Fighting Dragons

Review of Naomi Klein's Doppelganger

by Eric Walberg / April 28th, 2024

I love Naomi Klein. Strong, courageous, principled. In her latest, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (2023), willing to open her life for us to see for ourselves what makes her tick. A world of doppelgangers, shadow selves of many varieties from our repressed inner Other, to an AI construct of who you are in public.

Your social media profile is constructed by the ad world, which creates our ‘Others’ worlds, which become our online ghosts. We like a certain level of automated customization (suggest music, books, people) but the computer doesn’t know when to stop! Before the cell phone, we moved through world like phantoms, no trace, no algorithms, cloud. Free. Now there has been a radical shift in what our lives are for and it’s not pretty. We are all mine sites now, despite the intimacy of what’s mined. It’s done ‘behind factory doors’ by unaccountable mine operators. We have outsourced the management of our critical informational pathways to algorithms run by for-profit companies and govts. It (rightly) bothers Klein that protests of this are mostly far right, and our response is hate-speech laws.

We can bear unbearable realities only if we work to change them. She is not afraid to label the culprits. We must name the systems that have carved out the shadow lands, deemed them erasable: capitalism, imperialism, white supremacy, patriarchy. Struggle helps us see each other, to break from the peculiarities of our identities. John Berger remarks on the power of mass protest. It can disrupt the smooth flow of business, and it lets you feel solidarity with your ‘class’ (e.g., peacenik, environment-nik), not just as individuals.

Klein nails her media doppelganger, Naomi Wolf, who flipped from liberal feminist to far right wacko after a brief flirtation with pro-Palestinian views. Big mistake. She was purged from academia after that and it seems her worldview as a liberal feminist collapsed with nothing to replace it, leading her down rabbit holes, antivaxxer conspiracies, cabals. Yes! Liberalism is a deadend.

But Klein was and still is a feminist. Her evils include patriarchy. She wants no truck with the far right. Speaking of trucks, she slams the antivaxxers categorically, accusing all who kicked up a fuss over masks and vaccines as anti-social individualists.

Agreed. Wolf’s problem was liberalism—the individual is good/bad, so victim/perp is the focus, not the structures lurking in the shadows. ‘America is not entirely enslaved like Australia or Shanghai or Canada because [of the] millions of owners of guns. It is harder to subjugate an armed population.’ (p 310.) No! It’s our corrupt colonial institutions, stupid! Based on genocide and denial, so there is no trust. Guns only make things worse.

But wait a minute. The cabalists surely have a point. It’s the Faucis who threaten us with totalitarianism, vaccine passports, loss of sovereignty to unelected global elites (WHO, EU corporations). Klein falls on her own sword there. She didn’t know the damning results of the various parliamentary committees investigating Trudeau’s use of the Emergencies Act, who unloaded the stinking pile earlier this year. In February 2024, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association announced it was suing the federal government, stating that the Emergencies Act must be reserved for national emergencies, which they argued was a “legal standard that has not been met, that the normalization of emergency legislation threatens our democracy and our civil liberties.” Ouch. The truckers’ anger was not just selfish liberalism, and the government acted like a dictator. The other Naomi has a point.

I suspect Wolf’s errors (and her correct view of the truckers) spring not just from her liberalism but her earlier feminism (which she seems to have dumped). Her claim to fame is her bestseller The Beauty Myth (1991), which Klein damns with faint praise. She was a pretty face saying troubling things about anorexia when that was fashionable. We don’t know where Wolf stands on feminism now though I suspect she’s moved on after marrying a beefy body guard and falling in love with guns.

Klein may have lost her illusions about liberalism, but she’s still a feminist, the kind that denounces truckers, promotes transgenderism as well as the usual unqualified access to abortion. But these are very much focused on individualism, not social solidarity, let alone socialism, and public shaming and the censorship of #MeToo, built on militant feminism, is as ugly as you can get.

And Klein’s solution is totally secular. While she is not a doctrinaire workers-of-the-world Marxist, there is no hint that the key to transforming society may have a lot to do with spirituality, religion. She does embrace her ‘Naomi confusion’ as an ‘unconventional Buddhist exercise in annihilating the ego,’ but as a fillip. The thrill of being part of a mass protest that she finds transcendent (as do I) is a spiritual feeling. The high, the awe. The ‘class’ the protesters belong to is not so much a Marxian materialist one, but, especially now, a spiritual one, welling up from that part of our being, our ghost, our good doppelganger, the inner Holy Fool. It is the same feeling I get as a Muslim in communal prayer, which is always a protest against our sinful world, and a thanks for our conscious ability to change it.

Klein is conflicted. She buys into abortion, trans/ feminism, so wants laws to force acceptance and outlaw criticism. The nightmare of parents with flighty, confused teens hating themselves, with an aggressive state trying to settle the issue with force, is ongoing. Klein dismisses anti-vaxxers as selfish, refusing cooperation. But masks were 90% useless in 1918 and again in 2020. They should be recommended only (i.e., protect yourself with a good mask worn properly), and it was right to dispute and refuse dubious vaccines. Klein has no use for global corporations, but fails to at least consider WHO, Big Pharma, 9/11 (?) as conspiracies leading to fascism.

She does see capitalism as the underlying conspiracy. So I repeat: I love Naomi. She nails Israel too. In Israel post-1967, anti-semitism came to be treated not as a question in need of historically informed answers, but rather as something eternal. The spectral Shylock, the eternal Jew that is the shadow-double of all Jews. Israel made its own doppelganger, the sunbaked muscle-bound machine-gun-toting New Jew. With its own anti-self: the Palestinians, a eternal threat inside Israel and on its borders. Remembering genocide is a quest for wholeness. Retraumatizing freezes you in the shattered state. (p 296)

Searching for ways to fight our collapsing world, our collapsing worldview, she digs up wonderful nuggets from the past. Red Vienna 1919-34, when social democrats swept the elections: ‘He who builds children’s palaces tears down prison walls.’ (p 209. Socialist educator Otto Felix Kanitz, 1925.) Then the Nazis took the socialist policies and refashioned them for their racial supremacist project.

So nations have doppelgangers too! How apparently easy it was for Germany to flip into its shadow self in 1933. We witnessed this today, when Russia finally moved against the increasingly fascist Ukraine in 2022, egged on by US-NATO. We flipped overnight. Our programmed Russophobia clicked in. Kill, kill, kill as many Russians as possible. All the while, ignoring the massive slaughter of Ukrainians for no real reason, as Russia won’t lose, with its nuclear trump card.

We witness it in the flip in Israel to genocide after October 7, 2023. Though it seems that this genocidal bent was already there, just better hidden. Klein’s insight: we have both selves built in and can flip between them. Unless we become aware and ‘not lose the thread’.

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde are archetypes for people and nations. We can live with our inner monster only by repressing, ignoring it.

As a parent of an autistic child, Klein is sensitive to the subtleties of that disability. An autistic person is inwardly forcused, lacking social norms. The archetypes are the hyperfocused artist, absent-minded professor. In Red Vienna, they were treated as different, requiring understanding, not as a disease, a pathology. Enter Hans Asperger, who started out a nice Viennese liberal, working with Georg Frankl, diagnosing young patients displaying autistic traits.

But much like Wolf, he flipped from nice liberal to Nazi executioner (of innocent children!), his own doppelganger shadow self. The autistic child shows a ‘poverty of gemut (group bonding)’, making them unsuitable to the eugenist program of creating a master race. They were transformed into diseased psychopaths. A small subset, little professors, were an exception, saved for Nazi use as codebreakers etc. The others were killed as defects. Asperger’s work will be remembered as the epitome of Nazism, double-sided atrocities in the name of collective health and wellness.

Like Asperger, Wolf flipped from liberal feminist to far right. Asperger flipped willingly to fit the new zeitgeist, as did Wolf, whose collapsed worldview had nothing to replace it with, leading her down rabbit holes. Asperger and his eugenist ideology lives on. Parents live through their children. They want them to have a ‘competitive edge’ to thrive in a world falling apart, rather than making a world where everyone can thrive.

Systemic forces buttress the ‘core capitalist imperative to expand and grow by seeking new frontiers to enclose. (p 228) I would add my own scaled-down feminism: this is all from the male aggression instinct, which capital has harnessed, and which needs to be controlled both at the individual and societal levels.

No question I prefer Klein to her Other. The social issues (feminism, gaylib) are secondary and will sort themselves out in due course. We can all agree that human behavior is still a mystery. The real issue is fighting capitalism/ imperialism. Klein didn’t lose the thread like her Other, because she had a good training in Marx and Jewish socialism. She settles on the Bund as her model belief, that Jews can only be free when everyone free, not by building a militarized ghetto. Bundists saw nationalism as the enemy, leading inevitably to race hatred.

As for autism, Klein questions whether it has increased or is just better diagnosed. But the number of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder has continued to rise consistently and dramatically since the 1990s. What’s the explanation? How about capitalism? That is the conclusion of another (brilliant, Jewish female) academic, Liah Grenfeld, whose Mind, Madness and Modernity (2013)  argues that madness in its new form—the big three of contemporary psychiatry—schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression—was brought about by nationalism, the cultural framework of modernity, our secular, egalitarian, essentially humanistic and democratic world.FacebookTwitter

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Eric Walberg is a journalist who worked in Uzbekistan and is now writing for Al-Ahram Weekly in Cairo. He is the author of From Postmodernism to Postsecularism and Postmodern Imperialism. His most recent book is Islamic Resistance to Imperialism. Read other articles by Eric, or visit Eric's website.

Columbia Protests Now and in ‘68

BY JONAH RASKIN

 APRIL 25, 2024Facebook

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Protests in and around Columbia University in support of Palestine and against Israeli occupation. Photograph Source: SWinxy – CC BY-SA 4.0

The student protests on the campus of Columbia University this April have reminded me of the protests that took place there 56 years ago. Along with about  700 or so other men and women, I was arrested and jailed at the Tombs in Manhattan. Those arrests didn’t curtail student protests. Indeed, there were demonstrations later that year and again in 1969, 1970, 1971 and 1972. When push comes to shove, Columbia has called on the police again and again and the police have arrived in force and have made arrests.

The current president of Columbia, Minouche Shafik, an Egyptian-born American economist and a baroness, has surely not acted on her own impulses to establish what she might call “Law and Order.” Rather, she has surely followed the orders, the prayers and wishes of trustees, deep pockets and alumni who have wanted to see demonstrators punished for exercising freedom of speech and for practicing old-fashioned American civil disobedience.

Robert Kraft, the New England Patriots CEO, and a major financial contributor to Columbia —and my classmate— recently said, “I am no longer confident that Columbia can protect its students and staff and I am not comfortable supporting the university until corrective action is taken.” He also said,  “I believe in free speech, say whatever you want, but pay the consequences.”  That doesn’t sound like free speech, not if it comes with a price tag. Back then, the protests were largely about Vietnam. Now, they’re largely about Gaza and Israel. The names have changed, but the underlying story is much the same. Shouldn’t students today have a significant role to play when and where it comes to university investment?

Columbia University president Shafik was deputy governor of the Bank of England, and a vice president at the World Bank. She surely knows who has buttered her side of the crumpet and who has poured her cup of tea. Over many decades, Columbia has known very well how to make cosmetic changes and alter its image. It is now, as it was in the 1960s, about making money, expanding and occupying more and more of the island of Manhattan, and about mass-producing students to become consumers and citizens loyal to the social institutions that have made the US a global superpower.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, we raised awareness about the university’s collaboration with the war machine and with institutions of racism and patriarchy. Columbia began to hire women and Black and brown intellectuals and to revise the curriculum in response to student demands to make education relevant to their own lives and their times.

In 1968, I was not a student at Columbia. I was already a professor at the State University of New York who had graduated from the college in 1963 when it was still locked in the mindset of the Cold War, and McCarthyism and could not  be accurately described as an “Ivory Tower.” In 1968, my beef with Columbia had its roots in my undergraduate years when I was rebuked for using Marxist sources for essays I wrote for teachers and slammed for thinking critically and questioning academic dogma. In 1969 when I was arrested again for my role during a campus protest, one of my former professors said that since I was a “Columbia scholar and a Columbia gentleman” I should apologize to the university. When I declined to knuckle under, the powers that be had me arrested and jailed. Who then was the scholar and the gentleman?

My freshman year at Columbia, my classmates and I were required to read Jacques Barzun’s tome The House of Intellect. It didn’t take long for me to see that the house of intellect was a house of cards. In 1968, we didn’t blow it down or blow it up, but we rocked it for a time and then watched as it put its house back in order and restored its foundations.

I don’t believe it’s possible to dismantle Columbia now, much as it wasn’t possible to dismantle it in 1968. It’s too big, too powerful, too wealthy and too rapacious. But protesters today can certainly raise awareness about the political and economic ties between the US “power elite,” as Columbia professor, C. Wright Mills called it, and the power elite in Israel. Things may not improve in the Middle East any time soon, but they won’t stay the same way they have been for the past half-century, either. The student protesters with their tents on campus are a sure sign that the times have changing and will go on “a-changin'” as Dylan suggested.

Too bad Columbia is locked in the past. Too bad it has given up on meaningful dialogue with student protesters today. Too bad it doesn’t see the handwriting on the wall. Over the past few weeks, I’ve wondered what Columbia professor Edward Said, the author of Orientalism—and for a time an independent member of the Palestinian National Council—would think and say. Indeed, he seemed to occupy a kind of middle ground when he observed in 2003, the year he died, that with regard to Palestine, “nobody has a claim that overrides all the others and entitles that person with that so-called claim to drive people out!”

That middle ground seems to have evaporated. Indeed, the ground under our own feet has shifted dramatically.  There is less room for dissenting opinions today than there was in ’68, near the height of the war in Vietnam. There are also more virulent anti-Arab and more virulent anti-Jewish voices today than there were then. Better prepare for the rocky road ahead.

Jonah Raskin is the author of Beat Blues, San Francisco, 1955.

No country for children: The not-so-hidden horrors of child sexual abuse in Pakistan

Are religious institutions shielding predators? 

Delve into the harrowing truth of systemic child abuse in Pakistan, where clerical influence and misguided donor efforts perpetuate a cycle of silence and impunity.

Afiya S. Zia 

Published April 24, 2024

Recent reports of sexual molestation of children by clerics and incriminating videos of corporal punishment of madrassa students are neither new discoveries, nor particular to Pakistan.

Globally, totalitarian institutions — seminaries, the Vatican, and even lay establishments like boarding schools, military barracks, orphanages, and shelters — have long records of systemic abuse. However, the power of clerical lobbies in Pakistan often secures impunity for religious institutions and only the high risks taken by whistleblowers, fearless activists, and survivors result in any kind of justice.

Unfortunately, over the past 20 years, the more temporal approaches to social development in Pakistan have been displaced by a generation convinced that sacralising development is appropriate for Muslim sensibilities. This has complicated pre-existing challenges in Pakistan’s colonial and Islamic hybrid legal regime, deepened the shame and stigma associated with concepts of gender and sex, and privileged clerical authority over human rights advocacy.

Vocational sex abuse

According to data gathered by Sahil, an NGO working on cases of child sexual abuse, the overwhelming majority of abusers are acquaintances or neighbours in communities or family members. At the same time, the data also shows that institutionally, the highest number of complaints emerge against religious teachers or clerics — more so than police, school-teachers, or nuclear family members.

In 2020, the Associated Press documented several cases of sexual abuse in madrassas, including the case of 8-year-old Yaous in Mansehra, where despite the arrest of the offender, Qari Shamsuddin, fellow clerics and worshippers at the mosque disputed the charges, terming him innocent and a ‘victim of anti-Islamic elements in the country’. The cleric was later sentenced to 16.5 years imprisonment.

Primary data remains limited and organisations rely on media reports and police complaints but the trend over the past 20 years shows the gender divide of abused girls in madrassas is slightly higher than that of boys (‘Cruel Numbers’). The recent case of Qari Abubakar Muaviyah’s alleged rape of a 12-year-old boy in Shahdara initially looked like a lost cause due to the usual clerical pressure for the survivor to resile.

Under the amended anti-rape law, the police and prosecutors are duty bound to continue investigation and judicial hearing, even if the survivor resiles, yet they prefer compromises. The difficulty of obtaining DNA forensics is another escape route in many cases. In the end, it was only social media pressure over the Muaviyah case that resulted in a political and legal response against powerful religious lobbies.

Over the years, there have also been several reports of gang rapes in such seminaries. In very rare cases do children fight their rapists off and where parents are resilient in their pursuit for justice.

The madrassa reform debacle

Historically, Pakistani madrassas have been subject to cycles of reorganisation and reform but only over curricula or funding and not institutional accountability.

In 2003, at the peak of the ‘war on terror’, a new form of war anthropology and research methods emerged, relying on fixers, handlers, translators, NGO research and No Objection Certificates awarded by the military authorities at their discretion. This new paradigm produced a body of newly minted ‘experts’ on Islam, terrorism, jihad, security and conflict studies and now, Islam and development, as funded by British and American governments under the pretext of Muslim exceptionalism (especially, Muslim women and the poor).

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) implemented a five-year, $100 million bilateral agreement in 2002. Another multi-million pound religions and research project was spearheaded by DFID in 2008, paving the way for faith-based approaches to social change in Pakistan. With the help of overseas Pakistani consultants, they found that religion can be valuable in terms of providing organisational resources for social movements, with religious leaders and Muslim NGOs as ‘partners’.

Policy briefs from such projects stressed on the need to review and include religion into the mainstream of development research and policy itself, including support to madrassas and to encourage women’s religious leadership as alternatives to Western feminism.

At the time, Gen Musharraf’s US-compliant government was facing domestic resistance for registering madrassas as suspected support bases and havens for terrorists. The top-down consultant policy briefs insisted on the kind of reform that was acceptable to the undefined “Ulema” and ignored the experiences of civil society on the subject by dismissing any critique of faith-based development by feminists as ‘western and liberal-secular orientalism’.

The experts producing such research rode the crest of Gen Musharaff’s duplicitous project of enlightened moderation and recommended the inclusion of madrassas and clerical leaders into the social development sector. Even those claiming radical credentials, and who were critical of the binaries of western secular departure from religious-based education, invested hope in the role of madrassas as some decolonising, non-Western social safety nets for children from impoverished backgrounds and in women’s empowerment through mosque and madrassa piety.

These researchers and studies completely ignored — as some orientalist presumption — the history of corporal punishment and child sexual abuse at mosques and madrassas that human rights activists had been documenting for at least a decade. This was a revealing and damaging missed opportunity.

This ‘partnership’ between donors and clerics has empowered the latter as community gate-keepers (especially, in projects related to education, vaccination, child protection committees and labour). Recent cases have shown, however, that some of these clerics, who are now power brokers, may pressurise victims to resile charges of sex abuse in communities and madrassas, and who facilitate compromise and settling cases outside of courts, especially when it involves fellow clerics.

Law as protection, not a right

Research studies, academic theses and donor reports continue to recommend that Pakistan’s government should make genuine efforts to understand how the madrassa leadership perceives reform and modernisation, and for involvement in social development projects without any caution for regulation of widespread allegations of physical or sexual abuses.

Every other sector of reform is subjected to correction as a constitutional and moral imperative (especially, the ‘corrupt’ bureaucracy and judiciary) but the one sector where appeasement by government and donors remains consistent is religion and its institutional influence. This extends and sustains moral and legal impunity to the priestly classes and prevents rights-based progress.

In the first instance, legal reform has managed to chip at some religious exemption by way of releasing rape and honour crimes from the Qisas and Diyat loophole. It took 30 years of consistent advocacy from women’s rights activists and not the route of some decolonial thesis, nor due to reinterpretive exegesis. The amendments to many discriminatory laws have been rationalised by liberal appeal and universalising influences within the Constitution and while some opportunist clerics and politicians have been ‘encouraged’ to curb their opposition, this does not count as ‘success’ of ecclesiastical partnerships.

Secondly, many gender and religious biases are underwritten in family laws which prevent consensus or consistency on matters of sexual maturity and underage marriage. Over 18 per cent of girls and 4 pc of boys in Pakistan are married before the age of 18 and prevention is complicated by our dual legal regime and by societal trends of forced conversions of girls from religious minorities. If marriage remains an unequal legal arrangement for all women, and an economic safety net for the poor and a social status for the rich, girls will remain devalued for just their labour and reproductive worth and their virginities and sexual purity will serve as premiums.

Third, overwhelmingly, cases of any but especially child sexual abuse continue to be subject to attrition where survivors or victims’ families resile under counsel and social pressure from community, police or clerical leaders. As human rights lawyers point out, as long as the judicial process privileges ocular evidence over corroborative forms and courts are unwilling to try cases despite resiling, sex crimes will not be subject to justice.

Mythos over logos

Beyond legal recourse, social protection for Pakistani children remains precarious due to misguided beliefs and flawed remedies.

The first myth that family, marriage, and community are safe havens encourage private settlements in sex abuse cases and perpetuate lifelong generational trauma. The second damaging myth is that biology is the driver of sexual violence instead of unequal power relations, especially between genders.

Feminists have countered both these fallacies. They refute the notion that sex abuse is a private matter by insisting that the personal is political and risk their lives to speak out on the commonality of violence in families and marriages. The Aurat March movement has expanded this cause with many members narrating their own experiences of sexual offences and providing ventilation for other survivors. Stigmatising sex education, or underplaying abuse on the pretext of immorality or false respectability, disarms the potential victim from self-defence — silence and shame is the paedophile’s best alibi.

Glorifying the virtues of domesticated pious women and obedient children justifies discipline and decision-making as the male guardian’s natural right. Feminists contend that it is not biology but elite capture of social, economic, political resources that buys impunity for powerful abusive men. They also point out that while there is significant challenge in addressing attitudes within clerical, judicial, and political circles where some may justify male privilege, dismiss allegations of sex crimes, or blame victims, such figures often remain in positions of leadership and trust.

Age of innocence; beyond reliance and alliances

Despite these conceits of legal, social and sexual inequalities, the self-defeating solutions continue to fixate on laws, liberation theology, and male allies — but each needs reconsideration.

Pakistan has no standard legal definition of a child — ages for voting, marriage, sex crime, factory work, succession age, or as a juvenile liable to criminal proceedings — vary considerably across the country and provinces. Addressing sex crimes either involves deferring responsibility to communities and families, which may perpetuate abuse, or relying on technological solutions as a last resort.

There are at least 17 officially listed helplines for children-related complaints, yet members of Sahil say that hardly any child uses the helplines to complain (it is mostly parents or other adults who use the referral system). The high profile and politicised Zainab Alert App for missing children offers lopsided results nationwide and reports more abduction of boys than girls in every province, offering no analysis.

Most laws and policies on women’s and children’s rights are missing data or evaluation, yet random remedies continue to sink the country’s global ranking. The girl-child has been the poster figure for the UN and donor organisations that have sponsored efforts to change the fate of generations of stunted, anaemic, illiterate Pakistani girls from growing into disenfranchised, disinherited, dependent and vulnerable adult women.

But the hubris that has insisted on religious inclusivity in donor programming over the past 20 years, has escalated faith-based approaches to girls’ and women’s development and which essentially bribe male religious leaders to approve projects that deliver basic rights. This approach has reinforced the role of clerics as gatekeepers in community programmes —officials note a variety of specialised roles among clerics, including those focusing on polio, family planning, and gender issues.

Those who defended piety politics and appealed for faith appropriate alternatives to ‘Western’ rights have subdued radical resistance into reformative donor projects and culture festivals. This has also trapped the Aurat March movement, since pietist women oppose the demands for sexual equality in a not-so-docile manner.

Improving conviction rates for sex offences is important but castration or cajoling male allies to detox their masculinities is not going to end sex abuse. The only proven difference is when women and children refuse to remain silent; instead, they subvert and challenge all disparities, insist on equal educational, inheritance, marital, and professional rights, rather than constantly bargain with patriarchy or plead with its institutional representatives.

Rather than pouring resources into Sisyphean programmes for community behavioural change, perhaps, it is time to empower the child directly. This could involve implementing rights-based approaches and providing information and leadership to diminish the influence of community leaders, guardians, and traditional intermediaries. Such measures would help restore a sense of balance while ensuring the safety and self-reliance of children.

As long as academics sanitise religious institutions and activists promote faith-based laws and rights as decolonial tools; as long as newspapers refuse to carry ‘sensitive’ discussions on religion or sex, and feminists wait politely on the good will of male allies to introspect and lose their privileges; as long as governments continue to appease the political clerical classes while donors continue their paradoxical faith based social development, the country will fail to secure the godliness that is, a safe childhood.

Header image taken from Reuters.

DAWN

Herbert Marcuse – New Left Revival?

BY ROBERT HUNZIKER

 APRIL 19, 2024
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World events serve as a stage of constant search for how best to construct and maintain society, which is an underlying theme of some decades ago found in the works of Herbert Marcuse, 1898–1979, German-American philosopher of prominent fame during the 1960s considered an intellectual giant of his time.

Charles Reitz, widely recognized as a scholar of Herbert Marcuse, has brought to life his ideology for a prosperous healthy society, proposing that “nature is an ally” in his book The Revolutionary Ecological Legacy of Herbert Marcuse, 284 pgs. Daraja Press, 2023.

Today, it can be argued that a byzantine world of discordant parties, i.e., (1) global ultra-high-end capitalism (2) neofascism (3) racism (4) anti-establishmentarianism (5) flagging democracy are converging altogether at an explosive point in time in a new chapter of human history, and hopefully, as an aside, everlasting fusion technology (that really works) to take the heat off global warming but still decades in the making.

The works of Herbert Marcuse in the spirit of a hearty revival of the New Left are timely and may be necessary in today’s world to re-establish some semblance of sanity by offering balance to a geopolitical order that seems utterly confused and directionless and at each other’s throats.

Author of Eros and Civilization (1955) and One-Dimensional Man (1964) Marcuse was thrust onto the big stage as the preeminent theorist of the New Left, arguably more relevant today than during the 1960s. His widely read One-Dimensional Man exposes the inherent weaknesses in capitalism and communism found in a stifling conformity of life (somewhat in the spirit of Aldus Huxley’s Brave New World) via modern modes of domination and social control but hopeful of human freedom and happiness by way of liberation, as expressed in Eros and Civilization.

“The distinguishing feature of advanced industrial society is its effective suffocation of those needs which demand liberation.” (One-Dimensional Man, pg. 7)

Charles Reitz’s comprehensive study of Marcuse: “These works challenged corporate capitalism’s illusions of democracy characterized by consumerism, cultural anaesthetization, intellectual compliance, environmental degradation, and war as untenable forms of wasted abundance and pollical freedom.”

Accordingly, “If the New Left emphasizes the struggle for the restoration of nature, for public parks and beaches, for spaces of tranquility and beauty; if it demands a new sexual morality, the liberation of women, then it fights against material conditions imposed by the capitalist system and reproducing this system. (Marcuse 1972, 17) Marcuse’s political-philosophical vision continues to offer intelligent strategic perspectives on current concerns—especially issues of neofascist white supremacy, hate speech, hate crimes, police brutality, environmental destruction, and education as monocultural social manipulation. These troubles are profound, yet they can be countered through a Marcusean strategy of revolutionary ecological liberation and women’s emancipation— radical socialism as I will attempt to show in my concluding chapter 10 below. Marcuse’s posthumously published Paris Lectures at Vincennes University, 1974 underscored his belief that the women’s movement was one of the most important political forces for system change.” (The Revolutionary Ecological Legacy of Herbert Marcuse, pg. 145)

Marcuse’s work lays the groundwork for the 99% to be awakened, politically prepared, and strengthened, calling for a new ecosocialist world system Charles Reitz refers to as “EarthCommonWealth” with emphasis on equality and liberation of labor in a world of nature’s restoration. He interconnects the basic elements of a good life by removing the rotting influence of capitalistic excesses that stealthily brainwash the subconscious, by-the-hour, day-in, day-out via television, social networking galore, city bus posters, blaring radio ads, freeway billboards, insolent mobile phone ads, subway wall glitterati of comparables for purchase, on credit, over time.

As explained by Reitz, EarthCommonWealth is a revolutionary alternative to the “misuse of limited natural resources for profit.” Accordingly, this misuse is at the heart of a disruptive world climate system and disadvantaged lifestyle for labor throughout the world.

In the context of Marcuse’s criticisms of contemporary society, Reitz zeroes in on America: “Racial animosity, anti-immigrant scapegoating, and a resurgent nationalism/ patriotism are being orchestrated today in the troubled system of American/ global capitalism. These are neo-populist/neo-fascist instrumentalities of social control and economic stabilization… All this is said without mentioning the name of Donald Trump, though it has clear relevance to recent political developments in terms of a resurgence of reactionary rhetoric and racist tendencies on the right.”

“One-dimensional thought is systematically promoted by the makers of politics and their purveyors of mass information. Their universe of discourse is populated by self-validating hypotheses, which, incessantly and monopolistically repeated, become hypnotic definitions or dictations.” (One-Dimensional Man, pg. 14)

Underlying America’s extreme racial animosity used as a political weapon, radicalization of education provides a contemptuous convenience that “Marcuse anticipated back in the 1960s of counterrevolutionary tendencies now raging in higher education to reduce the liberal arts in American general education to the conservatively filtered monocultural residue of an elitist, Anglocentric curriculum.”

Reitz defines democracy’s experiment with capitalism, especially in the eyes of younger generations, portending a different future that older generations should contemplate: “Given today’s workforce discontent and destabilization, it is no wonder that an openness to socialist alternatives is taking hold among younger people. An opinion piece in The New York Times, (Goldberg 2017) carried the heading “No Wonder Millennials Hate Capitalism.” Millennials are the “older cousins” of Generation Z (Volpe 2). The piece concludes that the “rotten morality” behind today’s intensifying inequalities is more apparent than ever, hence radicalizing young people. This reflects the steady growth among the youth of what Marcuse called the “New Sensibility”—new needs, generated under capitalism, but which capitalism cannot fulfill, for gender equality, ecological economics, and anti-racism.”

“New needs unfulfilled by the current system” are fully exposed for all to see by America’s broken-down dysfunctional politics of infighting as a normal course of governing, failing to address “new needs.” How is it possible to take this seriously?

“Today the 1% is armed with its own theory; the 99% is not. A fundamentally different outlook is necessary. The main problem, as I see it, is to develop an incisive vision for humanity as sensuous living labor. I have developed in this volume a labor theory of ethics, an ethical realism grounded on the mutual respect, cooperation, and reciprocity of commonwealth labor… EarthCommonWealth envisions the displacement and transcendence of capitalist oligarchy as such, not simply its most ugly and destructive components. This is a green economic alternative because its ecological vision sees all living things and their non-living earthly surroundings as a global community capable of a dignified, deliberate coexistence,” pg. 257.

The Revolutionary Ecological Legacy of Herbert Marcuse by Charles Reitz with an afterword by Nnimmo Bassey is an antidote, a breath of fresh air, to society’s state of confusion and misdirection, and above all else, a sense of relief knowing there is another way that is much better.

This short review does not come close to doing justice to Reitz’s remarkable work that shines a beam of enlightenment, with impressive detail and brilliant source material, on a better course for the world’s 99%. It should be in the library of every serious advocate for a better ecologically safe existence, a much better existence.

The Revolutionary Ecological Legacy of Herbert Marcuse needs to be studied, reread, and then reread and studied again, and then shared. It’s worth it!

Robert Hunziker lives in Los Angeles and can be reached at rlhunziker@gmail.com

The revolutionary ecological legacy of

 Herbert Marcuse – 2nd Edition

By:Charles Reitz, Nnimmo Bassey

This new edition includes an Afterword by Nnimmo Bassey: System Change Will Not Be Negotiated.


The author appeals to the energies of those engaged in a wide range of contemporary social justice struggles such as ecosocialism, antiracism, the women’s movement, LGBTQ rights, and antiwar forces. As the dialectical counterpart of Marcuse’s Great Refusal, the book, which culminates with the ‘EarthCommonWealth Project’ is keyed to what we are struggling for, not just what we are struggling against. The author argues that regressive political forces must be countered today, and this is best accomplished through radical collaboration around an agenda recognizing the basic economic and political needs of diverse subaltern communities. System negation must become a new general interest. The author discusses core ethical insights from African philosophical sources, indigenous American philosophy, and radical feminist philosophy. Humanity’s first teachings on ethics are to be found in ancient African proverbs. These subsequently served also as a critique of colonialism and neocolonialism. Long-suppressed indigenous American sources supply a philosophical and political critique of Euro-centric economic and cultural values. They also offer an understanding of humanity’s place in nature and the leadership of women and attest to modes of cooperative and egalitarian forms of community. Feminist anthropology furnishes an historical context for understanding the origins of patriarchy and how to move beyond dominator power to new forms of partnership power. The book envisions the displacement and transcendence of capitalist oligarchy as such, not simply its most bestial and destructive components. This is a green economic alternative because its ecological vision sees all living things and their non-living earthly surroundings as a global community capable of a dignified, deliberate coexistence. It is searching for a new system of ecological production, egalitarian distribution, shared ownership, and democratized governance, having its foundation in the ethics of partnership productivity with an ecosocialist and humanist commitment to living our lives on the planet consistent with the most honorable and aesthetic forms of human social and political fulfillment.

ISBN Print: 9781990263811
Publication Date: July 2023
Page Count: 284
Binding Type: Soft cover
Trim Size: 6in x 9in
Language: English




Charles Reitz

Charles Reitz: Retired Co-Director of Campus Intercultural Center and Director of Multicultural Education; Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Social Science, Kansas City Kansas Community College. His previous books include: Art, Alienation, and the Humanities: A Critical Engagement with Herbert Marcuse…


Nnimmo Bassey

Nnimmo Bassey is a Nigerian environmental justice activist, architect, essayist and poet. He is the director of the ecological think-tank, Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF) and coordinator of Oilwatch International. He was the chair of Friends of the Earth…