The Little Red Blog

Wednesday with Pascal: Man's Hopes & the Human Predicament

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat continues his quest for Truth.}

Leszek Kolakowski’s God Owes Us Nothing was a book-length meditation on Blaise Pascal and on the Catholic church’s “Jansenist” controversy in which Pascal was involved.  As it happened, Kolakowski’s attention had been drawn to Pascal at least in part by Lucien Goldmann’s earlier book The Hidden God, a study of Pascal and his contemporary, the dramatist Jean Racine.

Kolakowski and Goldmann make for an odd pairing. Lucien Goldmann was a French Marxist and sociologist whose focus, in the post-war decades of the Fifties and Sixties, was on recovering the humanism inherent in Marxism, an element he believed had been lost with (and perhaps even before) Stalinism. Goldmann and Kolakowski shared a resistance to dogma and to enforced orthodoxies. Kolakowski, of course, eventually rejected Marxism; he emigrated in 1968 to America and eventually received numerous honors and awards (he died in 2009). Goldmann remained in France, writing and publishing, until his death in 1970 at the age of fifty-seven. He was by then considered persona non grata, in French leftist circles, most members of which remained loyal to the party-line Marxism in which they had been indoctrinated; they had no use for Goldmann’s heterodoxy.    

Kolakowski, for his part, having examined Pascal’s “sad religion,” concluded that it “was a religion for unhappy people and it was designed to make them more unhappy.” Which did not mean, of course, that the theology was therefore wrong or that Kolakowski disapproved of it; he himself, according to those who knew him best, doubted his capacity for happiness. He may have felt temperamentally at home in the church of Pascal even if he could not accept it intellectually.  

What drew Goldmann, a Marxist and an atheist, to a 17^th-century thinker and Christian like Pascal? According to Michael Lowy, a former student of his, Goldmann, in the years following World War II, struggled to remain optimistic in the face of the Cold War and of revelations about Stalinism, writing, in 1948, ‘I must admit that so far as the immediate future is concerned my hopes have not been fulfilled. In place of a better world and a better community, new clouds are gathering. The possibility of another war has become part of the normal order of things. In the midst of this depression and disquiet, conditions are clearly unfavorable for a philosophy of optimism and hope.’

Despite that observation, it was precisely a philosophy of optimism and hope that Goldmann continued to craft throughout the Fifties and Sixties. A lifelong Marxist, he insisted that “Marxist faith is a faith in the future which men make for themselves in and through history. This faith becomes a ‘wager’ which we make that our actions will, in fact, be successful.” Echoes of both Pascal and Kierkegaard, but devoid of any Deus ex machina; Goldmann always believed that salvation was a human task.

According to Michael Lowy, Goldmann found three aspects of Pascal’s thought compelling: his tragic view of life, his resistance to modern individualism, and the famous Pascalian “wager,” the proposed leap of faith that encouraged belief in God (or at least the sincere effort to believe), based on a supposedly favorable risk/reward ratio—if God does not exist, you have lost nothing by believing in Him, but if God does exist, your unbelief will have condemned your soul to eternal punishment. ¹   

Michael Lowy on Goldmann: “A revealing passage in The Hidden God states: ‘Once again, the social forces that in the nineteenth century enabled man to go beyond tragedy by using dialectical and revolutionary thought have, for reasons too complicated to analyze here, led to the sacrifice of value to efficiency. And, once again, the most honest thinkers have been compelled to recognize the existence of the dichotomy which had already struck Pascal between justice and force, between man’s hopes and the human predicament.’ The vision of the world that Goldmann appealed to here was the Marxist dialectic, rather than the tragic vision of Pascal and the Jansenists. But,” Lowy adds, “Goldmann no longer believed, as he had [earlier], in the imminent advent of peace, democracy and socialist humanism.”

History was a struggle. Not unlike the members of the Frankfurt School (Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, etc.) Goldmann’s Marxism had been chastened—or, you might say, mugged—by history; but, also like the Frankfurt thinkers, Goldmann would not capitulate to capitalism, to modern individualism, or to the atomized society those ideologies produced. Lowy explains:

As a sociologist of culture, Goldmann was interested in the social and historical foundations of [modern] individualism, and critically examined the connections between the development of the market economy, in which the individual appeared as the autonomous source of his decisions and acts, and the appearance of visions of the world that saw this same individual as the prime source of knowledge and action.

In The Hidden God, Goldmann wrote: ‘The philosophers of the Enlightenment demanded loud and clear recognition of individual understanding as the supreme instance that should not be subject to any higher authority.’ ² Individualist thought conceives society only as the sum of individuals, and social life as the product of the thought and actions of a large number of individuals, each one of whom constitutes an absolute and isolated starting point. The relation of individuals to the social totality, therefore, can only be that which they have with the market: observation of its ‘objective’ movement, study of its ‘scientific laws’.

To bring this meditation full circle, I will add this observation by Leszek Kolakowski about Marxism:

To Marx, socialism represented the full emancipation of the individual by the destruction of the web of mystification which turned community life into a world of estrangement presided over by an alienated bureaucracy. Marx’s ideal was that every man should be fully aware of his own character as a social being, but should also, for this very reason, be capable of developing his personal aptitudes in all their fullness and variety. There was no question of the individual being reduced to a universal species-being; what Marx desired to see was a community in which the sources of antagonism among individuals were done away with.

Unlike Kolakowski and Goldmann, Marx was confident to the point of certainty (and his followers even more so) that the Promised Land was in sight. He could have used a bit of the tragic sense of life; in fact, so can we all.

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Lucien Goldmann - Wikipedia

¹ I have closely studied Pascal’s Wager, I have calculated the odds, and I have concluded that the best option is always to switch your choice from whichever door you have already chosen to whichever of the other two doors remains closed.

² In this regard, Enlightenment philosophers were following Protestant Christians; they were even following Thomas Aquinas, Catholic theologian par excellence, who taught that an individual’s conscience was his (or her) highest authority.

[Illustration from "SoftLineSketches" on DeviantArt]

Books Report

{I recently had considerable time to read on airplanes and in airport lounges.} 

Jonas Ceika is a Norwegian philosopher and YouTube entrepreneur. He is also, it seems, a Marxist, and he has written a book titled How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle: Nietzsche and Marx for the Twenty-First Century. Among other things, Ceika sets out to debunk common misreadings of the two nineteenth-century giants; he also attempts to show that they were, if not exactly philosophical bedfellows, at least more similar in their views than has been thought. Ceika suggests that we read Marx through the lens of Nietzsche’s nihilism, and that we read Nietzsche through the lens of Marxist social radicalism: “If we use Nietzsche to excavate Marxism, we can uncover all the Nietzschean aspects of Marx that have been purposefully denounced, overlooked, or ignored throughout the failures and deformations of Marxism in the twentieth century.”

Those “Nietzschean aspects” to which Ceika refers compose “the human element—active human beings, their lived experience and their most personal concerns—and there is no modern philosopher who provides this element more fiercely than Nietzsche.” In view of that, writes Ceika, “I propose a Nietzschean Marxism, which, paradoxically, comes to be more Marxist than forms of Marxism claiming to be Marx’s direct heirs.

As Ceika says, “Marx has been made to suffer through many horrific surgeries and mutations. He has been transformed from a thinker who wants to transcend modernity’s categories altogether, into a thinker who merely wants to reform some given sphere of modernity: a social democrat, a moralist, a historical determinist.” When Marxism was made into an ideology focused solely on power—that is, when Lenin appropriated Marx for his own purposes—the human element, the humanism of Marx’s thought, was lost. Ceika’s attempt to rescue it is welcome, though likely wasted on Americans who, by and large, have preferred to caricature Marx rather than grapple with his actual ideas.

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Speaking of Marx: Leszek Kolakowski’s Main Currents of Marxism is a three-volume doorstop of Marxist theory, beginning not with Marx himself but with a whirlwind tour of the elements of Western philosophy that served as background to Marx’s thinking. Kolakowski was born, raised, and educated under a Communist regime, from which he eventually deviated and which he ultimately rejected. His magnum opus was originally published in 1976, translated into English in 1978, and reissued as a single volume in 2005.

The striking thing about Kolakowski’s work, aside from the obvious erudition it displays, is its lack of vitriol or invective rhetoric. Main Currents of Marxism is not a polemic; it is a thoughtful, measured analysis of Marxist thought in historical context, including the myriad “Marxisms” that competed for the mantle of the great man’s rightful heirs. Nor was Kolakowski an apologist for Marx; he believed that the brutalities and tyrannies of Leninism, Bolshevism, and Stalinism were logical outgrowths of Marx’s thought, which is not to say that Marx would have endorsed them.

Jonas Ceika (above) would almost certainly have nothing but disdain for Leszek Kolakowski, an ex-Marxist and a lifelong atheist who converted late in life to Christianity. Kolakowski, though, remains one of my intellectual heroes, someone with whom I do not always agree but cannot help but respect. As I slowly work my way through Volume One (“The Founders”) of Main Currents of Marxism, I believe I am in good hands.

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We Shall Be Masters, by Chris Miller, is not about Marx; the subject of the book is Russia’s “pivot to East Asia, from Peter the Great to Putin.” The Russian psyche, as well as Russian foreign policy, has long been torn between its historic ties to the West and its heritage from the East—Russia was under the rule of Tatars (Mongols) for some two hundred and fifty years, and it borders China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Japan. Even as Peter the Great and then Catherine the Great sought to Westernize Russian ways, and while Slavophiles and “Old Believers” sought to preserve Russian traditions against Western influence, the Far East always beckoned, if only because it seemed less intimidating than the West. It is hard to overstate the humiliation Russians felt when they were defeated by Japan in 1905, or the loss of confidence in Tsar Nicholas II that resulted.

Miller’s book, then, is about “the promise of the East” and the repeated disappointments Russia has suffered over its expansionist dreams. Miller claims that Putin, in pursuing a strategic alliance with Xi Jinping’s China, is following in his predecessors’ footsteps; but he suggests that any such alliance will be limited and short-term, and that, in the long run, Russia’s ambitions in East Asia “are likely to be unattainable”.

You can read We Shall Be Masters to help understand current events and Russia’s foreign policy, or you can read it simply as a foray into Russian history; it is informative in either case. 

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Saturday Lecture: The Destruction of the Idols

{The widespread hatred of Karl Marx—in America, at least—is due primarily to the fact that people don’t know the first thing about him.}

Erich Fromm, from “Marx's Concept of Socialism”:

Marx's concept of socialism follows from his concept of man. According to this concept, socialism is not a society of regimented, automatized individuals, regardless of whether there is equality of income or not, and regardless of whether they are well fed and well clad. It is not a society in which the individual is subordinated to the state, to the machine, to the bureaucracy. Even if the state as an "abstract capitalist" were the employer, even if "the entire social capital were united in the hands either of a single capitalist or a single capitalist corporation," this would not be socialism. In fact, as Marx says quite clearly in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, "communism as such is not the aim of human development." What, then, is the aim?

The aim of socialism is man. It is to create a form of production and an organization of society in which man can overcome alienation from his product, from his work, from his fellow man, from himself and from nature; in which he can return to himself and grasp the world with his own powers, thus becoming one with the world. Socialism for Marx was, as Paul Tillich put it, "a resistance movement against the destruction of love in social reality." 

Marx expressed the aim of socialism with great clarity at the end of the third volume of Capital: "In fact, the realm of freedom does not commence until the point is passed where labor under the compulsion of necessity and of external utility is required. In the very nature of things, it lies beyond the sphere of material production in the strict meaning of the term. Just as the savage must wrestle with nature, in order to satisfy his wants, in order to maintain his life and reproduce it, so civilized man has to do it, and he must do it in all forms of society and under all possible modes of production. With his development the realm of natural necessity expands, because his wants increase; but at the same time the forces of production increase, by which these wants are satisfied. The freedom in this field cannot consist of anything else but of the fact that socialized men regulate their interchange with nature rationally, bring it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by some blind power; they accomplish their task with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most adequate to their human nature and most worthy of it. But it always remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human power, which is its own end, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can flourish only upon that realm of necessity as its basis." 

Marx expresses here all essential elements of socialism. First, man produces in an associated, not competitive way; he produces rationally and in an unalienated way, which means that he brings production under his control, instead of being ruled by it as by some blind power. This clearly excludes a concept of socialism in which man is manipulated by a bureaucracy, even if this bureaucracy rules the whole state economy, rather than only a big corporation. It means that the individual participates actively in the planning and in the execution of the plans; it means, in short, the realization of political and industrial democracy. Marx expected that by this new form of an unalienated society man would become independent, stand on his own feet, and would no longer be crippled by the alienated mode of production and consumption; that he would truly be the master and the creator of his life, and hence that he could begin to make living his main business, rather than producing the means for living. Socialism, for Marx, was never as such the fulfillment of life, but the condition for such fulfillment. When man has built a rational, nonalienated form of society, he will have the chance to begin with what is the aim of life: the "development of human power, which is its own end, the true realm of freedom." Marx, the man who every year read all the works of Aeschylus and Shakespeare, who brought to life in himself the greatest works of human thought, would never have dreamt that his idea of socialism could be interpreted as having as its aim the well-fed and well-clad "welfare" or "workers' " state. Man, in Marx's view, has created in the course of history a culture which he will be free to make his own when he is freed from the chains, not only of economic poverty, but of the spiritual poverty created by alienation. Marx's vision is based on his faith in man, in the inherent and real potentialities of the essence of man which have developed in history. He looked at socialism as the condition of human freedom and creativity, not as in itself constituting the goal of man's life.

For Marx, socialism (or communism) is not flight or abstraction from, or loss of the objective world which men have created by the objectification of their faculties. It is not an impoverished return to unnatural, primitive simplicity. It is rather the first real emergence, the genuine actualization of man's nature as something real. Socialism, for Marx, is a society which permits the actualization of man's essence, by overcoming his alienation. It is nothing less than creating the conditions for the truly free, rational, active, and independent man; it is the fulfillment of the prophetic aim: the destruction of the idols.

Speaking of Idols

Saturday Lecture: The Abolition of Alienation

Erich Fromm:

Man, before he has consciousness of himself, that is, before he is human, lives in unity with nature (Adam and Eve in Paradise). The first act of Freedom, which is the capacity to say "no," opens his eyes, and he sees himself as a stranger in the world, beset by conflicts with nature, between man and man, between man and woman. The process of history is the process by which man develops his specifically human qualities, his powers of love and understanding; and, once he has achieved full humanity, he can return to the lost unity between himself and the world.

This new unity is the at-onement of man with himself, with nature, and with his fellow man, based on the fact that man has given birth to himself in the historical process. In Old Testament thought, God is revealed in history, and in history, not in a state transcending history, lies the salvation of man. This means that man's spiritual aims are inseparably connected with the transformation of society; politics is basically not a realm that can be divorced from that of moral values and of man's self-realization.

While Christianity, especially since Paul, tended to transform the historical concept of salvation into an "other-worldly," purely spiritual one, and while the Church became the substitute for the "good society," this transformation was by no means a complete one. The early Church fathers express a radical criticism of the existing state; Christian thought of the late Middle Ages criticizes secular authority and the state from the standpoint of divine and natural law. This viewpoint stresses that society and the state must not be divorced from the spiritual values rooted in revelation and reason ("intellect" in the scholastic meaning of the word).

The mainstream of Messianic thinking after the Reformation, however, was expressed no longer in religious thought, but in philosophical, historical, and social thought. It was expressed somewhat obliquely in the great utopias of the Renaissance, in which the new world is not in a distant future, but in a distant place. It was expressed in the thinking of the philosophers of the Enlightenment and of the French and English Revolutions. It found its latest and most complete expression in Marx's concept of socialism.

What is common to prophetic, thirteenth-century Christian thought, eighteenth-century enlightenment, and nineteenth-century socialism, is the idea that State (society) and spiritual values cannot be divorced from each other; that politics and moral values are indivisible. This idea was attacked by the secular concepts of the Renaissance (Machiavelli) and again by the secularism of the modern state.

It seems that Western man, whenever he was under the influence of gigantic material conquests, gave himself unrestrictedly to the new powers he had acquired and, drunk with these new powers, forgot himself. The elite of these societies became obsessed with the wish for power, luxury, and the manipulation of men, and the masses followed them.

However, if the state or the society is meant to serve the realization of certain spiritual values, the danger exists that a supreme authority tells man—and forces him—to think and behave in a certain way. The incorporation of certain objectively valid values into social life tends to produce authoritarianism.

The spiritual authority of the Middle Ages was the Catholic Church. Protestantism fought this authority, at first promising greater independence for the individual, only later to make the princely State the undisputed and arbitrary ruler of man's body and soul. Rebellion against princely authority then occurred in the name of the nation, and for a while the national state promised to be the representative of freedom. But soon the national state devoted itself to the protection of the material interests of those who owned capital and could thus exploit the labor of the majority of the population.

Certain classes of society protested this new authoritarianism and insisted on the freedom of the individual from the interference of secular authority. This postulate of liberalism, which tended to protect "freedom from," led, on the other hand, to the insistence that state and society must not attempt to realize "freedom to," that is to say, liberalism had to insist not only on separation from State and Church, but had also to deny that it was the function of the state to help realize certain spiritual and moral values; these values were supposed to be entirely a matter for the individual.

Socialism (in its Marxist and other forms) returned to the idea of the "good society" as the condition for the realization of man's spiritual needs. It was antiauthoritarian, both as far as the Church and the State are concerned, hence it aimed at the eventual disappearance of the state and at the establishment of a society composed of voluntarily cooperating individuals. Its aim was a reconstruction of society in such a way as to make it the basis for man's true return to himself, without the presence of those authoritarian forces which restricted and impoverished man's mind.

Thus, Marxist and other forms of socialism are the heirs of prophetic Messianism, Christian Chiliastic sectarianism, thirteenth-century Thomism, Renaissance Utopianism, and eighteenth-century enlightenment. It is the synthesis of the prophetic-Christian idea of society as the plane of spiritual realization, and of the idea of individual freedom. For this reason, it is opposed to the Church because of its restriction of the mind, and to liberalism because of its separation of society and moral values. It is opposed to Stalinism for its authoritarianism as much as for its neglect of humanist values.

Marxist socialism is the abolition of human self-alienation, the return of man as a real human being. "It is the definitive resolution of the antagonism between man and nature, and between man and man. It is the true solution of the conflict between existence and essence, between objectification and self-affirmation, between freedom and necessity, between individual and species. It is a solution of the riddle of history and knows itself to be this solution". For Marx, socialism meant the social order which permits the return of man to himself, the identity between existence and essence, the overcoming of the separateness and antagonism between subject and object, the humanization of nature; it meant a world in which man is no longer a stranger among strangers, but is in his world, where he is at home.

Marx's Concept of Man. Erich Fromm 1961 (marxists.org)

Saturday Lecture: Sympathy for Karl Marx?

{As I may have mentioned before, a specter haunts the American political Right: the specter of Marxism. With MAGA-world convinced that Marxism is the root of all evil, it seems relevant to point out that the word “Marxism” does not mean what they think it means.}

John Plamenatz, from German Marxism and Russian Communism:

If by ‘liberalism’ we mean the doctrine that society should, as far as possible, be so organized as to enable every man to live his own life in his own way, provided he respects the right of others to do likewise, then not only democracy, but almost all the varieties of socialism, including even Marxism, derive from the same liberal principle.

Marx remained all his life in principle a believer in extreme democracy; and he denounced what the liberals called democracy only because he believed it to be a sham. His ideal society, which he called communist and the coming of which he believed inevitable, would be a society of equals, where none could use force to impose his will on another. Whatever he may have been by temperament, Marx was not by doctrine illiberal; he believed that every man in the classless society would be as free as social institutions could make him, and merely denied that, while society remained divided into classes, this freedom was possible. Marx’s avowed purpose was to work for the coming of the classless society, the only society where the rights of man dear to the liberals would not be the privilege of a minority.

Marxism, like the other varieties of socialism, is a product of the French and the industrial revolutions. The ends it approves of are those recommended by the liberal and radical philosophers of the eighteenth century. The Germans did not adopt them until they had been popular for some considerable time in both England and France. The early socialists added nothing to them; they wanted for mankind nothing that Locke or Montesquieu or Rousseau or Paine had not wanted. Their ideal was that of the American and French revolutionaries: that every man should be free to make the best use oi his life according to his own notions of what is good. They differed from the older philosophers in the means they recommended but not in the ends they approved.

The Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Americans who were the first champions of freedom in the modern world had hoped that private property and government by consent would together suffice to give men as much freedom as they could reasonably expect in any society. The socialists who came after them believed that, while some men remained much richer than others and could engross all natural wealth and important instruments of production, the others could not be free. There could be freedom for the great majority only if the material resources of the community were deliberately controlled for the common good by persons responsible to the community. The early socialists had widely different opinions about how that control should be exercised, what should remain private, and what become public property, and the proper size of the productive unit; but what made them socialists was the belief that, without some such control, the rich would exploit the poor and make it impossible for them, whatever the legal rights granted to them, to lead the full and free life that the philosophers had said ought to be secured to them. These early socialists were improving on what Rousseau had said before them: that men cannot be free while some are much richer than others, and that therefore every just society will take it upon itself to ensure that inequalities of wealth are never great enough to endanger freedom.

The important difference between Marxism and the theories of the English and French socialists is aesthetic; it lies in the different quality of the impact it makes on the mind of the convert to it. There is a power often uncontrolled by reason in the roar and clatter of Marx’s long German sentences as they make their way regardless of obstacles irresistibly towards the ‘Truth.’ Marx believed that in the communist society men would be freer than they had ever been; he believed that proletarian democracy would be more truly democratic and less oppressive than the parliamentary governments of the bourgeois; and he warned the workers against premature revolution and useless violence. Yet Marx was not mild or kind or generous; he hated oppressors more than he loved the oppressed; and he thought more of the struggle than of the victory coming after it. The ideal communities that the early socialists loved to depict and contemplate, their faith in reason and in men’s being persuaded by it, even their hopes of quick and easy success, attest their humanity; they did not, like Marx, place the millennium after a long, bitter, and uncompromising struggle, and then devote all their thoughts to the fight with almost none to spare for what made it worth fighting for. Though Marx called them Utopians, because they had mild and inadequate notions about how mankind was to make its way to the free and just society, the longer and more terrible road that he described no more led to it than did theirs. They hoped the way would be easy, while he—knowing no more about it than they did—was certain that it must be painful. Because he felt certain while they mostly hoped, he called himself scientific and them Utopian.

Had Marxism never been adopted as the creed of any considerable political movement, it would still be worth studying. Karl Marx was a great thinker, and his system, for all its defects, deserves scrupulous and severe analysis. We cannot fairly ask of a political theorist, who is also a system builder, that he should present us with anything like a true account of the phenomena he seeks to explain; the state of our knowledge about things social and political does not warrant any such demand. We ought to be grateful to him, if, when we have pulled his system to pieces, we are appreciably wiser than we were before. Nor should we blame him for having attempted the impossible; for it is ordinarily the boldest speculators who invent the most fruitful hypotheses.

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John Plamenatz - Wikipedia

Saturday Lecture: The Divine Power of Money

Karl Marx:

The distorting and confounding of all human and natural qualities, the fraternization of impossibilities – the divine power of money – lies in its character as man’s estranged, alienating and self-disposing species-nature. Money is the alienated ability of mankind.

That which is for me through the medium of money – that for which I can pay (i.e., which money can buy) – that becomes me, I myself, the possessor of the money. The extent of the power of money is the extent of my power. If I possess money, money’s properties are my properties, its powers are my powers. Thus, what I am and am capable of is by no means determined by my individuality. I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women. Therefore, I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness – its deterrent power – is nullified by money. I, according to my individual characteristics, am lame, but money furnishes me with twenty-four feet; therefore, I am not lame. I am bad, dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid; but money is honored, and hence its possessor. Money is the supreme good, therefore its possessor is good. Money, besides, saves me the trouble of being dishonest: I am therefore presumed honest. I am brainless, but money is the real brain of all things; how then should its possessor be brainless? Besides, he can buy clever people for himself, and is he who has power over the clever not more clever than the clever? Do not I, who thanks to money am capable of all that the human heart longs for, possess all human capacities? Does not my money, therefore, transform all my incapacities into their contrary?

If I long for a particular dish or want to take the mail-coach because I am not strong enough to go by foot, money fetches me the dish and the mail-coach: that is, it converts my wishes from something in the realm of imagination, translates them from their meditated, imagined or desired existence into their sensuous, actual existence – from imagination to life, from imagined being into real being. In effecting this mediation, money is the truly creative power.

No doubt demands also exist for him who has no money, but his demands are mere things of the imagination without effect or existence for a third party; therefore, they remain unreal and objectless. The difference between effective demand based on money and ineffective demand based on my need, my passion, my wish, etc., is the difference between being and thinking, between that which exists within me merely as an idea and the idea which exists as a real object outside of me. If I have no money for travel, I have no need – that is, no real and practical need – to travel. If I have the vocation for study but no money for it, I have no vocation for study – that is, no effective, no true vocation. On the other hand, if I have really no vocation for study but have the will and the money for it, I have an effective vocation for it. 

Money, as the external, universal medium and faculty for turning an image into reality and reality into a mere image, transforms the real essential powers of man and nature into what are merely abstract notions and tormenting chimeras, just as it transforms real shortcomings and chimeras (which are impotent and exist only in the imagination of the individual) into real powers and faculties. In the light of this characteristic alone, money is thus the general distorting of individualities which turns them into their opposite and confers contradictory attributes upon their attributes.

Money, then, appears as this distorting power both against the individual and against the bonds of society which claim to be entities in themselves. It transforms fidelity into infidelity, love into hate, hate into love, virtue into vice, vice into virtue, servant into master, master into servant, idiocy into intelligence, and intelligence into idiocy. Since money, as the existing and active concept of value, confounds and confuses all things, it is therefore the general confounding and confusing of all things – the world upside-down – the confounding and confusing of all natural and human qualities.

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Karl Marx was a 19th-century German vaudeville performer, equally adept at slapstick, pantomime, and acerbic one-liners (e.g., "A specter is haunting Europe."). He is best remembered as the grandfather of the legendary Groucho, Harpo, and Chico Marx, who were known collectively as the "Lenin Sisters".    Karl Marx - Wikipedia

"It's mine, I tell you! It's all mine!"

The Furious Mania for Work

{The long Labor Day weekend is upon us; traditionally, we take this opportunity to celebrate the virtue(s) of labor and to honor America’s working women and men. However, I am choosing instead to feature a series of brief essays, each of which questions the nobility and even the necessity of work. I begin with Paul Lafargue’s passionate denunciation of the worth ethic. Lafargue was the son-in-law of Karl Marx; famously, Lafargue’s interpretations of his father-in-law’s writings led Marx to say (to Friedrich Engels), “Whatever I am, I know I am not a Marxist.”}

“All individual and societal misery takes its origin in the passion of the proletariat for work.” (Paul Lafargue)

Paul Lafargue, from The Right to Be Lazy (1898):

The ancient philosophers taught contempt of work, this derogation of the free man; the poets sang of laziness, this gift of the Gods; “God gave us this idleness,” sings Virgil. In the Sermon on the Mount, Christ teaches: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin, yet I say unto ye that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.”

A strange mania governs the working class of all countries in which capitalist civilization rules, a mania that results in the individual and collective misery that prevails in modern society. This is the love of work, the furious mania for work, extending to the exhaustion of the individual and his descendants. The parsons, the political economists, and the moralists, instead of contending against this mental aberration, have canonized work.

Even the proletariat, the great producing class of all civilized nations, the class which by its emancipation will release mankind from servile work and will create a free being out of the human animal; the proletariat, too, mistaking its historical calling, has allowed itself to be seduced by the dogma of work. Its chastisement is hard and terrible. All individual and societal misery takes its origin in the passion of the proletariat for work.

If the sufferings resulting from compulsory work have closed upon the proletariat, more numerous than the locusts of the Bible, it is the proletariat itself who have conjured them up. The same work which the proletarians demanded, weapon in hand, they have laid upon their families; they have handed their wives and children over to the factory barons. With their own hands they have destroyed their household hearths; with their own hands dried up the breasts of the women. They have allowed pregnant and nursing women to go into the factories, into the mines where they shattered their nerves and tortured their spine; with their own hands have they undermined the life and the vitality of their children. Shame upon you, proletarians! Whither are gone those women with playful speech and fresh humor, of whom our old legends and tales relate? Whither are gone those vivacious women, who, always cooking, always tripping about, scattering life, brought healthy and strong children into the world when they gave themselves the pleasure? Today we have women and girls in the factory, stunted flowers with pale complexion, colorless blood, poor stomachs, and exhausted limbs. A healthy pleasure is unknown to them. And the children? Twelve hours’ work for the children!

All the academicians and all the clergy could have devised no evil more stupefying to the mind of the children, more injurious to their disposition, more ruinous to their organism than work in the pestiferous atmosphere of capitalist workshops! Our century is called the century of work; actually, it is the century of pain, of misery, of corruption! And yet the bourgeois political economists and philosophers individually and collectively have sung loathsome songs of praise to the God Progress, the oldest son of work. To listen to them, it would seem as if happiness must rule upon earth, and as even now its presence might be felt. They have meandered through the centuries of earlier ages, burrowing through the dust and misery of feudalism in order that the sun of the present day may shine more brightly.

Capitalist morality curses the flesh of the worker by reducing his needs to the minimum, by smothering his pleasures and his passions, and by condemning him to play the part of a machine out of which work is exploited without rest and without thanks. To the revolutionary Socialists, therefore, is assigned the task of mounting an assault against the morality and social teachings of capitalism and of eradicating prejudice from the brains of the class which is summoned to action; prejudice, the seeds of which have been sown by the ruling class. It is for the revolutionary Socialists to proclaim that the earth will cease to be a valley of tears for the workers.

Work without moderation and without aim is the worst frightful scourge which mankind has ever known; only when work is regulated according to reason and is limited to a maximum corresponding to the social needs, will it be a spice to the pleasure of idleness, a useful exercise to the human organism. Meanwhile, the age of leisure, prophesied by the ancient poets, has not come to pass; the blind, insane and homicidal mania for work has transformed the machine, from an instrument of emancipation, into an instrument of enslavement for free beings: the productive power of the machine has become the cause of the pauperization of the masses.

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lazy_pl.pdf (slp.org)

Paul Lafargue - Wikipedia

Paul Lafargue, trying to look like he's doing nothing at all

Books Report

Of interest (at least to me):

The Rise of Western Christendom, by Peter Brown

Peter Brown is the doyen of historians of late antiquity and early Christianity. His 2003 classic The Rise of Western Christendom was a revision and expansion of the original edition published in 1996.

In the 2003 revision, Brown, chronicling “Western Christendom” from 200 CE to 1000 CE, extended his gaze to the east, making clear that Christianity was not originally a western religion:

“Throughout this period, the Christianity of what we now call Europe was only the westernmost variant of a much wider Christian world whose center of gravity lay, rather, in the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. The eastern Roman Empire was not a remote and unchanging presence of little relevance to the emergence of Latin Catholic Christianity; rather, it (and not Rome) lay at the hub of a worldwide Christianity which stretched as far into Asia as it did into Europe.”

Brown acknowledged that he had been prompted “in light of modern scholarship” (archeological discoveries in particular) to rethink his views on “the conventional Grand Narrative [regarding] the spread of Christianity in late antique and early medieval western Europe.” Here is an example of Brown’s new perspective:

It was in the early Middle Ages, and not earlier, that the Christian imagination took on its peculiarly western shape. There occurred a series of irrevocable “precipitations” of ideas which had existed in diffuse form in late antique Christianity, but which had never been brought together with such decisive clarity of focus until the seventh and eighth centuries. These novel “precipitations” did not occur in late antiquity but in the period between 550 and 750 CE; they mark the true “End of Ancient Christianity”.

These [early medieval] changes are not associated with dramatic changes in doctrine. They are considerably more important than that. They represent nothing less than a slow reorientation of the Christian imagination of the West. It is as if, having traveled all day through a landscape, we looked out the window to discover we had, indeed, entered a different region. Old landmarks are nowhere to be seen. New ones dominate the horizon. There are now large monasteries, pastoral systems devoted to confession and to the saying of Mass for the relief of souls in the other world. We can even detect the first, tentative outlines of the “Christian” cemetery, after centuries where such an institution had been strikingly absent.

It is only by looking back to the beginning of our journey that we realize that these new landmarks (landmarks which we now take for granted as part and parcel of Christianity) had simply not been there when we started out. On issues which intimately affect the Christian view of the afterlife and the day-to-day practice of all believers, we have left behind an ancient Christianity.  

Peter Brown (historian) - Wikipedia

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The Bolsheviks in Power, by Alexander Rabinowitch

Alexander Rabinowitch’s The Bolsheviks in Power focuses on The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd. Rabinowitch, who had previously written Prelude to Revolution and The Bolsheviks Come to Power, was given access, in the 1990s, to previously inaccessible Soviet archives; what he found there “demolishes standard interpretations of the origins of Soviet authoritarianism.”  

What Rabinowitch sought in his research was, essentially, an explanation of how Bolshevism went so wrong so quickly, in the process betraying its own ideals:

If the success of the Bolshevik party in 1917 was at least partly attributable to its open, relatively democratic, and decentralized character and operational style, as seemed clear, how was one to explain the fact that it was so quickly transformed into one of the most highly centralized, authoritarian, political organizations in modern history? Further, if soviets, in 1917, were genuinely democratic, embryonic organizations of popular self-rule, as my studies also suggested, how was it that the independence of soviets and other mass organizations was destroyed so quickly? Most fundamental, perhaps, if the goal of many of the dissatisfied lower-class citizens of Petrograd who spearheaded the subversion of the Provisional Government and facilitated the Bolshevik seizure of power was the creation of an egalitarian society and a democratic-socialist, multiparty political system, and if this goal was shared by many prominent Bolsheviks, as my research also showed, how was one to explain the extraordinary rapidity with which these ideals were subverted and Bolshevik authoritarianism became firmly entrenched?

Rabinowitch’s narrative covers, among much else, “the rapid fall of influential moderate Bolsheviks, the formation of the dreaded Cheka, the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, the Red Terror, the national government's flight to Moscow, and the subsequent rivalry between Russia's new and old capitals.” According to him, “In the first few days after October, amid internal and external counter-revolutionary threats, the ad hoc nature of Bolshevik government could perhaps be justified. Most Bolsheviks viewed the first repressive decrees as extraordinary measures to deal with temporary emergencies.” Instead, those “temporary” measures and tactics shaped the regime that emerged from the wreckage of civil war, and the “emergencies” never disappeared.

Alexander Rabinowitch - Wikipedia

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Grand Hotel Abyss, by Stuart Jeffries

Zach Beauchamp, writing at Vox, recently interviewed the British journalist Stuart Jeffries about the meanings (and misunderstandings) about postmodernism. Postmodernism, of course, is a well-known gateway ideology that leads inevitably to Cultural Marxism; and it turns out that Stuart Jeffries has already plunged down that rabbit hole as well. In 2016, Jeffries published Grand Hotel Abyss, a history of the Frankfurt School, a group of Marxist (and post-Marxist) thinkers—Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse—widely accused of seeking to destroy Western Civilization by replacing Truth with Relativism, Nihilism, and Critical Thought.

The evil that men do, it has been said, lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones. Here is how Jeffries’ publisher (Verso Books) describes the book:

Grand Hotel Abyss combines biography, philosophy, and storytelling to reveal how the Frankfurt thinkers gathered in hopes of understanding the politics of culture during the rise of fascism. Some of them, forced to escape the horrors of Nazi Germany, later found exile in the United States. (Benjamin was arrested in Spain and committed suicide when threatened with deportation to Nazi-occupied France.)

From the relative comfort of [postwar] California, Herbert Marcuse wrote the classic One- Dimensional Man, which influenced the 1960s counterculture and thinkers such as Angela Davis; while in a tragic coda, Adorno died from a heart attack following confrontations with student radicals in Berlin.

By taking popular culture seriously as an object of study—whether it was film, music, ideas, or consumerism—the Frankfurt School elaborated upon the nature and crisis of our mass-produced, mechanized society. Grand Hotel Abyss shows how much these ideas still tell us about our age of social media and runaway consumption.

In the words of Stuart Jeffries, “The Frankfurt School deserves to be freed from its detractors, from those who have wittingly or otherwise misconstrued its works for their own ends. It also deserves to be liberated from the idea that it has nothing to say to us in the new millennium.”

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Zach Beauchamp’s interview of Stuart Jeffries is at: How capitalism undermined postmodernism - Vox Jeffries’ most recent book is Everything, All the Time, Everywhere: How We Became Postmodern

Saturday Lecture: The Role of the Individual in History

(In the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, Georgi Plekhanov was considered the leading theoretician of Russia's Marxist Left. Lenin himself granted Plekhanov pride of place, even though Plekhanov broke with Lenin and opposed the 1917 Bolshevik takeover. In the following excerpt, Plekhanov responds to critics who claimed that Marx’s “historical determinism” (or “economic determinism”) excludes any role in history for individual agency, just as determinism undermines the idea of free will. Plekhanov insists that determinism and agency are not incompatible.}   

G.V. Plekhanov, from “The Role of the Individual in History”:

[Critics of] dialectical materialism regarded it as a doctrine which sacrifices all other factors to the economic “factor” and reduces the role of the individual in history to nothing. Materialists began to be accused of betraying leanings towards quietism even before they had worked out their dialectical conception of Nature and of history.

There cannot be the slightest doubt that the materialist conception of the human will is quite compatible with the most vigorous practical activity. At all events, this has been the case in history so far. Men who have repudiated free will have often excelled all their contemporaries in strength of will and have asserted their will to the utmost. History shows that even fatalism need not be a hindrance to energetic practical action; on the contrary, in certain epochs it was a psychologically necessary basis for such action.

Those who think that believing that a certain series of events is inevitable is sufficient to eliminate all motivation to affect, or to counteract, such events are very much mistaken. Here, everything depends on whether [I believe that] my activities constitute an inevitable link in the chain of inevitable events. If they do, then I waver less and the more resolute are my actions. There is nothing surprising in this: when we say that a certain individual regards his activities as an inevitable link in the chain of inevitable events, we mean, among other things, that for this individual, lack of free will is tantamount to incapability of inaction, and that this lack of free will is reflected in his mind as the impossibility of acting differently from the way he is acting. This is precisely the psychological mood that can be expressed in the celebrated words of Luther: “Here I stand, I can do no other,” and thanks to which men display the most indomitable energy and perform the most astonishing feats.

When the consciousness of my lack of free will presents itself to me only in the form of the complete subjective and objective impossibility of acting differently from the way I am acting, and when, at the same time, my actions are to me the most desirable of all other possible actions, then, in my mind, necessity becomes identified with freedom and freedom with necessity; and then, I am unfree only in the sense that I cannot disturb this identity between freedom and necessity, I cannot oppose one to the other, I cannot feel the restraint of necessity. But such a lack of freedom is at the same time its fullest manifestation.

Again, being conscious of the absolute inevitability of a given phenomenon can only increase the energy of a man who sympathizes with it and who regards himself as one of the forces which called it into being. If such a man, conscious of the inevitability of this phenomenon, folded his arms and did nothing, he would display his ignorance.

But what effect will the consciousness of the necessity of a given phenomenon have upon a strong man who does not sympathize with it and resists its taking place? Here the situation is somewhat different. It is very possible that it will cause the vigor of his resistance to relax. But when do the opponents of a given phenomenon become convinced that it is inevitable? When the circumstances favorable to it are very numerous and very strong. The fact that its opponents realize that the phenomenon is inevitable, and the relaxation of their energy, are merely manifestations of the force of circumstances favorable to it. These manifestations, in their turn, are a part of the favorable circumstances.

But the vigor of resistance will not be relaxed among all the opponents; among some of them the consciousness that the phenomenon is inevitable will cause it to grow and become transformed into the vigor of despair. History in general, and the history of Russia in particular, provides not a few instructive examples of this sort of vigor.

A French historian has written, “At any given moment a man may, by the sudden decision of his will, introduce into the course of events a new, unexpected and changeable force, which may alter that course, but which cannot be measured itself owing to its changeability.” It must not be thought that “sudden decisions” of human will occur without cause. That would be too naive. Rather, the mental and moral qualities of a man who is playing a more or less important role in public life, his talent, knowledge, resoluteness or irresoluteness, courage, or cowardice, etc., cannot help having a marked influence on the course and outcome of events; and yet these qualities cannot be explained solely by the general laws of development of a nation; they are always, and to a considerable degree, acquired as a result of the action of what may be called the accidents of private life.

Does not this conclusion contradict the conception of a social development conforming to laws? No, not in the least. The effect of personal peculiarities is undeniable; but no less undeniable is the fact that such could occur only in the given social conditions. By virtue of particular traits of their character, individuals can influence the fate of society. Sometimes this influence is very considerable; but the possibility of exercising this influence, and its extent, are determined by the form of organization of society and by the relation of forces within it. The character of an individual is a “factor” in social development only where, when, and to the extent that social relations permit it to be such.

Georgi Plekhanov - Wikipedia

For what it's worth, I highly recommend Plekhanov's "On the So-Called Religious Seekings in Russia," first published in 1909: On the So-Called Religious Seekings in Russia by Plekhanov 1909 (marxists.org) It is far more intelligent and far more entertaining than Lenin's crude atheistic vitriol. 

Georgi Plekhanov, aka 'Carnac the Magnificent'

A Troika of Deplorables

(To be clear: the authors referenced below—William Lind, Michael Anton, Timothy Gordon, and Michael Robillard—may be fine, decent human beings. It is only their political/ideological views which I deplore.}

According to William Lind (at The American Conservative), modernity is, among many other flaws, terminally ugly:

A curious aspect of today’s America is its combination of wealth and ugliness. In the past, money usually led to beauty: to classical, baroque, and art deco buildings, to the music of Biber, C.P.E. Bach, and Boccherini, to the art of Michelangelo, Titian, and Gainsborough. Now, money buys decadent art, painful music, and alienating architecture. Most prominent architects belong to the “turd in the punchbowl” school; they delight in forcing something disharmonious into a previously charming neighborhood. America’s commercial districts, with their endless strip malls and parking lots, have to be among the ugliest ever built. A southern mayor, speaking at a Congress on the New Urbanism, showed a slide of one of his city’s main streets and said, “I call this our corridor of crap.”

One need not share Mr. Lind’s ideology to agree with his premise that a good deal of the American landscape has been uglified. The disagreement revolves around who, or what, is responsible for the uglification:

Three reasons why we are awash in ugliness stand out. The first is the abolition of the concept of beauty by relativism. There are no objective standards. Everyone’s opinion is of equal value, and there are nothing but opinions.

A second reason is a change in the means of cultural transmission. Today, electronic screens are the means of cultural transmission, and they drive morals, aesthetics, and culture ever lower. Why? Because money is to be made by appealing to the widest audience, which means the least educated, crassest, and most vulgar. Relativism having abolished all standards, there are no limits on how low taste dare go.

A third force promoting ugliness: ideology, specifically the ideology of cultural Marxism, currently parading itself in the Emperor’s clothes of “wokeism.” 

Good Christ, does anyone on the Right know anything about “cultural Marxism”?

Anyone who can discuss the uglification of America without mentioning the word “capitalism” is either disingenuous or obtuse.

The Ugliness of Everything - The American Conservative

Michael Anton is one of the Right’s intellectual lights, which gives you some idea of the darkness on that edge of town. Nevertheless, Anton is not wrong when he explains:

The “socialism” with which we are most familiar today—high and progressive taxation, a generous welfare state, nationalization of key services such as health care, an expansive list of state-guaranteed “rights,” combined with the retention of private property and private ownership of most means of production—Marx and Engels deride as “bourgeois socialism,” i.e., not only not the real thing but fundamentally closer to bourgeois capitalism than to true socialism, much less communism.

In short: bourgeois socialism is not true socialism, much less communism.

Now, if only Anton had the sense to realize, or the honesty to admit, that it is therefore preposterous to equate American liberals’ efforts to bolster the welfare state (social safety net) with Marxism or Bolshevism. Alas, despite his having spelled it out, neither Anton nor his conservative colleagues seem able to understand, or willing to recognize, the difference between Communism and what is called in much of the world “democratic Socialism”; and so, on they go, Anton and his ilk, prattling about gulags and tyranny, pretending to be persecuted, marginalized, and silenced while commanding impressive speaking fees, book contracts, and prestigious think-tank fellowships.

Socialism and the Great Reset - The American Mind

Finally, at The American Mind, Timothy Gordon and Michael Robillard do their utmost to convince young readers not to go to college. Their rationale is as simple as it is specious:

The modern university has succumbed, in the name of the triple-headed god of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), to the hegemonic ideology of woke intersectionality. All decisions about staffing, curriculum, and student life must be minutely inspected for their adherence to dismantling white supremacy and patriarchy. Despite an ever-growing list of instances of campus hysteria, cancellation of conservative voices, and violent harassment of heterodox university speakers, the unquestioned cultural narrative persists: One must go to college in order to flourish as a full person in society.

Nor is this calamitous situation limited to the humanities; “Even traditionally rigorous courses of study have been blighted. Woke university professors have declared mathematics “a field dominated by whiteness and racism.” At the University of Toronto, one can now take a “Liberating Mathematics” course which seeks to “re-imagine” mathematics, offering the mathematically incompetent a handy excuse in the form of a “daring critique” of math, allegedly delegitimizing it as having drawn predominantly from “the experiences and narratives of men.” In formal logic, scholars have declared “there is much more to be done–especially on decolonizing our curriculum.” 

The authors wax predictably grim over the prospect of academic decolonization:

This woke takeover of the hard sciences is reinforced by an entrenched set of professorial and administrative hiring quotas, overbearing and overbroad institutional incentives and disincentives, and an oppressive campus culture submerged in the now-unquestionable presuppositions of woke orthodoxy. All this has engendered a reinvigorated cult of scientism.

Gordon and Robillard then briefly discuss Stalinism and Lysenkoism, thus linking American universities to Stalinist atrocities. They conclude by urging, “We need to encourage STEM-inclined Zoomers to circumvent the college-industrial complex altogether, to marry young and learn a trade, and to get on with their lives in a world hopefully soon delivered from woke-mathematics and nature-hating scientism.”

The authors have a book due for release soon from Regnery Press, titled Don’t Go to College: A Case for Revolution. The spirit of the Sixties lives on, albeit in unexpected quarters: “tune in” to Fox News and Infowars, “turn on” the woke liberal elite and the nefarious Deep State, and “drop out” of modernity to find your own, doubtless very different, Benedict Option.

Welcome to the New Dark Ages. The cost of one admission is your mind.  

 The Triumph of Scientism - The American Mind

The Three Horses of the Woke Apocalypse