+ people's rights is not to be left to the labor movement). And, it is true that Marx and Engels were 19th century Germans who did not devote the majority of their careers to analyzing the processes of colonization. Putting aside that Marx did in fact address both colonization and the exploitation of nature in the chapter on So Called "Primitive Accumulation" in Capital, Vol. 1, it's important to remember that all sciences are incomplete and unfolding methods of knowledge production, and the specificities of Marx no more limit the science of Marxism than do the specificities of Newton limit physics. The same physical laws uncovered by Newton centuries ago still hold whether on Earth or on Mars, and the same physical-social laws of motion found by Marx still hold whether in Germany or Palestine. What Marx left was not only a book about political-economy but the scientific method of historical materialism, a science which can purify and ameliorate itself through its very application to non-European and non-19th century contexts. It's ironic to me that the vocabulary of Eurocentrism so crucial to the postmodernist critique of Marxism was coined by Samir Amin, a Marxist himself.

We are scientists!!!!

But more practically, when science is abdicated for ideology, concepts get much more opaque. Terms that show up in Wynter's work include “post-Industrial New Poor” (as opposed to proletariat); “middle class suburban” (vs petit bourgeois); “presently dominant ethnoclass” (vs white monopoly capitalist) and “colonial matrix of power” (instead of dictatorship of the imperialist bourgeoisie). The difference between Wynter's vocabulary and the Marxist vocabulary is that, for example "proletariat" has a concrete, testable definition rooted in material relations, while "post-Industrial New Poor" is a vacuous category which really could mean anything. Sure, there may be edge-cases where the proletarian or petit-bourgeois class position of a person or profession is up for debate, but at least a meaningful debate is possible. The postmodern shift to abstract, dematerialized power renders such discussions impossible, in turn damaging the movement which requires we learn who are friends and enemies are on concrete terms.

Science also allows us to rethink the meaning of failure itself. Yes, the Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc, and many Western Communist parties failed in the sense that communism has not yet been realized, but science reframes these efforts as experiments in the laboratory of class struggle, conducted by Marxist-Leninist scientists with the instruments of our science (the vanguard party, the mass group, and the red army). With consistent scientific vocabulary, trends and findings can be summated and truths of the science can be established for the next attempt. Non-Marxist theory cannot establish a body of knowledge for the revolution, so it is much less highly represented in actual revolutionary movements. Areej Sabbagh-Khoury points out that in Palestine the trendy academic paradigm of settler-colonialism, which emerged from postmodern indigenous studies in the 90's, is largely confined to Palestinian academics working in zionist universities and has not been seriously taken up by the Palestinian liberation movement, which remains part-Marxist-Leninist(-Maoist) and part Islamist.

As there are interesting things in non-Marxist writing, such as Emile Durkheim's work on solidarity, I am not suggesting that we become narrow-minded fanatics who do not engage with the "post-" theorists or that we cannot cannibalize them for helpful vocabulary and ideas where such help may be found. However, I'm saying that if we recommit to scientific socialism, Marxism-Leninism, and activism, we will be best equipped to discern helpful insights from nonscientific works. Marxism can and must be self-critical and its practice and application purifies and advances the method. After all, it is Marxism-Leninism itself through the 60's-70's Maoist and New Communist upsurge which has reintroduced the really revolutionary and vital essence of Marxism and put us back on the path to total victory with the explicit theorization of the mass line.

Society Must Be Defended

Even as the United States is being torn apart by the contradictions of capitalism, the cultural and institutional apparatuses which pump out the false consciousness of a unified America are working overtime. Everywhere centrists continue to calls for Americans to "disagree better" and seek common ground despite the irreconcilably opposed material interests of the broad masses of people and the bourgeoisie. I can only really speak in terms of the academy, the milieu I inhabit, but I feel like there are even more attempts by annoying and asinine ideologists to push a false institutional neutrality on things like the genocide in Gaza (false because it's a clearly bourgeois position with no benefit to average people). However, despite the quantitative increase in calls for neutrality, many people don't seem to be buying the idea of a common American identity any longer. While the mass organizing being done by leftists to raise people's consciousness and dispel false beliefs deserves credit for the disintegration of bourgeois American society, I think that there is a profound disinterest and atomization occurring which has also sped up the process.

Of course, some disintegration is inevitable. Society needs a reserve army of disintegrated people in order to reinforce needy parts of the social organism. If everyone simply remained within their social networks and localities from cradle to grave, there would be little in the way of dynamism and innovation within society's organizations, institutions, and religions. Converts bring with them two new hands to materially reinforce a social network alongside crucial outside perspective. The classics knew of the phenomenon of disintegration; Marx's account of alienation and Durkheim's anomie in their own way each explore the inevitable demoralization of people in a highly specialized modern economy. However, when too many are stripped of a sense of belonging, when people do not have a referent for their morality, then social solidarity totters and falls. We are at that stage in the United States. The threads of mechanical solidarity which have stitched the American social organism together in the face of inequality and other material contradictions are coming undone, and more and more people drift listless and demoralized from the approved identities and worldviews.

Very dumb to those experiencing disaffection

The anomie in America is ultimately relative to the morality of the ruling class, however. As society is polarizing and splitting, new moral pluralities, such as communism, are staking their claim as legitimate rubrics of social organization. The defenders of American civil society are attempting to delegitimize the upsurge of new moralities, because they portend the upsurge of a new social organism. Lenin wrote during the time of the dual power in Russia that the bourgeoise seeks an undivided dictatorship, and the new seizure of power by the soviets challenged this dictatorship as new proletarian institutions were developed (ie, police and military apparatuses). This is the unspoken next stage of social disintegration; a new moral calculus is created with its own defenders as the balance of material power shifts. In turn, the bourgeoise ideological majority became a pole of Durkheimian deviance, the defenders of the old society became moral entrepreneurs (counter-revolutionaries) trying to bring things back. We are nowhere near the dual power at all, but a manifestation of the same general trend can be observed by activists who know and work with regular people.

So, in the end, those who become disaffected from society through the alienation of capitalism and those who become disaffected from society through direct organizing ultimately will be drawn into a new parasociety, which will in turn become a dominant society under the right conditions. It's moral entrepreneurs, the organizers, who will decide the terms and contours of that society under the weight of history, and it will be their turn to defend it from deviance and collapse. There's probably more intellectual work needed to fully elide polarization and disaffection on a material basis, but that's for another blog.

Effervescence at the Mass Rally

The ongoing mass protests in support of the Palestinian resistance have reinvigorated and consolidated huge numbers of people to a common cause: the end of the Israeli occupation and the victory of the Palestinian people. In some ways, it's hard to imagine that just around month ago, this movement was considered fringe, marginalized even on the left, and far more people accepted Zionist misrepresentations of the movement as "anti-Semitic". The occupation was depoliticized as a "conflict." In not so distant memory, even wearing a keffiyeh to an action was seen as extremist!

To be clear, the same imperialist reactionaries are trying the same tricks. Protestors are being arrested, people are being defamed by everything from the Canary Project to ludicrous doxing vans displaying activists' faces. Yet, people's principles stand unfazed, or even strengthened. How is this so?

Durkheim once analyzed a ceremony honoring an important snake deity of the Warramunga people, an aboriginal Australian society. For four days, all members of the Warramunga gathered to sing, dance around fires, and engage in normally prohibited sexual practices. Durkheim couldn't entertain the idea that this ceremony was useless to the Warramunga or motivated by simple superstition; anything this important had to help maintain their social cohesion somehow. 

Effervescent marchers

He argued that the ceremony wasn't about snakes or even the deity at all, but rather the collective Warramunga values that the snake totem represented. The clan-wide ceremony generated a feeling called collective effervescence, a sacred state where shared principles and values are affirmed and updated in the presence of the whole community.

The protests for Palestine unfolding worldwide also generate collective effervescence. Protestors come together, espousing all sorts of particular ideas about Israeli apartheid, but the act of protest ceremonially constitutes and sustains a collectively heightened understanding of the situation. In addition to the affirmation these events provide to longtime solidarity activists, slogans like "From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free" have taken their rightful place in the eyes of people as collectively held sacred ideals through the power of collective consciousness under the guidance of militant leadership.

As in religion, individual values are instantiated by collective values, and participants take a piece of collective consciousness back to their normal lives. However, effervescence tends to diminish with distance from the frenzy of ceremony, so periodic ceremonies are needed to reinvigorate the shared values. This is why the Marxist-Leninist approach is so effective for changing people's minds. Consciously organized political campaigns fought out over time give rise to a correspondingly protracted state of collective effervescence. In contrast, liberals, anarchists, and Trotskyists often throw a protest once or twice in reaction to the news, and abandon the movement shortly after, allowing the shared principles generated at the rally to rapidly whither away.

This is precisely what I think happened, unfortunately, to some of the momentum of the 2020 George Floyd uprising. Although much organization was won and consciousness was certainly heightened across the board, conditions in nationwide organization were such that the bourgeoisie was able to successfully mobilize distracting narratives (like fake news about "crime waves" in cities with "defunded" police departments), damaging the collective consciousness that had seen millions of people march on the racist police state only a year earlier. There were not yet the requisite organizational conditions to bring forth rallies, community meetings and other organizing moves that would constantly reaffirm the collective spirit of 2020.

This time, I think things will be different. People's organization is stronger than it has been in a long time. The movement has centered the Palestinian and Arab-American masses, who have taken the lead, and organizers are bravely fighting for Palestinian national liberation in the face of heated repression. All of this has generated a shared resolve that is proving impervious to the bourgeois ideological onslaught.

Durkheim Party!

Emile Durkheim is such an unfairly maligned thinker, and easily matches Hume and Kant when it comes to scoffing and caricature from the academic left when he isn't ignored outright. While his reputation as a conservative is probably deserved, a lot can be learned from Durkheim and much of his logic comports with Marxism.

Certainly, a criticism of Durkheim's mechanical materialism should come before any praise. He ingeniously describes the reproduction of society, but on superficial readings he seems to foreclose the possibility of revolutionary change. However, it's worth clarifying that Marx himself is quite attentive to social reproduction, and from a wide enough scope, the revolutionary process itself is just another function within the ongoing life of society. In fact, as Gramsci points out, from one perspective Capital Vol. 1 is just as much a book about the capitalist plan as it is a revolutionary book (although this revolutionary essence is certainly primary)!

While Marx more than covers the functional role of economic classes, Durkheim's solidarity is a helpful tool for understanding all sorts of social formations, from religions to political organization. Social solidarity arises either from shared consciousness/values (mechanical solidarity) or the division of labor (organic solidarity). Organic solidarity is named for the organ-like roles that specialized people and institutions play in society. These integrated bonds are much stronger than the mechanical associations that come from shared values. People's mutual interdependence within organic solidarity gives rise to a continuous, flexible reproduction, while groups founded on mechanical solidarity maintain association through punitive measures directed against those who dare offend the collectively held morality.

I think this is a good way of thinking about dogmatism and Marxist organization. Mass social democratic parties have a preponderance of mechanical solidarity, with the shared value being their particular conception of socialism. This primitive organizational type cannot innovate or react to changing conditions because the only basis of cooperation is the shared dogma, and innovation in line or tactic is tantamount to an affront to socialism itself. In Marxist terms, mechanical solidarity doesn't allow for the criticism and self-criticism needed to stay relevant to people, and so these kinds of organizations appeal primarily to moralistic strata like the petit-bourgeoisie.

On the other hand, Marxist-Leninist organizations exhibit organic solidarity. Each cadre has a specialized function within their unit which in turn functions within the district which ultimately has a function within the national organization. Organic specialization provides greater room for individual and collective initiative when moving among the masses than the stultifying dogmatism/moralism that defines mechanically solid groups. Of course, a collective socialist consciousness persists in Marxist-Leninist groups, but it is pared down to the true essence of communism.

Additionally, while effective Durkheimian division of labor opens the door to the development of expertise, revisionist organizers try to be environmental activists one day, student organizers the next, so on and so forth, never deepening their organization and thus never growing closer to any one social movement.

Durkheim is radical!

These loose mechanical collectives are often some of the many disembodied organs strewn about the activist left: left-wing gun clubs (security groups without organizations), leftist publishing houses (educational departments without parties), and unaffiliated local socialist groups (local groups without national counterparts). This to say nothing of the constant mitosis of anarchism, a context where any attempt to develop interdependent structure and functional organization evokes moralistic reaction, and, even if successful, often entails the organ breaking away from the body to form a new floundering activist group. 

While mergers between salvageable groups likely loom in our future, our main task as Marxist-Leninists is not to gather these abortive organs into a new revolutionary body. Relevant expressions of organization must be formed through the needs of the struggle, and the focus needs to stay on recruiting new cadre from the masses. Additionally, overspecialization can paradoxically lead to social disintegration, what Durkheim called anomie and Marx may have called alienation. Basically, in becoming too disconnected from the whole, there's a risk of misunderstanding our role in greater society and thus drifting away from it. Thus, in building and winning power, it will be helpful to stay attentive both to efficient and nimble division of labor and the need to cultivate shared values, what Mao calls "the principles of collective life'".