Baby boomers show concerning decline in cognitive functioning

Trend reverses progress over several generations, study finds

OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY

 

COLUMBUS, Ohio - In a reversal of trends, American baby boomers scored lower on a test of cognitive functioning than did members of previous generations, according to a new nationwide study.

Findings showed that average cognition scores of adults aged 50 and older increased from generation to generation, beginning with the greatest generation (born 1890-1923) and peaking among war babies (born 1942-1947).

Scores began to decline in the early baby boomers (born 1948-1953) and decreased further in the mid baby boomers (born 1954-1959).

While the prevalence of dementia has declined recently in the United States, these results suggest those trends may reverse in the coming decades, according to study author Hui Zheng, professor of sociology at The Ohio State University.

"It is shocking to see this decline in cognitive functioning among baby boomers after generations of increases in test scores," Zheng said.

"But what was most surprising to me is that this decline is seen in all groups: men and women, across all races and ethnicities and across all education, income and wealth levels."

Results showed lower cognitive functioning in baby boomers was linked to less wealth, along with higher levels of loneliness, depression, inactivity and obesity, and less likelihood of being married.

The study was published online recently in the Journals of Gerontology: Social Sciences.

Zheng analyzed data on 30,191 Americans who participated in the 1996 to 2014 Health and Retirement Survey, conducted by the University of Michigan. People over 51 years old were surveyed every two years.

As part of the study, participants completed a cognitive test in which they had to recall words they had heard earlier, count down from 100 by 7s, name objects they were shown and perform other tasks.

Other research has shown that overall rates of mortality and illness have increased in baby boomers, but generally found that the highly educated and wealthiest were mostly spared.

"That's why it was so surprising to me to see cognitive declines in all groups in this study," Zheng said. "The declines were only slightly lower among the wealthiest and most highly educated."

Zheng also compared cognition scores within each age group across generations so that scores are not skewed by older people who tend to have poorer cognition. Even in this analysis, the baby boomers came out on bottom.

"Baby boomers already start having lower cognition scores than earlier generations at age 50 to 54," he said.

The question, then, is what has happened to baby boomers? Zheng looked for clues across the lifetimes of those in the study.

Increasing cognition scores in previous generations could be tied to beneficial childhood conditions - conditions that were similar for baby boomers, Zheng said.

Baby boomers' childhood health was as good as or better than previous generations and they came from families that had higher socioeconomic status. They also had higher levels of education and better occupations.

"The decline in cognitive functioning that we're seeing does not come from poorer childhood conditions," Zheng said.

The biggest factors linked to lower cognition scores among baby boomers in the study were lower wealth, higher levels of self-reported loneliness and depression, lack of physical activity and obesity.

Living without a spouse, being married more than once in their lives, having psychiatric problems and cardiovascular risk factors including strokes, hypertension, heart disease and diabetes were also associated with lower cognitive functioning among people in this generation.

"If it weren't for their better childhood health, move favorable family background, more years of education and higher likelihood of having a white-collar occupation, baby boomers would have even worse cognitive functioning," Zheng said.

There were not enough late baby boomers (born in 1960 or later) to include in this study, but Zheng said he believes they will fare no better. The same might be true for following generations unless we find a solution for the problems found here, he said.

While many of the problems linked to lower cognitive functioning are symptoms of modern life, like less connection with friends and family and growing economic inequality, other problems found in this study are unique to the United States, Zheng said. One example would be the lack of universal access and high cost of health care.

"Part of the story here are the problems of modern life, but it is also about life in the U.S.," he said.

One of the biggest concerns is that cognitive functioning when people are in their 50s and 60s is related to their likelihood of having dementia when they are older.

"With the aging population in the United States, we were already likely to see an increase in the number of people with dementia," Zheng said.

"But this study suggests it may be worse than we expected for decades to come."

###

Contact: Hui Zheng, Zheng.64@osu.edu

Written by Jeff Grabmeier, 614-292-8457; Grabmeier.1@osu.edu

The US food system is killing Americans
Opinion by Akash Goel, Michel Nischan, Bill Frist and Tom Colicchio

Updated 9:17 PM ET, Sun August 2, 2020

(CNN)This global pandemic has given a new meaning to the idea of American exceptionalism. The United States is faring far worse than other countries and shoulders a disproportionate share of global disease burden -- with 4% of the global population, yet, at the time of writing, nearly a quarter of global Covid-19 fatalities.

While much of the rationale has focused on our government's flat-footed response and poor public health infrastructure, this ignores a significant and underrecognized risk factor -- the exceedingly poor baseline health of our country's population.
Among the most significant risk factors for hospitalization and death in Covid-19 are the presence of diet-related chronic diseases such as hypertension, heart disease and obesity. America's starting point? Nearly three out of four American adults are overweight or obese.

And half of US adults have diabetes or pre-diabetes. A 2018 study found that only 12% of Americans are metabolically healthy, which is defined as having optimal levels of blood markers and pressures as well as waist circumference. Diet-related diseases are no longer the things you have to worry about down the road. In a pandemic environment, they could hasten death next week.
Poor metabolic health stems, in part, from poor-quality diets and poor nutrition. Just as baseline chronic disease portends a worse outcome for individuals with Covid-19, our food system is our country's pre-existing condition that leaves us all at greater risk. As doctors and chefs, we feel that now, more than ever, it is critical to address nutrition insecurity in America head on.
While food insecurity is about providing more food, nutrition insecurity is about providing the right food, so we and our children can build the metabolic heath we need to better survive this and future pandemics.
Most of our legacy food policies were born of national security concerns in the 1940s. They were conceptualized during a time of absolute caloric deprivation, when as many as 40% of military recruits were ineligible for service because of malnutrition and being underweight. Soon initiatives such as the National School Lunch Program, the modern food stamp program and other nutrition assistance programs followed.
In the private sector, subsidies enabled mass production and stockpiling of food in preparation for food scarcity during the next global conflict. The postwar industrialization of food led to a domestic food market rife with highly processed, carbohydrate-laden, shelf-stable and convenient foods.
Consumption of these cheap products increased, while consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables decreased. The American diet flipped from largely whole foods to highly processed foods requiring little time and cooking. The diet-related disease debacle we face today is one unintended outcome.

We may not have a cure for the coronavirus, but we do for hunger
Programs born of good intent for reasons of national security and convenience no longer fit the bill. Instead of keeping our children and most vulnerable healthy and productive, we are now sicker than we were post-Depression. A 2018 report filed by Mission: Readiness, a council of retired admirals and generals who advocate for policies that help kids stay healthy, in school and out of trouble, stated that, "In the United States, 71 percent of young people between the ages of 17 and 24 do not qualify for military service," noting exceptionally high rates of obesity starting as early as age 2.
The numbers have flipped, and so have the health conditions. Fewer Americans are physically ready for work and war than in 1945, yet, instead of being underweight and malnourished, they are overweight and malnourished.
Now during this pandemic, our industrialized food system, optimized for efficiency over resilience, seems to be failing. One only has to witness farmers dumping milk and fresh produce and see the Depression-era-style lines wrapped around food banks to realize the depths of our food crisis. Now is the time to both address nutrition insecurity and support regional and specialty farmers.
While there are significant financial and distribution challenges that our food system is facing during the pandemic, there are still important things we can do right away to help improve nutrition security.



Food banks overwhelmed by demand 03:02
We see an opportunity to leverage the greatest impact in public health through changes to the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which serves about 40 million Americans.
We can promote better health by valuing quality of calorie over quantity. Ten percent of SNAP dollars go toward the purchase of sugary sweetened beverages, which amounts to a roughly $7 billion subsidy toward sugar. This can easily be fixed by doubling down on the USDA's fresh produce incentive, which combines federal, state and philanthropic dollars to support the purchase of fruits and vegetables.
Modeling studies suggest that combined incentive and disincentive programs are cost neutral, yet lead to significant gains in health outcomes and cost savings equaling roughly $10 billion over five years. SNAP has had early success with incentive-based pilot programs, which if expanded offer significant gains for public health.
Our response to food insecurity during the pandemic has focused largely on supporting food banks, but this is not working. In April, for example, 10,000 cars lined up in San Antonio in just one day, with thousands having waited overnight for their place in line.
In New York, people are waiting up to six hours in line at distribution sites. Executive leadership at the top emergency feeding organizations have called on Washington to expand SNAP, rather than drive people to already overtaxed and underresourced facilities.
Expanding SNAP offers the added benefit of stimulating local and regional economies. The USDA economic impact model suggests that every dollar spent on SNAP is an economic multiplier, yielding up to $1.50 in economic activity. As a large share of SNAP recipients live in rural regions, the subsidy often supports small business such as farmers, local food retailers and grocers. A 2016 study showed that this multiplier effect is even greater when SNAP dollars are redeemed at farmer's markets.
With food insecurity rampant in the midst of an economic down cycle, bolstering investments in SNAP benefits are a win-win. It would have been a boon to the San Antonio retail grocery economy if those 10,000 cars instead went to any of the many grocery stores and supermarkets with SNAP benefits to buy the food of their choice.
Get our free weekly newsletter


Sign up for CNN Opinion's new newsletter.

Join us on Twitter and Facebook


Now is the opportunity to connect the dots between our food system and health. We have too long operated in silos to the detriment of both food and public health. Roughly 65% of adults receiving SNAP are on Medicaid, according to a report from the Bipartisan Policy Center.
We have the ability to track how food and nutrition incentives may support better health outcomes and drive cost savings, while supporting retail grocers and farmers. Once this link is drawn, we can rebuild a better system focused on health promotion and prevention rather than treating the long-term and unsustainable consequences of chronic disease.
The American food system is not broken -- it is functioning as designed, a system optimized for efficiency, not one optimized for resilience and nutrition. But our food system is killing us, and that happened long before Covid-19. It is bound to continue unless we take steps now to leverage food as medicine.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Akash Goel is an assistant professor of medicine at Weill Cornell/NewYork Presbyterian Hospital and term member of the Council on Foreign Relation. Michel Nischan is a James Beard Foundation Award winning chef and sustainable food advocate. He is founder, president and CEO of Wholesome Wave and co-founder of the Chefs Action Network.
Bill Frist is a heart transplant surgeon, former US Senate majority leader and a senior fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center. Tom Colicchio is a James Beard Foundation Award winning chef and owner of Crafted Hospitality. He is the head judge and executive producer on Bravo's "Top Chef." The opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the authors; view more opinion on CNN.



Akash Goel


Michel Nischan


Sen. Bill Frist


Tom Colicchio

Conspiracy Theorist Claims Musk Was Right About Pyramid's Alien Origins, Explains Why
© CC0 / Pixabay

02.08.2020

Laying out the "facts" which he claims should confirm that aliens built the pyramids of Egypt, Scott Waring challenged scientists who "say that Egyptians have the ability to make a great pyramid today" to prove it.
While tech entrepreneur Elon Musk ended up being chastised online by Egypt's former minister of antiquities Zahi Hawass, after the SpaceX founder, perhaps jokingly, suggested on Twitter that the legendary Egyptian pyramids were built by aliens, intrepid UFO hunter and conspiracy theorist extraordinaire Scott C. Waring stepped forward to back Musk's claim.

Insisting that even with today's technology, Giza "is too poor to be able to afford such equipment necessary to create the great pyramid", Waring proceeded to lay out a number of "facts" which he apparently believes confirm the alien origins of the ancient Egyptian monuments.

Firstly, the conspiracy theorist noted how the stone blocks that were used in the pyramids' construction weighed up to 50 tons, and "Egyptians had not learned of the wheel and the boats they used could not possible carry such weight across the Nile river".

He also argued that building such a massive and heavy structure "on top of the sand", without it sinking in the following 5,000 years would've been "impossible for humans, even the humans of today".
"The three pyramids of the Giza pyramid complex are aligned exactly with the position of three stars of the Belt of Orion", Waring postulated in his next argument. "As the science of astronomy would not have been that developed thousands of years back, but aliens could do this".

He also added that the pyramids of Giza were "all built directly facing true magnetic north" - which he claims should've been impossible for humans since "the compass was not yet created" - and pointed at "the wall carvings in the Temple of Seti I at Abydos", one of which apparently resembles a helicopter, with the depictions of a "submarine" and a "spaceship" also allegedly being present there.
"Aliens could predict the future, since they have seen such evolution on other worlds", Waring argued.

Finally, the conspiracy theorist delved into things numerical, claiming that “the perimeter of the Great Pyramid when divided by two times the height of the monument gives a number which exactly equal to pi, and it is matching till the 15th decimal place”, and that “the Great Pyramid at Giza's latitude, 29.9792458°N, perfectly matches up to the speed of light, which is 299,792,458 meters per second”.

© CC0
Blink-182 Star Looks for Link Between Aliens & Pyramids as He Launches New Season of UFO Docu Series

It wasn't immediately clear, however, how exactly these numbers might point at the identity of the pyramids' builders.

"For any scientist to say that Egyptians have the ability to make a great pyramid today...I say prove it", Waring surmised. "They neither have the focus, the unity, they finances, equipment nor engineering skills to successfully achieve such a remarkable structure today".

The Giza pyramid complex is located on the the Giza Plateau in Greater Cairo, Egypt., and includes one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World – the Great Pyramid of Giza.

In 1990, tombs belonging to some 10,000 of the pyramid builders were discovered in the complex's vicinity, with the findings indicating they were paid workers rather than slaves.


THE RUSSIAN PRESS LOVES; SIBERIAN MONSTERS, UFO'S, BIGFOOT, CONSPIRACY THEORIES, ANCIENT PYRAMIDS, LOST CIVILIZATIONS, CRYPTOZOOLOGY, FROZEN MAMMOTHS, PSYCHICS, SHAMANS, ETC. ETC.

 SPUTNIK IS PRAVDA MEETS WORLD WEEKLY NEWS

Scientists Worry About Political Influence Over Coronavirus Vaccine Project

Operation Warp Speed has moved along at a rapid clip. But some people involved in the process fear pressure to deliver an October surprise for President Trump.


President Trump has been relentlessly promoting the administration’s vaccine efforts, including during an appearance at a biotechnology laboratory in North Carolina last week.Credit...Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times


By Sharon LaFraniere, Katie Thomas, Noah Weiland, Peter Baker and Annie Karni
Aug. 2, 2020

In April, with hospitals overwhelmed and much of the United States in lockdown, the Department of Health and Human Services produced a presentation for the White House arguing that rapid development of a coronavirus vaccine was the best hope to control the pandemic.

“DEADLINE: Enable broad access to the public by October 2020,” the first slide read, with the date in bold.

Given that it typically takes years to develop a vaccine, the timetable for the initiative, called Operation Warp Speed, was incredibly ambitious. With tens of thousands dying and tens of millions out of work, the crisis demanded an all-out public-private response, with the government supplying billions of dollars to pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, providing logistical support and cutting through red tape.

It escaped no one that the proposed deadline also intersected nicely with President Trump’s need to curb the virus before the election in November.

The ensuing race for a vaccine — in the middle of a campaign in which the president’s handling of the pandemic is the key issue after he has spent his time in office undermining science and the expertise of the federal bureaucracy — is now testing the system set up to ensure safe and effective drugs to a degree never before seen.

Under constant pressure from a White House anxious for good news and a public desperate for a silver bullet to end the crisis, the government’s researchers are fearful of political intervention in the coming months and are struggling to ensure that the government maintains the right balance between speed and rigorous regulation, according to interviews with administration officials, federal scientists and outside experts.

Thanks for reading The Times.Subscribe to The Times

Even in a less politically charged environment, there would be a fraught debate about how much to accelerate the process of trials and approval. The longer that vaccines are tested before being released, the likelier they are to be safe and effective.

But with 1,000 people dying each day in the United States, schools finding it difficult to reopen and the deep recession inflicting economic pain across the country, the desire to find a way to return to normal life is powerful and transcends partisan politics and borders. On Sunday, Russia announced that it planned to start a nationwide inoculation campaign in October with a vaccine that had yet to complete clinical trials, the latest evidence of the global potential for cutting corners.

Despite concerted efforts by the Trump administration and a bevy of pharmaceutical companies it is working with, the original October target has slipped, with the administration now pushing to have hundreds of millions of doses available by the end of the year or early 2021.

But experts inside and outside the government still say they fear the White House will push the Food and Drug Administration to overlook insufficient data and give at least limited emergency approval to a vaccine, perhaps for use by specific groups like front-line health care workers, before the vote on Nov. 3.

“There are a lot of people on the inside of this process who are very nervous about whether the administration is going to reach their hand into the Warp Speed bucket, pull out one or two or three vaccines, and say, ‘We’ve tested it on a few thousand people, it looks safe, and now we are going to roll it out,’” said Dr. Paul A. Offit of the University of Pennsylvania, who is a member of the Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine advisory committee.

“They are really worried about that,” he added. “And they should be.”

Mr. Trump relentlessly touts progress toward a vaccine, raising hopes of quick approval. Touring a North Carolina biotechnology lab last week, he vowed to “deliver a vaccine in record time.” In a tweet last month, he explicitly tied vaccines to his re-election hopes.

The administration is providing billions of dollars in aid to pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.Credit...Hans Pennink/Associated Press

On a campaign call with supporters in Pennsylvania on Sunday evening, Mr. Trump said the “F.D.A. has been great, at my instruction,” and he again raised hopes of rapid progress.

“We expect to have a vaccine available very, very early before the end of the year, far ahead of schedule,” he said. “We’re very close to having that finalized.”

The president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, who is helping to steer the re-election campaign from the White House, is a regular participant in meetings of a board formed to oversee the vaccine effort.

While White House officials do not specifically mention the election during the board’s discussions, people familiar with the conversations say they ask regularly about October, a date that hangs over the effort. Trump campaign advisers privately call a pre-election vaccine “the holy grail.”

The Food and Drug Administration’s approval of a new vaccine is typically an exhaustive process, where agency employees meticulously go through data from clinical trials to review whether the vaccine is both safe and effective. The threshold for approving vaccines is typically higher than it is for therapeutic drugs because they will be used in millions of otherwise healthy people, meaning that even rare side effects could affect many more people than a drug that treats a specific illness.

An independent advisory panel of outside experts also weighs in, and while the agency has the power to make its own decision, it typically follows the advice of its outside panels. The Food and Drug Administration’s senior regulator has the power to approve or deny vaccines for emergency use, but that decision could be overridden by the agency’s top leaders, or by the secretary of health and human services.

White House officials said that Mr. Trump would not distort the vaccine review process to help his campaign. “The rapid research, development, trials and eventual distribution of a Covid-19 vaccine is emblematic of President Trump’s highest priority: the health and safety of the American people,” said Judd Deere, a White House spokesman. “It has nothing to do with politics.”

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told lawmakers on Friday that he remained “cautiously optimistic that we will have a vaccine by the end of this year and as we go into 2021.”

Dr. Stephen Hahn, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, has not ruled out emergency approval of a vaccine.

“We would consider using an emergency use authorization if we felt that the risks associated with the vaccine were much lower than the risks of not having a vaccine,” he told The Journal of the American Medical Association in an online interview.

He also said regulators would certify that any vaccine would meet the agency’s rigorous standards, adding, “My job as commissioner is to make sure to the fullest extent possible that any pressure that comes to the agency is not reflected downward” onto regulators and scientists studying the vaccines.

At the same time, a senior administration official refused to promise that any emergency approval of a vaccine would be vetted through the Food and Drug Administration’s outside advisory panel of experts, scheduled to meet on Oct. 22.
Sign up to receive an email when we publish a new story about the 2020 election.
Sign Up

Operation Warp Speed got its start in April, the brainchild of Dr. Peter Marks, a pencil-thin, bespectacled physician who leads the regulatory unit at the Food and Drug Administration that approves vaccines and therapies.

A “Star Trek” fan, Dr. Marks named the initiative Warp Speed and pitched it in an April 10 phone call to Alex M. Azar II, the secretary of health and human services, who quickly embraced it. In a follow-up phone call a few days later, according to a person familiar with the discussions, several health officials said the October deadline was unrealistic; over the next few months, officials began publicly citing the end of the year or early 2021 as a target.

With his job on the line, Mr. Azar, the target of Mr. Trump’s wrath over the virus, was especially eager to prove his worth to the White House. He teamed up with Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper, whose department has long experience with vaccine development and distribution to protect troops. An expert in complex logistics, Gen. Gustave F. Perna, became the operation’s chief operating officer.

Mr. Kushner, Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House coronavirus coordinator, and others interviewed Dr. Moncef Slaoui, a pharmaceutical industry veteran, and orchestrated his appointment as chief scientific adviser despite concerns within the Food and Drug Administration about conflicts of interest because of his financial ties to two companies that are developing a vaccine. Rather than being bothered by the conflict, Mr. Kushner and others reasoned that it took someone with such industry experience to oversee the effort.



Dr. Deborah L. Birx and Alex M. Azar II, the health and human services secretary, are among those overseeing Operation Warp Speed.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

Dr. Slaoui resigned from the board of Moderna, which has received nearly $1 billion in federal support to develop a vaccine. But as of May he still had nearly $10 million of stock in GlaxoSmithKline, a partner with the French drugmaker Sanofi, which last week signed a $2.1 billion agreement to produce 100 million doses. Dr. Slaoui, who is working on a $1 contract, cleared an ethics review by the Department of Health and Human Services and has said he is determined to avoid any conflict.

Shortly after Dr. Slaoui’s appointment, Dr. Marks resigned from the project he conceived and returned full-time to his post as a senior regulator at the Food and Drug Administration, where he will be the key decision maker on whether a vaccine merits approval.

The administration has conducted the vaccine hunt with a focus lacking in much of the rest of its pandemic response. Contracts have been executed at a brisk pace. Mobile trailers have been speedily delivered for experimental doses to be administered. When a company was short on needles, the Pentagon dispatched planes to deliver supplies within 48 hours.

The pharmaceutical companies are reporting the results of their trials at regular intervals, accelerating the review process. With the government paying much of the cost, the companies are beginning the process of manufacturing millions of doses of vaccine essentially on spec so that they can be distributed quickly if they secure approval.

The process has moved at a remarkable clip. Two vaccine candidates, one developed by Moderna in conjunction with Dr. Fauci’s institute and another by Pfizer, last week began Phase 3 trials, the final stage of clinical experimentation. Others are expected soon.

In Mr. Azar’s conference room at the Department of Health and Human Services headquarters, Mr. Kushner and Dr. Birx join meetings with Mr. Azar, Mr. Esper and others. Mr. Kushner repeatedly pushes the group to move faster and has deputized two close associates, Brad Smith and Adam Boehler, to press the case.

The team has sought to ensure that a variety of different types of potential vaccines are being pursued to increase the chances that at least one will work. Dr. Birx has been interested in what is known as a subunit protein vaccine, and at one point called executives at the biotechnology company Genentech and asked what they could do. (Warp Speed is now working with two companies pursuing that type of vaccine.)

Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, also talks with pharmaceutical executives. People briefed on the discussions say the White House has also pushed for progress by the fall on therapeutics — drugs to treat people who fall ill to the disease — including the possibility of an emergency use authorization for one or more of those drugs. Late last month, Mr. Trump called the chief executive of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals to check on the progress of a potential antibody treatment.

Dr. Stephen Hahn, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, oversees the regulatory approval process for vaccines.Credit...Samuel Corum for The New York Times

Career officials have assured Dr. Hahn that they would stand behind him to head off any vaccine decision not based on science. But Dr. Hahn already lost a measure of credibility with the scientific community for approving the emergency use of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, two anti-malaria drugs promoted by the president as treatments for the coronavirus over the objections of his public health advisers. The Food and Drug Administration later revoked the authorization, concluding the risks outweighed the benefits.

Scientists have argued that it would be unwise to cut corners on a vaccine that is to be injected into some 300 million Americans, adding that a failed effort would fuel public distrust of vaccines generally.

But a senior White House official, who discussed the matter on the condition of anonymity, said that it would also be unethical to withhold an effective vaccine for an extra three or four months while more people died just to check the boxes of a more routine trial process.

Michael R. Caputo, a spokesman for Mr. Azar, said October was not the goal.

“Everybody at H.H.S. hopes Operation Warp Speed will achieve 300 million doses of a safe and effective Covid vaccine for Americans by January 2021,” he said. “We know that’s optimistic. I have never heard mention of any other timeline, and certainly not from the secretary.”

“Careless talk about career F.D.A. regulators somehow approving an unsafe and ineffective vaccine just for politics only undermines confidence in the public health system,” he added.

It is not clear that a vaccine approval shortly before the election would be an “October surprise” sufficient to alter the outcome of the vote. An announcement could give Americans hope that the end is in sight. But some Republican strategists said that it might not help Mr. Trump because his opponent, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic nominee, would surely continue the vaccine process if elected.

“Does it turn everything around for him politically? I don’t know,” said Sarah Longwell, a conservative strategist and prominent Republican opponent of Mr. Trump who regularly conducts focus groups and has found that public attention is more focused on government relief checks and school reopenings.

“If the vaccine is an October surprise, there’s a lot of other things that are cutting against” it as a game-changer, she said.

The drug companies find themselves caught in the middle. While eager to bring products to market as quickly as possible, they face risks in moving too quickly in order to fit an election calendar, analysts said.

“They are acutely aware of the political dynamic here,” said Rob Smith, the director of Capital Alpha Partners, a research firm. A vaccine that flopped would jeopardize their broader business, he said, and it would not make sense “to take a huge reputational risk not just for your vaccine but for all the products across your portfolio to benefit the president politically.”

Dr. Fauci has expressed confidence that the system will hold.

“Historically, the F.D.A. has based their decisions on science,” he told a House committee last week. “They will do so this time also, I am certain.”

Maggie Haberman contributed reporting and Kitty Bennett contributed research.
The Race for a Vaccine
Coronavirus Vaccine Tracker
June 10, 2020

Corporate Insiders Pocket $1 Billion in Rush for Coronavirus Vaccine
July 25, 2020

Trump Seeks Push to Speed Vaccine, Despite Safety Concerns
April 29, 2020

Moderna and Pfizer Begin Late-Stage Vaccine Trials
July 27, 2020

First Coronavirus Vaccine Tested in Humans Shows Early Promise
July 14, 2020




Sharon LaFraniere is an investigative reporter. She was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for national reporting on Donald Trump’s connections with Russia. @SharonLNYT


Katie Thomas covers the business of health care, with a focus on the drug industry. She started at The Times in 2008 as a sports reporter. @katie_thomas


Noah Weiland is a reporter in the Washington bureau of The New York Times, covering health care. He was raised in East Lansing, Michigan and graduated from the University of Chicago. @noahweiland


Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent and has covered the last four presidents for The Times and The Washington Post. He also is the author of five books, most recently “Impeachment: An American History.” @peterbakernyt • Facebook


Annie Karni is a White House correspondent. She previously covered the White House and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign for Politico, and covered local news and politics in New York City for the New York Post and the New York Daily News. @AnnieKarni
A version of this article appears in print on 

Aug. 3, 2020, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Scientist Fret as White House Rushes Vaccine. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Marx and the Communist Enlightenment

Post on: August 2, 2020
Doug Enaa Greene
Harrison Fluss


Marxism is the completion of the Radical Enlightenment project.



Part I | II | III | IV | V | VI

Marx and Engels were the philosophes of a second Enlightenment.
— Louis Menand
Enlightenment and the Young Marx

For Jonathan Israel, Marx’s status as a Radical Enlightenment figure ended prematurely in 1844. According to this interpretation, Marx was a Spinozistic liberal until he discovered the proletariat and converted to communism.1 But this sharp break that Israel assumes in Marx’s thinking did not occur. Israel provides only a cursory treatment of Marx’s writings after 1844 and never shows how Marx broke with the Enlightenment. This stark division between Enlightenment ideas and communism is arguably the worst part of his latest book, The Enlightenment That Failed. Israel implies that if only Marx had not collaborated with the bad Engels, but had stuck with the liberal Young Hegelians, he would have been saved from the economic “determinism” and “authoritarianism” that marred his later political career. Israel’s case for a counter-Enlightenment Marx ignores how earlier “Spinozistic” concerns and themes were integrated into his theory of communist revolution. Neither the “young Marx” nor the “old Marx” renounced humanism, naturalism, and the progressive ideas of Radical Enlightenment.

Israel mentions Marx’s father, Heinrich, in passing, but he neglects an entire backdrop of Marx’s Enlightenment-influenced childhood. This refers to the impact of Baron Ludwig von Westphalen, the privy councillor of Marx’s hometown of Trier and his future father-in-law. It is true that Heinrich Marx was a fan of Voltaire and Rousseau, but he was a fairly moderate liberal; it was in fact Ludwig who introduced the more radical aspects of the French Revolution to Marx, such as the utopian socialism of Henri de Saint-Simon. One other influence Israel ignores is that of Ludwig’s daughter and Marx’s future bride, Jenny von Westphalen. Four years his senior, and sometimes scandalously wearing a French tricolor in her hair, the young Jenny was key to Marx’s political development.2

As Israel notes, in order to practice law, Heinrich was forced to convert from Judaism to Lutheranism. Seven years after the defeat of the Grande Armée, Frederick William III revoked the civil emancipation of Jews that Napoleon had established in Trier. The emancipation of Jewish people was a conquest of the French Revolution, championed by Robespierre and Napoleon alike, and won the admiration of liberal elements in Germany. The revocation of Jewish emancipation affected not only the Marxes but also future associates of Karl such as the Hegelian law professor Eduard Gans and the poet Heinrich Heine. Heinrich Marx, Gans, and Heine were all pressured to civilly renounce Judaism.

After his conversion, Heinrich Marx continued to admire the French Enlightenment, and as a fellow liberal, he befriended Ludwig von Westphalen.3 Together, they were members of the Trier Casino Club, a club of bourgeois professionals with a liberal or left-wing bent. On one particular Bastille Day, the members spontaneously sang “La Marseillaise” in celebration. Little did they know that there was a Prussian spy in their midst, and once word reached the king about this rousing rendition of the subversive anthem, the club was unceremoniously shut down.

Soon after Karl began studying at university, he immersed himself in Hegelian philosophy. Heinrich feared the increasing radicalization of his son and believed that Karl’s path into philosophy would do him little good for his professional career. Once Marx told his father that he discovered Hegel in 1837, Heinrich all but despaired for his son’s prospects. Marx, however, ignored his father and delved deeper into the exciting world of Young Hegelianism.4

The two most important professors whom Marx had at the universities of Berlin and Bonn were Eduard Gans and Bruno Bauer. Gans was one of Hegel’s students, but after the July Revolution of 1830, Gans took Hegelianism in a republican and socialistic direction. Bauer was also a disciple of Hegel’s, and originally belonged to the Hegelian right; he favored orthodox Lutheranism and monarchism. But later, he transformed into a radical republican and a staunch critic of the Bible. Arnold Ruge christened Bauer the “Robespierre” of theology.5 From these teachers, Marx absorbed Hegelian philosophy and democratic republicanism.
Enlightenment and the Young Engels

Growing up in different circumstances, the young Friedrich Engels was raised by strict conservative Pietists. The wealthy Engels family was based in Wuppertal, and his father, Friedrich Sr., owned textile factories as part of the firm Ermen & Engels. Young Friedrich gradually shook off the traditional religious beliefs of his parents and converted to atheistic Hegelianism after reading David Strauss’s The Life of Jesus (1835–36). Strauss was one of the first left Hegelians, combining Hegel’s philosophy with Enlightenment rationalism. He argued that the Gospels were not literal histories but mythopoetic illustrations of the human condition. Jesus was not the son of God but a poetic representation of humanity’s own infinite worth.6

After beginning military service in Berlin, Engels joined forces with the Young Hegelians. He frequented the Hippel café, where Bauer and others would drink and converse. Engels liked to draw funny caricatures of their rowdy philosophical debates,7 and he even wrote a bombastic epic poem about Young Hegelianism, entitled “The Insolently Threatened yet Miraculously Rescued Bible.” There, Engels portrays the Young Hegelians as more dangerous than the Jacobin Club and refers to himself by his new Jacobin alias, Oswald:


Right on the very left, that tall and long-legged stepper
Is Oswald [Engels], coat of grey and trousers shade of pepper;
Pepper inside as well, Oswald the Montagnard;
A radical is he, dyed in the wool, and hard.
Day in, day out, he plays upon the guillotine a
Single solitary tune and that’s a cavatina,
The same old devil-song; he bellows the refrain:
Formez vos bataillons! Aux armes, citoyens!
[Form your battalions! To arms, citizens! — from the Marseillaise]8

Marx knew Engels in 1842 but did not think much of him at the time. Two years later, however, when they reencountered each other in Paris, they recognized that they shared the same fundamental worldview and thus began a lifelong friendship and collaboration as communists. Engels was the first to accept communism through the work of Moses Hess. From his experiences with the Parisian working class and after reading Engels’s Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy (1843), Marx embraced communism in turn. In another essay written in the same year, Engels deduces socialism as the logical result of British economics, the French Revolution, and German philosophy:


The English came to the [socialist] conclusion practically, by the rapid increase of misery, demoralisation, and pauperism in their own country: the French politically, by first asking for political liberty and equality; and, finding this insufficient, joining social liberty, and social equality to their political claims: the Germans became Communists philosophically, by reasoning upon first principles. This being the origin of Socialism in the three countries.9

Marx repeats this European trinity of British economics, French politics, and German philosophy in his writings from 1844: “It must be granted that the German proletariat is the theoretician of the European proletariat just as the English proletariat is its economist and the French its politician.”10 With this new communist worldview, Marx and Engels attempted to settle their philosophical debts with the Young Hegelians. In doing so, they took up the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach, which combined materialism, empiricism, and humanism.
The Holy Family

Making their Feuerbachian debut together in The Holy Family (1845), Marx and Engels saw Feuerbach’s materialism as repeating the Enlightenment’s battle against metaphysical abstractions. As Hegel put it in The Phenomenology, Enlightenment liberated itself from any metaphysical rationalism, emphasizing what’s finite and concrete over what’s theological and abstract. In The Holy Family, Marx and Engels saw Hegel himself as the German repetition of 17th-century rationalism (e.g., Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Malebranche), while Feuerbach represented the return to the Enlightenment of Holbach, Helvétius, and Bentham. According to Marx and Engels, Feuerbach had finally exorcised the ghost of metaphysics once and for all, and now all philosophy had to go through the “fire bath” of Feuerbach. As Marx put it once earlier, “There is no other road for you to truth and freedom except that leading through the brook of fire (the Feuerbach). Feuerbach is the purgatory of the present times.”11

But even in their criticism of Spinoza as a rationalist metaphysician, Marx and Engels maintained a materialist basis. In The Holy Family, they affirm a materialist monism, that “body, being, substance, are but different terms for the same [material] reality. It is impossible to separate thought from matter that thinks. This matter is the substratum of all changes going on in the world.”12 But, in contrast to Bauer and to Israel, Marx and Engels in The Holy Family trace the impact of John Locke’s empiricism on French materialism. It is true, as Israel has pointed out, that Spinozism was an important philosophical component of the Radical Enlightenment; nevertheless, Lockean epistemology had radical implications for philosophers on the Continent as well.13

The Holy Family criticizes the elitism of the Young Hegelians, where Bauer merely echoes the unhistorical conception of human progress that pits a disembodied reason against the spirit of reaction. For Marx, progress advances from social contradictions, and the masses themselves are the bearers of this progress. The masses are the most important factor in Enlightenment, and this process of Enlightenment is inseparable from class struggle.14 The question of the masses is central to Marx and Engels’ critique of Bauer. Bauer saw philosophical criticism as a task directed against the ignorant masses; for him, the lofty fight for self-consciousness and liberty was antagonistic to the crude material interests of the crowd. As one reviewer of The Holy Family wrote, satirizing Bauer’s own elitism, “To get rid of the French Revolution, communism, and Feuerbach, he [Bruno Bauer] shrieks “masses, masses, masses!,” and again: “masses, masses, masses!”15

For Marx and Engels, the two main sources of French materialism were Lockean epistemology and Cartesian natural science. “The two trends intersect in the course of development,” giving birth to the more refined and sophisticated materialism of Holbach and Helvétius. This materialism, however, contains a dialectic within itself, one that points beyond bourgeois society. From the philosophical claims of materialism, the authors deduce the political conclusion of communism. It is worth quoting The Holy Family at length here, since Israel argues that Marx stopped his association with Radical Enlightenment in 1844. But in 1845, Marx and Engels assert the contrary:


French materialism leads directly to socialism and communism. There is no need for any great penetration to see from the teaching of materialism on the original goodness and equal intellectual endowment of men, the omnipotence of experience, habit and education, and the influence of environment on man, the great significance of industry, the justification of enjoyment, etc., how necessarily materialism is connected with communism and socialism. If man draws all his knowledge, sensation, etc., from the world of the senses and the experience gained in it, then what has to be done is to arrange the empirical world in such a way that man experiences and becomes accustomed to what is truly human in it and that he becomes aware of himself as man. If correctly understood interest is the principle of all morality, man’s private interest must be made to coincide with the interest of humanity.16

Here, Marx and Engels take up key Enlightenment tenets, including the essential goodness of human nature (i.e., the rejection of original sin); the importance of education and environment; the “great significance” of industry; and hedonistic ethics, or what they call “the justification of enjoyment.” These are the principles that any socialism must defend for it to make philosophical sense. Again, Israel’s stark demarcation between Enlightenment and Marx’s communism is belied by such passages.

Without the backbone of these Radical Enlightenment premises, the struggle for social equality would be meaningless. Marx and Engels affirm equality as,


man’s consciousness of himself in the element of practice, i.e., therefore, man’s consciousness of other men as his equals and man’s relation to other men as his equals. Equality is the French expression for the unity of human essence, for man’s consciousness of his species and his attitude toward his species, for the practical identity of man with man, i.e., for the social or human relation of man to man.17

In other words, equality is the social expression of our common human identity. It serves as the basis for criticizing the dehumanizing economic relations that pit human beings against each other.
The German Ideology

In The German Ideology (1845-6), written shortly after The Holy Family, Marx and Engels criticize Feuerbach for being insufficiently materialist, since he, like the French materialists before him, was an idealist when it came to history. In this domain, Feuerbach still privileges ideas over material reality. The German Ideology is where the authors first clearly articulate the materialistic conception of history, which is marked by a series of different modes of production. The products of consciousness such as law, religion, and philosophy are all conditioned by material circumstances. Such a theory of history in particular explains how French materialism is a necessary outgrowth of the bourgeoisie’s struggles against feudalism.18

The German Ideology acknowledges what Hegel had already discovered in The Phenomenology: that the spirit of Enlightenment came about through emerging bourgeois conditions. The truth of Enlightenment was “utility,” and utilitarianism was the philosophy of the radical French bourgeoisie. Before the consolidation of capitalism, philosophers like Holbach and Helvétius did not carefully distinguish human flourishing from economic competition and exploitation. Bourgeois reality was assumed to be the natural order of things. According to Marx, this idealized conception was a necessary and justified illusion, without which there would be no ideological motivation for the bourgeois revolution. But there is a darker side to bourgeois Enlightenment, of what Hegel called “the spiritual animal kingdom.” Beneath the idealistic image of human flourishing lurked the dehumanized relations of commodity exchange.

In The Holy Family, Marx and Engels extracted the communist kernel from the shell of bourgeois Enlightenment, meaning a transition from Helvétius and Holbach to the utopian socialism of Gracchus Babeuf and Charles Fourier. Here, in The German Ideology, the authors focus on the illusion of bourgeois Enlightenment, which could not fulfill the promise of human flourishing. While Helvétius and Holbach represent the bourgeoisie in its heroic and more universal phase, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill represent the philosophical conscience of a cynical bourgeoisie that has resigned itself to the reality of exploitation. For the latter, human flourishing is fully identified with market relations.
The Communist Manifesto

Nonetheless, as jaded as bourgeois Enlightenment can be, there is something refreshing about its rejection of feudalism. Repeating what Hegel argued in The Phenomenology, Marx and Engels see bourgeois reality as achieving a relative kind of Enlightenment. As Marx and Engels put it famously in The Communist Manifesto (1848): “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”19 The enlightened bourgeoisie “has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.”20 This description of feudal culture’s demise was strongly foreshadowed in the pages of Hegel’s Phenomenology and its discussion of Rameau’s Nephew.21

In the Manifesto, Marx and Engels not only praise the bourgeoisie for uniting the world economy; they also acknowledge the democratic “representative state” as its most important political achievement. Not just the (partial) liberation of the productive forces, but liberal ideas like freedom of conscience, equality before the law, and freedom of the press are legitimate gains for humanity. Political equality, however, is insufficient without economic equality. The bourgeoisie achieved Enlightenment only halfway since it clings to a superstitious belief in private property. Thus the bourgeoisie cannot complete its own Enlightenment, since a truly human and secular society is incompatible with class relations.22

In the third chapter of the Manifesto, Marx and Engels attack what they call feudal socialism and “true socialism.” Both of these false socialisms are reactionary, insofar as they advocate romantic solutions to capitalism. The feudal socialist wants workers to return to an imagined organic aristocratic society, in which they will resubmit to their noble betters. On the other hand, the “true socialist” wants to push aside class struggle in favor of a classless humanitarianism. Such ethical idealism denounces bourgeois society in toto as sinful and irredeemable. While the “true socialists” think they are moving past bourgeois society, they inadvertently adopt the romantic critique of capitalism. For Marx and Engels, one cannot achieve socialism without presupposing the accomplishments of bourgeois society and bourgeois enlightenment.

True socialism “forgot, in the nick of time, that the French [socialist] criticism, whose silly echo it was, presupposed the existence of modern bourgeois society, with its corresponding economic conditions of existence, and the political constitution adapted thereto, the very things those attainment was the object of the pending struggle in Germany.”23 In their absolute rejection of everything progressive in bourgeois society, including constitutional law, true socialism gives aid to reaction. Presupposing the advancement of science and industry, socialism not only liberates the productive forces; it also consummates the struggle for democracy. Socialism does not simply cast off the forms of democracy and republicanism, but makes democracy real for the working class.
The Dead Dogs

As Marx matured in his economic thinking, he returned to Hegelian dialectics as the basis for his critique of capitalism. In a letter to Ludwig Kugelmann, he accuses Feuerbach, along with the rest of the German intelligentsia, of treating Hegel like a “dead dog.”24 According to Marx, one must extract the rational side of Hegel’s dialectics and discard its irrational idealism. It is no coincidence that when Marx defends Hegel in his afterword to the first volume of Capital (1867), he compares Hegel’s fate with that of Spinoza’s. If the German Enlightenment stunted itself in treating Spinoza as a “dead dog,” then the same goes for Eugen Dühring and others when they treat Hegel as a mere mystic.25

Marx’s approach to Spinoza and Hegel is itself dialectical. As he puts it in a letter to Ferdinand Lassalle, “Even in the case of philosophers who give systematic form to their work, Spinoza for instance, the true inner structure of the system is quite unlike the form in which it was consciously presented by him.”26

Spinoza is not absent in Marx’s Grundrisse (1859) and Capital. Marx wrote his critique as a “natural history,” wherein he laid bare the economic law of motion for the capitalist system. This presupposes a Spinozistic outlook of paying attention to rational causes over mere appearances: “Vulgar economy which, indeed, ‘has really learnt nothing,’ here as everywhere sticks to appearances in opposition to the law which regulates and explains them. In opposition to Spinoza, [political economy] believes that ‘ignorance is a sufficient reason.’” 27 Not only does Marx assume Spinoza’s materialism of causation; like Hegel, he also accepts Spinoza’s insight that all determination is negation; that it is not enough to negate something, but to overcome that negation in turn. Negation is determined not just by particular things, but by an overall process, or what Marx refers to as “the negation of the negation.” For Marx, Spinoza provides the philosophical basis for this dialectical logic: “This identity of production and consumption amounts to Spinoza’s thesis: determinatio est negatio.”28 Needless to say, this reemergence of Spinozism as integral to Marx’s critique refutes Israel’s argument that the later Marx abandoned Spinozism.
Marx and Engels’ Second Enlightenment

In the Grundrisse, Marx takes issue with bourgeois socialists, who merely affirm the ideals of the French Revolution, while ignoring the realities of capitalism. In pursuing liberty, equality, and fraternity one-sidedly, these socialists ironically reinforce unfreedom, inequality, and atomization. This is because they do not understand the reality of competition and exchange, and fall prey to its logic. This is certainly the case for Marx when he discusses the petty bourgeois socialism of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and his followers.29 As Marx puts it in Capital, “There alone rule [in bourgeois society] Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham,” where the name of Bentham signifies the crass logic of exploitation.30

Seemingly strange bedfellows, both Israel and the structuralist Marxist Louis Althusser claim that the later Marx abandoned his original humanism. But the evidence in the mature economic manuscripts is clear. Marx reaffirms that socialism will be a realm of freedom based on an advanced material economic base. The realm of necessity will not be abolished but workers will “rationally” regulate “their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature.”31 The realm of freedom will “blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.”32 In socialism, humanity will live “under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature.”33

The interrelation between humanity and nature, a Spinozistic point, is an echo of what Marx and Engels previously wrote decades before in The Holy Family: “If man is shaped by his surroundings, his surroundings must be made human. If man is social by nature, he will develop his true nature only in society, and the power of his nature must be measured not by the power of separate individuals but by the power of society. This and similar propositions are to be found almost literally even in the oldest French materialists.”34 These passages from The Holy Family and Capital show continuity in Marx’s Enlightenment humanism.

In his separate works, Engels celebrates the thinkers of the Enlightenment. Diderot and Rousseau are credited for inventing modern dialectics in their respective criticisms of bourgeois society and property relations. But the entirety of the French Enlightenment comes in for special praise in his Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886): “The French materialists no less than the deists Voltaire and Rousseau held this conviction [of historical progress] to an almost fanatical degree, and often enough made the greatest personal sacrifices for it. If ever anybody dedicated his whole life to the ‘enthusiasm for truth and justice’ — using this phrase in the good sense — it was Diderot, for instance.”35

In Anti-Dühring (1877), Engels calls Spinoza “a dialectician,” and in Dialectics of Nature (1883), he affirms Spinoza’s idea of a self-caused substance as expressing the activity of matter in motion, that is, as anticipating dialectical materialism. 36 In an anecdote, Plekhanov recounts how Engels told him that “old Spinoza” was “absolutely right” to see mind and matter as two sides of one nature. In contrast to Israel, Plekhanov unequivocally states, “I am fully convinced that Marx and Engels, after the materialist turn in their development, never abandoned the standpoint of Spinoza.”37

According to Engels, it was the radical bourgeoisie that originally developed the modern idea of equality. This idea was “first formulated by Rousseau, in trenchant terms but still on behalf of all humanity.”38 The emerging proletariat, however, went deeper than the bourgeoisie in adopting equality under its revolutionary banner, and as “was the case with all demands of the bourgeoisie, so here too the proletariat cast a fateful shadow beside it and drew its own conclusions (Babeuf). This connection between bourgeois equality and the proletariat’s drawing of conclusions should be developed in greater detail.”39 Hence, we see that proletarian morality for Engels is not the total negation of bourgeois Enlightenment morality, but its dialectical negation. Political equality is insufficient and needs social equality to be made substantive and permanent.
The Critique of the Gotha Program

This leads us to Marx’s conception of equality in The Critique of the Gotha Program (1875). Under the banner of social equality, the proletariat establishes its rule. But, according to Marx, during the first phase of communism (i.e., socialism), the right to equality still presupposes inequality. How is this possible? In this initial stage, the productive forces still need to be reorganized and further developed. Socialism frees society from the domination of what Marx called “the law of value” (i.e., commodity relations), but it cannot totally do away with principles of exchange. For the sake of developing the productive forces, the first phase of communism is governed by the principle from each according to their ability, to each according to their deed. This means that “as far as the distribution of [the means of consumption] among the individual producers is concerned, the same principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity equivalents: a given amount of labor in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labor in another form…The right of the producers is proportional to the labor they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labor.”40

Under this first phase of communism, it does not recognize class differences, but it does recognize differences when it comes to what workers can contribute. Some workers, either physically or mentally, will contribute more than others, and they may need more compensation than others because of their particular circumstances. Perhaps they have to take care of more dependents, or they have a greater skill set. Regardless, Marx is clear that a kind of exchange still exists under socialism.

Only in the upper stage of socialism, namely communism proper, does exchange value completely wither away in favor of use value. Hegel had already seen the contradictory nature of value in his analysis of the bourgeois Enlightenment. The truth of bourgeois Enlightenment for Hegel was utility, a contradictory phenomenon that expressed both the promise of human flourishing and the reality of exploitation. Utility was bound up with the commodity form, in which use-value is dominated by market exchange. But for Marx, only full communism can liberate use value from exchange value, thus resolving the main contradiction of bourgeois Enlightenment. Thus, communism is not the abstract negation, but the completion of the Enlightenment project. This completion is summed up in the slogan: “From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs!”41

Under communism, equality is understood as a law of proportion — that all human beings have a right to equal development and satisfaction of their different needs. Helen Macfarlane, the Chartist radical and first translator of The Communist Manifesto into English, put it as follows: “The Rights of one human being are precisely the same as the Rights of another human being, in virtue of their common nature.”42 Without this common human nature, Marx’s slogan for the realization of human wants is unintelligible and unachievable. This slogan is at one with Macfarlane’s translation of the Manifesto’s statement that the “old Bourgeois Society, with its classes, and class antagonisms, will be replaced by an association, wherein the free development of EACH is the free development of ALL.”43

Whether it is Spinozism, French materialism, or the ideas of the French Revolution — particularly the idea of equality — Marx and Engels were no strangers to Radical Enlightenment. On the contrary, they were its most advanced representatives. We have demonstrated that Radical Enlightenment was not just a passing phase of Marx’s youth but the consistent philosophical thread throughout his thinking.

Part V of this series on the Enlightenment will appear next Sunday.


Notes

1. ↑ “Marx’s early thought, shaped by Bauer and Feuerbach, was in a sense a variant of Spinozist materialism, naturalism, anti-providentialism, and anti-Scriptualism which, before long, became dramatically infused with zeal for democratic transformation.” Jonathan I. Israel, Enlightenment that Failed, 905.



This ignores Bauer’s explicit anti-Spinozism, which favored self-consciousness over substance, as well as Feuerbach’s empiricist critique of Spinoza as a metaphysician. Marx himself in his dissertation repeats Bauer-like criticisms of Spinoza, while in later works, such as The Holy Family, he repeats Feuerbach’s critique. Israel does not deign to comment on Marx’s criticisms of Spinoza in this early period.
2. ↑ Harrison Fluss and Sam Miller, “Subversive Beginnings,” Jacobin, June 19, 2016; Harrison Fluss and Sam Miller, “The Life of Jenny Marx,” Jacobin, February 14, 2016.
3. ↑ For more on Heinrich Marx’s opinions on the French Revolution and Napoleon, see Michael Heinrich, Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society: The Life of Marx and the Development of His Work, vol. 1: 1818–1841 (New York: Monthly Review, 2019), 81–82.
4. ↑ The young Marx was into dueling, drinking, and, now, Hegel. In Berlin, a group of Young Hegelians met at Hippel’s café, calling themselves the Berlin Frei. There they drank and vigorously argued, celebrating not just free thought but free spirits. When the future anarchist Mikhail Bakunin visited Berlin in its Young Hegelian heyday, he liked to play a philosophical drinking game:




In Russia, the young Bakunin became a member of a literary group so intoxicated with Hegelian idealism that even their love affairs were permeated by it, and who, volatilizing in the Russian way the portentous abstractions of the German, used to toast the Hegelian categories, proceeding through the metaphysical progression from Pure Existence to the divine Idea.

Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (New York: New York Review of Books, 2003), 262.
5. ↑ David Leopold, The Young Karl Marx: German Philosophy, Modern Politics, and Human Flourishing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 103.
6. ↑ Marilyn Chapin Massey, Christ Unmasked: The Meaning of the Life of Jesus in German Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983); and Friedrich Engels, Letters of the Young Engels (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976).
7. ↑ For Engels’s drawings, see “Die Freien by Friedrich Engels,” Wikipedia Commons.
8. ↑ “The Insolently Threatened Yet Miraculously Rescued Bible,” in MECW, vol. 2, 335.
9. ↑ “Progress of Social Reform on the Continent,” in MECW, vo. 3, 392–93.
Later in the same article, the young Engels inferred that the premises of German philosophy lead to the conclusion of communism:




Our party has to prove that either all the philosophical efforts of the German nation, from Kant to Hegel, have been useless — worse than useless; or, that they must end in Communism; that the Germans must either reject their great philosophers, whose names they hold up as the glory of their nation, or that they must adopt Communism. (Ibid., 406.)

Lenin also popularized Marxism as a synthesis of British economics, French politics, and German philosophy:


The Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true. It is comprehensive and harmonious, and provides men with an integral world outlook irreconcilable with any form of superstition, reaction, or defence of bourgeois oppression. It is the legitimate successor to the best that man produced in the nineteenth century, as represented by German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism. (“The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism,” 1913, in Lenin Collected Works [henceforth LCW], vol. 19 [Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974], 23–24.)

Before Marx and Engels, Hess was the first to conceive of this progressive trinity of England, France, and Germany in his European Triarchy (1841), wherein he claimed that Spinoza represents “the ideal foundation of modern times.” Four years before he wrote this work, Hess had announced in The Holy History of Mankind (1837) that humanity had entered into the Age of Spinoza.
10. ↑ “Critical Notes on the Article: ‘The King of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian,’” in MECW, vol. 3, 202.
11. ↑ Karl Marx, “Luther as the Arbiter between Strauss and Feuerbach,” in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, ed. L. D. Easton and K. H. Guddat (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 95.
12. ↑ The Holy Family, in MECW, vol. 4, 129.



The relationship between Feuerbach and Spinoza is unfortunately outside the scope of this series. The scholar Marx W. Wartofsky, however, explains that Feuerbach saw himself as a legatee of Spinoza’s pantheism and materialism: “Thus, Feuerbach contrasts pantheism, as the theoretical negation of theology, with empiricism, as the practical negation of theology. But he says pantheism — that is, Spinoza’s pantheism, which accords matter divine status, albeit abstractly and metaphysically — as the legitimation and sanction of the “materialistic tendency of modern times.’” Feuerbach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 370.
13. ↑ Joseph de Maistre, in his St. Petersburg Dialogues, engages in a long rant against Lockeanism. In the sixth dialogue, by denying the doctrine of innate ideas, Locke is called an enemy of Christian authority, and Maistre despairs that so many French philosophers fell under Locke’s spell. They neglected their own “Christian Plato” (Malebranche) in favor of English empiricism. Joseph de Maistre, St Petersburg Dialogues: Or Conversations on the Temporal Government of Providence (London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993), 187, 188.
14. ↑ According to Lukács, during the Restoration period, defenders of human progress redefined Enlightenment as inextricably bound up with mass struggle:




According to the new interpretation the reasonableness of human progress develops ever increasingly out of the inner conflict of social forces in history itself; according to this interpretation history itself is the bearer and realizer of human progress. The most important thing here is the increasing historical awareness of the decisive role played in human progress by the struggle of classes in history. The new spirit of historical writing, which is most clearly visible in the important French historians of the Restoration period, concentrates precisely on this question: on showing historically how modem bourgeois society arose out of the class struggles between nobility and bourgeoisie, out of class struggles which raged throughout the entire ‘idyllic Middle Ages’ and whose last decisive stage was the great French Revolution. These ideas produce the first attempt at a rational periodization of history, an attempt to comprehend the historical nature and origins of the present rationally and scientifically.

(Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel (London: Merlin Press, 1989), 27–28.)
15. ↑ Massimiliano Tomba, Marx’s Temporalities (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 22.
16. ↑ The Holy Family, in MECW, vol. 4, 130.
17. ↑ Ibid., 39.
18. ↑ The German Ideology is frequently described as a work that treats philosophy as a mere epiphenomenon of material class relations, or as simply bourgeois mysticism. But in their polemic against Max Stirner, Marx and Engels defend certain philosophers for their progressive contributions to humanity. This includes praise for the Stoic tradition and for Epicurus as a radical Enlightener: “Epicurus…was the true radical Enlightener of antiquity; he openly attacked the ancient religion, and it was from him, too, that the atheism of the Romans, insofar as it existed, was derived. For this reason, too, Lucretius praised Epicurus as the hero who was the first to overthrow the gods and trample religion underfoot.” The German Ideology, in MECW, vol. 5, 141–42. As we can see, Israel even ignores Marx’s own use of the phrase radical Enlightenment.
19. ↑ Manifesto of the Communist Party, in MECW, vol. 6, 487.
20. ↑ Ibid.
21. ↑ For Hegel’s discussion of Diderot, see Hegel, Enlightenment, and Revolution.
22. ↑ In On the Jewish Question (1843), Marx pointed out that abstract rights to property and religion presupposed an unequal and alienated society. Any society in which private property and religion predominate, such as in the United States, is not a truly humanized one, but still alienated. While political emancipation is certainly an achievement, it is not enough if it stays at the political level and ignores the so-called private realm of civil society. Thus, the problem is not that American society is secular, but since it rests on an alienated bourgeois reality, it is not secular enough. See “On the Jewish Question,” in MECW, vol. 3, 146–47.
23. ↑ Manifesto, 512.



Around the time of the Manifesto, Marx also wrote,


The workers know that the abolition of bourgeois property relations is not brought about by preserving those of feudalism. They know that the revolutionary movement of the bourgeoisie against the feudal estates and the absolute monarchy can only accelerate their own revolutionary movement. They know that their own struggle against the bourgeoisie can only dawn with the day when the bourgeoisie is victorious. Despite all this they do not share Herr Heinzen’s bourgeois illusions. They can and must accept the bourgeois revolution as a precondition for the workers’ revolution. However, they cannot for a moment regard it as their ultimate goal.

(“Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality,” in MECW, vol. 6, 332–33.)

We will address how Marx changes his position on the proletariat’s relationship to bourgeois revolutions in part six of this series. Suffice it to say, following the failure of the bourgeoisie to lead revolutions on the Continent in 1848, Marx argues that the proletariat cannot simply wait for the bourgeoisie to fulfill its original democratic tasks. By the 1840s, the heroic phase of bourgeois revolutions was over, and the proletariat must now play the leading revolutionary role; it must fight not only for the older tasks of democracy, but for socialism. Hence, after the failed struggles of 1848, Marx disavows a stagist conception of revolution, committing himself to a politics of permanent revolution. On the history and politics of permanent revolution, see Neil Davidson’s How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions?

It is interesting to note that Davidson himself uses the phrase “radicalized Enlightenment” to describe Marx and Engels’s socialist transformation of the bourgeois Enlightenment in the Manifesto: “From these doubts [about bourgeois society] came the radicalized Enlightenment at the heart of Marxism.” Neil Davidson, How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012), 655.
24. ↑ “Marx to Kugelmann. 27 June 1870,” in MECW, vol. 43, 528.
25. ↑ In the afterword to the second German edition of Capital, Marx said,




The mystifying side of Hegelian dialectic I criticised nearly thirty years ago, at a time when it was still the fashion. But just as I was working at the first volume of “Das Kapital,” it was the good pleasure of the peevish, arrogant, mediocre ‘Epigonoi who now talk large in cultured Germany, to treat Hegel in same way as the brave Moses Mendelssohn in Lessing’s time treated Spinoza, i.e., as a “dead dog.” I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even here and there, in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to him. The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.

(Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, in MECW, vol. 35, 19.)
26. ↑ “Marx to Lassalle. 31 May 1858,” in MECW, vol. 40, 316.
27. ↑ Capital, vol. 1, in MECW, vol. 35, 311.
28. ↑ Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 90.
29. ↑ Ibid., 248.
30. ↑ Capital, vol. 1, in MECW, vol. 35, 186. In a footnote to Capital, Marx contrasts Bentham — that “genius of bourgeois stupidity” — unfavorably with the more sophisticated French materialists. Marx does not dismiss the category of utility but argues that one cannot derive an adequate conception of human nature from utility alone: “The principle of utility was no discovery of Bentham. He simply reproduced in his dull way what Helvétius and other Frenchmen had said with esprit in the 18th century. To know what is useful for a dog, one must study dog-nature. This nature itself is not to be deduced from the principle of utility. Applying this to man, he that would criticise all human acts, movements, relations, etc., by the principle of utility, must first deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch.” Ibid., 605.
31. ↑ Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 3, in MECW, vol. 37, 807.
32. ↑ Ibid.
33. ↑ Ibid.
34. ↑ The Holy Family, in MECW, vol. 4, “131.
35. ↑ Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, in MECW, vol. 26, 373.
36. ↑ “Reciprocal action is the first thing that we encounter when we consider matter in motion as a whole from the standpoint of modern natural science. We see a series of forms of motion, mechanical motion, heat, light, electricity, magnetism, chemical compound and decomposition, transitions of states of aggregation, organic life, all of which, if at present we still make an exception of organic life, pass into one another, mutually determine one another, are in one place cause and in another effect, the sum-total of the motion in all its changing forms remaining the same (Spinoza: substance is causa sui strikingly expresses the reciprocal action).” The Dialectics of Nature. Fragments and Notes, in MECW, vol. 25, 511.
37. ↑ Georgi Plekhanov, “Bernstein and Materialism,” Marxists Internet Archive.
38. ↑ “Preparatory Writings for Anti-Dühring,” in MECW, vol. 25, 603.
39. ↑ Ibid.
40. ↑ Critique of the Gotha Programme, in MECW, vol. 24, 86.
41. ↑ Ibid., 87. According to Eric Hobsbawm, the phrase “From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs!” was originally a Saint-Simonian one. Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism, 29–30.



While Saint-Simon himself eschewed the Jacobin Terror, he defended the achievements of the French Revolution, and his conception of history and utopian socialism built on Enlightenment ideas. According to the Marxist historian Samuel Bernstein, “Saint-Simon set himself the objective of founding the science of man. He desired to follow in the tradition of Newton, and he conceived of science as organized and directed toward the improvement of mankind. Equally with other great Utopians, he looked to those in power for the fulfillment of his dream.” Samuel Bernstein, “Saint-Simon’s Philosophy of History,” Science & Society 12, no. 1 (Winter 1948): 85.

In Louis Blanc’s speech of 1848 (“A Community of Labor”), we find an early popularization of the slogan that Marx would adopt. The French reformist said, “The ideal toward which humanity must proceed is the following: to produce according to its powers, to consume according to its needs” [authors’ translation]. The original French reads, “L’idéal vers lequel la société doit se mettre en marche est donc celui-ci: produire selon ses forces, consommer selon ses besoins.” Louis Blanc, Pages d’histoire de la Révolution de Février, 1848 (Paris: Imprimerie et Librairie de V Wouters, 1850), 217.
42. ↑ Helen Macfarlane, Red Republican (London: Unkant Press, 2014), 66–67.
43. ↑ Ibid., 139.


This is a Guest Post. Guest Posts do not necessarily reflect the views of the Left Voice editorial board. If you would like to submit a contribution, please contact us.
Tags: History