One year after the Capitol riots, America’s white supremacists remain the biggest risk to its democracy

One year after a mob of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol, President Biden wants to start a "new chapter". But there has been an acute failure by the US government to tackle the attack's white supremacist roots, writes Richard Sudan.



Richard Sudan
06 Jan, 2022

Trump supporters breached security and stormed the US Capitol as Congress debated the 2020 presidential election Electoral Vote Certification on January 6, 2021, in Washington, DC.

One year ago, thousands of people stormed the US Capitol, ransacking the very buildings at the heart of US democracy. Regardless of whether white supremacy had previously been embraced, side-lined or denied by Americans, here it was on naked display proudly parading through the streets for the entire world to see.

Black communities have, of course, been terrorised by white supremacy in all its forms for hundreds of years. But it took Jan 6 to pierce the consciousness of many people - and that should not be the case.

The previous year leading up to the Capitol riots had seen a wave of Black Lives Matter protests sweep the country, which eventually spread around the world, leading to calls for the police to be reformed and even defunded. This even reignited calls for African-American descendants of slaves to be allocated reparations to address the longstanding and demonstrably provable racial imbalance in the country.

White supremacists swarming the capitol on Jan 6th was, at least in part, a direct backlash to the growing demands for racial justice for Black people in the United States. While they were encouraged by Trump and other politicians, it is important to remember that white supremacy is not a right or left issue. And the vast array of protesters which took part represented a wide spectrum of American society and professions including law, law enforcement, and the armed forces. A significant portion of that crowd were undoubtedly card-carrying white supremacists.

"Black communities have, of course, been terrorised by white supremacy in all its forms for hundreds of years. But it took Jan 6 to pierce the consciousness of many people - and that should not be the case"

Eventually, several weeks after the Capitol siege, FBI director Christopher Wray acknowledged that Jan 6 constituted an act of domestic terror. Not only that, but the FBI have also admitted that white supremacy is the most significant and growing domestic terror threat on US soil, accounting for the lion’s share of the FBI’s resources.

You might think that for a nation that famously coined the phrase “the war on terror” that the obvious threat of white supremacist extremism within its own borders might lead to a war on white supremacy. But far from this happening, it seems as though white supremacy was the talk of the town for only a few weeks in 2020 - enough time to safely get the openly racist Trump out of office.

Conversations about reparations too, were very popular in the run up to the election, but fizzled out following Biden’s victory. Biden even pledged to meet rapper Ice Cube to discuss reparations and a plan for Black America. This meeting, of course, never transpired.

But one year on, and despite President Biden’s commemoration speech calling for a “new chapter”, there has been an acute failure by the American government to tackle white supremacy, which remains a life or death issue for Black Americans. The conditions that produced the Capitol siege remain in place and wilfully unchallenged. Far from healing any racial divides as some liberal pundits sought to frame the election, the polarisation that characterised the campaigns merely exposed the fragility of it.

The report into the events of Jan 6 is moving at a snail’s pace. While some of the perpetrators have since been jailed, there have been widespread accusations that the sentences handed down by judges have often amounted to little more than slaps on the wrist. While Black and non-white people have been jailed for much longer for much less, those involved in a significant act of domestic terror have not received punishments which reflect the severity and significance of what took place at the Capitol.

Groups like the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and other white supremacist militia, who played a role in the Capitol riots, have not been added to any US list of domestic terror groups. Canada did make the move, by designating the Proud Boys as such, but the United States has failed to do so. In the United States, the ties between many corrupt police officers and links to white supremacist groups, with many being active members, have been well exposed.

White supremacist violence at Capitol was anything but unprecedented

A solid investigation into the ties of some politicians to the groups that participated in storming the Capitol has been stalled at every juncture. Roger Stone, a former key ally of Donald Trump, was famously pictured with Oath Keeper members thought to have taken part in the riots on the morning of the riots themselves. Stone of course has denied having any prior knowledge of the events which took place later in the day.

There have been suggestions too, that some law enforcement officers not only had prior knowledge of what would take place at the Capitol on Jan 6, but that some actively took part in the violent scenes and encouraged it. One year on and that rabbit hole in particular seems to have been avoided at all costs.

In many ways, much of this is nothing new. The lines between the system, law enforcement and white supremacy are increasingly blurred. White vigilantism in the United States is not only relatively unpunished but is often rewarded, with Kyle Rittenhouse offering a case in point. This in itself sets a very dangerous precedent going into 2022, and it is a precedent that remains unchallenged.

"For America to finally get its house in order, and to tackle the ongoing scourge of racism that blights the nation, it needs to "stop denying racism, and start dismantling it""

The reality is, much like in the UK, the US’s long-standing relationship and systemic love affair with white supremacy runs deep with strong foundations that can’t be removed overnight, even with the political will, however an uncomfortable truth it might be for some.

US Federal authorities have known of the threat to national security that white supremacy poses for decades. Jan 6 was not so much a culmination of the problem, as some like to frame it, but rather symptomatic of a much wider issue- “chickens coming home to roost” if you will.

For America to finally get its house in order, and to tackle the ongoing scourge of racism that blights the nation, it needs to heed the words of the UN High Commission on Human Rights and to “Stop denying racism, and start dismantling it”. It’s not enough to pay lip service to the causes of Jan 6. The conditions which produce it must be eradicated, once and for all.

Richard Sudan is a journalist and writer specialising in anti-racism and has reported on various human rights issues from around the world. His writing has been published by The Guardian, Independent, The Voice and many others.

Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.

Tehran rally demands justice on anniversary of jet downing

The New Arab Staff & Agencies
08 January, 2022

Relatives of the victims of the Iranian armed forces' accidental downing of a civilian Ukrainian airliner have held a rally demanding justice for their loved ones.


Families of the victims of the Ukrainian airliner downing have demanded justice [Getty]


Families of those who died when Iranian armed forces shot down a Ukrainian airliner two years ago demanded justice for the 176 victims at a commemoration in Tehran on Saturday.

Ukraine International Airlines flight PS752 was shot down shortly after take-off from Tehran's Imam Khomeini airport on January 8, 2020, killing all 176 people on aboard. Most were Iranians and Canadians, including many dual nationals.

Three days later, the Islamic republic's armed forces admitted to downing the Kyiv-bound plane "by mistake."

Relatives of the victims gathered at the crash site near the airport to mark the anniversary, local media reported.

They held up pictures of their loved ones, laid flowers and lit candles in their memory, while calling for "Justice! Truth!", videos shared on social media showed.

State television separately published an interview with the mother of Zahra Hassani Saadi, who died in the crash, in which she questioned the authorities' handling of the case.

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"We have several questions, who will answer us? Why wasn't the flight cancelled? Why was the cruise missile fired? We don't know and no one explained it to us," she asked.

At another gathering, held inside the airport on Saturday, relatives called for a "fair investigation" into the incident, ILNA news agency reported.

On Friday a commemoration was held in Tehran's largest cemetery, Behesht-e-Zahra.

"We hope that the legal process of this case will end soon in the judiciary, so that the ones who made the error can be identified, and this will reduce the suffering of the bereaved families," state news agency IRNA quoted Vice President Amir Hossein Ghazizadeh Hashemi as saying there.

At the time of the incident Iranian air defences were on high alert for a US counterattack after Tehran fired missiles at a military base in Iraq that was used by American forces.

Those missiles came in response to the killing of Major General Qasem Soleimani in a US drone strike near Baghdad's international airport. Soleimani headed the foreign operations arm of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Iran's judiciary said in November that a trial had opened in Tehran for 10 military members in connection with the jet's downing.

On Friday Iranian officials said payments of $150,000 have started to be made to victims' families.

Separately, a Canadian court awarded more than $80 million in compensation to the families of six of the victims in a decision made public Monday.

Colorado’s Suburban Firestorm Shows the Threat of Climate-Driven Wildfires is Moving Into Unusual Seasons and Landscapes

Backyard fences, decks and landscaping helped spread the flames through suburban neighborhoods and shopping malls baked by global warming.

By Bob Berwyn
January 7, 2022

The Marshall Fire continued to burn out of control on Dec. 30, 2021 in Broomfield, Colorado. Credit: RJ Sangosti/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images

When he saw smoke in the air around Boulder, Colorado on Dec. 30, Tom Veblen walked up a trail near his home to check it out. Veblen, a professor emeritus of geography at the University of Colorado Boulder who has been studying forest ecology, wildfires and climate change since the mid-1970s, said he could see that the Marshall Fire, on the southern edge of the city, was already jumping over distances of several hundred yards.

The winds were so strong that he said he struggled to open his car door, and to stay on his feet in the powerful gusts. Wooden fences separating yards in the suburbs sprawling in the distance looked like burning fuses, as winds gusting faster than 100 mph pushed the flames along them to ignite decks, roofs and residential landscaping. The firestorm would eventually engulf shopping malls and a hotel.

As a resident of a neighborhood he had previously believed to be a safe distance from the fire-prone forests, Veblen felt a sudden and unfamiliar sense of vulnerability.

“Sure, I knew that Chinook winds could drive winter grassland fires to spread very rapidly, but in the past we just did not have all the driving factors align so perfectly—wet spring producing abundant grass fuels, one of the warmest and driest June-Decembers on record and then an ignition at the base of the mountains.” Local topography also contributed to the intensity, with a canyon opposite the fire acting like a nozzle, blasting winds from the peaks onto the flames and pushing the fire east into suburban neighborhoods.

The Marshall Fire ultimately burned some 6,200 acres, destroying at least 1,084 homes and seven commercial structures, before it was largely smothered by a New Year’s Eve snowfall. On Wednesday, investigators reported they had found partial human remains assumed to be those of one of the two people still missing after the fire. Insured losses are estimated at about $1 billion, making it Colorado’s most destructive fire on record in terms of property loss.

In the days since the fire, Veblen said he’s had many conversations with neighbors and friends, some feeling a combination of survivor’s guilt and post traumatic stress disorder, and all wondering how worried they should be about wildfires burning into suburbia in the future.

“I told them that, this winter, we’re probably going to be OK,” he said. But with the warming and drying climate shortening the snow season and desiccating grasses and brush more each year, chances are growing that similar drought, heat and wind will align more frequently to drive wildfires into the cold seasons and developed landscapes where they were once rare.

In the meantime, few residents of rapidly expanding suburbs in which most of the vegetation has been planted by homeowners and developers realize that they are living in an expanding “Wildland Urban Interface,” or WUI, in which wildfires can threaten their homes and lives. In some areas with little natural vegetation, wooden fences and decks, wood-framed houses, flammable roofs and landscaping are the biggest source of fuel, which can burn down into glowing chunks that are lofted by high winds to help a fire hopscotch through neighborhoods.

“We could have another fire starting in Sunshine Canyon in some of those grassy areas and burn right down into Boulder,” he said. “We could call it a freak event, but we know that it’s not. It’s just a matter of those conditions setting up again.”

Jordan Hymes gets a hug from her grandmother Nancy Grigon, left, as her grandfather Guy, right, looks towards their burned out subdivision in the Coal Creek Ranch subdivision in the aftermath of the Marshall Fire on Dec. 31, 2021 in Louisville, Colorado. Hymes and her family lost their home of ten years. The fire may have potentially burned 1,000 homes and numerous business. The fast moving fire was stocked by extremely dry drought conditions and fierce winds, with gusts topping 100 mph, along the foothills. Credit: Helen H. Richardson/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images

A visit Friday to the towns devastated by the Marshall Fire by President Biden, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis and Rep. Joe Neguse (D-Boulder), could help jump-start the conversations needed to address the threat, he said.

“The important message our society needs to hear from them is that this is an example of a climate-enabled event, and the probability of similar events will continue to increase as we have continued warming,” he said. “Unless we keep fossil fuels in the ground, these events are going to get more frequent and worse.”
New Climate, New Fuels and New Fires

“It’s clear the climate change is increasing the likelihood of these types of events,” said University of Montana fire ecologist Phil Higuera, who is currently a visiting fellow at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder, studying the relative influence of climate, vegetation and human activity on wildfire trends.

“What I don’t want to see is a reaction of, ‘Oh, this is such an extreme event that we can’t do anything about it,’” he said. “Yes, this fire was very bad luck, but we shouldn’t be rolling the dice with fire in December.”

Yet research, including a landmark 2019 study of fire weather indices, shows that global warming is loading those dice for more winter fires. Warmer temperatures and decreasing precipitation increasingly leave fuels like trees and brush tinder dry late in autumn and early winter, and increase the probability that snow-free Decembers will leave grasses, decks and roofs uncovered and vulnerable to wind-driven sparks and embers that could ignite them.

What used to be the start of the season that brought snow to the West and cool, rainy conditions to many other parts of the country is now sometimes more like late summer. Even if global warming didn’t ignite the Marshall Fire, “there really is a seasonality change that is the main climate factor,” said UCLA climate researcher Daniel Swain, who studies extremes like fires and floods. “Usually by this time of year, there is just more moisture on the ground.”

For more than 20 years the region has endured alarmingly rapid aridification that has shrunk snowpacks, dried up river flows and lowered groundwater levels. Denver, just south of the Marshall Fire, experienced one of its longest snowless stretches on record just prior to the blaze, while much of the West blistered through an extreme autumn heat wave.

Winter fires are not unheard of in Colorado, or in grassland like where the Marshall Fire was first sighted, Swain noted.

“That is not quite as surprising as what happened next,” he said. “It started there, burned a few hundred acres within 10-15 minutes, then it came across shopping malls … a significant extent of tract homes, a fair bit of vegetation in people’s yards and city parks. This is not a wild place, not a remote place.”

“That’s why we get these eerie images,” he said, alluding to social media posts of people fleeing from shopping mall pizza parlors and medical workers watching the fire from a hospital window as near-hurricane force wind gusts pushed fire and smoke plumes east into the towns of Superior, with a population of 13,077, and Louisville, with 20,860 residents.

The images of fires around shopping malls are jarring, Swain said, “And yet as bewildering as it is, we’ve seen it in any number of large, wind-driven fires in recent years.”

Swain said several recent California fires were similar to the Marshall Fire, including the 2017 Tubbs Fire that burned more than 5,000 structures in Santa Rosa, the 2018 Camp Fire that killed more than 80 people when it destroyed the town of Paradise, and the Carr Fire, also in 2018, which jumped the Sacramento River in Northern California to spread into Redding, a city of 90,000 people.

Swain said the temperatures on the day of the Marshall Fire ignited were unremarkable for December in Boulder, with highs in the 40s. But that contrasted sharply with a “multi-month period of almost continuously balmy and record-warm temperatures leading up to this event, with many days making into the 60s and 70s during October and November and overnight lows rarely getting below freezing,” he said. “It was those antecedent record warm and dry conditions that were key in setting the stage.”

And the winds that drove the fire were like nothing he had ever encountered before. “The strongest I have ever experienced anywhere in the world while outdoors,” said Swain, who had to wear protective glasses to protect his eyes from airborne pebbles and roof shingles, with gusts “rushing downward over the Front Range foothills, creating very erratic windflow and occasional tornado-strength vortices. At one point, I witnessed one of these clear-air vortices cross the road and uproot a tree.”

With the increasing confluence of extreme fire weather conditions like high winds and extended droughts and heat waves, “there are a lot of places that are at similar risk, including many of the suburban areas around the Front Range,” Swain said. “But it’s really hard to prepare. There aren’t any simple interventions.”
Preparing for Wildfires in Suburbia

One part of the solution clearly lies in revising building codes to ensure that most construction and landscaping materials are non-flammable, even in areas that appear to be far from wildfire threats, said Veblen, an expert in the geography of fire. Such measures are becoming more common in areas where fire hazards are widely recognized, and the destruction of the Marshall Fire could inform how the boundaries of those zones are drawn in the future.

Since fires cross between jurisdictions, Veblen said that state rules would be most useful, but are unlikely to happen in Colorado, a home rule state where most land use decisions are made by local governments. So that leaves it up to county commissioners, “who need to feel they have the political support of the people so they can resist the influence of the building and real estate interests, which nearly always oppose any mandatory measures that make building more costly,” he said.

A meaningful change to building practices could also be spurred by the insurance industry, which could make sure that people who, for example, build with flame-resistant brick, pay less for fire insurance policies than those who build with flammable materials.

Apart from the built environment, he said the Marshall Fire will also trigger some “serious rethinking” of wildfire mitigation and the management of open space and parklands, which are among the key amenities that make the nearby homes desirable in the first place.

“We know that up until 1950 it was mostly ranchland,” he said, with grazing cattle keeping grasses short and less prone to fire. Residential development started after World War II and accelerated in the 1970s.

“The most important thing we’ve done is change the fuels by putting structures all over the foothill ecotone,” Veblen said. Some early reports on the Marshall Fire suggest the fire may have slowed down when it reached one of the few small areas where cattle still munch the grass, so it could be that managed grazing could be a fire mitigation strategy, he added. Restoring wetlands and stream corridors to the point that they sustain live vegetation could also help by adding moist fire buffers to the landscape.

The Marshall Fire and similar blazes burning in unusual landscapes and seasons could also challenge assumptions about how to reduce the wildfire hazard in areas far from the towns that burned—the fire-prone zone where forests spill off the lower slopes of the Rockies onto the plains. There, the long-standing thinking has been to thin woody fuels.

“But if you thin out ponderosa pine, it increases resources for grass to grow,” Veblen said. “So we said, ‘Sure, let’s have some grass fires, that will be beneficial.’ But no one was thinking about this. Wow, this fire event is changing my perspective on where it is or is not safe from fire.”

Bob Berwyn
Reporter, Austria
Bob Berwyn an Austrian-based freelance reporter who has covered climate science and international climate policy for more than a decade. Previously, he reported on the environment, endangered species and public lands for several Colorado newspapers, and also worked as editor and assistant editor at community newspapers in the Colorado Rockies.

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Social Media and Capitalism: People, Communities and Commodities

By:Suddhabrata Deb Roy

Co-publisher:Zand Graphics Ltd

Categories: Civics & Citizenship, Development, Dialectics, Economic Conditions, Forthcoming, Globalization, Leftism, Marx, Philosophy, Political Science, Social Science

There have been numerous studies done on social media or communication in general. However, most of these studies have neglected a recent and critical element of social media- Social Media Commerce. The present book is one of the first books to focus strictly and solely upon this phenomenon of social accumulation of profits through promoting commercial activities on social media. In this regard, the book presents itself to be a pioneering study within Digital Capitalism Studies.

The introduction will lay out the basics of how communication is being used by capitalism to further oppression and exploitation. It will primarily talk about digital capitalism and the relationship which digital capitalism shares with labour within the society. The introduction will provide a basic framework within which the subsequent chapters can be located. Some of the concepts and ideas which will be highlighted in the introduction are:

1. Digital Capitalism
2. Usage of Communication as a means of production
3. Societal Alienation within digital capitalism
4. The element of “Accumulation” within digital capitalism and its importance within capitalism.

The introduction will also provide an overview of Marxist-Humanist theory along with a brief history of its formation. The chapter will initially highlight some of the aspects of the work of Raya Dunayevskaya, the pioneer of the Marxist-Humanist theory. Taking cue from that, the chapter will then mainly discuss Henri Lefebvre, Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm, especially the aspects of their work relevant to current book. The chapter will also point out theoretical advances made by contemporary Marxist-Humanists like Kevin Anderson and Peter Hudis.

The first chapter looks at the element of social media commerce in general. It will, at first, explain the fundamental aspects of “Social Media Commerce” and its differences with other modes of digital commercial activities such as e-commerce websites and used-goods-digital storefronts. It will present a chronological description of the evolution of social media commerce, specifically ‘Facebook marketplace’. The chapter will explore the political economic perspective of this mode of commerce and its intersections with the revenue model based on targeted advertisements. The chapter will introduce some of the central concepts used in the book, namely:

1. Social Media Commerce
2. Real Subsumption
3. Social Media as a techno-social system

The second chapter will emphasise the theory of ‘property’. It will highlight the various theories regarding how property has been conceptualised.

This chapter will lay out the differences between personal and private property within capitalist social structures. The chapter will take references primarily from Marx’s Capital (All 3 Volumes) along with some of Engels’ works. In addition, the chapter will also provide an overview of the anarchist idea of property, mainly focusing on Proudhon and his debate with Marx and Engels. The final section of this chapter will also outline a theory of ‘digital and information’ property, which will be engaged with in details

The third chapter will focus on the usage of social media commerce within the Global North, primarily focusing on the study conducted by the author in Aotearoa New Zealand. The chapter will talk about how social crisis and human needs play a part in making these practices popular within the non-capitalist classes. Apart from the general results of the study which has used volunteer sampling and in-depth interviews to gather the qualitative data, two detailed accounts of social media commercial sellers will also be included. One of the two subjects of the study is an immigrant from the east, which will aid in establishing the relationship between race and social media commerce.

The chapter will emphasise the concept of “Property” within capitalism and the relationship between personal and private property from a political economic perspective. The chapter will analyse the relationship between these digital platforms and the other tangible methods of profit accumulation within capitalist and semi-capitalist economies. Finally, the chapter will put forward how under real subsumption, contemporary capitalism has transformed itself by inventing new modes of accumulation, which hinge upon dissolving the differences between personal and private property holdings.

The final pre-conclusive chapter attempts to provide an overview of how accumulation proceeds through social media within the Global South. This chapter will be primarily based on the study conducted by the author within the city of Hyderabad in India, with questions similar to those used in the case of the Global North. This chapter will emphasise upon the concept of “freedom” from a Hegelian-Marxist perspective and its manipulation within social media commerce by capitalism. The methodology adopted for the chapter will remain same as that of the previous chapter, i.e., volunteer sampling along with in-depth interviews, a rationale for which will be provided.

The chapter will analyse, or rather evaluate, the various elements of socio-economic crisis and human needs, as laid out in the previous chapter, within the context of the Global South. In doing so, this chapter will present a comparative analysis of social media commerce and its associated processes within the Global North and the Global South. The chapter will emphasise the various aspects of social structures, which play a pivotal role within capitalist accumulation processes. Specifically speaking, the third chapter will be about creating an intellectual dialogue between the Global North and the Global South, in terms of the relevance and usage of social media commerce by capitalism in both the contexts.

The conclusion will start with putting forward the importance of digital spaces within the general social space. Taking cue from this, the conclusion will talk about how abject alienation within the social spaces renders the alienation within these digital spaces invisible. The chapter will mainly focus on the perspectives developed by Raya Dunayevskaya and Henri Lefebvre, in putting forward a Marxist-Humanist account of contemporary capitalist exploitation within digital capitalism. The conclusion will bring out the importance of human subjectivity in addressing the questions of capitalist exploitation.

The conclusion will also focus on the factors of the successes of models like AIRBNB, in the Global North, and Oyo Rooms, in India. By doing so the conclusion will present a causal relationship between social alienation and the success of these models of capitalist exploitation. At the end, the conclusion will proceed towards analysing the usage of established communicative networks by capitalism to exploit the working class both digitally and physically, and the need of addressing this mode of exploitation from a Marxist-Humanist perspective, which takes an adequate cognisance of both human subjectivity and political economy.

---

Table of Contents

Introduction: Marxist-Humanist Theory

Chapter 1 Social Media and the Commerce Therein

Chapter 2 The Theory of Property

Chapter 3 Accumulation in the Global North

Chapter 4 Accumulation in the Global South

Conclusion: Marxist-Humanist Approach to the Issue

Notes

Appendices

Bibliography

ISBN Print: 978-1-988832-89-0

ISBN eBook: 978-1988832-90-6

Publication Date: August 2021

Binding Type: Soft Cover

Trim Size: 6in x 9in

Language: English

Colour: B&W

https://darajapress.com/publication/social-media-and-capitalist-accumulation

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Chile: Behind the Left’s Victory

Summary: Background and context for Chile’s runoff election – Editors

https://imhojournal.org/

In a stunning turnaround from the first round of voting four weeks ago, Left presidential candidate Gabriel Boric swept to victory Dec 19 over Right wing candidate José Antonio Kast by a margin of 56% to 44%. At 35 years of age Boric will become the youngest president in Chile’s history and one of the youngest heads of state in the world. To achieve this Boric increased his second round vote by 2.8 million to 4.6 million votes. This is more than 2.5 times his first round total four weeks earlier, which is remarkable.

Where did the 2.8 million votes come from? Boric was able to attract 1.2 million new voters into the second round despite customary Chilean voter abstention. These abstaining voters include youth, marginalized city dwellers, and rural populations. Of the seven first round presidential candidates, the four Center Left candidates threw all their 1.5 million votes to Boric. Surprisingly he also picked up 110,000 votes from the Center Right to reach the 2.8 million increase.

After the neoliberal abandonment of compulsory voting in 2012, Chilean elections have been marked by low voter turnout and apathy. Voters show low identification with parties. In the words of Noam Titelman, Chilean political scientist at the London School of Economics, the point to understand about the past two years in Chile is that “rather than being a turn to the Left, it’s been a turn against the elites. And while that turn has for some time been expressed in more progressive demands, it could at any moment be expressed by the far Right.” Happily, this election showed the anger against elites continues to favor the Left. On Dec 19 the Right wing message was rejected by Chilean voters.

Nevertheless, it is important to acknowledge that grassroots opposition to elites in Chile maintains its independence from Left and Right electoral politics. This shown by the December 19, 2021 vote totals:

Left (Boric) 4,620,671 (30.7%)

Right (Kast) 3,649,647 (24.3%)

Voters Abstaining 6,760,656 (45.0%)

Total Eligible Voters 15,030,974 (100.0%)

Thus the winning candidate on Dec 19 was ‘Abstain’ with 45.0% of the eligible vote. Boric came in second with 30.7% and the Rightist Kast a distant third with 24.3% of eligible voters.

There is a similar dynamic in U.S. politics where the Republican Party counts on voter apathy and abstention in its continuing effort to impose minority rule. Regarding the highly contested 2020 U.S. presidential election, Biden won 34% of eligible votes and Trump 31%, with 33% of the eligible voters declining to vote. Thus in the disputed U.S. election Trump did not come in second, but third.

The 67% turnout of the 2020 U.S. presidential election is low by Brazilian or Swedish standards but significantly higher than the 55% turnout in the 2021 Chilean election. Nevertheless, Boric’s supporters point to the 55% turnout as a validation of their candidate because it is the highest voter turnout in a Chilean election since 2012.

Gabriel Boric should be congratulated on his victory because his astute second round negotiation delivered the full support of all Center Left coalitions and brought 1.2 million new voters into the process in Boric’s favor. Nevertheless, it is important to acknowledge that the 45.0% non-voting bloc represents a significant check on any future Chilean administration. At 6.8 million voters this bloc includes some of the 3.7 million Chileans who drove the 2019 Uprising against Chile’s neoliberal regime in which $3.5 billion USD in private property was destroyed. The Uprising’s primary demand was for an elected Constitutional Convention to write a new democratic Constitution for Chile. Faced with millions of angry citizens in the streets and billions of dollars in targeted property destruction, Right-wing president Sebastian Piñera granted the Uprising’s audacious request. Elections for a Constitutional Convention were held in May 2021.

It is important to realize that Left street protest and Left electoral politics operate in tension in Chile. During the 2019 Uprising observers saw protesters would not allow the display of banners or insignia by established Left political parties. This “leaderless” insurrection had no apparent central coordinating body. Rocio Lorca, University of Chile law professor and Boric supporter, said Boric’s signature of an “institutional solution” to the 2019 Uprising was done against the wishes of his activist base. Moreover, Boric’s support for the incarceration of arrested protesters enraged the activist street Left. Boric is an astute politician who makes calculated choices in the context of the current situation. This situation was characterized by Chilean scholar Melany Cruz as follows, “Social movements are not going to go away. Whoever is in power will have to deal with these actors..The Uprising will start again.” Moreover, according to author Victor Figueroa Clark, “Social movements will keep tabs on the new government and hold them accountable.”

Thus there is a dual, but conflicted Left strategy at play inside and outside of state institutions in Chile. The prime leader of the inside strategy is Gabriel Boric and he is given high praise in this role. Chilean law professor Rocio Lorca says during the 2019 Uprising Boric was crucial to negotiating details of the new Constitutional Convention with the Right-wing Piñera government. The Constitutional Convention is under deadline to complete its work for a 2022 ratification by popular plebiscite. It will be Boric’s job as president-elect to see this happens. The current Piñera government has done little to assist the process and much to derail it. Rocio Lorca as a legal specialist is relieved that Boric won and and says this historic process is now “in good hands”.

Another significant challenge to Boric’s negotiating skills will be to win passage of a Left agenda through Chile’s current Congress. The four center Left coalitions control 51% of the 155 seats in the Chamber of Deputies. However, the 50 seat Senate is deadlocked with the Right controlling 25 seats. The Center Left controls 23 seats and must gain the support of 2 Independents to counter the Right. Boric will need every one of the Center Left votes he negotiated in the Dec 19 runoff to make headway with the current Chilean Congress. The threat of stalemated obstruction is real. In this, the outside strategy of the street Left comes into play. Although Boric does not control the outside strategy, Chilean youth and marginalized urban and rural populations can once again quickly throw themselves into forceful and militant protest when elites move to deny them basic needs. In the political stalemate and obstruction now afflicting the United States Congress it is noteworthy that forceful and militant street protest are missing and absence of progress is the clear result.

On balance, the Dec 19 Chilean election represents a turning point for a country that has weathered fifty years of political and economic assault from the neoliberal Right. For reference the background and context of the 2021 Chilean election include the following issues.

There is a legacy of decades of neoliberalism in Chile where the top 1% take 30% of the national wealth followed by the next 49% who are rewarded with two-thirds of the nation’s wealth. The latter is a good deal for Chile’s new ‘middle class’. Unfortunately, the bottom 50% of the population are left with only 2% of Chile’s income.

Chile’s vaunted ‘economic miracle’ covers up one of the highest levels of income inequality among OECD members. At $25,000 USD the national per capita income appears respectable but the fact is 70% of workers earn less than $7,400 USD per year.

In Chile all basic services are privatized, forcing Chileans to ‘purchase’ education, health services, even water. Working people resort to credit to make ends meet leaving Chileans with the highest household debt in Latin America. A significant portion of this is credit card debt. The current Right-wing president of Chile, billionaire Sebastian Piñera, made his fortune through the distribution of credit cards to the Chilean population collecting interest payments on people’s purchase of basic services.

Critical background to the social struggle in Chile today includes the growth of grassroots networks of mutual aid outside of government institutions and the 2019 “estallido social” (social explosion) where 3.7 million Chileans went into the streets in the largest protest in Chile’s history. Representing one out of every five people in the country Chile’s 2019 protest, on a proportional basis, was three times the size of the USA George Floyd protests. In what was termed a “leaderless” movement, protesting Chileans destroyed $3.5 billion USD in private property including the Santiago subway system where a fare increase sparked the initial protests.

A demand of the 2019 Uprising was a new Constitution to replace the neoliberal Constitution of 1980 imposed by Pinochet’s military dictatorship. In the May 2021 elections for a Constitutional Convention, the Chilean Right sought a blocking minority of one-third and the right of veto over all articles of the future Constitution. They were not successful. The 155 delegates were widely and directly elected by 65 different political organizations in several coalitions. In fact the Far Left won 35% of the delegates and thus obtained the blocking minority and right of veto over all articles. The Far Left and Center Left have 52% of all delegates and need to convince 25 of 39 independents to gain the 67% margin needed to win approval for their draft of the Constitution. This is achievable. In the Left-leaning Constitutional Convention it is noteworthy that 42% of the elected delegates are individuals with no party affiliation.

The Right wing candidate in the Dec 19 runoff election was José Antonio Kast. The Kast campaign was a backlash against the 2019 Uprising plus the ongoing feminist wave of struggle. Kast promised his supporters he would end mass mobilizations in Chile by increasing police violence. Kast implied, moreover, that he would persecute the progressive Chilean Left in the way Dilma Rousseff and Lula da Silva were removed from office and incarcerated in Brazil.

José Antonio Kast proposed deep ditches at Chile’s borders with Bolivia and Peru (as opposed to walls) to stop unwanted migrants. In the face of social protest Kast openly praises the brutal Pinochet dictatorship as Chile’s answer. Kast stokes fears of drug cartels and Indigenous rights activists to demand enhanced levels of state security. Kast speaks strongly against feminism, same sex relationships, and all forms of abortion. In these culture wars Kast partners with U.S. based Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) a legal advocacy group of the Religious Right.

Neoliberalism’s loss of credibility following the 2008 global crash has given rise to explosive anti-establishment feelings worldwide. In response, global elites have turned to the extreme Right and a politics of borders, authoritarianism, and social conservatism to maintain electoral coalitions. It is significant that Chilean voters when presented with a strong and familiar Right-wing narrative, rejected it by a margin of 74% on Dec 19. After 50 years could this represent a final crisis of legitimacy for the Chilean Right? Given Trump’s ongoing machinations, it is noteworthy that Kast conceded defeat quickly the same day. Could Chile represent an international turning point in the global crisis of neoliberalism?

The winning Left-wing candidate is Gabriel Boric, a former student leader and member of the Social Convergence party in the Frente Amplio coalition. Boric’s party are advocates of libertarian socialism, autonomism, and feminism. He campaigned on the slogan, “If Chile was the birthplace of neoliberalism, then it will also be its graveyard!” Boric was elected by a wide margin to head the larger Left electoral slate Apruebo Dignidad which includes the Communist Party of Chile. Given the youth, relative inexperience, and outsider status of the leaders of Frente Amplio, they have made concerted efforts to reassure the leaders of centrist political parties in order to secure their support in this election. There is a danger Boric and team will compromise with political centrists and will abandon the interests of the popular base who made the Uprising and who won the commitment to re-write Chile’s Constitution.

Three days before the runoff, Michael Chessum published an observation in the London Review of Books which visualizes a path forward for Chile.


The left faces a series of strategic dilemmas…It remains to be seen how far Boric will moderate his programme in the hope of winning over centrist voters. The young leaders of the Chilean left have to work out how to replace the establishment without becoming it.

As Chile’s inside Left work capably on institutional solutions, Chile’s independent social movements continue outside as a counterweight. We see a Left that endeavors to assimilate the hard lessons of history. A new generation has the stage in Chile. As we watch them work to fulfill Boric’s campaign slogan we are encouraged. “If Chile was the birthplace of neoliberalism, then it will also be its graveyard!”

Bill Young

Bill Young has a degree in Latin American studies and has traveled widely in the region. This includes time in Allende’s Chile in 1972. Spending twelve years in Indigenous communities in North and South America, he worked for locally-managed co-operatives there. Bill now volunteers in Mutual Aid organizations stateside and is happy to maintain links with América Latina through the UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México).

Time, Labour, and the Overcoming of Domination: Reflections on Martin Hägglund’s “This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom”

LONG READ

January 4, 2022


Summary: This review of an outstanding philosophic study that has much to offer to those seeking to develop an alternative to capitalism, first appeared in Historical Materialism Online, September 7, 2021 – Editors

I.

In the face of a global pandemic that underlines the fragility of individual life and the massive protests against police abuse and for Black lives that call for a reorganisation of social life, few books speak more to the present moment than Martin Hägglund’s This Life, Secular Life and Spiritual Freedom. It is not often that a dense philosophical work that engages thinkers ranging from St. Augustine, Spinoza, and Hegel to Marx, Adorno, and Martin Luther King Jr. achieves widespread popularity outside of academia. That Hägglund’s book has done so is due not only to his facility in conveying complex ideas without succumbing to the sin of popularisation; it is most of all because its central argument—that freedom is determined by how we cultivate the finite time at our disposal—speaks directly to the present historical juncture.

Freedom, he correctly emphasises, is not liberation from external constraints. It is being ‘able to ask ourselves what we ought to do with our time’.1 Taking ownership of our time is what he means by spiritual freedom. It involves secular as against religious faith, since notions of divine transcendence inevitably distract from prioritising the free and collective organisation of the limited time available to us. All living beings devote time to activities not directly related to maintaining their material existence. What characterises humans (for better or worse) is that we can reflect and act upon how to manage this surplus time. ‘It underlies all normative considerations, since what I do with my time is what I do with my life. Every question of what I ought to do—or ought not to do—is ultimately a question of what I ought to do with my time’.2 However, we can seize the time only if we acknowledge that time is finite; if we believe our lives are potentially infinite, there is no urgency to cultivate lived life as the highest value.

Hägglund’s critique of religion has nothing to do with the crude materialism of ‘new atheists’ or many orthodox Marxists. He is not suggesting that religious people are incapable of spiritual freedom, only that their pursuit of it is at odds with a belief in eternal life. Believers who help the poor out of fear (or love) of God actually treat them as means to an end instead of as ends-in-themselves; their standpoint is instrumental. I can treat someone as an end in itself only if in caring for them I affirm that their lives are not a mere way-station on the road to eternal bliss. Hägglund pulls no punches: ‘Freedom as an end in itself is not promoted by any of the world religions or by any of its founding figures. Neither Jesus nor Buddha nor Muhammad has anything to say about freedom as an end in itself. That is not an accident but consistent with their teachings. What ultimately matters from a religious perspective is not freedom but salvation, what ultimately matters is not to lead a life but to be saved from being alive’.3

While Hägglund’s critique of monotheistic religions (as well as Buddhism, which defines nirvana as liberation from contingency and finitude) is extremely cogent, it is less clear that it applies to animism (common among many Indigenous peoples), which denies any categorical distinction between the physical and the spiritual (Hägglund does not address the issue). Nor is it so clear that religion per se necessarily reflects an alienated society (one is reminded of Hegel’s praise of Greek religion for fusing religious imagery with ethical life, despite his criticisms of its accommodation with slavery). In any case, Hägglund does not presume that religion can be annulled by enlightened critique; he follows Marx in holding that, since religious alienation is an expression of alienated social relations, the former will persist as long as the latter remains to be uprooted.

The most important part or the book is the second half, which consists of a creative (if not totally original) reading of Marx’s critique of capital. Though few deny that the theory of value is integral to Marx’s critique of capital, many have attributed to him the view that ‘labour is the source of all value’. But this is clearly incorrect. The value of commodities is not determined by the number of hours employed in making them but by the average amount of time in which it is necessary to do so. If it were otherwise, producers would be made to work slower rather than faster, since the greater the quantity of labour time, the greater would be the value of the product. Hence, concrete labour is not the source of value; its substance is abstract or homogenous labour—labour forced to conform to a constantly-shifting average irrespective of the needs of the producers. Hägglund brilliantly shows that ‘socially necessary labour time as the measure of value is specific to the commodity form and becomes the essence of value only in the capitalist mode of production. Labour time as the measure of value is not transhistorically necessary but the historically specific essence of capitalism, which is contradictory and can be overcome’.4

Sadly, many Marxists view value production as a transhistorical necessity that cannot be overcome. They are so overburdened by the unequal distribution of value that permeates modern society that they overlook the need to uproot the human relations that makes value production possible in the first place. The emphasis on a ‘fair’ redistribution of value rather than the abolition of social relations which compel wealth to assume a monetary form defines not just the failed efforts to promote a ‘transition to socialism’ in the twentieth century but also much of the rebirth of interest in socialism in much of the world today. The critique of capitalism remains on the superficial, phenomenal level of targeting property forms and exchange relations rather than what is essential—the domination of abstract universal labour time. It is not hard to see that a superficial critique of the logic of capital that leaves aside its critical time determinant leads of necessity to an impoverished notion of socialism that stops short of a new humanism.

Before turning to the broader implications of Hägglund’s reading of Marx, it is worth noting that it speaks directly to subtle but crucial shifts underway in the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic—even though This Life was published prior to it. I am referring to the fact that millions of workers in the US and elsewhere are deciding not to return to work now that social restrictions in many countries are being lifted—even though there is an enormous pent-up demand for their labour power. As one report put it, ‘On a more philosophical level, the constant threat of illnesses, more time with family members, leisure time that gave way to new passions—all may have prompted some workers to reassess how they want to spend their time. Burned out, some people have left their jobs for once-on-a-lifetime experiences, like traveling the world. Others have seen an opportunity to shift careers or branch out on their own’.5 Another report notes, ‘Many are rethinking what work means to them, how they are valued, and how they spend their time. It’s leading to a dramatic increase in resignations—a record four million people quit their jobs [in the US] in April alone, according to the Labor Department’. It cites a worker saying, ‘I think the pandemic has changed my mindset in a way, like I really value my time now… I think the pandemic has just allowed for time. You just have more time to think about what you really want in life’.6

This hardly reflects the experience of all workers; many (especially in the health care profession) found that the pandemic left them with much less time. But we should not overlook the dramatic sea change in attitudes spurred by the pandemic. Faced with constant reminders of how fickle and uncertain is our finite existence in the face of millions of deaths, increasing numbers of people are rethinking their priorities—especially when it comes to deciding how to organise their time. Without realising it, they are grappling with a problem that is central to the Marxian critique of the capitalist mode of production.


II.

It may seem that Hägglund’s critique of the anxiety felt by many religious and philosophical currents when it comes to accepting the finitude of the human condition does not apply to secular leftists, who are devoted to more mundane matters than the pursuit of everlasting life. However, this is not the case. Marx is often credited or condemned for having a ‘perfectionist’ view of human nature, which implies that socialism ends not just class conflict but all basic conflicts. Others hold that socialism transcends natural necessity, often taken to mean that it abolishes labour—even though Marx held, ‘Labour, as the creator of use-values, as useful labour, is a condition of human existence which is independent of all forms of society; it is an eternal natural necessity which mediates the metabolism between man and nature, and therefore human life itself’.7 It can be argued that secular standpoints that envision a new society freed from such considerations express a disquiet with finitude similar to that found in many religious traditions.

Marx, of course, conceived of socialism as the end of class society, the transcendence of alienation, and the abolition of alienated labour. However, that is a far cry from suggesting that he conceived of the realm of freedom as bidding adieu to natural necessity. As he put it in his 1844 critique of Hegel, ‘Humanity is directly a natural being … [and] as a natural, corporeal, sensuous, objective being it is a, conditioned, and limited creature, like animals and plants’. For Marx, the aspiration to overcome our limited, sensuous being is possible only as ‘a product of pure thought (i.e., of mere imagination)—an abstraction’.8 That is why he stressed, ‘to be sensuous is to suffer’.9 A new society does not put an end to suffering, it puts an end to needless suffering, and it enables us to face our suffering by giving meaning to our life’s accomplishment and setbacks through the free organisation of our time.

That many are reluctant to acknowledge this is reflected in the widespread prohibition against discussing a postcapitalist society. There are good reasons for caution in trying to specify the content of a socialist or communist future, as suggested by Marx’s critique of the utopians. But many have taken this further, by applying the religious prohibition against making images of God to efforts to describe a new society freed from alienation. Perhaps the foremost expression is Theodor Adorno’s invocation of Bilderverbot in Negative Dialectics: ‘Such absence concurs with the theological ban on images. Materialism brought that ban into secular form by not permitting Utopia be positively pictured; that is the substance of its negativity. At its most materialistic, materialism comes to agree with theology’.10

There are serious problems with this perspective. It makes sense for a monotheist to prohibit positive descriptions of the ‘absolute,’ since doing so represents the infinite in finite terms. The most that can be done is to say what God is not (via negativa). But communism is not a substitute for God: the latter is unconditioned and freed of finitude whereas the former is historically conditioned and immersed in finitude. It is for good reason that Marx proclaimed, ‘communism is not the end, the goal, of human development’.11 There can be no ‘end,’ since development is impossible without an internal lack or limit. As Hegel never ceases to remind us, negativity is immanent in Spirit. Marx knew this well, as seen from his discussion of the ‘defects’ that define the lower phase of communism in The Critique of the Gotha Programme. He does not suggest that abstract labour, value production, or class domination persists in the lower phase; these are all superseded from the inception of socialism. However, the realm of freedom also undergoes self-development. The needed revolutions never end. Which is why the Grundrisse defines a society that frees material wealth from its value integument is one defined by ‘the absolute movement of becoming’.

But the question remains—is it possible to positively envision an alternative to capitalism without falling into the shortcomings associated with utopian speculation?

Perhaps the most original aspect of This Life is its discussion of how Hegel’s thought speaks to this. Many will object that Hegel was an idealist who glorified the Prussian state and had little to offer in the way of a critique of capital. Much of contemporary Hegel scholarship undermines such stereotypes and Hägglund puts it to good use. It is true that ‘the absolute’ in Hegel involves mutual recognition between individuals and the state, but, by ‘the state’, he means social institutions that embody the idea of freedom. An idea of ‘freedom’ that lacks concrete embodiment is formalist and empty. Hegel therefore contends that the quest for other-worldly religious salvation turns us away from the true object of devotion—freedom’s embodiment in forms of collective social praxis in which no one is considered free unless everyone is free. Such institutions are finite; but, like the Christian God, the idea of freedom must be embodied in a material form that is reconstituted (or born anew) when faced with death—that is, the rise of a new era that renders obsolete older forms of social praxis. Hence, Hägglund writes, ‘The aim of Hegel’s Phenomenology can be seen as a secular “reconciliation” with our finitude, in the sense of grasping that our finitude is not a limitation that blocks us from attaining the absolute. Rather… the absolute knowing of absolute spirit is not the act of a divine mind, but our philosophical grasp of the conditions of spiritual life’.12

Hägglund, nevertheless, acknowledges Hegel’s limits, since ‘On Hegel’s account, only the philosopher can attain the “absolute knowing” that we are the source of the authority of our norms and that our freedom—the highest good—is possible only through our mutual recognition of one another as essentially social, historical, material, and finite living beings’.13 Hegel makes this plain enough in The Philosophy of Religion: ‘How the actual present-day world is to find its way out of the state of dualism [between individual self-interest and collective praxis] and what form it is to take, are questions which must be left to itself to settle and to deal with them is not the immediate and practical business of philosophy’.14 Herein lies a fundamental philosophical divide between Marx and Hegel. As Hägglund puts it, ‘For Marx, on the contrary, absolute knowing cannot be limited to a theoretical achievement of the philosopher. Rather, absolute knowing must be a practical achievement that in principle can be taken up and sustained by everyone’.15 This is the meaning of the Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach—not that we forgo the effort to think the absolute, let alone the need to think philosophically, but that we change the world by creating conditions in which the absolute can be known—and so that we can be known.

As Gillian Rose magnificently put it several decades ago, ‘Hegel’s philosophy has no social import if the absolute cannot be thought’.16 It can likewise be said that Marx’s philosophy has no social import if the new society cannot be thought. This is because the absolute is immanent in our mundane earthly existence. Which means, ‘If the absolute is misrepresented, we are misrepresenting ourselves, and are correspondingly unfree. But the absolute has always been misrepresented by societies and peoples, for these societies have not been free, and they have re-presented their lack of freedom to themselves in the form of religion’.17

Insofar as the ‘absolute,’ when viewed from the vantage point of Marx’s transformation of Hegel’s revolution in philosophy into a philosophy of revolution, is the expression of a new society that transcends alienation, Hägglund’s book provides a powerful counter to the prevailing prejudice that envisioning the alternative to capitalism is pointless or counterproductive.


III.

There is still more to be said, however, as to whether is it possible to envision an alternative to capitalism without falling prey to the shortcomings associated with utopian speculation.

Many no doubt think that any effort to do so runs counter to Marx’s insistence that ‘Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things’.18 Yet I would argue that Marx’s opposition to defining the future irrespective of actual movements is precisely what compels us to spell out an alternative to capitalism. Marx made no secret of the fact that he considered the most vital accomplishment of the workers’ movements of his time to be its rejection of the capitalist organisation of time. The chapter on ‘The Working Day’ in Volume One of Capital goes so far as to call the movement for the eight-hour day a greater step in the fight for freedom than the Declaration of the Rights of Man. The question of time was hardly restricted to ‘when does my working day begin and end’; it extended to questioning the timing and rhythm of the work process itself, which Marx takes up in his critique of the despotic plan of capital at the point of production.’

This has taken on greater importance in recent decades in light of struggles against automation and artificial intelligence, objections to digital capital’s extension of the working day, criticisms of the enormous time constraints placed upon women burdened with unpaid domestic labour, and attacks on the prison industrial complex that offers victims of deindustrialisation little more than prison time for committing the pettiest of offenses—especially if they are Black, Latinx, or Native American.

Hägglund’s argument that socialism consists, first and foremost, of replacing socially necessary labour time with free time as the measure of social relations may not constitute an outline of a new society, but it surely provides conceptual ground for developing one. He stresses, ‘Socially available free time is not merely leisure time but time devoted to activities that we count as meaningful in themselves. These activities can range from participation in forms of labour that we recognize as necessary for the common good, all the way to the pursuit of individual projects that challenge the given norms of what may be a meaningful activity’.19 The abolition of socially necessary labour time does not end labour as such, since there will always be a need to reproduce our means of subsistence. It rather means that necessary labour will be reduced to a minimum, while its character and form—like all kinds of activity—will be freely determined: ‘Even our socially necessary labour can be an expression of our freedom if it is shared for the sake of the common good. The aim, then, is to decrease the realm of necessity and increase the realm of freedom by making the relation between the two a democratic question… we need to negotiate… how to cultivate the finite time that is the condition of our freedom’.20

Although Hägglund’s interpretation of Marx’s theory of capital is incisive, it raises a number of critical questions.

First, the term ‘value’ has two distinct meanings—one refers to economic valuation (‘what’s the value of your mortgage?’), the other to moral valuation (‘I value your love and friendship’). The first treats value as a quantity of money; the second cannot be quantified in terms of money. The two are, at times, conflated by Hagglund, as in, ‘The revaluation of value as the foundation for Marx’s arguments has generally been overlooked and never fully understood, partly because Marx restricts his own use of the term “value” to the capitalist conception of value as the quantity of labour time’.21He is right about this, but Marx has very good reasons for discussing ‘value’ in a purely economic sense. As Hägglund notes elsewhere, Capital is an immanent critique of capitalist society; it employs terms that are adequate to its concept. Value in an economic sense serves as Capital’s object of critique, since that is the only ‘value’ that is acknowledged by capital. This does not mean that a revaluation of value is not extraordinarily important; the creation of an alternative to capitalism hinges on developing social values that break from the notion that only that which augments profit is valuable. However, not alerting the reader to the divide between these two uses of ‘value’ can lead to lack of clarity.

Take the statement, ‘The measure of value is thus different in the realm of freedom than in the realm of necessity. The value of an object or an activity in the realm of freedom is not directly correlated with the amount of labour time required to produce or maintain it’.22 The ‘measure of value’ is indeed different in these two realms since the annulment of alienated or abstract labour puts an end to value production. It is impossible to ‘measure’ what does not exist. Things continue to be valued in socialism but not in terms of socially necessary labour time.

However, Marx clearly states—in the Grundrisse, Capital, and The Critique of the Gotha Programme—that actual labour time (not to be confused with socially necessary labour time) will serve as a measure of social relations in at least the initial phase of socialism or communism (Marx treats the two as indistinguishable, not as distinct historical stages). When Marx, in Capital, calls upon the reader to ‘imagine, for a change, an association of free people, working with the means of production held in common,’ he describes this postcapitalist, socialist society as follows: ‘The share of each individual producer in the means of subsistence is determined by his labour-time. Labour-time would in that case play a double part’—it would be the basis of ‘a definite social plan [that] maintains the correct proportion between the different functions of labour and the various needs of the associations’ as well as ‘a measure of the part taken by each individual in the common labour’.23 Actual labour time—the number of concrete hours one works—becomes a measure of social relations. Nowhere does Marx speak of the measure of value in a socialist or communist society, since actual labour time in no way implies the existence of socially necessary labour time. Since abstract labour is the substance of value, the abolition of the dual character of labour by the freely associated producers eliminates the very basis of value and surplus value in the economic sense. What is abolished is not labour, but social relations in which it is treated as a means for augmenting wealth in monetary form. As Marx discusses in The Critique of the Gotha Programme, once society dispenses with exchange value, commodity exchange and capital and subsequently distributes the social product based on the actual number of hours of labour performed by the individual, we will have reached the initial phase of freedom which prepares us for a higher one in which free time rather than labour time serves as a measure.

Second, while This Life has much to say about the measure of value, it has much less on the substance of value—abstract labour. The two are closely related: labour becomes a value-creating substance insofar as it is subjected to an abstract time determination that is beyond the producers’ control. But labour time is not necessarily correlated to abstract universal labour time; in fact, for most of human history the latter did not even exist. Nevertheless, Hägglund writes, ‘As long as we measure our social wealth in terms of labour time, technological development is bound to intensify exploitative methods for extracting relative surplus value from workers’.24 This is, again, not consistent with Marx’s discussions of a postcapitalist society.

That Marx—briefly and very much in outline—presented a conception of what life would be like following capitalism does mean it should be followed as a blueprint. We do need to take seriously, however, why Marx distinguishes between actual labour time and socially necessary labour time—especially since the point is lost on the part of almost all of his commentators. Take Hägglund’s statement, ‘As soon as the satisfaction of our needs depends on the contribution of our labour, we are back to the form of coercion that Marx sought to overcome through his critique of wage labour’.25 This not only overlooks the fact that some kind of labour contribution will be needed in any society; it also leaves unclear what is meant by a ‘contribution of labour’. Does it refer to producing goods and services in accordance with an average amount of time that is determined by the market or the state? Or does it refer to the actual number of hours of labour performed by freely associated individuals in communes or cooperatives? The two are not just different, they are diametrically opposed. If ‘contribution of labour’ is understood in the first sense, Hägglund is right; if it is understood in the second sense, he is not.

These problems may stem from the debt that This Life owes to Moishe Postone’s Time, Labour, and Social Domination. As I have discussed elsewhere,26 although the book is an important contribution to Marxist scholarship, it suffers from serious theoretical limitations. These appear in its most important contribution—its correct contention that the split between concrete and abstract labour (and value production generally) is specific to capitalism and is not a transhistorical fact of human existence. That, in itself, is no discovery of Postone’s; it was pointed out decades earlier by such figures as Rosa Luxemburg, Raya Dunayevskaya, and Karel Kosik. What is new in Postone’s ‘reinterpretation’ of Marx is the claim that concrete labour becomes so dominated by abstract labour as to become virtually indistinguishable from it. He well knows that both are generated in the same instant; but he argues that since concrete labour is the mode of expression of abstract labour, the logic of capital effaces any distinction between labourers and the value-form of labour power. The logical conclusion is that any appeal to subjective human forces to uproot capital (whether through class struggle or other kinds of human resistance) is futile; the subject of liberation is not living labour but dead labour, capital.

Postone largely draws his interpretation from the section of Marx’s Grundrisse on the automaton, which envisions a point at which living labour becomes so totally displaced from production that ‘labour time ceases and must cease to be a measure’27 of social wealth. Value production comes to an end through the very principle which governs it—the drive to squeeze out more value in less amounts of time through labour-saving devices.

But there are problems with such appropriations of the Grundrisse. First, Marx takes a different position in Capital, writing ‘Only the abolition of the capitalist form of production would permit the reduction of the working day to the necessary labour time. But even in that case. the latter would expand to take up more of the working day’.28 Second, as Dunayevskaya pointed out as early as 1958, since the Grundrisse was written during the politically quiescent 1850s, it falls short of dialectically connecting the objective laws of capitalism with subjective forms of resistance—unlike Capital, which was written under the impact of the campaigns for the eight-hour day and the struggles of African Americans against slavery. As she put it, ‘there is too much emphasis in the Grundrisse on machinery as providing the material basis for the dissolution of capital’.29 The effort to expunge class struggle and other forms of resistance from Marx’s value-theoretic categories—as if the former concerns the ‘exoteric’ Marx which can be put aside in favour of the ‘esoteric’ theory of value—rests on very shaky ground.

Hägglund takes aim at the claim that dead labour is the emancipatory alternative, writing, ‘In Postone’s story of the transition from capitalism to socialism, historical agents do not have the power to change anything… he offers no account of what we will be free to do and why our freedom matters’.30 He rightly holds that Postone’s ‘indeterminant conception of freedom is incompatible with democratic socialism’.31However, while these defects may be related to Postone’s failure to argue for a re-evaluation of value, it has much more to do with his peculiar reading of Marx’s theory of value, in which abstract labour effaces concrete labour to the point of foreclosing any human agency—and hence the kind of re-evaluation Hägglund is arguing for.

Hägglund’s project would be strengthened by engaging the Marxist-Humanist tradition, which decades before Postone, the Neue Marx-Lektüre, and value-form theorists, argued for the historical specificity of Marx’s theory of value, opposed the view that the abolition of private property and competitive markets ensures an exit from capitalism, and held that the elimination of socially necessary labour time in favour of freely associated time is the cardinal principle of socialism. As Dunayevskaya wrote in Marxism and Freedom, ‘The capitalist organisation [of society] is where all labour, no matter what its concrete nature, is timed according to what is socially necessary. It becomes one mass of abstract labour precisely because the labourer himself is paid at value’.32 Notice, here, that the duality of labour under capitalism is posed not only in terms of concrete versus abstract labour, but of the labourer versus the value-form of its labour power. Skipping over such potential internal resistance to the value-form renders value theory, and by extensive Marxism, arid, objectivist and non-humanist.

Marx’s critique of the value-form of mediation, however, is thoroughly humanist—contrary to the claims of Postone and many others. Marx’s value-theoretic categories are thoroughly rooted in class relations, not because he was a class reductionist, but because his fundamental object of critique is the reified form of human praxis that defines modern society—beginning with social relations at the point of production, but hardly ending there. As Dunayevskays argues, ‘Marx’s analysis of labour—and this is what distinguishes him from all other Socialists and Communists of his day and of ours—goes much further than the economic structure of society. His analysis goes to the actual human relations’.33 Grasping and developing this is the fundamental challenge facing all revolutionary theory today, especially when it comes to extending Marxism beyond issues of class to that of race, gender, and sexuality. ‘Marxism is a theory of liberation or it is nothing’.34 Each generation must find its way to meeting that perspective, most of all our own.

The issues raised by Hägglund’s study are of the foremost importance. For, if the logic of capital effaces subjective human resistance, it can only mean (as Postone and many capital-logic theorists openly affirm) that capital is the ‘absolute’ of modern life. And, if that is the case, it follows that we who resist capital are not part of the absolute. The absolute once again gets viewed as outside or beyond us. That is an egregious misrepresentation of the absolute. The claim that the human can no longer be thought—a central premise of much of contemporary left-wing thought—cannot but misrepresent ourselves as well as freedom itself. But the absolute—whether understood in Hegelian terms as the unity of subject and object or in Marxist-Humanist terms as the new society—can be thought, if only we are daring enough to think it.


References

Adorno, T. 1973. Negative Dialectics. New York: Seabury Press.

Dunayevskaya, R.1973. Philosophy and Revolution, from Hegel to Sartre and from Marx to Mao. New York: Dell.

Dunayevskaya, R. 2000 [orig. 1958]. Marxism and Freedom, from 1776 Until Today. Amherst NY: Humanities Books.

Ember, EW. 2021. ‘Record Numbers Are Quitting Jobs as Virus Wanes, The New York Times, June 21.

Hägglund, M. 2019. This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom. New York: Pantheon.

Hägglund, M. 2021. “Marx, Hegel, and thew Critique of Religion A Response,” Losa Angeles Review of Books, March 15, 2021 https://v2.lareviewofbooks.org/article/marx-hegel-and-the-critique-of-religion-a-response

Hegel, G.W.F. 2007. Lectures on the Philosophy of Revolution, Vol. III: The Consummate Religion, ed. Peter C. Hodgson. Oxford: Clarenden Press.

Hsu, Andrea 2021. ‘The Great Resignation: Why Millions of Workers are Quitting Their Jobs,’ National Public Radio, June 24.

Hudis, P. 1995. ‘Labour, High Tech Capitalism, and the Crisis of the Subject: A Critique of Recent Developments in Critical Theory,’ Humanity & Society, 19 (4) November, pp. 14-20.

Hudis, P. 2000. ‘The Death of the Death of the Subject,’ Historical Materialism, 12 (3), pp. 147-69.

Hudis, P. 2013. Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Marx, K. Marx, K. 1975 [orig. 1844]. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. In Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 3. New York: International Publishers.

Marx, K. 1977 [orig. 1867]. Capital, Vol. 1. New York: Penguin

Marx, K. 1987 [orig. 1858]. Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy, in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 29. New York: International Publishers.

Marx, K. and Engels, F. 1976 [orig. 1846]. The German Ideology, in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 5. New York: International Publishsers.

Rose, G. 2009 [orig. 1981]. Hegel Contra Sociology. New York and London: Verso Books.


Footnotes

1. Hägglund 2019, p. 11.
2. Ibid., p. 191.
3. Ibid., p. 375.
4. Hägglund, p. 252.
5. Ember 2021.
6. Hsu 2021.
7. Marx 1977, p. 133.
8. Marx 1975, pp. 376, 377.
9. Ibid. p. 377.
10. Adorno 1973, p. 207.
11. Marx 1975, p. 308.
12. Hägglund 2019, p. 365.
13. Hägglund 2021.
14. Hegel 2007, p. 162.
15. Hägglund 2021.
16. Rose 2009, p. 98.
17. Ibid.
18. Marx 1976, p. 49.
19. Hägglund 2019, p. 344.
20. Ibid., p. 25
21. Ibid., p. 262.
22. Ibid., p. 223.
23. Marx 1977, p. 172.
24. Hägglund 2019, p. 264.
25. Ibid., p. 273.
26. See Hudis 1995, Hudis 2000, and Hudis 2012.
27. Marx 1987, p. 91.
28. Marx 1977, p. 667.
29. Dunayevskaya 1973, p. 70.
30. Hägglund 2019, p. 277.
31. Ibid., p. 278.
32. Dunayevskaya 2000, p. 86.
33. Ibid., p. 60.
34. Ibid., p. 22.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

• Peter Hudis
  

  Peter Hudis has written widely on Marxist theory and contemporary politics and is the author of Marx's Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism, and Frantz Fanon: Philosopher on the Barricades. He is General Editor of The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg (three volumes have appeared so far).

https://imhojournal.org/