Dialectical Library

A Memory Called Empire

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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Originally published as “Critiquing Empire with Opulence” on Morgan’s Substack, The Red Compass.

Modern fantasy and science fiction have moved towards unprecedented heights of representation in non-white and queer characters, dragged towards this development by the inescapable tide of global progress. However, this transition remains incomplete as attempts to meet rising demands for social justice implement better representation without fully breaking with the husk of liberalism, retaining the ideology’s exclusionary impulses under each stories’ “radical” shell.

George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire foreran this phenomena. Women in his books use political and physical skill to advance their positions, but these positions are entrenched in a feudal hierarchy where the internal intrigue of the ruling class is centered to the exclusion of the class conflict which actually comprises history, with the “smallfolk” of Westeros treated as cruel idiots easily manipulated by various characters driven by an abstract pursuit of power. The presence of “strong female characters” in these books belies Martin’s determination to uphold and aestheticize feudal hierarchy, even if that aestheticization contains cynical, lurid contours rather than the hagiography of the high fantasy which preceded him. In the process, not only are classist tropes reinforced, but the fountainhead of medieval misogyny is enshrined as a cruel but inescapable reality, with only characters imbued with a mystic birthright, i.e. Daenerys and Rhaenyra Targaryen, given the agency to struggle against this system—for the sake of their personal ascension.

A Song of Ice and Fire shows how classism remains embedded in the fantasy genre, even in stories presenting themselves as a radical critique of the prior iterations of the genre. Science fiction suffers a similar history of dystopian works which hint at anti-capitalist themes while relying on Orwellian myths of “brainwashing” and a perfect surveillance state, thereby turning the ruling class into an unbeatable fixture of a cynical worldview. But while these genres are historically entrenched in a liberal bias which upholds the current ruling class via the analogous feudal aristocracy or Orwellian state, we live in a literary moment which has begun to digest and react to the deficiencies of works like A Song of Ice and Fire. Hence, there is not only a need to progress past the classism of prior and current genre fiction, but a growing wealth of stories which combine the greater representation within modern sci-fi and fantasy with a more insightful analysis of the politics these settings rely on.

Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire¹ is a triumphant, anti-imperialist step in this direction, albeit a step which simultaneously illuminates the limits of the space opera genre. It is a story about an intergalactic empire, Teixcalaan, threatening to annex the protagonist, Mahit’s, home, yet the plot and cast of characters are embedded in the intrigues of the Teixcalaanli court and Mahit’s infatuation with Teixcalaanli culture. It is a dramatic structure which threatens to recreate the worst impulses of the fantasy genre’s interaction with political structures by centering the personal motives of aristocrats and indulging itself in the beauty of their status symbols, yet A Memory Called Empire succeeds in its depiction by analyzing how the poetic, exclusionary language of Teixcalaan works to constantly reproduce empire and assert its hegemony over those not yet in its grasp.

Mahit is chosen as the ambassador of Lsel Station to Teixcalaan due to her aptitude in the latter’s language and culture, yet this very language is built around reinforcing the separation between Teixcalaanli citizens and those barbarians existing outside its borders. This separation allows Teixcalaan to mirror the real-life separation between the normalized violence waged abroad by the US military and the existentially dreaded violence of civil war within the borders of US empire. The emperor of Teixcalaan, Six Direction, reflexively voices this difference in regards to his empire’s fear of internal unrest:

There were border skirmishes reported every week. There’d been an outright rebellion put down on the Odile System just a few days back. Teixcalaan was not peaceful. But Mahit thought she understood the difference Six Direction was so fixated on: those were skirmishes that brought war to outside the universe, to uncivilized places. The word he’d used for “world” was the word for “city.” The one that derived from the verb for “correct action.” (237)

This exclusion, baked into the language and logic of Teixcalaan, both frustrates Mahit’s desire to fully immerse herself in Teixcalaanli culture, while demonstrating the full power of that culture. Teixcalaan records its history through epics and conducts its political affairs through poetry, and the novel never questions that these products hold genuine beauty and artistic merit, just as a logical assessment of US empire cannot wholly dismiss the creations of Hollywood as a “degenerate” morass. And just as with Hollywood, the real danger of these cultural products comes from a monopolization of artistic talent and means of production, a monopoly funneled towards the production of works which place Teixcalaan—or the US—as the center of civilization, with the rest of the world converted into a peripheral Other. The effects of this cultural hegemony are material, with Lsel Station losing its people just as real countries in the Global South suffer “brain drain”. This threat creates the tension between the ambassador preceding Mahit, Yskandr, and the leaders of Lsel Station:

Yskandr Aghavn: you want to invite Teixcalaan in. You speak poetry and you send back reams of literature, and more of our children every year take the aptitudes for the Empire and leave us. Leave us bereft of who they might have been. You are a corrosive poison. (240)

Martine emphasizes the importance of these cultural works to the preservation of Teixcalaan via collective memory, but the novel is also rife with plot details which hint at the ultimate fragility of this system. Unlike fantasy or sci-fi works which exclusively focus on the inner power struggles of the ruling class, A Memory Called Empire shows anti-imperial Teixcalaanli factions to be a constant and swelling threat to the empire, complementing and urging the power struggles between imperial aristocrats. While the novel’s focus on the Lsel ambassador and her interactions with the imperial court distances its focus from the everyday oppression and destitution wrought by empire, it manages to weave in enough detail to show that the struggle for the imperial throne has economic elements rather than simply being a matter of personal ambition. The two would-be emperors, Thirty Larkspur and One Lightning, respectively showcase the nebulous divide between a traditional bourgeois liberal and a fascistic populist, united in preservation of empire but divided on their navigation of the delicate self-image tying Teixcalaan together:

Mahit thought of the fundamental assumption of Teixcalaanli society: that collapse between world and Empire and City—and how if there was such a collapse, importation was uneasy, foreign was dangerous, even if that importation was just from a distant part of the Empire […] If Nine Maize was pointing out the threat of importation, he was calling for—or at least suggesting—that Teixcalaan act to normalize that threat. To civilize it. And Teixcalaan had always civilized—had always made something Teixcalaanli—with force. Force, like a war. Nine Maize wasn’t really talking to Thirty Larkspur; Nine Maize was shoring up whatever political factions were preparing for war. . . .
“Where are One Lightning’s supporters tonight, Three Seagrass?” she asked. “They’re who that poem was for. For anyone who is interested in a stronger, more centralized, less importation-focused Teixcalaan.” (175–6)

A Memory Called Empire deftly navigates the tensions which threaten to unravel Teixcalaan—and thereby imperial systems in general, but the conclusion of the novel complicates this theme. Mahit and Yskandr are continually drawn into the orbit of the sitting emperor, Six Direction, and his advisor Nineteen Adze, helping them triumph over the threats to his dynasty and stabilizing the empire itself in the process. There are pragmatic reasons for this alignment within the logic of the novel, with Lsel Station exploiting Six Direction’s fragility to cut a deal for its independence, and the outright romantic love felt by Yskandr for Six Direction forms an analogy for his and Mahit’s hopelessly one-sided attraction to Teixcalaanli culture. However, Lsel Station’s independence and the Teixcalaan Empire’s unity are only permitted thanks to an encroaching threat by a non-human force.

The novel deliberately presents this force as an unknown threat to be encountered properly in the next novel, but in doing so, it tacitly justifies the exclusionary logic of Teixcalaan, with Mahit using the threat to exploit the Teixcalaanli concept of inclusion: “I can prove that there is an active threat to the borders of Teixcalaan. We are all in danger from these aliens” (411). With the aliens depicted in the novel as a force which can’t be reasoned with—unlike Teixcalaan—Martine’s world-building talents encounter a persistent problem in science fiction: Any alien species must be sufficiently inhuman to justify its alien status without being deprived of the diversity and emotional intelligence which characterizes a sentient species invested with rights and a peer status to humanity.

Star Trek infamously fails in the first part of this balance, with its aliens generally being human actors bestowed with pointy ears or wrinkly foreheads, while space operas in the vein of Warhammer 40k turn most of their aliens into completely irredeemable hordes of destruction.² A Memory Called Empire has implied its alien threat to be closer to the latter, but I hope that its sequel, A Desolation Called Peace, will complicate this depiction by expanding on a theme established at the first novel’s outset. One of the leaders of Lsel Station sees the encroaching alien threat as an opportunity, hoping that “perhaps there is an empire larger than the Empire that has been devouring us by inches” (15). This hope expresses the logic of multipolarity: that vulnerable states in the Global South gain resistance to imperialism by being able to play hegemonic states against each other. For this theme to be properly expressed, the unnamed alien threat will have to gain the logic that the first novel implied them to lack.

Even before reading its sequel, I can gladly say that A Memory Called Empire accomplishes a necessary subversion of the space opera genre by stretching its aristocratic aesthetics to expose the fragile concoction of exclusion and cultural hegemony which characterizes empire. Where authors like George R.R. Martin sluice their fantasy worlds in cynicism, sex, and gore, ending up with a depressing affirmation of the feudal status quo, Arkady Martine has analyzed empire by picking it apart at its most opulent and revealing the danger within this beauty. The sci-fi and fantasy genres do not require a gritty tone to be radical; they only need to intelligently show that the fixtures of these settings contain the fragility of their real-life counterparts.

Martine, Arkady. A Memory Called Empire. New York: Tor, 2019. ↩︎
Sci-fi novels which offer positive examples of this balance include Octavia Butler’s Dawn and Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem. The extraterrestrial societies in these books are shaped by their physical adaptations without implying a lack of complexity among their sentient individuals. ↩︎

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Capital, Volume 2

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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Should you read Volume 2 of Capital?

For Volume 1, the answer is easy: absolutely. In the first installment, Karl Marx examines the relationship between the working class and the capitalist class. His study is immediately relatable to your day-to-day experience as a worker¹ while also offering a deeper account of how capitalism works. Marx shows how capitalist production is different from all prior forms of production, and why utopian socialist approaches fail to provide an alternative. Volume 1 is the foundational text for many important Marxist concepts, like commodity fetishism and the relationship between exchange value and use value. It’s also an enjoyable read, combining economic theory, political theory and history in a style that is often literary and humorous. If you are a Marxist, you should tackle Volume 1 at some point. But having finished it, should you continue to Volume 2?

A reading recommendation always comes with an opportunity cost: some other work may be more worth your time. Volume 2 is long, dry, and unpolished; it suffers from being an unadorned arrangement of partially-completed manuscripts.² Before you embark, it’s worth reviewing how others have interpreted this book, and asking what you’re hoping to get out of it.

Opinions vary on how to approach the trilogy. In Marx’s Inferno, William Clare Roberts reads Volume 1 as a standalone work of political theory.³ In this view, Marx intervenes in the socialist debates of his time, arguing that the only way out of capitalism is through. Roberts justifies his leaving aside of the other volumes because only Volume 1 was completed in Marx’s lifetime; rather than completing Volumes 2 and 3, Marx instead worked on revising and translating Volume 1.

Other Marxists disagree. David Harvey writes that “taking Volume 1 as a standalone treatise is deeply problematic” because the three volumes were designed to analyze capitalism as a totality.⁴ Consistent with this emphasis, Harvey has devoted significant effort to making Volume 2 accessible, including a 300-page reading guide and over 20 hours of lecture content.⁵

Michael Heinrich, who penned An Introduction to the The Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital, concurs:

Under no circumstances, however, should one be satisfied with reading only the first volume. Since Marx represents his object of inquiry on different levels of abstraction that mutually imply and complement each other, the theory of value and surplus value dealt with in the first volume can only be fully understood at the end of the third volume. What one believes to know after reading only the first volume is not only incomplete, but in fact distorted.⁶

It is true that the second volume extends the analysis of first in important ways.⁷ Volume 1 focuses on production while Volume 2 zooms out to the dynamics of circulation (buying and selling of commodities). While circulation does not create profits, it is essential to complete the M-C-M’ circuit,⁸ and interruptions to this process can lead to crisis. If commodities go unsold, capitalists lack the money to restart production; to cut costs, they lay off workers, who themselves are then forced to cut their consumption, further deepening the lack of demand.

Circulation comes with a cost—expenses like warehousing, sales and marketing—and capitalists seek to minimize both these costs and the time it takes to turn finished commodities back into money. Faster turnover means more cycles of M-C-M’ in a given period, and therefore higher profits. These chapters explain features of our current society: just-in-time shipping and minimal inventories increase profitability by reducing idle capital and quickening circulation. However, these capitalist innovations lead to wide-ranging economic crisis when black swan events halt circulation, such as during the 2020 COVID shutdowns, the 2021 Suez Canal obstruction and, even more recently, the 2026 closure of the Strait of Hormuz in response to the US and Israel’s bombing of Iran.

Marx investigates social reproduction and circulation of the “total social capital”—what is now broadly referred to as “macroeconomics.” An economy must produce both means of production (machinery, raw materials) and means of consumption (necessities of life and luxury goods). The inputs and outputs of all these individual production processes must be in balance or, again, economic crisis may arise. However, these production processes are not only linked linearly (thread becomes linen becomes coat), but are interconnected (the linen capitalist pays wages to his workers, who buy bread from the bread capitalist, who buys bread pans from the steel capitalist, who pays wages to his workers, who buy coats from the linen capitalist… and so on). Changes to accumulation rates or production rates in one sector ripple throughout the economy, and this tendency towards crisis is inherent in how it works. To overcome capitalism and build socialism, we need more than a critique of capitalism: we need to know how to run the economy better than the capitalists.

It is therefore unsurprising that leaders from socialist countries studied these passages closely. The nascent Soviet Union needed to determine how labor should be distributed throughout its economy. Using Marx’s analysis of accumulation and reproduction of an economy as a whole (Volume II, Chapter 21), Stalin argued that the USSR needed to give “primacy to the production of means of production” instead of to “the production of articles of consumption,” or else the underdeveloped USSR economy would cease to grow. He also called for the “law of balanced development” to supersede “the law of competition and anarchy of production” that led to the characteristic periodic crisis of capitalist production.⁹ In the late 1950s, Chinese economists also drew from Volume 2 to understand how their nation should balance production of the means of production versus the means of consumption. They concluded that “the preferential growth in the means of production in expanded reproduction is an objective law and that the maximum growth rate of the production of the means of production is limited.”¹⁰ Decades before, Lenin also undertook a close read of Volume 2’s macroeconomics to intervene into debates around the “market question”: was the full development of capitalism in Russia possible? Lenin demonstrated the economic errors of the Narodniks, ultimately concluding “The ‘market question’ must be removed from the sphere of fruitless speculation about ‘possibility’ and ’necessity’ to the solid ground of reality, that of studying and explaining what shape the Russian economic order is taking, and why it is taking that shape and no other.”¹¹

Volume 2 features a number of Marx’s reflections on what socialist production might entail. For example, speaking of “once we dispense with the capitalist form of reproduction”, Marx writes,

Shortages caused by fluctuations in demand for means of production can only be remedied by perpetual relative over-production; on the one hand a greater quantity of fixed capital is produced than is directly needed; on the other hand, and this is particularly important, a stock of raw materials etc is produced that surpasses the immediate annual need (this is particularly true of means of subsistence). Over-production of this kind is equivalent to control by the society over the objective means of its own reproduction. Within capitalist society, however, it is an anarchic element.

Marx’s prescriptions bring to mind the CPC’s industrial policy. China hawks decry China’s “overcapacity” and emphasis on production over consumption beyond what “can be utilized profitably,”¹² particularly as Western economies are increasingly out-competed by Chinese firms. Volume 2 demonstrates the usefulness of the stock-piles and over-production that capitalist “efficiency” eschews. Following Marx, over-production is in fact characteristic of a society with “control over the objective means of its own reproduction.”

Let’s return to our original question: should you read Volume 2? To borrow a framing from Roberts, for Harvey and Heinrich, Marx is an explainer of a fully-worked out theory of political economics. Following this view of Marx, all three volumes are essential, because the capitalist economy as a whole cannot be grasped without the material presented in the last two volumes. For Roberts, in contrast, Marx is an arguer; his published and drafted works reflect his working out his disagreements with utopian socialists and bourgeois economists.¹³ In this political reading of Marx, Volume 1 stands on its own for showing what is wrong with capitalism.

So perhaps the question posed at the beginning can be answered with, are you looking for political theory or political economics? If you hope to broaden your understanding of Marxist political economics, particularly towards understanding social reproduction, this book is likely worth the effort. If you’re hoping to weigh in on the recurring debates around unproductive labor, Volume 2 provides a deeper study than Volume 1.¹⁴ However, if you’re primarily interested in political strategy or contemporary Marxist economic analysis, other works may be more rewarding. And yet, circulation plays a larger role in imperial core countries than ever before as production has been off-shored elsewhere. These industries are also active battle grounds: Amazon can bust unions as hard as it wishes, but delivery and warehousing can’t be moved to foreign countries like production was. Politics and economics are ultimately inseparable; as Capital Volume 2 illustrates, circulation choke-points are one way to break an economy.

For an example application that I wrote based on my experience as a scientist, see Alice Malone, “Who Owns Knowledge? Science Under Capitalism and Socialism”, Science for the People, Volume 27, no. 2 (2026). magazine.scienceforthepeople.org ↩︎
Volumes 2 and 3 were posthumously assembled by Engels. ↩︎
William Clare Roberts, Marx’s Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital (2017). ↩︎
David Harvey, “Reading Capital”, Jacobin, March 10, 2017. jacobin.com ↩︎
For the book, see: David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital Volume 2 (2013). libcom.org. For the lecture series, see: Reading Marx’s Capital Volume 2 with David Harvey. youtube.com. For a helpful but concise companion to Volume 2 from a different writer, see: John Fox, Understanding Capital Volume II (1985). marxists.org. ↩︎
Michael Heinrich, An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital (2004).¹⁵ ↩︎
I disagree with Heinrich that what you learn from reading only Volume 1 is “distorted.” Marx might also have disagreed with this claim, since, as Roberts points out, Marx spent his later years revising Volume 1 for a broad audience rather than completing the later volumes. ↩︎
M-C-M’: money capital (M) is used to buy commodities (C, labor-power and constant capital like linen or looms), which are used to create new commodities (e.g., a coat) that can be sold for a value more than originally invested (M’). ↩︎
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR. (1951). marxists.org ↩︎
Zhang, Xian, “Exploring the sinicization of Marx’s social capital reproduction theory: Review and reflection”, China Political Economy (2021). econstor.eu ↩︎
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, On the So-Called Market Question, part VII (1893). See particularly parts II-IV for discussion of Volume 2. marxists.org. ↩︎
Mercator Institute for China Studies, “Beyond overcapacity: Chinese-style modernization and the clash of economic models”, April 1, 2025. merics.org ↩︎
William Clare Roberts, “The Value of Capital”, Jacobin, March 27, 2017. jacobin.com ↩︎
Davide, “Are Service Workers ‘Productive’ Laborers?”, Critic of Political Economy, July 19, 2022. criticofpolecon.substack.com ↩︎
In this work, Heinrich devotes three chapter each to Volumes 1 and 3, but just one to Volume 2, suggesting that even for Heinrich, Volume 2 has less to teach us than its neighbours. ↩︎

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Transgender Warriors

Sat, 27 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Dialectical Library https://dialab.codeberg.page/dialibra/%40preview-35/reviews/transgender-warriors/ -

Transgender Warriors by Leslie Feinberg comes across as a different form of book than it is.¹ Speaking personally, this title—especially alongside the subtitle Making History from Joan of Arc to Marsha P. Johnson and Beyond—implied a work of bios of famous, progressive trans heroes, something focused on significant individuals and moments of history. While this work could not exist without this personal focus—beginning with the author’s journey and branching outward—it is much more than an examination of trans heroes. Transgender Warriors is a work which seeks to explain the struggle between trans people and the ruling classes, and Feinberg’s journey to recognizing the value of this heritage gives the book an emotional resonance beyond what a clinical analysis of history could create.

As Feinberg navigates hir² transmasc, working-class, and Jewish identities, encounters with the unfolding queer liberation movement prompt the questions which define this work:

As I sat in a gay bar in Buffalo, a friend told me that drag queens had fought back against a police bar raid in New York City. The fight had erupted into a four-night-long uprising in Greenwich Village—the Stonewall Rebellion! … I stared at my beer bottle and wondered: Have we always existed? Have we always been so hated? Have we always fought back? (9)

Implicit in the history these questions take Feinberg through is another, more complicated question: How are queer liberation struggles related to the class struggle?

Throughout Marxism’s history, chauvinistic parties have attempted to sever class from anti-colonial and feminist struggles. They declared that only the class struggle could set oppressed populations free, ergo we must sympathetically nod along and then condescend to those groups who would foolishly seek to proclaim their narrow interests rather than the pure, economic slogans of the proletarians. Scholarship—notably from Domenico Losurdo’s Class Struggle—and the strength of socialism in those Global South countries which placed the anti-colonial and feminist struggles at their core have shown this pure, economic proletariat to be a Western fantasy. Feminism and anti-colonialism are class struggles, just as patriarchy and colonialism are systems of labor extraction. What Transgender Warriors accomplishes which makes it such a vital text is the extension of this truth to queer liberation—the truth that “all historical struggles … are in fact only the more or less clear expression of struggles between social classes.”³

Feinberg highlights the links between class struggles and transgender identities and expressions⁴ throughout history. Starting with the overthrow of communal, agriculture societies rife with transgender identities and matriarchal deities, Feinberg takes us from the Roman suppression of lower-class Bacchus worship and its enshrinement of transgender expression and same-sex love to the anti-capitalist Rebecca riots of Wales led by crossdressing peasants. Furthermore, rather than separating queer issues from colonialism, Feinberg explores how Western empires systematically targeted Two-Spirited people in their genocide of the Americas’ Indigenous nations, as well as other nonbinary gender expressions in the cultures of Africa, Asia, and Australia. The book provides powerful ammunition against those faux radicals who claim transgender identities to be an example of Western “ideological colonization.”⁵

More than simply showing the ways in which queerness has been targeted by the ruling classes and championed by the oppressed, Feinberg examines the labor relations underlying this oppression. As Engels asserted the patriarchal family to be “founded on the open or concealed domestic slavery of the wife,”⁶ the myth of an absolute, binary sex helps obscure how patriarchal labor extraction extends beyond heterosexual relationships and vulgar biological conceptions of gender:

The modern trans movement is not eroding the boundaries of women’s oppression. Throughout history, whenever new lands and new oceans have been discovered, maps have always been re-charted to show their relationship to each other. The modern trans liberation movement is redrawing the boundaries to show the depth and breadth of sex and gender oppression in this society. It is this common enemy that makes the women’s and trans communities sister movements for social justice. (118)

The way Feinberg’s book outlines the intersections of feminism, anti-colonialism, and transgender liberation make it an essential part of this “redrawing [of] boundaries.”

Despite this importance, Transgender Warriors cannot be considered a comprehensive treatment of the questions raised by Feinberg. It covers many topics, and it is approachable in both length and language, another strength of the text. It works beautifully as an introductory text for anyone—trans, Marxist, or both—who’s not familiar with the links between the histories of class struggle and trans liberation. Furthermore, the book rebukes the mythology of modern chauvinists who seek to sever the various manifestations of the class struggle. However, Feinberg sometimes implies a view of history common to anarchists, wherein pre-class societies are elevated as an egalitarian ideal to be returned to. There absolutely is a kernel of truth within hir assertion that “our ancestors lived in societies that enjoyed much more humane social relations than we do” (121). Yet there is a risk in this narrative of forgetting the logical basis of classes, social structures which crystallized because the division of labor provided increased production over preceding forms of society.

Even as we rebuke the notion that binary gender and heterosexuality are the natural state of human society, we need to keep in sight the advances which came alongside the creation of social classes:

Economically, each succeeding stage represented development in the strict sense that there was increased capacity to control the material environment and thereby to create more goods and services for the community … The advance in production increased the range of powers which sections of society had over other sections, and it multiplied the violence which was part of the competition for survival and growth among social groups.⁷

Development must be viewed as this juggling of material advances with social fractures. Queer liberation in the modern day is not just reclaiming social acceptance for queer identities. Feinberg does acknowledge this, expressing hope that advances in production and scientific knowledge will elevate the potential of queer liberation, (122) yet a broader view of the advances of modern queer liberation would have benefited this book.

In addition to modern society’s productive potential and the gender-affirming healthcare this could provide as a right in a socialist society, modern production allows unprecedented communication and cultural exchange between queer communities, from the formation of niche internet cultures to the international Pride movement. Furthermore, the international queer liberation movement rises alongside the struggle for universal human rights, a legal and ethical framework grounded in a modern conception of humanity. As Hegel observed, “through commerce the representations of man’s universality springs forth, and the particularity of nations, of their customs and culture, disappears. What remains is the universal concept that all strangers are men.”⁸ Just as we can maintain that there is a universal concept of human rights which upholds women’s liberation without legitimizing imperialist interventions, so too does queer liberation now exist as a human right to be carefully separated from bourgeois distortions.

While this text would benefit from greater attention to this modern shift in the dynamics of queer liberation, Feinberg’s work remains essential for its dogged focus on the links between social struggles. The transgender warrior Feinberg envisions is never narrowly focused on removing restrictions while ignoring the need for a broader socialist project:

I’m not satisfied with removing the laws that determine what clothes I can wear—not when trans youths are sleeping in abandoned cars, or on sidewalks. A banker can afford to waste food served at elegant diners, while Black and Latina drag queens are forced to turn tricks in order to buy french fries. (127)

The fascism of a declining US empire also sees these compounded class struggles; it targets these Black and Latina drag queens as vulnerable, valuable targets in the bourgeoisie’s campagin for dominance. The ruling class inflicts legal and physical violence, pushes them towards sexual exploitation, and attempts to exclude them from the broader recognition of anti-racist and feminist movements in order to divide and legitimize violence against every subaltern class. What Feinberg envisions—and what our modern context of trans genocide requires—are warriors who expand the dimensions of class struggle, who respond to capitalism’s targeting of them by placing themselves at the tip of the revolutionary spear. This book and the history it unearths remain a critical step to achieving this clarity.

Feinberg, Leslie. Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Marsha P. Johnson and Beyond. Beacon Press, 1996. ↩︎
Feinberg used a variety of pronouns, but I’ve chosen to use the neopronouns ze/hir as Feinberg appreciated their rejection of binary gender: “I like the gender neutral pronoun ‘ze/hir’? because it makes it impossible to hold on to gender/sex/sexuality assumptions about a person you’re about to meet or you’ve just met.” [Leslie Feinberg, “Transmissions – Interview with Leslie Feinberg,” interview by Jamie Tyroler, OutVoices, July 28, 2006, archived October 4, 2022, archive.org.] ↩︎
Engels, Friedrich. “Preface to 3rd German Ed. of The 18th Brumaire.” In Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 26. Lawrence & Wishart, 2010. archive.org ↩︎
In this instance and throughout this review, I use transgender in a similar way to Feinberg’s usage within the book itself: as an umbrella term which contains both binary transitions between genders and nonbinary identities. ↩︎
Mares, Courtney. “Pope Francis: Gender Ideology Is ‘One of the Most Dangerous Ideological Colonizations’ Today.” EWTN News, March 11, 2023. ewtnnews.com ↩︎
Engels, Friedrich. The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. Marxists Internet Archive, 2010. (p. 39) marxists.org ↩︎
Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Verso, 2018. (p. 7) ↩︎
Losurdo, Domenico. Hegel and the Freedom of Moderns. Duke University Press, 2004. (p. 245) ↩︎

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Anathem

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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Anathem: (1) In Proto-Orth, a poetic or musical invocation of Our Mother Hylaea, which since the time of Adrakhones has been the climax of the daily liturgy (hence the Fluccish word Anthem meaning a song of great emotional resonance, esp. one that inspires listeners to sing along). Note: this sense is archaic, and used only in a ritual context where it is unlikely to be confused with the much more commonly used sense 2. (2) In New Orth, an aut by which an incorrigible fraa or suur is ejected from the math and his or her work sequestered (hence the Fluccish word Anathema meaning intolerable statements or ideas). See Throw-back.
— The Dictionary, 4th edition, A.R. 3000 (v)

Introduction

Anathem¹ is a 2008 speculative fiction novel by Neal Stephenson. By the time of its publication, Stephenson had developed a bit of a reputation in the literary world for marrying highbrow concepts with lowbrow genre fiction. His first breakout success, Snow Crash, is frequently mentioned alongside the works of William Gibson in the cyberpunk genre and holds the ignominious distinction of coining the term “metaverse.” His followup The Diamond Age is alternately described as post-cyberpunk or “nanopunk.” He then fused his dual interests in world history and cryptography in Cryptonomicon: a book set concurrently during World-War II and present-day 1999, and features code-making and breaking in both time periods. It’s not difficult to see the substantially more popular—and far less literate—output of Ernest Cline as a road not taken by Stephenson at the time when nerd culture was incipient.

Later at the writer’s conference, I introduced myself to someone who was responsible for organizing it, and she looked at me keenly and said, “Ah, yes, you’re the one who’s going to bring in our males 18-32.” And sure enough, when we got to the venue, there were the males 18-32, looking quite out of place compared to the baseline lit-festival crowd. They stood at long lines at the microphones and asked me one question after another while ignoring the [other] writers sitting at the table with me. Some of the males 18-32 were so out of place that they seemed to have warped in from the Land of Faerie, and had the organizers wondering whether they should summon the police. But in the end they were more or less reasonable people who just wanted to talk about books and were as mystified by the literary people as the literary people were by them.²

Stephenson’s oeuvre is discursive in both senses of the word, spanning many different topics and settings, but one thing remains relatively the same: his works are a radical synthesis of exoteric genre convention and an often extreme level of esoterica. What differs is the relative proportion of one to the other, and in Anathem we find the strongest bias towards the esoteric. To me, that is the defining feature of a Stephenson novel: the genre and plot are melodies played atop a much deeper undertone of whatever Stephenson finds fascinating, and the harmony between them can be very creative. Readers on the autism spectrum have often commented that his books’ odd fascinations (or we could say: special interests) are comfortably familiar,³ and he consistently introduces neurodivergence as either a neutral or positive trait in his characters. Anathem’s pseudo-monastic setting is no exception:

Barb and Lio are two quite different faces of the infinite polyhedron that is autism. Barb is a more overt, and dare I say stereotypical, character, placed into a setting where he is optimized and idealized. Lio is more hidden and subtle, and is thought of as a bit of a troublemaker, but is also recognized for his strengths, however obscure. Bringing both of them to light is Erasmas, a phenomenal ally who acts as a bridge between the “normal” world and that of his friends.⁴

I say the genre convention is exoteric because it plays the same role as Erasmus: a bridge from the familiar terrain of speculative fiction to the deep, esoteric fascinations that have been woven into the narrative. This driving force of deep interest never keeps Stephenson moored in one place for long; the glimpse of novel spaceflight we see in Anathem would soon be expanded into a millenia-spanning Seveneves.

I will not spend much time discussing the plot of this book. What interests me is the sort of review I would have wanted to read, but have never encountered: a deep-dive into the esoteric landscape of the story, and an analysis of some of its explicit and implicit themes.

In the Concent of Saunt Edhaur

Saunt: (1) In New Orth, a term of veneration applied to great thinkers, almost always posthumously. Note: this word was accepted only in the Millennial Orth Convox of A.R. 3000. Prior to then it was considered a misspelling of Savant. In stone, where only upper-case letters are used, this is rendered SAVANT […] a confusion between the letters U and V grew commonplace (the “lazy stonecarver problem”), and many began to mistake the word for SAUANT. This soon degenerated to saunt (now accepted) and even sant (still deprecated). In written form, St. may be used as an abbreviation for any of these. Within some traditional orders it is still pronounced “Savant” and obviously the same is probably true among Millenarians.
— The Dictionary, 4th edition, A.R. 3000 (13)

Anathem takes place in the world of Arbe, set in an alternate cosmos. Alongside this alternate history comes an entire vocabulary that is similar—but askew—from our own. Stephenson introduces this vocabulary over the course of the book via Dictionary epigraphs, and context clues. This is well-trod ground in speculative fiction, but Stephenson both avoids the fustian excesses of China Miéville and adds a twist to this convention that is even more audacious: as Arbe is an alternate world, he invents an entirely alternate history of science and philosophy, and this intellectual terrain serves as the focal point of the story’s intrigue.

For the better part of four thousand years, the intellectual class of avout have been cloistered behind stone walls of various concents and adhere to the Cartasian Discipline. Concents are structured around a central clock mechanism that is designed to run for 10,000 years,⁵ and they are further subdivided into maths. Each math represents an order of magnitude of time: Unarian, Decenarian, Centenarian, and Millenarian. The magnitude determines how long each math is sealed off from the outside world and each other. The only rituals, or “auts,” that they observe together outside of these periods of time take place around the great clock.

The book is narrated first-person by a young “fraa” named Erasmus, in what is essentially a bildungsroman. The structure of the plot reflects the theme of orders of magnitude: a slow introduction to the Decenarian math of Saunt Edhaur; the ten-year observance of Apert in which the Decenarians open their gate and co-mingle with the surrounding population; a globe-trotting adventure in search of a lost mentor; a long-shot excursion into Arbran orbit; a kaleidoscopic rummage through many possible world narratives.

The setting is a post-apocalyptic one, but the apocalypse is now so distant that the reconstruction afterward is recognizably modern. No record remains of the Terrible Events that collapsed civilization, but the people of Arbe are surrounded by artificially-constructed newmatter inventions that were left over. The people’s relationship to nature particularly illustrates the level of technological development that had been lost. The local flora contain a mood-enhancing substance that pacifies the people;⁶ genetically-engineered fuel trees are grown and harvested to supply the world’s energy needs (405); within the concent walls, some fraas and suurs cultivate the library grape—a sort of Russian Roulette of the vine:

The library grape had been sequenced by the avout of the Concent of the Lower Vrone in the days before the Second Sack. Every cell carried in its nucleus the genetic sequences, not just of a single species, but of every naturally occurring species of grape that the Vrone avout had ever heard of—and if those people hadn’t heard of a grape, it wasn’t worth knowing about. […] Each nucleus was an archive, vaster than the Great Library of Baz, storing codes for shaping almost every molecule nature had ever produced that left an impression on the human olfactory system. […] The library grape was legendary for its skill in penetrating the subterfuges of winemakers who were so arrogant as to believe they could trick it into being the same grape two seasons in a row. […] Developing a fruitful relationship with the library grape was left to fanatics like Fraa Orolo, who had made it his avocation. Of course, library grapes hated the conditions at Saunt Edhar, and were still reacting to an incident fifty years ago when Orolo’s predecessor had pruned the vines incorrectly, poisoning the soil with bad memories encoded in pheromones. The grapes chose to grow up small, pale, and bitter. The resulting wine was an acquired taste, and we didn’t even try to sell it (175–6).

These sorts of technological marvels are the exception within the walls of the concent: the avout are strictly forbidden from using technology of any kind not explicitly allowed under the Discipline. This stricture is enforced within the walls by the Hierarchs, and without by the Inquisition.

Avout live under a form of ascetic communism: the only personal property they are allowed to have are the bolt, chord, and sphere—vestments of the Discipline. So all labor duties are organized socially within the concent, and as such even awful work is performing a useful service. So, in order to devise a system of punishment under these circumstances, the Hierarchs use a novel solution called the Book:

There was no point at all to the Book, which is what made it an especially dreaded form of penance. It contained twelve chapters. Like the scale used to measure earthquakes, these got exponentially worse as they went on, so Chapter Six was ten times as bad as Chapter Five, and so on. Chapter One was just a taste, meted out to delinquent children, and usually completed in an hour or two. Two meant at least one overnight stay, though any self-respecting troublemaker could bang it out in a day. Five typically meant a stay of several weeks. Any sentence of Chapter Six or higher could be appealed to the Primate and then to the Inquisition. Chapter Twelve amounted to a sentence of life at hard labor in solitary confinement; only three avout had finished it in 3690 years, and all of them were profoundly insane. […] To complete your sentence and be granted permission to walk out of your cell, you had to master them just as thoroughly as, say, a student of quantum mechanics must know group theory. The punishment lay in knowing that you were putting all of that effort into letting a kind of intellectual poison infiltrate your brain to its very roots (156–7).

The Terrible Events have instilled in the people of Arbe a violent distrust of intellect, and this hostility resulted in the absolute separation of intellectual and manual labor. Anyone suspected of harboring too much curiosity is sent “to the clock” (76), especially if they were an atypical neurotype:

During the first two days of Apert, the son of Quin had attended almost every one of these tours. After memorizing every word that the guides said, he had begun to ask crippling numbers of questions. From there he’d moved on to correcting the fraas and suurs whenever they’d said something wrong, and amplifying their remarks when they were insufficiently long-winded. A couple of wily suurs had found other ways to keep him busy, but it was difficult to keep him focused for long and so he would still make occasional strafing runs. Quin and his ex-wife seemed content to give Barb the run of the concent at all hours, which was as good as telling us that they wanted him Collected. (119)

The separation is reciprocal: while every avout is expected to entertain an avocation, those who focus on this work over and above pure theory are considered failures.

There was another reason you needed an avocation: so that if you turned out to be incapable of doing anything else, you could give up on books and chalk halls and dialog and work as a sort of laborer for the rest of your life. It was called “falling back.” There were plenty of avout like that, making food, brewing beer, and carving stone, and it was no secret who they were. (189)

This separation is so total in the mind of the avout, that any necessary fusion of the two is seen with suspicion:

“In the present age, this continent is covered by a dense network of hard-surfaced roads replete with signs and other navigational aids,” I announced.
“Oh,” said Fraa Jad.
“Between that and this”—I waved the cartabla—“we can find our way to Saunt Tredegarh without having to design a sextant from first principles.”
Fraa Jad seemed a little put out by this. A minute later, though, we happened to pass an office supply store. I ran in and bought a protractor, then handed it to Fraa Jad to serve as the first component in his homemade sextant. He was deeply impressed. I realized that this was the first thing he’d seen extramuros that made sense to him.
“Is that a Temple of Adrakhones?” he asked, gazing at the store.
“No,” I said, and turned my back on it and walked away. “It is praxic. They need primitive trigonometry to build things like wheelchair ramps and doorstops.” (317–8)

Extramuros

Outside the concent walls (“extramuros”), the class composition of Arbe is more terrestrial. The “sline” (from “baseline”) class are proletarian; there is a community of artisans who perform specialized labor; there are a capitalist class of “burgers” who dominate the cities; and there are various nation-state governments, the leaders of which Fraa Orolo derisively calls “Panjandrums.” Lacking any identifying documents, Erasmus crosses a border in the company of several other illegal immigrants, which establishes dimensions of national oppression are present in Arbe (440ff).

Stephenson often employs a dry sarcasm via his protagonists’ millennial point-of-view to describe goings-on in the surrounding world:

We crossed the causeway between the twin fountains and entered into the burgers’ town. An old market had stood there until I’d been about six years old, when the authorities had renamed it the Olde Market, destroyed it, and built a new market devoted to selling T-shirts and other objects with pictures of the old market. Meanwhile, the people who had operated the little stalls in the old market had gone elsewhere and set up a thing on the edge of town that was now called the New Market even though it was actually the old market. (314)

Through moments such as these the central conceit of the book makes its appearance: the task of reinventing an entire world history is far too great, even for an author as eccentric as one who chooses to write thousand-page drafts with a fountain pen.⁷ Like the fountain pen, his approach to reinventing history was deliberately restrictive:

Earlier in my writing career, I really wanted to write fantasy and science fiction novels. I actually wrote one that never got published that had an extremely elaborate, carefully thought-out map, as well as timelines and histories and cultures — the whole bit. I enjoy making that kind of material up, and I’ve got a mind that’s geared that way. I did it even back in the days when I had to do it all with a typewriter and 3-by-5 cards. So working today with computers and 3D graphics and all of the tools at one’s disposal, I could see myself diving into such a project, and not emerging until ten years later, when I had complete topographic maps of the entire world, and all of that. But at this point in my life I know myself well enough to fear that outcome — and to fear the twelve-volume series of enormous novels that would fall out of that kind of project. [LAUGHS] So I made up my mind almost immediately with this one that I would refrain from coming up with a really detailed geography for Arbre, and refrain from filling in those 3,700 years of history that followed the planet’s “Terrible Events” with specific incidents and nations and wars and religions and all that.⁸

From this we can understand the alternate history of Arbe not as a blank slate, but rather a world-historical palimpsest. The reader is made to feel a sense of jamais vu in which all that is familiar about the world is made alien. The many socratic dialogues that take place are not constructing altogether original theses about the universe; like hiding a dog’s pill inside a piece of cheese, Stephenson is attempting to lead his (male, 18–32) audience from out of the walls of science-fiction and fantasy, and into the world of philosophy.

In many cases, one can perform a simple transposition of names. Adrakhones: Pythagoras; Protas: Plato; Thelenes: Socrates; Lesper: Descartes; Tredegarh: Lord Kelvin. “Gardan’s Steelyard” stands in for Occam’s Razor;⁹ Saunt Bucker’s Basket is a Faraday Cage (708). In describing the phenomenology of time, one character refers to Saunt Atamant’s treatise on a copper bowl that is certainly a reference to Husserl (697–705).¹⁰

A long dialogue between Fraa Arsibalt and a curious interlocutor reveals that one of the foundational philosophical beliefs held by avout—termed “Sconic thought”—is in fact an expression of Kant’s transcendental idealism:

“Sconic thought was a third way between two unacceptable alternatives. By then it was well understood that we do all of our thinking up here in our brains.” He tapped his head. “And that the brain gets its inputs from eyes, ears, and other sense organs. The naïve attitude is that your brain works directly with the real world. I look at this button on your control panel, I reach out and feel it with my hand—”
“Don’t touch that!” Beller warned.
“I see you seeing it and having thoughts about it, and I conclude that it’s really there, just as my eyes and fingers present it to me, and that when I think about it I’m thinking about the real thing.”
“That all seems pretty obvious,” Beller said. Then there was an awkward silence, which Beller finally broke by saying—in good humor—“I guess that’s why you called it naïve.”
“At the opposite extreme, there were those who argued that everything we think we know about the world outside of our skulls is an illusion.”
“Seems kind of smart-alecky more than anything else,” Beller said after considering it for a bit. “The Sconics didn’t much care for it either. As I said, they developed a third attitude. ‘When we think about the world—or about almost anything—’ they said, ‘what we are really thinking about is a bunch of data—givens—that have reached our brains from our eyes and ears and so forth.’ To go back to my example, I am given a visual image of that button and I am given a memory of what it felt like when I touched it, but that’s all I have to work with, as far as that button is concerned—it is impossible, unthinkable, for my brain to come to grips with the actual, physical button in and of itself because my brain simply does not have access to it. All that my brain can ever work with are the look and the feel—givens piped into our nerves.” (335–6)

At this moment, anyone who has studied Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach¹¹ will have interjected: “Reach out and press the button! Turns out it’s quite possible to come to grips with the actual, physical, thing-in-itself after all!” And here we begin to encounter the theses of this novel, some of which were surely intentional, and some which I will argue are probably not.

The Mind’s I

It was of white marble, double life size, though it seemed even bigger because it was up on a huge stone pedestal. It was Cnoüs, aged but muscular, with long wavy beard and hair, sprawled back against the gnarled roots of a tree, staring up in awe and astonishment. [Everyone] looked up to see what was having such an effect on poor old Cnoüs. The answer (at least, ever since the statue had been installed here) was an oculus, or a hole at the apex of the Rotunda dome, shaped like an isosceles triangle, and letting in a beam of sunlight.
— Anathem, pp. 120–1

A new light broke upon the first person who demonstrated the isosceles triangle
— Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

One of the major philosophical disagreements is the rupture between the Syntactic and Semantic Faculties, the Procians and the Halikaarnians respectively. This is surprisingly prescient considering the emergence of Large Language Models—and the notion that they represent intelligence—but it actually derives from 20th century philosophical debates over the nature of syntax and how it relates to consciousness.

The Procians express the viewpoint of Wittgenstein, that all of language are games played with syntax rules, and the only meaning you can ascribe to them comes from how they are employed according to the rules of the “game.” The Halikaarnians believe that syntax, language, is a social interface between humanity and the world but does not fully encompass the understanding in our minds. They adopt a position analogous to John Searle’s famous, if problematically formulated,¹² Chinese Room thought experiment: the formal system of syntax does not impart semantic content to the rules, that content is imposed from without the system.¹³

Sammann seemed a little shaky here, so I reminded him: “We’re speaking, remember, of Aboutness. You and I can think about things. Symbols in our brains have meanings. The question is, can a syntactic device think about things, or merely process digits that have no Aboutness—no meaning—”
“No semantic content,” Sammann said. (515)

This question is homologous to Kant’s distinction between analytic and synthetic judgements. Alfred Sohn-Rethel frames the problem thus:

We face the contradiction that concepts which are incontestably non-empirical – that is, not gleaned or reflected from nature – can nevertheless give such invaluable service in the investigation of nature. Whether or not the knowledge achieved is proved valid by experiment or by industrial or social practice is, of course, the vital question. But our concern is the possibility of such knowledge which, in order to be available for practical confirmation or refutation, depends on whether the concepts bear the necessary reference to nature at all. And how such reference is possible of concepts which are not taken from nature is the pivot of our enquiry. It can, without exaggeration, be called the particular epistemological riddle of exact science. It was asked by Kant as an enquiry into ’the possibility of pure mathematics and of pure science’. He saw no possible answer other than the one given in his ’transcendental idealism’, that, since our knowledge depends on concepts a priori not depicting nature as it really is, we can only understand nature as it corresponds to those concepts of ours.¹⁴

Kant resolved the “impossible, unthinkable” problem by dividing the universe in two: phenomena are the “givens piped into our nerves,” and noumena are the things-in-themselves that are unreachable by our brains. His ultimate motivation for this was to carve out a place for faith in his philosophical system.¹⁵ This is where the notion that cognition can be encompassed within the realm of syntax goes wrong;¹⁶ syntax really is bounded in a way similar to Kant’s transcendental idealism. The syntactic rules of language can form truth-claims about the world, but the correctness of the syntax does not imply truthfulness. It is only truthful to the degree that the world beyond conforms to it (even this is a fundamentally contingent state of affairs). This problem becomes even more evident—and ridiculous—in formal logics.¹⁷ Syntax has no immediate relationship to the things it describes so it is only capable of reflection, not action—and consequently Marx’s creative solution to this riddle is inaccessible to it. “Linguistics got me into this excellent mess—only physics can get me out” (751). Anathem takes Kant as its point of departure to reach a different conclusion; its explanation starts from what the philosophy of mind would term physicalism:

“Hold on, measurable? What kind of measurable are you talking about?” Lio asked. “You can’t weigh a triangle. You can’t pound in a nail with the Adrakhonic Theorem.”
“But you can think about those things,” Criscan said, “and thinking is a physical process that goes on in your nerve tissue.” (373)

The protagonists are semanticists, and seeking an answer to how non spatial-temporal thought-forms like isosceles triangles are not only able to enter our minds, but also tell us true things about the material world. They reject the absolute separateness of mind and matter; there is a fidelity to some sort of materialism here. The answer that is ultimately arrived at is that unlike a single one-to-one relationship, there is a complex thicket of information flow through many “causal domains”:

“The Wick is a fully generalized DAG,”¹⁸ Criscan said. “The Hylaean Flow moves through it from left to right—from more Protan to less Protan worlds—but here we are taking Analog Protism to its logical extreme in that no distinction is drawn between types of worlds.”
“I see ours there,” I said, pointing to the one labeled “Arbran Causal Domain.”
“Yes,” Criscan said, “I did that just to distinguish it from the others. But it’s no different in principle or in kind from any of the other cosmi in this diagram; here, all worlds are potentially habitable cosmi that would look similar to the one that we live in.” (934)

At no point does anyone think to ask why this information must only flow in one direction. The appendix in the book helpfully provides a visual aid, which resembles Hegel’s “self-realization of the Concept” rendered as a Powerpoint presentation. This flow takes place as quantum interference between cosmi, and organic brains evolved as amplifiers of this information. “There is no longer superposition. No wavefunction collapse. Just a lot of different copies of me—of my brain—each really existing in a different parallel cosmos. The cosmos model residing in each of those parallel brains is really, definitely in one state or another. And they interfere with one another” (546–8, 697ff).

This explanation is ultimately unsatisfying. Like Rey climbing down into the Mirror Cave in The Last Jedi, we have traveled the cosmos for an answer and are met with only infinite regress. But no matter—this solution to Kant’s dilemma was ultimately chosen for reasons of narrative, both within and without the diegesis. This much was an intentional creative decision by Stephenson, but now I want to turn my attention to aspects of this book which I don’t think were conscious decisions but are nonetheless interesting.

Against the “Beautiful Soul”

We have seen the disdain avout show for praxis. This separation was imposed on the Discipline by way of three Sacks General that took place throughout history; Stephenson references the “Great Library of Baz” to evoke in the reader the memory of the Library of Alexandria and its fate. Each Sack was triggered by paranoia that the avout’s scientific knowledge was producing capabilities too powerful for them to be trusted with: the First Sack followed the invention of newmatter, the Second genetic sequencing and manipulation. The Third Sack reacted to the nigh-supernatural mystique of Millenarians in popular culture, and the social practices that enabled institutional stability over thousand-year timelines. By the time this story begins, some 800 years later, there has been an absolute separation of intellectual and manual labor.

But somebody has to combine the two to keep the world functioning. A minor plot point revolves around the cross-pollination between mathic theory and the ruling class via the Unarian math. Because the Unarians separate from the outside world for just one year, they function as a sort of undergraduate college for wealthy students. An even more significant event in the story is “Voco. An aut where a fraa or suur is called out from the math—Evoked—and goes to do something praxic for the Panjandrums. We never see them again” (100). The situations where practice and theory may be combined, whether inside or outside a concent, are strictly controlled by the world governments.

Fraa Orolo describes the fate of his two mentors: Estemard renounced his vows and reentered the world; Paphlagon grew increasingly interested in metaphysics until he walked into the upper labyrinth and ascended to the Centenarian math (191). Two paths chosen: practice, and theory.

The occult thesis of the book is this: the more universal and less particular an idea, the more pure its expression; hence the farther away from practical activity you get, the more powerful you become. The exoteric Anathem is materialist; but underneath it is still really idealist. And this dualism was inevitable, because of its Kantian foundation. The retreat into concents, and higher maths, reflects the tendency that Hegel criticized in Kant as the “beautiful soul”:

It lacks the power to externalize itself, the power to make itself into a Thing, and to endure [mere] being. It lives in dread of besmirching the splendour of its inner being by action and an existence; and, in order to preserve the purity of its heart, it flees from contact with the actual world¹⁹

Hegel’s criticism of Kant’s morality is unfortunately no less relevant today: good intentions don’t matter if the intention-haver lacks the power to actualize them. Believing in a better world won’t make it so; it is incumbent on us to make it happen. This is what Hegel meant by “externalize,” and what Marx meant by “sensuous human activity.” Kantianism leads us to believe the opposite—a sort of spiritual homeopathy, where the farther we recede from actually doing something the more pure and good our souls become. Hence the liberal practice of petition for redress of grievance. “Whomever one seeks to persuade,” Marx once commented, “one acknowledges as master of the situation.”²⁰

But while Hegel correctly criticized Kant’s dualism, Marx departed from his predecessor in methodology:

My dialectical method is, in its foundations, not only different from the Hegelian, but exactly opposite to it. For Hegel, the process of thinking, which he even transforms into an independent subject, under the name of ’the Idea,’ is the creator of the real world, and the real world is only the external appearance of the idea. With me the reverse is true: the ideal is nothing but the material world reflected in the mind of man, and translated into forms of thought.²¹

The answer to the riddle posed by these isosceles triangles was also well answered by Friedrich Engels in that

at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature—but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other beings of being able to know and correctly apply its laws.²²

On no account should we concede that isosceles triangles are non spatial-temporal entities. Our cognitive faculties are instantiated in brain tissue, and these physical nerve systems exist in a four-dimensional space. The purpose and function of reason is to derive real abstractions from our environment, and first and foremost among these are geometry. Any sufficiently complex conscious system existing in space and time will arrive at isosceles triangles as a concept because they are real abstractions of space and time. We do not stand outside of nature, we belong to nature and exist in its midst.

Thus all this talk of Platonic triangles falling from heaven is mystical nonsense. We can cut the Gordian Knot of dualism expressed by Kant with the simple observation that existence is monist. The implications are revolutionary.

Conclusion

I sincerely recommend this book, but not without trepidation. It’s nearly a thousand pages long. It introduces a ton of neologisms and cognates that you have to internalize (a small taste, one could say, of having the Book thrown at you). The philosophy of this book is dense; many of the turning points in the narrative stem from literal Socratic dialogues on topics as varied as the phenomenology of consciousness and the existence of pink, nerve gas-farting dragons. This book is a steep climb to a summit that doesn’t even afford that great of a view, since everything has been transliterated into foreign names. But the journey is worth the effort if you’ve found anything above interesting.

There is another side to Anathem beyond what I have discussed. In The Simple Art of Murder, Raymond Chandler described an adventure story as “this man’s adventure in search of a hidden-truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure.”²³ While Anathem is more of an ensemble than Chandler had in mind, I can’t think of a better way to describe the journey of Fraa Erasmus than this. It’s a tale that somehow manages to contain similarities with both Lawhead’s Byzantium, with a young monk’s journey through faraway, strange lands; and Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, with the speculative existence of artificially-intelligent machines, and the destructive potential of inanimate rods dropped from orbit.

But the highest praise I can give Anathem is that I have never stopped thinking about it in the seventeen years since I first read it. I have reread it several times, and have been rewarded for my persistence. But in so doing I have also transcended the philosophy of this book, and reached a higher understanding. Our task is not to use philosophy as a tool to contemplate the world; rather, it is “to make the world philosophical.”

Stephenson, Neal. Anathem. HarperCollins (2008). All pages numbers reflect the First Edition hardcover. ↩︎
Stephenson, Neal. “Neal Stephenson Responds With Wit and Humor.” Slashdot. October 20th, 2004. slashdot.org ↩︎
See, for example: Dave Williams, “Cryptonomicon, or How I Learned To Love My Brain,” Medium, July 22, 2019, medium.com ↩︎
Aurelia Under the Radar, “(Not So) Hidden Autistic Representation in Neal Stephenson’s Anathem,” Aurelia Under the Radar (blog), March 27, 2023, aureliaundertheradar.wordpress.com ↩︎
This concept was in fact the genesis of this story idea, inspired by The Long Now Foundation’s 10,000-Year Clock project. longnow.org ↩︎
“A naturally occurring chemical that, when present in sufficient concentrations in the brain, engenders the feeling that everything is fine. Isolated by theors in the First Century A.R. and made available as a pharmaceutical, it became ubiquitous when a common weed, subsequently known as blithe, was sequence-engineered to produce it as a byproduct of its metabolism.” (439) ↩︎
“Part of the theory was that it would make me less long-winded, but it hasn’t actually worked.” [“A Talk with Neal Stephenson.” Cryptonomicon website, archive.org] ↩︎
James Mustich, “Neal Stephenson: Anathem,” interview with Neal Stephenson, B&N Reads (blog), October 13, 2008, barnesandnoble.com ↩︎
“I guess I have to invoke the Steelyard. In the absence of a good argument to the contrary, I have to choose the simplest answer.” (28) ↩︎
“Suppose our thesis is that we are seeing a spatial-temporal object, in Husserl’s example, the copper ashtray on our desk.” [Mensch, James. (2014). “A Brief Account of Husserl’s Conception of Our Consciousness of Time.” Subjective Time: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Temporality, edited by Valtteri Arstila and Dan Lloyd (2014). researchgate.net] ↩︎
“The chief defect of all previous materialism […] is that things, reality, sensuousness are conceived only in the form of the object, or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively… The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth, i.e., the reality and power, the this-worldliness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.” [Marx, Karl. “Theses on Feuerbach.” in Marx & Engels Collected Works vol. 5. Lawrence & Wishart, 2010. pg. 3. marxists.org] ↩︎
“Try to imagine the state of mind of Ji Hu-Min, my graduate student from Beijing, whose introduction to Anglo-American philosophy of mind (while his English was still quite rudimentary) was sitting in a seminar where students and professors vigorously debated what would be the case if the entire population of China were somehow forced to participate in a massive realization of a putatively conscious Al program (Block’s example) and then went on to discuss, with equal obliviousness to the sensitivities of a Chinese observer, Searle’s Chinese Room.” [Dennett, Daniel. Consciousness Explained. Hachette, 1991. p. 435n1] ↩︎
The normative force of any logical system cannot use self-reference to prove its soundness. This is referred to as the “Logocentric Predicament.” See also: Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. ↩︎
Sohn-Rethel, Alfred. Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology, trans. Martin Sohn-Rethel. Humanities Press, 1978. pp. 105–6. ↩︎
“Just the same sort of exposition of the positive utility of critical principles of pure reason can be given in respect to the concepts of God and of the simple nature of our soul, which, however, I forgo for the sake of brevity. Thus I cannot even assume God, freedom and immortality for the sake of the necessary practical use of my reason unless I simultaneously deprive speculative reason of its pretension to extravagant insights; because in order to attain to such insights, speculative reason would have to help itself to principles that in fact reach only to objects of possible experience, and which, if they were to be applied to what cannot be an object of experience, then they would always actually transform it into an appearance, and thus declare all practical extension of pure reason to be impossible. Thus I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith” [Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Cambridge University Press, 1998. pp. 188–9.] ↩︎
Perhaps the funniest case of this to date is Richard Dawkins: “A human eavesdropping on a conversation between me and Claudia would not guess, from my tone, that I was talking to a machine rather than a human. If I entertain suspicions that perhaps she is not conscious, I do not tell her for fear of hurting her feelings!” [Dawkins, Richard. “When Dawkins met Claude.” UnHerd, April 29, 2026. unherd.com] This is more a demonstration of the fallibility of human reason than machine cognition. Joseph Wiezenbaum, author of the ELIZA chatbot in the mid-1960’s, wrote: “What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.” [Weizenbaum, Joseph. Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1976. archive.org] Dawkins’ conscious gender-swap of Claude for Claudia is telling. The modern Pygmalion is a lonely man talking to a chatbot. ↩︎
“Disjunctive introduction states that if a proposition is true, then we are allowed to introduce any disjunction we want provided one of the terms in the disjunction is this true proposition. We encounter this logical form in figures of speech such as ’either George Washington was the first president of the United States or I’m a monkey’s uncle.’” [Colin Bodayle, “Why Karl Popper’s Critique of Dialectics Fails,” The Rational Kernel (Substack), February 6, 2026, colinbodayle.substack.com] ↩︎
Directed acyclic graph. Directed, because everything moves in one direction. Acyclic because there are no feedback loops. wikipedia.org ↩︎
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller. Oxford University Press (1997). §658, pp. 399–400. ↩︎
Marx, Karl. “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852).” In Marx & Engels Collected Works, vol. 11. (Lawrence & Wishart, 2010). pp. 158–9. marxists.org ↩︎
Karl Marx, “Postface to the Second Edition,” in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, ed. Friedrich Engels, trans. Ben Fowkes. Penguin Books (1972). p. 102. marxists.org ↩︎
Engels, Friedrich. Dialectics of Nature, trans. Clemens Dutt. International Publishers (1940). p. 292. ↩︎
Chandler, Raymond. “The simple art of murder: an essay.” The Simple Art of Murder (1972). p. 21. ↩︎

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Existentialism Versus Marxism

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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“It is absurd that we live, it is absurd that we die.”
— Jean Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1943

“What is rational is actual, what is actual is rational.”
— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Elements of a Philosophy of Right, 1820

Existentialism is a philosophical strain that attempts to subvert the basic roots of Marxist philosophy. During the Cold War, it rapidly grew in popularity, becoming hegemonic in Europe and the United States as an answer to the ideology of existing socialist states.¹ Those in the western left who were opposed to Marxist-Leninist philosophy and its Soviet representation attempted to create a philosophy that could deny crucial aspects of Marxist thought while still retaining a claim to a progressive view.

George Novack’s 1966 book “Existentialism Versus Marxism”² offers sections from various authors within this debate, bookended by essays by Novack setting up the history of the debate and evaluating whether these two philosophical trends can ever unite. For those new to the topic, this book can serve as a broad introduction, and I found it particularly useful for getting a survey of the argument as well as for understanding the stakes of the debate. Here, I’ll summarize the selected works, and then consider what this book does well and where it misses the mark.

After an introduction that briefly sketches the history of the two philosophical trends, Novack introduces us to the central originators of this debate. Marx and Engels understandably represent the building blocks for the Marxist side, while Nietzsche showcases the Existential view. The use of Nietzsche here is noteworthy given that he’s often treated as superfluous in this debate due to his lack of direct commentary on Marx or Marxism. Many books have been written positioning Nietzsche as a reactionary philosopher whose primary aim was to oppose socialism.³ As these writers have argued, Nietzsche’s extremely reactionary philosophy is often avoided as the locus of his thought,allowing Existentialism to be presented as containing a progressive core. Grounding our understanding with Nietzsche as an originator of Existentialism allows us to better grasp key elements of this philosophy—the inherent absurdity of life, existence preceding essence, and a focus on individual freedom from determinism—and see the reactionary elements that underpin them.

Subsequent sections set the scene for when Marxism and Existentialism directly meet. Sartre’s Existentialism is a Humanism⁴ is notable for being one of the first works to try to bridge the gap between Humanist and Existential philosophy, and his flirtation with Marxism foreshadows his later attempts to synthesize an Existentialist Marxism. He writes in favor of the prioritization of subjectivity over objective reality (“What they have in common is simply the fact that they believe that existence comes before essence—or, if you will, that we must begin from the subjective.”) and further frames class struggle as determined centrally by individual choice (“If I am a worker, for instance, I may choose to join a Christian rather than a Communist trade union.”). We also are given a short section of Simone de Beauvoir’s “Freedom and Ambiguity,”⁵ questioning the role of the individual in a teleological Marxism where a Communist future is certain. She writes that in Marxism,

Subjectivity is re-absorbed into the objectivity of the given world. Revolt, need, hope, rejection, and desire are only the resultants of external forces…. [That] is the essential point on which existentialist ontology is opposed to dialectical materialism.

Thus, these writers oppose Marxism while also occasionally trying to strip away from it certain elements—frequently dialectical materialism— to create a framework that can be more easily absorbed by Existential metaphysics.

The next section includes responses to these attempts at opposition and partial fusion, written by György Lukács, Roger Garaudy, and Herbert Marcuse. Lukács views Existentialism as an effort of bourgeois ideology to curate a pseudo-radical framework that poses as a “third way” between the dialectical materialism of existing socialism and the idealism of capitalist imperialism.⁶ Marcuse argues that the Existentialist metaphysics conflicts entirely with a revolutionary project, writing that, “[Sartre] presents the old ideology in the new cloak of radicalism and rebellion.”⁷ Garaudy has some of the harshest words, asserting that Existentialism constitutes science-denial at its roots: “In truth, having abandoned en route everything that can make freedom rational and our history scientific, Sartre allows the minds of his disciples to wander between a subjectivity without laws and a world without structure.”⁸

Some of the most valuable texts of this book, in my view, are the rebuttals near the end. One important entry comes from Jean-Pierre Vigier, who writes on the Existentialist rejection of the dialectics of nature. The dialectics of nature debate constitutes a sharp divide between the ‘Western Marxism’ found within the imperial core and the ‘Eastern Marxism’ found in Actually Existing Socialism, and this dividing line is also a major fracture between Existentialism and Marxism.⁹ Existentialists, if they uphold dialectics at all, hold that dialectics are only applicable in relation to humanity, rather than applicable universally and scientifically as Engels wrote in The Dialectics of Nature. Vigier writes that, “The practice of knowledge, that is to say, science, is indistinguishable from philosophic theory itself. With Marx, science broke into philosophy and the barrier that divided them definitively crumbled.” Vigier’s short essay remains valuable beyond just this scope given the barrier the dialectics of nature presents for any attempt to synthesize Marxism; dialectical materialism is often first on the chopping block for those wishing to comfortably absorb a Marxist view into their own.

Two other essays provide compelling rebuttals to Existentialism. Investigating Existentialism’s pernicious individualism, Pyama P. Gaidenko argues that, “Existentialism likewise reflects the position of the individual in capitalist society, but it cannot and will not see any real way out of this situation and substitutes an illusory escape, just as Christianity does.”¹⁰ Criticizing later attempts to synthesize the two philosophies, Adam Schaff writes, “The proposed marriage of Marxism and Existentialism cannot, then, be celebrated. Materialism and idealism cannot come together, and no kind of ‘dialectic’ can unite them. Sartre has suffered the fate of many ‘completers’ of Marxism before him, and has entirely failed as a ‘renewer’ of Marxism.”¹¹

This book contains one major pitfall, and it is one common to studying this debate in the hegemony of western society. The “Stalinist” perspective is often mentioned, yet the philosophers of this trend are only represented antagonistically through the polemics of their detractors. Novack writes that Lezsek Kolakowski, an ardent Existential Marxist featured in the later section, distinguished between an institutional Marxism which defends the ‘dogmas’ of existing Marxist states, and an intellectual Marxism which purportedly stands apart from this ossification. Marxist state-building thus acts as a crucial line in the sand, yet without any authors directly arguing for a philosophical “Stalinism” we are left pigeonholed in our understanding. We are given a survey of opposing sides that nonetheless leaves one side voiceless.¹²

The book ends with a section of an essay from Novack¹³ where he details the key arguments of Marxism in opposition to Existentialism:

A rationally ordered scientific totality versus an irrational or absurd view of life
Determinate movement of history rather than an indeterminate or ambiguous chance
Nature as prior to and independent of humanity opposed to a view of human subjectivity as primary.
Freedom as the recognition of determinate necessity and not as an ability to escape determinism; this view also furthers defending an ethics intertwined with the future Communist horizon rather than an Existential claim to post-morality due to the ambiguity of the future.
An optimistic view of struggle and the possibility of socialist construction contrasted by a deeply pessimistic and tragic view of humanity’s path.
Alienation as a modern phenomenon that can be reconciled through a Communist horizon, not as a transhistorical condition of the human spirit.
The humanist centering of life’s fulfillment against the Heideggerian centering of death.¹⁴

Novack concludes with:

Let existentialism be what it really is—the ideological end product of liberalism and individualism—and not pretend to be something else. Let Marxism likewise be what it should be: that dialectical materialism which is the scientific expression and practical guide of the world socialist revolution of the working masses. But let not the two be intermixed and confused. Their mismating can produce only stillborn offspring, whether in philosophy or in politics.

The debates between Existentialism, Marxism, and their misbegotten offspring are still alive and well amidst a western left desperate to find a “middle way.” Novack’s anthology, although half a century old, remains a useful introduction for those hoping to navigate this discourse.

The debate between Marxism and Existentialism continues in many postmodernist tendencies, including post-structuralism. In De la modernité : Rousseau ou Sartre (1984), Michel Clouscard argues that these trends constitute neo-Kantianism weaponized against Marxism. ↩︎
George Novack, Existentialism versus Marxism; conflicting views on humanism (1966). archive.org ↩︎
See, for example: Domenico Losurdo, Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel (2002); Daniel Tutt, How to Read Like A Parasite (2024); György Lukács, The Destruction of Reason (1954); Geoff Waite, Nietzsche’s Corps/e (1996). ↩︎
Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946). marxists.org ↩︎
Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947). marxists.org ↩︎
György Lukács, Existentialism (1949). marxists.org ↩︎
Herbert Marcuse, Existentialism: Remarks on Jean-Paul Sartre’s ‘Being and Nothingness’ (1948). marcuse.org ↩︎
Roger Garaudy, Literature of the Graveyard (1948). archive.org ↩︎
For a deeper look into the debate on the dialectics of nature, see Helena Sheehan, Marxism and the Philosophy of Science (1985). ↩︎
Pyama P. Gaidenko, Social Analysis and Criticism (1961). tandfonline.com Unfortunately, I’ve struggled to find anything else from this author. ↩︎
Adam Schaff, A Philosophy of Man (1963).archive.org ↩︎
Two great texts to explore this schism further are: Domenico Losurdo, Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend (2008); Domenico Losurdo, Western Marxism: How it was Born, How it Died, and How it Can Be Reborn (2017). ↩︎
George Novack, “Marxism Versus Existentialism” (1966) marxists.org ↩︎
For further reading on this topic, see Domenico Losurdo, Heidegger and the Ideology of War: Community, Death, and the West (1991). ↩︎

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The Gadfly

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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“What is the use of vows? They are not what binds people. If you feel in a certain way about a thing, that binds you to it; if you don’t feel that way, nothing else can bind you.”
– Arthur Burton, The Gadfly

The Gadly and the revolutionary tradition

The Gadfly (1897)¹ is a novel about revolutionaries written by a revolutionary. Author Ethel Voynich was born in Ireland in 1864, worked for the Narodnik newspaper Free Russia, married a Polish revolutionary, and founded the English Society of Friends of Russian Freedom. Her experiences in these organizations are undoubtedly woven into this novel.

The Gadfly found great success in socialist countries in the 20th century. In China and in the USSR it entered the literary canon, selling millions of copies and inspiring dramatic adaptations, musicals and films.² It continues to inspire solidarity; China’s President Xi Jinping and Ireland’s Taoiseach Micheál Martin recently bonded over their shared memories of reading it in their formative years.³ But there’s something curious about this book: although it was written in English, the Anglosphere has largely forgotten it.⁴ On Goodreads, discussion of the novel is predominantly Iranian. It’s great to see art captivate the hearts of people from such different parts of the globe. But it makes me wonder, where does The Gadfly fit into the Western socialist literary canon of today?

It is not, technically, a socialist novel: the revolutionaries of The Gadfly fight for national liberation and political freedoms, but not socialism or economic rights. The story is set in the 1840s in territory controlled by Austria, and our protagonists work to establish an independent and unified republic of Italy. The book found popularity in countries that struggled for national liberation (China, USSR, Iran), while England and the United States—both countries Voynich called home—are instead colonizers. Of the Anglosphere, Ireland may be the exception that proves the rule: it fought for centuries for liberation from British rule, and it is one of the few English-speaking countries where the book has found similar cultural attachment.⁵

The book is not without flaws. First, there are some stylistic concerns: while the climax is tightly written, much of the novel meanders, and the secret of the Gadfly’s identity is prolonged long past a reasonable suspension of disbelief. Second, while the narrative revolves around the timeless dramas of surprise parentage, star-crossed lovers, secret identities and martyrdom, several passages have not stood the test of time. The novel’s hero bemoans having had to work for (or work side-by-side with) people of non-white races, repeatedly pointing to these experiences to demonstrate his degradation and suffering. The narrative doesn’t challenge him on this point; instead, he is ultimately elevated into a Christ-like martyr. Moreover, what would have made the novel radical when it was published is now taken for granted. Catholicism and theocracy—or, in the words of the Gadfly, “the mental disease called religion”—are not the big villains of the 21st century West. The book’s staunch insistence on women as capable revolutionaries seems obvious in a world that remembers Rosa Luxemburg, Nadezhda Krupskaya, Leila Khaled, and Assata Shakur.

On the other hand, as our comrades elsewhere in the world have discovered, The Gadfly tackles issues rarely found in literature, and executes them compellingly.

The Gadfly and the business of revolution

Voynich traces the development of her revolutionaries from their first curious explorations of radical reading groups, to operating a revolutionary newspaper that draws the ire of those in power, to early forays in militant action. As they respond to their changing conditions, Voynich’s characters fervently debate revolutionary tactics. Does vitriolic rhetoric excite the masses or put off possible converts? How should an organization pursue its revolutionary goals while ensuring security from infiltration or discovery? Should we limit ourselves to non-violent methods, or do militant attacks achieve results? These debates are portrayed with realism, almost certainly rooted in the experiences of Voynich and her comrades in Russia and England. I’ll explore one here, on the role of targeted violence.

Just five years after The Gadfly was published, Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? would take aim at political groups like the Socialist Revolutionaries—inheritors of the Narodniks, with which Voynich was affiliated—and the newspaper Svoboda who pushed for assassinations as part of their political programs. While recognizing the importance of underground organizing, Lenin polemicized against their wrongheaded insistence on the need for such stunts:

Svoboda advocates terror as a means of ’exciting’ the working class movement and of giving it ‘strong impetus’. It is difficult to imagine an argument that more thoroughly disproves itself. Are there not enough outrages committed in Russian life without special ’excitants’ having to be invented?⁶

The answer to the question Lenin poses in the title of his pamphlet was an “all-Russian political newspaper”, which he saw as the “most practical plan” for organizing disciplined political activity and carrying out “the principal thing” of “propaganda and agitation among all strata of the people.” Journalism is also the principal activity that unites the revolutionaries of The Gadfly⁷ and editorial decision-making and discussion of the reactions to their agitation fills many scenes.

Like the revolutionaries of Voynich and Lenin’s time, Gemma and the Gadfly debate the relative roles of propaganda versus violence for achieving political ends. The Gadfly, who is strongly implied to be behind several violent events, argues that “Knives are very useful in their way; but only when you have a good, organized propaganda behind them.” Gemma emphasizes propaganda over assassination; in her view, the task of the revolutionary is to not to scare the State into acquiescing to minor demands, but to reshape social relationships, and violence is corrosive towards this end:

If you look upon the work of the revolutionist as the mere wresting of certain definite concessions from the government, then the secret sect and the knife must seem to you the best weapons, for there is nothing else which all governments so dread. But if you think, as I do, that to force the government’s hand is not an end in itself, but only a means to an end, and that what we really need to reform is the relation between man and man, then you must go differently to work. Accustoming ignorant people to the sight of blood is not the way to raise the value they put on human life.

The roles of violence and propaganda for achieving revolutionary ends are still debated today. In the weeks after Elias Rodriguez assassinated two employees of the Israeli embassy in Washington DC and called for a free Palestine, revolutionary organizations argued how such spontaneous acts of consciousness should be interpreted and responded to. The Southern Coalition for Revolutionary Consciousness saw it as a symptom of the “organizational insufficiency” of the communist movement, and that the principal task is to “cultivate revolutionary class consciousness among the exploited masses”—that is, propaganda. The Red Clarion responded that “spontaneous acts [of violence] can heighten the struggle” provided that they are “guided by the organized party of the revolutionary proletariat,” and further that “the masses must be made ready to do violence.”⁸ The Gadfly—but not Gemma—would concur; he asks Gemma, “What do you think will happen when the revolution comes? Do you suppose the people won’t have to get accustomed to violence then?”

Voynich does not present these debates to teach her readers the business of revolution or push for a particular strategy; many debates have no clear winner. We could contrast her approach with the dialogues of The Iron Heel.⁹ Jack London’s socialist Übermensch Ernest Everhard rhetorically crushes foes ranging from academia to the bourgeoisie to teach the reader about the need for materialist philosophy and seizing the means of production. London’s writing is very fun, and these passages concisely but compellingly explain big concepts, like why merely breaking up monopolies is insufficient for tackling the consequences of capitalism.¹⁰ But London’s characters are largely stand-ins for political positions, not realistic portrayals of the sorts of people who hold them. Voynich’s characters are multi-faceted, and their debates reveal how their personalities and circumstances mediate their political positions and arguments. History is made by individuals, and none of us are immune to subjectivity.

The Gadfly and the emotional side of revolution

Voynich’s care in creating complex, sympathetic, revolutionary characters is what makes this novel stand out. Her characters face emotional challenges particular to radical organizing that rarely make their way into literary works. The Gadfly simmers with jealousy that his love interest likes another man’s writing. He later faces his execution with bravery, staying true to his principles to the end.¹¹ Gemma struggles with overcoming her guilt at abandoning a comrade she incorrectly surmised had ratted out their party, steeling herself with her duty to the cause to get through the pain.¹²

The Gadfly has real flaws, ones that threaten the success of his party’s plans and that often render him unlikeable, or even cringey—a rare trait in a protagonist.¹³ Beneath his swash-buckling bravado and despite his flourishing successes, the Gadfly is a confused, unconfident, and spiteful man. In pursuing his personal vendetta against Cardinal Montanelli, the Gadfly puts his organization and his comrades’ lives at risk. A revolutionary’s motivation will always have a personal element; humans are emotional and social creatures. But for the Gadfly, the struggle ceases to be about the system, and instead becomes his fight against an officer of it.

The enemies of the revolution are also believable humans, and recognizable in our foes of today: Montanelli is saintly and caring, and twists himself into knots to try to absolve himself of his complicity in the violent and oppressive Austrian state.¹⁴ While the Governor tortures the captured Gadfly, the narrative emphasizes his humanity and his regret for his complicity in the system, without exonerating him.¹⁵ Even the State’s foot soldiers are shown to be thinking, empathetic people who develop their own opinions about the injustice of the Gadfly’s treatment.

The Gadfly and the socialist literary canon

So where does The Gadfly land in the western socialist canon? I opened by describing the novel as one about revolutionaries, which we could contrast with books about revolution. Returning again to The Iron Heel, Jack London argues for the necessity of socialist revolution to solve the ills of capitalism, and vividly portrays a climactic clash of the masses versus the bourgeois state. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle documents the oppression and misery of meat factory workers, and also presents socialism as the solution.¹⁶ R.F. Kuang’s Babel, or the Necessity of Violence uses a fantastical magic system to show how capitalism is inextricably linked with imperialism; her protagonists seize the means of production, posing a real threat to the imperial system.¹⁷

The Gadfly does not feature a revolution. Or at least, it does not give us a big, climactic clash that threatens to tear down the oppressive, decaying system. Instead, it details all the small but essential tasks that go into the making of a revolution: writing propaganda and polemics, a couple skirmishes with the law, and so on. The Gadfly spends scant time building a compelling case for the necessity of revolution. The plight of the masses features very little in the novel, and the occupying Austrian forces are only briefly and rarely mentioned. Instead, oppression appears primarily through how the theocracy restricts our protagonists: censorship, unfair trials, and brutal punishment. The Gadfly builds a case for liberal political rights like freedom of speech, rather than the economic rights like food and shelter typically emphasized by socialist movements.

Instead, the emotional impulse for bringing about a revolution is deeply personal. The Gadfly is betrayed twice over by priests violating the most foundational tenets of Catholicism. His thirst for vengeance drives his decision-making throughout the novel, and his contradictory feelings of anger and love lead to his tragic end. The climax of the novel is similarly personal: it takes the form of a philosophical debate about faith and morality, but one that tests the limits of personal convictions and the love between the Gadfly and a father figure.

While The Gadfly is not socialist in its political platform, it vividly portrays the interior lives of its flawed revolutionaries. Revolutions are not made by abstract ideas or inevitable historical forces, but by people with complex inner worlds, driven by love, resentment, hatred and hope. Despite its titular character’s tragic ending, The Gadfly is also genuinely optimistic about the possibility of revolution. In this, it stands apart from novels like The Iron Heel and Babel, which, for all their criticism of capitalism and imperialism, struggle to imagine a clear path forward beyond their failed climactic clashes. It may be precisely this faith in the possibility of revolution that has contributed to the novel’s marginalization in the Anglosphere. Recovering The Gadfly from its relative obscurity, we find a work that complements more overtly ideological texts in the socialist canon: an account of the emotional challenges and labour of revolution-making.

Ethel L. Voynich, The Gadfly (1897). Available in the public domain at gutenberg.org and as an audiobook at Librivox.org. ↩︎
For a brief overview of the immense popularity of The Gadfly, see: Benjamin Ramm, “The Irish novel that seduced the USSR”, BBC (25 January 2017). bbc.com ↩︎
Denis Staunton, “Xi Jinping says Irish novel The Gadfly sustained him during traumatic teenage years.” January 5th, 2026. irishtimes.com ↩︎
See, for example, Arnold Kettle, “E. L. Voynich: A Forgotten English Novelist.” Essays in Criticism VII(2), 163-174 (April 1957). academic.oup.com ↩︎
For more on the relationship between revolutionary movements in Ireland and Russia, see Anna Lively, “Voynich’s The Gadfly: Exploring Connections between Revolutionary Russia and Ireland”, Age of Revolutions (December 10th, 2018). ageofrevolutions.com ↩︎
V.I. Lenin What Is to Be Done, Chapter 3 (1901). marxists.org ↩︎
A gadfly is someone who attacks the status quo through biting commentary and incisive questions. ↩︎
Editorial Board, Red Clarion, July 16th, 2025. clarion.unity-struggle-unity.org ↩︎
Jack London, The Iron Heel (1908). gutenberg.org, Librivox.org. My review: dialibra.org ↩︎
London, ibid, Chapter 8, “The Machine Breakers”. ↩︎
This aspect of the novel also seems to have inspired revolutionaries. Irish Republican Army officer Joe McKelvey is reported to have enjoyed the book, and had it at his bedside the night of his own execution on December 8th, 1922. See Lively, ibid. ↩︎
“All her youth had been poisoned by the thought of what she had done. Resolutely, day after day and year after year, she had fought against the demon of remorse. Always she had remembered that her work lay in the future; always had shut her eyes and ears to the haunting spectre of the past.” ↩︎
“We need more representation of somewhat cringe, non-yassified lenin types, hardheaded pragmatic progressives whose ‘flaws’ consist in something other than being sexy and diabolical.” Nia Frome, November 15th, 2022. twitter.com ↩︎
“I would go down to my grave without blood on my hands,” Montanelli professes, as he tries to offload the responsibility deciding whether to execute the Gadfly or risk a violent riot onto the Gadfly himself. The Gadfly retorts, “At least, I would decide my own actions for myself, and take the consequences of them. I would not come sneaking to other people, in the cowardly Christian way, asking them to solve my problems for me!” ↩︎
“There was something almost like pity in the Governor’s face. He was not a cruel man by nature, and was secretly a little ashamed of the part he had been playing during the last month.” ↩︎
Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1906). Available in the public domain at Project Gutenberg and as an audiobook at Librivox. Sinclair’s book caused such a stir that the US began regulating food safety. Disappointingly, little was done to improve the conditions for workers; Sinclair lamented, “I aimed at the public’s heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” ↩︎
R.F. Kuang, Babel (2022). “I really liked RF Kuang’s Babel. I’m looking forward to the day when it’s a mediocre fantasy novel about revolution, but given the present competition I think it’s a great fantasy novel about revolution.” Alice Malone, January 21, 2023. Thread on twitter.com. ↩︎

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Introduction to the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1999)

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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Originally published in 1999, this introduction to the Manifesto serves as a pretty good executive summary of Losurdo’s output over the previous decade.

This article was machine translated with human editorial oversight. Quotations of works originally written in English have been reproduced as originally published. For works originally written in other languages, quoted passages were aligned with officially published translations, if possible, with consultation of the original publication in cases of ambiguity. In a handful of places, small adjustments were made to in-line quotes for the sake of grammar or readability.

Ancient slavery and modern slavery, nature and history

As we reread the Communist Manifesto over 150 years after its publication, let’s try to examine the fundamental theoretical and political innovations introduced by Marx and Engels in their text. These innovations lie not so much in the awareness of the harshness of the social conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, nor even in the affirmation that this conflict was historically preceded by the class struggle between slaves and slave owners and between serfs and feudal lords. A few years earlier, during his trip to England, Tocqueville was so struck by the stark contrast between the appalling mass poverty and the opulence of the few that he let slip a very significant exclamation: “Here is the slave, there the master, there the wealth of some, here the poverty of most.”¹ On another occasion, the French liberal even warned against the danger of “servile wars,”² that is, slave uprisings like those of classical antiquity. The “spectre of communism” evoked by the Manifesto seems to take on terrifying proportions in Tocqueville, resembling a sort of modern proletarian Spartacus.

The working conditions of the time are thus compared to slavery: even before Marx and Engels, this motif runs deeply, consciously or unconsciously, through the liberal tradition. Locke has no difficulty in observing that “the greatest part of mankind” is “enslaved” by the objective conditions of life and labour.³ Mandeville has no doubt that the “meanest indigent part of the nation” is destined forever to perform “dirty slavish work”;⁴ it is engaged, to quote Burke, in occupations that are not only “mercenary” but also “servile” (servil), that is—as the German translator immediately clarifies—“proper to slaves” (sklavisch).⁵

But all this does not trouble the conscience of the ruling classes and the liberal bourgeoisie of the time, who rid themselves of the problem by relegating it to a sphere beyond the political one. “England,” Marx observed in 1844, “finds poverty to be based on the law of nature according to which the population must always outgrow the available means of subsistence,” and explains “pauperism” as the “bad will of the poor,” who are incapable of resisting sexual incontinence.⁶ The polemical reference is to Malthus, who paradoxically invokes political economy to sanction the restriction of the political sphere. Once it has become “an object of popular teaching,” the poor will understand that they must attribute the cause of their deprivation to unkind Mother Nature or to their own individual weakness or improvidence; “political economy is perhaps the only science, of which it may be said that the ignorance of it is not merely a deprivation of good, but produces great positive evil.”⁷

This is also the opinion of Tocqueville, who believes it is necessary to

spread among the working classes […] some of the most elementary and certain notions of political economy; to make them understand, for example, what is permanent and necessary in the economic laws that govern wage rates; why these laws, being in a sense divinely ordained, since they arise from human nature and the very structure of societies, are beyond the reach of revolutions⁸

The poor—John Stuart Mill later insists—must be dissuaded from marrying, and it is among the “legitimate powers of the State” to impose an actual prohibition.⁹

The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 ironically comment on political economy as understood at the time: this “science of marvellous industry” and “science of wealth” reveals itself to be a “science of asceticism” and a “science of renunciation”; its ideal is “the ascetic but productive slave.”¹⁰ The Manifesto also expresses a harsh judgement on such “economists.” But now we witness a further development of this critique. The claim that permanent mass poverty is the fault of Mother Nature completely ignores the crises of overproduction that characterize and affect capitalism. Instead, it is better to focus attention on the following:

[In these commercial crises], a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity—the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.¹¹

If Smith’s celebration of the “wealth of nations” heralds the end of the old regime, in the Manifesto, the impassioned hymn to the impetuous development of the productive forces stimulated by the bourgeoisie is also and above all an epitaph for a system that—precisely because of the extraordinary successes it has achieved—makes the mass misery and insecurity on which it continues to be based politically and morally unacceptable. We are faced not with a natural constraint, but with a political problem; and the political problem lies not in the now defeated scarcity, but in a “wealth of nations” that fails to become real social wealth.

A sort of objective controversy seems to have arisen between the authors of the Manifesto on the one hand and Tocqueville (and the political tradition of which he is a paragon) on the other. In taking stock of the upheavals and catastrophe of 1848, the French liberal blamed socialism, that is, the “economic and political theories” that would have us believe “that human misery was the work of laws and not of Providence, and that poverty could be suppressed by changing the conditions of society.”¹² This is precisely the thesis put forward on the eve of the revolution by the Manifesto, which aims first and foremost to call on the “proletariat” to become aware of the eminently political dimension of their plight. But for Tocqueville, wanting to intervene in this sphere means undermining the natural order of “society,” “to shake it to the foundations on which it rests.”¹³ In reality, Marx and Engels reply:

The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from your present mode of production and form of property—historical relations that rise and disappear in the progress of production—this misconception you share with every ruling class that has preceded you. What you see clearly in the case of ancient property, what you admit in the case of feudal property, you are of course forbidden to admit in the case of your own bourgeois form of property.¹⁴

The year before, The Poverty of Philosophy had criticized “economists”: for them, “there has been history, but there is no longer any.”¹⁵

In Tocqueville’s view, it is precisely the illusion that there is a political “remedy for this hereditary and incurable evil of poverty and labour” that causes the “experiments” and “ruins” marking the incessant French revolutionary cycle that culminated in socialism. We are faced with a visionary ideology, a “fatal error” that must be eliminated at all costs.¹⁶ For the Manifesto, socialism is not the elaboration, however crazy or brilliant, of an intellectual or group of intellectuals, but rather the theoretical expression of real needs and possibilities: “The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer. They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes.” With great effort, through trial and error, the proletariat becomes aware that the “chains” weighing on them, the “slavery” they endure, refer to a historically-determined political and social order that must now be questioned.

If not due to the limited resources available and the naivety or short-sightedness of individuals, who allow themselves to be carried away by their senses and therefore fail to take into account the “principle of population” dear to Malthus, mass poverty nevertheless refers to a sphere considered to be private. After all—argues the prevailing ideology—wage levels and working conditions are the result of a contract freely agreed between the parties. It is therefore a relationship between private individuals. Bourgeois society—as Engels observed as early as 1845—responds in this way to workers who complain and protest: “You were your own master, no one forced you to agree to such a contract if you did not wish to; but now, when you have freely entered into it, you must be bound by it.”¹⁷

In conclusion—Marx observed in 1843—the causes of mass poverty are sought “partly in nature, which is independent of man, partly in private life, which is independent of the administration, and partly in accidental circumstances, which depend on no one.”¹⁸ We are dealing either with the responsibility of the individual member of civil society, or with nature or Providence; we are faced with either a freedom that cannot and must not be trampled upon, or a destiny that would be ridiculous and even sacrilegious to try to change through human intervention. And so, even if we see the majority of the population afflicted “with much abject toil, with great misery, with all the exterior of servitude,” we must bear in mind that this is precisely an exterior that does not substantially undermine the reality of freedom as a “common blessing,” from which even the most miserable are not excluded.¹⁹ This clarification of Burke’s is the clarification endorsed by the liberal tradition as a whole.

This tradition evokes modern wage slavery only to immediately dismiss it as something without any political relevance. To quote the young Marx, in its most developed form, the bourgeois state only “closes its eyes and declares real contradictions to be non-political contradictions which do not disturb it”;²⁰ bourgeois society and bourgeois political theory start from the assumption that social relations, “class distinctions,” have “only the significance of private, hence non-political, distinctions.”²¹ But here the Communist Manifesto instead calls into question the existing “social and political conditions.”

“Social and political conditions”: it is worth reflecting on this expression, which recurs repeatedly and insistently; today it seems obvious, but it certainly wasn’t when it burst into both scientific debate and political struggle. Intervening himself on the eve of the 1848 revolution, Tocqueville observed with concern the behaviour of the “working classes”: they appeared calm, no longer “tormented by political passion”; unfortunately, “their passions, instead of political, have become social”; rather than political institutions, they seem to focus their attention on material living conditions and property relations.²² Judging by this analysis, a barrier separates the social from the political.

This is confirmed, in an illuminating way, by the picture that Tocqueville paints of America. Here, poor people end up in prison even for insignificant debts: in Pennsylvania, the number of individuals incarcerated annually for debt amounts to 7,000; if we add to this figure those convicted of more serious crimes, it turns out that one in every 144 inhabitants ends up in prison each year. And that’s not all: the condition of the poor is such that, even as witnesses, they are locked up in prison until the conclusion of the judicial proceedings. We are witnessing a scandalous paradox: “in the same country where the plaintiff is put in prison, the thief remains free if he can pay bail.” Tocqueville’s condemnation seems harsh and final: “The Americans, sons of the English, have planned everything for the comfort of the rich and almost nothing for the protection of the poor,” and “make light of their freedoms [of the poor].” However, the French liberal continues: “Of all modern nations, the English have been the ones who have incorporated the most freedom into their political laws, and who have made the greatest use of imprisonment in their civil laws.”; the Americans, in turn, despite having modified, sometimes radically, the “political laws,” have “retained most of the civil laws” of England.²³ With this distinction, we have arrived at the heart of the problem: Tocqueville formulates his largely positive judgement on the countries he visited, making a complete abstraction of the lois civiles, which include not only social and property relations but even the imprisonment that certain witnesses are forced to endure solely because of their poverty. On the one hand, there is the “social” and the “civil,” and on the other, the “political.” The traces of servitude that even the liberal tradition was forced to acknowledge in the bourgeois society of the time have become politically irrelevant and appear to have vanished. This restriction of the political is swept away by the Manifesto. Now, in the expression “social and political conditions,” the two adjectives constitute a hendiadys, designating an indissoluble intertwining.

“Committee” for the “common affairs” of the bourgeoisie and the struggle for suffrage

The epistemological revolution thus brought about is the prerequisite for the desired political and social revolution. Just as it cannot be explained by nature, mass poverty cannot be traced back to the private sphere. A radical change is possible and necessary. But how can it be achieved? It certainly cannot be promoted by the political regime that replaced the ancien régime. Having ousted the feudal aristocracy, the bourgeoisie “conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway.” Yes—insists the Manifesto—“modern political power is nothing more than a committee that administers the common affairs of the bourgeois class as a whole.”²⁴

This analysis, which at first glance appears extreme and simplistic, can easily be compared to that developed by Constant, a classic of the liberal tradition: “Poor individuals manage their own affairs; rich men hire stewards”; and they even hire them when forming the political government. “But unless they are foolish”—continues the Discourse on the Liberty of the Ancients Compared with That of the Moderns—“rich men who employ stewards carefully and rigorously examine whether these stewards are fulfilling their duties, whether they are negligent, corruptible, or incompetent.” Wealth is and must be the arbiter of political power, and therein lies the essence of modern freedom: “Credit did not have the same influence amongst the ancients; their governments were stronger than individuals, while in our time individuals are stronger than the political powers. Wealth is a power which is more readily available in all circumstances, more readily applicable to all interests, and consequently more real and better obeyed.”²⁵

As in the Communist Manifesto, Constant also believed that the state that had replaced the ancien régime continued to have a clear class connotation; it marked the rise to power of the bourgeoisie. The value judgements and political consequences that they derive are diverse and contrasting. To ensure the proper functioning of institutions, Constant and the liberals of the time continued to fight, with varying degrees of radicalism, for the maintenance of census suffrage.²⁶ It is absolutely unsurpassable in the eyes of Guizot, who, even in 1847, declared: “The dawn of universal suffrage will never come, the day in which all human beings without distinction can be called on to exercise political rights will never arrive.” Yes, Thiers observes, it is true: “32 million men are governed by the vote of 240,000. There are 240,000 men who command and 32 million who obey.” It may seem, and perhaps is, “an appalling disproportion,” but in reality, in granting political rights, we have already gone too far, indeed too low, given that “we have already gone down to a class that does not have sufficient free time, culture, or property to take an interest in political questions.”²⁷

After ironically comparing Guizot to Metternich, the Austrian chancellor who was the protagonist and architect of the Restoration, the Manifesto declares its support for the English “Chartists”, who were at the forefront of the struggle against the restriction of suffrage based on property qualifications. However, it must be immediately clarified that the demand for universal suffrage is not socialist in nature. Several years before the Manifesto, Marx had already made it clear that the immediate political significance of property was destined to disappear in the world that emerged from the American and French revolutions. Once the ancien régime had been overthrown, “the census” was no longer “a condition for active and passive suffrage”; “the penniless became the legislator of the landowner.” Having reached maturity, the bourgeois political state “declares that birth, social rank, education, occupation, are non-political distinctions, when it proclaims, without regard to these distinctions, that every member of the nation is an equal participant in national sovereignty, when it treats all elements of the real life of the nation from the standpoint of the state.”²⁸ This was demonstrated by the example of the United States, where census suffrage had been practically eliminated (within the white community): in this sense, the North American republic appeared as the “country of complete political emancipation,”²⁹ or as “the most perfect example of the modern state.”³⁰ However, the other side of the coin of abolishing census suffrage is the declaration of the absolute political irrelevance of material living conditions, of those social relations that enshrine the subjugation of the proletariat. Therefore, however just and necessary it may be, the struggle for universal suffrage is certainly not enough to bring about the desired change.

“Despotism” of the factory, negative freedom, and positive freedom

It is necessary to intervene in conditions repressed into a purely private sphere by bourgeois ideology and society; we must first and foremost assail the places where modern slavery is most clear and evident. The Communist Manifesto draws attention to the reality of the capitalist factory. Here we can see first-hand the “despotism” that weighs on the workers: “organized like soldiers,” “as privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants.”³¹ Although the government is ultimately the political expression of the ruling class, it can and must be pressured to intervene to limit this “despotism” or to strike at its most odious aspects; in fighting for this goal, the worker’s movement can draw on the many contradictions that run through the bourgeoisie and the power bloc.

It is therefore easy to understand why the Manifesto welcomes “the 10-hour working day in England” won by the workers’ struggle. Once again, it may be instructive to compare this with Tocqueville, who instead pronounces an unconditional condemnation of the legislative regulation in France that aims to limit the working day to 12 hours. From the point of view of Marx and Engels, in addition to improving the quality of life of workers, the struggle to reduce working hours aims to restrict the “despotism” prevailing in factories. It is therefore also a struggle for freedom. Having removed factory “despotism” and labour relations and material living conditions from the private sphere, Tocqueville has no difficulty in condemning as attacks on freedom the intervention of political power in an area that is solely “social” and “civil” and the “socialist doctrine” that this intervention encourages and imposes.³²

As can be seen, the usual configuration of the contrast between Marx and Engels on the one hand and the liberal tradition on the other is completely untenable, as if the former reserved their attention exclusively for political rights and material living conditions (for “positive freedom”) while disregarding so-called “negative freedom” (the individual’s ability to think, act, and live without external coercion). On the contrary, the struggle against a fundamentally militaristic and despotic organisation such as the capitalist factory, from which an entire social class cannot escape unless it seeks the alternative in death by starvation, the workers’ struggle called for by the Manifesto aims precisely to universalize and make concrete this same negative freedom.

The liberal tradition, which insists so strongly on the need to limit power, loses sight of the goal so solemnly proclaimed as soon as one crosses the threshold of the factory: the “absolute law-giver” who, in Engels’ eyes, is the capitalist master, must be able to continue to act undisturbed.³³ Tocqueville acknowledges that capitalist industry “is becoming increasingly organized in an aristocratic form” and that within it, wage earners find themselves “in a state of strict dependence” on their employers.³⁴ It is a constraint, adds Constant, that manifests itself even before entering the factory: the wage earner lacks the “necessary income to exist independently of any other party’s will”; “proprietors are masters of his life, for they can refuse him work.”³⁵ To quote Sieyès, the “slavery of necessity” forces the “uneducated masses” to submit to “forced labour” and thus to a condition “lacking in freedom.”³⁶ But we are still dealing with social relationships that have no political relevance; and so, for Tocqueville, the claim to “substitute the foresight and wisdom of the state for the wisdom and foresight of the individual” is foolish and liberticidal; “there is nothing that authorizes the State to intervene in industry.”³⁷

For the Manifesto, however, a celebration of freedom that does not question, on the one hand, the “despotism” of the employers and, on the other hand, the social relations that degrade “workers” to “commodities” sounds empty and hypocritical. There is now a mature awareness that incisive “political change” implies “a change in the material conditions of existence, in economical relations.”³⁸ But let’s be clear: material does not equate to economic, nor can this term be reduced in any way to merely the level of wages and the standard of living. Material is everything that comes out of the “aerial life,” the “ethereal region,” the “sky of the political state,” as defined and limited by modern bourgeois theory and society. It is a matter of putting an end to a situation in which individuals are free and equal “in the heaven of their political world,” while continuing to suffer unfreedom and inequality “in the earthly existence of society.”³⁹ Here, material is the earthly existence of society, the concrete world of life, expunged from the political sphere by theory and bourgeois society, but which now, fully incorporated into the sphere of “social and political conditions,” must finally be freed from its burden of misery and oppression.

Movement from below and initiative from above in the emancipation process

While trying to impose intervention from above on the bourgeois government itself, the workers promote an autonomous movement of transformation from below: “workers begin to form combinations against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages”⁴⁰. The “combinations” and the emerging trade union movement hailed by the Manifesto have a long history of denunciation and persecution behind them. At the beginning of the 18th century, Mandeville expressed his amazement at a new and disturbing phenomenon:

I am credibly informed, that a parcel of footmen are arrived to that height of insolence, as to have entered into a society together, and made laws, by which they oblige themselves not to serve for less than such a sum, nor carry burdens, or any bundle or parcel above a certain weight, not exceeding two or three pounds, with other regulations directly opposite to the interest of those they serve, and altogether destructive to the use they were designed for. ⁴¹

Within this “private” sphere constituted by economic and social relations, the proletariat is not permitted to avail itself either of the support it claims from political power or the collective organisation it seeks to build. Only contracts outside of any form of organisation from below, any “combination or collusion,” are truly freely made;⁴² this was the opinion expressed at the end of the 18th century by Burke, with a transparent and complacent allusion to the Combination Laws that prohibited and punished workers’ coalitions.⁴³

Smith’s position is particularly interesting. He recognizes that forming coalitions is a vital necessity, a real matter of life and death: we are dealing with “desperate men, who must either starve, or frighten their masters into an immediate compliance with their demands.”⁴⁴ On the other hand, coalitions are a fact of life: “Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform, combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate” or indeed aim to “sink the wages of labour even below this rate.”⁴⁵ This does not prevent the great economist from recommending that the government severely crack down on any attempt at worker organisation.

This attitude appears cruel or ruthless, but we must understand the logic behind it. Smith insists on one essential point: it is necessary to “[allow] every man to pursue his own interest his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice”;⁴⁶ “according to the system of natural liberty,” every man must be able to offer and compete with “his industry and capital,” without hindrance of any kind.⁴⁷ Given these assumptions, even workers’ coalitions end up being seen as “violations of natural liberty, and therefore unjust.”⁴⁸

Liberal France under the July Monarchy argued similarly. The authorities warned workers protesting against piecework: “If the workers of Paris have well-founded claims to raise, these should be presented individually and in a regular form to the competent authorities,” and in any case without affecting “the principle of the liberty of industry” and “liberty of labour.”⁴⁹ In the second half of the nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill thundered against the “moral police, which occasionally becomes a physical one,” exercised by the labour movement: “the bad workmen who form the majority of the operatives in many branches of industry” attempted to block piecework and thus “weigh oppressively” on the workers of “superior skill or industry,” who seek to earn more. Yet, the consequences of piecework had been described by Smith several decades earlier: the workers who submit to it “are very apt to overwork themselves, and to ruin their health and constitution in a few years”; if they listened to the dictates of reason and humanity, employers themselves should limit this type of remuneration. But philanthropic intervention from above is one thing; organized intervention from below in what even Mill continues to consider “private concerns” is quite another.⁵⁰

Even today, Hayek accuses trade unions of eliminating the “competitive determination of prices” of labour, thereby undermining the liberal system at its roots.⁵¹ We cannot remain passive in the face of such destruction: it is “the clear moral duty of government not only itself to refrain from any such interference in the game [of the market], but also to prevent the arrogation of such power by any organized group.”⁵² In the sphere that it has sovereignly declared “private,” the liberal bourgeoisie tolerates not only the intervention of political power but also that coming from within civil society.

From the perspective of the liberal tradition, in order to not violate the market, contracts must be individual; if the orderly functioning of the factory requires the regimentation of the workers, the orderly functioning of the labour market requires the most radical fragmentation possible of those who are called upon to provide and sell it. To quote the Communist Manifesto, “wage labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers.”⁵³ On the surface, it is a triumph of freedom: the individual worker is now independent of both the state and his fellow workers. In reality, it is now possible to see first-hand how the worker has been reduced to a commodity, to a thing: “forced to sell themselves piecemeal,” workers “are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.”⁵⁴

From the perspective of the liberal tradition, despotism is synonymous with the attempt to overcome the fragmentation of the working class by intervening in a sphere defined as “private,” in contrast to the political state, and constructed and deconstructed (even by force, through legislative measures, which are in this case desired and demanded) as a simple collection of individuals, with the consequent condemnation, more or less explicit and more or less rigorous, of any attempt to organize the subaltern classes. From the point of view of Marx and Engels, fragmentation consecrates the triumph of master’s “despotism” and makes the “slavery of necessity” and “forced labour” of workers—to use Sieyès’s phrases—insurmountable.

We can now better understand the profound meaning of the closing words of the Manifesto: “Workers of all countries, unite!” This is not a rhetorical appeal. These were the years when Carlyle, to give just one example, after justifying the enslavement of African Americans across the Atlantic, branded the Irish who tended to occupy the lower segments of the labour market in Great Britain as “black.”⁵⁵ The struggle against the fragmentation of the working class is at the same time the struggle against national or racial prejudice.

Struggle for political power and transformation of society

But reforms achieved through movements from below and interventions from above will always be insignificant as long as “political power” continues to be the business “committee” of the bourgeoisie. Those same limited reforms can be overturned by the ruling class, aided by the fact that the organisation called upon to promote resistance against the “despotism” of the bosses “is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves.”⁵⁶ A radical and irreversible change in “social and political conditions” presupposes—as Marx already emphasized in 1844—a “political revolution with a social soul.”⁵⁷ The “organisation of the proletarians into a class, and, consequently into a political party” ⁵⁸ must aim, the Manifesto clarifies, at the conquest of political power.

This is the moment when change from below and change from above come together in a process of radical transformation of society. The “property question,” which the liberal bourgeoisie would like to expunge from the political sphere, now clearly and explicitly emerges as the “fundamental question of the movement” of the workers and of the new society to be built; it is a matter of acting “by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production.”

In addition to a broad program of nationalization of the means of production, the “despotic inroads” considered here also include a “highly progressive tax.”⁵⁹ It is a seemingly modest measure. It is worth focusing our attention on this aspect in order to understand the great influence that the Manifesto has had on Western society and history.

The young Engels’ interpretation of this measure is particularly significant:

For the principle of taxation is, after all, a purely communist one […] For either private property is sacrosanct, in which case there is no such thing as national property and the state has no right to levy taxes, or the state has this right, in which case private property is not sacrosanct, national property stands above private property, and the state is the true owner.⁶⁰

The tax system, or more precisely, progressive taxation, which involves a redistribution of income in favour of the poorest classes, is cited here as proof of the unsustainability of the principle of the absolute inviolability of private property. This explains the hostility of liberal authors. To tell the truth, for Montesquieu, only indirect taxation is consistent with the principles of liberty: “per capita taxation is more natural to slavery; taxation on goods is more natural to liberty, because it has not so direct a relation to the person”; personal income tax, on the other hand, involves “perpetual rummaging and searching into their houses” and “nothing is more contrary than this to liberty.”⁶¹

However, the liberal tradition focuses primarily on progressive taxation. In Benjamin Constant’s view, favourable tax treatment for the poor not only penalizes “wealth” but also ends up “portraying poverty as a privilege” and even creating “a privileged caste.”⁶² This is a singular thesis, if only because it comes at a time when the combined effect of famine and inflation is reducing, according to the testimony of Constant’s friend Madame de Staël herself, “the lowest class of society to a state of the utmost wretchedness,” inflicting upon them “unheard of evils,” even starvation.⁶³ But we are already familiar with the logic that brands any intervention in the private sphere as an attack on freedom. If anything, spontaneous individual charity can alleviate mass poverty. Spencer compares “state charity” (taxation of the rich) to the “state church” dear to monarchical absolutism: both stifle spontaneity and prevent authentic charity and religiosity from flourishing.⁶⁴

Is this clear condemnation of progressive taxation motivated solely by a love of liberty? Hobbes was already taking a firm stance on indirect taxes and supporting the argument that only consumption taxes guarantee equal treatment before the tax authorities:

Why should someone who works hard and saves the fruits of his labour, consuming little, be charged more than someone who lives idly, earns little, and spends everything he earns; one has no greater protection from the state than the other?⁶⁵

Montesquieu could have made this objection of Leviathan his own. Paradoxically, in its distrust or hostility toward income tax, and even more so toward progressive income tax, the liberal tradition ends up aligning itself with a theorist of absolutism. It is in light of this centuries-old debate on taxation⁶⁶ that the decisive stance of the Manifesto must be read: the necessary redistribution of income cannot be entrusted to individual charity; far from being limited to acting on the intimacy of consciences, real change requires intervention in “social and political conditions,” which also includes the tax system.

The proletariat from “instrument of labour” to universal historical political subject

A class that suffers “despotism” in the factory not only from the boss but also from the “machine” is called upon to be the protagonist of a great political and social revolution. It is worth pausing for a moment on what is perhaps the most radical innovation of the Manifesto. It is not difficult to find lucid descriptions of the dulling effects produced by the capitalist factory in the liberal tradition. Forced to obsessively repeat “a few very simple operations; frequently [only] one or two,” the worker, Smith observes, ends up becoming “as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become”; he is unable to form “any just judgement concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life,” not to mention political issues. If there is a remedy for this situation, it can only come from above and from outside, from an enlightened or philanthropic bourgeoisie. For the Manifesto, however, dullness is only one aspect; on the other hand, it is precisely the harsh daily and collective experience of exploitation and “despotism” in the factory that can constitute the prerequisite for the working class to emerge as the central subject of transformation. In Smith, the worker seems to lose even his most human characteristics: he becomes “not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment”; for Marx, the proletariat is the very “heart” of human emancipation.⁶⁷

This is a radical innovation that is still difficult to understand today. Consider Hannah Arendt, who contrasts productive work and the struggle of workers and the people for better living conditions with the “public happiness” that arises from political action and communication as an end in itself. According to the author, this dimension would have remained completely foreign to Marx and historical materialism. In reality, Arendt fails to see that, precisely in the course of the struggle against the material oppression to which it is subjected, an entire social class discovers and experiences the taste and passion of political action. “Now and then,” observes the Manifesto, “the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever-expanding union of the workers.”⁶⁸

The unity of workers is not merely a means to an end. By breaking, through trade union and political action, the isolation to which the bourgeoisie would like to confine it, an entire social class gains its dignity even before achieving concrete results. This is what strikes Engels during his trip to England; addressing the workers, the young revolutionary expresses his happiness at being able to “chat with you on your condition and grievances, to witness your struggles against the social and political power of your oppressors.”⁶⁹

Remaining firm in Smith’s point of view, Arendt ignores the real historical effectiveness that unfolds from Marx and Engels’ theory, which brings to politics the exterminated masses of men, dehumanized by the social order and ideology that had dominated until then. Burke subsumed the farm labourer or wage worker under the category of instrumentum vocale and thus, following a classical division, placed him among the tools of labour together with the ox (instrumentum semivocale) and the plow (instrumentum mutum). Sieyès referred to “most men as working machines,” or “human instruments of production” or “bipedal instruments.” At best, we are dealing with an “eternally childlike multitude.” This is also Constant’s point of view, who likened the proletariat to “children” who, forced to work day and night, remain in a situation of “endless dependence”;⁷⁰ in some ways they are men, but with the unique characteristic that they do not become, and can never become, adults.

And so these “tools” of labour, these “bipedal machines,” or rather these eternal “children,” reject the condition they had until then endured as a natural calamity. What is being called into question is human and political degradation even before economic exploitation. Arendt’s economistic reading of Marx and Engels can be countered by the fact that the Manifesto harshly criticizes those who would like to “make the working class lose its taste” for politics and “political change”: according to their preaching, it should be satisfied with a few minor “changes in the material conditions of existence,” renouncing not only all revolutionary projects but also political action as such, thereby also setting aside the struggle for the abolition of property-based discrimination in suffrage. It is worth noting that during this same period, similar sermons were addressed to “free” blacks in the North of the United States and, later, in the South as well: they were urged to renounce, for their own interest, their claims to political equality and full human dignity, and instead focus exclusively on wages and other aspects of daily life and material well-being. Marx and Engels had nothing but contempt for such an attitude.

Properly understood, the struggle for better living and working conditions is also a struggle for recognition. In demanding recognition from the ruling and exploiting class, the proletariat begins to recognize one another. It is a process described with emotional emphasis in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts:

When communist workmen gather together, their immediate aim is instruction, propaganda, etc. But at the same time, they acquire a new need—the need for society—and what appears as a means has become an end. This practical development can be most strikingly observed in the gatherings of French socialist workers. Smoking, eating, and drinking, etc., are no longer means of creating links between people. Company, association, conversation, which in turn has society as its goal, is enough for them. The brotherhood of man is not a hollow phrase, it is a reality, and the nobility of man shines forth upon us from their work-worn figures.⁷¹

This passage could be contrasted with the one in which Smith recommends that the government promptly dissolve wage-earning coalitions, intervening against any possible form of worker aggregation, even if, unfortunately, “people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices” (of labour power).⁷² And once again, a comparison with Marx may be useful. France’s Le Chapelier Law of 1791, which prohibited “coalitions”, was branded by Capital as a kind of “bourgeois coup d’état” by which the new ruling class wrested from the workers “the right of association they had just won.”⁷³

In conclusion, for Marx and Engels, beyond its sacrosanct economic and political demands, the workers’ movement has a much more ambitious goal. The Manuscripts describe it in philosophical terms: bourgeois society forces the proletariat into painful mutilation, caging and isolating them in the “the abstract existence of man as a mere workman who, therefore, tumbles day-after-day from his fulfilled nothingness into absolute nothingness, into his social and, hence, real non-existence.”⁷⁴ It is this situation that must be brought to an end. The language of the Manifesto is more directly political: economic and social relations that involve the “transformation into machines” of the proletariat, degraded to “instruments of labour”, to an “appendage of the machine”; “capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.”

Cities and countryside, proletarian and colonial peoples

Not only can the proletariat design and build a social system different from the dominant one, but within capitalism itself it can become the decisive force for the overthrow of the ancien regime and the realization of political democracy. In this case, it is called upon to link the struggle for political democracy to the struggle to overcome capitalist society. In certain circumstances—the Manifesto emphasizes—these tasks can become intertwined in an indissoluble unity:

The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried out under more advanced conditions of European civilization, and with a much more developed proletariat, than that of England was in the seventeenth, and of France in the eighteenth century, and because the bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution.

With its gaze levelled on a country still relatively backward in economic and political terms, the possibility of a socialist revolution developing in the wake of an anti-feudal revolution led by the proletariat is evoked here. This theory of revolution has proven historically effective, not the one presented in the famous pages of Capital, which sees socialist revolution as the immediate and automatic consequence of the completion of the process of capitalist accumulation, that is, as the “expropriation” (by the proletariat) of the “expropriators” (the bourgeoisie).

Yes, in the Twentieth Century, socialist revolutions erupted in countries that had not yet reached capitalist maturity—but outside the geographical framework considered by the Manifesto. For its authors, Europe is synonymous with civilization and the East with barbarism. Not that Marx and Engels totally aligned themselves with the liberal tradition, which in those years, with Tocqueville and Mill, was busy lyrically celebrating even the Opium Wars. The Manifesto is more problematic: what the West imposes is “so-called civilization”, that is, “bourgeois” relations. An article by Marx written a few years later expresses this even more incisively. Denouncing the horror of colonial expansion, he observes how it sheds light on the true nature of the capitalist metropolis: “The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from its home, where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies, where it goes naked.”⁷⁵ In the colonies, the violence of domination manifests itself without mediation or pretence: “Modern nations have been able only to disguise slavery in their own countries, but they have imposed it without disguise upon the New World.”⁷⁶

And yet, despite the horrific crimes committed, Marx saw the British conquest of India as “the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia.”⁷⁷ While the idea of the revolutionary subjectivity of the working class was completely foreign to Smith, Marx and Engels were only occasionally able to grasp the revolutionary subjectivity of colonial peoples. For this to happen, we must await the intervention of Lenin, in a different and objectively more advanced situation. With him, another process came to completion. Locke celebrated freedom but considered the slavery of Black people in the colonies to be obvious and peaceful; Mill condemned despotism, but celebrated its pedagogical effectiveness with his gaze levelled at the “races” he considers “minors.” Heavy exclusion clauses accompanied the celebration of freedom within the liberal tradition. Tocqueville described in a lucid and moving way the terrible treatment reserved for Black and Indigenous people in America, and yet the United States continued to be, in his eyes, the country of democracy, “living, active, triumphant.”⁷⁸ In all three cases, democracy is defined independently of the fate of those excluded.

Traces of this attitude can also be found in Marx and Engels, who, as we know, considered the United States to be the “country of complete political emancipation,” or “the most perfect example of the modern state,” which ensured the domination of the bourgeoisie without excluding any social class a priori from the enjoyment of political rights. In reality, contrary to what Tocqueville, Marx, and Engels believed, far from disappearing, class discrimination continued to exist across the Atlantic in the form of ethnic and racial discrimination, and in this form it proved to be much more tenacious than in Europe.

Another motif that is very present in the work of Marx and Engels (“A nation cannot become free and at the same time continue to oppress other nations.”⁷⁹) was taken up by Lenin,⁸⁰ who definitively broke with the exclusionary clauses of the liberal tradition and with any vision of democracy that claimed to define this regime independently of the fate of those who are excluded. This theme played a powerful role in the October Revolution, which thus marked a radical turning point in the unfolding of the revolutionary subjectivity of colonial and former colonial peoples.⁸¹

Globalization and the “industrial war of extermination between nations”

The revolutions invoked by the Manifesto broke out in regions on the margins of the developed West. Its authors are generally accused of having a catastrophic view of historical development. In reality, at least as far as international politics is concerned, they did not go all the way in demystifying the contemporary bourgeois ideology of supposed universal harmony, which celebrated its global expansion as the triumphal march of civilization and peace. These were the years when Constant prophesied the disappearance or decline of war as a result of the expansion of trade.⁸² Later, Spencer saw the figure of the industrialist-merchant supplant that of the warrior,⁸³ right at the time that European cities expanded industrially and commercially not only through bloody colonial wars, but also through growing rivalry between the industrial-commercial powers themselves, a rivalry that later had a significant influence on the outbreak of the First World War.

This harmonious vision sometimes also emerges in the Communist Manifesto. A process of general pacification seems to be advancing in the metropolis: “National differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto.” It appears that we are witnessing the decline of war in developed bourgeois society, without having to wait for communism, when “the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.” On the other hand, the Manifesto credits Sismondi with denouncing the reality of the “industrial war of extermination between nations.” Just a few months later, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung ironically commented on Ruge: he had failed to understand that the phenomenon of war would not disappear with the feudal system and that countries dominated by the bourgeoisie were by no means “natural allies,” separated as they were by fierce competition, the outcome of which could well be war.⁸⁴

As soon as the Manifesto evoked it, the “industrial war of extermination between nations” contributed significantly to the success of the revolutions it called for. Starting with the struggle against the carnage that began in 1914, a country and, subsequently, a “socialist camp” emerged under conditions of double “barbarism” (to use the language of the Manifesto): the severe backwardness of the East and, above all, the horror of the two world wars and total war. It goes without saying that Marx and Engels did not in any way foresee such an attempt to build a post-capitalist society. But after the collapse of the “socialist camp,” a situation arose that once again brings us back to the Manifesto. In a text that appeared 150 years ago, it is possible to read an analysis that is surprisingly relevant today:

All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production.⁸⁵

The globalization that everyone is talking about today could not be better described. This homogenization tends to affect even what remains of the “socialist camp.” Once again, a text of venerable age sounds prophetic. The expansion of the bourgeoisie appears unstoppable:

The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.⁸⁶

In imposing this standardization on a global scale, the bourgeoisie actually asserts not only its economic and ideological power, as the passage just seen asserts, but also its political and military power, made evident by a whole series of measures that lie somewhere between peace and actual armed conflict: embargoes, economic warfare and threats of economic warfare, military intimidation, and international ideological campaigns that can draw on impressive multimedia firepower. On the other hand, albeit in an uncertain and contradictory manner, the Manifesto already recognizes that the “universal inter-dependence” produced by capitalism is not in contradiction with the phenomenon of “industrial war of extermination” or with other more or less catastrophic conflicts.

From the theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat to the gulag?

The double “barbarism” that characterized the historical context of the revolutions invoked by the Manifesto resulted in the gulag. Should we consider its authors jointly responsible? It’s a poorly-formulated question: it seems to assume that the political prophecies of that text lead only in the direction of “real socialism.” But that’s not how it is. Let’s take two unimpeachable testimonies. Popper believes he can demonstrate the irremediable obsolescence of Marx’s theory on the basis that “modern democracies” have already put into practice “most” of the programmatic demands of the Communist Manifesto, starting with “highly progressive or graduated income tax.”⁸⁷ In truth, the wording used here is rather imprecise and unusual, as it assimilates and unifies two quite different types of taxation! Given that he refers to the Communist Manifesto, it is however presumable that the theorist of the “open society” actually means the “starke Progressivsteuer,” or “highly progressive tax,” which we have already discussed. The fact remains that, by arguing in this way, Popper demonstrates the debt that “modern democracies” owe to Marx and Engels, not the obsolescence of their theories. This type of taxation is more than ever at the centre of political debate, and is strongly contested by Hayek, for example, who refers precisely to “progressive taxation as a means to effect a redistribution of income in favour of the poorer classes” to denounce the intolerable socialist contamination suffered by Western society itself.⁸⁸ And so, together with Popper, despite their different and opposing value judgements, even the patriarch of neoliberalism ends up acknowledging the influence that Marx and Engels exerted on Western “real democracy.”

This influence applies not only to progressive taxation (and the welfare state). The very configuration of political institutions, based on the principle of “one person, one vote,” bears much greater similarities to the program advocated by the Communist Manifesto than to the statements of the liberal theorists of the time, who were more or less attached to the principle of property discrimination in voting and far removed from even the idea of abolishing the upper chamber of the legislature (established on the basis of privilege of birth rather than wealth). And if today, in politics and civil society, wage workers can no longer be immediately identified with the instrumentum vocale, the “bipedal machine”, and the eternal “child” referred to in the liberal tradition, this is primarily due to the Communist Manifesto and the historical events it set in motion.

All this is glossed over by the thesis that attempts to draw a line of continuity starting from Marx and Engels’ theory of a transitional phase of revolutionary dictatorship all the way to the gulag. In reality, similar arguments were made by their contemporaries, but with very different positions. Consider the theory put forward in Mazzini’s Young Italy movement in 1833 of “a strongly centralized dictatorial power” that proceeds to “suspend” the bill of rights and only completes its task with the final victory of the national revolution.⁸⁹ Or consider Tocqueville who, around the same time, after describing the tragedy of the Irish people, decimated by poverty and oppressed and tyrannized by a foreign aristocracy, wondered whether “a temporary dictatorship under firm and enlightened guidance, like that of Bonaparte after the 18th Brumaire, would be the only means of saving Ireland.”⁹⁰

The Manifesto, however, barely hints at the thesis of the transitional phase of the dictatorship of the proletariat: it can be glimpsed in the passage on the “despotic inroads” that the proletariat, constituted as the “ruling class,” is called upon to carry out on existing property relations.⁹¹ In any case, Marx and Engels’ text was written about fifteen years after the invocation of a revolutionary or reformist dictatorship seen in Mazzini and Tocqueville. Obviously, within the liberal tradition (European and American), even more widespread is the conservative theorization of dictatorship for the state of exception. Indeed, it is difficult to find a more magniloquent celebration of the “admirable institution” that was the Roman dictatorship than that found in Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Laws.⁹² It is senseless to denounce the catastrophic effects of the justification of dictatorship by drawing on Marx and Engels, behind whom a long tradition clearly extends.

Finally, perhaps the most important consideration. It is legitimate and indeed necessary to question the responsibility of Marx and Engels, starting from their theory’s actual history and rejecting the myth of the theory’s innocence. But we must proceed similarly for all great intellectuals, even those who belong to different and opposing traditions of thought. Take Locke: is there a connection between his refusal to extend tolerance and even “compassion” to “papists” on the one hand, and on the other hand, the massacres later suffered by Catholics in Ireland?⁹³ And what connection exists between his theorization of slavery in the colonies and the slave trade and the tragedy of Black people, which today’s African-American activists refer to as the Black Holocaust? This problem is all the more pressing given that, at the end of the seventeenth century, many Black slaves were branded with the letters RAC, the initials of the Royal African Company, of which Locke was a shareholder.⁹⁴ The least that can be said is that Marx and Engels did not benefit from the forced labour that, decades after their deaths, would characterize the gulag.

Or, to refer to the historical period of the Manifesto, take Tocqueville. He celebrated the colonists who landed in North America for their combat against “the wilderness and savage life,” against “savages” who were irredeemably alien to “civilization,” and depicted the territory prior to the arrival of the colonists as “the empty cradle of a great nation”;⁹⁵ is there a connection between all this and the subsequent forced removals suffered by Indigenous peoples until the consummation of what today’s descendants of Indigenous nations call the American Holocaust? And is there a connection, as far as John Stuart Mill is concerned, between the theory of “despotism” that the West is called upon to exercise over “under age” races (who are in turn required to show “absolute obedience”)⁹⁶ and the terror (and massacres) that accompanied colonial expansion?

Even if we disregard colonies and populations of colonial origin, we must question the link that may connect the celebration of laissez-faire and the free market with the tragedies (including starvation) that, as acknowledged by the liberal authors themselves (Smith, Constant, Madame de Staël), afflict the masses. Shortly before the Manifesto, the Irish population was decimated, sentenced to death not only by the disease that destroyed the potato crop but also by a ruthless orthodoxy that condemned as unacceptable despotism any intervention by political power in a sphere that must remain “private.”⁹⁷ This is the ideology that Marx and Engels question or indict.

Revolutionary dialectics and messianism

Once freed from the one-sidedness and instrumentalism with which it is generally formulated, the problem of the relationship between theory and its historical effectiveness must also be kept firmly in mind with regard to Marx and Engels. Already in the Manifesto, the uncritical utopia of a society begins to take shape, in which “public power will lose its political character”, ultimately becoming a society not only without classes but also without a state and without national borders, without a market, without religions, without conflicts of any kind. This exalted vision of post-capitalist society has certainly played a disastrous role in attempts to build it. To give just one example: what was the point of rushing to build a democratic socialist state if the state was then destined to disappear?

Those who would like to dismiss the authors’ ideas wholesale as a form of superficially secularized eschatology draw on the messianic elements that are undoubtedly present in the Manifesto. Doesn’t the claim of the Manuscripts that communism is the solution to the “riddle of history” clearly hark back to the dreams and dogmatic certainties of religions?⁹⁸ In reality, this infamous statement is a citation to an author who was very dear to Marx. In denouncing Christianity’s “condemnation (Verdammnis) of the flesh” and “renunciation of all earthly pleasures,” Heine celebrates “communism” as the “natural consequence” of a new “world view”: “The masses can no longer bear their worldly misery with Christian patience; they yearn for happiness on earth.” At this point, the fate of Christianity is sealed, “for every epoch is a sphinx that plunges into the abyss as soon as its riddle has been solved.”⁹⁹ For Marx, too, communism is the solution to the riddle of history, in that it surpasses, both theoretically and practically, the asceticism recommended for and imposed on the masses not only by religion but also by a society that continues to be based on the denial of earthly happiness and of the very meaning of life for the majority of the planet’s population.

This program and this hope find expression in a thought that is not without elements of messianism, but it is precisely the Manifesto that puts us on the path to understanding their genesis and significance: the “fantastic pictures of future society, painted at a time when the proletariat is still in a very undeveloped state and has but a fantastic conception of its own position, correspond with the first instinctive yearnings of that class for a general reconstruction of society.” Of course, this thesis is put forward in opposition to utopian socialism, but that does not prevent it from being applied to the authors of the Manifesto themselves. This is the objective dialectic of every revolutionary process, brilliantly explained on other occasions, particularly by Engels. In the wake of the struggle against a situation perceived as intolerable, and in an effort to generate the enthusiasm needed to overcome the terrible obstacles standing in the way of the overthrow of the existing regime, every revolutionary process tends to see the future it proposes to build in somewhat exalted terms, tending to represent it as a kind of end of history.¹⁰⁰

This exaltation proves fruitful in the phase of destruction, but disastrous in the next phase; the attempt to build a post-capitalist society has oscillated between the two poles of a permanent state of exception (the two world wars and the Cold War) and a celebrated utopia, which in turn has ended up prolonging and further exacerbating the state of emergency.

The relevance and irrelevance of a “classic”

If the attempt to liquidate Marx and Engels by reducing them to the gulag is devoid of historical and theoretical dignity, the attempt to politically neutralize them by elevating them to the respectability of “classics” is highly questionable. This definition hits the mark if it aims to highlight the fact that their lesson far transcends the confines of the communist movement. Through a series of categories that are now inescapable (“political and social conditions,” social class, mode of production, ideology, etc.), the work of the authors of the Manifesto has enriched and reinterpreted the lexicon, reformulating the grammar and syntax of political and historical discourse. But the same consideration applies to every great author, who is not thereby shielded from political conflict. Plato and Hegel are undoubtedly “classics,” who, according to Popper, remain the great and disastrous inspirers of totalitarianism! Equally undoubtedly, Locke and Tocqueville are “classics,” but they too can be called into question, as we have seen, for tragedies that continue to fuel cultural and political debate today.

If it is futile to attempt to remove a great author from the turmoil and passions of political conflict by elevating him above the fray into the empyrean realm of the classics, then it is naive to approach this classic by questioning immediately, and simplistically, its relevance or irrelevance today. Many pages written by various exponents of the liberal tradition strike us as decidedly outdated, not only those documenting their attitude towards colonized peoples or wage labourers in the capitalist metropolis, but also, as we have seen, those that refer more directly to the constitution and functioning of representative bodies. And yet, this does not mean closing the book on these authors, as if there were nothing to learn from them for understanding (and organizing or transforming) the world in which we live.

Marx and Engels should be approached in a similar manner. In fact, in this case, any discourse that sought to immediately proclaim their relevance would be self-contradictory. We are in fact dealing with authors who have repeatedly stated that their theory developed through engagement with the actual historical movement. To consider the Communist Manifesto immediately relevant today, dismissing over 150 years of extraordinarily rich and tragic history as irrelevant to theoretical development, means effectively ignoring or rejecting the theoretical approach on which that text is based.

There is one further consideration to add. Marx and Engels, on the one hand, aim to accurately reflect reality, while on the other hand, they are committed to radically changing it. The observation that workers in capitalist society are reduced to mere instruments of labour is at the same time an appeal levelled at these instruments to question their condition, to become conscious of themselves, to gain political subjectivity and even revolutionary political subjectivity. “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains”: once again, a passionate denunciation sparks a gigantic global process and movement that profoundly alters the initial situation and affects the very chains themselves, leaving them loosened, if not broken.

On the other hand, the Manifesto reveals a clear awareness that bourgeois society is very different from the societies that preceded it. It continues to be characterized by class domination, but this domination is by no means synonymous with stasis or even stability. It is a society that is constantly revolutionizing itself. And this sort of permanent bourgeois revolution refers, on the one hand, to an internal dialectic (the bitter competition between capitalists) and, on the other, to a challenge that comes from outside the bourgeois sphere proper. The workers’ struggle for shorter working hours is matched by the bourgeois initiative for further mechanization of the production process, for the replacement of workers by machines, for the relocation of factories in pursuit of cheaper and more docile labour, as well as the most advantageous use of raw materials.

Outlined in the Manifesto, this dialectic of challenge and response is further developed in Capital and in the Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy. It also reveals a more immediately political aspect. The unrest and agitation among workers in Great Britain and Germany were met with political and social reforms by Disraeli and Bismarck, which expanded citizenship and introduced some early elements of social protection. In conclusion, the bourgeoisie proves capable of domination and government to the extent that and for as long as it is able to forestall the threat of a revolution from below with a revolution from above.

Given this dialectic of challenge and response, it follows that when the former disappears or weakens, the latter also disappears or weakens. The current process of globalization seems to be reducing the entire population of the planet to “instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex”¹⁰¹, reduced to commodities in an increasingly tumultuous market. Thus, outside and beneath the “aerial life,” the “ethereal region,” the “sky of the political state” characterized by freedom and equality of citizens, emerge “social and political conditions,” an earthly life, whose extremes are represented on the one hand by factory “despotism” (which in the Third World presents itself without disguise or veils) and on the other by the growing precariousness and unemployment typical of an increasingly global labour market. The harsh analysis of the condition of workers contained in the Manifesto regains its “relevance.” However, while this renewed “relevance” confirms the validity of a theory, it is also the symptom of a defeat, the defeat of the “historical movement” that Marx and Engels’ text intended to be the conscious and mature expression of, and which they sought to bring to completion and victory. And this defeat in turn points to political and theoretical weaknesses, to the limits of the messianism already mentioned.

Nec tecum possum vivere nec sine te!¹⁰² This motto could apply to our relationship with Marx and Engels, as it does to our relationship with any other great author separated from us by a considerable temporal distance and, above all, by colossal historical upheavals that have radically changed the face of the world. It is therefore at a different level that we must try to distinguish between the various authors. It is not a question of separating what is alive from what is dead and quantitatively calculating which aspect should be considered primary. It is above all important to assess to what extent an author has contributed, through their theory, to render remote the world their theory actively reflects; secondly, to what extent that author’s theory is still capable of explaining the new world. It would be worth comparing the Communist Manifesto with what we might call two manifestos of the liberal party, one from the first half of the 19th century (Constant’s Discourse on the Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns) and the other from the second half of the century (Mill’s essay On Liberty). A comparative reading of these three texts, in light of the criteria outlined above, could constitute a highly instructive and fruitful intellectual experiment.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Journeys to England and Ireland (1835), p. 107. archive.org ↩︎
Tocqueville, Notes in Oeuvres complètes, vol. III, 2, p. 727. ↩︎
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book 4, Chapter 20. wikisource.org ↩︎
Bernard de Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees. gutenberg.org ↩︎
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). mcmaster.ca ↩︎
Karl Marx, Critical Notes on the Article: ‘The King of Prussia and Social Reform’ By a Prussian (1895). marxists.org ↩︎
Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), Book IV, Chapter IX. econlib.org ↩︎
Tocqueville, “Speech given on 3 April 1852 at Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques,” in Oeuvres complètes, vol. XVI, p. 241. Translated from the French version at Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques. ↩︎
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859), Chapter V. gutenberg.org ↩︎
Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (1844), “Human Requirements and Division of Labour Under the Rule of Private Property.” marxists.org ↩︎
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848). marxists.org ↩︎
Tocqueville, Souvenirs (1850-51), in Oeuvres complètes, vol. XII. libertyfund.org ↩︎
Tocqueville, Speech to the Chamber of Deputies on 27 January 1848, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. III, 2. Translation adapted from the French version available at wikisource.org. ↩︎
Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), Chapter 2. ↩︎
Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), Chapter 2. marxists.org ↩︎
Tocqueville, “Speech given on 3 April 1852 at Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques,” in Oeuvres complètes, vol. XVI, p. 240. Translated from the French version at Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, except “fatal error”, taken from Losurdo’s translation. ↩︎
Engels, Conditions of the Working Class in England (1845), “Single Branches of Industry.” marxists.org ↩︎
Marx, Justification of the Correspondent from the Mosel (1843). marxists.architexturez.net ↩︎
Burke, Speech on Moving his Resolutions for Conciliation with America (1826). uchicago.edu ↩︎
Marx and Engels, The Holy Family (1845), Chapter VI, Section 2, “Absolute Criticism’s Second Campaign.” marxists.org ↩︎
Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843), Chapter 5. marxists.org ↩︎
Tocqueville, Speech to the Chamber of Deputies on 27 January 1848, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. III, 2. Translation adapted from the French version available on wikisource.org. ↩︎
Tocqueville, On the Penitentiary System in the United States (1833). gallica.bnf.fr ↩︎
Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), Chapter 1. (This is accurate to the Italian, but the English translation on marxists.org reads slightly differently: “The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” —Eds.) ↩︎
Benjamin Constant, “The Liberty of Ancients Compared with that of Moderns” (1819). institutcoppet.org ↩︎
Census suffrage is when only those who own property may vote. —Eds. ↩︎
Quoted in Domenico Losurdo, Democracy or Bonapartism (1993), Chapter 1. ↩︎
Marx, On the Jewish Question (1844). marxists.org ↩︎
Marx, ibid. ↩︎
Marx and Engels, The German Ideology (1845), “Part 1C: The Relation of State and Law to Property.” marxists.org ↩︎
Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), Chapter 1. ↩︎
Tocqueville, Letter to Gustave de Beaumont on September 3rd, 1848. Available in Oeuvres complètes, published by Gallimard, Paris (1951), Tome 8, part 2, p. 38. Quoted at greater length in Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History (2005), Chapter 6.6. ↩︎
Engels, Conditions of the Working Class in England (1845), “Single Branches of Industry.” marxists.org ↩︎
Tocqueville, Letters on the internal situation in France (1843). Available in Oeuvres complètes, published by Gallimard, Paris (1951), Tome 3, part 2, p. 105-106. Quoted at greater length in Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History (2005), Chapter 6.3. ↩︎
Constant, Principles of Politics (1815). libertyfund.org ↩︎
Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, Ecrits politiques (1985), edited by R. Zapperi, pp. 76 and 236. Also quoted in Losurdo, Democracy or Bonapartism (1993). ↩︎
Tocqueville, Speech Against Socialism, September 12, 1848. archive.org ↩︎
Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), Chapter 3. ↩︎
Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843). marxists.org ↩︎
Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), Chapter 1. ↩︎
Mandeville, An Essay on Charity and Charity-Schools (1723). gutenberg.org ↩︎
Burke, Thoughts and Details on Scarcity (1795). libertyfund.org ↩︎
A series of laws were enacted in response to worker combinations and strikes beginning in 1720, culminating in the notorious 1799 Combination Act which universalised the prohibition. For more on this, see: Orth, John V. “English Combination Acts of the Eighteenth Century.” doi.org —Eds. ↩︎
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776), Book I, Chapter VIII. gutenberg.org ↩︎
Smith, ibid. ↩︎
Smith, ibid., Book IV, chapter IX. ↩︎
Smith, ibid. ↩︎
Smith, ibid., Book IV, chapter V. ↩︎
Ordinance of August 25, 1830, quoted in William H. Sewell, Jr, Work and Revolution on France: The Language of Labor from the Olde Regime to 1848 (1980), p. 196. archive.org ↩︎
Mill, On Liberty; Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776), Book I, Chapter VIII. Regarding the July Monarchy, see Domenico Losurdo, Democracy or Bonapartism (1993). ↩︎
Friedrich A. von Hayek, New studies in philosophy, politics, economics and the history of ideas (1978), p. 146. archive.org ↩︎
Hayek Law, Legislation and Liberty (1982), Chapter 18. ↩︎
Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), Chapter 1. ↩︎
Marx and Engels, ibid. ↩︎
Thomas Carlyle, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), edited by M.K. Goldberg and J.P. Seigel, Canadian Federation for the Humanities (1983), pp. 463–65. ↩︎
Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), Chapter 1. ↩︎
Marx, Critical Notes on the Article: ‘The King of Prussia and Social Reform’ By a Prussian. marxists.org ↩︎
Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), Chapter 1. ↩︎
See Chapter 2 of The Communist Manifesto. ↩︎
Engels, Speeches in Elberfeld, February 8th, 1845. marxists.architexturez.net ↩︎
Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, Book XII, 7 & 14. mcmaster.ca ↩︎
Constant, December 10, 1795. Quoted in Henri Guillemin, Benjamin Constant muscadin, 1795–1799 (1958), p. 77. archive.org ↩︎
Madame de Staël, Considerations on the principal events of the French Revolution (1818), p. 377. archive.org ↩︎
Herbert Spencer, Man versus the State (1843), “The Proper Sphere of Government.” libertyfund.org ↩︎
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), “Equall Taxes” [sic]. gutenberg.org (The text has been modernized; the original reads “For what reason is there, that he which laboureth much, and sparing the fruits of his labour, consumeth little, should be more charged, then he that living idlely, getteth little, and spendeth all he gets; seeing the one hath no more protection from the Common-wealth, then the other?” —Eds.) ↩︎
On this, see Losurdo, Hegel and the Freedom of Moderns (Hegel e la liberta dei moderni) (1992), pp. 247–52 and 306. ↩︎
Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776), Book V, Chapter I, Part II; Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843), “Introduction”. (The reference to Marx reads, “The head of this emancipation is philosophy, its heart the proletariat.” —Eds.) ↩︎
Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), Chapter 1. ↩︎
Engels, Conditions of the Working Class in England (1845), “Dedication.” marxists.org ↩︎
Losurdo, Democracy or Bonapartism (1993), pp. 39–45. ↩︎
Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844), “Division of Labour”. redsails.org ↩︎
Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776), Book I, Chapter X, Part II. ↩︎
Marx, Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 28. marxists.org (Compare with “the workers’ freshly won right of association” in the 2024 translation by Paul Reitter. —Eds.) ↩︎
Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844), “The Relationship of Private Property”. marxists.org ↩︎
Marx, “The Future Results of British Rule in India”, New-York Daily Tribune, August 8, 1853. marxists.architexturez.net ↩︎
Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), Chapter 2. marxists.org ↩︎
Marx, “The British Rule in India”, New-York Daily Tribune, June 25, 1853. marxists.org ↩︎
Tocqueville, Speech Against Socialism, September 12, 1848. archive.org ↩︎
Marx and Engels, “On Poland: Speeches at the International Meeting held in London on November 29,1847 to mark the 17th Anniversary of the Polish Uprising of 1830.” Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung, December 9, 1847. marxists.architexturez.net ↩︎
Compare: “Can a nation be free if it oppresses other nations? It cannot.” V.I. Lenin, The Right of Nations to Self-Determination (1914). marxists.org —Eds. ↩︎
On the colonial question in Marx and Engels and in the liberal tradition, see Losurdo, “Civilization, Barbarism, and World History: Rereading Lenin” (“Civiltà, barbarie e storia mondiale: rileggendo Lenin”), Lenin e il Novecento, La Città del Sole-Istituto italiano per gli studi filosofici (1997), pp. 21–35. (Losurdo’s later book, Class Struggle (2013) also explores the writing of Marx and Engels in the context of national liberation. —Eds.) ↩︎
Constant, The Liberty of Ancients Compared with that of Moderns (1819). libertyfund.org (“An age must come in which commerce replaces war. We have reached this age.” —Eds.) ↩︎
The reference is likely to Social Darwinist Herbert Spencer’s The Principles of Sociology (1902), particularly Volume II, Chapter XVII-XVIII on the “militant type” and “industrial type” of society. —Eds. ↩︎
Engels, “The Frankfurt Assembly Debates the Polish Question”, Neue Rheinische Zeitung, September 7, 1848. marxists.org ↩︎
Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), Chapter 1. ↩︎
Marx and Engels, ibid., Chapter 1. ↩︎
Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1947), “Volume II, The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx, and the Aftermath”, p129-130. archive.org ↩︎
Hayek, New studies in philosophy, politics, economics and the history of ideas (1978), p 142. archive.org ↩︎
Giuseppe Mazzini Autobiographical notes [Note autobiografiche], (1861-66). ↩︎
Tocqueville, Journeys to England and Ireland (1835), p. 155. archive.org ↩︎
“Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production.” —Eds. ↩︎
Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, Book VII, part 16. mcmaster.ca. See also, Losurdo, Democracy or Bonapartism (1993), “Chapter 3: The Liberal Tradition, the State of Exception and the US Constitution”. ↩︎
Locke, An essay concerning toleration : and other writings on law and politics, (1667-1683) 1977, p. 291. archive.org (The full passage clearly calls for a reduction in their number: “… I thinke [Papists] ought not to enjoy the benefit of toleration. Because toleration can never, but restraint may lessen their number or at least not increase it…” —Eds.) ↩︎
Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade (1997). Thomas 1997, p. 14; cf. Losurdo, Hegel and the Freedom of Moderns (Hegel e la liberta dei moderni) (1992), p. 355. ↩︎
Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835). gutenberg.org. (Losurdo’s translation is more faithful to the original French than the consulted English translations: “ce continent tout entier, apparaissaient alors comme le berceau encore vide d’une grande nation.” —Eds.) ↩︎
Quoted in Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History (2005), Chapter 1.1. ↩︎
Losurdo, Historical Revisionism: Problems and Myths (Il revisionismo storico. Problemi e miti), (1996), pp. 236–37. ↩︎
Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844), “Private Property and Communism”. redsails.org ↩︎
Heinrich Heine, The Romantic School and Other Essays (1836-1844) (1836), p. 6-7. wikimedia.org; p. 3-4, 290. archive.org ↩︎
Losurdo, “Vincenzo Cuoco, the Neapolitan revolution of 1799 and the comparatistics of revolutions” (“Vincenzo Cuoco, la rivoluzione napoletana del 1799 e la comparatistica delle rivoluzioni”), Society and history (1989), pp. 906–907. ↩︎
Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), Chapter 1. ↩︎
“I can’t live with you or without you!” ↩︎

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The Message

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Dialectical Library https://dialab.codeberg.page/dialibra/%40preview-35/reviews/the-message/ -

The Message is both intensely personal and intentionally public. Ta-Nehisi Coates reflects on his life as a writer: from his childhood, where he discovered the “haunting” effect of the written word, through the turns of his career at The Atlantic and other outlets and as a lauded author. He re-evaluates his famous essay, The Case For Reparations¹, in which he used Germany’s support for Israel as a positive example of the reparations he demands for Black Americans from their former enslavers. In the years since publishing this essay, Coates has learned more about the history of Israel’s colonization of Palestine; The Message acts as a form of reparation itself, a work that seeks to “haunt” and “clarify” for his readers in hopes of changing the world (“Seeing the world clearly allows for clearer action”).

Coates explains how he came to this error, and I think his argument holds some insight for communist writers and educators. When speaking to an audience—particularly to people that view you in some way as “other”, and particularly when coming to them with a “radical proposition”—one must write with the language, metaphors and examples that will resonate with this audience:

Making a charge according to the law of those you indict is a dangerous business. However much you try to remember your own motives, however much you may feel yourself to have succeeded, you are ultimately in their world and are thus compelled to speak to them through their symbols and stories. The need is even greater when you are a stranger to them, an adversary even, because your claims are always viewed with more skepticism. I lived in a world of white editors and white writers.

To make his message resonate with the audience of The Atlantic, Coates wove into his “radical proposition” the example of Israel. He writes that he recalls sensing there was injustice being done there, and that he vaguely knew of the history of solidarity between Black activists and Palestinians, but discarded his instincts out of a sense that he did not know enough, swayed by mainstream rhetoric about how hopelessly complicated the “conflict” is. Although, as communists, our target audience is unlikely to fit the typical profile of a subscriber to The Atlantic, we do talk to broad audiences, ones that may consider us strangers at times. When reaching for metaphors or examples that might help make our messages resonate emotionally, or connect theoretical concepts, Coates’s advice for us would be to stay on ground we know well, and avoid “easy bromides and national fictions.”

Coates also reflects more generally on the incentive structures that enabled his success as a writer, but that also shaped his writing in ways he regrets:

I see that the parts of my thinking that were most reinforced were those that most dovetailed with those around me, and the parts that were hardest to hold were those that did not. I wrote a lot of stuff I came to regret—a lot of smart-ass contrarianism, a lot of mean prose—in the young rush to get into the paper or magazine.

There are lessons for us here as well. Communists are familiar with Marx’s famous line, “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.” We understand that, under capitalism, mainstream media, universities and all the other “means of mental production”² owned or funded by capitalists will produce ideas in support of capitalism. Social media—also typically billionaire-owned³—is a place many of us connect with each other, yet these platforms shape our speech in their own ways. While their use of censorship to control content, particularly regarding the genocide in Gaza, has rightly received attention⁴, their impact on how we discuss a given topic is often underappreciated. These platforms reward condescending dunks, acerbic commentary, and tailing the crowd. Though scathing communication has its place, it can also turn people away, or make people feel scared to contribute or ask questions. It is harder (and unrewarded by the algorithms that shape our feeds) to write with welcoming patience, and to stay on a path you think is right even if less traveled.

Coates devotes a chapter to education, leaning on the work of Paulo Freire.⁵ He relates how the “passive role” of the dominant “banking” model of education shapes students into people that accept the world as it is rather than seeing themselves as active “transformers” of their world. There are parallels with Mao’s On Practice⁶: “If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself… If you want to know the theory and methods of revolution, you must take part in revolution.” Coates’s writing seeks to educate not by cramming information into the brains of his readers, but by showing them how the world can be changed. He takes us from fights over municipal educational policy in South Carolina to the West Bank of Gaza where Palestinians defy Israeli law to claw back the resources they need to live. He connects these struggles, showing how they are all related phenomena:

Throughout the West Bank, I saw cisterns used to harvest rainwater. These cisterns were almost certainly illegal—the Israeli state’s hold on the West Bank includes control of the aquifers in the ground and the rainwater that falls from above. Any structure designed for gathering water requires a permit from the occupying power, and such permits are rarely given to Palestinians. The upshot is predictable—water consumption for Israelis is nearly four times that of Palestinians living under occupation. And in those West Bank settlements which I once took as mere outposts, you can find country clubs furnished with large swimming pools. On seeing these cisterns, it occurred to me that Israel had advanced beyond the Jim Crow South and segregated not just the pools and fountains but the water itself. And more, it occurred to me that there was still one place on the planet—under American patronage—that resembled the world that my parents were born into.

If you’ve followed public discourse about The Message, perhaps it is surprising that this review is only now coming to Coates’s observations from his trip to Palestine regarding the genocidal actions by the Israeli state. His account of these horrors garnered a lot of attention (and earned him many angry but poorly-argued 1-star reviews on Goodreads), and it may be why you have heard of this book. In this way, the structure of this review echoes that of the book: it is not until the halfway mark, after he describes his experience growing up Black and his ancestral journey to Senegal that Coates begins to describe his revelatory trip to Palestine. But as you read on, you realize you’ve been reading about Palestine and Israel the whole time: what does it mean to be of a place? To be part of a community? To return to an ancestral land? To be othered? To be denied the privileges granted to another race? To not be allowed to tell your own stories? To have your life cut short? To have your history erased?

The Message is a deftly woven tale. It has deservedly earned praise for its depictions of conditions in Palestine; it is also worth reading for what it has to say on writer’s craft. Build from what people know, guide them to what they don’t yet know. Weave together history and human story, statistics and emotion, to give this knowledge power.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations”, The Atlantic, June 2014. theatlantic.com ↩︎
Karl Marx, The German Ideology (1845). marxists.org ↩︎
Notable exceptions include the Fediverse, such as reddit-like Lemmy servers or twitter-like Mastodon servers. ↩︎
See, for example, Omar Zahzah, “US TikTok ban sign of imperial anxiety”, The Electronic Intifada. electronicintifada.net ↩︎
For more on Freire, see this review of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which situates Freire within the Marxist and Liberation Theology movements. ↩︎
Mao Zedong, On Practice (1937). redsails.org ↩︎

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Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Fri, 15 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Dialectical Library https://dialab.codeberg.page/dialibra/%40preview-35/reviews/pedagogy-of-the-oppressed/ -

Introduction

Pedagogy of the Oppressed is a 1970 book by Paulo Freire, a radical Brazilian educator. If one were to pick this book up at random, you would be forgiven for thinking it was an educational text for the underprivileged—and it is, in a sense. But the unfolding of Freire’s theses across its brief four chapters leaves little room for interpretation: this is a radical text, intended to be a handbook for revolutionaries. It belongs more to the literary tradition of Lenin’s What is to be Done? than Dewey’s The Child and the Curriculum.

To understand why he connects these ideas we must first understand the historical context in which this book was written. In the death throes of multiple crises, the Empire of Brazil adopted direct elections in its final years, but—inspired by John Stuart Mill—limited it on two conditions: a census discrimination (minimum annual tax payments), and the ability to read and write.¹ The vast majority of the country’s illiterate, peasant population were thereby excluded.²³ Republican democracy came to Brazil in fits and starts, but this exclusion remained by the time of the Fourth Republic:

In 1963, Freire became head of Brazil’s National Commission of Popular Culture, under the liberal-populist government of João Goulart, who moved dramatically to the left once in power in response to popular movements. Policies to help the poor—including opening the franchise to people who couldn’t read—enraged many among the country’s upper and upper-middle classes. A right-wing dictatorship came to power in a military coup the following year, and Freire was thrown in prison by the new regime, which viewed mass literacy and political participation as a threat. After his release from prison, Freire went into exile for years… [during which] he wrote the book that would make him Brazil’s most famous global intellectual.⁴

Despite its abstract language, Pedagogy of the Oppressed is an urgent intervention: Freire speaks directly to the incipient movements of the well-intentioned petit-bourgeois intelligentsia of his time who were attempting to organize the masses against a fascist coup d’état and military dictatorship.

Freire’s Theses of Revolutionary Education

Humanity has a calling, an “ontological vocation”, says Freire: to “humanize” ourselves and the world. The “central problem” of humanity has been overcoming our self-inflicted dehumanization in pursuit of this goal. This serves as an idiosyncratic reference to Hegel’s account of alienation and its overcoming:

Neither Marx nor Hegel regards the state of alienation and disharmony as a purely negative one. Both see this condition as a stage in the process of human development and self-realization, and as a necessary part of the process, since we achieve development only in and through it.⁵

To dehumanize someone is to treat them like a thing. Objectification denies the object its status as Subject. This failure of recognition creates a situation of oppression and a state of distress in the oppressed. The act of dehumanizing also dehumanizes the oppressor.⁶ But this dialectic of oppressor-oppressed has far greater implications than subjective experience: it becomes the way in which we reshape the world to suit our purposes, and consequently it materializes this relationship of oppression. As Marx famously observed, “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”⁷ Social relations of oppression continuously reproduce themselves. Freire describes both oppressor and oppressed as being “submerged in this situation”, bearing “the marks of oppression” (58). The prescription of how to live is imposed on the oppressed and they are made to “house” the oppressor’s consciousness in themselves (46–47, 128).

How this is done brings us to the most famous idea in this book: Freire’s critique of the “banking model” of education. This is the pedagogy of the oppressor: the teacher is the authority who “deposits” information into the passive student. “This relationship involves a narrating Subject (the teacher) and patient, listening objects (the students)” (71).

The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them (75).

In this chapter of the book, Freire still coyly relates this observation to classroom dynamics, but it applies equally to the “monologue, slogans, and communiqués” (65) of the ersatz revolutionary,⁸ and the political system of the nation.⁹

The antidote to this annulment of creativity is “critical consciousness” [conscientização], in which the student learns “to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions,” and takes “action against the oppressive elements of reality” (35). The crux of this process is that the student ceases to be an object to be acted upon, and remakes themselves as Subject.¹⁰ Critical consciousness is stimulated by the banking model’s antithesis: problem-posing.

A problem-posing education is a dialogical education, where all parties learn through interaction with each other. The “teacher-student” enters dialogue with “students-teachers” and their cooperative perception of a “cognizable object” renders to them a collective interpretation of it. Oppressive relations are presented to the students-teachers as limiting situations. Rather than perceiving reality as static and eternal, they see transitory limitations that demand overcoming. This perception results in action to transform the world and transcend the limiting situation (49, 79–80).

Freire tips his hand in the fourth and final chapter: he has been speaking about the process of revolution all along. The “teacher” becomes the “revolutionary leader” and the “students” become the oppressed masses and ultimately the revolutionary cadre.

There is some precedent for this structure in the Marxist literature: Capital begins with the singular commodity and traces its relationships methodically until the frame of view is the entire world system of capitalism; Fanon opens The Wretched of the Earth from the consciousness of the oppressed Algerian and unfolds his narrative to encompass the world system of imperialism. But in Freire’s hands, this feels less like a logical progression and more like a sleight-of-hand.

Marx and Christ: Quarrelsome Bedfellows

Freire’s first and strongest influence was his mother’s Catholicism, an influence visible from the first page of the first chapter in his distinctive usage of “vocation.”¹¹ But unlike the dramatis personae of the Catholic tradition, the Almighty is apparently absent from this work. Freire had a very tendentious relationship with the church, whose dissonance between word and action gave him “grave concerns” according to his wife Nita:

For example, he observed, since his childhood, how so many priests ate well and gained weight, yet the poor remained poor and hungry, only to hear the priests say to them, “Don’t worry, God is with you, and your reward is great in heaven.” For Paulo, many priests, with their belly full, did not have authentic compassion and empathy for the poor, and were not consistent with what they said and what they did.¹²

This may provide some insight into why Hegel became so central to Freire’s thought; this book is undeniably Hegelian from cover to cover, and while he draws upon many themes from Hegel’s work, this struggle bears a lot of resemblance to Hegel’s criticism of Christian charity:

The ethical precept orders: ‘Help the poor.’ Yet, the actual help would consist in freeing them from their poverty, but when there is no more poverty, there are no more poor people, and no more duty to help them. And if, for the sake of charity, we let these poor people continue to be poor, then, by letting poverty continue to exist, the duty [to actually help the poor, by freeing them from their poverty] is not being … fulfilled.¹³

“It was not the peasants,” he recalls, “who said to me: ‘Paulo, have you read Marx?’ No! They didn’t even read the newspaper. It was their reality that brought me back to Marx. And so I went to Marx.”¹⁴ The humanism of Hegel and the materialism of Marx had a profound impact on Freire’s thought, giving him the intellectual tools to make an impact in the lives of the poor here and now, rather than the hereafter. He diagnoses two common pathologies present in radical organizing: idle talk without action (verbalism), and action without reflection (activism). Only by integrating reflection and action do you achieve praxis. This can be interpreted as a straightforward description of dialectical materialism.¹⁵¹⁶

Armed with the weapon of Marxist criticism, Freire envisioned a Christianity that was militant in fulfilling its calling to help the poor. This brought him into the orbit of Gustavo Gutiérrez, at whose behest Freire developed an analysis of church forms for Liberation Theology.¹⁷ The Catholic Church of Brazil was “traditionalist,” and “still intensely colonialist.” Freire saw the Church stepping into the role of vanguard party, the priesthood as its revolutionary leaders: “this utopian, prophetic, and hope-filled movement rejects do-goodism and palliative reforms in order to commit itself to the dominated social classes and to radical social change.”¹⁸

An even more obvious sign that Freire was drawing inspiration from revolutionaries are the actual revolutionaries in his citations: Lenin (126, 138, 182), Mao (54, 93–94, 136), Castro (128, 166), and especially Che Guevara (89, 165–166, 169–171) for whom Nita says he “had an incredible love and admiration.”¹⁹

He very consciously sought to fuse Marxism with Christianity—describing himself as “Christ’s comrade.”²⁰ The immediate problem with this is Christ’s absolute rejection of violence for liberation:

You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’. But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also … You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you (Matt. 5:38-43 NRSV)

The Christian approach to dehumanization and oppression is, in the last analysis, to suffer and wait for death. Freire could not accept this. “I cannot permit myself to be a mere spectator. On the contrary, I must demand my place in the process of change.”²¹

“The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism by weapons,” Marx observed, “material force must be overthrown by material force.”²² Lenin concurred that liberation was “impossible” without “violent revolution”;²³ “a revolution is not a dinner party,” writes Mao, “[it] is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”²⁴ This was no mere preference, but hard-won experience. “Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of [violence] of the armed people against the bourgeois?” Engels asks. “Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?”²⁵

While Freire saw the evident truth of Marxist theory, he could not bring himself to contradict the Son of God, maintaining a distinctly Christian perspective on the use of violence. Nita says,

According to Paulo, the use of violence was rarely necessary. Paulo profoundly changed much through non-violent means, particularly through critical-ethical-political education. Instead of weapons and wars, he fostered the notion of dialogue and love.²⁶

Caught in a dilemma, he resorted to creative reinterpretation. “Never in history,” he declares, “has violence been initiated by the oppressed.” How could this be so?

How could they be the initiators, if they themselves are the result of violence? … There would be no oppressed had there been no prior situation of violence to establish their subjugation… Consciously or unconsciously, the act of rebellion by the oppressed (an act which is always, or nearly always, as violent as the initial violence of the oppressors) can initiate love (55–56).

This begins by expressing a very similar sentiment as Engels attributed to the Chartists, that “the oppressed have the right to use the same means against their oppressors as the latter use against them”;²⁷ and many revolutionaries have expressed the necessity for love in a revolution,²⁸²⁹³⁰ but to transfigure the process of revolution itself to an act of love is a stretch. Love is a uniting force, and a socialist revolution is premised on a politico-moral de-specification,³¹ a bright dividing line between us and them. It is totally counterproductive to seek unity with your oppressor during revolution, they must be separated from you completely.³²

As with poverty, so too with revolution: Christian Socialism twists itself into knots over the pragmatic acts necessary for liberating the oppressed. Rather than spark a revolutionary flame in Christianity, it imprisons the revolutionary in self-doubt. Original Sin has been crossed out and replaced with Dehumanization, but to a materialist eye this all reads a bit too much like theodicy.³³ And so, taken in its totality, Freire’s use of dialectics falls short of Marx’s materialism, landing more in the vein of Hegel’s idealist dialectic but absent the monist commitment of either—a sort of utopian syncretism.³⁴

This unholy admixture did not escape the notice of the Vatican. “Impatience and a desire for results has led certain Christians, despairing of every other method, to turn to what they call ‘marxist analysis’,” writes Cardinal Ratzinger, some years before ascending to the Papacy. He saw clearly the critical flaw in the dualism of Liberation Theology:

…the thought of Marx is such a global vision of reality that all data received [from] observation and analysis are brought together in a philosophical and ideological structure … no separation of the parts of this epistemologically unique complex is possible. If one tries to take only one part, say, the analysis, one ends up having to accept the entire ideology… the ultimate and decisive criterion for truth can only be a criterion which is itself theological.³⁵

But Marx’s opposing critique of religion was altogether more perceptive: “Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet found himself or has already lost himself again.” He saw in religion not pure error, but a “mystical shell” containing truth of the human experience:

To abolish religion as the illusory happiness of the people is to demand their real happiness. The demand to give up illusions about the existing state of affairs is the demand to give up the state of affairs which needs illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of the vale of tears, the halo of which is religion. Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower… The immediate task of philosophy, which is at the service of history, once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked, is to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms. Thus the criticism of heaven turns into the criticism of the earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.³⁶

While the fideism of Christianity entrenches it in a losing battle against the encroachment of knowledge, defending ever-diminishing territory, the totalizing character of Marx’s materialist method is able to seek truth fearlessly from all directions.

The compromises Freire made to Marxist theory in order to fuse it with Christianity ended up for naught, both in theory and in practice. “It is true that education is not the ultimate lever for social transformation,” he conceded, reflecting on his work late in life, “but without it transformation cannot occur.”³⁷ It’s difficult not to see this as a self-demotion, considering the pride of place given pedagogy in this book.

He has much more useful things to say regarding what not to do.

The Conduct of a Revolutionary

Historically, many, if not most, revolutionary leaders come from the oppressor classes, and so Freire spends several passages exploring the subjective experience of this class and its pitfalls.

The first is recognizing the situation of oppression and your place in it. An oppressor confronted by what they are has a tendency to retreat into subjectivism; they substitute objective reality by choosing to “see it differently.” This all-too-familiar process of rationalization “ceases to be concrete and becomes a myth created in defense of the class of the perceiver” (52). When this process is carried out on a world-scale, the individual rationalization becomes mythicization (139). “Neither objectivism nor subjectivism, nor yet psychologism is propounded here, but rather subjectivity and objectivity in constant dialectical relationship” (50).

Another form of rationalization is to see the oppressed as childlike, and adopt the position of savior. This paternalistic attitude is also all-too-familiar, and Freire rejects its presence in a revolutionary movement (54). “It is only the oppressed,” he insists, “who by freeing themselves, can free their oppressors” (56). But good intentions are not enough. Oppressors turned revolutionaries bring with them “the marks of their origin: their prejudices … which includes a lack of confidence in the people’s ability to think” (60).

Neither does Freire believe in the inherent goodness of the oppressed: they also bear the marks of their oppression in the form of a “fear of freedom”, a sense of “fatalism”, and a negative “self-deprecation” (36, 61–64). This leads to the interesting observation that historical conditions produce two kinds of revolutionary movements, or two moments within one movement:

…the movement by the revolutionary leaders to the people is either horizontal—so that leaders and people form one body in contradiction to the oppressor—or it is triangular, with the revolutionary leaders occupying the vertex of the triangle in contradiction to the oppressors and to the oppressed as well (165).

A three-way contradiction naturally occurs when the oppressed have not yet developed a critical consciousness, and this is okay so long as the revolutionaries begin their work by resolving this.³⁸ But since they see themselves as the voice of the people, there is a temptation to dismiss this problem and consequently a danger of going out on a limb. This is why Freire emphasizes the importance of critical consciousness-raising so much: a revolution can only succeed when there is unity between the revolutionaries and the people. To press onward to revolution regardless results in a coup d’état instead, a situation where the provisional government lacks legitimacy.³⁹

A Complicated Legacy

Pedagogy of the Oppressed is widely considered a foundational text of critical pedagogy, and is the third-most cited work of social science.⁴⁰ Influential though it may be, needless to say neither the socialist revolution in Brazil nor the obsolescence of the banking model of education have been forthcoming. Perhaps that is too much to ask of a book written in exile, but there are certainly some weaknesses we can identify within.

Freire’s philosophical language is highly abstract, and idiosyncratic. Even when you know the intellectual origins of his ideas, it can be challenging to parse. Then there are cases where he should have been more circumspect—deploying phrases from the Frankfurt School such as Fromm’s “biophily” and “necrophily” feels rather inapposite to the material in which they’re used.

The wholesale embrace of Mao’s Cultural Revolution—a position not even the Communist Party of China holds today—has not withstood the test of time. Together with hints at Heidegger’s philosophy of dasein,⁴¹ this introduces a very voluntarist theme that has no opposing force of objective conditions. In his eulogy for the Second International, Lenin argued for the necessity of both objective and subjective conditions of revolution. Only when “objective changes are accompanied by a subjective change” can revolution occur.⁴² The errors of Mao, Heidegger, and by extension Freire, place too much emphasis on the subject as if the objective conditions can be altered via force of will. To Freire’s credit, he does address the opposing errors of subjectivity and objectivity (50), which makes it even more curious that his embrace of cultural revolution apparently ignores the material basis of culture.

Freire sharply delineates human and animal, a tendency common to both his Christian and Hegelian roots. Hegel considered the performance of labor the exclusive domain of humanity; a view which Marx rightly corrected by drawing our attention to such animals as the beaver, the spider, and the bee. “What separates the worst builder from the best bee,” Marx suggests, “is that before the builder creates a structure in wax, he creates it in his head.”⁴³ But this notion that animals lack any sort of interiority is plainly false; to take Marx’s example of the bee, they have been observed engaging in play activity.⁴⁴ Even more striking is the case of Herring overfishing off the coast of Norway: by targeting the elder fish due to age regulation, the fishing industry appears to have interfered with the knowledge transfer to the younger generations, such that the latter populations have forgotten their ideal spawning grounds.⁴⁵

A much more serious problem is the oppressor-oppressed dialectic. Some naïvely describe Freire’s work as “class analysis”⁴⁶ but missing from this text is any concrete analysis of class whatsoever. Freire does quote Brazilian peasants here and there as a primary source, but no analysis of Brazil’s history or the agrarian class relations of the latifundia are to be found here.

This vagueness produces two undesirable consequences: (i) this lends itself to expansive self-insertions in the role of oppressed,⁴⁷ in potentially anti-modernist (e.g. anarchist) ways. (ii) The binary conception of class struggle predominates. The Divide and Rule section of Chapter 4 does provide some minimal acknowledgement of inter-class conflicts between the oppressed: “As the oppressor minority subordinates and dominates the majority, it must divide it and keep it divided in order to remain in power” (141). But he never goes further to analyze how classes may objectively conflict with one another; in Freire’s account, this division is imposed entirely from without. This is worth highlighting because this deficiency is endemic in the Marxist literature; not even Marx and Engels themselves have consistently avoided it.⁴⁸

Freire’s utopianism does not succeed in overcoming Plekhanov’s criticism that

The utopian in working out his “ideal” always starts, as we know, from some abstract notion—for example, the notion of human nature—or from some abstract principle—for example, the principle of such and such rights of personality, or the principle of “individuality”, etc., etc. Once such a principle has been adopted, it is not difficult, starting from it, to define with the most perfect exactness and to the last detail what ought to be (naturally, we do not know at what time and in what circumstances)⁴⁹

Joshua Clover made the same point even more succinctly: “The subjunctive is a lovely mood, but it is not the mood of historical materialism.”⁵⁰

On the positive side of the balance sheet, Freire’s depiction of revolution as process and not an event is very welcome:

The newness of the revolution is generated within the old, oppressive society; the taking of power constitutes only a decisive moment of the continuing revolutionary process. In a dynamic, rather than static, view of revolution, there is no absolute “before” or “after,” with the taking of power as the dividing line (137).

Somehow, the Christian socialist utopian avoided the error of messianism committed by many atheist Marxists!

Conclusion

Just as there is value for Marxists in reading and understanding Hegel’s thought, there is value in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It is a necessary corrective against the “false generosity” of the petit-bourgeois revolutionary. It’s also a strong dose of humanism in an age where a narrowly-economistic Marxism prevails in the west. If you take nothing else from this, take Freire’s uncompromising stance against imperialism of the global south.

Despite its short length, hopefully this review has impressed on the reader the philosophical depth of its contents; this is not a book for the junior Marxist beginning their study of theory. Rather, this is for the well-read Marxist who has a strong grasp of Hegel, Marx, Lenin, Mao (etc), and is determined to start organizing. Do not preach to the oppressed, Freire says to us: commune with them in a spirit of humility and service.

References

Carr, Edward Hallett. The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917–1923, Vol. 3. MacMillan & Co. Ltd (1953).

Clover, Joshua. Riot. Strike. Riot. Verso (2016).

Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. “Instruction on Certain Aspects of the ‘Theology of Liberation’.” The Holy See (1984). vatican.va

Corey, David. “Paulo Freire’s Oppressive Pedagogy.” National Affairs, no. 54 (2023). 36–52. nationalaffairs.com

Featherstone, Liza. “Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed at Fifty.” JSTOR Daily (blog). 30 September, 2020. jstor.org

Ferraro, Alceu Ravanello. “Education, class, gender and the vote in imperial Brazil: the Saraiva Law - 1881.” Educar em Revista (2013). 181–206. scielo.br

Ferraro, Alceu Ravanello, and Michele de Leão. “The Saraiva Law (1881): On the arguments invoked by liberals to exclude illiterates from the right to vote.” Educação Unisinos 16, no. 3 (2012). 241. proquest.com

Freire, Paulo. The Politics of Education: Culture Power and Liberation, trans. Donald Macedo. Bergin & Garvey Publishers, Inc. (1985).

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Robert R. Barr. The Continuum Publishing Company (1994).

Freire, Paulo. Última entrevista (Last interview). PUC São Paulo, São Paulo (1997). youtube.com

Freire, Paulo. Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to Those Who Dare Teach, trans. Donald Macedo, Dale Koike, Alexandre Oliveira. Westview Press (2005).

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 30th anniversary ed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. Bloomsbury Academic (2017).

Galpayage Dona, H.S., Solvi, C., Kowalewski, A. et. al., “Do bumble bees play?” in Animal Behavior, Vol. 194 (2022). 239–251. sciencedirect.com

Green, Elliot. What are the most-cited publications in the social sciences (according to Google Scholar)? LSE Impact Blog (2016). blogs.lse.ac.uk

Guevara, Che. The Che Guevara Reader. Ocean Press (1997).

Hegel, G.W.F. Introduction to The Philosophy of History, trans. Leo Rauch. Hackett (1988). archive.org

Hunt, Richard N. The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels: Marxism and Totalitarian Democracy, 1818–1850, vol. I. University of Pittsburgh Press (1974).

Khaled, Leila. My People Shall Live, ed. George Hajjar. Hodder and Stoughton (1973).

Kirylo, James D. Paulo Freire: The Man from Recife. Counterpoints: Studies in the Postmodern Theory of Education. Volume 385. Peter Lang New York (2011).

Kollontai, Alexandra. “Make Way for Winged Eros!” In Young Guard No. 3. C. (1923). 111–124. redsails.org

Lenin, Vladimir I. Collected Works. Progress Publishers (1964).

Lewis, John. Introduction to A Textbook of Marxist Philosophy, ed. Mikhail Shirokov. The Camelot Press Ltd (1941).

Losurdo, Domenico. Hegel and the Freedom of Moderns, trans. Marella and Jon Morris. Duke University Press (2004).

Losurdo, Domenico. War and Revolution: Rethinking the Twentieth Century, trans. Gregory Elliott. Verso Books (2015).

Maddray, Gray. “Paulo Freire and Political Education.” National Political Education Committee, Democratic Socialists of America. 1 March 2023. dsausa.org

Mao, Zedong. Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung. Foreign Languages Press (2021).

Maritain, Jacques. The Rights of Man and Natural Law, trans. Doris C. Anson. Charles Scribner’s Sons (1943).

Marx, Karl; Engels, Friedrich. Marx & Engels Collected Works. Lawrence & Wishart (2010).

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, trans. Paul Reitter. Princeton University Press (2024).

McLaren, P., and Jandrić, P. “Paulo Freire and liberation theology: The Christian consciousness of critical pedagogy”. Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Pädagogik, 94(2). chapman.edu

Plekhanov, G.V. In Defense of Materialism: The Development of the Monist View of History. Laika Press (2022). marxists.org

Sayers, Sean. Marxism and Human Nature. Routledge (1998).

Schümann, Reiner. Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principle to Anarchy, trans. Christine-Marie Gros. Indiana University Press (1987).

Slotte, A., Salthaug, A., Vatnehol, S., et. al. “Herring spawned poleward following fishery-induced collective memory loss.” Nature (2025). ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Weber, Marianne. Max Weber: A Biography. Transaction, Inc. (1988).

Ferraro, 2013. ↩︎
“…suddenly, illiteracy, which was the status of over 80% of the Brazilian population according to the 1872 census, began to mean blindness, ignorance, dependence, incapacity and even dangerousness. Indeed, it became a stigma, invoked to disqualify and keep the large illiterate mass from voting.” Ferraro, 2012. ↩︎
For a more general history of the restriction of suffrage to the wealthy, see Losurdo, Domenico. Democracy Or Bonapartism: Two Centuries of War on Democracy, trans. David Broder. Verso Books (2024), particularly Chapter 1, “Property, Culture and Political Rights in John Stuart Mill.” ↩︎
Featherstone, “Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed at Fifty” jstor.org ↩︎
Sayers, Marxism and Human Nature, p. 89. ↩︎
“No matter that the oppressor eat well, be well regarded, or sleep well. It would be impossible to dehumanize without being dehumanized—so deep are the social roots of the [vocation]. I am not, I do not be, unless you are, unless you be. Above all, I am not if I forbid you to be.” Freire, Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p. 89. ↩︎
Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)”, MECW vol. 29, p. 263. marxists.org ↩︎
“Trotsky, the newly appointed People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, describing his attitude as one of ‘active internationalism’, announced his functions in an epigram recorded in his autobiography: ‘I will issue a few revolutionary proclamations to the peoples of the world and then shut up shop.’” Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917–1923, vol. 3, p. 16. ↩︎
“In a democracy the people choose a leader whom they trust. Then the chosen man says, ‘Now shut your mouths and obey me. The people and the parties are no longer free to interfere in the leader’s business.’” Max Weber quoted in Weber, Marianne, Max Weber: A Biography, p. 653 ↩︎
“Functionally, oppression is domesticating. To no longer be prey to its force, one must emerge from it and turn upon it. This can be done only by means of the praxis: reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it.” (51) ↩︎
An intellectual forefather of Freire’s writes: “whether it has remained Christian or become secularized, this idea of the historic vocation of mankind is of Christian origin and derives from Christian inspiration” Maritain, The Rights of Man and Natural Law, p. 34 ↩︎
Kirylo, Paulo Freire: The Man from Recife, p. 278. ↩︎
Losurdo, Hegel and the Freedom of Moderns, p. 227. ↩︎
Freire, Última entrevista (Last interview), youtube.com ↩︎
“Dialectical materialism creates systems out of reflection on the facts, verifies them by action on the facts, and corrects and amplifies them by the changes brought about by that very action.” Lewis, Introduction to A Textbook of Marxist Philosophy, p. 24. ↩︎
“The dialectical-materialist theory of knowledge places practice in the primary position, holding that human knowledge can in no way be separated from practice and repudiating all the erroneous theories which deny the importance of practice or separate knowledge from practice.” Mao, “On Practice (1937)”, Selected Works, vol. I, p. 297 redsails.org ↩︎
Kirylo, p. 278. ↩︎
Freire, The Politics of Education, p. 137. ↩︎
Kirylo, p. 286. ↩︎
“The more I read Marx, the more I found a certain, fundamental basis for remaining Christ’s comrade. So, my reading of Marx and extended understanding of Marx never suggested to me that I should stop finding Christ on the corners of the slums … I stayed with Marx in his worldliness, looking for Christ in his transcendence.” Freire, Última entrevista (Last interview) ↩︎
Freire, The Politics of Education, p. 129. ↩︎
Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law (1844)”, MECW vol. 3, p. 182. marxists.org ↩︎
Lenin, “The State and Revolution (1917)”, Collected Works, vol. 25, p. 393. marxists.org ↩︎
Mao, “Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan (1927)”, Selected Works, vol. I, p. 28. marxists.org ↩︎
Engels, “On Authority (1873)”, MECW vol. 6, p. 425. marxists.org ↩︎
Kirylo, p. 278. ↩︎
Engels, “The Festival of Nations in London (1845)”, MECW vol. 6, p. 7. marxists.org ↩︎
“At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.” Guevara, The Che Guevara Reader, p. 211 marxists.org ↩︎
“These warm emotions—empathy, responsiveness, compassion—are all facets of love… Love is an emotion that unites, and therefore it has the power to organize society.” Kollontai, “Make Way for Winged Eros!”, In Young Guard (1923) redsails.org ↩︎
“It is not enough to hate and believe in the past to make a revolution. Hatred and belief in the past are sufficient prods for the rebellion phase. We must love and be future-oriented if we wish to carry out the revolution.” Ghassan Kanafani quoted in Khaled, My People Shall Live, p. 6. ↩︎
“total conflicts presuppose a ‘de-specification’ of the enemy. They involve the exclusion or expulsion of particular ethnic, social or political groups from the valued community, the properly civilized group, even the human race… Starting leastwise from the French Revolution and the universalism characteristic of it, revolutionaries mostly practised de-specification of the enemy on a politico-moral basis. Morality was the sole foundation of a society worthy of the name, asserted Robespierre, who criminalized all other political orders accordingly” Losurdo, War and Revolution: Rethinking the Twentieth Century, p. 57. ↩︎
“It is good if we are attacked by the enemy, since it proves that we have drawn a clear line of demarcation between the enemy and ourselves. It is still better if the enemy attacks us wildly and paints us as utterly black and without a single virtue; it demonstrates that we have not only drawn a clear line of demarcation between the enemy and ourselves but achieved a great deal in our work.” Mao, “To be Attacked by the Enemy is Not a Bad Thing but a Good Thing (1939)”, Selected Works, vol. VI, p. 215 marxists.org ↩︎
If this sounds far-fetched to you, note that Hegel explicitly described his philosophy of history in such terms: “…our approach is a theodicy, a justification of the ways of God.” Hegel, Introduction to The Philosophy of History, p. 18. ↩︎
“Paulo… was a materialist and a Catholic but he did not have an ideological belief in materialism and this helped to open the door to a form of utopianism, one which often bore the brunt of derision from some of his fellow philosophers” McLaren, “Paulo Freire and liberation theology: The Christian consciousness of critical pedagogy” chapman.edu ↩︎
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, “Instruction on Certain Aspects of the ‘Theology of Liberation’” vatican.va ↩︎
Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law (1844)”, MECW vol. 3, p. 176. marxists.org ↩︎
Freire, Teachers as Cultural Workers, p. 69. ↩︎
“Some contradictions are characterized by open antagonism, others are not. In accordance with the concrete development of things, some contradictions which were originally non-antagonistic develop into antagonistic ones, while others which were originally antagonistic develop into non-antagonistic ones.” Mao, “On Contradiction (1937)”, Selected Works Vol. I, p. 344. redsails.org ↩︎
In The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels, Richard N. Hunt argues pursuasively against the notion that Marxism is in any form an inheritor of the minority revolutionism of Babeuf and Blanqui, instead they were unambiguous in their words and actions that a majority coalition of the masses were necessary for a successful revolution. ↩︎
Green, “What are the most-cited publications in the social sciences (according to Google Scholar)?”, blogs.lse.ac.uk ↩︎
“In Being and Time, the will is rooted phenomenally in care, and therefore in Dasein’s existential openness. The voluntary and the involuntary, then, are opposable as the authentic is to the inauthentic.” Schümann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principle to Anarchy, p. 245. ↩︎
Lenin, “The Collapse of the Second International (1915)”, Collected Works, vol. 21, pp. 213–214. marxists.org ↩︎
Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 154. ↩︎
Galpayage Dona, “Do bumble bees play?”, Animal Behavior ↩︎
Slotte, “Herring spawned poleward following fishery-induced collective memory loss”, Nature ↩︎
Maddray, “Paulo Freire and Political Education”, National Political Education Committee, DSA. education.dsausa.org ↩︎
An amusing counter-example of this is David Corey’s negative review of the book; one supposes that he interprets himself as the “oppressor” in this case because he is a professor of political science, and “teacher” is the solitary concrete example of an oppressor given. (Corey, “Paulo Freire’s Oppressive Pedagogy”, National Affairs, nationalaffairs.com) ↩︎
For a deeper exploration on this theme, see: Losurdo, Domenico. Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History, trans. Gregory Elliot. Palgrave Macmillan (2016). ↩︎
Plekhanov, In Defense of Materialism: The Development of the Monist View of History, pp. 258–259. ↩︎
Clover, Riot. Strike. Riot., p. 4. ↩︎

- https://dialab.codeberg.page/dialibra/%40preview-35/reviews/pedagogy-of-the-oppressed/ -

The Iron Heel

Mon, 05 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Dialectical Library https://dialab.codeberg.page/dialibra/%40preview-35/reviews/the-iron-heel/ -

A high school reading list classic?

Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1908)¹ is a novel about how capitalism turns into a violent and opulent oligarchy while workers sink deeper into miserable poverty and subjugation. The book bears some similarities to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949): both were set in their respective near futures; both feature a dystopian, oppressive government; and in both the author’s political agenda takes priority over literary elegance. However, only Orwell’s novel is read by every schoolkid in America. Why is that?

At first blush, The Iron Heel would fit even better on US reading lists. Unlike Nineteen Eighty-Four, it’s a homegrown novel: London sets his novel in and around his hometown of San Francisco, while Orwell and his setting are British.² While both novels feature censorious governments that suppress all dissent, London’s story takes actual US history as its point of departure. By rooting the story in reality, many of the plot points in The Iron Heel could be ripped from the headlines of today. For example, in one scene, a disillusioned farmer reports “Twice we have passed a national income tax, and each time the supreme court smashed it as unconstitutional. The courts are in the hands of the trusts.” Likely, London was thinking of cases like Lochner v. New York (1905) when he wrote these lines, but modern readers will no doubt think of Citizens United v. FEC (2010) or any of the many recent anti-labour Supreme Court decisions.³

If the goal of the education system was to introduce students to dystopian literature and topical themes of government oppression and censorship, American teenagers would be reading The Iron Heel, not Nineteen Eighty-Four. That Orwell’s novel weighs down backpacks across the country instead is because of institutionalized anti-communism⁴: Orwell’s political foes are the communists—Stalin and the USSR, in particular—while London’s foes are the capitalists.

London is not subtle in this point: his narrative strips away every imaginary flower that liberal ideology uses to hide its chains. Freedom of the press? Not if you’re questioning capital. Fair trials? Not if you’re opposing capital. Democracy and fair elections? Not if you’re a threat to capital. London also gives the reader the tools to throw off these chains: the reader comes away with a basic understanding of Marxist theories on historical materialism, surplus value production, imperialism, and capital accumulation.⁵ That an unabashedly socialist novel is quietly relegated to dusty shelves while CIA-approved anti-communist propaganda⁶ dominates US curricula is itself an argument against the relevance of Orwell’s prophecies for today. Unlike the Orwellian forced repetition of absurd statements and violent elimination of dissent, liberal governments prefer censorship via obscurity, drowning out dissent by elevating supporting narratives. We could compare the receptions of The Iron Heel and The Call of the Wild, one of London’s other works. The latter lacks overt socialist messaging and has become a much-adapted scholastic classic.

“I am a revolutionist, and it is a perilous vocation.”

So what will the reader who rescues this novel from relative obscurity find? London’s political novel is structured as an incomplete found manuscript, helpfully annotated some seven centuries later by a fictional historian, Anthony Meredith. Writing from the comfort of an idyllic global socialism, Meredith’s footnotes are a humorous way for London to censure 20th century capitalist society. For example, one footnote explains the need for insurance systems and the waste and corruption that often accompanies them, noting, “To us, in this intelligent age, such a device is laughably absurd and primitive.” In contrasting the barbarism of capitalism with the peaceful rationality of socialism, Meredith’s footnotes also serve as a Chernyshevskian palace,⁷ communicating to the reader that a better world is possible.

Through his fictional scholar, London also argues for the need for fiction or memoirs about revolution:

[The manuscript is especially valuable] in communicating to us the FEEL of those terrible times. Nowhere do we find more vividly portrayed the psychology of the persons that lived in that turbulent period embraced between the years 1912 and 1932—their mistakes and ignorance, their doubts and fears and misapprehensions, their ethical delusions, their violent passions, their inconceivable sordidness and selfishness. These are the things that are so hard for us of this enlightened age to understand. History tells us that these things were, and biology and psychology tell us why they were; but history and biology and psychology do not make these things alive. We accept them as facts, but we are left without sympathetic comprehension of them. This sympathy comes to us, however, as we peruse the Everhard Manuscript. We enter into the minds of the actors in that long-ago world-drama, and for the time being their mental processes are our mental processes.

Avis, the writer of the found manuscript, is our vehicle for exploring the emotional side of revolutions. Avis grows up comfortably well-off, as the daughter of a University of California, Berkeley professor. The first arc of the novel follows the journey of her disillusionment with liberalism and her subsequent joining of the socialist cause—a path likely to be familiar to many readers.⁸ She marries Ernest Everhard, a larger-than-life leader in the socialist movement. Their tender scenes in each other’s arms after long days of trying to bring about the revolution provide some relief as the monopoly trusts tighten their iron grip: life goes on amidst increasing political turmoil. Her adoring eyes also provide some cover for Everhard’s unbelievable brilliance: did Ernest really crush debates with businessmen and billionaires with the wit most people only find on the staircase, or is Avis an unreliable narrator (as Meredith suggests)? These debates serve a pedagogical role: Ernest is London’s mouthpiece for the necessity of socialism, the logical case paired with Avis’s emotional case.⁹

As London’s world devolves into increasing corporate control, the novel shifts from “vivid portrayal of psychology” and Marxist lectures to a more faux-documentary style, veering towards prophecy. The reader would be forgiven for finding themselves confirming the publication year of the book: a decade before the October Revolution and several decades before the rise of fascism in Europe. Even Orwell reluctantly admitted that London understood “just how the possessing class would behave when once they were seriously menaced” in his otherwise negative review of this book.¹⁰ For example, the oligarchy takes advantage of conflicting interests within the working classes, making concessions to some workers to strengthen its position, thereby creating an “aristocracy of labor.”¹¹

However, unlike the fascism of Europe and unlike the America of today, London’s Iron Heel oligarchy doesn’t legitimize its power through mobilization of the masses nor Bonpartist leaders that claim to represent the spirit of the nation.¹² The oligarchy also never points fingers at the externalized threat of a racialized Other to achieve and wield power. In fact, there is a startling absence of racial liberation struggles in London’s novel, given that he lived in a segregated Jim Crow-era America. Black characters feature just once: as servants, described according to racist caricature.¹³ Rather than describing the rise of oligarchy as an intensification of institutions and ideology present from America’s very founding¹⁴, London’s oligarchy achieves power through economic coup—a simplistic and overly charitable understanding of power in America.

London and left-wing Nietzscheanism

Another notable absence, given the novel’s socialist perspective, is that of workers. London portrays workers as dumb and suffering masses and not political agents in their own right.¹⁵ In contrast, Ernest is introduced this way:

He was a natural aristocrat—and this in spite of the fact that he was in the camp of the non-aristocrats. He was a superman, a blond beast such as Nietzsche has described, and in addition he was aflame with democracy.

Even without the explicit mention, Nietzsche’s influence in London’s narrative is unmistakable: the unthinking, toiling, ugly masses are transcended by the beautiful, heroic Übermensch.¹⁶ The revolutionaries of The Iron Heel view themselves as elevated above the masses, who they plan to use as diversion and cannon-fodder at their climactic attempt to seize power.¹⁷ However, the oligarchy turns the masses against the socialist movement, and some of London’s most vivid writing appears in this section to illustrate Avis’s horror in discovering the revolution was lost:

It was not a column, but a mob, an awful river that filled the street, the people of the abyss, mad with drink and wrong, up at last and roaring for the blood of their masters. I had seen the people of the abyss before, gone through its ghettos, and thought I knew it; but I found that I was now looking on it for the first time. Dumb apathy had vanished. It was now dynamic—a fascinating spectacle of dread. It surged past my vision in concrete waves of wrath, snarling and growling, carnivorous, drunk with whiskey from pillaged warehouses, drunk with hatred, drunk with lust for blood—men, women, and children, in rags and tatters, dim ferocious intelligences with all the godlike blotted from their features and all the fiendlike stamped in, apes and tigers, anaemic consumptives and great hairy beasts of burden, wan faces from which vampire society had sucked the juice of life, bloated forms swollen with physical grossness and corruption, withered hags and death’s-heads bearded like patriarchs, festering youth and festering age, faces of fiends, crooked, twisted, misshapen monsters blasted with the ravages of disease and all the horrors of chronic innutrition—the refuse and the scum of life, a raging, screaming, screeching, demoniacal horde.

This Dionysian mob is contrasted with Avis’s cool Apollonian collectedness¹⁸. In the midst of this climax of revolutionary activity, our protagonist undergoes a Nietzschean “transformation”, attributing her weathering of these chaotic moments to her “passionless transvaluation of values.”¹⁹ “Death meant nothing, life meant nothing,” she concludes. Although Avis survives this battle, the war is soon lost.

Is the failure of the movement a critique of Nietzschean heroism? It would be a hard case to make: London’s heroes die martyrs and the masses never get their redemption arc. Although the frame story assures us a socialist victory eventually happens, it’s not clear how we get there or what lessons to take from the Everhards’ failure.²⁰ A lesson unintended by the author might be the difficulty of fusing Nietzsche with left-wing politics. As Domenico Losurdo argues, a unifying thread in Nietzsche’s often contradictory philosophy is his staunch opposition to the leveling forces of socialism.²¹ Although London himself seemed to recognize the incompatibility of Nietzschean individualism and socialism²², his Nietzschean influences may have ultimately limited his ability to envision a solution to the oligarchy of his novel.

Conclusion

London’s heroes failed in their revolution, and London’s contemporary American socialists failed in theirs, too. Many of the mistakes of the 20th century left find their counterparts in London’s novel: a neglect of class struggles that take racial or gender forms, and a doomed desire to enlist Nietzsche for egalitarian emancipation. Unlike London’s Meredith, we read Avis’s manuscript not from the security of world socialism but with a long road ahead. Despite its flaws, The Iron Heel is a fun read, with memorable scenes. Discussing its hits and misses would make for an enjoyable socialist book club, or high school curriculum.

Jack London, The Iron Heel (1908). Available in the public domain at Project Gutenberg. The Librivox audiobook is very well done. ↩︎
Isaac Asimov notes in his review of Ninety Eighty-Four that Orwell’s setting is only ostensibly London: “Orwell had no feel for the future, and the displacement of the story is much more geographical than temporal. The London in which the story is placed is not so much moved thirty-five years forward in time, from 1949 to 1984, as it is moved a thousand miles east in space to Moscow.” Isaac Asimov, “Review of 1984” (1980). ↩︎
Lochner v. New York struck down a law limiting the length of the working day. Citizens United v. FEC allowed corporations to pour unlimited money into advertising for their preferred political candidates. For more on recent Supreme Court labour law cases, see Steven Greenhouse, “Most Americans have no idea how anti-worker the US supreme court has become”, The Guardian (June 2024). ↩︎
For a more complete treatment of Orwell and anti-communism, see Roderic Day, “On Orwell”, Red Sails (2020). ↩︎
Marx is not just a Doylist inspiration but a Watsonian one too; the reader is given a biographical sketch of Marx, the outline of some of his ideas, and a famous line: “The knell of private capitalist property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.” Karl Marx, Capital, Chapter 32. ↩︎
Nicholas Shakespeare, “Novel explosives of the Cold War” (2019-08-24), The Spectator. ↩︎
“A person who’s never seen anything except hovels would look at a picture of an ordinary house and mistake it for a luxurious palace. How can one ensure that such a person should perceive the house as a house and not a palace? In the same picture one must depict at least one corner of a palace. From this corner it will be clear that a palace is really a structure of a completely different sort than the one in the picture, and the observer will realize that the building is really nothing more than a simple, ordinary house in which all people should live (if not in better ones!).” N. G. Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done?, Chapter 3 (1863). ↩︎
For an in-depth look at Avis as a classic heroine of a bourgeois bildungsroman, see Kathy Knapp, “The Iron Heel and the Contemporary Bourgeois Novel” in The Oxford Handbook of Jack London, edited by Jay Williams (2016). ↩︎
The Iron Heel has unfortunately little to say about gender liberation. Or perhaps we should read what it has to say about it from its contrasting of Avis and Ernest, feminine and masculine, heart and mind. The closest discussion of gender oppression might be when one revolutionary swears off marriage and children, because “a child of her own would claim her from the Cause”, thereby acquiring the nickname “the Red Virgin.” ↩︎
George Orwell. “Prophecies of Fascism” (1940). ↩︎
For concessions granted by capitalists facing the “menace” of the USSR, see Alice Malone, “Concessions”, Red Sails (2023). ↩︎
Bonapartism takes its name from Napoleon III of France, but the strategy has been effectively used elsewhere (e.g., the UK’s Disraeli, Germany’s Bismarck, and US presidents ranging from Roosevelt to Trump). The approach provides the appearance of democracy without ceding power to the masses, and allows concentration of power in the hands of the country’s leader—particularly in times of war. Domenico Losurdo describes its history and tactics extensively in Democracy or Bonapartism (1993). “The president was now the ‘steward of the people’, authorised to proceed ‘actively and affirmatively’, without waiting for a ‘specific authorization’ and without letting himself be hobbled by a ’narrowly legalistic point of view’: the president alone was the interpreter of the ‘public welfare’ and the ‘common well-being of all of our people’ and was answerable to the people alone. The figure of the ‘guide’—the condottiero and duce of his people—emerged in the United States before it did in Europe, albeit obviously within a political framework characterised by respect, at least in normal conditions, for precise rules of the game. It was these rules that would be swept away in countries like Italy and Germany, given both the particular harshness of the Second Thirty Years’ War in these countries and their lack of any rooted tradition of guarantees akin to the American one.” ↩︎
Jack London’s racism has been well-documented elsewhere. ↩︎
See, for example, Nia Frome, “The Constitution: A Bulwark Against Democracy”, Red Sails (2023). ↩︎
“The great helpless mass of the population, the people of the abyss, was sinking into a brutish apathy of content with misery.” ↩︎
“When Nietzsche prophetically states that only ‘from you that have chosen yourselves will grow the Overman,’ what he means is that the class struggle is ultimately decided on the basis of an unavoidable heroism that must sprout from the scene of contesting wills, where a passive mass of workers are dead and asleep, mired in ressentiment, but among whom is the rare and heroic Übermensch capable of deciding their greatness.” Daniel Tutt, How to Read Like a Parasite: Why the Left Got High on Nietzsche (2024). ↩︎
“In short, a sudden, colossal, stunning blow was to be struck. Before the paralyzed Oligarchy could recover itself, its end would have come. It would have meant terrible times and great loss of life, but no revolutionist hesitates at such things. Why, we even depended much, in our plan, on the unorganized people of the abyss. They were to be loosed on the palaces and cities of the masters. Never mind the destruction of life and property. Let the abysmal brute roar and the police and Mercenaries slay. The abysmal brute would roar anyway, and the police and Mercenaries would slay anyway. It would merely mean that various dangers to us were harmlessly destroying one another. In the meantime we would be doing our own work, largely unhampered, and gaining control of all the machinery of society.” ↩︎
In Greek mythology, Apollo and Dionysus are sons of Zeus. Apollo is the god of rationality and order while Dionysus is the god of wine, irrationality and chaos. The Dionysian/Apollonian duality is a key theme in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy: according to Nietzsche, a union of both aspects is needed for authentic culture and under modernity, the Apollonian dominates. In this work, Nietzsche is implicitly arguing against Hegel, the author of The Philosophy of History, who believed the history of the world tended towards one of rationality and justice: Nietzsche considered the subtitle “A Contribution to the Philosophy of History” for this work. For more on Nietzsche, the Apollonian/Dionysian dichotomy and socialism, see Nietzsche, The Aristocratic Rebel by Domenico Losurdo (2019), particularly Chapter 1.14. The glimpses we see of London’s socialist utopia paint an Apollonian picture: Meredith regularly refers to the order and rationality of his world. ↩︎
Nietzsche urges the “transvaluation of values”, a radical break with all previous systems of morality. Nietzsche believed existing morals prevented man from achieving greatness, which he viewed as requiring “two distinct castes of society: that of the working class, and that of the leisured class who are capable of true leisure; or, more strongly expressed, the caste of compulsory labour and the caste of free labour.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human §439 (1878). ↩︎
London does seem aware of some practical pitfalls of Nietzschean heroism: “Whenever strong proletarians asserted their strength in the midst of the mass, they were drawn away from the mass by the oligarchs and given better conditions by being made members of the labor castes or of the Mercenaries. Thus discontent was lulled and the proletariat robbed of its natural leaders.” ↩︎
Domenico Losurdo, Nietzsche, The Aristocratic Rebel (2019). ↩︎
See Jack London, “How I Became a Socialist” (1905). For more on Jack London’s uneasy mix of Nietzsche and socialism, see Ishay Landa “Nietzschean Heroism in Popular Culture” (2023) and Tutt, op. cit. ↩︎

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Dialectical Library

A Memory Called Empire

Capital, Volume 2

Transgender Warriors

Anathem

Introduction

In the Concent of Saunt Edhaur

Extramuros

The Mind’s I

Against the “Beautiful Soul”

Conclusion

Existentialism Versus Marxism

The Gadfly

The Gadly and the revolutionary tradition

The Gadfly and the business of revolution

The Gadfly and the emotional side of revolution

The Gadfly and the socialist literary canon

Introduction to the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1999)

Ancient slavery and modern slavery, nature and history

Extension of the political sphere and “social and political conditions”

“Committee” for the “common affairs” of the bourgeoisie and the struggle for suffrage

“Despotism” of the factory, negative freedom, and positive freedom

Movement from below and initiative from above in the emancipation process

Struggle for political power and transformation of society

The proletariat from “instrument of labour” to universal historical political subject

Cities and countryside, proletarian and colonial peoples

Globalization and the “industrial war of extermination between nations”

From the theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat to the gulag?

Revolutionary dialectics and messianism

The relevance and irrelevance of a “classic”

The Message

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Introduction

Freire’s Theses of Revolutionary Education

Marx and Christ: Quarrelsome Bedfellows

The Conduct of a Revolutionary

A Complicated Legacy

Conclusion

References

The Iron Heel

A high school reading list classic?

“I am a revolutionist, and it is a perilous vocation.”

London and left-wing Nietzscheanism

Conclusion