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/

London's $8M Marble Arch Mound to close Sunday after mockery

The Marble Arch Mound will close on Sunday. File Photo courtesy City of Westminster

Jan. 8 (UPI) -- London's $8 million Marble Arch Mound attraction will close on Sunday after receiving widespread mockery on social media since its opening six months ago.

The Mound, an artificial hill tourist attraction at the corner of Hyde Park and Oxford Street, promised lush vegetation, unique city views and a light exhibition inside, but when it opened July 26, visitors said it did not deliver on its promise, The Guardian and CNN reported.

It led to widespread mockery on social media, with pictures showing scaffolding used in the structure's development still visible and lush greenery clearly lacking, according to CNN.

The inside of the structure was marketed as "descending into the heart," but it felt "a little soulless rather than a beating heart, an empty space used to store hand sanitizer and temporary signs," a review for The Critic said, which also noted the light exhibition wasn't there in its opening days.

Stuart Love, Westminster's chief executive, admitted in a statement it "wasn't ready for visitors," when it opened.

"London's business and residents have suffered through the pandemic and we built the Mound as part of our bigger plan to get people back into the city and into the shops, restaurants, theatres and to see the amazing sights the West End has to offer," Love continued in the July statement. "We wanted to open the Mound in time for the summer holidays and we did not want to disappoint people who had already booked tickets. We made a mistake and we apologize to everyone who hasn't had a great experience on their visit.

The project's leader ended up resigning less than a month after the Mound's opening.

"With regret, I have accepted the resignation of my deputy leader, Melvyn Caplan, who led the Mound project," council leader Rachael Robathan said in an August statement to The Guardian. "We have also instigated a thorough internal review to understand what went wrong and ensure it never happens again."

Findings from the internal Westminster Council review released in October cited multiple failures, including failure of project management, mismanagement of project finances by senior officers responsible for the project and lack of effective governance and oversight.

Still, the council defended the project ahead of its closing in a statement to The Guardian.

"The Mound has done what it was built to do -- drawn crowds and supported the recovery in the West End," a spokesperson for the council said in the statement. "Central London's economy has suffered more than any other area during the pandemic. With football slashed and near-total loss of overseas tourists, many business have faced oblivion.

"We're really pleased that nearly 250,000 visitors have come to Westminster to see The Mound and the terrific light exhibition inside," the spokesperson added. "Those visitors have gone onto spend money in shops, bars and restaurants across the West End- helping local businesses to get back on their feet."

On the 150th Anniversary of the Paris Commune: Marx, Gender, and the Alternative to Capitalism in 1871, 1844, 

and Today

December 14, 2021

https://imhojournal.org/

Marx’s writings on the Paris Commune in 1871 and on crude communism in 1844 point to the centrality of gender in the struggle for the alternative to capitalism — Editors

Celebrating the Paris Commune as a Positive Form of Communism

This year, as we mark the 150th anniversary of the Paris Commune of 1871, the question arises as to whether that type of direct democracy with an anti-statist, anti-capitalist bent is realizable any longer. One of the many objections to the Commune as a model centers on the notion that such practices cannot be replicated on the large scale of modern nation-states, let alone a world socialist polity. Another objection holds that the subjective force that brought about the Commune, i.e., the emerging working class as a powerful group with enough social weight to really challenge capitalism, has receded in size and importance, at least in the most technologically developed countries. Still, the aspiration persists, as seen most recently in the Occupy movement of 2011.

The Paris Commune poses, even now, the possibility of a totally different way of life, one where the working people, broadly conceived, take power and implement not a mildly reformist social democracy or an authoritarian system that calls itself socialism, but real mass self-rule. Marx sums it up this way in his classic eulogy, The Civil War in France, written as a statement of the First International in the wake of the Commune’s violent repression by the French army: “It was essentially a working-class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labor.”

This was communism in the positive sense, as Marx also wrote: “Yes, gentlemen, the Commune intended to abolish that class property which makes the labor of the many the wealth of the few. It aimed at the expropriation of the expropriators. It wanted to make individual property a truth by transforming the means of production, land, and capital, now chiefly the means of enslaving and exploiting labor, into mere instruments of free and associated labor. But this is communism, ‘impossible’ communism!”


Women and Revolution in the Commune and After

At the same time, a number of commentators, most notably Edith Thomas in her 1963 book Women Incendiaries, have pointed out the substantial involvement of women in the Commune. Marx also singled out the participation of women as one of its core features, writing of how “the real women of Paris” came out onto the streets, “heroic, noble, and devoted, like the women of antiquity.”

It is striking that these words describe not women under capitalism, but women taking a leading role in a social structure that is reaching beyond capitalism.

But hasn’t that often been the case? Didn’t women, for example, touch off the Russian revolution of 1917, with the demonstration by working women on March 8 of that year? And wasn’t Stalin’s turn to counter-revolution within the revolution in the 1930s connected to the dismantling of many of the gains of women during the revolution, among them free and legal abortion?

This takes us to a slightly different issue, gender relations as a measure of whether a given society is genuinely revolutionary, or is turning away from its most revolutionary possibilities.


Gender and the Critique of Crude Communism in Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts

Looking from this angle also helps illuminate Marx’s most famous discussion of women, in a paragraph in the essay “Private Property and Communism” in the 1844 Manuscripts, where he writes of gender relations as a measure of social progress.

“Private Property and Communism” begins not with a discussion of how to transform capitalist society in a progressive direction, or even with how to abolish capitalism. Instead, Marx begins with the concept of communism itself at a very general philosophical level. He doesn’t sketch a positive model but instead develops a critique of “an entirely crude and unreflective communism.” Thus, we are conceptually already beyond capitalism and in a new society, but not in a positive sense. This crude communism is one of economic equality, but without real human emancipation, without the elimination of exploited and alienated labor. He adds: “The role of worker is not abolished but extended to all human beings.”

Marx ties this form of communism to gender, writing that such a “crude and unreflective communism” expresses itself in the notion of “the community of women,” wherein woman’s position is shifted from being the private property of one man to a type of “communal and common property.” Obviously, this not a positive solution to the problem of women’s subordinate position as the property of men, a system that has existed across many societies.

It is in this context, the critique of crude communism, including on gender relations, that Marx makes an important generalization: “This communism, which negates the personality of the human being in every sphere, is only the logical expression of private property.” He goes on to develop these critical remarks about crude communism for a few more lines of his essay.


Marx’s Most Cited Passage on Gender: Its Links to Communism

After that, Marx launches into what have become his most famous lines on gender relations, here quoted in part:


The direct, natural, necessary relationship of human being to human being is the relationship of man to woman…. Therefore, on the basis of this relationship, we can judge the whole stage of development of the human being. From the character of this relationship, it follows to what degree the human being has become and recognized himself or herself as a species being; a human being; the relationship of man to woman is the most natural relationship of human being to human being. Therefore, in it is revealed the degree to which the natural behavior of the human being has become human.

Thereupon, Marx returns to his discussion of communism as “democratic or despotic,” etc.

I have to admit that I have tended to see his famous paragraph on gender as a stand-alone statement about gender relations as a measure of social progress that could be connected to all manner of societies across human history. I did so, for example, in my introduction to Marx on Suicide in 1999. But when read carefully and in relation to the surrounding text, it becomes clear that this passage is about social progress in a very specific context, that of a society that has already abolished or begun to abolish capitalism, or at least tried to take steps in that direction.[1]

Thus, we need to view Marx’s 1844 comments on gender and human liberation very specifically as a discussion of gender in relation to the alternative to capitalism, just as we need to view those on women’s participation in the Paris Commune in a similar light.

To that I could add that his very last writings, particularly the Ethnological Notebooks of 1880-82, contain very lengthy ruminations on gender and the family in a number of precapitalist contexts, from Indigenous America to ancient Greece and Rome. This research, which concerns alternative forms of society to that of the industrial capitalism developing in Western Europe at the time, was also seen by Marx as related to the question of how a post-capitalist society could be organized on an emancipatory basis.


Taking It Forward to Today

Thus, on the basis of his 1844 Manuscripts, it could be said that Marx viewed gender relations as a very important yardstick that could measure whether a society aiming toward communism was getting on the wrong track. This problem weighs on us more deeply today, after developments like Stalinism or the Nicaraguan revolution. All too often, the counter-revolution that replaced the revolution did so on the backs of women, in a sometimes sudden and always vicious turn against women’s rights that was the harbinger of a much wider turning away from any possibility of human emancipation.

And what of the discussion within Marxist and feminist theory?

First, it should be said that most commentators on the 1844 Manuscripts have neglected the passage on gender.

That said, it should also be noted that several prominent feminist thinkers of the twentieth century have taken up the passage, as have newer studies like Heather Brown’s Marx on Gender and the Family (2012).

In 1949, the feminist and existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir quoted Marx’s paragraph on gender at the end of her pathbreaking book The Second Sex. To de Beauvoir, this showed how connected the struggle for women’s liberation is to all social progress: “It is when the slavery of half of humanity is abolished and with it the whole hypocritical system it implies that the ‘division’ of humanity will reveal its authentic meaning and the human couple will discover its true form.” And that is the way Marx’s passage has usually been read.

However, this kind of reading does not grapple with the specific context in which Marx writes these lines on gender relations as measure of social progress, the critique of crude communism. It is possible that de Beauvoir did not see or chose not to emphasize this aspect because at the time she was an apologist for Stalin’s Russia, siding with that regime — surely one of the best-known examples of a crude communism — against Western capitalism. In so doing, de Beauvoir was in agreement with her leftwing existentialist colleagues Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

By the 1970s, attitudes on the left toward Russia had shifted in the wake of its violent suppression in 1968 of Prague Spring’s “socialism with a human face,” after which it became very difficult to find apologists for the Russian regime on the left.[2] In 1973, the noted Marxist-Humanist and feminist philosopher Raya Dunayevskaya took up the paragraph on gender in her groundbreaking work, Philosophy and Revolution, tying it to Marx’s critique “vulgar communism’s ‘sham universality’.” Dunayevskaya concluded that the women’s liberation movement of the time was offering a challenge not only to the capitalist order, but also to the narrow vision of communism being put forth from the left, especially the Maoist-tinged New Left of the 1960s: “The uniqueness of today’s Women’s Liberation Movement is that it dares to challenge what is, including the male chauvinism not only under capitalism but within the revolutionary movement itself.”[3]

Pulling these threads together leads to two observations about Marx, communism, and gender.

First, Marx’s initial discussion of gender in 1844 occurs as part of a critique of crude communism, not a critique of capitalism. This makes his critique especially crucial to any discussion of the alternative to capitalism, of the new communist society in a positive sense. One thing therefore becomes clear in terms of gender: Gender relations are an important measure of whether a communist project is crude and limited, or whether it is, in Dunayevskaya’s apt phrase, “reaching for the future” in a positive sense. To Marx, the Paris Commune was reaching toward such a positive form of communism, not least because of the central involvement of women, especially but not limited to working women, in its project. This notion, drawn from Marx in 1844 and 1871, is the theoretical argument developed in the present essay.

Second, all this needs to be connected to the empirical, factual experience of revolution in the twentieth century, as revolutions in the name of Marxism began to win, to come to power. Starting with the Russian Revolution of 1917, women’s emancipation has been a key factor in almost all modern revolutions, as has women’s leading role in the struggle against old regimes. Yet under Stalin, women’s rights were sharply rolled back at the very time the regime was transforming the revolution into its opposite, a totalitarian state-capitalism where the workers and peasants came under exploitation by the state and the Communist Party in order to build up a modern industrial economy. The terrible human cost exceeded even those horrors described by Marx in Capital as “primitive accumulation” because rapid transformation of Russia into an industrial society took a decade rather than being spread out over centuries. More recently, the 1979 Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua involved crucial participation by women, both in the struggle and in the new regime. Nicaragua soon faced a brutal U.S.-backed war by counter-revolutionaries — the “Contras” — against the new regime. This partially dislodged the Sandinistas from power, but by the time they took full control of the state again in 2007, they had moved sharply to the right under the leadership of Daniel Ortega, especially on women’s rights. Ortega now supported a complete ban on abortion, even in cases of rape, incest, or serious risk to the mother’s life. This was accompanied by all kinds of reactionary measures, whether in terms of democratic rights or the environment. Looking at Russia and Nicaragua as examples of how crude forms of communism have blocked the drive toward a humanistic communism, one could say that Marx’s 1844 critique has had enormous predictive power.

Overall, Marx’s critique of gender oppression under crude communism offers an insightful and still-timely perspective that links together a needed critique from within of the revolutionary movement and a conceptual framework that targets key features of an errant form of communism. It is an instance of something Peter Hudis underlines in his 2012 book Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism, that Marx often gives us insights into his own concept of communism in critiques of what he considers to be false and inadequate notions of communism.

[1] I would like to acknowledge at this point that my thinking on these issues was stimulated by a summer 2021 dialectics study group in which I participated with a group of students, intellectuals, and activists. We took several sessions to go over the opening pages of “Private Property and Communism,” as the participants kept insisting on reading these pages as a whole, rather than as a set of isolated statements. The group included Damian Algabre, Kristopher Baumgartner, Gerardo “Gary” Colmenar, the late Ali Kiani, Ndindi Kitonga, Derek Lewis, Andres Magon-Marmol, Nina, Jess, and Sushanta Roy.

[2] Angela Davis was a notable exception in this regard. It should also be noted that many like de Beauvoir who now attacked the Russian regime had switched to an equally uncritical stance toward Maoist China.

[3] A somewhat similar, more empirical critique can be found in Margaret Randall’s 1992 book Gathering Rage: The Failure of Twentieth Century Revolutions to Develop a Feminist Agenda.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

• Kevin B. Anderson
  

  Kevin B. Anderson’s authored books include Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies and Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism. Among his edited books are The Power of Negativity by Raya Dunayevskaya (with Peter Hudis), Karl Marx (with Bertell Ollman), The Rosa Luxemburg Reader (with P. Hudis), and The Dunayevskaya-Marcuse-Fromm Correspondence (with Russell Rockwell).

REWILDING

Former quarry turns haven for endangered UK birds


A Great White Egret in flight over the RSPB Ouse Fen Reserve (AFP/Justin TALLIS)

These Greylag Geese are among the wildlife species attracted to the former quarry site (AFP/Justin TALLIS)



Senior site manager Chris Hudson (l): 'It's really a demonstration of how working with partners -- big decisive action at large scale -- we can bring species off that Red list' 

Richard Gregory of the RSPB: 'When you protect the habitats, and you protect the birds, they can bounce right back' (AFP/Justin TALLIS)



Mute Swans at the Ouse Fen Reserve. Mother Nature is retaking her throne at a former quarry in the east of England (AFP/Justin TALLIS)

Sylvain PEUCHMAURD
Sat, 8 January 2022

Nature is reclaiming her territory at a quarry in the east of England that is being transformed into a vast reserve offering vital sanctuary to endangered birds.

With its reedbed wetlands, the marshy plain of the Fens outside Cambridge has become an attractive habitat for the secretive bittern, which was until 2015 on the UK's Red list of most-threatened species.

Today the thickset heron, with its perfectly camouflaged streaked brown plumage and a booming springtime call that sounds like someone blowing over the top of a bottle, is on the less critical but still threatened Amber list.

"It's really a demonstration of how working with partners -- big decisive action at large scale -- we can bring species off that Red list," said Chris Hudson, senior site manager at the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds' (RSPB) Ouse Fen Nature Reserve, some 120 kilometres (80 miles) north of London.

Although the elusive bird did not put in an appearance when AFP visited on a brisk and rainy January winter morning, five percent of the UK's bitterns now nest at Ouse Fen.

The reserve's bittern population is today larger than the nationwide total in the mid-1990s, when the RSPB's list of threatened species was first published, said Hudson, binoculars always at the ready.

- Insect decline -

The latest edition of Birds of Conservation Concern was published in December 2021 and now includes 70 species on the Red list -- more than double the figure when the first report was published in 1996.

Around 30 percent of the British Isles' 245 bird species are now in danger.

Among the new species on the list are the house martin and the swift, migratory birds that fly thousands of kilometres (miles) from central and southern Africa each spring to breed in Europe.

Richard Gregory, head of monitoring at the RSPB Centre for Conservation Science, blames population decrease mainly on changing land use in the UK, Europe and beyond, which deprives birds of food and habitat.

"The decline of these birds might tell us something about a huge decline in the biomass of insects, which has been a real concern for conservationists across Europe recently, and it's probably a much wider phenomenon," he said.

"So we need more research, but that's a real warning sign about how the environment is changing around us.

"But we also know that when you manage the habitats, when you protect the habitats, and you protect the birds, they can bounce right back," said Gregory, pointing to the example of the "magnificent" white-tailed eagle, which was extinct in the British Isles in the early 20th century.

Thanks to a programme of protection and reintroduction, this imposing bird of prey is no longer on the Red list and today there are at least 123 pairs of these large sea eagles in the UK.

- Make conditions right -

At the Ouse Fen reserve in early January were once-rare great white egrets of the heron family and marsh harriers, a threatened bird of prey whose numbers have bounced back thanks to decades of conservation efforts.

The mix of reedbeds, open water and grassland, opened in 2010 and visited by 20,000 people a year, is being restored from land that has served as Europe's largest sand and gravel quarry.

Over the lifetime of the ongoing project, around 28 million tonnes of aggregate are being dug from the ground, leaving holes that are now filled with water and reeds, to the birds' delight.

"Our job here was to recreate the right habitat conditions that would bring the bittern back," said Hudson. These include "lots of feeding opportunities to get their prey sources like fish, and particularly eels".

"Once we've put those conditions in place, that effectively brings the birds back. 'If you build it they will come' is the phrase that we quite often use."

Humans change the landscape, creating bodies of water and planting reeds, "and then nature will look after the rest and come back quite naturally if given that opportunity, and that's the really key thing," he said.

"Give nature a chance and it will return."

spe/cjo/phz/gil

HALF A TRILLION

Europe nuclear plants 'need 500 bn euro investment by 2050': EU commissioner

ByAFP
Published January 9, 2022

France has led the charge for nuclear power -- its main energy supply -- to be included as a sustainable option - Copyright AFP/File SEBASTIEN BOZON

The European Union will need to invest 500 billion euros ($568 billion) in new generation nuclear power stations from now until 2050, the bloc’s internal market commissioner said in an interview published at the weekend.

“Existing nuclear plants alone will need 50 billion euros of investment from now until 2030. And new generation ones will need 500 billion!” Thierry Breton told the Journal du Dimanche newspaper.

Breton also argued that an EU plan to label energy from nuclear power and natural gas as “green” sources for investment was a vital step towards attracting that capital.

The EU is consulting its member states on that proposal, with internal disagreement on whether the power sources truly qualify as sustainable options.

France has led the charge for nuclear power — its main energy supply — to be included, despite robust opposition from Austria and scepticism from Germany, which is in the process of shutting all its nuclear plants.

The proposal says the EU Commission “considers there is a role for natural gas and nuclear as a means to facilitate the transition towards a predominantly renewable-based future”.

Currently the bloc gets 26 percent of its energy from nuclear power, but Breton estimated that by 2050, that would be reduced to around 15 percent.

The proposal also states that for nuclear power, appropriate measures should be put in place for radioactive waste management and disposal.

And it calls for the building of new nuclear power plants to be conditioned on permits given out before 2045, while work to extend the functioning of existing plants would need to be authorised before 2040.

'Old Man Out!': Anger In Kazakhstan Focuses On Ex-leader

By Christopher RICKLETON
01/08/22 AT 9:53 PM

As protesters armed with sticks and discarded police shields prepared to storm the mayor's office in Kazakhstan's largest city Almaty, they marched to chants of "old man out!"

They were not referring to President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, 68, but Nursultan Nazarbayev, the octogenarian who after more than a quarter-century in office picked career diplomat Tokayev as his loyalist successor in 2019.

Since Kazakhstan's independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Nazarbayev has been synonymous with the world's ninth-largest country, a majority Muslim Central Asian state rich in oil.

Since Kazakhstan's independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, founding president Nursultan Nazarbayev has been synonymous with the country Photo: AFP / NICHOLAS KAMM

But the 81-year-old has yet to appear in public since the country was plunged into unprecedented chaos this week when armed clashes between protesters and police escalated from demonstrations over a New Year fuel price hike.

For many residents of the city of 1.8 million people, the strongman who styles himself as a force for stability in the wider region is an increasingly incendiary and divisive figure.

"Kazakhstan has been turned into a private company of the Nazarbayevs!" vented a 58-year-old called Saule, as Almaty residents surveyed the charred, bullet-strewn territory of the presidential residence whose now-battered gates open out onto a street named after him.

"One clan lives well and everyone else is in poverty," complained Yermek Alimbayev, a builder who was chatting with volunteers manning a makeshift checkpoint in the city, where Kazakh military and a force from the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) have secured strategic buildings.

  

Protesters in Kazakhstan have chanted 'old man out!' in reference to 81-year-old former leader Nursultan Nazarbayev Photo: AFP / Abduaziz MADYAROV

In one particularly striking image this week, demonstrators pulled down a statue of Nazarbayev in the provincial town of Taldykorgan.

 

Map of Kazakhstan Photo: AFP / Sophie RAMIS


The breadth and depth of anger now laid at his door would once have been unimaginable.

Credited with overseeing impressive economic growth in the years after the millennium, the one-time steelworker and Communist Party bigwig benefited from a personality cult that blossomed even as local incomes were hammered by successive economic crises.

Image consultants promoted his reputation abroad as an elder statesman committed to nuclear diplomacy and world peace.

Among them was former British prime minister Tony Blair, who continued to advise Nazarbayev even after police lethally repressed a 2011 oil strike in the western town of Zhanaozen, where this week's unrest over the fuel price hike began.

While the precise contours of the political crisis that has engulfed Kazakhstan are unclear, it is evident that the ruling elite has been roiled.

On Saturday, authorities announced the arrest on treason charges of Karim Masimov, a high-profile Nazarbayev ally who was dismissed from his post as security committee chief at the height of the unrest.

A notice on the presidential website said Tokayev had also appointed a new man as the committee's first deputy -- a role previously occupied by Nazarbayev's nephew, Samat Abish.

Tokayev has not mentioned the former president in a series of addresses to the nation since the crisis began, though he did say he was taking over as head of the national security council.

Nazarbayev had assumed the powerful position as part of the power transition.

Nazarbayev's spokesman on Saturday denounced rumours that the ex-leader had left the country, saying he was in the capital Nur-Sultan and in touch with Tokayev.

If the Nazarbayev political star is finally on the wane in Kazakhstan, then his relatives shoulder some of the blame.

Oldest daughter Dariga Nazarbayeva's political career, mainly in the rubber-stamp legislature, has been marked by a series of controversial statements and perceptions of an abrasive style.

Offshore leaks and a high court challenge in London have revealed the extent of her family's foreign property holdings -- part of a capital flight trend Nazarbayev officially discouraged while president.

His middle daughter Dinara and her husband Timur Kulibayev control Halyk, the largest commercial bank, and are among the richest people in the country.

Rustam Nugmanov, a 48-year-old man who arrived in Almaty on Saturday morning on the first train allowed to leave the capital for the troubled southern city, said Kazakhs had "woken up" and were ready for life without Nazarbayev.

"He did a lot for the country, but he could have done so much more," said Nugmanov. "Maybe he just wasn't capable. Greed, other human weaknesses. He kept feeding those weaknesses."

Kazakhstan unrest: At least 164 killed in crackdown on protests, reports say

Sun., January 9, 2022



At least 164 people have died in Kazakhstan during violent anti-government protests, according to media reports citing health officials.

If confirmed it would mark a sharp rise from the previous figure of 44 deaths.

Almost 6,000 people have been arrested, including "a substantial number of foreign nationals", Kazakhstan's presidential office said on Sunday.

The demonstrations, triggered by a rise in fuel prices, turned into huge riots as they spread across the country.

They started on 2 January and grew to reflect discontent at the government and former President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who led Kazakhstan for three decades and is still thought to retain significant influence.

Last week, troops from countries including Russia were sent to Kazakhstan to help restore order.

The presidential statement added that the situation had stabilised, with troops continuing "cleanup" operations and guarding "strategic facilities".

A state of emergency and a nationwide curfew remain in place.

AT THE SCENE: 'Like something from an apocalypse film'

CONTEXT: Why is there unrest in Kazakhstan?

Kazakhstan: The basics

Where is it? Kazakhstan shares borders with Russia to the north and China to the east. It is a huge country the size of Western Europe.

Why does it matter? A former Soviet republic which is mainly Muslim with a large Russian minority, it has vast mineral resources, with 3% of global oil reserves and important coal and gas sectors.

Why is it making the news? Fuel riots, which have escalated to become broader protests against the government, have resulted in resignations at the top and a bloody crackdown on protesters.

In the capital, Nursultan, there are obvious signs that security has been tightened, says the BBC's Steve Rosenberg, with the entrance to the city's Presidential Palace blocked.

There is a growing suggestion, our correspondent adds, that the recent violence is linked to a power struggle within Kazakhstan's ruling elite.

Some 103 fatalities in the latest violence were reportedly in the main city, Almaty.

The security forces said they killed rioters in Almaty while trying to restore order and that protesters had tried to take control of police stations in the city.

President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev said "20,000 bandits" had attacked Almaty and that he had told security forces to "fire without warning".

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Sunday criticised the president's directive. "The shoot-to-kill order, to the extent it exists, is wrong and should be rescinded," he told ABC News' This Week.

He said the US was also seeking clarification from the Kazakh president on why he had requested the presence of Russian troops.

On Saturday, Kazakh authorities said the country's former intelligence chief Karim Massimov had been arrested on suspicion of treason. They gave no further details.

AFP

Amid Kazakhstan unrest, Almaty residents seek bread and information

After days of violent anti-government protests, the situation in Kazakhstan's largest city, Almaty, appears to have stabilized. DW spoke with residents who are now wondering what's next.


After days of unrest and turmoil, a semblance of normalcy has returned to Almaty

For days, Almaty has been enveloped in thick fog in the evenings. Explosions are heard from different parts of the city, sometimes accompanied by gray-blue flashes of light muffled by the murky haze. Gunfire, too, breaks the silence from time to time.

But compared to earlier this week, the situation has calmed considerably. Residents of Kazakhstan's largest city are now venturing out once again.

Many were scared to leave their homes, especially after dark — and not only because of the curfew imposed after mass protests broke out on Tuesday. Those who had unexpected access to the internet, despite an online shutdown, were shocked by footage that showed a young woman with a child being hit by bullets. It remains unclear who shot at her.

More people are now out on the streets, many seeking out small grocery stores in their neighborhoods. The big supermarkets and shopping centers in the city remain closed.


Basics like bread, milk and noodles have been hot commodities in Almaty

Askar Jermekov owns a small food store and told DW he has seen a big demand, especially for bread and noodles. "Before I open my store, I have to line up in front of the bread factory for a long time. If I can manage, I buy about 50 loaves of bread," he said. "I open my shop at 9 in the morning and by 10 I have almost nothing left, no noodles or milk. I'm now considering how to manage the shopping for tomorrow. The bread factories are operational, but the problem is that their drivers are scared and are refusing to deliver to shops."

'Everyone has to help as much as possible'

Nevertheless, residents seem to have enough bread. Many of the small snack bars in the city's neighborhoods, which normally sell shawarma and the savory puff pastry, samsa, have also begun baking their own loaves.

Some have also been preparing other dishes according to Kazakh, Uyghur, Uzbek or Tajik traditions — Almaty is a multiethnic city. The dishes are then transported by car to small stores, where they are distributed free of charge to those in need. It's estimated that more than 7,000 such trips have been carried out so far.


Free delivery of bread loaves have been a lifeline for many residents

"People are having a hard time. At a time like this, everyone has to help as much as possible. When I heard that there was a problem in the city with bread supplies, I showed up early in the morning and baked some," said the owner of a small bakery, who did not want to be named. "But I only give one loaf per person so that everyone gets something."

'We don't know anything, we only hear shooting'

Another small bakery near the now burned-down residence of the Kazakh president has also resumed business, also distributing free bread to those in need. Waiting in long lines, people exchange the latest information.

"How else are we supposed to know what's happening around us? There is no internet and the mobile network doesn't work everywhere. Television reception is disrupted," said one woman. "We don't know anything, we only hear shooting. It's an information vacuum. That's also one of the reasons we come here, to at least find out something." Nearby, other people standing in line nod as she speaks.

Getting reliable information in and out of Almaty is difficult. Many rumors and unbelievable stories are circulating in the city, mostly spread by those people who still have a landline. At the moment, the old-school telephones are almost the only means of communication available to the general population.

Many shops in Almaty were looted and vandalized during days of turbulent protests and violence

With mobile internet switched off and intermittent problems with wired connections, instant messaging services — very popular here — have been essentially shut down. In addition, many terminals that could be used to top up cellphone credits have been vandalized during the riots.
Situation remains volatile

As dusk falls, fresh gunfire can be heard. But those who still want a loaf of bread stay in line, seemingly already used to the new situation.

Suddenly, two armored personnel carriers drive by at high speed. It's unclear who they belong to, because the vehicles aren't marked. Many people in the bread line begin to speculate. Some think they are the so-called "peacekeepers" from Belarus or Russia, while others are convinced the vehicles belong to the Kazakh army, which is still trying to maintain order.

In any case, after days of violent turmoil the streets are once again being patrolled by police officers, with some security officials armed with machine guns. Patrols are common, even though numerous police cars were burned or destroyed during the unrest.

'We are dealing with bandits and terrorists'

In a televised address on Friday, Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev said Almaty alone had been invaded by "20,000 bandits," and ordered security forces to fire on the "terrorists" without warning. He dismissed as "stupidity" appeals "from abroad" for all parties to negotiate a peaceful solution to the crisis.

This article was originally written in Russian

SUNNI PATRIARCHY

Outspoken Saudi princess released after nearly three years in jail

Human rights advocate Princess Basmah and her daughter were imprisoned without charge in 2019
 

Princess Basmah, the daughter of Saudi Arabia’s second king and an outspoken human rights advocate, has been freed after almost three years in jail. 

Photograph: Marcus Ingram/Getty Images

Staff and agencies
Sun 9 Jan 2022

Saudi authorities have released a princess and her daughter who had been detained without charge for nearly three years.

Princess Basmah bint Saud bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, 57, an outspoken human rights advocate and member of the royal family, went missing in March 2019 along with her adult daughter Souhoud al-Sharif.

“The two ladies were released from their arbitrary imprisonment, and arrived at their home in Jeddah on Thursday 6 January 2022,” her legal adviser Henri Estramant said on Saturday.

“The princess is doing fine but will be seeking medical expertise. She seems worn out but is in good spirits, and thankful to reunite with her sons in person.”


Supporters of detained Saudi princess call for UK to help secure release

The government has not made a comment about her release. It has never publicly commented about the case.

In 2020, Princess Basmah said via social media that she had been imprisoned in the capital Riyadh for more than a year and was sick. She demanded that the current ruler and her cousin, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, release her and provide medical care.

She claimed she was being detained without charge in al-Ha’ir prison, where numerous other political detainees have been held, and neither she nor her daughter received explanations for their arrests, despite repeated pleas to the kingdom’s royal court, and to her uncle King Salman.

The youngest child of the late King Saud, Princess Basmah has been critical of the kingdom’s treatment of women.

She had been due to travel abroad for medical treatment around the time of her arrest in late February 2019, and was informed after her detention that she was accused of trying to forge a passport, a close relative said at the time. The nature of her illness has never been disclosed.

Following her release, rights group ALQST for Human Rights said: “She was denied the medical care she needed for a potentially life-threatening condition. At no point during her detention has any charge been levelled against her.”



Prince Mohammed has overseen a reform drive since he was appointed by his father King Salman in June 2017 at the expense of the previous designated heir to the throne, Mohammed bin Nayef.

Reforms have included lifting a decades-long ban on women driving and the easing of so-called “guardianship” rules that give men arbitrary authority over female relatives. But Saudi authorities have also cracked down on dissidents and even potential opponents, ranging from preachers to women’s rights activists, even royals.

In written testimony to the UN in 2020 Princess Basmah’s family said her detention was likely due in large part to her “record as an outspoken critic of abuses”. She was also deemed an ally of Mohammed bin Nayef, the written testimony added.

With Reuters and Agence France-Presse