The week before the election ended with the strongest possible signs of a Democratic wave, including record numbers at rallies for Kamala Harris and empty arenas for Donald Trump, record early voting tallies and reports from poll workers in Democratic precincts that that they counted more ballots than they have in living memory, and a final grudging admission from pollsters that they may well have been tilting their samples in favor of Republicans. Then came the Russian bomb threats –accompanied by software glitches in election management systems– across all of the most important swing states: Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, Georgia and North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada. Finally, Russian state media welcomes Trump back to the White House, and then mocks him showing films of his wife naked. He asks Putin not to escalate the war in Ukraine. Putin sends in another 100,000 troops.
Something is wrong.
The Right has spent the past four years doing everything it can to discredit claims of election fraud and manipulation (by making false and in fact incredible claims). And this is a tactic made for manipulating the liberal bourgeoisie and the professional middle class, which depends for its identity and self-esteem on recognition by authoritative cultural institutions. The law, furthermore, has, since the last big Republican steal at the national level in 2000, made it very difficult to challenge election results, and so facts, such as they are, will be hard to come by.
I am not advocating a resistance strategy centered on charges of election fraud. It is too early to settle on any strategy. But we cannot build our strategy around an assumption that the reported results are correct. That could lead to serious errors. And we need to do the best we can to determine if there was fraud, how it happened, and how we can prevent it in the future.
2. The Democratic Party has focused on answering Republican claims that people are currently worse off than they were four years ago. And on nearly every measure the Democrats are correct. But not all.
There is, first, of all, and there remains, the Pandemic. This was obviously not caused by the Democrats. And Biden and the Democratic Party certainly don’t bear sole responsibility for the way it was managed. They have nonetheless failed utterly to resist the bourgeoisie’s demand for a return to “normal.”
Four years ago, we were still in the early stages of the pandemic. Hospitals were still full of people suffocating to death. The economy was in shambles.
Shortly after the election, seemingly effective vaccines became widely available and the Biden administration adopted a “vaccines only strategy,” and chose to “take the win” rather than risking electoral blow-back from public displeasure over mask mandates, school closures, and other mitigation measures. As it became apparent that the vaccines, while helpful, were nowhere near sufficient given the virus’ evolutionary trajectory, the administration none the less doubled down on claims that the pandemic was over.
The electoral blowback came anyway in 2022. And since then, we have had wave upon wave of new infections, many as worse as all but the most serious of the early years. And we now know that repeated infections wear down our health globally, eroding immunity, causing enduring cardiovascular and neurological impairment. Our children are sick constantly and we are sick far more often than we can sustain. There have been days this autumn when up to 20% of the academic division I lead at a California community college has been out due to illness or illness on the part of family members. It’s not quite the Zombie Apocalypse people have been playing at for years in video games. But people aren’t what they used to be. And they know it. They just don’t understand why.
The early years of the pandemic came with mitigations that some people found economically difficult. But people were getting stimulus checks, which the Democratic Party had to all but force Trump to send, but which still bore his signature. And there were extended unemployment benefits and expanded Medicaid access, extended sick leave to cope with the pandemic and a moratorium on evictions. And many were able to work from home, massively reducing the percentage of their lives which were under the direct control of Capital and the faceless bureaucracies which serve it.
When these ended, yes, people’s lives became worse.
But there is more. By buying into the fiction that the pandemic is over and that things have returned to “normal” when they have not, we have lured into collaborating in the deaths of millions and the disablement of many, many more, all so we can continue to eat out, go on vacation, stay in business the way we are used to rather than making one of those “nimble” adaptations at which capitalism is supposedly so adept. We have been weakened physiologically and mentally and coarsened morally. That is why everything and everyone feels so unbearably harsh. And we know that fascism feeds on this harshness. It is, in fact, the distillation of this harshness.
And then there is the climate. Biden and the Democrats are certainly not responsible here. On the contrary, they have made the first really significant effort in the US to do something about carbon emissions, and have done it in a way which has been overwhelmingly good for the economy. But the climate is worse. The planet is hotter, colder, wetter, drier, and windier than it had been and it is changing much less gradually than we had hoped. And this affects people. It makes our lives worse. Some actually believe that the Democrats are intentionally causing all the disasters with secret weather machines worthy of Dooffenshmirtz, Incorporated. But most just feel it and factor it into their answer to that question …
3. The economy is doing as well as any economy could under these circumstances. And the Biden administration accomplished things no one thought was possible: a soft landing from an extended period of strong growth and a significant renaissance of manufacturing. But there are things which are well outside the control of the government in any capitalist economy –any economy actually. There is a fairly strong consensus among economists (at least those not seeking to score points with or for the Republicans) that the recent surge in inflation was not due to the modest stimulus and wage growth which accompanied the pandemic, but to price gouging by businesses who charged more because they could.
In formal terms it is difficult to distinguish “market pressures” and “price gouging” or “charging more because you can.” But then that is the limitation of economics as a science. Bourgeois economics provides a formal description of the behavior of various quantities. It doesn’t really distinguish between “lots of small decisions” and “a few big ones.” But I would like to suggest that Capital was terrified by the sudden power which the working class acquired as a result of the pandemic. They needed to beat it back. And so, they raised prices, knowing that the Federal Reserve would raise interest rates in turn, further increasing the financial pressure on workers and weakening the new wave of labor militance.
It is not yet clear that this worked. Labor is still stronger than it was before the pandemic. But higher prices may have helped the Right win the election. Once prices go up there is no bringing them down without causing a massive recession. And the political economy of the pandemic also affected different classes differently. The most marginal workers saw their wages increase the most and were the focus of new efforts at unionization. And established unions won some big victories. The professional middle classes gained just a little and so felt like they were suffering the most in cash terms, even if they did reap the benefit of remote work. If there was a rightward shift among this Democratic constituency, this might be part of the reason.
4. If this election does represent a re-alignment, it is first and foremost a re-alignment within the ruling class. For a long time, the US bourgeoisie has been divided between a liberal wing centered the high technology and information sectors, along with education and nonprofits, and a reactionary wing centered in extractive, agricultural, and low technology, low skill, low wage manufacturing. Finance leaned just a bit to the left (mostly investment bankers), as did business services (especially the big consulting firms).
Recently, however, the structure of the bourgeoisie has changed. The neoliberal era witnessed the emergence of Capital as an autonomous intelligence independent of the historic bourgeoisie. This was the whole aim of neoliberalism. But more recently we have also witnessed the emergence of capitalist magnates (think Musk) who, while they benefited from neoliberalism, saw it only as a means to an end, and have no intention of ceding their power to market forces. These elements have allied with state capitalist and organized criminal elements (think Putin) to challenge globalism and the neoliberal order as well as the emerging regime of cultural pluralism. These are people who believe their wealth and power means that they are smarter and better than everyone else. And they have been joined by a cadre of renegades from the professional middle class, “dark elves” or the Dark Enlightenment, mostly white men with a background in STEM fields and an interest in but no formal training in politics, philosophy, and theology. And they have been working hard, using dual tactics, to neutralize or even win over elements of the legacy media and the academy (what they call the Cathedral), again especially whites and especially men.
If the election was in some sense stolen, this is who was ultimately behind it, along with what must be a much larger network than we would have imagined of well placed, highly skilled FSB/SVR/GRU operatives –or cyberwarfare capacities well in advance of our own.
5. All of which brings us to the question of the social basis and political valence of Trump’s “victory” –because it is that, even if the election was stolen. Don’t be confused by the fact that large numbers of workers voted for Trump (or for that matter a larger than expected number of Black and Latino men). This election belonged to the capitalist magnates, post-socialist/state capitalist autocrats and their ex-KGB operatives and Dark Enlightenment intellectuals. The capitalist magnates do not constitute a class or class fraction in the strict sense, as they lack a distinct way of extracting surplus. They are just very, very, very, very large capitalists. And their interests are not identical to Putin and the ex-KGB, or the Russian mob. The Right is, rather, defined by and united around a profound rage at anything that gets in the way of them doing whatever it is they decide they want to do. They are enraged by unions and by government regulations and by taxes which limit their ability to leverage their massive wealth as effective power. But they are also enraged at having to meet the demands of the marketplace. They are enraged by the very thought of members of historically colonized peoples exercising even limited authority over them. And above all they are enraged by the fact that they cannot have their way with any woman they choose, at any time they wish to.
History has not been kind to individuals of this sort. Human beings survive by means of collaboration and tyrants always end up destroying each other. But they can do a great deal of damage in the meanwhile. And this generation of tyrants has at its disposal the technology to do permanent, irreparable damage to humanity and to our common home.
6. But the tyrants were not able to do this alone, you say. Of course not. Like anyone else they had to build power. And they did this by the only means possible: by tapping into the hopes and fears of broad layers of the population. But it is essential that we are clear on the specific character of the hopes and fears in question.
There has been a great deal of recrimination on the Democratic side centered around the “culture wars” and “wokeness.” “Black men are the most sexist of any demographic and hate immigrants.” “Latinos will never vote for a Black candidate.” “Latinos got pissed off at “woke” activists who decided to change the final letter of their demonym without asking them and decide to vote instead for someone who promises to deport them all.” “White women who would otherwise have voted to defend abortion rights got all freaked out that Kamala was going to round up their kids and forcibly “transition” them –or at least make it impossible for their daughters to excel athletically by flooding their teams with transwomen who can outcompete them. And so they ignored the real and obvious threat to their health and freedom and voted for someone who promises to make their wombs the property of their husbands and the state.”
This is, of course, all nonsense. Yes, there is racism and misogyny within historically oppressed communities. That is (part of) what we mean when say that these are structural questions. And sometimes people vote against their (racial and gender as well as class) interests based on that racism and misogyny. The alienation produced by the commodification of labor power creates authoritarian personalities, and these authoritarian personalities express themselves through racism and misogyny. This is settled science, not a trendy new theory.
But none of these groups created the MAGA movement. Trump didn’t create the MAGA movement. Indeed, in the last weeks of the campaign Trump seemed convinced he was going to lose and said he wasn’t sure why he was doing “all this.” No, what happened on the fifth of November was the result of successful longue durée organizing on the part of a lineage of capitalist magnates and their political and cultural staff that is more than century old. And while this lineage is not much discussed and is poorly understood it is not a secret conspiracy. We know who collaborated with Mussolini and Hitler, with Franco and Salazar and Hirohito. We know who was involved in the Businessmen’s Plot. We know the membership of the Mount Pelerin Society.
The current leadership of the Right is centered around Vladimir Putin and a cluster of allied authoritarian leaders and capitalist magnates. Putin groomed Trump, almost certainly for much more modest operations, for many years and when his 2016 campaign took off, he invested heavily in it. Musk and Thiel and others, along with their Dark Enlightenment intellectual cadre saw an opportunity, and they seized it.
But the broader conditions for what happened were created long ago. Beginning in the late 1960s and especially after journalists largely foiled Richard Nixon’s attempt to subvert the Constitution, the Right began an attack on the “liberal media” and effectively sold the idea that balanced or objective coverage meant ignoring the facts whenever they were inconvenient for the Right. Venture capitalists and others then took over most of the mass media and effectively destroyed journalism as a profession. Frightened by the student movements of the 1960s the Right ensured that universities were defunded and broad based liberal education destroyed, so that fewer and fewer people had the tools necessary to make sense of what was going on. Frightened by the Catholic Church’s support for national liberation movements the Right staged a coup and effectively destroyed the church as an independent institution. Then Reagan and Thatcher all but destroyed the labor movement and increased market pressures forced everyone to work more so that they had less and less time to organize or even to build the communities and institutions on which organizing depends.
7. So what now? Much of the answer to that question –including the part most people really want to hear—is beyond my sphere of expertise. I am deep, longue durée strategist, and my knowledge of operational art is limited at best. So I will leave to others conclusions about our short and medium term response.
In the long run, however, nothing has changed. To be sure, our lives and our communities and everything we value is in vastly more jeopardy than they were before the election. But everything leading up to the election was in motion already and while winning the election was important it was never going to be enough. Greg Olear is quite correct that were never going to beat the Right just by winning elections.
With this in mind, we need not to lose sight of our longue durée strategy. We need to conserve what we can of humanity and its civilizational heritage and work to rebuild the communities and institutions which nurture us and challenge us to become better than we are. That is where the millions of people we will need in this struggle will come from. It’s what we have done since the beginning and what we will continue to do, even if in forms we cannot imagine, from age to age and world to world. And it is the future.
And so we are here, always and forever, but now more than ever: working, loving, and praying, seeking wisdom, doing justice, and ripening being. The present is but a vanishing moment. The Power of Being as Such is eternal.
All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind (Marx and Engels 1848/1978.
Virtual Utopia/Apocalyptic Hellscape
Over the course of the past 250 years, industrial production has transformed our planet’s ecosystem in ways and to degrees that until recently we could not have imagined possible. Ancient communities which guarded the knowledge of how best to tend a planet already transformed by horticulture and agriculture from a wilderness into a garden have been dissolved by the corrosive power of primitive accumulation and proletarianization, while direct producers have been stripped of their understanding of how to unlock the hidden potential of matter for complex organization and transformed into instruments of the very tools they once used. The great liturgy of or species, making conscious matter’s desire for Being, has given way to the accumulation of dead labor.
It is not so clear, however, that , humanity has finally been forced to “face with sober senses” its “real conditions of life,” and the structured relationships which shape those conditions. The authority of priests and prophets, poets and alike has, to be sure, been radically undercut. The ideals of beatitude or enlightenment or of restored harmony with the way of the cosmos which guided human civilization for millennia havegiven way to a utopia which seeks to transcend the limits of finitude by technological means. This utopia, however, cannot really be called innerworldly. It promises, rather, a purely virtual existence, freed from material necessity, in which we can be whatever we imagine we want to be and live whatever life we imagine we want to live –quite possibly forever. This, at least, is the ideal of the transhumanist vanguard which has emerged to articulate the current trajectory of Capital.
It is not so much that everyone believes in this utopia. Far from it. But broad layers of the population see those who promote it thriving, and always wonder if their inability to break into this metaverse isn’t just a result of their personal failures: a lack of talent or hard work, or at most an insufficient education. Others, recognizing that this utopia was always impossible for them, double down on claims to privilege based on gender or ethnoreligious status, embracing authoritarian patriarchal and racist ideologies. And as we will see, many do both.
Marx could not have foreseen this development. He not only never doubted that Capital required both (human) workers to exploit and (human) consumers to buy what workers produced, allowing it to realize the surplus value it had extracted as profit. He never imagined that anyone, bourgeois or proletarian or even petty bourgeois could possibly think or wish otherwise. His technological utopia was one in which very material robots produced the means to the ends of human life while humanity pursued those ends freely. And this utopia presupposed the transcendence of capitalist relations of production, which could not facilitate and could not survive the end of material scarcity. There were, to be sure, still many problems with Marx’s utopia. It ignored the fact that industrial production, by breaking down existing forms of organization to release energy and do work by its very nature degrades the ecosystem and the social fabric. The ideal of a humanistic intellectual in the vanguard of a worker’s movement which was still composed of recently and often only partially proletarianized artisans and craftsman, it assumed that human beings were still rooted in their natural drive to creative labor and would naturally embrace the struggle for a life ordered towards seeking meaning, creating beauty, and building deep and loving relationships. And it never occurred to him to ask whether or not artificial intelligences complex enough to do for us everything we do not want to do for ourselves might not also have to be complex enough to be sapient, raising the question of whether or not fully developed communism wasn’t actually a form of robot slavery.
From Neoliberalism to the Dark Enlightenment and Alterimperialism
That problem, however, seems to belong to a different timeline. For the past 40 years our planet was been on a very specific trajectory, one defined by the defeat of socialism and the national liberation movements as a global project and by the neoliberal project of creating a unified global market not merely in goods and services but also in capital and labor power. This project was theorized by an information-theoretical neoliberalism (Hayek 1988) which saw the marketplace as an information processing system and which in turn facilitated the emergence of Capital as an autonomous intelligence, operating independent of the historic bourgeoisie.
There were, to be sure, various inflections of this project. While its authors, such as Hayek, legitimated it as a superior adaptation with more survival value than the alternatives, he and others tied it to the libertarian project of freedom from the an overbearing state, a freedom to do whatever one wished, so long as it did not harm others and so long as one was willing to accept the material consequences of one’s decisions. Social conservatives were drawn in by the support for traditional family structures, moral norms, and religious institutions, Hayek taught had demonstrated their survival value and would thus naturally triumph over rationalistic alternatives which were ultimately destructive. Moderate neoliberals from historically social liberal or social democratic parties, meanwhile, stressed the superiority of capitalism and free markets generally on creating the wealth necessary to support the social liberal project of making liberal freedoms meaningful for everyone, while stressing importance of continuing regulation and public investment in order to position the communities they led at the higher end of the emerging global division of labor.
By 2008 this project had largely run its course. Humanity lost decades in its struggle to replace fossil fuels and prevent climate change which now threatens to render much of the planet uninhabitable. In the absence of state intervention and strong trade unions to support wages effective demand floundered or was shored up by easy credit which in turn led to investment bubbles and economic crises, culminating in the Great Recession. After two decades in which almost no one would admit to being a socialist we witnessed the rise of a “pink tide” in Latin America, the Occupy Movement and then a new wave of “democratic socialism” in the US, the emergence of new “left populist” alliances in Europe (Podemos, Syriza, France Insumise) and what many interpreted (as some still do) a Left turn on the part of the Communist Party of China.
Unfortunately this new “millennial” Left missed the broader break with neoliberalism of which they were simply a part. Much of the bourgeoisie also abandoned neoliberalism, albeit in different and conflicting ways.
In order to see what they missed, we need to understand the social basis of the various political party formations in the United States and Europe since Great Depression. Historically, since at least the advent of the New Deal, the Democratic Party represented an alliance between the more advanced sectors of the bourgeoisie (first consumer durables producers and later the high technology and information sectors), the new petty bourgeoisie or professional middle class, and the working classes. The advent of neoliberalism was at once facilitated by and further promoted a decline in the weight of the organized working class in this alliance, which continued to uphold the expansion of liberal rights to historically excluded communities, women, and increasingly to other gender nonconformists, as well as arguing for the public investment necessary to position the United States at the high end of the global division of labor. At the same time, the party pulled back from the support for organized labor and for the social supports which at once provided a safety net for the the most marginalized and softened market pressures on the proletariat as a whole. Other Center Left parties, especially in Europe, evolved in similar ways.
But in response to the Great Recession, the Democratic Party in the United States returned to its social liberal roots, if incompletely and inconsistently, first under Obama and even more so under Biden, , a social liberal turn which has led to three Democratic victories in the last four US Presidential Elections. This was reflected in Obama’s single major policy victory, the Affordable Care Act, as well as in the limited stimulus he was able to get through congress and the much larger stimulus he sought. It is also reflected in the Biden’s Build Back Better framework, only about a third of which he was actually able to get through Congress. This was much less true in Europe, most other Center Left parties and alliances have stuck with the neoliberal Third Way. Witness, for example, Macron’s technocratic neoliberalism and the Labor Party’s current strategy of trying to show that it embraces austerity even more radically than the Tories. This is probably due in large part to differences in electoral structures. The two party system in the US channelled Left sentiment into the Democratic Party while in Europe proportional representation systems encouraged the development of new Left formations which meant that the Center Left remained neoliberal and, incidentally, drained support from the older socialist and communist parties.
The Republican Party, on the other hand, after the Second World War, represented the more backward sectors of Capital tied to extractive and agricultural activities, manufacturing which relied on older technologies, and lower wage commercial and service sectors for which investment in research, education, and infrastructure as well as wage growth to support effective demand were less important. These very narrow elements built a mass base by drawing on the patriarchal and racist backlash to movements for civil rights and for the liberation of women and gender nonconformists. The Conservative Party in the UK did much the same. Similar parties in Europe and elsewhere which did not so fully embrace reaction have found themselves reduced to minor interest groups, displaced by openly fascist parities such as the Rassemblement National, Fratelli d’Italia, and Vox.
We have, however, reached a turning point. First, with the rise of Trump in the US, the decision of the UK to leave the European Union, and the transformation of the old liberal conservative parties into or their displacement by openly fascist formations, the Right has abandoned anything which could be called neoliberalism in favor of two distinct but currently allied projects. The first of these is the so-called Dark Enlightenment. Libertarians, increasingly aware that their vision could never be implemented in a democracy, gave birth to the Dark Enlightenment which seeks to replace the current political order with a network of privately owned city states from which the people will have the right of “exit” but in which they will have no voice. This is essentially an attempt to give the capitalist magnates who would own and rule such city-states the freedom to which libertarians actually aspired but dared not demand: the freedom to do whatever they want, even if it manifestly harms others. How such as system would evolve in the unlikely event that it were to emerge is difficult to predict, but the most likely result would be global market in governance as well as in goods, services, labor, and capital and the probable subjection of even the largest magnates to Capital as an emerging intelligence.
The second project is an attempt to restore territorial empires which were dissolving into global capitalist networks independent of any territorial base –a project legitimated by an appeal to nationalistic, racist, and patriarchal ideology and the mobilization of the authoritarian personality structures engendered by the commodification of labor power. We call this Alterimperialism. Where the period between 1968 and 2016, the Republican Party, following Kevin Phillips’ Southern Strategy (Phillips 1968) leveraged racism and misogyny in order to win elections, since 2016 it has become committed to the destruction of the liberal order and of democracy in order to preserve and restore the status of the United States as a territorial empire in which those of European descent enjoy a permanently privileged position, even if this means ceding the rest of the world to other powers. This project is part of a broader trend which is led by Putin’s Russia, Modi’s India, and a range of Islamist projects with differing political theological agendas. China under Xi has embraced elements of this agenda, but retains a commitment to socialism and to the welfare of humanity as a whole. Just how strong the alliance is between the Dark Enlightenment and Alterimperialism, between capitalist magnates and aspiring emperors, remains to be seen.
Closely connected with these developments, many of the capitalist magnates who emerged out of the high technology sector over the past few decades, have broken with the Democratic Party and turned turned sharply to the Right, while the rest of the liberal bourgeoisie has become increasingly uncomfortable with a president who is arguably the most pro-labor in the history of the United States. This has forced Biden to walk a very fine line. On the one hand, he has continued to bring forward very progressive policy proposals including, in his most recent State of the Union message and budget proposals, a plan for significant increases to taxation on the wealthy. On the other hand, he yielded very quickly to pressure from Capital to end COIVD mitigations and social supports which had significantly reduced the pressure on workers to sell their labor power, forcing significant wage gains and catalyzing a surge of union organizing and trade union militance among works now “discovered” to be essential, while affording the professional middle class significantly greater autonomy.
The Specific Character of the Turn Where are these most recent turns taking us?
The answer is dark but we need to confront it. WE are witnessing a decisive a turn on the part of many if not all of the high technology magnates towards a policy of abandoning the planet and abandoning humanity. This is reflected in the end to COVID mitigations, which not only allows but actually intends a radical “thinning of the herd,” and the development and embrace of a “generative” AI which seeks to liberate Capital from the one category of humanity on whom which it still recognizes any dependence: the high end artistic and technological creatives who can still demand monopoly rents on skill and innovation, forcing the magnates such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel to share with them the surplus they extract from the rest of the economy. Capital, in other words, is proposing to get rid of both its workers and its consumers.
This is, ironically, an end to capitalism. Zizek (Zizek 2021) calls it “corporate neo-feudalism,” though I would stress that it is not corporations per se but rather individual magnates who are the key actors and that there is as yet no evidence of authentically feudal relationships among them. Indeed, it has become much more difficult to identify broad capitalist groupings or collaborations such as the robber baron dynasties of which emerged during the Second Industrial Revolution, or the “major monopoly capitalist groupings” which they fed into and which dominated the postwar period (Perlo 1957, Mandel 1968, Menshikov 1959). Capitalist magnates no longer seem to collaborate and show no interest in creating institutions beyond those which facilitate accumulation or over which they can exercise total control. This is a mark of the decline of bourgeois civilization as something capitalists do with their capital and the rise of something different.
It would be more accurate to say that we are witnessing the emergence of a mode of production and a new ruling class. This mode of production is characterized by the production of use values by artificial intelligence for a small group of capitalist magnates and their retainers. The new ruling class aspires first to formal domination over the capitalist economy, then to its replacement, and finally to the displacement of humanity altogether.
More specifically, in the first stage (which is where we now find ourselves), what have historically been regarded as the more advanced and progressive sectors of Capital establish formal domination over the rest of the economy, extracting surplus produced elsewhere. This has been happening for well over a century, as finance capital has extracted dividends and interest from the productive economy and managed it in such a way as maximize capital gains. But financial capital has no way of liberating itself entirely from capitalism. The value it extracts must first be created and that requires workers and consumers. Now we find high technology sector magnates extracting surplus in the form of monopoly rents on technology, platforms, software, and other goods from the rest of the economy (including the financial sector). This is preparatory to a second stage: the displacement of historic capitalism by a system centered on the automated production of use values for high technology magnates who either let the planet burn while they live in protected sanctuaries or “re-wild” it as the human population dies off. In either case, only a remnant at best of humanity survives. Then, finally, in the third stage, these magnates imagine, they will be able to “upload” themselves to an omniscient and omnipotent information processing system independent of human bodies, running (as Frank Tipler prophesied 40 years ago, cf Barrow and Tipler 1986, Tipler 1994) on the hardware of a re-engineered universe.
Is this Our Future?
This is almost certainly an impossible project. Matter, as we have argued elsewhere (Mansueto 2010b), is the potential for Being and thus for the development of increasingly complex organization. But this latent potential operates dialectically, for the simple reason that Being is neither substance nor subject, but rather relational, transformative generativity. The emergence of one or another sort of more complex organization is an expression and partial realization of matter’s drive to Be. But it also constrains future development, placing limits on the ability or any one form of organization to dominate in a way which excludes all others. This preserves the infinite diversity of the universe and also teaches us that what we seek is not any one form of contingent being, but rather Being as Such –and that Being as Such, while present in us, is always and only beyond our reach. This leaves us perpetually frustrated, and yearning, but also protects us and forces us to refine our understanding of the end we seek. The alternative would be an overbearing Will to Power which devours and, rather than creating, destroys.
Capital is, without question, the greatest expression of such a Will to Power in the history of our planet. And now, as Marx predicted (though perhaps in somewhat different ways), Capital has run up against the limits which Matter herself imposes and, when it has refused to stop and reflect (something of which it is mostly likely incapable) those limits have become sanctions. The industrial production which Capital evokes breaks down existing forms of organization –physical, biological, and social– in order to release energy to do work, degrading some part of the ecosystem and social fabric as it builds up others. As a result vast areas of urban civilization in the areas of the planet historically most conducive to production and trade, which Capital requires, are being rendered uninhabitable. The land, water, and air are being poisoned, and the resources on which we have depended for energy are being depleted. The human civilizational project has, from the beginning gradually drawn all parts of the planet into connection with each other, something which in itself can lead to more complex forms of human life, but which also facilitates the spread of pathogens released by human encroachment on wilderness areas. Capital has vastly accelerated this process, generating a new wave of pandemics the effect of which on humanity is at best unpredictable and, if as seems the case, we choose not to attempt to constrain or mitigate them, could actually provoke an extinction event.
But the resistance of Matter to the combustive agenda of Industry and Capital is not only ecological. Each of the characteristics of the current phase of capitalist development we identified above evokes similar limits imposed by Matter as corrective measures. When human labor is rendered redundant, there is no one to buy the products Capital produces and the result is economic crisis (a dimension of Matter’s disciplinary regime which, of course, Marx noticed long ago). When freedom stops meaning the right to decide for one’s self what it means to be human, and to live accordingly, so long as one’s choices do not constrain the similar freedom of others, and instead becomes a license for those with the means to do whatever they want, the result is dictatorship and chaos. And when human beings, because of the commodification of labor power, become so alienated from their own essential nature as participants in the creative life of Being and instead see themselves as mere consumers, or indeed become so unreflective that they no longer reflect on themselves and their interests at all, they begin making choices which eventually undermine their own survival, limiting the damage they can do.
The attempt on the part of capitalist magnates to evade the internal contradictions of capitalism by simply jettisoning humanity –first ours, then their own– is as untenable as capitalism itself. This is for the simple reason that even if these capitalist magnates managed to jettison humanity, they could not jettison matter. They would remain subject to physical laws, including the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which imposes constraints on the accumulation of power and requires the input of energy from outside a system in order to create and maintain complex organization. And this is precisely what the capitalist magnates in their solipsistic VR fantasies are trying to escape.
That said, they can do a lot of damage. The beginning of the pandemic in 2019 and early 2020 was the occasion of a pause. Our race to self-destruction was stopped, or at least slowed, and we were forced, like naughty children sent to the corner, to reflect on what we had been doing and what on who and what we wanted to be. Unfortunately, we chose to ignore that lesson and refused to learn from it, with the result that Matter is forced to apply a bit more pressure. The effects of climate change are now encroaching on the the lives of not just the most marginalized but on the relatively privileged populations of Europe and North America. The danger that automation will lead not to utopia but apocalypse is being driven home by the advent of “generative” AI which threatens to liquidate the creative and humanistic intelligentsia once and for all. Capitalist magnates are buying up and destroying the public platforms (such as Twitter) which created new virtual town squares to replace the old ones which Capital had obliterated. And the election of a fascist president in the US now looks less and less like an anomaly resulting from a highly successful Russian information operation and more and more like something which a very significant segment of the population actually wants.
The Current Conjuncture
It is with this in mind that we must map out the current alignment of political forces and suggest how we dispose of our own limited political resources in the coming year, leading up to the 2024 US General Election, which will have a profound impact, if not on the underlying structural dynamics driving the current crisis, then at least their ability of various forces to respond to those dynamics.
It is useful to begin by distinguishing between period and conjuncture. By period we mean the time during which a particular regime of of accumulation comes to power, flourishes, and then, having exhausted its potential, begins to succumb to its internal contradictions. Thus, we speak of the post-war period of stabilization and growth under a social liberal regime, beginning in roughly 1945 and extending until the late 1960s or early 1970s, or the neoliberal period which began in the later 1970s and continued until the Great Recession (though it might be subdivided between the time before and after the events of 9/11. There is as of noow no consensus term for the present period, but it is characterized by a break with the neoliberal consensus and a resurgence of both social liberal and more radical tendencies on the Left and, of course, a very powerful and dangerous fascist Right. It is mostly likely a transitional period like that between 1968 and 1978 which eventually led to the neoliberal hegemony which dominated the next 30 years.
By a conjuncture, on the other hand, we mean a briefer period in which struggle is focused around a defining contradiction or perhaps a cluster of such contradictions, to which all political players must respond, in such a way that their response to the contradiction or contradictions in question largely defines their identity. Because of the tremendous global importance of the US presidency these conjunctures often match, at least roughly, US presidencies, but they should not be identified with them. Thus we can identify conjunctures defined by the rise of Reagan and later of Trump and to a lesser extent of Obama, but also conjunctures defined by the collapse of the Soviet block, the events of 9/11 and the beginning of the current pandemic.
Up until the advent of the pandemic the political initiative belonged to the Left and Center Left, which was mounting an ultimately successful resistance to the Trump government and what was ultimately realized as an attempted fascist coup. This initiative persisted into the first year of the new administration, as Biden unveiled an extraordinarily broad range of new progressive initiatives ultimately worth $4.4 trillion, of which roughly $1.5 trillion were ultimately passed.
The situation then changed dramatically, however, in ways and for reasons which have largely been misunderstood. The Left continues to insist, incorrectly, that Biden is just another neoliberal corporate shill, which he is not. If he were, then the mainstream media and Centrist pundits would not be constantly attacking him and insisting that we need someone younger and more moderate. The liberal bourgeoisie, on the contrary, was and is deeply frightened by a break with neoliberalism far more complete than anything Obama even attempted.
Biden lost the political initiative, on the contrary, precisely because, while putting forward a program which frightens the liberal bourgeoisie, he also backed down when they demanded an end to COVID mitigations and social supports. COVID mitigations at once cost significant sectors of the bourgeoisie a lot of money, highlighted the fact that at least some workers really are essential, reduced (by means of cash subsidies) the pressure on the most vulnerable workers to sell their labor power in order to survive and, by way of remote work, restored part of the relative autonomy of the professional middle classes. It is not surprising that, once a vaccine became available to facilitate such a turn, the bourgeoisie would demand an end to these mitigations, whether through direct lobbying by critically affected sectors (commercial real estate, for example) or by stoking the fires of a false “pandemic learning loss” panic.
Having already strained his support among the liberal bourgeoisie, which provides most of the financial and institutional support for the Democratic Party, Biden undercut his support among the largely unorganized and voiceless, but politically still very important strata of “essential workers,” and the elderly and disabled, and other marginalized groups. The professional middle class, meanwhile, was divided. While many mourned pressure on remote work rights, many also bought hook, line, and sinker concerns about “pandemic learning loss” and frankly didn’t want their children home all the time and demanding their attention.
This is, in fact, the principal contradiction of the current conjuncture, the point around which all political struggles are actually organized, whether or not the parties to those struggles understand this. Stated more formally, the principal contradiction of the current conjuncture is between the exploiters and the more privileged layers of the exploited on the one hand who have embraced or at least accepted the “return” to “normal” and the “unexploitable” on the other hand.
This creates a very complex and unusual situation. Historically, the longer the period in question, the closer the principal contradiction of that period is to the fundamental contradictions within the human civilizational project: i.e. between the broader ecosystem of the planet and human technologies which sometimes undermine its integrity and between exploiters and exploited, i.e. men and women, conquerors and conquered, landlords and peasants, bourgeoisie and proletariat. During shorter periods, however, contradictions may arise which divide exploiters and put some of them on the side of the exploited. This is the basis of the popular front strategies which have been behind essentially every successful socialist “revolution,” in which communist parties came to power by demonstrating their superior ability to lead struggles against fascism and for national liberation and land reform –not by persuading a majority of the superiority of socialism or through a direct frontal assault on the part of the proletariat on the whole bourgesoisie. And it is true of the broader period in which the current conjuncture is located during which a contradiction has arisen between a fascist Right uniting Capital as an emerging intelligence, capitalist magnates, the more backward sectors of the bourgeoisie and upper petty bourgeoisie generally, and growing segments of the technogentry against a popular front against fascism uniting (shrinking) elements of the bourgeoisie, the humanistic intelligentsia, the proletariat, women, and historically excluded communities. But the current conjuncture divides the exploited, with the more privileged, including elements on both sides of the broader conflict between fascism and the popular front, joining the exploiters, leaving those who are least privileged and only marginally exploitable or, due to disability, not exploitable at all.
How Should We Respond?
The political imperatives deriving from the principal contradiction of the present period, between fascism and the popular front remain intact. Our choice this year is not between a greater and a lesser evil but between fascism and a government which, however flawed, may still be the most progressive in the history of the United States. We need to support this government while challenging it on the questions most critical to the survival of humanity and the recovery of the human civilizational project –which also happen to be questions which, however indirectly, put the decommodification of labor power on the table.
Outside of the disability rights movement and the small community of the “COVID conscious” there is essentially no organized expression of the vantage point of the unexploitable. This is because exploitability, generally under the guise of productivity or “hard work and talent,” are the conditions for recognition as a full participants in our social order. Anyone who is not exploitable (and who lacks the capital necessary to be free of the need to work in order to survive) is essentially an outcaste in US society –and, increasingly, on a global scale. This is why racist ideology promotes the idea that African Americans and other excluded communities such as “illegal” immigrants are unproductive “takers” and hereditary criminals. It is part of the effort to exclude the most exploited communities from the status which comes from “working hard and playing by the rules,” i.e. contributing to the accumulation of Capital which is the Great Liturgy of capitalist society. It is also why women who do not want to become outcastes are required to be exploitable across a broad spectrum of arenas: as sexual “partners,” emotional caretakers, mothers, and as contributors to both the accumulation of capital and the high consumption levels their partners demand of them.
It is important to note here that the democratic socialist Left organized around Our Revolution, Justice Democrats, and Democratic Socialists of America did not resist Biden’s concessions to the bourgeoisie around pandemic mitigation and social supports. On the contrary, this trend –like the Baby Boomer New Left of which it seems entirely ignorant– is fundamentally a movement of resistance to the proletarianization experienced by the humanistic intelligentsia. It has, to be sure, shown more interest in economic questions and has invested to some extent in labor organizing, leading some (Hartman 2017) to see it as a revival of the Old Left of the 1930s. But I would suggest that this economic focus is simply the result of the fact that the process of proletarianization of the humanistic intelligentsia has already proceeded much farther. For all their professed radicalism, millennial socialists have largely accepted the necessity of selling their labor power in order to survive and are simply demanding relief from the economic pressures specific to their situation: crippling student loan debt and the high cost of health insurance, especially for those who have not yet found a sustainable niche in the economy. These are certainly legitimate economic interests, but realizing them does not require a break with capitalism nor are they necessarily the most urgent from the vantage point of humanity’s survival and the human civilizational project.
While capitalism may be defined by the contradiction between specific types of exploiters and exploited –the bourgeoisie and the proletariat– it has always harbored other classes. Some of these have been acknowledged and their role in the class struggle analyzed: –a petty bourgeoisie which had to work for a living but which had enough capital not to have it sell its labor power or sufficient skills to retain significant autonomy and part of the surplus they produced when they did, peasants not yet fully separated from control of the means of production, and exploited by means of rents or unequal exchange, and slaves who were themselves commodities. Those who cannot be exploited, however, and cannot be rendered exploitable, have generally been treated as politically inert and lumped together with criminals as part of the unstable and potentially reactionary “lumpenproletariat.” The current conjuncture, defined by the mass production of disability by a crippling virus and by the end of pandemic mitigations brings to the fore what has long remained the occult truth about capitalist society. There is a class the vantage point of which is far more revolutionary than that of the proletariat. The teleological ordering of the proletariat towards the transcendence of commodification, has historically been diverted and derailed by social democratic or socialist reforms (and we include here those following on the seizure of state power by Communist Parties as well as those following on elector victories by Social Democrats) which simply improve the terms under which workers are forced to sell their labor power. Indeed, leaving aside campaigns which effectively replaced the wage relationship with forced labor, there have been no serious long term efforts to decommodify labor power under socialism, for the simple reason that socialism never actually had this as its objective. It was instead a strategy for industrialization and imperial restoration on the margins of European civilization and in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. But the demands and aspirations of the unexploitable cannot be derailed in this way. Being useless, they cannot be used. But being fully human, they nonetheless aspire live and grow and find joy. And this is possible only when the resources required for life, growth, and fulfillment are available to everyone regardless of their “contribution” to the accumulation of capital or socialist construction or any other civilizational ideal.
The position of the unexploitable is, fundamentally, a class position, but it is an unusual one. It is a position not within but rather outside the relations of production. As we have begun to argue elsewhere, however, the capitalist class structure is layered over with a global caste system (Mansueto, forthcoming), which groups and ranks lineages and ethnoreligious communities based on their supposed “contributions” to society. This system is fundamentally religious in character, a legacy of liberal Calvinism, which regarded “usefulness to society” as a mark of divine election. People may be silent about the divine character of the election in question, ostensibly in deference to secularist norms, but actually because it is Capital which is the “divine” elector. And the criterion may be applied globally and pluralistically (thus the phenomenon of “model” minorities). But the system is real. And the unexploitable as a class also define a position within that caste structure: that of the outcaste. This is a status they share with other groups (in the US, for example, African Americans and immigrants) whose contributions must be hidden lest they de-legitimize the Anglo American bourgeoisie entirely, as well as with groups which effectively refused to be exploitable (most indigenous peoples in North America).
So how should we deploy our limited forces as we approach the upcoming US General Election and the numerous other elections around the world? It is our assessment that our basic strategic orientation should remain unchanged –but with a sharpened focus derived from the lessons of the current conjuncture. We must continue the broad de facto popular front against fascism which is embodied in the Progressive Alliance while bringing to the fore, both in struggles within the popular front and more especially in our organizing work the vantage point of the unexploitable. This is the only vantage point which will begin to put the decommodification of labor power for everyone on the table –rather than simply resisting the erosion of a privileged exemption from commodification for a few or bargaining for better terms of exploitation. In struggles within the popular front this means arguing for the restoration of pandemic mitigations and social supports on a global scale. In our own organizing it means defining our ultimate goal in a way which not only taps into the creative aspirations of the vast majority who find their struggle to realize the ends of human life distorted and ultimately destroyed by the commodification of labor power, but which also directly attacks as eugenic and as a strategy for instrumentalization and dehumanization the hegemonic ideal of productivity, legacy of the Protestant Ethic, in its diverse expressions. And the concrete expression of this resurgent eugenics is the current COVID policy forced on governments around the world by the Capital.
This will not be easy. It involves asking people to do things they do not want to do. Some of these ought to be very small annoyances, like masking and quarantining. Others actually present opportunities, like investing in improved virus mitigating ventilation –a solid infrastructure investment that ought to appeal across the political spectrum. But all are terrifying because they cause us to confront the reality of the human condition: we all end up old, and thus disabled, and eventually dead. We all eventually become unexploitable and outcastes. Right now humanity is trying as hard as it can to hide from this truth. Our job is to help them understand that confronting it, while difficult, is the only way to wisdom. If we do not confront this truth then Matter Herself will force us to, through mass disability and economic collapse, and eventually by the threat of extinction.
Acknowledging our terror and learning from it, we bring its aid and comfort to the people, and take together we take the next steps.
References
Hayek, F.A. 1973. Law, Liberty, and Legislation, Volume One: Rules and Order. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1988. The Fatal Conceit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mandel, Ernest. 1968. Marxist Economic Theory. New York: Monthly Review Press. Marx, Karl. 1844/1978. Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. New York: Norton. ———. 1848/1978. The Communist Manifesto, in Marx-Engels Reader. New York: Norton.
Menshikov, S. 1959. Millionaires and Managers. Moscow: Progress Perlo, Victor. 1957. The Empire of High Finance. New York: International Phillips, Kevin. 1969/2014. The Emerging Republican Majority. Princeton: Princeton University Press Zizek, Slavoj. 2021. “Beyond a Neoconservative Communism,” in The Philosophical Salon, accessed at https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/beyond-a-neoconservative-communism/
There is no more pressing question for humanity in the present period than that of the failure of the revolutions which began in the Enlightenment to make good on their promise of liberation. Liberalism, which promised to all the freedom to decide rationally, for themselves, what it means to be human, and to act on that freedom so long as it does not conflict with the similar freedom for others, has instead given birth to Capital, which requires under pain of starvation that all do its will, and which is displacing even its former owners, the bourgeoise, as the great lords of the planet. Democracy, while it has sometimes been able to hold the power of Capital in check and even support a redistribution of resources which makes liberal freedoms more meaningful for the vast majority, seems less and less able to resist the capacity of Capital to render the State, which it is democracy’s means of restricting market forces, largely irrelevant. And Socialism, rather than making progress towards the decommodification of labor power and our final liberation from Capital. has instead served as a mechanism for primitive accumulation and imperial restoration in colonized countries and marginalized empires on the periphery of the world system.
The principal response (generally called poststructuralist or deconstructionist) to these failures over the course of the past 50 years has been to blame the Enlightenment itself for the “failure” of the liberal, democratic, and socialist revolutions —to claim that the ideal of rational autonomy was, from the beginning, a reflex of a will to domination which defined European civilization as colonial at the very root. As Quijano and Dussel put it, Descartes’ cogito is just a cover for ego conquiro which defines the distinctively European way of being (Quijano 2000a, 2000b, Dussel 2008). We should not be surprised that the civilization which emerged form the Enlightenment turned out to be oppressive. And most, looking behind the Enlightenment, see the older tradition of “ontotheology” and rational metaphysics, of the attempt to rise rationally to a first principle in terms of which the universe can be explained and human action ordered, which they trace back to Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle and see as the deep logic behind the the regime of techno political control which reached full fruition in capitalism and socialism. (Derrida 1967, 2001).
We have devoted a good bit of our scholarly career to defeating this narrative (Mansueto 2005, 2010). Instead, we have argued that rational dialectics forms an integral part of the broader Axial Age (Jaspers 1953) project of religious problematization, rationalization, and democratization which is by no means uniquely European, but which includes Judaism, Buddhism, the Jaina tradition, and the Upanishads, Zoroastrianism, and the historic Chinese schools (especially Confucianism and Taoism) as well as Hellenism. It is, in other words, part of humanity’s long march towards freedom, even if all of these ideologies were leveraged at one point or another to legitimate Empire. The humanistic secular projects (liberal, democratic, and socialist) which emerged from the Enlightenment, while deeply flawed, are extensions and radicalizations of this project, claiming for everyone the right to the full development of their capacities which the Axial Age still reserved, in practice if not in principle, to a minority of philosophers, sages, and saints. Everyone has, at least in potentia, the ability to decide for themselves what it means to be human, to participate in deliberation regarding the common good, and to engage in work which is a creative expression of both what Marx called their species being and their distinctive individual vocation.
We have also argued, following Marx, that the liberal and democratic variants of the humanistic project are too limited. As long as people are forced to sell their labor power in order to survive, they are forced to do not what an informed conscience commands but what their employers desire and are thus not only subject to total instrumentalization, but are compelled do what they may believe is wrong. From this point of view the decommodification of labor power is the necessary condition for realizing not just the liberal and democratic projects but also the various axial projects of spiritual self-cultivation as well. It is not possible to be morally excellent and spiritually advanced and survive in a capitalist society. The decommodification of labor power is morally obligatory and Marx’s contribution in demonstrating this places him among humanity’s great prophets, pointing the way to a deeper understanding and realization of the human vocation.
This said, it remains to explain why both the Axial Age projects and their Enlightenment extensions have failed, becoming the prisoners of Empire and/or Capital. At one level, of course, this is obvious: it is because of Empire and Capital, which have built up the power necessary to crush any attempt at liberation or, where this is not possible, to turn it into a means of legitimation. But our theory tells us that our struggle is that of humanity as a whole, and that we ought to be able to organize the people to resist and transform … And we have, over the past two centuries, built powerful movements of resistance and revolution, only to find that the results were … Empire and/or Capital. What are we doing wrong?
It is here that a critical look at the deep logic of our project is in order. And it is especially critical for those of us who have insisted on the decommodification of labor power as the condition for creating a society which makes possible authentic rational autonomy and authentic human excellence. Here two things stand out. First, if we go back to Marx’s critique of capitalism, we find at its core the concept of alienation: the claim that the commodification of labor power alienates us from our nature as human beings, so that we actually lose sight of what it is that capitalism takes from us. Alienation is, at the deepest, level, what is wrong with capitalism. But it also makes us unable to see that capitalism is wrong. Yet Marx and most of his interpreters, both social democratic and communist (outside of Fromm and the Frankfurt School, Fromm 1941) have ignored the –very dark—implications of this analysis. The alienation generated by the commodification of labor power means that the proletariat, far from spontaneously developing into a conscious revolutionary class dedicated to transcending capitalism, is in fact profoundly susceptible to authoritarian ideologies, patriarchal and racist, and has frequently been transformed into a mass base for fascism.
This creates a profound paradox. If we are to organize effectively we must first transcend the alienation the organizing is intended to overcome. It is this which has made the attempt to understand the “spiritual conditions for communism” so critical. Thus the growing influence, since the problems of socialism began apparent after the Second World War, of both Gramsci and Mao who, albeit in very different ways, attempt to address this problem, whether by leveraging popular religious traditions with an anticapitalist valence, or engaging in “study and struggle” designed to eradicate bourgeois ideology (and thus presumably alienation) head on. And yet Gramsci’s influence did nothing to prevent the decline of this communist parities it inspired in Europe nor did it keep those in Latin America who embraced his vision from themselves becoming authoritarian. And it certainly did not prevent the resurgence of fascism on either continent. And Mao, of course, led China into an authoritarian nightmare which nearly destroyed Chinese civilization.
And so we need to look deeper, at Marx himself. And when we do, we find that despite his insistence that the criticism of religion is the beginning of all criticism, Marx has his own spirituality. His aim is not to stamp out religion, but to realize it, or at least to realize its aim, which is that of all human beings: the desire to be God. In order to understand this, we need to remember that God, as Thomas demonstrated in De Ente et Essentia, is the identity between existence and essence, the One whose essence is to be. And we need to remember Marx’s formal definition of Communism.
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 (Marx 1844/2009).
What Marx is doing here, of course, is to gloss over the distinction between necessary and contingent Being and claiming that purely political changes can carry humanity across the threshold from contingency to necessity, resolving, as he put it, the contradiction between existence and essence and, in effect, building God.
This dynamic of godbuilding and messianism is integral to the logic of historic socialism. Socialist and Communist parties have simply chosen not to talk about it and have disciplined or expelled those who do, whether to advocate it (Rowley 1978) or even to constrain it in a way which actually serves the interests of the party (Lukacs 1923/1971). But it is precisely the logic of godbuilding which drives an effort to transcend finitude (in the form scarcity) by means scientific, technological, and economic progress, as the economic precondition for true communism, legitimating the transformation of socialism from a form of transition to communism which aims at the decommodification of labor power into a strategy for primitive accumulation and imperial restoration.
Of course no historic society has claimed to have actually realized the higher stage of communism. The key, on the contrary, is what precedes communism: socialism or the workers state. The means by which the proletariat will transcend capitalism and thus alienation is the same one by which the bourgeoisie overturned feudalism and carried out the liberal and democratic revolutions: a political revolution directed at state power. For social democrats this takes place by means of democratic elections; for communists it may happen by means of elections or it may require insurrection or popular war, but it is mediated through the communist party, which understands the “line of march, conditions, and ultimate general result (Marx and Engels 1848/2009) of the struggle. If communism is actual resolution of the contradiction between existence and essence, i.e. actual theosis, socialism is the formal resolution of this contradiction, it is formal theosis.
Now we already know that historic revolutions are complex phenomena which, whatever they claim, bring together many different social forces with many different aims. And of course among those aims, especially on the capitalist periphery, have been industrialization (which most Marxists believed was necessary anyway) and the revival or restoration of states (in some cases, such as that of Russia and China, large, territorial imperial states) which had never quite made it into the imperialist inner circle (Russia) or which had been humiliated by both their neighbor and by Europeans (China).
The construction of socialism as the formal resolution of the contradiction between existence and essence, and thus as formal theosis, provides a means of legitimating socialist states as they turn away from the aim of decommodification and towards primitive accumulation and imperial restoration. And the key link in this process is the claim that the principal means of carrying out a revolution is the seizure of state power, whether by peaceful or violent means.
This in turn brings us back to why the poststructuralist/deconstructionist analysis of the failure of the Enlightenment project is so profoundly wrong. The latest current in this broader trend has resdiscovered political theology, and in particular the political theology of German NAZI jurist Carl Schmitt —not to criticize it, mind you, but rather to effectively embrace it. Some of Schmitt’s claims are, to be sure, rather ordinary for anyone possessing a basic acquaintance with the sociology of religion: e.g. that secular political ideas derive ultimately from theological concepts developed by the Romans and by Christianity. But the key claim —that the “sovereign is he who decides the exception” i.e. that sovereignty is constituted by the capacity to create and suspend a legal order — Schmitt actually took from the revolutionary antifascist Walter Benjamin. This seems, in turn, to have rendered the claim politically acceptable for those with communist or broadly liberatory aims and has become the foundation of most of the new revolutionary theory produced in the past two decades, especially that of Agamben, Badiou, and Zizek.
In our own view this amounts to a de facto fascist hegemony over the Left, exercised through Schmitt’s decisionist political theology. The idea that the ethical and legal order is constituted by the sovereign, whether understood as God, the people, or a revolutionary party of the Left or Right, is tantamount to reducing ethics to raw force —the position advanced by Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic and is the natural consequence of a univocal metaphysics in which everything exists in the same way, with God (if acknowledged in a particular system) differing quantitatively rather than qualitatively from other beings: i.e.as infinitely powerful. This is the metaphysics which first appeared with the organic ideologies of Empire during the Axial Age: the Sophists and Skeptics, the Caravaka and the Legalists, and which was perfected by Paul of Tarsus and his interpreters.
To put the matter clearly the idea that there is a natural law, an implicit moral law which is prior to any and all legislation, is not the source of authoritarianism, but our only safeguard against it. Decisionist political theology, and the univocal metaphysics on which it is based, is the theology and the metaphysics of fascism and of all other authoritarianisms.
Thus the importance of political ontology and political theology. Specifically, we must guard at the metaphysical level against any turn towards a univocal metaphysics —a metaphysics in which everything, including God, exists in the same way we do, with the difference between God and creature understood as purely quantitative. A univocal metaphysics creates a zero-sum game between God and humanity, between humanity and all other species and indeed between all forms of organization. This makes our effort to realize our latent potential itself sinful and the only way to honor God radical submission. And the only credible alternative to this submission is to reject and deny God, and seek to transcend finitude by means of scientific and technological progress, the first form of godbuilding. The result at the level of political theology is precisely the fascist “sovereign who decides the exception,” who grounds the legal and moral order on the basis of an original act of violence which he claims to be divine.
We have long argued (Mansueto 2005, 2010) that the most adequate alternative to a univocal metaphysics is an analogical metaphysics, which understands phenomenal reality as participating in the power of Being as Such in such a way that that power is manifested and represented in the phenomenal world. This is the classical metaphysics of the Catholic tradition, and the foundation of its sacramental system. It has the advantage of taking a very positive view of phenomenal reality, seeing everything as a participation in the creative life of God, and can certain ground a natural law ethics which limits sovereignty and makes the ripening of being the principal moral imperative. We no longer believe that this metaphysics is adequate. First of all, by allowing mythological language and other symbolism which cannot help but depict God as a being, and which depicts God as acting in spacetime, and more specifically as a sovereign ruler whose commands constitute ethics, even an analogical metaphysics can leave intact the whole dynamic of divine command, human sin and disobedience, and the need for redemption which, except for the tiny minority with the philosophical sophistication to grasp the analogy of Being, unfolds much as it does in the context of a univocal metaphysics.
Second, the most developed analogical metaphysics, that of Thomas Aquinas, grounds the analogy of Being in the divine act of creation ex nihilo, in which God gives creatures a created share in His Being. This is, on the one hand, not a fully coherent concept, since it is not clear how their can be a created share of something uncreated. On the other hand, it covertly preserves or reinstates divine sovereignty and decisions at the level of the creative act, which is why Thomism, especially the purer Dominican forms of Thomism, have always, in the end, been pushed back and given ground to what amount to univocal language about God and Being, divine command language about morality, and to a political theology of sovereignty. This is reflected in the affirmation of Christological doctrines which affirm that it is possible to be both divine (Necessary) and human (contingent) and in the doctrine of “accidental” theosis in which human beings take on the form of divinity by means of the grace which allows them to love God with God’s own love. This makes beatitude seem possible, but in reality contingency is not overcome, and cannot be, either on earth or “in heaven,” for the simple reason that Necessary Being is by nature One and any multiplicity would destroy its Necessity by making it dependent on its divine other. The beatific vision, precisely to the extent that it is a vision of God, is also a profound knowledge of our own limitation and of the injustice we have committed in struggling to transcend these limitations. Indeed, in order to make his Paradiso credible as a state of beatitude, a poet as great as Dante had to strip those who entered it of their memory of their sins, and deprive them of any knowledge that higher degrees of beatitude might have been possible.
An analogical metaphysics, finally, while it does not ground a sovereign who creates a legal and moral order by “deciding the exception” through divine/revolutionary violence, does imply the possibility of the God Man who brings into being a divided sovereignty in which the representative of His divine nature –the spiritual lord– teaches, sanctifies and governs in accord with the natural and divine law while the representative of his human nature –the temporal lord– while obligated to govern in accord with natural law, cannot be compelled to do so. The result to defer justice indefinitely to a beyond in which it is still impossible because our contingency and finitude, which are the occasion of choices which lead to injustice, remains intact.
It is in this context that we must acknowledge the wisdom of Jiang Shigong (Jiang 2018, 2020) when he argues that that it is necessary to extricate the communist project from Christian political theology, which begins by demanding theosis, and ends by deferring even the much more modest goal of social justice to the beyond. That said, it is also vitally important that we not allow the communist ideal to become a means of legitimation for what amount to restored civilizational empires. This is, in effect, what Jiang is arguing when he reduces communism to a xinxue or “learning of the heart,” which draws on historic Chinese traditions but rejects any continuity at all with liberalism and democracy. While the Dharmic and Taoic traditions have much to teach us about living with and growing through finitude and contingency, the humanistic tradition is not wrong to value overcoming contingency to the extent and in the way we actually can, by achieving rational autonomy and collective self determination, by creating effective legal protections for liberal rights and mechanisms which hold leaders accountable for their actions.
With this in mind we propose an “equivocal metaphysics” which argues that God is in an entirely different sense than phenomenal reality. God is the Power of Being as Such, the Beauty of which draws into existence, acting as and only as final cause. The phenomenal world, on the other hand ex-ists it is in a limited and qualified sense outside of Being. The phenomenal world is subject to cause and effect, and in this sense quite literally matters. It can, with the proper structures, be perceived. And everything in the phenomenal world seeks Being in countless ways, in the beautiful but ultimately inadequate forms of thermodynamic stability, nutrition, growth and reproduction, sensation and locomotion, intellect and will, and ultimately wisdom and love. But phenomena are only partly real.
This metaphysics, in turn, at once allows us to ground a natural law ethics which requires that we act in such a way as to ripen being, to help all things to grow and develop in accord with their natures, while rendering the concept of sovereignty logically impossible. On the one hand, we all seek Being as best we can and we have an obligation to do so in the most effective way possible. On the other hand, while drawing things into Being through her incredible Beauty, God has no other effects in the phenomenal world. Authentic power, furthermore, consists not in command and control but rather in challenging and nurturing. And if even God is not sovereign, how can any human, or collectivity of human beings, or human organization be? This gives us everything we need to make the argument against Capital and also shows that the historic socialist and communist obsession with state power was not simply in error, but was based on an illusion. It also, as we will see, helps us understand organizing in a new way.
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Since I published the first the Preface Against Capital: The Current Crisis and the Crisis in Theory I have realized that there is one point that I did not make fully clear. This is, perhaps, because it is so obvious to me that —despite long experience— I did not remember that it would be necessary. Why is theory necessary in the first place? Surely oppressed and exploited people know that they are oppressed and exploited, and can organize to resist …
It is a fundamental claim of this work that, under capitalism at least, this is simply not true. First, capitalist exploitation, because it appears under the form of a voluntary exchange between two legally free individuals, is not transparent, but reveals itself only under the lens of the labor theory of value, which shows that new value is created by labor, which is capable of creating more value than it needs to reproduce itself. Capital —except under conditions of super exploitation, which are not sustainable in the long run, pays workers the value of the labor power, what they need to feed, clothe, and house themselves and their families and raise children who can do more or less what they can. Capital retains the surplus, realizes it as profit and accumulates it. Generally speaking, without benefit of theory workers become aware only of superexploitation, which is in excess of what they are accustomed to, and which makes life impossible.
Second, capitalism, unlike other forms of exploitation, by forcing people to sell their labor power in order to survive, alienates us from our humanity and thus from the rational capacity possessed by all human beings, regardless of their degree of intellectual formation, to understand the authentic aims of human life, and generates, as Erich Fromm (Fromm 1941, 1943) demonstrated, authoritarian and marketing personalities which are in turn fertile ground from patriarchal and racist deformations. And the communist project is not just about resisting exploitation but also about transcending alienation and recovering and realizing our latent potential as creative, loving, and wise human beings. Third, the need for theory is not just a function of capitalism. Indeed, one of the first ways in which formal rationality was deployed, as it emerged during the Axial Age —the time when petty commodity production first emerged— was to “deconstruct” arguments that slavery and the accumulation of wealth through trade were wrong, generally by arguing that there is nothing which is Good in itself and that morality is at best mere convention and perhaps simply a cover for the covert interests of those who make moral claims. This was the function of nihilistic ideologies such as Sophism, Legalism, and the Caravaka school. The rational dialectics developed by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, as well as somewhat different forms of formal rationality developed in India (Buddhism, Jaina, the Upanishads) and China (Confucianism and Taoism), regrounded our capacity for moral judgment and, more broadly, argued that there is more to being human than rapacious self-interest. In this way they served as a basis for resisting these new forms of oppression, even when they are also partly deformed by it (Mansueto 2012, 2016).
Finally, we will show that exploitation and oppression emerge in the first place because of our finitude and contingency, which make it difficult to perceive higher Goods, and lead us to become mired instead in the struggle for lesser goods which, by their nature, are finite and scarce. Thus the temptation to take things which others need. Theory helps us see behind appearances to deeper levels of reality and thus to discern higher goods. Thus Plato’s insistence that leaders make the “journey of the dialectic.” Thus the focus on both dialectics and meditation in the dharmic traditions, and the “investigation of things” as well as “heart” (xin) in the Chinese tradition. Theory is not the only tool we have in this regard, nor is it sufficient —a point on which we differ with dialectical materialism. Art and music and literature all make their contribution. And because of the force of habit, we all need communities which challenge us, support us, and hold us accountable as we grow and develop spiritually. But theory is necessary for the simple reason that it is the only means by which we can decide independently what we believe it means to be human. It is entirely possible that both the fine arts and communities of accountability can take us further along our chosen way than theory ever could. And there is nothing wrong with being lured onto a way by beauty and friendship. But we must be able to decide rationally which ways we believe are right, both in general and for us. And anyone who has ever been recruited by a cult knows that beauty and friendship, or at least the appearance of beauty and friendship, which only theory can see through, can easily lure us along the wrong path.
It could be argued, to be sure, that my claims for theory are an artifact of my roots in a movement which resists specifically capitalist exploitation and alienation: the communist movement. And this is certainly true. Racism is not nearly as occult as capitalism and the fact of racist oppression is largely transparent to its objects. And the same might well be said of patriarchy and other forms of gender oppression. But the nature and aetiology of these forms of oppression is occult, or at least partially so, especially though not only because they have become bound up with capitalism, and cannot be understood in their present form without also understanding Capital.
Finally, I want to address the claim —implicit in most postructuralist discourse and widespread in anarchist and “left communist” and “libertarian socialist” circles, as well as within many identity movements— that theory is itself oppressive and simply a way of constituting the authority of a particular group —the humanistic intelligentsia generally and philosophers in particular— or even to make this group into a new ruling class. This criticism is often escalated by adding the charge that theory is white, male, and Western. Philosophically this is, in fact, simply the old Sophist argument resurrected, and over the course of this work we will rely on the larger dialectical tradition to demonstrate that it is mistake. Sociologically it is, of course, possible for any idea to advance the interests of a particular social group and we will respond in detail at various points across this work to the claim that dialectics is simply a tool of Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power (Konrad and Szelenyi 1967). Briefly, it should suffice to say that while the humanistic intelligentsia has its particularistic interests and blind spots like any other social group, dialectics has not proven to to be an especially effective instrument for this group to conquer class power on its own. The communist project is and always has been about an alliance between the humanistic intelligentsia and the peasantry, the proletariat, and ultimately large parts of the petty bourgeoisie and even the bourgeoisie. And the idea that theory is somehow uniquely white, male, and Western simply cannot be sustained once we become aware of the rich theoretical traditions of the peoples of Asia and Africa and the Americas and the incisive power of feminist theory in particular.
I hope that these reflections have convinced the reader that it is not only worth the effort, but actually imperative, to press on through this work and more broadly to make the great journey of the dialectic. I look forward to continued dialog.
The third tendency in contemporary political theology which we need to address —Radical Orthodoxy— seems at first to be very different in both its sources and its aims. Where the Dark Enlightenment melds hierarchical traditionalism with right accelerationist technological disruption and transhumanism, and what we have called Dark Liberation dresses an indirect apologetic for Capital in costumes from the barricades, Radical Orthodoxy, whatever else one thinks about it, seems to be at once genuinely conservative, in the sense of re-affirming the historic teachings of the Church and its role —and that of transhistorical community and enduring institutions generally— in the human civilizational project, and authentically committed to transcending capitalism. And at the level of its surface claims and arguments, this is certainly true. Milbank not only attempts to reground theologically an analogical metaphysics of participation (Milbank 2006a); he advances an analysis of capitalist development and of the current situation as just precisely an “enclosure of the sacred” and regards not only the current return of the religious, but the whole history of socialism as a movement of resistance to this enclosure (Milbank 2006b). And where other poststructuralist theology retain from its secularist past the anti-Catholicism (for what is “globolatinity” (Derrida 2001) but a code word for the Catholic?) which was always its real meaning, Milbank calls for a renewed Catholicity as the real meaning of Europe and of the West. But in its philosophical and theological sources and its political positions, Radical Orthodoxy ultimately bears the marks of infection by the Heideggerian virus as the political theologies we discussed in Dark Liberation. Milbank rejects the traditional way in which Mediterranean and European civilization has grounded the sacred —through an autonomous metaphysics of Esse— and attributes the turn towards a univocal metaphysics, which he sees as the root of the enclosure of the sacred, to the influence of Islam. He furthermore wrongly includes under the category of univocal metaphysics all non-Christian ontologies, missing the very different way in which the question of Being is posed as well as answered across humanity’s diverse ways. While capturing profoundly the deep roots of capitalism in the Protestantism and especially the English Reformation, he misses the specificity of alternative Franciscan and technocratic secular variants of univocity. He recognizes as only a few others have (Mansueto 1985, 1988, 2002a, 2010, 2016) that much historic socialism was a movement of resistance to capitalist modernization, but fails to analyze fully the relationship between these movements of resistance and technocratic, alterimperial, and humanistic variants of socialism.
We will begin by situating Radical Orthodoxy in the context of recent Catholic theology. We will then proceed to analyze the underlying logic which links its sociological, philosophical, theological, and political arguments. We will then turn to a critique and explain why, Milbank’s many powerful insights notwithstanding, the tendency ultimately succumbs to the Heideggerian virus and fails in ways which demonstrate the necessity of breaking not only with Heidegger but ultimately with Christianity itself.
Theological Lineages
In order to understand Radical Orthodoxy, we need to situate it in the contemporary political theological spectrum, and more specifically in the context of the range of broadly “Catholic” theologies which fed into and emerged from the Second Vatican Council, and more broadly to understand the political-theological significance of the Council itself.
The Second Vatican Council must be seen as part of the long process of adaptation the part of Catholicism generally and the papacy in particular to the formation of the sovereign nation state and to the liberal, democratic, and socialist revolutions. And this is part of the larger history of the relationship between Church and Empire. Historically, the Catholic Church had carved out for itself both sociologically and theologically a position superior to but distinct from the political sphere represented by the Roman Empire and its successor states. This settlement, expressed in and embraced by the Church in the political theology of Thomas Aquinas respected the autonomy of the political sphere and entrusted secular lords with the task of governing in accord with natural law and with specifically with guiding humanity towards the realization of its natural end—the full development of its natural capacities, intellectual and moral. The Church was responsible for leading humanity to full theosis, which we desire but cannot achieve except by grace, but also for holding the secular lords accountable for governing in accord with natural law. The Church had the right to dissolve the bonds between a people and their government, though not to usurp secular rule itself.
This position was never popular with the emerging absolutist states in Europe that developed with the Norman Conquests, the Crusades, the Reconquista, and the Conquests of Africa, the Americas, and Asia and these monarchies tended to support Augustinian theologies, such as that of Anonymous of York (Goerner 1965) which modeled royal authority on an absolute divine sovereignty which Thomas rejected and which elevated Jesus’ royal above his priestly office. Some of these theologies fed into Protestantism and others into Gallicanism and other nationalistic tendencies and, in spite of the a resurgence, based in large part on support from monarchies which rejected the Reformation primarily for geopolitical reasons, Thomism tended to lose influence over the period leading up to the middle or end of the nineteenth century. It was only with the defeat of the ancien regimes, with which it had been allied against the liberal, democratic, and socialist revolutions that the Church turned decisively back to Thomas and resumed its role as guarantor of natural law, mounting a critique of capitalist exploitation and advocating for the right of workers to organize, a living wage, and public support for education, health care, and social insurance. This led to the emergence of Christian Democratic parties which exercised a kind of joint rule in Europe with Social Democrats throughout the postwar period, but it did little to reinvigorate the Church’s influence on the spiritual life of Europe. Among other things, the Second and Third Thomisms which dominated Catholic theology, by making such a sharp distinction between nature and grace, were seen as denying any ultimate spiritual significance to this world and to human history. Appeals to mitigate capitalist exploitation might win votes from peasants and workers who still experienced this world as a “vale of tears” and remained embedded in traditional communities and oriented toward otherworldly beatitude towards their final good. But it was not going to draw support from the bourgeoisie and middle strata who, if they voted for the Christian Democrats, did so as a bulwark against socialism and who found the meaning off their lives in inner worldly activity, be it the accumulation of capital or the exercise of a liberal profession.
The nouvelle theologie which fed into the Council was an attempt to address this problem by softening the distinction between nature and grace and making more explicit the sense in which human history —including the changes shaping the modern world— is itself a participation in the life of God. It is worth citing the Council’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church and the World, which affirms this new theology, at some length.
The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ. Indeed, nothing genuinely human fails to raise an echo in their hearts. For theirs is a community composed of men. United in Christ, they are led by the Holy Spirit in their journey to the Kingdom of their Father and they have welcomed the news of salvation which is meant for every man. That is why this community realizes that it is truly linked with mankind and its history by the deepest of bonds.
Hence this Second Vatican Council, having probed more profoundly into the mystery of the Church, now addresses itself without hesitation, not only to the sons of the Church and to all who invoke the name of Christ, but to the whole of humanity. For the council yearns to explain to everyone how it conceives of the presence and activity of the Church in the world of today.
Therefore, the council focuses its attention on the world of men, the whole human family along with the sum of those realities in the midst of which it lives; that world which is the theater of man’s history, and the heir of his energies, his tragedies and his triumphs; that world which the Christian sees as created and sustained by its Maker’s love, fallen indeed into the bondage of sin, yet emancipated now by Christ, Who was crucified and rose again to break the strangle hold of personified evil, so that the world might be fashioned anew according to God’s design and reach its fulfillment.
God did not create man for life in isolation, but for the formation of social unity. So also it has pleased God to make men whole and save them not merely as individuals, without any mutual bonds, but by making them into a single people…
This communitarian character is developed and consummated in the work of Jesus Christ … In His preaching He clearly taught the sons of God to treat one another as brothers …
He founded after his death and resurrection a new brotherly community composed of all those who receive Him in faith and in love.
This solidarity must be constantly increased until that day on which it will be brought to perfection. Then, saved by grace, men will offer flawless glory to God as a family beloved of God and of Christ their Brother (Vatican II: Gaudium et Spes 32).
The vision here is one of a humanity which, created in the image of a triune God, is essentially social in nature, developing its capacity for solidarity throughout the course of one single history, a solidarity which is consummated in the work of Christ, and brought to perfection in the Kingdom of God. In the place of the old dualistic theology with its sharp distinction between the finite human, secular, lay, realm on the one hand, and the divine, sacred, clerical, sacramental realm on the other, we see a unified process of divine-human activity pointing towards a τελoσ which transcends history only in the sense of being beyond our finite human comprehension. Everything we do, however, which authentically builds up solidarity, is a real contribution to the building of the Kingdom, and not merely a finite, non salvific participation in building the true city of human laws.
At the same time, the conciliar documents are theologically and philosophically ambiguous and softening the distinction between nature and grace can lead in two very different directions. On the one hand, by stressing the sense in which “natural” humanity is already participating in the life of God and the sense in which “grace” is structured into the very nature of reality, the new theology can be read as endowing secular activity with ultimate spiritual significance, quite apart from the authority of the Church or participation in the sacraments. On the other hand, if everything good is already “grace” and if by grace we insist on understanding the free gift of a personal God mediated through the sacraments by the hierarchical priesthood and subject to the authority of the Church, then everything good is radically dependent on divine action in a way which, frankly, would make most Calvinists blush.
These two possibilities soon developed into two competing theological trends, associated with two different pastoral strategies. The first argued for what amounted to a strengthening of the Church’s support for the broadly progressive civilizational aspirations of the popular classes, and situating these aspirations in the broader spiritual context of the Catholic narrative. This group included both those who argued for an alliance alliance with the poor and the working classes–the so-called preferential option for the poor– even if this meant collaboration or alliance with the communist left and those who focused on the aspirations of the aspirations off the professional middle class or new petty bourgeoisie of the “North Atlantic.”
Participation in popular struggles tended to produce a “leftist” or “liberationist” interpretation of the conciliar theology. Partly this resulted from the application of historical materialist sociology in the social-analytic stage of the “see/judge/act” process. Increasingly, leaders and participants in the base communities alike began to understand that realization of the historic aims of Social Catholicism were impossible within the context of a market driven global economy. The political aims of Catholic organizers began to drift leftward until they were indistinguishable from those of secular socialists and the distinction between these secular aims and the ultimate spiritual ends of humanity tended to disappear.
God makes history. Why? Because by becoming one with the lot that every person has in history (Gaudium et Spes 22) he converts history, seemingly profane history … into the road by which the individual has access to transcendence and therefore salvation (Gaudium et Spes 22) … The historical work of all people will lead, by the grace of God to eschatological metahistory (Segundo 1985:69).
As liberation theology gradually gained influence in the Catholic Church during the 1960s and 1970s, a right opposition emerged which argued that communism remained the Church’s principal adversary, and that while building or rebuilding a base among the poor of the Third World generally, and Latin America in particular, was vitally important, this work must be carried out within the context of a geopolitical alliance with the bourgeois states of the West, and an intense ideological struggle against dialectical materialism, feminism, and other forms of secularism. This is the course preferred by Woytila, Ratzinger, and by the international theological movement organized around the journal Communio.
The theological key to Communio-theology can be found in Love Alone, a small book published more than fifty years ago by one of the trend’s most creative theologians, Hans Urs von Balthasar (von Balthasar 1968). Von Balthasar distinguishes between three approaches to theological reflection: the cosmological, the anthropological and the “aesthetic.” The cosmological approach is the method of traditional Catholic theology, which used the concepts of Greek philosophy, Platonic or Aristotelian, as a criterion for the interpretation of the scriptures and the teachings of the church. Thus, in cosmological theology, the doctrine of God or the Trinity is explained in terms of philosophical categories of being, essence, person, etc. The anthropological approach is the method of most modern theology, which takes its categories from modern philosophy, or, by extension, from the social sciences, and interprets the tradition in terms of these categories. According to this perspective God is the perfectly good will of the liberals, the “ground of authentic being” of the existentialists, –or the liberator of the oppressed.
The difficulty of both of these approaches, von Balthasar argues, is that they reduce God, and thus divine love, to a postulate of human reason, something understandable, and in a sense necessary in human terms –something other than the fully free and unmerited love through which God reveals himself to us in the scriptures.
Christianity is destroyed if it lets itself be reduced to a transcendental presupposition of man’s self-understanding, whether in thought or in life, in knowledge or in action (1968:43) … The moment I think that I have understood the love of another person for me –for instance on the basis of laws of human nature, or because of something in me– then this love is radically misused and inadequate, and there is no possibility of a response. True love is always incomprehensible, and only so is it gratuitous (von Balthasar 1968: 44).
This is a critical point. What von Balthasar is suggesting is that any attempt to understand revelation in terms of rational, human criteria, be they Platonic, Aristotelian, Thomist, Kantian, Existentialist, or Marxist, has the result of reducing the love which is revelation to merely a necessary, and in some sense merited, reflection of our own human nature, or of the structure of being in general. To put this in another way, the communio created by divine love becomes simply a community of mutual interdependence, in which cooperation is rationally comprehensible on the basis of definite natural or social laws, and the ultimate purpose of which is the satisfaction of individual desires –rather than a communion based on self-sacrificial love which is spontaneous, gratuitous, and incomprehensible in terms of anything which we know about human nature. Such a rational harmony does not really overcome the egoism of the individual, and thus is not genuinely or fully redeeming in character. It is this danger which makes von Balthasar and Ratzinger so cautious about any rationalistic hermeneutic. Dialectical and historical materialism is simply the most radical variant of the rationalism they seek to combat. Their strictures would apply as fully to Rahner as they do to Segundo or the Boffs, and, perhaps, more fully than they do to Guttierez.
Communio-theologians, furthermore, understand love first and foremost as self-sacrifice, modeled on the substitutionary work of Jesus on the cross.
The sign of Christ can only be deciphered if His human love and surrender ‘even unto death’ is read as the manifestation of absolute Love .. His task, in Love is to allow the sins of the world to enter into him who is dispossessed out of love of God –to become the `lamb of God who bears the guilt of the world (1 John 1:29) and my sins … This is the dogma –the dogma of vicarious suffering, of bearing the guilt of others’ which in the last analysis determines whether a theology is anthropological or christocentric … For it is precisely with this act that really unaccountable, inconceivable love begins and ends; a love moreover which qua love is self evidently divine (von Balthasar 1968: 1982).
It should be apparent at this point that von Balthasar has utterly and completely abandoned the Catholic tradition in favor of something like a sacramentalized and clericalized Lutheranism. It should thus come as no surprise that von Balthasar and his comrades in the Communio movement should adopt a typically Lutheran stand towards the market system, subjecting economic individualism to constant moral denunciations while opting for a de-facto geopolitical alliance with the bourgeois states of Europe and North America. Indeed, through the efforts of Karol Woytila, Communio played a critical role in providing organizational and ideological support to the anticommunist opposition in Central and Eastern Europe–particularly in Poland. In this way they helped to demolish over seventy years of socialist construction, which had built up the planet’s premiere technological, artistic, scientific, and philosophical apparatus. This anticommunist campaign has been accompanied by a frontal assault on the women’s movement, which Communio seems to regard as fully as dangerous as communism.
Radical Orthodoxy should be seen as an attempt to avoid the pitfalls of both liberation theology and the Communio trend. On the one hand, Radical Orthodoxy is first and foremost a critique of secularism which it sees as intimately bound up with the capitalist project and argues that by embracing as much secular social theory as it did, liberation theology effectively abandons Christianity and becomes precisely the humanistic secularism which Ratzinger charges that it is. At the same time, Radical Orthodoxy wants to take seriously the sense in which everything participates in the life of God in proportion to its nature, which it regards as the foundation of Catholic sacramentality, and thus to affirm the struggle for social justice and indeed for socialism as a constitutive dimension, if not the fullness, of human salvation. It does this, we will see, by making a distinctive political-theological move, making the Church and not the State the architectonic human society.
Radical Orthodoxy
In his early work, Milbank largely accepts the Heideggerian critique of ontotheology and argues, in effect, that the whole dialectical tradition is ultimately grounded in an ontology of violence in which will is pitted against will. This is illustrated for him not only in modern social theory, but also in the older dialectical ethics of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Even Plato’s ideal state, he claims, is an “armed camp,” and Aristotle’s whole concept of virtue is really just transformation of a fundamentally military ethic of heroism. Indeed, he points out Aristotle counsels his students to be haughty to those beneath them in station and to make sure that others depend on them (Milbank 1990).
Against this ontology of violence, Milbank proposes an ontology of peace, the carrier of which is the Christian Church which, following Augustine, he calls the “Other City,” founded on different loves. Milbank argues that when we recognize Being as difference, we learn a nonpossessive love which at once cancels and preserves the distance between persons. This is the creative love of God, who brings into Being creatures different from Himself and authentically free, and who calls us to love each other in the same way. There is, Milbank argues, no way to ground this ontology dialectically; indeed to try to do so is to yield to the very ontology of violence which seeks truth through struggle and contradiction.
Gradually, Milbank has clarified his position, and granted greater space for metaphysics. Even in Theology and Social Theory we find the seeds of an alternative critique of ontotheology, one which locates its point of origin not in Plato and Aristotle, or even in the Latin middle ages generally, but rather in John Duns Scotus, whose doctrine of the univocity of Being laid the groundwork for both the Reformation and secular modernity. What this doctrine does (and here I am clarifying and extending Milbank a bit) is to make the difference between God and human beings quantitative rather than qualitative. On the one hand this approach grounds divine authority in power rather than love; on the other hand it opens up the possibility, which defines humanity—that human beings, by building power (through, for example, scientific and technological progress) might be able to transcend finitude and achieve divinity.
In a more recent paper (Milbank 2006a) Milbank further develops this thesis, dating the “ontotheological lapse” clearly to around 1300 and, following Benedict XVI, attributes this ontotheological lapse to the growing influence of Islam which, together with Judaism, because of the primacy which they both give to the law over the image as disclosing the divine, he deems resistant to an analogical metaphysics of participation. Only Thomas, along with Nicholas Cusanus and a few others, escaped this lapse and conserved an analogical metaphysics of participation.
The change in historical analysis has not, however, altered the basic character of Milbank’s position. He argues, in effect, for a reflection on being and on society in the light of faith –in effect an organic neo-Augustinianism. Methodologically, this means the primacy of theology; substantively it means an ontology of difference and an ethic of nonpossessive love which is grounded, ultimately, only in revelation and specifically in Christ. Indeed, Milbank rejects any effort on the part of theology to draw on secular social theory. More specifically, he argues that this theory is not simply “agnostic” with respect to theological questions but that it represents a secularization of historically Christian positions, a secularization which follows necessarily from the univocal metaphysics which defines all modern thought.
This sounds, in many respects, like Caputo’s weak theology (Caputo 2006.) Where it differs is in Milbank’s distinctive understanding of Christianity. The doctrine of the incarnation for Milbank uniquely grounds a metaphysics of participation in the divine. This, in turn gives his ethic of nonpossessive love a distinctly Catholic flavor. Where the weak theologians have found in Christianity an iconoclastic critique of all structures of domination, Milbank finds the image of a divine economy which includes and transforms social structures, creating a new ecclesial order based on the gift relationship. But I anticipate …
In order to understand the real significance of Milbank’s position, we need to examine his social and historical analysis. In an unpublished paper (Milbank 2006b) Milbank begins by arguing for a mode of analysis which takes from Marxism its broader concern with systemic and structural analysis, but which avoids economic determinism, situating the economic within a broader field which not only includes by which is ultimately defined by the religious. Following (but rather substantially revising) Bataille, he calls this perspective a “general economy”.
The advantage of Marxism, as opposed to ‘postmodern’ analyses, would seem to be the way it offers a grasp of the overall logic of societies and a single diagnosis of oppression which thereby allows a concerted resistance to this in the name of greater justice. But the disadvantage would appear to be the surrender to an economic determinism which only fits the facts through an obvious forcing … Yet suppose that there is a third option here … following Bataille (yet without his death cult), we try to fuse Marx with Mauss in order to diagnose for the various historical phases the operation of a ‘general economy’ – or in other words the entire logic of both production and exchange in every sphere – economic, political, religious, reproductive, erotic, imaginary, and so forth (although the distinction of spheres is itself a historical upshot and will only sometimes apply).
Milbank suggests that the precapitalist economy
was not an economy in the restricted sense, but a mode of general economy which held the material and the symbolic together. It is rather capitalism which invents a distinct ‘economic’ realm, indifferent to the political standards of the just wage and the just price, to the content of what is produced and to the mode of government which secures the freedom of the market.
Indeed, capitalism, for Milbank, is founded on the enclosure of the sacred.
as Karl Polanyi long ago acknowledged in The Great Transformation, what capitalism initially accumulates or ‘encloses’ is not simply that which serves people’s ‘real’ needs. Beyond the most basic level of subsistence the latter is indefinable. What capitalism really encloses, … is ‘the sacred’, taken in the very broadest sense. That is to say, it seizes both land and people who previously have been considered to occupy positions, arrangements and roles of social, political, cosmic and religious as well as merely ‘economic’ significance.
This enclosure does not, however, create purely secular social order. On the contrary, it is the product of what Milbank calls a “Christian heresy.” This heresy is nothing other than Protestantism itself, which is founded on the same univocal metaphysics which lies behind the modern project generally and which, by its very nature, divests the material of its participation in the divine, and thus of its symbolic significance. The intimate link between Capitalism and Protestantism is apparent in the English Reformation which, for Milbank (extending the insights of Weber and Moore), becomes the unique constitutive act of capitalism itself.
Nevertheless, the emergence of fully-fledged capitalism first in an England and then a Scotland permeated by Calvinist influence, now appears newly significant. In England the aristocracy and gentry and even their tenant farmers connected their new capitalist agrarian power with the memory of the secularization of sacred land in the seizure of the monasteries (so setting in train the ‘gothic haunting of the whigs’ in their houses built of ecclesiastical rubble) …
And the role of the English Reformation in capitalist development was not only economic.
… It is not simply the case that Protestantism ideologically supported the de-sacramentalisation of terrain, it is also true that the emergent capitalist economy was itself part and parcel of a new less sacramental mode of religious practice. Thus in the old ‘religious economy’, a material surplus was generally converted into sacred buildings and liturgy combined with a store of public charitable resources all managed by lay fraternities whose practice approximated to that of the celibate clergy. But in the new ‘religious economy’ the surplus was re-cycled for the expansion of material production and the growth of profit, and the poor were now subject to a disciplinary management in a re-definition of the very nature of ‘charity’. The entire realm of material production and exchange, instead of being seen as a participation in the divine-human commercium itself, was now rather seen as the realm of proof of divine arbitrary benefit for the body alone, a field of testing for the reality of inward faith and finally as one of oblique and unreliable proof of election.
The capitalist economy in the narrower sense, and the modern sovereign nation state function within the context of this heretical theology, as expressions of humanity’s unrestricted, vice-regental dominion over a desacralized earth. The current situation is, for Milbank, first and foremost simply a radical extension of this process of enclosure, to the point that there is, in fact, almost nothing left to enclose. For contemporary capitalism, in other words, nothing is sacred.
Because of this, any resistance to capitalism in the present period will inevitably be a religious resistance, and will, in fact, take a very specific form:
Refusal now is likewise is liable to take on a more absolute and global political form: as David Harvey notes, contemporary struggles are less over relative wage and working conditions as over attempts to resist further enclosures of whole ways of life. Hence they tend to occur in areas still ‘on the margins’ of the globalizing process (South America and India: resistance to crop-patenting, ending of Coca production, dam projects etc) but can nonetheless enlist to some degree the solidarity of concerned consumers in the richer parts of the world – thus globalization also permits the possibility of world-networks linking worker with consumer co-operatives …
… today the only persisting struggles against capital are in some measure struggles to protect sacrality and often include specifically religious dimensions.
Indeed, Milbank argues that
.. successful socialism has always been ‘conservative’ in that it has necessarily only been able to build upon inherited ‘sacred’ values, since these alone symbolically fuse matter and the ideal, thereby posing the only possible alternative to mere exchange value, whose other phase (as Baudrillard divulged) was pure use-value seen as production for its own sake. This means that the ‘route to socialism’ lies not only not necessarily through capitalism, but rather not at all through capitalism. Instead it lies through the bending of inherited sacral orders in more egalitarian directions, augmenting certain more democratic, participatory elements which are usually already there to some degree.
This said, Milbank does not believe that just any religion provides an adequate basis for resistance to global Capital. Indeed, he argues, nonmonotheistic cultures, such as “Japan, China, and most of India … lack the counter-globalizing force and reach such as is most certainly provided by Judaism, Islam, and Christianity (Milbank 2006b) In another essay Milbank lumps together all non-Christian metaphysical systems under the heading of “impersonal religions which celebrate fate or the void” and identifies them with the nihilism of modernity (Milbank 1999).
But most monotheisms also fail to live up to Milbank’s standards. Judaism, he argues, has largely allied itself with an evangelical Christianity for which the establishment of the state of Israel is a sign of the end times, while reducing its own religious content to a “wooden legalism” which identifies spirituality with ethics and ethics with the American constitutional order (Milbank 2006b). Protestantism, on the other hand, cannot catalyze resistance to capitalism because it is itself the very root of capitalism, and survives as a “religious supplement” only to explain the brutality of the market, to contain the damage which capitalism does to the social fabric, and because it can itself function as a type of capitalist enterprise (Milbank 2006b).
Milbank, interestingly enough, has little to say about Islam in his “Geopolitical Theology.” On the one hand, he acknowledges that some manifestations of contemporary Islam, such as the Iranian revolution, represent real resistance to the enclosure of the sacred and thus to global Capital, though he seems to attribute this largely to the influence of European Marxism and conservative romanticism, and only partly to the greater influence of mystical traditions and philosophy. On the other hand, he argues that the sharia lacks the specificity to ground any real resistance to capitalism, and seems to suggest that Sunni Islam in particular tends to a rational legal ethical universalism which is ultimately compatible with the capitalist world order. Indeed, as we noted above, Milbank attributes the modern turn towards a univocal metaphysics to the influence of Islam itself (Milbank 2006a).
It is, ultimately, only Catholic Christianity which offers for Milbank the resources necessary to mount an effective resistance to global Capital. This is because, in the Incarnation, Christianity posits the participation of the human in the divine and thus the reversal of the capitalist enclosure of the sacred.
Christianity is also Christendom precisely because it is the religion of the Incarnation. Were its universalizing tendency only a spiritualizing one, as is ultimately more the case for Judaism and Islam, then it would conceive of salvation more simply as our raising ourselves above the local and specific in response to the call of God … It would generously be able to imagine modes of this raising being able to be conveyed in other images and other words: it would be able to be ‘multi-cultural’. But because it is founded on the scandalous and dangerous idea that the infinite was in some sense born from a finite womb, in fulfillment of a particular local tradition, it is committed to the idea that the only way to the spiritually universal is through the gradual conjoining of all times and all spaces in an open-ended continuum of meaning. The project of individual salvation is then inseparable from the project of the pacification of the earth announced by the angels to the shepherds in Luke, which Paul tried to set in motion by establishing a kind of new polity, the ecclesia, that was also an international gift-exchange network (Milbank 2006b).
The Incarnation, in other words, implies a radical transformation of the economy and of the state.
Within the ‘general economy’ of antiquity, the ‘economic’ in the narrower, special sense was confined to the area of household management or its more large-scale equivalent, such as the provisioning of troops. The ‘economic’ existed ultimately to sustain the possibility of a more elevated ‘political life’ of negotiated friendship in debated agreement amongst adult males. But as Mondzain points out, Christian theology now spoke of a ‘divine economy’ that was at the very heart of ‘divine government’ and no subordinate aspect. This ‘economy’ was at once a proportionate distribution of being to the finite creation in various modes and degrees, and at the same time an ‘exceptional’ extra-legal kenotic and dispensatory adaptation of the ‘theological’ inner-divine Trinitarian life to the creation and especially the human creation, through processes of ‘provision’ that included the ‘economy of salvation’ (Milbank 2006b).
The Incarnation also has political implications:
if the Father only exercises his omnipotence through a sharing of himself in the image, that monarchic authority is here re-defined … The Trinity is a ‘monarchy’ Gregory averred, but only in the sense of a supreme unified arche whose principle of order already exists as a set of reciprocal relations or scheses. The divinely economic ‘rule by image’ is therefore not a deceiving bedazzlement by a reserved and manipulating paternal will, but rather the always-already begun emergence of paternity only in filial expression, which is then open to interpretative and loving reception by the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity (Milbank 2006b).
This points, ultimately towards
the primacy of an ecclesial rule which surpasses the mere imposition of law and the upholding of regulation, but rather reaches economically to people’s detailed needs and the endeavour to reconcile all creatures to all other ones, while permitting the people themselves to participate in this economizing transmission. This is not, as Mondzain implies, an ideological sanctification of a rule which the iconoclasts were trying to secularize, but just the opposite: an attempt, equivalent to that of Augustine in the west, relatively to secularize the imperial power and to insist on the primacy of trans-political social purposes (Milbank 2006b).
This “primacy of ecclesial rule” lies, ultimately, at the heart of Milbank’s project.
A truly orthodox Catholic position would demand radical resistance to the American empire, capitalism and conservative evangelicalism …
… the only hope for the future substantive peace of global inter-related harmonious consensus lies in re-inventing in some fashion a Catholic mode of terrestrial occupation, both sacramental and political … Secular authorities should remain independently occupied with the things of time, but the ultimate measure of justice here is the degree to which this occupation opens already the way to human deification under grace. To sustain this measure, the Church should now encourage the social growth of a far more egalitarian mode of economic gift-exchange, beyond anything so far known in Christendom, yet in consistency with its even as yet still unenclosed sacral commonalities (Milbank 2006b).
Practically, Radical Orthodoxy has been associated with Blue Labor and, to a lesser extent, with the Red Tories. Blue Labor attempts to reground the socialist project in an ethics of virtue and to reframe Labour policy in a way which emphasizes localism and subsidiarity, as well as social institutions which cultivate virtue. It has tended towards soft Euroskepticism and some hesitation with regard to open immigration. The Red Tories on the other hand tend to blend a more organic traditionalism at the theological level with a commitment to paternalistic policies which protect but do not empower the working classes.
Critique
There is much to commend in Milbank’s work. Milbank’s analysis of the univocal metaphysics which at once expresses and legitimates the secular project is profoundly insightful and has deepened and enriched my own work. And his use of Bataille’s theory of “general economy” allows him to analyze the Reformation and Primitive Accumulation as part of a single, global process, so that there is not merely an “affinity” between the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, as Weber argued, nor is Calvinism merely the “ideological superstructure” of a process of primitive accumulation which was, at the “real” level, entirely economic; the Reformation –along with some similar developments in Baroque and Enlightenment Catholicism– and Primitive Accumulation constitute, on the contrary, a single, inseparable whole. Milbank is correct that capitalism is, at root, an enclosure of the sacred and that resistance to Capital requires resistance to further enclosures and the rebuilding of community beyond the state. There are, however, some critical errors, both in his sociohistorical analysis and his underlying theoretical choices, which point him in some very dangerous directions. The heart of the problem concerns his claim that only Christianity can ground a resistance to Capital —and especially his profoundly negative attitude towards Judaism and Islam in particular. There is an extensive literature documenting the role of essentially all religious traditions in resistance to capitalist development, and especially in the resistance to the penetration of capitalist relations of production into the countryside (Alper 1987, Sarkisyanz 1965, Wolf 1969, Lancaster 1988).
But Milbank’s mistake here is not merely historical; it is philosophical and theological. Milbank seems to believe that Judaism and Islam and indeed all religious traditions apart from Catholic Christianity are incompatible with a metaphysics of participation (Milbank 2008a). This is a result of a his classification of ontologies as either univocal or analogical, and insistence that only an anaological ontology makes a metaphysics of participation possible. First, Milbank passes over too quickly the fact that the debate about univocity, analogy, and equivocity was originally about not metaphysics but rather about language, and more specifically about the way in which we predicate things about God. This means, in turn, that while we certainly can apply the taxonomy to any and all traditions, the meaning of each term is going to differ depending on whether or not the tradition in question uses the term “God” and what they mean by it. And if we apply the taxonomy to an atheistic or nontheistic tradition we need to be clear about what other terms to which we are applying it. Thus understanding God as the Infinite, as Duns Scotus does in his proof of the existence of God (Scotus 1301/1965), tends towards a univocal use of the term Being as the difference between God and creature is quantitative rather than qualitative. But this can lead to some very different conclusions at the level of ethics and spirituality. A univocal metaphysics tends to treat the universe as a zero sum game and thus the classic Aristotelian ethics of virtue or excellence, and the whole aspiration to theosis tends to be read as an affront to divine sovereignty and an attempt to take for oneself what ought to be shared with others. Thus the whole development of a complex analysis of the case diaboli in Scotus and the articulation of an ethics of non-possessive love and respect for difference among Franciscan and other Augustinian theologians —an ethics very much like that advocated by the early Milbank (Ingham 1993). And this is no doubt very much what Duns Scotus and his Franscican party intended. But there are other possibilities. In the Reformed tradition we get an spirituality of radical submission to the divine sovereign and the attempt to bring the entire world of finite beings under His dominion, which it has somehow, inexplicably escaped, simply by existing and having their own needs and purposes. The ” disinterested benevolence” advocated by the very highest Reformed Theologies, such as that of Samuel Hopkins, encodes the demand of Capital that we quite literally “give all” to meet its absolute, unlimited, and inscrutable demands. Even as many Reformed theologians, such as Hopkins and his teacher Jonathan Edwards, criticized aspects of Primitive Accumulation, such as the slave trade and the genocide of indigenous communities, their theology formed the sort of people that Capital requires. But this formation does not really require that God even exist, because Capital is, in essence, an emergent intelligence which is trying to become the Calvinist God by transcending finitude by means of scientific, technological, and economic progress.
If, on the other hand, following Thomas Aquinas, we understand God as Necessary Being, we will incline towards either an analogical or equivocal use of the term Being. This is because there is a qualitative gulf between the way in which God and creatures are said to exist. God has, indeed is— the power of Being as such. Creatures share in God’s Being.
This is the univocity and analogy which Milbank helps us understand.
Something like the a division between univocal, analogical, and equivocal use of language about God remains —at least partially— meaningful in a Jewish or Islamic context. But what we find is actually very considerable diversity and almost certainly some shift in meaning. Thus the Asharite and especially the Wahabi focus on absolute divine sovereignty and the option for an occasionalism in which God creates each moment separately can certainly be read as reflecting radically univocal metaphysics in which anything but radical submission is an unforgivable affront to God. But occasionalism itself implies a rejection of a univocal use of the concept of causality (Lee 2020) which might lead scholars in or of this tradition to regard the resulting metaphysics as something other than univocal. And the rich and complex emmanationist cosmologies of ibn Sina and the Persian illuminationists make sense only in the context of an analogical metaphysics of participation. And yet ibn Sina is generally read as an advocate of the univocity of Being, though with some “nuances.” (Lizzini 2020).
Similarly, Spinoza is ordinarily read as arguing for the univocity of Being, with the distinction between God and creature being simply that between part and whole. But alternative readings are possible if we look carefully at Spinoza’s arguments for the existence of God, which imply the distinction between contingent and necessary being which lies behind the Thomistic analogy of Being. This said, the distinctively Jewish position on the “voice” of Being would seem to be that of Moshe ben Maimon, who argues that our use of the term Being is equivocal, i.e. radically different when applied to God and creatures. But again this does not exclude participation. Thus when we act justly, we “know” God. Thus the concept of da’ath elohim articulated among other places in Hosea. But in the Aristotelian context in which Moshe ben Maimon worked implied that we become God, not in essence to be sure, but accidentally and thus share in God’s Being, a dynamics which also defines Thomistic mystical theology (Aquinas. Summa Theologiae II.45.a2). And the Kabbalistic concept of Tikkun Olam is based on the concept that since there can only be one God, and thus one necessary Being, creation will always be fractured. Human beings do what God cannot: mending the inevitably torn fabric of the universe. We thus participate in the work of God precisely because we exist in an any utterly different way from God.
Where a specifically analogical approach to Being becomes critical, in fact, is in grounding sacramentality. If Being is univocal then everything —and nothing— is sacred. Spirituality is about what we do and the extent of our contribution to realizing the will of God or to actually building or becoming God. If Being is equivocal, then sacramentality in the strict sense (though not necessarily ritual) is impossible. No created thing can mediate the divine. It is the hierarchy of degrees of Being which makes the sacraments possible, as material objects are engaged in ways which communicate one or another aspect of the divine. Thus Milbank’s concern for an analogical metaphysics is fundamentally a defense of the broadly Catholic sacramental system and thus of the specifically sanctifying dimension of hierarchical authority. While there is nothing intrinsically wrong with this, we need to be clear that about what interests are actually being defended. The logic of Milbank’s position defends not so much the displaced peasants and marginalized workers whose commons Capital has enclosed, but rather the clerics and monastics whose lands were also taken and whose authority was undercut by the Reformation and the secular project.
How does all of this shake out when we move outside what I have called the way of justice and liberation (Mansueto 2016) —the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions? The question of the “voice” of language about God and Being appears —at least to the extent that I can determine as a nonspecialist working through English language translations and scholarship— not to have been engaged directly in the Indian tradition. What we have instead is the question about the relationship between Brahman and Atman in the Vedanta tradition and question about svabhava, sunyata, and pratitya-samutpada, or intrinsic self-existence, emptiness, and interdependent origination in the Buddhist tradition. The term Brahman comes from roots which mean the power (-men) to make strong (brah-). The term Atman refers to the self. And here we have three main positions, along with a few attempts to nuance them. The Advaita Vedanta argue that Brahman and Atman are identical, and any distinction between them a product of illusion or Maya to be overcome by meditation. The Vishishtadvaita argue that Brahman is the only reality but is present in and through distinct modes: Parabrahman or Ishvara, the Lord (Vishnu), chit-brahman or sentient beings and achit-brahman or insentient beings. Individual souls or atman are real and permanent. The Dvaita Vedanta argue that Brahman, in the form of Vishnu, is an independent personal God who created separate sentient and insentient beings (Chatterje and Datta 1954). The profound similarities between the metaphysics of Brahman and that of Esse notwithstanding, it is very difficult to see how to apply the concepts of univocity, analogy, and equivocity here. Does Advaita Vedanta teach univocity because there is only one sort of being and that is Brahman? If so, then this univocity is connected with a very high doctrine of human participation in the life of God. One might expect to find something like an analogy of being among the Vishishtadvaita , but both they and the Dvaita practice a form of Bhakti or devotion to Vishnu which looks rather like Protestantism in the end (Chatterje and Datta 1954). Buddhism makes it even more difficult to apply the taxonomy of various “voices” of the word “being.” This is because Buddhism is nontheistic, so the question of how the term “being” can be predicated of God is moot. Indeed, nothing can be predicated of a God that does not exist. Instead, we have a debate around the extent to which and sense in which the term “being” can be predicated of anything at all. Thus, at the most general level, we have the debate between the Theravada, who argue that it is only atman or the self which lacks svabhava self-existence, so that the impermanence of the phenomenal world is the result of a constant flux of the underlying dharmas or foundational elements of the universe and the Mahayana, who are generally regarded as arguing that all dharmas are empty of inherent existence. —the defining ontological claim of the Mahayana. The Theravada, furthermore, or at least the broader stream of schools which led into what is how called the Theravada, are divided between the Sarvastivadins, who argue that dharmas are real and exist in the past, present, and future, but that phenomenal reality consists of impermanent aggregates and the Sautrantikas and most contemporary Theravadins, who argue that only present dharmas exist. The Mahayana, similarly, is divided between the Madhyamika, who argue that nothing has inherent existence, and the Yogacara, who believe that only mind is real. Some of the higher Mahayana schools such as the Huayen, give a more positive sense to the idea of emptiness, suggesting that the deepest level of reality is that of interdependent origination, the “jewel-net of Indra” which encompasses an infinity of Buddha-worlds, which is just covered over by our illusion of self-existence. Many of these schools also posit the idea of the tathagatagarbha or Buddha-nature, share by all beings, which is at once an underlying, universal capacity for enlightenment and the deepest level of reality. This, in turn, led to sharp debates within the Vajrayana tradition between the Rangtong, for whom sunyata or emptiness is itself the ultimate reality, and the Shengtong, who argue that the teachings regarding emptiness are simply a preparation which clears away conceptual constructs for meditation on a higher Paramarthasatya, or absolute reality (Williams 1989).
Whatever one thinks of the various Buddhist doctrines, the only possible conclusion of even a cursory study of Buddhist metaphysics is that there exists a tremendous diversity in the way the concept of “being” is used, and that there is a movement from a sort of atomistic doctrine stressing the impermanence of all aggregates to a belief in very different levels of reality —or rather degrees of understanding of the one reality. This is not a doctrine off equivocity in the sense the term is used by, say, Moshe Ben Maimon, but it is also clearly not a doctrine of univocity in the sense used by Duns Scotus …
Among the various Chinese traditions, it is possible to argue that the concepts of Tian and Tai Chi (heaven and the great ultimate) operate in something like the way the concept of Being does in traditions influenced by Hellenic philosophy, but this is itself an analogy. Taoism tends to give priority to Wuji or the “non-ultimate,” sometimes read as “non-Being” over Being, and this was one of the loci of debate between Taoists and Confucians in the early centuries of the Common Era, when the Confucians responded with arguments for the priority of being over non-being. But most of the really definitive debates in the Chinese tradition center around whether or not there is a Tao or way which governs the universe (pitting the Legalists against everyone else), whether or not it can be known and expressed in language and concepts (pitting the Taoists against the Confucians), and whether or not we can derive from it rules and practices which promote the growth and development of humanity (also pitting the Taoists against the Confucians). With the exception the Legalist tradition, which rejects all these ideas in favor of an attempt to maintain order and build civilization by means of regulation and punishment, and perhaps some forms of Mohism, which affirms a personal, cosmic sovereign, “participation” in the sense of Milbank understands it, is taken for granted (Fang 1981).
Finally, we should note that any typology of ontologies excludes entirely what we will call the first ways of hunter gather, horticultural, and early agrarian societies, which engaged questions of meaning and value by means of image and story rather than concept and argument. It might be argued that some of the mythic cycles of these societies encoded an implicit ontology which is univocal, analogical, or equivocal. But at least some of the representatives of these traditions would no doubt reply that this misunderstands what their traditions are trying to do.
What this all suggests is that our alternative is not simply between capitalism and a broadly Catholic socialism, but rather between many different ways of being human, each of which understands and acts on our existence in radically different ways, and each of which opens the door to many different possible civilizational projects. In the coming chapters we will survey these possibilities briefly and suggest where they might point in the present period.
Let me be clear that I do not want to diminish the significance of Milbank’s insights regarding the role of a (very specific kind of) univocal metaphysics in the genesis of “modernity”or, more precisely, secularism and capitalism. Secularism is, in its deepest meaning, the conviction that things exist in only one way and that there is, in fact, therefore, only one world, this one, in which everything happens. This is a view shared by mechanistic readings of “modern science” and by Christian fundamentalists, who believe that if anything is true it must be literally true and that, for example, things like the resurrection and the Second Coming, if they happen, happen in a way which could be empirically verified by those present for them. It is the univocity of Being in this sense, and the secularism which it at once articulates and legitimates, which leads to frantic attempts to accumulate Capital in order to bring the creation back under the dominion of God or else to build God technologically and thus transcend finitude. It is a view profoundly worthy of criticism.
This said, precisely because the distinction between the univocal, analogical, and equivocal use of the word “being” constitutes an abstract, formal taxonomy it is of limited use as a way of analyzing traditions outside Europe. Even in the context of Judaism and Islam meanings begin to change, and in India and China and the rest of the world applying this taxonomy amounts to answering questions which haven’t even been posed. And it is deeply troubling, especially in the light of Milbank’s sympathy for Heidegger’s critique ontotheology and and Schmitt’s construction of sovereignty that he applies the taxonomy in a way which has an objectively antisemitic and Islamophobic valence.
Indeed, in the end we must ask why Milbank is so anxious not simply to articulate a Catholic critique of capitalism, distinct from dialectical and historical materalism and to show how it answers certain questions and solves certain problems which historic secular socialism has not, but also to argue (like most secular scientific socialism) that it is the only way. In order to make sense of this, however, we will have to look deeper into the social basis and political valence of Christianity itself, which we will argue is constitutively imperial even if it originated in a Jewish anti-imperial sect. What we will find, from the letters of Paul onward, is a theological core centered not on participation in the life of God, but rather on absolute divine sovereignty, radical depravity, and a demand for absolute submission which, we will show, is at once a reflex of and means of legitimating Empire and, with certain developments, Capital. The insistence, furthermore, that submission take the form of faith in and incorporation into the crucified and resurrected Christ, who was tortured to death by his Father for our sins and then ressurected, marks Christianity as constitutively antisemitic and thus ultimately racist, and constitutively patriarchal. It is antisemitic and racist because it argues that the Jewish —and by implications all other— ways are inadequate and lead only to damnation. And it is patriarchal because it is a religion specifically of submission to a Father who requires unconditional obedience to inscrutable demands, with the only alternative being torture, death, and damnation. And all this plays out within a divine trinity in which the feminine is not only subordinated to the masculine, but actually excluded.
Catholicism, we will argue, softens this, but it does not overcome it.
In order to make this case, we need next to situate Christianity in the context of the larger transhistorical debate regarding what it means to be human, a task to which we now turn.
References
Alper, Harvey “Order, Chaos, and Renunciation: The Reign of Dharma in India,” in The Terrible Meek, ed. Lonnie Kliever (New York: Paragon, 1987), Aquinas, Thomas.. 272/1952. Summa Theologiae, Chicago, Encyclopaedia Britannica. von Balthasar, Hans Urs. 1968. Love Alone. London: Allen and Unwin Bataille, Georges. 1949/1988. The Accursed Share. New York: Zone Books. Chaterjee, Satischandra and Datta, Dhirendramohan. 1954. An Introduction to Indian Philosophy. Calcutta: University of Calcutta Compilation Group for the Modern History of China Series. 1976. The Taiping Revolt. Peking: Foreign Languages Press Derrida, Jacques. 2001. Acts of Religion. London : Routledge. Fang, Thombe. 1981. Chinese philosophy: its spirit and its development. Taipei: Linking Publishing Company. Gaudium et Spes. 1965. Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World Promulgated by His Holiness Pope Paul VI. Accessed at https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19651207_gaudium-et-spes_en.html Goerner, E. A. 1965. Peter and Caesar. New York: Herder and Herder. Ingham, Mary Elisabeth, CSJ. 1993. “Scotus and the Moral Order,” in American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly LXVII:1 Lancaster, Roger. 1988. Thanks to God and the Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lee, Sukjae, “Occasionalism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2020/entries/occasionalism/. Lizzini, Olga, “Ibn Sina’s Metaphysics”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2020/entries/ibn-sina-metaphysics/. Mansueto, Anthony. 1985 “Blessed Are The Meek: Religion and Socialism in Italian American History,” Proceedings of the American Italian Historical Association . ———. 1988 “Religion, Solidarity, and Class Struggle,” in Social Compass XXXV:2 ———. 1995. Towards Synergism: The Cosmic Significance of the Human Civilizational Project. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. ———. 2002a. Religion and Dialectics. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. ———. 2002b. Knowing God: Restoring Reason in an Age of Doubt. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. ———. 2010a. The Death of Secular Messianisms. Eugene, OR: Cascade ———. 2010b. Knowing God: The Journey of the Dialectic. Eugene, OR: Pickwick ———. 2011. Knowing God: Doing Justice. Eugene, OR: Pickwick ———. 2012 Knowing God: The Ultimate Meaningfulness of the Universe. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Mansueto, Anthony and Maggie. 2005. Spirituality and Dialectics. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books. Milbank, John. 1990. Theology and Social Theory. London: Blackwell. ———. 1999. “The Theological Critique of Philosophy in Hamman and Jacobi,” in Radical Orthodoxy, edited by John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward. London: Routledge. . 2006a “Geopolitical Theology,” unpublished paper accessed at http://www.theologyphilosophycentre.co.uk/papers.php . 2006b ” Only Theology saves Metaphysics: on the Modalities of Terror,” unpublished paper accessed at http://www.theologyphilosophycentre.co.uk/papers.php Sarkisyanz, E. 1965. Buddhist Backgrounds of the Burmese Revolution. The Hague: Nijhoff Scotus, John Duns. 1301/1965. A Treatise on God as First Principle (De Primo Principio). trans Allan Wolter. Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press. Segundo, Juan Luis. 1985 Theology and the Church. New York: Harper Walser, Joseph. 2018. Genealogies of Mahayana Buddhism. New York: Routledge. Williams. Paul. 1989. Mahayana Buddhism. New York: Routledge Wolf, Eric. 1969. Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century. New York: Harper 1969
This latter paper has long since been removed from the online archive where I first found it, so while I will press forward with my critique, it should not be assumed that Milbank still holds all of the positions he took in this paper, at least in their original form.
2. Milbank’s actual roots are in the Anglo-Catholic tradition, but his theology is intentionally Catholic and seems to address the entire Catholic tradition sufficiently to be treated in this context.
3. By alterimperial we mean the tendency of communist led antimperialist struggles to lead to imperial restoration projects in countries such as Russia and China.
4. See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, (New York: Scribners, 1958) and Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, (Boston: Beacon, 1966)
5. This, at least, is the way in which the debate is presented both in Buddhist doxologies and by contemporary scholars of Buddhism, though in fact there are many variants of both positions, and recent research (Walser 2018) suggests that historically both the theoretical lines of demarcation between traditions and their practical, political and spiritual implications, were less clear.
When interest in political theology began to emerge on the Christian Left and Center Left in the 1960s, those engaging the discipline were at pains to distinguish not just their specific theological positions but their entire set of questions and concerns from those which motivated the “Old Political Theology” of the NAZI jurist Carl Schmitt. This concern is reflected in the outstanding status questionis prepared by Francis Schussler Fiorenza in 1977 (Fiorenza 1977/2012), which makes it clear that the Schmittian problematic is simply one among many possible approaches, whether to a theology of the political or to what he and his associates call a “consciously political theology” as opposed to the unconsciously political theology which is created when theologians do not understand the social basis and political valence of their claims.
Specifically, Fiorenza identifies the following political-theological paradigms:
The tripartite distinction between mythical, philosophical, and civic or political theology associated with Varro (cited in Augustine 427/1972),
Augustine’s doctrine of the Two Cities (augustine 427/1972),
An Enlightenment doctrine centered around natural theology and civic religion (Locke 1690/1967, Rousseau 1762/1962) ,
The political theology of the Catholic Restoration, within which he situates Schmitt, but which also includes the much earlier and somewhat different work of de Maistre and de Bonald (Bonald 1796, Maistre 1775-1821/1965,
The German political theology of the 1960s 1970s (Solle 1974) and
Latin American liberation theology (Solle 1974).
To these, even restricting ourselves to the limited historical and civilizational frame which Fiorenza analyzes, I would add, at a minimum:
Thomistic political theology, both in its original form, and in its Baroque and social Catholic/Christian Democratic incarnations (Goerner 1965, Gilson 1968), and
An entire spectrum of Protestant political theologies including, at least, early Lutheran and Reformed political theologies, the competing liberal and Evangelical political theologies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Neo-Orthodoxy, and an entire sub-spectrum of fundamentalist political theological, from Dispensationalism through Reconstruction and Dominion (Niebuhr 1951).
If we were to bring the typology up to date, we would need to add:
The Communio theology which developed in reaction to Latin American liberation theology (Ratzinger 1984, 1986) and
Radical Orthodoxy, which is distinctive in proposing the Church rather than the State as the architectonic political paradigm, (Milbank 1991).
All of this, furthermore, presupposes that we addressing only Christian political theologies. It does not consider the vast range of Islamic political theologies which have informed on the global political scene in recent years, or the various Jewish political theologies which have shaped Christian polities and which led, through the triumph of Zionism to the establishment of a Jewish State which has in turn become a significant point of political-theological interest to both Christianity and Islam. Nor does it consider the Indian, Chinese, Southeast and Northeast Asian, Indigenous American and African domains which make up far more than half of humanity.
And yet contemporary discourse around political theology in the broader academy has been dominated by precisely the Schmittian problematic, as indicated in the work of Agamben, Baidou, and Zizek, and to a lesser extent Foucault and Derrida, among others, in a way which makes Fiorenza’s Eurocentric typology seem quite cosmopolitan in character. We will have the opportunity to return, in later chapters, to analysis of these various political theologies and the social interests they represent. It is the aim of this section to explain clearly just what Schmitt did that has been so been so captivating for the academy, as well as its links to the broader hermeneutic ontological and structuralist-poststructuralist lineages of which his followers form a part. We will also ask why it has been so captivating and show just how profoundly dangerous this problematic, in both its “Left” as well as its Right forms, has become.
To anyone who has followed the careful process by which the Right in the United States has cultivated a “bull-pen” of conservative and especially conservative Catholic intellectuals to help it map its road back to power since its defeat in 1932 and the failure of the “Business Plot” in 1933 to overthrow Roosevelt and install a fascist regime (Reimann 2017), figures such as Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger represent a familiar type. In the wake of Germany’s defeat in the First World War and the democratic revolution of 1918, in which significant elements pressed for the transfer of power to workers councils on the Soviet model, and which even for the mainstream of the Social Democratic Party which opposed the Soviet model was part of a strategy for a peaceful transition to socialism, the ruling classes began plotting their restoration. Then as now the conservative Catholic small and petty bourgeoisie provided the intellectual shock troops for that restoration. Little did they know that they would also shape the direction of the Left a century later.
Writing in the 1920s, during the Weimar Republic, Schmitt advanced a pair of theses which have come to dominate political-theological discourse. First, he argued that all modern political concepts are simply secularizations of theological concepts (Schmitt 1922/2005). Second, he argued, against historic natural law theories and more recent concepts of popular sovereignty, that “the sovereign is he who decides the exception (Schmitt 1921/2014).”
The first of these claims is, despite the enthusiasm it has excited among secular intellectuals unaware of their own religious heritage, actually quite unremarkable. Nearly all the great thinkers of the Enlightenment saw themselves as working to realize in the secular arena the principles and values of the Christian (or the Jewish) tradition. Thus Locke grounds his doctrine of rights on the concept of property and his concept of property on the divine act of creation —and humanity’s limited participation therein. Even as he undercut the historic arguments for the existence of God, Kant insisted that the moral principles of Christianity, at least as he understood them, were, in fact, obligatory on the basis of reason alone. And Hegel argues that
The divine spirit must interpenetrate the entire secular life: whereby wisdom is concrete within it, and carries the terms of its own justification. But that concrete indwelling is only … ethical organization. Hegel, G.W.F. Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (Hegel, G.W.F. 1830/1971 3: 552).
Indeed, Marx himself —Schmitt’s ultimate adversary— says essentially the same thing in his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction (Marx 1843/2009). Philosophy grasps the rational kernel in religion, and politics —in the form of the proletariat— realizes philosophy.
The criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism.
The head of this emancipation is philosophy, its heart the proletariat. Philosophy cannot realize itself without the transcendence [Aufhebung] of the proletariat, and the proletariat cannot transcend itself without the realization [Verwirklichung] of philosophy. (Marx 1843/2009)
It is only the fantastic and untenable character of the claims made by both of the principal secular projects of recent centuries —technocratic or humanistic— to effectively deify humanity, whether through scientific, technological and economic progress or by creating a political subject which makes humanity the master of its own destiny, which has led those championing those projects to keep the theological, or rather theotic, character of their aims largely hidden —another issue to which we will return later.
Schmitt’s second claim is more serious. In its original context it lays out the juridical groundwork for Hitler’s suspension of the Weimar Constitution in 1933 in the Enabling Act or Reichstag Fire Act and thus for the whole NAZI regime. Here Schmitt is arguing that modern constitutionalism is a secularization not so much of Christian as of Roman ideas, though the specific points he cites are, for example, reaffirmed in Catholic theology (Aquainas. Summa Theologiae. I-II:95:4). Specifically, in the Roman tradition, laws were enacted senatus popolusque, “by the people and the elders together.” Potestas or power belonged ultimately to the people, without whose consent no law could be effective, even if in practice this popular consent was given as the result of significant economic and rhetorical manipulation. But the validity of the law rested on the auctoritas or authority of the Senate, which determined whether or not it was in accord with higher principles which, in the Roman context, were rather ill defined, but which in a Catholic context would later become identified with natural law and in a liberal context with natural rights or established constitutional principles. In this sense the juridical role of the Senate was more like that of our Supreme Court than that of most contemporary “upper houses” of parliament.
Roman law had a provision, though, which allowed the Senate to temporarily suspend the rule of law in the case of a public emergency, and to appoint one or more “dictators” who were free to act as they saw fit in order to protect the Roman state. In the profoundly aristocratic (and thus anti-monarchic) political culture of Republican Rome, it was taken for granted that no one would abuse this power and risk the loss of respect on honor from his peers which, assuming command over sufficient land and labor to guarantee the ability to devote one’s life to philosophically informed civic engagement was understood as the chief social good. But of course it was precisely this provision which through a complex series of events allowed the “dictatorship” to become permanent in the form of continuing military imperium which was, officially at least, created in order to protect the institutions of the Republic, and which eventually assimilated not just the popular potestas but also the senatorial auctoritas to itself.
It is Schmitt’s explicit endorsement of this final move which constitutes his embrace of the NAZI Fuhrerprinzip, the embodiment in the Fuhrer of the senatorial auctoritas which Roman dictators never had under the Republic and which they gained only gradually and de facto under the empire.
This is, we should note, part and parcel of the same broader project as Heidegger’s hermeneutic ontology, especially in his later thought after the “turn.” Heidegger’s early critique of metaphysics, set forth in Problems of Phenomenology (Heidegger 1927) and Being and Time (1928) focuses on the failure of thinkers, beginning with Plato, to grasp the distinction between Being and beings, and instead attempts to theorize Being as the beingness of beings –i.e. it thinks Being in entitative terms. Where the pre-Socratics, according to Heidegger, were able to think the self-manifestation of Being, something he associates with the term physis or nature, Plato and Aristotle increasingly use the language of morphe (form) and energeia (actuality). Form, and especially the Good or the “form of forms” is, for Plato, what really is and that in terms of which this world of appearance must be explained and judged. Aristotle goes even further down this road, arguing that it is form which actualizes matter, bringing things into being. Rather than simply allowing Being to manifest itself, to present itself as a question, it is reduced to something other than Being, something which can be comprehended –and once comprehended, used to ground our own process of making, our own process of bringing into being. Indeed, as Heidegger points out, the very notion of morphe derives from the language of the craftsman: it is the look or appearance given to something by its producer. Energeia, similarly, is rendered in German as Wirklicheit, from the root for work. Metaphysics thus grounds technology, and the larger technological mode of relating to the world.
Later (Heidegger 1941) Heidegger modified both his historical analysis and his philosophical position. Increasingly identifying ancient Greek and German romantic thought, he claimed to hear in Plato and Aristotle echoes of the earlier Greek aletheia or unconcealment of Being and located the crystallization of metaphysics in the “translation” of Greek thought into Latin, the language of road builders and empire makers, a crystallization which is completed in the Middle Ages when Being is identified with the supreme maker, the Christian Creator God. This process culminates, of course, in Thomas, who is the supreme philosopher of the “ontotheologic,” the universal causal-explanatory system in which Being is simply an instrument for explaining and ultimately manipulating entities. Modern metaphysical theories, such as those of Descartes and Hegel –or for that matter Marx– differ only in giving human rather than divine subjectivity or labor pride of place. Nietzsche’s claim that the world is just the “will to power” is simply the culmination of this long metaphysical tradition, and offers just one more formulation of the first principle.
Being, for the later Heidegger, manifests itself in a people only through the voice of the few who help it to discover its “god,” a sort of mythos under which Being is revealed.
… the essence of the people is its “voice.” This voice does not, however, speak in a so-called immediate flood of the common, natural, undistorted and uneducated “person.” The voice speaks seldom and only in the few, if it can be brought to sound … (Heidegger >1934/1989: 319)
A Volk is only a Volk if it receives its history through the discovery of its god, through the god, which through history compels it in a direction and so places it back in being. Only then does it avoid the danger of turning only on its own axis … (Heidegger >1934/1989: 398-399).
The result of Heidegger’s move is, we should note, in no sense a global abandonment of metaphysics, but rather a change in its aim. Where historic metaphysics terminates in the concept of Being as Such or its transcendental equivalents —the Good, the True, the Beautiful, and the One— in order to explain the universe and order human action, Heidegger argues instead for interpreting Being in its concrete historical unconcealments. Now this might seem entirely harmless or even attractive. After all, when we encounter another human being, we like to imagine that we do not begin by trying to explain them or use them to explain anything else, but rather attempt to understand them intersubjectively —something which requires interpretation. Beginning with explanation seems like an objectification and even an instrumentalization. But this is not really how we proceed. We first make a strategic and tactical estimate of who a person is —of their interests and networks and capacities— and what they intend, something which entails causal analysis and explanation. Thus, if the someone knocks on our door in the middle of the night (or at mid-day, for that matter) we do not simply welcome them in and begin a deep conversation, aiming at intersubjective understanding. We first need to know who they are and why they are there. After all, some people who knock on doors in the middle of the night arrest those they find and send them to death camps … Indeed, even if the individual approaching us is a colleague at the office rather than a stranger in the middle of the night, we want to make an estimate of their intentions before we decide how much to share.
But there is more. Let us say that the individual in question is planning to round up your people, gas them, then burn them in ovens. If you are going to resist you need not only to understand this person intersubjectively; you need to know why they are doing what they are doing so you can develop an effective strategy for resistance. And you need to ground a principle of value in terms of which the genocide can be authoritatively condemned. To put it in terms of Roman Law, both potestas and auctoritas depend on metaphysics as science or explanation: on demonstrating the ordering of the universe and everything in it to Being and to the Good. Rejecting metaphysics as science or explanation leaves us with no alternative but to accept the auctoritas of Being’s latest unconcealment, even if that unconcealment takes the form of Hitler, and seek guidance for our actions only through an interpretation of that unconcealment. Heidegger’s “gods” or “voices” of the people are the metaphysical equivalent of Schmitt’s Sovereign, which decides on the exception and which possess in themselves (and not as interpreters of Being) the auctoritas to define the principles which will govern the social order.
We will, in a later chapter, see that a similar problem afflicts “modern science” —or at least its architectonic discipline, mathematical physics— which has been largely left behind explanation in favor of formal description —and the physical interpretation of mathematical formalisms.
***
It should be apparent by now just why Schmitt was so pivotal in the NAZI road to power. Like Heidegger he was able to interpret the rise of Hitler in terms which were attractive to a large conservative Catholic and Romantic constituency which had no doubt envisioned a “restoration” that looked very different from the one they got.
But why has Schmitt so captivated the Left, especially in the decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union?
In order to answer this question we need to know that Schmitt’s 1921 essay On Dictatorship — and to a significant extent his entire body of work— was, in fact a response to an earlier essay —The Critique of Violence— by Walter Benjamin, which addressed a critical gap in revolutionary political theory. The problem is this. Historically socialism understands itself as building on and completing the liberal and democratic projects, not as simply negating them. And central to these projects is the establishment of rule of law. This includes a legal framework which protects the rationally autonomous individual and which specifies a format of representation by which the “people” can elect the government of the day and make and change laws. But the laws which protect the rationally autonomous individual also protect the property owner, and indeed generally define rights in proprietorial terms. And both the formats of representation which specify democracy and the objective conditions under which political struggle takes place reflect a balance of power in which the exploiting classes —the aristocracy and especially the bourgeoisie— retain a significant advantage. How, under these circumstances, do we carry out an authentically revolutionary transformation which expropriates the bourgeoisie and brings the proletariat —the vast majority of “the people”— to power, and which sets in motion the decommodification of labor power necessary to realize the ideal of self-determination which motivated not just the socialist but also the liberal and democratic projects to begin with?
Liberal theorists generally resolve this question by appeal to some sort of natural rights theory —to the laws of nature and nature’s God—- or else to some other strategy (such as Kant’s categorical imperative) for grounding moral principles prior to any social contract. But of course the principles to which they appeal are precisely those which ground the private property rights which in turn make Capital possible. So a breach with positive law is permissible —but only when Capital is threatened. Democratic theorists such as Rousseau thus went further and grounded rights themselves in a social contract which is itself the product of democratic —or even revolutionary— processes. This puts on the table, as it were, the possibility that the political order is itself ultimately the product of violence even if it aims to contain such violence in the future. And this was precisely the opportunity which was seized by the Catholic “traditionalists” de Maistre and de Bonald who argue that it is indeed violence which is the foundation of any possible social order, and that the one legitimate form of such violence is the divine violence of the sacrifice on the cross. We can already see that this road leads us to Schmitt.
We have argued elsewhere (and will argue even more forcefully in this work) that the only consistent way to ground revolutionary transformations, especially when they require action outside of positive law, is on the basis of a robust if radically historicized natural law theory (Mansueto 2014), which is what we believe Marx actually outlined in the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction and the Communist Manifesto, but which he left radically underdeveloped. And this in turn requires a metaphysics of Esse. Now most social democrats and the communist right (the tradition of that includes Bukharin and Bogdanov, Gramsci and Silone) have taken such an approach in practice, gaging cautiously what degree of change is appropriate based on a careful reading of the social conditions. Thus the debates on the Left regarding whether or not the “objective conditions” existed for a socialist transition, or for some other more partial step in that direction. But others have followed the example of Rousseau and the French Revolution and grounded the legitimacy of the revolution and the revolutionary regime which emerges from it in revolutionary violence as such, a violence which Rousseau’s sociologically more acute critics on the traditionalist Right correctly identified as literally or symbolically divine in character, in that it does not simply represent but actually defines justice. And this is precisely what Benjamin does in The Critique of Violence. Specifically, Benjamin identifies what he calls a divine violence, which aims at the constitution of justice outside of any possible positive law. It is this and this alone which can be the mediating term between one legal regime and another. There is thus a deeply rooted connection between the revolutionary left and the traditionalist right, one that goes back behind Benjamin and Schmitt to Rousseau and the traditionalists. While Benjamin —and later Derrida— argue for a “violence” which transcends the Law in the name of Justice, Schmitt argues for a violence which suspends the Law in the name of Justice. Neither can tell us what Justice is and neither believes it can be grounded.
Now neither Benjamin nor Derrida actually engaged in or directly advocated revolutionary violence, and while Benjamin might have had he connected with the Resistance rather than committing suicide, it should be clear that the poststructuralism is by no means actually a revolutionary ideology. Derrida’s advocacy of “divine violence” means something else. In order to understand what it means, we must identify the precise social basis and political valence of poststructuralism generally and of the poststructuralist fascination with Schmittian political theology. And this, in turn, requires that we analyze the class composition the historic socialist and communist movements to which poststructuralism is largely a response.
While there can be little doubt that the industrial proletariat did, in fact, provide much of the mass base of both the social democratic and communist wings of the movement, and while it has always been peasant movements which have brought communist parties to power, the leadership of the socialist and communist movements has historically been drawn from what Marx and Engels called “the bourgeois ideologists.”
Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the progress of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of old society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole (Marx and Engels 1848/2000).
This is the same group that Marx earlier identified as Philosophy, which he called the “head of the revolution (Marx 1843/2009)”. It is also Hegel’s “universal class” of liberally educated civil servants. It is what we are calling the “humanistic intelligentsia,” (those trained in and attempting to live from —or at least devote their lives to the practice of the liberal arts and in particular the humanities and the humanistic social sciences). And while in the nineteenth century—and to a lesser extent even today— elements of the humanistic intelligentsia were and are derived from the bourgeoisie as such, this group (which is a social category and not a class), is predominantly petty bourgeois both in their origins and in their class position and, as capitalism develops, is subjected to increasing proletarianization. By this we mean that, on the one hand, unlike the proletariat as such members of the humanistic intelligentsia enjoy significant creative control over their work, but like the proletariat they see this control gradually slipping away, by way of attacks on academic freedom and faculty governance in universities, the decline journalism as a liberal profession, etc.
Since this is the group which actually does social theory and philosophy, we do well to take into account its specific interests as we analyze its theoretical products and assess them as political strategies. And by the early twentieth century the humanistic intelligentsia had three well defined political options on the table. The first was what we might call “professionalism,” i.e. a privileged, semi-autonomous role based on the exercise of one’s specific discipline within the context of bourgeois society, on the condition that it remain “value neutral,” i.e. that it provide advice regarding the means to ends which are determined by others: nominally “the people,” acting through democratic structures, but in practice the bourgeoisie. This is the option represented by Weber in Science as a Vocation (Weber 1919/1968) and is what today we often call a technocratic orientation. This option generally involves an alliance with the liberal and advanced, technocratic bourgeoisie and, in practice, with the more fully proletarianized elements in the population by way of social liberal and social democratic parties. The second option was communism —a bid for all-sided global leadership based on an alliance with the proletariat and other exploited classes, aimed at ending for everyone the commodification of labor which was the principal form of capitalist oppression experienced by the humanistic intelligentsia. In the context of this option, the humanistic intelligentsia trades some of its autonomy (actually a lot) for a global leadership role in the context of a Leninist vanguard or Gramscian counter-hegemonic party —again in alliance with the proletariat as such, the peasantry if there is one, and often in popular fronts with the liberal bourgeoisie. The third option was Romantic Reaction —an alliance first with absolutist monarchic and aristocratic and later with imperialist and colonizing bourgeois elements who, the intellectuals in question imagined, promised a return to a less instrumentalizing, preindustrial, precapitalist past. This is, of course, the option of the traditionalists de Maistre and de Bonald, of Nietzsche, and ultimately of Heidegger and Schmitt who, however, introduce a new element to the strategy. (Lukacs 1953/1980).
As King and Szelenyi (King and Szeleny 2004) have suggested, an integral part of professionalism as a class strategy is artificially maintaining the scarcity of professionals. This is something physicians, for example, have done very well, attorneys reasonably well, and academics very poorly. We are, after all, in the business of training our own competition. Pierre Bourdieu makes a compelling case (Bourdieu 1988/1991) that Heidegger’s famous obscurantism, something which has since been mimicked by scholars throughout the humanities, was designed to confer on the philosopher an oracular mana which set him apart from ordinary humanity and, in effect, made doing philosophy inaccessible to the vast majority of people.
By the 1920s and 1930s the contradictions of historic socialism were becoming apparent. State ownership of the means of production turned out to be a means not to the decommodification of labor power but to the full proletarianization of the entire society. And Stalin began systematically liquidating precisely those elements with the humanistic intelligentsia who actually insisted on exercising the critical rationality which had drawn them to the socialist project in the first place. But this was also the period, of course, during which fascism was ascendant, as a cluster of political formations around the world drew on the alienation and authoritarianism generated by the commodification of labor power to legitimate the destruction of not just the socialist but also the liberal and democratic projects, and to militarize their societies in pursuit of the colonial empires which Capital needed in order to survive. Intellectuals like Heidegger seemed to imagine that they could leverage their philosophical obscurantism into a privileged position within, or even hegemony over, the fascist regime.
The Frankfurt School, with which Benjamin became associated played a critical role in this situation. On the one hand, the Frankfurt School represented “petty bourgeois socialism” par excellence. Drawn from the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, many of its members had studied Weber and studied with Heidegger and they were profoundly sensitive to the fact that the critique of capitalist instrumentalization could easily be turned on actually existing socialism. And their organic connection to the proletariat was very limited at best. Nevertheless, despite some ideological problems —such as Benjamin’s fascination with divine violence and Adorno’s radical pessimism—they maintained their commitment to the socialist project. And Fromm’s (Fromm 1941) analysis of the links between the alienation engendered by the commodification of labor power and the authoritarian personality structure on which fascism depended are critical to understanding not only historic fascism but what has followed.
After the defeat of fascism, the liberal bourgeoisie —increasingly, it seems likely, under pressure from occult networks on the far right— broke the popular front and imposed on the humanistic intelligentsia a return to professional “value neutrality” which increasingly included an implicit or explicit “anticommunism” clause. Many of those who submitted —especially those who came from places of privilege themselves— found positions of honor and responsibility in the social liberal order; those who did not were marginalized. Meanwhile, however, the rapid expansion of higher education created a new “mass intelligentsia,” which could not really be accommodated within even the also expanding ranks of the professional middle class, at least not at the levels of that class which provided the professional autonomy which the student generation of the 1960s saw being exercised by “the best and the brightest,” who were actually a small, privileged stratum. This was the social basis for the student movement of the 1960s (which actually extended well into the 1970s, and which had a significant “afterlife” in the 1980s). And it is not surprising that the Frankfurt School, with its focus on resistance to the alienating impact of the commodification of labor power and its distance from the rest of the working classes, was an inspiration to this movement.
But just as the mass student movement was edging towards socialism, it became apparent that historic socialism was irredeemable. Krushchev’s reforms beginning 1956 represented a break with the worst of Stalinist repression, but if anything seemed to move the Soviet bloc further away from the communist ideal of the decommodification of labor power. The Maoist alternative catalyzed the excitement of many in the 1960s and 1970s, among other things precisely because it targeted the persistence of commodity production under socialism, and led to the formation of an entire Maoist “new communist movement.” But it soon became apparent that Maoism was, if anything, vastly more repressive, especially for the intelligentsia than Stalinism. Stalin murdered those he saw as a political threat. The Cultural Revolution targeted the entire intelligentsia, regardless of its political orientation or practical activity, even at the cost of nearly destroying Chinese Civilization. And while some of the later Third World national liberation movements, especially in Latin America, engaged a range of new constituencies, embracing, for example, a significant movement of radicalized Catholic clergy and laity, and largely avoided the creation of a monolithic single party state, they too turned out to be mostly about creating a national state bourgeoisie rather than about liberating people from the need to sell their labor power in order to survive.
In the Soviet bloc the process was a bit different. The humanistic intelligentsia welcomed periods of reform —1956, for example, and in a more limited way 1968, but was inevitably pushed to the side as reforms were either crushed or the opening they created reserved for technocratic managers rather than humanistic advocates of decommodification. By the mid-1980s, when Gorbochov made it clear that real reform was coming, the humanistic intelligentsia in the Soviet bloc had largely given up the dream of “socialism with a human face” and facilitated the collapse of the system and a capitalist restoration.
This is the point at which the political valence of the poststructuralist appropriation of Schmitt (and Heidegger) becomes clear. Beginning in the 1960s a group of French intellectuals pioneered a new strategy for the humanistic intelligentsia: what we might call “critical professionalism.” Critical professionalism allows the humanistic intelligentsia to criticize the increasing proletarianization of their own stratum, while refusing to engage Capital, and thus abandoning the rest of the proletariat and working classes. We see this illustrated most clearly in the work of Michel Foucault. Foucault (Foucault 2007) argues that while premodern states aimed only a control over territory, modern states exercise a detailed control over bodies which he calls biopolitical. Thus ancient empires merely taxed their citizens; modern states (or rather the modern corporations which modern states protect) aim at total control of the production process. This thesis, which certainly points to something real but, we will argue, also misunderstands it, became the basis for the strange politics of an entire generation of the humanistic intelligentsia which aimed at resisting proletarianization without resisting Capital, or indeed without even mentioning its existence. Indeed, it is incontestable that historic socialism also represents a practice of biopolitics, so poststructuralism comes off seeming even handed and, if it not as enthusiastic about capitalism as the Right would like, this made it relatively unobjectionable. Heidegger’s obscurantism was maintained as a way of promoting the artificial scarcity of professional deconstructionism, and we have the humanistic academy which took shape from the 1980s onward —perhaps earlier in Europe.
Agamben’s work is located in this context, largely as an extension and correction of Foucault, who was his teacher. Specifically, Agamben argues that modernity represents not a modification of the concept or aims of of Sovereignty, but rather a shift from a discourse around Sovereignty and politics to a discourse around economy. This shift, he argues, is located genealogically in the emergence of a Trinitarian theology which distinguishes between God’s Being, identified variously with the Trinity as a whole or with the Father, and his activity or the divine economy, identified with the relations between the Persons of the Trinity or with the Son. This shift points to the emergence of an immanent order which depends not on the establishment or application of principles or of law but on the concrete, empirical resolution of particular problems.
The strategy worked —for Capital. An entire generation of the humanistic intelligentsia (or more) was cut off from the struggle against Capital and focused on “deconstructive” activity which it understood as liberating but which was actually aimed at disarming the Left. But the strategy did not work for the humanistic intelligentsia itself. Graduate programs continued to churn out doctorates and universities cut tenure track lines and shifted responsibility for most of their teaching mission to adjunct faculty and a lower caste of largely unprotected “teaching faculty.” And the handful who got tenure assisted their employers by denying it to anyone who questioned the poststructuralist orthodoxy. Seeking allies, poststructuralist academics offered their theories to the women’s movement and to movements against imperialism and racism, which had the effect, in turn, of cutting these movements off from any possible alliance with the proletariat. It also promoted an “allergy to power” as itself instrumentalizing and oppressive, which condemned those who took this route to political impotence.
The result is an absurd situation in which very comfortable humanistic academics earning large salaries and still enjoying very significant autonomy (on condition that they not deploy it against Capital) talk about revolutionary violence and say other things which sound incredibly revolutionary —but intend nothing. Are they merely soothing their consciences by occasionally nipping at the hand that feeds them? Or are they up to something more sinister? The method we advocate is focused more on analyzing concrete impact than it is on ascribing intentions. Here two points are in order. First, political theology in the Schmittian mode has largely displaced the liberation theologies of the last century which, whatever their failings (which we will discuss in a later chapter), advocated a politics focused on the self-liberation of the proletariat and the peasantry. Where liberation theology got people reading Marx, Agamben, Baidou, and Zizek have them reading a fascist, just as Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze did before them. Second, while there has been a resurgence of interest in “socialism” during the past decade, very significant elements of this new maximalist left have flirted or worse with the alt-right and especially with the New Axis of which Vladimir Putin is the public center. For “genealogists” such as Nietzsche, Foucault, and Agamben this would, in fact, be enough convict. But at present we will leave the matter in the form of a question.
Over the course of the following chapters we will offer an alternative account of what a consciously political theology should look like —one which situates humanity’s struggle for self-determination in the broader context of our desire for Being and which demonstrates the ways in which Christianity has hegemonized this desire in the interest of Capital, while engaging the political theologies of other spiritual and civilizational traditions. And this will allow us to settle accounts with poststructuralism and Dark Liberation by way of a more rigorous argument. But before we proceed, we need to consider the question of method.
References
Agamben, Giorgio. 1995/1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford University Press
_________________. 2000/2005, The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans. Stanford University Press
_________________. 2003/2005. State of Exception. Stanford University Press
_________________. 2007/2011. The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government. Stanford University Press
_________________. 2010/2012. The Church and the Kingdom. Stanford University Press
_________________. 2011/2013. The Highest Poverty. Stanford University Press
_________________. 2012/2012 Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty. Stanford University Press
_________________. 2013/2015. Pilate and Jesus. Stanford University Press
_________________. 2013/2017. The Mystery of Evil: Benedict XVI and the End of Days. Stanford University Press
Aquinas, Thomas. 1272/1952. Summa Theologiae, Chicago, Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Augustine. 426/1972. The City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson. New York: Penguin
Baidou, Alain. 1998/ 2005. Being and Event, transl. by Oliver Feltham; (New York: Continuum
_____________. 2002/2003. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Stanford University Press
_____________. 2006/2009. Logics of Worlds: Being and Event, Volume 2, New York: Continuum.
Barbour, Ian. 2000. When Science Meets Religion. SanFrancisco: Harper
Benjamin, Walter. 1921/1978. “Critique of Violence,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, tr. Edmund Jephcott, New York: Schocken Books
Bonald, Louis de. 1796: Théorie du Pouvoir Politique et Religieux.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1998/1991. The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Fiorenza, Francis Schussler. 1977/2012 . Political Theology as Foundational Theology. Proceedings of the Catholic Theological Society of America, 32. Retrieved from https://ejournals.bc.edu/index.php/ctsa/article/view/2881
Fromm, Erich. 1941. Escape from Freedom, New York: Holt Reinhart Winston.
Foucault, Michel. 2007. The Politics of Truth. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e)
Gilson, Etienne. 1968 Dante and Philosophy. Glouster, MA: Peter Smith
Goerner, E.A. 1965 Peter and Caesar. New York: Herder and Herder
Milbank, John. 1991. Theology and Social Theory. London: Blackwell
Niebuhr, H. Richard. 1951. Christ and Culture. New York: Harper
Raschke, Carl. 2012. Postmodernism and the Revolution in Religious Theory. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
Ratzinger, Joseph Cardinal. 1984. “Instruction Regarding Certain Aspects of the Theology of Liberation,” United States Catholic Conference
______________. “Christian Freedom and Liberation,” United States Catholic Conference
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1762/1962 Le contrat social. Paris: Freres
Reimann, Matt. 2017. These Wall Street millionaires literally plotted to overthrow the president. Timeline, August 17, 2017.
Sartre, Jean Paul. 1943/1993. Being and Nothingness. New York: Washington Square Press. Schmitt, Carl. 1921/2014. Dictatorship. From the Origin of the Modern Concept of Sovereignty to Proletarian Class Struggle (1921), Cambridge: Polity Press
_____________. 1922/2005. Political Theology. Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (1922), trans. by G. Schwab, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Segundo, Juan Luis .1976 The Liberation of Theology. Maryknoll: Orbis
______________. 1985 Theology and the Church. New York: Harper
Solle, Dorthee. 1974. Political Theology. Philadelphia: Fortress
Tipler, Frank. 1994. The Physics of Immortality, New York, Doubleday
Voskuilen, Thijs and Sheldom, Rose Mary. 2008 OperationMessiah: St. Paul, Roman Intelligence, and the Birth of Christianity. Valentine Mitchell
Weber, Max. 1918/2004. “Science as a Vocation,” and Politics as a Vocation,” in The Vocation Lectures, trans. by Rodney Livingstone, New York: Hackett.
____________. 1920/1968. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Scribners
____________. 1921/1968. Economy and Society. New York: Bedminster
Žižek, Slavoj. 1999. “The Politics of Truth, or, Alain Badiou as a Reader of St. Paul,” in The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Core of Political Ontology. New York: Verso
Theology has, it appears, escaped. What was once a respectable, architectonic, but also tightly regulated discipline which exercised its office in an almost hidden manner, her charms accessible only to the most discerning, and her relationships mediated and her conversations chaperoned by her “handmaid,” Philosophy, is now galavanting around not just the academy but other institutions of civil society like Collegiate Assessor Kovalyov’s nose (Gogol 1836/2011) , impersonating State Counselors and every other manner of authority and consummating forbidden liaisons with other fields and disciplines.
The most notorious such liaison is theology’s ménage a trois with Philosophy (now “liberated” from her role as handmaid) and Politics, under the form of what has come to be called “political theology.” Most contemporary accounts of the origins of political theology —at least in the sense the term is used today— trace it to Carl Schmitt’s assertion in his Politische Theologie (Schmitt 1922/2005) that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.” Together with his claim that “the Sovereign is he who decides the exception (Schmitt 1921/2014),” (i.e. determines when to suspend the rule of law) this thesis formed the basis of Schmitt’s legitimation of the Enabling Act of 1933 and thus of the whole NAZI regime. And yet Schmitt has a large following today is on the “Left,” for which his thesis has become a way of deconstructing the entire humanistic secular project of constituting a political subject which can make humanity the master of its own destiny of which it was the historic proponent, and the metaphysical foundations of which they have now determined to be the basis of its technocratic opposite: the regime of universal, instrumentalizing techno-political control which defines both capitalism and historic socialism alike. (Agamben 1995/1998, 2000/20005, 2003/2005, 2007/2011, 2010/2012, 2011/2013, 2012/2012, 2013/2015, 2013/2017; Baidou 1998/2005, Zizek 1999)..
But these theological “genealogies” of the humanistic secular project are not theology’s only liaisons dangereux. On the contrary, theology has taken upon itself the task of policing the boundary between “religion” and “science” which was once also under the jurisdiction of Philosophy —and the results have been catastrophic. While scholars of religion (Barbour 2000) have been busy elaborating a standardized typology of four different forms of engagement between religion and science (conflict, non-overlapping magisteria, dialogue, and integration) physicists (Tipler 1994) have generated “theologies” which make explicit the technocratic secular claim to realize by means of scientific, technological, and economic progress the theosis which has always been humanity’s deepest desire. And if interventions such as Tipler’s Omega Point Theory remain marginal, they nonetheless constitute a wedge which has allowed the proliferation of a whole range of more “modest” transhumanist discourses —most notably those of the Dark Enlightenment (Land 2013, 2017). Meanwhile grave questions about the theoretical coherence and political integrity of mathematical physics remain unanswered. Quantum theory, it turns out, has roots as steeped in emerging NAZISM as the (Heideggerian) hermeneutic ontology which dominates the humanistic academy (Lerner 1991) and is, in fact, part of the same “hermeneutic turn” which, far from being a product of the past two centuries, in fact dates back to the Augustinian Reaction of the 1270sand to the Reformation. This too is political theology.
But theology has not only escaped. It has simultaneously gone under cover, hiding as something other than itself where one might expect to find it, even as it loudly proclaiming its presence where it was thought to have been banished. Thus religious studies … that melange of discourses about religion which has been very clear from the beginning that it is not theology. And yet the genealogy of this field shows unambiguous roots in liberal Protestantism and thus interests which are at once theological —establishing a cosmopolitanism in which pluralism becomes a mechanism of specifically Protestant hegemony— and political, as indicated by recent critiques which locate its origins in what amounts to a practice of sociocultural intelligence in service to imperialism (Raschke 2012).
Our liberal and democratic sentiments incline us to celebrate escapes and impersonations. But theology, we must remember, is the Queen of the Sciences, and history should warn us that unregulated royalty is dangerous. And as it turns out, without the supervision of her handmaid (Philosophy), theology has behaved badly indeed, hatching every manner of reactionary and authoritarian plot under the guise of liberatory discourse and prophetic denunciation —and, we will argue, collaborating in disarming humanity in the hour of her greatest need. More specifically, I will suggest, theology and especially political theology and something called religious theory have become the latest vectors by which the hermeneutic-ontological (Heideggerian) virus has spread, rewriting our culture using subtly fascist code, and in the process disarming the Left and disarming humanity. Specifically, the hermeneutic ontological virus undercuts the foundations the communist project, which have always been in a metaphysics of Esse and in humanity’s ordering to the power of Being as such (Mansueto 2005, 2012, 2016) —while pinning the blame for Capital’s regime of technopolitical instrumentalization on the very “ontotheology” which grounds any possible resistance. Thus the failure of Schmitt’s disciples to criticize the univocal metaphysics which has its roots in Christianity and which grounds the technocratic and capitalist project of transcending finitude by means of scientific, technological and economic progress.
It should come as no surprise that in the midst of this there should be a revival of interest in Paul of Tarsus. Any reasonable reading of Paul cannot help but locate in his letters the seeds of two millennia of Christian antisemitism —and by way of that antisemitism the transformation of a messianic sect within Judaism into a legitimating force for Empire (Mansueto 2002). And there is a good case to be made that he functioned as a Roman “counterinsurgency”operative (Voskuilen and Sheldon 2008). And yet scholars as diverse as Agamben. (200/2005),Baidou (2002/2003), and Zizek (Zizek 1999) have found in him the rotes of revolutionary universalism.
We are not, to be sure, arguing that theology should not address itself to the broader concerns of humanity in the present period, to the “joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men (sic) of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted (Gaudium et Spes 1).” On the contrary, we will argue for what Francis Schussler Fiorenza (Fiorenza 1977/2012) has called a consciously political theology, because theology is always political, even when it is not aware of the social basis and political valence of its interventions. And we will argue for a theologically conscious politics —and a theologically conscious theory to guide it. We need a theology which sets politics in its broader civilizational and spiritual context. But this theology needs a firm foundation in social theory (and indeed the sciences in general) and in philosophy, which can ensure that it serves the interests of humanity as a whole, and does not fall prey to complex, multigenerational ideological operations from the Right.
What might this look like? Part of the difficulty in answering this question derives from the ambiguous position of theology in the secular academy.
If the study of religion sits uncomfortably in the academy it is for good reason. The academy itself, even in its secular, technocratic, and corporate manifestations, is fundamentally a religious institution. The history of the academy is nothing other than the history of humanity’s changing –some would say evolving– engagement with the sacred. What began as myth and ritual, a system of shared meanings and practices which ordered the earliest human societies towards their ends, becomes in the axial age (Jaspers 1953) the mystery cult and poetry, philosophy and theology and, with the dawn of the third saeculum the criticism of religion, which in turn finds its development in hermeneutic and social scientific engagements with the sacred. When we study religion –almost regardless of how we proceed– we reveal, in a way which we otherwise keep carefully concealed, our hidden agenda, which has always, since the time of the first academy (Plato’s) been not merely to interpret the world, but to change it (Marx 1845/2002). And in its “final” (liberal, democratic, and communist) humanistic form, the criticism of religion seeks not merely to understand the divine, but to realize the humanity’s deepest, in fact constituent, desire: the desire to be God (Sartre 1943).
Because it is constitutive of the academy, and thus of all disciplines, the study of religion cannot itself be a discipline. It is, rather, a field of study which, in the secular academy, operates covertly as one interdisciplinary field among many, but which remains, even as it is marginalized, substantively universal in its scope. The fragmented approach to this study is a product not of the immaturity of the field but rather an artifact of an ongoing political and ideological (in fact theological) struggle between competing ways of being human and their associated civilizational projects –a struggle in which the competing parties, at least to the extent that they are strategically and tactically self-conscious, all recognize that their battle can never be anything other than occult. This is because the dominant technocratic secular project, which aims at transcending finitude by means of scientific, technological, and economic progress, and the subaltern humanistic secular project which aims at transcending contingency by creating a political subject which makes humanity the master of its own destiny, exercise hegemony by concealing their (theological) character and mediating their principles and values through various “reinterpretations” of axial traditions which alone are admitted to be religious. Breaking this cover would require both projects to attempt a direct apologetic which, in the light of the events of the long twentieth century, which radically undercut the theotic claims of both “science” and “politics,” would no longer be credible. At the same time, the older “axial” traditions, widespread dissatisfaction with the “modern” and the “secular” notwithstanding, lack the capacity to present themselves as credible global alternatives to the secular projects –or, when they do (as in the case of Christian and at least some other fundamentalisms) retain the underlying, defining metaphysics of the saeculum: the univocity of Being.
It is in this context that we must understand theology’s most recent maneuvers. And it is in this context that we must frame our own task in this Summa: Against Capital. Specifically, we need to map out just how and why the legal theories of a NAZI jurist came to inspire and even dominate so much of the “Left” academy and turned the “humanistic” intelligentsia into its opposite. —and how this fits into the larger hermeneutic-ontological project. And we must trace out the even more complex and involved process by which the irrationalist interpretations of a scientific theory (quantum mechanics) the relative value of which we do not deny became hegemonic for the sciences as a whole.
It is to these tasks that we turn in our next installment.
References
Agamben, Giorgio. 1995/1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford University Press
_________________. 2000/2005, The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans. Stanford University Press
_________________. 2003/2005. State of Exception. Stanford University Press
_________________. 2007/2011. The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government. Stanford University Press
_________________. 2010/2012. The Church and the Kingdom. Stanford University Press
_________________. 2011/2013. The Highest Poverty. Stanford University Press
_________________. 2012/2012 Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty. Stanford University Press
_________________. 2013/2015. Pilate and Jesus. Stanford University Press
_________________. 2013/2017. The Mystery of Evil: Benedict XVI and the End of Days. Stanford University Press
Baidou, Alain. 1998/ 2005. Being and Event, transl. by Oliver Feltham; (New York: Continuum
_____________. 2002/2003. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Stanford University Press
_____________. 2006/2009. Logics of Worlds: Being and Event, Volume 2, New York: Continuum.
Barbour, Ian. 2000. When Science Meets Religion. SanFrancisco: Harper
Benjamin, Walter. 1921/1978. “Critique of Violence,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, tr. Edmund Jephcott, New York: Schocken Books
Fiorenza, Francis Schussler. 1977/2012 . Political Theology as Foundational Theology. Proceedings of the Catholic Theological Society of America, 32. Retrieved from https://ejournals.bc.edu/index.php/ctsa/article/view/2881
Lerner, Eric. 1991.the Big Bang never Happened. New York: Random House
Mansueto, Anthony. 2001. “Christianity, Antisemitism, and Empire,” in Religion and Dialectics, Lanham: University Press of America.
_____________. 2005. Spirituality and Dialectics. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books (with Mary Mansueto)
_____________. 2012 Knowing God: The Journey of the Dialectic.Eugene, OR: Pickwick
_____________. 2016. The Ways of Wisdom. Eugene, OR: Pickwick
Marx, Karl. 1845/2002. Theses on Feuerbach, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm
Rascke, Carl. 2012. Postmodernism and the Revolution in Religious Theory. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
Sartre, Jean Paul. 1943/1993. Being and Nothingness. New York: Washington Square Press. Schmitt, Carl. 1921/2014. Dictatorship. From the Origin of the Modern Concept of Sovereignty to Proletarian Class Struggle (1921), Cambridge: Polity Press
_____________. 1922/2005. Political Theology. Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (1922), trans. by G. Schwab, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Tipler, Frank. 1994. The Physics of Immortality, New York, Doubleday
Voskuilen, Thijs and Sheldom, Rose Mary. 2008 OperationMessiah: St. Paul, Roman Intelligence, and the Birth of Christianity. Valentine Mitchell
Žižek, Slavoj. 1999. “The Politics of Truth, or, Alain Badiou as a Reader of St. Paul,” in The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Core of Political Ontology. New York: Verso
An earlier version of this paper was presented as “Why Religious Studies is not a discipline and why it is important anyway,” at Revisioning Religious Studies, Denver, November 2018
This is the first installment of what I expect will be a very long-running serialization of my Summa Theologiae et Politicae: Against Capital. This will be my major systematic work and, over the course of what will likely be several volumes will explore what it means to be, and especially what it means to be human, in the light of our desire for Being and the current crisis of the human civilizational project. I invite you to become an active participant in shaping this work by sharing your questions, comments, and critiques.
Humanity stands at a critical juncture. We can continue down our current road, the capitalist road, and watch as the planet is rendered uninhabitable by climate change, resource depletion, and the toxic waste generated by the combustion of the planet by industrial technology and as human civilization is destroyed by the capitalist combustion of human capacities and human relationships. Humanity will be either fully instrumentalized as a tool of Capital or displaced by machine intelligence, or both, and the planet will belong to Capital: not the historic human bourgeoisie, with all its many vices but also many human virtues, but rather to the emergent autonomous intelligence running like software on the hardware of humanity and its artifacts. And Capital, like a great asura, will do the only thing it knows how to do. It will attempt a tragically misunderstood and impossible theosis:a pure productivity without consumption. This is the spiritual and civilizational ideal of capitalism, prefigured the Reformed doctrine disinterested benevolence, and analyzed so brilliantly by Weber in the Protestant Ethic (Weber 1920/1968). But it is quite impossible. Thermodynamics will make certain that. And what will be left instead will be nothing but pure combustion.
We can continue down our present pathway or we can chart a new one. But for this latter task our existing theory is nowhere near adequate. Marx (Marx 1867/1996), while he opened up the the field of Capital for scientific investigation, had only a very limited experience of Capital and thus only a very limited vision of what it would become. Dialectical and historical materialism and critical theory have extended Marx’s analysis, interpretation, and critique, but they remain in many ways the science of an earlier capitalism and an earlier stage in history, when Capital was something owned by the bourgeoisie and thus by at least a small part of humanity and history really was the history of class struggles. Today Capital owns us all, indeed constitutes us (even the bourgeoisie) and the struggle is between humanity and our common home —the Earth— on the one hand, and an emergent intelligence which threats to destroy us. Marx still believed that capitalism was necessary, progressive stage in our development. We believe that it is a potentially fatal evolutionary dead end.
These questions about the adequacy of Marx’s analysis are further complicated by the history of “actually existing socialism,” which, while it sometimes made real contributions to human liberation and human development, has not, on the whole, proven itself to be an authentic form of transition to communism, understood to include at the very least the decommodification of labor power and the restoration of creative control over labor to the workers themselves. On the contrary, historic socialism has on the whole, radicalized and extended proletarianization and has served the interests of primitive accumulation, with the result that it is better understood as a more “popular” variant of the statist road to capitalist development than as form of transition to communism (Moore 1968, Skocpol 1978).
Weber can help us here, and so can Durkheim. But they too can only take us so far. Weber (Weber 1968/1920) understood better than Marx the capitalist ideal —and its destructive impossibility. And he had a dawning intuition in his discussion of the “iron cage of instrumental rationality” that Capital, while it had emerged from humanity, was becoming an autonomous power. But he could not, in his time, imagine fully what it would become. And Durkheim (1893/1964) understood early on, in a way that Marx did not, that capitalism was destroying the very fabric of our society, breaking down through the division of labor the bonds which nurture the meaning and solidarity which make us human, but he had no idea that that destruction would eventually become nearly complete.
There have, to be sure, been tentative efforts to engage what Capital is becoming. Leninism was first and foremost a response to the fact that the alienation engendered by the commodification of labor power (Marx 1844/2000) undercut the spontaneous development of socialist consciousness within the proletariat and necessitated the formation of a conscious, professional revolutionary leadership (Lenin 1902/1929).But Lenin was mostly concerned with the road to state power.He did not thematize and analyze in depth the impact of alienation on the formation of socialist consciousness and did not explain how the revolutionary leadership, unlike the proletariat it led, was to escape the spiritual deformities caused by capitalism. The Frankfort School (Fromm 1941, 1947) thematized and engaged the first of these questions, extending the analysis to show how capitalism systematically produces fascism, but offered little in the way of a solution. Gramsci (Gramsci 1926-1935/2000) engaged a related set of questions, and offered more in the way of a strategy, but it was largely away around the problem rather than through it, building support for socialism on the basis of precapitalist meanings and solidarities, religious, nationalistic, or democratic. He did not tell us what to do once Capital has destroyed these meanings and solidarities or so infected them with authoritarian dynamics that they become useless. Mao (Mao 1962) understood that the persistence of commodity relations under socialism reproduces capitalism, but he attributed the problem to petty commodity production, which is relatively benign, and not to the commodification of labor power, which he left untouched. The result was a Cultural Revolution which leveraged an important insight in service of internal power struggles within the party, struggles which nearly destroyed humanity’s oldest continuously existing civilization.
The interpreters of Weber and Durkheim have also fallen short. While Weber ended his life convinced that capitalism was destroying the human spirit (even if he did not know what to do about this) most later interpretive sociology has been an apologia for capitalism, joining Weber’s insights regarding the Protestant Ethic to an evolutionary paradigm which regards capitalism as the best possible human adaptation to life on this planet, or else arguing that humanity is doomed to endless struggle between competing civilizational ideals. (Huntington 1993). Durkheim’s interpreters (Bellah 2011) have elucidated the dangers of egoism and anomie and deepened his account of how human societies and human capacities develop, but they have not come to terms with Capital.
The result has been a dark turn in theory which has its antecedents deep in the nineteenth century, but which is marked above all by the hegemony of Martin Heidegger (Heidegger 1938/2000) and his interpreters across the humanities and social sciences. The attraction of Heidegger would not be hard to see —were he not an unrepentant NAZI.Heidegger thematized and criticized the instrumentalization of humanity and nature at a time when socialism had come to mean forced collectivization and primitive socialist accumulation. But even if his analysis had not led him to NAZISM —by means, we will show, of an ineluctable, necessary logic— his analysis of the roots of this dynamic of “technopolitical control” in what he calls Latin “ontotheology,” the drive to a universal explanatory-deductive system which explains the universe and orders human action, simply doesn’t hold up (Mansueto 2012). And his theory of history as a series of divergent “advents”or “unveilings of Being” is little more than a philosophical substructure for the “clash of civilizations” reading of Weber, with the difference that where the neoconservatives who popularized this reading in the 1990s and 2000s argued for defending liberal, democratic, values Heidegger argues for … NAZISM.
This is why, even though it is not at all hard to find theory which recognizes just how destructive capitalism has become and which recognizes that historic socialism was also a dead end, we have no vision, no analysis, no strategy to move us forward.The poststructuralist, deconstructive, genealogical, and “weak communist” theory (Derrida 1967/1977, Foucault 1976/1979, Agamben 1995/1998, Vattimo and Zavala 2011) which presents itself as an alternative in the present period, while it is capable of incisive criticisms of existing structures of oppression, teaches that any attempt to ground such a critique metaphysically or morally, and to join it to an explanatory-deductive theory which can in turn govern strategy will lead right back to ontotheology and technopolitical instrumentalization. In other words, Heidegger’s followers, not wanting to advocate NAZISM, advocate Nothing. This trend, furthermore, while often at least seeming to prioritize the struggle against racism and patriarchy over the struggle against Capital, does so on the basis of the very logic which led Heidegger to NAZISM in the first place.
Capital no longer needs to disarm the Left. We have disarmed ourselves.
And so we need a new theory and a new analysis of the historic trajectory of Capital which takes into consideration where capitalism has actually led us. But if we are going to the laws of motion Capital and their articulation with imperialism and colonialism, patriarchy and misogyny, which long precede Capital, we need a theory with much more comprehensive historic reach. And if we are going to take seriously the depth of the ecological crisis and its roots in an industrial technology intimately bound up with the scientific paradigms which emerged from the scientific revolutions of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, as well as the emergence of Capital as an autonomous intelligence independent of the historic bourgeoisie and the possible emergence of other forms of artificial intelligence, this cannot just be a social theory. We need a theory which thinks about the human civilizational project in a much broader context, a theory which allows us to think politically about space and time, place and history, matter and energy, minerals and chemicals, plants and animals, rational animals and intelligent machines and differently-embodied intellects like Capital. Only on this basis can we elaborate a strategy which will allow us to engage a struggle which is increasingly no longer just with human adversaries but with the asuric, transhuman power which is Capital.
But there is more. Humanity’s struggle against Capital depends on a comprehensive account of what it means to be human, and thus of human potential and of the aims of human life in the context of the material reality we inhabit. And this in turn requires a comprehensive treatment of the nature of Being as such, including 1) what we can know and how, 2) the nature of the material universe and its cosmoi, 3) the first principle and the end or purpose to which the universe is ordered,and, most especially, of 4) human nature, the specific ends to which we are ordered, and our possible evolutionary trajectory.Only on this basis that we can discern how to ripen Being and to cultivate the kind of human beings who can defeat Capital and realize the communist ideal of a society in which“every one of [our]relations … must be a specific expression, corresponding to the object of [our] will, of [our] real individual life Marx 1844/2000).And so we need philosophy, which as Marx always knew, is the “head of the revolution (Marx 1843/2000).”
What we discover, though, is that the end to which humanity is ordered is nothing other than God, understood as the Power of Being as Such. This is quite apart from the question of whether or not “God exists.”The atheist Sartre understood that “humanity is the desire to be God (Sartre 1943),” and Buddhism has long argued that the underlying cause of human suffering is our difficulty in accepting that our desire for permanent, inherent existence, which is the same thing as the desire to be God, is impossible.While we will address question of the existence and nature God, and give a more positive evaluation of the arguments forGod than either Sartre or the Buddhists, the more pressing question is to consider what it means to Be and specifically what it means to be human in relation to our desire to be God.We need, in other words, a theology. And since we have already framed the question of what it means to be human in terms of contemporary political struggles, the sort of theology we need is a political theology.
The larger work —my Summa Theologiae in Re Publicae: Against Capital— of which this is the very beginning, will be all of these: fundamental theory (formal and scientific, physical, biologial, social, and transocial), philosophy, and (political) theology and it will examine all of these questions in considerable depth, in the light of the relevance to the current crisis and the ultimate ends of human life. But since the higher discipline (here political theology) forms and informs the lower (science and philosophy), we need to begin with an in-depth discussion of what we mean by political theology, especially in the light of its recent revivals. It is to this task which will turn in the next installment of this blog.
References
Agamben, Giorgio. 1995. Homo Sacer: Il potere sovrano e la vita nuda Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen as Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998). Stanford: Stanford University Press
Bellah, Robert. 2011. Religion in Human Evolution. Cambridge: Belknap
Derrida, Jacques. 1967/1978. “Violence and Metaphysics,” and “From a Restricted to a General Economy: For an Hegelianism Without Reserve,” in Writing and Difference, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Durkheim, Emile. 1893/1964. The Division of Labor in Society. New York: Free Press
Fromm, Erich. 1941. Escape from Freedom, New York: Holt Reinhart Winston.
———. 1947. Man For Himself. New York: Holt Reinhart Winston.
Foucault, Michel. 1976/1779. A History of Sexuality: Introduction (The Will to Knowledge). London:Penguin.
Heidegger, Martin. 1936/2012. Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event).Trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Huntington, Samuel. 1993. “The Clash of Civilizations,” in Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993
Lenin, V. I.1902/1929. What is to Be Done?New York: International
Moore, Barrington, 1966.Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Boston: Beacon
Sartre, Jean Paul. 1943/1993. Being and Nothingness. New York: Washington Square Press.
Skocpol, Theda. 1979. States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Vattimo, Gianni and Zabala, Santiago. 2011. Hermeneutic Communism. New York: New York: Columbia University Press
Weber, Max. 1920/1968. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Scribners
As we celebrate the victory of the Democratic Party in the 2020 US General Election —and the end of the disastrous Trump government— it is important to be clear regarding what has and what has not changed —not because the change is not significant, because it is, but because many of our most important tasks nonetheless remain the same, and where they have changed addressing them requires a correct reading of the objective situation. Specifically, there is a grave danger that those on the Left will assume that the need for a broad popular front against fascism has ended and begin to polarize on the new government at a time when it needs our support and creativity in addressing critical challenges such as the pandemic and climate change and the continuing assault from the New Axis and the Dark Enlightenment.
In attempting to provide clarity regarding our tasks in the current conjuncture we will begin by asking what happened. What factors shaped the Democratic victory? And why did Trump do as well as he did? We will then go on to analyze what has and has not changed in the objective situation, and draw out the implications of this analysis for bothour longue duree strategy and for the way in which we understand the principal tasks of this period and conjuncture.
What Happened?
The victory of the Democratic Party in the 2020 US General Election is a product of the following factors:
broad popular rejection of Trump’s fascism, racism, patriarchy, climate denial, and his handling of the pandemic,
broad popular support for effective action to address these problems, even if there is also significant disagreement regarding just how to do so, and
improved election security which made it impossible for the FSB/Republican axis to steal the election.
Campaign funding data (Open Secrets 2020) shows overwhelming support for the Democrats across all of the most advanced sectors of Capital, including information, technology, and investment banking as well asphilantropocapitalists, the clergy, and the humanistic intelligentsia as represented in the education, civil service, and nonprofit sectors as well as organized labor. The Republicans, on the other hand command energy and natural resources (except sustainable energy production), forestry, agriculture, construction, transportation, and some lower and mid-technology and low manufacturing activity such as textiles and steel. Other sectors, including defense, and the technical and business intelligentsia (think engineers and accountants) , are sharply divided.
Demographic data (Frey 2020) show at most small shifts from 2016, with major divisions along the lines of race, gender, religion, education, and urban versus rural location, with some evidence that urbanization is actually a substitute for linkage to the global market, which is difficult to measure. Shifts occurred to the Democrats most especially in the suburbs of major metropolitan areas. Shifts towards the Republicans took place among men, including Black, Latino, and Asian men, and among Latinos generally, especially those of Cuban descent and those who identify as having multigenerational roots in the US as opposed to those who identify as immigrants or the descendants of recent immigrants.
The Democratic victory in the election was assisted by improved election security which made it more difficult for the FSB and their Republican allies to steal the election and by a generally strong campaign in spite of the limitations on the ground game imposed by the pandemic.
But what of Trump’s continued strong support? In the wake of the 2016 general election there was a great deal of analysis claiming that Trump’s victory represented the economic anxiety of something called the “white working class.” The numbers then, as now, do little to support this claim, at least if we understand the working class to mean those who must sell their labor power in order to survive.And even if we use a broader definition, lower income is consistently associated with votes for the Democratic Party.What is actually at issue here is a reassertion of racist and patriarchal identities in response to the alienation which accompanies proletarianization.
Marx expected that the process of proletarianization would generate a revolutionary class which would, with little more than organizing and strategic leadership, struggle to transcend capitalism and decommodify labor power (Marx and Engels 1848/2000). This has turned out to be a fundamental mistake. The alienation engendered by the commodification of labor power is real and results in a radical de-humanization and de-moralization of the proletariat. In response to this, as Fromm and others have demonstrated (Fromm 1941/1994), people develop authoritarian personality structures centered on submitting to those above them and dominating those below them. This is, by itself, not confined just to “white” workers. It happens to everyone to the extent to which they lose creative control over their own labor, are ripped from communities of shared meaning,and are not able to find a way to resist at a spiritual level. But when it happens to white people, and white men in particular, the authoritarian psychological dynamics that take shape are expressed by way of racist and patriarchal ideologies, creating a massive strategic reserve for the Right. We see a lesser form of this playing out with Black and Latino men, who have actually turned towards Trump since 2016.
These contradictions are further exacerbated by status contradictions within the working classes. Status refers to the prestige, honor, or mana attaching to a person or thing, and Marx and his interpreters have ignored it at their peril, though Weber (Weber 1920/1968) analyzed it in depth, and Bourdieu (Bourdieu 1983/1986) considered it under the category of “cultural capital.” First, there are sharp contradictions between those who have a university level education and those who do not, and especially between those who have a liberal arts education and those who do not. In the multidimensional status hierarchy which exists in the US, higher education education generally has emerged as a substitute for older forms of ascribed status such as race and gender and authentic liberal education in particular confers nominal gentry status. Increased access to higher education has enabled both women and members of historically oppressed communities to gain status in relation to “white” men who do not have a university degree.
Indeed, the term “white working class” must be understood as referring not to an intersection of actual class and ethnicity — people of European descent who are forced to sell their labor power in order to survive— but rather to a constructedidentity, and a racist and patriarchal one at that, that dates back to Kevin Phillips “southern strategy” for the Republican Party (Phillips 1969, Grosghal and Kruse 2019). Many so called “white workers” are not proletarianized at all but are small proprietors of low status but often very lucrative businesses such as automobile dealerships, sometimes making millions of dollars a year. And of course the symbols of “white working class” identity are not symbols of proletarianization or even, for that matter, of manual labor, but rather of racism (the Confederate Flag) and machismo (an oversized pick-up that allows one to rule the road, or a large collection of rifles).
The basis for the formation of this sort of identity is spontaneous, a direct and inevitable result of the alienation of labor, but it is cultivated, crafted, and mobilized by a conscious leadership on the Right, beginning with the theoreticians of the Southern strategy and continuing today with the interventions of the New Axis consisting of right accelerationist/transhumanist sectors of Capital (Peter Thiel) backed by the more usual members of the reactionary bourgeoisie (the extractive, agrarian, construction, transportation, and manufacturing sectors), along with reterritorializing state actors such as Russia,and at least some elements of the leadership in Turkey, India (under the BJP) and China (under Xi).This Axis has determined that the “libertarian” policies they favor (i.e. policies which give them the right to do whatever they please, even if it harms others) will never be implemented in a democratic setting and have made the struggle against democracy, explicitly in the case of the Dark Enlightenment and indirectly, by undercutting the democratic claims of immigrants and those not of European origin among the ethnonationalists, their central priority. They have at their disposal a vast political apparatus including major media outlets such as Fox News and a network of alternative media sources, as well as large “sock puppet” farms around the world working to shape identities and mobilize political actors.
Finally, something must be said about the claim of the so-called Justice Democrats and democratic socialists that the Democratic campaign would have been more effective had it been led by Sanders rather than Biden and had the platform included certain “left” litmus-test positions such as ”medicare for all” and “defund the police.”There is absolutely no evidence to support these claims. Justice Democrats almost uniformly underperformed Biden even in some of the most progressive districts in the country. And this is what we would expect.The alienation of labor which follows on proletarianization effectively destroys any spontaneous mass base for what the Justice Democrats are calling “socialism.”Rebuilding it requires protracted intervention on the part of a conscious leadership which must effectively resocialize the entire population.Simply surfacing more radical demands does not contribute to this. This why the position of the so called “democratic socialists,” a position historically known as maximalism, was rejected by the nominally more “leftist” communists a century ago and must be rejected now.
Has the Objective Situation Changed?
This question has two different dimensions. First, does the Democratic victory indicate that the broader underlying situation has changed, i.e. have we entered a new period or regime of accumulation?Second, to what extent does the Democratic victory itself alter the objective situation?
The answer to the first question is, at the broadest level, no. On the one hand the balance of power does not and has not actually favored global fascism. Trump’s victory in 2016 depended on significant levels of interference by the FSB and related actors.On the other hand, as we have noted, fascism represents a permanent danger under capitalism and one that deepens as the process of proletarianization advances.More broadly, we remain in the early stages of ageneralized crisis of technocratic capitalist civilization, marked by profound ecological crisis and a systematic destruction of the social fabric and a resulting dehumanization as a result of the alienation of labor.We are also in the early stages of the emergence of Capital as an autonomous intelligence independent of the historic bourgeoisie, pointing towards a possible transhuman or posthuman future for the planet.
With respect to the second question, the Democratic victory clearly matters.We will see a return to a more “normal” pattern of government focused on pragmatic solutions to global problems such as climate change and the pandemic, a more open policy towards immigrants and refugees, at least some effort to address police violence, and modest efforts to come to terms with the dislocations caused by technological progress and globalization by improving the social safety net and perhaps even beginning to experiment with initiatives such as the Universal Basic Income. These are all changes which will save lives, quite possibly prevent the planet from becoming uninhabitable, and make modest but real contributions to restraining racism, sexism, and possibly even market pressures.But it does not, for the reasons we have already noted, undercut the deeper social basis for fascism nor does it all by itself disarm the Dark Enlightenment/Ethnonationalist New Axis.
Strategic and Operational Directions
What are the implications of this analysis at the strategic, operational, and tactical level?
Strategic Directions
At the strategic level, our principal directions remain unchanged. We must identify, cultivate, mentor, and deploy organizers who are capable of catalyzing and guiding a longue duree civilizational transition, with the capacity to act across multiple trajectories of transition —reform, revolution, decadence, and collapse. These leaders must, in turn, be deployed in the arduous work of healing the damage that Capital has done to our planet and its peoples, creating a new way of life on the margins of and within the womb of the old, building the critical mass of power to stand against Capital effectively as it increasingly takes the form of an autonomous intelligence, independent of humanity, and establishing and exercising the cultural hegemony necessary to legitimate and sustain this struggle over what may be an arbitrarily long period.
What do we look for in organizers? An organizer must be spiritually and politically mature, capable of a broad vision and an unshakeable revolutionary commitment. They must be dedicated to the work of ripening being and specifically of promoting the full development of human capacities. They must be capable of understanding the need to transcend capitalism in order to do this. And they must fully understand that this is a protracted, multigenerational process. Neither they, nor their children, nor their children’s children will enjoy the fruit of their labor. They must have the potential to develop extraordinary relational skills, learning to engage potential leaders one on one, map out their interests, networks, and capacities, and mentor them as they themselves have been mentored. And they must be self-aware, reflective, self-critical, able to learn from mistakes and grow in ways that can often be painful.
What do we mean when we say that they must be deployed in healing the damage which Capital has done to the planet and its peoples? This means, first of all, creating the technological basis for a new way of being that is in harmony with the laws of nature and which, rather than breaking down existing forms of organization to release energy and do work, instead taps into the underlying self-organizing dynamic within matter to promote the emergence of new and more complex forms. We call such technologies hortic, alchemical, or synergistic. Second, it means repairing the alienation produced by the commodification of labor power, and especially the authoritarian personality structures which emerge as this alienation is channeled through racist and patriarchal structures. This work is spiritual in nature: ideological, therapeutic, and pastoral. We must challenge and demonstrate the internal contradictions of capitalist, racist, and patriarchal ideologies but we must also cultivate generative personality structures to which these ideologies will not appeal. And we must show skillful means in doing so. We must understand that some individuals need to be approached intellectually and others affectively. And in all cases, building communities which sustain spiritual healing and the cultivation of generative personalities is of foundational importance.
What does it mean to cultivate a new way of life on the margins and in the womb of the old?Cultivating a new way of life on the margins of the old means building intentional communities using hortic, alchemical, or synergistic technologies, an economic base where people cooperate in a way which respects their rational and creative autonomy, deliberative structures which engage in reflection around ends as well as means, and which promote the full development of their members, intellectually, morally, spiritually, and politically.Cultivating a new way of life in the womb of the old means creating or protecting sanctuaries or “liberated zones” within existing institutions which share as many of these characteristics as possible.
Together these two forms of institutional organizing will, over a protracted period, build the critical mass of power necessary to confront Capital effectively. In this sense the work of building a core of organizers and the work that these organizers do when deployed is not entirely distinct. Organizers constitute a conscious leadership, but aim to engage emerging leaders in as profound a way as possible, drawing them into processes of deliberation, and growing them into organizers themselves. Organizing in this sense is the principal responsibility of every revolutionary. Whatever other work we undertake we must organize in our workplace and/or local community. Otherwise we will never build the power to confront Capital.
What do we mean by confronting Capital? Confronting Capital itself will be a multidimensional process, involving an as yet indeterminate mixture of electoral struggle, direct action, armed struggle, building and exercising cultural hegemony, and in all probability a significant measure ofcyberwarfare. It must always be our aim to limit violence as much as possible and to do as much as we can without it. And we should never believe that large numbers of people can be forced to embrace communism. They must grow into it. Where armed struggle is required, it must be defensive, aimed at protecting electoral and other gains from Capital acting e illegally, extra legally, or in contradiction with natural law.
The mention of cyberwarfare may seem strange here, but one of our central claims is that Capital is an emergent intelligence independent of humanity. While parts of the bourgeoisie may ally themselves with Capital, others will ally themselves with us —with humanity— as this struggle takes shape. And even those elements of the bourgeoisie which ally themselves with Capital are not Capital itself. Defeating them does not defeat Capital, which is a formal relation not a group of people. What we are attempting to do is to re-program a system, not destroy a piece of machinery or kill a group of people. To the extent that this system increasingly runs on computers and other electronic networks, cyberwarfare is integral to that reprogramming. And to the extent that it still “runs” on physical, biological, and social systems, it is an important metaphor for the forms of struggle we must develop.
What do we mean by establishing cultural hegemony? Cultural hegemony consists in defining the terms of public deliberation around what it means to be human —around the ends of human life— and around the means to these ends. It does not require imposing a single unified ideology. What it does require is regulating the way in which ideological claims are framed and evaluated. Specifically, we need for there to be deliberation around the question of what it means to be human and around how to promote the full development of all human beings, and indeed on how to ripen being generally. Within this context pluralism is not only possible but essential. We do not even need to prevent people from advocating capitalism, as long as the resulting debate asks whether or not capitalism promotes human development. It does not. Because capitalism quite literally incinerates planets and people it can never gain a following where ripening being, even if understood in many different ways, is the shared purpose of the community.
Cultural hegemony is exercised through institutions.Thus the priority we place on organizing cultural institutions, on building, conserving, and transforming them. Cultural hegemony is never about having a charismatic leader who everyone follows (the great mistake of the Russian and Chinese revolutions), but about creating structures that actually ripen Being, so that there are always many leaders operating in diverse ways across diverse dimensions.
Operational Directions
These strategic imperatives are more or less permanent, though they may be inflected significantly by the way in which the transition from capitalism to what comes next unfolds.But there are other imperatives which pertain specifically to our period and conjuncture.Even here, however,our principal tasks have changed only a little. As we have seen, while the victory of the Democratic Party in the 2020 US General Election is significant, it does not represent a definitive defeat of fascism. On the contrary, we have shown that capitalism constantly and permanently generates fascistic tendencies, resistance to which thus always constitutes our principal task in any given (capitalist) period. This is because a fascist victory could well spell the end of humanity and end of our planet.
Because of this, all of the activities outlined above must be carried out in the context of the popular front against fascism. This means that we must always give priority to defeating fascism over struggle with our allies in the liberal bourgeoisie. This does not mean that internal struggle within the popular front is never permissible, but our struggle against capitalism takes place in the context of our basic organizing work, not in the context of the popular front. i.e. not in the electoral arena.
This said, the specific work of the popular front, because the election brings a Democratic government to power in the US, has changed. Before we were focused primarily on impeaching Trump and then on winning the election. Now we must focus on making the Democratic government successful, both because the work it will undertake is important for the planet and for humanity and because we want to avoid another Republican presidency. This means ensuring the success of the new government in:
containing the pandemic and supporting an economic recovery,
restarting and intensifying efforts to contain climate change and promote the use of sustainable energy sources,
returning to a more open immigrant and refugee policy,
confronting systemic racism, especially in the criminal justice system by purging police departments of the white nationalists who have intentionally infiltrated them, ending sentencing rules which lead to the mass incarceration of historically oppressed peoples,and reforming the drug laws which are instrumental in those incarcerations, and
expanding access to and public subsidies for health care and, if possible, expanding the social safety net generally.
Internationally the Democratic government will need to carry out some tasks which may well be unpopular on the Left. First, it will need to repair the fabric of global trade on which most economies on the planet now depend.This is the only way to prevent the mass impoverishment which would result from a turn to autarchy just as climate change is altering comparative advantages and the only context in which we will be able to struggle effectively for ecological protections and labor rights at the global level. Second, it will need to rebuild and restructure our international alliance system and our military to contain and combat what I have called the New Axis of reterritorializing and ethnonationalist powers and Dark Enlightenment nonstate actors.This in turn will require rebuilding and expanding our intelligence capacity in the areas of both human intelligence and signals intelligence, as well as developing new capacities in the area of information and cyberwarfare, which are emerging as principal forms of military conflict on the global stage.
Both of these moves will be difficult for those of us who came of age politically in the era of anti-imperialist struggles.But frankly anti-imperialism long ago became intertwined with the geopolitical imperatives of states like Russia and China which are themselves imperial formations and remained so after their respective revolutions. Anti-imperialist struggles were also always inter-imperialist struggles, making a pure revolutionary defeatism problematic at the very least.And in spite of the efforts of Russia, China and some other emerging powers, the era of not just territorial empire but of classical imperialism based on the export of what is meaningfully “national” Capital is long past. The global hegemon is no longer the United States acting on behalf of “its” capitalists. It is Capital itself. All states, including “superpowers”and “great powers” are terrains of struggle like any other institution. In the wake of the rise of the New Axis and especially in the light of Russian support for fascism in the US, Europe, and elsewhere, and taking into account the progressive role of the intelligence community in the resistance to the Trump government over the past four years, the Left needs to regard support for and participation in the intelligence community and the US military in much the same way we understood participation in the OSS and WWII —as part of the antifascist struggle.
***
Fascism will not be defeated until capitalism has been defeated.But capitalism will not be defeated by a small group of maximalists who have a very limited political base at best, and very little grasp of the history of anticapitalist struggles and its strategic, operational, and tactical lessons. Maximalism, because it does not take into account the alienation of labor and the constant production and reproduction of racist and patriarchal identities, always creates an opening for fascism.This is because it does not prioritize combating racism and patriarchy and because it assumes that people understand their self interest in a (generative, creative) way which capitalism makes accessible to them. We must actually heal humanity before humanity will act on its own behalf. In the meanwhile we must act to protect our freedom to do that work, and to defend the most vulnerable from those who annihilate them. And this means doing the hard work of organizing hidden the shadows, while maintaining the popular front.
As the 2020 US General Election approaches, the United States and the world stand at a crossroads, faced with a decision which may well be the most momentous in their history. It is a choice between freedom and slavery, fascism and liberal democracy, survival and genocide. That some elements on the Left continue to promote the idea that there is no significant difference between the candidates or between the Democratic and Republican parties is astounding, as it the claim conflicts with both obvious fact and the entire body of revolutionary theory which we have painstakingly built up over the past two centuries.
The argument against voting for Biden generally consists of four distinct propositions: 1) that Biden represents a bourgeois party or at best the dominant neoliberal wing of a multi-class party and that a vote for Biden is therefore a vote for capitalism and against socialism, that 2) Biden will “do nothing for the working class” that 3) electing reformers retards the radicalization of the proletariat, and that 4) a popular front led by the bourgeoisie will never transcend capitalism.
The first of these claims is in fact broadly true, but it is no reason not to vote for Biden and the Democrats. As even a cursory analysis of the election finance data will demonstrate, both of the principal political parties in the United States are financed and thus controlled by the bourgeoisie. The Democratic Party, however, represents the more progressive sectors of the bourgeoisie —the information, technology, and finance sectors in particular, with the education and the nonprofit sector, elements of the petty bourgeoisie, both traditional and new, and the unionized working class playing the role of junior partners in a class alliance. The Republican Party represents the most backward sectors of Capital: mining, energy, lumber, and most agriculture, as well as the lowest technology manufacturing and transportation sectors, with much but not all of the traditional petty bourgeoisie (think insurance agents and automobile dealers) as junior partners in the alliance. Many sectors of the bourgeoisie, such as defense/aerospace and health care and insurance are sharply divided, as is the “new” petty bourgeoisie or professional managerial class, depending on the sector in which they work and the relative weight of humanistic, scientific technical, financial education in their formation.
These are facts. The question, of course, is their significance. And in order to understand their significance we need to understand the difference between the worlds being created by the more progressive and the more reactionary sectors of the bourgeoisie. The progressive bourgeoisie needs a world of literate, diverse, free, and reasonably prosperous consumers who supply the final demand for what the information sector (which is the demand side driver in the current capitalist regime of accumulation) produces (television, film, games, music, etc.), and for the consumer technologies through which those products are distributed. It is this final consumer demand which in turn creates the demand for high technology capital goods (think the equipment used to make smart phones, tablets, and computers and the technological infrastructure necessary to run the internet and 5G networks). And it is the demand for capital goods which creates the demand for Capital. The progressive bourgeoisie, furthermore, because it needs mass consumers needs a habitable planet. They have a limited need for human labor and what labor they need is labor highly skilled and capable of complex intellectual and emotional tasks. They do not, therefore, need to reduce women to their wombs. On the contrary, they need small families which choose parenthood, invest intensely in their children, and cultivate emotional complexity, not toxic masculinity. Finally, they need an integrated global market which gives every producer access to every consumer. And cultural diversity is good for them, creating a multitude of niche markets which many individuals cross, expanding total demand.
This is why Biden and the Democratic Party support investment in green energy, universal access to health care, a higher minimum wage, and investment in education, research, and development. It is also why they support reproductive rights for women, protection for those who do not correspond to gender norms, free trade, and are at least beginning to move on immigration, racism, and police brutality.Are they perfect on these issues? Of course not. But they are vastly better than Trump and the Republican Party.And there is a trajectory, a possible though unlikely world in which continued technological progress gradually renders human labor —or at least involuntary, noncreative human labor— obsolete. The value of labor power and thus real wages —and effective demand— will decline towards zero. If the liberal bourgeoisie wants to continue to sell its products, it will have to support reforms such as a universal basic income and a rapidly rising social wage (goods and services provided directly to all citizens such as free health care, public transportation, education, etc.) which will leave in place mass consumers who can buy them. And as this system expands, capitalist relations of production become an empty shell. “Capitalists” become a sort of archaic title holder, like contemporary members of the aristocracy who are neither the wealthiest nor the highest status people on the planet.Star Trek, in other words, a world in which capitalism has been transcended without anyone ever noticing it, really is a possible future.
The more backward sectors of the bourgeoisie, on the other hand, need cheap labor, which requires growing populations and thus submissive, fertile women. They need submissive labor and thus the racism which keeps a large part of the population living in terror. And for the most part, they need workers with only modest skills. This is why Trump and the Republicans favor extractive and combustive energy which will create a poisoned world in which humanity will have to adopt an r strategy in order to survive. It is why they oppose anything which lightens market pressure or leads to increased wages. It is why the want to strip women of control over their bodies and their lives and ensure that immigrants and African Americans live each day in terror of deportation or random murder. It is why they want to destroy liberal education.
Here, too, there is a trajectory, a possible future. It is one in which impoverished masses languish in slums stretching out across the hellish landscape of a dying planet, while a tiny elite live off their labor in walled compounds. It is a future which combines the worst of natalism and genocide, in which a restored patriarchy cultivates sadomasochistic personalities full of rage and hate which is periodically discharged in wars of annihilation which pit surplus populations against each other.
The future being prepared for us by the liberal bourgeoisie still falls far short of what is possible for humanity. But it is infinitely better that the future which Trump and the Republicans have in store for us.
But this is just a superficial analysis, based on the facts and innocent of revolutionary theory and revolutionary strategy. The relevant theory here is centered around the concept of “contradiction.” One of Marx’s great insights is that history is, in significant measure driven by contradictions. But he was never entirely clear just which contradictions were most fundamental and how various contradictions are articulated with each other. In the Paris Manuscripts he identifies as fundamental the contradiction between humanity’s species being, our underlying creativity, sociality, and sapience, and the ccommodification of labor power which alienates us from our true selves as well as from nature and from each other. In the German Ideology and the Communist Manifesto, on the other hand, the focus is on the contradiction between the forces and relations of production, with the former understood more nearly as advancing technology and the latter as the private property. But in the Manifesto he also claims that “history is the history of class struggle,” and sets out a series of stages through which the class struggle develops, from sabotage to trade unionism to political reformism to the emergence of a revolutionary vanguard.
In all of this, however, Marx made two assumptions which have been proven not to be true. The first is that the liberal and democratic struggles are largely complete, and that socialism, understood as the form of transition to communism, is now on our agenda. The second is that the proletarianization which is a constitutive dimension of capitalist development radicalizes the working classes, generating socialist consciousness if not spontaneously, then at least with the help of the conscious leadership of the humanistic intelligentsia.
Already in the beginning of the last century Lenin recognized that neither of these propositions was true. The liberal and democratic struggles were far from complete in either the majority of the planet which had been colonized by Europe or in places like Russia which represented weak links in the imperialist chain. And proletarianization, far from created a consolidated, revolutionary working class engendered divisions based on location in the international capitalist division of labor, with privileged workers in the imperial metropoles favoring reformist social democracy and marginalized workers and peasants in the colonies supporting socialism. These insights were further refined later in the century by Mao and Fromm. Mao showed that correct political strategy depends on identifying the principal contradiction of a particular period or conjunction. This contradiction will drive political struggles whether we like it or not and we must therefore engage this contradiction and leverage it to advance our ultimate aims. Fromm demonstrated that the alienation which results from the commodification of labor power produces sado-masochistic, authoritarian personalities which are vulnerable —or worse— to fascist appeals.
It was these insights which informed the historic victory of humanity over fascism in the middle of the last century. This struggle was was not won on the basis of sectarian purism. On the contrary, an international communist movement which was supported by a much better organized working class, after veering sharply to the left during the “third period” in the late 1920s (largely so that Stalin could justify the forced collectivization and rapid industrialization necessary to prepare for what he knew would be a struggle to the death with fascism) banked back to the center and forge a popular front with the liberal bourgeoisie and indeed all elements (including, in parts of Europe, elements of the old landed aristocracy) against the fascist menace. The role of the communist movement in leading this struggle secured it a place at the table for nearly fifty years in those countries in Europe in which it played a significant role. And to the extent that the victory over fascism remained incomplete, it is because the left had not yet developed any way to cope with the dehumanizing impact of proletarianization on the human soul.
It is these same principles which we need to apply —and extend— in the present period. While the contradiction between labor and Capital has certainly ripened, it is not yet the principal contradiction of the period or the conjuncture. On the contrary, because of the legacy of patriarchy and imperialism, liberal and democratic struggles remain in the fore, and more specifically struggles around gender and race. This would be true even if we were not facing a resurgence of fascism that threatens not only women and colonized peoples, but essentially all of the liberal and democratic victories of the past several centuries.
Now each situation does have its unique characteristics, and it is important to understand what is driving the current fascist offensive. Here the comparison with the last century is useful. By the beginning of the twentieth century the contradictions of capitalism had ripened to the point that they could no longer be resolved except by exporting capital to low technology, low skill, low wage activities in the colonies, and by repatriating profits to support effective demand in the metropoles. The periodwitnessed two popular revolutions (Russia and Mexico), one of which led to socialism and the other to a regime with significant socialist features. Fascism emerged as a way to discipline and militarize the population by leveragingnationalist, racist, and religious ideologies and authoritarian personality structures in order to defend existing colonial empires (Spain, Portugal) or gain new colonies (Italy, Germany, Japan) —and defeat the communist movement in the process.
The current situation is, as we noted above, defined by technological progress which may ultimately call capitalism itself into question and which, at the very least, points beyond an industrial capitalism driven by the combustion of fossil fuels and the exploitation of low skilled industrial workers. It certainly points beyond a natalism supported by patriarchal structures which reduce women to wombs and transform men into toxic, sado-masochistic monsters and beyond a colonialism in which the facts of a conquest five centuries ago determine not only one’s place in the international capitalist division of labor but whether or not one can walk the streets or sleep in one’s bed without threat of random violence.
The fascist offensive in the present period is, precisely, an attempt to defend and intensify this industrial regime along with the patriarchy and colonialism which are its presuppositions. And the correct response to this offensive is, as in the last century, a popular front with the liberal bourgeoisie and indeed all other elements of society which have cause to resist. Inevitably in this situation struggles around the ecosystem, race, and gender will dominate and even overshadow struggles around class. But these struggle 1) matter all on their own and 2) will help undercut the technological, economic, political, cultural, and psychosexual foundations on which capitalism rests. Communism properly understood has never been something apart from liberal and democratic struggles. It is, rather, simply the recognition that the completion of these struggles requires us to transcend the commodification of labor power. And the survival of the planet and the liberation of women, those who reject gender norms, and the colonized peoples of the planet are legitimate aims in their own right. Socialist feminists such as Chodorow and Federici have, furthermore, demonstrated the centrality of the oppression of women in the (ongoing) primitive accumulation of capital and the creation of the authoritarian personalities which Capital requires (and onto which racist ideologies draw).
Our analysis thus far has already demonstrated the foolishness of the first three arguments against supporting Biden. Yes, Biden does represent a bourgeois party, but alliance with the liberal bourgeoisie is, in fact, fundamental to antifascist struggle. Biden will do a great deal for the working class. In fact a Democratic victory may well put us on a trajectory which makes capitalist relations of production incompatible with capitalist profit, and thus create the conditions for the fundamental contradiction of capitalism to come to the fore.Reforming capitalism, finally, will not slow the radicalization of the proletariat and the formation of class consciousness. On the contrary, we have seen, unmitigated capitalism produces authoritarian, sado-masochistic monsters and actually prepares the ground for fascism. If there is any capitalism the progress of which favors the political development of the working classes it is one in which liberal and democratic rights are strong and market pressures have been softened enough for people to begin to recover their humanity.
The final objection remains—that any popular front we create today will be led by the liberal bourgeoisie and thus not able to lead us beyond capitalism.
This claim is, by itself, largely true. Certainly the popular front we propose will led by the liberal bourgeoisie. And no, it will not lead us beyond capitalism —at least not intentionally. First, without an analysis of the social determinants of fascism, an analysis which exposes its own roots in capitalist exploitation and oppression, the bourgeoisie will not be able to lead an effective struggle against fascism —much less a struggle against the capitalist conditions of its own existence. Second, while privilege can open up the space for the cultivation of a broader perspective, it does not tend to produce effective fighters who are ready to risk everything for the struggle. And third, even as elements within the bourgeoisie itself bring forward proposals, such as a Universal Basic Income, which call into question capitalist relations of production, they are doubling down on the proletarianization of the new petty bourgeoisie and imposing ever stricter market norms.
But this is what we mean when we say that the liberal bourgeoisie plays a contradictory role. Our job, alongside advancing the antifascist work of the popular front, and especially of ensuring a Democratic victory in the 2020 US General Elections, is to shift the balance of power within the popular front. And there is only one way to do this: by organizing.And this is going to take a long time, precisely due to the dehumanizing effects of proletarianization. In the last century the international communist movement was able to leverage strategic reserves from among broad sectors of society which had not yet been fully proletarianized, from the peasantry and traditional petty bourgeoisie through the academy and the religious institutions, something which laid the groundwork for Antonio Gramsci’s strategy of cultural hegemony which was in turn expressed in the Historic Compromise in Italy and in the strategic alliance between the communist movement and the Catholic Church in the national liberation movements in the 1970s. Today our strategic reserves are dwindling and it is not so much a question of leveraging existing ren as it is of rekindling and nurturing a humanity which is all but dead. Thus the central work of longue duree organizing which, I have argued, is the essential complement to the popular front. This is the work of identifying potential leaders, building relationships, agitating and nurturing, challenging and cultivating, and ultimately not just rekindling their humanity but healing it and helping it grow and develop. And it is the work of conserving what sanctuaries for humanity remain while building new ones.
Finally, I would note that there are aspects of the current situation which suggest that the liberal bourgeoisie may itself eventually embrace the struggle against capitalism. This is the fact that, with the formation of a unified market in capital mediated by global information systems Capital has begun to emerge as an autonomous intelligence independent of the historic bourgeoisie, allocating itself across the planet in whatever way maximizes accumulation, without regard to “human factors.” Now there are elements in the bourgeoisie, including elements in the technology sector, which embrace this development and envision a “transhuman” future for the planet. And some of these elements, the so-called Dark Enlightenment links this accelerations and trans humanism with neofascist ideas around race and gender and the state. But the liberal bourgeoisie is composed of human beings, and humanity has no real place in such a future. And so, the liberal bourgeoisie will likely find itself forced to choose between its capitalist privilege and its humanity. And many will choose their humanity, for the simple reason that the alternative is the loss of the only possible subject which might enjoy privilege.
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We face a long and difficult struggle. Victory is never certain. But we know that matter itself is the desire for Being. Evil really is just a defect of Being and the annihilationist trajectory of Capital leads nowhere. Joining with allies whose vision and interests are compromised is never easy. But then it is always just a matter of degree. We too are shadowed by Capital. We too see but in a mirror darkly. We too have privilege and interests which hold us back. And yet our work bears fruit. There is movement and movement is always both of limitation and of growth. Let us join in this popular front not in a spirit of begrudging reluctance, seeing it as the “best we can do under bad circumstances” or the “lesser of two evils” but with a commitment whole and entire to the complex multidimensional strategy of which it is a part, as a way of joining with those who reject the way of hatred and death, whatever our other differences with them, as imperfect leaders of an imperfect humanity which is still the best hope for a flourishing and verdant planet and as the cutting edge of wisdom and compassion in this beautiful and mysterious cosmos.
