Having set up his system Dühring undertakes to discuss the nature of the “state of the future.” His ideas are, Engels maintains, watered down simplifications of notions he has gleaned from Rousseau and Hegel. In his own words, Dühring bases his state on the “sovereignty of the people.” He explains what he means in the following passage of essentially meaningless mumbo jumbo:

If one presupposes agreements between each individual and every other individual in all directions, and if the object of these agreements is mutual aid against unjust offenses– the the power required for the maintenance of right is only strengthened, and right is not deduced from the more superior strength of the many against the individual or of the majority against the minority.

Don’t worry if that passage doesn’t make any sense as Dühring adds the following to explicate it. He says, “The slightest error in the conception of the role of the collective will would destroy the sovereignty of the individual, and this sovereignty is the only thing conducive to the deduction of real rights.” Engels thinks this pretty “thick” even by the standards of Dühring’s so called “philosophy of reality.”

This is especially so since the “sovereignty of the individual” consists in the fact that he or she is, Dühring says, “Subject to absolute compulsioin by the state.” This is because the state “serves natural justice” and that is the best guarantee of individual sovereignty. There will be a police force for internal security and an army as well — to enforce the will of the state — which is the same as that of the community of sovereign individuals and to ensure people don’t use their sovereignty in an incorrect and un-sovereign manner. And just in case the state makes an error, well, the citizens will still be better off than they would have been if left in the state of nature! Anyway, they will get free lawyers to boot.

Since Dühring says his new state is based on “sober and critical thought”, he announces that religion will be banished from the commune.” In the free society,” he says, “there can be no religious worship; for every member of it has got beyond the primitive childish superstition that there are beings, behind nature or above it, who can be influenced by sacrifices or prayers. [A] socialitarian system, rightly conceived, has therefore … to abolish all the paraphernalia of religious magic, and therewith all the essential elements of religious worship.”

It is important to note, since in the real history of socialism in the twentieth century, some socialist and communist states tried to eliminate religion and religious practices by forceable means, that this idea ["the state has to…"] comes from Dühring, an enemy of the Marxist outlook, and not from anything Marx or Engels had to say. Engels explicitly criticizes this view.

This is not to say Marx and Engels were in any way “soft” on religion ["opium of the masses" and all that] but they respected “individual sovereignty” enough not to dream of using the “state’ [which they wanted to abolish in any case] to trample on people’s rights of conscience in religious affairs.

At this point Engels adds a succinct account of the Marxist view of the origin, social function, and future of religion. It is more or less as follows. Religion is just a reflection in the brains of people of the forces in the external world that are out of their control which affect their lives and that they imagine as supernatural beings which they need to fear and placate. Originally these were the powers of nature that took on the guise of gods and goddess, but as human society progressed and evolved social forces also came to assume these roles. Over time, in the West at least, the many gods and goddess representing these alien powers were distilled down to one god [monotheism; e.g., Jews and Moslems, or three gods posing as one as in the Jewish-pagan synthesis called Christianity- tr] and in this form religion will have a lease on life as long as humans are dominated by natural and social powers they neither understand nor control.

In contemporary capitalist society people are dominated and controlled by an economic system that they have themselves made yet rules over them as if it were an independently existing power beyond their control. The Market– made by humans, rules humans. This is essentially the same reification as is found in religion, and it reinforces religious attitudes and beliefs already historically present in modern society. Engels thinks of this development as the First Act of human development. It is now time for the Second Act.

In the Second Act humans will take control of the means of production and distribution which they have created over the long ages [thereby hangs a tale] and by means of scientific understanding and advance be able to control them rather than being controlled by them. Science will also explain the origins of life, the workings of nature, and the role of humans, leading to advances in medicine, agriculture, education, etc., so that humans will seek to understand the world instead of bowing down before it in stupefaction.

Engels says “only then will the last alien force which is still reflected in religion vanish: and with it will also vanish the religious reflection itself, for the simple reason that then there will be nothing left to reflect.” Dühring can’t wait and wants to administratively abolish religion before humanity has reached the intellectual and social level where it will of its own accord fade away. This will only inflame resistance, antagonize the masses, and strengthen the hold of superstition over the brains of people by giving it “a prolonged lease of life.” I might add, if some of the socialists and communists of the past century, let alone this one, would have taken Engels to heart many mistakes and tragedies could have been avoided.

After Herr Dühring has disposed of religion he tells us that “man, made to rely solely on himself and nature and matured in the knowledge of his collective powers, can intrepidly enter on all the roads which the course of events and his own being open to him.” Fine. Let us see how “man” travels down these roads. First he is born. Then he, or she as the case may be, is under the control of his mother the “natural tutor of children” until puberty (about 14 years) when the role of the father kicks in, as long as “real and uncontested paternity” can be demonstrated. If not a guardian is appointed. Ancient Roman law serves Dühring as a model for these ideas.

This shows, Engels says, that Dühring has no sense of history. The family, for him, is immutable, basically the same in Ancient Rome as in modern capitalism with no allowance for the changes in economic conditions and social relations between the ancient world and contemporary world. Engels then quotes the following passage from Volume One of Das Kapital to show the superiority of Marx’s outlook to Dühring’s. Marx wrote that “modern industry, by assigning as it does an important part in the process of production, outside the domestic sphere, to women, to young persons, and to children of both sexes [due to the rise of the working class movement capitalism's urge to exploit children in the productive process has been somewhat curtailed-- tr] creates a new economic foundation for a higher form of the family and the relations between the sexes.”

This new form is still in the process of creation, but there is no going back to the Ancient Roman family, nor even, as our Republican politicians are learning to their chagrin, to the patriarchal family of the Christian Middle Ages — so beloved by the reactionary classes in our country.

Dühring next informs us that “Every dreamer of social reforms naturally has ready a pedagogy corresponding to his new social life.” He may think he is putting others down and himself coming up with a truly scientific plan for the educational needs of society, for the “foreseeable future”, but he is actually a worse dreamer than those he opposes, according to Engels.

In the schools of Dühring’s future cooperative society the children will, Dühring writes, learn “everything which by itself and in principle can have any attraction for man” and so will include “the foundations and main conclusions of all sciences touching on the understanding of the world and of life.” Dühring also tells us he sees in outline all the textbooks of the future but he is personally unable to actually see their contents and just what the children will be learning as that “can only really be expected from the free and enhanced forces of the new social order.” But they will concentrate on physics, math, astronomy and mechanics while biology, botany, and zoology and such will be “topics for light conversation” [!]. He completely forgets to say anything about chemistry. Engels says his knowledge of the sciences seems to be confined to Natural History for Children — a popular book of the 18th Century by Georg Christian Raff (1748-1788).

When it comes to the humanities, Dühring sounds like a second rate Plato. He wants to ban, for example, the great artistic creations of the past because too many of them have religious themes. As Plato banned Homer for portraying the Gods with human flaws, so Goethe is banned by Dühring for “poetic mysticism” and others for any religious content at all — since religion is banned completely in the future state.

American monoglot educators will appreciate Herr Dühring’s attitude to foreign languages. Latin and Greek will be junked entirely — who needs dead languages? Living foreign languages “will remain of secondary importance” and the students will really concentrate on their own native tongue. Engels thinks this is a way to perpetuate the dulling national narrow mindedness of people who are basically ignorant of the world and of the Other. Latin and Greek actually open up people’s minds to a broader perspective of the world and history, at least if they have a classical education, and learning foreign modern languages also allows peoples to have greater understanding of others and their cultures. Dühring’s views are those of the narrow minded Prussian Philistine and similar to the “English only” bigotry found on the right in this country.

Engels gives Dühring credit for at least being aware of the fact there will be a difference between educational policies under socialism and those currently employed in bourgeois society, but since he keeps capitalist relations of production in place in his future communal society he can’t quite figure out what those policies will be. Thus he is reduced to coming up with such ideas as “young and old will work in the serious sense of the word” which, along with other empty phrases, Engels calls “spineless and meaningless ranting.”

Engels counterpoises a brief comment on socialist education from volume one of Das Kapital where Marx says that “from the Factory system budded, as Robert Owen has shown in detail, the germ of the education of the future, an education that will, in the case of every child over a given age, combine productive labour with instruction and gymnastics, not only as one of the methods of adding to the efficiency of production, but as the only method of producing fully developed human beings.” Our own educational system, which produces dropouts and graduates functional illiterates, is American capitalism’s answer to what education will be in the future.

Finally, after we find out how children will be educated in Dühring’s future society, we find out how they are to come into the world. Dühring, no doubt inspired by Plato’s Republic, tells us that future humans must be “sought in sexual union and selection, and furthermore in the care taken for or against the ensuring of certain results.” We are here on the road to Dühringean eugenics. The most important thing to keep in mind about the future births is not the number but “whether nature or human circumspection succeeded or failed in regard to their quality.” This leads Dühring to conclude that “It is obviously an advantage to prevent the birth of a human being who would only be a defective creature.”

Modern scientific sentiment would not reject this conclusion out of hand, regardless of the feelings of those blinded by religious prejudices or logically challenged. It all depends on the kinds of defects that are presented. Dühring is thinking, however, along lines made popular by Nietzsche, of some sort of super human race compared to the run of the mill humans that unaided Nature tends to produce.

Dühring believes in a human right which may be important, but is not generally appealed to these days, for the purposes of eugenics; i.e., “the right of the unborn world to the best possible composition” [biologically-- tr]. “Conception,” he says, “and, if need be, also birth [infanticide- tr] offer the opportunity , or in exceptional cases selective, care in this connection.” Dühring is not just talking about medical defects– but also “aesthetic” defects.

He thinks, in fact, that people should be bred to look like the ancient Greeks! “Grecian art — the idealization of man in marble [not "European" man but "man"]– will not be able to retain its historical importance when the less artistic, and therefore from the standpoint of the fate of the millions, far more important task of perfecting the human form in flesh and blood is taken in hand.” OK, so we won’t all look like Antinous or the Venus de Milo but that goal will be a work in progress for the future Dühringean society.

How does Dühring bring about the this perfection of the human [ancient Greeks-- Dühring had no use for modern Greeks] form? Well, he says force would be harmful but it will come about as a natural result of the mating of beautiful people– sort of by an “invisible hand” (but in this case a different anatomical feature will be at work). Here is Dühring’s quote: [From the] “higher, genuinely human motives of wholesome sexual unions … the humanly ennobled form of sexual excitement , which in its intense manifestations is passionate love, when reciprocated is the best guarantee of a union which will be acceptable also in its result…. It is only an effect of the second order that from a relation which in itself is harmonious a symphoniously composed product should result.”

Engels thinks Dühring’s views on sex are “twaddle.” This is because force would have to be used to make sure all unions were “wholesome” by Dühring’s standards. In the real world it is not just the beautiful people who fall in love and have children (symphoniously composed products) but all kinds of people so “the second order” effects of lovemaking would be the same in the future communal state of Herr Dühring as they are now. [He could, however, try for a rigged lottery a la Plato's Republic to match up the "best" people and only allow those with baby licenses to reproduce. This would lead to more problems than the Chinese have had with the one child policy -- which was successful in limiting population numbers but a failure from the point of view of creating balanced population growth.]

Engels also critiques Dühring’s “noble ideas about the female sex in general”[prostitution is a normal activity due to the constraints of bourgeois marriage]– but both Dühring’s ideas and Engel’s response are too shaped by nineteenth century conditions to be applicable to twenty-first century advanced industrial societies so I will pass this topic by and come to the conclusion of Anti-Dühring.

After having gone over all the major views that Dühring had presented in a series of writings over the years, and refuting them by giving a proper Marxist response to his mixed up theoretical constructions, Engels sums up Dühring’s oeuvre as being the product of mental incompetence due to megalomania.

Postscript: Eugen Dühring survived Engel’s critique and wrote more books and articles. In the 1880′s he began turning out anti-Semitic writings some of which led Theodor Hertzel to conclude that the Jews needed their own state. Frederick Nietzsche’s rantings against socialism were the result of his having read Dühring’s works not those of Marx and Engels (although I doubt it would have made any difference). Of his many books only one has been translated into English — his anti-Semitic tract on the Jewish question was published in 1997 as Eugen Dühring on the Jews by 1984 Press. Dühring died in 1921 thus being deprived of seeing the fruits of his anti-Semitic labors. These and other interesting facts about Dühring are to be found in the Wikipedia article “Eugen Dühring.”

Dühring treats distribution independently of production. Once the social product has been produced, and this is accomplished by the necessary operative laws of capitalist production, the product can be distributed by an act of will so that “universal justice” is done. This can be done because in the commune everyone must labor and consume based on all forms of labor being considered as of equal value. This system will obtain both within the commune and between the communes. Furthermore, exchange value will be linked to the value of the precious metals. This system will be an improvement over the “foggy notions” of thinkers such as Marx.

Let’s see just how this “universal justice” actually is brought about. Following Engels, lets take a model commune of 100 workers working an eight hour day and making $100 worth of commodities each or a total of $10,000 worth of goodies. Say they work 250 days a year for a yearly product of $2,500,000. According to Dühring’s system “universal justice” requires that each worker get paid the exact value of his labor which would be 250 times $100 or $25,000 a year. The commune pays out the entire value that it creates so, as Engels says, at the end of a year, or a hundred years, “the commune is no richer than at the beginning.” There is no accumulation possible in this system. Individuals can accumulate wealth for a worker can always deprive himself and not spend all of his money in a given time period, but society cannot accumulate wealth for any economic expansion or to carry out any kind of social programs.

This is not the only problem with Dühring’s commune. The fact that workers are all paid the same means a single worker will actually have more income for savings than a worker with a large family to take care of. Rich and poor will gradually reappear and eventually all the problems of a capitalist society. This tendency cannot be stopped by rules and regulations as Dühring’s “universal justice” demands that the workers can dispose of their wages as they wish. And as money is the “social incarnation” of human labor and operates by the laws of capitalist economics in the commune as well as the surrounding world, all of Dühring’s regulations to control it “are just as powerless against it as they are against the multiplication table or the chemical composition of water.”

Dühring’s system breaks down because he, not Marx and other socialists, is under the control of “foggy notions.” Dühring just doesn’t understand the basic operating conditions of the capitalist system. He wasn’t the only one in Engel’s day who claimed to be able to explain economics without really understanding what was going on– the phenomenon is just as rampant today in the 21st century as it was in the 19th. Therefore at this point in his polemic against Dühring, Engels takes a timeout to give his readers a brief summary of Economics 101.

The capitalist economy is based on commodity production and the only value recognized by capitalism is the value of commodities, according to Engels. To say that any given commodity has a value is to say four things about it. 1. That it has a use value– it serves some socially useful function. 2. That it has been privately produced [this is a simple model of capitalism, not a mixed economy or state capitalism]. 3. It is a product of individual labor but “unconsciously and involuntarily” it also is a social product containing human labor in general which is measured through exchange. 4. The value of the social labor contained in it is measured by some other commodity. Engels gives the example a clock having the same value as a certain quantity of cloth– say “fifty shillings”.

This only means that it took the same amount of socially necessary labor time to make the clock as to make the cloth. Since we don’t live in a barter society a special commodity has developed which is used to measure the relative values of all the other commodities to each other– this is money.

The term “relative” value is important. We cannot determine the “absolute value” of every commodity– i.e., calculate the exact value of the labor power used to create it. This is because of the complexity of the capitalist system and the variations of the cost of labor and labor time from factory to factory and location to location. All these different factors average out over time and commodities begin to reflect their relative values, the relative rate of socially necessary labor time needed to create them, by having their worth expressed in terms of money. Prices are reflections of relative value not absolute value and can fluctuate wildly around the actual value of commodities– but over time they come to reflect the actual values that underlie them but in a relative manner.

Engels gives an analogy from the chemistry of his day. He says that the absolute atomic weights of the elements were unknown so scientists used hydrogen as 1 and expressed the relative atomic weights of the other elements as multiples of hydrogen. This is analogous to elevating “gold [or whatever is used as money] to the level of the absolute commodity, the general equivalent of all other commodities” and using it to measure the relative value of human (social) labor contained in them.

The term “social labor” is important to understand. It is not raw individual labor that determines the value of a commodity. It is rather the amount of labor that in a given society is necessary to produce different commodities that gives them their values– the socially necessary labor time. At least this is “value” as expressed in a capitalist society. In a communist society “value” will not be so expressed. A communist society will have a planned economy and workers will know the value of the labor power they will devote to the production of the products needed by society. “Money” will not be necessary to measure this value. Engels notes that “all that would be left, in a communist society, of the politico-economic concept of value” is the knowledge by the workers/planners “of the useful effects and expenditure of labour on making decisions concerning production.”

The notion of “value” is the hallmark of a commodity based economy and, Engels says, it “contains the germ, not only of money, but also of all the more developed forms of the production and exchange of commodities.” The fact that this exchange takes place by means of money, and considering the complexity of production (i.e., that in some fields more or less of the socially necessary labor may be involved) “admits of the possibility that the exchange may never take place altogether, or at least may not realize the correct value.” This is especially true of the commodity labor-power which, as with all commodities, has its value determined by the socially necessary labor time it takes to produce it and can also be forced into service for longer periods of time than is socially necessary for its reproduction.

Once money has been invented within a primarily commodity producing society we will see its “first and most essential effect” which is the commodification of all aspects of society in which soon all social relations begin to be converted into money relations based on individual private interests. Engels mentions the dissolution of the common tillage system among Indian peasants and the same amongst the Russian peasants and their village communes. Inspired by Marx we might say “Privatize, Privatize, that is the Gospel and the Church!”

Now back to Dühring and his ilk. We cannot meaningfully talk about the “value of labor” and how to see that the worker gets his “full value” as Dühring does in discussing his system of communes. When you measure the value of commodities by the labor they contain you cannot then talk about the value of labor in the same way. Engels says it is the same with weight. We can measure the heaviness of commodities by their weight but we cannot talk about the heaviness of weight. What Dühring and others do is try to measure the “value” of labor by the products it makes (it should actually be measured by time) and then they think the function of socialism is to see to it that “the full proceeds of labour” are given to the workman. But this means the whole value of what the working class creates is returned to the workers in terms of each individual getting back all the value he has created.

This will of course leave nothing for the capitalists. What it overlooks is that “the most progressive function of society” is accumulation. This is why Marxists, by the way, tout the General Consumption Fund (GCF). The individual workers do not get back 100% of the value they have created. The “state” or whatever social arrangement that replaces it, takes a portion of the created value and puts into the GCF which then disperses it to society as a whole (rent and food subsidies, medical care, education, maintenance and replacement of machinery, etc.) The working class does get back the value it creates but collectively as well as individually. The Dühringean system would stagnate and fall apart– it is economic nonsense.

Finally, Engels points out that the law of value is “the fundamental law” of commodity production and so of capitalism “the highest form” of commodity production. The law of value dictates that commodities created by equal social labor are equal to each other– i.e., mutually exchangeable. In our day, as in Engels’, the only way this law can operate under capitalism is “as a blindly operating law of nature inherent in things and relations and independent of the will or actions of the producers.”

It is just this law that Dühring is appealing to when he dreams of creating communes where equal labor is exchanged for equal labor based on his “universal principle of justice.” He thinks it possible to keep capitalist economic relations but to abolish the abuses that such relations lead to. In this he completely resembles Proudhon who also wanted to “abolish the real consequences of the law of value by means of fantastic ones.”

Engels ends his chapter by comparing Dühring’s search for a new society based on his notions of just distributions to Don Quixote’s search for Mambrino’s helmet which turns up only the old barber’s basin.

The story revolves around the return to Tunis of Said Ferjani, a self educated Islamic politician, who lived in the U.K. for 22 years and is a member of the Ennanah Party — an Islamic political party that won the recent elections in Tunisia after the overthrow of the dictatorial former president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in 2011.

Ferjani sees the task of his party as building a society both democratic and Islamic. “This is our test,” he said. The test, of course, is to see if it is truly possible to create a modern democratic society, even a bourgeois democracy, based on Islamic rather than than secular foundations. Shadid pointed out that the Islamists of Ferjani’s generation (and the Ennanah Party) are the spiritual descendants of the movements spawned under the aegis of the Muslim Brotherhood — a society founded in 1928 in Egypt by Hassan al-Banne who was inspired both by European fascist movements and the desire to impose Sharia law.

Many Arab secularists and political liberals doubt that so-called “moderate” political Islam, such as is represented by the Ennanah Party, can, given its roots in fascism and Sharia, actually lead the way to a real representative democracy. We shall see, in the course of this article, if their fears are warranted or not.

“I can tell you one thing,” Ferjani is quoted as saying, “we now have a golden opportunity. And in this golden opportunity, I’m not interested in control. I’m interested delivering the best charismatic system, a charismatic democratic system. This is my dream.” It is strange for a Sunni to be using the term “charismatic” as this is a term usually associated with the Shia tradition and a “charismatic” and mystical element that can be found in leaders; it is also associated with fascist ideology.

As a young teenager Ferjani came under the influence his school teacher, Rachid al-Ghannouchi, who went on to become a political activist and the founder of the Ennahda Party. The questions that were discussed by Ghannouchi centered around the theme of Muslim backwardness. Ferjani remembers his teacher asking “What makes us backwards? Is it our destiny to be so?”

At this time these questions were being answered by the Muslim Brotherhood founded by Hassan al-Banna whose ideas had spread beyond Egypt to other Arab countries including Tunisia. Banna was a pan-Arabist and anti-imperialist who build the Brotherhood he founded in 1928 from a small group to a large international organization of 500,000 members. He was assassinated in 1949 at the age of 42 because he opposed violence and denounced terrorism as a way for Muslims to fight imperialism and to further democratic rights.

After Banna’s death, Sayyid Qutb rose to prominence in the leadership of the Brotherhood. Originally a man with secular values that did not conflict with Islam, he became a radical jihadist in theory after a sojourn in the US (1948-50 he was turned off by the “immodesty” of the women and he hated jazz) and rejecting the secular government in Egypt that resulted from the overthrow of the monarchy (which he approved) by Nasser, who later executed him as a terrorist — although he had only advocated it not engaged in it personally.

Qutb’s faction of the Brotherhood advocates offensive jihad, violence, and eventual world conquest by militant Islam and the universal imposition of Sharia law. World conquest has never worked out for the those who advocate it and Qutb’s version of radical Islam, which was very influential in the ideology of bin Ladin and al-Queda, is a minority viewpoint within the Sunni branch of Islam where it originated (although past and current US policy in the Middle East is making it more popular day by day.)

Despite its rejection by the majority of Muslims it is almost the only version of Islam that the American public is exposed to from the preachings of right wing fundamentalists calling themselves “Christians”, the screechings of talking lunkheads on Fox TV, to the frothy mixture of political opportunism and misinformation bandied about by Rick Santorum and other Republican presidential wannabes.

Over in Tunisia, Ghannouchi and his followers did not adopt Qutb’s extremism and instead argued for an Islam compatible with pluralism and democratic values (a move away from fascism). This did not stop their falling victims to political oppression and in some cases imprisonment, torture and exile. In the late 1980s Ferjani found himself in jail, tortured, and finally forced to flee into exile in London.

London in the 1990s was a hot bed of Islamic thought. Ghannouchi followed Ferjani and there were Muslim exiles from all the Arab countries and of all stripes and Islamic positions. There was also exposure to Western values and ideas. Here was no Chinese wall between western and eastern ideals. Ferjani told Shadid that while all the different exiles were mixing it up they did not all agree. “We know each other. But knowing is one thing, doing things together in every sense — as many may think — is another. In politics, its not that we all agree.” The moral here, I think, is that any attempt to paint political Islam with broad strokes as some kind of monolithic movement threatening the West at every turn, is a gross error.

The NYT report makes an important point, often overlooked by other Western media and especially by conservatives in the US — including the Republican party leaders whose grip on reality is questionable to say the least. The idea of a unified and radically violent political Islam grew out of three sources in the 90s and early 2000s. These were the revolt in Egypt by radical islamists, the the civil war in Algeria, and the rise of Bin Laden. And, the Times points out, Bin Laden’s distorted “Manichaean” world view was the mirror image of “the most vitriolic statements of the Bush administration.”

To place al-Queda and the Bush administration on the same level of ideological putrescence took a lot of courage. This should tell us what is at stake in the 2012 elections. The Republican Party is the standard bearer of Bush’s ideological putrescence and lack of understanding of the world as it really is. For this crypto-fascistic party to take control of the US would be a disaster for the American people and the world taking us down the road to more wars and inviting the growth of radical anti-Western sentiments at the expense of more moderate outlooks. It would be especially disastrous to working people here and abroad whose class interests would be sacrificed for the illusory well being of what has come to be called the 1%.

This article also makes the case for a real moderate Islamic political trend such as the one now heading the governing alliance in Tunisia and led by Ghannouchi who favors democracy and maintains that majority rule is not anti-Islamic as the radicals claim. He also wants more participation by women in the political process and in the Parliament– a very different position from what we see in Saudi Arabia and the Taliban (although the King in S.A. has recently allowed women to participate in municipal elections; but no car driving). “Frankly,” Ferjani told the NYT, “the guy who brought democracy into the Islamic movement is Ghannouchi.” As for resorting to violence, Ghannouchi has publicly said that “Rulers benefit from violence more than their opponents do.”

Ghannouchi, and many others, have evolved away from the rigid stances of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood itself has undergone changes and while many of its positions such as the subordination and separate education of women, since their natures are unlike those of men (this is a little analogous to the Southern Baptist position on women but the Baptists allow for co-education), are unacceptable to progressives, and it now says it is against violence and supports political democracy. However, the Brotherhood is an international muti-tendency organization and still has many militant radical fundamentalists within some of its chapters.

The Brotherhood’s old motto, still in use, “hearing and obeying” is increasing being rejected by the new generation of Islamists. “That’s over,” Tariq Ramadan said (best remembered by Americans as the Islamic scholar barred from visiting the US by the second Bush administration and thus prevented from teaching at that hot bed of radical Islamic thinking Notre Dame University). “The new generation is saying if it’s going to be this, then we’re leaving. You have a new understanding and a new energy.” Ramadan pointed out that this has a lot to do with the contact of the Islamic exiles with Western thought and ideals. The ideology of Islamists is “not just coming from the Middle East anymore. It’s coming from North African countries and from the West. These are new visions and there are new ways of understanding. Now they are bringing these thoughts back to the Middle East.” Ferjani, for example, who left Tunisia an anti-Leftist, returned from London a believer in the economic theories of Karl Marx and a critic of capitalism; views not usually associated with Islamic politics. “Exile,” he remarked, “changed me a lot, profoundly.”

Well, we shall see what the results of the Constituent Assembly are with respect to writing a new constitution for Tunisia. The October election won by Ennahna allows this party to have a major influence now in running the country and in composing the constitution. It is actually ruling in a coalition with two other parties, a center left secular party and a “populist” party set up by a wealthy businessman with alleged ties to the ousted president Ben Ali. Of the 217 people elected three are members of the Tunisian Communist Workers Party so Marxism will be represented in a small way at least. If a real democratic constitution is drawn up it should put to rest the anti-Islamic hysteria in Europe and the US. Time will tell.

Engels will compare his and Marx’s “bastard” progeny with the “legitimate” progeny of Herr Dühring with respect to economic production in this chapter. Dühring rejects any notion of the capitalist production system which claims that economic crises are due to the very nature of the structure of capitalism itself. That is a Marxian fantasy.

For Dühring, Engels says, “crises are only occasional deviations from ‘normalcy’ and at most only serve to promote ‘the development of a more regulated order.’” The Marxists maintain, au contraire, that crises are caused by over-production and this is a structural fault within the capitalist system itself. But Dühring rejects this and writes that the real reason for crises is, in his words, “the lagging behind of popular consumption … artificially produced under-consumption … with the natural growth of the NEEDS OF THE PEOPLE (!), which ultimately make the gulf between supply and demand so critically wide.”

To this Engels replies that the masses have been forced to under-consume throughout history and in every economic system based on class exploitation, therefore under-consumption is not some artificially produced phenomenon but something all class societies share — i.e., that the exploited class never has the value of its yearly production returned to it at the end of the year. The crises of industrial capitalism, however, only date from the the first quarter of the nineteenth century.

Thus, Engels concludes, it is under capitalism that periodic economic crises come into the world and while under-consumption of the masses is a PREREQUISITE it is not the CAUSE of crises. And knowing this, he says, “tells us just as little why crises exist today as why they did not exist before.”

Dühring, in fact, does not think mass markets are all that important anyway. He himself says that capitalist production happens to “depend for its market mainly on THE CIRCLES OF THE POSSESSING CLASSES THEMSELVES.” His confusion becomes only more apparent when he follows up on this by claiming that the most important industries (this is the 1870s remember) are cotton and iron production. But, Engels points out, the production of these two is entirely dependent on a mass market and the possessing class make up only an “infinitesimally small degree” of its market.

Engels then points out that capitalism, by it very need to grow and expand, brings about crises. He says, for example, in England there is just one small town (Oldham) that from 1872 to 1875 doubled its production of spun cotton [the number of its spindles went from 2.5 to 5 million] and this is just one of a dozen small towns around Manchester. Oldham, by the way, produced as much spun cotton as ALL of Germany (including Alsace). This was happening in towns all over Great Britain.

It thus shows “deep-rooted effrontery” on the part of Herr Dühring to blame the English masses for under-consumption rather than the capitalists for over-production when it comes to “the present complete stagnation in the yarn and cloth markets.”²

Engels ends his critique of Herr Dühring’s views on crises but gives a few quotes that demonstrate that Dühring has no idea about capitalism as an economic system but sees everything in terms of the behavior of individuals. If over-speculation and the unplanned building of private factories are responsible for crises we must see that as simply “the ordinary interplay of overstrain and relaxation” of the system and look closely at “the rashness of individual entrepreneurs and the lack of private circumspection” as one of the causes.

The only “rashness” here, Engels maintains, is the habit of turning the facts of economics into “moral reprobation.” This is a problem of our times as well, not just the time of Engels. How often do we hear talk about our current crisis as a product of “greed” on the part of Wall Street bankers and that they should pay their “fair share” of taxes and such rubbish as if the decay of capitalism is a moral disorder on the part of the ruling class instead of a structural disorder that requires the replacement of the system rather than remedial Sunday school classes for the capitalists.

But all this has been treated of in the previous chapter of Anti-Dühring and Engels wants to move on (Cf. “Frederick Engels on the Theoretical Development of Modern Capitalism” in the November 2011 Political Affairs). Engels will now turn his attention to Dühring’s new system of viewing socialism which is called “the natural system of society.”

Dühring bases his system of socialism on what he calls the “universal principle of justice” which applies everywhere and is independent of historical and economic facts. This is enough to disqualify it as idealistic nonsense but Engels wants to philosophically pepper spay Dühring for having the gall to attack Marx for being unclear and fuzzy as to what type of socialism he believes in. It appears that the demands made in the name of the workers in the Communist Manifesto are “erroneous half measures” far inferior to Dühring’s ideas which represent “a comprehensive schematism of great import in human history.”

Marx, according to Dühring, thinks of socialism as “nothing more than the corporative ownership by groups of workers … an ownership that is both individual and social.” Engels is upset because this is far from anything Marx has suggested and in truth actually applies to the system that Dühring has concocted.

Dühring advocates a federation of independent economic communes which compete with one another and which have absolute freedom of movement from one commune to another. In this crazy system the wealthy successful communes will out compete the poorly run communes which will become defunct as the people will all end up moving to the well run ones.

Production within the communes stays the same as production in the past — i.e., the communes are still capitalist in nature even though controlled by the workers. So the greatly touted natural system of justice and the new socialism amounts to the fact, Engels says, that “the commune takes the place of the capitalists.”

What are Dühring’s views on the most basic form of all hitherto existing methods of production — i.e., the division of labor? With respect to the primary division, that between TOWN and COUNTRY (or industry and agriculture) he has little to say beyond some common place remarks about its “inevitable” nature and the possibility of overcoming it in the future. Thin gruel from Engels’ point of view.

When it comes to the modern division of labor in trade and industry Dühring is very vague and only says that we have an “erroneous division of labor” and that all will be remedied in the future “as soon as account is taken of the various natural conditions and personal capabilities [of the workers].” Engels doesn’t say so, but Dühring’s views here are suspiciously similar to those of Plato in the Republic and very far from the socialist analysis of Marx to which Engels now turns.

Marx tells us that in all societies where production springs up “spontaneously” (including capitalism) we discover the means of production dominate the people not the other way around. The first great division of labour saw the development of towns and cities surrounded by peasant agriculturalists. This division has doomed rural people for thousands of years, Marx says, to “mental torpidity” and enslaved the town dwellers to their own specialized trade. This “stunting” of humanity increases with the increase of the division of labor.

Under capitalism the workers become tied to their machines and to one specific function and one tool. Capitalism, Marx says in Das Kapital “converts the laborer into a crippled monstrosity. by forcing his detail dexterity at the expense of a world of productive capabilities and instincts…. The individual himself is made the automatic motor of a fractional operation.” How much this has been alleviated by the modern day union movement varies from country to country and in proportion to the percentage of workers who are unionized. The large number of working people in the US for example, that vote Republican shows that “mental torpidity” is not confined to the rural populations of Texas, Iowa or Alaska (to name a few).

It is not just the workers who suffer under the present day division of labor but also, Engels says, the “empty-minded bourgeois” chasing after profits (Donald Trump comes to mind), the lawyers dominated by “fossilized legal conceptions” and so-called “educated classes” of society plagued by “local narrow-mindedness” and “mental short-sightedness”– just think of the tribe of Sunday morning news pundits paraded before the public by all the major TV networks, or the platoons of professors giving advice about everything under the sun and hardly agreeing on anything other than that capitalism is still the best of all possible economic formations.

But how are we to overcome this division of labor and the consequent alienation of humanity from its potentials and possibilities? One way only says Engels: “in making itself the master of all the means of production to use them in accordance with a social plan, society puts an end to the former subjection of men to their own means of production.” In other words, socialism based on central planning and most importantly — a feature historically absent in 20th century socialist societies due to their premature appearance in economically backward conditions — planning democratically controlled and carried out by the working people themselves. The former alienating division of labor will be done away with as “society cannot free itself unless every individual is freed.”

Engels says that this is not just a “fantasy” or a “pious wish.” He maintains that the state of industrial development in the 1870s is so advanced that society could “reduce the time required for labour to a point which measured by our present conceptions, will be small indeed.” This figure needs to be actually quantified — but the point is all the goodies needed to live and thrive could be created with people just working a few hours a week and with no one being chained to any one boring and unsatisfying job. The growth in productivity since Engels’ day must make this even more true today.

Engels quotes Das Kapital: “The employment of machinery does away with the necessity of crystallizing this distribution [of labor-tr] after the manner of Manufacture, by the constant annexation of a particular man to a particular function. Since the motion of the whole system does not proceed from the workman, but from the machinery, a change of persons can take place at any time without an interruption of the work….”

Modern capitalism with its constant crises and dislocations of industrial centers and working people and financial catastrophes makes, Marx says, it necessary that we posit as a “fundamental law of production, variation of work” so that modern workers have to be ready to change jobs and learn new skills or leave the labor market. This disrupts lives and threatens widespread social disorder. Only socialist planning and a system that puts people before profits can prevent society from self destructing under the contradictions generated by the present capitalist world market which, in the name of profits first and people last, fragments both human individuals and their social relations with others which inevitably results from the private appropriation of socially created wealth.

Engels also says that the abolition of capitalism and the development “one single vast plan” which harmoniously “dovetails” industry and the means of production so that the differences between town and country are overcome is a prerequisite to overcoming environmental degradation and “present poisoning the air water and land.” To this must be added the current disaster of human induced global warming which simply cannot be dealt with as long as capitalism remains the dominant economic system. This problem was not seen in Engels’ day and now, despite the overwhelming scientific evidence of impending doom, the various capitalist powers are unwilling to take the drastic regulatory measures needed to deal with the problem.

Engels maintains that none of these claims he is making is “utopian” but that they are logical conclusions of scientific central planning and the abolition of the difference between town and country. It looks as if the towns, or rather the great cities (such as New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Beijing, etc., etc., will have be abolished as well! Engels says that it “is true that in the huge towns civilization has bequeathed us a heritage which it will take much time and trouble to get rid of.” But, “the great towns will perish.”

No, this is not Pol Pot, it is Frederick Engels and he is saying this because he envisions a complete redistribution of the population under socialism in order to get the “most equal distribution possible of modern industry.” So the abolition of the separation of town and country means the abolition of the cities. They must and will be eliminated “however protracted a process it may be.” This might just be a little too “utopian” and perhaps with the progress of science and communications since the 1870s, especially the growth of the internet, the contradictions between town and country can be resolved without offing the Big Apple.

In any event, leaving the abolition of cities aside, the point Engels wants to make is that Dühring’s view of socialism leaves out of account that building socialism will necessitate “revolutionizing from top to bottom the old method of production and first of all putting an end to the old division of labour.” Dühring thinks that the state can just take over production as is and harmonize it to people’s “natural appetites and personal capabilities.” He also thinks the division between town and country is natural and inevitable and has no plan for putting an end to the alienation and crippling of human capabilities that result from this division.

So much for Engels’ critique of Dühringian socialism’s handling of production. In the penultimate chapter of Anti-Dühring Engels will discuss the problems of distribution.

1. Anti-Dühring Part III Chapter III “Production.”
2. Engels is referring to an economic crises of the 1870s.

Today, Engels says (he means the 1870s in Europe  but his comments are still as true now as then) there is a growing sense that something is basically wrong and unfair in how our national and international economic system operates. It can’t employ all who wish to work; millions of people are living in poverty; famines, droughts brought about by human activity engulf large sections of the globe and hunger stalks the streets of many of our largest cities. Families are homeless and uprooted, and our schools and colleges fail to properly educate the youth to understand the world they live in. Yet a very small group of wealthy people grow richer and richer while the vast majority of humanity suffers and wastes away.

This shows, according to Engels, that new ways of production and distribution have evolved and that the social order we live in has not kept up with these developments. In fact, our social order has become dysfunctional and is holding back all the possible potential improvements in human welfare that the new productive and distributive powers could provide. It is the task of socialists to discover and point out the current impediments which prevent the productive system from reaching its full potential and to discover the means of benefiting all humanity rather than just a small portion. And, he says: “These means are not to be invented, spun out of the head, but discovered with the aid of the head in the existing material facts of production.”

Our present society is the creation of a class of people consisting of merchants, shopkeepers, owners of small manufacturing concerns, all those who made their living either by buying, selling, and trading commodities, small farmers who trucked their product to market and those who ministered to them (doctors, lawyers, teachers and preachers). Underneath this class was a class of laborers who made the commodities, or helped in their storage and distribution, upon which the former relied for their income. This latter class became the working class of today and the former the class of people living off of the surplus value created by the working class. Marx and others referred to them as the bourgeoisie or capitalists.

This mode of production, the creation of commodities for a market, has come to be called capitalism. The first capitalists found themselves subservient to a powerful ruling class of nobles consisting of feudal lords and (mostly) hereditary monarchs who lived by means of agricultural exploitation of serfs and taxation of the income of the developing bourgeoisie. This ruling class stifled the productive capacity of the bourgeoisie and prevented it from reaching its true potential. In other words, the bounds within which the feudal system restricted the capitalists were incompatible with that class’s growing mode of production and so, Engels says, the “bourgeoisie broke up the feudal system and built upon its ruins the capitalist order of society.”

Once the feudal bonds were broken (the French Revolution was one of the most dramatic instances) the capitalist mode of production flourished and developed the productive forces of society to unprecedented heights, only in its turn to find that its own associated method of distribution contradicted its mode of production. The social product is a collective creation of working people in all the branches of production but it is appropriated by a small number of capitalists who own and control the means by which this social product is created. The social product is then distributed in a way that increases the social wealth of the capitalist class at the expense of the well being of the working people, ultimately leading to their impoverishment. The only way the working people can free themselves from the exploitation of the capitalist class is by uniting together and abolishing it.

This conflict is waged daily in every work place, factory, field, and mine where the capitalist mode of production holds sway. This very active and real class warfare is a feature, 24/7, of daily life in almost every country on the face of the earth, and just like high blood pressure (the silent killer) it is going on and even intensifying whether the people involved are aware of it or not.

Engels says, “Modern socialism is nothing but the reflex in thought, of this conflict in fact; its ideal reflection in the minds, first, of the class directly suffering under it, the working class.”  The fact that in many countries many, and even most, working people are lacking this “reflex in thought” is testament to the power of the capitalist class, through its mass media and control of the education system, means of entertainment, and professional sports, to fill the heads of working people with illusions and a false sense of reality.

How did this class warfare between workers and capitalists begin?  It was not to be found in the Middle Ages because the peasant farmers and handicraft men, or their families, made their own necessities by and large, and the products of their labor belonged to them. They could use them themselves or take them to market as commodities or pay their taxes and feudal dues in kind or exchange them with one another.

With the progress of invention it was possible for a person to set up shop with, say, many looms, and put many hands to work side by side with the peasant with his own loom in his hut making products for himself. Now the product of the man with many looms belonged to him and loom workers were given wages.

Engels says the old division of labor of the peasant village with products being exchanged in kind began to break up as this primitive factory system began to evolve. “In the midst of the old division of labour, grown up spontaneously and upon no definite plan, which had governed the whole of society, now arose division of labor upon a definite plan, as organized in the factory; side by side with individual production appeared social production.” Planning locally, and eventually central planning, was a major feature of the success of capitalism. Whatever the problems of 20th century socialism were, they did not result from the use of central planning, per se.

As the capitalist system evolved it eventually replaced individual production with social production but kept in place individual appropriation of the products that were produced – thus creating a new class of exploited human beings that became known as the proletariat who soon began to stand outcast and starving amid the wonders they had made, which wonders were now the property of the bourgeoisie.

As production for a market became more and more wide spread it was soon discovered, Engels points out, that: “Anarchy reigns in socialized production.” This is because no one can really tell what the fate of the commodities they are making will be.  Will there be a demand for them? Will they be sold at a profit or loss? Even with the planning involved in setting up the factory system there always remains this risk factor under capitalism.

Capitalism thus finds itself subject to the laws of EXCHANGE (“the only persistent form of social interrelations”) which manifest themselves in competition. The anarchy became exacerbated since capitalism destroys competing modes of production and will not co-exist with them;thus handicrafts were replaced by the system of manufacture and manufacture by steam powered machinery.

This all happened under pressure of the age of discovery, starting roughly with the voyages of Columbus, and planting of colonies which vastly increased the number of markets and sealed the fate of the handicraft system which could not keep up with demand. It also led to the outbreaks of wars between nations fighting for market share — a form of anarchistic behavior that still marks the world capitalist system.

It is at this point that Engels turns to Darwinian images to describe the relations of capitalists to one another. Both Marx and Engels were very impressed with The Origin of Species but neither were so-called “social Darwinists.” Nevertheless, today’s globalization is simply an extension of the world market of the nineteenth century that Engels described as a universal struggle of existence between different capitalist elites and whole nations and those who fail are “remorselessly cast aside” — unless, of course, they get government stimulus money and bailouts.

“It is,” Engels says, “the Darwinian struggle of the individual for existence transferred from nature to society with intensified violence.” Capitalism reduces humanity back to its natural animal form of existence. This is the result of the intensification of the contradiction between socialized mode of production and the private capitalist appropriation of the social product.

One of the results of the unfettered competition between capitalists is that they lose control of their own economic system, as we see going on at present, and as it crashes the anarchy of production (which also reigns in the financial sector) forces “the great majority” of the people into becoming “proletarians.”  The current Occupy Wall Street Movement (OWSM) reflects the fact the “middle class” (actually a better paid strata of the working class mixed with small business people and professionals) is being forced into lower paid jobs, unemployment, bankruptcy, and debt and sees no way out for itself in this economy. They are becoming part of the surplus population (from the point of view of the capitalists) and don’t like it. They have yet to fully realize that this is the natural outcome of capitalism and their only hope for a better life is to support socialist economic measures.

The OWSM is a natural response to what is the latest breakdown in the capitalist system. Engels dates the first general breakdown to the Crisis of 1825, caused by over- speculation by the banks (esp. the Bank of England) in unsound investments in Latin America (esp. Peru). Just as our current crisis, investors were given misinformation about the soundness of their investments and when the market collapsed were left holding bag. The banks use the term “asymmetric information” to note that what they know about the investment and what you know is different. The term “fraud” would be more to the point. In 1825 France bailed out England.  In our current crisis the US taxpayers bailed out the banks.

These panics used to occur about every ten years but there was some stabilization after World War II and we had about 60 years of minor panics and recessions before this current world wide ongoing economic crash of the capitalist system with no end in sight. However, for Engels, what looks like a financial crisis is really a crisis in production. Socialized production has made too many goodies for the markets so factories laid off working people who then could not pay their bills — esp. the fraudulent mortgages. Since the financial sector had cooked up so many mortgages based on “asymmetric information” the whole economy began to fall apart.

So many factories remain closed or under-utilized that unemployment balloons, and the great productive forces available to our economy are dormant until the capitalists can figure how to get them going again in such a way that they, not the American people, can once again appropriate the wealth that will be created by the workers. The added twist of our day is that capitalists, their industries having become unproductive during the down turn, add to their profits by getting out of paying taxes, by adding fees and surcharges to service products, and by hiking interest rates to private borrowers (credit cards, for example) even while commercial interest rates are held low by government intervention via the Federal Reserve.

As the corporate world flounders, as the auto industry recently did, it relies on “its official representative”; namely, the state, to come to its aid. It should be obvious to all that the state which Lincoln called “of the people, for the people, by the people” is now “of, for, and by the corporations”. It is their referee.

Engels says that the state will eventually be forced to take over the commanding heights of the economy simply because the capitalists can no longer control them due to the growing contradiction between the socialized productive forces (masses of workers united with or without unions in the creation of the social product in factories and industries and subject to increasing unemployment and poverty) and the private appropriation of the social product by the 1 to 10% of the ruling class and its top functionaries. The tipping point has not yet been reached, but it is coming.  If not in this crisis, then the next it will present itself.

This state takeover under capitalism is not yet socialism, Engels tells us, even though the commanding heights will have been converted into state property. However, the takeover reveals that all the functions of running the economy can be taken over by state “salaried employees”. Since the “modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine” as it is forced to nationalize failing industries “it actually becomes the national capitalist.” The state directly exploits the working people having done away with individual, and incompetent, private capitalists (done in by their own creation).

This is not a stable situation and in a democracy it cannot last. The contradiction between the state and the people brings “to a head” the capitalist relation between people and their government and this must “topple over.”  State capitalism is not, therefore, the answer to the class conflict, “but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements” leading to that answer.

Once the people understand the source of their problems is the private appropriation of the social product, then the 99% can really set an agenda to put the 1% in their place. Here is what Engels thinks should happen. The people should set about ” the harmonizing of the modes of production, appropriation, and exchange.” Hopefully they can do this through political action and the regulation of the three modes. Engels says “it depends only upon ourselves to subject them to our own will” and if we don’t do so, these forces will continue to work against us and to master us. State capitalism will be transformed in the direction of socialism.

The greatest challenge is to become conscious of the need for what is to be done especially when that need is the take over of the economy by the people because “this understanding goes against the grain of the capitalist mode of production and its defenders”; i.e., the capitalists, the major political parties, the mass media, the mainstream churches, and the public and private education systems as well as the leadership of most unions and mass organizations as presently constituted.

Nevertheless, according to Engels, as the crisis deepens this consciousness will begin to develop in all of the above institutions except for the capitalist class itself and those completely dependent upon it. The working people and its allies and friends, the 99%, will have to take political power out of the hands of the corporations and their flunkies, if they have not already been nationalized, and turn the current privately held means of production into state property.

A by product of this action, the abolition of private property, is that the 1% will no longer have the means to dominate the 99% — all people will be equally working for their own and the common good. This is what Engels means when speaking of the ending of classes and class exploitation.

An even more startling consequence, to both his own time and ours, is Engels’ (and Marx’s) belief that the state will disappear. Even the most jaded Libertarian or demented tea bagger could never hope to get government reduced to zero. But Engels points out that throughout history the role of the state has been to control the 99% in the interests of the 1% — be they slave owners, feudal lords, or capitalists. This role will no longer exist in a society where everything (economically speaking) is owned and managed by the people collectively at the points of production and distribution. There will still be planning commissions and civic associations, but the state, as we know it, will be superfluous.

This doesn’t  mean that the state will be formally abolished by some sort of declaration or proclamation. It will just slowly wither away over time as its functions become moribund. At least this is the ideal that Engels has in mind for it; perhaps like “liberty and justice for all” it will remain an ideal that every generation comes closer to but never 100% attains. Then again maybe Engels will be right.

We must be mindful that all of this speculation about the coming to power of the working people, the disappearance of the 1%, the transition to socialism, etc., is dependent on the development of the productive forces of society to such a high degree of perfection that they can eliminate scarcity and there will be the possibility of abundance of food and other necessities and luxuries for all and that the only reason for poverty and suffering is the control of society by the 1% in its own selfish interests.

In the language of philosophy this means that Sartre’s proposition in the Critique of  Dialectical Reason: “Scarcity is a fundamental relation of our History and a contingent determination of our univocal relation to materiality” leading to his assertion “There is not enough for everybody” does not hold, it has been overcome and negated, for our world. Indeed, Engels thought it did not hold even in the nineteenth century. We have the productive capacity but we cannot use it due to the capitalist framework within which it exists. It is as the sick person — the medicine exists to cure him but he hasn’t the money to buy it, so he dies.

If this is ever done, and it is a big IF, the world humanity will find itself in after the passing of the capitalist mode of production will be very different from the world of today. Commodity production will cease as there will be no market and no anarchy of production. Objects with use values will be made according to a central plan and they will be made to satisfy human needs not to be sold for profit. There will be no more struggle for existence as all humans will be provided for and, Engels says, for the first time humanity will live as humans should and not be subject to an animal existence. For the first time humanity will control the laws of its own social existence and economy and not be subjected to them. The pre-history of humanity will be over and the true history of humanity will begin. It will be the beginning not the end of history. It will be the leap of humanity “from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.”

Well, as the Chinese say, a journey of a thousand miles begins with one step, I hope we have made that step on September 17, 2011 a few blocks from Wall Street in Liberty Square. But even if we haven’t and Engels was at heart an utopian and his vision of the future a dream, still a dream, if that is all it is, can, as Martin Luther King, Jr.  taught us, inspire people to fight for a better world.

After the overthrow of Louis XVI and the abolition of the monarchical French state, a new state was constructed by the revolutionaries — one based on “eternal” reason and designed to be completely rational. The spiritual progenitor of this state was Rousseau’s book “The Social Contract”. But “eternal” reason turned out to be simply the explanation of existence from the point of view of the rising bourgeois class. The complexity of the new political reality they had created quite eluded them as the contradictions between their class and the newly conscious masses of the disposed poor of Paris and the countryside began to manifest themselves. The wretched of the earth exerted themselves and the bourgeois rational state fell apart and morphed into the Reign of Terror under which the masses, for a moment, gained “the mastery” and saved the Revolution.

With the abolition of feudalism the bourgeoisie had expected social peace but instead got a furious international response and the development of an intense struggle between the poor and the rich at home. After Robespierre and the Jacobins, representing the French masses, were overthrown on 9 Thermidor Year II (July 27, 1794) by the conservative bourgeoisie, the new ruling class lost faith in its own ability to rule. After five years of corrupt government under the Directory, they surrendered to the coup d’etat of Napoleon Bonaparte on 18 Brumaire Year IX (November 9, 1799).

All this turmoil was a reflection of the “development of industry upon a capitalist basis [which] made poverty and misery of the working masses conditions of existence of society.” From the dispossessed Paris masses (the “have-nothings” and other disadvantaged groups the proletariat began to develop “as the nucleus of a new class.” However, at this time “the antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, was still very incompletely developed.” At this historical juncture the three “founders” of socialism appeared: Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Owen.

First on the scene was Claude Henri Comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825). The Revolution was supposed to be a victory of the Third Estate (production workers) over a ruling class of idlers (the nobility and the Catholic hierarchy and its priests). But, in reality, Engels says, the victory did not go to the Third Estate as a whole but only that part of it owning property, “the socially privileged part.” Saint-Simon saw the Revolution as a struggle between “workers” (anyone engaged in productive activity) and “idlers”– people living off unearned income. For him “the workers were not only the wage workers, but also the manufacturers, the merchants, and the bankers.” Science and Industry must move to the forefront and lead the revolution. The undeveloped nature of the class struggle within the Third Estate is apparent — the proletariat and the capitalists are in the same “class.” (I can’t say the vast majority of the American people have gone much beyond that stage of consciousness yet but it has recently began to dawn on them that class struggle is real).

Saint-Simon’s heart was in the right place as he wanted to improve the conditions of the lowest and greatest number of the Third Estate — what would become the proletariat and included the masses of downtrodden peasants, the most numerous and poor; Engels quotes him: “la class la plus nombreuse et la plus pauvre.” However, his socialism was utopian as he expected the bankers to lead the way into the new world! “The bankers especially were to be called upon to direct the whole of social production by the regulation of credit.” Ironically the bankers today, the finance capitalists, do control production but in their interests not those of “la plus nombreuse et la plus pauvre.”

Saint-Simon actually thought the rich bourgeoisie, bankers and manufacturers, would change themselves into public servants and use their ruling positions to help the poor and oppressed. But at least he realized the “poor and oppressed” made up the majority of “the people” (Third Estate). In fact, Engels credits him with understanding that the Revolution was a three way struggle — Nobility vs. the Bourgeoisie AND the propertyless masses even though there was a tendency to group the latter two together when contrasted to the Nobility. His greatness was in proclaiming that “all men ought to work” and recognizing that within the bourgeois revolution the Reign of Terror represented the power of “the toiling masses” against the haut bourgeoisie.

Engels quotes Saint-Simon addressing himself to the poor masses: “See what happened in France at the time when your comrades held sway there; they brought about a famine.” The “they” are the bourgeois enemies of Robespierre and the rule of the Parisian sans culottes. Saint-Simon also saw a future where economics was more important than politics; i.e., the administration of things (planned economy) over the administration of people (the bourgeois state); i.e, he envisioned “the abolition of the state.”  We find in Saint-Simon the seeds, Engels says, of “almost all the ideas of later Socialists that are not strictly economic.”

Following on the appearance of Saint-Simon came the ideas of Francois-Marie Charles Fourier (1772-1837). He contrasted the actual living conditions of the people after the establishment of bourgeois rule (“material and moral misery”) with the pictures of what life would be like painted by their pre-revolutionary propaganda and by the “rose-colored phraseology of the bourgeois ideologists of his time.”

In his first book, ”The Theory of the Four Movements” (1808) he wrote, “Social progress and changes of a period are accompanied by the progress of women towards freedom, while the decay of the social system brings with it a reduction of the freedoms enjoyed by women.” Therefore, “Extension of the rights of women is the basic principle of all social progress.”

Engels says of him, with respect to the above passage, that: “He was the first to declare that in any given society the degree of woman’s emancipation is the natural measure of the general emancipation.”

This not only tells us a lot about Saudi Arabia, but where our own society is heading with its failure to pass an Equal Rights Amendment and the movement to restrict the right to abortion, as well as the recent Supreme Court ruling that the women discriminated against for years at Walmart have no right to a class action suit to redress their grievances.

Fourier also divided the history of human development up to the present era into “four stages of evolution,” which were 1.) Savagery 2.) the Patriarchate 3.) Barbarism, and 4.) Civilization.

In this scheme “Civilization” appears with the development of capitalism in the 1500s and he says “that the civilized stage raises every vice practiced by barbarism in a simple fashion into a form of existence, complex, ambiguous, equivocal [and] hypocritical.” Engels says that for Fourier civilization develops along “a vicious circle” throwing up contradictions it cannot resolve and arriving at the exact opposite destinations that it wants to arrive at or at least pretends to want to arrive at so that, as Fourier writes, “under civilization POVERTY IS BORN OF SUPER-ABUNDANCE ITSELF.”

For example, the US, the richest country in the world, has 25% of its children at, or under, the official poverty line — a completely ridiculous society! One of the things Engels admires about Fourier is his masterly use of the dialectical method in his writings, which he compares to that of Hegel “his contemporary.” Engels also says something curious here. He says Fourier postulates the “ultimate destruction of the human race” which he introduced into historical science just as Kant had introduced the “ultimate destruction of the Earth” into natural science. But, in this pre-Star Trek world, Kant’s end of the Earth scenario would have entailed the end of the human race as well.

Saint-Simon and Fourier were products of the French Revolution but, Engels points out, at the same time over in England just as great a revolution was taking place. The whole basis of bourgeois society was being changed by the development of steam engines and tool making machines and manufacture (from the Latin “manus” hand) was being replaced by gigantic factories where machines tended by workers began to to turn out commodities rather than commodities directly made by them, “thus revolutionizing the whole foundation of bourgeois society.”

This industrial revolution began to divide society into a powerful group of capitalists on one hand, and propertyless proletarians on the other. The heretofore large and stable middle class began to break up and tended to be forced down into the lower class of workers — “it now led a precarious existence.” Sound familiar?

However, then the term “middle class” had a different meaning than it does now. Then it meant the class of artisans and small shop keepers who thrived in the era of manufacture. Now it is used to refer to an income group consisting of well paid workers and professionals whose wages were partially subsidized by the mega-profits of the imperialist international capitalist corporations who bought a modicum of social peace at home at the expense of the international solidarity of first world workers with third world workers and peasants by the creation of a labor aristocracy, according to Lenin, in the metropolitan countries. Professionals such as lawyers, doctors and the parasitical class of preachers and priests were also included.   With the decline of high paying production jobs in the West due to the rise of industry in the third world, among other factors, these high wage jobs are disappearing forcing the “middle class” down into lower paying jobs and so, as in the first days of capitalism, it now leads “a precarious existence.”

Another difference is that today we have labor unions, pro-working class political parties and associations, and growing class awareness which is developing into a major class battle for the protection of people’s jobs, life styles and incomes. This battle is just beginning and should grow as today’s world capitalist system proceeds further down the path of decay and self destruction.

But in the England of the early 1800s, capitalism was on the rise and not the decline. It was into this world that the third great early founder of socialism arose: Robert Owen (1771-1858). Owen was a materialist in philosophy and thought that humans were the product of their heredity (although at this time nothing was known of genes or DNA or any of the mechanisms of heredity) and their environment, most particularly their childhood environment. For 29 years (1800-1829) he managed New Lanark the large cotton-mill employing around 2500 “hands” in Scotland. And, Engels says, by “simply placing the people in conditions worthy of human beings” the workers lived in a society without “drunkenness, police, magistrates, lawsuits, poor laws, [or] charity.” He sent all the children off to school at age 2, put the working day at 10 1/2 hours (not the 13 or 14 that was the norm) and kept everyone on full wages when there was a four month shut down due to a cotton crisis AND made large profits and doubled the value of the business.

Well, my goodness! Why didn’t all the capitalists follow suit? They didn’t follow suit, for the same reason Owen fought with the other shareholders at New Lanark — they didn’t like the extra expenses that had to be put out for “conditions worthy of human beings.” After Owen left in 1829 the community continued, in one form or another, under different capitalists, until 1968 when it went bust. It is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site drawing in around 400,000 tourists a year to visit it and the house where Owen lived.

In his work “The Revolution in Mind and Practice” (1849) Owen wrote he was unhappy with New Lanark because “The people were slaves at my mercy.” He pointed out that New Lanark’s 2500 workers, with steam power, created as much social wealth as it took 600,000 workers to create a couple of generations earlier. Those 600,000 had to be paid living wages just as the 2500 — so what happened to all the surplus wealth saved in wages that would have gone to 597,500 extra workers? It was pocketed by the capitalists.

This new wealth was being generated all over England. It was being used to wage the wars of the Empire and to maintain an oppressive aristocratic and bourgeois order at home. “And yet this new power was the creation of the working class.” Owen wanted this vast new wealth to go to the working class that created it for the building of a new society in which it would be, as Engels says “the common property of all, to be worked for the common good of all.”

In his day, because of his reforms at New Lanark, Owen was considered a great philanthropist. He was lionized and respected and welcome at the tables of the rich and powerful. But as soon as he started talking about the working class creating all the wealth and how it ought to build a new society based on “common property” he was dropped like a hot potato, became persona non gratia, and shunned by official society. He therefore went to the working class and became a union leader and, Engels says, “Every social movement, every real advance in England on behalf of the workers links itself on to the name of Robert Owen.”

Owen called for the overthrow of three great impediments to the advance of the working class and the reform of society along communist lines — private property, religion, and “the present form of marriage (Engels).” Marriage is going through some radical changes nowadays and it is certainly very different from the forms of marriage Owen would have seen in the early 19th century. But private property and religion (i.e., supernaturalism and superstition) are still major impediments that hold back social progress for workers.

The last few pages of this chapter Engels devotes to vituperative attacks against Dühring and his negative views of the three utopians compared to whom Dühring is a pipsqueak. Engels says Dühring displays “a really frightful ignorance of the works of the three utopians.” Their works are still worth reading (Dühring’s are not) and whatever limitations they have were the result of the undeveloped conditions of early industrial capitalism. But since the time of the utopians and today (the 1870s) “modern industry has developed the contradictions laying dormant in the capitalist mode of production into such crying antagonisms that the approaching collapse of this mode of production is, so to speak, palpable.”

Well, they may have been “palpable” to Engels, but capitalism is still around, sad to say. And once again the palpability of capitalist collapse is in the air. From the looming default of Greece, to the threat of defaults spreading to Spain, Portugal and Italy which will bring down the Euro-zone and mobilize millions of workers to take to the streets of Europe, to the failure of the recovery in the United States and the desperate turn to the Tea Party by big capital to nurture home grown fascism to attack the workers and their unions, the smell of capitalist decay is everywhere. Let us hope this generation of workers will pay due to the long ago optimism of Frederick Engels.

The future leader of China, Mao Zedong, was either present at one of Russell’s lectures or read a detailed account of it in the Chinese press. The purpose of this article is to discuss Russell’s blueprint for Chinese liberation and compare it to what the Chinese, under the leadership of the Communist Party, actually did. Another purpose is to point out that many of Russell’s comments about the role of the United States, made over 90 years ago, as well as what was needed in China, are still relevant today.

A word of caution. Russell considered himself a radical and a “socialist”, perhaps even a theoretical “communist” (although he was hostile to many of the actions of the Russian Bolsheviks) at this time. After WWII and up to the late 1950s Russell was a cold war anti-Communist, though not a ridiculous mindless one a la Sidney Hook and those in his milieu, before coming to his senses in the 1960s. I am only concerned, in this article, with Russell’s political statements and opinions in the early 1920s. Some of Russell’s views, while commonly held in the 20s, are completely politically incorrect by today’s standards — I will note them with explanation marks (!!) but otherwise I will not address them or pass over them in silence. These are usually remarks dealing with the nature of the “Chinese mind” or “character” as if all Chinese think a certain way.

“Questions”

This article will deal with Chapter One of POC: “Questions.”

In trying to understand China, Russell thinks he is dealing with a totally alien culture. He is forced to ask himself  what his ultimate values are, what makes one culture or society “better” than another, and what ends does he wish to see triumph in the world. He says different people have different answers to these questions and he thinks they are just subjective preferences not amenable to argument. He will merely state his own and hope his reader will agree with him.  Russell is no objectivist in morals. The ends he values are: “knowledge, art, instinctive happiness, and relations of friendship and affection.” He believes in the goals, if not   always the methods, of communism (although he is not a Marxist), and thinks a socialist society will best approximate the ends he wants. There are elements in Chinese culture that also reflect his ends better than they are reflected in Euro-American culture.

Russell thinks a nation should be judged not only on how its own people are treated, but also on how it treats others. He finds China, in this respect, better than the imperialist nations of the West. In the following quote Russell uses the word “our” and I want to stress that he does not intend to restrict its meaning to the British Empire but uses it inclusively to refer to the major imperialist nations of Europe and the English speaking world or even to “capitalist” nations thus including Japan.

“Our prosperity,” he writes, “and most of what we endeavor to secure for ourselves, can only be obtained by widespread exploitation of weaker nations .” The Chinese, however, obtain what they have by means of their own hard work. China is radically different today but  I think what Russell says about it is still basically correct and what he says about  “us” hasn’t changed very much at all.

What happens in China, he says, will determine the whole future course of world history. There are tremendous resources in China and whether they are to be controlled “by China, by Japan, or by the white races [!!], is a question of enormous importance, affecting not only the whole development of Chinese civilization, but the balance of power in the world, the prospects of peace, the destiny of Russia, and the chances of development toward a better economic system in the advanced nations.”

This remark is as true today as it was some 90 years ago. Chinese civilization, however, is now, at least, much more in the hands of the Chinese, the world balance of power remains in flux, the destiny of Russia is still undetermined, and a better economic system for the West (i.e., socialism) is still a distant dream but may be positively influenced by the economic development of China.

I didn’t mention the “prospects for peace” and that is because in the short term Russell was absolutely  correct: the civil war and revolution in China, World War II (in the Pacific), the Korean War, and the Vietnam War all had China, in one way or another, as their focus and the hope of eventually controlling her resources as a backdrop. Today, as well, many circles in the West, associated with international finance capital, see China as a future threat and the US military has contingency plans for a war with her. So Russell was quite prescient to see the economic resources of China as the focal point of contemporary history.

“Modern China”

Russell discusses the internal state of China, as he understood it in 1920-21, in his chapter “Modern China” in “The Problem of China.” He thinks there are only two ways the Chinese can escape from imperialist domination. The first way is for China to become a strong military power. Russell thinks this would be a disaster.

However, since “the capitalist system involves in its very essence a predatory relation of the strong towards the weak [a perfectly good Leninist proposition even if clumsily expressed], internationally as well as nationally” he proposes a second way for Chinese liberation. The foreign imperialist powers will have to “become Socialistic”. Russell thinks this is the only real solution for the Chinese.

It didn’t occur to Russell that China might free itself by military means and work towards socialism at the same time. It goes without saying that the Chinese would be waiting for kingdom come to be liberated if they had taken Russell’s advice and expected Europe and America to turn socialist.

Russell, as did many in his generation, expected a major war to eventually break out between Japan and the United States over which would be top dog in the far east, but did not see that war as an opportunity for the victims of imperialism to break free and become independent. At any rate, in respect to his “only” solution to Chinese liberation, Russell was wildly off the mark — despite his Leninist grasp of the nature of capitalism.

Russell did, however, urge progressives to support the fledgling government of Sun Yat-sen which was at this time battling the war lord system. No one at that time foresaw that the Kuomintang would degenerate into a fascist despotism under Sun’s successor, Chiang Kai-shek, or that the recently founded Communist Party of China would be the eventual vehicle both for Chinese liberation and regeneration.

Russell’s next comment was completely correct and was about an issue that, after the success of the revolution, the Chinese took very seriously.  Russell wrote that “in the long run, if the birth-rate is as great as is usually supposed, no permanent cure for their poverty is possible while their families continue to be so large.”

The introduction of birth control and the one child policy, which was a drastic step and is now being reevaluated, probably helped to considerably contain the population from an unmanageable explosion (not to credit natural disasters and the unintended consequences of  policies that turned out to be mistaken with respect to premature industrial expansion and agricultural reforms in the 1950s).

Another problem the Chinese would have to overcome before they could hope to compete with the West, according to Russell, was lack of a modern educational system for the masses. This too the CPC saw as a major problem and immediately after coming to power launched a mass literacy program and built schools and institutions of higher learning throughout China.

This was a prerequisite, Russell said, as Chinese workers would need education and skills in order to command decent wages (he did not foresee a socialist revolution in China). Nevertheless, industrialization in China, as in all other countries, would begin to develop by methods that are “sordid and cruel.” Intellectuals, he remarked, “wish to be told of some less horrible method by which their country may be industrialized, but so far none is in sight.”

Whether you are capitalist or socialist, it appears,  if you are starting from a primitive economic base, the only way you can accumulate capital to make industrial advances is to take  it from the surplus value created by the working class. As we will see Russell thinks state capitalism, or state socialism (they are the same for him), would be the best way for the Chinese to go — but he doesn’t envision a revolution.

Russell now hits upon a major problem which I think was responsible for some of the major errors of the Mao era.

There is one traditional Chinese belief which dies very hard, and that is the belief that correct ethical sentiments are more important than detailed scientific knowledge. This view is, of course, derived from the Confucian tradition, and is more or less true in a pre-industrial society.

One would think that Russell, with commitments to science as the basis for correct knowledge of the world, would hold that “detailed scientific knowledge” is always to be preferred; how would a pre-industrial society ever advance to a higher level without also developing  science?

In the 1950s and 60s Mao pushed the line that politics (“correct ethical sentiments”) was the correct guide to action and could win out over any objections based on economic (scientific) considerations. This led to the twin disasters of the Great Leap Forward and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. There was no basis in Marxism for the views he was espousing even though Mao used Marxist terminology to try and explain his thought. If Russell were correct, this would have been a case of the unconscious Confucian substrata in Mao’s world view manifesting itself in Marxist guise.

Mao, himself, was anti-Confucian at this time so even he was blind to the real origins of the reactionary policies he was peddling in Marxist dress. I should also point out that it was only one wing of Confucianism that held to this view — an Idealist trend that developed in the Ming Dynasty and that there were other wings of Confucianism that were materialistically motivated. Mao had indeed studied Ming Confucianism and was influenced by it in his youth, and, I think, unconsciously after he assumed power.

“Present Forces and Tendencies in the Far East”

Russell’s chapter, “Present Forces and Tendencies in the Far East” (in The Problem of China) deals with the balance of power in this region in the 1920s and focuses on China, Japan, Russia and America. I will omit his comments on Japan here and concentrate on China’s dealings with America and the influence of Russia. Russell points out that the interests of Britain are (leaving India to the side) basically the same as those of America — at least its ruling sector of finance capital and NOT “the pacifistic and agrarian tendencies of the Middle West.”

At this time Russell thought that the two most important “moral forces” in the Far East were those emanating from Russia and America. He thought the Americans to be more idealistic than the jaded imperialists running the European capitalist states. However, he thought that cynical imperialist views were an inevitability as a nation’s power increased and the Americans would abandon their idealism.

We must keep this in mind, he warns us, “when we wish to estimate the desirability of extending the influence of the United States.” Today we can see that Russell was right. The United States has evolved into the most cynical and ruthless imperial power in the world, encircling the globe with its garrisons and fleets, and subjecting whole nations and peoples to its bloody domination in search of power, wealth, and resources.

All this, however, was in the future. The benign United States that appeared to Russell was that of the Harding Administration and the Washington Naval Conference, presided over by Secretary of State Charles Evan Hughes. The conference was held from late 1921 to early 1922 and was the first disarmament conference in modern history. It was designed to reign in Japanese aggression in China, limit naval construction, and keep the Open Door Policy in place in China.

Russell thought America’s policy at the conference was a liberal one, but only because the outcome of the conference was in line with American interests in the Far East. What Russell really believed was that “when American interests or prejudices are involved liberal and humanitarian principles have no weight whatever.” Have we seen anything to contradict this assessment since the days of Warren Harding (or those of George Washington for that matter)?

If American plans for the future economic development of China should be successful, Russell thought it would be disastrous for China. It would certainly be good for America and her allies, but would involve “a gradually increasing flow of wealth from China to the investing countries, the chief of which is America [the CPC appears to have reversed this flow]; the development of a sweated proletariat [still a problem]; the spread of Christianity [another great evil]; the substitution of American civilization for Chinese [not yet but McDonalds and KFC have secured beach heads];…. the gradual awakening of China to her exploitation by the foreigner [China was already awake when Russell wrote]; and one day, fifty or a hundred years hence [around 1972 or 2022], the massacre of every white man throughout the Celestial Empire at a signal from some vast secret society.”

Well, the great awakening was already at hand when Russell wrote.  He was just blind to it.  China liberated itself in a little over 25 years, despite the best actions the US and its allies could do to prevent it, and no vast secret society sprang up to threaten every “white man.” The Celestial Empire has become a People’s Republic.

Russell’s vision of the future was off, but the definition he gave of what the West considers “good” government was spot on, even today: “it is a government that yields fat dividends for capitalists.” This is still the game plan in the 21st century.

Russell now embarks on some ill founded speculations which, nevertheless, hint at a grain of truth. He predicts, for example “it is not likely that Bolshevism [as seen in Russia-tr] as a creed will make much progress in China.” He gives the following three reasons:

1) China has a decentralized state tending towards feudalism whereas Bolshevism requires a centralized state. Russell doesn’t seem to understand a successful socialist revolution would reverse this tendency.

2) China is more suitable for anarchism because the Chinese have a great sense of personal freedom and the Bolsheviks need to have (and do have) more control over individuals “than has ever been known before.” This is strange. The Chinese had just emerged from an oriental despotism under the Manchus that had regulated everything including dress and hair styles for the population, and had no tradition of anything like “personal freedom” as had developed in Europe.

3) Bolshevism opposes “private trading” which is the “breath of life to all Chinese except the literati.” But ninety percent of the Chinese at this time were basically illiterate peasants  most of whom were under the control of a feudalistic landlord class. The Chinese masses had more in common with the Russian masses than Russell seemed to realize.

The greatest appeal of Bolshevism, Russell said, was to the youth of China who wanted to develop industry by skipping the stage of capitalist development. But Russia was now engaged in the New Economic Policy and Russell thought this signaled a slow return to capitalist methods which would disillusion the Chinese.

But, Russell said, the fact that as a creed Bolshevism [i.e., Marxism] would not hold any lasting appeal, Bolshevism “as a political force” had a great future. What he meant was that Bolshevik Russia would continue to play the Great Game in Asia and follow in the footsteps of Tzarist imperialism with Bolshevik imperialism since “the Russians have an instinct for colonization” [!!].

Here is where Russell becomes very confused in his analysis. He doesn’t really define “imperialism.” Marxists at this time defined it as the international policy of monopoly capitalism based on the control of the state by  financial capital sometimes allied with industrial capital. In this sense Bolshevik imperialism was a contradiction in terms. As far as “the Russians,” lumped together without any attempt at class analysis, having an “instinct” to become colonialists — such general statements are useless in trying to describe social reality.

Regardless, Russell thinks it would not be so bad for Russia to become hegemonic in Asia. The Russians could enter into more nearly equal relations with Asian peoples because their “character” [!!]  is more “Asiatic” than that of the “English speaking-nations.”  English speaking nations would not be able to have the same understanding and ability “to enter into relations of equally” with these strange inscrutable Orientals.  As a result an Asian Block of nations would arise as a defensive block and this would be good for world peace as well as “humanity.”

Russell recommends that outside powers leave off meddling with the Chinese and attempting to impose their own values on them as the Chinese will, left to themselves, “find a solution suitable to their character” for their own political problems. This idea  of “national character” is quite unscientific and if Russell had understood what he read of Das Kapital and other Marxist writings and substituted some such phrase as “find a solution based on their own historical development and class relations”, he would have made better sense. POC would have been better understood, in fact, if “national character” had been replaced by “historical development” whenever it occurred along with a brief description of that development.

Russell goes on to predict what the future of China will most likely be. Marxists, as  great predictors of the future themselves, especially its inevitable trends and outcomes, understand what a risky business this is and should have great sympathy for Russell’s wrong headed  prognosis.

Since the US emerged unscathed from WW I it had an excess of available capital to invest  and would be the principal nation involved in China’s future development. “As the financiers are the most splendid feature of the American civilization, China must be so governed as to enrich the financiers.” The US will contribute greatly to building educational institutions in China so that Chinese intellectuals will end up serving the interests of the big Trusts just as American intellectuals do. As a result a conservative anti-radical reform system will be produced and touted as a great force for peace. But, Russell points out: “it is impossible to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear or peace and freedom out of capitalism.”

The US will encourage the growth of a stable government, foster an increase in income to build up a market for American goods, discourage other powers besides themselves from meddling in China, and look askance upon all attempts of the Chinese to control their own economy, especially the nationalization of the mines and railroads, which Russell sees as a “form of State Socialism or what Lenin calls State Capitalism.” The reference to Lenin is in respect to the New Economic Plan (NEP) in Russia.

The US would also keep lists of radical students and see to it that they would not get jobs, try to impose its puritan morality on the Chinese, and because Americans think their own country and way of life are “perfect” they will do great damage to what is best in Chinese culture in their attempts to make China as much as possible resemble what they call “God’s own country.”

As a result of all this a “Marxian class-war will break out” between Asia and the West. The Asian forces will be led by a socialist Russia and be fought for freedom from the imperialist powers and their exploitation. These views are very different from those Russell will be representing in his future Cold War phase.

Ever the pessimist, Russell sees this war as so destructive all around that probably “no civilization of any sort would survive it.” When the actual war came it was very destructive, but it was a civil war between the bourgeois democratic capitalist powers and the authoritarian fascist capitalist powers into which the Russians were drawn against their will and from which the Chinese emerged as a free and independent people determined to build socialism.

Russell ends his chapter on a socialist note about the evils of the “present” (1920s) system of world wide capitalist domination. His conclusion is almost a perfect description of the world we live in today. “The essential evil of the present system,” he says, “as Socialists have pointed out over and over again, is production for profit instead of for use.”  American power may, for a while, impose peace, but never freedom for weak countries. “Only international Socialism can secure both; and owing to the stimulation of revolt by capitalist oppression, even peace alone can never be secure until international Socialism is established throughout the world.”

“The Outlook for China”

The last chapter in Bertrand Russell’s POC is entitled “The Outlook for China”. Russell, writing in 1922, thinks that China (due to its population and resources) has the capacity to become the second greatest power in the world (after the United States). Today the US seems to be slipping economically so maybe China will become number one in the world sometime in the present century.

Three things will have to come about for China to reach its full potential. Russell lists them as: 1) The establishment of an orderly government [the CPC has accomplished this requirement]; 2) Industrial development under Chinese control [this too has been brought about by the CPC whether you call it "market socialism" or "state capitalism"]; 3) the spread of education [ditto care of the CPC].

All three prerequisites put forth by Russell have been attained if not quite in the manner he imagined in his book. Let’s look at some of Russell’s elaborations on these prerequisites.

First, the problem of orderly government. Russell says that in the 1920s China was functionally anarchic with battling warlords and weak central governments in the north and south of the country. He envisioned an eventual constitutional setup and a parliamentary form of government. But he cautioned that even so the masses of the people (Russell uses the term “public opinion”) will have to be guided by what amounts to a Leninist political party using democratic centralist methods.

Here is what Russell wrote: “It will be necessary for the genuinely progressive people throughout the country to unite in a strongly disciplined society, arriving at collective decisions and enforcing support for those decisions upon all its members.” That is just what happened under the leadership of CPC.

Second, the problem of industrial development. China, or any country for that matter, to be truly free has to also be economically free and that requires that it has control of its own railroads and natural resources. He thus thinks the Chinese government should own the railroads and the mines of China. He also thinks that state ownership of “a large amount” of the industry in China should also occur. “There are many arguments for State Socialism, or rather what Lenin calls State Capitalism, in any country which is economically but not culturally backward.”

Russell thinks that is possible for China, with a strong and honest government, to skip over the stage of capitalism and lay the foundations for socialism. This is tricky business as the Chinese would find out much later. If you skip too far and too fast you can trip and fall on your face.  With the right government “it will be possible to develop Chinese industry without, at the same time, developing the overweening power of private capitalists by which the Western nations are now both oppressed and misled.” We can only hope that China is heading in this direction.

Third, the problem of education. Russell says that “Where the bulk of the population cannot read, true democracy is impossible. Education is a good in itself, but is also essential for developing political consciousness, of which at present there is almost none in rural China.”

By “democracy” Russell then, and almost all Western governments and their intellectual tools today, mean “bourgeois democracy”; i.e., “democratic” institutions and constitutions that guarantee the government will be controlled by, for, and of one of two contending classes that exist in the modern capitalist world; i.e., the capitalist class. Russell proclaimed his belief in “socialism” (Mao even said Russell believed in “communism”) but he never transcended the bourgeois concept of “democracy” inculcated in him by the British ruling class by which he was educated.

But the wider, and I believe correct, meaning of “democracy” (rule of the “demos” or people) includes other forms of government than those proclaimed by the bourgeoisie and their lackeys.  It must refer to any form  of government that objectively rules in the interests of its people; i.e., the vast majority of its population composed of working people,  called by old time communists “the toiling masses” and historically personified by the “people’s democracies” and “people’s republics” of eastern Europe and Asia, and by the only completely democratic state in the Western Hemisphere, Cuba.

In just a few years after Russell wrote the above words, hundreds of millions of the peasants of “rural China” would develop a political consciousness that would lead to the overthrow of the rule by landlords and capitalists in China and the establishment, however flawed, of a true people’s republic. Then they learned to read.

Russell was both correct and incorrect in saying the following: “Until it has been established for some time, China must be, in fact if not in form, an oligarchy, because the uneducated masses cannot have any effective political opinion [or in the case of the US -- miseducated masses]. If that “oligarchy” is a real communist party (not one in name only) it will bring to the masses the correct political opinion that they and they alone control their own destiny and can abolish their subjection to a class that only lives off of their exploitation. The one party state may be the instrument leading to this liberation and its own eventual elimination, along with the state, but it also gives to the masses “effective political opinion” and if it doesn’t, it may find itself being eliminated ahead of schedule.

Russell hoped the Chinese, by combining “Western” science with their traditional culture, would create a new civilization free of the deficiencies of the capitalist West. What we are seeing now, in the 21st century, in China is perhaps the fulfillment of Russell’s vision but it is a synthesis of Marx, left wing Confucianism, and modern science. Hopefully the coming century will see the end of Western “civilization” as we know it, a predatory war based imperialist system attempting to enchain the world, and the establishment of a real new world order. The values of Bertrand Russell will be better remembered and served in such a world.

Epilogue: What Mao thought of Russell’s Views on China¹

In his lecture at Changsha, Russell …. took a position in favour of communism but against the dictatorship of the workers and peasants. He said that one should employ the method of education to change the consciousness of the propertied classes, and that in this way it would not be necessary to limit freedom or to have recourse to war and bloody revolution….

My objections to Russell’s view point can be stated in a few words: ‘This is all very well as a theory, but it is unfeasible in practice’.

Education requires money, people and instruments. In today’s world money is entirely in the hands of the capitalists. Those who have charge of education are all either capitalists or wives of capitalists. In today’s world the schools and the press, the two most important instruments of education, are entirely under capitalist control. In short, education in today’s world is capitalist education. If we teach capitalism to children, these children, when they grow up will, in turn, teach capitalism to a second generation of children. Education thus remains in the hands of the capitalists.

Then the capitalists have ‘parliaments’ to pass laws protecting the capitalists and handicapping the proletariat; they have ‘governments’ to apply these laws and to enforce the advantages and the prohibitions that they contain; they have ‘armies’ and ‘police’ to defend the well-being of the capitalists and to repress the demands of the proletariat; they have ‘banks’ to serve as repositories in the circulation of their wealth ; they have ‘ factories’, which are the instruments by which they monopolize the production of goods.

Thus, if the communists do not seize political power, they will not be able to find any refuge in this world; how, under such circumstances, could they take charge of education? Thus, the capitalists will continue to control education and to praise their capitalism to the skies, so that the number of converts to the proletariat’s communist propaganda will diminish from day to day. Consequently, I believe that the method of education is unfeasible….

What I have just said constitutes the first argument.

The second argument is that, based on the principle of mental habits and on my observation of human history, I am of the opinion that one absolutely cannot expect the capitalists to become converted to communism. If one wishes to use the power of education to transform them, then since one cannot obtain control of the whole or even an important part of the two instruments of education — schools and the press — even if one has a mouth and a tongue and one or two schools and newspapers as means of propaganda…. this is really not enough to change the mentality of the adherents of capitalism even slightly; how then can one hope that the latter will repent and turn toward the good? So much from a psychological standpoint. From a historical standpoint…. one observes that no despot imperialist and militarist throughout history has ever been known to leave the stage of history of his own free will without being overthrown by the people. Napoleon I proclaimed himself emperor and failed; then there was Napoleon III. Yuan Shih-K’ai failed; then, also there was Tuan Ch’i-jui…. From what I have just said based on both psychological and a historical standpoint, it can be seen that capitalism cannot be overthrown by the force of a few feeble efforts in the domain of education. This is the second argument.

There is yet a third argument, most assuredly a very important argument, even more important in reality. If we use peaceful means to attain the goal of communism, when will we finally achieve it? Let us assume that a century will be required, a century marked by the unceasing groans of the proletariat. What position shall we adopt in the face of this situation? The proletariat is many times more numerous than the bourgeoisie; if we assume that the proletariat constitutes two-thirds of humanity, then one billion of the earth’s one billion five hundred million inhabitants are proletarians (I fear that the figure is even higher), who during this century will be cruelly exploited by the remaining third of capitalists. How can we bear this?

Furthermore, since the proletariat has already become conscious of the fact that it too should possess wealth, and of the fact that its sufferings are unnecessary, the proletarians are discontented, and a demand for communism has arisen and has already become a fact. This fact confronts us, we cannot make it disappear; when we become conscious of it we wish to act. This is why, in my opinion, the Russian revolution, as well as the radical communists in every country, will daily grow more powerful and numerous and more tightly organized. This is the natural result. This is the third argument…..

There is a further point pertaining to my doubts about anarchism. My argument pertains not merely to the impossibility of a society without power or organization. I should like to mention only the difficulties in the way of the establishment of such form of society and of its final attainment…. For all the reasons just stated, my present viewpoint on absolute liberalism, anarchism, and even democracy is that these things are fine in theory, but not feasible in practice….

1. Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, “Communism and Dictatorship”, November 1920. January 1921 [Extracted from two letters to Ts’ai Ho-sen[1895-1932 a leader of the CPC, arrested in Hong Kong by the British and turned over to the Kuomintang which killed him- tr], in November 1920 and January 1921]

It is Dühring’s 1871 work Critical History of Political Economy that Marx intends to critique, beginning with Dühring’s claim that his work in Political Economy “is absolutely without precedent.” Here we will find a definitive treatment of the subject in a scientific manner. The science is, he says, “peculiarly mine.”

Dühring’s first great “discovery” is that Political Science is a modern creation with no medieval or ancient roots. Marx points out, however, that this claim to modernity was already put forth by him in Capital and Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. The difference is that Marx begins with the great founders of this science [from William Petty (1623-1687) and Boisguillebert (1646-1714) to Ricardo (1772-1823) and Sismondi (1773-1842)] while Dühring begins with the “wretched abortions” of later bourgeois economists. Marx also has respect for the medieval and classical traditions.

Of course, since Political Science was founded in an attempt to scientifically understand modern CAPITALISM, you will not find it in the classical (slave) world , nor the middle ages (feudal). Capitalist societies are based on commodity production and exchange but there was limited commodity production and exchange in both the classical period and the Middle Ages and what the Ancients and other pre-moderns had to say about it is still worth while; Marx especially defends the economic writings of Aristotle (384-322 BC) and Plato (427-347 BC) from Dühring’s unerudite “criticisms.”

Dühring is also ignorant of the history and development of political economy in the modern period. For example, he takes a minor work [Antonio Serra's Breve trattato of 1613 as a defining work of Mercantilism -- the dominant economic theory of capitalism for its first 250 years of existence, ending around the time of Adam Smith (1723-1790)] while completely ignoring Thomas Mun’s (1571-1641) A Discourse of Trade of 1609 which was “the mercantilist gospel” for the entire Seventeenth Century.

Worse than that is Dühring’s treatment of William Petty, “the founder of modern political economy.” After much hard thinking and many investigations, Petty in 1662 formulated one of the bed rock foundations of political economy as a science (Treatise on Taxes and Contributions). Here, Marx says he “lays it down in a definite and general form that the values of commodities must be measured by equal labour.” Further, in a work of 1672 (Anatomy of Ireland) Petty has overcome “the last vestiges of mercantilist views.”

These are great intellectual feats for the founder of the new science. Marx says about Petty, and this applies to Marx himself in our day, that what is “quite natural in a writer who is laying the foundations of political economy and is necessarily feeling his way, experimenting and struggling with a chaos of ideas which are only just taking shape, may seem strange in a writer who is surveying and summarizing more than a hundred and fifty years of investigation whose results have already passed in part from books into the consciousness of the generality.” That Dühring fails to grasp this and thinks that “there is fair measure of superficiality” in Petty’s thinking, only shows, Marx avers, that Dühring is a “vainglorious and pedantic mediocrity.”

One of Petty’s great successors was the the philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) who, besides his works on the social contract and the foundations of epistemology, also wrote an important work in the fledgling science of political economy: Some Considerations of the Consequences of the Lowering of Interests and Raising the Value of Money, 1691.

Petty had already compared interest to “rent on money”– i.e. to “rent of land and houses.” His position was that all rent should be unregulated and determined by the market. This, of course, is a reactionary view today but not so in 1691. This was part of the fight against Mercantilism which progressives in those days rightly viewed as a system that held back social and economic progress by using the state to impose import duties and taxes to defend domestic markets and subsidize exports.

Trying to regulate interest rates, i.e., rent on money, Petty felt was “against the law of nature”. Petty, Marx wrote, “declared that legislative regulation of the rate of interest was as stupid as regulation of exports of precious metals [a pillar of Mercantilism] or regulation of exchange rates.” Ideas that are reactionary and unworkable today (just think of the ridiculous economic and philosophical bloviations of Ayn Rand and her followers) in the end stage of capitalism, were forward looking and progressive during it birth pangs.

Locke, whose economic essay, basically followed Petty’s lead, had a great influence in those European countries struggling to go beyond the strictures of the Mercantilists or economic nationalists. Petty, who is, incidentally credited with the invention of the laissez faire school, was also supported by Sir Dudley North (1641-1691) in A Discourse on Trade, 1691, a contemporary of Locke’s, whose work, Marx says “is a classical exposition, driven home with relentless logic, of the doctrine of free trade– both foreign and internal….”

Locke and North deserve credit for furthering Petty’s views and in developing them along new lines. But Dühring sees none of this. For Marx, the period 1691-1752 is crucial for the understanding of the development of political science. In was in this period that the writers influenced by Petty, Locke, North, and others, laid down the foundations for overthrowing Mercantilism. This period is a blank page for Herr Dühring. Dühring passes directly to David Hume (1711-1776) and the physiocrats. Marx has many interesting things to say about Hume as an economist (his philosophy is not mentioned) and why Dühring is so enamored with him.

Hume published his Economic Essays in 1752 and they are, in our current terminology, basically a plagiarized version of the 1734 work of Jacob Vanderlint (died 1740) Money Answers All Things. While Hume almost literally follows Vanderlint, he is, according to Marx, “less profound.” Dühring is unaware of Vanderlint and praises Hume while none the less failing to understand what he says.

Since Dühring doesn’t have a real understanding of Hume, I will just present Marx’s views for the record. Hume’s theory of money is that money is just a TOKEN of value and, ceteris paribus, “commodity prices rise in proportion to the increase in the volume of money in circulation, and fall in proportion to its decrease.” Hume is basically saying that the increase in the amount of gold and silver in circulation, due to the imports from the New World, increases the prices of commodities. He also notes that this takes some time to spread through out the country until it finally trickles down to the working people: in Hume’s words “it must first quicken the diligence of every individual before it increases the price of labour.” So old is Reaganomics.

But Hume is not, according to Marx, addressing the “real scientific question” in this description: i.e., how an increase in money “affects the prices of commodities.” However, Marx does not answer this question here as he really wants to remark on Hume’s theory of INTEREST. Hume says it is the not the money supply but the rate of profit that regulates the amount of interest (here he attacks Locke’s view). Hume’s theory is not original. Just as he got almost all his ideas from Vanderlint on most economic issues, his interest theory is just a rehash, and not as exact, of the work of J. Massie (died 1784) “An Essay on the Governing Causes of the Natural Rate of Interest,” 1750.

Hume, by the way, maintains a low interest rate means a nation is in a “flourishing condition.” Well maybe in his day — but we have low interest rates in the USA and we are hardly “flourishing”, at least with respect to the majority of the population which is made up of working people.

There are other problems with Hume’s ideas, according to Marx. Marx says “he had not the slightest understanding of the function of the precious metals as the measure of value.” This is because he didn’t know what “value” itself meant in terms of capitalist production. For example, he corrects Locke for holding that the precious metals only have “an imaginary value” by saying what they really have is “a fictitious value.” These views are “much inferior” not only to those of Petty but to his contemporaries as well who were writing on these subjects — especially, his friend Adam Smith.

Hume also is blind to the economic world coming into existence all around him. He holds to the outmoded view “that the ‘merchant’ is the mainspring of production.” Despite these limitations, Marx concedes that in his day Hume was still a “respectable” political economist. His criticism is meant to dispel the over wrought praise Hume is given by Dühring. Because, while respectable, Marx adds, “he is anything but an original investigator, an even less an epoch making one.”

Why does Marx think that Dühring likes Hume so much? It is because Dühring identified with Hume. Hume was denounced by the church for some of his views, but not so much as Gibbon was for his, Dühring too fell afoul of the authorities for some of his views. Hume attained a better reputation as a philosopher, and Dühring thinks that will also be his fate (it was not to be.)

Marx can’t resist giving two quotes which many Hume fans would resent. The first is from a popular German world history book by Friedrich Schlosser (1766-1861): “In politics Hume was and always remained conservative and strongly monarchist in his views.” He was also highly racist in his views on Africans. And William Cobbett (1762-1835) calls him “selfish” and a “lying Historian” [Hume wrote a history of England] and implies he was an hypocrite for attacking monks for their fatness, their not having wives or children and begging for their bread while he himself was without “a family or a wife and was a great fat fellow, fed, in considerable part, out of public money, without having merited it by any real public services.”

Well, enough about Hume. Marx next turns his attention to Dühring and the physiocrats, especially the Tableau Economique of Francois Quesnay (1694-1744). Marx says Dühring’s attempt to explain Quesnay’s economic theories (the physiocrats were the first real school of modern economics, not counting the Mercantilists as modern!, and Quesnay was the founder) is completely mixed up and confused and shows, once again, that Dühring doesn’t know what he is talking about. But so that WE can understand what the school was all about, Marx undertakes to explain it for our benefit.

The physiocrats divided society into three classes: the PRODUCTIVE class — i.e., agricultural workers and farmers — all wealth comes from a nation’s agricultural production; the LANDLORDS [landowners, the nobility, the Church] who live off of the surplus produced by the farmers; and the STERILE class [the industrial bourgeoisie, merchants, etc, who live off of the raw materials and surpluses of the productive class. Where's the proletariat? Sorry, 17th century France was too backward to have noticed this newly developing class.

Quesnay is not describing the actually real existing economy of France-- he is constructing a simple MODEL that represents a starting point for understanding the actual economy (just as Marx did in Das Kapital). Marx says Quesday makes three premises to simplify the model: 1) he only looks at circulation between the classes and not within them; 2) he only deals with simple reproduction and constant prices; and 3) he treats all the annual purchases between the classes as a lump sum. Marx also notes that at this time almost all the non-food articles consumed by peasant families in Europe were home made and "treated as supplementary to agriculture."

Lets start the ball rolling: the Tableau (all figures are based on the value of French money in the 17th century) the total value of the harvest for one year is the starting point. This amount will be the "total reproduction" in France for that year -- let us refer to it as 5 economic units [5EU -- this was 5 million livres in those days].

Since the farmers are the only productive class they have the entire 5EU to themselves. They produced it by investing 2EU in seeds, etc., so they have a surplus of 3EU. They give 2EU to the landlords as RENT and the landlords then buy food from them in the amount of 1EU for the year so now the farmers have 2EU and the landlords 1EU.

With their 1EU left, the landlords buy the things they need to live on, etc., [other than agricultural goods] from the STERILE class. The farmers also buy from the Sterile class say 1EU but the sterile class has to buy food from the farmers but it does not buy back as much in EUs from the farmers as the farmers gave to it because, instead of a fair trade in equivalents, the sterile class has extracted a profit from the farmers by selling their commodities to them above the cost of production AND above their real value.

By the end of the year it is time to reap another harvest and the cycle continues. I have simplified Marx’s exposition because the physiocrats are now only of historical interest and the main point has been shown– i.e., that for them all wealth is produced by the farmers and is then distributed about society to the other classes.

Having finished with the physiocrats Marx makes two more observations on Dühring’s incompetence. First, Dühring thinks that the physiocratic school ended with Turgot (1727-1781) the originator of the Idea of Progress and controller-general of France, 1774-76, in charge of economic reforms under Louis XVI. But Marx says the school actually ended with Mirabeau (1749-1791) “the leading economic authority in the Constituent Assembly of 1789.”

Second, Dühring barely mentions Sir James Steuart (1712-1780) whose work was between Hume and Adam Smith and who “permanently enriched the domain of political economy” (with An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy, 1767). And what he does say about him is wrong.

Marx ends his chapter with the opinion that Dühring’s Critical History is not worth reading, and he is particularly upset that Dühring begins his history with the large landlords of ancient history and doesn’t know anything about “the common ownership of land in the tribal and village communities, which is the real starting-point of all history.”

A commodity looks simple enough, says the pro-capitalist economist. Most such economists say a commodity is any object with a use value that somebody wants and is willing to pay for, and its value is determined by supply and demand. Nothing drives such a common sense economist more to distraction than reading Karl Marx who says a commodity is “a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.” What can Marx mean? Economics is a science, even a mathematical science, what has it got to do with metaphysics and theology?

Take a wooden table, says Marx. It is just wood that human labor has turned into a table and taken to market. Wood + Labor = Table. Where is the mystery? When it gets to the market, the table finds itself in the company of the stool and the chair. All three have use values, are made of the same wood and may be in equal supply and equal demand — yet each has its own different price.

Why these different prices? Same wood, same demand, same supply. They are all the products of human labor. What is the difference among them that justifies different prices? The prices are reflections of the underlying values of the products. Could the values be different? What does Marx say determines value? It is the different quantities of socially necessary labor time embodied in the commodities.

The table, the stool and the chair are three “things” that are related to each other as the embodiment of the social relations and necessary labor of human beings that created them. Human social relations have been objectified as the relations between non human things. The chair may be more valuable than the table, but the reason is now hidden away from the perception of people.

“A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing,” Marx writes, “simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relations of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour.”

To find an analogy Marx tells us we have to turn to the “mist-enveloped regions of the religious world.” In that world, the inventions of the human mind take on an independent existence and humans begin to interact with their own fantastical creations as if they were really independently existing objective things. This is similar to the Fetishism of Commodities. All the commodities we see about us are part of the sum total of all the socially produced objects and services created by human labor in our society. People all over the world are making things which are traded, shipped, sold, resold, etc. But their use values cannot be realized until they are sold — i.e., exchanged, especially exchanged for money. But why are some more expensive than others? Why do some have more value than others? Supply and demand has a role to play in setting price, but it merely causes price to fluctuate around value.

The fact that we know that value results from the socially necessary labor time spent in making commodities “by no means,” Marx says, “dissipates the mist through which the social character of labour appears to us to be an objective character of the products themselves.”

This is because we are so used to how the market operates under capitalism, how prices fluctuate, commodities rise and fall in prices, working people, as consumers, naturally just think the values (which we usually don’t differentiate from prices) are products of the natural world, that is, are functions of the things for sale or barter themselves. This is why “supply and demand” seems to be the basis of the value of things. We often fail to see it’s all really the result of the socially necessary labor time expended in the labor process that is the determining factor in value

This confusion of price and value leads Marx to say, “The determination of the magnitude of value by labor time therefore is a secret, hidden under the apparent fluctuations in the relative values of commodities.”

We are reminded that to understand the real nature of a social formation we have to reverse our knowledge of its historical development. We begin with the full-fledged capitalist system and try to figure why the prices of things are the way they are. Looking at the mature system, we don’t really see its primitive origins. In the same way many religious people looking at a human being fail to see an ape in the historical background.

Marx continues: “When I state that coats and boots stand in a relation to linen, because it is the universal incarnation of abstract human labor, the absurdity of the statement is self evident.” This has been remarked upon both by the most astute of thinkers (Bertrand Russell) and the most pedestrian (Ayn Rand).

The problem is that pro-capitalist ideologues look upon an historically transient economic formation, its own, as an eternally existing social order. Of course prices are set by supply and demand. What is that crazy Marx talking about? As the economist Brad Delong said, he had never known anyone who thought that way.

Well, let’s look at something other than the full-blown capitalist system at work. Marx says, “The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labor as long as they take the form of commodities, vanishes therefore, so soon as we come to other forms of production.”

To help explain, Marx gives the example of Robinson Crusoe. He chooses the fictional character Robinson because he was a popular example used in the texts of the day. Robinson has to make everything for himself, obtain his own food, and provide his own shelter. Obviously, the things that are most important for his survival are those he expends most of his labor time upon and are consequently the most valuable to him.

Marx then says we should consider a community of free people working together cooperatively to make all things necessary for their society. Whereas Robinson was just making use of values for himself, in this community a social product is being created. The people have to set aside part of the product for future production, but the rest they can consume. How would they divide it in a fair manner? They would divide the product in proportion to the labor time each individual had contributed to the joint production of the social product.

This is how barter went on in the Middle Ages. Peasants knew precisely how much labor time was involved in making cheese, for example, and in making a pair of shoes. If it took twice as long to make a pound cheese than a pair of shoes, no one was going to trade more than a half pound of cheese for his shoes. It is only in the complicated processes of commodity production, especially in capitalism, that the Fetishism of Commodities begins to manifest itself and the true nature of the source of value is lost.

The loss of knowledge about value produces generally a confused consciousness in our world. Our alienation from our own social product, the effects of commodity fetishism, and the continuing influence of religion all work together to keep us confused and off guard. But seeing what our condition is with respect to such mental blights also tells how far along the road to liberation we are and how far we have to go (quite a distance I fear).

The world is reflected in these distorted forms of consciousness. “The religious world,” Marx tells us, “is but the reflex of the real world.” And, for our capitalist society where all human relations, and relations of humans with the the things they create, are reducible to commodification based on the value of “homogeneous human labor,” the best form of religion is Christianity. (And since Catholicism represents a pre-bourgeois view of human nature more suitable to feudalism, at least in a Western or European framework, it is the Protestant form that is more congruent with capitalist conceptions.)

Why is this? Marx says it is because the idea of “abstract man” is the basis of the the religious outlook of these systems. A religion based on an abstract view of “human nature” is just the ticket for an economic system that capitalist ideology says is also based on “human nature.” The religion reinforces the basic presuppositions of the capitalist view of abstract humanity.

As long as humans are alienated and confused about how capitalism works and are mystified by their relation to the objects of their labor they will never be free, or free from the spell of religion, according to Marx. “The religious reflex of the real world,” he writes, can only vanish “when the practical relations of every-day life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible relations with regard to his fellowmen and to Nature.”

The next two sentences from Marx are extremely important as they explain, in very general terms, the failure of the Russian Revolution and the downfall of the socialist world system. The first sentence served as the basic idea for the Bolsheviks many years after it was written: “The life processes of society, which is based on the process of material production, does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan.”

This is certainly what was attempted — first by war communism, then the NEP and then by the five year plans, forced collectivization and industrialization. But why the failure? Where were the “freely associated” people?

To pull off this great transformation, the goal of communism, Marx wrote “demands for society a certain material ground-work or set of conditions of existence which in their turn are the spontaneous product of a long and painful process of development.”

In other words, the seizure of power was premature. The material ground-work had been insufficiently developed. If Lenin represented the negation of the Czarist regime, Gorbachev and Yeltsin represented the negation of the negation — brought about by the failure of that long and painful process of properly developing production by freely associated people. For all its efforts, the socialist world still belonged to that world in which the processes of production had the mastery over human beings and not the other way around. So we must still put up with the Fetishism of Commodities for a while longer.

The present crisis gives us an opportunity to think about the Fetishism of Commodities as it applies to the real world. General Motors is about to be 70 percent owned by the US government, and the UAW will have a stake of about 17.5 percent. This leaves 12.5 percent in the hands of the capitalists. The commodities that the workers make (vehicles) don’t have a life of their own. Their value is determined by the socially necessary labor time it takes workers to make them. They are extensions of the being of the working people rather than capitalists who have proved themselves totally incompetent.

The working people of this country far out number monopoly capitalists — both industrial and financial. The UAW and the AFL-CIO as well other unions should demand that the government represent the interests of the working class majority. Ideally, the 87.5 percent joint government-worker control of GM would not be used to return control to private interests, but to rationalize the auto industry by means of worker control, eliminate the capitalists and the Fetishism of Commodities that keeps people thinking private interests have a role to play in production.

Such actions might lay the ground work for future nationalizations of basic and vital industries, and, by extension, a more socially planned and democratically determined distribution of the benefits of our labor.

First, both movements were made up of oppressed poor people from the lower ranks of society. Christianity was a religion of slaves and people without rights subjugated by the state and very similar to the types of poor oppressed working people that founded the earliest socialist and worker’s organizations in modern times.

Second, both movements held out the hope of salvation and liberation from tyranny and oppression: one in the world to come, the other in this world.

Third, both movements were (and in some places still are) attacked by the powers that be and were discriminated against, their members killed or imprisoned, despised, and treated as enemies of the status quo.

Fourth, despite fierce persecution both movements grew and became more powerful. After three hundred years of struggle Christians took control of the Roman Empire and became a world religion. The worker’s movement is still struggling. After its first modern revolutionary appearance as a fully self conscious movement (1848) it achieved a major impetus in the later part of the nineteenth century with the growth of the First and Second Internationals, and the German Social Democratic movement. It too is now a world wide movement with Socialist, Social Democratic and Communist parties spread around the world. [The rise and fall of the USSR was a bump in the road the consequences of which have yet to be determined.]

The Book of Acts reveals that the early Christians were primitive communists sharing their goods in common and leading a collective life style. This original form of Christianity was wiped out when the Roman Empire under Constantine imposed Christianity as the official religion of the state and set up the Catholic Church in order to make sure that the religious teachings of Jesus and the early followers of his movement would be perverted to protect the interests of the wealthy and the power of the state.

With few exceptions, all forms of modern day Christianity are descended from this faux version, based on a mixture of Jewish religious elements and the practices of Greco-Roman paganism, and only the modern working class and progressive movements (basically secular) carry on in the spirit of egalitarianism and socialism of the founder of Christianity.

Engels points out that there were many attempts in history (especially from the Middle Ages up to modern times) to reestablish the original communistic Christianity of Jesus and his early followers.

These attempts manifested themselves as peasant uprisings through the middle ages which tried to overthrow feudal oppression and create a world based on the teaching of Jesus and his Apostles.

These movements failed giving rise to the state sanctioned Christianity of modern times. Engels mentions some of these movements– i.e., the Bohemian Taborites led by Jan Zizka (“of glorious memory”) and the German Peasant War. These movements are now represented, Engels points out, by the working men communists since the 1830s.

Engels reveals that misleadership is also a problem in these early movements (and still today I would add) due to the low levels of education found amongst the poor and oppressed. He quotes a contemporary witness, Lucian of Samosata (“the Voltaire of classic antiquity”). The Christians “despise all material goods without distinction and own them in common– doctrines which they have accepted in good faith, without demonstration or proof. And when a skillful impostor who knows how to make clever use of circumstances comes to them he can manage to get rich in a short time and laugh up his sleeve over these simpletons.” The Pat Robertsons and Jerry Falwell types have been around for a long time. I am sure readers can add a long list of names.

Part Two

Engels views on early Christianity were formed from his reading of what he considered “the only scientific basis” for such study, namely the new critical works by German scholars of religion.

First were the works of the Tubingen School, including David Strauss (The Life of Jesus). This school has shown that 1) the Gospels are late writings based on now lost original sources from the time of Jesus and his followers; 2) only four of Paul’s letters are by him; 3) all miracles must be left out of account if you want a scientific view; 4) all contradictory presentations of the same events must also be rejected. This school then wants to preserve what it can of the history of early Christianity. By the way, this is essentially what Thomas Jefferson tried to do when he made his own version of the New Testament.

A second school was based on the writings of Bruno Bauer. What Bauer did was to show that Christianity would have remained a Jewish sect if it had not, in the years after the death of its founder, mutated by contact with Greco-Roman paganism, into a new religion capable of becoming a world wide force. Bauer showed that Christianity, as we know it, did not come into the Roman world from the outside (“from Judea”) but that it was “that world’s own product.” Christianity owes as much to Zeus as to Yahweh.

Engels maintains that The Book of Revelations is the only book in the New Testament that can be properly dated by means of its internal evidence. It can be dated to around 67-68 AD since the famous number 666, as the mark of the beast or the Antichrist, represents the name of the Emperor Nero according to the rules of numerology. Nero was overthrown in 68. This book, Engels says, is the best source of the views of the early Christians since it is much earlier than any of the Gospels, and may actually have been the work the apostle John (which the Gospel and letters bearing his name were not).

In this book we will not find any of the views that characterize official Christianity as we have it from the time of the Emperor Constantine to the present day. It is purely a Jewish phenomenon in Revelations. There is no trinity as God has seven spirits (so the Holy Ghost is impossible Engels remarks). Jesus Christ is not God but his son, he is not even equal in status to his father. Nevertheless he has pretty high status, his followers are called his “slaves” by John. Jesus is “an emanation of God, existing from all eternity but subordinate to God” just as the seven spirits are. Moses is more or less “on an equal footing” with Jesus in the eyes of God. There is no mention of the later belief in original sin. John still thought of himself as a Jew, there is no idea at this time of “Christianity” as a new religion.

In this period there were many end of times revelations in circulation both in the Semitic and in the Greco-Roman world. They all proclaimed that God was (or the Gods were) pissed off at humanity and had to be appeased by sacrifices. John’s revelation was unique because it proclaimed “by one great voluntary sacrifice of a mediator the sins of all times and all men were atoned for once and for all– in respect of the faithful.”

Since all peoples and races could be saved this is what, according to Engels, “enabled Christianity to develop into a universal religion.” [Just as the concept of the workers of the world uniting to break their chains and build a world wide communist future makes Marxism-Leninism a universal philosophy.]

In Heaven before the throne of God are 144,000 Jews (12,000 from each tribe). In the second rank of the saved are the non Jewish converts to John’s sect. Engels points out that neither the “dogma nor the morals” of later Christianity are to be found in this earliest of Christian expressions.

Some Muslims would presumably not like this Heaven, not only are there no (female) virgins in it, there are no women whatsoever. In fact, the 144,000 Jews have never been “defiled” by contact with women! This is a men’s only club.

Engels says that the book shows a spirit of “struggle”, of having to fight against the entire world and a willingness to do so. He says the Christians of today lack that spirit but that it survives in the working class movement. We must remember he was writing this in 1894.

There were other sects of Christianity springing up at this time too. John’s sect eventually died out and the Christianity that won out was an amalgam of different groups who finally came together around the Council of Nicaea (325 AD). Those who did not sign on were themselves persecuted out of existence by the new Christian state.

We can see the analogy to the early sects of socialists and communists, says Engels. We can also see what happened after the Russian Revolution (Leninists, Stalinists, Trotskyists, Bukharinites, Maoists, etc., etc.). Here in the US today we have the CPUSA, the SWP, Worker’s World, Revolutionary CP, Socialist Party, Sparticists, and etc., etc.).

Engels thought that sectarianism was a thing of the past in the Socialist movement because the movement had matured and outgrown it. This, we now know, was a temporary state of affairs at the end of the 19th Century with the consolidation of the German SPD. The wide spread sectarianism of today suggests the worker’s movement is still in its infancy.

Engels says this sectarianism is due to the confusion and backwardness of the thinking of the masses and the preponderate role that leaders play due to this backwardness. The Russian masses of 1917 and the Chinese of 1949 were a far different base than the German working class of the 1890s.

“This confusion,” Engels writes,”is to be seen in the formation of numerous sects which fight against each other with at least the same zeal as against the common external enemy [China vs USSR, Stalin and Trotsky, Stalin and Tito, Vietnam vs China border war, Albania vs China and USSR. ad nauseam]. So it was with early Christianity, so it was in the beginning of the socialist movement [and still is, peace Engels!], no matter how much that worried the well-meaning worthies who preached unity where no unity was possible.”

Finally, for those fans of the 60s sexual revolution, Engels says that many of the sects of early Christianity took the opposite view of John and actually promoted sexual freedom and free love as part of the new dispensation. They lost out. Engels says this sexual liberation was also found in the early socialist movement. He would not, I think, have approved of the excessive prudery of the Soviets.

Part Three

“Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number IS Six hundred threescore AND six.”– Revelation 13:18

In the last part of his essay Engels explains that the purpose of the Book of Revelations (by John of Patmos) was to communicate its religious vision to the seven churches of Asia Minor and to the larger sect of Jewish Christians that they represented.

At this time, circa 69 AD, the entire Mediterranean world much of the of Near East and Western Europe were under the control of the Roman Empire. This was a multicultural empire made of hundreds of tribes, groups, cities and peoples. Within the empire was a vast underclass of workers, freedmen, slaves and peasants whose exploited labor was lived off of by a ruling class of landed aristocrats and merchants. In 69 AD the empire was in essence a military dictatorship controlled by the army and led by the Emperor (from the Latin word for “general”– imperator).

At this time there were peoples but no nations in our sense of the word. “Nations became possible,” Engels says, “only through the downfall of Roman world domination.” The effects of which are still being felt in the Middle East and parts of Europe, especially eastern Europe.

For the exploited masses of the Empire it was basically impossible to resist the military power of Rome. There were uprisings and slave revolts but they were always put down by the legions. This was the background for what became a great revolutionary movement of the poor and the exploited, a movement that became Christianity. The purpose of the movement was to escape from persecution, enslavement and exploitation.
A solution was offered. “But” Engels remarks, “not in this world.”

Another feature of the work is that it is a symbolical representation of contemporary first century politics and John thinks that Jesus’s second coming is near at hand. Jesus tells John, “Behold, I come quickly” three times (22:7, 22:12, 22:20). His failure to show up by now doesn’t seem to pose a problem for Christians.

As far as the later Christian religion of love is concerned, Engels reports that you won’t find it in Revelation, at least as it regards the enemies of the Christians. There is no cheek turning going on here: it’s all fire and brimstone for the foes of Jesus. Engels says “undiluted revenge is preached.” God is even going to completely blot out Rome from the face of the earth. He changed his mind evidently as it is still a popular tourist destination and the pope has even set up shop there.

As was pointed out earlier the God of John is Yahweh, there is no Trinity, it is He, not Christ, who will judge mankind and they will judged according to their works (no justification by faith here, sorry Luther), no doctrine of original sin, no baptism, and no Eucharist or Mass. Almost everyone of these later developments came from Roman and Greek, as well as Egyptian
mystery religions. Zoroastrian elements from the Zend – Avesta are also present. These are the idea of Satan and the Devil as an evil force opposed to Yahweh, a great battle at the end of time between good and evil, [the final conflict] and the idea of a second coming. All these ideas were picked up by the Jews during their contact with the Persians before their return after the Babylonian captivity and transmitted to the early Christians.

Once we realize all this we can also see why Islam was able to rise to the status of a world religion as well. Those areas of the world that were not the home land of Greco-Roman paganism were open to Islam which spread in areas of Semitic settlement and where Christianity had been imposed by force, so could Islam be.

We will give Engels the last word, the Book of Revelation “shows without any dilution what Judaism, strongly influenced by Alexandria, contributed to Christianity. All that comes later is Western , Greco-Roman addition.”

Smail’s thesis is that our actions are based on the long ago evolutionary development of our neurochemistry. Smail also reverses the biology-culture relationship that holds that culture is derivative from biology. At least this is what Mithen says. We will see that this is not the case since it is going to be neurochemistry (biology) which shapes culture and history.

History doesn’t really begin at Sumer. It begins way back in the Old Stone Age (the Palaeolithic) when the major neurochemical agents influencing our brain evolved. Many of these Palaeolithic chemicals are still at work today. Smail says: “What passes for progress in human civilisation is often nothing more than new developments in the art of changing body chemistry.”

Mithen tells us this is not just a rehash of the “crude evolutionary psychology” of Steven Pinker, Leda Cosmides, John Tooby and others, but is a “far more sophisticated” theory. We shall see.

Smail says human history begins way before the advent of writing five thousand years ago and the view that there was an “unchanging prehistoric past” and then “history” is wrong. Mithen, who is an archaeologist, is in tune with this view. So, apparently, is everybody else these days.

This is a terminological problem (or non problem). Marxists use the term “history” to refer to the advent of class society basically about five thousand or so years ago in the Middle East and “gentile” or “clan” society for the non class societies of “prehistoric” times. They do not believe that prehistoric societies (and what is “historic” and “prehistoric” varies in different parts of the world) were “unchanging.” Rather they were dynamic and rapidly evolving, or stagnant, depending on the physical environments they found themselves in and that they had to adapt to to survive.

Homo sapiens arose from Homo erectus about 200,000 years ago, and Mithen thinks, as do many archaeologists, that there was a radical break in human prehistory about 70,000 years ago “when the first unambiguously symbolic artifacts and body adornments are known” (Blombos Cave, South Africa). Right after this time H. sapiens began to spread out of Africa into the rest of the world. Mithen thinks that this has something to do with the final evolution of language. He also thinks, because of the “radical break” that Smail may be wrong to deny some period of historylessness to the period prior to 200,000 years ago. Mithen says, “… ‘the myth of Palaeolithic stasis’ may, in fact, be the reality prior to Homo sapiens.” By the tenor of his own argument, it might be the reality prior to the “radical break” as well.

Using the word “history” in a greatly expanded, and I think unhelpful manner, he says that Smail is right about “history” itself going farther back than H. sapiens. Mithin agrees that even chimpanzees and baboons “have history.” This is because their current social reality is based on their past social reality. So almost everything is historical. Why stop at baboons? Why not include the birds and the bees? It is far more useful to apply the term “history” to the written or remembered record and keep the term “prehistory” for the deep past. If your group has no consciousness of “history,” you probably don’t have a history to be conscious of.

New problems spring up when we leave the Old Stone Age for the New — for the period called by Vere Gordon Childe, the great Marxist archaeologist of the first half of the 20th century, the time of the “Neolithic Revolution.” This is the period of about 8000 to 3000 B.C. (at least for Europe and its immediate neighbors). The previous “mode of production” had been hunting and gathering. Now we settled down to farming and soon to building towns and cities, classes, and the first state structures. So, I think, history does begin at Sumer after all. This doesn’t mean prehistory is a blank. Childe call the Neolithic a Revolution because, as a good Marxist, he saw the new mode of production, large scale agriculture, as a qualitative leap and change from the hunting and gathering of the past.

This was due, as Mithen points out, to H. sapiens reaction “to the start of the Holocene some 11,600 years ago, with its warmer and wetter climate than the preceding Pleistocene.” Smail calls this period “the fulcrum of the great transformation” of human history. This is exactly what Childe thought as well.

Now we come to Smails’ special theory. As a result of the Neolithic’s new living conditions — humans began to settle down and give up the hunting gathering life style. At this time, says Mithin, Smail says “our Palaeolithic-evolved neurophysiology” begins to assert itself. The primate social structure, as seen in chimpanzees and baboons and based on domination “often” brought about by “random acts of violence” to keep lower ranking members of the group fearful and stressed out, begins to reappear.

This argument does not seem to hold water. Mithen points out most hunter gathers have egalitarian societies. He says the evidence is that the “majority of Palaeolithic hunter-gathers were egalitarian” as suggested, by the way, by Engels in his discussion of “primitive communism” in “The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State.” So the neurophysiology that we evolved in the Palaeolithic would not have resembled the chimp-baboon model necessary for Smails’ theory.

Mithen, however, finds some of this new theory fairly persuasive. Smail says the new political elites that developed to control trade and agriculture “needed to control the brains and bodies of their subordinates by manipulating their neuro-chemistry.” So they ruled by relying on “random acts of violence” against their people to keep them down through fear and stress, via the head baboon, since “control of agricultural surpluses or trade routes was not enough to maintain their power base.”

This is just completely unscientific speculation worthy of a vision of the Neolithic conjured up out of reading too many Edgar Rice Burroughs novels. Of course, Smail holds that the rulers were not aware of what they were doing — Mithin says, “they were simply repeating what had seemed to work in gaining them power. Random violence is a winner every time.”

There is no evidence that the political elite in the Neolithic period used random violence against their people to maintain power. This is just speculation and guess work. Mithin however says that it wasn’t just physical violence. People who know about the Neolithic site of Chatalhoyuk (Anatolia: 7000 BC) will find Smail’s views “particularly striking and persuasive.” Why is this?

Because, at this site “we find horrendous wall paintings and sculptures showing decapitated people and monstrous animals.” This is very emotive. Lets give a more scientific formulation. Here “we find strange (to us) wall paintings and sculptures showing headless people and large unknown mythological animals. We do not know what the purpose of these images was. Perhaps it was religious.” This is not the conclusion of Mithin.

He simply asserts that these images show “a culture of suppression through terror, with– no doubt– a priestly caste benefiting from these visions of a Neolithic hell.” Terror was used to “attack the body chemistry” of the people (evolved during the baboon Reign of Terror)to make them fearful and afraid of those “intent on maintaining power.” These speculations are completely without merit.

From the Neolithic we advance into the historical period proper. Since our neural states “are plastic and thus manipulable” we find that “new forms of economic, political and social behaviour emerge during the course of history.” The six most important vis a vis our neurochemistry have become also the most important for human culture. The six are “religion, sport, monumental architecture, alcohol, legitimised violence — and sex for fun.” At least random violence is not on the list. These six are the “most effective in moulding and manipulating our body chemistry.”

So the Romans had it down with bread and circuses. First put the subject population under stress, then provide relief which advantages the ruling class. “What better way,” Mithen notes, “for elites to build and maintain their power than to create stress within a population by a culture of terror and then very kindly to offer the means for its alleviation by arranging such events.” Examples today would be professional sports, movies, and especially great events such as the Olympics. Mithin quotes Etienne de la Boetie who in 1548 referred to sporting and theatrical extravaganzas as “tools of tyranny” and “drugs for the people.”

Methods used by others to influence or control our brain and body chemistry Smail calls “teletropic mechanisms.” Those we use on ourselves are “autotropic.” Mithin points out that it “is far better for those in power to be in control of their subordinates’ body chemistry than to leave it to the subordinates themselves.” This is why many religions, for example, as ruling class tools, reject such autotropic mechanisms as masturbation, sex for fun, alcohol, and recreational drugs. The state, in fact, seeks to regulate and control autotropic mechanisms as far as possible.

The plot thickens. The world historical change from the Middle Ages to our modern world may be better explained by the manipulation of neurochemistry than by Marxist theory. The European discovery and use of tea, chocolate, coffee, and tobacco allowed people to regulate their own brain chemistry, for these items are all autotropic. The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of the struggle between autotropic and teletropic mechanisms. Smail is credited with Mithin’s comment that the: “Making of the Palaeolithic relevant to the drinking of tea is no mean feat.”

Two quotes from On Deep History and the Brain sum up the argument and bring us to the book’s grand conclusion. “We can finally dispense with the idea, once favored by some historians, that biology gave way to culture with the advent of civilisation. This has it all backward. Civilisation did not bring an end to biology. Civilisation ENABLED important aspects of human biology, and the drama of the past five thousand years lies in the fact that it did so in ways that were largely unanticipated in the Palaeolithic era.” The second quote is “we need not dig only in the dusty topsoil of the strata that form the history of humanity. The deep past is also our present and future.”

What Marxist would disagree with this first comment. It only says that human potential has been increased by the inventions of civilization and that these inventions were not foreseen in the Old Stone Age. What Smail means is that the brain chemistry that evolved in the Old Stone Age was not adapted for the changes that lay ahead, it being oriented towards the teletropic. But we have already seen that H. sapiens in the Palaeolithic was largely egalitarian (primitively communistic) and so autotropic. The evolution of our brain chemistry fits into any type of society it would seem. As for the notion of the “deep past”: it is of course true that we are the product of evolution, of animal ancestors and that this heritage remains with us today and forms part of our nature. Who, since Darwin, would deny that.

The question remains, how are we best to understand history, the rise of capitalism, the contradictions of imperialism and the way to overcome them and proceed on the road to socialism? Historical Materialism, the theories of Marx, Engels and Lenin are still to my mind the best methods to use to answer these questions. It is true that candy is dandy, and that chocolate, masturbation, and alcohol are handy autotropic devices, but they won’t replace class struggle and the analysis of the means and modes of production as ways to change the world. Political power does not grow out of a Hershey bar.

“Fraught with Ought” reviews two new books concerning the American philosopher Wilfred Sellars (1912-1989). These are a collection of papers about Sellars by Jay Rosenberg (Wilfred Sellers: Fusing the Images, Oxford, 2007) and an anthology (In the Space of Reasons: Selected Essays of Wilfred Sellars, Harvard, 2007). Why all this interest in an academic philosopher, unknown to the general public, and dead for almost twenty years? And what has any of this to do with Marxism?

Briefly, Sellars was an analytic philosopher, a member of a school stemming back over a hundred years, that grew out of the rejection of the European philosophical tradition growing out of German Idealism, especially Kant and Hegel. Marxism also grew out of this German tradition.

Recently some analytic philosophers have come to believe that the wholesale rejection of Hegel and others in the classical tradition has been a mistake and was based on a faulty understanding of their works by some of the founders of the analytic movement, especially Bertrand Russell.

Sellars’ philosophy is being examined in this light and is taken by some to be useful in reclaiming Kant and Hegel, for example, and using them as part of the program of analytic philosophy — viz., of using the analysis of ordinary language usage and the philosophy of language to find the solution to philosophical problems. Rehabilitating the thinkers from whom Marx and Engels learned so much and whose ideas they grappled with in forming their own is also a way of reminding the contemporary world of the continuing relevance of Marxism.

One of Sellars’ most important works was his 1956 paper “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.” Although not in this work, Sellars gives an interesting definition of the aim of philosophy: “The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.”

This really is quite general and could be said of the natural and social sciences as well. The aim of Marxism could be said to be to bring about the end of human exploitation in the broadest possible sense by the most effective means, considered in the broadest possible sense, of eliminating capitalism and abolishing classes.

Marxists also share a common aim with Sellars. He wanted, in his own words. “to formulate a scientifically oriented, naturalistic realism which would ‘save the appearances.’” The last expression refers to a desire not to stray too far from common sense. His love of science is the same as that of all true Marxists and is very clearly expressed by him when he writes, “in the dimension of describing and explaining the world, science is the measure of all things, of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not.”

In other words, he shares with Marxists the idea, as Crane says, that philosophy’s “fundamental task” is “to explain how things seem (in the broadest sense of that term) consistent with what science has told us about the world.” The term “scientia mensura” is used by Sellarsians (it could be adopted by Marxists as well)to sum up this view. The job of philosophy is to bridge what Sellars called the “manifest image” of the world [i.e., common sense] and the “scientific image” [we are just a bunch of vibrating strings or atoms, etc.] Crane says Sellars developed his own “systematic philosophy” to deal with this problem. Let us see how far it agrees with Marxism.

Many philosophers such as Sellars have been bothered by three things about the manifest image of the world, according to Crane, namely intentionality or meaning, value, and consciousness. All bourgeois realists, just as all Marxist materialists, accept “that there is a world independent of thought.” Bourgeois realists are in fact materialists. Sellars, however, has a problem with how we become aware of the world and how we use language to describe it.

Marxist and non-Marxist realists alike tend to see language as somehow reflecting or referring to the objects of the world. We learn what “cat” means by referring to a real cat. “According to this view,” Crane says, “things in the world cause our minds to form certain representations, which is why they represent what they do.” This is what Lenin thought when he said consciousness or sensation is a picture of reality. Crane says it is the view of the early Wittgenstein (of the Tractatus). But Sellars doesn’t buy this. He has his own theory by which he replaces “reference” with “inference.” As Crane puts it, “To talk about the meaning of a word is not to talk about the relation it bears to the object it stands for. Rather, it is to talk about what inferences — what legitimate patterns of thought and reasoning — that word can be used in.”

This is a very dicey development. It seems to grow out of the later Wittgenstein (the Philosophical Investigations) and his notion of a “language game.” Whether this view can be reconciled with materialism is still being debated. What is really distinctive in this view is, Crane says, the role that normativity comes to play in the system. Sellars refers to words as “natural-linguistic objects” and we have to learn the rules (norms) for their use: “they tell us,” Crane points out, “how words should and should not be used. Signification and meaning are normative matters.” This leads us to a very important key concept of his philosophy — namely, “the myth of the given.” I’m not sure this “myth” is really a myth.

Sellars thinks of thought as “inner speech”, as Crane says, “as employing the concepts one has learned in the course of acquiring a language to make inferences which result in dispositions to make ‘outer’ verbal judgments.” So thinking, just as speaking, is subject to rules and norms.

Crane uses the example of a fig tree to clarify Sellars’ views. An old fashioned materialist (such as Lenin) might say that we have the notion of a fig tree as a result of having learned how to use the words “fig tree” as a result of our early education. Our senses were presented with a particular object, our parents say “fig tree” and we learn that this “given” is to be referred to as a “fig tree.”

This is an example (but not a good one) of “the myth of the given.” Sellars says “all awareness is a linguistic affair.” As crane puts it “the perceptually given” is not “a mental episode which is prior to thought and language.” This has the smell of idealism clinging to it.

Let’s try to be clearer. Crane says Sellars holds, “Every episode of taking something in is really a case of conceptualizing it, and conceptualizing requires being subject to the norms which can only come with the acquisition of a language.” Sellars is really saying it is wrong to think there was a “concept of x” in the mind of the child just waiting to be given the name “fig tree”. It was only by learning a language that a fig tree could present itself to the child as a fig tree and not just some kind of perceptual static.

Sellars’ ideas about sense perception are weak, I think, and I agree with Crane when he says he thinks them “unconvincing.” I think, for example, that consciousness and consciousness of objects have evolved from organisms that were precursors of H. sapiens. Other animals certainly have awareness and can even think yet are without “language” — or least without what we humans think of as “language”. Sellars appears to believe that only humans have language. If we grant this and restrict ourselves to “human language” then Crane thinks Sellars’ ideas are “clearer and more tractable” if we confine the inferentialist theory to thought and language and leave sense perception out of it.

Now thought, language, meaning, and inference are the result of brain processes that can be studied by science. This is the case even if meaning, thought, and knowledge will not themselves be, as Crane says, part of “the scientific image as such.” Why is this so? Sellars writes that it is because “in characterising an episode or a state as that of KNOWING, we are not giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says.” And Crane reminds us, this also goes for saying and thinking. If I say, think or know that e.g., my redeemer liveth, or that workers by uniting will only lose their chains I must give reasons that logically lead to a justification for these statements. I am not just referring to some chemical or neurological activity in my brain.

What is important about this part of Sellars’ theory is, according to Crane, that questions dealing with “meaning and significance” are not about facts — “questions about what is the case” — they are questions concerning “what ought to be.” They are not questions for science. Sellars thinks they are normative because we have to follow rules for justification which are located in “the logical space of reasons.” Sellars says. “If they are thinking THIS, then they OUGHT to think THAT too.”

What is going on here? It seems natural to distinguish between factual (scientific) statements and value (moral, un- or non- scientific) statements. But, says Crane, Sellars has gone beyond this dichotomy: “not only moral value, but also thought and consciousness, are (in his words) ‘fraught with ought.’” There are problems with this I think. If I give justifications for my belief that united workers have only their chains to lose those justifications are intended by me to be true factual statements about the world and thus subject to scientific scrutiny. It is scientific socialism to which I appeal. It is another question, indeed fraught with ought, whether that commitment logically forces me to embrace the dictatorship of the proletariat as well.

Some have come to think that Sellars’ views would cause a “sea change” in philosophy. Crain disagrees and thinks Sellars’ “inferentialism” with respect to “meaning and thought” can be weaned away from other elements in his system and adopted by those with “more traditional” attitudes towards “the self and the mind.” I think that there is no need for Sellarsian extremism on the question of the “scientia mensura.” To save the appearances, the “manifest world”, we don’t have to divorce it so completely from the “scientific world” as Sellars maintains. We only need show there is no manifest contradiction between the two worlds. There is no contradiction between our being human beings running about with “minds” on the one hand, and being ultimately vibrating strings or atoms on the other.

Marxists view the human world of consciousness as a higher level organization of matter (that stuff existing independently of the human mind from which the universe and everything in it derives) and what science ultimately discovers this stuff to be will not be in contradiction to the view that the manifest world is part of the continuum logically derived from the knowledge of the scientific world. Thus, Marxists can adopt some portions of Sellars’ inferentialism, especially with regard to the consistency of their thoughts with respect to what they ought to believe and do given what they say they believe and do.

Russell tells us straight away that he is only looking at history “as a pleasure,” as an enjoyable way to pass one’s free time, and that his approach is that of an “amateur.” Nevertheless, he thinks this approach will show what he has usefully derived from history and what others may also. Let us see.

He divides history into two parts — the large, which leads to an understanding of how the world got the way it is, and the small, which “makes us know interesting men and women, and promotes a knowledge of human nature” (supposing there is such a thing independent of culture). He thinks we should begin the study of history not by reading about it but rather from watching “movies with explanatory talk.” I think he has very young children in mind, because even “historical” movies are more fiction than history.

Russell maintains there have been only “three great ages of progress in the world”: the first being the growth of civilization in the Near East (Egypt, Babylonia), the second being Greece (from Homer to Archimedes), and the third being from the 15th century to the present. This scheme appears to be Eurocentric.

Russell appears to credit “progress” or historical development to men of genius. He says the proof of this is that the Incas and the Maya never invented the wheel. But they certainly had men of “genius,” as they had monumental architecture and the Maya and others had invented writing. It doesn’t occur to Russell that inventions such as the wheel are called forth from certain needs within a culture. The Maya and the Inca did just fine without the wheel. What they needed was gunpowder to give a proper greeting to the Spanish.

Russell also thinks that we would still be living at the productive level of the 18th century if “by some misfortune, a few thousand men of exceptional ability had perished in infancy.” This begs the question. Do the social conditions people find themselves in call forth their ingenuity and inventiveness, thus leading to progress, or is it all due to men of genius. Russell apparently believes in the ‘great man theory of history,’ but this theory rests on the logical fallacy I mentioned above (begging the question.)

Russell does not approve of those who “desire to demonstrate some ‘philosophy’ of history,” and he singles out “Hegel, Marx, Spengler, and the interpreters of the Great Pyramid and its ‘divine message’.” When it comes to Hegel, he even maintains that his view of history “is not a whit less fantastic than the views of those who divine by the Great Pyramid.”

In all fairness to Hegel, he and Russell may share more ideas about the nature of history than the latter thinks. In a nutshell, Hegel saw history as a gradual increase in human self-consciousness of freedom, finally leading to a condition where all human beings would be equally respected and their rights recognized. Hegel also appeals to empirical evidence, i.e., history itself, to justify this conclusion.

The end which Hegel envisioned has had its ups and downs, but the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (part of the UN Charter) is the type of progress he had in mind, even though there must still be a long process of development for the ideals of this document to become translated into actuality.

In theory, I am sure, Russell would not disagree with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, despite residual racist and misogynist opinions he might have shared with the people of his generation, not to mention latent eugenicist tendencies.

For instance, he believes female behavior should be “circumscribed by prudential considerations”. Women who have been free to do as they like, i.e., women who have become rulers (“empresses regnant”) have, in the main, “murdered or imprisoned their sons, and often their husbands; almost all have had innumerable lovers” (one would think Russell might have approved of this considering his private life).

“If this is what women would do if they dared,” he writes, “we ought to be thankful for social restraints.” The only example he gives is Catherine the Great. Henry VIII or Nero do not elicit similar thoughts about male behavior. We are also told that “men of supreme ability are just as congenitally different from the average as are the feeble-minded.” This is a view he shares with Nietzsche.

The following opinion, however, is more in accord with what Hegel would believe. “Although,” Russell writes, “history is full of ups and downs, there is a general trend in which it is possible to feel some satisfaction; we know more than our ancestors knew, we have more command over the forces of nature (this is highly problematic since our economic system seems to be in the process of destroying us and our natural environment), we suffer less from disease and from natural cataclysms [also problematic].” He adds that “violence is now mainly organized and governmental, and it is easier to imagine ways of ending this than of ending the sporadic unplanned violence of more primitive times.”

We must remember that Russell was writing in 1943 in the midst of World War II. Nevertheless, his “general trend” is a nod to progress, and for him the founding of the UN, the growth of the concept of universal rights, and the spread of social democratic ideals are all in accord with Hegelian notions. Despite his dislike of the notion of a “philosophy of history”, Russell’s “general trend” is in accord with Hegel’s outlook.

Besides being a closet Hegelian, it is interesting to note that this essay also reveals a Platonic bent to Russell’s thought, and a decidedly non-Hegelian cyclical approach to history.

“The greatest creative ages,” Russell writes, “are those where opinion is free, but behavior is still to some extent conventional. Ultimately, however, skepticism breaks down moral tabus, society becomes impossibly anarchic, freedom is succeeded by tyranny, and a new tight tradition is gradually built up.”

What is striking about this passage, besides its mechanical way of thinking, is that it seems to be in agreement with Russell’s conservative critics. Russell, the “passionate skeptic,” was himself accused of breaking down conventional moral beliefs, and it was objected that his teachings would lead to social breakdown and anarchy, and hence he should not be teaching at the City College of New York.

On the basis of the preceding passage, it appears that Russell might have even made the following statement: “It is true that I, Russell, am a skeptic, that I do think many conventional moral tabus are nonsense, and if my views are generally adopted a tyranny will replace our freedoms, since views such as mine lead to social breakdown and anarchy. Now, how about that teaching job?”

To be fair, Russell realizes this problem, which he later calls, “the dilemma between freedom and discipline.” Russell needs a method to break the cycle described above, and he finds it in science, allied with what he calls “intelligence” (a rather amorphous concept).

“Genuine morality,” he writes, “cannot be such as intelligence would undermine, nor does intelligence necessarily promote selfishness. It only does so when unselfishness has been inculcated for the wrong reasons, and then only so long as its purview is limited. In this respect science is a useful element in culture, for it has a stability which intelligence does not shake, and it generates an impersonal habit of mind that makes it natural to accept a social rather than a purely individual ethic.”

But this cannot be right. Here are some German scientists in 1943: “Well, personal ethical considerations aside, our society has asked us to figure our how much Zyklon-B should be delivered to Auschwitz to eliminate x number of social undesirables per day, and is Zyklon-B the best chemical for the task at hand. Let us calculate together.”

The above comments and considerations seem to me to point out serious difficulties with some of Russell’s ideas about the lessons one can learn from reading history the way he recommends — as a pleasurable leisure-time activity, one that assiduously avoids any attempt to formulate a philosophy of history.

“The men who make up philosophies of history,” he writes, “may be dismissed as inventors of mythologies.” His two primary bug-a-boos here are Hegel and Marx. He sees only two functions for the study of history. First we can look “for comparatively small and humble generalizations such as might form a beginning of a science (as opposed to a philosophy) of history.”

This is pretty arbitrary. Why not the beginning of a philosophy as well as a science? Hegel insisted that philosophy was to be pursued as a rigorous scientific procedure, just as any other discipline claiming to arrive at knowledge. Marx also praised the scientific method and claimed his ideas were scientific.

The second function of history, according to Russell, is to seek “by the study of individuals … to combine the merits of drama or epic poetry with the merit of truth.” This is an Aristotelian approach. The first function “views man objectively, as the heavenly bodies are viewed by an astronomer; the other appeals to imagination.”

I think it safe to say that Hegel and Marx fully agree with Russell’s first function, but would object to his second function as having no place in an objective study of the historical process. In fact, the basis of Russell’s animus towards Hegel and Marx is his opinion that they mix up his own second function with the first. I would like to conclude this brief presentation with a few remarks on Russell’s criticism of Marx’s views.

After a lively survey of the development of the West and an appreciation of some of the most interesting classical historians one ought to study (Herodotus, Thucydides, Plutarch, and Gibbon), Russell comes to Marx, whom he, in another essay, considers a free thinker and compares to Robert Owen and Thomas Paine.

In this essay, however, Marx is credited with founding the current interest in the economic interpretation of historical events. “Modern views,” Russell says, “as to the relation of economic facts to general culture have been profoundly affected by the theory, first explicitly stated by Marx [and Engels], that the mode of production of an age (and to a lesser degree the mode of exchange) is the ultimate cause of the character of its politics, laws, literature, philosophy, and religion.” Russell fails to mention the relations of production, a factor of prime importance for Marx and Engels.

Russell then says — and this is something that Lenin would certainly have agreed with, as would all who have been influenced by the Marxist classics — that this view “is misleading if accepted as a dogma, but it is valuable if used as a means of suggesting hypothesis.” Russell adds that “It has indubitably a large measure of truth, though not so much as Marx believed.” Just what was excessive in what “Marx believed” merits its own discussion, but in Russell’s essay Marx’s faults seem to be sins of omission rather than commission.

The “most important error” in Marx’s thought, according to Russell, is that “it ignores intelligence as a cause.” It is difficult to understand this objection. Russell says that “men and apes, in the same environment, have different methods of securing food: men practice agriculture, not because of some extra-human dialectic compelling them to do so, but because intelligence shows them its advantages.”

Granted that Marx was trying to explain the development of human society and not ape society, the question becomes, where did this “intelligence” come from? It appears that it just fell from the sky into human beings. A little dose of Darwin is needed here, and if Russell had read and been influenced by Engels’ essay “The Role of Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man,” he would not, I think, have had such a reified notion of “intelligence.”

Russell says he does not want to imply that “intelligence is something that arises spontaneously in some mystical uncaused manner.” He grants its causes are partly social, partly biological, and partly individual, and that “Mendelianism has made a beginning” into understanding its origins.

My point is that Marx did not “ignore intelligence as a cause.” He did not single it out as a primary factor, because he saw it as part of the human condition that arises as a response to the evolution of the species and its interactions with the natural and social environment.

Russell’s concern with “intelligence” appears to be the result of the prominence of the eugenics movement in his time and is reflected in his comment, quoted above, about the differences between the feeble-minded “average” folk and people such as himself (“of supreme ability”).

How to Read and Understand History is an enjoyable introduction to some of Russell’s ideas, but although one can enjoy it, one cannot, I think, understand history from reading it.

In that book he proposed that ONLY humans have language and that the claims that other animals have language abilities as well is bogus. “For Pinker, children learn language because their brains are specifically prepared by evolution to do so.” King will take issue with some of Pinker’s ideas but I am a little bit dubious as to her motivations. She implies he is not “even handed” because he has said religious beliefs are “akin to astrology or alchemy,” which, in fact, they are. However, that said, we will see that her review draws some justifiable critical conclusions about Pinker’s work as she presents it.

Pinker thinks the key to understanding human nature is to learn how we put our ideas and feelings into words. King tells us that he uses “conceptual semantics” to do this. Pinker himself says, “Linguists call the inventory of concepts and the schemes that combine them ‘conceptual semantics.’ Conceptual semantics — the language of thought — must be distinct from language itself, or we would have nothing to go on when we debate what our words mean.”

Pinker’s book is full of examples of how we express ourselves in speech that show we have an underlying of reality to which language conforms. King gives one. “Why, driving home from the grocery store, do we refer to a gallon of milk in our car, but never a gallon of blood (even though blood circulates inside our body as we sit there)? Because we conceptualize our bodies as solids rather than as containers.” Expressions such as this lead us to think about space and time, cause and effect, and substance, “through which in turn we may identify the deeper rules of conceptual semantics.”

Pretty thin gruel! If our bodies are conceived as solids why do say we put too much food in our mouths, or have a pain in our stomach, or too much gas in that self same organ? I fear we cannot draw Pinker’s conclusions based on the different idiomatic expressions of different languages and cultures.

Half way through the book, we are told, Pinker reveals the key to his speculations. One of his inspirations is the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, of whom he says:

“Kant’s version of nativism, with abstract organizing frameworks but not actual knowledge built in to the mind, is the version most viable today, and can be found, for example, in Chomskan linguistics, evolutionary psychology, and the approach to cognitive development called domain specificity. One could could so far as to say the Kant foresaw the shape of a solution to the nature-nurture debate: characterize the organization, whatever it is, that makes useful learning possible.”

This is a strange theory for an evolutionist to hold. The human mind has a built in abstract framework a la Kant which is there to organize our experiences into categories (domains) before we even have them. Only humans have this with regard to languages, so the first humans to have a language must have come with this ready made. This is a pre-Darwinian outlook.

According to Darwinian notions language ability would have gradually developed by natural selection and there is no reason “lower” forms in the evolutionary sequence would not exhibit different stages of this ability.

Pinker thinks that the way evolution worked was to form different domains in the human brain each with its own task to fulfill. King says, for Pinker, “The human past constrains our present human nature because it has so closely shaped our brain modules.” Pinker says, for instance, that it is necessary to “pry our mental modules free of the domains they were designed for.”

This is not good science. Our so called modules were not “designed” for anything. Our responses evolved as the result of environmental adaptations. There is no reason to think that this process halted sometime in the paleolithic and is no longer functioning.

King quotes Pinker as saying that “left to our own devices, we are apt to backslide to our instinctive conceptual ways.” The solution, he says is, by education “to make up for the short comings in our instinctive ways of thinking about the physical and social world.” This outlook is basically that of Confucianism as put forth by Xunzi well over two thousand years ago and in our time by Freud. We are apt to let the Id take over if we are not educated to be social by Ivy League Super Ego types.

Marx asked who educates the educators. King is fairly critical of Pinker and thinks his views could lead to a “ranked hierarchy” of humanity antithetical to democratic values. She says he back pedals a bit from his basic theory when he grants that some of the properties he finds in the domains may not be, in his words, “necessarily direct reflections of the genetic patterning of our brains: some may emerge from brains and bodies interacting in human ecologies over the course of human history.”

King thinks this much more likely than Pinker allows. Marxists would think it is the most important factor and agree, I think, with King when she concludes that our real “human nature” is much more creative and contingent than the pre-programmed computer brains (her analogy) of Pinker’s pre-Darwinian Kantian humans.

The review says that the title of his book refers to not giving up one’s political views and ideals and that, “There is no doubt about Bolton’s vision of himself as the dauntless defender of US principles as he sees them.” And what principles he sees!

A jingoist, xenophobic, America-runs-the-world-so-get-out-of-the-way attitude more or less sums up the Bolton world view which derives, Urquhart believes, not from the neocons but from his early 60s encounter with and support of Goldwaterism. Urquhart alludes to a Col. Blimp flavor to some of his pronouncements, but this does Col. Blimp a disservice. For all of his pomposity and foolishness, Col. Blimp was kindhearted on a personal level. Bolton reveals himself to be petty, nasty, and small-minded.

Urquhart reminds us that as an undersecretary of state, before his stint at the UN, “he did much to undermine America’s leadership and position in the world.” Actually, not a bad thing as undermining and weakening the power of the number one imperialist power strengthens the world progressive movement. Perhaps Bolton is a secret anti-imperialist? What Urquhart has reference to, however, is Bolton’s role in undermining the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and the International Criminal Court. Of course he could have only done this with the consent of his masters Bush, Cheney and the ineffective Colin Powell.

When Condoleeza Rice took over State, Bolton was bounced over to the UN job, but he was so incompetent for the position that he could not even get confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate. He got a recess appointment in August 2005 — he lasted about a year or so and had to resign when it became obvious that the new Democratic-controlled Senate would never confirm him; he was such an embarrassment.

His role at the UN was basically disruptive, as he had no regard for the institution, its goals, or international organizations and treaty commitments in general. His book also reveals his personal animus towards those he disagrees with, blaming them for policy failures which were the results of the actions of others. So his book seems not to be a trustworthy account of his record and the actions of the UN.

For example, he has a great dislike for Kofi Annan whom he says “was simply not up to the job” of Secretary General, a view that history is not likely to validate. He blames Kofi Annan for the Oil-for-Food scandal in Iraq. “It was,” however, Urquhart says, “the Security Council, including the US, that allowed Saddam Hussein’s government to negotiate deals and kickbacks directly — without UN supervision — with the hundreds of commercial firms involved.” He also fails to note UN success stories. His book appears to be just a nasty-minded, distorted account of his activities with little regard for truth or accuracy.

He is also stupidly indiscreet. He reveals that when seeking a replacement for Kofi Annan, Rice told him, “I’m not sure we want a strong secretary general.” They then agreed on Ban Ki-moon. Urquhart calls this “a gross disservice” to Ban Ki-moon and, I might add, to Rice as well — but it is good to know what is really going on, so thanks, John, for spilling the beans.

Bolton now works out of the American Enterprise Institute (where else?) and has become a favorite of the corporate media (The New York Times, The New York Sun, etc.) who love to quote his quaint and outrageous opinions on all major world issues. Urquhart tells us that “Reporters seem to feel that if they quote him, they will have included a ‘tough’ conservative point of view.”

Bolton doesn’t think the US should talk with its adversaries. Threats and conventional military actions are all that’s really needed to enforce the Pax Americana. Urquhart calls this outlook an “anachronism” and quotes William Pfaff (born in 1928, Pfaff has written eight books and is a frequent contributor to the NYRB) from a 1998 piece: “[T]he belief that America as ‘sole superpower’ would or could dominate the world, widely held after communism’s collapse, rested on the illusion that military and economic power directly translate into political power, and that power is identical with authority. The exercise of authority requires consent, and rests on a moral position.” A moral position is something Bolton and his coterie of admirers most certainly lack.

His credo is summed in the following four propositions based on Urquhart:

1. Only US interests count. The UN should serve those interests.
2. Allies are not to be trusted and hostiles must be treated by force as they will never abide by their commitments. The hostiles include North Korea, Iran, any enemies of Israel, and others.
3. Hostiles should not be negotiated with on a long tern basis or rewarded for a change of behavior. Force and violence are always a possibility on our part.
4. Idealists, liberals, multilateralists and “most Democrats” are “almost” the same as the hostile foreigners who oppose our country.

Urquhart concludes, as any rational person must, that Bolton’s views and behavior “are a luxury the United States can no longer afford.”

The impression most Americans get from the popular, mostly right wing and conservative, media is that Islam is a backward religion run by medieval throwbacks to the Dark Ages. To counter such outlooks progressives can refer the neocons to the web site of the Lebanese cleric Grand Ayatollah Fadlallah. Now don’t expect a Marxist, but the GA has decidedly progressive views when compared to the Christian right in this country and many of the more backward looking reactionary Islamists.

What is a Grand Ayatollah? Well, an Ayatollah is someone so respected for his knowledge of Islam that his faith community (in this case the Shia branch of Islam) grants him that title. A GA is an Ayatollah the other Ayatollahs respect and elect as it were. He can pronounce fatwas, that is, give an authoritative interpretation of Islam for the faithful to model their behavior on. It is a nonbinding but very powerful statement of what is good conduct and vice versa.

GA Fadlallah is reported to have outraged “conservative” (i.e., culture bound reactionary) Muslims with his fatwas based on more enlightened and modern perspectives. Here are some examples. “A woman can respond to physical violence inflicted on her by a man with counter-violence as a self-defense measure.” The reactionaries considered this fatwa from the highest-ranking cleric in Lebanon scandalous. He also ruled against “using any sort of violence against a woman, even in the form of insults and harsh words.”

The GA is also quoted as saying, “The belief that it is disgraceful for the man to manage household tasks is derived from the social culture and not from Islam. Personally, I think that no woman would be obliged to bring her social life to a standstill just because she is being occupied with her children.”

What this shows is that it is NOT Islam per se that is to blame for the many negative characteristics selectively reported in the US press, but the surrounding cultural conditions and level of societal development. It is analogous to not blaming the democratic process because Huckabee won in some states.

GA Fadlallah is also politically advanced. He is opposed to US imperialism and at the same time to Islamic extremism. “I think,” he said, “the current Iranian president lacks diplomatic skills, and I think he creates problems for Iran.” Very diplomatically put.

As far as the notion of a worldwide Shia anti-Western movement is concerned, the GA says: “I don’t see there is a unity in the situation of Shiites in the world.” Marxists would agree since they see religious views as tempered by the economic and productive forces at work in a society.

He also has progressive views with respect to women’s rights to education stating that “Knowledge is a merit for man and woman equally, and the importance of acquiring it is identical to both of them.” The GA Fadlallah is an example of a relatively progressive voice within Islam. We in the West should be reporting on and becoming more aware of such voices.

The policies of the Bush administration and its military adventures and diplomatic fiascos in the Middle East and elsewhere only strengthens the hand of Islamic reaction. It is US policy that is responsible for the so-called “threat” of militant Islam and that makes the views of clerics such as GA Fadlallah and other liberal minded clerics more difficult to spread in the Islamic world.

Gates says that “We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve poorer people as well.” Those aspects are the exploitation of human labor power and the extraction of surplus value from workers. It will be a nice trick to see how this will happen.

Gates wants to further what he calls “creative capitalism” and use the technological revolution to help the poor of the world. “The rate of improvement for the third that is better off,” he stated, “is pretty rapid. The part that is unsatisfactory is for the bottom third — two billion of six billion.”

He at least concedes capitalism has left behind two billion people. The number may be greater than that. Other experts think that the figure should be four, not two billion — i.e., a bottom two thirds (C.K. Prahalad from the University of Michigan).

The “free” market, the cause of this misery of the poor, will be used to help the impoverished billions out. Don’t panic capitalists! Your role is to design products and systems that help the poor AND make a profit for yourselves at the same time! “Such a system,” Gates tells us, “would have a twin mission: making profits and also improving lives for those who don’t fully benefit from market sources.” But you can be sure, no profit, no benefit.

Is this a realistic plan? “The idea,” he says is “that you encourage companies to take their innovative thinkers and think about the most needy — even beyond the market opportunities — that’s something that appropriately ought to be done.” But this is just not how the market works, not the way globalization operates. While company X is using its resources “beyond market opportunities” company Y moves in and takes the market share that X failed to appropriate. Gates sounds good, and has set up big aid programs, but all this won’t make a real dent in the poverty caused by monopoly capitalism.

The WSJ quotes a critic of this utopian scheme, a past economist at the World Bank and now a teacher at NYU, William Easterly, who is quoted as saying, “There’s a lot of people at the bottom of the pyramid but the size of the transactions is so small it is not worth it for private business most of the time.” This means most of the poor will stay poor. Easterly wrote a book in 2006, the Journal reports, The White Man’s Burden, in which he maintains that even though $2.3 trillion has been expended in foreign aid in the last 50 years nothing much was really accomplished for the masses of the world’s poor.

Gates is reported to dislike this book and to have publicly “snapped” at Easterly for his criticisms. Easterly rejoined that, “The vested interests in aid are so powerful they resist change and they ignore criticism. It is so good to try to help the poor but there is this feeling that [philanthropists] should be immune from criticism.”

Bill Gates is not deterred. He says that “If we can spend the early decades of the 21st century finding approaches that meet the needs of the poor in ways that generate profits for business, we will have found a sustainable way to reduce poverty in the world.”

Again the stress on capitalist profits, without which we can’t be rid of poverty. But business can’t even keep its own workers employed, even when it make profits. In fact it sometimes fires its own workers in order to increase its profits. Can we really think that capitalists will forego opportunities to maximize profit margins just to help the poor. I don’t question Gates sincerity but If he is really committed to ending poverty I suggest he spend less time reading Adam Smith and more reading Karl Marx.

To make a long story short, the US and other First World countries account for about one billion people who out consume, on a per capita basis, the 5.5 billion people in the developing world by a factor of 32 to 1.

That is we use oil and gas and metals and “produce wastes like plastics and greenhouse gases” at a rate 32 times that of the non developed world. On this scale of 1 to 32, China is about a 3 and India even lower. So the problem with pollution and depletion is clearly in our back yard.

The problem is the poorer countries want to have a better life style; they want to develop, but it is just impossible for them to catch up to our 32 level. Diamond gives the example of Kenya. Kenya has about 30 million people, its consumption level is 1 while the US with 300 million has a 32 level. We have 10x the population but consume 320x the resources. If the poor countries, including China and India, really attained out advanced consumption levels it would be as if the present 6 billion earth population became 72 billion at present consumption rates. This is impossible since the earth’s resources cannot sustain anywhere near the equivalent of 72 billion people.

Therefore, the idea that globalization, honest government, democracy and the free-market will allow poor people to advance gradually to a first world living standard is “a cruel hoax.” In fact, China alone will never get to our level, let alone the rest of the non developed world. What can prevent eventual disaster?

Diamond says third world peoples are aware of the consumption disparity between us and them. This leads to the development of, or condoning, of terrorism, it is the real cause of terrorism. “There will be more terrorist attacks against us and Europe, and perhaps against Japan and Australia, as long as that factional difference of 32 in consumption rates persists.”

Diamond doesn’t say so, but if his thesis is correct, it means the War on Terror is really a preemptive move by the US to maintain its “way of life” by making sure the third world remains backward and exploited. And, there will be a real problem with China as it cannot rise without pulling our 32 level down. At present levels, China’s catching up with the US “would roughly double world consumption rates” (and don’t forget India!). “The world is already running out of resources, and it will do so even sooner if China achieves American level consumption rates. Already, China is competing with us for oil and metals on world markets.”

Have we seen something like this before? Dust off your history books. The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw the advanced countries scrambling for the control of markets and resources not only among themselves, but against new rising powers. This led to two world wars.

Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism is still the best guide to what this entails for the future. Already the US is militarily engaged in the Middle East, having invaded one oil rich country and still threatening another.

Diamond says the only way China and other countries might be induced NOT to try and develop to our levels would be to “make consumption rates and living standards more equal around the world.” To stave off and prevent my Leninist vision of Armageddon the US, for example, would have tone down it living standards and share the goodies of the world with the have nots.

Diamond thinks this possible, so he is optimistic about the resolution of this great contradiction between the aspirations of the third world and real politic of the first. The “world doesn’t have enough resources to allow for raising China’s consumption rates, let alone the rest of the world, to our levels. Does this mean we are headed for disaster?”

Diamond says “No.” Better planning is all that is needed. In fact “Real sacrifice won’t be required.” We can have our cake and eat it too. Americans are wasteful. Western Europe uses 50% less per capita oil and gas than the US, yet their living standards are higher than ours. We could conceivably, by better planning, reduce our oil consumption by 50% and still raise or maintain our living standards (more or less, no more Hummers).

Other examples, from Diamond, of misused resources that are about to collapse but could be maintained by proper management are the world’s fisheries and forests. All we lack, he tells us is the “political will.”

What is the problem here? We have just seen the EPA shoot down California and other states’ attempt to impose fuel efficiency standards on automobiles. The fisheries and forests will, presumedly, continue to be overexploited (we have known about this for years yet it continues).

The basis of capitalism is maximizing profits. Exxon-Mobile and other corporations are not going to give up market share and profits to make the world a fair place for everyone. That is just not the nature of capitalism.

What Diamond is asking for is a world wide regime based on central planning that could rationally allot and share the world’s resources. Who could administer such a regime. The United Nations? Is there any hope that the US or any other of the major capitalist powers would cede their economic sovereignty to the UN or any other transnational organization and renounce the “free-market” as the means for regulating globalization in favor of a central planning and management scheme?

Reality may force this upon the world and my hunch is that if it does it will be rather messy. A specter is haunting Europe once again.

World hunger is one of them. The last century was dotted with mass famines, all of them man made. Surely the UN and the leading nations of the world would not let that sorry record repeat itself?

It appears, however, that they will. The UN is doing its part to help prevent famines, but the UN can only do what the leading nations, represented on the Security Council will allow it to do. We must remember that any criticism of the UN is in reality a criticism of the five permanent members of the SC.

At any rate, the UN has warned us that a famine of Biblical proportions may be on the way.

Tuesday’s New York Times has the story. “World Food Supply is Shrinking, U.N. Agency Warns,” by Elisabeth Rosenthal (12-18-07). Here is the gist of it. Jacques Diouf, who runs the UN Food and Agriculture organization has stated that there “is a very serious risk that fewer people will be able to get food” in the coming years. That doesn’t sound very good at all. Rosenthal, reporting from Rome, says his reason for announcing this is that because of “an ‘unforeseen [?] and unprecedented’ shift, the world food supply is dwindling rapidly and food prices are soaring [good old supply and demand] to historic levels.”

There appears to be only 12 weeks worth of wheat and 8 of corn left in storage (based on world wide consumption levels.) to feed the world in case of an emergency. One reason for this is that it is more profitable to grow non food crops than food crops. There has been “a shift away from farming for human consumption to crops for biofuels and cattle feed” [more McDonald's burgers for the First World obese]. And, don’t overlook the fact that “the early effects of global warming have decreased crop yields in some crucial places.”

The leader of the World Food Program, Josette Sheeran, is quoted as saying, “We’re concerned that we are facing the perfect storm for the world’s hungry.” Other experts are equally glum. A major, crop disease or climate change in an important area would put the hungry in “a risky situation.” This has already happened in Australia (lack of rain) and In Ukraine (also climate change) with less food being produced.

The UN’s Diouf thinks the advanced countries will have to come up with new ideas to reflect the new economic and environmental realities. New ideas are in the works, but they may be based on putting people before profits. When has the US done that lately?

But not to worry here in the USA. We will be able to ride it out. Ms. Sheeran noted that, “In the U.S., Australia and Europe, there’s a very substantial capacity to adapt to the effects on food — with money, technology, research and development. In the developing world, there isn’t.” It’s comforting to know that if disaster strikes it will be the poor of the Third World who die off while we will continue to pollute the atmosphere, destroy the climate, and have all the junk food we need to see us through.

Cohen is in Caracas, presumably to observe Sunday’s constitutional referendum, and this column reveals the thoughts of a man who has no sympathy at all for the interests of the people of Venezuela but every sympathy for the interests of US imperialism and its supporters.

He begins his article by saying, “It was a fascist general in 1930s Spain who coined the phrase “Viva la muerte” or ‘Long Live Death.’ We are then told that although Hugo Chavez doesn’t like fascists “he has not hesitated to deploy the imagery of death to bolster his leftist brand of petro-authoritarianism, now operating under the ludicrous banner of ‘Fatherland, Socialism or Death.’”

Somebody should tell the patriarchally inclined Cohen that Patria, Socialismo o Muerte means ‘Motherland[or Homeland], Socialism or Death.’ It is no more “ludicrous” than the slave owning Patrick Henry’s “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death” and means about the same thing. It also means just about what those New Hampshire fascists meant when they turned to the imagery of death for their state motto: Live Free or Die.

It should also be pointed out that what Cohen calls “petro-authoritarianism” is actually a government that has been democratically elected by its people in a country with a vibrant opposition press and ruled by a constitution approved by the Venezuelan people.

Knowing this, when Cohen calls Chavez an “oil-gilded caudillo,” he is just being emotional and abusive. He might just as well write for the New York Post or the Washington Times. The Times is in fact slowly approaching that level of writing by adding Cohen’s right wing blather to that already provided by David Brooks.

Cohen’s rant against Chavez stems from his aversion to his policies leading Venezuela towards socialism and especially the new powers he may get as a result of the democratic choice of the people in the Sunday referendum. Cohen fears his new powers will allow him “to expropriate private property” [God forbid!] “and create the second formally socialist nation in the Americas alongside Fidel’s” [it's about time].

“The measures amount to a constitutional coup,” laments an opposition newspaper editor quoted by Cohen. So now he doesn’t know the difference between a coup [Pinochet] and a free election. This is typical of the American mass media and its pundits.

Cohen certainly doesn’t embrace the notion of People Before Profits. He grudgingly admits Chavez “has reduced poverty [the UN says "extreme poverty" has gone from 15.9 % to 9.9] but this has been at the “expense” of the underfunded oil industry.

I don’t understand Cohen’s concern about the establishment of “socialism.” He says Chavez has actually been instituting a “crony capitalism” for his own benefit. The US has lots of experience dealing with crony capitalist regimes, so what is all the fuss about? In the rush to see all things evil about Chavez [Cohen has seemingly only interviewed opposition people, not one supporter of Chavez has anything to say] he can’t make up his mind about what kind of regime is being built. Is it a second socialist state that is coming to be, or just another run of the mill Third World crony capitalist state with lots of oil?

Here is some really keen reportage. Cohen says you can’t find eggs or chickens to buy due to “price controls.” “Chavez’s socialism [so he a socialist again, good] delivers subsidized gasoline and glittering malls but no milk.” But is it really “price controls”? Other reporters have pointed out that the real reason for these sorts of shortages is hoarding by producers trying to sabotage economic reform and create a climate to help defeat the referendum. The pro-capitalist Cohen can only see the bumbling hand of socialism at work and not the invisible and criminal hand of price fixing capitalists creating an artificial shortage to further their class interests.

Cohen reveals his ignorance of what is going on when he says that since the US buys so much oil from Venezuela, “Chavez’s ‘socialism’ [now it's back in quotes] and his chumminess with Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad [what has that got to do with anything: Saudi Arabia is even worse and the US is very chummy with it] do not extend to cutting off the ‘imperialist empire’. Chavez is too shrewd to sever his lifeline.” Nevertheless, despite the malinformed Cohen, that is just what Chavez has threatened to do. He has publicly stated that he would cut off oil to the US if it continues to interfere in Venezuela’s internal affairs. The Chinese will take all the oil they can get, by the way. But poor Americans would suffer as Chavez sells discounted oil to poor communities in the US whom he cares about more than their own government does.

Towards the end of his article Cohen appears to have completely lost his mind. He says that, in effect, by taking his socialist vision of Venezuela’s future to his people to vote upon, his actions are as “grotesque and dangerous– as Fascism was– a terrible example for a region that has been consolidating democracy.” That’s right folks. By putting his ideas before the people to vote on them, Chavez is a bad example for democracy. It’s positively Fascist!

He then approvingly quotes the hereditary Bourbon monarch of Spain, installed by a real Fascist, Franco, who told Chavez to “shut up” recently at an international meeting. He thinks Venezuelans should “follow suit on Sunday” by voting down the proposals in the referendum. Fair enough, the voting is free after all.

But as a journalist there is only one word for Cohen. That is “hack.” I wish the New York Times had higher standards and told him to “shut up, already.”