The People and the Earth

Part III of the Tragedy

Previously: Mephisto, Lord of This Earth, Part II of the Tragedy

The consensus of official Communism around Stalin was not Faustian Marxism’s entrance into hell, but purgatory. We cannot leave the story there as a morality tale of caution, a warning to save our souls from damnation and refuse the temptation of the devil. If that was the conclusion of the tragedy of Faustian Marxism, there would be little reason to tell it except to make a well-worn condemnation of Stalinism. What is more significant about the memory of Faustian Marxism is that, for all of its millenarian ambitions of a new world civilization, its resistance was ultimately broken by the world capitalism that it resisted politically. The surviving Faustian party-states decided that if you cannot beat them, join them, and the horizon of Marxist politics today has been reduced to anti-monopoly lobbying and multipolar capitalist geopolitics.

We all already know that things are bad. Those of us who care enough to read political essays are presumably in agreement that we should fight for alternatives. But our sense of alternatives today are only to seize hold of our immediate possibilities, which often serves to do little more than develop new techniques for the adaptation and maintenance of capitalism—see the recuperation of the U.S. democratic socialist movement by the Democratic Party. Rather than telling a story of straightening our backs and becoming hard-nosed realists, leaving 20th century utopias behind, we should pick up the fragments of Marxism and put together a strategic road, a long march, a mass cultural revolution that opens up the narrow shelter of the self to the stars of new horizons. Our story sleepwalks through the germs of the past in the directions of their multitudinous impulses, wandering on each footpath in search of freedom.

Though words often fail us when we attempt to give voice to the nightmarish present, an old story might help us find our footing. We left our tale off with our protagonist, Faust, rejected by the primordial Mother of all, the Earth-Spirit, and seeking compensation for this loss in his fraternal love for Helen of Troy. The Faustian hope to possess all of nature finds its political form in the recovery of Ancient Greek democracy in the maturity of a socialist democratic republic. The scholar Faust’s striving for free self-cultivation and infinite knowledge is consummated in his assimilation into the collective force of human labor. The self-preservation of the whole, of the working organism, becomes the avatar for the victory of spirit over matter.

Amidst the twin rise of technocracy and the collective worker in the Soviet Union, international Marxists reflected on their own strategies and their relationship to the ultimate goal: communism. Some struck a skeptical note, seeking to warn against the basis for domination and conformity in the struggle for knowledge and freedom itself. Critical theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer wrote in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944): “Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology.”¹ The domination of nature itself begins from needfulness, from animal self-preservation, and this needfulness conditions enlightenment all the way through to its reversion to mythology in the name of consciously organizing itself. In the process of the Russian Revolution, this meant the rise of DiaMat and the personality cult of Joseph Stalin. Others struck a more optimistic note, believing that the turn of the Communist movement to mass democratic struggle in the wake of the Great Depression and fascist warmongering would open up space for the liberating Faustian Marxism of 1917 to renew itself. C.L.R. James, a longtime communist internationalist critic of the Communist International, wrote in his Notes on Dialectics (1948) that the abolition of the distinction between party and mass in the independent political revolts of workers “is the Absolute Idea, the concrete embodiment in thought of subject and object, of ideal and real, of politics and economics, of organization and spontaneity, of party and mass. Every cook, every worker, to a man, to administer the state and run the economy: that was 1917.”²

World War II and its aftermath initiated a new era in politics, just as the outbreak of a great war in 1914 and world revolution in 1917 had initiated the true commencement of the 20th century. The problems of the mid-20th century were partisanship and organization, independence and democracy, the national and the popular. These questions contained fertile possibilities and brutal limits. Though no equation can or should be made between Nazism and Marxism-Leninism, the same national-populist massifying tendencies manifested in both just as they manifested in the North American liberalism of the New Deal and the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Sweden.

The leveling conformity rushing across the face of the earth found Marxist expression in the theories of Andrei Zhdanov just in time for the conclusion of the Second World War. The lack of an outer existential threat to direct the force of the nation’s total mobilization allowed apparatchiks like Zhdanov to turn the forces of consensus-making inwards once again, returning to the crudely pragmatic anti-intellectualist moralizing of the Great Purges but on the basis of the new socialist rule of law. The Zhdanov Doctrine, introduced in 1946, held that Soviet cultural work had to conduct a campaign against “decadents of every shape and hue” who were “disowning the people and proclaiming the thesis of ‘art for art’s sake,’ preaching the meaninglessness of literature and screening their ideological and moral corruption behind a pursuit of beauty of form without content.”³ Art was to serve political consensus around common tasks or it was to be suppressed as opposed to revolutionary work. While so-called “formalist” artists appealed for the autonomy of art from the party-state, Zhdanov asked his fellow apparatchiks: “how can we let them, behind their mask of impartiality, impose ideas on us that are alien to the spirit of the Soviet people?”⁴

The campaign against “art for art’s sake” quickly morphed into an attack on cosmopolitanism. Internationalism now meant “the full flowering” of national identity and the purge of all foreign elements.⁵ Zhdanov, drawing from the Stalinist theory of socialist internationalism as the political consensus of many socialist patriotisms, argued forcefully: “To forget this is to lose one’s individuality and become a cosmopolitan without a country.”⁶ The spiritual loyalty of rootless cosmopolitans to a cause, of course, could not be trusted. The campaign, which began in the realm of literature and art, spread into a generalized nationalist and anti-cosmopolitan drive against the postbellum prospect of subordination to the West.

In 1953, the very same anti-cosmopolitan effort served to ramp up what could have become yet another purge: the so-called Doctor’s Plot. The Soviet state, vexed by the rise of the very Zionism they had assisted in 1948 into a sympathy among Soviet Jews, accused a group of primarily Jewish doctors of plotting to poison Stalin in order to sabotage Soviet socialism. At the commencement of the trials, the editors of Pravda wrote: “The filthy face of this Zionist spy organization, covering up their vicious actions under the mask of charity, is now completely revealed.”⁷ After a number of doctors were imprisoned or executed, Stalin’s death on March 5, 1953 granted reprieve as the remaining Soviet leaders ended the purges. Yakov Rapoport, a survivor of the campaign, later wrote that during an interrogation the secret police had accused him of being motivated by a desire to retaliate for the antisemitism of the Soviet bureaucracy, and that: “There is nothing paradoxical about this interpretation: antisemitism, after all, is an inherently animalistic feeling, akin to cannibalism, projected onto Jews.”⁸

The antisemitic episode, only one among many in the 1940s, to say the least, is revealing of the dilemmas faced by the party-state. James the party “the characteristic social form of today.”⁹ While James looked on the party-form as in his day a means to keep the independent self-activity of the workers in check, in a manageable form, he did not fully appreciate the new passions unleashed by the party—particularly on its achievement of the party-state. The partisan consciousness of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union framed itself as the political and intellectual vanguard in the struggle against all stubborn, rootless minorities standing in the way of the proletariat’s general will. Its antisemitism in this period was a veiled self-recognition. Rather than the immediate embodiment of a general consciousness, an institution of consensus, the party had to constantly fight to maintain its inner unity and outer hegemony. It recognized its own particularity in the Jews, analyzing their behavior according to its own conspiracies of narrow self-preservation, and scrambled to neutralize them as a competing party.

European Christians had long associated Jews with narrow particularity for refusing to join the universal community of Christendom. When modern parties encountered the particularity of the Jews, they reminded them that they themselves were still only the will and mind of a partial group. Scrambling to reinforce their sense of standing at the head of a herd, they attacked egoistic selfishness in general and Jewish rootlessness in particular. In their calumnies against the cosmopolitanism of the Jews, confusedly combined with condemnations of the Zionist movement that sought to eliminate the very same cosmopolitan character in favor of imperialist territorialism, they made a secret confession of their own desire to preserve their roles as commanders of a great army of labor. Adorno and Horkheimer wrote that this populist-workerist hatred of Jews targeted the accusatory image of freedom shining back at them from the Exodus: “happiness without power, reward without work, a homeland without frontiers. religion without myth. These features are outlawed by the ruling powers because they are secretly coveted by the ruled. The former can survive only as long as the latter turn what they yearn for into an object of hate.”¹⁰

The bad conscience of technocracy manifested throughout the intellectual work of Marxist-Leninist nationalism. Philosopher of praxis Georg Lukács, who had focused his efforts on defending democracy from fascism and radicalizing it along socialist lines, constructed concepts for the attack on autonomous art and independent intellectuals in his 1953 disaster, The Destruction of Reason. Returning to his central concern with rationality as the free self-determination of human consciousness, he wrote: “Reason itself can never be something politically neutral, suspended above social developments. It always mirrors the concrete rationality—or irrationality—of a social situation and evolving trend, sums it up conceptually and thereby promotes or inhibits it.”¹¹ While Lukács acknowledged that progress could be irrational, he still thought in the linear terms of ascending, humanist world-makers and decadent, egoistic self-preservers. While idealist pan-logism reflected the enlightening bourgeois-democratic mission of the French Revolution, which had been inherited by the proletariat, relativism and irrationalism reflected the class interests of a reactionary and parasitic bourgeoisie.

Though he had been a critic of the Zhdanov doctrine, Lukács invoked the very same themes of the need to purge decadence from culture. By questioning the ability of human labor to remake the world in the image of consciousness, the skepticism towards pan-rationalism of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Wilhelm Dilthey inevitably paved the way for fascist imperialism: “For in the eyes of the reactionary bourgeoisie, one of irrationalism ‘s most important tasks is to provide men with a philosophical ‘comfort,’ the semblance of total freedom, the illusion of personal autonomy, moral and intellectual superiority—while maintaining an attitude that continually links them with the reactionary bourgeoisie in their real dealings and renders them absolutely subservient to it.”¹² Sounding like an apparatchik denouncing a ‘petit-bourgeois’ worker for slacking off rather than attending to their social responsibility to unleash the productive forces, Lukács declared that “the departure from objectivity and rationality presents itself promptly and directly as a resolute stand against social progress.”¹³ Irrationalism collapses the great collective toil of the human herd into incoherence, with its emphasis on conceptual multiplicity and lived experience signifying “that irrationalism cannot possibly have a unified, coherent history like, for instance, materialism or dialectics.”¹⁴

Above all, Lukács despised irrationalism for dissolving consensus and cooperative toil into selfish individualism. Everything could be reduced to the struggle of class standpoint against class standpoint, of the masses against the parasitic minorities. Philosophical critiques of moralism, no matter how well-founded, served only to guarantee “the maximum of spiritual and moral ease: it has at its disposal a morality liberating it from all social duties and elevating it to a sublime height above the blind, uncomprehending riff raff, but a morality whose very founder exempts the intelligentsia from obeying it (where it becomes difficult or even just inconvenient).”¹⁵

This social responsibility even extended, according to Lukács, into irrationalist critiques of capitalism. The basis for this was in the isolated intellectual’s drive for self-preservation, since “all decadent minds detect instinctively that their existence can have a foundation only in an objectively decayed world, even if subjectively they believe themselves to be passionately against that world.”¹⁶ Without a civilizational mission, the intellectuals were left residing in “a modern luxury hotel on the brink of the abyss, nothingness and futility. And the daily sight of the abyss, between the leisurely enjoyment of meals or works of art, can only enhance one’s pleasure in this elegant comfort.”¹⁷ The intellectuals had to be whipped into shape, to be either disciplined into their duty to articulate the single consciousness of the proletariat or be destroyed—through strongly worded dialogue, of course. As a consistent Leninist, Lukács prioritized unity of action above all else, and limited his intellectual attacks to those who he believed threatened the centralizing force of the modern party. He later wrote that “we must take the stand that there is only one truth regarding a problem, and that we Marxists have to fight to uncover that one truth[...] sympathy means not that we have to agree on every question, but the feeling that we are fighting for the same things and the knowledge that even if we argue, we do so in the name of one and the same objective.”¹⁸

That objective, of course, was to possess the earth together. Lukács held onto his Oedipal hope of reconciling man and nature, which he continued to need, through the rational penetration of the cosmos by consciously self-directed labor. It was, after all, he himself who had once quoted Novalis’s teaching: “Philosophy is really homesickness[...] it is the urge to be at home everywhere.”¹⁹ This desire served to reinforce Lukács’ very own crude vitalism, in which there were only the ascendant world-penetrators and the decadent world-preservers. Lukács perhaps could have benefitted from reflecting on the words of the poet Friedrich Hölderlin, who he looked on as a mirror of his Romantic council communist past: “Being at one is god-like and good, but human, too human, the mania/Which insists there is only the One, one country, one truth and one way.”²⁰ Even commonness needs many rays to be truly in-common rather than the externalized power of all over each. Instead of rejecting this multitudinous world in favor of the true One, communism finds a stronger emotive ground in the free play of animal spirits than in their extermination by the machinery that needs to discipline them to set off into motion.

Of course, life cannot be all play when we dwell under the threat of destruction and the responsibility of survival. The fortitude sought by Lukács is a legitimate necessity for human maturation. His desire to claim everything for mature consciousness, however, was really not so far from his youthful desire to dissolve the self into the world. In his behavior, this unconscious hope so central to his spirit appeared as a surrender to the self-created world of the greater force—the total mobilization of the collective worker. Psychoanalyst Otto Rank wrote in his The Trauma of Birth (1924) that the pain of separation from a mother’s womb, the first forcible individuation of the human organism into a feeble and precarious body in a wide world, is consummated in the consciousness of the child in the trauma of another child’s birth in which “the later coming child materializes the deepest wish tendency of the already present child to again be in the mother, and, as it were, spoils once and for all the chances of ever returning there.”²¹ The paternalist Oedipal prohibition of incestuously returning to the womb is well-explored, but the sibling trauma and the dynamics of desire buzzing within it are often neglected. While the patriarchal authority preserves the hierarchical lineage of the family between generations by preventing the recursion of the son to the mother and daughter to the father, the authority of the mother seeks to reconcile the horizontal relationship of siblings by playing a mediating role between the equals and setting down their rules of engagement.

After the birth of the second, the first child may then choose to seek their fantasy of liberating themselves from individuation in death, in surrendering to the caprice of exterior powers, or in making their sibling the object of their hopes. In pursuing a reciprocal relationship with their siblings and cousins, children make their entrance into the cohabitation of social association. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel wrote in Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) that in the sibling relationship, people are “free individualities in regard to each other,” but only insofar as “the moment of the individual self, recognizing and being recognized, can here assert its right, because it is linked to the equilibrium of the blood and is a relation devoid of desire.”²² The sibling relationship ultimately serves as the affective glue of any mass association. The slogan of democracy is, after all, Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. One of the first slogans taken up by the European communist movement was this: “All men are brothers!” While Hegel wishfully thought of the sibling relationship as devoid of desire, as pure ethical sublimation, it is in fact rarely so clear-cut. Hegel thinks too much like a father, assuming that his wife-mother is doing her duty and raising children who will be responsible to their state as he is in his role as the paterfamilias.

The ethical superego cannot itself explain the dark and often irrational behavior of sibling to sibling and citizen to citizen. According to Juliet Mitchell’s Fratriarchy: Sibling Trauma and the Law of the Mother (2023), the existence of social association beyond the narrow family unit requires that “no-one can exist in the exact same place as another and must be totally assimilated or made to vanish totally,” the “need for the sexuality of incest is retained as the desire for coupling and bonding within the same or similar social group, which of course means that social classes, ethnic and racial groups still tend to inter-marry.”²³ Society demands differentiation in order to be accomplished as a large-scale association, yet the drive of organizations and groups to self-preservation extends the logic of incestuous equalization into society. Hierarchical relationships and vertical relationships come together in a social organization which preserves itself through the limited possibilities for its members’ life-courses. People dominate each other in order to ensure that their collective domination of nature, their primordial Mother, continues uninterrupted. As we might know from Karl Marx, caprice and class exploitation often rule the day even under the legal regime of formal equality. Parties accordingly emerge as a technique of contesting power among equals, with the rational plans written in party programs ostensibly serving as the regulative ideals of their day-to-day competition and cooperation with the other parties. Democratic equals more often act according to impulse and expediency than according to consciously and freely expounded reason. Even oppositional mass movements, the alliance of equals, insist on “a difference in which is inherent the violence of the displaced sibling’s need to survive.”²⁴

The struggle for freedom from the fraternal exploitation of human by human ignited a new era of revolutions in the post-WWII world. The revolutionary voluntarism of 1917 reappeared in struggles for national independence, democratic self-determination, and mass participation in governance. The world revolution had broken up into many fronts, but on these fronts, a universal hope manifested in the tactical and organizational behaviors of the mass movements of the propertyless. The council-form itself reappeared as a weapon of struggle in Indonesia in 1945, Korea in 1945, Hungary in 1956, Algeria in 1962, China in 1967, France in 1968, Iran in 1978, and elsewhere. The front lines of revolutionary war diffused away from Moscow, the new Rome, and Washington, the self-declared champion of democracy. The Cold War had established the three great regions of the First World, in the West, the Second World, in the Soviet Eastern Bloc, and the Third World, in the independent or aspirationally independent nations which the two blocs competed over.

The divide between the First and Second Worlds from the Third World was, above all else, that of the global metropoles from the global agricultural centers. The antithesis of town and country had long characterized the imperialist global division of labor. New mass movements and independence regimes in the Third World attempted to address this problem through development of their productive forces. The aims of this developmentalism immediately brought into question what sort of society they were aiming for. Would they dedicate their efforts to a Faustian revival of Soviet or Western-style managerial industrialism or seek the rebirth of their ‘traditional’ cultures? Would they imitate foreign models or create their own original ones? Would they outpace Faust or outgrow him?

In the metropolitan West, the Faustian soul found new life in the new industries of consumerism, which consciously reconciled work and play in the circulation of a single production process. Initially, some Marxists greeted this new culture as potentially threatening capitalism by proliferating too many consumer needs for the masses to be satisfied by the prevailing system. After the apparent recuperation of the proletariat through the incorporation of labor unions into the state’s corporate deal-making, transforming the workaday world into a conservative force, this seemed to be the new site for the eruption of a social revolution. Herbert Marcuse, who had once participated in a soldiers’ council during the German Revolution, wrote in Eros and Civilization (1955) that the unleashing of desire by consumerist ‘desire capitalism’ could result in “a resurgence of pregenital polymorphous sexuality and in a decline of genital supremacy. The body in its entirety would become an object of cathexis, a thing to be enjoyed—an instrument of pleasure. This change in the value and scope of libidinal relations would lead to a disintegration of the institutions in which the private interpersonal relations have been organized, particularly the monogamic and patriarchal family.”²⁵

Marcuse hoped that polymorphousness, which psychoanalysis associates with the infant’s narcissistic unawareness of the individuated determination of egohood, could “lead to culture-building if the organism exists not as an instrument of alienated labor but as a subject of self-realization—in other words, if socially useful work is at the same time the transparent satisfaction of an individual need. In primitive society, this organization of work may be immediate and ‘natural’; in mature civilization, it can be envisaged only as the result of liberation. Under such conditions, the impulse to ‘obtain pleasure from the zones of the body’ may extend to seek its objective in lasting and expanding libidinal relations because this expansion increases and intensifies the instinct’s gratification.”²⁶ Even after falling under the sensuous temptations of Mephisto, Faust could be redeemed by desiring his own infinite enjoyment in free association with other people. This Faustian renewal would become the very spirit of a new youth movement and Sexual Revolution.

Of course, such a revolution came, but not quite as Marcuse had imagined it. Rather than breaking the hold of the patriarchal family and birthing new communist subjects, the Sexual Revolution effectively liberalized the family. Parents began to care for both the self-responsibility and self-actualization of their children, while children sought careers which would satisfy their deepest sense of themselves. The proliferation of needs in the consumer economy proved quite adaptable to the needs of capital, particularly as the U.S.’s imperialist drive for the supremacy of the dollar and the construction of welfare institutions merged with the mass culture industries of films, radios, televisions, cars… The regimes of accumulation in the West began to shift from heavy industry, which had once demanded such extreme asceticism of its workers, to the social democratic family wage arrangement, which allowed the nuclear family to flourish in alliance with the popular consumer industries, and ultimately to a post-industrial service consumer economy, where everyone could be a free-wheeling self-sufficient owner, seller, and buyer of goods.

Marcuse adjusted his analysis accordingly in One-Dimensional Man (1964). By offering instant gratification of the libido through a smorgasbord of simple pleasures, the new consumer economy had in fact localized eroticism to one-dimensional sexuality rather than allowing it to mature by sublimating into a Faustian-polymorphous hope for Culture. Through the socialization of industrial-imperialist wealth and transition to a service economy where advertising played a central part, sexual freedom “becomes a market value and a factor of social mores. Without ceasing to be an instrument of labor, the body is allowed to exhibit its sexual features in the everyday work world and in work relations.”²⁷ As if predicting the rise of Ronald Reagan through an alliance of moralistic suburbanites and indifferently laissez-faire young urban professionals, Marcuse wrote: “The organism is thus being preconditioned for the spontaneous acceptance of what is offered. Inasmuch as the greater liberty involves a contraction rather than extension and development of instinctual needs, it works for rather than against the status quo of general repression–one might speak of ‘institutionalized desublimation.’ The latter appears to be a vital factor in the making of the authoritarian personality of our time.”²⁸

In our 21st century, we live in a world of repressive desublimation. In the West, even politics of pure self-preservation are limited by the short attention spans, resignation, and atomization of the masses into consumers lacking a common basis for action. The ascetic-Faustian collective worker has been fragmented into a million pieces. All we hear now are hymns of positivity and self-care, expressing the individuation of the creative Spirit into a self which must care for itself autarkically and expand itself in blind competition with others. The conformity of ‘just going with it’ and making your own self the meaning of your life implies a surrender to whatever is ready-to-hand. The entrepreneurial and therapeutic society makes everyone forget that they are raped, that they are nothing but appendages of a gigantic machinery that fucks them every day and uses or wastes them like unreal raw materials.

The need for self-preservation drives them into the arms of the aggressor. Each individual believes they can continue to be self-sufficient as long as the whole expands and affirms itself uninterrupted. If the negativity of doubt is entertained even for a second, the whole thing might come crashing down in a stock market run. But doubt is a mortal, limited being’s subjective freedom, a freedom of the possibility that there might be other possibilities. According to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity (1948), ethics signifies not blind adherence to the way of the world but a realization of a possibility that one freely determines to be right, “the triumph of freedom over facticity.”²⁹ In the world of the one who surrenders from human freedom, who refuses any project, the “world about him is bare and incoherent. Nothing ever happens; nothing merits desire or effort. The sub-man makes his way across a world deprived of meaning toward a death which merely confirms his long negation of himself. The only thing revealed in this experience is the absurd facticity of an existence which remains forever unjustified if it has not known how to justify itself.”³⁰

One needs the responsibility of freedom, not blind resignation to the responsibilities we find thrown onto our shoulders by the world. In the words of Wilhelm Reich, to freely accept unfreedom, fleeing from the responsibility of self-determination, means: “Your slave-driver is yourself.”³¹ If your life is nothing but a series of inputs and outputs, if you only react to stimulus with scripts others have written for you, you have forgotten the freedom implied in the fact that you are playing a part. Free play is not blind chaos. The play of children is very serious, even when they make up all of their own rules on the fly. Free play demands that one must have a sense of right that draws them towards an aspiration—yet also that one must be untethered enough to adapt according to the needs of the moment. Play is how we first come to know each other as different from ourselves, and how we learn to cooperate in making a world. To blindly play our part is to flee from a life that could be so much more than it already is. We must come to each other as strangers who have something in common without each being merely the mirror of the other in a single homogenous species of siblings.

In the world situation today, fragmentation accomplishes the work of homogenization. The antithesis of town and country is ‘resolved’ by introducing industrial automation into agriculture, reducing the population of agricultural laborers to a minimum while increasing the masses of the landless and the unemployed through competition. The concentration of capital in fewer and fewer hands is accomplished through the decentralization of production, forcing workers in multinational labor markets to compete with each other through the free movement of multinational corporations across strictly policed borders. Even without preoccupation with the management of large-scale production, the metropoles proliferate the class of middle-managers as part and parcel with a system of rent-seeking that feeds directly off of the incomes of individuals. The general intellect of all, the information produced by all of society, has found a technological home on the internet, and yet it appears in privatized form as social media platforms and data companies. The average, the mediocre, of the general intellect, which has long regulated communications through algorithms, now directly manifests in a quasi-dialogue with us through Artificial Intelligence, which serves to reduce the labor necessary to manage workers and capture the attention of consumers. The general will, which once gave democracy its passion as force, now appears as the blind impulses wasted by digital mobs on the enemies of the weak and on the charismatic populism of opportunistic politicians. Mass politics, in short, have disappeared into the war of all against all, and the despotism of all over each.

We have recalled the ‘great politics’ of the Faustian twentieth century, which stretched from 1914-1945. Its tragedy culminated in Stalinism. The Second World War brought new forces into politics, just as the First World War had done, but without a united global revolutionary front. There was no longer a Comintern in this postbellum era. Rather, numerous global associations of widely varying characters competed for members or participants—the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Trotskyist Fourth International, the Non-Aligned Movement, the Organization of African Unity, the United Arab Republic, the World Zionist Organization, the Trilateral Commission, the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, the World Economic Forum, the World Social Forum… A little twentieth century, characterized by the diffusion of the world civil war, stretched from the independence of the State of Israel from the British Empire in 1948, which transformed the territorialism and terroristic techniques of the previous decades into the prevailing logic of the new era, to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, which seemed to establish liberalism as a world civilization without alternatives and which has led to a political limbo. In retrospect, the real legacy of this little twentieth century—the globalization of consumerism and rebirth of fascistic racial nationalism—indicates a century of the Self.

To the extent that one can speak of politics after 1991, it has been a family dispute between the ruling governance techniques of technocracy and the blindly oppositional force of populism. Neither are driven by the kind of universal, civilizational missions that bloomed from 20th century politics. We recognize the birth of this abyssal existence as the unfolding of our own tragedy. The twilight of politics gave way to the dark night of blind entrepreneurship. Faust did not find the human collective of free people working together, but was doomed to purgatory, infinitely repeating his personal tragedy between the meaningless successes of the self-sufficient entrepreneur and the hellish suffering of the surplus masses thrown out of work and subsistence by automation. Damnation and failure accord with the very drive for infinite self-consciousness today, which has fragmented into a few billion pieces. Only the body is fluid today, manifesting beyond the cyclical discourse and willfully alienated consciousness of all in the interdependency of each with the other. I have often heard people say that the only hope on earth lies in the inner sanctum of their personal life, while in the outer world nothing reigns but lawless cruelty. We can only salvage the ethical, creative, and libertarian hopes of communism, which were lost in tragedy, by remembering and thinking with the impulses striving to emerge from their scattered fragmentation and come together into the project of a universal association of free people and a free earth.

The National-Popular

The global strategy of Marxism during and after World War II was democratic. It aimed to establish favorable political conditions for socialism through democratic struggles against imperialism and fascism. The Moscow-centered Comintern had taken time to come to this position, thinking only in terms of its international strategy of winning a victory of ascendent communism over terminally moribund capitalism and its attendant factions of fascism, liberalism, and social democracy. Even before the rise of Italian Fascist Benito Mussolini to power in 1924, Marxists like José Carlos Mariátegui and Antonio Gramsci had warned of the rise of fascism and the need for a united front of the working masses against it. In short, they perceived a glimmer of socialism in the affirmation of democracy, the rights of which had been deprived from the workers, against fascism, in which the brutally imposed order of party-state dictatorships enjoyed the backing of big and small capitalists alike.

While imprisoned by the Fascists, Gramsci worked out his strategy of winning hegemony for the Communist Party, the modern Prince, throughout the realm of the “national-popular.” The ruling classes maintain power not merely through force, but through the consent of all willfully elicited by Ideological justification, and in fact the modern state ought to be conceived of as “hegemony protected by the armour of coercion.”³² A crisis of hegemony, or a failure to forge a consensus, gives an opportunity to the other parties. In the modern world of multiparty struggle, each faction struggles for hegemony over the nation, and in order to become apt for the struggle, Communist Parties must forge “an intellectual unity and an ethic in conformity with a conception of reality that has gone beyond common sense and has become, if only within narrow limits, a critical conception.”³³ He argued that the “modern Prince must be and cannot but be the proclaimer and organizer of an intellectual and moral reform, which also means creating the terrain for a subsequent development of the national-popular collective will towards the realisation of a superior, total form of modern civilisation.”³⁴

Under the repressive conditions of fascism, Gramsci developed the concept of a “war of position,” maintaining the front lines of a position and attempting inch-by-inch expansion of one’s hegemony against the enemy, and of a “war of maneuver,” meaning the direct and forcible offensive against the enemy. Between the two, he wondered if there might be “an entire historical period in which the two concepts must be considered identical— until the point at which the war of position once again becomes a war of manoeuvre?”³⁵ All the while, it must be remembered that a “war of position” is an effort of total mobilization, since it is not “constituted simply by the actual trenches, but by the whole organisational and industrial system of the territory which lies to the rear of the army in the field.”³⁶ Though these thoughts were penned in dark isolation, they became the guiding doctrines of Communist Parties in the construction of postbellum democracies.

As the Allies overtook Axis-occupied Europe, they carved it up between the occupying powers along a sectional basis that would eventually become the front lines of the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. The regions that fell to the Soviet lot were eventually placed under Marxist-Leninist parties, whether they had already achieved popularity there or not. In the West, where Communists had led the popular underground resistance to fascism in Italy and France, the Communist Parties became leading factions of post-war democracy. Italian Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti “the creation of a progressive democracy, that is, the creation of a new democratic popular regime, based on radical reforms in the economic structure of the country, and on the participation of the working class, the peasantry and the entire people in the political administration of the nation.”³⁷ He warned against the twin temptations of opportunism and maximalism while arguing that the spirit of the 1848 national-democratic revolutions went hand in hand with the principled class program of proletarian hegemony and socialism. In Italy and France, the Communist Parties would become central to the dynamic of multiparty parliamentarism and the politicization of popular culture in the ensuing decades.

In the Western leader of the Allied Powers, the United States, the Communists did not fare quite so well. The goal of democratization superseded communism—the meaning of this becomes clearer if we survey the brief history of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA). The CPUSA had, since Lenin’s intervention on its founding in 1919, focused its efforts on the twin problems of unionist struggles for democracy in the decision making of industries and Black struggles for Civil Rights in the decision making of the country. During the Depression, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) had split off from the American Federation of Labor (AFL) to pursue a more radical strategy and advocate against the legal discrimination that the AFL supported. On the declaration of U.S. involvement in the World War on the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, Civil Rights activist Bayard Rustin and Black unionist A. Philip Randolph popularized the Double V campaign—victory against fascism abroad and racism at home—through the March on Washington Movement. The Communist Party would make a close alliance with the CIO and its Civil Rights campaigns. Through the Popular Front, both would serve as part of the New Deal coalition led by Democratic Party President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

In many instances, this coalition could serve as a means to win victories for workers. The 1935 Wagner Act, for example, enshrined workers’ rights to unionization and collective bargaining into law—within certain conditions, of course. After a long joint effort by the CIO, CPUSA, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), President Harold Truman issued an executive order in 1948 desegregating the Army, which initiated the long press of expanding on the initial anti-discrimination legislation. More often, the coalition undermined the Communists’ and unionists’ abilities to pursue independent courses. The AFL and CIO reconciled in a joint no-strike pledge in support of the U.S.’s war effort. This allowed them to oversee the total mobilization of countless new workers as the military spending of the Federal government and deployment of much of the workingmen abroad practically ended the Depression. This accomplishment of the New Deal Democrats almost birthed a one-party state in the United States, though this possibility was ultimately avoided by the leadership of the Republican Party adopting the program of the New Deal until the rise of anti-New Deal neoliberals in the 1970s.

The fraternal alliance of Soviets and Americans in the war effort seemed to undermine the basic justification of American Communism as an independent class force representing Bolshevik internationalism. In 1944, Earl Browder, the staunchly Americanist leader of the CPUSA, dissolved the Party into the Communist Political Association in order to reinforce the peaceful coexistence of the Soviet Union and U.S. and the coalition of Marxists with liberals in a Democratic party-state: “Every class, every group, every individual, every political party in America will have to readjust itself to this great issue embodied in the policy given to us by Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill. The country is only beginning to face it so far. Everyone must begin to draw the conclusion from it and adjust himself to the new world that is created by it. Old formulas and old prejudices are going to be of no use whatever to us as guides to find our way in this new world. We are going to have to draw together all men and all groups with the intelligence enough to see the overwhelming importance of this issue, to understand that upon its correct solution depends the fate of our country and the fate of civilization throughout the world.”³⁸ Though the Party was restored in 1945 at the Comintern’s behest, it would remain a marginal force accompanying the two great struggles of mass unionism and Civil Rights.

Taking in all of these developments, James would write in 1948 of his “expectation that in the United States the party will be the CIO politically transformed. The organization may very rapidly be the union movement itself, drawing in the communities around it, and functioning as a union and with different personnel or in a different formation, politically. But this is not important. The proletariat will decide. The thing is to tell the proletariat to decide.”³⁹ The 1949-1950 miners’ general strike seemed to confirm this hope of a new Communist Party when union workers transitioned from a sit down tactic to refusing their leaders’ compromise proposals seizing control of the means of production. Raya Dunayevskaya later wrote that the miners had posed a new question: “What kind of labor should man do?”⁴⁰ But after a series of police repressions, the strike wave ended with the creation of a contract system under the sponsorship of local and national Democratic Party leaders. The CIO merged back into the AFL in 1955, and ever since, the AFL-CIO has effectively served as the labor wing of the Democrats.

In 1945-1946, a strike wave by unionists led the Federal government of Harry Truman to initiate a crackdown on Popular Frontists. Truman began to screen Federal employees to demand that they declare their loyalty to the U.S. and not to foreign governments like the Soviet Union. In 1950, Republican Senator of Wisconsin Joseph McCarthy led the House Un-American Activities Committee’s persecution campaign against all Popular Frontists, even non-Communist antifascists, as part of the Red Scare. In 1952, Federal Bureau of Investigation director J. Edgar Hoover initiated a purge of Popular Frontists from the Federal bureaucracy. While these repressive methods isolated Communism from the public sphere, the reformist methods of the New Deal party-state kept workers attached to the wellbeing of the Federal government. The leadership of many labor unions even began to purge actual or suspected Communists from their ranks in order to demonstrate their loyalty to the welfare-warfare state.

The consensus of all factions of American society around military Keynesianism, the welfare state, and the consumer society in the 1950s paved the way for the United States leadership to conduct a brutal campaign against the Korean People’s Army, Chinese People’s Liberation Army, and Soviet Red Army in 1950-1953 with practically no political opposition by American workers. While the U.S. Army, having come out of the World War, disproportionately deployed those considered undesirables in the U.S. (Mexican Americans, Black people), the Asian Communists engaged in a campaign of total mobilization for not only victory, but survival. General Douglas MacArthur, who had begun his career invading Mexico during its Revolution, saw the Korean War as a conflict between races and civilizations. While President Harold Truman sought to conduct a limited war of containment, MacArthur repeatedly advocated for the use of atom bombs on Chinese and Koreans. While he did not get his wish, his forces were provided ample bombs to level northern Korea. As if in a prelude to the atrocities of the Vietnam War, the U.S. Army slaughtered Korean refugees in the No Gun Ri massacre and covered it up by presenting the violence as the brutal actions of the invading Communist horde.⁴¹

In the setting of Western non-opposition and Eastern total mobilization, some communist activists attempted to adapt the thesis of class against class in a world civil war to a situation where national struggles seemed more immediate than class struggles. Trotskyist activist Sam Marcy wrote that the two sides of the Korean War were “organically inter-connected, indissolubly anchored to and absolutely dependent upon the two great class pillars of contemporary society—the world proletariat and the world bourgeoisie.”⁴² The conflict was a front in the great class war “between the upper and lower strata of a convulsed social organism which could no longer endure the restraints of class stratification.”⁴³ The Faustian energies of Old Europe had poured out into East and West, with a shift of “the revolutionary center of gravity to the East and the economic center of gravity to the far West.”⁴⁴ Preceding the hopes of many in the New Left, Marcy wrote that America would become the “foundry where the fate of man will be forged” when the divide between the two centers of gravity “will sooner than most philistines realize, convert itself into its opposite and result in a union of the two” in a social revolution of the U.S.⁴⁵ To bring this revolution about, Marcy formed the Workers World Party (WWP) in 1959 and began recruiting veterans to publicly agitate against the military-industrial complex. This theory of the global class war, the unitary confrontation of imperialists with anti-imperialists, opposition to the war machine, and activist provocation of revolution as the United States as the deciding factor in a new era of struggle is today the ideology of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), which split off from WWP in 2004.

At the same time that activist internationalism grew from the politics of the Popular Front, a critique of the most basic relations of everyday life planted the seeds of a new social movement. This developed on the margins of the national-popular, where women seeking to truly accomplish the democratization of life realized that the men they worked alongside still limited this democratic revolution to the equality of breadwinners. Numbers of women, who had been drawn into industrial production and public life by the war, began to critique the very foundations of modern civilization from their own perspective. Labor unionist and CPUSA member Mary Inman wrote in 1940 that “the housewife must be given credit for performing, in the home, work that is indispensable to the present method of machine production.”⁴⁶ Proletarian women later proved this for themselves when, after the working men were forced back to work during the 1950 Empire Zinc strike in New Mexico, their wives refused to continue performing the housework necessary for their husbands to prepare for work and decided to maintain the picket line themselves instead. Nevertheless, the CPUSA met Inman’s theses with indifference, seeing little relevance of the problem as she framed it to building a national-popular coalition of working people. Yet the problem even extended into the realm of wage labor for many women—particularly Black domestic workers toiling away in care work for white children and their families. Caribbean-American activist Claudia Jones addressed this other side of the problem, writing in 1949: “Inherently connected with the question of job opportunities where the Negro woman is concerned, is the special oppression she faces as Negro, as woman, and as worker.”⁴⁷

The problem, however, could not find a comprehensive expression in the economistic and democratic national Communist movement, which wanted to unite as many masses of people together rather than question their conduct in their home lives. It would have to find expression in the realm of the ultraleft, who did not shy away from foundational critiques of civilization. Selma James, whose partner was C.L.R. James, initiated a critique of domestic labor in 1952: “The work that is part of having a child destroys much of the pleasure of having them for the one that has to do the work[...] The terrible thing that is always there when you are doing the housework is the feeling that you are never finished. When a man works in a factory, he may work hard and long hours. But at a certain time, he punches out and for that day at least he is finished[...] A housewife has an entirely different kind of a boss. Her first boss is her husband’s work. Everything a woman has to do is dependent on the job her husband has[...] the most ruthless boss and the one that really keeps a woman going is the work itself. The work does not look on you as being a human being.”⁴⁸ French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir fielded a fundamental critique of modern civilization on the basis of these alienating conditions of women, writing in The Second Sex (1949) of “the imperialism of human consciousness, which seeks to match its sovereignty objectively. Had there not been in human consciousness both the original category of the Other and an original claim to domination over the Other, the discovery of the bronze tool could not have brought about woman’s oppression.”⁴⁹ Beauvoir hit on the profound challenge posed to Faustian imperatives by the oppression of women and their couverture by the subjecthood, sovereignty, property, and incomes of men. The sharply critical arguments of Inman, Jones, James, and Beauvoir went on to become the very heart of the feminist movement during the 1960s.

Another critique of civilization began to make itself heard on the margins of politics. During World War II, amidst a genocidal war campaign, the Nazis had carried out the industrial extermination of 6 million Jews and up to 500,000 Romani. The ideology of Blood and Soil, which served as a justification for imperialist expansionism in the doctrine that the German people needed living space, found its devilish foil in the character of the Eternal Jew, the permanent nomadic character of International Judeo-Bolshevism which the Nazis recognized across all of their enemies, capitalists and socialists alike. Writing at the height of the genocide in 1945, Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels claimed that the Jews “are the incarnation of that destructive force that in these terrible years has guided the enemy war leadership in a fight against all that we see as noble, beautiful, and worth keeping. For that reason alone the Jews hate us. They despise our culture and learning, which they perceive as towering over their nomadic worldview.”⁵⁰ Goebbels and other Nazis invoked biological metaphors to justify the genocide of Jews, invoking the imagery of medieval plague rats to argue that the drive of self-preservation between two opposed species could simply not be reconciled. If the dominant species would conduct itself rationally, it would destroy its enemy, irregardless of the righteousness of the action.

This argument for imperialism from the premises of self-preservation led some Marxists to question civilization itself. German Jewish philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer wrote that this rhetoric touched on something deep in modern civilization, revealing that fascism seeks “to place oppressed nature’s rebellion against domination directly in the service of domination[...] Civilization is the triumph of society over nature—a triumph which transforms everything into mere nature[...] The Jews appeared to have successfully achieved what Christianity had attempted in vain: the disempowerment of magic by means of its own strength, which, as worship of God, is turned against itself. They have not so much eradicated the adaptation to nature as elevated it to the pure duties of ritual. In this way they have preserved its reconciling memory. without relapsing through symbols into mythology. They are therefore regarded by advanced civilization as both backward and too advanced, like and unlike, shrewd and stupid. They are pronounced guilty of what, as the first citizens, they were the first to subdue in themselves: the susceptibility to the lure of base instincts, the urge toward the beast and the earth, the worship of images.”⁵¹ This fundamental critique of civilization came not as an endorsement of resignation, but as an attempt at rethinking the Faustian premises of classical Marxism. Enlightenment could only find a new life in the critique of what the Enlightenment had wrought. As a self-reflective concept of Enlightenment developed by intellectuals, this would become a doctrine of resisting conformity amidst the homogenization of democracy, and thereby preserving democratic values themselves.

While Adorno and Horkheimer, thinking from the experience of Auschwitz, questioned the premises of the modern rationalizing state, others set to work constructing new democratic republics. Global anti-fascism provided many Marxists with the opportunity to revisit the basic democratic questions that had been central to Marxism-Leninist theory. Georg Lukács participated enthusiastically in the construction of People’s Democracies in Soviet-occupied Europe, seeing in this a shift of Soviet policy towards his own conception of socialist construction. The Central and Eastern European People’s Democracies, he thought, were superior to the formal democracies of Western Europe by the fact that “a society of working people consciously seeks to solve the question of how the acquisition of cultural and progress in cultural life can be made accessible for everyone.”⁵²

Though many of the political systems in the countries of Europe that would become the Eastern Bloc were constructed from above by the placement of Communist Parties into power under the sponsorship of the Red Army, Lukács did not consider this an impediment to their democratic construction, since the “planned character of the work of reform entails the leading role of the working class and the most self-conscious workers organised into a party.”⁵³ For the goal of national construction, the party would harness “the collective power of the whole working people, including the working class, peasantry, and progressive intelligentsia; that for completing this work of construction and reconstruction, not even the most advanced working class, the very best workers’ party, will alone suffice.”⁵⁴ The ultimate goal of the People’s Democracy would be the old Marxist and Leninist hope of building “in the most developed democracy, with the proletarian dictatorship, a classless society in which even a proletariat—in the sense that this term had in class society—would no longer exist.”⁵⁵ Lukács had long articulated the meaning of this as the goal of a total human personality in his writings on communism, and most forcefully asserted the necessity for a continuation of bourgeois humanism along these lines in the Faustian essays of Goethe and His Age (1940). Under Soviet occupation, and being put through a process of de-Nazification and de-industrialization, Germany itself as the intellectual home of this Faustian Marxism would not appreciate the implications of Lukács’ arguments until it returned to a plan of nationally planned industrial development under the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Under the leadership of the Socialist Unity Party, Lukács’ reading of Goethe’s Faust would influence the adoption of the poem as the official mission statement of the GDR by the German intelligentsia.⁵⁶

The hopes of a European revolution in the late 1910s returned in a movement of democratic and socialist partisans against fascism in the Balkans. In Albania, a People’s Republic was founded in 1946 under the leadership of the Party of Labor of Albania. Though the momentum of the Albanian effort and the Greek effort overlapped in the hope of a general Balkan anti-fascist revolution, the Greek movement fell in 1949 to the Anglo-American-backed Kingdom of Greece and its fascist allies. Meanwhile, in the Slavic Balkans the Communist partisans won majority support in the Constituent Assembly of Yugoslavia and established the Democratic Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Josip Broz Tito, partisan leader turned head of state, sponsored the combination of the federal legislative structure with a system of workers’ self-management at the level of the firm to avoid the Soviet central planning’s systems of sluggish over-centralization. Tito believed that this method would revive the original Leninist hope of socialist-democratic governance: “The decentralization of economy and political, cultural and other aspects of life is not only profoundly democratic but has inherent in it the seeds of withering away not only of centralism, but of the state in general, as a machine of force.”⁵⁷

In Asia, Communists struggling in national independence and unification movements pursued many of the same democratic-socialist themes. In 1949, the Communist Party of China (CPC) accomplished the unification of the country under the People’s Republic of China. Under the term of “the people,” Mao Zedong theorized much of what Gramsci had spoken of as the “national-popular.” Acknowledging that this bloc of “the people” could shift with the times, Mao described the democratic “people” in 1949 as encompassing a faction of “the working class, the peasantry, the urban petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie,” while this “people” exercised a dictatorship over “the running dogs of imperialism—the landlord class and bureaucrat-bourgeoisie, as well as the representatives of those classes, the Kuomintang reactionaries and their accomplices” by excluding them from the rights of popular sovereignty like participating in elections, exercising freedom of speech and assembly, and enjoying a full place in public life.⁵⁸ Mao thought of this assertion of the general will through popular sovereignty as part of the struggle for transforming the nation into a communist association: “Our present task is to strengthen the people’s state apparatus—mainly the people’s army, the people’s police and the people’s courts—in order to consolidate national defence and protect the people’s interests. Given this condition, China can develop steadily, under the leadership of the working class and the Communist Party, from an agricultural into an industrial country and from a new-democratic into a socialist and communist society, can abolish classes and realize the Great Harmony.”⁵⁹ The struggle for this Great Harmony as the ultimate goal informed much of the oppositional and confrontational style of Chinese politics in the coming decades.

In Vietnam, a different approach to national independence prevailed in the guerrilla movement against French and U.S. imperialism. Ho Chi Minh, leader of the Workers’ Party of Vietnam (WPV), wrote that the French attempt to “Vietnamize” the war by sponsoring a local anti-communist military regime would backfire: “First, everywhere in the enemy-held areas, the population struggles against the enemy raiding and coercing the youth into their army. Second, the people so mobilised have resorted to actions of sabotage.”⁶⁰ Both of these forms of resistance plagued the French and U.S. occupations of Vietnam, eventually leading to the fall of the anti-communist Republic of Vietnam and birth of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in 1976. Ho predicted: “The Vietnamese people’s future is as bright as the sun in spring. Overjoyed at the radiance of the sun in spring, we shall struggle for the splendid future of Viet Nam, for the future of democracy, world peace and socialism. We triumph at the present time, we shall triumph in the future, because our path is enlightened by the great Marxist-Leninist doctrine.”⁶¹ In the works of the Vietnamese Communists, the Soviet doctrine of peaceful coexistence became a regulative ideal to critique the warmongering of the West and make an international moral appeal for support in a patriotic independence struggle.

In the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), the national reunification movement of the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK) began to transform its campaign of political unification into a project of Koreanizing Marxism-Leninism. The nationalist content of this new turn drew on long-running themes in the Korean revolutionary movement. The anarchist independence activist Shin Ch’aeho had already framed the terms of the revolution as that of nationalizing politics and culture along democratic lines: “Since at the top of ‘Korea’ resides a foreign race, ‘Japan,’ a despotic country, Korea under the despotism of a foreign race is not an authentic Korea. To discover the authentic Korea, we destroy the rule of a foreign race.”⁶² As the party-state set to work unifying production and politics, they discovered a technique for homogenizing the life of the nation through the Taean Work System.⁶³ In this system, the workers elect a small executive committee from among themselves to conduct day-to-day management, while a party committee represents national organizations and unifies the management of the individual firm with the management of all other firms in the nation’s planned economy. This system of integrated management served to reinforce the WPK’s ideology of self-sufficiency and Korean authenticity. By the 1970s, General Secretary of the WPK and President of the DPRK Kim Il Sung began to describe the ruling ideology of the country with Shin’s term “Juche,” meaning “the embodiment of independence and creativity; the people must adopt an independent and creative stand in order to solve all the problems arising from the revolution and construction mainly by themselves in the context of their own country’s actual conditions.”⁶⁴

The politics of the national-popular also served to reconstruct the global economic system—particularly through the force of Comecon in Europe and the world. Throughout the small 20th century from 1991, the Soviet Union acted as a force of globalization. Though it never posed an equal and opposite challenge to American-centered global capitalism, it did serve as a force of multipolarity. The reconstruction of Europe, the expenditures of the Marshall Plan, and peaceful coexistence served as an opportunity for the Soviets to transform the structure of the global financial and trade system. They pursued a strategy of trade which would bring them Western technology in exchange for raw materials, serving to orient the construction of the country along industrial and commercial lines. Rather than supporting the metallic system of global currency, the Soviets believed that paper money and its attendant flexibility could serve just as well if each country kept its finances in order. The Soviets often held Western countries to account in following through on trade deals in a timely manner, helping to establish a mutual-benefit rules-based norm for international trade that other developing countries would imitate.⁶⁵ Nevertheless, the Soviets remained dependent on the dollar-organized world economy, and the necessities imposed by foreign exchange often informed the party-state leadership’s decisions in crafting economic plans—such as prioritizing lucrative petroleum production in heavy industry.⁶⁶

Soviet multipolarity was neither a strategy of charity nor a conspiracy for domination, but it did often serve to reinforce the power of the Moscow party-state. Even where negotiators managed to obtain cheap raw materials in trade with the Soviets, they effectively functioned as subsidies granted by the party-state in exchange for policy collaboration. Pursuing international prestige, the Soviets spent masses of resources in aiding the development of central economic planning and public infrastructure in other countries in order to reinforce alliances and win visible victories for their model of civilization in the Cold War’s struggle for hearts and minds.⁶⁷ In some cases, this meant teaching policymakers abroad the Soviet model of expert management as a technique of industrial centralization. In other cases, this meant ideological concessions to other party-states in pursuit of allies. In all, the Soviets spent approximately $41 billion in foreign aid from World War II to the fall of the Union.⁶⁸

The Soviet challenge to the unipolar power of the United States and the British Empire allowed breathing room for the rise of alternative political systems. For those countries who were unlikely to join the Eastern Bloc or adopt the leadership of a Marxist-Leninist party, such as India or Egypt, the Soviets developed the theory that they were pursuing a “non-capitalist way of development” which was not quite capitalist and not quite (Soviet-style) socialism. This very stance of geopolitical and economic expediency, however, also led Soviet leadership to sponsor the independence of Israel in 1948 as a cooperative-socialist enterprise against British imperialism. The Soviets were in fact the very first country to recognize the Zionist entity in May of 1948. Soviet Ambassador to the United Nations Andrei Gromyko attempted to frame this recognition within the terms of “national-popular” democracy and advocate a binational Zionist state, since “the legitimate interests of both the Jewish and Arab populations of Palestine can be duly safeguarded only through the establishment of an independent, dual, democratic, homogeneous Arab-Jewish State.”⁶⁹ If the two could not get along, Gromyko advocated for a two-state solution.

The “national-popular” had little built into it, as it had been articulated so far, which would protect the rights of indigenous peoples and national minorities. It only thought in terms of masses, and where masses acted against each other, it attempted to either segregate them or elevate one over the other. In the Soviet Union, the semi-nomadic peoples of Siberia were subordinated to the authority of ethnically Russian People’s Commissars, who worked to assimilate them to Russian culture and impose settled life on them, before their homelands were later flooded by Russians seeking employment in the petroleum industry. The same effort to affirm work and national unity over nomadism manifested in the project of Israel. The Zionists had other aspirations than Gromyko’s legalistic proposals. They did not acknowledge any limits to the popular sovereignty of the settlers who believed that they, and only they, had toiled long enough to make the land their own. They slandered the Palestinians as nothing but rootless cosmopolitan nomadic Semites who could live just as well anywhere that the homogeneous horde of Arabs settled. The ensuing settler ethnic cleansing of indigenous Palestinians, known as the Nakba, initiated Israel’s long role as a destabilizing and expansionist force. The immediate return of racial nationalism as a force in global geopolitics would serve as one prominent factor among many in a global crisis of the Popular Frontist strategy of the “national-popular.”

Demands of Democracy

The many impulses of the Popular Front, which pulled from their centrifugal cohesion in Moscow, finally exploded into a multitude of directions. The impulses of politics could no longer be held within the bounds of the “national-popular” official Communist Parties. As the forces of Marxism departed from its institutional embodiment in the formal vanguard parties, a verifiable Reformation began. Some remained true to their institution and attempted to revitalize it from within, while others believed that the very premises of the institution were rotten and attempted to base everything in Marxism on Marx as their scripture and their own inner freedom as a power to reason through the scripture that everyone could share.

This explosion began with challenges to Stalin’s rule amidst the construction of capitalist democracies. After the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Raya Dunayevskaya had broken with the Soviet defenceist stance of Leon Trotsky and began to argue that the U.S.S.R. was a capitalist society. While the apologists of Soviet society argued that its rapid accumulation of value amidst a worldwide Depression proved its socialist independence from global capitalism, she countered in 1943 that the balance sheet of tangible offered a “record of how the production of means of consumption not only failed to meet its goals, not only showed no increase in production, but starkly reveals a decrease from even the 1928 levels.”⁷⁰

The ‘socialization’ of the means of production had not done away with their private character as capital, and this manifested in a disjuncture between the growth of productive forces and the growth of consumption. The Soviet state’s turnover tax, “a tax applied to all commodities at the point of production or immediately upon acquisition of the goods by the wholesaler,” increased the prices of everyday goods beyond their cost of production alone, creating a situation in which “the whole cost of industrialization and militarization has been borne by the people through that ingenious scheme known as the turnover tax, which provided 79 percent of the total state revenue in 1937.”⁷¹ As to the claim that the Soviets had abolished unemployment, she pointed out the mass unemployment of expropriated peasants who often refused to join the factory regime of the cities: “The truth of the matter is that unemployment, poverty and misery continue to exist in the country but even under his unhappy lot the peasant will not turn to industry because conditions in the factory, especially after 1938, are well known to him and he prefers unemployment in the country instead.”⁷²

Dunayevskaya’s polemic extended to the claims of the Soviet intelligentsia. In the 1940s, new Soviet political economy textbooks were written by A. Leontiev in order to clarify the relevance of Karl Marx’s Capital (1867) to Soviet society. Leontiev claimed that the nature of socialism was the liberation of the powers of social labor, the collective worker, and that only the proletarian dictatorship “can liberate the gigantic productive forces that have grown up within the framework of capitalism from those fetters into which the production relations of capitalism are transforming themselves.”⁷³ While Leontiev and others saw nationalization as breaking the limitations of private property on social labor, Dunayevskaya detected an Ideology of state capitalism. She critiqued Leontiev’s claim that “although the law of value operates in Russia, it functions in a changed form, that the Soviet state subordinates the law of value and consciously makes use of its mechanism in the interest of socialism,” arguing that Leontiev’s work “presents an administrative formula for minimum costs and maximum production.”⁷⁴ This meant the accumulation of more capital, command over social labor, in the hands of the state bureaucracy, who Dunayevskaya believed had become a new capitalist class.

Another ultra-leftist initiated a critique of the Stalin-era Soviet Union from another angle. Amadeo Bordiga had long participated in the international communist movement and advocated for seeing in it a single, unbroken, organic whole. Each individual member and party of the movement ought to be considered only units of the communist organism, and yet “organized social units do not have fixed boundaries and are continually being renewed, mingling with one another, simultaneously splitting and recombining.”⁷⁵ Bordiga considered the democratic-populism of the Soviet leadership to indicate that they had departed from the communist programme and initiated a basically Jacobin project.

In 1952, Bordiga arranged a meeting with Stalin, which would be the last time that anyone publicly criticized him to his face and lived. Stalin said to Bordiga that the most important outcome of WWII was “to have split the world market into two parts,” one capitalist and one socialist, while Bordiga pointed out that in “both camps the market exists, ergo the commodity system, ergo the capitalist economy. So we allow the expression of the parallel markets to pass through, but what we completely reject is the definition according to which there is a capitalist market in the West and a socialist one in the East, a contradictio in adjecto.”⁷⁶ Bordiga considered the strategy of peaceful coexistence and the construction of national states to be “a democratic movement, not a class movement.”⁷⁷ The Soviet leadership, in Bordiga’s estimation, had abandoned the internationalist notion of the proletariat as a force of socialization and instead oriented itself “towards the political categories immanent in bourgeois ideology and propaganda: people’s democracy and national independence.”⁷⁸

Not all left critics of Stalin shared Bordiga’s unitary interpretation of democracy as the capitalist collaboration of classes taken together as the “people” of the nation and state. Others turned to the multitudinous sense of self-governing assemblies characteristic of the Ancient Greek polis and argued for a proletarian democracy to confront the rise of bureaucracy. Militants Raya Dunayevskaya, C.L.R. James, and Grace Lee Boggs collaborated to draft State Capitalism and World Revolution (1950), which claimed that the “elite, the organizers, the administrators, the leaders, confront the self-mobilized proletariat. Counter-revolution and revolution oppose one another without intermediaries. Modern society offers no third camp between complete totalitarianism and complete democracy.”⁷⁹ Just as the Enlightened bourgeoisie enacted the technocratic rule of an active elite over a supposedly passive mass, the Bolshevik leadership had enacted the rule of a party-state over a class. Because rationalism, which extended across both bourgeois philosophy and DiaMat, had faith “that harmonious progress is inevitable by this path, the essence of rationalism is uncritical or vulgar materialism, and uncritical or vulgar idealism.”⁸⁰ This reductionism, however, missed the fact that the appearance of “state-capitalism, one-party state, cold war, hydrogen bomb” indicated a fundamental change in theory and practice; “it is obvious that we have reached ultimates[...] all universal questions are matters of concrete specific urgency for society in general as well as for every individual.”⁸¹

Dunayevskaya, James, and Lee Boggs believed that the political force of proletarian communism lay in its ethical humanism. Calling for a return to the council governance of 1917, they believed that the proletariat “as a class” is necessarily “opposed to increase of productivity of labor in any form, whether it is speed-up of the line or the machine, or the further division of labor. It is convinced in the very marrow of its being that any such increase is obtained only at the expense of its own most vital material and spiritual interests. But the capitalist class is equally convinced that the desire of the workers to have the decisive word on production standards is opposed to the vital interests of the capitalist system which they represent. Both sides are absolutely correct upon the basis of capitalist production. The clash is final and absolute.”⁸² In short, the independent communists posed a voluntarist humanism against the determinism of the Soviets. They confidently assumed that an absolutely independent activity of workers and other mass subjects lay in waiting under the repressive command of totalitarian states, and that upon liberating themselves from the bureaucracy, they would rocket past the problems that had led the Bolsheviks into a party-state and found a complete democracy on the basis of the council-form.

A messianic humanism was in the air, permeating both the Popular Front and its left critics. After Georg Lukács and David Riazanov had discovered and dated them in their archival work for the Marx-Engels Institute, Marx’s humanist 1844 manuscripts had been made available to the world. They forced a reconsideration of the core motivations of Marx’s project. Within the manuscripts, which appear to be something of an experiment at drafting an intellectual project, Marx had set out on his characteristic critique of political economy by working through his critiques of theology, Young Hegelian philosophy, and Christian-democratic politics. Marx argued that Hegel’s conflation of objectification (entfremdung) and alienation (entäußerung) implied that freedom could only be realized in a superearthly fashion through the creation of an entire phantom-like world out of the Concept. He argued that instead needfulness is the beginning of all activity, conditioning the Conceptual all the way through so that the forgetfulness of need is an end result of the alienation of humanity. After all, humanity was only one part of needful thingliness, which Marx provisionally granted the name of “nature.” He expressed his alternative cosmology as follows:

“Whenever real, corporeal man, man with his feet firmly on the solid ground, man exhaling and inhaling all the forces of nature, posits his real, objective essential powers as alien objects by his externalisation, it is not the act of positing which is the subject in this process: it is the subjectivity of objective essential powers, whose action, therefore, must also be something objective. An objective being acts objectively, and he would not act objectively if the objective did not reside in the very nature of his being. He only creates or posits objects, because he is posited by objects—because at bottom he is nature.”⁸³

In an attempt at getting past Hegelian idealism on the basis of Ludwig Feuerbach’s species-humanism, Marx attempted to locate universality in the nature of humanity’s activity itself. He claimed that any other “animal forms objects only in accordance with the standard and the need of the species to which it belongs, whilst man knows how to produce in accordance with the standard of every species, and knows how to apply everywhere the inherent standard to the object. Man therefore also forms objects in accordance with the laws of beauty.”⁸⁴ On the basis of this universalism, Marx would later look to the Faustianism of capital as a force that would unite humanity into one great production process.

At the same time, he critiqued capital for producing mediocrity and misery. This was because “a particular form of labour—labour levelled down, fragmented, and therefore unfree—is conceived as the source of private property’s perniciousness and of its existence in estrangement from men.”⁸⁵ Thus, Christian equalization of all to ascetic toil according to a shared monastic plan could not be the basis for any liberated society. Marx rather believed that the assertion that “the earth lacks the power to feed men” is “the pinnacle of Christian economics,” and that the fact that “our economics is essentially Christian I could have proved from every proposition, from every category, and shall in fact do so in due course.”⁸⁶ This proof came much later, in the form of Capital. Marx continuously polemicized against any communism which inveighed against sensuousness, thingliness, and the enjoyment of life. The association of free people, unlike crude ascetic communism, “re-establishes, now on a rational basis, no longer mediated by serfdom, overlordship and the silly mysticism of property, the intimate ties of man with the earth, since the earth ceases to be an object of huckstering, and through free labour and free enjoyment becomes once more a true personal property of man.”⁸⁷

Ultimately, Marx laid down that “communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man—the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.”⁸⁸ The last line became the silent slogan which would guide all of Marx’s future works, though its meaning would shift with the challenges of his object of work itself. When the 1844 manuscripts became widely available in the 1950s, they became the inspiration for a humanist revival of Marxism. Pro-Soviet, pro-Popular Front intellectuals (like Lukács) claimed this revival as the soul of their efforts at the same time that staunch critics like Dunayevskaya and James looked to the young Marx as a model for critiquing the compromised position of official Communism.

The reformists of official Communism and the revolutionists of the communist opposition shared many of the same humanist morality as the other emergent political movements like Christian Democracy. Humanism was flying on everyone’s lips. The question of the day was how to make grand, impersonal structures fit the needs of the human totality. In his Dialectical Materialism (1940), philosopher Henri Lefebvre had recognized that the problem of needs extended into the inner life of the spirit as well. The dispersion of humanity into competing individuals “has manifested itself even within individuality itself; the concrete, practical or natural element has become separated from the rational or cultural one. Rationality brings the concrete content under control by violence; the spiritual powers, deprived of a content, function abstractly.”⁸⁹

These spiritual problems became manifest to those who worked to maintain capitalism. C.L.R. James, writing of American civilization, noted that advertisers, political speechwriters, and authors of managerial textbooks had begun to stress the need to incentivize people with something other than money, to give them a sense of belonging and personal self-actualization in their work. James believed that the spiritual content of the American consumerist deluge revealed that they “are very real but synthetic constructions, projections from a harsh reality and an attempt to overcome that reality without touching fundamental relations. It is a substitute but a substitute that does not fall from the sky but springs organically from below, from the reality itself. It finally ends in becoming an iron barrier to the very needs it sought to satisfy, if even partially.”⁹⁰ Opinion polling became a widespread means to measure the ‘Voice of the People,’ attempting to give public expression to their hopes and dreams while nevertheless treating them as a homogenous mass that could be quantified. Even priests, who had drawn so much of Marx’s ire, drew from the humanism of Marx’s 1844 manuscripts to prove that that ancient bureaucracy, the Catholic Church, could address the problems of the times.

These paeans to the spirit may have appealed to many of those who enjoyed a full place in the postbellum prosperity of the consumer economy. The peoples of the darker, non-Western, colonized world would not be satisfied with such a substitution for freedom. Writing in 1940, Black leader W.E.B. Du Bois described the Faustian humanity of the white West as disfigured in that it was imperialist. Rather than the progress of the light of thoughtful consciousness over dark unconsciousness, “as a system of culture it is idiotic, addle-brained, unreasoning, topsy-turvy, without precision; and its genius chiefly runs to marvelous contrivances for enslaving the many, and enriching the few, and murdering both.”⁹¹ After the Soviets tampered their critique of imperialism in the name of an alliance of democracy against fascism and peaceful existence, many Black radicals turned away from the Comintern as having made a deal with the devil and sought their own path.

A Black humanism became increasingly independent in thought as the events of the day gave it concepts with which to express itself. After witnessing massive drives of Black self-organization against fascism and racism during WWII, and the beginning of African and Caribbean independence movements in the 1950s, many believed that Black people across the world would chart an independent course from capitalism and official Communism. James estimated the long history of pan-African revolt as a force of democratization, since the “African bruises and breaks himself against his bars in the interest of freedoms wider than his own.”⁹² The outbreak of the Gold Coast Revolution in West Africa in the late 1940s, led by popular assemblies in which women played a prominent part, launched a wave of independence movements in Africa and the world. George Padmore, a Communist turned Pan-Africanist, argued that the universality of the revolutionary wave that had begun in the Gold Coast proved that in “our struggle for national freedom, human dignity and social redemption, Pan-Africanism offers an ideological alternative to Communism on the one side and Tribalism on the other. It rejects both white racialism and black chauvinism. It stands for racial co-existence on the basis of absolute equality and respect for human personality.”⁹³

Independence struggles gave colonized and dehumanized peoples the power to articulate their own hopes for the world. Kwame Nkrumah, leader of the newly independent Gold Coast nation of Ghana after 1957, declared: “If one seeks the social-political ancestor of socialism, one must go to communalism. Socialism stands to communalism as capitalism stands to slavery. In socialism, the principles underlying communalism are given expression in modern circumstances[...] Socialism is a form of social organization which, guided by the principles underlying communism, adopts procedures and measures made necessary by demographic and technological developments.”⁹⁴ This notion of African socialism informed the policies of many newly independent African countries. Yet, taken with the developmentalist problem of managing the accumulation of capital for the nation-state, this African socialism also erupted into class struggles. Workers in newly independent countries continued to revolt against technocracy, overwork, exploitation, and one-party rule. Foreign-backed military coups and dictatorships continued to make the labor and lives of African people available for global capital. While the Pan-Africanists had proved that the human personality is not singular, that it is a multiplicity, their theory of socialism had obscured the inner struggle of forces that now united each civilization in the problems of capital and labor.

Pan-Africanists adopted varying approaches to these problems of capital. These struck at the very basis of decolonization, which Black revolutionary Frantz Fanon had said “infuses a new rhythm, specific to a new generation of men, with a new language and a new humanity.”⁹⁵ Léopold Sédar Senghor, poet of négritude and leader of independent Senegal, attempted to locate the solution in the Romantic spiritual unity of communalism itself. Rather than allowing the alienated divide between spirit and matter, the life-attitude of indigenous peoples like his own Serer people “does not draw a line between himself and the object, he does not hold it at a distance, nor does he merely look at it and analyse it. After holding it at a distance, after scanning it without analysing it, he takes it vibrant in his hands, careful not to kill or fix it. He touches it, feels it, smells it[...] sympathises, abandons his personality to become identified with the Other, dies to be reborn in the Other. He does not assimilate; he is assimilated. He lives a common life with the Other; he lives in a symbiosis.”⁹⁶ Sedar drew directly from Marx’s 1844 manuscripts in this spiritual self-portrait, claiming the synthesis of humanism and naturalism as an accomplished fact for African civilization. Rather than achieving the victory of rational consciousness over irrational thingliness, Senghor thought that the tribal human being’s feeling of symbiosis with the Other would grant a moral strength in resisting the totalitarian technocracy of Western civilization.

Others did not consider this spiritual doctrine to address the concrete problems of the day. After being forced into exile by a military coup in 1966, Nkrumah argued forcibly that “History has shown how a relatively small proletariat, if it is well organised and led, can awaken the peasantry and trigger off socialist revolution[...] Socialism can only be achieved through class struggle. In Africa, the internal enemy—the reactionary bourgeoisie—must be exposed as exploiters and parasites, and as collaborators with imperialists and neocolonialists on whom they largely depend for the maintenance of their positions of power and privilege.”⁹⁷ The future lay in class struggle and self-organization. This was closer to the course taken by the Algerian Revolution from 1962 to 1965, when workers’ councils practiced autogestion. While under the decision making power of the national pary-state, however, the councils could only go so far. They declined with the construction of a military dictatorship in Algeria. After all, in the words of Fanon’s magisterial The Wretched of the Earth (1961), “bourgeois leadership of the underdeveloped countries confines the national consciousness to a sterile formalism[...] The living expression of the nation is the collective consciousness in motion of the entire people.”⁹⁸

In the white Western world, this project of free self-determination had already fragmented from the construction of postbellum democracies into a skeptical individualism. Existentialism, the themes of which had accompanied rationalist pan-logism throughout the history of philosophy, asserted the freedom of inner life against the alienated way of the world. Rather than accepting the doctrine of the whole as the true, or the real being the rational, they affirmed their inner uniqueness as the realm of freedom which the outer totalitarian realm of necessity could never exterminate—except if one freely chose to submit. Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who had fought against the Nazis in the French resistance, wrote in Being and Nothingness (1943) that the inner uniqueness of a life is itself its freedom: “For us, the appearance of the for-itself, or the absolute event, is the sign of an in-itself’s endeavor to found itself: it corresponds to an attempt, on the part of being, to remove contingency from its being.”⁹⁹ This removal of contingency is the struggle of each to be true to themselves, to be authentically me. This is the content of self-determination for inner life, to become itself.

Yet to become oneself, one must already be something other than oneself. The attempt at authentic existence “leads to the in-itself’s nihilation, because the in-itself cannot found itself without introducing the itself—a reflexive and nihilating referral—into the absolute identity of its being and without, in consequence, becoming degraded into for-itself.”¹⁰⁰ This self-awareness, the source of so much anxiety for the modern person, “corresponds therefore to a destruction and decompression of the in-itself, and the in-itself nihilates itself and absorbs itself in its attempt to found itself.”¹⁰¹ Freedom is not merely an exhilarating experience. It demands maturity, it demands endurance in the face of the nausea of existence. Our everyday exercise of freedom reveals ourselves to ourselves as a fragment, as eternally incomplete.

The atomized individuals of the modern world cannot escape their alienation either inwardly or outwardly. Reflecting inwardly, a life finds that the “in-itself is not therefore a substance, of which the for-itself is an attribute, a substance able to produce thought without being exhausted in that very act of production. It merely remains within the for-itself like a memory of being, as its unjustifiable presence to the world.”¹⁰² This absurdity of the mere fact of our existence, which we try to mitigate against with our search for self-justification in authenticity, only reveals to us that “consciousness cannot ever prevent itself from being, and yet it is completely responsible for its being.”¹⁰³ The Faustian soul of self-determination, fragmented into the inner self of modern humanity, now faces personal responsibility for the infinite struggle for a total personality. Many surrender from this nauseating imperative, choosing instead to give themselves over to the way of the world. They find ready-made choices in work and consumption, fleeing from their own responsibility by playing the parts given to them by the impersonal crowd of the workaday world. In short, one must either exercise the freedom of one’s own project, in which one searches for oneself, or escape freedom through conformity. Existence is a question mark that we confront and attempt to answer in our deeds, which taken together are that very same existence. Rather than an answer one can find in a book or in the measurement of a population, humanity is a project.

A similar dilemma of self-determination and conformity confronted Soviet leadership by the 1950s. The personal authority of Stalin had aged from a leader of a world movement to the narcissistic and resentful dictator of a national machinery of control. When Stalin finally died in March of 1953, it seemed to signal a new beginning for the Eastern Bloc. Countless dogmas and habits which had been taken as a given, as necessary for duty to Stalin and the party, came into question as the more dynamic collective leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union took the place of Stalin. In June of 1953, the people of East Berlin took the opportunity to revolt against the Soviet system of management.¹⁰⁴ They had expected liberation from the Nazis to mean a return to the semi-democratic participatory management system of the Weimar Republic, but instead found themselves under the authority of central planners, who demanded that they meet stark quotas and accept the reduction of their living standards as the Soviet authorities de-industrialized the city. Though the Soviets suppressed the rebellion with the tanks of the Red Army, as they would do multiple times in the coming years, the uprising of workers spelled out the need for a political and economic reform.

In 1956, First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev made an attempt at giving ideological expression to such a reform by criticizing Stalin, the symbol of a Moscow-centered consensus, which led to the decisive fracturing of Marxism-Leninism. In a speech to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Khrushchev effectively blamed Stalin and his cult of personality as entirely responsible for the problems of Soviet society. While the cult of identification with Stalin had attributed responsibility for the successes of the Soviet collective workforce to its highest administrative leadership, Khrushchev’s de-sanctification of Stalin inverted the logic of the cult by pointing the figure at one man and his personal allies in an attempt to maintain the consensus and legitimacy of the whole. Khrushchev called on his party to “return to and actually practice in all our ideological work the most important theses of Marxist-Leninist science about the people as the creator of history and as the creator of all material and spiritual good of humanity, about the decisive role of the Marxist Party in the revolutionary fight for the transformation of society, about the victory of communism.”¹⁰⁵ The revelations about Stalin, rather than allowing for a return to consensus, shook the Communist world with dissent. Many left the movement altogether, disgusted that they had supported Stalin throughout the reign of terror described by Khrushchev.

Georg Lukács, on the other hand, greeted the denunciation enthusiastically as a return to the project he had set out for himself since the 1929 Blum Theses. After being purged by his own Hungarian Working People’s Party in 1948 for his humanist strategy of class culture against class culture, he had been searching for just such a reorientation of the Communist movement. Just as he had interpreted Lenin’s call for a democratic class front as a mission for the anti-fascist struggle, he now interpreted the “state of the whole people” as the ideal mission of actually existing socialism. In June of 1956, Lukács criticized Stalinism’s ultraleft confidence that communism could be achieved by the sheer force of will of its partisans, arguing that it wrongly implied “that we are fully prepared for it ideologically and morally, not to mention economically, that our scholars have formulated the major problems, and that all we need to do in each case is apply the ready-made doctrines to that given case. Here we have the worldview roots of what we call dogmatism, citationology, and much else.”¹⁰⁶ He called for a democratization of political life, the freedom of criticism, and the strategy of convincing rather than forcing, seeing this as a return to Leninist principles.

In October of 1956, Lukács seemed to have gotten his wish of democratic reform, but by means that he had not expected. A nationwide revolution broke out in Hungary which challenged the government of the People’s Republic. The movement united intellectuals, the middle class, and workers into a general democratic and nationalist movement.¹⁰⁷ Some, especially the upper skilled classes, thought of the movement as a struggle to achieve national independence from the “anti-national” People’s Republic. They often delved into anti-communist and antisemitic themes. Others, primarily workers, revived the council form of organization as a means to directly seize democratic decision making power for themselves. Imre Nagy formed a government seeking to unite both forces in a reformed People’s Democracy. Georg Lukács joined the effort as Minister of Culture. In November, however, the Soviets rolled in their tanks and crushed the government under a military occupation. The Soviets would not allow any potential Western orientation on their doorstep. They constructed their own reform government, which would carry out the reorganization of Hungary without reorientating to political independence and unreliability. Lukács was deported to Romania, narrowly avoiding execution, and could only return to Budapest in 1957. As he had done after his 1930s purge from the Hungarian Communist Party, Lukács retreated from politics and focused on returning to the humanist fundamentals of political and cultural theory until his death in 1971.

The official Communists had long taught a doctrine of absolute moral duty. They believed that one’s inner life must always be a single unit of a whole movement, and that otherwise, one would be decadent. They met the existentialist talk of an existential project with this retort, thinking of all people as one organism, as finding themselves in their place within the whole. It was a philosophy of conformity. It echoed the general will of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Jacobins, which called for every class of people to become one in the nation and party. Popular sovereignty, in turn, would be realized in the party-state and the movement of the ascetic class. All would be equal by committing themselves equally to the good of all. Italian philosopher Galvano Della Volpe, attempting to interpret this turn in as universal of terms as possible, affirmed that Marxism “solves this problem, which we can call the problem of an equality which is universal and yet mediates persons. This problem was discovered and posed by Rousseau, with his moralistic (humanitarian) method, in the egalitarian and anti-leveling democratic conception of the person: i.e. of the social recognition of the merits and abilities of all men without distinction.”¹⁰⁸ Communist consensus was not only for the self-preservation of the class or party organization, but for the good of all persons. Drawing on this democratic idea, China’s Mao Zedong declared that “Stalin failed to see the connection between the struggle of opposites and the unity of opposites.”¹⁰⁹

The Soviets attempted to establish their new consensus through the humanism that had grown to prominence in the politics of the anti-fascist Popular Front. The CPSU wrote a new party programme, which it completed and adopted in 1961. The party declared that it had turned over a new life, and that the Great Patriotic War had united the Soviet people of all classes into a single national will. The dictatorship of the proletariat, the imposition of force by the working people against their mortal enemies, could now be replaced by well-rounded democracy: “The state, which arose as a state of the dictatorship of the proletariat, has, in the new, contemporary stage, become a state of the entire people, an organ expressing the interests and will of the people as a whole[...] The Party holds that the dictatorship of the working class will cease to be necessary before the state withers away. The state as an organisation of the entire people will survive until the complete victory of communism.”¹¹⁰ The tasks which remained on the path to communism were the perfection of the rule of law, the improvement of education, the incorporation of the people into public self-governance, and most importantly, the development of the nation’s productive forces. Within 20 years, they claimed, the Soviets would be on the precipice to communism.

The community of labor, the national state, was the homeland for the toiling human being’s infinite striving to achieve a total human personality. This Enlightenment bourgeois humanism guided Lukács’ commentaries on art and labor in his final years. His Specificity of the Aesthetic (1963) described the didactic role of realist art for a new cultural age. Through the uniqueness and intentionality of the aesthetic experience—the person’s encounter with the consciously constructed work of art—the “nature of the ‘man-made-whole’ in the disanthropomorphising reflection of reality results from the dialectical interaction of the gradual transition and leap in relation to this homogeneous medium on the one hand and in relation to the whole man of the everyday on the other.”¹¹¹

The artist must attempt to intensify the human powers called to action by this homogenizing, disanthropomorphising reflection in order to draw the audience into understanding the reified world that the artwork occupies a place in as an object. Through the artist and audience’s attention to the object-work of reflection, “what is simultaneously and inseparably contained in any discovery that the man-made-whole accomplishes in his surrender to the homogeneous medium of his art is something newly discovered in objective reality itself, which constitutes the surrounding objective world of man, and in the relationships of people to it.”¹¹² The comprehensibility of the art object, its lawfulness, is also the comprehensibility and lawfulness of the objective world itself. Any content can be justified as “the formation of the creative subjectivity,” the point is that the artwork serves “as a model for a comportment worthy of humanity, to apprehend and to shape the objectivity of the world so that such a subject-object relationship reaches expression in it.”¹¹³ Art combats reification, the reduction of life into mute things-in-themselves, by challenging the audience’s certainty in the obviousness of everyday life, revealing the forces of free creativity which human beings exercise in the creation of the world. The old consciousness-raising hope of the councils would have to begin again in the educational work of art.

As he began to work on the manuscript for Ontology of Social Being in 1964, Lukács turned his reflections on the subject-object relationship of the artwork to the topic of labor itself. Labor meant “teleological positing,” mediating the raw material of work with “an adequate, considered and willed result.”¹¹⁴ This struggle to realize plans, which encompasses both the conscious execution of ends and careful reflection of reality, involves “the rise of a conceptual grasp of the phenomena o f the real world, and their adequate expression in language.”¹¹⁵ This character was central to the realization of communism through the work of de-reification carried out within the socialist community of labor, since in “the act of teleological projection (Setzung) in labour, social being itself is now there. The historical process of its development involves the most important transformation of this ‘in itself’ into a ‘for itself,’ and hence the tendency towards the overcoming of merely natural forms and contents of being by forms and contents that are ever more pure and specifically social.”¹¹⁶ The toil of labor is the march of reason. Any utopia seeking to reverse the linear flow of development “must necessarily have an essentially irrationalist character-unless the backward orientation is simply due to imagination, to a misunderstanding of its own basic intentions, as was the case with the ostensible resuscitation of antiquity in the Renaissance era.”¹¹⁷ As human labor remakes the world, the dialectic of ethical questions is directly posed to the workers in their objective product itself, since in “order to posit pairs of opposites of this kind, at once linked and distinct, human practice and the thought guiding it must homogenize its environment.”¹¹⁸ Only in the human-made world can reason ascend to victory, and it must do so by making its own activity conscious, free, and participatory rather than blind, forced, and managerial.

In Czechoslovakia in 1968, First Secretary Alexander Dubček initiated a series of liberalization reforms in search of “socialism with a human face.”¹¹⁹ His reforms did not reach anywhere near the democratic political ambitions of Nagy and Lukács in 1956 Hungary, but he did seek to completely loosen the Soviet-style system of central management in favor of allowing a more free exchange of commerce and culture. The liberalization sent the Soviets into panic, with the leadership believing that Dubček intended to align with the West. After negotiations failed, the Warsaw Pact ended the Prague Spring with an invasion of tanks. In the aftermath of the repression, Lukács decided to initiate an open critique of the Eastern Bloc system.

Throughout 1968, Lukács worked on drafting his criticisms into a systematic perspective as the book The Process of Democratization. After reviving the themes of the council republic in his commentary on art, he now adapted them directly to problems of political forms. Socialist democracy was absolutely necessary to pursue the universal participation in Faustian development that the Communist Parties now sought, since it is “the political framework that allows objectivity, without violating the inherent law of objectivity , to become a tool in the teleological designs of conscious active men. It is the conquest of consciousness and self-determination over blind objectivity. As the victory of self-determination, socialist democracy transforms the human neighbor, one’s fellow man, from acting as a hindrance to one’s own praxis to an indispensable and affirmative co-worker and co-helper.”¹²⁰ For all to be made co-Faustians, they had to see the satisfaction of their personality in the political system of socialism—this required thoroughgoing democratization.

Lukács criticized Stalinism as having buried this basic necessity of realizing socialism through democracy, a task which he had stressed since 1924: “The basis of Stalin’s praxis was that the existent tactical needs were supported by a generalized theoretic substructure that in many cases bore no resemblance to either the facts or to the general lines of historical development. Rather, the theory was exclusively intended to justify the existing tactical needs.”¹²¹ The long term goal of communism collapsed into the expediency of the bureaucratic party-state’s self-preservation. The aim of socialism was not opportunist expediency, Lukács argued, but transcending the formalism of bourgeois citizenship with collective communist cooperation in the governance of everyday life. Bureaucratic deviations could only be combatted within Marxist theory by combatting them within socialist reality.

Lukács thought of democracy as what makes Faustian ambitions accessible to everyone by giving each a place in the Faustian mission of the state. This lays the basis for the incorporation of each personality into the total personality of Man in communist society. The educational work of cultural cultivation in socialist society prefigures the communist society where flourishing is the end in itself. But work itself had to be organized appropriately to satisfy the personality of each in the all-togetherness of collective toil. Lukács would now look to Yugoslavia’s system of self-management as a potential model for the future of Faustian democracy. Self-management updated the principles of the councils, which posed the question of workers’ management, “one of the most important questions of socialism.”¹²² Lukács thought that this question returned to the notion that “the essence of socialist development[...] lies in developing the democracy of everyday life. This is a matter of expanding democratic public self-management from the most basic levels of everyday life to popular decision-making on outstanding questions.”¹²³ He hoped that the universal cause of Communism, by being made democratic in the here and now, would keep all together on the march towards communist freedom. But as he could have learned from Chairman Mao Zedong, the dialectic reveals that “every entity invariably divides into different parts,” and only “by making distinctions and waging struggle can there be development.”¹²⁴ One divides into two.

Bombard the Headquarters

The old headquarters of the world revolution, Moscow, had grown into a wealthy and industrious city since postbellum reconstruction had begun. The total wealth of the Soviet Union, which had been vociferously accumulated as the state’s capital in the Stalin era, now began to give a basic standard of life to all through investments in healthcare, education, and housing. Light industry still lagged far behind heavy industry, particularly as the petroleum industry became a lucrative investment for industrial production and foreign trade which the state could not tear itself from, but a certain degree of consumerism found enthusiasts among the professional classes of the city. The bureaucrats were not a new bourgeoisie—they did not personally command capital and their living style was radically elevated—but a managerial class of intellectual laborers who mediated the workers of the firm and the administrators of the state in their implementation of economic plans. The internal commercialization of firms under Khrushchev, however, granted these bureaucratic managers an independent power and to many Communists seemed to mark the ascent of economic exchange over the command of politics.

Khrushchev’s reforms allowed an expansion of commercial-cooperative kolkhozy through the Virgin Lands campaign in order to meet urban demand for food with less imports, yet they also transformed many cooperative and industrial managers into wealthy men.¹²⁵ This was meant to lighten the burden of an excessively centralized system of management and planning, which often could not keep up with the inefficiencies which dragged the system down in the middle between the center and the citizens.¹²⁶ He relaxed censorship of the media so that artists and writers could freely debate the path to communism, but the free exchange of ideas was often subordinated to the free advertisement of products. He allowed managers more decision-making power in planning, but the 1961-1965 financial and economic reforms made profitability and sales the real marker of a plan’s success, introducing direct competition between firms. Money would now be an inner rather than only total, national, and formal means of managing production efficiently.

The collective worker of the Stalin-era planned economy had been divided up from the single general of an army of labor to the commanders. Khrushchev’s belief that these reforms would erode the social basis for Stalinism were not unfounded, since after all “the less authority presides over the division of labor inside society, the more the division of labor develops inside the workshop, and the more it is subjected there to the authority of a single person. Thus authority in the workshop and authority in society, in relation to the division of labor, are in inverse ratio to each other.”¹²⁷ The “state of the whole people,” in short, meant the distribution of national profits on national capital throughout the managerial system.

In 1961, Mao Zedong initiated an open polemic against this project. He considered peaceful coexistence with the U.S. empire to be a strategy of imperialistic opportunism, and saw in the humanism of the “state of the whole people” a doctrine that abandoned the dictatorship of the proletariat, the withering away of the democratic bureaucracy through workers’ directly democratic self-organization, and the party’s orientation towards the ultimate goal of communism. He attacked Khrushchev for “peddling bourgeois ideology, bourgeois liberty, equality, fraternity and humanity, inculcating bourgeois idealism and metaphysics and the reactionary ideas of bourgeois individualism, humanism and pacifism among the Soviet people, and debasing socialist morality. The rotten bourgeois culture of the West is now fashionable in the Soviet Union, and socialist culture is ostracized and attacked.”¹²⁸ Against the reconciling humanism of the new course, Mao argued for a strategy of class war, since if “the state is not yet withering away, then it ought to be the dictatorship of the proletariat and under absolutely no circumstances a ‘state of the whole people.’”¹²⁹ As the proletariat wields its democracy as a dictatorial weapon against the democracy of the bourgeoisie, it works to out-organize its enemy class, and “in the higher stage of communism proletarian democracy will wither away along with the elimination of classes and the withering away of the dictatorship of the proletariat.”¹³⁰ The Soviet system, on the other hand, attempted to fuse the interests of workers and capital, and thereby paved the way for the restoration of capital.

Mao’s polemic against the humanism of People’s democracy marked the culmination of the Sino-Soviet split. The People’s Republic of China would now pursue its own path to communism, attempting to lead all dissidents to peaceful coexistence and humanist reformism. The editors of the theoretical reviews People’s Daily and Red Flag began to make appeals to the working people of China and of the world to focus their efforts on a democratic anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist struggle. Peaceful coexistence, they argued, taught a colonial Christian doctrine of submission: “If only you are patient, if only you wait until the imperialists lay down their arms, freedom will descend upon you. Wait until the imperialists show mercy, and the poverty-stricken areas of the world will become an earthly paradise flowing with milk and honey!”¹³¹

The People’s Republic opposed Soviet participation in Third World conferences as the infringement of Muscovite European whites on the politics of the colored world that they kept under the domination of imperialism with the same conservative hypocrisy as the old revisionists. The Soviets shot back and justified this approach as necessary for defending national liberation struggles from imperialist warmongers, noting that “history furnishes no example of a country rendering aid to other countries on such a scale in the development of their economy, science and technology.”¹³² Hitting a Civil Rights note, they argued that the People’s Republic “put forward an idea that people of different color cannot understand each other and act hand in hand even if they hold common goals and have common enemies.”¹³³

The editors replied that “the national question in the contemporary world is one of class struggle and anti-imperialist struggle[...] The question here is not whether to side with the white people or the coloured people, but whether to side with the oppressed peoples and nations or with the handful of imperialists and reactionaries.”¹³⁴ The clearest example of this betrayal, they thought, was the French Communist Party’s opposition to total Algerian independence and advocacy for a French federal republic extending into Africa. The People’s Republic attempted to make good on the alliance of class struggle and national struggle on their very own borders, using radio addresses and leaflets to make appeals to both Eastern Bloc workers and Central Asian peoples against Moscow’s despotism.¹³⁵ Though Soviet Asians enjoyed a system of affirmative action in the Union, they were also expected to adhere to Russocentric managerial plans which were developed in Moscow.¹³⁶ The People’s Republic saw the Soviet Union as having joined the white, capitalist, imperialist side of the world against the colored, proletarian, colonized side.

Amidst this split within the socialist bloc, the Cuban Revolution erupted in 1959. Small bands of revolutionaries, known as focos, coordinated the guerrilla campaign of the 26th of July Movement against the U.S.-aligned dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. They drew on the support of peasants to hide from the police and military, while the workers of major Cuban cities had long hoped for a democratic revolution and would enthusiastically participate in public trials of landlords, dictatorial functionaries, and counter-revolutionary torturers.¹³⁷ While guerrilla leaders Fidel Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara assembled to the leadership of government, workers’ factory committees served as the basis for the organization of neighborhood assemblies known as Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR) sprung up to carry out the everyday governance of the country.¹³⁸ In 1961, Castro declared his allegiance to Marxism-Leninism, explaining: “We revolutionaries don’t know how to be anything halfway. We only know how to be 100 percent something. And to that we shall dedicate our efforts, our energies, our entire selves.”¹³⁹ This declaration began a process for the merger of the Integrated Revolutionary Organization, which united the democratic-nationalist guerrilla factions into one coalition, with the Popular Socialist Party, an urban Soviet-aligned faction, into the United Party of the Socialist Revolution in Cuba. The Cuban national republic began to align with the Soviets to seek a counterweight to American aggression. This culminated in the 1962 Missile Crisis when the U.S. and Soviet Union came close to nuclear war when the U.S. discovered that the Soviets had placed nukes in Cuba to match the U.S.’s nukes in Turkey, near Soviet borders. The event seemed to confirm the validity of peaceful coexistence as a strategy for Castro and the Soviets, but the problems of capitalist-imperialism continued to make themselves felt in the Americas and the World.

The peaceful conclusion of the Missile Crisis gave Cuban socialists the freedom to dispute many of the same questions of strategy and socialist planning which had erupted between China and the Soviet Union. Che, an Argentinian revolutionary who hoped that Cuba would spark a hemispheric revolution, argued in 1965 that the leveling of pay and introduction of moral incentives in work would reinforce the socialist spirit of the democratic revolution: “Failure to fulfill a quota means failure to fulfill one’s social duty. The society punishes the offender by deducting a part of his wages. The quotas is more than a mere guidepost marking a feasible or conventional measure of labor; it is the expression of the worker’s moral obligation and his social duty. Here, administrative and ideological control must join forces.”¹⁴⁰ His conception of political strategy followed from this voluntarist morality—he advocated for the republic to send focos to South America to spark a revolutionary wave.

The old Marxist-Leninists of the Popular Socialist Party, however, argued for a different approach. Joaquín Infante pointed to a bright future of Cuban development in “the sugar harvest, where greater production means more foreign exchange for the country and therefore more imported commodities.”¹⁴¹ Visiting German Trotskyist Ernest Mandel believed that this problem of economic development also touched on the path to a vibrant democracy, since the “more underdeveloped a country’s economy, the fewer able, experienced, and truly socialist technical cadres it will have, and the wiser it is, in our opinion, to reserve decision-making power over the more important investment matters to the central authorities. As the economy progresses and becomes more sophisticated and diversified, the number of able technical cadres grows, and successive moves toward decentralization become appropriate as risks are lowered.”¹⁴² Charles Bettelheim, a French Marxist economist and admirer of the People’s Republic of China, expressed skepticism about the implications of the cash crop path to development to the possibilities of this prospective construction of a democratically planned economy. He offered that the use of money in planning was necessary to regulate the balance of supply in demand as long as the organization of socialized central planning was lacking, but at the same time that “distribution takes place through the ‘wages’ category because the labor contributed by each worker is still not direct social labor. But society’s increasing control over its productive forces permits it to distribute an ever greater part of the social product according to need instead of labor, and in commodities rather than through categories.”¹⁴³ In short, voluntarist ethics could only become more prominent in society insofar as they were accompanied by the cultivation of wealth and democratic organization, and any attempt to impose industrialization without attending to these needs would result in arbitrary rule by decree rather than communism.

Fidel Castro attempted to mediate all of these positions by implementing a mixed incentive system and relying on sugar exports to and aid from the Soviet Union to finance the development of the country, explaining: “Communist conscience means that in the future the wealth we create through everybody’s effort should be equally shared by all.”¹⁴⁴ Despite his voluntarist inclinations, Che concurred that socialization faced problems in a society that had been organized for the exploitation of unfree labor and the extraction of cash crops for so many centuries and made his peace with Castro’s approach. He recognized that the Cuban Revolution was torn between the Soviets and China for the same reasons that it was torn between reform and revolution of the economy. Seeing the cash crop path of development as risking the decline of the revolution into a nationalist and commercial managerialism, which would leave the country dependent on imperialism, Che decided to fight for world revolution abroad. After giving support to the failed popular Simba rebellion against the Western-aligned Democratic Republic of Congo in 1965, he returned to South America in 1966 to attempt to initiate a revolution in Argentina from a base in Bolivia. Bolivia’s military dictatorship captured him, tortured him, and executed him, parading his body in front of the press. Against their intentions, Che became a martyr and symbol of revolutionary humanism.

Though Che’s voluntarist spirit of organization did not prevail in Cuba, its tones resonated with new changes in the management system of the People’s Republic of China. During the 1958-1962 Great Leap Forward, in which the Communist Party of China attempted the rapid industrialization of the young People’s Republic, a political campaign of developmentalism gave workers an opportunity to demand the reorganization of management on the basis of its inefficiency. The Soviet system of one-man expert management, they argued, limited the scope of production only to what could be controlled. They believed that a participatory system of management, filled with a voluntarist spirit of toil for the common good, would serve the Great Leap Forward better. In 1960, workers of the Anshan Iron and Steel Corporation drafted a constitution for the new system of management. It would require that party cadres directly participate in the labor process, that workers participate in the management of their own labor, and that the power of expert technicians be limited by both, putting politics in command. Mao endorsed the document, seeing in it a means to keep the development of the country subordinated to his party’s goal of proletarian class struggle and communist development.

In the West, the flaming passions of the collective worker had been fanned by the new course of world politics. Black autoworker Charles Denby reported to his friend Raya Dunayevskaya that, when Stalin had died in 1953, his coworkers began saying “I have just the man to fill Stalin’s shoes—my foreman.”¹⁴⁵ The democratic spirit of the times could not be limited to the goals of democratic parliamentary systems and national wealth for long. The entire system of managerial organization, and with it the mode of production, began to come into question. While delivering a public lecture in 1960, C.L.R. James declared that the “revolution, the mass proletarian revolution, the creativity of the masses, everything begins here. This is Reason today. The great philosophical problems have bogged down in the mire of [Martin] Heidegger, Existentialism, psychoanalysis, or are brutally ‘planned’ by the bureaucracies. They can be solved only in the revolutionary reason of the masses.”¹⁴⁶ Of course, this human rationality would face a challenge from the objective organization of the world according to the needs of capital. Autoworker and Black Power organizer James Boggs believed that the problems of automation, which had thrown countless workers into the army of the unemployed as a relative surplus population, could in fact be made into the question of communist self-organization if workers successfully seized democratic political power over society. In his The American Revolution (1963), Boggs wrote that people had to face “the fact that even if the workers took over the plants they would also be faced with the problem of what to do with themselves now that work is becoming socially unnecessary. They have not been able to face this fact because they have no clear idea of what people would do with themselves, what would be their human role, or how society would be organized when work is no longer at the heart of society.”¹⁴⁷

This prediction that conformity would not hold the tide of existential questions unleashed by postbellum development seemed to predict the course of the era. In the early 1960s, a wave of militant strikes demanding “more pay, less work” broke out across Italy, concentrated in the autoworker’s city of Turin.¹⁴⁸ Students and Communist Party intellectuals participated directly in supporting the strikes. Seeking to bypass the elitism and reformism of the universities, communist militant Raniero Panzieri’s journal Quaderni Rossi revived Karl Marx’s method of sociological investigation known as worker’s inquiries. This became the characteristic approach of the operaistas, militants in the Italian Communist Party. Mario Tronti articulated the basic article of faith of this tendency when he stated: “We too saw capitalist development first and the workers second. This is a mistake. Now we have to turn the problem on its head, change orientation, and start again from first principles, which means focusing on the struggle of the working class. At the level of socially developed capital, capitalist development is subordinate to working-class struggles; not only does it come after them, but it must make the political mechanism of capitalist production respond to them.”¹⁴⁹ Panzieri explained that the technique of the inquiry would serve as the basis for a new autonomous politics, and that “we need to investigate the manner in which the system of values expressed by the workers in normal circumstances changes, and detect those values that are substituted or disappear when the awareness of alternatives arises, because some of the values held by workers under normal circumstances are absent from moments of class conflict and vice versa.”¹⁵⁰

While the operaistas conceived of the workers as the absolutely active and creative class at the heart of capital, they also understood that workers were not engaged in a permanent and infinite political struggle against capital. After all, the trade unions had carried out a reconciliation of many workers with the management of factories on the basis of a common goal in national wealth and consumerism. The operaistas searched for ruptures in the consensus of developmentalism, with Tronti claiming that mass indifference to politics could in fact be interpreted as “the workers’ collective, mass refusal, expressed in passive forms,” which even without a leading party could constitute them as “a ‘class against capital’ before they have this organisation of their own, before they have this total demand for power. The working class makes its own existence. But it is, at the same time, an articulation and dissolution of capital.”¹⁵¹ Returning to the problems outlined by Lukács, James, Boggs, and Dunayevskaya, Tronti thought that class consciousness was only a final, political result. Along the way to a revolutionary theory, consciousness might stumble into the capitalist trap of “an ideological lament for the living life of the machine operative reduced to a dead object, and always followed by the mystical cure for this worker’s class consciousness, as if in the search for modern humanity’s lost soul.”¹⁵²

The inner life of an individual could only be salvaged through opposition to the reign of capital. To the youth and intelligentsia, the operaistas appealed for a strategy of proletarian-led opposition to the conformity of the consumer society. The “hot spot” method of inquiry, Panzieri explained, would be based on the acknowledgment that “an antagonistic society can never reduce one of its basic constituent elements—the working class—to homogeneity,” and that any possibility of communist political intervention depended on “the extent to which it is possible to concretely grasp the dynamics behind the working class tendency to move from conflict to antagonism and to make the dichotomy typical of capitalist society unstable. The outline of the questionnaires we employ in these circumstances deserves great attention and must be thoroughly worked out.”¹⁵³ This demanded a fundamentally different approach to that of the trade union bureaucracy, who pretended to represent the interests of the workers as a whole through their administration of them as a corporate interest group within the state.

The operaistas pursued a different philosophy of organization than representationism, which really amounted to substituting the consciousness of the leaders for the consciousness of the class. Tronti believed that these dynamics, when linked with political work, demonstrated that the “institutional levels of the workers’ movement divide everything; capitalism’s own structures unify everything, but in its own exclusive interests[...] The only way to prove [class] unity is to work to organise it. Then we shall discover that the new form of class unity is wholly implicit in the new forms of working-class struggle and that the new field of these forms is social capital at an international level.”¹⁵⁴ Every act of non-collaboration, of refusal against infinite capitalist growth as the aim of labor, of independence from bureaucrats revealed the possibility of a new revolutionary political strategy. Marxists had to recognize, from a higher level of abstraction, that the composition of a united social body was the basis for class consciousness, since “wherever a social mass of industrial labour-power has historically been able to concentrate, it is easily able to see the same collective attitudes, the same fundamental practices, a single type of political growth.”¹⁵⁵ Tronti argued that the role of the party, in giving the workers a mouthpiece to express their alienation, would be to articulate the position of labor outside of capital, transforming itself into the “organisation of alienation.” By investigating and linking up with spontaneous forms of oppositional solidarity between workers, Panzieri believed that each inquiring intervention would be able to determine “how far workers are aware of reclaiming a society of equals in the face of an unequal society, and it being a demand for equality in an unequal capitalist society, the importance of their demand for the whole of society.”¹⁵⁶

In China during the same time period, such mass democratic demands of equality and cooperative determination were being leveled against the technocratic power of experts. Those on the “expert” side of the debate argued for the Soviet one-man management system with managers selected from the most qualified technicians as a means to ensure the success of a single plan in production. The “red” side retorted that the technicians, caring only for the plan instead of mass political power and the leadership of the Communist Party, would reinforce the ranks of the capitalist roaders in the People’s Republic. Chairman Mao attempted to mediate the dispute, saying that while “Ideological and political work is the guarantee for the accomplishment of our economic and technological work; it serves the economic basis. Ideology and politics are the commanders, the soul,” that political “workers must have some knowledge of business. It may be difficult for them to have a lot, but it may not do for them to have only a little. They must have some. To have no practical knowledge is to be pseudo-red, empty-headedly political. Politics and technology must be combined together.”¹⁵⁷

Mao’s themes touched on the basic problem of enacting a socialist transition through the centralizing and disciplinary power of a party-state. The leading communists, seeking to both hold their country together in the work of industrial-agricultural development and to lead the workers’ democratic struggle of self-organization to victory, had to maintain a simultaneously mediating and independent stance. Only the masses themselves, Lenin taught, could ultimately accomplish the realization of communism; but they could only do so if they had the political education and organizational methods appropriate for this work, which the party had to provide resources for. C.L.R. James wrote that this problem could not be ignored, since “the world around us is in social and spiritual torment precisely because of the abandonment of the idea that the proletariat is the only part of society which can give the impetus to the reorganization of society.”¹⁵⁸ James looked to China and the oppressed peoples of the world to spell out Leninist problems once again, believing that the vanguard party would be superseded in the West by the transformation of abundant wealth and voluntary associations into means for the immediately democratic organization of life in workers’ councils. Tronti claimed Lenin as the leading spirit of the new era, though he believed that the new Leninism had to place its emphasis on “the inequalities of the political development of the working class; this is in order to accept the neo-Leninist principle that the chain will not break where capital is weakest but where the working class is strongest.”¹⁵⁹ Lenin was a guide for struggle, a symbol of the political victory of 1917 that workers and youth now attempted to recapture. In the struggle against bureaucracy and conformity, the words of Lenin took on new meaning: “So long as the state exists there is no freedom. When there will be freedom, there will be no state.”¹⁶⁰

In China, the struggle to overcome bureaucracy erupted into the high tide of the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1969. The first rumblings of the Revolution began when Mao offered public support to the egalitarian positions of Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan, who had criticized the rise of technocratic authority and differential wage scales as a betrayal of the voluntarism and fraternity of the People’s Liberation Army during the 1930s. The Central Committee of the Communist Party declared that calls for liberalization along Eastern Bloc lines constituted a betrayal of the dictatorship of the proletariat, empowering the bourgeoisie with the demand for “a so called relation of equality, or of peaceful coexistence between exploiting and exploited classes, or of kindness or magnanimity.”¹⁶¹ They denounced the “representatives of the bourgeoisie who have sneaked into the party, the government, the army, and various cultural, warning that unless the Cultural Revolution opposed them, “they will seize political power and turn the dictatorship of the proletariat into a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.”¹⁶² They sponsored the formation of Red Guards, who formed cadres which wandered through the cities and attempted to rally workers against the political enemies of the Mao faction and against the experts. Mao reacted with hesitance, requesting that the Red Guards orient their political activities to public squares and other avenues rather than disrupting the process of production. He reminded them to “pay attention to uniting with all who can be united with,” and that even those who had made harmful mistakes and publicly criticized should be offered “a way out of their difficulties by giving them work to do, and enabling them to correct their mistakes and become new men.”¹⁶³ Drawing on the Soviet concept of reform through labor, which guided the Chinese criminal justice system, this became the new impetus for the voluntary and coerced exodus of young intellectual professionals to the countryside in the Sent Down Youth campaign.

As the Cultural Revolution caused disruption within the normal operation of technocratic development, many in the Communist Party began to express their trepidations. They attempted to send in cadres of work teams to manage the disorder in the schools and professional settings. Chairman Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping attempted to repress the more chiliastic elements of the Revolution by these means, seeking to reorient it towards a campaign of reinforcing the party’s command over the economy. Mao replied with indignation, declaring that they had “enforced a bourgeois dictatorship and struck down the surging movement of the great cultural revolution of the proletariat.”¹⁶⁴ He issued a new big character poster slogan to guide the Revolution: “Bombard the Headquarters!” Red Guards, workers, and peasants all took the opportunity to attack not only Mao’s factional enemies, but their managers. The factional struggle at the top level, conducted in an alliance with the “red” side against the “expert” side of Chinese society, spilled over into a social revolution.

The revolt against technocracy began to carry out a reorganization of work and politics. The People’s Communes, organs of industrialization during the Great Leap Forward, found new life in the function of political self-governance. In early 1967, the Cultural Revolution Group of Shanghai rebelled against the city leadership for their attempt to restore law and order and by February established the Shanghai People’s Commune. The Commune was to be organized along the lines of the Paris Commune, but the factions of the revolutionaries disagreed about how broadly reaching its implications would be. Some saw it as only a means to enact the Mao faction’s policies in China, while others sought to transform the whole People’s Republic into a communal system based on the self-determination of workers’ councils and People’s Communes.¹⁶⁵ Mao began to show hesitancy, asking: “If everything were changed into a commune, then what about the party? Where would we place the party? Among commune committee members are both party members and non-party members. Where would we place the party committee? There must be a party somehow! There must be a nucleus, no matter what we call it.”¹⁶⁶ The plans for direct democracy were cast aside, and the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee replaced the People’s Commune. The Cultural Revolution would be organized along factional lines for the future, while the ultraleft critics of the rule of experts were pushed to the margins.

In the West, student unionists, Civil Rights organizers, youthful workers, and the structurally unemployed sparked into a New Left. Looking to the revolutions abroad, they adopted an internationalist stance against the U.S.-led slaughter in Vietnam. From Che, they adopted a slogan fit for their strategy of multiple fronts against the capitalist system: “How close we could look into a bright future should two, three or many Vietnams flourish throughout the world with their share of deaths and their immense tragedies, their everyday heroism and their repeated blows against imperialism, impelled to disperse its forces under the sudden attack and the increasing hatred of all peoples of the world!”¹⁶⁷ In the atmosphere of this multiplicity, the New Left recovered alternative theoretical avenues that had been obscure during the Stalin era. They returned to the works of Georg Lukács, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Raya Dunayevskaya, and C.L.R. James in attempts to reclaim Marxism for the new freedom struggle. While the old Marxism had its subject in the collective worker, and the Popular Front placed this subject as the face of a national-democratic “people,” the New Left unleashed a deluge of new political subjects: the youth, Black people, women, the Indigenous, the gay movement…

While they expressed their sympathies for the revolutions in China, Vietnam, and elsewhere, the New Left attempted to make an independent stance from the predominance of Cold War bloc politics in the official parties. From the existentialist critique of conformity and the rights revolutions won by the Civil Rights movement, they adopted a democratic stance which elevated human rights and justice above all national states. They were dissidents from all systems, declaring that their allegiance lay with neither Washington nor Moscow.

Though they attempted to supersede bloc politics, differences between political systems made their impact on the varieties of the New Left. Even neighboring peoples could host starkly different New Lefts. In the United States, racism was central to the formation of class distinctions, with Black people constituting a segregated underclass of sharecroppers in the deep South and a class of disposable workers and criminalized unemployed in the ghettos of the cities. As youth militants of the Civil Rights movement turned to Marxism and sought to confront the one-dimensional society of consumerism, they focused their efforts on this racial divide. The 1962 Port Huron Statement offered the perspective of white students from middle class professional families who organized the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS): “Loneliness, estrangement, isolation describe the vast distance between man and man today. These dominant tendencies cannot be overcome by better personnel management, nor by improved gadgets, but only when a love of man overcomes the idolatrous worship of things by man.”¹⁶⁸ These white student activists made up the most visible presence of the New Left on college campuses, drawing the ire from the older generations of their own class. In 1970, Ohio national guardsmen fired on such protestors, killing four and injuring nine others.

Black militants drew on a different approach than a cultural revolution against consumerism. They sought to address the everyday brutality of white supremacy, personified in the police, and demand jobs and resources for their abandoned communities. The Black Panther Party (BPP), which began in 1966 as a movement of Black college students from working class backgrounds and expanded into a general movement of the ghettoes, articulated a goal of racial autonomy: “Black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.”¹⁶⁹ The Panthers quickly drew the attention of the FBI, who worked to take advantage of fractures in the organization and destroy it. In the case of Chicago’s Fred Hampton and others, Panthers were outright assassinated by state agents—this did not become nearly as much of a scandal as the Kent State shooting, because they were criminalized Black people. Imprisoned Panther George Jackson, who was assassinated during the Attica Rebellion in 1971, wrote that the rise of U.S. monopoly capitalism in the Reconstruction era had ensured that masses of people accepted their enslavement in the name of self-preservation, “a result of the sense of dread and anxiety which is the lot of all men under capitalist rule.”¹⁷⁰ Jackson called for an uncompromising revolt against this decadent existence, which he identified with fascism in its manifestations of a lawless police-prison apparatus directed against the ghettos. James Boggs conditioned this call by arguing that the state would succeed at isolating and exterminating the revolutionary movement unless “masses of people not only glimpse the desirability of serious improvement in their condition, but can see the force and power able to bring this about.”¹⁷¹ Boggs and other Black power militants looked to the successes of revolutions in China and other non-Western countries to inspire the oppressed people of the U.S. with a sense that they had this power.

Both Black and white New Leftists drew on the ideas of the Third World revolutions to oppose the power structures of the West. They praised the revolutionaries of Vietnam, China, Cuba, and Algeria as models for revolutionary struggle. As the public activities of the New Left faced backlash and repression, it seemed reasonable to many to draw from the guerrilla methods of these revolutions to adapt. By the mid 1970s, both Black and white New Left militants formed underground urban guerrillas to adapt to declining momentum and growing repression. Organizations like the Black Liberation Army would continue to be active into the early 1980s, but by then the movement they had sprung from had declined into civic movements, electoralism, and resigned indifference.

In Mexico, different conditions influenced the rise of a different New Left. Mexico was ruled by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional [Institutional Revolutionary Party] (PRI) in a one-party dictatorship, which by the late 1960s had begun to abandon the post-Mexican Revolutionary project of land reform, labor empowerment, and the nationalization of industries in favor of making naked bureaucratic management of society an end in itself. When Mexico City was to host the Olympics in October of 1968, student militants decided to take the opportunity to criticize their government in front of the world and held massive demonstrations in Tlatelolco. On October 2, 1968, snipers opened fire on the students. Claiming that the students had fired on them, the government massacred the protestors and cracked down on all public expressions of discontent to create the appearance of tranquility for the Olympic ceremonies. Student militants went underground, many leaving the cities for the countryside, and joined disillusioned peasants to participate in the struggles of guerrillas like the Partido de los Pobres [Party of the Poor] of Guerrero. While both U.S. and Mexican students drew on a language of Third Worldism, it meant something very different for theory and practice in each country.

In France, the New Left’s character was informed by the prominent position of institutional Marxism. The New Left often antagonized the French Communist Party and drew on the critiques of DiaMat and socialist humanism made by academics like Henri Lefebvre and Louis Althusser to attempt to work out a new concept of communist politics. The intellectual and artist organization known as the Situationist International, founded in 1957, looked to the revival of the council-form in the Algerian Revolution as the sign of the times. Mustapha Khayati, a Tunisian revolutionary and Situationist, wrote that the rise and decline of autogestion proved that “self-management, by the simple fact that it exists, threatens the society’s entire hierarchical organization. It must destroy all external control because all the external forces of control will never make peace with it as a living reality, but at most only with its name, with its embalmed corpse.”¹⁷² Situationist theorist Guy Debord, writing in 1967’s Society of the Spectacle, identified these external forces of control as “spectacle,” in which whatever “once was directly lived has become mere representation,” “a social relationship between people that is mediated by images,” a relationship which “proclaims the predominance of appearances and asserts that all human life, which is to say all social life, is mere appearance.”¹⁷³

Reviving the problematic of Georg Lukács’ youthful council communism, Debord and other Situationists criticized capitalist society as elevating society’s self-representation, which emerged through the fracture of the original organic unity of human society into classes, into reality itself. While spectacular power rendered people passive observers of representations, “linked only by a one-way relationship to the very center that maintains their isolation from one another,” the council-form represented “the needs of dialogue invested with executive power.”¹⁷⁴ The Situationists forcibly polemicized against Communist, social democratic, and liberal student activists for their careerist hopes of becoming technocratic managers. They argued that “to tolerate alienation in any one domain of social life means acquiescing in the inevitability of all forms of reification.”¹⁷⁵ Like Moses Hess and the other Young Hegelians, they treated capitalist society as the imposition of alien, external powers into human freedom. In communist society, where everything would be transparent to everyone as part of the victory of consciousness over unconsciousness, Hess and the Situationists believed that each “can live and act according to his nature and express his essence unhindered.”¹⁷⁶

The Situationists and others in the French New Left held that students would only become truly revolutionary by joining with workers. In May of 1968, the coincidence of student occupations at the Sorbonne against the police and workers’ general strikes seemed to create an opportunity for this alliance. Workers and students joined in dialogue as they occupied universities and factories. However, while the Situationists believed that it was obvious that the time to form councils was now, and spread leaflets across Paris to that effect, not everyone was there with them. Workers were used to being represented by the Communist-aligned General Confederation of Labor, and when the Communist leadership made peace with General Charles de Gaulle to exact concessions and participate in a new governing coalition, they were unsure what to do. Students, for their part, did not understand the daily lives of the workers very well, and did not always succeed at linking their slogans with the day-to-day concerns of union workers. In short, they lacked a common language and common project. May 1968 ended with a series of labor and academic reforms, but not the social revolution that the Situationists had hoped for.¹⁷⁷

The Politics of Desire

One element of May 1968 which had a wider theoretical appeal and influence in the transformation of everyday life was the notion of a Sexual Revolution. The students returned to the works of psychoanalytic Marxist Wilhelm Reich to critique the stuffy conformity and conservatism of the French middle class. Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933) served as the textbook for the Sexual Revolution. Turning traditional theories of class rule as the one-sided repression of majority by a minority inside out, Reich believed that “there is no greater fear than the fear of the creation of general freedom,” if freedom is understood as “the responsibility of each individual to shape personal, occupational, and social existence in a rational way.”¹⁷⁸ Rather than fascism being an aberration, a contingent product of a conspiracy to seize absolute power during a crisis, Reich believed that fascism drew on “a human structure that has been shaped by thousands of years of mechanistic civilization and is expressed in social helplessness and an intense desire for a führer.”¹⁷⁹ The sexual repression of the nuclear family, which confined enjoyment to the use of sexualized genitalia for reproduction, compelled the child into “a strong identification with the father, which forms the basis of the emotional identification with every kind of authority.”¹⁸⁰ This identification with the father as the head of the family meant that, as people grew into a capitalist world where each is interchangeable with the other in a competition of all ith all, the “more helpless the ‘mass-individual’ has become, owing to his upbringing, the more pronounced is his identification with the führer, and the more the childish need for protection is disguised in the form of a feeling at one with the führer.”¹⁸¹

Rather than secondary to the fascist offensive against proletarian revolution, this identification was at the very heart of mass enthusiasm for fascism and existed even in ‘democratic’ consumer societies. Each person’s “identification with authority, firm, state, nation, etc., which can be formulated ‘I am the state, the authority, the firm, the nation,’ constitutes a psychic reality and is one of the best illustrations of an ideology that has become a material force.”¹⁸² Ideology constitutes people as subjects by beckoning them to identify with institutions more powerful than them. Though Reich still thought of this as an imposition on the natural polymorphous freedom and creativity of the human being, he recognized that fascism drew on the “mentality of the ‘little man,’ who is enslaved and craves authority and is at the same time rebellious.”¹⁸³ Dictators do not come from outside of society, but do “nothing more than bring already existing ideas of the state to a head. He had merely to seize upon this idea and to exclude all nonrelated ideas to achieve power.”¹⁸⁴ Ideological conformity and complacency with the course of society prepare the way for dictatorship.

Democracy alone would not prevent dictatorship. Reich pointed to a bigger problem than classical fascism alone: “Open confession of dictatorship is far less dangerous than sham democracy. One can defend oneself against the former; the latter is like a creeper attached to the body of a drowning man.”¹⁸⁵ A society made up of bored, indifferent squares constitutes a political body which cannot be authentically democratic. The basic problem of fascism, the flight from freedom, is present even in the attitudes of uninteresting and mass-produced personalities: “To be nonpolitical is not, as one might suppose, evidence of a passive psychic condition, but of a highly active attitude, a defense against the awareness of social responsibility.”¹⁸⁶ Just as every forgetting can be the product of an active forgetfulness, every nonpolitical stance can be the product of an active nonpoliticalness. While Tronti and the operaistas had seen militant opposition in this nonpolitical stance among workers, Reich saw it as a product of resignation and defection to the powerful under conditions of impotence. Both reframed the original problematic of revolutionary consciousness by focusing on the problems of class struggle as the composition of class factions and the decomposition of class factions as the creation of impotent “little men” who could make up the mass base of fascism.

Wilhelm Reich’s theories of Sexual Revolution attempted to address this problem with a great revolt of creativity and independence against repression and conformity. Reich, echoing Lukács, believed that the conscious proletarian internationalist “feels himself to be a leader, not on the basis of his identification with the führer, but on the basis of his consciousness of performing work that is vitally necessary for society’s existence.”¹⁸⁷ The difficulty of reproducing proletarian families with the income of a male breadwinner would create conditions for a revolution in the home in working class households before middle class households. Since the nuclear family reduced women into the reproducers of property lineages among the upper class and toiling hands among the oppressed classes, sexual awakening of “women, affirmed and recognized as such, would mean the complete collapse of the authoritarian ideology.”¹⁸⁸ A democratic and revolutionary alliance of workers, women, and youth, each distinctive subjects but all aligned as people who the system attempts to subordinate to secure its reproduction, could destroy the authoritarian system and transform society on a freely associated and life-affirming basis.

As radicals of the feminist movement arose from conformist and liberal organizations like the National Organization of Women (NOW) to pursue their own path, they attempted to make good on the affirmation of themselves as sexual beings. Radical feminist organizers in Redstockings and other sects set their sights against the domestic world of the housewife as a whole rather than attempting to reform it. For organizing among women, they drew from the consciousness-raising concepts and methods which had once been advocated by Lukács and others for the proletariat. Like Lukács, they believed that society had rendered people into mere things, and that only by bringing them into common struggle, united organizations and shared conversations could they realize that their objective conditions of dehumanization could in fact be politicized into a strategy of liberation.

Shulamith Firestone, a radical feminist who had made a name for herself fighting for abortion rights and against the objectification of women, published The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970). Firestone adapted the Faustian ambitions of Marxism for feminism, arguing that the technological development of artificial reproduction of human beings and domestic labor-saving technologies would abolish the basis for women’s oppression in the exploitation of their wombs and domestic labor. The demands of women for freedom from the drudgery imposed on them by nature and irrational social organization would serve as a powerful ferment for socialist revolution. Firestone imagined that the abolition of all scarcity through the total industrialization of life, the victory of unlimited consciousness over the limited body, would realize a world where “all relationships would be based on love alone, uncorrupted by objective dependencies and the resulting class inequalities.”¹⁸⁹

As the emergent social movements returned to the Faustian imperative of a full human personality from new angles, they reconsidered the stances of their inspirations. They did not find a theory ready-made from the older prophets of the Sexual Revolution. Wilhelm Reich did not include all in the democratic coalition that the rise of feminism finally seemed to be transforming into reality. He believed that homosexuality was an unnatural product of repression, with the “distorted and diverted homosexual and sadistic feelings” and “asceticism” cultivated by the disciplinary culture of German society serving as the emotional basis for the fraternity of young men in the Nazi Party.¹⁹⁰ Reich, like the Soviets, could not imagine a homosexuality which was not premised on misogyny and aristocratic pederasty. Freudians and Marxists alike looked on gay men as narcissists in love with themselves or masochists who loved to be degraded. Herbert Marcuse, on the other hand, believed that the self-love of Narcissus was “connected with oneness with the universe,” his life “that of beauty, and his existence is contemplation,” and that this could productively be linked up with the gay heroic singer Orpheus, whose “language is song, and his work is play.”¹⁹¹ Marcuse welcomed homosexuality as another wing of the life-affirming polymorphous Great Refusal of the repressive society. Gays, in turn, greeted Marcuse as their ally and inspiration.

The rise of a mass gay movement in the West during the 1970s proved that queer desire could be the basis for radical critique and revolutionary opposition. After the Stonewall Riots in 1969, destitute transgender women like Sylvia Rivera served as the (often disavowed) vanguard of a new social movement against marginalization and discrimination. Gay Liberation Fronts (GLF) formed in the U.S., Canada, U.K., and Australia almost concurrently to each other. The early theorists of this movement stressed the universality of homosexuality, the basic bisexuality or androgyny of the human being, and the centrality of sexual enjoyment in any cultural affirmation of life against death. SDS and GLF member Carl Wittman published The Gay Manifesto in 1970, arguing that “Nature leaves undefined the object of sexual desire. The gender of that object is imposed socially[...] marriage is a contract which smothers both people, denies needs, and places impossible demands on both people[...] We have to define for ourselves a new pluralistic, role-free social structure for ourselves.”¹⁹² In 1971, Australian gay liberation theorist Dennis Altman wrote that emancipation would recover the “polymorphous whole” of a total human personality, involving “a breakdown oof the barriers between male and female homosexuals, and between gays and straights. Masculinity and femininity would cease to be sharply differentiated categories, and one would expect an end to the homosexual parodies of role playing in the cult of leather and drag. The nuclear family would come to be seen as only one form of possible social organization, not as the norm from which everything seems a deviation. This would mean an end not only to the oppression of gays, but major changes inn general consciousness.”¹⁹³

As the gay movement established itself on the ultraleft of the New Left, critiquing civilization at its very basis and calling for a total transformation, its theorists began to reflect on the deeper significance of the marginalization of ‘out’ gay people to the ghettos of society. The obsession with ‘curing’ homosexuality at the intellectual higher echelons of society reflected many of the same anxieties as the straight men who brutalized gay people in the streets. In France, members of the radical feminist wing of the gay movement—the Front Homosexuel d’Action Révolutionnaire [Homosexual Front for Revolutionary Action] (FHAR), which united gay men and lesbians—initiated a critique of misogyny as a whole as the sublimation of homosociality. Parisian philosopher Guy Hocquenghem, who had been expelled from the Communist Party for his homosexuality, wrote in Homosexual Desire (1972) that “we find the greatest charge of latent homosexuality in those social machines which are particularly anti-homosexual—the army, the school, the church, sport, etc. At the collective level, this sublimation is a means of transforming desire into the desire to repress.”¹⁹⁴ The conspiracy of men against women and of straight men against gay men obscures the fact that what holds these men together is their desire for each other. Rather than desire already being divided up into neat categories of orientations and identities, the fundamental androgyny or bisexuality of desire as a cosmic force is something like the productive force of all social organization. To say that each sees themselves in the other is the same as to say that a latent homosexuality dwells within all.

This perspective, of course, scandalized the official Communists. They looked on Hocquenghem and others as perverts who looked to corrupt society—of course, it did not exactly help that the early gay liberation movement adopted many of the polymorphous blind spots of the Sexual Revolution as a whole and in some cases endorsed pederasty as a technique of revolt against the nuclear family. In 1973, an anonymous member of the FHAR made their attack on the official left in an essay titled The Screwball Asses. The author focused their critique on a problem which manifested throughout Western civilization, the left as a whole, and especially in gay organizations: “the festivity of bodies transforms speech into a servant of the body, nothing else[...] we only speak of sex in front of people with whom it does not take place or who likewise admit to having no desire for us. The dichotomy between making love and speaking love does not come from me. On the contrary, I abhor it.”¹⁹⁵

Psychoanalysis, which revealed the homosocial desire which binds social association, also revealed that “homosexual libido, in which everyone participates, must be sublimated by sentiments, friendship and socioeconomic activity.”¹⁹⁶ Organizational structures are made possible by the segregation of desire to reproductive heterosexuality and ghettoized homosexuality. Gay people embraced their ghettos in their fantasies, loving to subvert the norms of heterosexual public life, living “as if homosexual desire could only be inscribed where repression has inscribed it.”¹⁹⁷ Rather than heterosexuality being primary, it is a response to heterosexual norms, while heterosexual norms repress the homosexual desire of each member of the couple even to the point of their hating each other and desiring nothing more than homosocial bonds as an outlet from the couple. The left, on the other hand, either represses all talk of sexuality or confines public behavior only to talk of it while maintaining the segregation of sex: “All struggles for the return of the body have been so contaminated by the non-body that when they speak of the body they only accentuate its exile. We forget that the content of speech is only the container of our universe.”¹⁹⁸ Theoretical talk represents sexuality while repressing it in order to make speech a material for organizational unity, while blind caprice reigns in sexuality. At the same time that desire “has become God” through the Sexual Revolution, it “has remained blind and mechanical, true to its construction by the capitalist apparatus and family history.”¹⁹⁹

The author of The Screwball Asses reserved scandalizing criticisms for both the ‘prudish’ left and the sexually ‘liberated.’ Western civilization has over thousands of years drawn a sharp conceptual and organizational dichotomy between speech and the body, consciousness and unconsciousness. Those who seek power through speech, public and shared consciousness, must refuse desire for the body as brute sensuousness, and “so speech bodies refuse to make love to other speech bodies, speech against speech in the tumble of bodies, for they are afraid of abdicating their power of speech in the fray.”²⁰⁰ Leftists attempt to elevate consciousness above personal desire, which they render private, but to do so they become comically cruel to each other, enforcing strict expectations of behavior, establishing “a reciprocal mechanism of removal, attorney’s work through which the revolution is supposed to grant us power of attorney and to speak for each of us. The revolution remains, but we are no longer there.”²⁰¹ And yet, loveless and sadistic polemics which pose phantom principle against phantom principle are impotent to realize their own aims of organizational centralization and the fullness of life. Allowed free reign, “Leftism dries up whatever it touches.”²⁰²

Leftists are not personally satisfied by their organizations, which demand total self-sacrifice into a single theoretical monologue and attempt to realize this through the mutual destruction of sects. They run “back to those who only possess the power of the body and whose body they can mark by speech, or by their muted speech, or whose phallus can interrupt their own speech.”²⁰³ They want bodies which are strictly external objects, to possess an Other as a purely corporeal existence. Fleeing from the common mind, which is such a bore, desire must “construct its sexual objects within another race, class, culture, intellectual framework, objects that are, quite simply, of another age. These sexual objects must not correspond to them in thought, and it would be most difficult to share a life with them.”²⁰⁴ While the fraternity of the organization attempts to force all comrades into a single speech body by denying their corporeal individuality, the so-called Sexual Revolution seeks exoticized Others to blindly exploit.

Leftists seek out foreigners, brown people, youth as mere instruments of capricious pleasure, excluding them from political dialogue and cooperation. They act out violent fantasies on these mute bodies, even to the point of coercing and raping them. They thus prove that “there is nothing more racist than desire as it has been transmitted to us, and there is nothing more discriminatory than the absolute power of desire as it continues to tunnel along single-mindedly.”²⁰⁵ Against the ‘revolutionary’ pederasty of many Sexual Revolutionaries, the author wondered whether “pederasty hides the worst, most insidious cult of the phallus behind its revolt.”²⁰⁶ Narcissism is the reigning force in sexuality through the imperialism of the desiring self, and it is the regulative ideal of politics through the sectarian cruelty of organization.

Having challenged the fundamental assumptions of the Sexual Revolution, the author attempted to gesture in the direction of a new path. They looked to what the Sexual Revolutionaries prohibited above all: passionate love and grinning death, both of which “point to the same desire to lose oneself.”²⁰⁷ The dissolution of narcissism could only be enacted by elevating living dangerously above the conservative ethic of self-preservation and self-extension. The fullness of life needs to discover overwhelming joy in embracing love and risking death. Love is “the desire to desire,” death the unspeakable which neither bourgeoisie nor revolutionaries are brave enough to speak about.²⁰⁸ Society represses “the polyvocity of desire” in the name of monovocal organization while reducing bodies into “sexual organs”—in short, it reduces everything to self-preservation.²⁰⁹ The very same applies to conformists as to rebels, to heterosexuals as to homosexuals, to the cisgender as to the transgender. If we “live our corporality rather than speak our sexuality,” refusing to repress the feeling of love and the mortal fate of death, we could pursue a different utopia than infinite Faustian expansion.²¹⁰ The author imagined, as a new regulative ideal, “a utopia in which our heterosexuality would no longer be molar or social, our homosexuality no longer personal and marginal, our transexuality no longer elementary and secret, since the three would connect in the same bodily place and be so melded together that we would no longer need several words to distinguish them.”²¹¹ The author’s vision, however, would be realized against their hopes. In feminism and the gay movement, two mutually contradictory visions of utopia surfaced which continue to clash even today.

While Firestone and others had developed a framework for feminism from the ethics of Faustian Marxism, an eco-feminism emerged in the 1970s which called on women to abandon Faust rather than outdo him. Françoise d’Eaubonne, a member of FHAR, published a text advocating such an approach as Feminism or Death (1974). She identified the subject of woman not as a future Faust, but as the nature dominated by Faust: “This flesh for rape, this object that resembles a being, this zombie, this negativity, this hole: that’s me. We are not born as such; we become it.”²¹² Each woman responds to this objectification differently, but responds nevertheless. D’Eaubonne pointed to the conservative turn of the Sexual Revolution and free love the moment that consumer industries began to adapt to their needs with the legalization of pornography and, in some places, of prostitution. This prioritization of enjoyable objects over free relationships proved “that the totalitarian liberation of Eros” could recuperate any Sexual Revolution which failed to address the basic problem of the objectification of women and the domination of nature.²¹³ If the sexual alone was liberated, capitalism and class society would remain, and so one must “liberate the body altogether” and realize “the free disposition of the body—not only of the sexual organs” which “puts the entire society into question” by refusing the commodification of life.²¹⁴ Women had already touched on this insight in their struggle for the right to abortions, to choose to enter relationships with women or with no one at all, and for society to acknowledge its dependency on them by remunerating their domestic toil. D’Eaubonne argued that the revolutionary subject would therefore have to be woman, as the human personification of denied and repressed nature.

From northern Italy, a crossdresser and militant of the Fronte Unitario Omosessuale Rivoluzionario Italiano [Italia Revolutionary Homosexual United Group] (FUORI) worked to elaborate the positions of the gay movement in a different direction. Mario Mieli’s Towards a Gay Communism (1977) attempted a fundamental critique of capitalism, the family, and gender on the basis of the universal androgyny of all. Radicalizing the gay liberation movement’s theory of the polymorphous universality of homosexual desire, Mieli wrote that “we are all, deep down, transsexuals, we have all been transsexual infants, and we have been forced to identify with a specific monosexual role, masculine or feminine.”²¹⁵ Mieli believed that those who crossed the hard lines of desire and identity like himself, acting out their own “hermaphrodism” and embracing the presence of the ‘other’ sex in themselves, revealed “the transsexuality (bisexuality) that is latent in everyone.”²¹⁶

Compulsory sexual morality, however, enforced the separation of men and women, straights and gays, mind and body, consciousness and unconsciousness. To attempt to merely collapse all into an undifferentiated, polymorphous Sexual Revolution would be to forget that “in this night, not all cows are gay.”²¹⁷ It would take a long effort of cultural revolution to break down the barriers. Mieli thought that queer people would play the part of beckoning the world to greater and higher ambitions for life, since after all, “Faust would not be Faust without the devil.”²¹⁸ Mieli called for a critique of gay men’s part in shaping women into the image of men’s patriarchal desires in the fashion industry at the same time that he called for a critique of the part played by mothers in repressively raising children into heterosexual girls and boys. He called for an affirmation of gay ‘narcissism’ as rather a prefiguration of communist intersubjectivity in its victory over selfish atomization, and an affirmation of feminist ‘anti-sociality’ in the name of the liberation of society from the masculine denial of the desiring body. Mieli believed that the outcome of this long revolutionary struggle would be the realization of the old Faustian hope of a united human species-collective, no longer split “between Ego and non-Ego, between self and others, between body and intellect, between word and deed.”²¹⁹

Both of these visions, which departed in anti-Faustian and Faustian directions, reflect the limitations of their very own factions. D’Eaubonne’s approach often reflected the leveling and technocratic beliefs of the sectarian left. She praised the moral values of “self-denial, the sense of sacrifice, the gift of love, the thirst for devotion,” which in the micro-sects denounced by the author of The Screwball Asses often looks more like the sadistic moral discipline of all on all in the name of the sect’s self-preservation.²²⁰ She conflated the oppression of white women with the racial domination of Black people, a narcissistic error made by many white feminists in her time. Mieli, on the other hand, endorsed a form of outward-facing subversion characteristic of many in the early gay movement which the author of The Screwball Asses identified with Faustian imperialism. Mieli declared: “We revolutionary queers see in the child not so much Oedipus, or the future Oedipus, as the potentially free human being. We do indeed love children. We are able to desire them erotically, in response to their own erotic wishes, and we can openly and with open arms grasp the rush of sensuality that they pour out and make love with them.”²²¹

Many radical feminists today conflate such pedophilic sentiments with gay men and transgender women. Yet even Shulamith Firestone—who believed that sex distinctions were fundamental to nature, unlike Mieli—set out from Faustian ethics and ended up advocating pedophilia as a free form of love which “might become lifelong attachments in which the individuals concerned mutually agreed to stay together, perhaps to form some kind of non-reproductive unit.”²²² While d’Eaubonne conflated moral commitment with emancipation, a perspective which would be undermined by the rise of women in the New Right, Mieli and Firestone conflated unlimited polymorphousness with love, as if the enjoyment of children as objects of pleasure was not completely characteristic of the all-devouring consumer society. One side looked inward, the other looked outward, and both looked past the autonomy of the Other.

How to think of revolutionary politics beyond disciplinary moralism and instrumentalizing consumerism? In spite of his homophobia, we could learn from Reich’s advice that, insofar as sexual problems directly made their presence felt in radical youth politics, that they could organize “large-scale public debates between the young people and parents in which the young people, who dare not protest when they are alone at home or who fritter away their energies in futile squabbles with their parents, could bring out their problems and grievances in public at meetings controlled by the mass of youth and parents. We can be sure (for this has already been proved in practice) that parents will not be able to maintain for long in public the point of view they represent at home. And so the young people will come out victorious and new forces will be released for the youth organizations.”²²³ This approach would place dialogue at the center of politics. It would stage an emotional confrontation touching on the totality of social forces and institutions rather than being the (repressively) homogeneous assertion of a single love and single will which would empower adults over youths rather than develop an autonomous youth wing of revolutionary struggle. Reich’s call rings truer to the struggles of youth against the conformity of institutions and the emptiness of consumerism. Instead of the practice of language and the body as opposed, we should think of language as where we simultaneously melt into each other in the impersonal theoretical-conceptual interpretation of the world and individuate ourselves before each other through the singular gesture and rhythm which marks them as distinctly our words.

In the 1970s, however, such debates over orientation had become impotent with the loss of revolutionary momentum. Even in 1973, The Screwball Asses lamented that dialogue had become impossible—people heard what they wanted to hear, excluded what they did not want to hear, or did not listen to anything challenging at all. The author believed that this was because “the gears of Leftism have fallen in ruins. And yet the machine keeps running, like a record stuck on the same groove. Like a ghost. Like a blind dog taking himself for a guide dog.”²²⁴ The revolutionary wave against technocracy had fallen into its own miniature technocracies of sect leaders desperately attempting to hold on to their members. The prominent media spectacle of the 1977 Jonestown Massacre, in which the leaders of a leftist church led its members in a mass murder-suicide, seemed to mark the end of the New Left in the humiliating fate of self-destruction. The apparent unity of the many against the few in a common cause fell apart as that unity itself took on a suicidal appearance.

Differences of sentiment became differences of path, even a basis for each to lock arms with former enemies and engage former allies in a struggle to the death. In 1972, Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai met with Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger to initiate an alliance against the Soviet Union. In 1979, Vietnam, which advocated the international rule of law and peaceful coexistence, was invaded by China, which supported a global civil war. The two incidents broke the truisms of campus Third Worldism. Meanwhile, feminism challenged the hedonistic norms of New Left movement culture at the same time that it was dissolving into drug addiction and gangsterism. The FBI repression of the Black Panthers gave way to the flood of CIA-trafficked heroin and crack into Black neighborhoods. The AIDS crisis destroyed the polymorphous utopianism of cruising and decimated gay communities. Amidst it all, a neoliberal and populist New Right was rising to power by adopting the rhetoric of the New Left against institutional conformity and state bureaucracy to privatize the public sphere and dismantle the welfare state, reinforcing the prejudices of the nuclear family and the narcissism of the consumer economy. The New Left had to adapt to a world that had left it behind—some destroyed themselves out of a refusal to do so, while others made their peace with the boring conformity of institutions.

Long March Through the Institutions

The New Left did not throw their hands up in defeat all at once, but slowly dissolved their mass assemblies and streamed into the institutions of the bureaucracy, the mass media, the army, academia, and even high-tech corporations. In 1967, speaking of the German New Left’s turn to extra-parliamentary opposition, student militant Rudi Dutschke articulated the strategic significance as “the long march through the institutions.”²²⁵ Just as Gramsci had taught that the “war of position” could take an entire organizational effort, these militants believed that they would have to form a united oppositional faction across the entire public sphere.

This strategy of cultural revolution meant confronting the norms of the consumer society. The light industries had adapted to 1968 through flexible production, while the state opened up more space for them to expand into by de-regulating parts of the economy and lightening the burden of censorship against previously criminalized industries like pornography. This allowed for a wide proliferation of wide varieties of products and sub-products to provide consumers with a broad means of affirming their polymorphous sense of themselves by way of ready-made consumer objects. Communist theorists Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge believed that this made an attack against advertising, the industry of Ideology par excellence, central to socialist strategy. Instead of rejecting the public sphere, which had been absorbed in advertising, they advocated for a strategy of a proletarian counter-public sphere, which would confront the consumer society “idea against idea, product against product, production sector against production sector.”²²⁶ They and other radicals set to work attempting to determine the outlines of an independent organization of artists and the production of revolutionary aesthetics in the high-tech mediums of radio, television, and eventually, the internet.

In the People’s Republic of China, the Cultural Revolution was making its last gasps after failing to destroy the bureaucratic state and reorganize society from the ground up. The final expressions of the Cultural Revolution drew on the passions of the collective worker, which now found expression in a kind of left-communist Stalinism. As Mao backed the PLA’s efforts to restore law and order, the Gang of Four attempted to maintain the Revolution by force of partisan factional struggle. In the years leading up to his death in 1976, Mao had become depressed, believing that his revolution had been defeated. He had reduced his hopes to preserving the independence of the People’s Republic. The Shanghai ultra-left faction of the Communist Party still held onto the notion of a class struggle within the party-state. They argued that commodity production was the social basis for an inner-party bourgeoisie, pointing to the fact that the capitalist roaders “always advocated the theory of the extinction of class struggle and the theory of productive forces.”²²⁷ The sectarian style of the Gang of Four, however, failed to secure hegemony over the state, and after the death of Zhou Enlai, the rest of the party leadership moved against them and threw the whole weight of the state against them.

As Deng Xiaoping—the target of these ultraleftists—ascended to party executive power with the assistance of Mao, he began to establish a middle class social basis through the introduction of an internal market in the country and the privatization of People’s Communes.²²⁸ After 1978, Deng and his allies enacted the Reform and Opening Up policy, ending the pursuit of autarky and allowing foreign capitalists to trade within the country while dismantling the system pursuing welfare and full employment known as the Iron Rice Bowl.²²⁹ Deng wrote that “to take advantage of the superiority of socialism means to substantially develop the productive forces and gradually improve the people’s material and cultural life,” redefining democracy as participation in the party-state rather than the sectarian self-organizing struggle of the Cultural Revolution.²³⁰ The Chinese New Left had little left to do but leave the country or join academia. Institutions were more of a refuge for them than a site of struggle. The era of ultraleft mass revolt had ended in China. Future uprisings in China drew their ideological language from liberal intellectuals—from the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests to the 2022 White Paper movement.

In the West, some looked on the relationship between the left and the institutions with skepticism. Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan doubted whether the New Left constituted a real opposition, suspecting that they actually desired recognition from the paternal authorities of the society that they revolted against. Lacan believed that “the recognition of desire is bound up with the desire for recognition,” that the “satisfaction of human desire is possible only when mediated by the desire and the labour of the other,” and that it was only a linguistic mirage that “the subject appears fundamentally in the position of being determinant or instrumental of action”²³¹ Rather than seeking to recover an authentic self behind the illusion of repression, the New Left was prolonging the Ideological doctrine of “the organism’s pseudo-totality” by pointing to arbitrary social determinations like masculinity, femininity, homosexuality etc., and seeing in these the personal identity of a coherent Subject or self.²³²

The constitution of any subject, an individuated being to which individuated responsibility can be attributed, is Ideological. It makes an immediate, certain truth out of a mediated, uncertain existence. In its efforts for recognition from society as really women, gays, youths, etc., a subject discovers a “fundamental alienation that made him construct [his being] like another, and which has always destined it to be taken from him by another.”²³³ The real, instead of an inevitable result of recognition, is the absolute, meaning “always to return to the same place,” and yet for thinking this means “the signifying equation” which can only be gestured towards by the exhaustion of impossibilities.²³⁴ What gives the subject the sense of reality is not consciousness, not absolute certainty, but “jouissance,” which in English may be described as an unconscious and overwhelming impulse which ruptures the self, “and it is the absence of this that makes the universe vain.”²³⁵ But jouissance must be limited into the form of the organism’s pleasure, or else it threatens to rupture the organism’s self-regulating structure. Nevertheless, jouissance manifests in the excesses of impulses, in orgiastic feeling, in mystical experience, in the nearness of death, in surpluses—economically, in the form of the surplus-value appropriated by capital. Lacan registered the rupture of the Faustian imperative of absolute knowledge in the struggle of making people subjects itself, which only reveals how ‘little’ conscious self-determination really is.

Some Marxist admirers of Lacan attempted to take his critiques in stride and liberate politics from the narrow imperative subjectivation. Academic philosopher Louis Althusser, who had begun a campaign aligned with Maoism by attempting to strip Marxism of the Popular Front’s class collaborationist humanism, saw in Lacan a means to critique his opponents. In For Marx (1965), Althusser had differentiated Ideology, which presents a unified pseudo-totality, and science, which reveals what underlies Ideology: “its author as a concrete individual and the actual history reflected in this individual development according to the complex ties between the individual and this history.”²³⁶ Althusser believed that Marx’s own career demonstrated this distinction in the “epistemological break” between Marx’s youthful humanism and his pursuit of a theory of historical materialism that Althusser located in the years after 1845. Althusser believed that it was only this scientific outlook which could be salvaged and made universal beyond the Ideological conditions of the individual, such as Marx, as a subject, providing “a theory which makes it possible to distinguish a word from a concept, to distinguish the existence or non-existence of a concept behind a word, to discern the existence of a concept by a word’s function in the theoretical discourse, to define the nature of a concept by its function in the problematic, and thus by the location it occupies in the system of the ‘theory’[...]”²³⁷

As Althusser’s career continued, he became more skeptical of whether Marx had provided a ready-made way out of this conundrum within his work. Althusser’s notion of science became more demanding, arguing that intellectuals could only become apt for articulating the class Ideology of the proletariat through “a long, painful and difficult re-education. An endless external and internal struggle.”²³⁸ Intellectuals like Althusser had to empty themselves out, to become pure receptacles for science in order to fuse their Marxist theory with the movement of the proletarian mass political subject. Althusser believed that the difference between the imperatives of workers and of intellectuals lay on this basis: “Class instinct is subjective and spontaneous. Class position is objective and rational.”²³⁹ The workers, by the mere fact of their instinct, would begin to adopt their own partisan position as they educated themselves in the experience of struggle. The intellectuals would have to deny and destroy their subjective interests in order to become mouthpieces for the class position of the proletariat. Both, taken together, would finally constitute the class standpoint of the proletariat that Lukács had once identified with the vanguard party. The science of this proletarian party’s Marxist theory, for Althusser, meant “the science of history.”²⁴⁰

But what was history? Althusser had become certain that it was something determined, but not that it was merely the development of the productive forces as many Marxist-Leninists held. With his concept of overdetermination, which refused the one-dimensional determinism of the economic, Althusser noted that “superstructural” phenomena like ideology “never seen to step respectfully aside when their work is done or, when the Time comes, as his pure phenomena, to scatter before His Majesty the Economy as he strides along the royal road of the Dialectic. From the first moment to the last, the lonely hour of the ‘last instance’ never comes.”²⁴¹ Only impersonal contradictions in the overdetermined structure, when taken advantage of by the revolutionary party as a conjecture for action, could grant the communists the opportunity for victory. And theorists could only recognize these conjectures if they lived by the dictum that “all scientific discourse is by definition a subject-less discourse.”²⁴² The subject is a product of the Ideological reproduction of the state of things, a reproduction carried out by means of and within the institutions of Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs)—churches, schools, families, parties, etc. In all, individual subjects are interpellated relative to the capital Subject of society—in Althusser’s age, this was perhaps Man. The Subject needs subjects for its actualization, just as the subjects need the Subject for their subjectivation. Every free subject of everyday life is in fact a product of Ideology, a “reflection of the effect which produces it: the individual is interpellated as a (free) subject in order that he shall submit freely to the commandments of the Subject, i.e. in order that he shall (freely) accept his subjection, i.e. in order that he shall make the gestures and actions of his subjection ‘all by himself.’”²⁴³ The ISAs cannot be bypassed by revolution, because there is no subject preceding Ideological subjectivation. Revolution must make its long march through them, posing faction against faction, but “the class struggles in the ISAs is only one aspect of a class struggle which goes beyond the ISAs. The ideology that a class in power makes the ruling ideology in its ISAs is indeed ‘realized’ in those ISAs, but it goes beyond them, for it comes from elsewhere.”²⁴⁴ This brings politics to the ultimate struggle for power, for hegemony, of which Ideology is only a front. Theory registers the balance of this power, and the conjunctures for a rupture within and against it, through impersonal science.

After his failure to support the 1968 student demonstrations, many of his former students publicly criticized Althusser. He began to retreat from his notion of impersonal, scientific theory in favor of the basic problems of power. He attacked all philosophical theories of totality as identifying “philosophy with a function of the Logos charged with thinking the priority of Meaning over all reality.”²⁴⁵ This sort of philosophy, characteristic of Lukács, which attempts to elevate consciousness over the world represents “the violence of the concept” and the intellectuals’ attempt to “assert their power by bringing under the sway of the law of Truth (their truth) all the social practices of men, who continue to toil and to dwell in darkness.”²⁴⁶ It is only practice which “shakes philosophy to its foundations,” introducing an unexpected outside through what philosophy thought it overcame, not as “a substitute for Truth for the purposes of an unshakeable philosophy[...] it is that other thing—whether in the form of the ‘variable cause’ of matter or in that of class struggle—which philosophy has never been able to master.”²⁴⁷

Practice reveals the pseudo-totality of society as in truth a complex, an uneasy balance of power, power as a practice with agents but no ultimate subject. Power is “nothing but what one makes of it, that is, what it produces as its result,” and the philosopher as the one who sees the whole does so not to idealize it as a rational order but “for the purpose of putting it in order, that is, of imposing a determinate order on the elements of the whole.”²⁴⁸ Althusser called for a partisan position of materialist philosophy as that which grasps the contingency of the whole world, taking advantage of the clinamen, the swerve of atoms which makes freedom possible, not in order to realize the victory of spirit over matter but to make the decision to look on an aleatory encounter and “catch it as it moves.”²⁴⁹ Althusser’s radically depersonalized notion of freedom, of history as a process without a subject, marked the radical change in Marxist thought from the era of chiliastic world revolution to the era of marching through the institutions. It was a Marxism adapted for the age of Mephisto, a Marxism which was within and against an order in which sudden, total transformation seemed to be nothing but a fantasy of philosophers.

Althusser’s Marxism served as an inspiration for those who sought to develop a new strategy of struggle in the 1970s. Greek-French Marxist Nicos Poulantzas, drawing from the experience of the failure of communist partisanship and rise of rightist dictatorship in Greece, attempted to do so on the basis of Althusser’s concept of power. Poulantzas located the basis of the state’s materiality as an institution, as bureaucratic management, in the fact that “the State incarnates intellectual labour as separated from manual labour[...] it is within the capitalist State that the organic relationship between intellectual labour and political domination, knowledge and power, is realized in the most consummate manner.”²⁵⁰ The specialization of the state apart from manual labour in the practice of law, courts, administration, and police elevates the managerial power of technocrats above society in the very work of organizing and reproducing this society itself. Poulantzas reinterpreted class struggle as always-already political, since the “power of a class refers above all to its objective place in economic, political, and ideological relations—a place which overlies the practices of struggling classes (that is, the unequal relations of domination-subordination among classes rooted in the social division of labor), and which already consists in power relationships.”²⁵¹

Rather than a mere apparatus of reproducing the prevailing order of things, the public sphere of the state is a terrain of class struggle, which constitutes the transformation of the state itself. Just as the political state’s autonomy was an outcome of a specific field of power relations, the victory of revolutionary popular forces over the autonomous state would represent a transformation of this terrain. Institutions should not be treated as things to be accepted or rejected, but as terrains to adapt to and to be adapted to our needs. Poulantzas discarded the thesis of the withering away of the state, arguing that rather the radicalization of “the institutions of representative democracy” was necessary in order to realize a democratic socialism characterized by “political (party) and ideological pluralism, recognition of the role of universal suffrage, and extension and deepening of all political freedoms including for opponents[...]”²⁵² Poulantzas’s position was that of the New Left as strictly an agent of the democratization of institutions, with the horizon of communism having gone up in smoke as a half-remembered dream. The aim was now to affirm the democratic common good as a socialist project, characterized by the kind of pluralism that would empower socialist parties against the domination of conservative party-states and bureaucratic apparatuses.

This politics of the common good served as a response against the New Right, who attacked the identification of the good with politics, the state, and party and instead asserted that ethics amounted to the self-responsibility—and thus freedom—of each individual as owner of themselves. As capitalist production was made multinational, a division of labor emerged which eroded sovereignty within the bounds of national states and their democratic institutions. Cities were de-industrialized, welfare states were dismantled, and regulations were loosened for capitalists while policing laws were thrown out at the urban underclasses. Reacting to the rise of Ronald Reagan as a popular President and the conservatism of the American working class, Marxist historian Mike Davis wrote in Prisoners of the American Dream (1986) that the Fordist and social democratic model of a capitalism that would infinitely expand its scale with ‘externalities’ ameliorated by the welfare state had given way to a kind of consumerist imperialism that would later be described as neoliberal. Davis wrote that the Reagan Revolution marked the political rise of “an increasing political subsidization of a sub-bourgeois, mass layer of managers, professionals, new entrepreneurs and rentiers who, faced with rapidly declining organization among the working poor and minorities during the 1970s, have been overwhelmingly successful in pro ting from both inflation and expanded state expenditure.”²⁵³

The rise of the New Right had proven that the history of capitalism was not a linear, rational development that could be captured by a rational minority of intellectuals and workers, but an irrational politics of accumulation which did not always reach higher and more well-organized forms but could adopt irrational and volatile forms of organization. While some predicted the rise of a new well-oiled fascist state from the neoliberal revolt against the law of the common good, embodied in welfare and organized labor, Davis expected “a closing frontier of income and status mobility,” culminating in “the radicalization of the broad right spectrum represented by neoliberalism.”²⁵⁴ He believed that this radicalization would involve “not only futuristic techniques of surveillance and preemptive repression (sanctioned by the longevity of the Burger Supreme Court), but also the further dissemination of a culture that justifies the spiralling viciousness necessary to justify socioeconomic apartheid.”²⁵⁵ Davis saw little potential in the attempts of organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America to realize a social democratic program through radicalizing the Democratic Party. He believed they were little more than the loyal opposition of a declining New Deal liberalism. They failed to fundamentally challenge the logic of consumerist imperialism, yet failed to provide an outright program for this imperialism either, and so they had no appeal to anyone except for middle class professionals. Davis argued that, instead, the left should see its mass base in the Black and Hispanic underclasses, since the “minimal democratic program of the civil rights movement, involving the claims to equal housing, equal employment and equal political representation, has proved to be an impossible set of reforms for contemporary American capitalism to enact.”²⁵⁶

The radically democratic and Third Worldist critique of social democracy as an accommodation to the ascendant reactionary powers already rung out in the Third World itself. The long march through the institutions in this setting, for many, meant directly engaging with institutions of world culture in a strategy of solidarity. Palestinian novelist and Marxist-Leninist guerrilla fighter Ghassan Kananfani wrote in 1967’s On Zionist Literature that Zionism instrumentalized art to promote the colonization of Palestine, and that “Israel’s media campaign is therefore not a mere passing raid; this is conquest upon well-trodden terrain, striking deep into the consciousness of an audience that has long been deceived.”²⁵⁷ Kanafani looked upon a critique of these myths as a democratic technique of solidarity. Kanafani’s democratic and pan-Arabist outlook addressed the problems of the time in the confrontation with imperial expansionism. In 1967, the victory of Israel in its Six-Day War against Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq marked a new era of imperialistic expansion. The racial supremacist, yet social democratic norms of Labor Zionism would undermine themselves through the settler-colonial venture itself. Throughout the 1970s, hard right Zionists ascended over Labor Zionists on the basis of a mass enthusiasm for illegal expansionism and annexations, culminating in the victory of the Likud Party in 1977. Palestinian guerrillas sought to adapt to the changing terrain. Drawing from Lukács’ theories of organization, Kanafani believed that revolution had to mediate theory and practice: “when organization is not the product of a revolutionary theory, it ends up in a conspiratorial theory, and when the organization is not the means of executing that theory into practice, it ends up in an isolated sectarian group.”²⁵⁸ Kanafani, however, was murdered by the Mossad in 1972. His hope for a mass democratic front against the dual faces of reaction, colonialism and capitalism, would have to be taken on by those who outlived him.

The Western and non-Western left departed on two different paths to the same assertion of a common good, variously defined, against the forces which aimed to dismantle this ideal along colonial and consumerist lines. Two episodes can illustrate this difference in shorthand. In Europe, the left pursued electoral power and social democratic management of the economy. Socialist François Mitterand was elected as President of France and ruled from 1981 to 1995 in a coalition with the Communists. He pursued a protectionist, Keynesian program for a state-led model of development with the distribution of wealth in a welfare state, aiming for the independence of Europe from the expanding neoliberal consumerist empire of the United States. In Latin America, the Nicaraguan Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional [Sandinista National Liberation Front] (FSLN) overthrew neoliberal dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle in 1979. They enacted similar reforms to Mitterand, though prioritizing literacy and land reform to draw greater masses of workers into the state. At the same time, they inherited the old problems of the urban state in Latin America, often entering bloody disputes with the opponents to sandinismo among the coastal Indigenous peoples like the Miskito. Both pursued a homogenous consensus rather than the pluralism imagined by Poulantzas. Both demonstrated that the late Cold War had become a struggle of two forms of law, that of free enterprise and that of the common good, either of which could be enforced by ‘peaceful’ or by ‘violent’ methods.

As revolutionaries entered the institutions, they came to realize that institutions seemed to have a mind of their own. As strong as their ethical convictions might be, the everyday work organization of an institution and its role towards the whole of society embodies a distinctive ethic that overwhelms all of its members as long as they do not have an equally powerful momentum supporting them against its own momentum. The revolutionaries grew used to a conformist and reformist logic as their utopian ideals grew distant, no longer offering them a critical horizon from which to evaluate the present reality, and instead replaced by a sense of duty to fix institutions to make them work as justly as possible—universities, welfare offices, churches, political parties… The radicals, in short, were institutionalized. Recounting some episodes of the long march will give a more concrete sense of this recuperation of outsiders.

The radical feminist movement first began its engagement with the institutions during the housework debate of the 1960s-1970s. The dispute concerned the question of what role housewives’ unpaid domestic labor played in the total production process of capital. Some, usually socialists, argued that housework was non-productive labor and that housewives had to be brought into public wage labor to join the workers’ struggle, while others argued that housework was productive but unwaged labor as a portion of the husbands’ surplus-value-producing role in the production process which was hidden in the home behind the man’s family wage. Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James seemed to hit on a reasonable middle ground with an argument that the housewife’s work is pre-capitalist, but that the expansion of consumerist norms into the household represented a struggle to transform the family—and the housewife’s labor with it—to more effectively serve “​its capitalist productive function, the reproduction of labor power.”²⁵⁹ While it does not produce surplus-value, since it does not produce anything new within the immediate production process, housework reproduces the source of surplus-value in the commodity of labor-power by reproducing the life of the wage worker.

They argued that this reproduction, which appeared in the work of care for husbands, childbearing, childrearing, and homemaking, could be resisted and subverted if housewives began to meet each other as women, to discuss common problems and organize a common struggle, and if women joined the public struggle of the class from an independent stance through “factory meetings, neighborhood meetings, student assemblies, each of them are legitimate places for women’s struggle[...]”²⁶⁰ Others argued that the movement had to win recognition and waged remuneration for women’s unwaged domestic labor from the state in the Wages for Housework campaign. They fought for welfare reforms that would recognize this work as entitling mothers to payments rather than treating welfare mothers as public charges. The Wages for Housework organizers believed that this change in the law would not reinforce women’s domestication but reveal the part played by even the most sentimental elements of society in the production process of capital, radicalizing the conditions for political struggle through changes in the terrain of law and politics.²⁶¹

In the late 1970s, many feminists began to struggle to transform this terrain by other means than Wages for Housework. They intervened directly in the public sphere to oppose pornography and slasher films as an attack on women, defined as a marginalized group discriminated against on the basis of immutable characteristics by the public. This definition, strategy, and rhetoric was meant to adapt Civil Rights anti-discrimination and anti-hate speech laws for women. While the ‘sex-positive’ faction argued that this legal campaign to censor pornography would empower a state that could not be trusted to apply feminist principles, and others argued that pornography and the sex industry as a whole could be a means for women to reclaim sexuality, the ‘sex-negative’ faction had already developed an outlook that no longer subscribed to the New Left’s notion of a polymorphous sexual freedom. Radical feminist Andrea Dworkin argued that the abusiveness of ‘sexually liberated’ men towards women could be explained by the fact that they valued “the absence of any moral dimension to sex as freedom,” and that this absence “signified the inferiority of the woman, because relations with a human on the same level as oneself always have a moral dimension (which does not mean that one is morally good, only that one is morally accountable).”²⁶² Dworkin believed that the legal protection of the production and consumption of pornography revealed a fundamental imbalance in legal-moral subjecthood, where the male self is absolute and unlimitable and women lack selfhood. She argued that “the nature of the male self is that it takes, so that, by definition, the absolute self is expressed in the absolute right to take what it needs to sustain itself[...] The self is the conviction, beyond reason or scrutiny, that there is an equation between what one wants and the fact that one is.”²⁶³ She argued that even the polymorphous libertarianism of the left reinforced this inequality, and that only the self-advocacy of women in collective politics and their intervention to change the terrain of law and politics to reflect that they were a subject that was being excluded from the body politic would be the way forwards.

Feminist theorists set to work in this women’s march through the institutions to establish themselves as a collective moral-legal subject through anti-discrimination laws. Feminist political theorist Carol Pateman claimed in The Sexual Contract (1988) that liberalism’s theory that the public order was a freely crafted contract between equals obscured the sexual contract of men with each other in which they exercised couverture over women, deciding for them what was in their best interests even where women played a consultative role to the men in their lives. She believed that this was the same logic which granted rights to slaveowners within liberalism, and that at the same time, opponents of it could fight within the institution of law just as abolitionists had done against slavery. Pateman posited that “the achievement of juridical freedom and equality” would “help in the task of creating the social conditions for the development of an autonomous femininity; the caveat is that women’s equal standing must be accepted as an expression of the freedom of women as women, and not treated as an indication that women can be just like men.”²⁶⁴

Others drew from Marxist critiques of the rule of law to argue that a more radical approach was necessary to rupture the patriarchal-paternalist horizons of this sexual contract. Radical feminist legal theorist Catharine MacKinnon argued in Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989): “Under sex equality law, to be human, in substance, means to be a man. To be a person, an abstract individual with abstract rights, may be a bourgeois concept, but its content is male. The only way to assert a claim as a member of the socially unequal group women, as opposed to seeking to assert a claim as against membership in the group women, is to seek treatment on a sexually denigrated basis.”²⁶⁵ Laws which protected women as distinctive members of the community also often treated them as a helpless group needing recourse to male authority and male law for protection. They did not immediately treat them as fully participating members of the body politic. Legal equality cannot be applied without changing society, which requires actualizing women’s collective concept of substantial equality between different people through a political struggle that would extend into jurisprudence. MacKinnon registered the limits of the long march through institutions on the basis of the social whole retaining its character as capitalist and patriarchal. She nevertheless held onto collective subjecthood as a basis for political struggle and argued for the limitation of the Faustian polymorphousness of the consumer market as part of the struggle to transform the unequal right of bourgeois men over everyone else into the equal subjecthood of a new democracy.

By the 1990s, this critical line of inquiry towards the institution of law split in different directions. One questioned the strategy of constituting a collective aggrieved subject before the law as a means for achieving substantive equality and the conditions for autonomous politics. Critical theorists led the charge. Philosopher Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) questioned the coherence or desirability of “woman” as a singular political subject, arguing that feminists should recognize and strategize around the fact that all political jurisprudence represents and therefore produces coherent subjects, and that treating “woman” as already singular risks reifying the patriarchal Ideology that produces women as subjects. Butler argued that this realization could be the basis for a political strategy of pluralist freedom: “If a stable notion of gender no longer proves to be the foundational premise of feminist politics, perhaps a new sort of feminist politics is now desirable to contest the very reifications of gender and identity, one that will take the variable construction of identity as both a methodological and normative prerequisite, if not a political goal.”²⁶⁶ This project of Butler’s sought to recapture the dialogue of feminism, queer theory, and the polymorphous sexual revolution for the autonomous politics of a new era.

Others writing within this critical thread questioned the turn to juridical authority as a means for the representation of an aggrieved identity group, believing that it would limit the power of popular-democratic decision making. Writing in 1995’s States of Injury, Wendy Brown reinforced this argument for pluralism by suggesting that theorists like MacKinnon threatened to develop a politics of resentment that would reinforce despotic unfreedom, insofar as “a regulatory fiction of a particular identity is deployed to displace the hegemonic fiction of universal personhood, we see the discourse of rights converge insidiously with the discourse of disciplinarity to produce a spectacularly potent mode of juridical-disciplinary domination.”²⁶⁷ These previous theorists had collapsed the state into a masculine contract, ignoring the actual complex of many forms of power and political terrains that appear in the form of the state and thus the strategic imperatives implied by them. Even the “liberal subject—the abstract individual addressed by liberal political and legal codes—may be masculine not only because his primary domain of operations is civil society rather than the family, but because he is presumed to be morally if not ontologically oriented toward autonomy, autarky, and individual power.”²⁶⁸ Brown looked upon this assumption of a self-moving subject as one that is part and parcel with capitalism and especially with the contemporary rise of neoliberalism. To challenge the imperative of this unitary capitalist subject, which appears as the despotic power of the market over those whose needs make them desperate dependents begging for legal recourse from the power of capital, radicals have to act on multiple terrains through a pluralist political strategy more in line with Poulantzas and other radical democrats.

This effort to critique the ‘aggrieved subject’ approach as reinforcing the same juridical authority which maintained the dominant power structure extended to other realms of politics as well, establishing a theoretical basis for democratic pluralism. Critical race theorist Charles W. Mills published The Racial Contract (1997) as a parallel critique of the state as a form of exclusionary power, in this case taking aim at the U.S. as a white supremacist order. Just as the feminist critics took aim at both the notion of a non-gendered state and the attempt at constituting “woman” as a singular legal subject, Mills argued that the state reinforced a racist order within its territory and in a global imperialist system rather than racism being an unintended exception to a colorblind law, and that at the same time the “white” order of homogenous citizenship was reinforced by non-white people all the time. Civil Rights strategies could not just draw recourse to the extension of the existing order of law; “one has to think against the grain.”²⁶⁹ Each people must have the confidence to draw from their own experience, their own history, their own community body politics to critique the exclusive order of the white imperialist state. Mills believed that a Black critique of colorblind law as in fact representing white racial interests “makes it possible for us to connect the two rather than, as at present, have them isolated in two ghettoized spaces, black political theory’s ghettoization from mainstream discussion, white mainstream theory’s ghettoization from reality.”²⁷⁰ Like Butler and Brown, Mills sought to revitalize democracy through an autonomous struggle while transforming both law and society instead of relying on juridical power to enforce civil rights.

In the U.S., this juridical power more often used civil rights to limit social movements rather than empower them. The Supreme Court case of Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), which allowed universities to practice affirmative action only within the limits of serving the diversity of students within the classroom, laid the basis for Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard (2023), which did away with most forms of university affirmative action and narrowly the “diversity” of the classroom as a diversity of students’ singular personal viewpoints. In short, the Supreme Court used the equal protections provided by civil rights laws to weaponize their colorblind implications and destroy a legal means for political challenges to the white racial character of institutions. The feminist project of an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in the 1970s was defeated from the opposite extreme direction. Conservative Evangelical Christian activist Phyllis Schlafly struggled with feminists over control of “woman” as a collective political subject, arguing that the ERA would remove distinctive legal protections for women as a fragile and endangered group and would erode women’s distinctive sphere in society by forcing them to compete with men. Schlafly shared the concern of many feminists towards the misogynistic attitudes promoted by pornography, but she believed that it was obvious that the true feminine counterposition to the amoral market and impersonal law was the hearth and home. Andrea Dworkin, interested by the appearance of “woman” as a conservative political subject in the Reagan era, described Schlafly as revealing fault lines in feminism: “Many women who hate Schlafly’s politics would agree that women have a special moral responsibility ‘to keep America good.’ They have a different political program of good in mind and a different conception of women’s rights, but their conception of a biologically determined morality in which women are better than men is not different. Antifeminism allows for this sentimentality, encourages and exploits this self-indulgence; liberation does not.”²⁷¹

The struggle to limit the power of the impersonal and amoral had begun to become a feminist project. The critique of polymorphous freedom as a one-sided masculine power began to extend to a critique which sought to defend the territory of a feminine-natural revolt against the corruption of modern civilization. In Gyn/Ecology (1978), theologian Mary Daly argued that the patriarchal Godbuilding of Faustian Man actually drew from women’s very own cosmic life-creating powers to dominate the earth through control over fertile life: “It is impossible to miss symptoms of this male fertility syndrome in the multiple technological ‘creations’ (artificial wombs) of the Fathers—such as homes, hospitals, corporate offices, airplanes, spaceships—which they inhabit and control. Moreover, these male-constructed artificial wombs are ultimately more tomb-like than womb-like, manifesting the profoundly necrophilic tendencies of technocracy.”²⁷² Daly believed that women had to embrace their wildness against masculine and Faustian civilization to recover this creative power for themselves: “Refusing their assimilation we experience our Autonomy and Strength. Avoiding their elimination we find our Original Be-ing. Mending their imposed fragmentation we Spin our Original Integrity.”²⁷³ Some questioned the homogenizing implications of this counter-Godbuilding. Black lesbian feminist Audre Lord replied: “The oppression of women knows no ethnic nor racial boundaries, true, but that does not mean it is identical within those differences. Nor do the reservoirs of our ancient power know these boundaries. To deal with one without even alluding to the other is to distort our commonality as well as our difference.”²⁷⁴

By the 1980s, the anti-Faustian religion had already found a new personification of the enemy forces that it would begin to unite and centralize its efforts around over the coming decades. In 1980, a student of Daly’s named Janice Raymond published The Transsexual Empire, which claimed that “transsexual treatment and surgery[...] violate a dynamic process of be-ing and becoming that includes the integrity of the body, the total person, and the society. The chromosomal base of maleness or femaleness is one defining factor of bodily integrity[...] medicalized intervention produces harmful effects in the transsexual’s body that negate bodily integrity, wholeness, and be-ing.”²⁷⁵ The Faustian goal of the total human personality reappeared, but now as a limit—as the destiny of the embodied self, which is only one part of the whole’s harmony. Raymond believed that transgender women empowered male doctors, reinforced misogynistic stereotypes, and represented a masculine attempt to transcend embodiment. Radical feminists began to single out the Faustian figure of the transgender woman— representing a project of transforming the outer body into an appropriate manifestation of the inner self—as a target for special critique. Not as an exclusive target—they continued to critique the same older topics—but as a target which the Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs) thought of as encapsulating everything they opposed in the Faustian world of the market and the state. Theirs was a politics against Faustianism, existential inwardness, and polymorphous freedom. They repeat many of the gestures of party-building centralism, but as a sect which rejects the prevailing order as fallen and call on women to escape it.

Through its attempt at a long march through the institution of law, feminism had split between democratic pluralism and homogenous moralism. In the former, singular collective subject of “woman” split into many, while in the latter, “woman” became a moral-national territory with strictly policed borders. In both, feminist theory registered an attempt at developing a strategy that would adapt to the decline of the mass politics which had invigorated the era of the collective worker. The collective subject of “woman” figured as a kind of rabble, a destitute and deprived identity which feminists then worked out political strategies for. Some refused the destiny of a rabble and saw a democratic pluralist opportunity in the role of politics in constituting identities, while others believed that only a united moral front against the capriciousness of the society which targeted all who challenged the power of the harmonious moral whole of Being would would be appropriate. Both gestures entered the realms of theology, and a resonant effort manifested in a Christian attempt at renewing their religion as a moral movement of the poor.

Since the 1962-1965 Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church had recommitted itself to reorganizing its activities so that it would meet the needs of the modern world. By the nature of Catholic doctrine, it had to present this as updating an immutable moral force to changing times—the introduction of vernacular worship, unity among Christians and unity with non-Christians, and lay participation were all supposed to reinforce Catholic universalism. It was of course no coincidence that the Church had transitioned from a landed, paternalist ally of conservative latifundistas and monarchies against bourgeois Jacobin liberalism and atheistic socialism to a force of social justice and political struggle after a long period of mass anti-clericalism and revolutionary Church expropriations that began in 18th-century Jacobin France and 19th-century Liberal Mexico. Latin American radicals, who had long invoked Christian ethics of equality against the Church, began to see a basis for an alliance with the institution in its reorganization. Some initiated a march through the institution to revitalize the Church for the good of the institution and the good of the poor alike.

The earliest forms of liberation theology sought to advocate for revolutionary-critical praxis as the central force of Christian revitalization in a capitalist world. Lima-born Dominican Order priest Gustavo Gutiérrez sought to draw on the abolitionist tradition of the Latin American priesthood in order to establish a role for men like himself in the new era of popular-democratic revolutions. In A Theology of Liberation (1971), Gutiérrez attempted a merger of Christianity and Marxism by arguing that “charity has been fruitfully rediscovered as the center of the Christian life. This had led to a more Biblical view of faith as an act of trust, a going out of one’s self, a commitment to God and neighbor, a relationship with others[...] love is the nourishment and the fullness of faith, the gift of one’s self to the Other, and invariably to others. This is the foundation of the praxis of Christians, of their active presence in history.”²⁷⁶ Gutiérrez’s work recovered many of the themes of the Left-Hegelianism of the 1840s, engaging with Marx’s concept of history to reorient the humanist ideal of a “religion of love” advocated by Ludwig Feuerbach to construct the “theology of hope” anticipated by the utopian Marxism of Ernst Bloch. This theology aims at the culmination of history in a classless community of believers who gift themselves to each other out of devotion each and every day, realizing the fullness of their God-given humanity in this Christ-like civilization of charity. After the pro-liberation theology clergy won leadership over the Latin American Episcopal Conference, they began to pursue the policy of a preferential option for the poor in order to elevate the impoverished as the mass subject for Christian moral revitalization and the priests as their vanguard.

Liberation theology after González continued to reconstruct Left-Hegelian themes to aid the transformation of the priestly intelligentsia into the vanguard of revolutionary social movements. For inspiration, liberation theologists looked back to the slain Colombian priest Camilo Torres, who had seen in the Marxist-Leninist Ejército de Liberación Nacional [National Liberation Front] (ELN) a force of Christian praxis. Mexican Jesuit José Porfirio Miranda believed that the selfishness and cruelty of the property society, where the wealth of the bourgeoisie and the starvation of the poor coexisted side by side, was a systematized form of idolatry. He saw Marx and Christ as offering parallel critiques of this idolatry, locating the saving force in the creative and redemptive power of humanity itself. Social revolution and the struggle for justice were the practice of de-fetishization, and only the realization of communism could establish moral questions on a solid basis. Miranda read deeply in the New Left’s debates over reification and commodity fetishism, using these ideas to argue that only revolution offered a means to address the religious doubts of the present age: “All our rebellion against Western civilization and against its acute extreme called capitalism is the attraction exercised on us by a future world in which justice, authentic love, is possible. Then, in the societal relationship of justice, and not before, the authentically dialectical mind will have to see if God exists or does not exist. Anything else would be vulgar materialism and dogmatism.”²⁷⁷

In the 1980s, this strategy of moral and practical alliance with democratic and socialist movements began to pay off. In Nicaragua, liberation theologists played a major part in the popular appeal and victory of the Sandinista coalition. Argentine-Mexican theologian Enrique Dussel believed that the Nicaraguan Revolution had demonstrated how the political subject of the poor, as the embodiment of exclusion from the social order, could be transformed into a moral opposition—a liberating community, which the Church was becoming—through “the affirmation of what Nicaragua is as exteriority (to capitalism), as a totality (what Nicaragua is, as an origination from the precapitalist, humane, heroic, and historic past; and what Nicaragua is today as a proyecto [project], a real utopia not contained even as a potentiality within bourgeois prerevolutionary Nicaragua).”²⁷⁸ This attempt to negate and limit the power of capital and recover a totality, however, had a similar outcome to the radical feminist affirmation of alterity as a position of united moral opposition. The Catholic wing of the Sandinistas opposed women’s ability to choose to terminate pregnancies as a moral affront, limiting reproductive rights in Nicaragua, and empowered the centralist party-state of Daniel Ortega.²⁷⁹ The ultimate hope of a de-fetishizing communism has been buried by the politics of moral populism. The liberation theologians believed that this would bring the masses to freedom, but it has often instead reinforced the worst moralistic prejudices of the poor as the heart and body of democratic movements and their dependency on their state representatives to serve as the brain (and arms) of the Fourth Estate. The outcome of liberation theology, in short, has thus far failed to cross the horizon of Left-Hegelian democratic humanism, which provided ideological concepts for state socialism and nationalism.

While the Soviet intelligentsia did not explode into a public opposition movement, they did make their own efforts at a long march through the institutions. They did not abandon the Faustian imperative of the October Revolution, but attempted to revitalize its conscience in a time when the elderly General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev and his allies declared the brute validity of “actually existing socialism,” with its horizon “as mastering the difficult art of organising the entire life of society along socialist lines, and, in particular, the science of planning and managing the national economy, and developing a socialist consciousness in their citizens.”²⁸⁰ Philosopher Evald Ilyenkov, questioning both the Central Committee’s self-aggrandizement and Western anti-Sovietism, associated the Soviet system rather with a “crude communism” still limited to a bureaucratic leveling by the task of negating the world reign of private property. The political revolution of the Communist Party was only a first condition for society to “find itself with the power to face itself, and moreover, to really accomplish the gigantic task of creating a society without government, without currency and without my other external mediators for relationships among men,” which would overcome the need for a Communist Party and its planners since “voluntary cooperation for the all-around development of the individual will, in this capacity, no longer needs ‘External Mediators.’ On the other hand, only the all-around development of the individual has the strength to establish such a cooperation.”²⁸¹

The Faustian total personality, in the language of Soviet reformers, now began to touch back down to the earthly lives of Soviet citizens. Faust, after all, is a “son of the earth.”²⁸² The Soviet ecological movement was one such attempt at drawing people into this work by expanding the concept of needs beyond the abstract need of society’s collective working force as the central planners defined it. The ecological movement began in the 1960s within the Soviet intelligentsia, as scientists questioned the industrial scale pollution, health issues, and environmental devastation caused by a model of development which disproportionately focused on large-scale heavy industry and lucrative petroleum.²⁸³ Local planners came to see forests as organisms with their own needs, threatened by the blindness of the general plan, and needing to be taken care of for the very sustainability of Soviet industrial society.²⁸⁴ The warm stream of the Russian Revolution returned in these ecological and conservationist efforts. They were still limited within the working world, but in the Soviet Union, this world continued to hold democratic potentials.

Though the party-state and its planners had long ascended to the soaring heights of a total administration, the local levels of Soviet politics continued to preserve the self-governing and self-organizing practice of workers’ councils and citizens’ assemblies.²⁸⁵ For strictly local issues, soviets exercised significant power, while the center was otherwise able to dictate generalized norms through quotas and laws. In short, the issues they faced were not significantly distant from those of local government under the U.S.’s almost monarchical Federal executive. The difference for the Soviets was that the state directly managed all major industries and reinforced a disproportionately industrial model of development while limiting the spread of consumerism’s moral and economic norms in favor of an ascetic commonwealth of cultured citizens. The Soviet state’s claim to central power was that the universal is the true, that the more universal is always right against the more particular, and that the common good can only be secured by the organizational representative of a common power.

The Soviet Union institutionalized the ideals of absolute idealism and mechanical materialism. Any attempt to transform it would have to hold it to its pretence that it represented a democratic system of rights. Reformers like Ilyenkov attempted to adjust this notion of the common good and common truth to open up space for a reinvigoration of soviet self-governance and self-organization. Ilyenkov, like Lukács had done before him, identified the plan as where truth-procedure and ethics coalesced in Soviet society. Rather than being a supernatural phantom or illusion, Ilyenkov held that ideals are in fact the practical horizons that human institutions strive towards. Ideality “has a purely social nature and origin. It is the form of a thing, but it is outside this thing, and in the activity of man, as a form of this activity. Or conversely, it is the form of a person’s activity but outside this person, as a form of the thing.”²⁸⁶ These things, when they manifest as the objective, compulsory, and lawful form that conscious activity must take, can either reinforce the creative power of humanity or limit it. Money is the fetishistic ideal of capitalist society, limiting creation to the horizon of universal wealth accumulation as the end of all human activity. Socialism, on the other hand, establishes the total human being as the unlimited horizon of ideality, making as an end in itself “the unceasing process of the transformation of the form of activity— into the form of a thing and back— the form of a thing into the form of activity (of social man, of course).”²⁸⁷

The reform of the planning process through self-management, self-governance, and self-organization would place this total human being back at the center of socialism. The conscience of Soviet society had come around to the position Georg Lukács had advocated since the end of the Second World War. But Lukács had come to this position as an ally of powers greater than him. By the end of his life, Lukács was like an old schoolmaster who had decided to look for some compensation for his youthly hopes in reaching the Absolute by committing himself to whatever gave him the sense of being something more long lasting than him. He died in 1971, warning just a while before: “People see no design, no strategic aim, and do not move; the problem of individual incentives becomes insoluble[...] we must learn to connect the great decisions of popular political power with personal needs, those of individuals.”²⁸⁸ Faust died thinking of the collective power of human labor; Lukács, the great Faustian Marxist, died thinking of a great reconciliation of inner life and society’s working plans.

But these attempts to preserve a position on the terrain of politics fell when the terrain itself collapsed. Neoliberalism dismantled these centralized institutions, which could be fought over between factions, and instead made every owner a free tyrant over their property.²⁸⁹ The common good was undermined. The left was shipwrecked from its mass subjects, its mass politics, and lines of struggle were redrawn in many micropolitical realms rather than continuing to treat the state as a public square for the revolutionary struggle to march on. Millions were left hanging as precarious units of a massified yet atomized society. Each and every person was expected to behave omnipotently in the competition of all with all and yet preserve the bounds of the law of self-preservation and order of private property as the economic measures for the righteousness of all conduct. Neoliberalism melted down the idol of Faust and recast him as Atlas. The liberal, democratic, and pluralist revolutions of 1960-1990 retrospectively look like the decay of a mass political era into entrepreneurialism rather than a new beginning in the civilization of self-determination.

The Twilight of Politics

If you have read this far, I assume that you care deeply about problems that stem back far before any of us were born. This is a rare characteristic in an era of resigned fatalism. Hold onto your care, because this section begins the story of how we found ourselves in a careless world where constant dissolution into indifference joins ceaseless demands for attention from the daily tasks of self-preservation. From the perspective of our time, the late 20th century era of questioning and skepticism failed to produce new myths for a new day, and thus failed to initiate a renaissance of civilization.

The closest thing to a new ethos came from the market rather than the old, heroic realm of politics. The dirigiste welfare states of the Fordist era had long drawn opposition from many businessmen as an infringement on their power within their own territory. Even while the New Deal and other social democratic reforms saved capitalism from destruction, the capitalists who felt they had been cut a raw deal rather than given a new means of political participation in the responsible management of capital denigrated it as a betrayal of classical liberalism and the law of free enterprise. By the 1970s, when the Fordist-social democratic order was wracked by crises of de-industrialization, industrial decentralization, metropolitan stagnation, financial inflation, and social revolts against conformity, these businessmen made their alliance with reform politicians to initiate the construction of a new order: neoliberalism.

Rather than treat the state as the coalescing point for society’s abilities and needs into a general will and collective consciousness, which the state embodied in its management of resources, the neoliberals saw the state as only a tool with which to enclose the commons, maintain law and order, incentivize the market to deal with externalities without relying on the force of law, and enforce the strict separation of owners from each others’ property. They did not do away with the general will or social consciousness, but externalized it into something that no administrator could control—the invisible hand of the market. A 1980 comment by economist Milton Friedman revealed how many of the traits of the old Godbuilding state the neoliberals transferred to this market:

“None of the thousands of persons involved in producing the pencil performed his task because he wanted a pencil. Some among them never saw a pencil and would not know what it is for. Each saw his work as a way to get the goods and services he wanted—goods and services we produced in order to get the pencil we wanted. Every time we go to the store and buy a pencil, we are exchanging a little bit of our services for the infinitesimal amount of services that each of the thousands contributed toward producing the pencil.

“It is even more astounding that the pencil was ever produced. No one sitting in a central office gave orders to these thousands of people. No military police enforced the orders that were not given. These people live in many lands, speak different languages, practice different religions, may even hate one another—yet none of these differences prevented them from cooperating to produce a pencil[...]

“The price system is the mechanism that performs this task without central direction, without requiring people to speak to one another or to like one another. When you buy your pencil or your daily bread, you don’t know whether the pencil was made or the wheat was grown by a white man or a black man, by a Chinese or an Indian. As a result, the price system enables people to co-operate peacefully in one phase of their life while each one goes about his own business in respect of everything else.”²⁹⁰

The early 20th-century marginalist revolt against the so-called labor theory of value, which was falsely stamped on David Ricardo and Karl Marx alike, was revived as a weapon against all doctrines of the planned economy. The neoliberals looked on the state’s tool of the public debt with suspicion, recognizing in it a force for the centralization of capital. Many believed that doing away with state control over money would do away with monopoly, and that a common good would trickle down from the investments of a capitalist class freed from the dead weight of the regulatory state. But monopoly remained, and the neoliberal state continued to socialize the losses of big capitals and bailing out bankrupt companies while cutting down on the social management of wealth circulation represented in such institutions as nationalized industries, public infrastructure, and welfare.

By the 1980s, high-tech capitalists in Silicon Valley took the radical democratic beliefs of many early personal computer advocates to claim that the militant struggle for monopoly power waged by companies like Apple and Microsoft would allow for the free flow of information among an enriched citizenry.²⁹¹ The Faustian total personality reappeared as the omniscience of the internet. Writing in a 1994 manifesto, a group of policy advisors and businessmen identified this shift with a kind of digital utopianism which would realize a true democracy: “Rather than being a centrifugal force helping to tear society apart, cyberspace can be one of the main forms of glue holding together an increasingly free and diverse society.”²⁹² President Bill Clinton concurred, opening up a path to the growth of multi-industry monopolies emanating from the information technology industry with the 1996 Telecommunications Act. This devil’s bargain culminated in the emergence of modern digital platform monopolies and the first tech trillionaires. The externalization of the general will to the free market and the general intellect to monopolies undermined the reinvigorating power of myth and left people only with the opioids of Ideology to forget their shattered reality.

The consumer utopia of suburbia was the last global utopia of politics, the last partisan ideal. The last because, as it became the (imposed) consensus of all factions, it destroyed the autonomy of the political and its power to direct the economy along the lines of partisan utopias. It elevated the “free market,” the buying and selling exchanges of things between owners, into the exclusive site of all personal and political ethics. It expected each to be entirely master of themselves, thinking that it would abolish external mastery by giving all motivated people a path to inner and outer self-mastery.

This did not introduce any problems external to the antithesis of labor and capital, but reformulated the relationship between the management of work and capital accumulation. After all, as Mario Tronti once wrote, “the commodity labour-power is the properly active side of capital, the natural home of any capitalist dynamism.”²⁹³ The mass subjects of working democracy began to dissolve into the flexible, amorphous, and untethered figure of the entrepreneur. Democracy had foundered without momentum, with the transformation of mass voluntary associations into the advocacy of professionals, with the fragmentation of the collective worker into precarious entrepreneurs of labor. The old institutional conformity survived by adapting to the quasi-democratic self-worship of the entrepreneur and the expansion of the bourgeoisie’s standard of living to a mass of young urban professionals through the gutting of public wealth and the subsidization of consumerism through aggressive imperialism. Even the old U.S. revolutionary coalition of labor unions and Civil Rights decayed into the collaboration of industrial and ethnic representatives with Presidents Nixon and Reagan to promote the participation of union bureaucrats in management and ethnic professionals in profiteering off of their communities.

Even the minuscule autonomy of mass media was eroded through the rise of entrepreneurialism. Radio and television had been mass institutions, forums of the public sphere where people could talk with each other in front of everyone. They still faced corporate control and government censorship, which served to provoke democratic struggles through local, political, educational, underground radio stations, tape trading, and independent scenes. These were the social basis for aesthetic innovation in punk rock and hip-hop, where many socialists found fertile ground. They declined with the rise of commercial concentration, copyright law, unrestrained advertising, and a yuppie attitude of indifference. After all, if you can’t beat them, join them—even alternatives have their market and their price!

The battle of the law of free enterprise and the law of the common good split the left right down the spine through the long-standing discontents of the common good itself. Some embraced the basically technocratic and moralistic sense of the common good as responsibility to the state and nation while the discontented embraced a polymorphousness that was increasingly captured by neoliberal consumerism. The tension between the common and the plural unleashed new mass dissident struggles which the common good could no longer contain , and which finally ruptured it.

The collapse of the left’s common good began when its traditional mass subjects began to behave unexpectedly—at least unexpected for the state’s plans. Workers were discontented with workers’ parties and socialist states, which had left them demoralized by allowing them no means to express their collective interests.²⁹⁴ In 1980, the Polish independent trade union Solidarity was founded to express the discontent of workers.²⁹⁵ While the government initially recognized it, hoping to rein in its oppositional force within the system, Solidarity continued to challenge the whole social structure of the Eastern Bloc with a mass movement inspired by democracy and nationalism. The state cracked down with martial law, but Solidarity continued to organize as an underground opposition movement supported by the United States and the Vatican. They shared Milovan Djilas’s suspicion of state bureaucrats as “more highly organized and more highly class-conscious than any class in recorded history.”²⁹⁶ Eastern Bloc conservatives and bureaucrats, in turn, despised blue jeans and rock music as symbols of decadent Western consumerism just as they had once despised jazz. By the time that Solidarity won the state’s concession of multiparty elections in 1989, many leaders had set their sights on free enterprise as the emancipation of labor from bureaucracy. Ironically, it was as political bureaucrats that many members of Solidarity later imposed neoliberalism on Poland by decree.

The world anti-colonial revolutionary forces that had once erupted alongside the Bolsheviks increasingly regarded the Soviets as an imperialist threat. Islamic movements began to directly challenge Soviet geopolitical hegemony and the ideology of Marxism-Leninism. Writing a few years before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, while he was imprisoned by the Shah’s regime, Iranian philosopher Ali Shariati described the Godbuilding ideology of Western socialism as self-negating by treating humanity as devoid of spiritual needs. He countered atheistic materialism with Islam’s monist doctrine of tawhid, which “through the principle of assignation (i.e. humanity’s assumption of its freedom, discretionary powers, and destiny), man is free of material determination and divine foreordination[...] man in the Islamic world-view is a governing will in relation to nature, and might be termed the god of nature; in relation to God, he fulfills the role of His viceregent.”²⁹⁷ When the Islamic Republic of Iran was established, and the conversation of Iranian Marxists and Muslims ended with a state massacre of communists, this notion of humanity’s destiny as the viceregent of God began to overtake Marxism-Leninism in Asia. When the Marxist-Leninist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) seized power over the newly born Afghan Republic in Kabul, whether they would align with the new wave in Asian politics over the Eastern Bloc—or fall to the rural rebels who intended to do so—was unclear to the Soviets. At the end of 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, triggering a long and brutal war between the Red Army and the mujahideen guerrillas. Islamic fighters like Osama bin Laden came from abroad to join a struggle against atheistic imperialism. By the end of it in 1989, the Soviets abandoned the PDPA, and the state fell to the mujahideen.

In the 1980s, the Soviets began to seek another “revolution from above” to preclude a liberal democratic revolution within their own country. Bleeding dry from the occupation of Afghanistan, which treated the country as little more than a buffer against Iran and the West, reform was quickly becoming a matter of survival. Dissidents had long suggested that the system could be revived by the local democracy of the soviets. But instead of establishing a mass base in this local sphere, reform was carried out by decree of the Communist Party. After becoming General Secretary in 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev announced that the Communist reformers “are seeking to strengthen democratic principles in management, to broaden the autonomy of production associations, enterprises, collective and state farms, to develop local economic self-management and to encourage initiative and a spirit of enterprise, naturally in the interests of society and to its detriment.”²⁹⁸ Through restructuring (perestroika), Gorbachev decentralized the Union and further empowered the managers of firms in a liberalized economic system. Through openness (glasnost), he attempted to allow the free expression of dissent and governmental transparency. The combination of reform by decree, decentralization, liberalization, and the broadcasting of past crimes committed by the state leadership lit the fuse of dissent and dealt a fatal blow to the centralizing force of Moscow. The blat system of favors had already begun unsteady, and the permission of free financial exchanges birthed a wave of bloodthirsty entrepreneurs who demanded wealth rather than favors alone.²⁹⁹ As nationalist and neoliberal dissidents gained hegemony over dissent, the Soviet Union began heading towards dissolution.

In 1991, despite the support of many voters in a referendum for the preservation of the Union, the state collapsed as newly-elected President Boris Yeltsin declared the independence of Russia from the Union and forcibly dissolved the Communist Party’s presence in Moscow. Yeltsin collaborated with U.S. authorities to impose neoliberal shock therapy on the country, privatizing state firms in the hands of their managers, and dismantling the public’s infrastructure and common wealth. Russia became a gangster state led by capitalists, while the military was given free rein to apply the lessons of late Soviet warfare against Chechens and and other ethnic minorities. In the Balkans, the collapse of Yugoslavia had much the same outcome, culminating in the Serbian nationalist genocide of Bosnians in 1992-1995. To the extent that the law of the common good survived, it now meant the good of ethno-linguistic nations and religious communities rather than of a polity of common labor.

In China, the Reform and Opening Up remained under the control of the Communist Party. Mao had helped ensure that the Cultural Revolution remained within the bounds of the party-state after 1967, and so the capitalist roaders inherited a solid system of management which could be used for market reforms. Regarding the Soviet reform attempt, Deng Xiaoping’s son Deng Zhifang reported: “My father thinks Gorbachev is an idiot.”³⁰⁰ Even while the PLA slaughtered rebelling workers in the cities of China throughout 1989, the collective worker of large-scale industry remained the growing body of the nation’s general will as represented in the party.³⁰¹ In a Marxist-Leninist ideological expression of this industrial basis, the CPC today continues to affirm Stalin, but at the same time that it pursues “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.” The content of this “socialism” has been changed from the world partisanship of Stalin and Mao to the reduction of politics to the administrative management of the national capital. Politics and civil service are the same in modern China—and every politician is a bureaucrat.

The strategy of the world’s Communist Parties collapsed into similarly national aims. Eurocommunism attempted to adapt the notion of the common good to a parliamentary strategy independent from the declining Soviet Union. Eurocommunism was social democratic and nationalistic in varying measures according to the country. When the Soviets fell, and Communists became irrelevant, many simply dissolved into social democratic and liberal nationalist parties. Even former New Left militants like Régis Debray adjusted their horizons to civic nationalism. Some parties eventually found a replacement for Moscow and aligned with Beijing as representing the law of the common good in the age of free enterprise. Today, they collaborate in the extension of China’s Belt and Road Initiative to construct infrastructure for multinational capitalist production and exchange.

Far-right regimes continued to justify themselves as a bulwark against the allies of foreign hordes. Some still defined the threat as communism, while others placed Islam in the old scripts of anti-communism. Ex-Communist nationalist regimes, in turn, could adopt terrorism as an existential threat in place of the capitalist West. Even Muslim-majority countries like Algeria and Uzbekistan pointed to this threat to justify martial law. While not all of these regimes are fascist, all fascisms attack real or imagined revolutions and depend on an indifferent social mass’s desire for security. The party-state of classical fascism was far rarer in an era where active partisan minorities had to navigate the shattered general will of neoliberal states. Fascists began to thrive in populist forms, channeling the discontent of neoliberalism, using democratic channels for undemocratic ends. To achieve hegemony, modern fascists do not need to capture the state, which today is burdened with responsibility for all of society’s failures, but only need to disorganize their enemies. Fascists often oversee purges of the remaining left-wing long marchers. Neoliberalism and far-right purges have often ensured that the institutional left cannot lead a mass opposition movement but instead is driven to preserve the institutions that they are dependent on, where they can then be isolated by a siege of the public sphere and dismantled by the destruction of infrastructure.

Neoliberalism made common cause with technocratic developmentalism in the military dictatorships of Latin America. The men who staffed the dictatorship of Chile’s Augusto Pinochet could learn techniques of torture from the U.S.’s School of the Americas at the same time that they learned neoliberal economic doctrine from the Chicago School. Many veterans of the Latin American New Left began to critique the logic of developmentalism as a whole, seeing the seeds of neoliberalism within it.³⁰² Edgar Vásquez Benítez, graduate of Colombia’s UniValle, argued that the rationality of modernity was only the “technical rationality that not only governs economic processes but is internalized by individuals to such an extent that their current and expected personal actions and behaviors are programmed and decided based on the proper calculation of this rationality.”³⁰³ Colombian philosopher Arturo Escobar looked on the Third World as little more than a failed developmentalist project. He noted that development remained, even up to 1995, “a top-down, ethnocentric, and technocratic approach, which treated people and cultures as abstract concepts, statistical figures to be moved up and down in the charts of ‘progress.’”³⁰⁴ The future lay not in the rational plans of a party-state, but in the radically democratic decolonization of society.

Indigenous peoples began to articulate their own international decolonial critique to the public in the 1980s and 1990s. They had begun to meet with each other in the 1960s and 1970s with the rise of Red Power and indianismo across the Western hemisphere. Many attended the United Nations’ conference on Indigenous peoples in Geneva in 1977, influencing the creation of a global framework for indigenous rights. They posed a spiritual challenge to the fundamental ethics of Faustian civilization, which they regarded as imperialistic by nature. In a critique of Marxism, Red Power leader Vine Deloria Jr. (Íŋyaŋ Woslál Háŋ) wrote that Natives “did not suffer the emotional trauma of the first millennium [of the Mediterranean world] and consequently did not find it necessary to look beyond nature and outside of themselves for meaning[...] Marxism offers yet another group of cowboys riding around the same old rock[...]”³⁰⁵ Natives, on the other hand, “reject a universal concept of brotherhood in favor of respectful treatment of human beings with whom they have contact. It is not necessary, they argue, that crows should be eagles.”³⁰⁶ From the Peruvian Andes, Quechua and Aymara peasants of the Proyecto Andino de Tecnologías Campesinas [Andean Project of Peasant Technologies] (PRATEC) began to promote their community-based model of sustainable development as an alternative to Faustian industrialism for the entire world. PRATEC leader Eduardo Grillo Fernández wrote: “In the Andes the world does not exist as an integral whole different and distinct from its components; here there do not exist ‘wholes’ and ‘parts’—these are only abstractions. In the Andean world there is symbiosis which is immediate to life—a symbiosis lived in the Andes in the form of mutual nurturance.”³⁰⁷ In this setting, there was a substantial cooperation of each with all in place of the externalized law of the common good.

In the West, the radical oppositional position formerly occupied by a broad New Left had been whittled down to the feminist movement, which experienced multiple new waves from the 1980s to the 1990s. Radical feminists worked to adapt their refusal to conform to radically changed conditions. Adrienne Rich wrote that she “did not want the current times, with their images of falling walls and slogans about a ‘new world order,’ to wash out for me all continuity with revolutions of the past and the hopes they had touched in so many nerves.”³⁰⁸ When Rich asked veteran communist Raya Dunayevskaya what the path should be for the new lesbian feminist movement, a year before the aged revolutionary would pass away, Dunayevskaya replied: “You are the one who must do it; workers work out their own emancipation and Blacks theirs, so must all other forces of revolution—youth, women, and women not just in general, but the very concrete question of lesbianism, or, for that matter, all of homosexuality.”³⁰⁹ It became less and less common that feminists identified communism as the horizon of their struggle. They sharpened their critique of civilization to its very roots, but they became less sure of where they were going.

Feminism, as one of the last remaining forms of politics still thriving in the twilight of politics, had to endure doubt and questioning to strengthen its own sense of commitment. Black feminists critiqued feminism from within in an effort to strengthen their political communities’ practices of pluralist democracy. They critiqued the unitary subject of “woman” itself and, drawing from their own interpersonal relationships with women, advocated thinking of the movement as a loving association. Black lesbian feminist Audre Lorde wrote that eros “empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.”³¹⁰ Lorde and others pointed to a way forward for feminism, and thus the remaining forms of the political, in the affirmation of interpersonal commitment and passion against the selfish and impersonal force of conformity.

For many in the official Communist movement, the New Left’s critique of conformity culminated in a general dissolution rather than in revitalization. Official Communism did not survive the attack on conformity, it could not endure the doubt of the individual, which ruptured the general will of the party-form. Philosopher Lucio Colletti provides an illustrative example of this phenomenon. Colletti had done deep work into Marxology, discovering a troubling continuity of “a perennial oscillation between two extreme poles: a reckless subjectivism that sees the essence of the revolution ad socialism in the promotion to power of particular political personnel, who are, as we know, the party bureaucracy; and an inter-class conception of the State.”³¹¹ Colletti looked on the rightward turn of the “national-popular” strategy of the Italian Communist Party as an instance of the latter, leaving it for good in 1964. Colletti grew increasingly skeptical and disillusioned throughout the remaining decades of the 20th century, suggesting that “from a Marxist point of view, history can never be wrong—in other words, mere a priori axioms can never be opposed to the evidence of its actual development.”³¹² By 1996, he had given up on Marxism altogether and joined Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s neoliberal Forza Italia party. Berlusconi, after all, was a staunch opponent of all philosophies of conformity: “I am only myself, a sincere person who doesn’t bend to any conformity.”³¹³ Unlike the Communists, who were the most cruel to their own comrades, Berlusconi offered impunity for all the average, little men. Gaffe after gaffe had no effect on him, because he refused any power of conscience and affirmed only the right of the little men to do what they pleased.

The dawning of the millennium shone on movements struggling to affirm a right to difference—indigenism, feminism, Islamism—but where monuments to political utopias once sat, there were only fragments. In an oft-cited book, liberal philosopher Francis Fukuyama called it “the end of history,” in which a “universal and homogeneous state” appears “resting on the twin pillars of economics and recognition.”³¹⁴ There was nothing left for the world but the infinite accumulation of capital and the perfection of liberal democracy. Philosophers remained isolated spiritual dissidents against this outcome. Theodor Adorno had already announced in 1966 that “[p]hilosophy, which once seemed outmoded, remains alive because the moment of its realization was missed.”³¹⁵ Class consciousness, which was supposed to guide the dispossessed to the realization of a totally rational society, had been broken up into a million pieces. Theory became irrelevant to all but activists and academics. Marxism was regarded as an absurdity, an evolutionary holdover from another time.

In the Brave New World, the dream of “free men on ground that is free” was only the nostalgic memory of the aged.³¹⁶ It was recounted to minuscule audiences who indulged it out of pity and regret. The youth were too busy for this consolation of philosophy. They were “the grabbing hands,” who “grab all they can, all for themselves,” because “after all, it’s a competitive world.”³¹⁷ They stripped the dried corpse of Faustian civilization for parts, swallowing chunks of the old man’s flesh. They used his contraptions, which they no longer understood, to subjugate and exterminate each other. It was a New World Order in which the peaceful consensus of businessmen and politicians enforced the law of free enterprise in the war of all against all. Over the crowded wastelands, the humming glow of advertisements cluttered the heavens that a scholar and a demon had once made a night journey across.

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166. Mao Zedong, “Talks At Three Meetings With Comrades Chang Ch’un-Ch’iao And Yao Wen-Yuan,” February 1967, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-9/mswv9_73.htm.

167. Ernesto Guevara, “Message to the Tricontinental,” April 16, 1967, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/guevara/1967/04/16.htm.

168. Students for a Democratic Society, “Port Huron Statement,” June 15, 1962, The Sixties Project, https://www2.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Manifestos/SDS_Port_Huron.html.

169. Black Panther Party, “Ten-Point Program,” October 15, 1966, BlackPast, https://blackpast.org/african-american-history/black-panther-party-ten-point-program-1966/.

170. George Jackson, Blood in My Eye (Black Classics Press, 1996), p. 101.

171. James Boggs, Racism and the Class Struggle: Further Pages from a Black Worker’s Notebook (Monthly Review Press, 1970), p. 59.

172. Mustapha Khayati, “The Class Struggles in Algeria,” trans. Ken Knabb, Not Bored, December 1965, https://www.notbored.org/class-struggles.html.

173. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Zone Books, 1995), pp. 12-14.

174. Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, p. 22, 127.

175. Mustapha Khayati, On the Poverty of Student Life (Black & Red, 2000), p. 27.

176. Moses Hess, “A Communist Credo,” in The Holy History of Mankind and Other Writings, ed. and trans. Shlomo Avineri, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 121.

177. Fredy Perlman and Roger Gregoire, Worker-Student Action Committees (Black & Red, 1969), pp. 85-96.

178. Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, trans. Vincent R. Carfagno (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), p. 320.

179. Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, p. 281.

180. Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, p. 54.

181. Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, p. 63.

182. Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, p. 47.

183. Reich, “Preface to the Third Edition (August 1942),” in The Mass Psychology of Fascism, p. xv.

184. Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, p. 271.

185. Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, p. 300.

186. Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, p. 201.

187. Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, p. 63.

188. Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, p. 105.

189. Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (William Morrow and Company, 1972), p. 233.

190. Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, p. 192.

191. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, pp. 170-171.

192. Carl Wittman, The Gay Manifesto (The Red Butterfly, 1970), pp. 3-4.

193. Dennis Altman, Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation (Outerbridge and Dienstfrey, 1971), p. 94.

194. Guy Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire, trans. Daniella Dangoor (Duke University Press, 1993), p. 72.

195. Noura Wedell, trans., The Screwball Asses (Semiotext(e), 2010), p. 2.

196. The Screwball Asses, p. 14.

197. The Screwball Asses, p. 4.

198. The Screwball Asses, p. 57.

199. The Screwball Asses, p. 57.

200. The Screwball Asses, p. 11.

201. The Screwball Asses, p. 19.

202. The Screwball Asses, p. 18.

203. The Screwball Asses, p. 11.

204. The Screwball Asses, p. 11.

205. The Screwball Asses, p. 40.

206. The Screwball Asses, p. 43.

207. The Screwball Asses, p. 27.

208. The Screwball Asses, p. 28.

209. The Screwball Asses, p. 36.

210. The Screwball Asses, p. 36.

211. The Screwball Asses, p. 36.

212. Françoise d’Eaubonne, Feminism or Death: How the Women’s Movement Can Save the Planet, trans. Ruth Hottell and Emma Ramadan (Verso Books, 2022), pp. 9-10.

213. D’Eaubonne, Feminism or Death, p. 179.

214. D’Eaubonne, Feminism or Death, p. 177.

215. Mario Mieli, Towards a Gay Communism: Elements of a Homosexual Critique, trans. David Fernbach and Evan Calder Williams (Pluto Press, 2018), p. 8.

216. Mieli, Towards a Gay Communism, p. 8.

217. Mieli, Towards a Gay Communism, p. 32.

218. Mieli, Towards a Gay Communism, p. 200.

219. Mieli, Towards a Gay Communism, p. 255.

220. D’Eaubonne, Feminism or Death, p. 106.

221. Mieli, Towards a Gay Communism, p. 54.

222. Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, p. 233.

223. Wilhelm Reich, “Politicizing the Sexual Problem of Youth,” in Sex-Pol: Essays 1929-1934 (Vintage Books, 1972), pp. 260-261.

224. The Screwball Asses, p. 22.

225. Quoted in Ulrike Marie Meinhof, “Sozialdemokratismus und DKP (1968),” in Die Würde des Menschen Ist Antastbar: Aufsätze Und Polemiken (Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, 2004), p. 160.

226. Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt, Public Sphere and Experience: Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, trans. Peter Labanyi et al. (Verso Books, 2016), p. 80.

227. Qin Zhengxian and Shanghai Municipal Committee Writing Group, Communist Party of China, Inner-Party Bourgeoisie in Socialism (Germinal Publications, 2021), p. 59.

228. See Joshua Eisenman, Red China’s Green Revolution: Technological Innovation, Institutional Change, and Economic Development Under the Commune (Columbia University Press, 2018).

229. Meisner, Mao’s China and After, pp. 468-470.

230. Deng Xiaoping, “The Present Situation and the Tasks Before Us,” January 1980, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/deng-xiaoping/1980/217.htm.

231. Jacques Lacan, “The agency of the letter in the unconscious or reason since Freud,” in Écrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (Routledge, 2005), p. 130; Jacques Lacan, “Aggressivity in psychoanalysis,” in Écrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (Routledge, 2005), p. 20, p. 18.

232. Jacques Lacan, “The Freudian thing, or the meaning of the return,” in Écrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (Routledge, 2005), p. 96.

233. Jacques Lacan, “The function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis,” in Écrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (Routledge, 2005), p. 32.

234. Jacques Lacan, “On a question preliminary to any possible treatment of psychosis,” in Écrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (Routledge, 2005), p. 171, n. 31; Jacques Lacan, “The agency of the letter in the unconscious or reason since Freud,” in Écrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (Routledge, 2005), p. 127.

235. Jacques Lacan, “The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire,” in Écrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (Routledge, 2005), p. 242.

236. Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (Verso Books, 2005), p. 63.

237. Althusser, For Marx, p. 39.

238. Louis Althusser, “Interview on Philosophy,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (NLB, 1971), p. 12.

239. Althusser, “Interview on Philosophy,” in Lenin and Philosophy, p. 13.

240. Althusser, “Interview on Philosophy,” in Lenin and Philosophy, p. 15.

241. Althusser, For Marx, p. 113.

242. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and the State,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (NLB, 1971), p. 171.

243. Althusser, “Ideology and the State,” in Lenin and Philosophy, p. 182.

244. Althusser, “Ideology and the State,” in Lenin and Philosophy, p. 185.

245. Louis Althusser, “The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter,” in Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978-1987, ed. François Matheron and Oliver Corpet, trans. G.M. Goshgarian (Verso Books, 2006), p. 168.

246. Louis Althusser, “Philosophy and Marxism,” in Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978-1987, ed. François Matheron and Oliver Corpet, trans. G.M. Goshgarian (Verso Books, 2006), p. 276.

247. Althusser, “Philosophy and Marxism,” in Philosophy of the Encounter, p. 275.

248. Althusser, “Philosophy and Marxism,” in Philosophy of the Encounter, p. 277.

249. Althusser, “Philosophy and Marxism,” in Philosophy of the Encounter, p. 277.

250. Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism, trans. Patrick Camiller (NLB, 1978), p. 56.

251. Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism, p. 147.

252. Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism, p. 261.

253. Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the US Working Class (Verso Books, 2018), p. 198.

254. Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream, p. 280.

255. Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream, p. 282.

256. Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream, p. 288.

257. Ghassan Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, trans. Mahmoud Najib (Ebb Books, 2022), p. 3.

258. Ghassan Kanafani, “Guerrilla Work In Its Current Dilemma,” trans. Resistance Music and Media, 2024, p. 7.

259. Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (Pétroleuse Press, 1971), p. 21.

260. Dalla Costa and James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, p. 22.

261. For a comprehensive overview of the housework debates, see Ellen Malos, ed., The Politics of Housework (Allison & Busby, 1980).

262. Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse, Twentieth Anniversary Edition (Basic Books, 2007), p. 13.

263. Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women (Perigee Books, 1981), pp. 13-14.

264. Carol Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford University Press, 1988), p. 231

265. Catherine MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 229.

266. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1999), p. 9.

267. Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 133.

268. Brown, States of Injury, p. 183.

269. Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 119.

270. Mills, The Racial Contract, p. 132.

271. Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women (Perigee Books, 1983), p. 208.

272. Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Beacon Press, 1990), p. 61.

273. Daly, Gyn/Ecology, p. 423.

274. Audre Lorde, “Letter to Mary Daly (May 6, 1979),” in Sister Outsider: Essays & Speeches (The Crossing Press, 1984), p. 70.

275. Janice G. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (Teachers College Press, 1994), pp. 17-18.

276. Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation (Orbis Books, 1988), p. 6.

277. José Porfirio Miranda, Marx and the Bible: Critique of the Philosophy of Oppression, trans. John Eagleson (Orbis Books, 1974), p. 296.

278. Enrique Dussel, Philosophy of Liberation, trans. Aquilina Martinez and Christine Morkovsky (Wipf and Stock, 1985), p. 192.

279. Maxine Molyneux, “The Politics of Abortion in Nicaragua: Revolutionary Pragmatism, or Feminism in the Realm of Necessity?,” Feminist Review, no. 29 (Summer 1988): 114–32, https://doi.org/10.2307/1395153.

280. Leonid Brezhnev, “On the Draft Constitution (Fundamental Law) of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the Results of the Nationwide Discussion of the Draft: Report and Closing Speech at the Seventh (Special) Session of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, Ninth Convocation, October 4-7, 1977,” Novosti Press Agency Publishing House, 1977, Marxists Internet Archive, p. 25, https://www.marxists.org/archive/brezhnev/1977/oct/brezhnevondraftconstitutionussr.pdf.

281. Evald Ilyenkov, “From the Marxist-Leninist Point of View,” 1974, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/articles/marxist-leninist.htm.

282. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, a Tragedy, trans. Martin Greenberg (Yale University Press, 2014), p. 57.

283. D.J. Peterson, Troubled Lands: The Legacy of Soviet Environmental Destruction (Westview Press, 1993), pp. 1-7.

284. Elena Kochetkova, The Green Power of Socialism: Wood, Forest, and the Making of Soviet Industrially Embedded Ecology (MIT Press, 2024), p. xxxiv.

285. Jeffrey W. Hahn, Soviet Grassroots: Citizen Participation in Local Soviet Government (Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 82-95.

286. Evald Ilyenkov, “The Concept of the Ideal,” Philosophy in the USSR: Problems of Dialectical Materialism, trans. Robert Daglish (Progress Publishers, 1977), p. 87.

287. Ilyenkov, “The Concept of the Ideal,” Philosophy in the USSR, p. 98.

288. Georg Lukács and Franco Ferrarotti, “A Conversation with Georg Lukács,” in Georg Lukács: Theory, Culture, and Politics, ed. Judith Marcus and Zoltán Tarr (Transaction Publishers, 1989), p. 215.

289. Gary Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era (Oxford University Press, 2023), pp. 115-130.

290. Milton Friedman and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose: A Personal Statement (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), pp. 12-13.

291. Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, “The Californian Ideology,” Mute, 1995.

292. Esther Dyson et al., “Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age (Release 1.2, August 22, 1994),” The Information Society: An International Journal 12, no. 3 (1996): p. 303.

293. Tronti, Workers and Capital, p. 31.

294. Donald Filtzer, “Labor Discipline, the Use of Work Time, and the Decline of the Soviet System, 1928-1991,” International Labor and Working-Class History, no. 50 (Fall 1996): pp. 23-24.

295. Harman, Class Struggles in Eastern Europe, pp. 219-252.

296. Milovan Djilas, The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System (Frederick A. Prager, 1957), p. 59.

297. Ali Shariati, Marxism and Other Western Fallacies: An Islamic Critique, ed. Hamid Algar, trans. R. Campbell (Mizan Press, 1980), p. 83.

298. Mikhail Gorbachev, “Peace and Disarmament: We Should Look for a Way Out Together,” August 1985, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/gorbachev/1985/august/look-for-a-way-out-together.htm.

299. Alena V. Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favors: Blat, Networking and Informal Exchange (Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 184.

300. Quoted in Vladislav M. Zubok, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union (Yale University Press, 2021), p. 60.

301. Craig J. Calhoun, Neither Gods nor Emperors: Students and the Struggle for Democracy in China (University of California Press, 1994), pp. 143-148.

302. Amy C. Offner, Sorting Out the Mixed Economy: The Rise and Fall of Welfare and Developmental States in the Americas (Princeton University Press, 2019), p. 164.

303. Edgar Vásquez Benítez, “Tecnología y Sociedad: Una Aproximación Crítica,” Revista Extensión Cultural, 1986, p. 45.

304. Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 44.

305. Vine Deloria Jr., “Circling the Same Old Rock,” in Marxism and Native Americans, ed. Ward Churchill (South End Press, 1992), pp. 134-135.

306. Deloria Jr, “Circling the Same Old Rock,” in Marxism and Native Americans, p. 136.

307. Eduardo Grillo Fernández, “Development or Decolonization in the Andes?,” The Spirit of Regeneration: Andean Culture Confronting Western Notions of Development, eds. Frédérique Apffel-Marglin and Proyecto Andino de Tecnologías Campesinas (Zed Books, 1998), p. 221.

308. Adrienne Rich, What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (W. W. Norton & Company, 1993), p. 46.

309. Raya Dunayevskaya to Adrienne Rich, September 18, 1986, From the September-October 2022 Issue of News & Letters, #11293, Supplement to the Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, https://newsandletters.org/from-the-writings-of-raya-dunayevskaya-letter-to-adrienne-rich-womens-liberation-gay-liberation-dialectic/.

310. Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic (August 25, 1978),” Sister Outsider: Essays & Speeches (The Crossing Press, 1984), p. 57.

311. Lucio Colletti, From Rousseau to Lenin: Studies in Ideology and Society, trans. John Merrington and Judith White (Monthly Review Press, 1973), p. 223.

312. Lucio Colletti, “A Political and Philosophical Interview,” New Left Review 1, no. 86 (1974): p. 28.

313. Frank Bruni, “Berlusconi Urges Support for U.S. on Iraq,” New York Times (New York, New York), December 5, 2003..

314. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (The Free Press, 1992), p. 204.

315. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. Dennis Redmond (Suhrkamp Verlag, 2001), p. 13, https://probablydave.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/adorno-theodor-negative-dialectics-2019-dennis-redmond-translation.pdf.

316. Goethe, Faust, p. 423.

317. Depeche Mode, “Everything Counts,” track 4 on Construction Time Again, Mute, 1983.