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.