La città che sale by Umberto Boccioni (1911)

“It is in the name of what it builds that a party appears before the tribunal of communist evaluation.
Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject¹

I. Introduction

Today we are witnessing a turn of revolutionary thought back towards the question of the party. After a period of explicit rejection of the party-form from various ultra-left currents, debates on organizational considerations (such as horizontalism, autonomism, communization, and tiqqunism/appelism’s “imaginary party,” to name but a few) have been brought to bear against the intensification of the class struggle and the inability of the large-scale uprisings of the 2010s and early 2020s to coalesce into a revolutionary situation on their own terms. Beyond (and at times alongside) the ultra-left, factions within the Democratic Socialists of America have also undertaken more serious considerations into the question of the party. Where the partyists of the democratic socialist current assume the party in its form as a traditional political party, they are incapable of articulating a position in practice distinct from that of the Democratic Party’s ballot line. What the ultra-left and democratic socialist currents share in their rapprochements with the party is the attempt to consider the party on different terms than its degradation in the practices of various so-called Marxist-Leninist, Trotskyist, or Maoist sects.

Within the ultra-left milieu, Phil A. Neel has recently attempted to salvage the concept of the party in his essay “Theory of the Party,” certain parts of his newest book Hellworld: The Human Species and the Planetary Factory, and his subsequent writings on partisan organization. Across his body of work, Neel has produced valuable geographic research and insight into the global operation of the capitalist mode of production today. In his conjunctural and regionally specific studies of social conditions, Neel’s work is detailed and genuinely useful. It is, however, appended to a theoretical mélange that leaves us with a mistaken guide to political action. The recent turn towards considerations of the party must take up the question of the form of the communist party specifically as a vehicle of revolutionary struggle.

Neel’s effort to think the party gains its particular significance for its recognition of place and moment, and its commitment to the political significance of the rebellions, uprisings, and retributive acts of recent decades to the question of organization. He attempts to lay out the fundamentals of a distinctly revolutionary communist project through the theorization of the subjectivity of the revolutionary communist partisan, the subjectivity’s relationship to the proletarian classes, and the attendant forms of partisan organization that develop in this process of social relation. He aims to problematize many traditional accounts of the question of organization, seeking to show the ways in which it is more often invoked as a salve than any concrete prescription. Rather than developing a programmatic account of the party, Neel bases his theory on the core assumption that processes of subjectivation are set into motion by Events that exceed the boundaries of the social order and thus open up a possibility of communist measures to be implemented in the contingency of the rupture. This passive conception of the party is precisely the critical failing of his theory. There will continue to be uprisings and they will be critical sites of intervention, but the providential impulse to see each instance of such as an immediate path to communist revolution is not a tenable basis for the formation of the party.

We take no issue with the objective of the advance of a communist project through the formation of the party, nor with the necessity of developing a communist party capable of making militant tactical advances and staging the conditions for insurrection. It is absolutely essential that the question of the development of the communist party is undertaken not on the terms of its being a traditional political party that aims to act within the parliamentary structures of the capitalist state, or as one more isolated and cultish sect, but instead on the terms of the intentional construction of the communist party as a vehicle for revolutionary struggle, able to unite different forms of practical activity towards that end. These needs are points of agreement upon which we establish this critical intervention.² Rather, we aim to critique the means that Neel proposes towards the formation of the party, and the ways in which his theory’s political prescriptions and implications practically frustrate the realization of the objective of militant communist struggle.

Neel’s theory of the party is unable to posit a distinctly communist project. A communist project necessitates creating the means to develop a specifically communist politics, and fundamental limitations of Neel’s theoretical position render him incapable of doing this. His theory disavows the active role of any conscious relationship to the process of political development. Instead, he begins from a tactical fetishism that, in its attempt to defend the political potential of the uprisings of recent decades, reduces the practice of determining a communist political content to the deployment of tactics themselves in localized moments of open conflict. The terrain of tactical engagement with the armed forces of the capitalist state, however, is demonstrably not solely that of the proletariat or communist militants, but right-wing and explicitly fascist militants as well. The question of tactics and their relationship to the political content of mass mobilizations must then be critically engaged. Instead, Neel simply assembles an eclectic array of material which serves as a substitute for the development of any conscious method for determining the political potential of uprisings. He relies heavily on allusions to mystical forces rather than articulating the development of consciousness within the proletariat as the revolutionary class and the development of communist partisans from within the class. This lack of attention to the active development of revolutionary consciousness entrenches the separation between partisan and proletariat, the separation which Neel ostensibly seeks to develop the theoretical means of overcoming. In his practical rejection of Marxism, Neel’s approach to methodology then loses its critical posture and begins accommodating even those social elements antagonistic to communist measures in their struggles. What Neel develops is a syncretic methodology that merely relies upon an aesthetic of militancy to support its prescriptive claims. From this, he does not arrive at any clarity of what the communist party today may be or must become; he simply falls into what is ultimately a populist embrace of class-collaborationist politics, where differentiated interests both within and between classes are obscured by the generalization of an immediatist notion of the “species” that unites itself against capital and the state. Such desperate opportunism—which rejects the specificity of the proletariat in the development of a revolutionary communist party—leads Neel further away from communism than he was when he began, and much closer to a renewed third position.

Through this immanent critique, we seek to demonstrate that communist partisans are not bound to the occult mysteries of the unknowable, and are in fact capable of intentionally crafting programmatic interventions for the practical development of the communist party in our own context (as ourselves revolutionary communists located in the so-called U.S.). Through such efforts, the method for building the party must cohere across many uneven and differentiated conditions and relations in the global class struggle, and through the construction of forms of mediation that transform class struggle into communist revolutionary practice. If we are to overcome the challenges of the past, we must understand the party as the vehicle for closing the gap between the partisan and the proletariat, and not as the institutionalization of this separation.

II. Tactical Fetishism

In matters of strategy, the distinction between tactics and politics must be made. While there is a necessary relationship between the tactical and the political within a given situation, serious weaknesses result when these terms are conflated or misconstrued as a simple unity in strategic considerations. It has historically been the work of communist partisans to think about these together dialectically in order to formulate political programs and strategies against the classes antagonistic to the proletariat. This has been essential in order to structure the development of the proletarian class struggle towards the adoption of revolutionary communist measures.

Neel’s theory of the party begins with the conflation of tactics and politics, and furthermore provides no definition of what tactics or politics even are in the first place. In arguing that political positions arise from tactical actions themselves without clarifying the meaning of these terms, Neel makes an error that we call tactical fetishism: the assumption that tactics in themselves possess an intrinsic political content, as things that appear to animate people rather than being the product of human social activity. Tactics and politics are in fact two different things, and an essential task of the communist party is to develop the critical consciousness of the activity of the social relations constituting them in practice. Here we will reconstruct his argument as we follow the development of this error throughout his theory of the party and subsequent efforts to think partisan organization.

The failure of existing forms of organization to meaningfully intervene in the uprisings of our time is the starting point of Neel’s theory. According to Neel, the reason that existing forms of organization fail is because they “usually provide no concrete tactical experience or strategic knowledge and are therefore incapable of pushing the revolt beyond its limits and building substantial forms of proletarian power.”³ This problem is identified as “a symptom of concrete tactical limits evident in the inability of rebellions to enact meaningful social change or generate forms of proletarian power that can survive in their wake.”⁴ We have here a dual-sided failure of tactical acumen: that of the organization that cannot make an offering to the masses in revolt, and the rebellion that cannot cohere its activity into a definite form. However, reducing the problems of these rebellions to tactical limits already begins from a position that ignores the question of the political situation—the historical development of the specific struggle in which an intervention must be planned. By beginning from this orientation to tactical primacy, Neel makes himself unable to recognize the historical specificity of the moments in which uprisings occur, assuming that all uprisings are internally similar and occur on a similar ground. This fundamental assumption forecloses a Marxist analysis of the balance of class forces in contention within a specific historical conjuncture, and the practical political efforts to forge conscious interventions within moments of struggle. What Neel produces instead bears a closer resemblance to bourgeois social scientific thought than it does to dialectical and historical materialist analysis. Without such specific methodological clarity, what he proposes makes the construction of specifically communist interventions impossible.

Neel thus begins with a rejection of a conscious relationship to the conditions of struggle itself and remains at a stage where his diagnosis is unconscious of its own conditions of possibility. The moment of uprising or rebellion is then assumed to be in itself the foundation of a communist politics, without any consideration of the conditions from which such forms of struggle would emerge, or any avowed political character on their own terms. It is from here that the separation between the politicized communist partisan and the proletariat appears as his problem of organization:

in the midst of struggles and rebellions of various intensities, myriad forms of organization (often mischaracterized as “spontaneous” or “informal”) emerge from tactical puzzles posed to the collective intelligence of participants and, only once this practical substrate of popular power is formed, can more “strategic” or theoretical forms of larger-scale coordination and power-building begin to take shape. In other words, those who enter into the rebellion demanding that “we get organized” presume a “we” that does not yet exist.⁵

Neel then articulates the starting point of the theory of the party as a twofold question:

how can a specifically communist form of revolutionary subjectivity emerge out of the distinctly non-communist, everyday struggles of the class? And how might specific f ractions of individual communist partisans produced by these struggles intervene back into these conditions in order to further elaborate this partisan subjectivity in and beyond individual struggles?⁶

In an attempt to answer this question, Neel seeks to construct a bridge between the subjectivity of the class and the partisan with his concept of the “tactical vanguard.” This notion places at the forefront of strategy a fidelity to a specific kind of tactical militancy best understood as actions undertaken in the context of an uprising or rebellion, what Neel would call an Event. Neel provides the following reasoning for the primacy of the tactical vanguard:

the assumption is that people are convinced to adopt certain political ideas through conversation, polemic, or propaganda, and that these ideas then imply the adoption of certain strategic orientations and affiliated tactical practices. But history demonstrates the exact opposite: political positions emerge from tactical action rather than the discursive imposition of moral or ideological arguments.⁷

In this schema, the actual program of a political organization is not the primary affair, for “people do not join organizations, support them, or adopt their political positions, symbology, and general dispositions en masse because they agree with them. They do so because these organizations exhibit competency and strength of spirit.”⁸ Since politics, he argues, flow from tactical action, concerns over the so-called political ideas of militants or uprisings themselves are superfluous. The focus is what individuals or crowds do, and not why they may do it. Where the discursive terrain of politics is subordinated to tactical action, the consciousness of political activity ceases to be a concern.

On the one hand, Neel has a point—political programs do not on their own compel attention and allegiance without being articulations of real action and demonstrated competence. What does it matter what a political formation says if no one knows what it does or if it cannot do what it says it does? But on the other hand, he has over-extended the capabilities of this point in a total rejection of the program itself in establishing how people might recognize the actions of a formation as legible in the first place. One must ask why he opposes politics to action and competence. Competency is reduced here to a simplistic vision of “brave” actions taken by frontliners in moments of street conflict. The demonstration of competency, however, can occur across a wide range of activities in which the party may develop links with the class that enable them to politicize their conditions and self-consciously direct activity toward the objective of class struggle, from legal defense efforts to the provisioning of relief supplies in moments of crisis. The key is that such activity subordinates its tactics to the achievement of the political objective of advancing the adoption of communist measures to address the conditions of struggle that require tactical interventions in the first place. In other words, the demonstration of competency must organize said activity in a manner that directly engages in and further cultivates the capacities of the proletariat in its struggles towards the goal of communist revolution. What is most important then is not simply tactical competency, but the initiative of communists in crafting interventions into the conditions of struggle. It is the clarity of the political objective in practice, not merely the act on its own, that compels the proletariat’s development into a force that recognizes itself as revolutionary.

There is a more immediate context that explains Neel’s attempted intervention here, though it only reveals the parochial character of his thought. Tactical fetishism can be read as an overcorrection for the era of street mobilizations and confrontations, from 1999’s protests of the World Trade Organization to the 2020 George Floyd Uprising. In this period, particularly the 2010s, the antagonistic dynamic between street militants and “peace police” protestors hostile to property destruction and confrontations with police became ascendant as a clear mark of distinction between participants and their respective objectives. Elements hostile to street militancy laundered the ideology of non-violence through privilege discourse to discredit militants in street demonstrations. This counterinsurgency was carried out in various ways largely by nonprofit employees and individuals indoctrinated in an identity reductionist politics diffused through the university and social media. For militants, such elements become the primary opponent in the struggle to overcome immediate internal limits to the advance of an uprising. The problem could be identified as one of opposing tactics, but that would be an oversimplification; militants themselves are haunted by the pessimism of this era of “horizontalist” movements and struggle to preserve the tactical advances of these confrontations and develop mobilizations into definite political projects. The immediate concern tends to become the question of how to convince everyone who is already out in the street to take up the militant position, rather than a more critical study of who is out in the street and why. The dynamic of pro- vs. anti-militancy often appears as simply a debate over the adoption of violent vs. nonviolent tactics, but in actuality it is an opposition undergirded by fundamental political differences, which are significantly determined by differences of the social composition of the respective forces deploying certain tactics.

While tactical acumen is an essential skill that a communist partisan project must develop, such interventions cannot be entirely reduced to the uprising or rebellion as the sole terrain of engagement or political clarity. In Neel’s conception, however, the tactical is made identical to the political in order to demonstrate the insufficiency of ideas or discursive approaches to political engagement. This tactical fetishism amounts to an immediatism that turns the party from a force that intentionally develops mass revolutionary proletarian consciousness into a special operations unit and a meme generator (on this latter point, see section III below). There are always political implications to any action undertaken that precede the moment of implementation, and objective and historical developments that do not always appear immediately to us in the practice or perception of a tactic in its moment. What must be recovered from this prescription then is a notion of the stakes of communist politics—the critical evaluation of capitalist social relations and creation of prescriptions for how to confront them in order to transform them through the organization of practical activity—in which the conscious mediations of party and program are recognized in their historical roles.

Neel rejects this reciprocal relation of party and program, stating that the “‘programmatic’ approach to party building is fundamentally backwards, confusing the result of generation-spanning organizational debates and practical reformations with its starting point.”⁹ According to him,

enforcing a strict and schematic adherence to a maximal program stunts most organizations before they can get off the ground, leaving no space for the participation of new generations of partisans with little practical experience and only a murky grasp of revolutionary theory and history. For this reason, it is also a method used by racketized organizations to ensure that their core members (who have at least a basic grasp on these debates) can exert their authority over the broader organization through manipulation of these programmatic points and forcible exclusion of personal enemies on the basis of even minor disagreements.¹⁰

Yet without such consciousness of party and program as forms of mediation that are developed to deliberate and evaluate the efficacy of political activity among large groups of people, “tactical action” simply becomes a fetish object in Neel’s work, as the mere representation of action takes primacy over the social activity of decision-making. Politics are expected to be transmitted absent any attempt to engage in the development of a directed process of a tactic’s conscious implementation, or a conscious engagement with the conditions in which specific tactical actions become legible to those taking them up. While he is correct that organizations may use a rigid programmatism to control and manipulate their rank-and-file members, the construction of a cult of the deed amongst partisans in an informal social milieu without agreed-upon means of forming collective decisions is no alternative. Such environments are just as oppressive and rife with manipulation as any formal sect, and just as much a racket in which wealthier and more well-resourced elements have a clear social advantage over others that they often abuse. Without the intentional construction of party-building and programmatic development as a reciprocal process based in the mediations of partisan and class activity, Neel’s “tactical vanguard” remains an insular force, if one at all. The notion of an immediate transmission of partisan subjectivity through the tactical interface implies that no uprising or rebellion has limits to their development into a revolutionary situation beyond the willpower of its participants. As such, Neel’s notion of partisan subjectivity carries within it a voluntarism in which communism may be carried out by whomever takes the tactical edge in a moment of conflict. This tactical fetishism further metastasizes in Neel’s concept of the “sigil.”

III. The Occult Power of the Meme

Neel’s tactical fetishism substitutes the conscious consideration of politics with the notion of the “sigil.” The “sigil” is said to operate at its “most rudimentary” at the “aesthetic level,” and in a more elaborate form as “certain tactical practices or organizational dispositions” that are “transmitted through a name and a package of minimal practices.”¹¹ This sigil then “renders tactics into broadly replicable forms and offers a minimal passage through which the uninitiated (i.e. that section of the population deemed ‘apolitical’) are able to enter into the moment of rupture.”¹² It is, for Neel, “a preliminary form of collective subjectivity,” one that “simultaneously summons a partisan force out of the class through its seemingly occult power [!] and, as a practical waypoint orienting concrete tactics, also structures this amorphous subjectivity into minimal forms of organization.”¹³ So, what exactly is a sigil? A glorified meme.¹⁴

Rather than proposing a program for the development of a critical self-consciousness realized in proletarian self-activity, the practice offered instead is a memetic affair of summoning “occult power.” For Neel, this largely follows from moments such as the gilets jaunes movement in France and the yellow helmets of the Hong Kong uprisings (his choice examples), in which the internet and social media played a major role in transmitting practices to people in disparate places. Here, Neel disavows analysis of the real conditions by which these practices or tactics may have been transmitted. The transmission of practice is conceived neither as the result of some kind of conscious act of recognition nor out of determination by specific conditions faced by specific partisans. Instead, Neel appeals to an immediate, mystical connection which does not require rational explanation. Such a concept assumes that political development is both unconscious and uniform. While it is true that practices of street militancy were transmitted via internet memes throughout the 2010s, Neel simply takes it as given that such isolated processes can transmit communist politics, an assumption that becomes increasingly ludicrous as the far right consolidates control of popular digital platforms.

But beyond the practical fact of the right-wing seizure of digital platforms and mass media, there is also the much more general question—left unexamined by Neel—of the inherently reactionary form of mass media and of the politics of the meme in particular. Following the logic of the sigil, we are to assume that partisan subjectivity is to emerge from the position of the uniform spectator, in which the activity of the subject already appears to it as its alienated product. Political development is then a matter of physical mimicry, instilled in the participant through this alienated image of collective activity. What is offered here is not a means of developing a critical and rational consciousness within the class struggle, but a means of inducing a mechanical response according to certain stimuli. This is the logic of advertising and of meme-driven engagement in digital platforms. Are we to take this as the logic of communist politics? Where “political dispositions […] trail behind the sigil, serving as the messy, mostly subconscious articulation of these radical acts after the fact,”¹⁵ the sigil is presented as a shortcut to the development of a revolutionary communist activity, lacking any political criteria beyond the immediate appearance of a certain action in a certain situation, regardless of who is doing so and why. The sigil then doesn’t produce conscious participants in class struggle; instead, it reproduces passive recipients of propaganda. The internet meme, though infinitely reproducible in a decentralized manner that may appear as participation, merely pantomimes conscious participation in the form of self-alienating representations. Neel’s entire theory of a “tactical vanguard” relies on the continual separation between vanguard and class that the sigil’s form of engagement requires in practice. Politics are assumed to be transmitted in a streamlined fashion through the reduction of the individual to a mere recipient, simply reproducing the way that mass media platforms already operate and elevating the meme to the level of strategy. The partisan here does not meet the proletariat in its conditions of struggle, much less directly advance the class beyond its conditions through conscious intervention. In fact, the partisan does not meet them at all. The partisan farms content.

Neel’s theorization of the relations class, partisan, and vanguard is then based upon a set of contradicting assumptions. We can accept that these formations are distinct in practice and currently exist in a state of separation, and it is from this point where the attempt to theorize practice begins. However, in the mechanical logic of the sigil’s operation, these objects are assumed to arise throughout a homogenous social substance, which ironically serves to justify the irreconcilability of their separation in practice. The lack of any particular clarity in Neel’s deployment of these terms simply constructs a naturalized hierarchy of anti-social actors that are supposed to be capable of politics, despite the reciprocal alienation of this form of activity. This notion of the party is primarily an aesthetic one. The potential of partisan political development is reduced to the immediate moment of an Event, a rupture that itself unfolds in isolation from the historical development of the struggle that forged its conditions and relations. In this conception, vanguard elements are merely empowered partisan planners who transmit instructions to an undifferentiated mass that acts as mere recipients.

Where Neel adopts the term of the “historical party” to name the political potential of the mass that is unconsciously constituted by the immediacy of the Event or moment of rupture, it is in fact a party without history; his tactical fetishism has now overcome any need to identify any specifically revolutionary class strata from within this mass and the historical development of the balance of class forces within that struggle. In doing so, Neel forgoes the party’s essential task of transforming the proletariat from a class in-itself, a distinct mode of social existence characterized by specific relations of production, to a class for-itself, a distinct political formation capable of articulating its interests across its differentiated forms of appearance and acting upon them in an intentional and conscious manner. When the task of transforming social relations is entirely subordinated to the immediacy of the Event, it disavows the historical relationships preceding and developed within and beyond the Event. This disavowal evacuates any means of consciously creating the conditions for rupture to be created by the self-activity of the revolutionary proletariat. Such capacities can only be achieved through practices of organization and the development of collective strategy that create the historical consciousness of the relations and conditions of any moment of rupture. In Neel’s conception of the party, the form ceases to have any determinate content, and thus itself ceases to be able to assume any definite form.

In constructing this fetishized representation of tactical action and his resort to the mysticism of the “sigil” in propagating politics, Neel actually abandons the party and instead revives a version of “propaganda of the deed” that ultimately obscures the actual process by which masses in struggles—such as the uprisings of our time—come to recognize what must be done and undertake such necessary actions. While these struggles are often spontaneous to their moment, there is an essential logic in their historical development such that a set of specific tactical actions becomes recognized as necessary to participants. Contrary to a recognition of the historical dynamic of the proletariat becoming active and conscious, Neel reproduces a view of the mass as statically passive and drawn to mere representations of militancy. While such a form of unconscious activity may appear true in the manner by which capitalist social relations are immediately represented, the task of communist political practice is to overcome these social relations to realize a newly emancipatory form of social life. If one were to assume that these dynamics will simply be automatically reproduced in struggle, then one must wonder what the point of “communism” even is?

The “sigil” then produces an intractable contradiction that compounds the above error of tactical fetishism. On the one hand, the “sigil” collapses the conscious reconstruction of a struggle’s historical development into a voluntarism that expects any potential action to be picked up by any mass, similar to that of the role of the “tactical vanguard.” On the other hand, these masses are now conceived of as fundamentally devoid of legible reason themselves, acting subconsciously and susceptible to the spectacular representation of their struggle in the form of “memetic replications.” The voluntarism of his tactical fetishism has now produced an attendant fatalism, where despite any appeal to the “collective intelligence” of the masses that Neel may make, he essentially does not find them to be particularly conscious actors.

IV. Politicizing Needs

While Neel’s tactical fetishism and deployment of the “sigil” foreclose a program of the development of the proletariat as a self-consciously communist partisan force, it would be unfair to say that he makes no attempt to offer further strategic points of intervention. These contributions, however, are derived from the same subjective division which has complicated his bridge between the “tactical vanguard” and the proletariat, between the partisan and the class. The vacillation between voluntarism and fatalism becomes erratic and volatile as he attempts to address this subjective division in practice.¹⁶ This is most apparent when he deploys the notions of “subsistence struggles” as the baseline of intermediary activity between uprisings or “Events.” While Neel intends for these proposals to be clarifying, he neither recognizes the conditions in which distinct needs become catalysts for class struggle, nor is he at all clear on the relation between interventions into these struggles and the development of a communist political project.

In Neel’s terms, subsistence struggles are “concrete issues of survival under capitalism” and are to be classified according to two types: “struggles over the terms of subsistence, and struggles over the imposition of these terms on the population.”¹⁷ This is a distinction made without a difference. What he claims as two types of struggle collapse into each other. They ultimately possess no determinate political objective in the same manner as his tactical fetishism, and his elaboration of them forms a convoluted means of concealing the partisan’s aims. Where the former tend to be largely economic struggles involving questions of price levels and the distribution of wealth and resources, the latter are said to focus “on raw survival and dignity in life and work.”¹⁸ Where the economic struggles can be recuperated to the ruling order according to the concrete interests of classes and class strata against the interests of others, the more confrontational struggles against impositions of the terms of subsistence are said to have the potential to become “struggles against domination as such.”¹⁹ For Neel, “particular confluences of subsistence struggles serve as the grounds from which mass uprisings emerge, which will then exceed these initial bounds and thereby cease to merely express these underlying subsistence struggles.”²⁰ While Neel is correct to point out that subsistence “struggles are more easily recuperated into the policy sphere, and only take on a radical edge in extreme conditions or when partisan organizations exist to push them in this direction,”²¹ he operates on mistaken assumptions that maintain a separation between the vanguard and the masses in ways that contradict the purpose and basis of the communist party. What struggles over our conditions must lead to is the recognition of the interdependency between the vanguard and the proletarian masses, a relation that becomes a conscious one to participants through the mediations of the party and its programs.

Engagement with these struggles on such terms maintains an antinomy between the ends of the proletariat and those of the partisan subject. Where the proletarian engagement in such struggles is reduced to subsistence, Neel does not identify the class as developing any direct political consciousness of the stakes of their struggles. Partisan intervention is where these are made to be seen “as a limit to be overcome.”²² Missing from this analysis is a key part of class organization: observing and learning from the self-activity of the class. There is a social character to the way we get our needs met. If the partisan has a role here, it is to make conscious the social and political character of needs and their satisfaction. It is only through this process that an effective strategy of action in confrontation with bosses, landlords, and institutions can cohere. The partisan and the class are mutually incomplete; each part has something the other does not. Mutual recognition of this incompleteness is key to the development of proletarian forces in the class struggle. Maintaining a separation between the two, each left to their own silo, precludes the possibility of building mass revolutionary politics. If the separation of class and partisan is maintained, movements become stagnant and insular, and easy for the state to pick off in times of intensifying repression. There can be no revolutionary communist party worth its name without the closing of this gap. Developing the capacity to satisfy social needs in a directly political and politicizing manner is an essential means of overcoming this separation of the daily class struggle and the communist revolutionary project.

Following his earlier subjugation of the question of conscious development to the operation of memes, Neel’s engagement in subsistence struggles is here completely subordinate to the end of creating the conditions for the uprising as an Event. He assumes that the key escalations leading to an uprising will come from the brave partisans rather than from the proletarian masses. There is no politicization beyond simply steering the class into conflicts with the state, for which they may or may not be prepared. Fighting the police or the state’s armed forces is both necessary and inevitable in any struggle. It is, however, a potential source for manifold tactical blunders if experienced partisans are either unable to prepare proletarians accordingly for what they may face, or are themselves ignorant of the tactical necessities that proletarians know intimately.

Just as much as timidity in the wrong moment can produce a loss of confidence from the proletarian masses, rash action solely designed to escalate could make itself illegible to them. At every moment, true tactical acumen requires an embeddedness in the proletariat such that the class becomes self-conscious of the fact that only militant struggle may truly satisfy its needs, and that the objective of this struggle is communism. Tactical acumen then is not simply meeting people where they are at, but becoming skilled in the tactful guidance of proletarians towards conscious and strategic escalation, and the work of making ourselves attuned to recognize those moments when proletarians are ready and going to escalate. Engaging in subsistence struggles with ulterior or concealed motives the way that Neel’s strategy implies would only make the communist party a force alien to the interests of the proletariat. In doing so, Neel reproduces the transactional logic of certain organizational projects focused on the provision of services, where proletarians have no agency. Here, the class is conceived of as economistic actors that are reduced to an inert object for partisan intervention. What is needed is a relationship of conscious reciprocity between the proletariat and communist partisans, not a transactional one. The transactional relationship maintains the separation between the tactical vanguard and the recipient masses, mirroring how the sigil operates on the assumption of the same separation.

When this transactional approach to need is taken as given, it obscures how need is socially mediated by capital and subordinated to the necessity of reproducing capitalist social relations. The transactional approach does nothing to transform the recipient into a conscious political actor, nor the predisposition to understand need as something that is beyond their reach within these social relations. The political aspect of need is obscured in the moment when subsistence is naturalized and stripped of its social character, and converted into a so-called basic need.²³ This obfuscation reproduces the separation between the partisan and masses, for it disavows the necessity for communist partisans to engage in the development of proletarians’ class consciousness and of their conditions which are the basis for this consciousness. Where needs are de-politicized, their satisfaction comes to proletarians as transactional relations without history, rather than through developing consciousness that a need’s satisfaction is the result of an entire system of interdependent relationships within a determinate mode of production. The objective of developing class consciousness is to create the potential to transform capitalist relations of interdependency, where need is satisfied through the production and exchange of commodities, into a communist one, where needs and desires are satisfied by the collective association of liberated actors in a classless society. The satisfaction of subsistence needs is then one avenue for imputing class consciousness, though at this moment for many reasons such activity ends up reproducing the service model. This is a problem for communist partisans to solve, not to ignore or cynically take advantage of.

V. Incoherent Methods

Neel’s sole strategic contribution is the objective of directing struggle to the moment of an uprising. What is to happen beyond this is anyone’s guess. Strategy is surrendered to the imperative of action, yet the significance of this conception itself cannot be explained. While he knows that “communism must emerge from a revolutionary break with the old world and cannot be slowly approached through the evolutionary means of gradual reform and development of the productive forces,”²⁴ Neel is unable to articulate what the social substance of a communist project is in terms of concrete political organization. For him “the most important dividing line” is simply

that which separates communists from all those who fear, dismiss, or treat as infantile the riotous behavior of the crowd in the moment of the uprising, preferring either orderly and “peaceful” protest tactics or some mythic form of militant discipline, as if insurrections were surgical military operations rather than messy, mass uprisings.²⁵

The proletarian uprisings of the 21st century are indeed the high watermarks of class struggle and communist revolutionary potential in our time; they are the real movement. These uprisings are the closest we have come to conceiving of what the development of mass proletarian armed struggle may look like in our contexts in a manner that precedes the formal organization required to wield such capacity according to a politically-directed strategy. A dividing line does form in practice between those who recognize the necessity of directing organized proletarian violence against its class enemies and those who disavow this necessity. Neel, however, reconstructs this dividing line in a manner that fetishizes the Event itself as a purely tactical moment at the expense of the specific political motivations and class compositions of such Events. For him, anyone who would join in any uprising, apparently regardless of the character of said uprising, would be considered a member of the “historical party.” For Neel, revolution ceases to be an intentional affair that is maneuvered according to plans made reflexively in the midst of crises and evaluated according to their efficacy (in turn denying the actual history of any of the successful revolutionary communist parties). The outcome of this subordination of all strategy to the aim of creating this singular Event of an indeterminate political character is a methodological incoherence which serves only to retroactively justify Neel’s assumptions about political practice. This ultimately foretells a failure to prepare for protracted class struggle that culminates in communist revolution.

This militant posturing conceals the absence of any ability to articulate the means of developing distinctly communist strategy, leading Neel to contradict himself. He defends this lack of strategy in a characteristically moral fashion, stating that the “one thing that should unify communists, then, is a strict opposition to sectarianism and any pretensions to certainty.”²⁶ This is because “our practice must be ecumenical and experimental from the very beginning, cultivating, collating, and catalyzing differences that are then put into constant conversation with one another.”²⁷ Discursive means have returned after their prior rejection in order to make sure communists do not differentiate themselves too strongly from each other for the purpose of “maintaining a posture of openness toward apolitical or antipolitical currents, as well as to those whose stylistic or tonal expression of politics differs from our own, rather than clunkily transmuting such aesthetic differences into allegedly political critiques.”²⁸

As here “communism coheres through the very diversity of expressions that compose it,” it is at the same time “not a strict or supervening unity that overrides and homogenizes subsidiary elements, but merely a requisite measure of coherence.”²⁹ Neel then recognizes that these “minimal conditions must be enforced in order to ensure” the creation of “an ecumenical environment that allows for the proliferation of truly communist ideas.”³⁰ While this enforcement is necessary, the very means of doing so are opaque on the terms that Neel establishes. If there is to be deliberation, there is no way offered here beyond merely a new way to charge those who disagree with “sectarianism.” Amidst the appeal to ecumenicism and experimentation, and despite Neel’s insistence that “any claim by any party to possess the one true path to revolution is obviously laughable,”³¹ we are led to only assume the authority of Neel’s position, despite his lack of clarity. The appeal to deliberation is already complicated by his notion of the tactical vanguard’s primacy of demonstrating “strength of spirit”³² through “brave acts”³³ in “incendiary conflicts.”³⁴ The privileged voice in any deliberation is then only certain practitioners within that terrain of struggle. What emerges instead, if we are to take such proclamations seriously, is a vision of the party in which political organization is subordinate to the armed wings of struggle. We are left to wonder how much deliberation would indeed be possible in practice.

While Neel warns against “eclecticism,” his work does not demonstrate such caution. Taking him at his word, we can see how his pretensions to “openness” in practice lends itself to a peculiarly syncretic methodology capable only of assembling concepts from various areas and creating links between them in a roughly ad hoc manner. This is how Neel appears to possess a certain erudition and scope in his analysis. In reality, it is that sheer quantity of information has combined with the entertainment of an abundance of (often mixed) metaphors to conceal the lack of a critical synthesis of the concepts that are deployed. A reconstruction of the logic of his theory would reveal a series of influences more than it would any definite consistency of method. This is all deployed to the ends of justifying a pre-conceived notion of what revolutionary communist praxis entails (the reified rupture), largely avoiding any critical (let alone self-critical) import. As Neel’s reasoning is entirely instrumentalized to the uprising, his own method is revealed to be a logical spontaneism that projects its own political indeterminacy upon the objectives of any struggle. Communism then has no reason to be found in the class struggle on its own terms, but itself has become an empty signifier for any possible “rupture.” Rupture is not enough.

To briefly survey some of the theories invoked in Neel’s assemblage: the concept of the “‘competitive control’ over an open field of conflict,”³⁵ developed by military strategists of the capitalist state’s imperial order, is used by Neel to argue that his tactical fetishism has reasonable grounds. From this notion, only when “concrete leadership in action has been established do people become receptive to the more abstract leadership in program and principle.”³⁶ Yet this follows from the assumption that “organization emerges through the practical overcoming of material limits, trailing its intellectual, aesthetic, and ethical commitments behind.”³⁷ The clear separation between practical exigency and the means of any self-consciousness of praxis then posits that partisans of any position—communist, liberal, even fascist—are essentially engaged in the same game on an identical field, competing over the same constituencies. In assuming the open field of conflict and common constituencies for any quality of formation, Neel loses the ability to differentiate situations of and conditions for action.

This is what the above-mentioned notion of the memetic transfer of tactics in the sigil intends to flatten into a general terrain for action. As opposed to organization that intentionally acts within a specific composition and develops a specific form of subjectivity, Neel follows Adrian Wohlleben’s work on memes³⁸ to posit subjectivity as a perpetually singular and contingent matter. In his opposition to the specificity of organized intervention, Neel vacates the question of class composition and reproduces the inability of those cited imperial military strategists to understand proletarians as actual or potential historical actors. Where he renounces the conscious orchestration of insurrection and subordinates all strategy to the assumption of the spontaneous uprising, Neel must draw up on another eclectic combination to relieve himself of the burden of constructing concrete analyses of concrete situations. He (quite selectively) draws upon the works of Alain Badiou and Michael Neocosmos to posit the precedence of an ontology of the Event over the scientific anticipations of Marxism. As everything is subordinated to the immediacy of the moment of rupture and what “practice” is assumed to be “pragmatic” to such moments, all Neel offers is a newly-conjured spontaneism. Nothing can be theoretically ascertained in anticipation of these moments, and there is no practice that informs theory in the interstices of these “incendiary” events.

We are back at the perennial problem, which is that Neel has no practical idea of what constitutes politics beyond the physicality of the spontaneous Event, which is the only term through which his reified understanding of social relations is able to render class struggle intelligible. In Neel’s thought, we would have no means of actively cohering the party except by resorting to tailing any spontaneous activity in these “magical” moments of rupture, at the expense of developing any determinate social, and thus too political and discursive, content in doing so. He instead only alludes to a “protracted process of political experimentation and construction that takes root in whatever fractions of the class move earliest and most forcefully and which then develops only by exceeding these initial bounds.”³⁹ Thus it ceases to matter exactly which elements of the proletariat take action, or even their precise motivations, so long as they are the ones taking action. Forgoing class analysis, we instead get an irrationalist vitalism. In order to more fully grasp the extent to which Neel abandons the political import of Marxism, we must visit him at his most self-conscious with his engagement in method.

VI. The Devaluation of Marxism

Neel’s syncretic approach to method is prominent in Chapter 4 of Hellworld, in which he most clearly sheds the presuppositions of Marxism and class analysis. Read as a theoretical foundation for the arguments made in his “Theory of the Party,” it becomes clear that his tactical fetishism is a recapitulation of the way he fetishizes the relation between labor and value—at times rendering them identical, at times seeing them as completely opposite each other. Despite the appearance of theoretical rigor in his reconstruction of these key categories of Marxism, he in fact never establishes a logical relation between them. What follows from this is an arbitrary naturalization of these social relations in which labor is posited as simply external to capital, rather than being an essential and constitutive category of capitalist social relations.

Where it is the case for Neel that “the labour process constitutes the basic engine of exploitation producing the social surplus that then accrues to the ruling class, as capital,”⁴⁰ he demonstrates an immediate identification of the labor process with the valorization process. These distinct, coterminous moments of the capitalist process of production are already elided. This error leads Neel to further reduce the question of labor-power’s exploitation to one of a physical nature rather than a matter of the organization of social relations. Value is described as substantial “in the sense that it behaves like a quantity” and “exerts a very real physical force on the world around it.”⁴¹ Where value becomes “synonymous with these social relationships” in which it is produced⁴² for Neel, he disregards the fact that value and these social relationships are, in fact, two different things. As such, he cannot articulate any relation or practice of mediation between them. From this, Neel’s fetishistic identification of human labor with its value-producing form retreats into a naturalized, vitalistic conception of labor where the conditions for the capitalist mode of production’s endemic crises are to be “found in class antagonism,” yet these antagonisms are reduced to “the contradictory inclusion of labour within capital.”⁴³ He states that:

As the source of value, labour-power exerts both an intrinsic force in the form of class conflict […] and poses an extrinsic constraint in the sense that, as a transmutation of general human intellectual and bodily capacities, labour-power is a peculiar commodity that cannot be produced directly by capitalist means. Thus, it poses the most intractable contradiction: labour must simultaneously be a commodity and a non-commodity.⁴⁴

For Neel “labour, like nature, is ontologically prior to production” and “therefore constantly confounds its smooth conversion into labour-power with the obstinate friction of the worker’s living body.”⁴⁵ As a result, he concludes that “labour can be transformed into the source of value for the simple reason that value is the form taken by the social relationships of domination that bridge the metabolic gap.”⁴⁶ The value form is here reduced to a process of subsumption in which value is the form taken by social relationships of domination, which are themselves the form of appearance of value. Where labor is now “ontologically prior” to the very activity of production in which labor is intelligible as labor, Neel’s attempt at explaining the nature of value and its relation to labor is that of two parallel tautologies. Labor is taken as something that exists in a natural state, and value an unnatural imposition placed upon it. Labor’s dual existence is then, for Neel, solely that of an appearance as both commodity and non-commodity, rather than that of abstract and concrete labor. He is mistaken.

The social form of labor does not stand apart from capital as an external contradiction, but is in actuality a contradiction internal to capitalist social relations. The concept of labor, developed by bourgeois political economy, necessarily already presupposes the commodified form of labor as labor-power. This is what Marx recognized, and why he developed the distinct concept of labor-power in the first place, to identify more precisely what social relations bourgeois consciousness mystified in the notion of labor.

Neel maintains a naturalism that presupposes a transhistorical notion of labor, as if it did not emerge as a concept that already presupposed its essential alienation of the agent from their own activity. Despite critiquing positions that see capital as a “parasite,”⁴⁷ this is precisely the position that Neel arrives at himself. Labor, for him, remains intrinsic to social activity, a natural property. Value remains an alien configuration imposed externally upon labor’s life-activity by social relationships of domination, which cannot be explained by his account of the relations themselves. Neel has no account of the form of value as an immanent product of the social and historical development of antagonistic social relations of production.

If value is not a contradictory product of labor’s own activity, but rather always imposed again by capital successfully against the “friction” of these physiological limits, then there would not appear to be any means immanent to the laboring subject’s capacities to do anything beyond resisting its “domestication.”⁴⁸ According to Neel’s anti-logic, there are then no possible means to reconstruct why such a form has developed historically from the activity of relations of class struggle, or to discern what is to be done about it beyond prescriptions that remain at the level of an abstract negativity. This is the theoretical basis for his fetishistic attachment to the immediate temporality of the Event, and so too is it a self-induced frustration of any proclaimed communist aims. This puts us in dangerous territory: class struggle is then always fated to fail, and class does not really seem to matter. This problem arises because Neel has foregone the social basis of the contradictions of capitalist social relations for one to be found in a natural, physiological limit. Without the clear recognition of this social basis, we cannot recognize how value’s social relations of domination are produced by the social form of labor itself.

Value then cannot be understood merely in its abstract negativity as an antagonism to be destroyed, but as the positing of distinct social relations through the organization of practical activity. The logic of capital’s form of value continuously produces social antagonisms that undermine the continued operation of that very form. The logic of value’s social relations thus necessarily and simultaneously contains the capacity to transform these very social relations from within that very antagonism. The temporal differentiation characteristic of capitalist society’s reproduction of antagonistic social relations posits that social needs can only be satisfied at the expense of others, through the exploitation of labor-time. The communist imperative is to engage in those forms of activity by which the needs of the proletariat are met at the expense of capitalists and class strata that rely on their exploitation. The recognition of this relation of exploitation first encounters value in the form of social relations of domination. This is, however, specifically the domination of capitalist relations, which is the reproduction of the conditions for the production and realization of value in the form of money. Capital’s form of value is then more precisely stated as the reproduction of social activity as a universally alienable property.

The logic of the valorization process is a field of contestation over the terms of life-time’s subsumption to labor-time. From this emerges the social and historical necessity to practically transform these relations within the course of their reproduction. The necessity of doing so is given by the capitalist mode of production’s fundamental dependency on the expanded reproduction of proletarian dispossession, and the antagonism of the satisfaction of proletarian need and desire to capitalist reproduction. Class struggle against the terms of capital’s valorization then entails the organization of the capacity to make decisions to posit communist social relations in the very practices of social life’s material reproduction.

As such, the contradictory tension in value cannot remain at the simple level of “capital and labor,” since the very logic of capital’s valorization produces manifold differentiations of forms of capital and labor. The potential for the development of communist revolutionary consciousness arises from the confrontation within and against these very differentiations. We then do not posit the “decommodification” of labor, as Neel does,⁴⁹ for the criterion of communist measures. Where he assumes a natural unity in the “universal subjectivity of the species” through the “annihilation” of labor-power, it is an entirely passive concept that hopes for spontaneous uprisings in the wake of capitalist breakdown and crisis.⁵⁰ This contradicts Neel’s own imperative to act. We articulate instead an active relation of the proletariat in the process of the subjective development of communist consciousness. The commodification of labor-power is not solely the formal dispossession of labor from its means of production, but the reproduction of the separation of the capacity of proletarians to act from their own conscious intentions. That is, proletarians cannot decide what is to be done with their own capacities, nor are they permitted the means of directly satisfying their needs or desires in order to do so. Where the valorization of capital sets the terms of social metabolic reproduction, decisions about the conditions for living life-time are set by capital’s needs. It is from within this contradiction and antagonism that the struggle towards the negation of this social metabolic order must take place. Our task is to make proletarians conscious of this alienation from and separation of these moments of self-activity that reproduces the commodity labor-power.

In the engagements of class struggle, the capacities of proletarians are re-combined with those intentions that are antagonistic to capital’s needs. In this re-unification that negates the initial negation of labor from its means of production, something new and more than labor’s decommodification is posited: the creative self-activity of the revolutionary proletariat. The process by which a fusion is made of the revolutionary proletariat’s creative self-activity and its articulation in the party we call communist evaluation. It is the potential of this active and conscious relationship of the proletariat to the class struggle from which communist politics will develop, and it is precisely this that Neel forecloses in his theory’s bourgeois naturalization of labor that obfuscates the task of the proletarian development of communist consciousness that can become capable of recognizing the actual terrain and terms of class struggle.

VII. The End of Class

In the place of the proletariat’s creative self-activity, Neel instead offers an account of the indeterminate coordinates of singular, ruptural Events and the subjectivities produced in their time and place. In doing so, he contradicts himself when he attempts to theorize the determinate differentiations of the proletariat and other class strata as “subjectivities.”⁵¹ These dynamics of class differentiation pertain amongst many labor processes that can be said to now be formally proletarianized, but they are not homogeneous in their conditions. The proletariat for Neel ceases to be a subject that possesses an antagonistic character to other classes and strata as the content of this separation, but is rather part of an already assumed unity of the “species” in which the specific antagonisms of class struggle are suppressed by Neel.

For Neel, the notion that “the proletariat will serve as the necessary gestation chamber for revolutionary subjectivity… has in fact become so obvious as to be banal,” a position that now “will be proven correct by simple tautology… since the vast majority of the global population has now been proletarianised.”⁵² The question is rather that of “where within the social brain will this revolutionary impulse first spark and spread, and how might this occur?”⁵³ He directs his critical ire against the position that “there exists a particular demographic defined by its structural position relative to production (including groups that lie ‘outside’ of it), that acts as the primary subjective force of revolutionary struggle because of this structural position.”⁵⁴

In this deviation from Marxism, the question of the social base for the communist partisan then follows his tactical fetishism as a matter of “organization as a practical question posed in the midst of insurrection.”⁵⁵ Insurrection is then only defined as “the passage through and beyond” the “delimited interests” that arise in the moment of the “excess” through which subjectivity “takes shape,” and takes “the class beyond itself.”⁵⁶ Insurrection is, according to Neel, “an active, practical universality built in the tension between livelihood and emancipation, through the concrete construction of communist power.”⁵⁷

What could any of this amount to in practice without a serious engagement with the necessity of the proletariat, and the specificity of its revolutionary elements in a given situation? As we can see, it is sufficient enough for Neel to assume that insurrection is solely a communist affair, and not a tactical position that could also be assumed by reactionaries. Neel does not trouble himself with such concerns, as for him “it is not a question that can ultimately be answered with any specificity in theory because […] it is not a question of theory at all but instead a pragmatic one, solvable only within the particular confluence of historically-accreted conflicts that poses it as a question in the first place,”⁵⁸ for “revolutionary agency always has a singular and contingent character, composed of functional organs formed in a specific context and only provisionally useful beyond it.”⁵⁹ Where he has been so strident before, Neel is now averse to any totalizing claims, proposing a vitalistic immediacy against the conscious work of politics as a substitute for any articulation of the relation between theory and practice, or class and consciousness. There is apparently no need for communist partisans to develop any political criteria across different conditions if everything is singular and contingent to its time and place.

But this now leads Neel to a qualified defense of what he has just dismissed: such conclusions now mean “that certain groups, due to the excess of oppression they suffer within the social system, may have broader ‘interests’ that more easily gesture toward emancipatory ends, rather than insular ones.”⁶⁰ He is forced to admit that there are specific historical antagonisms that influence the development of revolutionary potential within specific fractions of the proletariat. Where such developments in subjectivity may “take on a universally emancipatory character […] pushing even beyond the bounds of the broadest possible ‘demands’ that arise from structural position alone,”⁶¹ the task of organization in political struggle becomes that of inventing “practical methods to span a heterogenous class rather than expecting some forthcoming homogenisation of interests.”⁶²

The formation of a revolutionary proletariat and communist consciousness is necessarily a historical product of class struggle, conditioned by the ongoing reproduction and development of specific social relations of antagonism. Where Neel has subsumed the specificities of dynamics of proletarianization and its forms of class antagonism to a notion of a species immediately given in unity against an autonomized capital, he vacates the means to reconstruct the reasons for revolutionary development within specific class strata over others. Such criteria would then demand questions of composition, questions he attempts to eschew.

We see that Neel wishes to be freed from history’s constraints, while also selectively appealing to them when he cannot evade confronting our inherited social conditions. This internal contradiction haunts Neel’s theory and its concept of subjectivity. He flattens the proletariat, neglecting differentiations of relations to production within the class and the distinct loyalties to capital and the state that such differentiations engender. Neel develops an essentially populist vision of the party. His tactical fetishism and reliance on the ontology of the Event lead him to turn to the participation of anybody in a moment of uprising. Class collaboration is not engaged as a tactical problem, but itself the strategy.

The heterogeneous class is assumed to undergo an immediate transformation in a singular moment, yet it is also not a matter of any definite class. Neel sees no issue here, because he neglects the class basis of the party and its revolutionary objective entirely. Where he states that it is a “false presumption that partisans are entering into the class from the outside,” because “as proletarians, partisans have no choice but to engage in such struggles,” he simultaneously states that “rather than ‘connection’” of day-to-day struggles with the partisan project, “the principle of active and intentional separation is the foundation of partisan organizing.”⁶³ Anyone who compares the social compositions of various politicized activist milieus of U.S. metropolitan areas with the same areas’ respective proletarian populations will find many cases of stark differentiations and social separation. The practical separation of these categories in Neel’s theory of the party reifies this separation, and so his only means of overcoming it is to state that there is already an immediate unity of class and party which does not exist in reality. As such, Neel’s theory only further justifies this separation and makes it the basis of further party-building strategy, rather than any conscious effort to recognize and act within the actual differentiations between these class strata. It is altogether unclear how further separating the intentions of these politicized elements from the class’s struggles would create any kind of social power beyond a cult of the deed amongst self-styled activist militants who await the transformative potential of an Event with Messianic faith and themselves have no meaningful political contact with the proletarians around them. Where a communist movement is supposed to arise from this is anyone’s guess.

If one were to proceed by this method, one would quickly begin to experience endless frustration as proletarians of different nations, occupations, and conditions do not experience an immediate unity of interests, especially in those much vaunted “incendiary” moments that Neel makes so central as a clarifying force. These moments are indeed clarifying, but they are so precisely for the reaction that they provoke, inciting the class enemies of the revolutionary proletariat to close ranks. Contrary to Neel, we see no need to assume an irreducible singularity that can only be recognized as the Event, but rather recognize the need for the party as the vehicle for establishing a continuity of specific historical developments of the class struggle. It is the fusion of the revolutionary proletariat and the party that articulates this continuity of the class struggle’s moments of rupture as a rationality that can be reconstructed for the purposes of future anticipation, guiding the prospective interventions of communist organization. The party is not to be separated, but to become a living force in the daily life of the proletariat, emboldening its need and desire to engage in militant revolutionary confrontations with its social conditions of existence.

It is in these moments historically that we see the futility of any populist strategy. Contrary to any attempt to seek an immediate unity in the “species,” we instead experience a world already differentiated in extensive points of antagonism. The abstract domination of capital is in fact the work of specific social actors, distinct classes that are themselves members of the same “species” in biological terms, yet socially entirely different from those they exploit in order to constitute this social order and reproduce its essential conditions. This is the entire reason for the specific study of classes, the particular forms that they take in a given context, and their relation to the totality of the capitalist mode of production’s interdependent social relations. Because these are social relations from definite histories of class struggle, individuals may indeed move between ranks, but the continuous cycles of reproduction accumulate a set of marked distinctions between classes such that they do not experience each other as members of the same “species” in practical terms.

Lifetimes and bodies are indeed mutilated by the social relations of capitalist accumulation, yet the dominant classes of the capitalist garrison are not moved by any fellow feeling that is to be found in a natural basis of common being. They are only moved by the force of the revolutionary proletariat’s organization. The power of dominant classes is only displaced by the efforts of the communist party to realize the dictatorship of the proletariat. To forego this specific objective of the communist party is to cede the ground to all manners of distortion.

Neel’s omission of the dictatorship of the proletariat in order to embrace populism reveals that the conceptual arsenal that has been deployed thus far has no intrinsic political character, and can apply to the development of a movement of any political quality, as his vitalistic conception of labor has vacated capitalist social relations themselves of any political qualities. Where there is no recognizable social basis for the historical continuity of a communist movement in his theory of the party, there are no definite coordinates within engaging the class struggles of our time in relation to the historical development of a communist movement. The fetishistic emphasis on the tactical interface has further rigidified the separation between class and partisan, for rather than developing the linkage between these categories, he assumes them already developed—existing independently in mutual isolation and to be joined by the spontaneous movement of the Event, yet unable to relate to themselves in any self-conscious way in the interregnum. Neel envisions contending partisans arriving in the field of conflict to spar in acts of bravery, competing for the mantle of popular approval. All elements of the above formulations follow each other without positing any particular direction; in separation, the class tails the party, the party tails the class.

VIII. Return to Blood

Neel is quite aware of the tailism problem, though he is unable to address it beyond mounting a simple, reactive defense. In addressing the primacy of the act within this tactical interface in Hellworld, he polemically addresses “those trapped in the rotting corpse of the left [that] can only see a latent fascism [!] in any politics that prioritises action over program, which is to say any possible politics at all.”⁶⁴ This is, to say the least, a curious way to preempt criticism. Made in reference to the challenge of right-wing localism predominating in the Hong Kong uprisings of 2019, Neel cannot assume any course of action beyond matching these reactionary forces in a struggle that in actuality would appear to only strengthen the very development of reaction. If this is indeed the case, then the only possible politics according to Neel’s own theory of the party are no politics at all at best, and a support of reactionary militancy at worst.⁶⁵

Neel’s reaction thus reveals a bad conscience that he can only justify by degrading the political content of tactics themselves. In his own attempt to critique far-right claims of being “beyond left and right,” Neel claims that “we lie beneath left and right rather than beyond it” and immediately after offers the formulation “or perhaps before left and right: in the antepolitical space that precedes true partisanship.”⁶⁶ In this breathless indecision, he can only finally land upon a renewed third-position, not so different from the right-wing position he attempted to critique, with the formulation that “beneath left and right, we have only the act.”⁶⁷ Where the activity of the tactical vanguard of a situation is now reduced to the status of an ante-political terrain, right wing political forces (here, right-wing localists in Hong Kong)⁶⁸ are apparently engaged in essentially the same political program as any would-be communist partisans. For all his efforts to lay out a specificity of communist “subjectivity,” Neel ultimately believes that communists are in a race with fascists for the hearts and minds of the same masses. In this error, he finds himself making the most egregious concessions to exactly the manner by which fascistic organizations and partisans relate to any mass mobilization or seizures of political power. This is the convenient justification that arises from his own intractable contradiction, where these right wing forces are present, but we are somehow at the same time all “beneath left and right,” forced by powers beyond our simple comprehension to follow whatever class fractions take action. Where Neel has critiqued third positionist fascist politics elsewhere for the fact that “political practice only exists for them insofar as it can be performed by kindred actors” and “politics is the performance of this kinship,” his theory of partisan organization effectively concedes this fascistic “oath of blood” as a universal necessity.⁶⁹ In the end, where Neel describes far right strategy as the “pragmatic focus on questions of power,”⁷⁰ he appears to admit that he recognizes in these struggles a path that he himself would like to see taken.

Neel’s further engagements with partisan organization only continue to dilute the potency of any communist potential. Partisans are not strictly that of communist revolution, but said to be “partisans of a better world,” without stating what such a “better” world may be.⁷¹ There is no doubt that committed fascists believe themselves to be fighting on behalf of a better world against the domination of the present order,⁷² and it is the responsibility of communists to articulate why this is not the case. Yet Neel would have it that communist partisans only make this case through the competency of tactical actions in revolts alongside right wing elements, even if those elements predominate, so long as they are partaking in “brave” frontline militancy in the streets. Where he may state a criticism of the “fantasy of the politically purified ‘militant,’ in which a small subset of those with the True Knowledge can, through some sort of refined and ruthless insurgency […] compel world-historical transformation at the barrel of a gun,”⁷³ this is precisely the fantasy that he himself evokes. For Neel, “building power through action therefore remains the necessary precursor to any question of how that power might best be deployed or which practices are best suited to decommodification,” because “procrastinating about the precise political content of our actions [!] rather than their practical effect (and ability to amplify our own further capacity to act) quickly becomes a form of paralysis.”⁷⁴ It need not matter if the communist partisan’s actions are part of a movement that is antagonistic to the class, so long as they experience no “paralysis” in taking action.

IX. Conclusion: Salvation

Neel experiences no “paralysis” himself, because he has no capacity for the discretion that actual tactical acumen demands of the communist partisan. Neel is unable to see the necessity of organization based in the political act of decision, much less any cultivation of judgment. As such, he has no methodological basis upon which the revolutionary strata of the proletariat can practically construct the means of developing and deploying its decision-making power in the process of enacting communist measures. This is the direct consequence of analysis in which the ground is continually ceded to contingency, spontaneity, and voluntarism. All that is left to him is the blatant opportunism in his notions of the “tactical vanguard” and the “sigil,” where the determinate content of the communist party is beholden to the transmission of memes. Neel cannot see a path to the development of the critical self-consciousness of revolutionary communist subjectivity in the proletariat; he only seeks out a mechanical logic in which people are put into motion in reaction to various stimuli. This cannot be said to be a communist position, but rather is that of an enlightened cynic who believes that principles and norms are important for others, but not necessary for oneself. He must rather be the opportunist who believes in nothing but raw strength in order to enact a will to power in any moment, and the movement is but a means with no other end.

What does this theory of the party then look like in practice? For all of Neel’s current writing on these forms of partisan organization, it is unclear how any such forms are capable of contributing to his supposedly “minimal conditions” for communist unity: “the belief that the goal of such a project is the creation of a planetary society operating according to principles of deliberation, non-domination, and free association, using the vast (scientific, productive, spiritual, cultural, etc.) capacities of the human species to rehabilitate its metabolism with the non-human world.”⁷⁵ What we have instead is a tentative non-program for the construction of social groupings and initiatives that would supposedly create the kind of socialization from which a communist party proper could emerge. This is nothing but an attempt to make the social milieu of political activists, already a fixture in many metropolitan areas of the U.S., the basis for party-building strategy. In practice, such scenes are anything but deliberative or participatory, much less capable of addressing the social chasm that exists between the individuals in them and the surrounding proletariat at large. When Neel invokes the “conclave” as “the atomic form of partisan organization,”⁷⁶ it is clear that deliberation only happens at a level that is not transparent, between the elite who are not accountable to anyone else. As these forms are largely void of any formal organization or broader responsibility, they often become havens of abuses driven by hierarchies of interpersonal relationships based on individual proximities to wealth and resources. While this is a persistent base from which all manners of trauma and disorganization are produced, Neel sees an opportunity. Where he sees partisan organization as primarily to be “oriented around self-cultivation, the construction of community, and the evangelical exposition of communist positions to those already interested or seeking comfort in a harsh world,” he is explicit that “such an organization would effectively function as a church.”⁷⁷ We then have in no uncertain terms no theory of the party, but only a theory of the Church of “Communism,” to be led by Father Neel himself.

Bibliography

Adorno, Theodor W. “Theses on Need,” tr. Martin Shuster and Iain Macdonald ([1942], New Institute for Social Research, 2017). Accessed online at https://isr.press/Adorno_Theses_on_Need/index.html

Badiou, Alain. Theory of the Subject, tr. Bruno Bosteels (Bloomsbury Press, 2013)

Benoist, Alain de, and Charles Champetier, “Economics: Beyond the Marketplace,” Manifesto for a European Renaissance (Arktos, 1999).

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich. “What is to be Done? Burning Questions for Our Movement,” [1902] in Lenin’s Collected Works, vol. 5:347-530, tr. Joe Fineberg and George Hanna (Foreign Language Publishing House, 1967). Accessed online at https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/ii.htm

Lukács, Georg. “What Is Orthodox Marxism?” History & Class Consciousness, tr. Rodney Livingstone ([1923]; Merlin Press, 1967). Accessed online at https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/orthodox.htm

Neel, Phil A. Hellworld: The Human Species and the Planetary Factory, (Brill, 2025)

———. Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict (Reaktion Books, 2020)

———. “Theory of the Party,” Ill Will, September 6, 2025. Accessed online at https://illwill.com/print/theory-of-the-party

———. “What May Come: Prospects for Partisan Organizing.” Heatwave, No. 3 (June 2026):60–73

Wohlleben, Adrian. “Memes Without End,” Ill Will, May 17, 2021. Accessed online at https://illwill.com/memes-without-end

Notes

Introduction (1.1)

1920 is an important year in both Georg Lukács’s biography and the history of socialism. Following the October Revolution in 1917 and the end of the First World War in 1918, popular unrest across Europe quickly developed into attempts at socialist revolution. Lukács’s homeland of Hungary was one site of this revolutionary wave. Amidst an optimistic mood, the Third, Communist International was founded in early 1919 in the recently formed Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and held its first congress, which for a variety of reasons was only sparsely attended by international delegates. By the end of the year, nearly all of the revolutions that had sprung up had been defeated, at least for the time being. Despite the defeats of so many declared followers of the Russian example, more and more socialist organizations and parties aligned themselves with the new International in Moscow. 1920 would be the year of the Communist International’s Second Congress, which was its first truly international congress and, as a result, a decisive event for the future direction of the socialist movement.For a brief overview of the context and events of the congress, see Ch. 5 in John Riddell, *Lenin's Comintern Revisited* (Brill 2026).

In a 2020 paper on Lukács and the practice of intellectual history, Richard Westerman argued that the application of modern intellectual history methods—specifically that of the Cambridge School—to the work of Georg Lukács could “help renew” his work “by drawing out implied claims and assumptions that might hitherto have been hidden—thus pointing to latent and hidden possibilities in our own theoretical toolboxes.”Richard Westerman, "Lukács in the 1920s and the 2020s: The practice and praxis of intellectual history," *Thesis Eleven*, Vol. 157, No. 1 (April 2020), 1-17; 3. I believe that Westerman was right to argue this, and in this essay I will follow his lead, albeit with some significant modifications.

Westerman’s text focused on the philosophical context and content of History and Class Consciousness, arguing that it is necessary to situate Lukács in the context of Neo-Kantianism to properly understand him.Westerman, "Lukács in the 1920s and the 2020s," 6 I agree with this argument, but in this essay I would like to shine the spotlight on Lukács’s political writings, in particular those from the year 1920, and analyze them in light of two crucial pieces of political context: the aftermath of the Hungarian Revolution of 1919 and the Second Congress of the Comintern in 1920. Two texts from 1920 serve as focal points in this analysis: Lukács’s Hungarian-language “Self-Criticism,” an English translation of which is included as an appendix to this essay, and his German-language essay “Legality and Illegality,” which was later reprinted in unmodified form in History and Class Consciousness.

Lukács’s “Self-Criticism” is rarely referenced, but it provides crucial insight into how he conceptualized the failure of the Hungarian Revolution. Published mid-August 1920 in the Hungarian communist periodical Proletár, the text pairs startlingly frank admissions of naïveté, inexperience, and error with a serious attempt to describe the causes of the fall of the Hungarian dictatorship of the proletariat.

“Legality and Illegality” is a similarly suggestive text. Drafted in response to the flood of texts being published in the run-up to the Comintern’s Second Congress, it was the only essay reprinted without any alterations in History and Class Consciousness, indicating that Lukács had particular confidence in its argument for several years afterwards. Moreover, it was written in July of 1920, implying a potential overlap with the composition of the “Self-Criticism.” In the essay, Lukács performs a concealed self-criticism and reinforces the conclusions made in his post-mortem of the Hungarian Revolution.

Thesis and Method (1.2)

My approach in this essay is to largely bracket Lukács’s pre-1919 biography and focus on his immediate political situation in 1920 instead of bracketing his immediate political situation in order to construct a biographical narrative or timeless political judgment. In this sense, I am giving precedence to the synchronic over the diachronic, or rather narrowing the scope of the synchronic to about a year. Lukács’s immediately political texts—I place in this category those that are principally and explicitly concerned with questions of organization, tactics, and strategy—are given precedence over more theoretical or philosophical texts, of which he wrote little in 1920. At a certain level, I am hypothesizing that the former holds the key to the latter and making experimental interpretations under that assumption.

Thus, I will be treating Lukács mainly as a political writer and activist in the Marxist tradition and not a philosopher as such. I acknowledge that this is an artificial hermeneutic device, but it is at least consciously artificial. Biographical studies do not even attempt to justify the construction of the biographical object, and perennialized political evaluations generally fail to go beyond dogmatic comparison with pre-established images of Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, or whoever else the author alternatively idolizes or despises.

Sometimes Lukács’s own dishonest retrospective framing of his early Marxist writings as “ultra-leftist” and “messianist”Georg Lukács, *History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics*, tr. Rodney Livingstone (MIT Press, 1972), xiv, xv. is uncritically accepted. Labels like “ultra-leftist” distort the historical picture by dogmatically articulating genuine political disagreements as erroneous deviations from a single, correct political doctrine. Moreover, the all-too-common conclusion that Lukács’s embrace of a “leftist” Marxism was due to his above-it-all, bohemian intellectual background sits uncomfortably with two important facts. On one hand, the “leftist” position was extremely popular in the Comintern at the time, holding the upper hand in numerous parties during the 1920s, and, on the other hand, Lukács consistently displayed a markedly moderate stance on political tactics in Hungary.

Intellectual-biographical and philosophical accounts of Lukács’s work often foreground the continuity between the pre-Marxist and Marxist periods of his biography, downplaying the importance of political context in the process. Michael Löwy’s use of the theme of “romantic anti-capitalism” in his classic Georg Lukács: From Romanticism to Bolshevism leads him to adopt this perspective at times. Arpad Kadarkay’s studies of Lukács are in general more concerned with the drama of his biography and the utility of the Magyar intellectual as novelistic figure in whom the drama of the 20th century in Central Europe is made incarnate than the content of Lukács’s thought, and so Kadarkay has no qualms passing by most of Lukács’s literary production and interpreting History and Class Consciousness as a book in which “Ideas transported out of philosophy are found […] meddling rashly in revolutionary practice.”Arpad Kadarkay, *Georg Lukács: Life, Thought, and Politics* (Basil Blackwell, 1991), 270 In Lukács’s Phenomenology of Capitalism: Reification Revalued, Richard Westerman skips directly from the defeat of the Hungarian Revolution in August 1919 to the writing of History and Class Consciousness in 1922 in the space of a page,offhandedly claiming that “the collapse of the Hungarian Council Republic at the beginning of August 1919 brought little immediate alteration in the tone of his work.”Richard Westerman, *Lukács's Phenomenology of Capitalism: Reification Revalued* (Palgrave MacMillan 2019), 88 While Westerman’s arguments for the importance of Neo-Kantian thought for Lukács are convincing, the lack of attention given to political factors is a clear lacuna in his work.

I demonstrate below that Lukács’s political positions developed in the context of the Hungarian Revolution and its aftermath through engagement with debates ongoing within the nascent Communist International, rather than as translations of prior philosophical positions into political terms. Lukács’s answers to the most important questions of the day show that he closely followed the back and forth between Paul Levi and Karl Radek, considered local particularities when evaluating tactics, and relented to superior arguments when presented with them. Far from being a zealot, Lukács often comes across as informed and reasonable. The evolution of the Magyar class-traitor’s arguments shows the truth of Jörg Kammeler’s judgment that the “real years of apprenticeship of Lukács’s Marxism can be seen as a process of permanent self-criticism.”Jörg Kammler, *Politische Theorie von Georg Lukács: Struktur und historischer Praxisbezug bis 1929* (Luchterhand, 1974), 135.

Within the existing literature, my argument is closest to that of the aforementioned Jörg Kammeler’s magisterial study Politische Theorie von Georg Lukács, but I have two major criticisms of his arguments. The first is that Kammeler, in correctly arguing that Lukács’s political ideas drew heavily on Rosa Luxemburg, often implies that these ideas were therefore in opposition to the politics being put forward by the Comintern: Kammeler claims, for instance, that Lukács took up the directives of the Comintern’s second congress “with characteristic modification.”Kammeler, *Politische Theorie von Georg Lukács*, 192. This remark misses the fact that the Comintern’s directives were produced precisely in order that they would be modified and that a system of norms against which Lukács’s “characteristic modifications” would stand out as abnormal was still incipient and yet to be articulated as an enforceable institutional relation.

My second criticism is that Kammeler’s “practical-critical” mode of presentation did not go far enough.Kammler, *Politische Theorie von Georg Lukács,* 137. Kammeler is, again, correct in one sense to gloss Lukács’s theory of class consciousness as a product of his philosophy of history, but such an interpretation neglects the substantial differences in content between the two thoughts in favor of emphasizing their rhetorical continuity and homological parallels. When Lukács’s political writings are treated as equally authoritative as his theoretical writings, the points of rupture become clearer.

Lukács’s “Self-Criticism” and “Legality and Illegality” are texts that strongly agree with arguments and conclusions made in the lead-up to the Second World Congress of the Comintern by authoritative figures like Grigorii Zinoviev and V. I. Lenin. Lukács’s orthodoxy is, however, not the focal point of my analysis here. Rather, the question becomes how and why a statement of like-mindedness so little resembles the documents it was written to support. This redirects the analysis to everything surrounding the core political claims of the essay: argument, rhetoric, authorial voice, genre, context, and so on. Analysis of these elements is necessary for an understanding of the discursive formation that Lukács’s writings were part of.

Lars Lih’s Lenin Rediscovered was a significant point of reference for this paper. I have, in part, imitated that book’s structure: a relatively extensive review of discursive context followed by a relatively intensive analysis of a small number of texts. Quentin Skinner’s writings on method provided compelling principles for historical analysis that I have, to the best of my ability, tried to heed.See his *Visions of Politics*, *Volume One: Regarding Method* (Cambridge University Press, 2002) In my textual analyses, I follow him in interpreting texts as communicative acts that depend on their context. Michel Foucault’s archeological system also provided me with a number of useful concepts and guidelines for in-depth analysis of discourse as a system of relations.Michel Foucault, *The Archeology of Knowledge,* tr. A. M. Sheridan Smith (Harper Colophon Books, 1976)

In my analysis of Lukács’s context, I employ a concept of discursive revolution, which is to be understood as a variation on Thomas Kuhn’s conception of scientific revolution.Thomas Kuhn, *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions* (University of Chicago Press, 1996), Ch. X ff In short, a discursive revolution inaugurates a new discursive formation. The discursive revolution that forms the context for Lukács’s texts had clear external causes and an embryonic (but increasingly powerful) apparatus for the regulation of the discursive formation it created, Leninism. It remained an ongoing and unsettled matter because of both the undeveloped form of its corresponding institutional apparatus and the unresolved problems and questions internal to the discursive formation.

While political discourse about principles, strategy, tactics, organization, etc. became increasingly regulated in the Comintern after the Second Congress in fall 1920, the development and subsequent enforcement of a systematic orthodoxy on all intellectual matters only properly began in 1922 alongside the introduction of the New Economic Policy in Russia.This is the periodization proposed by René Zapata, see René Zapata *Luttes Philosophiques en URSS 1922-1931* (Presses Universitaires de France, 1983) Censorship was therefore not an important factor because it was not yet in place. Moreover, Lukács’s autobiographical reflections indicate that most of the changes in position he made throughout the 1920s were the result of genuine persuasion and reflection, not duress.

The word revolution seems appropriate to describe the advent of Leninism as a distinctive discourse and political doctrine more because of its willed character than the radicality of the changes involved. With regard to the latter, the groundbreaking work of Lars Lih and associated revisionists like Eric Blanc on Russian Social Democracy and the Bolsheviks has argued that there was considerable continuity between the Marxism of the Second International and that of the Bolsheviks and early Communist International.See Lars Lih, *Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done in Context* (Haymarket Books, 2008) and Eric Blanc, *Revolutionary Social Democracy: Working Class Politics Across the Russian Empire (1882-1917)* (Brill, 2021) The degree of rupture between the Comintern and the Second International grew with the years, and Lukács’s work can help us better understand the dynamics of debate, continuity,and discontinuity in the discursive revolution birthed by the socialist revolutions of 1917-1923.

In summary, I argue that Lukács’s political stances were primarily influenced by his political context, not his philosophical background. Below, I analyze two texts (“Self-Criticism” and “Legality and Illegality”) and two major pieces of context (the Hungarian Revolution and the Second World Congress of the Comintern), arguing that these two texts, when placed in context, are key for understanding his political development. My analysis draws attention to questions of rhetoric, textual genre, and the texts’ places within the discursive formation of the Comintern. Inter alia, effort is made to demonstrate that the depiction of Lukács as a philosophically deluded “ultra-leftist” unmoored from practical considerations is mistaken.

Section 2 begins (2.1) with a brief review of the Hungarian Revolution, its aftermath, and Lukács’s activity during both. Following this, two major pieces of context are analyzed: the publication in which many of Lukács’s political writings appeared, Kommunismus, and the debate within the Hungarian communist movement about tactics. In the final subsection (2.4), I survey the various evaluations of the Hungarian Revolution made by participants and observers, closing out with an analysis of Lukács’s own contribution to this discussion, his 1920 “Self-Criticism.”

Section 3 is dedicated to the analysis of “Legality and Illegality” as a discursive act. In the first subsection, I provide some important context for the Second World Congress of the Comintern. Following this, I analyze the illocutionary dimension of “Legality and Illegality” and how the text serves as a performance of communicative acts. Finally, in Section 3.3 I analyze the content of “Legality and Illegality,” focusing on the multivalent meaning of the term “consciousness” in the text and its relation to the archive of Marxist discourse.

In the Conclusion (Section 4), I turn to consider the institutional and discursive relations emerging in the Comintern and how they affected Lukács’s literary production.

The bibliography of Lukács compiled by Maruyama Keiichi<https://www.lana.info.hu/en/lukacs/bibliography-of-georg-lukacs/> was of tremendous use for determining and tracking of dates of publication and related facts, as were the other online resources afforded by the Lukács Archive, which is thankfully set to reopen following the much-anticipated fall of the Órban government earlier this year.Justin Weinberg,"Authoritarianism & Philosophy: After Orbán's Ouster, an Effort to Reopen the Lukács Archive," *Daily Nous*, 06/15/2026 <https://dailynous.com/2026/06/15/authoritarianism-philosophy-after-orbans-ouster-an-effort-to-reopen-the-lukacs-archive/> All quotations from German sources were translated by the author unless otherwise noted.

Proleptic Remarks on Language (1.3)

Before 1919, Lukács was a career bohemian who published essays and the occasional book while primarily subsisting on allowances drawn from his father’s considerable fortune. His work and outlook was greatly influenced by the contemporary titans of the Central European intelligentsia, some of whom he had become personally acquainted with, and the classical German philosophers of the 19th century.Michael Löwy argues that the seeds of Lukács's socialism are visible in the romantic anti-capitalism of the *fin de siécle* Central European intelligentsia, see the first two chapters of his *Georg Lukács: From Romanticism to Bolshevism*, tr. Patrick Camiller (New Left Books, 1979).More recent studies have focused on the Neo-Kantian context of his work. Lukács explained in what would be his final interview that he had only a rough knowledge of Marxism, listing Karl Kautsky, Franz Mehring, and Georges Sorel as the authors he was most familiar with.Georg Lukács and András Kovács, "Georg Lukács: the final interview," tr. David Fernbach, *Verso Blog* (25 March 2022) <https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/5309-georg-lukacs-the-final-interview> He was ignorant of Lenin and the revolutionary anti-war minority in the socialist movement until, in his words, “very late.” As a result, his very first writings as a Marxist activist are chocked full of language drawn from Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and more recent Neo-Kantian scholars. The imprint of Neo-Kantianism is visible in almost all of Lukács’s philosophical work, but only in the years 1919 and 1920 can one find defenses of Marxism accompanied by emphatic references to the categorical imperative and other concepts drawn from the idealist tradition.

This would not, however, have necessarily been a sign of pernicious idealism to Marxists of the time. The leading intellectuals of Austrian Social Democracy unabashedly cited Kant and the Neo-Kantians on topics from ethics to epistemology, as did members of the various factions within the Russian socialist movement. As one of the leaders of the Austrian Social Democrats, Max Adler, argued in a review of Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov’s Fundamental Problems of Marxism, it was not at all clear that the content of Marxist theory and politics had anything to do with ontological “Weltanschauungsfragen.”Max Adler, "Marxismus und Materialismus," *Der Kampf*, Jg. 3, No. 12, 1 September 1910, 564-571. Accessed online at <https://www.marxists.org/deutsch/archiv/adler-max/1910/09/marx-mater.htm> Max Adler was somewhat unique in his outright rejection of conceiving Marxism as a Weltanschauung, but Plekhanov was also unique in his absolute intransigence on what he considered to be the foundations of the Marxist Weltanschauung—an intransigence that was largely passed on to his Bolshevik successors.

Adler’s stance—Nikolai Bukharin’s could be adduced as another example—shows that terms and concepts that would be crucial to Lukács’s work such as consciousness and dialectic were up for debate in the early 20th century. It was not inconceivable that a Marxist could use language reminiscent of philosophical idealism while still being committed to revolutionary socialist politics. Nor was it inconceivable that someone committed body and soul to Marxism as a Weltanschauung could be against revolution: Plekhanov himself died in 1918 as a staunch opponent of the ascendant Bolsheviks. Marxism was undergoing a discursive revolution, and it would be fallacious to project the dogmatic enforcement of later Soviet dialectical materialism backwards onto the year 1920.

Within the communist movement, different figures had wildly different ideas about the future of philosophy and related theoretical endeavors. Some Russian Marxists argued that philosophy should cease to exist as an independently recognizable discourse. The followers of Plekhanov’s ideas in the USSR wanted to maintain philosophy as a discipline, but ultimately reduced to an auxiliary support of politics over the next several decades. Lukács’s texts, meanwhile, sometimes suggested a fusion of philosophy and politics. The relation between political and philosophical language, even within the oeuvre of a single author, was much more discursively problematic at this time than the future official discourse of Marxism-Leninism would suggest in retrospect.

The Hungarian Revolution and its Aftermath

The Revolution (2.1)

Before joining the Party of Communists in Hungary in December 1918, Lukács had never been a member of any political party or movement.Lukács and Kovács, "Georg Lukács: the final interview," <https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/5309-georg-lukacs-the-final-interview> The time, however, was ripe for politicization. Unrest had been brewing throughout the war, and in the last days of October 1918 this boiled over into a political revolution. The National Council, a body recently assembled from leaders of the Independence Party, the National Radical Bourgeois Party, and the Social-Democratic Party, had won the allegiance of the police and most of the army. A spontaneous occupation of Budapest’s municipal centers of power by revolutionary soldiers on the night of October 30th led the king/emperor to form a coalition government headed by Count Mihály Károlyi, the leader of the National Council, the following day.Gábor Vermes, "The October Revolution in Hungary: from Károlyi to Kun" in *Hungary in Revolution 1918-1919: Nine Essays*, ed. Iván Völges (University of Nebraska Press, 1971), 31-60; 36 Within the space of another day the king, under heavy pressure, released this new government from its oath of loyalty. A little over two weeks later the Republic of Hungary was proclaimed before parliament.

This new republic was immediately imperiled by the military incursions made by the Little Entente—Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia—and the ongoing social and political turmoil. The Károlyi government had concluded an Armistice with the Entente that kept Hungarian troops out of much of the southern portion of the old Kingdom’s territory, undermining its legitimacy. Amidst this tumult, the Károlyi government resigned and was replaced by a Social Democratic government on January 8. With the Little Entente’s armies continuously advancing and the big Entente proposing further contraction of Hungary’s borders, the Social Democrats ultimately decided to form a joint government with the surging Communist Party on the 21st of March. The two organizations, which had been at each other’s throats just days ago, merged to become the Socialist Party of Hungary (renamed in June to the Hungarian Socialist-Communist Workers’ Party). Hungary was declared a council republic—it would eventually be officially named the Hungarian Socialist Federative Council Republic—and the new dictatorship of the proletariat began frantically attempting to reorganize society while simultaneously repelling a three-pronged military assault.

After acceding to power in March 1919, the Hungarian communists sent one of their own, Ernst Bettelheim, to Vienna under orders to organize a revolution. Bettelheim quickly usurped the leadership of the recently founded Communist Party of German Austria (KPDÖ) and then attempted to organize an insurrection in the summer, provoking the arrest of the party’s entire leadership and the violent quelling of the uprising in Vienna on June 15. The fallout of this debacle would birth years of factional infighting in the Austrian party, and no doubt contributed to the strife that would develop in the Hungarian one, too.For more about the relevance of this event to Lukács see Rudolf Schlesinger, "Historical setting of Lukács's *History and Class Consciousness*" in *Aspects of History and Class Consciousness*, ed. István Mészáros (Routledge, 1971)

The day following the failed insurrection in Vienna, another Hungarian-backed attempt at revolution foundered in Slovakia.Bennett Kovrig, *Communism in Hungary: From Kun to Kádár* (Hoover Institution Press, 1979), 60. The exhausted revolutionary government in Budapest found itself besieged on all sides: the Entente’s diplomatic pressure had forced them to withdraw from Czechoslovakian territory; the peasants they had alienated with their out of touch land reform policy were increasingly in open revolt; the Red Army’s attempt to push into Romanian-held territory provoked a decisive counter-attack; and the government itself was collapsing under factional conflict between the Social Democrats and communists. Thus the Trade Union Council, acting in concert with the social democrats, demanded on July 31 that the Governing Council resign. After some resistance the communists acquiesced. A few days later the Romanian army entered Budapest, and within months a counterrevolutionary reign of terror would begin.

Lukács briefly served as (Deputy) People’s Commissar for Public Education for the Council Republic and then, even more briefly, as the political commissar for a battalion belonging to the Fifth Division of the Hungarian Red Army and later the entire Fifth Division.Georg Lukács, *Record of a Life: An Autobiographical Sketch*, ed. István Eörsi, tr. Rodney Livingstone (Verso, 1983), 60ff. In other words, he was not a mere paper member of or intellectual appendage to the revolutionary movement. Lukács had risked his own life and showed himself willing to take those of others for the revolution.In his capacity as political commissar he had eight men court-martialed and summarily executed for cowardice after their battalion fled from battle; see Lukács, *Record of a Life*, 65. In return, he would be exiled from his homeland, which, having been a regular author for left-wing nationalist publications before 1918, he loved dearly.

Set to flee to Austria on a sealed train protected under diplomatic immunity, Béla Kun, the informal leader of the Council Republic, rashly ordered Lukács and his comrade Ottó Korvin to stay in Hungary and organize the party—or at least what was left of it—in clandestinity.Lukács later claimed that he believed at the time that he and Korvin were "being prepared for martyrdom" by Kun due to their disagreements with him. Lukács, *Record of a Life*, 68. While Lukács was able to escape the white terror and make it to Austria, Korvin was quickly captured and sentenced to death alongside the so-called Lenin Boys, the primary agents of Hungary’s brief and relatively insignificant episode of red terror. Lukács wrote a tribute to Korvin in the November 28, 1919 issue of the Austrian Rote Fahne that was later translated into Hungarian and reprinted with slight changes in the August 19, 1920 issue of Proletár.A transcription of the German version is available at <https://www.lana.info.hu/de/otto-korvin/>

The communist émigrés who had fled Hungary for Austria, many initially detained by the authorities and threatened with deportation, would regroup in Vienna over the course of a few months. Over time, the party in exile tended to split into two factions: one based in Moscow centered around the former paramount revolutionary leader, Kun, and one based in Vienna centered around Jenő (Eugen) Landler, the former People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs, Commander-in-Chief of the Red Army, and presently a member of the toothless Provisional Central Committee alongside Lukács, Kun, and a few others.See the biographical note in Lukács, *Record of a Life*, 192. What little remained of the party in Hungary was, meanwhile, in complete disarray, and the question of what to do about this situation would be the primary concern of the Hungarian communists for the next several years.

Kommunismus and the Communist International (2.2)

“Legality and Illegality” was written in July and published in September of 1920 in the weekly periodical Kommunismus, which proclaimed its status as the Zeitschrift der kommunistischen Internationale für die Länder Südosteuropas (periodical of the Communist International for the countries of South-East Europe) on its front page. Kommunismus was officially an organ of the Vienna bureau of the Comintern, but it was published and managed by the Communist Party of German Austria (KPDÖ). Lukács and other Hungarian émigrés were members of its editorial circle,serving under the editor-in-chief Gerhart Eisler (brother to both the composer Hanns Eisler and the infamous KPD leader Ruth Fischer).Károly Kókai, "The Communist International and the Contribution of Georg Lukács in the 1920s" in *Social Scientist*, Vol. 45, No. 11/12 (November--December 2017), 63-72; 65. Even though it was de jure managed by the Austrian party, the pages of the journal were often dominated by the writings of the Hungarian émigrés: László Rudas, Eugen Varga, Béla Kun, Jenő Landler, and of course Lukács himself, and in spite of its official affiliation with the Comintern, the journal tended towards the left due to the political position of the Austrian editors and their Hungarian émigré comrades.

The first issue of Kommunismus is unremarkable: the editorial introduction to the publication as a whole announces that “with the victories of the Russian Revolution, the workers movement of the whole world has entered a new epoch” and that “we are in the middle of the world revolution.”Unsigned, "Zur Einführung" in *Kommunismus*, 1 Jg., no. 1/2 (February 1, 1920), 1, 2. The issue included articles by the Hungarians E. V. (Eugen Varga) and B. K. (Béla Kun) and featured an advertisement in the back for pamphlets by Bukharin, Lenin, Radek, Zinoviev, Trotsky, and Kun. Kommunismus had a consciously international(ist) scope, including alongside diverse articles by authors from all over Europe a section titled “International Review” that dealt “with countries such as Germany, Austria, Hungary, the Balkans, England, France, Italy and ‘America.’ ”Kókai, "The Communist International..." 65-66.

Kommunismus sometimes flaunted its Comintern affiliation and published articles by authors who were on the outs with the Moscow-based Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) such as Anton Pannekoek (Vol. 1, No. 28/29, August 1, 1920) and Henriette Roland Holst (Vol. 2, Nos. 1-8, January-March 1921.)See also the list of authors in Michael Löwy, *Georg Lukács: From Romanticism to Bolshevism*, tr. Patrick Camiller (New Left Books, 1979), 156. Both were members of the problematic Dutch section of the Comintern who would soon depart to form their own party in large part due to the resolutions of the Comintern’s Second Congress, but even before their exit the activities of the Dutch communists had already provoked the dissolution of the Amsterdam Sub-Bureau of the Comintern in May 1920, with Karl Radek explicitly citing their “sectarian politics” as the reason.Radek quoted in Jörg Kammler, *Politische Theorie von Georg Lukács*, 162.

The minority position of Kommunismus, exhibited in its apparent alignment with the Dutch communists, led to criticism from Moscow at a very early stage: Grigorii Zinoviev, the Chairman of the ECCI, threatened Lukács in particular with disciplinary measures because of his April 1920 article “Class Consciousness.“Kadarkay, *Georg Lukács: Life, Thought, and Politics*, 260.

Beginning in the fifth issue, published on the 22nd of February 1920, Kommunismus ran a series of articles responding to and criticizing the tactical directives disseminated by the West European Secretariat of the Comintern, directives which originated as excerpts from Karl Radek’s pamphlet Die Entwicklung der Weltrevolution und die Taktik der Kommunistischen Partei im Kampf um die Diktatur des Proletariats.See L. R. [László Rudas], "Fragen der kommunistischen Taktik" in *Kommunismus*, 1 Jg., no. 5 (February 22, 1920), 130ff. Radek was the most important representative of the Comintern in Europe at the time, so criticism of his directives was a rather serious matter.

The first article in the series, written by László Rudas, criticized Radek’s argument that the intellectuals of Europe could be universally “won over” (gewonnen) to the side of the proletariat, as well as the “pathetisch-journalistisch” tone of the document and its lack of attention to several pressing issues. This was followed next week by Lukács’s article “Zur Frage des Parliamentarismus,” which further piled on Radek’s tactical proposals by criticizing the validity of participation in parliament during the offensive stage of the revolutionary process. This could scarcely have been well received by the Comintern leadership, and indeed Lenin himself would single out Lukács’s essay for criticism in June (see Section 3.1 below).

Immediately following this series of anti-Radek articles appeared Lukács’s essay “Organisationsfrage der dritten Internationale” in the March 15 issue of Kommunismus. The text illustrated a rather unique picture of the International, which at this time was still in its infancy and was yet to have its first genuinely international (and not merely Russian) congress. Jörg Kammeler ties the essay to the proposals made at a conference held on February 3, 1920 by the Amsterdam Bureau of the Comintern where support for a decentralized organizational model was first expressed.Kammeler, *Politische Theorie von Georg Lukács*, 200ff

In the essay, Lukács uses the language of idealism to argue that “the Second International viewed itself as reality, while the Third International is a regulative idea for the action of the proletariat, its unavoidable goal.”Georg Lukács, "Organisationsfragen der Dritten Internationale," *Kommunismus*, 1 Jg., No. 8/9 (March 15, 1922), 238-250, 238. The “regulative idea” that governed the new International was that of the unity of the entire proletariat regardless of national boundaries, which capitalism was itself abolishing day-by-day.One can detect hints of barely-sublimated Magyar *revanche* in Lukács's claim that "The 'national states' that formed after the war are incapable of life." Lukács clarifies a few pages later that this description of the International as a “mere” idea is realism, not philosophizing. The plain and simple truth for him was that at the moment—March 1920—the Third International existed only as an idea which had not yet “penetrated into immediate reality.”Lukács, "Organisationsfragen der Dritten Internationale," 244-245. Given the dysfunction of the Comintern in that moment, Lukács’s diagnosis is far from absurd.

Furthermore, the difficulties of coordination and communication between geographically dispersed parties—let alone underground ones—indicated the impracticality of lending strong authority to a central office or even the congresses of the new International, meaning that a decentralized structure was necessary. Thus, Lukács argued that “The [organizational] chaos can only be vanquished by solid principles and dynamic and elastic tactics,” which would construct proletarian unity “from below.”Lukács, "Organisationsfragen der Dritten Internationale," 247 An ensemble of “tactical centers” would assist in the coordination of individual parties without, however,imposing any limitations on the “immediate relations of the parties between themselves.” The intimacy of relations between these parties, which would no longer be organized around strictly national lines, would be so great that “the same party must be represented on multiple central committees.”Lukács, "Organisationsfragen der Dritten Internationale," 248 This system, Lukács maintained, would surpass that of “general congresses with their often much too general resolutions.”Lukács, "Organisationsfragen der Dritten Internationale," 249

The international’s destiny was, moreover, to be an illegal body, as for communists legality could only ever be a “transitory phase.” This was a relatively realistic evaluation at the time: The parties of Germany, Hungary, Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, and Poland were illegal at the time of writing; the IWW and the two nascent communist parties in the United States were still reeling from the First Red Scare; and numerous other parties (Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Latvia, etc.) would be banned in the coming months and years. In this political moment, it was universally agreed that communist parties, whatever their structure, must be prepared to cope with repression and illegality.

The use of idealist jargon in “Organisationsfrage der dritten Internationale” should not distract from the practical concerns that occasioned the essay and Lukács’s attempt to solve the problems generated by them.

Debates in the Hungarian Party (2.3)

The chaos of the revolution left wounds in the party, wounds that developed into ever-more open factional strife in the years following 1919. After his brief imprisonment, Béla Kun left Vienna for Moscow in July 1920, leaving behind a few allies that would have to contend with Landler, the leader of the faction that would come to include everyone in the party who disagreed with Kun. Lukács, despite his seemingly Kun-esque leftism on many questions, quickly found himself aligned with Landler when confronted with Kun’s bureaucratic trickery and irresponsible politics.Lukács, *Record of a Life*, 74.

Looking back decades later, Lukács attributed his support for Landler to the fact that Landler “had no programme which he could have used to appear before the world as the leader of the Communists. He simply concerned himself with the practical possibilities of reviving the Hungarian movement.”Lukács, *Record of a Life*, 75. Whereas Kun conspired with Zinoviev in attempts to conjure a mass party in Hungary out of thin air by means of ridiculous schemes, Landler was fundamentally a Realpolitiker. Lukács’s politics for the next several years would be defined by the stark difference between the low-tempo policies he promoted for the Hungarian party and the high-tempo ones he promoted for the rest of the Comintern, in particular the German party. While he disagreed strongly with Kun and Zinoviev on Hungarian matters, he repeatedly found himself aligned with the pair on international matters, especially those concerning Germany, over the next few years.

Before getting into the debates, it is worth briefly mentioning what was not in contention, at least openly. All European communists, even the notoriously cautious Paul Levi, agreed that the continent’s political situation necessitated an offensive strategic stance.Paul Levi, "The Beginning of the Crisis in the Communist Party and the International" (1921), in *In The Steps of Rosa Luxemburg: Selected Writings of Paul Levi*, ed. David Fernbach (Brill, 2011) 92-112; 95. The disagreement between the left and right factions within the Third International principally concerned the tempo and tactics of the offensive. After repeated setbacks in 1920 and 1921, the “theory of the offensive,” as the position promoted by Zinoviev, Kun, and Radek came to be known, would be officially condemned at the Third Congress of the Comintern, but even this did not abolish the distinction made between the fundamentally offensive stance of communists and the fundamentally conformist stance of social democrats.

Amongst the Hungarians, a debate about legality, illegality, and tactics was brewing, but it had different reference points than the one in, for instance, Germany. The communist party was completely illegal in Hungary, and former members of the Council Republic’s government were fugitives who risked death sentences if arrested. Completely abstaining from illegal activity was out of the question, as it would amount to total liquidation of the party. Moreover, both factions of the party agreed that revolution and proletarian dictatorship, not bourgeois democracy, remained their goal and differentiated themselves from the Social Democrats on this count.Miklós Molnár, *From Béla Kun to János Kádár: Seventy Years of Hungarian Communism*, tr. Arnold J. Pomerans (Berg, 1990), 32. Rather than the fundamental question of legality and illegality in general, the debate in Hungaryrevolved around the specific tactical programs of the two factions.

The factions quarreled about whether or not it was desirable for émigrés to attempt illegal crossings back into rump Hungary and the successor states to join in the clandestine work and build the party. An initial effort to this effect had been organized in Slovakia circa August 1920 to little result, and in December of the same year a large cohort of communists embedded in a returning group of prisoners of war crossed into the realm of Admiral Horthy only to be immediately arrested. Communist émigrés would continue to make risky ventures back into Hungary in the following years, but these were increasingly restricted to temporary incursions by experienced cadres for specific purposes, rather than harebrained attempts to import a party wholesale.

The question of how communists should work in the Social Democrat controlled trade unions, which represented the only real avenue for party work within the bounds of legality, was another bone of contention.Bennett Kovrig, *Communism in Hungary: From Kun to Kádár* (Hoover Institution Press, 1979), 79, 83. The Landlerites, Lukács among them, were opposed to recklessly sending émigrés home and Kun’s proposal that communists refuse to pay the dues to the Social Democratic Party required of all trade union members, a gesture that would simultaneously isolate and expose them.Georg Lukács, *Record of a Life*, 75. The chronology of when the debate about dues began is somewhat unclear in Lukács's account. I infer from context that it took place simultaneously with the debate about sending émigrés back to Hungary, i.e. in mid to late 1920 after Kun went to Moscow. This matter was a clear point of differentiation between Lukács’s politics and that of the Dutch-German communist left, who argued for complete abstention from social democratic trade unions.

By August 1920, real factional lines of battle were already forming, and sectarian strife would only intensify over the next several years.

Looking Back on the Revolution (2.4)

Another crucial piece of context for Lukács’s writings from 1920 are the debates and discussions produced by the fall of the Hungarian Council Republic and failure of the Hungarian revolution. These controversies began almost immediately after the fall of the Council Republic at the beginning of August 1919. In what is probably the first summation written on the experiences of the Hungarian Council Republic, published on November 1, 1919 in the KPD organ Die Internationale, an anonymous “member of the Hungarian council government” listed ten facts that formed the “quintessence” of the causes of the Republic’s defeat:

1. Unprepared seizure of power

2. Too few politically reliable comrades

3. Merger with the Social Democrats

4. Sabotage by the former Social Democrats

5. Mistakes by the People’s Commissariats of the Interior by indiscriminate appointment of former Russian prisoners of war to office

6. Corruption

7. Hostility of the peasants

8. Dilettantish financial politics

9. Replacement of the old [military] officers

10. Military superiority of imperialist mercenary troopsQuoted in Jörg Kammler, *Politische Theorie von Georg Lukács: Struktur und historischer Praxisbezug bis 1929* (Luchterhand, 1974), 146. Full text: <https://archive.org/details/die-internationale-jahrg-1-2-1915-1920_202504/page/304/mode/2up>

This list encompasses most if not all of the causes that would be subsequently described in longer pamphlets from leading members of the government such as Béla Kun and Eugen Varga. The criticism of the “Russian prisoners of war,” by which the author surely meant Hungarians like Béla Kun and Mátyas Rakosi who had been captured by the Imperial Russian Army in the war and then converted to the Bolshevik cause, apparently proved too controversial, as the accusation does not appear in any subsequent retrospectives.

One factor is curiously absent from the above summary: internal reactionary forces. The primary villains conjured by the anonymous author are the Social Democrats within and the “imperialist mercenaries” without. Local counterrevolutionary forces had, in fact, organized themselves in the town of Szeged, which lay to the south of Budapest in the part of Hungary then occupied by France and Yugoslavia, but this counterrevolutionary movement refrained from undertaking any military actions until after the Council Republic had been overthrown by the Little Entente.Nicholas M. Nagy-Talavera, *The Green Shirts and Others: A History of Fascism in Hungary and Romania* (Center for Romanian Studies, 2001), 76-77, 80.

The anonymous article in Die Internationale was soon followed by Béla Kun’s pamphlet Von Revolution zu Revolution (From Revolution to Revolution)—the afterword says the manuscript was finished on November 7, 1919—which Kun wrote during his confinement in Austria and published under the pseudonym Blasius Kolozsváry in early 1920. As the title suggests, Kun argues for an immediate resumption of the offensive and generally avoids any extended analysis of the actual revolutionary process that had just unfolded in Hungary, explicitly stating that “this is not the place to unveil the history of the origin of the dictatorship of the proletariat in Hungary.”Blasius Kolozsváry [Béla Kun], *Von Revolution zu Revolution* (Genossenschaftsverlag der "Neuen Erde" 1920) 13. <https://archive.org/details/vonrevolutionzur00kolo/> What, then, caused the failure in his opinion? Kun tends to focus on the betrayal and sabotage by the Social Democrats, arguing that “The cause of all errors that began during the dictatorship and finally lead to its downfall were—if not exclusively, then [at least], from the standpoint of tactics, primarily—hidden within the structure of the workers movement,”Kun, *Von Revolution zu Revolution*, 21. by which he meant the bureaucratic, reformist character of the Social Democratic Party and the trade unions. This historical background kneecapped the Hungarian communists. Kun’s pamphlet was quickly joined by tracts penned by Béla Szánto (former People’s Commissar of National Defense), Eugen Varga (former People’s Commissar for Finance), and László Rudas (former member of the Foreign Affairs Subcommittee). I will not explain in detail their arguments here, but suffice to say they all pointed to the way that the government was established as a key factor in its eventual downfall.Most of these are briefly summarized in Kammler, *Politische Theorie von Georg Lukács*, 147-150. Digitized versions of the pamphlets can be found online. The proletariat did not have to fight for power and so lacked a combative spirit, class consciousness, and adequate organization (party, councils, etc.). This was the principal “birth defect,” as Szánto put it, that afflicted the dictatorship.

The Comintern’s top man in Europe, Radek, wrote the foreword to Szántó’s pamphlet. In it, he strongly argued against the apparently widespread prejudice that the republic was “a simple result of a compromise between party leaders,” insisting that it was instead “the result of the revolutionary class struggle of the proletariat“Béla Szántó, *Klassenkämpfe und Diktatur des Proletariats in Ungarn* (Western European Secretariat of the Communist International, 1920), iv. My translation. Available online: <https://archive.org/details/klassenkmpfeun00szuoft/> and Szántó’s work proved this. Radek claimed this even though Szántó concluded his study by saying the exact opposite: “On one hand the Social Democrats did not make the communist program their own out of principled theoretical conviction; on the other hand—and this was the real error—the proletariat came into power without a decisive battle against the bourgeoisie.”Op. cit, 109. The “Lessons of the Hungarian Revolution” (the title of Radek’s preface) were that Social Democrats could never be trusted. Indeed, Radek opined that “The coalition with the Social Democrats was necessary, but the communists needed to erect gallows next to the house of government, upon which they could eventually demonstrate to their beloved allies what the proletarian dictatorship meant in concrete terms.”Op. cit., viii. Paul Levi would later criticize Radek for this rather bloodthirsty remark.

Radek’s endorsement, if that is the right word, of the Hungarian Revolution was in many ways a barely concealed criticism of Paul Levi, who had written a critical article about the foundation of the council government just two days after its birth. The following passage from that text is key:

As far as we are concerned, the possibility for the dictatorship of the proletariat exists not when the bourgeoisie collapses but when the proletariat rises—when, in other words, it has acquired in the process of a constant revolutionary struggle the intellectual maturity, the determination and the insight to realise that salvation lies in its dictatorship alone; it will become possible when the last proletarian is filled with the belief in socialism.Paul Levi quoted in Paul Levi, "The Lessons of the Hungarian Revolution" (1920) in *In The Steps of Rosa Luxemburg: Selected Writings of Paul Levi*, ed. David Fernbach (Brill, 2011) 70-78; 71-72.

Paul Levi quoted the above sentence in his own “Lessons of the Hungarian Revolution,” which he wrote in June 1920 for Die Internationale, where Radek’s preface to Szántó’s pamphlet had also been reprinted. Levi had been courting the base of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) since Fall 1919 when he expelled the left-wing majority of the nascent KPD over the issue of parliamentarism, and the KPD had been forced to organize inside the USPD during periods when the party was banned. The upcoming Second Congress of the Comintern would prove to be an important step in his eventually victorious campaign to absorb the USPD left into the KPD. Radek’s extreme hostility to the very idea of working with Social Democrats and passion for red terror therefore represented a threat to his own political program, and so the debate about the Hungarian Revolution became an arena for leaders of the German communist movement to advance positions on their local politics. In this back-and-forth, the reality of the events that had transpired in the Carpathian Basin was increasingly lost.

Lukács finally offered his own views on the fall of the republic in an “Önkritika” (Self-Criticism) for Proletár, the Hungarian-language mouthpiece of the Landler faction, in August 1920.Georg Lukács, "Selbstkritik" (1920), in *Revolution und Gegenrevolution: Politische Aufsätze II 1920-1921*, eds. Jörg Kammeler and Frank Benseler, tr. Janos Györkös et al (Leuchterhand, 1976), 42-46. The reference to Levi in the essay indicates that it was occasioned by Levi’s article, which had been reprinted in Kommunismus in July.

Lukács’s contribution to the debate about the failure of the Hungarian Council Republic uniquely emphasizes not the compromise with the Social Democrats, but the substitution of the party by the “proletarian state.” He wanted to ask what the “roots of the failure” were instead of “what [they] would have needed to do in the moment.”Georg Lukács, "Selbstkritik," 42. Emphasis in original. Self-criticism is not about how clever one’s ideas were at the time. Indeed, Lukács questions how his erroneous argument that the communist party was unnecessary was able to appear as official party literature without provoking any objections. What sort of conditions obtained in the Hungarian movement that this could happen?

Lukács begins his argument proper by clearing some ground. One should not ask, as Paul Levi did, whether the communists were right to seize power, but rather if they were right to give up their organizational independence and merge with the Social Democrats. Even this question, however, leads him back to a more basic problem, namely that “In the moment of unification, there was organizationally no communist party.”Lukács, "Selbstkritik," 43 Agitation and propaganda had won over many workers as sympathizers, but these workers largely remained outside the party, which also suffered from catastrophic member turnover and the arrest of much of its leadership in February.

In fact, “the party and the leadership were not really aware how indispensable the party is for leading a revolution.”Lukács, "Selbstkritik," 44 Lukács further claims that “many,” including himself, “believed that [they] could fulfill this function [i.e., that of the party’s leadership] with the organ of the proletarian state.”

As Béla Kun and others had already pointed out, the Hungarian movement prior to 1919 was only familiar with the “corrupt and compromise-happy”Lukács, "Selbstkritik," 45 party of social democracy. Their ignorance led them, and many others outside of Hungary, to conclude that “the party organization is in essence a child of bourgeois society, which must be replaced by new, specifically proletarian organizations (workers councils, factory councils, industrial unions, etc.) for the proletarian class struggle.”Lukács, "Selbstkritik," 45

The Hungarians only began to truly understand the importance of the party as their revolutionary government was already collapsing, and so just as in Russia after 1905, the emergence of a revolutionary party was only possible “after a failed revolution.” This conclusion leads Lukács to ask how, and indeed if, the other parties of the Comintern (particularly those of Western Europe) will solve this problem. He freely admits his own ignorance as to how they can move past the “stage of mere agitation and propaganda” and form a “closed mass party” before the revolution’s victory.Lukács, "Selbstkritik," 46 This is, in Lukács’s estimation, the “greatest crisis of the revolution.” His only consolation is that this crisis, which first showed itself in the Hungarian dictatorship of the proletariat, is now known world-wide, even if no solution has been found.

The argument of Lukács’s self-criticism gives the party a central role in the revolutionary process. It is the only organ capable of mediating the seizure of power and directing it towards radical social transformation. The experience of the Hungarian Revolution demonstrated that the “organ of the proletarian state” will become compromised if it is not led by a revolutionary party. Cadres capable of taking on the responsibility of leadership could only be forged through a drawn-out process that includes defeats. Where Levi asserted that the communists should not have entered government and Radek proclaimed that they should rather have hanged the Social Democrats after doing so, Lukács sought the true “roots of failure” and found them in the lack of a real party.

These debates show that the Hungarian Revolution quickly became a literary topos on which different authors attempted to define correct political doctrine and draw up “lessons.” The Hungarian authors variously defended and criticized themselves and their compatriots, and their summations became ammunition for non-Hungarian authors attempting to draw universally applicable lessons that could be communicated to the whole International. Lukács’s contribution to the literature more closely resembles that of the non-Hungarian authors in its eschewal of extended analysis in favor of generalized lessons, but it is distinctly humble and uncertain in a way that strongly contrasts with the texts of Radek and Levi as well as Lukács’s other political writings. I believe this uncertain tone was kept confined to this Hungarian-language text to save face and avoid looking like a pessimist, as pessimism and uncertainty were held in suspicion.

Beyond Legality and Illegality

In the Shadow of the Second Congress (3.1)

In June 1920, the eleventh issue of Die Kommunistische Internationale announced that the Second Congress of the Communist International was set to take place from July to August. It also contained an article by Lenin criticizing three Kommunismus articles—one by Lukács and two by Kun—on account of their anti-parliamentarism and lack of concrete analysis.V. I. Lenin, "Kommunismus: Journal of the Communist International" (June 12, 1920), in V. I. Lenin, *Collected Works*, Vol. 31, 165-167. Accessed at <https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/jun/12.htm> For what it’s worth, the controversy over abstentionism was seen as a lesser tactical dispute in terms of its actual content: Lenin once expressed some sympathy for the hardline abstentionism of Amadeo Bordiga’s faction in the Italian Socialist Party given the conduct of the party’s “opportunist parliamentarians.”V. I. Lenin, '*Left-Wing' Communism: An Infantile Disorder* (1920) in V. I. Lenin, *Selected Works in Three Volumes, Vol. 3* (Progress Publishers, 1971), 345-430; 385n There was near universal consensus that parliament was exclusively an instrument of bourgeois domination in the Third International.Kammler, *Politische Theorie von Georg Lukács*, 167. Lukács refrained from embracing the more controversial stance of strict abstention from “reactionary” social-democratic trade unions and made efforts to distinguish himself from the Dutch-German communist left, calling the KAPD “putschist” in an article from September 1920.Georg Lukács, "Massenstreik und Arbeiterräte in Deutschland" (1920), in *Revolution und Gegenrevolution: Politische Aufsätze II 1920-1921*, eds. Jörg Kammeler and Frank Benseler, tr. Janos Györkös et al (Leuchterhand, 1976), 82-89; 84.

Lenin’s brief review was accompanied by a trove of texts for the Congress, among them the theses of the ECCI—that is, of Zinoviev—for the upcoming Second Congress on “the role of the communist party in the proletarian revolution” and “the communist party and the question of parliamentarism,” which warned against sectarianism and encouraged the “revolutionary” use of parliament. The subsequent July issue of Die Kommunistische Internationale contained more theses from the ECCI and Lenin’s “Theses on Fundamental Tasks of The Second Congress of The Communist International,” which generally agreed with the positions of the ECCI.V. I. Lenin, "Theses on Fundamental Tasks of The Second Congress of The Communist International" (1920), in V. I. Lenin, *Collected Works*, Vol. 31, 184-201. Accessed at <https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/jul/04.htm> Finally, Lenin provided the coup de grâce with his pamphlet Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, a more elaborate intervention into the ongoing debates that would later be distributed to all who attended the congress. It should go without saying that this text was also critical of many positions that Lukács held despite not being explicitly targeted at him. Positions closely hewing to those proposed by the Bolshevik leadership would be officially adopted at the Second Congress in late July. The aforementioned theses drafted by Zinoviev and Lenin would be adopted without any significant alterations.

“Legality and Illegality” and Lukács’s “Self-Criticism” were thus written under the influence of Lenin’s criticism and the theses first proposed in Die Kommunistische Internationale and then adopted at the Second Congress with regard to legality, sectarianism, parliamentarism, and so on. Both texts indicate that Lukács took the opinions of the Bolshevik leadership—particularly Lenin—seriously and quickly discarded many of the proposals set forth in “Organization Questions of the Third International.”

Although the actual events of the Second Congress cannot have influenced “Legality and Illegality” or Lukács’s “Self-Criticism,” it is worth briefly describing the profile of the Hungarians and their predicament at the congress. The exiles in Vienna, Lukács among them, were unable to attend, so the Hungarians were represented by two Moscow-based followers of Kun: Endre Rudnyánsky, who would abscond to Romania after pilfering Comintern funds the following year, and Matyas Rákosi, the future leader of post-war socialist Hungary.Kovrig, *Communism in Hungary,* 78, 87 The events of the Hungarian Revolution were not hotly debated, as there was already broad agreement amongst communists Hungarian and otherwise about the causes of the revolution’s failure. The impact of the events in Hungary is, however, felt in the reference made in the preamble of the “Theses on the Conditions for Admission:” “No Communist may forget the lessons of the Hungarian soviet republic.”John Riddell (ed), "Theses on the Conditions for Admission" in *Workers of the World and Oppressed Peoples, Unite! Proceedings and Documents of the Second Congress, 1920* (Pathfinder Press, 1991), 765-770; 766. Overall, the Hungarian representatives seem to have played little role despite the considerable impression that the events of the Hungarian Revolution had made on the Comintern.

The Illocutionary Dimension (3.2)

“Legality and Illegality” is a text that aimed to accomplish several goals. Following Skinner, I distinguish between the locutionary and illocutionary aspects of communication.See Chapter 7 of *Visions of Politics,* Vol. 1 The former refers to the content, while the latter refers to the question of what genre of communicative act the text falls under and how the text realizes a performance of said act. This pragmatic analysis of Lukács’s writings presents some challenges due to his style and the circumstances of publication. I will treat these challenges as they come up.

What did Lukács accomplish in publishing this essay, i.e., what illocutionary acts does he perform by way of language? I find two distinct acts worth noting: warning and self-criticism. These two acts are closely connected. Lukács is able to issue a warning because he has engaged in (and/or is presently doing) self-criticism about his—and the entire Hungarian leadership’s—failures in 1919. The self-criticism in “Legality and Illegality” is largely implicit. Because Lukács was writing semi-anonymously as “G L,” only someone who was already somewhat familiar with the major figures of the Hungarian communist movement would be able to immediately identify him as the author.As I described above, all the Hungarian émigrés used abbreviated, semi-anonymized signatures for their articles in *Kommunismus*, but several other contributing writers also followed this convention. Despite this figleaf of semi-anonymity, Lukács strongly implies that he is one of the Hungarian émigrés through his references to the history of the Hungarian Council Republic.See Georg Lukács, *History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics*, tr. Rodney Livingstone (MIT Press, 1972), 266, 268, 270.

Even though this attempt at anonymity is half-hearted and easily seen through, it has consequences for the essay’s style. In the “Self-Criticism,” the first person plural pronoun identifies the author, who signed the text with his full name, as a member of the revolutionary government and the first person singular identifies the author as a particular member of that government, namely Georg Lukács. In “Legality and Illegality,” the first person plural is used as the pluralis modestiae (“We have made it a requirement…”) . The only singular first person pronouns used are also used in a purely stylistic manner: the phrase “von mir gesperrt” in a footnote and a use of ich (“Ich denke hierbei…”) that is, in principle, interchangeable with wir, although in context it strongly implies that the author is a Hungarian revolutionary.

Lukács (in the persona of the authorial entity “G L”) is also engaged in an act of self-criticism for his previous illegalist and anti-parliamentary articles in Kommunismus. Again, no explicit references are made to the fact that Lukács himself was once guilty of the “romanticism” he criticizes in the essay, but a reader who had been following his writings in Kommunismus over the past half-year and/or could identity “G L” as Georg Lukács would understand that this text was an implicit self-criticism. In relation to this, we can see Lukács’s denouncement of Narodnik-cum-White Army general Boris Savinkov as part of this self-criticism given that he had previously positively cited Savinkov vis-a-vis illegality in his 1919 Hungarian-language essay “Tactics and Ethics.”Lukács, *History and Class Consciousness*, 264. For the positive reference to Savinkov, see "Tactics and Ethics" in Georg Lukács, *Tactics and Ethics 1919-1929*, tr. Michael McColgan (Verso, 2014).

In this way Lukács identifies himself as a veteran of the Hungarian revolution, who, taking account of his errors, offers a warning to the rest of the Comintern. Anonymity and generality are complementary here: Lukács assumes anonymity because he is a particular kind of person, a Hungarian communist, but because he is anonymous he cannot specify the particulars and must therefore remain at the level of generality.

The key rhetorical device of Lukács’s warning is the metaphor of disease, expressed on the very first page of the essay with Lenin’s keyword Kinderkrankheit (childhood disease, growing pain) and then with the word Übel (malady, illness) in Section 2 of the essay. Lukács distinguishes two major symptoms—reformism and putschism—and argues that both result from the “disease” [Übel] of “the inability to see the state as nothing more than a power factor.”Lukács, *History and Class Consciousness*, 263. This line of criticism echoes what he said in his “Self-Criticism” about the mistaken belief that the state could fulfill the functions of the party, lending further credence to my argument that the essay as a whole has the character of a warning informed by self-criticism.

The mere use of the word Kinderkrankheit specifies who is afflicted by the disease (the Comintern) and what causes it (immaturity). Thus, even communists with a storied history in the old Second International, or even genuine Bolsheviks like Béla Kun, may now be mere children in comparison with the norm of the Third International sketched in Lenin’s pamphlet and mandated by the resolutions of the Second Congress.

The text’s displacement of the self of self-criticism safeguards it from falling into either the retrospective grandstanding that Lukács condemned in his Proletár “Self-Criticism” or the ritual of reconciliation under duress that self-criticism would become in later years. The acts performed through the text—warning and self-criticism—are connected to the enunciative modality employed by Lukács. Instead of claiming the delegated authority of a party leader, Lukács authorizes his warning by implying that he is a veteran of the Hungarian Revolution who is doubly qualified as both an immediate witness to the events and a reflexively aware commentator capable of criticizing himself.

The Locutionary Dimension (3.3)

At this point, I turn to the analysis of the locutionary dimension of “Legality and Illegality.” What was Lukács doing by writing this essay? What positions was he staking out? What did he want to convince his audience of? If, as I am arguing, Lukács is playing doctor in this essay, then what does he prescribe as the cure for the Kinderkrankheit that has been diagnosed? In a word, the cure is a certain kind of consciousness, Bewusstsein, but this word can be misleading.Lars Lih resolved the problem posed by consciousness vocabulary in his study of Lenin by quibbling about the Russian language and choosing new English equivalents with which to translate the relevant words. I am not convinced that such an approach is appropriate with German-language material.Commentators tend to immediately assimilate any use of the word to the philosophical articulation of class consciousness detailed in the core essays of History and Class Consciousness. Jörg Kammeler, who otherwise does an incredible job laying out in detail what is redundant and what is emphatic in Lukács’s early political writings, underplays the continuity between the sense of consciousness in Lukács’s political writings and its sense in mainstream Marxist discourse.

The sense(s) given by Lukács to the word “consciousness” were conditioned by the archive of statements carried over from other discursive formations (Austrian, German, Hungarian, and Russian Social Democracy) and the functions assumed by the concept of consciousness in these statements. At the most fundamental level, the translation and reproduction of such statements across time and languages inevitably produces semantic drifts. This drift is accompanied by the proliferation of morphologically distinct concepts: zielbewusst, falsches Bewusstsein, Klassenbewusstsein, tred-yunionistskoye soznanie, politisches Bewusstsein, sozialistisches Bewusstsein, etc. The circulation and reproduction of the statements including these concepts crystallized into patterns of usage that entailed specific relations between the concepts, specified their relation to the objects of discourse, and implied the assumption of certain enunciative modalities in those who deployed the concepts.

The concepts could be sorted into a graded hierarchy—Lars Lih has reconstructed what this hierarchy looked like for Kautskyan “orthodox Marxism.”Lih, *Lenin Rediscovered*, 75ff Rosa Luxemburg produced two different matrices of consciousness in the pamphlets “Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy” and “The Mass Strike.” In the former, she divided “das Unbewusste” from “das Bewusste” on grounds of chronological and logical priority, arguing that the “experimental” and “elemental” class struggle drove the cause of socialism forward, while the social-democratic leadership merely reinforced these advances. “The logic of the objective historical process,” she claimed, preceded the “subjective logic of it bearers.”Rosa Luxemburg, "Organisationsfragen der russischen Sozialdemokratie" (1904), in *Gesammelte Werke*, Band 1, 2. Halbband (Dietz 1979), 422--446. Accessed at <https://www.marxists.org/deutsch/archiv/luxemburg/1904/orgfrage/text.htm> In “The Mass Strike,” Luxemburg contrasted “theoretical and latent” class consciousness with its “practical and active counterpart.”Rosa Luxemburg, *The Essential Rosa Luxemburg: Reform or Revolution & The Mass Strike*, ed.Helen Scott (Haymarket 2007), 160. The degree, as it were, of class consciousness was irrelevant to this classification, which was based on activity conditioned by the political situation. A single concept thus became an important point of dispersion from which concepts multiplied and were connected to various objects, most of which were political in nature and hence far afield from the traditional psychological or philosophical objects attached to the concept of consciousness.

With this background in mind, I think it is a mistake to throw Lukács into the flattened problematic of a philosophy of consciousness so hastily. Bewusstsein must always be read as a polyvalent term. I find three operative senses of consciousness in Lukács’s text, which I will call the metonymic sense, the political-theoretical sense, and the psychological sense.

The first of these is the most abstract. In the discourse of the Second International, talk about consciousness often functioned as metonymic talk about the organizational situation of the proletariat. One frequently finds words related to (Klassen-) Bewusstsein and Organisation placed side by side. The Hainfelder Programm of the Austrian Social Democrats states that “The bearer of [the] evolution [from capitalism to socialism] can only be the class-conscious and politically organized proletariat.”The text of the original is reproduced at <https://rotbewegt.at/lexikon/das-programm-von-hainfeld-1888-1889/> In his famous commentary on the Erfurt Program of the German Social Democrats, Kautsky claimed that “Social Democracy […] is in essence simply the part of the fighting proletariat that is conscious of its goal [zielbewusste]” and that this conscious, fighting proletariat tended “to become ever more synonymous with Social Democracy,” finally making his point crystal-clear with the statement that “In Germany and Austria the two have in reality become one.”Karl Kautsky, *Das Erfurter Programm: in seinem grundsätzlichen Teil erläutert* (J. H. W. Dietz, 1892), 216. Accessed at <https://library.fes.de/prodok/fa87-01370a.htm> Luxemburg repeated this statement in “The Mass Strike,” a text which Lukács studied thoroughly in the early 1920s. Quoth: “Social Democracy is the most enlightened, most class-conscious vanguard of the proletariat.”Rosa Luxemburg, *The Essential Rosa Luxemburg: Reform or Revolution & The Mass Strike*, ed. Helen Scott (Haymarket 2007), 161. These are all repetitions of a key governing statement operative within the discourse of classical social democracy.

By and large, then, Marxists saw the political party as the logical embodiment of the class-conscious proletariat, and an authority as important as Kautsky was not afraid to assert that under certain conditions they were literally identical. The splits in Marxism provoked by the first World War and the subsequent foundation of the Third International complicated this picture, but the basic argument that the most conscious layer of the proletariat was coextensive with the party continued to be recited. The Second Congress of the Comintern unanimously accepted Zinoviev’s “Theses on the Role of the Communist Party in the Proletarian Revolution,” which stated that “The Communist Party is a part of the working class, and moreover its most advanced, most class-conscious and therefore its most revolutionary part.”Riddel, ed. *Workers and Oppressed Peoples, Unite!*, 191.

And so, when Lukács writes that “the reform of consciousness is the revolutionary process itself,”Lukács, *History and Class Consciousness*, 259. one must recall his argument in the “Self-Criticism” that the party is the indispensable organ of revolution and infer that “the reform of consciousness” that occurs within the “revolutionary process” is intimately connected to the activity and development of the party. Whatever else it means, consciousness is a metonymic designation of organizational strength. The concept is anchored to a particular kind of object, namely organization. This interpretation clarifies the political position Lukács occupied in 1920 and harmonizes the focus on consciousness found in his essays for Kommunismus with the import given to the party in his “Self-Criticism” and subsequent essays.

The political and theoretical sense of consciousness is multifaceted and difficult to pin down. The most deflationary approach would be to define it simply as assent to a set of propositions that define the revolutionary and Marxist outlook, with the lynchpin (at least for Lukács) being the doctrine of the abolition of classes at the hands of the proletariat and the philosophy of history that goes with it. The most inflationary approach would be to define it in the way that Lukács did in the essay “Tactics and Ethics.” He argued there that knowledge incorporating both the scientific sociology of class struggle and the Marxist philosophy of history is necessary to determine correct tactics—so far so good—but, leaning heavily on the language of German idealism, he further specified that a “self-consciousness” of “the given historico-philosophical situation”Georg Lukács, "Tactics and Ethics" in *Tactics and Ethics, 1919-1929: The Questions of Parliamentarianism and Other Essays,* ed. Rodney Livingstone, tr. Michael McColgan (London: Verso, 2014). beyond mere discursive scientific and philosophical knowledge was also necessary. This conclusion is in line with the overarching concern with, as Westerman calls it, “Dostoevskyan” heroism in Lukács’s work from the mid 1910s to the early 1920s.Richard Westerman, "From Myshkin to Marxism: The Role of Dostoevsky Reception in Lukács's Revolutionary Ethics," *Modern Intellectual History*, Volume 16, Issue 3 (November 2017), 927 - 960; 22 et passim. (I disagree with Westerman’s diagnosis that the Dostoevskyan elements are anti-Hegelian; in my opinion this description accords very well with Hegel’s conception of heroism as “the absolute unity of character and the universal” in the passion of the world-historical person.Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, *Lectures on the Philosophy of World History,* Vol. 1 *Manuscripts of the Introduction and the Lectures of 1822-3*, eds. and trs. Robert F. Brown, Peter C. Hodgson, et al (Oxford University Press 2011), 176) In the limited scope of “Legality and Illegality,” the scale tips towards a more modest focus on correct discursive knowledge that is, however, still accompanied by an internalized, quasi-intuitive sense of the historical situation. Lukács avoids the error he made in “Tactics and Ethics” and does not make heroic theoretical consciousness into the singular keystone of revolutionary practice. Moreover, this sense of consciousness is clearly linked to a different object than the political-organizational sense.

The third and final sense of consciousness in Lukács’s formulations is the psychological. It is perhaps the most fugitive element in his thought given his repeated denial that (class) consciousness is a psychological phenomenon.Lukács inadvertently contradicted himself in the original version of "Klassenbewusststein" by claiming that "the real motor forces of history are independent of man's consciousness of them," only to correct this by changing the phrasing to "independent of man's (psychological) consciousness" in the version that appears in *History and Class Consciousness*. Nonetheless, Lukács clearly appeals to psychological consciousness when he writes that “the revolution itself can only be accomplished by people […] who have become intellectually and emotionally emancipated from the existing system.”Lukács, *History and Class Consciousness*, 257. This intellectual and emotional emancipation is necessary for organizational strength and discursive knowledge to not fall back into political cretinism—another medical term of abuse dear to both Lenin and Luxemberg—and academic Kathedersozialismus. It fuels the drive to organize and study social reality in the interest of changing it, but, unlike with Hegel or the Buddha, no one can be completely psychologically emancipated prior to revolutionary social emancipation: “They need the evidence of their own eyes to tell them which society really conforms to their interests before they can free themselves inwardly from the old order.”Lukács, *History and Class Consciousness*, 258. Psychologically emancipated consciousness is both an impetus towards practice and the projected fruit of victory, albeit in different forms. Despite this internal differentiation, this concept is again linked to a different order of objects than the other two.

These three dimensions of consciousness shed light on the sometimes enigmatic nature of consciousness in Lukács’s early Marxist work on two levels. On the political level, each dimension is insufficient by itself, but together they cohere into something greater than the sum of its parts. Metonymic consciousness in the form of organizational strength is illusory if the organization is not committed to revolutionary theory and staffed by partisans. Theoretical consciousness that loses sight of the real, external basis of its content—the power of the proletariat organized into a party—and the psychological motivation that drives it becomes merely scientific. Psychological consciousness divorced from an organizational context and correct theory results in romanticism. The political form of the first deficit is reformism; that of the third is putschism. Between them is the wavering stance of intellectuals who dally with Marxism like Lukács himself before 1919.

On the discursive level, the diversity concealed underneath the signifier “consciousness” is connected to both prior social democratic discourse and ongoing political concerns as articulated in the debates conducted in publications like Kommunismus, Die Internationale, and Proletár.

Conclusions

Beyond the interpretations I have made of Lukács’s “Self-Criticism,” “Legality and Illegality,” and related texts as interventions into specific debates, many of Lukács’s others essays from the early 1920s can be seen as attempts to close gaps in the emerging discursive formation that would come to be known as Leninism.Lukács says something along these lines in the introductory remarks to his unpublished 1926 manuscript *Tailism and the Dialectic*, see *A Defence of History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic*, tr. Esther Leslie (Verso, 2000), 47 Throughout this essay, I have described various ways by which the content of Lukács’s literary production was conditioned by political events and debates. Now I want to discuss the relation of his literary production to the fundamental governing rules of the institutional-discursive system emerging in the Comintern.

In the early years of the Comintern, the process by which governing statements were produced, reproduced, and transformed was relatively transparent. Assertoric and/or imperative resolutions were drafted individually or collectively and then approved by committees made up of representatives from member parties. These resolutions were the primary, although not necessarily the first, enunciation of the governing statements that provided the rules for the discourse of the Comintern. During the approval process and subsequent dissemination through institutional organs, the content of these resolutions was subject to various transformations: treated as a general law and applied to a particular case; explained as a conclusion drawn from historical experience; justified as the extension of established principles; inverted into a corresponding defect; shifted from its original modality, whatever that may have been, into oughts, ises, musts, woulds, and ifs; and so on. As statements, resolutions occupied the ambivalent space between knowledge and tactics that characterizes political discourse. From one angle, political resolutions appear as the governing statements, but from another they appear to depend on and be derived from the archive of scientific and theoretical knowledge. While this relation was held in suspension during the time of the Second International, it would be resolved in favor of one side by the Third.

With the growing power of the ECCI following the adoption of the first set of binding resolutions at the Second Congress, both the production of statements and the rules for their transformation became increasingly regulated at every level, but especially at the primary level of institutional power. The ECCI was given the power to act with the authority reserved for congresses between congresses, which allowed its leaders to exert considerable influence on the direction of the congresses. The processes of Bolshevization and Stalinization would make the process of discursive production both less and less transparent and more and more restrictive as they matured.

The different enunciative modalities that Lukács adopts—and, in the case of his “Self Criticism,” does not adopt—in his texts testify to a different vision of discursive authority than the one that would crystallize in the Comintern. The heart of this vision is self-criticism, which was to be the difficult but necessary work of freely admitting errors, striving to correct them, and producing knowledge through this process. The unique perspective on international organization articulated in “Organisationsfrage der dritten Internationale” registers a similar line of thought in its protest against bureaucratic unity: if unity cannot be established by fiat, then how can knowledge? Self-criticism is a process that recognizes, defines, and solves problems in a manner fundamentally different from the circulatory pyramid of congressional centralism. Extrapolating from Lukács’s sketch, it can be inferred that the interpenetration of parties—having discarded their national affiliations—would transform the lonely subject of self-criticism into a collective, polyphonic subject for whom the task of self-criticism would be more than a punishment for the disobedient. The authority to produce, reject, and transform statements would be distributed throughout the field of action, rather than concentrated in representative central bodies (and the executive bodies that inevitably exert their power in between congresses). The relation between the general and the particular would be formed anew.

Lukács’s tendency to write within what his student István Mészáros called an “unhappy correlation” of subjective, particular historical processes and a singular, objective, and universal process was just as much a product of his political situation—including its institutional and discursive aspects—as of his intellectual background.István Mészáros, *Lukács' Concept of Dialectic* (Merlin Press, 1972), 37. The hegemonic conception of Marxism as theory and science, which the Comintern carried over from the Second International, implied a totalizing intellectual and political project that, because of the institutional situation emerging in the Comintern, lent itself easily to such “unhappy correlations.” At the discursive level, the model of Marxism as science had considerable parallels with the institutional system of congressional centralism: Both ordered statements into general and particular, law and case, and instituted hierarchical rules of enunciation based on this order. Lukács’s own formulation of what made Marxism scientific, in centering the question of method, militated against the received idea of science, but his agreement with the content of the Comintern’s resolutions won out over his criticism of the institutional form that produced them. His attempt to reproduce the content in a form that rebuked the primary institutional relations standing behind its own production and implied a different system of discursive relations lacked the political and institutional force to seriously contest the Comintern’s totalizing project.

For better or worse, Marxists have long known that political writing is a kind of political speech, which is a kind of political act. Lukács was evidently aware of this as well: in both his early, principled self-criticism and his later, resigned attempts at it, he recognizes the political center of even his most philosophical arguments in a way that academic philosophical commentators, in the interest of warding off the spectre of totalitarian contamination, have not. A genuine historical engagement with Lukács’s work must patiently untangle these threads where appropriate and recognize the load-bearing structures woven amongst them where not.

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When the narrator, speaking omnisciently with insight into the proceedings of the gods, lists the accomplishments of Sheep and Grain, he—for this was undoubtedly a man—talks of how they gave sustenance to the land, filled the granaries and barns, brought wealth to the poor, and carried splendor and beauty with them wherever they went. Sheep and Grain themselves, having gotten drunk on sweet wine and sweet beer, take things in a different direction.

Grain boasts of how she bestows her “power” onto warriors, making them forget fear and go into battle “as if to the playing field.” This could refer to some kind of religious rite, or it could mean that Sumerian warriors were in the habit of getting soused before combat. She also mentions her ability to mediate feuds and give freedom to prisoners.

Sheep responds in kind, describing how Šakkan, king of the mountain and god of wild animals, “twists a giant rope against the great peaks of the rebel land” and manufactures the sling, the quiver, and the longbows. Clearly she is no slouch in martial prowess either.

It goes on like this. Grain charges that shepherds, those fearful plains-dwellers, covet the farmers’ fields and must be chased away with a cudgel in hand. “I am Grain, I am born for the warrior…” Incensed, Sheep takes things too far and vividly describes how “a banished enemy, a slave from the mountains, or a laborer with a poor wife” comes to the threshing floor, bound in rope, and violently pounds Grain into flour. Her face is mutilated by the wretch’s club and she is tossed around by the winds.

Grain is hurt and retaliates in the same fashion, mocking how Sheep’s innards are butchered and packed for the marketplace. At this point Enki, one of the leaders in the gods’ cosmic council, intervenes and declares that “Sheep and Grain should be sisters […] But of the two, Grain shall be greater.” Everyone “should submit to the yoke of Grain.”

Thus a dispute between the two axial organic technologies of the day—meaning the third millennium BC—became a contest in violence. The two life-bringers of Sumeria boast of their ability to wreak death. First they mustered their arguments about who was best for war, and hence the state. When this proved insufficient, they turned nasty and conjured grotesque metaphorical images of mauling and humiliating women. Pastoralism and agriculture meet as rival modes of production, daughters of the neolithic, but their debate in Sumeria elides any precise references to the relations of production. The systems appear as divine forces rather than arrangements between human beings and domesticated organisms. While the poem’s narrator portrays them as universally beneficent, the stock and measure of wealth itself, they portray themselves as power, indeed as antagonistic power. Both stories contain bits of mangled truth.

Much of recent scholarship, even if unintentionally, depicts the transition to class society as an unrelenting, millennia-spanning horrorshow. Fire and axe felled the great cedar forests, and plows broke the plains, subjecting them to the yoke of Grain. As it became ecologically impossible for the unfree workers, whether they were slaves, serfs, or something in between, to flee into the wild countryside, so too did the cities become the hosts of world-historical zoonotic diseases, nemeses of humanity that would put a cap on endogenous urban growth for millennia. The marshes were drained and irrigated, but the canals turned the land into a salted waste. The peoples of the “rebel peaks” and “high plains” were taken in captivity to the cities, the workhouses, the fields. Amidst such apocalyptic upheavals, it’s no wonder that the tension between the epoch’s two defining modes of life became the stuff of myth.

It Will Truly Be Known, So It Is.

What does it mean for enlightenment to return to myth? And, coevally, what does it mean to live in a violent world? These are the dual questions posed by the form and function of the prophetic poem nin me šara, more commonly known as The Exaltation to Inanna, written in exile by the Akkadian high-priestess Enheduanna in the midst of a civil war.

The Sumerian city-state of Ur, under the rebel king Lugal-Ane, along with a number of other city-states, had risen up against the authority of the Akkadian Empire, ruled then by Narām-Sîn, blood relative of Enheduanna, both of whom were direct descendents of Sargon, the first king of the empire. Lugal-Ane beseeched Enheduanna, as priestess of the city, to inaugurate him as the rightful king of Ur, but she refused, and under threat of execution fled the city. The ritual for which the nin me šara was written took place in this moment of acute turmoil, where the power and authority of the goddess Inanna, patron deity of the Sargonic kings and cultic spouse of Narām-Sîn, had been cast into the utmost doubt, and through which Enheduanna sought to empower Inanna and call upon her to open up “the gateway of tears” and to rain down her righteous and bloody justice upon the city-state of Ur.

Enheduanna tells the story of how Inanna gathers her strength, acquiring the “countless numinous instruments of power” (of which, however, there are said to only be seven necessary instruments) from the other deities of the pantheon, through various demonstrations of her own cunning, power and aggression, such that she usurps her father, An, as the most powerful of the gods and the highest authority on Earth. It is, then, from this apex that Inanna is prophesized, by Enheduanna, to pass judgment upon her enemies and for this judgment to be executed on the city of Ur and every rebellious city, in an unceasing storm of destruction: on Inanna’s authority the patron goddess of Ur, NANNA, lays waste to the city, “overwhelming all places of joy in the city”, depriving the city of food and all means of either defense or offense, burning the city gates, conquering its troops, killing its people, filling the the canals of the city with blood such that those who are left have only the blood of their fallen to drink, and ensuring that no love, sex, or new life of any kind, may come to the wombs of the city. The rebellious cities are subdued, Ur submits, and becomes part of Inanna’s territory. Inanna will have proven her dominion over all the lands. She will have proven herself the most powerful among the gods. And so it is that the gods, in turn, will have been made to submit to her authority in heaven. Inanna will have become sovereign in Heaven and on Earth.

Enheduanna’s ritual in exaltation of Inanna’s power and authority functions as a narrative battle ground for political conflict and by all accounts did act as a turning point in the war that favoured Akkad. Hylistic analysis of the poem—breaking the text down into hylemes, the smallest action-bearing unit—reveals a sophisticated structure wherein common, abstract myths are interwoven with a concrete prophetic retelling of the same stories. The core abstract myth: An lets Inanna execute his judgment on her enemies and Sumer is made to function as the vessel, or empty form for the narration of political conflict and construction of a mythic right to rule. Meanwhile, the concrete myth: Inanna Lets Nanna execute her judgement on Ur and every rebellious city state becomes the arrogation of authority for the Sargonic king and the Akkadian Empire to quell the uprising in Ur by the most violent means necessary, and impels them to emerge from the civil war victorious. The myth in the abstract sanctions violence as a mode of law-making; the myth in the concrete sanctions a specific act of divine violence that will have been to inaugurate Akkad, Narām-Sîn, and Enheduanna as sovereign, monarch, and high-priestess, respectively, over the city of Ur and all of Sumer.

The chronology of the myth is rearranged in the text—beginning with a statement of Inanna’s authority over the land and ending with Inanna having proved herself the greatest of the gods by an elliptical return to the phrase “Queen, who would dare take away your territories from you?” Inanna, then, becomes the protagonist of both the abstract myth, wherein she executes AN’s judgment to conquer Sumer, and in the concrete myth, wherein she devastates Ur – to emphasise this final outcome, the judgement of Inanna. Inanna becoming sovereign in Heaven and on Earth is made homologous with the actual sacking of Ur. By this the poem functions as both a revision of and a return to the myth of Inanna’s absolute sovereignty, yielding the practical meaning that the Akkadian Empire must be, or rather will have been, victorious by whatever means necessary.

The climax of the poem and, so too, the ritual involves a heavy repetition of the phrase “ḫe-zu-am”—It will truly be known, so it is. And by this mantra Inanna’s judgement, power, victory, and wrath are all in turn asserted to be, equally and at once, the true and the actual. It will truly be known, so it is—that Ur will fall and the Empire will rule.

In the Beginning Was the Scribe

Mesopotamian polysemy contrasts with the Greek search for etyma and Abrahamic inquiries into gematria and hurufiyyah because it largely shuns appeals to roots and numerological hypotheses. For example, the sign designated as MUL—made up of three AN signs, which in turn mean “the heavens”—ordinarily means “star,” but it can conceivably mean, following various relations of homophony, synonymy, and homography, “planet,” “writing,” “shoes,” and “man.” The last possibility is illustrative: In Emesal, an obscure form of Sumerian used by goddesses in certain literary texts, the word for man is pronounced mulu, which is almost a homophone of the standard Sumerian mul.

Would anyone ever actually write MUL and mean “man?” Probably not, but knowledge of such complex semiotic connections was nonetheless important. Lexicography gave the scholar, who was always also a scribe, crucial insight into the esoteric structures of reality, which were often linguistic in nature. The liver studied by a baru was a “tablet of the gods,” gods who wrote omens in the stars for the tupšar Enuma Anu Enlil—tupšar being a Sumerian loanword literally meaning “tablet writer,” and Enuma Anu Enlil the title of a mammoth list of over 6,000 astronomical omens—to decipher. Incantation tablets used semiotically charged spellings to enhance their potency, and less esoteric lists gave scribes who worked in accounting the knowledge required to make fine-grained distinctions: During the reign of the Third Dynasty of Ur, sheep and goats were categorized based on their age, sex, quality of wool (five grades), and what they had for fodder.

In the past scholars were wont to ascribe to the Mesopotamians a desire to create a Listenwissenchaft, a science of and in the form of lists that reflected their belief in cosmic order and social control. Cuneiform had, after all, originated as a form of bookkeeping, and almost as soon as it became a full-fledged system for representing language there began to appear troves of tablets listing different signs in innumerable arrangements based on all conceivable criteria. The idea of Mesopotamian Listenwissenschaft has fallen out of favor, but cuneiform lists of all types demonstrate an interest in knowledge for its own sake, not least because numerous entries were impossible or absurd: a solar eclipse that proceeds from north to south, a jar of donkey, grammatical formulations like “he is going away from us with us,” or a lion with the face of an ass born of a ewe. Late Babylonian astronomers kept a continuous list of astronomical observations for 600 years, the data from which laid the basis for their famous mathematical astronomy. Before any of that, however, the scholars had more practical concerns.

In the proto-historic and early historic periods of Sumeria, scribes had a crucial role in constructing two of the eternal pillars of class society: the distinctions between hand and head and town and country. The cities, and in particular their temples and palaces, became the agents of exchange, organizers of infrastructure, and owners of vast tracts of land as well as, with time, human beings. The scribes were the city’s administrative bureaucracy, and hence central to all of these roles: They were the ones who wrote contracts, tabulated the outlays for construction projects, and recorded land ownership.

After centuries of this arrangement, things became dire. The junior members of the ruling class had preyed too fiercely on the commoners, extracting exorbitant fees and forcing them into debt penury. The status of the free citizens that the Lugal—the Great Man, the one today called king—relied on was jeopardized, prompting these Great Men to periodically issue jubilee edicts that canceled debts, freed slaves, and scolded the bureaucrats for their rapacity. An ideology of justice emerged, with Hammurabi of Babylon—or rather his scribes—as its most famous mouthpiece.

In the more chaotic scene of the Babylonian and later Assyrian periods, neither the gods nor economic performance could guarantee the legitimacy of the ruling class and the prestige of the scribes. How could the people sleep soundly after their enemies sacked the city and carried off the holy statue of Marduk, which was both the actual body of Babylon’s divine protector and the center of the world?

It was in this era that divination took on increasing importance and penetrated every sphere of life: commoners and kings alike consulted the baru haruspices and ašipu exorcists. Babylonian divination used the semiological principles of writing and interpreting cuneiform to manipulate the logic and categories common to the population. The application of these semiological principles, mixed with some empirical and historical elements, to events celestial and terrestrial generated the omen lists; from the omen lists diviners could find an entry that was appropriate for their mark’s quandary; and with logic and a fitting omen in hand the diviner could reduce the whole edifice to the binary of favorable and unfavorable, typically telling the client that everything would be OK after all.

Divination thus served as a guarantor in an increasingly chaotic world. When the scribes were a bureaucratic quasi-class joined at the hip with the state, writing was an immediate performance of power. Discursive ideology did not concern them. As the secretions of the original state-class nexus took on their own relative autonomy through the grand dance of differentiation and integration, so the scribes ceased to be a uniform bloc of privileged administrators attached to the great institutions. They became subject to the same precarity their predecessors had usuriously inflicted upon the tillers of the soil. The majority of first-millennium BC scribes known to history worked in the private sphere and freely sold their services as a commodity; some were even able to turn their knowledge to pecuniary ends and become wealthy merchants. Science, philosophy, and magic, scarcely distinct from one another, were all alternative forms of authority that scribes could claim. These were repetitions of the power they once enjoyed, which was now only available in a diminished form. Knowledge had become decoupled from the state.

What Does Heaven Ever Say?

For Confucius, Heaven was forever mute. However much he idolized the rites of Zhou, the numinous, spirit-packed world of the Shang would have been alien to him. The sage himself once disclaimed his power of speech and voiced his preference for quiet.

The most powerful forces, whether human or divine, were silent. Godlike meant something that just worked, as it were, with no outward hint of transcendence. Divine efficacy is as effortless as the North Star standing in the sky, and this is what made it so painful to be a teacher of students and advisor of lords—how could any man measure up to the example of Heaven? Rhetorical trickery and logical games could never achieve the immanent sublimity of the true way.

Thus the teacher must endlessly grapple with the fact that the same divine and human history that furnishes him with examples of just and sagelike conduct is to blame for his present predicament. Conversely, the success of learning would put an end to it. Learning and teaching are practices characteristic of an unhappy age, and only through indirection can they become more than trickery and brutishness.

Indirection that shuns trickery can therefore be forceful at times. When asked about serving the gods and the spirits of those passed on, Confucius replied with his own question: “You are not able to serve men, how can you serve their spirits?” How indeed.

Getting from A to A

There may be no greater vindication of speculative thought than the final movements of Zeno of Elea. His infamous paradox demonstrates the situation of action and desire in space and time. To get to where we want to be, we first must move part of the way there. And to reach partway, we had to first move towards it in part as well. Getting to where we want to go may be broken down into infinitely small steps of getting only part of the way there. The result of this analysis is that we cannot, in theory, ever get to where we want to be. We cannot close the gap. We are left, emphatically, where we always already are. Arrival becomes impossible. And yet, it is a brutal fact of history that to have arrived at where we are now, we must have moved from where we used to be. Arrival must, therefore, at some point in time, have been possible. Logically, we cannot get anywhere. Yet, empirically, we have gotten to where we are. To pass the impasse, must one limb give way?

Consider the following:

The horse, by the procession of its hoofs – front left, hind right, front right, hind left – moves from A to B, maintaining, at any moment, at least one hoof suspended in the air. This quadpartite example is the dialectical demonstration par excellence of the antinomy of historical movement. The bike, by contrast, displays a different modality. Beginning at the base of a slope, the flow of pedals, the constant flux of feet – both of which being indefinitely suspended – proceed by infinitesimal increments and generate a real force within the wheels which, in relation to the ground, exert a false, or derivative, force upon it and by this the bike arrives atop the hill. In neither case, on Zeno’s analysis, should movement have occurred. But in both cases, movement does. Whether one emphasises the concrete progression of each historical hoof or the constant flow of force across a concrete surface one remains incapable of explaining how history happens and, therefore, how we might possibly move from here to where we want to be.

Now, Zeno, outside the academy, was certainly a mover and shaker. Becoming embroiled in a plot to overthrow a tyrant ruler. For this he was apprehended and impelled to divulge the names of his co-conspirators. Being, too, a good comrade, Zeno refused. Enduring torture and, eventually, forfeiting his life. However, in his final moments before death, cast at the feet of the tyrant, Zeno appeared to relent and begged that the tyrant come close, saying that he would, at last, disclose the identities of his fellow revolutionaries. But then, as the tyrant leaned in – and here the sources differ – Zeno bit off the organ by which his history would be inscribed. On one account he bites down upon the tyrant’s ear, holding fast until he is stabbed to death; on another he bites off the tyrant’s nose; and on another still, he bites off his own tongue, but only after crying out “You are the curse of this city!” and turning to the bystanders, “I marvel at your cowardice, that, for fear of any of those things which I am now enduring, you should be the tyrant’s slaves.” By this the crowd was moved and promptly stoned the tyrant to death.

The immediate significance of such movement is clear. The contradiction between the ruler and the ruled, the eternal curse of the city, is resolved and the people set free. But, on the grander tableau of history, Zeno’s death, and his last gasp attempt to prove the truth of Parmenidian ontology, left barely a mark. The city-state of Elis, after the synoecism Zeno would have witnessed in his youth, oscillated between modes of governance. At times approximating Athenian democracy and at others shifting into an oligarchic gear, the latter often set in motion by military defeat. History continued to move, its direction set neither by the inertia of Being that Zeno adduced nor by the activity his sacrifice elicited.

What then maybe said of history? That it does not move by increments, but by the catastrophic, violent defiance of the rational authority: the horse’s hind hoof lands ahead of where its front hoof began and by this it begins again; not anew, not partly moved, but literally on different grounds: the bike outputs, upon the concrete, the full force of all those thousands of feet, all that labour congealed within it, to effect an upward climb. Only from this higher vantage may we look back and assess how far we have come, and begin to recoup the cost.

The problem, though, with these representations, is that in them movement is presupposed. They do not address what is to be done when we are in the saddle. What would make the difference can only be viewed, so it appears, from the top of the hill that we may never reach. At the same time, every martyr may be the one for whom the masses move. The rational and the empirical must be equally denied and construed. What belies the two is that the movement of history can, at any point in time, change directions—and we are the moment of inflection—real actuality manifests itself through what it produces. Such is the weapon of nature and the nature of the weapon by which we get to where we are going. All prevarications of so-called paradox are but the reins and chains of prehistory.

All Your Life You Were a Dog

The work of Antisthenes survives only in quotations, testimonia, and brief summaries. One fragment, transmitted by a certain Athenaeus, stands out. It simply says “to be fed like a suckling pig.” This is a rich image, then as now. The good life for the Cynic can be defined, via negativa, as not being “fed like a suckling pig.” Positively, the strong association between Antisthenes and dogs leads us to the position that the good life must also be canine in character. Thus it seems to us that the entire Cynic outlook is contained within the opposition of the dog and the pig. The dog and the pig are both creatures of human settlement. (It seems that wild dogs were not prominent in Greece, for Aristotle specifies that only in India are dogs sorted into wild and tame.) Both beasts are dirty, violent, chthonian, and rough, but while the dog can retain its sense of nobility in abjection, the pig is a cultured being through and through: It cares little for what it consumes as it is fattened for slaughter. Thus, we can see two differing styles of abjection in the lives of these animals: the porcine and the canine.

Juvenile pigs were an impure beast used often for minor purification ceremonies; perhaps their tendency to consume waste suggested apotropaic potency. Piglets were also the least expensive votive animal in Greece, and this is another reason they were used in such diverse rites: burnt in the holocaust to Zeus; butchered and buried for the sake of Demeter in the autumn thesmophoria, only to be dug up a few days later and cast into the fields as magical fertilizer; and used in some manner for initiation into the famous Eleunisian mysteries. Citizens would ritually cleanse public spaces in Athens by slitting the throats of piglets and sprinkling their blood around (the victims’ bodies were burnt afterwards to dissipate the impurity they carried). Mature pigs were also sacrificed, as one can already see in Homer, but they, too, represent a special case. Unlike with other livestock, the procedure seems to have focused on the meat of the pig, as opposed to the fat and bones traditionally offered in the thysia. The pig symbolized lack of taste and distinction just as much as it did an excess in appetite not just for food, but also for sex and even violence (thus Aristotle: “A pig will give battle even to a wolf”).

The dog, too, was an impure animal banned from entering most sacred spaces—notably the Acropolis of Athens—but paradoxically they were permitted to stand guard outside them. Despite their impurity, or at least in part because of it, they were also sacrificed. Like the piglet, they were an inferior sort of offering. Their bones and teeth could become protective amulets. A puppy could be used as a magical cure: rubbed on the body of a sufferer to absorb their affliction and then killed. In Athens dogs were mainly used in apotropaic rituals dedicated to Hecate, the chthonian witch queen of death whose presence was heralded by howling dogs. Even though they were not strictly taboo, dogs were rarely eaten. Odysseus’s dog Argos shows loyalty, but Homer’s goddesses are called bitches on numerous occasions. There is a certain roughness even in the supernatural roles played by dogs.

Dogs are a laboring companion, raggedy but strong. A scholium on Aristotle’s Rhetoric tells that both dogs and Cynics are “good guards,” much in contrast to the incontinent violence of swine and servility of the unlearned hoi polloi. Further, it says that both are capable of discrimination, being loyal to friends and barking at foes. Consumed by indiscriminate lust and rage, the pig does not and cannot know friendship. Incapable of prudence in the world of everyday action, how could the pig’s life have anything in common with that of the sage?

An awesome magical potency is contained within the dog. Its voice omens disaster, and its body has the power to ward it off. The Cynic similarly dispenses the truth without regard for convention and turns their body and soul into an unbreakable fortress. Foreign, poor, woman, slave: the Cynics will learn to be hardy. The pig, meanwhile, is the least valued sacrifice. Everywhere slaughtered, even dismembered and thrown into the soil. The symbols of the dog’s physical strength, its bones and teeth, are magical, but to the gods is left the fatty meat of the pig. What little remains from Antisthenes on the topic of religion is not positive. He mocked priests and dismissed the worship of many gods as an erroneous custom that obfuscated the singular god of nature: “The god resembles nothing, and therefore no one can know him from an image.” One can hardly imagine him finding inspiration in the votive fungibility of Sus domesticus, a property which reflects its undignified abjection.

The Cynic critique of Athenian society is, like that of Socrates, a hierarchical one, and the dog reflects the perilous nature of such a critique: it must be loyal without being servile in the same way that the Socratic ironist must follow the law (even when unjust) without inwardly submitting to it. One must acquire either a mind or a noose. The ideal for Antisthenes is radically Socratic in a way that contrasts strongly with, for example, Aristotle’s megalopsychos. He has dispelled arrogance, yet is still “hard to bear” and his “kingly” behavior earns him a bad reputation. The most widely reproduced apothegm of Antisthenes is some variation on him saying that he would rather go mad than experience pleasure. The Cynic’s abasement justifies their condescension, just as the dog is imbued with magic by its own tenuous social status. This cynical gesture of condescension from below, rather than the high-handedness of Plato and Aristotle, is the true prototype of all philosophical critique.

Food for Thought

Dionysius of Heraclea was, for much of his life, a stoic. A student of Zeno. A man of surety. Of strong constitution. He put his name to a number of works, all of which now lost, save for their titles: On Apathy, On Training, On Pleasure, On Riches and Favours and Revenge (and a few more, though we need not list them all). But what can be said about a title alone? Perhaps very little. Each of these titles could easily be found sitting in the ‘smart thinking’ section of a chain store, adorning some more-or-less helpful self-help text written by some more-or-less sincere pop-psychologist. Dionysius’ concerns are of a timeless appeal and stoicism itself is never seemingly out of fashion, but, knowing nothing of their content, we will learn nothing from the texts themselves. We may, however, learn something from the title that Dionysius earned for himself.

Some time, later in life, Dionysus became afflicted with chronic pain, localized at the back of one of his eyes. This prompted the once healthy and steadfast man into a radical change of perspective. He disavowed his earlier commitments to stoicism and turned, instead, to the hedonism of the Cyreniacs, acquiring, by virtue of this, the title of Renegade. Now, it would be easy to paint this as a typical picture of how stoic attempts to discipline the mind will ultimately flounder in the face of any sufficiently intensive or extensive physical pain. The body keeps the score and at some point the mind cannot keep count, or something like that. But that would be lazy and reductive. It would fail to comprehend the meaning of Dionysius’ change of heart, and impose upon it only the content of his hedonistic turn, telling his history from its victory.

The stoics were not ignorant of pain. Many were, on account of their social standing, relatively insulated from toil, though this was far from a universal truth. Indeed, Epictetus, a favourite of both the French Enlightenment and the contemporary self-improvement guru, was a slave. The stoic ethic was not a simple assertion of Mind over Matter. But what we can glean from the Renegade is that this was, perhaps, his understanding. Dionysius’ biography does not speak to the triumph of this or that ethical outlook but rather to the failure of his self-relation as both mind and body.

Dionysius’ initial stoicism was a satisfying reduction. It felt good for him to think that he had mastery over the appetites of his soul, as man of surety, of strong constitution. But this felt less good than the pain of failure felt bad. The body is not so easily satisfied and the mind not so easily dominated. Learning the weakness of his mind he concedes to it and substitutes for the stoic life a new simplification. His turn to hedonism, though prompted by chronic pain, was not in satisfaction of his body: it soothed his mind. His mind had failed, ultimately, to dominate itself and this new ethics absolved him of that difficulty. Whereas the old reduction had appeared to satisfy his body, this new reduction appeared to satisfy his mind. But both were, at base, satisfactions of a voracious mentality; a body in denial of itself.

The truth of this is made by the manner of his death. Dionysius, at the age of eighty, having spent many years first as stoic, then later a hedonist, in an act of asceticism seemingly at odds with them both, starved himself to death. Had he, then, at last, won the battle? Suppressing his bodily instincts through so total a mastery of his mind that they could no longer fight back against him? No. Dionysius’ death represents the total victory of the body, for it had convinced the mind this victory was its own. In his attempt to infinitely suspend the tension of having a body he had shown himself utterly incapable of facing the struggle of being one, exposing both his stoicism and his hedonism as so much repression thereof.

Dionysius was neither, really, a stoic nor hedonist; he simply shovelled these teachings down into his belly/stomach to quiet whatever discomfort he was, at the time, unable or unwilling to confront. It was perhaps this disposition that Zeno identified when, upon Dionysius asking why he never corrected him in class, Zeno replied, “It is because I do not trust you.” He treated all teaching as mere food for thought. To satisfy the appetite of his inner resentment. Rather than comprehending either ethic as an engagement with the tension between body and mind he understood them each as domination and disavowed the fight he was afraid he could not win.

Avoiding Distress

Our truth is the intersection of many independent lies. Thus, every body of knowledge is built on a structure of cultured ignorance; the lie within truth is one of omission. This is self-evident in the history of pestilence. The Antonine Plague, the first pandemic to rupture ancient civil society, has been transmitted to us via various textual sources, but primarily from Galen’s De indolentia (περὶ ἀλυπίας—“on avoiding distress”). The exact etiology or what caused the pandemic remains a matter of controversy; initially, historians unanimously agreed that it was smallpox, but recent genomic and phylodynamic work has cast doubt on that conclusion. De indolentia is a curious text, Galen wrote it as an exercise of equanimity to demonstrate his mastery over the vicissitudes of misfortune. The text catalogues his personal losses during the plague years—a library destroyed by fire, manuscripts lost in transit—and rehearses the mental disciplines required to maintain ataraxia amid catastrophe. What the text does not catalog, except as occasion for demonstrating indifference, are the material conditions genomic analysis now reveals: livestock decimation disrupting grain supply, urban mortality concentrating in insulae tenements where the non-citizen poor lived at lethal densities, mass graves (and sometimes there were no graves!) where the bodies of slaves were deposited without record or ritual. The plague appears in Galen’s writing as physis—nature, fortune, the unavoidable—never as politeia, never as a product of social organization.

This is not a mistake or a matter of nescience; Galen is the physician of antiquity after all. In his work, e.g. On the Method of Healing, you find acute clinical observations: pneumonic symptoms, bubo formation, mortality patterns, and detailed taxonomy of diseases. But we know better today, don’t we? Ancient medicine was an individualizing profession, a determinate concept of population has yet to emerge. Galen was concerned with the patient’s specific constitution, their healthy base-line, their humors, in order to understand both what is wrong and how best to treat it, to return the sick person to their previous state of health. Genomic sequencing of Yersinia pestis from Roman-era dental pulp has allowed bioinformaticians to reconstruct what Galen of Pergamon could not say.

What genomic analysis and computational reconstruction reveal is not the correction of ancient error but the exposure of necessary erasure, the independent lie. Galen’s silence about the political economy of differential death was ideological labor essential to imperial subjectivity, not a fault of knowledge. Roman civil society required that slave mortality remain unthinkable as social murder—otherwise, the entire edifice of humanitas collapses into its actual foundation: normalized mass violence. Philosophy provided the conceptual apparatus for this unthinkability. Stoicism’s universalizing gesture—“all men die, the sage accepts this”—performs the same function as our contemporary epidemiological models when they describe plague transmission via “population density” and “R-naught values” without naming that density as a function of land-rent, or that certain populations were rendered expendable by law. To sequence ancient DNA is to read biological evidence of what written sources suppressed, but the reading itself occurs within institutions (genomic research facilities, university presses, grant-giving bodies) that reproduce contemporary versions of the same exclusions. Whose deaths are we counting now? Whose remains, in Galen’s phrase, matter for “avoiding distress?”

Where Galen required Stoic discipline to render mass death philosophically tolerable, we require statistical models, machine learning optimizations, the entire apparatus of data science. The content changes: genomic markers replace humoral imbalances, neural networks replace syllogistic reasoning. But the form persists. Catastrophe appears as an object of contemplation, of reconstruction, of knowledge production; never as an indictment of the social order that organizes who lives and who dies. Technical reason, in making the past legible, reads its own prehistory. The algorithm that translates περὶἀλυπίας does not transcend the text’s ideology; it extends it. We have developed new instruments for the same refusal. This is what development means: barbarism becoming more sophisticated in its forms, more total in its reach, more capable of naming itself while remaining unchanged. The plague killed; Galen philosophized; we sequence and model and publish. The self-scarring continues, now with better tools for describing the wound we continue to inflict.

Wisdom Died Twice

The apocalypse is the most productive time to acquaint yourself with the signs of God. The dark night of the soul materialized twice: first as Athens, representing eternity; second as Baghdad, representing history. Said another way, wisdom died twice.

In 9th-century Iraq, after a bloody civil war, the Caliph al-Ma’mun ascended the throne. A lover of the intellect, he established Bayt al-Hikmah (the house of wisdom) and generously financed it. Aristotle, it is said, came to him in a dream, urging the union of Greek wisdom and Islamic knowledge. However, al-Ma’mun’s belief in the Bayt was more a wager than a gift: he believed that the Day of Judgment was near and wanted to meet Allah having built the architecture that unified Greek, Indian, Persian, and Arabic knowledge—the ideal soul for the Round City of Baghdad. It is within this milieu that the black Mutakallim read the signs.

At the end of the Mutakallim’s life, Abu Uthman Amr ibn Bahr al-Kinani al-Basri, better known as al-Jāḥiẓ, attempted to document totality. He endeavored to make an encyclopedia of animals, documenting over 350 species, from the housefly to the lion, outlining their habitats, food chains, and taxonomy. Unfinished at seven volumes, the Kitāb al-Hayawān (book of animals) was something fundamentally different from Aristotle’s Historia Animalium: an allegory for creation that, by way of its reading, assimilates other semiotic systems to its own cosmological biosemiotics. What emerges from al-Jāḥiẓ’s prose is 9th century Baghdad and Basra via text—cities and creatures, Bedouins and mosques, markets and salt marshes, rendered as a single interconnected whole. Ecology before the word existed.

Scholars gloss al-Jāḥiẓ’s method as “accretive intercategory,” nowhere better demonstrated than the Dog-Rooster debate. The Proponent of the Rooster claims that the Dog is a cursed creature: neither predator (sabuʿ) nor prey (bahīma,) wild nor domesticated, clean nor unclean. It guards a household it cannot fully enter, hunts beside a master it does not fully serve, and reveals its essence by eating its own excrement and defiling corpses. The Proponent of the Dog retorts in kind. Loves its abusers? So does the Sheep. Eats corpses? So do Lions. Worried about excrement—have you seen Camels, Chickens, Fish, Pigs, Eels? For every neither-nor, a both-and. Poetry, proverb, ḥadīth, Islamic law—all marshaled toward one animal’s honor. Then the Proponent of the Dog brings the Pigeon: not filth this time, but breeding, varieties multiplied by hand until no fancier can say what a Pigeon is. The Dog was cursed by what it touched; the Pigeon is cursed by what it has become. The Rooster’s side had asked what the Dog truly is; the Pigeon asks what anything is, once you start asking. If you cannot think the Dog, you cannot think the Pigeon—and a fortiori, you cannot think the Rooster. Every animal lives at the threshold of every category. The debate was supposed to establish which animal was superior; what it established was that superiority requires a ladder, and the ladder requires rungs that hold. The Scala Naturae cannot stand. From this education the ideal reader learns to interpret the signs, restoring a precarious social harmony.

If an animal within its environment is a sign of god, then the same holds for the human animal. Al-Jāḥiẓ knew this with urgency. A Black man—a Zanj—in a society where attributes were weapons, he turned the intercategory method directly on Blackness itself. If the Dog is neither predator nor prey but the product of its relations, then Blackness carries no force internal to itself. It is a complexion produced by sun and geography, not a substance with inherent meaning. It is a testament to the power of this method that, even today, who and what constitutes the Zanj remains a live historiographical controversy. The Kitāb Fakhr al-Sudān ʿalā al-Bīḍān (Book of the Boast of the Blacks over the Whites) was a philosophical weapon, its blade the same one sharpened on the Pigeon and the Mule. And yet, al-Jāḥiẓ’s household contained a concubine, a eunuch, a slave; each a sign he refused to read. The method had dissolved the foundation of the institution in which he lived, and he did not follow it home. The ideal readers, unlike the ideal writer, must follow the signs from home to city.

Every sign bears the mark of its conditions, as the animals demonstrated, as Blackness confirmed, as the water beneath the cities made undeniable. A famous Arabic proverb: where the water ends, the land ends. Abbasid Iraq was an empire of flow—water, goods, bodies—and the Tigris and Euphrates were its defining terms. Baghdad sat at the rivers’ confluence, the Round City’s geometric ideal presiding over everything the water carried toward it: grain from the north, bodies from the south, spices and ceramics from the Indian Ocean. The caliphs built riverside palaces with sweeping vistas, audience chambers raised above a series of courts. For the masters, water was a vista; the Round City’s geometry as the soul’s ideal form, indifferent to the network beneath it. At the bottom of the same river system lay Basra: the delta, the confluence, the blood of the empire’s commercial exchange. Here al-Jāḥiẓ assembled his method in the Mirbad marketplace, among madmen and Bedouin brigands and Jewish poets, not in the Bayt. Further south the water descended into salt marshes, below the city, below the market, below the vista—the Tigris and Euphrates losing definition, braided into channels and reed beds that shifted with the seasons, the boundary between water and land dissolving exactly as the proverb said it would. This was the empire’s agricultural foundation and its most illegible sign: the labor that drained the marshes, worked the salt flats, maintained the irrigation network that fed the cities that housed the palaces that produced the vistas. The soul, at this scale, was the earth, and the people most acquainted with it were the Zanj. But were they even able to read the signs?

The Zanj did. They rebelled. Rayhan ibn Salih, Rafiq, Sulayman ibn Jami—the black vanguard history tried to read away—and behind them a coalition of enslaved and manumitted, peasant and craftsman, Arab Bedouin and Bahraini, every body the ladder sorted beneath politics assembling into a force—at that moment they were all Zanj—that held the strongest administrative system in the Muslim world at bay for 15 years. They read the signs from the salt marsh and the reed channels imperial troops could not navigate, ambushing canal forces from concealed side channels, fighting from inside the water rather than above it. Ali ibn Muhammad declared that the most qualified man should reign, even if an Abyssinian slave, which is to say: the attribute has no force internal to itself, the niche produces the qualification, the salt marsh co-generated the sign-reader that Wisdom could not. South of Basra, intersected by canals and protected by an iron chain across the main waterway, the Zanj built al-Mukhtara, the Elect City—palaces of baked clay, houses of brick and palm leaf, its own currency minted as early as 871. The Round City claimed to embody the divine plan: soul and city corresponding, signs resolving into the Creator’s wisdom. Al-Mukhtara was built on natural history—the water that moves, the boundary that shifts, the category that will not hold. Its unlocatability is its philosophical statement: the divine plan requires a fixed point; natural history has only conditions, and conditions change. When the rebellion was crushed in 883, plantation slavery was never again practiced in the Arab world. The method, once loose, did not stop even in defeat. The Bayt al-Hikmah’s books entered the Tigris in 1258, the water running black with ink, wisdom returned to the element it had refused to think. It died because it would not go where the Zanj already were. Wisdom died twice—once in Athens, once in Baghdad—and both times it built a city to last forever. The Round City has vanished without a trace. Al-Mukhtara never asked to be found. The false is an index of itself and the true. The signs are still here.

What if Nature Wasn’t What You Thought?

It is said that John Scotus Eriugena’s students stabbed him to death with their stylii. Whatever the provenance of this story it provides us with a telling counterpoint to this early Medieval philosopher’s christianized Neoplatonism. More than that, it gives us a useful opportunity to reflect on the practice of philosophy in general—on what it hides, what it reveals, and where its truth really lies.

In his most important work, the Periphyseon, Eriugena develops a physiologia, a Science of Nature, in which the latter is understood as a totality that encompasses both those things that are and those that are not. He sets it up so that what is not is to be understood as equivalent to what cannot be grasped by the senses or by the intellect, while what is corresponds to what can be so grasped. Among the things which cannot be grasped we find: God, the primordial causes and the higher orders of beings like angels. These are the hidden and unknowable essences of all that is manifest, the causes which lie behind the spatio-temporal world of becoming, those truths which remain concealed within “the most secret folds of nature.”

In other words, for Eriugena, power, creation and ultimate explanation for everything we take to be real in our everyday lives rests in a supersensible beyond that is both so high above and so deep within the things of our world as to be permanently hidden to us. Even human nature, which is unique among created things insofar as it is cast in God’s image, can only know of itself that it is, but never what it is, and this is so precisely because its lack of self-comprehension is what secures its infinity and likeness to God. God, the creative power from which everything emanates, through which it exists, and to which it returns, Nature, the totality of what is and is not, and Man himself are all knowable only negatively, analogously, and dialectically, but never concretely or truly—neither in nor for themselves, if you’ll allow me to use such anachronistic terminology.

This physiologia is presented in the form of a dialogue between a master and his suitably deferential pupil. In contrast to this idealized pedagogical relation, the real relation between Eriugena and his actual pupils in the story of his death allows us to see the doctrines just discussed in a new light. Whether the events of the story actually took place or not, they contain a truth hidden by the philosophical idealization of the Periphyseon.

In putting their pens to use not as weapons of criticism but as instruments of criticism with weapons, Eriugena’s pupils show that while it may be true that what is beyond comprehension constitutes the hidden cause of the world of appearance, it is more likely only what is beyond the comprehension of the philosopher and his idealizing abstractions. Rather than looking to the supersensible beyond or some unknowable transcendence as the ground of what comes to be and passes away, Eriugena would have been better off if he had turned his attention to what would become the source of his own passing away, and what is the source of coming to be for all of us: the manifest and sensible world of social relations.

They also give us a hint as to how the idealized relations of philosophical form can actually ground the philosophical content they enform. Just as the engaged acceptance and respectful posture of the idealized pupil of the Periphyseon allows the enlightened master to unfold an account in which the hidden, benevolent origins of power are recognizable through their visible manifestations without a hitch, so form always does its share of the work in providing the conditions for a specific content to take shape. This is a hint that applies just as much to the modern philosophical essay or monograph, with their assumptions of transparent communicability and indifferent address, as it does to the more visibly constructed and more obviously contrived—at least to our modern eyes—form of the dialogue.

What a non-idealized philosophical form looks like, one that does not turn away from the real social relations within which it is embedded, remains to be seen; unless it is simply the collective practice of self-emancipation through the weapon of criticism and criticism by weapons—a practice carried out for the most part by people who are not typically seen as philosophers, but one into which putative philosophers must subsume themselves if they are to have any chance of finding truth.

Weak, Indigent, and Rootless

Aggression is natural. All animals have a limb for defense, but God gave man alone a brain for thinking and hands for working. These two powers combine to enable labor and the crafts. Man’s most primal tools, the ones that put him on even ground with the dumb beasts of the Earth, are lances, swords, and shields.

These arms, however, are insufficient for man to defend himself against his fellow man: “If you are not a wolf, the wolves shall eat you,” as the saying goes. The only way out of this impasse is through the emergence of a human restrainer, wāzi’, that stands above the people and dominates them, but even this is a natural and necessary process—that is, if it can be called a process at all. By Ibn Khaldun’s own claim that it is impossible for human society to reach a true state of anarchy, it must be concluded that the pattern of restraint emerged outside of historical time. Even the maximal freedom of the desert-dwelling Bedouins and Berbers is conditioned by the natural restraints of political animality.

Still, kings and rulers do emerge. Dynasties are carried to the throne by the group feeling of their tribe, house, or faction, then lose their group feeling and rule through clients and followers, laws and punishments. The ruler’s personal restraining force is supplanted by that of the law, and the noble vegetate in luxury as their subjects languish under draconian harshness, becoming cowardly and unfit for militia service. To be punished by the law when one cannot defend oneself is humiliating and leads to the destruction of fortitude. Similarly, a child that grows up in the bosom of the city and receives education is deprived of its fortitude, being habituated to authority and incapable of self-reliance. Such craven beings make poor men.

Seeing the pitfalls of punishment and education, the Prophet applied a different restraint. Religious principles, unlike the law of the state, function without external sanction. The believers carry them within themselves, for they received the precepts of faith from the Lawgiver in a way that transcended technical instruction and scientific education. How could the Prophet have scientifically educated his companions when both he and so many of them were illiterate? With foresight, Muhammad stipulated that a ruler should not be too shrewd, for the shrewd are wont to be tyrants, and even predicted that the caliphate to succeed him would last only thirty years before descending into tyranny and injustice. Those who are too clever are all “would-be shayatin.”

In time, the leaders of the state came to exclusively concern themselves with governmental affairs, and by the end of the ‘Abbasid Caliphate scholarship had become a profession for the timid and resentful. Once worthy of being likened to prophets by God’s final messenger, the erstwhile class of scholars, ‘ulama, degenerated to the status of mere teachers for hire, mu’allimun, representing little more than a pack of “weak, indigent, and rootless” ingrates despised by those who enjoy the power of the state, perhaps because the rulers understood that these weaklings can only sap the fortitude of their subjects. Learning is further restraint, knowledge of the crafts and sciences a noxious tonic brewed in the luxury of civilization.

The scholars, for their part, are unable to grasp why they are hated. Political matters slip through the sieve of their analogical intellect just as the true contents of the sciences slip through the frivolous abridgements and handbooks they produce. Though scholars are mere “urban weaklings,” rulers still find themselves obliged to keep some scholars, particularly jurists, on hand for the maintenance of religious order. Lesser intellectuals found work teaching. Those in Ifriqiyah and the Maghrib used the Qur’an as the basis of their curriculum to the disbenefit of their students, for the Qur’an is inimitable and its study cannot provide students with the habits of knowledge.

And yet, children must be taught religion before they have “shaken off the yoke of authority,” and the power of custom dictates that the Qur’an comes first. Education is caught in a blind alley. Religion stands alone as the sole restraining force and form of knowledge that can sustain a dynasty, but it is impossible to teach religion without degrading both religion and teaching. Ibn Khaldun had served every post imaginable for a man of his rank: chancellery secretary, judge, professor, privy councilor, military commander, diplomat, prime minister—and his verdict was dim. When the father of social science takes on the role of a teacher and directly addresses his reader as a student in the sixth chapter of his Muqaddimah, it can only be interpreted as an act of desperation.

Humanity is not merely held in suspension between its natural and supernatural destinies, between the promise and the threat, by the circle of civilization; It is hanged. Prophetic ecstasy is the only thing that can put a spoke in the wheel and briefly establish an interregnum in the cycle of the lower world, where life is no more than the enjoyment of delusion.

On Becoming a Woman

The bivalent attitude which Christine de Pizan displays to her own gender is a result of the fortune and misfortune associated therewith. If, at the beginning of The Book of the City of Ladies, she laments her femininity, in the first book of On the Mutability of Fortune she laments the fact that Fortune saw fit to transform her into a man. Nature endowed Christine with a crown containing the precious stones of Discretion, Consideration, and Retention, but her female assignment at birth prevented her from inheriting her father’s earthly possessions.

What prompts male chauvinism? In The Book of the City of Ladies, Christine’s interlocutor Lady Reason provides a taxonomy of misogynists: those who defame women out of ignorance, those who do so out of vice and impotence, those who do so from jealousy, those who take pleasure in slander, and those who wish to demonstrate their erudition. None of these types are blameless - Reason even compares the ignorant misogynist to someone who has committed manslaughter - and yet each species of misogynist has its own particular venom. The misogynist who attacks women out of ignorance is harmful because he cannot be trusted to reason properly; he who attacks women out of vice and impotence is harmful because he has turned into a shriveled, misanthropic husk after a lifetime of pleasure-seeking, the vanity of vanities. Those who attack women out of jealousy recognize that they are intellectually mediocre and have boundless passion for attacking those whom they recognize as their rightful superiors; those who attack women from a desire for slander need no explanation for the harm they cause.

The recalcitrant dismissal of women opens up a philosophical puzzle: its origin. De Pizan, much like de Gouges centuries later, decries both the epistemic injustices that men commit against women as well as the property relations which forbid women from forming an independent bloc of economic power with which to rectify the situation. Yet unlike de Gouges, de Pizan does not attempt to connect the two causally. De Gouges insightfully sees nature as licensing egalitarian, pro-social relations between genders, yet de Pizan reverts to the chauvinist dogmas of her time on occasion. When de Pizan asks Reason why women do not hold legal offices, Reason responds by claiming that the different genders have different functions and serve different ends, a clear nod to the Aristotelian chauvinism that predominated in her time. From such a justification was the Salic Law upheld. And yet de Pizan’s personal role in helping France’s diplomatic aims during the Hundred Years’ War points to a performative contradiction; she condones a gendered division of labor in her writings yet shows their historical decadence in her actions in piazza.

Fortuna Audentes Iuvat

The philosopher, like the prince, must avoid flatterers. If, in The Prince, Machiavelli counsels that Fortune has its due, but that a sagacious ruler can temper it by working alongside it, then in the Discourses we see the inanity of the princely form of government itself. Be he under the rule of law or unshackled, a prince is less wise and constant than the people. Unjust people can be spoken to or dispersed, while the unjust prince can only be tempered by steel; the misdeeds of the common people are done in the name of the common good, while the prince’s misdeeds are done only for his own sake. Moreover, as maintaining the good graces of Fortune requires new provisions, a free republic will ever be able to supply a fresh crop of virtuous citizens, able to stand alongside history, weathering its tumults through skillful navigation instead of obstinate opposition. Fortune, then, is not a woman to be beaten, but a companion to be respected.

In the final chapters of Book I of the Discourses, the Polybian taxonomy of the anacyclosis is swept away, as is any classical liberal concern for artificially balancing the state against itself. There is only the free state, full of the people, wishing to keep itself free through its own virtù rather than grovel at the feet of their putative superiors. Yet this is no utopia: we are in a world of real people, subject to real political forces, which can drive a republic into servitude if not taken care of. A free people must beat down the ambition of its elites, lest their ceaseless lust for dominance subjugate the entire society. Consequently, the people need not respect aristocratic titles or the norms of noble civility. Fortune has no need for efflorescent reverence - like Hamlet, she knows not seems. All that matters is that the people carry out their most praiseworthy of duties - ensuring the maintenance of liberty through licentiousness

This task need not grant eternal reward - some societies will still decay despite the best efforts of its people to prevent the corruption of the nobility from undermining it. Yet a valiant defeat is still valiant. The Gracchi failed, yet their failure still prevented the accrual of yet more economic and political power in the hands of vicious and incompetent oligarchs. Struggle necessarily closes off the possibility of apodictic victory; it is still necessary to undertake regardless, for the alternative is a consolidation of tyrannical power in the hands of a self-interested few.

Those who do not respect Fortune should not expect her good graces. She takes great offense at the accumulation of power into the hands of an oligarchy or tyrant, for such people are ungrateful owing to greed and wish to oppress others. Consequently, their endeavors are done poorly and without sufficient care for the people, as was the case of the French invasion of 1494. On the other hand, she smiles on those who trust the people as the foundation of all free rule, since their desires “are rarely harmful to liberty, because they are born from being oppressed, or from suspicion of having been oppressed.” She also demands that the common people see to their own defense in both the domestic and foreign spheres, and be given good motive to take up arms. There is no motive greater than one’s own freedom from domination, and thus class struggle is the basis of stable society.

Fortune despises indolence, and for this reason she has no need for the so-called “gentlemen” who “idly live on the incomes of their possessions abundantly, without having any care for cultivation or of other necessary undertakings for living.” These so-called gentlemen of yesteryear, like capital today, are “dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” Closing oneself off from the world, idly indulging in ephemera reserved only for an aristocratic elite, is the negation of the dynamism of the free republic. Its indulgence comes at the price of the ruination of the rational society, for it undermines the restraints on the powerful that enable society to flourish. Such people are pernicious and ossify vice and corruption. The Florentine counsels the free republic to treat them like the sons of Brutus. Centuries before Robespierre, the sclerotic rule of the Italian city-states was proof that virtue without terror is impotence, and terror without virtue is destruction manifest.

Cogito Ergo Sum Extensus

Few know that René Descartes was not a dualist but a pseudo-dialectician, and a clever one at that. What is evident in the Sixth Mediation is downright clear and distinct in the 1643 letters to Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, that the mind and body must be conceived as both two and one. So much for an open and shut case of dualism. The cleverness of his response to Princess Elisabeth’s question—how can the mind move the body when such movement necessitates the extension the mind lacks?—lies in the fact that it is spurious as much as it is true. Descartes tells the Princess that she already possesses a concept for understanding how (1) the mind and body are really distinct, meaning I am extensionless mind that can outlive my extended body, and (2) these really distinct substances simultaneously comprise a whole human being. It is the concept at the heart of an apparently accepted but false theory of gravity. Descartes says that while one abuses the concept in question by applying it to weight and the body to which it is imagined to be joined, since they are not really distinct, it is precisely the “primitive notion” through which the apparent contradiction of the relationship between the mind and body together can be grasped. For the purportedly distinct quality of weight is falsely believed to inhere in bodies and move them toward the center of the Earth without pushing them and thus without requiring extension. Gravity may remain obscurely conceived but the contradiction motivating Princess Elisabeth’s problem has thus been resolved. That is to say, an accepted framework has been supplied for conceiving how a mind that is really distinct from body (and therefore lacks extension) can move the extended body with which it is intimately united.

Clever Descartes does not deserve most of the calumny inflicted upon him. And yet Elisabeth is right to want what this pseudo-dialectician cannot give: dialectical mediation, for him to say that I as a thinking thing am empirical body, beast of burden, rotting flesh.

Love is a Bourgeois Construct

Bourgeois revolutionaries are ever stuck in their own antinomies. On the one hand, their program of universal freedom and equality points to a world beyond class divisions, yet on the other, their program also valorizes the present state of things, be they extant socioeconomic forms or political symbols. No figure better exemplified this antinomy than Olympe de Gouges. Qua proto-feminist, she rightfully decried the racial and gender inequality of her time, and even correctly identified economic relations as a source of women’s disempowerment. At the same time, de Gouges’ appraisal of Marie Antoinette reveals that the former valorized a moribund feudal nobility, a penchant which ultimately led her to the guillotine.

While de Gouges notes that economic inequality is a wellspring from which gender inequality draws its strength, she meditates this source by way of the family. The Salic Law forbade female inheritance, and so she sought to remedy this injustice by proposing marital and inheritance reform, wherein a couple would pool all assets upon marriage and divide them equally to all children upon the couple’s death. Such an arrangement would be enforced through a contract to which both parties would agree. Here the irony of landing Marie Antoinette becomes apparent; while the French Revolution was the precondition for the possibility of martial and inheritance reform, as it rid the country of the nobility which relied on the Salic Law, de Gouges herself implicitly legitimized the Salic Law by exhorting one of the few women who materially benefited from its enforcement.

Another limitation of de Gouges’ proposal is that it can only help those who already have material wealth to inherit in the first place. The nascent bourgeoisie would find de Gouges’ proposal beneficial as they could pass on their wealth to their progeny. However, the Third Estate lumped together all lay people regardless of wealth, and those sans-culottes who would later form the proletariat would have little to pass onto their children regardless of gender. This lack of inheritance reproduces the very gendered relations that de Gouges sought to remedy; while she correctly identified economic dependence as a source of feminine unfreedom, by trying to solve this problem purely at the level of private contract, she prevents the women of the sans-culottes from benefitting from her reforms unless they supplicate themselves in front of a rich man.

While de Gouges was a bourgeois revolutionary par excellence, she nonetheless remained a bourgeois revolutionary insofar as she sought to remedy inequality through the formal mechanism of the contract. The dramaturgist de Gouges has a proletarian counterpart in the thespian Claire Lacombe, who vociferously argued for the execution of the nobility but also the restriction of capital accumulation to better provide for the women of the sans-culottes.

Despite the half-heartedness of her proposals, de Gouges’ oeuvre points to a world beyond class relations, though she herself does not know it. By correctly identifying the social and material sources of inequality, she deserves commendation for rising above the purely private domain in which other bourgeois thinkers of her time languished. At the same time, by restricting her solutions to the private sphere, her thought retains a bourgeois streak that prevents her proposal from forming the basis of universal liberation. The liberation of women, like the liberation of humanity as a whole, is not to be sought in private contract, but in the rectification of the social totality.

Known as the “first Marxist among the biologists, first biologist among the Marxists,”Stolz Rüdiger, "Geleitwort der Friedrich-Schiller-Universität", in Krauße Erika (ed.), *Julius Schaxel an Ernst Haeckel 1906--1917* (Leipzig, etc., 1987), 9, quoted in Nick Hopwood. "Biology between University and Proletariat: The Making of a Red Professor." *History of Science* 35, no. 4 (1997): 1. <https://doi.org/10.1177/007327539703500401> Julius Schaxel, the man who coined “dialectical biology,” is a forgotten giant among the rich tradition of Marxist working-scientists. He belongs to the ‘first generation’ of dialectical biology, a research program that belongs to yet exceeds every Marxist tendency.I complicate this "generation" cataloging from Peter J. Taylor, "Biology as Politics: The Direct and Indirect Effects of Lewontin and Levins," *Science as Culture* 19, no. 2 (2010): 241--53, <https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431003660246>. Taylor classifies the "visible college" of Marxist scientists in 1930s Britain---Bernal, Haldane, Needham, Blackett, and Levy, among others.---as the "first generation" of Marxist scientists. (These same figures participated in the "Theoretical Biology Club"; see Erik L. Peterson, *The Life Organic: The Theoretical Biology Club and the Roots of Epigenetics* (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017).) The "second generation" of Marxist scientists, according to him, would be Lewontin, Levins, Gould, the Roses, and Commoner, among others. However, this schema overlooks an earlier first generation, which includes Boris Hessen, Julius Schaxel, Lev Vygotsky, Ivan Schmalhausen, Marcel Prenant and others. Making this genealogy explicit allows contemporary eco-Marxism to critically engage its own philosophical and scientific foundations and developments. He is a challenging figure to parse; his difficulty stemming from three sources: his politics, his disciplinary scientific work, and the way he united them. Development, in every sense, defines Schaxel’s project and trajectory. On one hand, his disciplinary and philosophy of science work anticipated the field of evolutionary-developmental biology (evo-devo) by almost 60 years.Evolutionary-developmental biology (evo-devo), emerging in the 1980s, integrates development---how organismic form changes within an individual lifetime---with evolution, addressing a major lacuna in late 19th and early 20th century biological theory. See Manfred Dietrich Laubichler and Jane Maienschein, eds., *From Embryology to Evo-Devo: A History of Developmental Evolution*, Dibner Institute Studies in the History of Science and Technology (MIT Press, 2007). Evo-devo examines this relationship bi-perspectivally: how development constrains and enables evolution, and how evolution shapes development. This enriched biological theory by introducing *regulatory* concepts that bridge reductionist and holistic, functionalist and structuralist modes of explanation. See Rose Novick, "Structure and Function," *Elements in the Philosophy of Biology*, (Cambridge University Press, 2023), <https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009028745>. On the other hand, by the end of a life shot through with technocratic tendencies, Schaxel was a doctrinaire Stalinist. This double status as political militant and scientist became the motif animating his turbulent life. He is worth remembering for various reasons, but especially for his attempts to resolve this ambivalence by waging his battle for ‘socialist science’ not within academic establishments, but among educators, teachers, and workers. It is in this practical dimension—the who and whom of scientific practice—that Schaxel’s radicality emerges most clearly.

Born in Augsburg to a middle-class family on May 24, 1887 , Schaxel was enamored with nature from a young age, a love he later attributed to his parents.Christian Reiß, Susan Springer, Uwe Hoßfeld, Lennart Olsson, and Georgy S. Levit,. "Introduction to the Autobiography of Julius Schaxel," *Theory in Biosciences* 126, no. 4 (2007): 165--75. <https://doi.org/10.1007/s12064-007-0015-7>. During his schooling, he excelled academically, graduating top of his class while immersing himself in what he called the “classics of naturalism”Reiß et al., "Introduction," 167.—from Oscar Hertwig and Charles Darwin to the Friedrichshagen poetry circle. Ambitious, rebellious, and promiscuous, he approached life as a problem of intervention, always thinking about how to act more effectively in his immediate environment.

Upon graduating from high school, Schaxel, dazzled by Ernst Haeckel’s Die Welträtsel (The Riddle of the Universe), wrote to the German Darwinist. Impressed by him, Haeckel invited the young man to study zoology under him at the University of Jena.It is worth noting that Ernst Haeckel's *Die Welträtsel* was one of the most successful works of science popularization in German history selling over 650,000 copies influencing what the country thought what Darwinism entailed. See Gabriel Finkelstein, "Haeckel and Du Bois-Reymond: Rival German Darwinists," in "Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919): The German Darwin and His Impact on Modern Biology," ed. Uwe Hoßfeld, Georgy S. Levit, and Ulrich Kutschera, special issue, *Theory in Biosciences* 138: 105--12, <https://doi.org/10.1007/s12064-019-00282-6>. Schaxel would become Haeckel’s last student. By the time Schaxel matriculated in 1906, Haeckel, 72 years old, was more an ideological figure than the trailblazing scientist of his younger years. Nonetheless, Schaxel deemed his university experience “exceptional.”Reiß et al., "Introduction," 168. While Haeckel was less present as a research advisor, Schaxel would benefit from Haeckel’s impressive network for the rest of his career. In this milieu, the experimental embryologist Julius Schaxel was formed.

The field Schaxel entered in 1906 faced the very lacuna he would later attempt to address: the problem of evolutionary development. Ernst Haeckel cast an enormous shadow over both academic zoology and popular culture. In his younger years, Haeckel’s program of evolutionary morphology had been genuinely productive, introducing a battery of concepts that remain fundamental to evolutionary theory today: ecology, phylogeny, ontogeny, stem cells, and so on. But by the time Schaxel arrived in Jena, this research program had transmuted into polemical philosophy; a ‘monist’ nature-religion meant to overcome Christianity’s “dualism” through mechanical materialism.Nick Hopwood, "Biology between University and Proletariat: The Making of a Red Professor," *History of Science* 35, no. 4 (1997): 372--3, <https://doi.org/10.1177/007327539703500401>. Darwinism, both from the left and the right, was synonymous with materialism.It is worth distinguishing that the late 19th century and early 20th century Darwinism is different from what Darwin himself actually thought. See Gregory Priest, "Charles Darwin's Science of History" (Ph.D. thesis, Stanford University, 2025), <https://purl.stanford.edu/dt096gc1088>. Moreover, the dominant historiographical narrative of the "eclipse of Darwinism," mainly peddled by the neo-Darwanists, is fraught. See Jan Baedke et al., "A Synthesis Without Darwin: Unification Attempts in Early Theoretical Biology," in *Unity and Disunity in Evolutionary Biology*, ed. Richard G. Delisle et al. (Springer International Publishing, 2024), <https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42629-2_12>. Haeckel claimed the study of organic form (morphology) is “nothing other than the result of a balance of moving forces at a given moment. The science of forms or morphology of natural bodies is thus, in the broadest possible sense, the statics of matter”Ernst Haeckel, *Generelle Morphologie der Organismen*, vol. 1, *Allgemeine Anatomie der Organismen* (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1866), 11, quoted in Karl Porges et al., "From Idea to Law: Theory, Concept and Terminological Formation in Ernst Haeckel's Works," *Russian Journal of Developmental Biology* 50, no. 6 (2019): 293, <https://doi.org/10.1134/S1062360419060079>. This theoretical turn had methodological consequences. For morphology, taxonomy, and other allied subfields of biology, where Haeckel and the Jena school had the most influence, a descriptive and comparative method to natural phenomena dominated, primarily inherited from Naturphilosophie.Uwe Hoßfeld and Lennart Olsson, "The Road from Haeckel: The Jena Tradition in Evolutionary Morphology and the Origins of 'Evo-Devo,' " *Biology and Philosophy* 18, no. 2 (2003): 285--307, <https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1023988119440>.

Other subfields of biology— namely physiology, the medical fields and botany— were less influenced by these disciplinary developments, and allied themselves with more robust empirical experimental work, and a burgeoning new philosophy titled neo-Kantianism, which saw itself as a self-correcting tendency away from mechanical/scientific materialism.Frederick C. Beiser, "Encounter with Darwinism," in *The Genesis of Neo-Kantianism, 1796--1880*, ed. Frederick C. Beiser (Oxford University Press, 2014), <https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198722205.003.0012>. This new scientific philosophy of neo-Kantianism did not have a particular “party-line” especially against Darwinism, but troubled everything from the status of a proper natural-historical explanation and the potential normative-content of natural selection to the role of consciousness in science and the problem of teleology.Evan Clarke, "Neo-Kantianism, Darwinism, and the Limits of Historical Explanation," *British Journal for the History of Philosophy*, April 30, 2021, <https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2021.1912707>.

This philosophical crisis was inseparable from its institutional context. Key to understanding this scientific culture is grasping the social geography of German research institutions. The German university remained the privileged site where scientific knowledge was certified and careers made, yet it was increasingly stagnant.Hopwood, "Biology between University and Proletariat," 380--7. Serious science has been increasingly done outside of the academy. For example, chemists thrived much more around industrial laboratories, technical colleges were abundant, and new types of institutions, such as the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, were burgeoning.Hopwood, "Biology between University and Proletariat," 369--71. In other words, Science depended on networks of formal and informal venues beyond university walls. Within this geography, university scientists, the “mandarins,” enjoyed the most prestige, and as a result, they were the most reactionary.

It was into this fractured landscape that Schaxel entered. Like many of Haeckel’s students, he quickly drifted away from his advisor to be better acquainted with “modern biology.”Reiß et al. "Introduction," 167. To this end, using Haeckel’s impressive network, Schaxel earned his doctorate, roughly in 1909, under Richard Hertwig lab in Munich supervised by Richard Goldschmidt and interacting with young biologists such as Franz Doflein.Reiß et al. "Introduction," 170--1; Christian Reiß, "No Evolution, No Heredity, Just Development---Julius Schaxel and the End of the Evo--Devo Agenda in Jena, 1906--1933: A Case Study," *Theory in Biosciences* 126, no. 4 (2007): 155--64, <https://doi.org/10.1007/s12064-007-0016-6>. He conducted a morphological analysis of oogenesis, thus uniting both his old mentor’s commitment to natural-historical morphology (what was called “ontogeny”) and the new experimental biology he is becoming adept at. Indeed this problematic of evolutionary development (what Haeckel dubbed “phylogeny”) will be the motivating engine for the rest of Schaxel’s career as he performed more research on various animal embryos. This immediately put him in the field of Entwicklungsmechanik (“developmental mechanics”).Schaxel's self-described politicization (1906--1909) came through his landlord, communist Emil Höllein (later parliamentary representative), and Russian émigrés in Jena fleeing the 1905 revolution. Schaxel credited Höllein with leading him "away from Haeckel's scientific materialism to Marxism," noting he "had a greater influence on me than any professor." The émigrés introduced him to Kautsky's *Neue Zeit*, leading to his reading of Marx and Engels and joining the SPD in a few years. See Reiß et al. "Introduction," 169.

Schaxel began cementing himself increasingly in embryology and became reputable in the field. In 1916, he secured an “außerordentliche” professorship of zoology at the University of Jena. And in 1918, he founded the small “Institute of Experimental Biology,” where he conducted axolotl research, especially on its developmental and regenerative capabilities. It was at this point during the turbulence of WW1 where Schaxel switched more thoroughly from doing empirical work to more theoretical and conceptual work. One of his most cited and major works of this period was Grundzüge der Theoriebildung in der Biologie (“Foundations of Theory Construction in Biology”), in which Schaxel gave a synoptic and critical overview of the “crisis” state of biological theory. He argued that biology suffered from a profusion of incommensurable theories—Darwinism and phylogeny, Entwicklungsmechanik, physiology, and neo-vitalism—each generating a multitude of facts and descriptions, but lacked coherent unifying conceptions to guide empirical research.Hopwood, "Biology between University and Proletariat," 375--80; Reiß, "No Evolution, No Heredity," 158--61; Baedke et al., "A Synthesis Without Darwin," 345--8. His method was two-pronged, both philosophical and historical, tracing the tradition of various research programs and the development of their theoretical content through immanent critique. What was needed, he advocated, was a “theoretical biology” (which he had earlier called “Kritische Biologie”) that would disentangle, disambiguate, and unify these disparate frameworks.Reiß, "No Evolution, No Heredity," 159; Baedke et al., "A Synthesis Without Darwin," 344.

Schaxel’s approach sought a middle ground between competing extremes. On the embryological front, for instance, he positioned himself between Wilhelm Roux’s mechanism (Entwicklungsmechanik) and Hans Driesch’s neo-vitalism. Roux’s reductionism offered impressive experimental work but lacked a consistent, philosophically informed biological theory; Driesch provided a stronger philosophical framework, but his deductions—entelechy as an immaterial force—were not sufficiently grounded in empirical work. Theoretical biology, Schaxel argued, was needed precisely in this middle ground, and the task required biologists and philosophers of biology alike. To institutionalize this vision, Schaxel launched the book series Abhandlungen zur theoretischen Biologie (Treatise on Theoretical Biology), published from 1919 to 1931, with contributions from Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Paul Weiss, Emil Ungerer, Friedrich Alverdes, and many other young biologists.Baedke et al., "A Synthesis Without Darwin," 344. Regarding other programs of "theoretical biology" such as Jakob von Uexküll, Schaxel differentiated himself from them by his insistence on philosophically-informed empirical work. It is not that much of a stretch to slot Schaxel with what philosopher of biology Denis Walsh dubbed"methodological vitalism." See Denis M. Walsh, "Objectcy and Agency: Towards a Methodological Vitalism," in *Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology*, ed. Daniel J. Nicholson and John Dupré (Oxford University Press, 2018), <https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198779636.003.0008>.

By 1923, Schaxel was known as a successful young biologist, but that would change in the next two years. While he was politically active in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) since 1918, he would take politics much more seriously during this period, becoming professionally involved. After a surprising victory of the left-wing parties in Thuringia, Schaxel was appointed as an employee responsible for educational reform at the universities. The Mandarins were under threat, and naturally the socialist experiment was crushed by the Berlin military. Schaxel was branded a “red” professor, and instead of running away, he doubled down. Science needed to be saved.

Amidst this maelstrom, between 1924 and 1926, Schaxel headed the science communication magazine, Urania. As a socialist cultural product, Urania represented a critical development for his ongoing fight for scientific culture. It was here where left-wing scientists, teachers, statisticians, physicians, and worker-functionaries aimed to mediate between science as a culture product and the labor movement.Notable contributors include the sinologist K. A. Wittfogel, mathematician Emil J. Gumbel, and philosopher Theodor Hartwig, among others. The stakes of this project become clear when one considers the status of science for the German working class at the time. Science was viewed with justified suspicion: the memory and misery of WWI was fresh, “progress” had stalled, and eugenics was on the rise. Yet Urania’s record was not without contradiction; the magazine itself contributed to this situation, promoting versions of scientism ranging from “people’s eugenics” to outright machismo.Hopwood, "Producing a Socialist Popular Science," 117--20. It is also worth mentioning that in the wider network of the Urania Free Educational Institute---at least compared to other socialist circles at the time---there was a sizable female demographic. Here Anna Siemsen is the most notable example. However, with figures such as the sex reformer Max Hodann and some of the target demographics of Urania, it is clear that patriarchal relations were not as thematized and incorporated into the larger mission of the magazine.

Urania’s project was twofold: to critique “bourgeois science” and to establish a new scientific culture that could overcome the working class’s justified suspicion of it. Schaxel’s own biography became central to this project. He presented himself as a model of the dissident scientist whose expulsion from bourgeois institutions confirmed rather than undermined his credibility. While some in the social-democratic (SPD) and communist (KPD) milieus welcomed a scientific “authority” in their midst, the majority remained skeptical of bourgeois scientists. Science and the figure of the scientist were not givens.

Schaxel deployed the familiar Kautskyite argument: while science is class-determined, not all of it would be discarded by the ascending working class, for the full heritage of science still contained the building-stones from which a future proletarian society could be erected. Excluded from the reactionary educational system, Schaxel himself had been expelled from professional zoology by the racial hygienist Ludwig Plate, which only bolstered his political credibility among workers, he recast dissident university professors, schoolteachers, and their ilk as heroes. These socialist class traitors would serve the working class as “more experienced personnel” charged with “filtering and sifting” the heritage of science to produce “fighting knowledge.”Hopwood, "Producing a Socialist Popular Science," 130. Urania would be the nexus where this fight for scientific culture was conducted. Science had become a front in the class struggle.It is worth stressing that readers that sense a petit bourgeois element here are not wrong. This project is closer to a "reform" of scientific relations of productions than a more revolutionary demand of overhauling it all together. There is a real continuity between Schaxel's university reform proposal and his Urania work, despite ostentatious radical rhetoric.

To grasp the full scope of Urania magazine, it helps to contrast it with its bourgeois rival, Kosmos—Germany’s most popular science magazine at the time.Hopwood, "Producing a Socialist Popular Science," 121. Kosmos was a monthly publication principally concerned with promoting science in a rigorous yet accessible way, but it maintained a studied separation between science and politics. Urania used Kosmos as its template and acted as its deliberate politicized counterpoint. Both were considered high-quality publications, but their differences were instructive. Where Kosmos presented science as politically neutral, Urania sought to communicate it with its political and philosophical dimensions intact, primarily from a Marxist standpoint. In format, too, the magazines diverged: Urania favored a modern, slick roman typography that embraced a varied functionalism and included a generous number of photographs, making it far more visually accessible than Kosmos, which retained a more traditional gothic print. Even their distribution models reflected different orientations: Kosmos followed the standard subscription model, while Urania relied on a complex network of word-of-mouth, local party advertisers, and internal promotion.Hopwood, "Producing a Socialist Popular Science," 125--7.

Within Urania’s pages, advertisements for other Urania activities abounded. The magazine was only one component of a broader program of proletarian science: educational seminars, Marxist sociology classes, “social hiking,” lifestyle reform featuring vegetarianism and “natural healing,” and more. Urania’s fate was bound to the collapse of Weimar’s left-wing institutions. Urania with its whole host of activities continued until 1933 but was abruptly ended when the Nazi forces liquidated the entire operation. Julius Schaxel fled to the Soviet Union that same year. He died there under unknown circumstances in 1943.

* * *

This journal presents a translation of an article from Schaxel’s late period: “Das biologische Individuum” (The Biological Individual), published in 1931. This late period is characterized by two developments: first, a deeper engagement with Marx and Engels, both philosophically and politically, than his work of the 1920s demonstrated; and second, a return to the teachings of his original mentor, Ernst Haeckel—but now on dialectical materialist terms rather than Haeckel’s monist ones. Specifically, Schaxel articulates a left-wing naturalism that avoids three pitfalls: metaphysical speculation, neo-vitalistic or scholastic conceptions of the organism, and empiricist-mechanistic biology. To accomplish this, he introduces “dialectical biology” as his remedy. As Schaxel writes, dialectical biology “strips away all rigidified concepts, above all the concept at the center of any metaphysical biology—that of individuality.” It does so by refusing idealistic absolutes and returning them to the natural-historical development of society, underlining their “general relativity” in the course of both life and earth history. It is important to note, for him, this is not merely a scientific claim but a political one: Schaxel links biological dichotomies (individual/collective, organism/environment) to the polarity of labor and capital, making him among the first biologists to theorize this homology explicitly.

Using his legitimacy as a “red” professor, he aimed to overthrow the dominant conception of the organism-environment relationship while tracing its source, bourgeois social relations.The *Institut für Sozialforschung* (IfS), with whom Schaxel collaborated also looked for a "middle-way" between vitalism and mechanism; see for example Reiß, "No Evolution, No Heredity," 157. However, due to the Nazi institutional context, this biophilosophy, a part of the materialist dialectic, remained patchy and programmatic. See Kevin S. Amidon, " 'Diesmal Fehlt Die Biologie!' Max Horkheimer, Richard Thurnwald, and the Biological Prehistory of German Sozialforschung," *New German Critique*, no. 104 (2008): 103--37. In the text, Schaxel demonstrates the “general relativity” of biological individuals—what Haeckel termed “bionts”—against the absolute individual found in romantic conceptions of biology. Drawing on his own experimental work, he aimed to show the porosity of the organism-environment relationship; what he called the “dissolution of form.” In a series of parabiosis experiments, he linked the vessels and tissues of two axolotls in early development, creating a cardiovascular system with one heart connecting two morphological individuals. This experimental unit survived for seven years, far longer than Schaxel anticipated. From this result, he concluded that morphological boundaries convey no information for identifying biological individuals or the boundaries between them. The individual, he argued, dissolves both inward into metabolic and cellular processes and outward into larger environments—into what he called the living communities (Lebensgemeinschaften) characterized by rich reciprocal relationships. Where liberal biology naturalized competitive individualism, Schaxel’s dialectical biology revealed individuality itself as a product of historical processes: both natural-historical (evolution, development) and social-historical (the organization of labor under specific modes of production). The “division of labor” in biological communities was not a neutral descriptive term borrowed from economics but a site where natural and social history interpenetrated. The biological individual, for Schaxel, is neither a fixed essence nor an autonomous unit, but a relative, historically constituted process embedded in larger dynamics.

This intervention must be understood against the background of intense debate over biological individuality in early twentieth-century biology. What constitutes the “unit” of evolutionary mechanisms: the gene, the cell, the organism, or the community? These questions haunted researchers grappling with new embryological discoveries and extensive ecological field studies, with the organism-environment relationship at the center of concern. Schaxel’s position emerged from his controversy with Hans Spemann, the most successful experimental embryologist of his generation. Spemann had adopted Driesch’s concept of the “harmonious-equipotential system,” arguing it could be retained without neo-vitalist conclusions by understanding it as an organic whole that could be “regulated” back to harmony. Schaxel rejected this move as too theory-laden, fearing it introduced teleological conceptions of organismic development.The teleology of organisms still rages on as an area of hot debate in both the biological sciences and the philosophy of biology. A problem we directly inherit from Kant's mechanism--teleology antimony with immense ramification on issues, such as the agency of organisms, the nature of organismic function, the emergence of evolutionary novelty, and so on. For a dialectical answer to these issues, see Andrea Gambarotto, "Teleology and Mechanism: A Dialectical Approach," *Synthese* 201, no. 5 (2023): 155, <https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04137-y>. As historian Nick Hopwood has traced, this trepidation led Schaxel to brusquely deny “regulation of development” altogether; a position that now appears scientifically mistaken.Hopwood, "Biology between University and Proletariat," 374.

With hindsight, Spemann held the more contemporary and scientifically correct view on evolutionary developmental biology. Yet Schaxel possessed the more robust philosophical instincts, insofar as the justification of theory also constitutes a kind of progress. What we have in “The Biological Individual” is one of the strongest, if most brusque, statements of left-wing naturalism and theoretical biology from the period.I alternate between naturalism and theoretical biology, despite the latter now referring to a mathematical biology, because traditional theoretical biology had to justify itself both philosophically and empirically. This places theoretical biology closer to my preferred understanding of naturalism, one whose horizon is natural history acting as a critical concept that negates the occult, magic, and the supernatural in order to return us to understanding nature as *dynamic* second nature, namely, society. Historian of biology Jan Baedke has situated this article within the international intellectual movement of organism-centered biology (OCB), with Schaxel representing its dialectical materialist branch.Jan Baedke, "O Organism, Where Art Thou? Old and New Challenges for Organism-Centered Biology," *Journal of the History of Biology* 52, no. 2 (2019): 293--324, <https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-018-9549-4>. The three theoretical strands of the OCB are organicism, German holistic biology ("Ganzheitsbiologie"), and dialectical materialism. While the three theoretical strands have their commonalities, it is only the last tradition that was explicitly political in its philosophy of science and nature. The individuality article operates on two registers simultaneously: as political propaganda for socialist science and as scientific exposition for the working class. This double character reflects Schaxel’s conviction that the question of biological individuality is inseparable from broader questions of method, philosophy, and politics.

Similarly, Schaxel’s understanding of ontogeny and phylogeny, while trailblazing at the time, is quite outdated by today’s standards. His view of evolutionary history, despite its impressive integration without subordination of one domain to another, remained too Haeckelian. Phylogenetic relationships have proven far more complicated than the regular “tree of life” structure Schaxel assumed, particularly with discoveries like horizontal gene transfer. Moreover, both blood-relations and sexual-relations exhibit far greater environmental variability than Schaxel acknowledged. Nature proves too promiscuous to exclude the social mediation of how we understand natural history.For a classic study of this mediation, see Donna J. Haraway, *Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science* (Routledge, 2013), <https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203421918>.

Why return to Schaxel today? Contemporary biology possesses theoretical sophistication Schaxel could scarcely have imagined. Sophisticated enough, indeed, that his absence from the field seems almost justified. We have molecular genetics, systems biology, epigenetics, evo-devo frameworks that have incorporated much of what he struggled toward. Yet this very sophistication obscures what Schaxel understood: that dialectical materialism is a philosophy of nature insofar as it focuses on the lived, day-to-day pragmatics of philosophy of science, which in the last analysis is political philosophy. The dialectician reaps “a rich harvest” when this fact is ignored, and it is systematically ignored in contemporary scientific culture.

Consider the political work performed by seemingly neutral biological categories today. Microbiome research, for instance, operates with ever-greater technical precision while unwittingly reifying race as a biological category; the morphological boundaries Schaxel dissolved through parabiosis return as genomic sequence mapped onto the social field.Abigail Nieves Delgado and Jan Baedke, "How to Eliminate Race from Human Microbiome Research," *Argumenta* 10, no. 2 (2025): 497--510. Climate science generates increasingly accurate models while remaining largely divorced from the political economy driving climate change, treating atmospheric $CO_{2}$ as a technical problem rather than a symptom of capital accumulation. These are not incidental failures but structural ones, rooted in the same severing of scientific practice from political consciousness that Schaxel fought against. The battle for scientific culture that animated Schaxel’s proletarian science seminars appears, from our vantage, a lost fight. This absence is not accidental but the result of systematic depoliticization, Cold War purges, developments in the political economy of science, deskilling in education, and so on. The few scientists today who maintain dialectical commitments often do so privately, their Marxism cordoned off from their research as if the two inhabited separate worlds.

Recovering Schaxel means recovering the possibility that scientific practice can be a site of political struggle. Not applied politics, not science communication, but the research itself as intervention. This is not nostalgia for the Weimar Republic’s proletarian science seminars but recognition that the questions Schaxel posed remain unanswered: what is the biological individual in an age of microbiomes and holobionts? How do we understand organism-environment relations when the environment is being destroyed by capital? Who does science and for whom? These are not questions that more data will answer; they require the philosophical and political work Schaxel modeled. In this sense, he didn’t miss his chance to show up—we’re still living in the crisis he tried to address, only now with less awareness that it is a crisis at all. That is precisely why his voice, awkward and brusque as it can be, needs to be heard again. The harvest awaits those willing to reap it.

* * *

Because Schaxel’s synthetic project is difficult, his language is difficult too. We have translated Schaxel’s text and found that he uses multiple synonyms for certain key concepts in developmental biology, especially for the concepts of process, form/ation, and whole/ness or structure. Sometimes, Schaxel seems to use different words interchangeably for these concepts. In some passages, however, a slight difference in connotation or denotation between two different words for form/ation, for instance, will become significant for Schaxel’s argument. Often, the difference in meaning between two terms for a given concept—such as the difference between Ganzheit, translated below as “wholeness,” and Gesamtheit, translated below as “totality”—relates to a difference, whether real or potential, in (1) levels of scientific explanation, (2) theoretical vocabulary (e.g., Schaxel occasionally uses the language of Gestalt-psychology, an influential idiom for the description of “holistic” phenomena across numerous scientific disciplines in Weimar-era Germany), or (3) scale of the phenomena in question (as in the difference between Vorgänge, more discrete processes or sub-processes, and Prozessen, understood as more comprehensive.) We have attempted to standardize our translation of quasi-synonymous terms and mark out potentially significant differences in Schaxel’s language by including the German term in brackets. Ultimately, we believe that Schaxel’s conceptual presentation on its own terms is often significant for distinguishing between the various possible meanings in the variety of terms he uses for “process,” “form,” and “whole/ness” or “structure.” The linguistic slippage in Schaxel’s writing was, in part, intentional and even unavoidable: Schaxel was attempting to develop a unified theoretical vocabulary for developmental biology, bridging multiple extant and nascent paradigms, that did not preexist his interventions. Therefore, some of the differences between respective “processes” of development suggested by Schaxel’s language would, eventually, become more distinct with advances in theoretical and experimental biology, particularly in the consolidation of more comprehensive and synthetic paradigms like “evo-devo.” Finally, we endeavored to highlight these idiosyncratic usages of biological terms by Schaxel by writing them as translator’s notes peppered throughout the essay. We hope the readers can appreciate the systematicity and inventiveness of Schaxel’s description of organic development and the generalized relativity of the ontogenetic processes.

Tranlators’ Bibliography

Amidon, Kevin S. “ ’Diesmal Fehlt Die Biologie!’ Max Horkheimer, Richard Thurnwald, and the Biological Prehistory of German Sozialforschung.” New German Critique, no. 104 (2008): 103–37.

Baedke, Jan. ”O Organism, Where Art Thou? Old and New Challenges for Organism-Centered Biology.” Journal of the History of Biology 52, no. 2 (2019): 293–324. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-018-9549-4.

Alexander Böhm, Stefan Reiners-Selbach, and Vera Straetmanns. “A Synthesis Without Darwin: Unification Attempts in Early Theoretical Biology.” In Unity and Disunity in Evolutionary Biology, edited by Richard G. Delisle, Maurizio Esposito, and David Ceccarelli. Springer International Publishing, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42629-2_12.

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Clarke, Evan. “Neo-Kantianism, Darwinism, and the Limits of Historical Explanation.” British Journal for the History of Philosophy, ahead of print, April 30, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2021.1912707.

Delgado, Abigail Nieves, and Jan Baedke. “How to Eliminate Race from Human Microbiome Research.” Argumenta 10, no. 2 (2025): 497–510.

Finkelstein, Gabriel. “Haeckel and Du Bois-Reymond: Rival German Darwinists.” In “Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919): The German Darwin and His Impact on Modern Biology, ed. Uwe Hoßfeld, Georgy Levit, and Ulrich Kutschera.” Special issue, Theory in Biosciences 138 (2019): 105–12. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12064-019-00282-6.

Gambarotto, Andrea. “Teleology and Mechanism: A Dialectical Approach.” Synthese 201, no. 5 (2023): 155. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04137-y.

Haraway, Donna J. Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. Routledge, 2013. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203421918.

Hopwood, Nick. “Biology between University and Proletariat: The Making of a Red Professor.” History of Science 35, no. 4 (1997): 367–424. https://doi.org/10.1177/007327539703500401.

———. “Producing a Socialist Popular Science in the Weimar Republic.” Oxford University Press, no. 41 (1996): 117–53.

Hoßfeld, Uwe, and Lennart Olsson. “The Road from Haeckel: The Jena Tradition in Evolutionary Morphology and the Origins of ‘Evo-Devo.’ ” Biology and Philosophy 18, no. 2 (2003): 285–307. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1023988119440.

Laubichler, Manfred Dietrich, and Jane Maienschein, eds. From Embryology to Evo-Devo: A History of Developmental Evolution. Dibner Institute Studies in the History of Science and Technology. MIT Press, 2007.

Novick, Rose. “Structure and Function.” Elements in the Philosophy of Biology, ahead of print, February 2023. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009028745.

Peterson, Erik L. The Life Organic: The Theoretical Biology Club and the Roots of Epigenetics. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017.

Porges, Karl, Ian G. Stewart, Uwe Hoßfeld, and Georgy S. Levit. “From Idea to Law: Theory, Concept and Terminological Formation in Ernst Haeckel’s Works.” Russian Journal of Developmental Biology 50, no. 6 (2019): 290–302. https://doi.org/10.1134/S1062360419060079.

Priest, Gregory Michael. “Charles Darwin’s Science of History.” Ph.D., thesis, Stanford University, 2025. https://purl.stanford.edu/dt096gc1088.

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———, Susan Springer, Uwe Hoßfeld, Lennart Olsson, and Georgy S. Levit. “Introduction to the Autobiography of Julius Schaxel.” Theory in Biosciences 126, no. 4 (2007): 165–75. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12064-007-0015-7.

Taylor, Peter J. “Biology as Politics: The Direct and Indirect Effects of Lewontin and Levins.” Science as Culture 19, no. 2 (2010): 241–53. https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431003660246.

Walsh, Denis M. “Objectcy and Agency: Towards a Methodological Vitalism.” In Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology, edited by Daniel J. Nicholson and John Dupré. Oxford University Press, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198779636.003.0008.

The Biological Individual (1930)Julius Schaxel, "Das biologische Individuum." *Erkenntnis (1930-1938)*, 1930/1931, Vol. 1 (1930/1931),  467--492.

Introduction

Rather than attempting to trace the concept of the individual through the history of philosophy, or even to investigate the vacillating representations of the individual that have recently circulated in biological theory, in what follows, my aim is solely to anticipate a portion of the empirical material from a forthcoming, comprehensive presentation in which modern natural science will be illuminated from the standpoint of dialectical materialism. In light of this, and because this method will assert itself under pressure of fact with greater force than has heretofore been recognized or even admitted, even outside the broad social strata through whose movement the method enters into consciousness, some indication in this direction can be given through two formulations by the initiators, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. In a letter of May 30th, 1873, Engels wrote to Marx:

The subject-matter of natural science—matter in motion, bodies. Bodies cannot be separated from motion, their forms and kinds can only be known in motion; one cannot say anything about bodies without motion, without relation to other bodies. Only in motion does a body reveal what it is. Natural science therefore knows bodies by examining them in their relation to one another, and in motion. To understand the different forms of motion is equivalent to understanding bodies. The investigation of these different forms of motion is therefore the chief subject of natural science.Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, May 30, 1873, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, *Selected Correspondence*, trans. I. Lasker, ed. S. Ryazanskaya (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), 281, <https://archive.org/details/selectedcorrespondencemarxengels>.

What is significant for us is the fact that the chemist Carl Schorlemmer, upon reading this epistolary sketch, left the marginal note: “Very good, my own view precisely!” Sometime later, Engels notes:

Dialectics, so-called objective dialectics, prevails throughout nature, and so-called subjective dialectics, dialectical thought, is only the reflection of the motion through opposites which asserts itself everywhere in nature, and which by the continual conflict of the opposites and their final passage into one another, or into higher forms, determines the life of nature.Friedrich Engels, *Dialectics of Nature*. Translated by Clemens Dutt. *Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Collected Works, Volume 25* (Lawrence & Wishart [E-Book], 2010), 492.

In short, what follows comes down to the consideration of biological facts in a rather general context and deriving various lawful regularities from them.

For several years now, I have repeatedly addressed such matters in proletarian training courses and academic lectures alike. Recently, I have also had occasion to deliver a presentation on the object of this essay in connection with the demonstrations at the Berlin branch of the Internationalen Gesellschaft für empirische Philosophie on February 25th, 1930.

Before science ever deals with the concept of the individual, the society that produces this science is already familiar with the notion. It is one of those representations that characterizes relationships among members of such a society. The community emphasizes the individual individually. It is precisely those distinct, “exceptional,” “historical” individuals who need the foundation of the mass that carries them, and of which they are supposed to be the exponent. That is, empirically, individuality—in its spatial, temporal, and causal self-sufficiency—always remains relative. The absolute individual—the indivisible, the isolated, the ἄτομον (atom)—is a concoction of metaphysical speculation.

Individual self-reflection, “inner sense,” “I-feeling,” intuition, and in­tro­spec­tion—all of these employ the full range of means of social understanding. Not only is the “You” older than the “I,” but both presuppose the community of the “It.” In­di­vid­u­a­tion is, among other things, the index of a determinate stage of socio-historical development, one accompanied by linguistic expression, form in thought, and ultimately the concept.

Individuality proper, which is supposed to—and seeks to—signify ‘personality,’ arrives on the scene even later. [Individuality] is connected with the desire for universal freedom among all those who are super- and sub-ordinate to one another in society, a demand for a state of affairs in which each is their own master, a part of the declaration of human rights in the bourgeois-liberal era. The problem of individuality is therefore by right a problem of the bourgeois society of the present—as it appears problematic to itself. Thus, the problem is ever “posed” and never “solved.” The elevation of individuality into totality, of its individual character into wholeness [Ganzheit], simultaneously displaces the individual, which therefore remains a riddle, into the imaginary realm of the in-itself. A social strata, forced into the defensive, erects an ideological dictatorship that aims to prohibit empirical access to offensive empirie. The validity of any such prohibition is a question of power.

1. The General Relativity of Bionts[Translator's note:] Haeckel coins the term 'biont' to designate the 'onta' of 'ontogenesis.' Though he used 'biont' interchangeably with 'concrete' or 'physiological individual,' Haeckel relativized the concept of the individual in his work into six levels of individuality, from the single cell (whether unicellular individual or nested within a multicellular organism) up to colonial organisms, in light of then recent developments in biological theories of individuation as a process unfolding simultaneously across different scales and at different rates. For Haeckel's development of the term 'biont,' see: ["From Idea to Law: Theory, Concept, and Terminology in Ernst Haeckel's Works,"](https://www.biodidaktik.uni-jena.de/iefbdmedia/3124/2020-rjdb-from-idea-to-law.pdf) by Karl Porges, Ian G. Stewart, Uwe Hoßfeld, and Georgy S. Levit. *Russian Journal of Developmental Biology*, 2019, Vol. 50, No. 6 (2019), 290-302.

The empirical biologist who collects experience of the living through observation and experiment never encounters anything like a closed, rigid, categorical ‘individuality.’ The facts of living nature show themselves otherwise.

The living can only be cognized in their general contexts and connections, reciprocal relations of dependency, in their development and their movement. The living phenomenon, in its substance and its form, only ever presents itself to the observer in process and sequence, never as standing still, for-itself, isolated, abstract. There is no “life-in-itself.” Although determinate living beings always concretely exemplify “life,” they do not do so in an isolated or self-contained way, but as forms in motion, through their behaviors, in their relationships, and in the manifold connections between these movements.

Living beings are phenomena in a state of perpetual reorganization, subject to metabolism, ending in their death. Life continuously changes its material composition through the same metabolic process that constitutes the course of life itself. In close relationship to metabolism, the form of living beings is not a permanently ordered manifold, but in constant transformation in the formative sequences of development. This occurs in processes which operate at different speeds, and which are distinguishable from one another according to the kind of events which fulfill them.

The closer we occupy ourselves with the contents of the biosphere—which is integrated to a circumscribed extent with the hydrosphere, atmosphere, and geosphere of the planet—with the living beings that inhabit the earth’s crust—the clearer their interconnection with the totality [Gesamtheit] becomes.

Not all living beings are the same. Nor do they all undergo the same transformations, such that what we find would simply be various stages of life existing at the same time. And yet, we cannot say that beings are completely different from one another either. What is true of the leaves of a tree—of which, it is said, no two are exactly alike, but which are nevertheless identifiable as leaves of the same kind—applies on a larger scale for the living world as a totality. There is neither complete likeness, distinctness, nor isolatedness among living beings, but rather a graduated manifold that manifests itself as historical kinship. All that is living is connected through two kinds of kinship: the blood-relationship of descent from ancestors to descendants, and the sex-relationship of pairs who sexually reproduce offspring.

Aristotle first conceived life in the concept of the organism in a natural manner, having considered all living beings his equals, and himself in natural connection with them. It was only the thousand-year interpretation of the Christian Middle Ages that refashioned ‘the organism’ into a scholastic concept, one whose essential being was neither of this world nor, therefore, knowable in such context: the organism as an instrument of the “soul,” which intervenes in physical events from the transcendent beyond of the realm of metaphysics. To this day, idealistic philosophers still discuss "ideas," entelechies, and psychoids, and, so long as any of them remain, will continue to do so indefinitely.

When the geocentric and heliocentric standpoints of the natural sciences had long been overcome, in the midst of the powerful development of mechanics in the modern natural sciences, natural researchers nevertheless continued to run up against the wall of the scholastic-metaphysical category of the organism for nearly four centuries. No qualitatively new formation [Neubildung] in time, and so no organic history, was considered to be possible. As Linnaeus formulated the dogma: tot sunt species quot in principio creatae, inflicting the violence of preformationist evolution on the history of life.

Only in 1859 did Charles Darwin demonstrate, under the most exacting demand of burden of proof, that the present stock of organic products of nature, humans included, is itself the product of a long process of development that began from a few primordial germs. For the first time in the history of life upon the earth, the natural connection of all living things, and with non-living nature, was recognized.

During his search for an explanation for the fact that plants and animals populate the earth in such a multiform and graduated manifold, Darwin decomposed the organism as the totality of characteristics used as markers of identification for the purposes of classification. Once the organism was decomposed into the aggregate of properties that came about and came together in the course of time as the result of individual effects, the individual in the true sense of the word has ceased to exist. August Weismann arrives at an explicit dissolution of the individual with his view that the givenness of the organism is, in the last instance, the result of the determination-complex of its germ-plasm: in [this complex], independent series of events, without any causal connection to one another, are accumulated and, if they prove themselves, preserved. [These determinations] are contingent in origin; in their present operation, however, they belong together—brought together by the history of life.

As Ernst Haeckel sought to furnish Darwinian Transformism with a genuine theoretical foundation, beyond mere empiricism, for the first time, he devoted several chapters of his “General Morphology” to the topic of organic individuality, concluding therein that the concept of the individual “has no absolute, but only relative, meaning.”Ernst Haeckel, *Prinzipien der generellen Morphologie der Organismen. Wörtlicher Abdruck eines Teiles der 1866 erschienen Generellen Morphologie (allgemeine Grundzüge der organischen Formen-Wissenschaft, mechanisch begründet durch die von Charles Darwin reformierte Deszendenz-Theorie)* (Berlin: Druck Und Verlag Von Georg Reimer, 1906), 103. In summarizing the introduction to his distinctions, Haeckel states: “The oft-asked question of the absolute individuality of organisms is to be answered as follows: it does not exist…“Haeckel, *Generellen Morphologie* 108. In the course of his presentation, Haeckel finds himself compelled to introduce a new concept in order to do justice to the mobility of life-processes: “The physiological individual (Bion) is a single, organic unit of space, which, as a centralized living unity, possesses the capacity for self-preservation and is, at the same time, divisible, and which, moreover, due to the movements associated with these functions, can only be recognized as variable across different moments in time.”Haeckel, *Generellen Morphologie*, 135.

In the proceeding, we will continue to refer to “bionts” in order to avoid the contradiction of the “divisible individual.” After Darwin and Haeckel, the metaphysical individual and the scholastic organism have been banished from natural science; these ideologies divorced from actuality have dissipated like so many wisps of fog, opening up a view of the spatio-temporal process of life directly accessible to empirical praxis.

“Bionts” are processes of living connections, appearing solely in their movements and relationships, never as self-enclosed categories. Their having-become [Gewordensein] can be historically explained. In so doing, it is necessary not just to demonstrate the broad historical trends of their development, but also to demonstrate the descent and modes of action [of bionts] in detail. Bionts become objects of experimentation. [In the experimental process,] they repeatedly point beyond immediate conditions to connections operative on a variety of levels. Here, the points of transition between biology and sociology are of particular interest to us.

2. The Special Relativity of Bionts

Human thinking has never truly left nature behind, except in its imagination. Every such retreat from actuality has resulted in the erection of various kinds of barriers to human knowledge. The concept of the categorical individual, so inhibiting to biological insight, stems from the social being of a certain epoch. As the epoch comes to an end, facts begin to break through the artificial barrier. The general relativity of bionts is now widely acknowledged. Across individual fields of research, the confirmation [of this general relativity] is on the rise. Without claiming to be exhaustive, in what follows we present a few examples whose individual significance lies in the fact that, in their interconnection and in their connections to others still, they attest to the general dissolution of individuality.

a) The Historical Dissolution

Life on Earth presupposes conditions which only arose in the course of the Earth’s history. Life therefore began in geological time. Through abiogenesis, the tree of life is rooted in non-living nature. Over many millennia, countless living organisms have evolved from one another. The historical connection between interrelated groups is expressed in the graduated diversity of phenomena. It is reasonable to assume that the similarity of forms in a given group can be explained by descent from a common ancestral form [gemeinsamen Urform]. This approach is further strengthened in the event that the derivation obtained through the comparison of forms is corroborated by remnants of the history of forms, or in the event that the transitional form between one group and another is documented.

Already in 1863, Ernst HaeckelErnst Haeckel, "Über die Entwicklungstheorie Darwins," in *Gemeinverständliche Vorträge und Abhandlungen aus dem Gebiete der Entwickelungslehre* (Bonn: Emil Straus, 1902) concluded from the foundations laid by Darwin: “None of the various animals and plants alive today, nor indeed all of those organisms that have ever lived, … were created independently, whether in-themselves or as a species, but in fact, despite their extraordinary diversity and variety, have gradually, over the course of millennia, evolved from a few, or perhaps even one single ancestral form.” The diligent phylogenetic research in the four decades leading up to the turn of the century has generated a wealth of evidence that no individual being, plant or animal, can be considered “individually” in-itself or as a species. Phylogenetic explanation has become a matter of course. The work of recent decades presupposed transformism; it endeavored to penetrate into sub-processes, trace the operations of effective forces, and, admittedly somewhat late and without general success, conduct a careful review of its own concepts. The organism as historical formation, which points beyond itself towards its coming-to-be, is presupposition of the research initiated by Darwinism. Without the process of phylogeny, there would be no genetics, no developmental physiology, no ecology.

Individual beings are no longer regarded in imagined isolation. There was nothing that could be said about the absolute individual or the constant species except that all things of that nature exist without context, in complete disconnection. Only the knowledge of their having-become makes arriving at an understanding of their coming-to-be and passing-away, the process of nature, possible.

Organisms are products of historical accumulation. They change through independent increases or decreases of diversity. They are constructed through the assimilation of new parts or dismantled by the removal of others. This succession of events accumulates into something that endures. We speak of ‘accumulation’ in order to express the fact that the result in each case is not completely determined by real-time spatial boundaries, because the change in diversity is brought about through addition or subtraction in time. The individual events in this sequence, in their causal connection, constitute sums or aggregates. The establishment of historical accumulation not only abolishes the abstract conception of the individual and the species, but at the same time excludes any kind of teleological evolution whatsoever.

The historical dissolution of individuality places life-processes within the nexus of natural process. Now, it is necessary to determine the bonds of this interconnection, of organic formation, behavior, and its constitutive relationships. This endeavor has been most successful in terms of the bonds between ancestors and descendants—namely, in terms of heredity.

b) The Genetic Dissolution

Science has only begun to move on from the more-or-less anecdotal presentation of heredity-relations since 1900, when, building off of the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s findings in hybridization, scientists began conducting their own investigations in the analysis of cross-breeding.

Artificial selection and cross-breeding deal only with the facts of direct kinship, both the blood-relationship of descent and the sex-relationship of fertile couplings.

Thirty years of research have generated a series of important findings in three stages.

First, artificial hybridization of observable traits reveals the regularities with which the traits under observation arise in the succession of generations. Then, the collected statistical data is recorded under formulas of heritability and, at the same time, the “laws of inheritance” are derived from statistical clusters. Thereby, what endures in the flux of phenomena is separated out from what is randomly conditioned, the effect of inheritance from the effect of external conditions under which the process occurs, from the life-situation—in other words, that is, thereby the genotype is separated from the phenotype.

Second, in the treatment of the genotype, fictions about hereditary factors, or ‘genes,’ are introduced. The similarity of genealogically related persons, among whom the compared traits coincide in qualitative and quantitative terms, as well as in the spatial and temporal order of their occurrence, is accordingly explained by inheritance when evidence of the same genes in ancestors, descendants, or siblings is taken to be sufficiently well-established. For our purposes, what is significant is the renewed disintegration of the organism into an aggregate—previously of traits or properties, now of genes—already mentioned in the historical dissolution of individuality. Furthermore, with the progressive collection of experiences, there follows the realization that what seems to be an unsurveyably large number of varietal and breed distinctions within a species are in fact always based on different combinations and re-combinations of a relatively small number of genes. A particularly distinguished researcher of heredity, the botanist E. Bauer,Erwin Bauer, *Einführung in die experimentelle Vererbungslehre*, 3rd and 4th ed. (Berlin: Gebrüder Borntraeger, 1919). [Translator's note:] Schaxel does not provide an exact page number for this citation explains: “Once a species has been sufficiently analyzed, one can, just like a chemist, produce certain desired combinations of properties, i.e., new breeds, in a synthetic and goal-oriented manner.”

If genes were to remain mere symbols, genetics would only profess a mechanism without mechanics, and inheritance as a preserving principle through the fluctuation of organic processes would only consist in a mere persistence stripped of such process. The third step in the direction of insight into actuality is therefore the uncovering of those processes [Vorgänge] which have been provisionally described through the fiction of ‘genes.’ In any case, they must be processes, for we know that life is nothing but a process of processes [Ablauf der Prozessen]. Any return to the older corpuscular theories of inheritance is simply impossible.

In 1917, R. Goldschmidt began working in this direction, starting from heredity and the determination of sex. Already by 1920,Richard Goldschmidt, *Mechanismus und Physiologie der Geschlechtsbestimmung* (Berlin: Verlag von Gebrüder Borntraeger, 1920), 21. he entertained “that it is more probable that the definitive explanation of the essence and necessity of sexuality requires use of concepts of the order of reaction-product, catalysis, hydrogen-ion-concentration, and colloid rather than concepts of the order of rejuvenescence, amphimixis, and germinal selection.” These words harbor a rejection of the metaphysical-romantic biology that I have drawn attention to elsewhere.Julius Schaxel, *Grundzüge der Theorienbildung in der Biologie*, 2nd ed. (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1922), 103. Further, under the weight of the facts, Goldschmidt is compelled to become a dialectical materialist, though he was likely not conscious of this—a fate shared by many a natural researcher who posits nothing artificial into nature but derives results from it instead. He summarizes his physiological theory of heredity as follows:

The gene is a substance-particle to which not only a specific quality belongs, which is self-evident, but which is also already provided at the starting-point of development in a typical quantity—typical, but different for different genes or gene-groups. The chromosomal-mechanism, which ensures the right amount of the different genes at the starting-point of development, must also possess the necessary means to ensure the provision of the typical quantities of each. Each of these genes is material, which, beginning with an activation in fertilization (or parthenogenesis), participates in a reaction or chain of reactions, the specific quality of which is conditioned by the quality of the gene and its substrate (i.e., in the main, the egg-plasma), the speed of which, however, is proportional to the quantity of the gene. If one wishes to associate a more concrete representation with ‘the substance of the gene,’ it might best be classified as an ‘autocatalyst.’ With this, the preceding proposition can be expressed more concretely as well: the gene catalyzes a reaction with a speed proportional to its quantity. The development of an organism with independent differentiation can be dissolved into a series of parallel-running processes [eine Reihe nebeneinander-gehender Abläufe] which tend towards a chemical situation which at specific, but different, points in time can in general be described as the emergence of formative material, determination-substances, or, according to our more specific assumption, hormones of definitive configuration [Gestaltung] in effective quantities. The correct course of normal differentiation demands that these determination-points appear in precisely the correct sequential order, and that the determining substances arise localized, in precisely the right location. A system of precisely dosed gene quantities, and thus the reaction-process of proportionally coordinated speeds they catalyze, enables the result of the reaction, the determination-points, to appear in a typical sequential order and in the correct intervals. Each subsequent reaction-point confronts a different general physico-chemical situation on the grounds of the preceding, and so faster, processes; above all, each is met with an increasingly limited sphere of action due to the determinations that have already been completed, and which restrict and localize the scope of its effect. The assumption of parallel-running, coordinated rates of reaction for the process of determination explains the sequence and localization of differentiation; in connection with the causative role of precisely dosed gene quantities, the former representation becomes a theory of heredity, one which constitutes a decisive advance on the factor-theory.Richard Goldschmidt, *Physiologische Theorie der Vererbung* (Berlin: Julius Springer, 1927), 40.

In the genetic process, the effect-qualities are conditioned by precisely dosed gene-quantities, and thus the processes which pass through the generations, and which constitute the mosaic of the species-image at any one point in time, are incorporated into a lawful regularity that may be derived from all spheres of living processes—namely, the dialectical law of the transformation of quantity into quality. I will return to this point to provide a more thorough elaboration in the comprehensive presentation announced in the introduction above. Here, it is sufficient for us to establish the genetic dissolution of individuality into a series of parallel-running processes, the resultant effect of which is, at any one point in time, nothing but what we call the individual, and which, accordingly, we conceive of as a state of a natural process, as a cut-out from connection and context, as a complex of relations, but by no means do we imagine this as a permanent structure, nor, for that matter, as an absolute individual that, though unrepresentable, we are still somehow supposed to address.

c) The Formal Dissolution

That living beings have forms is one of their most obvious properties. Organic forms are never fixed and unchanging, but in a state of constant change. Not only does the material change in its form, but the form itself changes with the material.

The composition of parts referred to as ‘form’ is typical-specific, i.e., each respective, determinate, ordered composition (specific) arises through multiple events in ordered coordination (typical). Despite the singular diversity in number, arrangement, relationships, and alternation of their parts, there are always simultaneously many individual beings that display the same order of composition that repeats in the same sequence. The graduated diversity of the kinship-relations of living beings, the historical coming-to-be of which we are familiar, is evident herein.

The formative process is bound to material parts, each of which occupies a spatially determinate position at any one point in time. Accordingly, experiment—which consists in the translocation, disconnection, excision, insertion, and substitution of parts—focuses on these material parts.

In the formative states [Formzuständen] of single-celled and tissue-forming living beings, form finds its simplest expression in the fact that different materials are separated from one another spatially within the cell, distributed in specific proportions, and relate to one another in specific ways. Therefore, we speak of the compositionality, the constitution of the cell. In tissue-formation, cellular structures and their reciprocal positional relations are formally operative in cell-constitutions. Material form that arises from distinguishable parts is everywhere present. There are no states or structures that are identical in every respect but in which the composition of parts cannot be recognized.

Cells and cellular structures cannot be viewed as self-contained individuals, for it is precisely in view of form that life proceeds through the continuous sublation [Aufhebung] of these individualities. Any other approach to the cell as an illusory semblance of individuality or as an imagined totality contradicts the facts and, for that reason, creates an insoluble problem.

Cells with anabolism increase their material stock and then divide themselves. Quality transforms into quantity. The preservation and proliferation of cells, the living process, is only possible through the continuous negation of cellular individuals through division.

The difficulties this presents to holding onto the concept of the individual are already evident in Ernst Haeckel (1866). The reproduction of living beings is derived from growth.

As the individual grows beyond its individual measure, the surplus growth-product becomes detached from it in the form of a new part, which is soon restored into a complete individual through its own growth. The newly generated fetal organism (partus) is therefore a detached part of the paternal organism (parens). This detachment can be complete or incomplete. In the former case, the newly generated morphological individual, through the act of detachment, acquires the self-sufficiency of the physiological individual (bion). In the latter case, the fetal morphological individual remains more or less bound to the parental and forms in conjunction with it a complex or colony; the physiological individual becomes a member of a higher morphological order than either of the two components [viz., partus and parens]. Ernst Haeckel, Generellen Morphologie, 180.

The indivisible maintains itself through division, within the framework of an indivisible measure, the boundaries of which are, however, not fixed but movable in varying degrees. This contradictory formulation only demonstrates that the processes of life cannot be comprehended by rigid, individual concepts. They spring loose from the fetters of conceptual violence. The dialectician Friedrich Engels,Friedrich Engels, *Anti-Dühring*, trans. Emile Burns, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, *Collected Works*, vol. 25 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010) student of Hegel, was spared such scholastic confusions, despite the fact he was no biologist. He saw reproduction as an example of the dialectical law of the negation of the negation, as he explained on numerous occasions. In light of the mixed and mis-representations still in circulation today, if no more than certainly no less than in 1878, it is well worth returning to his example of the humble barleycorn. Engels says:

Let us take a grain of barley. Billions of such grains of barley are milled, boiled and brewed and then consumed. But if such a grain of barley meets with conditions which are normal for it, if it falls on suitable soil, then under the influence of heat and moisture it undergoes a specific change, it germinates; the grain as such ceases to exist, it is negated, and in its place appears the plant which has arisen from it, the negation of the grain. But what is the normal life-process of this plant? It grows, flowers, is fertilised and finally once more produces grains of barley, and as soon as these have ripened the stalk dies, is in its turn negated. As a result of this negation of the negation we have once again the original grain of barley, but not as a single unit, but ten-, twenty- or thirtyfold. Species of grain change extremely slowly, and so the barley of today is almost the same as it was a century ago. But if we take a plastic ornamental plant, for example a dahlia or an orchid, and treat the seed and the plant which grows from it according to the gardener’s art, we get as a result of this negation of the negation not only more seeds, but also qualitatively improved seeds, which produce more beautiful flowers, and each repetition of this process, each fresh negation of the negation, enhances this process of perfection. —With most insects, this process follows the same lines as in the case of the grain of barley. Butterflies, for example, spring from the egg by a negation of the egg, pass through certain transformations until they reach sexual maturity, pair and are in turn negated, dying as soon as the pairing process has been completed and the female has laid its numerous eggs. We are not concerned at the moment with the fact that with other plants and animals the process does not take such a simple form, that before they die they produce seeds, eggs or offspring not once but many times; our purpose here is only to show that the negation of the negation really does take place in both kingdoms of the organic world.Friedrich Engels, *Anti-Dühring*, trans. Emile Burns, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, *Collected Works*, vol. 25 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 126.

Through the continuous negation of the individual, the stream of life flows through the generations.

Prior discoveries about the preservation and proliferation of forms need to be deepened by determination of the content of events, the determination of development, on the basis of which further evidence for the dissolution of individuality emerges.

Development occurs in states that are distinguishable through changes in speed of the process and the kind of events which fill them. For example, in tissue-forming animals, development occurs as predevelopment (maternal egg and paternal semen), unification of the germ-cells (fertilization), triggering the development of the fertilized egg, construction of the body prior to cleavage (division of the egg), the forming of basic components and the separation of tissues, the structuration [Ausgestaltung] of the organs through their activity, operational processes, including any substitute-formations, and, in the end, senescence. Development extends from cell-formation to natural death. The cell is a finite member of a comparatively infinite sequence.

The determination of formations happens in a step-by-step progression. All subsequent states are necessary, since the change of any one individual state necessarily conditions the determination of all that follow. Determination can therefore also be characterized as an increasing restriction of possibilities through the restriction of opportunities for formation [Bildungsermöglichung] to a narrower and narrower sphere. Spinoza’s axiom applies here too: omnis determinatio est negatio.

‘Determination in successive acts’ excludes two misleading assumptions: predestination, which rigidly fixes the course of development from the outset, and the finalist conception, which supposes that teleologically directed forces strive towards a stage considered to be essential. What is ‘typical’ is only the typical outcome achieved along typical paths. The redirection of development along atypical paths always results in atypical progression. Nothing stands in the way of the artificial institution of modes of development that have yet to be realized in nature, even if this has largely been unsuccessful until now because our insight into the interaction of the parts is still too poor and the technical difficulty involved is still too great. The so-called “regulation of development” must only be spoken of with extreme caution, or else teleological speculation will replace derivation from facts. Here, the danger posed by fictive individuality and totality is particularly acute.

In 1922, summarizing more than a decade of research into the formation of animal form [Formbildung], I wrote:

There is a determinable boundary of the typical-specific form, one which cannot be overstepped without consequences that endanger the persistence of what is typical. Analytic experiment is of service in the determination of this boundary, which, in turn, provides a causal demarcation of the typical-specific form—after its descriptive presentation through comparison of formative modes [Bildungsweisen]. If we overstep this boundary—that is, if that which has form [Formhabende] is changed—and so change will inevitably continue to have an effect. The atypical form-process [Formvorgang] proves itself to be just as persistent as the typical. From this, it follows that the type is not absolute, possessing neither spatial fixity nor non-spatial persistence. The material bondage of the formed [Formhaften] also restricts atypical paths of development within a determinable scope. Overstepping this boundary results in the destruction of the organic form; decay takes the place of ordered interaction.Julius Schaxel, "Über die Natur der Formvorgänge in der tierischen Entwicklung," *Archiv für Entwicklungsmechanik der Organismen* 50 (1922): 523--24.

Several further examples of early embryo development, regeneration, and transplantation may be appropriate for purposes of illustration. The first developmental step in tissue-forming animals is cleavage, which consists in the division of the egg. The typically-constituted egg is gradually replaced by a typically-ordered aggregate of cells through a series of cellular divisions. This has been experimentally substantiated and replicated. The change in constitution of the egg results in a change in the modus of the cleavage and, thus, in outcome (Figs. 1 and 2). This results in—

—the constitution of each blastomere, and thus its determination for subsequent developmental events, which is conditioned, on the one hand, by the material composition inherited from the egg and its locationality and, on the other, by the preceding cleavage-process. What becomes of the blastomere that is experimentally removed from its germinal cluster (in isolation) depends on its constitution. Failure to take this circumstance into consideration has led to disastrous speculations about regulation, totality, individuality.

There are species whose modus of cleavage preserves the egg-constitution into the first blastomere-generations, e.g., the so-called radial-modus, with totally equal and then adequate cleavage, in many sea urchins and starfish, and also in species in which blastomere-constitution is still distinct from egg-constitution after the first, but always unequal, division (e.g., the spiral-modus of snails and many species of worm). Isolated blastomeres of the second group develop, if they develop at all, into one or another sort of atypia from partial-mass. They have never been seduced by “holistic representations” [“Ganzheitsvorstellungen”]. It is different for the first group.

For species whose blastomeres retain the external form and arrangement of contents after isolation from the cellular cluster they first arose in, the isolated blastomeres develop into partial-structures from partial-mass (e.g., the comb jellies or ctenophores in Fischel’s experiments). In sea urchins, however, the earliest experimenters encountered the initially baffling result: structured wholes [Ganzgebilde] obtained from isolated blastomeres, i.e., from partial-masses. Lacking requisite insight into the relevant context, these experimenters soon began to employ terms like non-spatio-temporal factors, elementary “soul,” the category of individuality—assumptions and representations whose socio-historical presuppositions have already been indicated in the above introduction. The careful reexamination of their experiments does not, in fact, result in similar constructions, but instead the derivation of much simpler lawful regularities from the facts.

Things stand as follows: the cleavage-modi of spherical eggs, whose blastomeres retain the egg-constitution and, after their isolation from the spherical-sector-form (half-, quarter-, and eighth-spherical contents), round into spheres once more—all of this enables the decomposition of the egg-whole into smaller eggs of typical constitution. The products of their cleavage are whole structures of partial-mass. In the case of the Asterias glacialis starfish (Fig. 3), I have produced detailed reports and drawn conclusions from them.Julius Schaxel, *Die Leistungen der Zellen bei der Entwicklung der Metazoen* (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1915), 153ff. What is certain is that there is no basis for whispers about non-spatio-temporal totality or the configuration of entelechia; there is, however, reason to suspect the paradox of divisible individuality, and to conclude that perhaps individuality is not the appropriate concept for designating the facts as we confront them.

Regeneration, understood as the regeneration of lost parts, has given rise to the erroneous conception that what is regenerated is “in each case precisely that which was missing.” This then becomes a question of maintaining the whole over and against external disturbances. Standard natural-scientific procedure does not seek the cause of present events in what is absent; a glance at the facts is enough to reveal their true face. As a rule, it is not that something missing is mysteriously regenerated, not even for supposedly exceptional species; rather, in the progression of organic formation, new formations arise in accordance with what is present.

Every excision of a part in the course of ongoing development creates a discongruence in the correlations of the remaining parts and, thus, an atypical end-structure. Absence of formation, scarring, budding, regenerative new formation, reconfiguration following removal—all of these are atypical phenomena; these are not, however, final approximates, but rather vary according to the specific cause of the wound and the tissue that remains.Julius Schaxel, "Regenerations- und Transplantationsstudien, I: Zum Determinationsproblem," *Zoologischer Anzeiger* 78 (1928): 153--57. However much one might resist surrendering their belief in an imaginary preservation of wholeness, it cannot be maintained that a motionless stump is nevertheless a limb, or that a tissue-complex completely unsuitable as a photoreceptor is nevertheless an eye. Rather, the inevitable conclusion they must draw is that there is no such thing at all (Fig. 4).

Finally, transplantation offers still another way by which one can go beyond the individual, who is by no means formally self-enclosed or complete. In the axolotl, astonishing multi-faceted structures have been created and cultivated over the course of many years through the grafting of body parts onto animals of the same or slightly older age as the donor, and through the creation of vascular- and tissue-connection between two nearly intact specimens. All manner of transitions have been demonstrated: from the grafting of surplus organ-parts to the insertion of foreign body-sections, and even the duplication of structures, in a manner reminiscent of conjoined twins, to the effect of creating a shared circulatory system that flows through a single heart (Figs. 5 and 6). Not infrequently, processes have arisen in which the correlations of tissue-complexes appear to break down, resulting in extensive tumor-growth.Regarding the transplantations conducted in my Institute, these are regularly reported on in the relevant specialist literature.

The stream of life pulses in organic forms, flowing not through a mesh of more or less distinct tubes, but in a broad and wide-branching riverbed, whose branches separate and rejoin one another, now and then branching off in new directions and perhaps even drying up. The individual is only a state, often just an arbitrarily circumscribed cutout, of the formative process.

d) The Social Dissolution

The metabolism of life is a sub-process of the metabolism of the Earth. Under the influence of solar energy, autotrophic green plants form organic mass out of simple compounds, which are diluted in water and dispersed in air. Microbes break down the organic matter to the point of complete disintegration. Together, autotrophy and heterotrophy constitute an internal bond between all living beings. Alongside phylogeny and kinship, life-preserving relations find expression in the relativity of bionts.

The Lebensraum (“living space”) of the Earth, wherein the conditions for life (nourishment, water, salts, warmth, space)Julius Schaxel, *Das Leben auf der Erde* (Jena: Urania-Verlagsgesellschaft, 1928), 13ff. are present, consists of numerous interlocking spheres of bionts, which are demarcated even less clearly from one another than the bionts themselves. The history of the distribution of life over the Earth occurs as adaptation in the Lebensräume, each of which fulfills the totality of conditions of life in a determinate state.[Translator's note:] "Lebensraum" is a biogeographical concept coined by Friedrich Ratzel in a 1901 essay which reconceptualized the Darwinian "struggle for existence" as a "struggle for space." See Friedrich Ratzel, "Lebensraum: A Biogeographical Study" [1901], trans. Tul'si (Tuesday) Bhambry, *Journal of Historical Geography* 61 (2018): 59--80. In the essay, Ratzel comments not only on the distribution of life on earth but also on imperialist colonization and the geographical distribution of human races. Despite Ratzel's denunciation of proponents of racial purity in the context of 19th-century biopolitics, he does make use of the racist scientific terminology of his time in the "Lebensraum" essay itself, including a distinction between 'stable' and 'mixed' or 'transitional' racial groups. In this sense, there is an unavoidable slippage between the biogeographical and geopolitical uses of "Lebensraum." Schaxel consciously takes up the word in the context of ongoing debates about the meaning and use of the concept without thinking that the question of its political significance can simply be bracketed. For a contemporary application of the term, see Jevgeniy Bluwstein, Connor Cavanagh, and Robert Fletcher, "Securing Conservation Lebensraum? The Geo-, Bio-, and Ontopolitics of Global Conservation Futures," *Geoforum* 153 (2024): 103752, <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2023.103752>.

The interlocking of the Lebensräume, the relational complex of the preservation of life, has led to the concept of biocoenoses, which, however, become living communities in the true sense of the word only through the progress of repeated success in phylogenetic history.[Translator's note:] Schaxel's "biocoenoses" [*Biozönosen*] invokes what was, in his day, a heavily theorized term in German ecology. Coined by Karl Möbius in 1877 for oyster-bed communities, *Biozönose* was taken up by figures like Thienemann and Friederichs as an organismic concept, which is to say a special type of 'whole' that is a harmonious self-regulating unity. For more information on this concept, see Kurt Jax, " 'Organismic' Positions in Early German-Speaking Ecology and Its (Almost) Forgotten Dissidents," *History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences* 42, no. 4 (2020): 44, <https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-020-00328-9>. Indeed, the contemporary concept of "ecosystem" arose to neutralize the holistic baggage found in biocoenosis favoring descriptions of matter and energy flow/dynamics, so the two terms are not simply interchangeable. Moreover, Schaxel own mobilization of the concept is in itself idiosyncratic; he adds an evolutionary criterion ("living community in the true sense" only through "repeated success in phylogenetic history") largely absent from Möbius's or Friederichs's accounts, anticipating present-day interest in ecological units defined by coevolutionary history. The biocoenosis encompasses the totality of the plants and animals in a location that furnishes all conditions for their development and maintenance. The members of a given biocoenosis exist in relationships of perpetual interaction with one another, whether indirectly or directly, via local conditions.

The interactive relationships between bionts are of two kinds. Either: coexistence is limited to the simultaneous exploitation of the chances for survival in a given locality. This ends in the competition between competitors, through which their strength is tested. Or: relations of one-sided or reciprocal dependency form. The shared way of life brings with it a more or less internal bond between cooperants. A community of the living in the true sense of the word emerges.

With his notion of the “struggle for life,” Darwin emphasized competition, the struggle for existence by all against all. This resonated with the prevailing mode of thinking in his society, its markedly individualistic features. Since then, as a consequence of the further development of human society, the significance of cooperation has received increased recognition. The struggle between competitors of the same kind for space, nourishment, and light is won by the stronger displacing, overgrowing, or crushing the weaker. This competition intensifies as it progresses. The natural filtration process of a forest shows, for example, that only one in 2,000 ten-year-old beech trees succeeds in fully developing into a hundred-year-old specimen. The competition between species is all the more violent the more their life-requirements and patterns of seasonal development coincide. The more diverse the inhabitants of a locality, the greater the sum of life that can be realized in the same spatial coordinates. The task of ecology is to empirically determine the comparative competitiveness of the species that populate it. Every none-too-minor slice of nature furnishes further examples: forest, meadow, oyster bed, coral reef, etc.

In each, the bonds of interdependent cooperation have overcome competition within their own sphere. Together, they enter into the struggle for existence as closed formations. One-sided relations of dependency are characteristic of parasites, which extract the raw living substance or draw ready-made flows of nutrients from their hosts. They have all manner of transitional forms, from those which suck their nutrients from the host to those for which the innards of the host serve as a Lebensraum all its own. In the reciprocal relations of dependency in symbiosis, the Lebensräume of the partners interpenetrate, as they reciprocally secure their chances for survival. The competitiveness obtained through this reciprocity is demonstrated by the example of lichens—the nutritive cooperative of autotrophic algae and heterotrophic fungi. Lichens are true cosmopolitans, spreading from sea coasts to high mountains.

The one-sided-parasitic and reciprocal-symbiont relations, even when they occur on a massive scale, have no true, or only the very beginnings of, social value. It is only the preservation of the members by the whole, the integration of interdependent and interreliant comrades, that guarantees mutual support, the social division of labor, and community. Whenever the masses form such a community, a new form of life emerges. Quantity has transformed into quality. In social progression, individuals are sublated into the collective. In natural history, this path has walked many times and to varying degrees. We will address this elsewhere in greater depth and detail.Julius Schaxel, *Vergesellschaftung in der Natur* (Jena: Urania-Verlagsgesellschaft, 1931).

The swarms and the herds of so many vertebrates, particularly fish, birds, and mammals, are assemblages of common activity of shorter or longer duration for specific periods of life, extending all the way to lifelong herd-formation. Beyond the naturally-occurring division of labor between the sexes, the organization of the social structure evolves in a domain in which humans, though still far from perfect, are already master. Among invertebrates, a number of sessile, aquatic creatures that reproduce asexually (through fission or budding) form nutritive cooperatives. Sponges, colonies of polyps, and corals display interwoven tissues and communication between gastric cavities, such that the actions of the parts affect the whole. Homomorphic colonies are the foundation on which hetero- and poly-morphic forms of society develop. In the polymorphic colonies of the siphonophores, there are no independently viable bionts to be found, because the division of labor has created a deep-rooted relation of dependency between all members of the colony alike. Even among socialized insects such as bumblebees, wasps, bees, ants, termites, bionts lose the capacity for independent survival. Procreation, brood-care, and nutrition—in short, all of the functions of reproduction—are socialized through the division of labor. Phylogenetically, ecologically, and physiologically—here, we see the dialectical intensification of mass-association and, along with it, social progression.

The earliest signs of human society are found in the horde of early humans, and they, in turn, brought this kind of association along with them from out of their animality. An animal as defenceless as the developing human being could only survive in isolation or small numbers on occasion. In order to complete the process of becoming-human, it was vital that the meager defensive capabilities of the individual were replaced by the unified strength and cooperation of the horde. Men and women of all stages of life (the elderly, adults, children) are unified in this horde and act together for the preservation of the whole. They use only naturally-occurring food sources (wild-growing plants, edible animals) and provision only for their more immediate needs. The conditions of life are the same for all members of the horde alike, which has yet to undergo any real differentiation. The subsequent social-historical structure does not lead to polymorphic reproductive communities as in the case of insects; rather, the performance of labor becomes the fundamental condition of human life. It is with labor that humanity’s domination over nature begins. Through it, humans are separated from animals and set on the path towards economy. The community of equals is pierced through by a streak of inequality, one which will leave its mark on the structure of human social development from that point on. Agriculture, animal husbandry, handicrafts, industry, and trade are all activities and achievements of a class-stratified society, as the greater part of human beings have no ownership over the means of production, which have since become the property of the rulers. Class society, constantly racked and rattled by struggles, wars, and crises, points beyond itself, towards the community of humanity [Menschheitsgemeinschaft]. In the producing collective, individuality is socially sublated.

The present-day content of the Earth’s biosphere is a historical product, and the preservation of this content binds its participants to one another. The degree of consolidation is variable. Socialization [Vergesellschaftung] always proves itself superior to isolation [Vereinzelung]. The most advanced reproductive communities of insects possess a phenomenal capacity for propagation. Human society, with its division of labor in production, proves itself incomparably more powerful, ready for further advances, and heightened organization. Already, it stands at a turning-point where the individual is no longer its goal and concept; rather, the community of the masses relegates all such boundaries into the past.

3. Individuality and Dialectic

In 1885, Friedrich Engels wrote:

It is however precisely the polar antagonisms put forward as irreconcilable and insoluble, the forcibly fixed lines of demarcation and class distinctions, which have given modern theoretical natural science its restricted, metaphysical character. The recognition that these antagonisms and distinctions, though to be found in nature, are only of relative validity, and that on the other hand their imagined rigidity and absolute validity have been introduced into nature only by our reflective minds—this recognition is the kernel of the dialectical conception of nature. It is possible to arrive at this recognition because the accumulating facts of natural science compel us to do so; but one arrives at it more easily if one approaches the dialectical character of these facts equipped with an understanding of the laws of dialectical thought. In any case natural science has now advanced so far that it can no longer escape dialectical generalisation.Engels, *Anti-Dühring*, trans. Burns, 14.

When he wrote this forty-five years ago, Engels was under the influence of thermodynamics and organic evolutionary history. Today, the accumulation of facts in all fields of natural science compels us to adopt a dialectical conception of nature. Because researchers and thinkers, given their social being, by no means necessarily confront the facts with consciousness of dialectical laws, heterogeneous eclecticism takes the place of general agreement, a chaos in which neither empiricists nor metaphysicians, but only dialecticians, can find their way. Only those who can recognize the ripeness of the fruit before them will reap the riches of harvest.

Dialectical biology strips away all rigidified concepts, above all the concept at the center of any metaphysical biology—that of individuality. The constant species has condemned mechanics to inactivity in the face of the living. Idealistic morphology exhausted itself in the transcendent Bauplan (blueprint, or structural plan).[Translator's note] "*Bauplan*" is a reference to Goethe's theory of morphology. See John H. Zammito: "In Goethe's approach to life science two crucial notions converged: form or structure (*Bau*) and design or telos (*Plan*). The paradigm that Goethe propounded to his age, morphology, was the empirical science of reconstructing---from observations and integration through and beyond observations---the *Bauplan*, the principle behind the development in actual organic life-forms. The essential point about life-forms, for Goethe, was their developmental directionality. This was lawful, but it was concrete. Each instantiation was unique yet utterly expressive of its type. Moreover, the developmental plan could itself change, altering the course of the whole sequence. In this, biological regularities showed a decisive divergence from inorganic, physical regularities. Life changed its expressions; physical matter simply reiterated its manifestations with ceaseless uniformity." *The Gestation of German Biology: Philosophy and Physiology from Stahl to Schelling* (University of Chicago Press, 2018), 294. Even transformism did not overcome the dichotomy between basic form [Grundform] and transformation of form [Formenwandlung]. Developmental mechanics is repeatedly obstructed by the totality of its objects. The result has always been the recoil into vitalism, the renunciation of natural explanation of life.

The natural individual has been dissolved: historically, genetically, formally, and, for the most natural-historically advanced species, even socially. Composed of its parts, the natural individual is itself only part of a larger context. We encounter it only as relative, never absolute.

In every respect, the individual is a transient state of the life-process, no more mysterious than nature as such, which we understand because we ourselves are part of it. Dialectical thinking only reflects the objective dialectic of nature.

Bibliography

Bauer, Erwin. Einführung in die experimentelle Vererbungslehre. 3rd and 4th ed. Berlin: Gebrüder Borntraeger, 1919.

Bluwstein, Jevgeniy, Connor Cavanagh, and Robert Fletcher. “Securing Conservation Lebensraum? The Geo-, Bio-, and Ontopolitics of Global Conservation Futures.” Geoforum 153 (2024): 103752. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2023.103752.

Engels, Friedrich. Anti-Dühring. Translated by Emile Burns. In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010.

Engels, Friedrich. Dialectics of Nature. Translated by Clemens Dutt. In Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25. Lawrence & Wishart, 2010. E-book.

Engels, Friedrich, to Karl Marx. May 30, 1873. In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, translated by I. Lasker, edited by S. Ryazanskaya, 281. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975. https://archive.org/details/selectedcorrespondencemarxengels.

Goldschmidt, Richard. Mechanismus und Physiologie der Geschlechtsbestimmung. Berlin: Verlag von Gebrüder Borntraeger, 1920.

Goldschmidt, Richard. Physiologische Theorie der Vererbung. Berlin: Julius Springer, 1927.

Haeckel, Ernst. “Über die Entwicklungstheorie Darwins.” In Gemeinverständliche Vorträge und Abhandlungen aus dem Gebiete der Entwickelungslehre. Bonn: Emil Straus, 1902.

Jax, Kurt. “‘Organismic’ Positions in Early German-Speaking Ecology and Its (Almost) Forgotten Dissidents.” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 42, no. 4 (2020): 44. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-020-00328-9.

Porges, Karl, Ian G. Stewart, Uwe Hoßfeld, and Georgy S. Levit. “From Idea to Law: Theory, Concept, and Terminology in Ernst Haeckel’s Works.” Russian Journal of Developmental Biology 50, no. 6 (2019): 290–302. https://www.biodidaktik.uni-jena.de/iefbdmedia/3124/2020-rjdb-from-idea-to-law.pdf.

Ratzel, Friedrich. “Lebensraum: A Biogeographical Study” [1901]. Translated by Tul’si (Tuesday) Bhambry. Journal of Historical Geography 61 (2018): 59–80.

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———. Das Leben auf der Erde. Jena: Urania-Verlagsgesellschaft, 1928.

———. Die Leistungen der Zellen bei der Entwicklung der Metazoen. Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1915.

———. Grundzüge der Theorienbildung in der Biologie. 2nd ed. Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1922.

———. “Regenerations- und Transplantationsstudien, I: Zum Determinationsproblem.” Zoologischer Anzeiger 78 (1928): 153–57.

———. “Über die Natur der Formvorgänge in der tierischen Entwicklung.” Archiv für Entwicklungsmechanik der Organismen 50 (1922): 523–24.

———. Vergesellschaftung in der Natur. Jena: Urania-Verlagsgesellschaft, 1931.

Zammito, John H. The Gestation of German Biology: Philosophy and Physiology from Stahl to Schelling. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018.

1. Prospectus for “A Dialectical Logic.”

In 1938, Max Horkheimer wrote a short prospectus for “A Dialectical Logic,” the first in a series of book-length projects proposed as part of a report on the activities of the Institute for Social Research (ISR). Although the report was written to fulfill requirements for receiving institutional support from Columbia University, it was also supposed to serve as a pitch to prospective sources of external funding for future ISR research. The report as a whole is strikingly high-concept, an early product of the desperate but ambitious grant writing practice Horkheimer and Adorno would refer to in their 1940s correspondence as “artistic begging.” Eva-Maria Ziege, *Antisemitismus und Gesellschaftstheorie* (Suhrkamp, 2009), 154. Author's translation. Horkheimer describes the dialectical logic as follows:

The guiding concern of the work is not a formalist epistemology, but a material doctrine of categories. In scientific and political discussions about social problems, there are certain categories which are used constantly, but which nevertheless give rise to differences of opinion as soon as a more precise definition is called for. Such categories include concepts like causality, tendency, progress, law, necessity, freedom, class, culture, value, ideology, dialectic, and so forth. […] These categories can only be preserved on the condition they are not embalmed but are instead kept alive through the continuous effort of relating them back to reality. […] Every determination of philosophical concepts involves the presentation of human society in its socially given condition."[Idee, Aktivität und Programm des Instituts...]" (1938), *Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften. Band 12: Nachgelassene Schriften 1931-1949*. Ed. Alfred Schmidt and Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1985), 156-157. For the English translation commissioned by the ISR in 1938, see "An Institute for Social Research: Idea, Activity, and Program (1938)." *Substudies* (blog), 9 June 2025. <https://jamescrane.substack.com/i/165428535/i-an-institute-for-social-research-idea-activity-and-program-1938>

Though consistent with Horkheimer’s earlier descriptions of the project,Cf. Max Horkheimer to Karl Landauer, 3/18/1935: "The intention is simply to develop what are in our view the most important categories, such as 'Thinking,' 'Science,' 'Actuality,' 'Cause,' 'Society,' 'Economy,' 'Religion,' 'Art,' 'Culture,' 'Family,' 'Authority,' 'History,' and so on, within a continuous nexus of thought, determining each according to the level of present-day knowledge." *Substudies* (blog), 8 December 2025. <https://jamescrane.substack.com/i/181013997/letterhorkheimer-re-idea-for-a-dialectical-logic> it is extremely unlikely that the kind of book outlined in the prospectus aligns with what readers—in his time or ours—would expect from a philosophical logic. In fact, the project seems to be defined primarily by its conscious break with the tradition of logic in Western philosophy, from Aristotle’s Organon to Kant’s “Canon,” and its explicit opposition to contemporary efforts to break out of that same tradition, from Husserl’s Logical Investigations to Carnap’s Logical Syntax of Language. In a discussion with Adorno in late 1946, when the pair revisit their earlier plans for a dialectical logic, Horkheimer concludes that they can neither ignore classical investigations in the field of logic nor dispute them, as “[t]he former does not quite match our method” and “the latter requires an extremely time-consuming reexamination of the relevant authors—above all: Plato, Aristotle, and, among the more recent, Mill, Trendelenburg, Stigwart, Brentano, Husserl, Prantl.”For the author's translation of these discussion minutes, see Horkheimer and Adorno, "Rescue of the Enlightenment (October 1946)." *Substudies* (blog), 11 August 2025. <https://jamescrane.substack.com/p/horkheimer-and-adornorettung-der> In what sense, then, was the dialectical logic supposed to be a logic at all? In each version of the prospectus, Horkheimer does refer to a specific model: Hegel’s Encyclopedia, and especially the Logic. Yet, when Horkheimer describes how he plans to write the dialectical logic “on the model of Hegel’s great work,” his formulations are not only indicative of his rather idiosyncratic reception of Hegel but are also almost entirely negative in character.On Horkheimer's idiosyncratic reception of Hegel, see the author's translation of Horkheimer's "Hegel and the Problem of Metaphysics" (1932). *Substudies* (blog), 9 May 2025. <https://jamescrane.substack.com/i/162852001/hegel-and-the-problem-of-metaphysics-1932> In a 1939 letter about the dialectical logic, Horkheimer writes that Hegel’s “attempt to free philosophy from the dictates of formal logic […] deserves recognition” even if, from the perspective of the critical materialist, it “went hand in hand with an extremely dubious metaphysics” that had to be contested.See the author's translation of Max Horkheimer to Paul L. Landsberg, 12/23/1939. *Substudies* (blog), 18 March 2025. <https://jamescrane.substack.com/i/158566797/letterhorkheimer-re-logic-in-the-tunnel>

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Horkheimer’s reference to Hegel’s Logic as a model has done less to disambiguate the original idea of the dialectical logic than to reinforce the suspicion among interpreters that the dialectical logic was impossible from the beginning. Given that Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (1947) originated, in part, from Horkheimer and Adorno’s discussions on dialectical logic, the question of whether the project was even possible has significant ramifications for understanding 1940s critical theory as a whole. Rolf Wiggershaus, for instance, draws an analogy between the unexplained relationship between the Science of Logic and the so-called Realphilosophie—the philosophies of nature and spirit, volumes II and III of the Encyclopedia—within Hegel’s system and the undeveloped connection between the speculative philosophy of history in Dialectic of Enlightenment and the empirical social research conducted by the ISR for their studies in anti-Semitism and prejudice.Rolf Wiggershaus, *The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance*. Translated by Michael Robertson (Polity, 1994), 319-321; 356-357. For Wiggershaus, Horkheimer and Adorno’s claims to the contrary amounted to little more than post hoc over-integration of abstract speculation and concrete empirical work in theory to compensate for under-integration of the two sides in practice. The fact the dialectical logic remained unwritten is accordingly interpreted as a sign of the collapse of early critical theory as a unified research program.

Whereas Wiggershaus refers back to the original idea of the dialectical logic to question the coherence of the research program of 1940s critical theory, Gunzelin Schmid Noerr identifies a theoretical incoherence internal to the idea itself: “without intending to, yet by surrendering themselves to the course of their own investigations, [Horkheimer and Adorno] gradually drifted further and further from the Hegelian-Marxist idea of an agreement between logic and history.”Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, "Zum werk- und zeitgeschichtlichen Hintergrund der Dialektik der Aufklärung." *Aufklärungs-kritik und aufklärungs-mythen: Horkheimer und adorno in philosophiehistorischer perspektive*. Ed. S. Lavaert & W. Schröder (Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2018), 36.For Noerr, the problem with the dialectical logic is one of second-order mediation: the conceptual mediation of logical concept and actual history. Referring to the 1938 prospectus, Noerr distinguishes between two levels in the original idea of the project. The first, a logical-methodological level that would devote itself to “developing the philosophical foundations of historical materialism,” i.e., the logic of the historical mediation of intellectual and cultural products, both in their dependency on and their relative autonomy from economic social processes. The second, a content-exemplary level that would provide a concrete demonstration of the logic established on the first level through its application to a contemporary social problem.Noerr (2018), 33-35. Noerr argues that the treatment of anti-Semitism as the “crystallization-point” of Dialectic of Enlightenment simultaneously presupposed a certain logic of historical mediation and evaded the task of its concrete demonstration. Instead, the central theoretical problem of “regressive reason” was identified with the social pathology of anti-Semitism on a civilizational scale.This is the guiding thesis of the recent collection of essays on *Dialectic of Enlightenment* edited by Noerr and Eva-Maria Ziege: *Zur Kritik der regressiven Vernunft. Beiträge zur „Dialektik der Aufklärung"* (Springer VS, 2019), 25. According to Noerr, a second-level “concrete demonstration” of a first-level logic of historical mediation would have required Horkheimer and Adorno to ground their theory of social pathology in contemporary empirical social-scientific research, and especially in political economy. Without this grounding, the relationship between the logic of historical mediation and its object, real social history, remained necessarily unmediated. Despite the appeals to an implicit historical logic made throughout the text, the re-orientation of Dialectic of Enlightenment around the task of sketching a “philosophical prehistory of anti-Semitism” could even be said to have displaced the task of the dialectical logic, the possibility of which the authors seem to have taken for granted. This seems to be confirmed by the 1944 preface, where the authors conclude with a list of the preliminary studies cut from the final manuscript: “Of the German preliminary studies to the whole work, which include the fragments themselves, we left out the pieces on logic, among others.”Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, *Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments.* Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, translated by Edmund Jephcott (Stanford University Press, 2002 [1987]), 255.

Like Wiggershaus,Wiggershaus (1994), 314-319. Noerr justifies the critical assessment of Dialectic of Enlightenment as a failed execution of the dialectical logic by referring to a letter from Horkheimer to Felix Weil from March 1942. In the letter, Horkheimer attempted to stimulate Weil’s interest in a long-term collaboration on a comprehensive theory of “the present phase of society” with a working group specifically organized for that purpose, a group that would include Horkheimer himself, Adorno, and Friedrich Pollock: “It is nonsense [to think] that I, even in collaboration with Teddie [Adorno], could lend the work the necessary precision and concreteness. It must be positively bursting with historical and economic material, or else it will come across as mere raisonnement.”Max Horkheimer to Felix Weil, 10 March 1942. *Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften. Band 17* (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1996), 275. Author's translation. Read in conjunction with Horkheimer’s subsequent, thwarted plans for an interdisciplinary ISR yearbook on “Racket Theory,”For an alternative account of the distinction between the "racket theory" yearbook and the planned book on dialectics, see: James Crane and J. E. Morain, "Introducing Racket Theory" on the *CTWG blog* (blog), 24 June 2025. <https://ctwg.net/blog/2025/RacketIntro/> Noerr considers the letter as a damning admission: “in the end, Dialectic of Enlightenment would therefore remain without the economic foundation which had in fact been considered indispensable for it.”Noerr (2018), 35. See also Wiggershaus (1994), 316-318. For Noerr, the fact that these planned interdisciplinary collaborations never came to fruition was not simply a consequence of the interpersonal conflicts or institutional barriers to their realization; rather, these obstacles themselves are interpreted as signs of some deeper, even fundamental, incoherence in the original idea of the dialectical logic. The failure to collaborate across disciplines in practice was conditioned by a failure to mediate between levels in theory. The real legacy of the dialectical logic is the abstract speculative character of Dialectic of Enlightenment, which inherited and dramatized the problems inherent to the original idea without fulfilling either the task of concrete demonstration the project demanded or, for that matter, a substantive engagement with logic. The primary function of the plans for a dialectical logic in secondary literature to date has been to serve as an entry-point for a nested stack of allegories for the failure of early critical theory as a whole. The story that begins with the 1938 prospectus unfolds with an almost fateful necessity. There is even something tragic about it.

And yet, as late as 1946, Horkheimer still planned to begin working on the dialectical logic in earnest, even going as far as identifying the project with the planned “second part” of Dialectic of Enlightenment.Horkheimer to Pollock, 3/27/1946. *MHGS*, Bd. 17 (1996), 714-715. Author's translation. This has posed a genuine problem for interpreters. In response to the challenge of reconciling Horkheimer’s 1946 plans with Horkheimer and Adorno’s polemic against the idea of “a logic of history” in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Noerr introduces two qualifications: “A logic of history, which, as stated in Dialectic of Enlightenment, one can and should ‘scorn’ under specific conditions, ‘if it is against humanity,’ is merely a metaphorical logic.”Noerr (2018), 36. In a first gesture, Noerr turns “if it is against humanity” into a condition for specifying targets of the polemic, thereby saving the idea of a logic of history in the abstract; in a second, Noerr renders the idea of a logic of history in the abstract so harmless, “merely a metaphorical logic,” that it becomes hard to understand why Horkheimer and Adorno bothered to write the polemic in the first place. The polemic, in short, would only apply to the very kind of logic of history that, on Noerr’s account, neither of the authors believed was tenable anymore anyway. Noerr reconciles the Dialectic of Enlightenment’s polemic against a logic of history with Horkheimer’s 1946 plans for the dialectical logic at the cost of eliminating the reasons for both. The problem remains: on what grounds was Horkheimer so confident that a “materialist logic” of history could still be written after the majority of Dialectic of Enlightenment already had been?

Ultimately, for both Wiggershaus and Noerr, the discrepancy between Horkheimer’s 1946 plans and the polemic in Dialectic of Enlightenment can best be explained as the symptom of a lag between long-term motive and hard-won insight, a sign of the lingering but waning influence of a dogmatic “Hegelian-Marxism” on critical theory, one Horkheimer had already effectively broken away from even if he hadn’t realized it yet.Noerr (2018), 37. On this reading, what, at the time, appeared to Horkheimer as developments in his idea for the dialectical logic can now, in retrospect, be understood as degenerations of the idea or departures from it. The narrative arc of the project from the early 1930s through late 1940s takes the form of a vicious cycle between an initial, unreflective assumption of its possibility and a gradual, reflective awareness of its impossibility. The 1938 prospectus is interpreted backwards: from the fact the book remained unwritten to its inherent unwritability. Horkheimer’s enduring confidence in the possibility of a dialectical logic is not explained but explained away. This teleological interpretive approach to early critical theory has enabled interpreters to identify what Noerr calls “preconditions of [the] discontinuities” in its development.Noerr, "Editor's Afterword," in *Dialectic of Enlightenment* (2002 [1987]), 219. However, it has also reinforced what Eva-Maria Ziege calls the “strong perspectival distortion” that overdetermines narrative accounts of the so-called Frankfurt School in advance: the ISR’s published texts are first abstracted from the working process that produced them and then made into the sole standard for evaluating that process as a whole, whereas “an abundance of failed or never-realized projects and designs were developed in the research process that Horkheimer and Adorno may well have considered their true goals in the mid-1940s.”Eva-Maria Ziege: *Antisemitismus und Gesellschaftstheorie* (Suhrkamp, 2009), 160-161. For more on the problem of "perspectival distortion" in the reception of the Frankfurt School's early critical theory, see "On Reading Critical Theory I: Perspectival Distortions," *Substudies* (blog), 9 May 2025. <https://jamescrane.substack.com/p/on-reading-critical-theory-i-perspectival> The purpose of this introduction is to correct for this perspectival distortion by situating the fragmentary sketches on topics in dialectical logic Horkheimer did write in relation to the basic idea of the unwritten dialectical logic itself.

Contrary to Wiggershaus and Noerr, I argue that the problem of mediating logic and history was not an implicit one lurking in the original idea of the dialectical logic but rather Horkheimer and Adorno’s explicit point of departure. The “open breach,” as Wiggershaus calls it, did not make the project of the dialectical logic impossible but possible. Noerr is right to stress that, throughout the 1940s, Horkheimer and Adorno became increasingly outspoken in their opposition to theories that presupposed a tacit agreement between logic and history. However, the “drift” away from theories that assumed an agreement between logic and history began with the suspension of any assumed identity of logic and history Horkheimer and Adorno found in the works of Hegel and Marx themselves. From the earliest references to plans for the project in Horkheimer’s correspondence, the idea of a dialectical logic is premised on the non-identity of logic and history for the thoroughgoing historical materialist—it is also the primary contention the materialist critic holds against the metaphysician and the positivist alike.See Max Horkheimer to Erich Fromm, 7/29/1934. *Substudies* (blog), 8 December 2025. <https://jamescrane.substack.com/p/horkheimer-early-sketch-for-a-dialectical> Dialectic of Enlightenment raises this contention into the criterion of conceptual thought: the concept can and should become an index of its own distance from its object.Adorno and Horkheimer: "But while enlightenment is right in opposing any hypostatization of utopia and in dispassionately denouncing power as division, the split between subject and object, which it will not allow to be bridged, becomes the index of the untruth both of itself and of truth. [...] For not only does the concept, as science, distance human beings from nature, but, as the self-reflection of thought---which, in the form of science, remains fettered to the blind economic tendency---it enables the distance which perpetuates injustice to be measured." *Dialectic of Enlightenment* (2002), 31-32. Hence, Adorno’s formulation of the aporetic character of the critical concept: going beyond the concept by means of the concept.Theodor W. Adorno, *Negative Dialectics*, Translated by E.B. Ashton (Routledge, 2004 [1966]), 15. Cf. Horkheimer: "The dialectic is a method by which one can develop one category from another, and thereby all categories. However, I would like to have a main theme in mind: e.g., what can theory do in the present situation? What is its place? Or: how can one overcome the abstractness of the concept by means of the concept itself?" "Rescue of the Enlightenment (October 1946)," *Substudies* (blog), 11 August 2025. <https://jamescrane.substack.com/p/horkheimer-and-adornorettung-der>

For Horkheimer and Adorno, following Marx, the central categories of the modern historical and social sciences are always given twice, “in the head as well as in reality,” as belated expressions of forms of social being or partial expressions of individual aspects of social life.Karl Marx, *Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft)*, translated by Martin Nicolaus (Penguin Books & New Left Review, 1973), 106. In their preface to Dialectic of Enlightenment, the authors warn readers that the concept of enlightenment at hazard is not to be understood merely in terms of intellectual history, but also in the sense that “enlightenment expresses the real movement of bourgeois society as a whole from the perspective of the idea embodied in its personalities and institutions.”Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, in *Dialectic of Enlightenment* (2002), xvi. Concepts are retroactive attempts to grasp in thought what practice has wrought in the interregnum. Concepts are less reflections than “refractions,” expressive of social being through its distortion.Horkheimer, *Eclipse of Reason* (1974), viii. Concepts are a register of the unfulfilled needs of human beings as they are and the unrealized powers of human beings as they could be. Understood accordingly, the power of the concept is a weak one; it belongs less to the concept already embodied in practice than to what in the concept remains to be. The non-identity between concept and reality is reproduced in each of our conceptual achievements. We do catch up to ourselves; in our success, however, we narrowly give ourselves the slip. And so, in an early draft of the first chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno describe the method and the hope of the book as follows:

[I]n drawing its own boundary, reason—as the social critique of reason—goes beyond itself. It fulfills the construction of the concept Hegel determined in Kant’s transcendental dialectic: by virtue of the contradiction inherent to circumscribing a narrow, contradiction-free region of experience for reason, it becomes the means of breaking out of the very region it circumscribes. The hopelessness of the fascist era is the despair and dissolution of hope as poor semblance in the face of the immediate possibility of its realization, to which hope weakly clings.For the author's reconstruction and translation of the archival material, see "Sketches in Myth and Enlightenment (Winter 1942/43)." *Substudies* (blog), 14 February 2026. <https://jamescrane.substack.com/p/sketches-in-myth-and-enlightenment>

Read under the aspect of non-identity, the fragments for a dialectical logic acquire a consistency of their own, anti-systematic in that they “make a claim at least as far-reaching as that of the system itself, and thereby demonstrate its obsolescence.”Horkheimer to Walter Benjamin, 2/23/1939. *MHGS Bd. 16* (1995), 564-568. Author's translation. Each fragment rearticulates the problematic relation between certain logical forms and their real social contents, which the forms are supposed to subsume, grasp, or render valid, transparent, tractable. Refusing to invent a meta-logic or meta-language of their own, Horkheimer and Adorno instead set out to make the history of philosophical logic a problem for itself. The task of the dialectical logic, in the infamously misological words of Dialectic of Enlightenment, is to induce logical thought itself “to scorn logic, if it is against humanity.”Adorno and Horkheimer, *Dialectic of Enlightenment* (2002), 180. The problematic of the dialectical logic is the project.

In the following second section, I outline an alternative reconstruction of the basic idea of the dialectical logic and its development on these grounds. Rather than treating the dialectical logic as an abortive preliminary exercise for Dialectic of Enlightenment, the project is reconsidered in light of three constituent elements neglected by previous interpretations: (1) the tripartite schema for a “material doctrine of categories”: reconstruction, application, anticipation; (2) the role of praxis as the historically mediating factor between logical forms and their real social content; (3) the progressive reformulation of the idea of the dialectical logic in terms of the philosophy and history of language.

In the third and final section, I offer my own thesis for how the fragments in the collection hang together as a whole. First, I present a case for the consistency of the fragments in terms of topics, literary form and style, and the basic methodological orientation of critical theory in the Marxian critique of political economy. In the process, I argue that the core of the project remains consistent from the early 1930s through the late 1940s, and that Horkheimer develops his early conception of the dialectical logic as a “material doctrine of categories” rather than abandoning it along the way. Finally, after suggesting a narrative arc to account for how the fragments fit together chronologically, I conclude with a short list of recommended “checks” to perform while reading the fragments which are meant to help readers get the most out of the collection.

2. Elements of a Dialectical Logic

In the 1938 prospectus quoted at the beginning of this introduction, Horkheimer highlights two moments of the dialectical logic: first, reconstruction of the historical genesis and transformation of certain categories of social thought; second, application of these categories to present-day society. These moments roughly correspond to the two levels of Noerr’s schema: reconstruction would consist in the articulation of a general logic of historical mediation of cultural-intellectual products by fundamental social-economic processes; application would consist in “a concrete use of the categories through an historical study” in the “analysis of contemporary society.”"International Institute of Social Research: A Report on its History, Aims and Activities 1933-1938" [1939], *MHA Na 656*, 371. When citing Horkheimer's Nachlass, we have used the format MHA (Max Horkheimer Archive) Na 1 (Nachlass) [digital container number], [page number(s)]. In the prospectus, Horkheimer takes up the category of freedom:

Whatever freedom, value, or culture might mean today can only be presented if a critical position is taken towards the existing state of things, demonstrating the extent to which what exists today is freedom in the proper sense and to what extent, contrary to the ruling ideology, what exists is rather compulsion, insecurity, fear, and powerlessness.

In Eclipse of Reason (1947), Horkheimer reformulates the process application as the “double-edged” procedure of negation: the evaluation of certain categories in their application to present-day society requires the evaluation of society according to whether it lives up to these categories as ideals.Max Horkheimer, *Eclipse of Reason* (Continuum, 1974 [1947]), 129. The reality-testing of concepts is simultaneously a conceptual test of reality. In execution, the respective tasks of reconstruction and application are incomplete without the other. Returning to the category of freedom in Eclipse, Horkheimer writes:

If it is true that we must know what freedom is in order to determine which parties in history have fought for it, it is no less true that we must know the character of these parties in order to determine what freedom is. […] The definition of freedom is the theory of history, and vice versa.Horkheimer., *Eclipse,* 119.

Crucial for our purposes is the fact Horkheimer included a third moment in a subsequent revision of the text of the 1938 prospectus, which was repurposed later that year to serve as an abstract for a stand-alone project titled “The Philosophy of Western Society.” The abstract concludes:

Finally, the concepts and their concrete application will lead to a picture of the immanent tendencies in our society. The third part of the work, therefore, will contain a prospectus of the real potentialities for the future development of human existence. It will lay the basis for critical decisions which must be made not in the domain of “pure” science but in the field of praxis.Max Horkheimer, "The Philosophy of Western Society" [1938], *MHA Na 657*, 297.

This pivot to the future and to praxis follows directly from Horkheimer’s treatment of the category of freedom in the 1938 prospectus. The past-oriented reconstruction of the changing historical significance of a given category of social thought and the present-oriented application of the category to given society, taken together, generate a structure of anticipation both open-ended and determinate. Whether future society will be legible in terms of categories like freedom depends on the practical intervention of those for whom they play an essential role in a theory of the present—that is, on whether “theory also becomes a material force.”Karl Marx, "Contribution to Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law. Introduction," *Marx & Engels Collected Works Volume 3: Karl Marx March 1843-August 1844*, translated by J. Cohen, C. Dutt, et al. (Lawrence & Wishart [E-Book], 2010), 182. In the less coded language of an ISR internal seminar from 1936,

The idea of socialism is not ‘imposed’ on us by the available empirical material. […] The socialist theoretician constructs a model of a possible event which can only be actualized by the will of those involved. […] Regarding the question of the ‘downfall of capitalism’: It cannot be determined in advance which stage capitalism is in. This is a consequence of the unique role human activity plays in the sciences of society. The task of the “practitioner,” in this case, is to experimentally determine whether this phase of capitalism is truly ‘the last and highest phase’ or not.Excerpt from the minutes of Discussion No. 5 (5/27/1936) in the ISR's Internal Seminar, "The Marxian Method and its Applicability to an Analysis of the Present Crisis." (1936) *MHGS, Bd. 15* (1995), 408-409. Author's translation.

With all three moments of the idea of the dialectical logic in hand, the problem of mediating between abstract logical forms and concrete experiential contents takes on a different character. The question becomes one of historical social practice, and the answer, in each case, concerns the changing historical relationship between theory and its practitioners. This is where the dialectical logic acquires its potential practical significance: the unity of theory and practice requires their difference not be forgotten.Cf. Horkheimer, "On the Problem of Truth" (1935): "[T]he knowledge of the falling fighter, insofar as it reflects the structure of the present epoch and the basic possibility of a better one, is not dishonored because humanity succumbs to bombs and poison gasses. [...] The truth is a moment of correct practice. But whoever identifies it directly with success passes over history and makes himself an apologist for the reality dominant at any given time. Misunderstanding the irremovable difference between concept and reality, he reverts to idealism, spiritualism, and mysticism." Max Horkheimer, *Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings*, translated by G.F. Hunter, M.S. Kramer, and J. Torpey (MIT Press, 1993), 199-200.

One form of historical social practice becomes increasingly important for Horkheimer’s approach to the dialectical logic: spoken and written language. In a 1939 discussion of “Copula and Subsumption,” one of Horkheimer’s earliest fragments for the dialectical logic, Adorno objects to what he considers Horkheimer’s overly one-sided, negative assessment of the role of universality in logical operations of identification—namely, given the violence with which the universal is inflicted on particulars and individuals in the process, both logical and social, of judgment. Adorno criticizes Horkheimer for failing to do justice to the latent, utopian dimension in the universality of the copula: “It could always be that this kind of thinking, under the form ‘it is,’ contains within itself the only possibility of going beyond that which merely is. I cannot imagine a critique that would not also really be this sort of identification.” Almost two years later, Horkheimer returns to the topic—only this time, from the utopian side. In a letter to Adorno from 1941, Horkheimer advances his own speculative theory about a performative contradiction inherent to any language that serves particularist domination, shrouding it in universality: “Addressing another in speech essentially means recognizing them as a possible member of a future association of free human beings. […] The speech of the concentration camp overseer itself is an utter absurdity, regardless of its content, except insofar as it condemns the speaker himself.” Adorno responds enthusiastically, recognizing his own earlier objection to “Copula and Subsumption” in Horkheimer’s speculations: “I wanted to put in a good word, so to speak, for language. And your latest reflections on language seem to point precisely to this motif.”See "Horkheimer & Adorno---On the Critique of Language (Sept. 1941)." *Substudies* (blog), 8 November 2025. <https://jamescrane.substack.com/p/horkheimer-and-adornoon-the-critique> In the course of his conversations with Horkheimer in the late 30s and early 40s about the prospects for a dialectical logic, Adorno arrived at the following formulation for the distinction between critical theory, as heir to speculative philosophy, from the new logical discourses of its contemporaries: “[if] philosophy as scientific semantics desire[s] to translate speech into logic, then it is left to it as speculative philosophy to bring logic to speech.”Theodor W. Adorno, *Against Epistemology: A Metacritique. Studies in Husserl and the Phenomenological Antinomies.* Translated by Willis Domingo (Polity, 2013 [Basil Blackwell, 1982]), 39-40. This goal, the restoration of philosophical logic to historical logos, accounts for the trajectory of Horkheimer and Adorno’s sporadic engagements with the various projects of philosophical logic—formal or pragmatic, empiricist or phenomenological, special-scientific or ordinary-linguistic—in the early 20th century.

Throughout the 1940s, Horkheimer’s fragmentary sketches on topics in dialectical logic would increasingly take their point of departure in language, understood as medium and record of the historical conflict between abstract logical forms and concrete social contents. In Eclipse of Reason, Horkheimer even defines the task of critical theory as a kind of critical philology, uncovering traces of the historical experience of class struggle, the perspectives of oppressors and oppressed, preserved and forgotten in our language today.Horkheimer: "Philosophy must become more sensitive to the muted testimonies of language and plumb the layers of experience preserved in it. Each language carries a meaning embodying the thought forms and belief patterns rooted in the evolution of the people who speak it. It is the repository of the variegated perspectives of prince and pauper, poet and peasant." *Eclipse of Reason* (1974), 117-118. By adopting the standpoint of language as a form of historical social practice, Horkheimer is able to pursue Adorno’s suggestion and develop not just the repressive side of abstract logical universality but its utopian side as well. Whereas in “Copula and Subsumption” (1939), Horkheimer protests against the violence of abstract universality imposed on particulars and individuals through the copula, “Trust and History” (1946) ends in a defense, albeit deeply ambivalent, of the identification of human beings with “human” as an abstract universal. It is precisely this abstraction, Horkheimer argues, that contains some memory of the struggle for human community as a concrete universal, which, to be realized, would require recognition of the humanity of non-human nature in a “community of suffering” as well. This is what Hermann Schweppenhäuser calls the utopia of human communication, which is “brought to life through the historical sense that writing preserves in terms such as communio, the Commune, and communism as the kingdom of freedom.”Hermann Schweppenhäuser, "The concept of language and linguistic presentation in Horkheimer and Adorno" [1986] translated by James Crane, *Critical Theory Working Group Blog* (blog), 22 April 2024. <https://ctwg.net/blog/2024/language/> Horkheimer’s linguistic reformulation of the project of the dialectical logic is consistent with Horkheimer and Adorno’s principled reaffirmation of the universal project of revolutionary socialist internationalism in their unpublished political writings through the end of the 1940s.See "Two Unpublished Fragments by Horkheimer and Adorno" [1946], translated by James Crane, *Critical Theory Working Group Blog* (blog), 30 September 2025. <https://ctwg.net/blog/2025/HA_Fragments_1946/> In Dialectic of Enlightenment itself, the utopian universality of the authors’ linguistic theory of logic and the revolutionary universalism of the authors’ critical socialism meet in the idea of communist free association as “the utopia contained in the concept of reason,” the living abolition of the inseparable nexus of class domination and domination of nature, the consummate expression of self-enlightening enlightenment.Cf. Adorno and Horkheimer's discussion of communism as "the utopia contained in the concept of reason" in *Dialectic of Enlightenment*: "[W]ith the revolutionary avant-garde, the utopia which proclaimed the reconciliation between nature and the self emerge from its hiding place in German philosophy as something at once irrational and reasonable, as the idea of the community of free individuals---and brought down on itself the full fury of reason. [...] The instrument by means of which the bourgeoisie had come to power, the unfettering of forces, universal freedom, self-determination---in short, enlightenment---turned against the bourgeoisie as soon as that class, as a system of rule, was forced to suppress those it ruled. By virtue of its principle, enlightenment does not stop short at the minimum of belief without which the bourgeois world could not exist. It does not render to power the reliable services which had always been performed for it by the old ideologies. Its anti-authoritarian tendency, which communicates, if only subterraneously, with the utopia contained in the concept of reason, finally made it as inimical to the established bourgeoisie as to the aristocracy, with which, indeed, it lost no time in forming alliances." *Dialectic of Enlightenment* (2002), 71-73.

3. Reading the Fragments

Though the dialectical logic appears to change drastically between Horkheimer’s earliest plans for the project in the 1930s and the last sketches he writes in the late 1940s, the underlying conception remains remarkably consistent despite its amorphousness.This is already prefigured in the fact that the Institute would immediately repurpose the prospectus for two further project proposals, one titled "The Philosophy of Western Society" (1938) and the other "The Philosophy of Social Science" (1939). Over the course of nearly fifteen years, the project develops in a string of successive variations on a limited but interconnected set of dialectical topoi. These topics include, among others: the copula, or the problem of identification and identity; the relationship between universality, particularity, and individuality; the relations between logic and grammar, concept and word, concept and thing, conceptual and non-conceptual; the problem of characterizing dialectics as a “method”; the opposition and identity of realism and nominalism. In each case, “[t]he real life process of society is not something sociologically smuggled into philosophy […]. It is rather the core of the contents of logic itself.”Adorno, *Against Epistemology* (2013), 26. When read in an approximately chronological order, the fragments do attest to a gradual evolution of the original conception of the dialectical logic: the project becomes increasingly self-reflexive. In the earlier fragments, Horkheimer reflects primarily on logical operations and operators, especially the copula. In the later fragments, Horkheimer’s focus shifts to questions of method, the relationship between language and forms of judgment, and the status of “the concept” as such—in short, to the media of the dialectical logic itself.

The project is also consistent in terms of literary form and style. All of the texts remain fragments that vary in length from a three-sentence sketch to a ten-page essay. The dialectical arguments proceed by way of extremes, chaining together bold declarations and illustrating the abysses between word and thing, thought and act, in the linguistic equivalent of expressionist grotesques. In a 1949 conversation with Kracauer, Adorno defends the difficult style of presentation he developed with Horkheimer by characterizing their technique as follows: “The fault lines the fragments form together are the script that discloses their meaning.”Theodor W. Adorno, "Tagebuch der großen Reise, Oktober 1949 Aufzeichnungen bei der Rückkehr aus dem Exil." In *Frankfurter Adorno Blätter*, No. VIII, 2003, 99. Author's translation. Nearly a decade after the publication of Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno introduces Heinz Krüger’s study of the aphorism as a philosophical form with a revealing turn of phrase: aphoristic thinking is “thinking in breaks.”Theodor W. Adorno, "Introduction to Heinz Krüger's Studies On the Aphorism as Philosophical Form (1956)." *Substudies* (blog), 22 February 2026. <https://jamescrane.substack.com/p/tw-adornothinking-in-breaks-1956>

Horkheimer and Adorno’s conscious decision to adopt aphoristic form and style at the height of their theoretical collaboration in the 1940s was motivated by, and motivated in turn, a shared conception of critical theory on the model of the critique of political economy. In a 1939 letter, Horkheimer defends their common methodological orientation to a critic of Adorno’s recent work, explaining that whenever they struggled to find the relevant material or social-economic mediations that shape a given cultural or intellectual product, they preferred to leave a blank space instead of filling in the gaps with false solutions to the problem:

We are very conscious of the demand for economic mediation; just as we are of the immense difficulties that stand in the way of this. To replace it, however, with an intellectual-historical [mediation] of the kind you propose would mean falling behind the essay’s approach to the subject matter and adopting psychological-historical explanations wherever political economy fails to deliver. We prefer to leave the gaps in mediation like blank spots on a map, and to present the problem as an objective, social one.Max Horkheimer to Hans Mayer, 3/23/1939. *Substudies* (blog), 6 March 2025. <https://jamescrane.substack.com/i/158485476/13-marxism-and-method>

In 1943, Horkheimer reaffirms that the distinction between critical theory and the prevailing “pluralism” in the human and social sciences is “the critique of political economy, which established dialectical relations between the totality of the social sciences” in a way antithetical to the practice of contemporary “academic groups, a kind of dealing between the different rackets which confirm to one another that they are indispensable.”Max Horkheimer to Friedrich Pollock, 10 February 1943, in *MHGS*, Bd. 17 (1996), 423-424. English in original. Critical theory is neither pluralist nor monist.See "The Method of Concept-formation in Critical Theory (1941)," *Substudies* (blog), 28 June 2025. <https://jamescrane.substack.com/p/the-method-of-concept-formation-in> It refuses both as complementary pseudo-solutions to the conflict of the faculties, itself an expression of “society as an antagonistic totality.”Adorno to Horkheimer, 12/23/1949. *Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer. Briefwechsel 1927-1969. Band III: 1945-1969* (2005, Suhrkamp), 395-396. Though most of the fragments revolve around topics from the history of philosophy, the fragments are also reflective of (or at least aspire to be) an approach that could be characterized as non-synthetic multi-disciplinarity. The fragments suddenly shift between a variety of theoretical and scientific discourses but nevertheless seem to lack any unified meta-theoretical perspective. In an unpublished memo on the ISR’s empirical social research, Adorno distinguishes the ISR’s approach from prevailing customs in “pluralistic” interdisciplinary research, such as the introduction of “factors” from various disciplines (e.g., sociological, psychological, economic factors) that remain external to the research process. Critical theory, to the contrary, treats each object of investigation as “a unifold phenomenon inseparably bound up with the structure of society as a whole” and the different approaches, e.g., sociological or psychological or economic, are kept “as far apart as possible in order to attain ultimate theoretical unity. […] There is no “synthesis” but only the tilting over of a radical pursuit of a thesis into another field of explanation.”Theodor W. Adorno, " 'Mammoth Motives,' Notizen zum Verhältnis von Soziologie und Psychologie des Antisemitismus" [1944], *MHA Na 655*, 176-178. Already in his 1928/29 review of Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Horkheimer describes the methodological orientation as a kind of “critical seriousness” in philosophy that “begins with the barbaric border crossing” from philosophy “into economics and politics.”Horkheimer, "On Lenin's *Materialism and Empirio-criticism*" (1928/29). *Substudies* (blog), 24 October 2025. <https://jamescrane.substack.com/p/max-horkheimeron-lenins-materialism>

Horkheimer argues for the necessity of this crossing given Lenin’s own four-part definition of dialectical logic: first, objects of inquiry must be examined in all of their “mediacies,” and according to the criterion of “comprehensiveness” as “a safeguard against mistakes and rigidity”; second, objects of inquiry must be “taken in [their] development, change, in [their] “self-movement” (as Hegel sometimes puts it)”; third, a full “definition” of an object of inquiry must involve the whole of human praxis, which serves as both a criterion of truth and an index of its practical wants; fourth, “dialectical logic holds that ‘truth is always concrete, never abstract.’ ”"Once Again on the Trade Unions: The Current Situation and the Mistakes of Trotsky and Bukharin" (1921), V.I. Lenin, *Collected Works*, Vol. 32. (Moscow : Progress Publishers, 1973), 94. Horkheimer’s conception of dialectical logic as “a material doctrine of categories” in the 1938 prospectus applies these four demands to the categories of social theory and science, including Marxism itself.Despite the close parallels between Lenin's fourfold definition of dialectical logic in "Once Again on the Trade Unions" (1921), the text Horkheimer cites in both his notes for the 1928/29 review and the review itself, and Horkheimer's 1938 prospectus, the connection has not been sufficiently acknowledged in previous secondary literature. For Horkheimer's previously unpublished notes for the essay, see: "Horkheimer: Notes on Lenin and Method (1928/29)," translated by James Crane, in *Substudies* (blog), 20 March 2026. <https://jamescrane.substack.com/p/horkheimer-notes-on-lenin-and-method> In unpublished materials for a draft of the preface to the late-1960s republication of Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno would characterize the book as an attempt to do just that.Theodor W. Adorno, "Aus einem Entwurf »Zur Neuausgabe« der Dialektik der Aufklärung Frankfurt a.M., Februar 1969," *Frankfurter Adorno Blätter VIII* (edition text + kritik, 2003), 7-8.

As mentioned in passing above, when read chronologically, the fragments seem to suggest their own pattern of interpretation. The thematic focus shifts from the history of logical forms (of judgment), as in “Copula and Subsumption” (1939), to the relationship between logical forms and language, as in “Original Sin and Copula” and “Haupt- und Nebensatz” (1942/44), and finally to questions concerning the dialectical method and the fundamental categories of dialectical thinking, up to “the concept” as such, as in nearly all of the fragments written post-1944. These three thematic foci converge in “Trust in History” (1946). Since the other fragments either anticipate the essay or continue to inhabit its conceptual milieu, “Trust in History” is a virtual center of gravity for the collection as a whole and can therefore serve as an interpretive key. Consulting “Trust in History” whenever the other shorter fragments break off, often very abruptly, is strongly recommended. In lieu of a conclusion, I wanted to offer readers a list of “checks” they might find useful to perform while reading the fragments, an exercise I’ve come to rely on in my own work. First, check whether and how the three essential moments of the original conception of the dialectical logic (reconstruction, application, anticipation) play a role in the fragment. Second, check whether and how historical forms of social practice, including language itself, mediate between abstract logical forms and concrete social contents. Third, check whether and how “universality” or “the universal” undergoes inversions in value as its double-sided character, both repressive and utopian, is progressively developed.

Bibliography

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Adorno, Theodor W. “Tagebuch der großen Reise, Oktober 1949: Aufzeichnungen bei der Rückkehr aus dem Exil.” Frankfurter Adorno Blätter VIII (2003): 99. Author’s translation.

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Horkheimer, Max. Letter to Walter Benjamin, February 23, 1939. In Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, vol. 16 (hereafter MHGS 16), 564–68. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1995.

———. Eclipse of Reason. New York: Continuum, 1974.

———. Letter to Erich Fromm, July 29, 1934. Substudies (blog), December 8, 2025. https://jamescrane.substack.com/p/horkheimer-early-sketch-for-a-dialectical.

———. “Hegel and the Problem of Metaphysics” (1932). Translated by James Crane. Substudies (blog), May 9, 2025. https://jamescrane.substack.com/i/162852001/hegel-and-the-problem-of-metaphysics-1932.

———. “[Idee, Aktivität und Programm des Instituts für Sozialforschung]” (1938). In Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, vol. 12, Nachgelassene Schriften 1931–1949 (hereafter MHGS 12), 156–57. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1985. For the English translation commissioned by the ISR in 1938, see “An Institute for Social Research: Idea, Activity, and Program (1938),” transcribed and edited by James Crane, Substudies (blog), June 9, 2025, https://jamescrane.substack.com/i/165428535/i-an-institute-for-social-research-idea-activity-and-program-1938.

———. Letter to Karl Landauer, March 18, 1935. Substudies (blog), December 8, 2025. https://jamescrane.substack.com/i/181013997/letterhorkheimer-re-idea-for-a-dialectical-logic.

———. Letter to Paul L. Landsberg, December 23, 1939. Translated by James Crane. Substudies (blog), March 18, 2025. https://jamescrane.substack.com/i/158566797/letterhorkheimer-re-logic-in-the-tunnel.

———. “The Marxian Method and Its Applicability to an Analysis of the Present Crisis”: excerpt from the minutes of Discussion No. 5, ISR Internal Seminar (May 27, 1936). MHGS 15, 408–9. Author’s translation.

———. Letter to Hans Mayer, March 23, 1939. Substudies (blog), March 6, 2025. https://jamescrane.substack.com/i/158485476/13-marxism-and-method.

———. “The Method of Concept-Formation in Critical Theory” (1941). Substudies (blog), June 28, 2025. https://jamescrane.substack.com/p/the-method-of-concept-formation-in.

———. “Notes on Lenin and Method” (1928/29). Translated by James Crane. Substudies (blog), March 20, 2026. https://jamescrane.substack.com/p/horkheimer-notes-on-lenin-and-method.

———. “On Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism” (1928/29). Substudies (blog), October 24, 2025. https://jamescrane.substack.com/p/max-horkheimeron-lenins-materialism.

Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. “On the Critique of Language” (September 1941). Substudies (blog), November 8, 2025. https://jamescrane.substack.com/p/horkheimer-and-adornoon-the-critique.

Horkheimer, Max. Letter to Friedrich Pollock, February 10, 1943. In Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 17 (hereafter MHGS 17). Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1996. 423–24. English in original.

———. Letter to Friedrich Pollock, March 27, 1946. MHGS 17, 714–15. Author’s translation.

Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. “Rescue of the Enlightenment (October 1946).” Translated by James Crane. Substudies (blog), August 11, 2025. https://jamescrane.substack.com/p/horkheimer-and-adornorettung-der.

Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. “Two Unpublished Fragments by Horkheimer and Adorno” (1946). Translated by James Crane. Critical Theory Working Group (blog), September 30, 2025. https://ctwg.net/blog/2025/HA_Fragments_1946/.

Horkheimer, Max. Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings. Translated by G. F. Hunter, M. S. Kramer, and J. Torpey. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993.

Lenin, V. I. “Once Again on the Trade Unions: The Current Situation and the Mistakes of Trotsky and Bukharin” (1921). In Collected Works, vol. 32. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973.

Marx, Karl. “Abstract from the Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.” Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/df-jahrbucher/law-abs.htm.

———. “Contribution to Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction.” In Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 3, Karl Marx, March 1843–August 1844, translated by J. Cohen, C. Dutt, et al. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010.

———. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft). Translated by Martin Nicolaus. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, in association with New Left Review, 1973.

Schmid Noerr, Gunzelin. “Zum werk- und zeitgeschichtlichen Hintergrund der Dialektik der Aufklärung.” In Aufklärungskritik und Aufklärungsmythen: Horkheimer und Adorno in philosophiehistorischer Perspektive, edited by Sonja Lavaert and Winfried Schröder. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018.

———, and Eva-Maria Ziege, eds. Zur Kritik der regressiven Vernunft: Beiträge zur “Dialektik der Aufklärung.” Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2019.

Schweppenhäuser, Hermann. “The Concept of Language and Linguistic Presentation in Horkheimer and Adorno” (1986). Translated by James Crane. Critical Theory Working Group (blog), April 22, 2024. https://ctwg.net/blog/2024/language/.

Wiggershaus, Rolf. The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance. Translated by Michael Robertson. Cambridge: Polity, 1994.

Ziege, Eva-Maria. Antisemitismus und Gesellschaftstheorie: Die Frankfurter Schule im amerikanischen Exil. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2009.

Archival Sources

Adorno, Theodor W. “›Mammoth Motives,‹ Notizen zum Verhältnis von Soziologie und Psychologie des Antisemitismus” (1944). MHA Na 655, 176–78. Horkheimer, Max. “The Philosophy of Western Society” (1938). MHA Na 657, 297. “International Institute of Social Research: A Report on Its History, Aims and Activities 1933–1938” (1939). MHA Na 656, 371.

Fragments for A Dialectical Logic

Program: ‘A Dialectical Logic’ (1938)Max Horkheimer, "Idee, Aktivität und Programm des Instituts für Sozialforschung" [1938], in *Gesammelte Schriften* (hereafter cited as *MHGS*), ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, vol. 12, *Nachgelassene Schriften 1931--1949* (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1985), 156--57. Cf. the Institute's original 1938 English-language typescript, "An Institute for Social Research: Idea, Activity, and Program," transcribed and ed. James Crane, in "Collection: The Idea of an Institute for Social Research: Reports 1938--1944," *Substudies* (blog), June 9, 2025, <https://jamescrane.substack.com/p/collection-the-idea-of-an-institute>.

The guiding concern of the work is not a formalist epistemology, but a material doctrine of categories. In scientific and political discussions about social problems, there are certain categories which are used constantly, but which nevertheless give rise to differences of opinion as soon as a more precise definition is called for. Such categories include concepts like causality, tendency, progress, law, necessity, freedom, class, culture, value, ideology, dialectic, and so forth. The equivocal and vague use of such concepts has resulted in the fact that whenever they seem to have been given an unambiguous definition in philosophy or psychology, the definition is in fact merely abstract—so abstract that no further meaning can be attributed to them. One influential philosophical school of the present, so-called logical empiricism, accordingly declares all such concepts utterly meaningless. True, these words have been terribly abused; at times, even misused for dogmatic and narrow-minded metaphysics. However, the prevailing fashion of simply discarding them can only reinforce the reigning confusion and helplessness of the intellect. In truth, all of these concepts have a correct meaning, though never one that can be defined once and for all with the very same words. Concepts cannot be treated the same way the Egyptians once did their corpses, as if by means of the technique of definition they could be embalmed and preserved intact for millennia. The desire for such security can never be fulfilled in the realm of spirit. The content of the foundational categories of the philosophy of history can only be determined by their exact relationship to the historical course of the present. These categories can only be preserved on the condition that they are not embalmed but are instead kept alive through the continuous effort of relating them back to reality. Whatever freedom, value, or culture might mean today can only be presented if a critical position is taken towards the existing state of things, demonstrating the extent to which what exists today is freedom in the proper sense and to what extent, contrary to the ruling ideology, what exists is rather compulsion, insecurity, fear, and powerlessness. Every determination of philosophical concepts involves the presentation of human society in its socially given condition. In this respect, the planned book will approach logic in a similar way to Hegel’s great work—namely, not a mere enumeration of abstract forms of thought, but rather a determination of the most decisive, content-laden categories of the most progressive consciousness of the present.

I. Copula and Subsumption (1939).

Copula and Subsumption (1939)Horkheimer, "Kopula und Subsumtion" [1939], in *MHGS* 12:69--74.

Discursive logic is completely focused on the opposition of universal and particular. According to it, language has to raise temporal events to atemporal concepts, multiplicity to unity; the business of language par excellence is subsumption. Science follows, formulating the invariants that recur in such events. Propositions that express invariants are called laws. Thus, discursive logic returns to a historyless actuality, however much the universal may subsequently be differentiated in relation to new special cases. The idea of a fixed order of kinds, the secret presupposition that, fundamentally, nothing changes, is inseparable from discursive logic. Language makes the new appear as old; it proves that all is given in the framework of that which has always been. Language stamps.

What this function has to signify, to what extent it’s objectively grounded—the truth of language has been up for debate since philosophy first began. According to the realistic conception, the universal, and indeed only the universal, exists. The first philosophers taught: there is but one great thing: Water, Fire, Air. Language makes the senses—according to which what is given is not the one but the many—see reason. It says: the tree is water, the house is water, the heavens are water, the only thing that exists is water. What the “is” signifies, the specific Being of the arché, is not discussed. Particular modes of existence cannot be thought. The distinction between the first Being and individual things is not, because individual things, taken for themselves, are not; because they are merely the first Being itself. All speech, however diverse it may sound, is fundamentally the same gesture of pointing to the individual with the one expression: Water—Water; Air—Air; and so on.

When later instead of just the one arché several were adopted, the affair became more complicated without, however, changing in principle. The individual thing was no longer the universal substance, but a mixture of substances. Take, for example, the concepts of ‘having’ and ‘properties.’ A thing has several properties; it is a mixture of several elements. Contradiction enters—without, however, becoming explicit. The same logical function is sufficient for relating all individual things to a single arché. If, however, this individual thing “is” fire in the same exact way it “is” water, the distinction of principles is negated. They have no being apart from being in the individual, which, for itself, is not. But the inherence is formulated through the copula, and discursive logic knows only the one. Language, in its Being, drives to monism and identity philosophy.

The successors of the nature-philosophers de-substantialized the substances; the relation of the one Weltding to the many individuals was transposed into that of the universal to the particular. Beyond the universal is not. As soon as one speaks, a particular is designated as a universal. Apart from this, one cannot speak, except, at most, to give names. In the traditional sense, cognition always refers back to an unchanging, timeless Being—even if the contrary is asserted. If the claim is abandoned that every proposition must adapt itself to the schema of subsumption, the subsumption of a particular subject by means of the copula under a preformed predicate-concept, then formal logic ceases to be universal. It is especially committed to the postulate that verbal statements must be capable of translation into substantive ones. Every event “is” a special case of its genus. The proposition “he hates” reduces the occurrence to abstract hate, which does not itself hate, but “is,” in the sublimated mode of being of the universal “is,” understood according to the thingly Being of the arché. According to formal logic, there is only one activity: “to be,” and “to be” is no real activity, no spontaneity, but rather the timeless duration of the genus derived from sheer thingly insistence, an eternal sameness.

Were the verbal statements not regarded as equivalent to the predicative propositions into which they are translatable, there would be as many logics as there are verbs. The logical relation of words would no longer be restricted to relationships such as encompassing and encompassed, universal and particular, substance and accident. There would be as many logical relationships as constellations in reality. Aristotle and Hegel are not distinguished with respect to the tendency to identify logic and metaphysics, but are distinguished in that the former encloses the world in simple and fixed boundaries and restricts it to the rigid hierarchy of a world that his logical laws reflect. Hegel, however, sought to raise differentiated, historical reality to speech through logic; but, of course, in the end, he sank it back down into the Eleatic night. Hegel’s logic too serves the philosophy of identity.

Nominalism believes itself far removed from these difficulties. According to nominalism, the copula has only the subjective function of memory. “He is an executioner” means he’s displayed certain traits here and there. The “is” says nothing about him nor about his victim, but describes the relation between my present impression and my memory. I am only ever thinking, only ever speaking about the relation between my impressions and my ordering-system, but never really about other human beings themselves. According to realism, language points to some spectral reality behind time, whereas in nominalism the copula fulfills the function of affixing signs or markers to appearances that bring the event into connection not with reality but to our system of signs or markers as a whole. Language no longer signifies anything outside itself; the reference to the fixed order of kinds, which both school retain in their conception, has no meaning outside this very kind of referral. In speech, especially in science, nothing is truly meant and expressed, but merely “operated.” According to nominalism, language is mute. There is no specific relationship of word and thing in the sense of expression, significance, meaning, and so forth. One can—according to the older nominalism—investigate the psychological relations of value-representations and other phenomena of consciousness; one can—according to the newer nominalism—establish the physical relations of words, brain processes, facial movements, and other things, each of which is the concern of a different specialization. The distinction, however, between an object and something that would not be an object at all is meaningless. What follows from nominalism is the omnipotence of positive science and, indeed, the impossibility of putting it into question. Kant’s attempt to simultaneously recognize and delimit physics and nominalism went far beyond nominalism. His assertion of the autonomy of the person is burdened with all the problems of realism. It returns the transient reality of the empirical human being to the level of eternal Being.

The nominalists would rather not pose the question of the truth of language in language. Instead, they would much rather describe what takes place in science or popular judgments. They replace philosophy, the critique of specialist knowledge, with apology. They are without bias and adapt their representations of logic to whatever use the professors make of it; they pick up their examples of cognition from the latter. If the scientific community were to conduct itself differently, no doubt these philosophers would find it to be just as good. On the basis of such experience, they subsume thinking under the concept of “operating,” which is perfectly suited for precisely such linguistic commerce. The so-called ‘rules of the game’ of thinking, which nominalism touts as laws, the axioms of formal logic, depict something crucial about actual language as much as the physical law of inertia depicts something crucial about an actual revolution.

The dispute over universals has nothing whatsoever to do with the universality of discursive logic. With few exceptions, both parties have taken it for granted that the reduction of the new to the familiar is the function of language. In language so understood, all of the concepts one might need to grasp anything are already available. Even the ars inveniendi is bound to the mathesis universalis, just as the forces of production are bound to the form of existing society. The defense of language against barbarians transforms into enmity against spontaneity. The “is” in the proposition about the executioner means, at bottom, that his property is grounded in the nature of the thing, that it cannot be otherwise. In the sense of the Platonic myth, he chose the character of the executioner for himself before he was born and now leads the life of the executioner by necessity. The addition of a temporal index that limits the quality to a moment or to a year or to a decade or etc., leaves the function of the “is” wholly unaffected. In this case, the inescapable refers to the given span. He cannot change; for it is not his changing but his being that functions as copula. At best, the propositions that ‘A’ is an executioner at point [I.] and ‘A’ is a minister at point [II.] can both be correct. The identity of ‘A’ cannot be maintained in a strict sense; because, according to discursive logic, ‘A’ must equal ‘A’ (“if two quantities are equal to a third, then they are equal amongst themselves”), it would have to follow that ministers are executioners. Contradictions are far removed from such logic; it eliminates the identity of the person and stands by the immutability of the system. The concepts remain separated, whatever might occur in reality. The “is” in the language of discursive logic stems from the Being of a spectral nature.

Today, human relationships correspond to the use of language. The question—which, according to Schopenhauer, outstrips all others in importance—is asked: what one is. One has conversations whose only meaning is finding this out, and the state apparatus has the tendency to adapt this logic. One is a Red, a Jew, a Fascist, a Coward, a Trotskyist, a Foreigner—and one’s happiness and unhappiness hang in the balance of such a verdict. One is to be subsumed, seized, classified, imprisoned, and killed accordingly. Discursive logic celebrates its triumphs: the determination and classification, the “statement,” the provable statement really counts for something. And what could be easier to prove than what costs someone their head. What could save them—tends to be insight into other orders.

Discussion (with Adorno) of Max Horkheimer’s Manuscript for “Copula and Subsumption” (October 2nd, 1939).Horkheimer, "Diskussion anschließend an das Manuskript von Max [Horkheimer] über Kopula and Subsumtion (1939)", *MHGS* 12:494-498.

Adorno: The entire way of posing the question presupposes the ontological dignity of the copula. The decisive thing would be an analysis of the copula with the aim of determining whether there is such an ontological dignity of the copula and how it relates to the claim of the positivists that the copula has absolutely no content.

Horkheimer: In the history of logic and of German idealism, [the idea is that] the copula would really lead to the essence of the concept of the subject. Example: This is a human being. The concept of the genus functions as the essence, and the copula has the function of placing the individual under the essence and [at the same time] conferring reality to the essence. The subsumption of the individual under the essence amounts to the annihilation of the individual. “[The] real is simply the essence.” The individual is canceled out in speech. That is how it is in Hegel: that which is no longer subsumable is worthless existence.

Adorno: The grounding though is that the meaning of being principally presents a determinate relation of the kind that every time one says “it is,” it is asserted that “it” falls under something that was already there.

Horkheimer: It’s about the interpretation of being, namely with the attempt [to understand] what really happens when one says of something, “it is.”

Adorno: The moment of identity is, at base, already hidden in being as the subsumption of the particular under the essence. That which here and now ‘is,’ ‘is’ self-same. The concept of being is thereby entirely reduced to the function of identity.

Horkheimer: Objection: if I say, “that [fellow] is an irate man,” I am only bringing something to the attention of others. By intention, I am not subsuming, but rather only indicating the new under the form of what was already there.

Adorno: Your theory is a monstrous attack on language. Is what lies at hand in language not dialectical? If I name something, is that always merely an analytical function? Does the copula always mean the self-same in all possible cases?

Horkheimer: If it doesn’t always do that, then we arrive at a kind of pluralism: sometimes the copula has that function, and sometimes it does not, so what I call uniform logic is broken apart. How should the other relationship be? I honor language very highly; I take it very seriously.

Adorno: In Hegel there is also the motif: everything is what it is, and, for that very reason, not what it is.

Horkheimer: That is, however, at base only an everlasting process of rectification, an ever more concrete and differentiated identification. The whole system still comes down to the subsumption of everything that is, and thus to being. In Hegel, “is” can only really be predicated of being itself. Even now, I still have the notion—which I really ought to get rid of—that language claims to designate that which is.

Adorno: It could always be that this kind of thinking, under the form “it is,” contains within itself the only possibility of going beyond that which merely is. I cannot imagine a critique that would not also really be this sort of identification. The logic in which we live is a kind of wall before reality. We are so enclosed within it that any escape from it other than one which would, at the same time, remain inside it is impossible. Your text awakens the feeling that we would really need to have a different language.

Horkheimer: I think that is only one side of the matter, but it is extremely difficult to describe the other. The nominalist exit is bad, a bad regress into the infinite.

Adorno: The manuscript differentiates between ontology and nominalism. I would say that if this analysis of the copula applies, then the difference between ontology and nominalism itself would be inapplicable. They both involve recognizing, subsuming.

Horkheimer: That’s how it is in my work.

Adorno: But this would also mean that we cannot differentiate between ontology and nominalism at all.

Horkheimer: They both accept the structure.

Adorno: Then what does it mean to speak of ontology and of a metaphysical concept of being, if being is nothing other than the function of identity? How can we ascribe substantiality to the concept of being?

Horkheimer: Language reduces itself to pointing.

Adorno: Can we really give ontological weight to the concept of being, as you are urging, if being is only a subsuming under that which was already there?

Horkheimer: It seems to me, however, that there is still something else tucked away into this being, namely the reference to the thing, the natural thing. If one were to speak of the being of the genus, of the known or of the old, then this would involve the permanence of eternal nature, in which—in a certain sense—everything should remain old.

Adorno: The logician can still resolve that by labeling this element of being as mere fetishization of the function of identity and excluding it.

Horkheimer: The order is, however, the reverse: there is not first of all the function of identity, which is then fetishized; rather the belief in eternal or substantial being is first, and then, only insofar as this is taken as the ground of the matter, can the function of identity be constituted at all. The gods were not invented on the basis of what was actual, rather they had to be presupposed in order for the concept of a univocal reality to be upheld at all. I do not mythologize identical being, but I can only attribute a meaning to identical being if I go back to such processes.

Adorno: Constellation of logic and myth: logic is mythical. Logical thinking is pre-logical thinking. The compulsion of logic as system is the moment of compulsion in nature, to which we have succumbed. There are, therefore, effectively two possible interpretations of logic:

1. The copula means nothing: positivists, blank space.

2. Language is given over to blind nature through becoming fixed. As I wrest this one thing away from nature and single it out as a being-for-itself, I thereby push it back into nature, as in this I say nothing other than: this is the very nature under which I subsume it.

Horkheimer: It seems to me that, in this world, language always relates everything to an order just as bad as that which the world itself presents. A better language only seems possible in a better world—in which it would, however, no longer be necessary. You can always argue that language as a whole does indeed convey something that goes beyond this.

Adorno: Hegel says that being as the function of identity is actually nothing at all, just as in positivism. He concludes from this that being is at the same time nothing. Isn’t it precisely because being is nothing but this subsuming, precisely because it ‘is not,’ that the thorn is thereby added to it, to the principle of subsumption posited in itself, which makes it otherwise?

Horkheimer: In saying “that is that,” it is really negated once again. It becomes—but no more—it is. The dialectic of being, nothing, and becoming occupies, in a certain sense, a unique place in the Hegelian dialectic as a whole. Hegel says: when we subsume something, this is only possible because the genus is a kind of intersection. The positing of being and its identification with nothing is, however, much more abstract than everything that comes later.

Adorno: The beginning of Hegel’s logic means: being, simple being without any further determination. No proposition. He sets up the copula in its abstractness, without relating it to a tode ti [‘a this’]. I don’t believe Hegel began with being by accident. The meaning rests on the withdrawnness of the being of the tode ti.

Horkheimer: The secret, the highest category for him and for the entirety of discursive logic is being; the copula must be subsumed under itself.

Adorno: Either nothing or nature is hypostatized. You have said it is a miracle that we can say or think anything at all that isn’t technical-administrative. I would say that the complete nothingness of this “is” is the fact that being is nothing other than subordination under something determinate, such that it has, in a certain way, turned against the operation that is thereby performed. Also implicit in logic is that this subsumption is nothing. This non-being of subsumption means that every individual identity is afflicted by an illness. Hegel recognized that this concept of being, having no content, is completely void, that every finite subsumption is false or inadequate.

Horkheimer: But in Hegel, there are continuous corrections. Every isolated proposition is false. Language, however, reinstates its rights once more, it makes up for it in the end. For if it did not, propositions would lose their sense.

Adorno: Hegel was very clever not to put the existential claim at the beginning of the logic. In actuality he was doing phenomenology! When he talks about being at the beginning, this is precisely an attempt to not predicate being of being itself. In a certain sense, we cannot get out of discursive logic, but in another we can nevertheless go beyond it.

Horkheimer: The aversion to speaking is linked to the aversion to predicative thinking.

II. Concepts for the Philosophical Fragments (1944)

Original Sin and Copula (1942/44)Horkheimer, "Erbsünde und Kopula (1942)," *MHGS*, 12: 277--278.

The crux of the problem of language is hidden in the copula. At bottom, language is incomprehensible because the copula is incomprehensible.

One side of the copula is relating everything new to the fixed hierarchy of kinds, the silencing of history. There is something akin to reconciliation in this: the fear of the totally foreign and isolated is dispelled. It is brought under the protection of what lasts.

It is this reflection that first grants the logical categories their meaning. Positivism removes the poison from questions like “What is truth? What is universal and particular? What is thinking?”—here too, the answer lies in definition, as all judgments are merely analytic. Such evasion can only be countered by pointing to the fact that there is a relationship to power at stake in these questions. The questions really do demand an answer to whether and to what extent categories participate in the highest good. It is not for nothing that the theory of the neoplatonists, that concepts are emanations of God, was held in high respect by the sharpest minds for centuries. It betrays an abyssal insight into the relation between logic and theology.

Being and Power are indissoluble; even the Stoics and Spinoza knew this. No great European philosopher has been able to dissolve this relationship. Kant’s synthetic judgments a priori are an attempt to rescue truth without anchoring it in power. He paid for this with the metaphysical obscurity of his concept of pure original apperception and the absence of any principles for the discovery of the categories, the two greatest weaknesses of his theoretical philosophy.

However, an abyss has opened between Being and Power in history, and so truth exists only in negation. This insight is the heart of Hegel’s philosophy—so far as it does not, like Baron von Münchhausen, pull itself out of the water by its own pigtails and, with the deification of determinate negation, with its assumption into the absolute, return to neoplatonism. Transcendental logic did not ignore the doctrine of original sin and, despite its ontological method, became the critique of ontology. Conversely, dialectical logic wanted to be ontology, whereas its method was the clearest expression of breaking with it. In restoring history, in good Christian fashion, into the guaranteed vehicle of truth and redemption, it reinstated the copula in all its injustice.

Haupt- und Nebensatz (1942/44).Horkheimer, "Haupt- und Nebensatz" (1942/44), *MHGS*, 12: 279--281. [Translators Note:] This piece turns on a distinction in German grammar which does not have an exact analogue in English. The German word *Satz* refers to both 'sentences' and 'clauses.' The latter are divided into two types: *Hauptsatz* and *Nebensatz*. With regard to their function in sentence structure, they are basically analogous to independent and dependent clauses in English, but they are differentiated by different word orders in a way distinct from English. In a *Hauptsatz*, the 'first' verb (i.e. either the sole 'main' verb or the 'first' modal or auxiliary verb) always occupies the 'second position,' with the subject and object(s) able to occupy any other 'position' (except for the 'final' one, which will be occupied by the other verbs---in a particular order, of course---if there are any other verbs, and then finally the detachable prefix of the 'first' verb, if there is one). In a *Nebensatz*, on the other hand, the 'first' verb always comes last, immediately following the other verbs if there are any, and with its detachable prefix still attached, while the subject and object(s) can again be in any position except the 'final' one. This grammatical feature makes *Nebensätze* markedly distinct from the *Hauptsätze* to which they are attached.

Dependent clauses belong to the juristic, argumentative phase of thinking. Primitives and totalitarians talk in independent clauses. “The Jew will be burnt.” In differentiated social systems one at least says, “the Jew, if he does not convert…” “the slave, who has stolen…” or “a murderer, whosoever he be…” There is a connection between humaneness [Humanität] and dependent clauses. As dubious social practice left its mark on all areas of spirit, the concept of the universality of law, as it was mediated in such dependent clauses, pointed out ideology, and so pointed beyond it. When dependent clauses fall, the idea of universality that exists in their mediation falls with them.

Even so, philosophy cannot exempt itself from the tendency towards the independent clause; it is able to reverse this development as little as any other byproducts of decline. Its adherence to outdated linguistic custom lends philosophy a character of harmlessness and the existing order a sheen of humaneness. Argument, restraint, and artful construction lose their weight. The style of theory becomes simpler, though because in doing so it denounces the very simplicity it consciously adopts by mirroring the barbaric process. The style approximates the rackets with the force of hatred and thus becomes their opposite. Its logic becomes as summary as their justice, as crude as their lies, as conscienceless as their agents—and, in this opposition to barbarism, becomes specific, exact, and scrupulous. The distinctionless designation of the essential being of society as the embodiment of rackets is infinitely differentiated, since it summarily denounces the distinctionless brutality against powerlessness. The generalization and simplification of philosophy, which, in the eradication of even one innocent, forgets that the millions who allowed this to happen survive it, displays no lack of subtlety. In omission of the dependent clause that relativizes the mutilation of humanity, it attributes absoluteness to the horror that emanates from this. The subtlest shade of pleasure is sacred to philosophy. In the lack of any in-depth description of the apparatus, in the absence of syntactic conjunction for the why and because and when of the night in which one victim is like the other becomes eloquent in philosophy. Reformism reaches for statistics; for cognition, one concentration camp is enough.

Any description of the concentration camp that draws fine distinctions between different categories of inmate and the respective kinds of abuse to which they will be subject, any description that follows closely the official motives and statistics in the reports from those institutions of hell, as if they were just one more object of study for political science—already participates in its apology, like the Catholic clerks who propagated the legality and ecclesiastical order of the Inquisition. Since the war began, the atrocities ‘over there’ have been handled summarily, even when with caution. But they aren’t the reason that war broke out. Domination declared war because it was threatened, not because the dominated were murdered. The atrocities were not the impetus, not by any means; it was rather the unworkable demands made on capital. Just think of how much more convenient it would have been if they could come to an agreement with reasonable hangmen, with the hangmen they already have at home. They forget that fascist practice only condescends to specification in the face of actual power, not when confronted with the unarmed competition. Before weakness, domination becomes totalitarian. Powerlessness can be subsumed so easily. The worthy competitor is only fought openly where no understanding between well-matched forces is possible. In himself, he is entitled to a dependent clause.

Reversal of the Idealist Dialectic (1944)Horkheimer, "Umschlag der idealistischen Dialektik" (1944), *MHGS* 12:286.

On close inspection, Hegel’s doctrine that the concept is the “inner side” of the thing itself, performed as the idealist dialectic, transforms into the materialist of its own accord. It’s like certain optical illusions: if you stare at them long enough, they reverse into another figure, just as much the image you see before you as the one you were just looking at. Turning Hegel right side up, from head to foot, was only so compelling because he was already standing.

III. Miscellaneous Fragments on Dialectical Logic (1945)

Principle of the Individual (ca. 1945)Horkheimer, "Prinzip des Individuums" [undated; editors assign 'probable' date of 1942], *MGHS* 12:318--319. Because the dating of the fragment in MHA Na 803, 'NY Notizen [I],' is '1945,' in the absence of any indication of an earlier date of composition, the date '1945' has been retained.

The individual is not a natural but a spiritual being. It necessarily involves reflection on itself as a principle separate from others, possessing a special connection to itself as distinct from life in general. Without the “I,” there is no individual.

Leibniz was intimately familiar with this relation. Indeed, he made his monads the elements of the universe, which they reflect. But insofar as naked monads, unconscious of themselves, from which dead things are composed, merely exhibit a negative, suffering, they are only monads in possibility, individuals in-themselves, in contradiction to their own essential being, pure activity as mere suffering. With this contradiction, the biological and historical process of development is set into motion that ultimately brings them to consciousness. Knowledge alone overcomes the contradiction and makes the living substance into what it originally is—individual.

The real, which Leibniz called “monad,” Hegel called “concept.” The concept becomes aware of itself as the individual acts and learns, through its participation in the universal process of development, what it is. Through the subjectivity of individuals, the substantial is actualized. Yet this historical process perpetuates itself in the death of individuals. Substance endures not as individual but as genus. Hegel turns the ephemerality of the individual into the ground of its own relative worthlessness. The principle by which the contradiction finally reveals itself is not the substantial form of the individual, but rather the totality per se. Insofar as the individual thinks the truth, it remains something abstract, not simply because of the social coinage of his thoughts, but because of the boundedness of his factual existence.

The difference between the Leibnizian and Hegelian systems is the difference between pantheism and theology. The question is: whether the progression of the dialectic beyond the individual to the genus, from the individual to the course of history as a whole, from the particular life to the closed totality, is not, in fact, the same as stepping back from the good into the bad infinity, from the essential into sheer quantity. (Which must, for Hegel, add up!)

The Golden Mean (1945)Horkheimer, "Goldener Mittelweg," *MHGS* 12:297.

The dialectical method could easily be understood as one of ‘the golden mean.’ Some proposition—for example, ‘true thinking is that of madness’—is spoken. This provokes a counter-thesis, which cancels [zurücknimmt] the concept of ‘madness’ and determines what kind of ‘madness’ or what features of ‘madness’ were meant. One could just as well have asserted the reverse, that healthy common sense is true, such that common sense would then be cancelled, to the point it no longer bore any resemblance to English philosophy. Accordingly, the much-vaunted sublation of opposites would in reality be the sanding-off of extremes, steering towards some juste milieu.

This view is not as entirely incorrect as we dialecticians would like to imagine. The description strips the method down to a minimum—which, of course, decides everything. What guides the dialectician in cancellation or negation is neither aversion to extremes nor inclination to plausibility, but is rather the fact that he never comes to terms with the existence of hopelessness and horror. This generates the scope and direction of the negation. The determination of truth-as-madness is incorrect because madness is as much in harmony with what exists as is healthy common sense. Madness, therefore, is not negated insofar as it is extreme, but insofar as it is identical with its opposite—that is, insofar as it is not extreme at all.

The same can be shown for all dialectical theorems. That the dialectical method, which is one of extremes, approaches the golden mean when stripped down to a minimum, has its counterparts in other areas, for example, in the aesthetic and the political.

The Dialectical Concept (1945)Horkheimer, "Der dialektische Begriff," *MHGS* 12: 299--301.

The quickest way to determine the difference between dialectical and undialectical thinking is as follows: in undialectical thinking, concepts are established by definitions, and any new cognition results in the expansion of their real scope; in dialectical thinking, however, new cognition constitutes an attack on the significance of the concept itself. Concepts need not, therefore, be tossed out as old scrap.

Of course, the distinction only becomes intelligible if it is made clear that in dialectical thinking each concept stands for the truth. The dialectical progression only ever comes about through negation of the absolute claim of concepts and judgments; thus, concepts and judgments which make no such claim are, in logical terms, sheer nonsense. At bottom, undialectical thinking has the same intention, only, in its resignation, it has given up and forgotten. In ceasing to reflect on the movement through which thinking is actually constituted, in relegating such concern to psychology, which, in absence of such reflection, is just as nonsensical, the integrative development, i.e., spirit, is driven out of concepts, which are transformed from thoughts into mere containers, things—not even signs, since a sign is only a sign at all by virtue of the intellectual intention it awakens. (Susanne Langer overlooks what’s decisive.)[*MHGS* 12, Ed. Note:] Cf. Susanne Langer, *Philosophy in a New Key* (1942), especially chapters 2 and 3; in her critique of utilitarian theories of language, Langer distinguishes between (symptomatic) signs and (representative) symbols. [Translator's Note:] In a letter to Pollock dated 3/21/1944, Horkheimer requests a copy of Langer's *Philosophy in a New Key*, MHA Na 581, [287r](https://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/horkheimer/content/pageview/6544976) .

What is becoming more manifest in social reality with each passing day was latent within bourgeois thinking from the beginning: the liquidation of development. One need only consider the concept of truth. Once defined, for example, as adaequatio intellectus et rei, there is nothing more to be learned about or beyond this highest idea at which all intellectual interest aims. In relation to this idea, the sole task left to thinking is the mechanical testing of whether a given proposition does or does not correspond to it; the conditions for this procedure are compiled in so-called logic. Opposed to this stands the assumption that we cannot yet know what the truth is, because cognition [Erkenntnis] is not finished. According to the latter view, the intellectual process consists not in the mere augmentation or correction of individual truths, one in which the purely formal concept of truth would itself remain untouched; rather, the material progression of the process affects the formal category, i.e., the distinction between formal and material is continuously sublated.

What holds for the concept of truth does for other concepts as well. Both are intimately connected. Apart from their essential identity with truth, fulfilled in each case through intellectual mediation, the relation between each concept and its object is governed by the concept of truth as well. If, however, this is not conclusively [abschlußhaft] fixed through definition, the relation between each individual concept and its object can no longer, therefore, be fixed through conclusive formal-logical propositions. The structure of logic is swept up in the course of objective cognition, just as, conversely, each step of objective cognition bears the problematic of the scope and significance of its advance with respect to conceptual relations of the highest order.

Not only does this reinforce the weight of the empirical, on which the ultimate questions now depend, but also reins it in, since these questions, with all of their demands and concerns, are henceforth implied in each act of empirical cognition. It should not be imagined that so-called empirical research is abandoned in dialectical logic. If what is called empirical research today is nothing more than the barren product of abstraction as represented in the bad separation of formal logic and material experience, and which tends, particularly in the social sciences, towards empty activity, then concrete thinking first comes into its own in the liquefaction of that opposition. Whereas in “research,” the subject matter is supposedly viewed without prejudice, but is actually viewed according to the schemata established through the economic division of labor, dialectics experiences in each instance the subject matter solely sub specie its philosophical interest, and, for that very reason, in relative freedom from the distortions of industrial conceptuality. For dialectics, appearance is always the perception of nature cut off from adequate expression, which dialectics itself would help to remedy.[Translator's Note:] Cf. Max Horkheimer, *Eclipse of Reason.* (Continuum, 2004 [1974]; Oxford University Press, 1947), 127. The attempt to understand what is, nevertheless, incapable of expression leads to speculation as a process in which the traditional dualisms are not blurred, but continuously reconfigured in their relations.

Preservation of Naïveté in Dialectics (1945)Horkheimer, "Bewahrung der Naivetät in der Dialektik," *MHGS* 12:301--302.

The dialectical spirit has a different relation to naïveté than the undialectical. The latter relates to naïveté in simple opposition: always and immediately seeking to discover conditions, causes, components, relationships of a given feeling or thing, and, even before it has discovered these, confronts givens with the anticipatory certitude that they are merely the effect of something else; that everything immediate and particular is merely a sign of the mediated and universal. The latter, that is, prescribes reification, in contrast to the naïve, who remains at the mercy of appearances.

Dialectics, however, distinguishes. It transforms naïveté without annihilating it. Like science, it too ‘gets behind’ the things, but it also preserves—and, indeed, rescues—the enchantment that emanates from them. Knowledge of relationships, transience, and illusoriness does not become a motive to apathy, as it does for Stoicism. This is the consequence of Hegel’s fundamental principle that in each successive mediation the preceding stage, i.e., the more immediate, should be sublated. There is more to this instruction than something ‘logical’ in the older sense. It implies that in the true enlightenment, that which is identical to philosophy, mythology is not shouted over and drowned out. Rather, its power is appeased, brought to rest.

Dialectics, like reflective behavior in general, resists the worship of the dead, but is nevertheless no stranger to the foolishness of handling things gently even when they cannot feel anything. In the refusal of blind domination of nature, the dialectical spirit escapes domination by nature, without, however, cutting things off from the possibility of enchanting it. The preservation of naïveté in thinking is what Kant gave the name of intellectual intuition and wanted to reserve for the Godhead alone. His successors sought to recover it for human beings by creating the dialectical method. If therapeutic psychology were what it should be, it would concentrate its efforts on uncovering the moments in individual and historical life through which power (in the figure of the father or the political ruler) made human beings incapable of devotion to things to leave them all the more securely at the mercy of things. In this function, psychology would become an instrument of philosophy once again.

IV. Trust in History (October, 1946)Horkheimer, "Vertrauen auf Geschichte" [1946], *MHGS* 12:119--127.

For the thinking of the enlightenment, society appeared as an association [Vereinigung] of human beings for the sake of their self-assertion in nature. “Necessity brings human beings together and associates them,” says Montaigne, who is able to appeal to the old empiricists for this. “This accidental association is afterwards transformed through laws… .”Michel de Montaigne, *Essais*, book 3, chap. 9, ed. Pierre Villey, vol. 3 (Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1931), 346. According to Voltaire, it was the needs which, along with the passions and reason, led the first beings out of their condition of savagery.Voltaire, *Traité de métaphysique*, in *Œuvres complètes de Voltaire*, ed. Louis Moland, vol. 22 (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1879), 221--22. Almost as soon as human beings first entered into association with each other, however, the cleverest among them took advantage of the rest, of their desire for well-being and their arrogance.

Early on, people were divided into two classes: the first, those divine men who sacrifice their self-love for the public good; the second, the miserable ones who loved only themselves: everyone wanted and wants still to belong to the first class, although, at the bottom of their hearts, everyone belongs to the second; and the most cowardly and selfish cried out louder than all the others that everything must be sacrificed at the altar of the commonwealth. The desire to command, a kind of arrogance, as detectable in a schoolyard bully or village mayor as in a Pope or a Caesar, is a powerful spur to human industry, for through it men are brought to heel by others.Voltaire. *Traité*, 233.

The darker drives, the antagonisms between human beings, develop their forces, intensify production, and facilitate civilizational progress. As Machiavelli instructed, the advantages of class struggle between the nobility and the people should not be underestimated.

They do not consider that in every republic are two diverse humors, that of the people and that of the great, and that all the laws that are made in favor of freedom arise from their disunion […] For whoever examines their end well will find that they have engendered not any exile or violence unfavorable to the common good but laws and orders in benefit of public freedom.Niccolò Machiavelli, *Discourses on Livy*, trans. H.C. Mansfield & N. Tarcov (University of Chicago Press, 1996), 16.

The idea of the creative violence of oppositions has dominated bourgeois philosophy since Heraclitus. In his Logic, Hegel calls it the power of the negative; in his Philosophy of History, the cunning of reason. The concept of society, presented here in its first steps, and which these theorists first raised to consciousness—namely, the harmony of social and individual purposes, of the universal and the particular—is actualized through the objective process of history. Marx’s theory applies this conception to capitalism. Just as earlier social forms generated the conditions for higher, more organized social forms, more satisfactory social relations for a greater share of humanity, so the present-day social form develops all of the elements needed for the final fulfillment of the concept of the right society and with it the concept of the human being. Working class politics should strengthen these economic tendencies and drive them forward to the point of their reversal. In a discussion of the role of factory legislation as a defensive means for the industrial proletariat, we read the following:

If the general extension of factory legislation to all trades for the purpose of protecting the working class both in mind and body has become inevitable, on the other hand, as we have already pointed out, that extension hastens on the general conversion of numerous isolated small industries into a few combined industries carried on upon a large scale; it therefore accelerates the con­centration of capital and the exclusive predominance of the factory system. It destroys both the ancient and the transitional forms behind which the dominion of capital is still partially hidden, and replaces them with a dominion which is direct and unconcealed. […] By maturing the material conditions and the social combi­nation of the process of production, it matures the contradictions and antagonisms of the capitalist form of that process, and there­ by ripens both the elements for forming a new society and the forces tending towards the overthrow of the old one.Marx, *Capital: Volume 1*, trans. B. Fowkes (Penguin, in association with New Left Review, 1976), 635.

Progress is, according to this theory, not unbroken, for just as every revolutionary period is preceded by periods of decline and tyranny, so the socialist one is preceded by a period of the direct, unconcealed domination of capital: fascism. The goal, however, despite all relapses, is just as surely laid out in advance for history as it is in the theories of bourgeois progressives: the rational self-preservation of associated humanity in confrontation with hostile nature.

Trust in history has replaced trust in God. It retains the conceptual realism of the Middle Ages in the sense that man fulfills his own concept through activity adequate to the course of history. While this concept is no longer linked to the concept of a Highest Being in a hierarchy of emanations, it is legitimized today through the authority of self-expanding rational civilization. However consciousless the economic, social, and psychological mechanisms that condition progress might be, the uniform direction in which their effects unfold constitutes an objective norm and bestows a significance to human interests beyond their status as subjective fact. Construction of a better society is just as much a matter of destiny for the revolutionary as integration into existing social relations is for the bourgeois. Such a conception, through which the enlightened individual imagined he could outrun the meaninglessness of existence, represents a desperate synthesis. It contains the element of heteronomy: something given, something blind is supposed to guide the human being. And in this, it is akin to the belief in fate, to any myth. Actions are to be ordered according to the course of time: its wisdom is conformism. Its every deed, service to the overpowering, all-conditioning mechanism; its idol, mute facticity. However, by holding history to be the actualization of the human being, its principle is at the same time universal: the fulfillment of a principle which is valid for everyone. It is not just that something factual should be achieved, but something spiritual that should be actualized. Insofar as the trust in history is grounded on the concept of the human being and, therefore, theory is not completely betrayed for practice, it holds open a vision of the right society. No subject can make a concept the ground of its action without at the same time, though it might forfeit its life as a result, making the claim in such a way that every other subject can affirm it as their own. This is the idea of the unity of truth which lies at the foundation of Kantian idealism. The concept negates the false principle of individuality by assuming the oppositions in which domination fixes individuals as untrue. The same judgment that postulates domination as the existing order [das Bestehende], as what holds power, by the same token denounces it as bad, for in its conceptuality, in its claim to be valid for all, it points beyond domination. In recognizing the origin of such oppositions from uniform actuality, it holds open the vision of a better one—in which the true might unfold. Wherever a conceptual judgment denies humanity, it contradicts itself. No word can be used to degrade that does not condemn the speaker. An inkling of this survives in the belief in history insofar as it posits the concept of the human being. It is a form of humanism, the last before its passage into barbarism. In it, something of what was pronounced dead by positivism and galvanized by fascism still draws breath: language. By relating actuality to concept, it revealed at the same time the abyss between the figure captured by the word and its redemption.

But language relates to the universal ambivalently. It subsumes under concepts which are the same for all. But this predicated universal—valid as comprehensive, familiar, and fixed—is not adequate to the thing it ought apply to. The predicate seeks to concretize the subject through something abstract, to determine it through something undetermined. The name of the subject is provisional; the predicate would help it find the right one, the name that would unlock its secret. The judgment is an attempt to help beings express what they cannot say in their muteness. This is the meaning of language, that towards which it always intends, despite its weakness. Dialectical negation holds fast to the idea of truth in the face of the weakness of discursive thinking; it would do justice to the subject of the judgment, the particular, even though the universal essence the judgment equates with the particular always spells the latter’s doom. The specific negation, advancing with each specific thesis, negates the copula, because the identity established by the copula involves the logical suppression in the subject of what it cannot unfold in practice. The concept under which the subject is subsumed is adequate to the subject only to the extent the subject is already circumscribed and imprisoned. Hence, Bergson banished the copula from metaphysics; dialectics, however, would convert the insight into the inadequacy of the individual judgment into the vehicle of its completion, instead of denying life such expression altogether. The inadequacy lies in the conclusiveness [Abgeschlossenheit] of the predicate. The conceptual universal, the qualities, the physical, biological, psychological forms, are, in each case, the law according to which the particular ‘goes to ground’ [zugrunde geht], they express the finitude of the particular: because the subject is an animal, a human being, a man, it must come to nothing. Judgment apprehends the living as mere nature, even where it conceives of the particular not through physical but social categories, such as ‘Nation’ or ‘State.’ Nevertheless, the concept is not external to what it comprehends. What in a single breath the copula posits as opposite and equivalent to the subject as his own essence indirectly betrays something of the secret of his longing, one which nevertheless cannot be named. In the concept, fulfillment and suffering are undivided. Its fixity faithfully mirrors that of the society which serves life only by suppressing it, develops human beings only by mutilating them, and knows no ‘homeland’ as protection except by repressing the protected. This insight pervades Hegel’s Logic: it develops the categories of the absolute as so many figures of decline. Its betrayal lies in the peace it makes with the content of such truth. Like Aristotle, it ultimately posits the finite as equivalent to what survives, the good as equivalent to what remains, and the forsaken as equivalent to the same categories through which it is forgotten. The Logic, a work which, like no other, is shot through with the injustice of judgment and so too of actuality, reposes into the system of judgments and belies the seriousness of the dialectic through the assumption of nothingness, pain, and death into the divine realm of the Idea. Through the Logic as a whole, the individual is supposed to recognize himself within and reconcile himself to the fate laid out before him by totality, no matter the hardship this may entail. By way of spirit, the individual is supposed to become one with the same order that spells his downfall. This is the goal of truth. The contradictions of history represent the opposition of the particular and the universal as it is driven to overcome itself, something Hegel still hoped for through politics until his Phenomenology. From the vantage of contemporary history: he let his hope wane and settled for the relative humanity of the welfare state as the basis for fulfillment. From then on, he located this fulfillment in the thought—on the grounds of what had been historically achieved—of reconciliation in the realm of spirit, in culture.

And so, like all bourgeois philosophy, his became one of resignation, of stoicism. With Schopenhauer and Judaism, he shares the insight into the forsakenness of the individual; with Nietzsche, he says ‘Yea’ to it. Modern existential philosophy, Heidegger’s courage-to-be before transcendental angst, is yet another version of the same stoicism, the old amor fati, the worship of the world. Every individual step of the Hegelian dialectic, so long as it is incomplete, consists in the sublation of inadequate predication. The subject that knows itself only as thing, man, has, with such judgments, not yet arrived at itself. In the end, however, the knowledge formed through all these negations is supposed to be the absolute judgment: the adequate concept. Divine truth is the insight into the division of its becoming, the totality of its determinations; truth is the last stage, whereupon the penultimate stage and all that came before it are raised to the concept. Accordingly, the truth, despite all objectivity, is merely intellectual. It actualizes itself in the one step history does not take, the step that thinking—in the shape of religion, art, philosophy—must make all on its own. The elevation of thought to perfection itself instead of its determinate negation has always meant the transfiguration of the powers of this world into the innermost being of all that lives. Thought repeats the very injustice that imprisons it. When the concept exhausts the truth, no room is left within the living except for what power encloses it; all is given as conquered through the system, through the concept, and the rest is cast aside as nothing, non-actual, accident. Hegel struck upon the spirit of language like no other: in expressing the determinacy of the finite, it spells pain and annihilation for the finite. The particular pays for its reflection as divine through language: it is thereby identified with the universal, with doom, with the figures of domination in nature and history and, in the end, with war. Whoever says Being must necessarily mean Power and Death as well. And when his judgment is made in earnest, when the particular is viewed as having utterly gone over into Being, he has already sealed its fate as Nothing, as what has justly ‘gone to ground’ [zugrunde geht]. The identification of language with truth is the work of the devil, just as the separation of truth from language is mute despair. This is the highest insight their interpenetration offers. However much the universal is determined in thinking for the sake of justice to the particular, however much every determination strives to give the particular more precise expression, the net of determinations reflects the web of fate.

Only by mediating this insight does language transform from a magical-mimetic technique into thinking. The concept is then neither, as in realism, a reproduction or reflection of the divine Idea nor, as in nominalism, a mere artifice or device without significance. The universal, object of the concept, becomes a negative for language; what it expresses, denunciation. By subsuming, it specifies suffering. When language names the universal, what binds human beings together is less that the universal by which they are captured in actuality recaptures them in thought, but rather that it says what holds them all in thrall. In such function alone does language shake the walls between human beings, behind which the identical is warped into the equality of the mutilated, the uniformity of the dominated. Skepticism and relativism, with all their knowledge of the conditionality of truth through the psychological individual, have always, through establishing the inadequacy of the concept, reinforced the absoluteness of its claim, albeit against their will. They are the sages of negation. Their summary procedure differs from dialectics in the generality and abstractness of the negation; dialectics relativizes the determinate judgment through the determinate antithesis and seeks, through its own limitation, to redeem the unlimited claim by which it points beyond itself. Fulfilling such a claim in itself—this is the meaning of every work of art. The work of art is, unlike the judgment, a totality: it means to enclose the truth inside itself, to reflect being as a whole. The work of art wants, like the judgment, to express what actuality is. And yet, whenever this is attempted, whenever, for example, the 9th Symphony is translated from musical into spoken language, the poverty of both is revealed. Where aesthetic means cannot reach, logical means fall short as well. Indeed only in this, the discrepancy between intention and fulfillment, is the promise unredeemed revealed. The repetition of the words ‘Man’ and ‘humanity,’ ‘brotherhood’ and ‘identity,’ is even more powerless than the duration of the work of art. In the absence of dialectical progression, the concept remains an abstract, harmless utopia. Language has always resisted the attempt to grasp the concept of the human being as something positive, to extract from it a principle beyond its reality; the attempt leads back to Stoicism, and, in the last instance, the idea of self-assertion. The highest point philosophy in such form beholds is a society in which agreement has been reached for the sake of maintaining dominion over all that is non-human all the more securely: the ideal of European philosophy, an exclusionary ideal in all its warmth and friendship. Human language points to no absolute goal. The principle opposite actual fact—which humanism believed it discovered in the concept of the human being, and whose fulfillment it ultimately saw in history—cannot be grasped by any concept. Unnamed, it lies at the ground of language and its concepts. The human beings who preserve themselves through society, as prescribed by their concept, practice domination, even if the councils were to function so perfectly that the state truly withered away and only surrounding nature were to suffer the blindness of human beings. The power human beings wield in becoming equal to their universal concept recoils on the human heart. The universality that faith in history contained as its truth was not the collective, but rather the emancipation of the living from its compulsion. The community of suffering was formulated in the concept. To sight freedom in the concrete thought of unfreedom: this is the reconciling force of determination through negation. Trust in history, however, passes into such negation: into consciousness of the deficiency of language, which only helps the living find expression by making it the concept with which it coincides, just as the justice system need only address someone who once committed a crime as a “criminal” to destroy them once and for all. And this trust is not in progress, whether historical or logical. The progression of determination is no recipe language can always rely on, however much depends on it. The universal concept of the human being contains a memory evaporated in those of “the Jew” or “the German”; the proposition that lingers on determinations so exact heralds less the abolition of suffering than one which dwells on the abstract.

V. Magic of the Concept (1949)Horkheimer, "Magie des Begriffs [1949]," *MHGS* 12:323--325.

With the advance of enlightenment, ever wider stretches of the world are subject, in extension as much as in intensity, to the fixed concept. The test of the concept is always an increase in power, and not of personal power, belonging to one single person alone, but in the sense of a power at universal disposal. The concept is a tool like any other. The conditions of its production and application correspond to those of other means of production. It is, so to speak, the tool come into its own, the tool kat exochen. The tendency, particularly associated with ‘the concept’ in the sense used by Bergson, to mistake what is preserved in memory, the available store of collected data in one’s possession, for the truth itself—today, this tendency appears before enlightenment itself, whose motor it once was, as a remnant of magic. It was once believed that with a lock of his hair, the absent enemy could be held in thrall; now, one imagines that because they hold the thing in thrall through its conceptual formula, that the formula is the thing itself. The quid pro quo is evident, and yet the whole question of the vocation of the human being is one and the same as that of an inner relationship between means and ends, practice and truth. However mad the fetishization of the means, the immediate positing-into-one [Ineinssetzen] of purpose and instrument, may seem, its antithesis, their radical separation, would necessarily nullify any hope humanity might have of arriving at the truth in any sense; even the greatest of philosophies only brand the identity of concept and being as mythical semblance [Schein] to the extent it has not been mediated—that is to say: as unearned, unappropriated, conceptless. Even in these greatest of philosophies, it is taken for granted that civilization will, as a matter of fundamental principle, catch up with the truth. Hegel considered his work as evidence that the Kantian abyss itself was bound to make Kant’s own philosophy a farce.

Concept is tool, tool is plan. So long as the plan is not one of humanity, end and means diverge. The entrepreneur of the Victorian style was a planner; he was alienated from the powers of society, the fluctuations of commodity prices, the vicissitudes of economic cycles, wars, and revolutions, because other plans were suddenly ratified at the cost of his own. The market could, therefore, only appear as regulator because none of the individual planners who met there were actually strong enough to prevail, and between classes and nations, the market was something more ephemeral still. The more tightly organized the subject of the plan in itself, the stronger the plan. With the thoroughgoing organization of humanity according to a common plan, alienation ends, for nothing human is alien to it any longer. The process reaches its completion when the universal plan is no longer forced onto the individual as external violence, as even when the plan is ideologically disguised as one’s own. The plan cannot be the administration of one by another, such that the distinction of the one from the other, as presupposition of the whole, eludes the concept. This was Marxist reason, the free association of humanity, free from the unplanned effects of social power. Only then, when each in their conduct becomes a means of the whole, do they also become an end to the whole and to themselves. Once the means is fully recognized as an end, we are freed from the domination of means.

However questionable the construction of classical—as well as proletarian—idealism may be, it is inherent in that first thought that, in the concept with which it sought to master beings, imagined it had touched upon truth, indeed in the first inkling that the expansion of human power is related to “right” living. The question is whether cognition is as fatefully chained to dominant conceptuality as it appears to be to such a logic, a logic which is itself so chained in its consistency. Attempted escapes from this logic—pure mediation, which is nevertheless straitjacketed by categories of domination; non-resistance, which bears the mark of dubious magical practice on its forehead; the humbug of sacred knowledge—none of these are truly tempting. The only rescue for thinking tired of the triumph of the means is to extend it to the point of its reversal. It is not true that enlightenment is at an end.

Bibliography

Horkheimer, Max. “Bewahrung der Naivetät in der Dialektik” (1945). In Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, vol. 12, Nachgelassene Schriften 1931–1949 (hereafter cited as MHGS), 301–2. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1985.

———. “Der dialektische Begriff” (1945). MHGS, 12:299–301.

———. “Diskussion anschließend an das Manuskript von Max [Horkheimer] über Kopula und Subsumtion” (1939). MHGS, 12:494–98.

———. Eclipse of Reason. 1947. Reprint, New York: Continuum, 2004.

———. “Erbsünde und Kopula” (1942/44). MHGS, 12:277–78.

———. “Goldener Mittelweg” (1945). MHGS, 12:297.

———. “Haupt- und Nebensatz” (1942/44). MHGS, 12:279–81.

———. “[Idee, Aktivität und Programm des Instituts für Sozialforschung]” (1938). MHGS, 12:156–57. Cf. the Institute’s original 1938 English-language typescript, “An Institute for Social Research: Idea, Activity, and Program,” transcribed and edited by James Crane. In “Collection: The Idea of an Institute for Social Research: Reports 1938–1944.” Substudies (blog), June 9, 2025. https://jamescrane.substack.com/p/collection-the-idea-of-an-institute.

———. “Kopula und Subsumtion” (1939). MHGS, 12:69–74.

———. “Magie des Begriffs” (1949). MHGS, 12:323–25.

———. “Prinzip des Individuums.” Undated; editors assign a probable date of 1942. MHGS, 12:318–19. Because the dating of the fragment in UBA Ffm Na 803, “NY Notizen [I],” is 1945, in the absence of any indication of an earlier date of composition, the date 1945 has been retained [translator’s note].

———. “Umschlag der idealistischen Dialektik” (1944). MHGS, 12:286.

———. “Vertrauen auf Geschichte” (1946). MHGS, 12:119–27.

Langer, Susanne K. Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942.

Machiavelli, Niccolò. Discourses on Livy. Translated by Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, in association with New Left Review, 1976.

Montaigne, Michel de. Essais. Edited by Pierre Villey. 3 vols. Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1930–31.

Voltaire. Traité de métaphysique. In Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, edited by Louis Moland, vol. 22. Paris: Garnier Frères, 1879.

Archival Sources

Horkheimer, Max. Letter to Friedrich Pollock, March 21, 1944. Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg, Archivzentrum, Frankfurt am Main. Nachlass Max Horkheimer, UBA Ffm Na 581, fol. 287r. https://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/horkheimer/content/pageview/6544976.

Now for the 300 lines of the Spain-review. The restrictions on length will make for even greater difficulties here, since longer excerpts from the report, still unavailable in English, were intended for inclusion in the review. 100 more lines wouldn’t have made this easy, but might have made their inclusion more possible. Nevertheless, I believe I will find a satisfactory solution and should in any event send the manuscript over in time for the deadline on the 20th. I hope I will have more luck this time in my renewed attempt to collaborate on the Zeitschrift than I did last time. After all of our discussions, I am basically convinced that the preconditions for this are definitely present. […]

[…] There is nothing else to report; since, as you know, the world is in enough turmoil already. All the same, I am anxious [to see] whether the Anarchists in Valencia will not attempt a last-ditch effort of resistance after the final capitulation of the Azaña-Negrin Government. They would lose a lot of blood through defeat, which, if they capitulated without a fight, would remain unshed. – But I see now that the working class must empty the cup completely; none of its organizations and ideologies until now can be spared.¹

Introduction

The short but intense success of the anarcho-syndicalist and the Spanish Communist Party uprisings against Franco’s fascist coup in July 1936 in Spain and the subsequent collectivisation processes that followed led Max Horkheimer to believe that these events could instantiate an anti-racket spirit. For the events of resistance and barricading successfully materialised as a series of spontaneous exercises of self-instituting, collectivising praxis that took immediate, collective control over the functions of private industrial firms and all kinds of businesses, but also the state’s public services, during a series of months. These collectivising processes were led by the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM), the Confederación Nacional de Trabajo (CNT), and the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (F.A.I.), lasting three years, from July 1936 to March 1939, forming an exceptional historical event not seen in Europe since the revolutionary actions of the Paris Commune.

Max Horkheimer expressed this to be the case both in a short remark in his essay “On the Sociology of Class Relations” and also in a brief mention in a draft for a book on “racket theory.”² However, what is particular about Horkheimer’s position on the collectivisation processes during the Spanish Civil War is that this was placed in the context of a lucid negative account of the time of its writing. Horkheimer’s essay, it must be clarified, related mostly to an assessment of the concrete social context of the USA, which was compared to or contrasted with that of Nazi Germany. Horkheimer conceptualised the dynamics implied in the evolving shapes that the systems of domination had taken and observed the full integration of the worker’s ‘work’ as a sort of upgraded, reified commodity to serve a new monopolistic form of organising around a new conceptual device, Labour with a capital “L”: “The term Labour, however, comprises both the leaders who appropriate the profits and the members who create them.”³ This is the specific phase in the context of the shift of working class forms of organising where Horkheimer sees the racket-form being smuggled inside the workers’ unions as they had turned into monopolistic patterns, giving their totalising dimension to that (late) stage of capitalism.

The moment where the Spanish case is brought up in Horkheimer’s text is precisely that moment where he situates a historical shift, a turn for the worse, hence introducing his thesis of the mutation of the trade unions into monopolistic forms: “The rise of workers from a passive role in the capitalistic process has been paid for with their complete integration. Labour in a monopolistic society is itself a kind of monopoly: to be more exact, it is the monopoly of its leaders.”⁴ Of this leadership’s complicity with a monopolistic totality which has been accomplished, Horkheimer writes: “[…] the leaders control labor supplies as the presidents of the big corporations control raw materials, machines, or other elements of production.”⁵ To grasp how this came to be the case, Horkheimer analyses the minds of the workers and of their leaders, their behavioural patterns, recurring to a dialectical, complicated pulse between a critical anthropological, phylogenetic Freudian reading and a materialist, Marxist one.⁶ These implicit methodological tensions in Horkheimer’s ‘aporetic’ recourse to anthropology and Freudian psychology for grappling with the pervasiveness of the racket-form will be discussed and analyzed further at a later point in this essay.

Karl Korsch initially wrote a critical account about Spain’s “soft revolution” and the instauration of its Segunda República in 1931.⁷ He described the factors involved in the ensuing capitalist, bourgeois alliances with the old regime’s inter-racket crisis that this so-called “Beautiful Revolution” supposed. This soft and beautiful ousting of the Bourbon monarchy in Spain and its democratic opening to the parties of the left led to the intensifying of a conspiracy of its ‘comprador classes’ and led their imperialist, international alliances (mostly with the UK, but also followed closely with the USA) to rely on a small military group of fascist rebels to stage a coup against the República.⁸ And yet, the event of the fascist coup, in its disruptive breaking of the dynamics of civil society, galvanised a series of practical developments taken by its opposing forces, such as the anarchist F.A.I., the syndicalist CNT, and the Communist POUM. This was the event where all the factors of what entailed a practical expression of that which had been learnt previously in theory—rehearsed by an ideation of their specific pedagogy as potential revolutionaries—became real experience: a spontaneous experiment in a concrete materialisation of the project of labour collectivisation. This realisation recalled Marx’s “ real community [in which] the individuals obtain their freedom in and through their association,” as with the case of ‘La Commune.’⁹

The collectivising period during the Spanish Civil War exemplified, for Horkheimer, as well as for Korsch, a positive sociohistorical moment of social organising; a realisation that an anti-racket spirit was applicable and possible; a moment where the people had shown a capacity for spontaneously negating the reproduction of the same racket-form as repeated by a sort of self-perpetuating and unchallengeable socio-biological fate.¹⁰ In a draft outline for the book on rackets, “Notes for the Programme of the Book (8/30/1942),” we read: “The racket-like elements in the Spanish Civil War as a model for anti-rackets: there were genuinely anti-racket-like forms, not only political but also in art etc.”¹¹ These social emancipatory qualities of the collectivising period also signified that elements of mimesis were at play in the course of the Spanish Civil War.¹² Concepts such as spontaneity, testing, and improvisation, which always bring into the present time that which was rehearsed and learnt, are important for grasping what factors are involved in the social revolutionary quality of the case. This social revolutionary quality is also important for understanding the reason why Korsch thought this experience, even once it had become part of the archive of failures, would hold the same positive properties as any other legacies of former attempts and rehearsals of previous practices in the pedagogy of revolution.

Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s negative-dialectical methodologies for elaborating on the concept of mimesis and the racket-form will also be considered here while looking at Korsch’s essays about the collectivisation processes during the civil war in Spain. Korsch’s articles supply us with great detail and comparative material of the specific cases and all the aspects of his documentation of what he states as his commitment to an objective non-idealist approach to historical facts. Thus, we will see how Korsch’s articles simultaneously inform Horkheimer’s ideas about concrete examples and possibilities for revolution and how those play in Horkheimer’s account of the relation between spirit and the racket in “Rackets and Spirit” as well as Horkheimer’s account of how racket-form materialises everywhere in “On the Sociology of Class Relations.”¹³

Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s variations on the concept of mimesis, as introduced in Dialectic of Enlightenment and other works such as Negative Dialectics, are sources to retrace the critical-dialectical relations that the concepts of the racket, utopia, praxis, mimesis, and anti-racket that were at play in Horkheimer’s writings at the time of his epistolary exchange with Korsch on the matter of collectivisation during the Spanish Civil War. Horkheimer’s short, parenthesised recollection of the past case of Spanish collectivisation becomes a present mnemonic of the potentia involved in spontaneity when activated by critical situations. Spain at the start of the civil war shared some structural aspects with Russia before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and this comparative cross-referencing will help Korsch to situate the specificity of the differences between the cases. The highlight for Horkheimer was that these barely rationalised and socialised Spanish workers’ organisations had managed to accomplish such an impressive level of collectivisation in a situation that required a great amount of spontaneity.

The exceptionality of its example is the success of its specific praxis, not just for defeating the fascist coup in Catalonia and Valencia, but for establishing its collectivising system for a great length of time. However, what concerns us here are the aspects of the case of Spanish collectivisation documented by Korsch versus the concepts sustaining the unforgiving critique by Horkheimer of the racket-form as reproduced in those same kind workers’ organisations elsewhere that he simultaneously recognised positively in the case of Spain, since the latter belonged to a previous, out-of-synch temporality. What we want to highlight here is that Horkheimer’s negative account of class relations and of the racket-form as it had become ingrained in labour organisations nevertheless includes the Spanish Civil War case of collectivisation as an exception and desynchrony, one which also contains a micrological seed for a future historical date. Per contra, we want to try to discern the concepts sustaining Korsch’s enthusiastic description of these emancipatory struggles against the racket form of capital and fascism in the collectivising takeover by the proletarian class of the industries, business, and public services in Catalonia. This will allow us to explore the perplexities that the concept of mimesis carries within.

Workers’ Organisations as Rackets (Horkheimer’s Aporetic Mimesis)

In the essays “Rackets and Spirit (1942/44)” and “On The Sociology of Class Relations (1943),” Horkheimer lays out the characteristics of each, the historical and relational developments of the bourgeois and the working classes, in order for us to understand the paradigm shift undertaken in both earlier forms of the party and the workers’ unions. Exposing the further ‘turn of the screw’ in the transformation of the subjects-workers, Horkheimer writes: “[a]lthough deprived as they were of their human qualities by being transformed into mere elements of production, […] had not yet become statistical figures of organizations.”¹⁴ However in the essays, we note that what informs Horkheimer’s assessment of labour unions involved two correlational factors: a focus on Nazi Germany, but also on trade unions in the US, the correspondence between which had intensified under the forces of the Fordist system (which was both opposed and mirrored by industry in Nazi Germany). It is relevant, too, to see the USA as the location of Horkheimer’s social and living experience when tackling the concepts of the spirit of the anti-racket and the process of collectivisation in Spain. This is especially because they have to be compared to the situation that Horkheimer describes as: “The hope of the proletariat today does not consist of sticking to traditional party and civil war patterns. Rather, it must recognise and fight the monopolistic set-up of society infiltrating into the proletariat’s own organizations and infesting the minds of its individuals.”¹⁵ It is in this context that Horkheimer will write and mention the Spanish (Civil) War and its “spontaneity before critical situations,” but also for having taken place in a context of social and economic backwardness. This is important, because he was analysing the problems that the concept of Labour as a refined, newly objectified commodity dirempted from a socialist-communist project, posed at the time:

The new situation is expressed in the concept of Labor (with a capital L) as it is recognized as a guiding intellectual principle not only in the minds of workers but also with the general public. Like Agriculture or Industry, or even sections of Industry, such as Steel, Rubber, and Oil, Labor is a collective term which is not an ordinary abstractum or generale. With regard to the individual elements included in their logical structure, such entities resemble a unit like State, Nation, Church, rather than a generality like Color, or Animal.¹⁶

Hence, for Horkheimer, the events in Spain, led by a spontaneous coalition of various workers (syndicalist, anarchist, and marxist) unions, had already been superseded: first due to their failure under the fascist forces and second by the ‘perverse’ agencies of Stalin’s imploding of their successful collectivisation. While the case of Spain and the Spanish Civil War is most generally subsumed under a global push and speedy pace of an American-led process of modernisation, the modernity this process produced was precisely what Horkheimer would describe as related to regression, to mimesis. Modernisation is mimetic regression. Yet, we want to keep in mind that Horkheimer still left us a comment on the events in Spain and of their existence, of their having been possible and exemplary.

Indeed, the particular exception of Spanish collectivisation did signify a positive example. However, its condition of possibility, as Horkheimer indicated, implied its being in a temporal-historical context of social backwardness. In the mid-1930’s, Spanish society was still closer in a structural sense to the composition of the workers and their ways of class fighting that were characteristic of 19th-century Marxist and communist movements and organisations. The case of Spain therefore involves an element of desynchronicity. Below is Horkheimer’s brief mention of the case of the Spanish Civil War in his essay “On the Sociology of Class Relations.” We can observe how he links the case practically to the 19th century, as Spain is mentioned between parentheses, a sign itself placing a sort of temporal decalage:

Around the middle of the 19th century, the non-integrated nature of the individual worker as a part of an amorphous proletariat of the disinherited peasant or artisan, and his retrogressiveness in terms of the ever increasing rational “socialization” (Vergesellschaftung) of society was inseparably bound up with his “progressiveness” in the sense of revolution. [It is significant that, even today, worker’s organizations which are with some justification labeled as “backward” both theoretically and economically have proven to be the most spontaneous elements in critical situations, such as the Spanish Civil War.]¹⁷

The next line in the opening paragraph following the quote above states: “However, the clock cannot be put back nor can the organizational development be revoked or even theoretically rejected.”¹⁸ It is from this point on that what happened in Spain, even if exemplary, is relegated to the past by Horkheimer.

With this in mind, we will reflect on the seed that such a short citation of the phase of Spanish collectivisation supposed, and on what the event itself, as described by Korsch, can bring to our present conjuncture. Horkheimer’s essay gives us a phenomenology of precedent forms of collectivising downwards, as he focuses on showing us the absolute monopolisation of everything. He offers a Marxian genealogy of forms that the dominating elites of society had taken in their way towards the present. His is a framework that is, however, supported by conceptual elements of both anthropology and psychology used in a critical and transdisciplinary form. This has to be the case for his approach because the mental transformations and the mental resistances to or pervasiveness of certain aspects in the human mind under capitalism will need explaining. Horkheimer exposes the role and tactics for shifting the subject’s mind that mass media and publicity played when he states that, “[t]he conscious precautions taken by radio, press, and motion pictures are only a visible supplement to the unconscious trends necessitated by economic and social development.”¹⁹ And relating to the previous era’s social collectivities, as in the case of religion and the church, he says: “In contrast to the tendencies of today’s mass culture, it did not sell the people their own way of living […].”²⁰ Thus he exposes the subterfuge of the mind by the entertainment industry: ​​

All the ingenious devices of the amusement industry serve but to reproduce over and over again, without betraying the slightest revolt, scenes of life which are already dull and automatized when they happen in reality. Motion pictures, radio, popular biographies and novels shout incessantly the same rhythm: this is our groove, this is the rut of the great and the little ones, this is reality as it is and should be and will be.²¹

The psychological aspect is brought up as, “Labor, becoming a trade among others, completes the process of the reification of the human mind.”²² Hence, the abducted ‘mind’ that forgets its previous socialist and communist aims is at stake here as the neuroplastic displacement and disappearance of proletarian theory: “It is a double-barrelled transformation into things. [..] The idea of intrinsic antagonism between the international proletariat and any system of domination is completely superseded by the concepts connected with the disputes of power between the various monopolies.”²³

However, Horkheimer’s psychological and anthropological devices are mediated by an ‘aporetic’* dialectical methodology when he tackles the pervasiveness of hierarchy and the authority principle within the family in their reappearance in expanded forms of organising at the time.²⁴ Horkheimer situates the patriarchal aspect, which is further developed into the context of bourgeois domination, as part intrinsic to both the capitalist and racket-form way of organising in their recourse to the structure of the patriarchal family.²⁵ Mostly, he indicates this by recalling the position of the subject as equated with a child in a context of hierarchy: “Just as the child repeats the words of his mother and the youngster, the brutality of his elders at whose hands he has suffered much, industrialized culture, the giant loudspeaker voice of monopolism, copies reality endlessly and boringly.”²⁶ And as Horkheimer puts it to close his essay “On The Sociology of Class Relations”: “[a]dults, with regard to the children, behaved as a totality. The racket was also the pattern of the organization of males with regard to females. The modern concept serves to describe past social relations. ‘The anatomy of the man is the key to the anatomy of the monkey.’”²⁷ In a letter to Felix Weil, Horkheimer explains this allusion as follows:

Once a certain psychological quality has become clearly visible, we always can trace its roots back to the past, but we easily forget that it would not have struck us as something unusual if it were not for the new form which it has taken in the meantime. You will remember the observation that human anatomy is the key to that of the monkey? The meaning of that truth is that once we know man, we can discover his beginnings in earlier forms of life. Once Fascism had developed in European society, we now are able to find its hallmarks in earlier stages of human history, but it would be an error to say that, because of those traces, the development was a necessary one.²⁸

Here a key element to think through is that of what “the modern concept” fully means here, because it is intertwined with a past temporality that prevails in those “past social relations,” but which can only be defined and explained by a conceptual explanation of modernity. Thus an assertion of the question of asynchronic, looped temporalities in their cultural and social forms is implied. For Horkheimer, in the actuality of those Nazi and fascist times, this relating-back to a primal latency in the form of a racket-like social organising that began within the family and its hierarchies, had equally transcended into the syndicalist formations, such as the workers’ trade unions: “[…] Docilely and without a hint of any opposing interests, the workers surrender part of their money to the mammoth trusts which trade in their labor.”²⁹ This Freudian aspect of the methodology in Horkheimer’s critique of the labour unions and the workers’ ‘docile surrender’ (child-like) to what he defines above as the “mammoth trusts,” is key. What is “child-like” in the workers’ disposition is also transferred to a sort of civilisational childhood that keeps re-appearing, in the same sense that “[t]he modern concept serves to describe past social relations.”³⁰ This is especially the case if the modern is informed by a regressive mimetism: “Modern culture is a resurrection of oppressed mimetic practices.”³¹ Mind, the unconscious, and the conscious, first and second nature, mental repression, and psychological manipulation are intrinsic to those social turns and returns.

Here, we ask if the case of the workers’ unions becoming a racket was caused by a patriarchal legacy that resisted evolutive displacement or even erasure, managing to endure in our social realm, by instinctive reaction. This could have occurred as the outcome of adaptive learning; as the recurrent, tactical, and cunning aspect of mimesis; of the learning and replicating of forms of oppression as self-defence, or even as a camouflage, in the social context in which all structures of society worked in similar mirroring forms, albeit with opposite aims vis-a-vis one another. That is, a mimesis which reproduces the order of domination to neutralise the oppressors’ same tactics. Looking at Dialectic of Enlightenment’s insights about the mimetic dynamics at work both in “The Odyssey” and in “Elements of Anti-Semitism,” we see the case of mimesis as being part of the conceptual tensions that we are exploring here, i.e. the correlation of learning, theory, praxis, error (failure) and spontaneity in the context of revolution.

Theodor W. Adorno was already conceptualising of ‘mimesis as reflection’ during his time in Oxford in the mid/early 30’s.³² In a footnote to his study of Husserl, he provides a condensed genealogy that helps us navigate the paradoxes of Horkheimer’s critique of the racket-form as present and reproduced in the labour organisations. Adorno’s grasping of mimesis as a process of learning is crucial here: if rationality as fully implicit in the “demythologization of mimetic modes of procedure” fulfils its purpose, “then it can be no surprise that the mimetic motif survives in reflection on cognition.”³³ Here Adorno, by dialectically negating that “[t]his is perhaps not simply an archaic holdover,” opens up the space for thinking and acknowledging the “fact that cognition itself cannot be conceived without the supplement of mimesis, however that may be sublimated.”³⁴ That ultimately, “[w]ithout mimesis, the break between subject and object would be absolute and cognition impossible.”³⁵ This shows us that mimesis does not just have a negative significance.

Therefore, we ask: does the racket-form thus survive (in a looped, reciprocal sense of a socio-biological import) from ancient configurations, like a persistent subconscious figure that resurfaces in every time there is a shift or paradigm turn in social formations? Because, albeit decapitated at some point in history, hierarchy does not lose its head: the captain, the leader, and the followers are placed in a determinate order of preference and responsibility and thus it always returns to dual social figurations of those who are protected and those who are left out, of the insiders and their others, the outsiders. Here, Horkheimer’s psycho-anthropological stance resonates (negatively) with the famous young Marx’s 1844 “species being” dictum, as Horkheimer wants to remind us of the involution and regression that modern culture represented:³⁶

…From the day of his birth, the individual is made to feel that there is only one way to get along in this world: by resigning his unlimited hope. This he can only achieve by imitation (mimesis). […] By echoing, repeating, imitating the surroundings, by adapting himself to all the powerful groups to which he belongs, by transforming himself from a human being into a member of specific organized bodies, by reducing his potentialities to readiness and ability to conform to, and gain influence in, such bodies, he can finally manage to survive. It is survival by practicing the oldest biological means of survival: mimicry.³⁷

In the above, Horkheimer lays out what a mimetic gesture and its realisation meant when reproduced in childhood processes (once more mobilising Freud —yet mediated by a critical Frommian anthropological interpretation— as we had already seen at play in his essay “Egoism and Freedom Movements”) and of the individual when it is faced with the pressure for survival in the context of modernity’s behavioural crises. These crises take the form of a brute, regressive fascism, of Nazism, overpowering the progress represented by the ideas and projects of anarchism, communism, and socialism.

For us, the racket-form taking over the workers’ unions could have still more complex psycho-social elements in its coming to be. This is especially true if we give the aspect of the social reproduction of the dominant and dominating in the existence of the dominated more emphasis. Our proposition here will be that, albeit communist or socialist in aims, this organising as union-form and its (perhaps unavoidable) fate in becoming a racket was mediated by a ‘species being,’ one which was apparently only able to reproduce what it already saw as a model by replicating it ‘mimetically’—even cannibalistically—in order to achieve what it considered necessary to avoid subjection from that same model, and from the system in the hands of the dominant class.³⁸ While this was not an optimal tactic, as pointed out in the above-quoted, a triggered response to a necessity for survival in a hostile situation and temporality where the objective conditions for revolution were yet not met. However, the case made precisely by Horkheimer and Adorno, in their chapter on Odysseus, develops the concept of ‘cunning,’ mimesis in response to a wound, which could explain that the union form was mimetic in relation to the racket, as it had inverted tactically (out of cunning, understood as an outcome of learning) the purposes of the racket: to be efficient and powerful. This tactical inversion was to counteract the grip of the capitalist rackets, to convey authority and to quash authority, to have power of dissuasion and negotiation with the correlative forces opposite to it.

Hence, we can look at the case of struggle and failure as modes of learning and mimesis as it is described in the chapter “Odysseus, or Myth and Enlightenment” in Dialectic of Enlightenment, where “[t]he adventures bestow names on each of these places, and the names give rise to a rational overview of space. The shipwrecked, tremulous navigator anticipates the work of the compass. His powerlessness, leaving no part of the sea unknown, aims to undermine the ruling powers.”³⁹ Indeed, if communism is understood as the result of the ultimate progression to fulfil the fate of human ‘species being’ (again, the anthropological trope of linear progress and evolution as mobilised by the young Marx), then the very content of ‘a’progress will entail a mimesis, a learning, in the fight “to undermine the ruling powers.” This forms a core spirit of the movement (in Hegelian terms) that this unity of opposites, this movement between the racket vs the spirit of the anti-racket, this history in the making, can signify. The aspects brought forward in Dialectic of Enlightenment, in its account of the dynamics of power that will produce the bourgeois capitalist order and its ethos at play in the Odyssey, also tell us that “[i]mitation enters the service of power when even the human being becomes an anthropomorphism for human beings.”⁴⁰ Man against man, master and slave, correlation of political forces, binaries, and polarities all come to mind when tackling the issue of the spirit of the racket, of power relations; potential emancipations with universalist, communist, and socialised forms that can overcome such mirrorist inversions of everything that they have had to learn, thus involve a core displacement of cunning as the central tactic of such.

At the same time, both Horkheimer, Adorno, as much as the young Marx before them, could not help but rely on notions borrowed from anthropology to mediate their concepts of either fated progress or fated regression. They leave us with the ambivalences of having to choose between the linear and the spiralling or circular, cyclical, eternal return. A moment of Blochean and Benjaminian hope, of a “not yet” or of the “time of the now,” appears to us today in the legacy Horkheimer leaves us in his reference to Spain, to the spontaneous historical lapsus signified by the phenomena of Spanish collectivisation, recorded as revolutionary pedagogy. For if these spontaneous, revolutionary events happened and lasted for a certain amount of time, they could indeed happen again and last longer. They could re-appear, return. With this, we may turn to look at the specific case of what happened to these workers’ unions at the time of the Spanish fascist coup—as indeed in a moment, and indeed in an open time—that provided a condition of possibility for them to supersede the racket form, for them to then enter into a new spatio-temporality. There, they would rehearse a self-liberating spirit of the anti-racket and its praxis.

The Subjective and Objective Material Conditions for Collectivisation in Spain

What the case of collectivisation in Spain shows us is that precisely the workers’ unions which had evolved to become another racket-form had instead, in the desynchronised and liberated space-time generated in the event of fighting the fascist rebels, opened up the chance for a collective formation. This ‘real community’ displaced the racket-like defensive strategies of mirroring and adapting to the surrounding totality, to instead jump into the experimental rehearsing of the possibility that such open temporalities brought about.⁴¹ Can we identify, however, which aspects of the collective takeover of business and public services during Franco’s coup, and its follow-up war of conquest, that could be illustrative or exemplary of the spirit of an anti-racket formation these processes of socialisation and collectivisation involved?

In Korsch’s “Economics and Politics in Revolutionary Spain” he states that, “[t]here is thus a deep shadow thrown on the constructive work resulting from the heroic efforts and sacrifices of the revolutionary workers in all parts of Spain where the syndicalist and anarchist slogan of ‘collectivization’ prevailed over the Social Democratic and Communist slogans of ‘nationalization’ and ‘state interference.’”⁴² The critique of the nation-state-based project of Communism as it was captured by Stalin appears quite clearly in various points throughout his articles. We argue that the so-called spontaneity of the Catalan Marxists, anarchists, and syndicalists in the context of a crisis in a sociohistorical opening of time, and its conditions of possibility for a revolutionary action, was, in itself, at the core of what signifies improvisation versus imitation. (Imitation, mimesis in the Greek sense, is a way of learning, repeating, and perfecting.) In connection to Korsch, it is important to reflect upon the temporal coincidence between the Spanish Civil War and Stalin’s Purges, which started on the 19th of August 1936, while the fascist coup by Franco started on the 17th of July 1936. In addition, during the Spanish (Civil) War, the Republican front, the so-called ‘Los Rojos’ according to the fascist front, was flooded by purging Stalinist agents who, by killing anyone not of their sect, disturbed the multi-party formation. Korsch was well aware of the intensity of Stalin’s murderous policies as they happened in these parallel temporalities, and, moreover, that because of these policies, the Spanish resistance paid a high price.⁴³

In the context of this powerful state of affairs in which Communism qua Stalinism appeared to be nothing more than another inverted world, its upside-down aspects equivalent to corresponding problems of authoritarianism and autocracy that affected the political leaders in the West, the example of praxis in the improvisational, spontaneous events beginning on July 1936 in Spain was a crucial one. Because the processes of Spanish collectivisations had managed to win and survive for a certain amount of time, Korsch considered them a great lesson (in the educational content of the process of revolution) that included a futuristic prospect of an ‘other’ Communism. This was a Communism that Korsch and many others, including Horkheimer, hoped for when they were confronted by disappointment, by the truth that Stalin’s abduction of the Communist Party of Russia implied.⁴⁴ In this retrospective light, what the Catalan uprising and takeover for a form of self-organising rule and structure meant and means as an example for revolutionary education is that indeed it could be possible then and now, that it was and is doable, and that it worked.

Looking back at what Horkheimer had to say about the relation between ‘rackets’ and ‘spirit’ in connection to the masses of the poor, we see how, “[the] brutality of the underclasses, from which the secret of the ruling must be kept, is nothing original, but socially generated. The terrible, bloodthirsty ‘Collective’ that traverses the history of humanity is but the other face of the exclusionary rackets, consciously or unconsciously generated by them.”⁴⁵ The fear of the “collective” and the masses, which the elites produce and reproduce in all its brutishness and subjection, appears to be a psychic projection for these bourgeois subjects in their dress-rehearsal as aristocrats, as they replace with their own heads those of the bodies and structures of privilege they previously decapitated, and do so with the help of these collectives and masses, with the help of the people.

The “fearsomeness” that the former collective generated should be considered in grasping the amount of “fearlessness” required by the new (marxist, anarchist and syndicalist) collective formations during the fascist attacks on the Spanish Republican democracy at the time.⁴⁶ This praxis of emancipation from a state on the brink of sequestration by fascism and already subservient to a capitalist bourgeoisie can only be defined in light of the juncture in which it found itself:

[…] Fascism has only revealed what was already inherent in liberalism: the delusive nature of the labor contract as a deal between partners equally free. It would be a grave theoretical mistake to denounce the contract in modern totalitarianism as a mere formality, and stress its genuine authenticity under liberalism. In both phases of the economic system, the aim of the contract may well be considered as the maintenance of that same basic inequality which is shrouded in its democratic language.⁴⁷

The exemplarity of the impromptu ‘putting-into-practice’ by the Marxists (POUM), the Anarchists, and the Syndicalists—all of whom had become fully invested in collectivisation, in a historically localised rehearsal of that which they had previously theorised—brings to the fore the particular, contractual nature of their collective organizing to abolish the contract of the ruling powers. Thus, the contract between the collective form of organisation becomes the antithesis of the capitalist-bourgeois contract, which is based on competitiveness and the production of inequality. Korsch presents the educational aspects and the legacy of these historical experiences in the archive alongside all the previous failed and defeated revolutions.⁴⁸ In the last thoughts that he gives to the defeated collectivisation-events in Catalonia and Spain, this is the very point Korsch leaves us with:

“To serve the history of the revolution” is the program which is invisibly written on the front page of the above cited faithful and comprehensive report on the positive results achieved in the economic field by the revolutionary workers of Barcelona and by the industrial and agricultural laborers in many a small Catalonian town or remote and forgotten village. “To serve history” means for the writer as well as for us, revolutionary workers of a dismal world laboring in the crisis and decay of all forms of the “old” socialist, communist, and anarchist labor movements, to learn from the deeds and from the mistakes of past history the lesson for the future, the ways and means for the realization of the goals of the revolutionary working class.⁴⁹

With this understanding of Korsch’s approach to the events that make history as lesson, archive, and pedagogy, we turn to how Korsch will tackle those same aspects as they historically developed in his second article on “Collectivisation in Spain,” just a mere year later.

The Spirit of the Anti-Racket: Korsch’s Pedagogy

Korsch’s article “Collectivisation in Spain” was published in 1939, when there was still a very slight possibility for the revolutionary efforts to resist, even if they had already failed all over Spain and almost fully in Catalonia. Korsch starts with a very specific declaration: “In a previous issue we have endeavoured to refute one of the main fallacies that conceal from the international-working class the particular importance of that new phase of the Spanish revolution which was inaugurated by the events of July 19, 1936.”⁵⁰ It is in those short fragments where we may appreciate Korsch’s positive assessment and appraisal of the events of July 19 1936, and their great relevance versus a “fallacious” negative narrative and the truth of these events that were hidden from the reports informing the international working class. Korsch recognised the events in their role of exemplarity; the future, educational aspect of such experience, that even if they had failed, would ultimately be crucial for the objectives of the ever-possible (future) revolution:

In spite of the rapidly increasing amount of literature on Spain today there is not available up to now any full report of what from our point of view we would call the real contents of the present struggles in revolutionary Spain. Of course, one would not expect such information on the really interesting facts from those progressively-minded people who even today go on to interpret the intensified class struggles, wars, and civil wars of contemporary history as so many expressions of an ideological struggle between a fascist and a democratic “’principle.”⁵¹

It is worth noticing already how Korsch makes a distinction between the subjects of the liberal progressive middle classes versus those on the left, mostly the workers, but also independent Marxists or anarcho-syndicalists involved in the ongoing practical efforts and fights. These are the affinities between the racket-form and fascism, the apparent entanglement of their forms, both products of the bourgeois era of capitalist correlations of force, bring out the tension implicit in the fact that the workers, too, developed a form of reproduction of the behaviour found in fascism. Indeed, looking at the reports of international members of the POUM like the American couple Lois and Charles Orr shows that there is indeed a great capability for many organisations and movements apparently aligned with the left and as anti-fascist to recur into a racket-form, even to the extreme of aiding a racket of counterrevolution, repression, brutality, and murder, in order to maintain the grip of their faction’s control over the masses of workers as subject.⁵² We can thus situate the case of collectivisation as a spontaneous element as an outcome of a critical and exceptional situation. This is the situation of an open temporality which gives space and context to a new form that is productive, possible, and positive. The spontaneity of the Marxist and anarchist groups and syndicalist trade unions was possible due to a full investment into, first of all, a defensive and assertive action, something that was made possible due to their interaction with one another. For, as we see in the reports about Catalonia about how the main independent Catalan government absorbs the initiative and includes leaders of both syndicalists and anarchists in the new situation, forming the Central Committee of the Anti-Fascist Militia, CCAFM, only to end in the betrayals that these formations of collectivisation suffered:⁵³

There is no use arguing (as many people have done) that during the many phases of the revolutionary development of the last seven years there has evolved more than once—in October, 1934, and, again, in July, 1936, and in May, 1937—an “objective situation” in which the united revolutionary workers of Spain might have seized the power of the state but did not do so either on account of theoretical scruples or by reason of an internal weakness of their revolutionary attitude. This may be true in regard to the July-Days of 1936 when the syndicalist and anarchist workers and militias of Barcelona had stormed the arms depots of the government and further equipped themselves with the weapons seized from the defeated fascist revolt […]⁵⁴

Korsch’s interpretation of analyses and reports about Spain identifies aspects of the experimental and practical forms taken by a spirit of the ‘counterracket’ in the organic, spontaneous processes of collectivisation and socialisation that occurred on a mass scale immediately after the Spanish fascist coup. Korsch will go on, in his description of the cases of the Catalan uprisings and takeover of industries and businesses, to outline very thoroughly how those formations had shown the possibility of a praxis, implied in their very form, of a sort of anti-racket fate. Korsch’s 1931 report gives us an account of the great obstacles implied for any sort of revolutionary-emancipatory workers-peasants coalition which is based on the fight for rights and the obtention of these rights. Korsch notes the case of the singularity of the Spanish context, with its particular backwardness and delays, in his introduction to the situation:

There is no doubt that the actual outcome of “collectivization,” even in those industries of Barcelona and the smaller towns and villages of Catalonia where it can be studied at its best, lags far behind the ideal constructions of the orthodox socialist and communist theories, and even more so behind the lofty dreams of generations of revolutionary syndicalist and anarchist workers in Spain since the days of Bakunin.⁵⁵

Initially, Korsch’s report portrays a Spain certainly lacking in revolutionary strength. This diminished and already weak historical situation for collectivisation makes the efforts of these subjects even more poignant. Korsch describes the case as follows: “During the whole process of revolutionary movement beginning with the overthrow of the monarchy in 1931, there has not been one single moment when the workers, or any party or organization speaking in the name of the revolutionary vanguard of the workers, have been in possession of the political power.” ⁵⁶ The complicated context formed by the Spanish national and regional, political and social problematics applies “even to the conditions prevailing in the syndicalist stronghold of Catalonia during the first months after July, 1936, when the power of the government had become temporarily invisible, and yet the new and still undefined authority exercised by the syndicates did not assume a distinct political character.”⁵⁷ However, the case is that these workers were indeed “armed” at that point, and thus enjoyed the upper hand in the correlation of forces, obstructing the fascists in a very specific tactical form. This was not a situation of “dual power,” but instead “[…] represented rather a temporary eclipse of all state power resulting from the split between its (economic) substance which had shifted to the workers and its (political) shell, [and] from the decisive fact that the main function of the bureaucratic and military machinery of any capitalistic state, the suppression of the workers, could not operate in any event against workers in arms.”⁵⁸ Korsch’s articles establish an instructive, comparative account of the Catalan uprisings versus that of the Bolsheviks. His insights about the singular aspects of the Spanish-Catalan case and the problematics inherent to those territories are geared towards leaving behind a testimony of a thorough research programme of an educational, exemplary legacy—an archive for the revolution. We cannot, moreover, eliminate from the equation the fact that the workers’ seizure of weapons and use of violence was part of the objective condition of possibility for their experiments in collectivisation.
While, in his introductory remarks, Korsch points to the limitations of the Spanish cases, he soon after emphatically defends them: “it cannot be said in fairness that the Spanish workers and their revolutionary syndicalist and anarchist leadership neglected to seize the political power on a national or even on a regional Catalonian scale under conditions when this would have been done by a revolutionary party such as the Russian Bolsheviks.”⁵⁹ Korsch points in particular to the double-standards at work in those who praise “the tactics of the Russian Bolsheviks in July, 1917 as a “cautious and realistic revolutionary policy” but “denounce the same policy as a “lack of revolutionary foresight and decision” when repeated, under such strongly analogous conditions, by the syndicalists in Spain.

Korsch describes this process as follows,

[…] a last hour victory of the revolutionary proletarian forces rallied in Barcelona - either with or without a rehearsal of the insurrection of the communardes in besieged Paris 1871-would immensely enhance the immediate historical and practical importance of the great experiment in a genuine proletarian collectivization of industry, which was initiated and carried through by the workers and their unions during the last two years.⁶⁰

The Spanish Marxists of the POUM were, however, in collaboration with the Anarchists and Syndicalists. Here we can see a possible diversion between, on the one hand, the objective of an emancipation that acquires its form through collectivisation from the bottom up and, in parallel, in the form of the anti-state and, on the other hand, a Communism that aims for the takeover of the state, that believes, in a Leninist sense, in the possibility of the state and the nation becoming fully transformed into a Communist form. Thus, once more, the possibility that such collectivisation signified a possible anti-racket form must have meant that there was a strong belief shared by Horkheimer and Korsch at the time that the State was the signifier and container of the racket of rackets.⁶¹ There must have also been a belief that only a collectivisation, an establishing of a collective take-over of business and industries, could result in a true democratic and freer form at a distance from the fate of the mimetic racketeering of the state.
In his article on “Collectivisation in Spain,” in which Korsch cites a small book published by the CNT/FAI about the Catalonian experiment of ‘collectivisation,’ Korsch proposes in his analysis and critique of the Spanish experience that such documents “cannot claim any greater merit than what we know from Marx, Engels, Lissagarays, and other writers about the economic experiments of the revolutionary Commune of the Paris workers in 1871.”⁶² Recalling the last paragraph of Korsch article “Economics and Politics in Revolutionary Spain,” we can see how Korsch develops a critical stance towards a decaying, older form of Communism and Socialism, but also of the degeneration of Anarchist and Labour movements at the time. For this, the notion of degeneration (as a kind of anthropology of social forms) is crucial, and is a matter of direct experience. This is the experience of something that once manifested, that ultimately ended in failure, but that leaves the possibility of being recorded, told, and written about, of forming part of the material that revolutionary pedagogy piles up for future use: memory, archive, data, studying, and theory to inform potential future practices.
The questions we have posed to Korsch and Horkheimer’s psychological and anthropological mediations in tackling the cases of the racket-form, its pervasiveness in the capitalist totality, as well as the conditions of possibility for social revolution, as signified by the collectivisation in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, have centered on a critical challenge to the concept of ‘mimesis.’ Our questions have also led us to revisit the tensions at work in Horkheimer’s Critical Theory, which, by necessity, because of its commitment to historical materialism, had to include the various aspects and fields involved in his transdisciplinary, dialectical praxis. We have seen how the fields of anthropology and psychology had their limitations, and further that Horkheimer was unable to fully discard them when attempting to mediate his definition of the racket-form. Thus, our argument has been that mimesis as quality, impulse, characteristic of our animal but also our social realm, possesses both positive and negative possibilities and options for its trajectory. One can be a regressive mimetic, and thus be an anti-Semite, Nazi, fascist, but can also be a learning mimetic, rehearsing, writing, memorising, and bringing forward manifestations of the positive emancipation of ‘species being.’ This was the case in the time and space when and where collectivisation in Spain managed to work, to be effective in creating another order, distribution, and new values.

With Rosa Luxemburg, we can understand that the spirit of the anti-racket is deeply involved in resisting with collective forms of relation and production, and that every defeat is also a pedagogy: “Because of the contradiction in the early stages of the revolutionary process between the task being sharply posed and the absence of any preconditions to resolve it, individual battles of the revolution end in formal defeat. But revolution is the only form of “war”—and this is another peculiar law of history—in which the ultimate victory can be prepared only by a series of defeats.”⁶³ The aspects and the characteristics that are registered in Korsch’s articles about Spanish collectivisation do not answer all of our questions, questions which we pose as a retracting and reflecting on the ongoing issues brought about under the circumstances in which we live today. Remembering, studying, testing, rehearsing, and taking notes on all of the past and present examples that constitute our modes of resistance and the spontaneous forms of fight, are thus a form of praxis we are doing once more, as did Korsch when reporting about the failed and defeated collectivisation of Spain.

Notes

The cover of Voltaire's book *Éléments de la philosophie de Newton* ("Elements of Newtonian Philosophy") of 1738, where Newton, up in heaven, emanates enlightenment to his readers

Preamble

This blog post presents a reworked version of an oral presentation originally delivered during the Spring 2025 reading group sessions on “The Science of Society in Critical Theory,” focusing on Boris Hessen’s seminal analysis of Newton’s Principia. While the core argument and structure remain faithful to the original presentation, this written adaptation includes the following changes: extensive citations of key claims, footnotes providing additional context and clarification, and a refinement of theoretical points to ensure stronger fidelity to Hessen’s original work. I hope you find in this blog post both a reconstruction of why Hessen’s intervention was so electrifying to science historiography and an appreciation of his enduring significance as a theoretical bridge connecting diverse strands of Marxist historical analysis.

Hessen Reconstruction

What is the relationship of science and technology to human history, and how have Marxists conceptualized this problematic within historical materialism? The work of Boris Hessen represents one of the most sophisticated attempts to apply a materialist analysis to the history of science—specifically, how the economic needs of early capitalism influenced what we now think of as modern science and the Scientific Revolution. In this blog, I explore how Hessen pursues his analysis in his seminal essay “The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia” (henceforth referred to as “Newton’s Roots”).I draw greatly from Gideon Freudenthal and Peter McLaughlin’s fantastic reconstructive preface in Freudenthal and McLaughlin, “Classical Marxist Historiography of Science: The Hessen–Grossmann Thesis,” in *The Social and Economic Roots of the Scientific Revolution*, ed. Gideon Freudenthal and Peter McLaughlin, Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science 278 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2009).

While Hessen did not develop the first Marxist analysis of science,Notably: Engels' detailed study on the development of rifles, Christopher Caudwell's coverage of the crisis of physics in the 20th century, and J.B.S. Haldane's unwitting revitalization of Julius Schaxel's "dialectical biology" all marked important contributions to the analysis of these areas, among others. Hessen’s approach was one of the first truly systematic attempts.For those interested in further reading, see Helena Sheehan, *Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: A Critical History* (London: Verso, 2018\) and John Bellamy Foster, *The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology* (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020). Both Sheehan and Foster offer good overviews and genealogies of Marxist science historiography, though are somewhat limited in their treatments of critical theory, labeled "Western Marxism.” Furthermore, "heterodox" Soviet Marxist thinkers like Lev Vygotsky and Evald Ilyenkov are not handled with the same level of sensitivity and care as figures such as Hessen. Moreover, his work helps us see past the often oversimplified division between “Western Marxism” and Soviet thought, revealing a productive tension in international Marxism through attempts to apply historical materialism in understanding science, technology, and nature under capitalist society.

In the same vein, Henryk Grossman makes the connection between science and capitalist society explicit in his work with the Institute of Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung, or IfS)—several of Grossmann’s articles were published in the IfS’s journal Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (ZfS). Grossmann was in fact one of the first defenders of Hessen’s work against critics such as George. N. Clark, Richard S. Westfall, etc. as these critics fundamentally misunderstood Hessen’s theses, and, by extension, Grossmann’s own formulation of the relation between science and capitalist society. While both reached similar conclusions independently, and Grossmann’s work is introduced at points, I focus on Hessen’s formulation here.

To do justice to Hessen’s analysis of Newton, it is important to apply Hessen’s own considerations toward Newton to himself. What was the context of this intervention? What were the social and economic roots of this text? And what can this context reveal about the text? To answer these questions, I first provide a brief biography of Hessen up to his Newton text. I then examine the core arguments of the Hessen-Grossmann thesis, before finally exploring what Hessen’s materialist approach to science historiography might mean for both theory and practice today.

A Brief Biography of Boris Hessen

Boris Hessen was born in 1893 to a middle-class Jewish family in Elisavetgrad (now in Ukraine), then part of the Russian Empire. His intellectual journey began early; we have evidence of his involvement in local Marxist movements during his gymnasium years, showing how science (here, seen equally as education) and politics were never separate for Hessen. Between 1913 and 1914, Hessen and his gymnasium friend Igor Tamm (who would later win the Nobel Prize in Physics) studied physics and natural science at the University of Edinburgh. There, Hessen worked under Edmund T. Whittaker, a mathematician and physicist specializing in astronomy and numerical methods. It is from his teacher that Hessen inherited an interest in the history of physics. Whittaker was known in academia equally as a scientist and as a historian of science. While studying under Whittaker, Hessen cultivated his sense that scientific and historical analysis must be integrated. This would become a neat historical motif as later Marxist scientists, such as Richard Lewontin, also match this historical pattern.In a similar vein, Richard Lewontin *critically* inherited his research problematic and approach from Theodosius Dobzhansky, his advisor. To quote Lewontin, “My own problematic is the problematic of my professor. I recognize that everything I do in science I get in one way or another from the [research] program he initiated.” This, most likely, did not just include guiding scientific research questions, but a sense of social service as well as social critique. See David Depew, “Richard Lewontin and Theodosius Dobzhansky: Genetics, Race, and the Anxiety of Influence,” *Biological Theory* 19, no. 3 (September 2024): 151–67, https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-023-00452-2.

Returning to Russia in 1914, Hessen continued his studies in physics, mathematics, and statistics at St. Petersburg University. Then came the Russian Revolution and Civil War—a period that transformed both Russia and Hessen himself. He enlisted in the Red Army, joined the Communist Party in 1919, and served on the Revolutionary Military Council from 1919 to 1921. After the civil war, Hessen worked at the Party School while continuing his physics studies at various institutions, eventually graduating from the Institute of Red Professors in Moscow in 1928.

Hessen’s dual position as both a physicist and a party intellectual placed him at the intersection of science and politics during a period of intense ideological battle in Soviet academia. This intersection became increasingly dangerous for Hessen. He faced severe accusations of being a “Machist” (a follower of Ernst Mach’s positivist philosophy) and a “right deviationist”—both potentially being connected to his Menshevik past.The veracity of the accusations against Hessen remains a theme in secondary literature. For further reading, see Gerardo Lenna and Giulia Rispoli, “Boris Hessen at the Crossroads of Science and Ideology. From International Circulation to the Soviet Context,” *Societate Si Politica* XIII, no. 1 (2019): 37–63. In particular, Einstein’s theory of relativity and quantum mechanics came under attack throughout the late 1920s by Communist Party philosophers in the USSR, who denounced such theory as “bourgeois science” contaminated by capitalist values. Hessen found himself in a snare: he was a Marxist who wanted to defend relativity and quantum mechanics as true advances in physics in a hostile social environment, and a physicist who was simultaneously committed to socialist construction.

Hessen presented “The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia” in 1931 at the Second International Congress of the History of Science in London as a member of the Soviet delegation led by Nikolai Bukharin. Hessen’s report is often considered a landmark in the historiography of science, with eminent figures such as J.D. Bernal and J.G. Crowther supporting Hessen. At the same time, however, Hessen’s sympathizers were outnumbered by detractors such as G.N. Clark, A.R. Hall, and R.S. Westfall, who made it their mission to critique Hessen’s work.

The importance of Hessen’s report still reverberates in the fields of STS (science and technology studies) and the history of science, where Hessen is taken to be an exemplar of an externalist account of science history.In brief, “internalism” was the dominant historiographical program in the history of science during the early 20th century. The program saw science as being done by intellectuals propelled in finding solutions to problems, emphasizing science as a body of ideas disconnected from its larger context. For an excellent discussion on Hessen’s reception in science historiography and the larger methodological disputes of “internalist” and “externalist” recounting, see Gerardo Lenna, “The International and Interdisciplinary Circulation of Boris Hessen’s Theses, ” in *Boris Hessen’s Manuscripts and Documents on the History of Physics: A Historical Materialist Textbook*, ed. Pietro Daniel Omodeo and Sean Winkler (Verum Factum, 2022), 75–130, https://iris.unive.it/handle/10278/5024380. Lenna suggests that these debates emerged in reaction to what Hessen represented\! Fast forwarding to contemporary times, the British historian Patricia Fara’s 2021 biography of Newton, for example, cites Hessen approvingly as someone who broke a taboo on reevaluating key scientific figures.Patricia Fara, *Life After Gravity: Isaac Newton’s London Career* (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 218–222. Fara’s judgment is representative of reception to Hessen’s report outside of the Soviet Union as an event.Fara, *Life After Gravity*, 218–222; cf. Freudenthal and McLaughlin, “Marxist Historiography of Science,” 26–34.

For Marxist science scholars, Hessen’s text has another valence. Loren Graham and others, for example, understood this text as a lobbying tactic by Hessen: party philosophers would not challenge the validity of Newton’s theories, and showing that these theories were motivated by bourgeois concerns, in Hessen’s eyes, would show that scientific ‘accuracy’ could exist whatever the motivations were for undertaking it.Loren R. Graham, “The Socio-Political Roots of Boris Hessen: Soviet Marxism and the History of Science,” *Social Studies of Science* 15, no. 4 (1985): 705–22, https://doi.org/10.1177/030631285015004005. However, there is little evidence that his paper had any effect in the internal Soviet philosophical battles over Einstein’s work.

Hessen returned to the USSR after setting the discipline of science history ablaze in the first world with his Newton presentation. Between 1934 and 1936, while continuing his scientific and history of science work, Hessen secured his last position as deputy director of the Physics Institute in Moscow. This position did not do him any favors. At this point, with the paranoia of ‘anti-Soviet’ conspiracy at fever pitch and his reputation still suspect, this new position of influence only reinforced the intensity of his potential dubiety. Like many “dissident” Soviet thinkers and philosophers, he fell victim to the Stalinist purges.

The Hessen-Grossmann Thesis Applied to Newton

Hessen’s analysis of Newton in “Newton’s Roots” represents a broader framework that scholars gloss as the Hessen-Grossman thesis. This thesis—its description as such suggesting an intimate connection with Grossman’s work—offers a materialist framework for understanding techno-scientific development through three interconnected claims:

First, technology opens up horizons for science. Scientific inquiry does not emerge in a vacuum, but is enabled by existing technological practices.

Second, technology simultaneously acts as a constraint/limit on science. Scientists can only conceptualize and investigate phenomena that materially manifest in existing technological practices.

Third, the interaction between science and technology in society generates a world-picture (Grossman) or image of nature (Hessen)—essentially, the dominant ideology or conception of nature in a given historical period.

Hessen’s analysis of Newton elaborates how the Hessen-Grossmann thesis explains techno-scientific development. For claims 1 and 2, Hessen argues that like any other form of labor, scientific labor is socially determined at its core. In turn, one of the key aspects of this social determination is the existence of particular, concrete technologies prior to the scientific process, technologies that Hessen argued expressed existing material practices—that is, the forces and relations of production. Scientists study these technologies to produce theories, models, and concepts. Conversely, science itself supplies new technological possibilities or means, creating what might be called a virtuous cycle of development.

In Newton’s case, Hessen demonstrates how scientific labor is socially determined by showcasing how the practical mechanics of early capitalism furnished the content for Newton’s theories. Consider his examples from the text. Maritime trade created demand for better ships and navigation, pushing forward developments in fluid dynamics and astronomy. Military needs drove innovations in ballistics and fortification design. Industrial challenges in mining and warfare required mechanical solutions spanning from basic machinery to advanced materials research. Hessen argues that all these practical concerns—excluding mining and metallurgy, which he classifies as chemistry problems—afforded, if not motivated or necessitated, the emergence of theoretical mechanics as a new science that could synthesize these diverse practical applications. In short, the means of production (tools, machines, etc.) supply and bound scientific labor’s developmental trajectory.

Crucially, Hessen connects these technological needs to the rising bourgeois class:

“Step by step, science flourished along with the bourgeoisie. In order to develop its industry, the bourgeoisie required a science that would investigate the properties of material bodies and the manifestations of the forces of nature. Hitherto science had been the humble servant of the church and had not been allowed to go beyond the limits set by the church. The bourgeoisie had need of science, and science rebelled against the church together with the bourgeoisie […]” Boris Hessen. “The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia,” in *The Social and Economic Roots of the Scientific Revolution*, (Dordrecht: Springer, 2009), 56\.

“Similarly, the division of labor within the various branches of industry was first put into practice in the army. This, in condensed form, is the entire history of the bourgeois system […]” Hessen, “Newton’s Roots,” 49\.

Just as revealing as what Newton addressed is what he failed to address. Hessen points out that Newtonian natural philosophy omitted problems in thermodynamics and electrodynamics, fields that would later be crucial to understanding the conservation of energy implied in Newton’s own theory. Such an omission can be explained: the invention of the steam engine, understood by Hessen as embodied material practice, had not yet occurred! The ‘material conditions’ for theorizing such sciences simply did not exist in Newton’s time. As Hessen explains:

“It was not the development of the motor and the invention of the steam engine that created the industrial revolution of the 18th century, but on the contrary the steam engine gained such enormous importance precisely because the division of labour that was emerging in manufacture and its increasing productivity made the invention of a machine-driven tool both possible and necessary, and the steam engine, which had been born in the mining industry, found a field awaiting its application as a motive power.”Hessen, “Newton’s Roots,” 78\.

One note here. According to Hessen, there was a further development in the social world between Newton’s time and the development of thermodynamics—that being economics—in the transition from merchant capital to industrial or manufacturing capital. These social developments posed new technical issues, which in turn generated new scientific problems.

Following Hessen, we see a pattern here. What makes the Hessen-Grossmann framework so powerful is its historical specificity. Technology becomes an ‘enabling constraint’ for science: such a constraint simultaneously makes specific scientific inquiries possible, while limiting others, but only during specific historical periods tied to particular social formations. The concept enabling constraints epitomizes claims 1 and 2 of the Hessen-Grossmann thesis. We can understand the mechanisms of these enabling constraints through the following process:

First, economic forces specify social and practical needs.
Second, technological means realize these economically specified needs.
Third, science examines existing technology and conceptualizes it.
Finally, science changes the structure of technological realization, which in turn alters the economic specification of needs.

This creates a dialectical relationship that Freudenthal and McLaughlin aptly describe:

“The need or desire to expand commerce, ascertained by Hessen, is not of itself a need to improve shipping… The decision to improve shipping for the purpose of expanding commerce […] presupposes the consideration of possible concrete projects characterized by the means for their realization.” Freudenthal and McLaughlin, *“*Marxist Historiography of Science,” 6\.

In other words, economic needs do not automatically translate into technological problems—any such translation itself requires existing scientific and technological practices. As Merton notes, “[e]conomic and military needs may be satisfied by other than technologic means. But given the routine of fulfilling these wants by technologic invention […] it may be said that, in a limited sense, necessity is the (foster) mother of invention.”Robert Merton, *Science, Technology, and Society in Seventeenth-Century England* (Osiris, 1938), 2nd ed. 158 quoted in Freudenthal and McLaughlin, “Marxist Historiography of Science,” 6\. Hessen and Grossmann are interested in the enacted abstractions happening behind people’s backs; what explains the peculiar social patterns of modern science’s actions and explanations based on a particular social order. The social mechanism behind mechanical thought (the mechanism behind the mechanism). This phenomenon can go by many names: mechanical thought, instrumental reason, or a reductive form of explanation, and it is what distinguishes modern scientific practice from what came previously.Here I use *enaction* in a technical sense following the enactive approach in embodied cognition. The fundamental tenet of this school of thought is that life and mind are deeply intertwined. The organism, as an agent, has an intrinsic normativity to precariously maintain itself and distinguish itself from its environment. This normativity becomes the seed of the organism's adaptive sense-making (enaction). The interpenetration of mind, organism, and environment is where cognition lies. Meaning is not found, but brought forth by many of the organism's autonomous dimensions. For us human beings, these would be our organic, sensorimotor, intersubjective, and linguistic dimensions, among others. Following this approach, abstractions have to be understood developmentally (ontogenetically, phylogenetically, and socially) and situationally (culturally, ecologically, etc.) in order to understand how they 'decouple' (become autonomous) from their original context.

One should caution against a potentially vulgar interpretation of the thesis, wherein the purpose of scientific inquiry in general is facilitating economic development by improving technology. The claim, instead, isn’t about this “mechanism” (economic need -> tech -> science), but rather on the conceptualization of how such a social mechanism became a dominant strategy and tactic in the production and reproduction of modern social life.

For both Hessen and Grossmann, the dominance of scientific inquiry as a social mechanism stems from a real separation between conception and execution, which was underway as a historical process via the introduction of machinery and mechanization across various sectors and industries. A reductionist strategy of abstraction, a “world-picture” or ideology, instrumentalizes two poles of commodity-producing labor/labor-power—the qualitative (skills and judgments) and the quantitative (the precise rules and protocols)—such that people are indeed reduced to being cogs in a machine via strict quantitative parameters. In turn, these very parameters incentivize these human cogs being replaced by actual machines due to the unique nature of social domination under capitalism: value enacted by the market. Mechanical labor homogenizes labor to be equal qualitatively and only differ quantitatively, and this difference is prescribed with measurement. In other words, labor becomes modulated as a social mechanism; the potential autonomy of labor is reduced to being a signal-to-noise ratio in the valorization of capital.

However, the content of science isn’t just bound by the socioeconomic and technological conditions on their own. Another factor in scientific concept-formation and practice is the ideological horizon determined by the various historical moments in class warfare. Hessen is particularly illustrative here, distinguishing between Newton and Descartes’ mechanical worldviews and showing that these differences arose from their ideological struggles and commitments. Thus, to properly reconstruct Newtonian theory, one must place him as representative and nexus of many social forces, which reciprocally determine each other. Newton was a member and partisan of the ascending bourgeois class of the English revolutions, a protestant, and a contemporary and a friend of philosophers and scientists (Locke, Bentley, Leibniz, etc.). Yet, the revolutionary transformation of society involved many diverse people and class representatives from Thomas Hobbes to the Leveller Richard Overton who all affected the content of Newtonian natural philosophy and his metaphysical and theological beliefs. Newton’s interweaving of religious elements with the principle of mechanical causation (the intertwined ideal and material elements) wasn’t just a deficiency in his personal conception, but a trace of, or reflective of, ideological battles of the time. Indeed for Hessen, the dialectic between individuals and collectives is key in determining the political form in which the ideological content of science manifests. Newton as an individual scientist only makes sense in a broader socioeconomic context, yet Newtonian mechanics was a singular achievement in the history of science. This as our text repeatedly demonstrated is not because of a genius idea or individual, but a determinate social individual. Put simply, Newton was an articulator and articulation of a particular socioeconomic condition, 17th-century London.This argument is given its full weight in Sean Winkler. “Individuals and Collectives in the Philosophy of Boris Hessen: An Introduction.” *Science in Context* 34, no. 1 (2021): 121–36. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269889722000096.

These various ‘political forms’ in which ideological content manifests can be seen concretely in Hessen’s comparison of Newton and Descartes. Like Newton, Descartes was a man of all seasons—an esteemed mathematician, philosopher, and humanist operating outside the university milieu still dominated by Aristotelian physics and Thomism. Alongside figures like Hobbes, Bacon, and Boyle, Descartes represented the ‘new science’ positioned against both scholastic dogma and Church authority.Grossman demonstrates the enabling condition or the content-determination of the mechanistic Carestain method terrifically. The function of the mechanistic method can be summarized by three interrelated points. (i) reduce the socially necessary labor time needed to learn, teach, and comprehend knowledge “So that it could be taught in a very little time” (Descartes to Mersenne, Nov 20, 1629 quoted by Grossman); (ii) map the different sciences “according to definite classifications,” such that uptake of known facts can be accelerated countering the tendency of secrecy among artisans by simplifying “the road to truth;” (iii) subvert intellectual over-specialization and elitism by making the method *exoteric*, such that the peasants are equal to the philosophers, in Henryk Grossmann, “Descartes and the Social Origins of the Mechanistic Concept of the World,” in *The Social and Economic Roots of the Scientific Revolution*, ed. Gideon Freudenthal and Peter McLaughlin, Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science 278 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2009), 165–168. Newton and Descartes’ approaches to the mechanism-divinity problem differed significantly. Newton explicitly incorporated God into his mechanical system through arguments from design, treating motion as requiring external causation and introducing the Creator to provide matter with its initial impulse. Descartes, by contrast, treated the world as an isolated physical system where no external agent (God) could interfere with natural processes, explaining planetary motion through purely material forces without requiring divine intervention.

These contrasting approaches illuminates what Hessen means when he treats ideology. For him, ideology is to be taken etymologically as a ‘science of ideas,’ which are always embedded in material practices constituting social reality. The different scientific positions Newton and Descartes adopted were refractions of the broader struggles between feudal and capitalist institutions. Newton’s theological compromises reflected the complex negotiations between diverse figures—from Hobbes to the Levellers—that shaped his intellectual milieu, while Descartes’ more consistent materialism refracted a different configuration of these same underlying social conflicts. Both individual commitment and collective historical forces combined to determine which ‘political form’ the ideological content of their science would take. Taken as a whole, the Hessen-Grossman thesis asserts that technology is the enabling constraint behind modern science, and that scientific and technological means generate a world-picture or image of nature, which, in the last analysis, is a product of class struggle.

The final section of “Newton’s Roots” is unfortunately the weakest part of Hessen’s text. Hessen reverts to bourgeois reductionism in his discussion of the Luddites, and he fails to notice that his own analysis resonates with their own,For an excellent reading on the Luddites, I recommend Gavin Mueller, *Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job* (London: Verso, 2021). instead holding reservations for their rhetoric. In spite of this stumbling block, however, I believe another dimension can be brought out in Hessen’s rhetoric. I read this final section as a jab towards Communist Party philosophers whom Hessen deems the wreckers of socialist construction. These philosophers are responsible for being the most advanced practitioners of science and the severest critics of this very enterprise; yet, these pressing demands remain unattended to, their custodians having vanished!While admittedly this claim is a bit audacious and hard to validate given the limited information about Hessen's life, I think it is worth staking here. Hessen spent the majority of his life as a physics instructor focused on the methodology of the natural sciences—keenly interested in the unity of the natural sciences, its history, and the philosophy of science. He taught at various universities, as the biography section of this blog detailed, and was involved with the 'Circle of Physicists-Mathematicians-Materialists.' Indeed, one of his last projects was a planned 700-page textbook of translated sources and expositions on the history of physics. One of Hessen's contemporaries, the positivist Hans Reichenbach, claimed that for them the history of science was mere recreational activity. Hessen could not have disagreed more. From this broader view, I believe Hessen wanted to change the way education was done, for education was an inner moment of the social form of scientific labor—and to expand its variation so it could fit and realize socialist society, history had to be brought into methodology. He saw the party philosopher's disinterest in concrete history to be a disaster in the waiting.

Conclusions

What is the relationship of science and technology to human history? As I have argued, I believe that the Hessen-Grossmann materialist framework for science historiography offers a sophisticated and historically localized answer to this question—one which merits serious reconsideration today. Though the consequences and implications of this framework are immense, I highlight a few promising threads.

There is no “neutral” technoscientific rationality. Science and technology emerged, persisted, and developed due to specific historical configurations—their current mystified appearance is a product of capitalist society. This has direct implications for revolutionary politics. “Appropriating the means of production” means more than simply taking over existing machinery. It requires transforming the social form of scientific and technical labor itself. The naive understanding that we can just seize capitalist machinery without addressing the class relations inherent in their design and deployment, espoused especially by ecomodernists, is misguided.

Given the “enabling constraint” thesis and the “ideology” thesis, any philosophical account of capitalist society must explain how material practices transition from one set of scientific and technological labor means to another. For a negative example, consider Moishe Postone’s analysis of capitalist temporality, which does not have such an account even though he scaffolds a potential one.Moishe Postone, *Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 176–179. Indeed Postone, regrettably, does not see how Henryk Grossman’s account could enrich his social-form theory, where the “empirical” is not far behind the “real abstractions” of the commodity-form—it is a particular realization of it. He interprets Grossman as a slightly more sophisticated “reflection” theorist. Just as with the concept of time and synchronicity, the shift from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics reflects not just abstract scientific progress but transformations in material technology and ideology. Newton’s physics corresponded to a centralized, universal clockwork maintaining uniform time, while Einstein’s emerged in what Matteo Pasquinelli, citing Peter Galison, calls “an electromechanical world” connected by new communication networks like the telephone.Matteo Pasquinelli, *The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence* (Verso, 2024), 91. This material influence extends even to the conceptual level. Einstein's elevator thought experiment could only emerge in an era when mechanical vertical transport was a common urban experience in the 20th century, showing how 'enabling conditions' shape not just scientific instruments but the very metaphors through which scientists think.

The Hessen-Grossmann framework allows us to develop a singular yet internally diverse history of science—one that sees the history of science as a part of the material history of planet Earth or the earth system. The Haber-Bosch process exemplifies this approach: ammonia synthesis emerged from Germany’s dependence on Chilean caliche (nitrate) for both feeding populations through fertilizers and sustaining its military through explosives during WWI. When British naval blockades severed these supply chains, triggering the war’s first naval engagement off Chile’s Pacific coast, this dual dependency transformed from regular ‘economic’ trade into existential crisis or a real practical challenge. The scaling-up of Haber and Bosch’s laboratory process into industrial production crystallized how bourgeois science-industry integration serves the contradictory imperatives of social reproduction and destruction. This transformation reveals the barbarism inherent in capitalist scientific development. Chile’s control of nitrate deposits, seized through the War of the Pacific and organized under the Anglo-Chilean Nitrate & Railway Company, created an extractive economy that devastated entire ecosystems. Today, Tocopilla Province bears witness to this violence: hundreds of abandoned mining towns and endless piles of overburden earth scarring the landscape. The Haber-Bosch “solution” merely shifted this ecological destruction from extraction to industrial synthesis, while nitrate’s dual use in fertilizers and explosives embodies the productive-destructive unity of capitalist technoscience.Ed Conway *Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future* (Dublin: Penguin Random House, 2024), 163–173; María Soledad Ureta-Zañartu, “How Chemistry Shaped Societies: The Case of the Atacama Desert in Chile,” *ChemTexts* 9, no. 1 (December 9, 2022), https://doi.org/10.1007/s40828-022-00172-3. Thus, to narrate a materialist history of science, one that is neither purely focused on the nature of “extraction” or “expropriation,” one must foreground the web of social relations (singular) as containing both moments latent in it.

As indicated briefly in the introduction, these implications were not lost for science historians. Broadly speaking, Hessen’s reception followed several trajectories. European ‘socialist’ historians labeled him as a crude economic reductionist, while ironically adopting the “externalist” approach to science history he helped inaugurate. Positivists, Stalinists, and vulgar anti-Stalinists alike mischaracterized him as an “internalist,” claiming his 1931 presentation was an anomaly in his oeuvre, whereas his previous work mainly took itself to caring about science’s internal conceptual development. More recently, social constructivists in sociology of science have advanced what Steven Shapin famously articulated: “There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it.”Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2018), 1 The ‘it’ here refers to the concept of the Scientific Revolution itself, which Shapin treats as a historiographical construct rather than a discrete historical event, but this approach lacks the self-reflexivity to examine what the selection of historical case studies reveals about the historians and society themselves, especially in terms of concrete practice. This “cultural turn” in science history focuses on micro-histories and questions the alleged discontinuity between pre-modern and modern science. Some go as far as saying there is no such thing as modernity.

As I hope my presentation made clear, I think that Hessen was neither an internalist nor an externalist. I follow others like Sean Winkler and Pietro Daniel Omodeo who also argue such, as both internalists and externalists share the conviction that the core of modern science was the advance of the physical-mathematical disciplines. For Hessen, this misses the real emergence of these disciplines in practical activity, where problems of knowledge are inseparable from problems of social order. Even for proponents of the cultural turn, Hessen remains a trailblazer with his ideology thesis. As Omodeo observes:

“But, at a deeper level, the Scientific Revolution itself was the expression of an ideology, namely the Eurocentrism that it implicitly justified. Such ideology is not mere mystification — an intentional lie to be dispelled and corrected. Rather, it is a conception that constitutes political action. It reflects on society, justifying and redirecting it. Hence, the Scientific Revolution cannot be treated as a mere problem of historiography and epistemology to be revised and eventually substituted by a ‘correct’ narrative (or abandoned for no narrative at all) once a hypothetical agreement among the academic community of historians of science (perhaps ‘historians of knowledge’) has been reached. Rather, the Scientific Revolution should be understood as the cultural expression of specific relations of power and a specific historical arrangement of society at a global level. Its geo-historical coordinates correspond to European colonial expansion and the establishment of Europe-centered forms of global dominion. It is by no means accidental that the dawn of the Scientific Revolution coincided with the definitive end of European centrality in geo-politics and the establishment of a US-centric globalization.”Pietro Daniel Omodeo, “Boris Hessen’s Philosophy of the Scientific Revolution,” in Omodeo and Winkler, *History of Physics*, 174.

Hessen’s enduring insight is that science, politics, and society cannot be delinked. Science was not a disinterested intellectual pursuit of the truth outside of worldly concerns, but one of corporeal organization and the co-evolution of the natural and social worlds. By investigating the forms of life that shape scientific practice, historiography transcends mere narrative to become functional in the metabolism between society and nature. For Hessen, socialist science must simultaneously keep pace with advanced capitalist science while being its harshest critic. It accomplishes this by refusing to separate scientific practice from scientific history. In the absence of such an integrated approach, the realization of an emancipated historical form of science cannot manifest, and the relationship of the content of science to its expressions (technology, research activity, education, etc.) will be mystified.

Similar to what Marx wrote in the 1844 Manuscripts, “Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.”Karl Marx, *Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844*, trans. Martin Milligan (Progress Publishers, 1959), 43 To quote Winkler, Hessen’s version of dialectical materialism “mediates socialist construction alongside both the relative limits of socioeconomic development and technological progress and the absolute limits of natural laws.”Sean Winkler, “‘A Pantheon of Great Ideas’: Boris Hessen and the History & Philosophy of Science,” in Omodeo and Winkler, *History of Physics*, 45–46. For Hessen, science represents the unity of revolutionary theory and practice. To put it in a pithy phrase: we should not just “do science for the revolution” (or worse, substitute science in place of revolution), but also “make revolution for science”—recognizing that the next scientific revolution will necessarily be a social one.

An ICE agent in Broadview, Illinois wears a skull mask, a garment associated with neo-nazi terrorism (September 6, 2025)

Read Part I

V - Translatio Imperii

Do these people—the killers—matter? Do they hold positions of power? Are their acts historically impactful beyond the immediate carnage? Sociologically speaking, they do not seem to originate from the same source as military, special forces, border patrol, police, etc. This is a new development: The old kind of killers—the Klan and Black Legion, the ex-officers of the Freikorps and squadristi, Eastern European pogromists, or even the neo-fascist bombers of the Italian Years of Lead—were largely the same kind of people hired to be the state’s official killers, and they had extensive connections to state officials who could turn a blind eye when needed.

Those of the new breed are a breed apart both demographically and ideologically.¹ They are younger, less extroverted, less active in official politics, and much more besides. Their acts of violence are not obviously embedded in a broader social movement or institution. The US Department of Justice has a name for them: Nihilistic Violent Extremists (NVEs).² Researchers and journalists elsewhere, such as the Accelerationist Research Consortium (ARC), have borrowed the term accelerationist to describe them. Both of these names curiously elide the nazi link and thereby obfuscate the historical connection between this modern form of terror and its historical predecessors, instead opting to implicitly define it by its exceptionality, albeit in different ways.

The most broadly accepted definition of ‘(militant) accelerationism’ in this context is, as far as I can tell, the one put forward by Matthew Kriner for the aforementioned ARC. It goes like this: “Militant accelerationism is a set of tactics and strategies designed to put pressure on and exacerbate latent social divisions, often through violence, thus hastening societal collapse.”³ This definition has a few problems. Kriner essentially argues that “militant accelerationism” is an outgrowth of “philosophical forms of accelerationism—such as the technology-centric visions of Nick Land and the anti-colonial liberationist theories of left-accelerationists.” It is a “set of tactics and strategies” which “grew to include various ideological currents, the most dominant of which is neofascism” (my emphasis). Kriner should know that “accelerationist” tactics were being promoted and even put into practice by fascists (and homegrown American “patriots”) decades before Nick Land started blogging.⁴ The Turner Diaries was written all the way back in 1978, and various Nazi guides to ‘revolution’ have been easily accessible on the internet from the 1990s onward. The ARC definition both distorts the historical picture and obfuscates attempts to understand the so-called accelerationists as part of both the broader fascist social movement and the right in general, thus constructing ‘accelerationism’ as a historical and social anomaly that can only be defeated by police methods.

The NVEs, meanwhile, are exceptional because they “engage in criminal conduct” in the pursuit of “goals that derive primarily from a hatred of society at large and a desire to bring about its collapse by sowing indiscriminate chaos, destruction, and social instability.” Ken Klippenstein notes that the term was created by the Trump II FBI “to replace the Biden administration’s focus on anti-government and ‘anti-authority’ extremism adopted after January 6,”⁵ but the appeal to “civilized society” found in the 2025 court documents ultimately occupies the same semiotic space as the Biden administration’s references to “anti-government” and “anti-authority” opinion. Moreover, “sowing indiscriminate chaos, destruction, and social instability” has been one of the main tools of US foreign policy for several decades now, and it is often difficult to find a coherent motive for such acts of wanton destruction beyond “hatred of society at large.” Take the 1998 destruction of the Al-Shifa medicine factory in Sudan.⁶ The alibi that they had intelligence it was a chemical weapons plant is only credible with the understanding that they also believed the Sudanese to be subhuman, a despised and cursed race, so verifying this intelligence was unnecessary. Racism is thus the most powerful vector of “nihilism,” that accursed alibi, in human history.

There are further similarities between the agents of stochastic terror and the agents of the state. This is most clear when comparing their actions to those of the US military and especially its special forces (Navy SEALs, Delta Force, etc). What is a search and destroy operation after all? It is an act of targeted killing typically based on questionable intelligence and executed with the presupposition that anyone encountered along the way was either complicit or a witness, to be disposed of in any case. Normal rules of engagement and laws of war are suspended. Children become nothing more than extinguishable heat signatures.

This is not to say that the killers are schooled in military technique: Most are (thankfully) relatively incompetent. I think the parallels are rather an example of action at a distance (and, of course, easy access to military-grade weaponry). When certain forms of violence are widely practiced and marked as legitimate by the state, this has far-reaching consequences for the use of violence throughout society. Police forces have increasingly grown to resemble the military over the past few decades, and today they are being joined everywhere by the National Guard and a completely militarized ICE. Even private security guards increasingly opt for a SWAT-style look. Given the continuous decline in violence that the US has experienced for decades, this is somewhat odd. There are economic explanations about the sale of surplus and used military equipment, but at a deeper level this militarism is, as the sociologists of the Bush era conjectured, a symptom of decline and the correlate expansion of the powers of fear and chaos.

VI - Do You Need a Movement to Be a Fascist?

The Order of Nine Angles and similar organizations may or may not exist—at least, they may or may not exist in the way that an organization such as the Dominican Order or Republican Party exists. We can be sure that there are individual adherents and that these individual adherents come together both in person and online. The most obvious trace of these organizations are the various artifacts that they leave behind: literature, online webpages and accounts, visual media, etc. Some authoritative fascist texts on strategy and organization—to the extent that they can be justly labeled that and not mere flights of political fantasy—outright reject large-scale organization in favor of small, cell-based or individual acts of terror. Their mantra: “You don’t need a movement to be a fascist.” Are they right?

The first thing to note in answering his question is that when neo-nazis use the word “movement,” they mean a large-scale organization, not a social movement as such. One can certainly be a fascist without being a part of a large-scale organization. Being a fascist without being part of a social movement (namely the right in general) is, however, a historical impossibility, if not a strictly logical one. (I am emphasizing, once again, that the killers are objectively part of the same social movement as Fox News hosts.) Beyond that connection, sociologists and miscellaneous counter-terrorism/extremism researchers have done a decent job of mapping out the “accelerationist” movement in particular—although admittedly the subjects in question made this mapping process pretty easy with their atrocious operational security.⁷

What emerges instead of a single organization are interconnected networks of more and less committed individuals and the groups they form. At one end are the empty husks serving life sentences and writing letters by hand in the hole of a maximum security prison. At the other end are teenagers who repost ultra-nazi memes about the “day of the rope” because they think it’s funny. Between these individuated poles of the social movement are discrete groups formal and informal. If we imagine the social movement as a kind of two-dimensional graph with individuals and groups on one axis, then the other dimension would be the social infrastructure and institutional background that makes this social movement possible as an aggregate of human beings. That category would include digital means of communication and coordination, the broader global social movement of the right, and certain institutions of the state—insofar as they are actually involved.

Despite the talk of “white jihad,” the organizational finesse of fascist terror groups pales in comparison to the likes of Al-Qaeda. The decentralization and network-based organizational structure of contemporary fascist terrorism is more a result of weakness and the congenital inability of these cretins to organize anything without the internet as a scaffold than deliberate strategy, despite their protestations to the contrary. Both as a mass and as individuals, they seem like highly manipulable actors. This is nothing new. The Italian fascist Enzo Erra, writing for the short-lived neo-fascist review Imperium in 1950, positively described the rank-and-file of the post-war neo-fascist movement as “a legion of true fanatics,” adding that “it is fanaticism that the revolution needs today.”⁸ Right-wing organizations are universally based on fear, trickery, irrational authority, backbiting, and the like. Dysfunction only seems to become more severe with illegal groups that have no real recourse to binding rules and bylaws.

The right’s ‘intellectuals’ and leadership strata almost always believe they are getting one over on their simpleminded underlings. The political leadership is correct about this, the intellectuals less so. Traditional intellectuals, as Gramsci called them, have always been pawns of the real, political leadership, whose cultural standard is often rather poor. The right-wing Catholic intelligentsia uniformly falls in line behind Trump because he gives them what they want in exchange for obedience—endorsement of so many mortal sins is forgiven under plenary political indulgence. The grunts and lower level ‘intellectuals’ (today: podcasters, etc.) similarly follow the top dog’s diktat unswervingly. In the event that they do dissent, this is done with the awareness that they cannot risk straying too far from the path—to the extent that they are organic intellectuals they remain mere organs functionally subordinated to something greater.

It was scandalous for Mario Borghezio, at the time a Member of European Parliament for the Lega Nord and himself a former cadre of the Italian neo-fascist movement, to publicly express his agreement with the beliefs (if not the actions) of Anders Breivik in 2011. (In the US, Glenn Beck compared the murdered children to members of the Hitler Youth, to give some idea of how the American right responded.)⁹ The situation has evolved since then. Now the killers identify themselves with recognized political parties, which have largely absorbed the Luciferian impulse and bent it to their will. Thus the defense attorney of Patrick Crusius, the mass murderer and face behind the “Chudjak” meme, told El Paso Matters that his client “thought he had to stop the [Hispanic] invasion [of Texas] because that’s what his president was telling him.”¹⁰ For the attorney, this was evidence that Crusius was mentally unwell and, given he made similar arguments at his client’s sentencing hearing, also a possible extenuating circumstance. For us it is something different—even taking into account the perfidy inherent to lawyery! Young Republican activists’ private exaltation of rape as “epic” is the memetic afterbirth of the Order of Nine Angles’ radicalization of traditional right wing defenses of sexual violence into outright praise for it.¹¹ The prodigal son has returned.

From a historical perspective, passive, conservative reaction produces the activist right and maintains the latter as a kind of kept boy or covert bastard, but finds itself falling back on this apprentice in times of need. The ‘Alt-Right,’ as it used to be known, was an organizational failure, but it provided an impetus and cadre of footsoldiers that could reinvigorate the flailing organs of the Republican Party and help bring it to power. The ascendance of Trump seems, in retrospect, to be both highly contingent and the inevitable culmination of many deeper historical processes. That is normal. “History does nothing, it ‘possesses no immense wealth,’ it ‘wages no battles.’ It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; ‘history’ is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims.”¹²

VII - Special Bodies of Armed Men

The German-Jewish jurist Ernst Fraenkel introduced the term dual state to describe the legal structure of the Third Reich.¹³ He argued that the Nazi state was divided into a “prerogative state” and a “normative state.” The former was a basically political body unconcerned with formal procedure and governed by a hierarchical chain of command ultimately terminating in the will of the Führer, while the latter represented the institutions governing “normal life,” in particular the regulation of private property. Crucially, the relationship between these two states was combative: the former possessed potentially unlimited jurisdiction, and new exceptions to the normative legal order could be called into existence at any moment.

Fraenkel’s picture, of course, does not map perfectly onto the present, but insofar as there are any attempts to make real changes in the structure of the US government today, these attempts are characterized by a dualism of exception and norm like that of the double state. The old style of unified, legally structured racial apartheid and blatant class domination that characterized the Solid South would be difficult if not impossible to restore, certainly within the span of a single presidential term, and so it seems to me that one of the main goals of the American right in this moment is to establish a kind of deformed double state without recourse to a full-on declaration of martial law or autogolpe. Indeed, one of the distinguishing characteristics of this ‘late fascism’ is its pointed avoidance of the totalizing rhetoric of a Mussolini or Hitler—Stephen Miller’s vituperative discourse notwithstanding.

The preferential vehicle for such a transformation today is the executive branch, the decrepit head of which is argued to already hold “plenary authority” by his aforementioned scheming vizier,¹⁴ but any part of the state will work in a pinch. (Indeed, some on the right are rather perturbed by Trump’s attempts to circumvent the sham judiciary they’ve cultivated for decades. In the case against Mahmoud Khalil, the State’s legal team is trying to get the case trapped in the immigration courts, which as administrative courts are not actually part of the judiciary and, since the unitarity of the executive has been all but ceded by the Supreme Court, therefore fall under the control of the President—a possible vessel for a system of Sondergerichte? But let me not digress too much.) The technique is a matter of combining finesse with bravado. For every spectacular episode of ethnic cleansing in the barrio, there are several less publicized agreements made and intragovernmental Drumpfschaltung campaigns enacted. When one plot against the human race is foiled—the so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” concentration camp, for example—another one is quickly devised and a step-by-step program to realize it is set in motion. While Federalist Society bigwigs no doubt have some fears that Trump will blow his load prematurely and ruin all their hard work, as he genuinely seemed to have done for a moment back on January 6, 2021, one can rest assured that they will keep their disagreements civil. It’s not like they have any other horses to bet on.

Political maneuvers like the ones I just described mainly serve to concentrate power, but beyond the short-term schematics of Project 2025 there is little indication of long term planning. For all the right’s unity, policy continues to prove a stumbling block. ‘More of everything worse, less of everything good’ seems an adequate summary of the vision for now. Historian Nicholas Nagy-Talavera remarked of Count Gyula Károlyi, one time Prime Minister of Hungary under Admiral Horthy, that for even a relatively well-meaning reactionary paternalist such as Károlyi, the content of reforms mattered less than the fact that they came from above.¹⁵ Such is the case too with whatever seemingly ameliorative reforms are floated in the pages of Project 2025 or blurted out by Trump. Among the rank-and-file society is considered a zero sum game, and it is therefore assumed that punishment and deprivation must automatically result in redistribution. This is one reason for attacking immigrants, but it has clear limits.

The United States depends heavily on the labor of undocumented workers, as everyone knows. Breaking the back of agricultural capital to mandate higher wages and make the work attractive to citizens is not on the agenda, nor can “people that live in the inner city,” as Trump euphemistically called them,¹⁶ be forced back to the fields. There is no clear way out, thus in the absence of any coherent plan, a white terror (literally!) is devised. The only real goal of it seems to be social and legal de-integration of immigrants (if not the outright dis-integration of immigrant communities), which is a prerequisite for the construction of any satisfactorily inhumane and bloodsucking solution to the ‘immigration question,’ as it used to be called.

In Spring of this year, Trump and Grand Poobah Miller attempted to deploy a shoddy legal argument that members of Tren de Aragua, a previously obscure Venezuelan gang, were “conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions against the United States”¹⁷ under orders from Nicolas Maduro and therefore eligible for detainment and expulsion under the Alien Enemies Act—and also that a number of random Venezuelan immigrants plucked off the street were in fact hardened enforcers and saboteurs for this outfit. They’ve since backed off from this argument—mainly because it wasn’t working in court—but have continued pursuing external aggression against the Bolivarian Republic by arbitrarily murdering Venezuelan boatmen with drone strikes. This blatant provocation is justified by smearing the boats as drug smuggling vessels whose freight was en route to the US. War is thus justified by a failed internal policy in order to retroactively justify this policy, which was itself intended to justify the war.

I saw a video recently of a masked skull-cracker—whether he was ICE or CBP I could not discern—incredulously asking a bystander, “How am I a Nazi?” In the back seat of his paddywagon was, of course, a restrained Latino man. All reporting on the farcical recruitment campaign being pursued by the Department of Homeland Security—a “shit show”¹⁸ according to an anonymous administration source—has driven home the same conclusion suggested by that video: ICE hopefuls are uniquely stupid, callous, and bellicose. The pseudonymous Yanis Varoufuckice recounted his (?) experiences talking with men who variously claimed to have seen video evidence of the Taliban at a fast-food restaurant or wanted to rid Times Square of “savages.”¹⁹ Most characteristic—a real patriot cannot stand to see his nation’s shrines to Mammon defiled by dusky brutes!

Perhaps the most interesting specimen from Mssr. Varoufuckice’s account, however, is the man who really just wanted to “[parlay] his wages as a deportation officer into buying Airbnbs.” That too is characteristic, and gels nicely with the reports of NPR and the New York Times. The former pointed out the moderate views on immigration held by some applicants and the apathetic order-follower attitude of others,²⁰ while the latter noted the presence of “a large number of working-class African American and Hispanic men”²¹ and several naturalized aspirants at a Texas hiring fair. This indicates that while some wanted to bust heads, a fair number viewed being a deportation officer as a job like any other. (I knew a guy who briefly worked at a temporary immigration ‘intake’ facility for undocumented children during the first months of the Biden admin, a lifelong democratic voter whose parents are immigrants—to him it was just a job. Never underestimate the power of money!) But anyway, I can’t imagine that attitude lasts long in the line of duty. Even if the recruits did not come in as recipients of political spoils, they will leave that way. One cannot pursue a career hunting ‘tonks’—Border Patrol slang for immigrants that originated as onomatopoeia for the sound made when a human skull is struck with a metal flashlight—and expect to come out the other side an even-keeled moderate.

Expanding the repressive apparatus is essentially the only attempt that the right has made to mollify rather than exacerbate the looming crisis of the middle classes, which has its roots in the inability of capital to expand fast enough to absorb labor-power whether skilled or unskilled. In a perverse way it seems almost hopeful to imagine that these utter rubes are being cultivated as a state within the state. They will be less a coherent body like the SS, more a strategic node among others for transforming the structure of the state into a shape more favorable to the right.

VIII - In the Style of Demons

Clichés about the right’s ability to learn from the left are grossly overstated and almost obfuscate the role of money and class power in the right’s successes. Commitment to slower-paced strategies that make use of civil society were not learned from the left. Civil society is making its last stand in the US today—in many places its independent existence has already been annihilated by the State and/or capital—for both the right and bourgeois liberalism.²² In the event that the former is victorious, people will perhaps finally learn that civil society is not an unalloyed good, or indeed necessarily a good at all.

A key component of the decay of civil society is the decline of religion in America, a process that has been correlated with the ascendence of the religious right. That movement, which we can see as being born in response to school desegregation on one hand and Roe v. Wade on the other, took decades to build the influence it presently wields.²³ Religious actors have political sway because they can mobilize their base, not because their beliefs are popular or even necessarily representative of their correligionists. Churches are one of the last real holdouts of classical, palm-greasing machine politics.

It has always been obvious that Christianity is a lever of social authority with regard to the family—if one drives around the South they will sooner or later encounter billboards proclaiming that to spare the rod is to spoil the child. The role of the religion in legitimizing and organizing violence against women and children, trivial to demonstrate, often goes unacknowledged outside of the political-intellectual ghettos of militant atheism and feminism. (One is hard-pressed to find militant atheism even among self-proclaimed Communists today!) It is unlikely that all the legal and political victories of the feminist movement (e.g. sexual harassment law) will be able to withstand an all-out campaign to destroy them, even if certain protections can be maintained at state and local levels. Mores will be harder to directly change, but they are also an area where the victories have been more uneven. Women cannot be forced out of work at this point, but their situation can be made worse and more precarious in innumerable ways.

If it is uncomfortable for many to confront the patriarchal role of the Christian churches, then the racial element in them is noted even more rarely. On one hand there is a racialized Protestant work ethic wielded against sections of the working class (themselves overwhelmingly Christian), and on the other Christianity functions as a more explicit codeword for white against middle class minorities and immigrants (who may or may not be Christian). In both cases it also encodes settlerism as a particular valence of whiteness. Allowances are made for conservative Black and Latino churches willing to admit the moral depravity of their neighbors and join in the struggle against the ways of the world, but evangelism to immigrants is out of the question.

Part of the reason that conversion therapy (another gift of civil society!) is so repulsive is that it violates freedom of thought, traditionally considered the basis of so many other rights. I doubt that many bigots grasp the violence wrought by the love of the sinner and hatred of sin—charity does not “cover the multitude of sins,” as Peter taught, but in fact creates that multitude, as Wilde observed. It is in this Christian universe of discourse that Randy Shumway, chair of Utah’s state Homeless Services Board and alum of a bank founded by his polygamist pedophile prophet, the “Lion of the Lord” Brigham Young, by the name of Zions Bancorporation, can say that his plans to build an “accountability center” for the homeless—also ein Kameradschaftslager?—will put a stop to the “culture of permissiveness” prevailing amongst them and redirect them “towards human flourishing.”²⁴ That is compassionate conservatism! The suggestion that being put in a cage has anything to do with flourishing—that should be enough of a sign that we are reading the words of an assassin.

The defense of the patriarchal family and jealous guarding of control over education is at least one area where cruelty, far from being “the point,” is quite functional. Childhood is the ground floor of domination, a time in life where coercion and persuasion are mixed freely. While the positive side of education is difficult to engineer, deprivation is trivial. Once you’ve given up on the future, it is easy to sacrifice someone else’s child for an uncertain short-term advantage. (We’ve only been doing it for thousands, if not millions, of years!) Even if the overall funding pool remained the same—and it will not—so-called “school choice” laws will transfer power to reactionary elements in civil society, especially the churches. Under a full “school choice” system, school segregation would explode to levels not seen since before Brown v. Board of Education. Private schools are, moreover, legally permitted to beat children in almost every state of the Union, a privilege jealously guarded by religious fundamentalists of every confession: The government of New York was prompted to put the kibosh on beating in private schools in 2023 (!) because of the extent of its use in Hasidic yeshivas in particular.²⁵

Beating of children may be on the decline, but they are exposed to other dangers, the most pressing of which is the vacuousness of their futures. Even the scions of the ruling class have little left to do but enjoy themselves before last call in the millennium. In the meantime, a school system which does not even have the well-meaning barbarity to funnel the proletarian urchins it’s responsible for into polytechnical schools and dump them on the streets by age sixteen oversees a collapse in literacy. The very idea of public education is founded on a liberal idea of progress inextricable from the historical arc of capitalist civilization, an arc which is now stumbling and seems poised to lunge into the abyss.

IX - Children of Rage

“People say, how can I help on this war against terror? How can I fight evil? You can do so by mentoring a child; by going into a shut-in’s house and say I love you.” —President George W. Bush

Between the time I started writing this essay and when I sat to finish it, multiple O9A terror attacks occurred in different parts of the globe. On the morning of the day I am writing, November 7th, 2025, a bomb attack took place at a high school’s mosque in Jakarta, Indonesia that injured over fifty people.²⁶ At the scene of the crime, a replica assault rifle was discovered. It was emblazoned with numerous anti-Muslim, Nazi, and school shooting slogans and symbols: the triple cross of the Romanian Iron Guard, the phrase natural selection, the number 14, references to Charles Martel and the Battle of Tours, the names of anti-Muslim terrorists, and on the barrel For Agartha—a reference to esoteric Nazism popularized by right-wing memes. The suspect is seventeen years old.

A little over a week before this, on the 28th of October, the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior announced the arrest of a fourteen year old boy in connection to an international extortion network connected to thirty incidents of suicide and other acts of violence. The boy allegedly coordinated this campaign through the game Roblox. “We received information through international cooperation that someone was luring victims to harm themselves, writing their names in blood on their bodies, and inciting violence, psychological abuse, suicide, and arson, including burning their homes and belongings, even animals,” an official announced to the press in front of AI generated graphics of a Roblox character and a boy in an orange prison jumpsuit.²⁷ One of the officials repeatedly gestured to the image, which clearly featured the logo of Google’s Gemini AI service in the bottom right-hand corner, and referenced “the boy you see before you,” implying the chimeric image depicted the actual suspect. No mention was made of O9A, 764, incels, or anything of that nature, but the parallels were immediately clear.

These people, the killers, are probably not misunderstood kids with noble souls deep down. Everything I read about every one of these individuals leads me to see them as unpleasant types, and stupid as well. Their backgrounds are often somewhat misfortunate—recall the gentleman with the cleft palate mentioned in the Overture—but ultimately well within the socially accepted parameters of misery. In other words, there is nothing special about them, nothing singular. They are statistical products as much as anyone else.

I cannot recall an instance in which one of these killers or would-be killers got onto the stand and made a convincing performance of madness, either.²⁸ (The relevance of mental illness and its extent among killers is also disputed in the quantitative literature on the topic.) They all seem to understand quite well what they did or planned to do. If the O9A teenagers believe (whatever that means!) in a magical Nazi alien named Drill Sergeant Grey—and I really must emphasize that I am not making that up—this does not make them any more insane than someone who claims to have a ‘personal relationship with God.’ Can we confidently say that there is a difference in kind between a Columbine-worshipping true crime community member and a Swiftie? Things change once violence is committed, but the majority of school shooting fans treat massacres as young people treat any other fandom.

So goes the story: a quiet but nice boy becomes increasingly withdrawn and consumed with screens. Maladaptive online interactions with a nefarious anti-social group clouds out happiness. An intolerable split between online identity and meatspace existence emerges. What is his relation to society? A yearning for recognition, satisfaction, and pleasure that becomes a vengeful demand. The entire breadth of their desire is epitomized in one killer’s repeated Google searches for “school shooter porn.”²⁹ Even in its explicitly political incarnations, this kind of youth terror is an assertion of the private life of power, to use a compelling phrase from Corey Robin.³⁰ Acts of internet incubated individual terror are a depoliticized species of political action. Allowing myself to lapse into Habermasianism for a moment, I would call such violence a protest against the colonization of the human lifeworld by the strategic paradigm of the class state and capitalist economy, outrage at the impossibility of community, acceptance, and belonging being given in any way except by grace alone. Whereas that triad cannot be extracted by violence, their subjective correlates (recognition, satisfaction, and pleasure) can, and their negative counterparts can be briefly forgotten amidst the bloodshed.

All the clichés from 20th century social theory about anomie, alienation, malaise, social dislocation, etc. have found their moment of truth today, but one recent addition to that pile struck me as especially relevant to this phenomenon. Roberto Unger introduced the word belittlement to describe what Lacanian psychoanalysts previously referred to as castration, i.e. the inherent unsatisfiability of desire. Jonathan Crary has wagered that the internet—and, one might add, the entire repertoire of capitalist culture—has produced a localized proof of Unger (and Lacan’s) theorems by making belittlement into a transcendental condition of participation in a whole region of human life.³¹ Even if desire has always been unsatisfiable, we did not always have this transcendental fact rubbed into our faces 24/7. More than anything, these acts of violence are a rebellion against belittlement. That negative content eclipses the positive longings.

Whether or not the killers planned to commit suicide in advance, and many do, they almost invariably decide to do so in the moment because it saves them from the humiliating ritual of explaining their idiotic beliefs and performing their cringe-worthy personas in front of the world that they hated. One can detect a crushing fear of being belittled once again—a psychiatrist described the multi-media manifesto package sent to NBC by the Virginia Tech killer as “a PR tape of him trying to turn himself into a Quentin Tarantino character.”³² (The more ideologically coherent Nazis do not commit suicide because for them it really is propaganda of the deed. Their milieu is just distinct enough to make a difference.) If they die—after livestreaming their spree to friends on Discord, of course—they will become martyrs, special ones venerated more like Kurt Cobain or Vincent van Gogh as men “suicided by society”³³ than properly political martyrs.

But in a certain sense they are political martyrs. The Satanic Nazism of O9A found an elective affinity with school massacres for reasons beyond mutual attraction to the heinous. The worldview—if it can be called that—typically expressed in the manifestos of prima facie apolitical killers is, upon further examination, intensely reactionary.³⁴ James Mason, in what seemed like idiotic insanity at the time, tried to forge a connection between Nazi terrorism and the world of spectacular crime by pitching Charles Manson as a kind of Aryan prophet in the 1980s, and by making connections with counter-culture scenester fascists he was able to have his obscure newsletter reprinted numerous times, such that it eventually fell into the hands of the users of Ironmarch, who sought to prove Mason’s interpretation right. With all this in mind, the formation of Satanic Nazi terrorist cults dedicated to sexually exploiting children (764) and grooming them into committing violent crimes (the Ukrainian-Russian ‘Maniacs Murder Cult’) makes more sense.³⁵ (Also, these cult/terror networks seem to themselves be largely made up of teenagers and young adults.) Either ‘accelerationists’ adopted their particular style of sanctifying killers from teenage true crime fans or the two practices evolved in parallel.³⁶ Their grooming tactics, which they claim to have learned from studying FBI manuals,³⁷ also bear a striking resemblance to the organically emergent modes of commiseration and maladaptive sociality endemic to the true crime community and related online subcultures.

What is the bigger scandal—that Nazi Satanists are grooming children to self-harm and commit school shootings or that children were already doing such things with no Satanic influence? Is the addition of pentagrams and swastikas enough to make people care? A single instance of mass murder committed by a teenager should be sufficient cause for a society to turn itself inside out looking for answers and solutions.

Notes

Glimpses of American Freedom by William Gropper (1919)

Overture - What is the Right?

What is the right? Even those on the right rarely enquire what being there means. Moreover, in the event that they do pose this question, their answers are universally more mystifying than clarifying—often deliberately so, I might add. When we on the left pose the question, points of clarification are immediately demanded. Are we asking at the level of sociology? (In which case we are really asking who is the Right?) Politics? History? Psychology? Which Right? Fascist, conservative, liberal, autocratic, agrarian, Christian, Kahanist, Salafist, or some other?

I am not particularly interested in asking or answering such questions. The Right is a historical concept; its meaning cannot be fixed easily, or perhaps at all. On the intellectual front, their output is too flimsy, incoherent, and downright stupid to form the theme of an investigation unless one adopts a deliberately simplified and narrowly philosophical frame like rationalism vs. irrationalism. Dominant psychological types can be described and a certain psychological home terrain can be delineated, but these efforts run the risk of falling back into an untenable reliance on the psychological as the explanans of social life, rather than something which is simultaneously explanans and explanandum in relation to society.

My approach here is political in a broad sense while also acknowledging the sociological, psychological, and cultural moments.¹ This essay is, at base, an attempt to ‘seek truth from facts,’ so to speak. I want to show the basic unity of what I am calling the Right in a theoretical, rather than historical—or, for that matter, conspiratorial—manner, with reference to the theme of violence.² In a certain sense, this is a way of doing unto others as they have done unto us. We on the left are already lumped into one big category; there is a specially designed socio-legal wastebasket taxon just for us (for more thereabout, see Section II below). The overall structure of these reflections is somewhat interrupted by the necessity of publishing them in two parts.

So much for prolegomenizing. Let’s look at an example. The official story is that a US Army soldier, one Jarret William Smith, was arrested for unwittingly sending IED recipes and bombing plans to an undercover FBI agent posing as a fellow member of an online neo-nazi group founded and led by a thirteen year-old Estonian boy who went by “Commander.”³ Immediately one must ask questions. Does a thirteen year old (and a rather immature one at that, judging by his leaked chats⁴) have the organizational chops to run an international—members were also arrested in the UK, Croatia, Lithuania, and Germany—terrorist outfit? The FBI were clearly present in the chatroom. How real were these plots? How many undercovers were in the group? Were any other intelligence agencies there? Was the whole thing a false flag or pseudo-gang? Entrapment seems possible, but we can never know. The full story lives only with people who will never talk. Interestingly enough, it seems that Smith did not attempt any kind of entrapment defense. Instead, he pled guilty and then tried to mitigate his sentence with various feckless arguments: He had depression, he was born with a cleft palate, he “yearn[ed] for acceptance,” and so on.⁵ In other words, his own defense was that he was so mentally weak as to be taken in by the questionable charisma of Feuerkrieg Division’s prepubescent Commander.

There is some more relevant background here. The name Feuerkrieg Division was clearly inspired by the American organization Atomwaffen Division (AwD). The latter was founded in 2015 by members of the forum Ironmarch, a spinoff of the more famous Stormfront for only the most radical of nazis. Brandon Russel, considered AwD’s founder, was only twenty years old at the time. Devon Arthurs, another founding member and former roommate of Russel who is serving a 45 year sentence for a double murder of two other Atomwaffen members committed in 2017 when he was eighteen, would have been just sixteen when Atomwaffen was founded. Although they seem to have disbanded around 2024, their influence is still strongly felt in the neo-nazi scene. Their key inspiration was the obscure figure James Mason, an American neo-nazi (and pedophile, allegedly) who claimed Charles Manson as a positive example for ‘The Movement’ and advocated committing individual acts of terroristic violence—including, comically, killing mailmen in particular—to bring about a race war. Another influence on certain members of Atomwaffen was the Order of Nine Angles (O9A). O9A is a secretive Satanist-cum-Neo-Nazi (or Neo-Nazi-cum-Satanist, depending on which account you believe) ‘organization’ that originated as a Wiccan group before being taken over by one David Myatt (pseudonymously known as Anton Long) in the mid 1970s. (I put ‘organization’ in inverted commas because it’s unclear to what extent it exists as a real group and not merely a set of diversely authored texts and self-proclaimed representatives.) O9A is infamous for their promotion of human sacrifice, pedophilia, and rape, among other atrocious things, and the credible links between the so-called Order (or at least its ideas) and actual acts of terrorism, murder, and sex crimes.⁶

The Order and related groups are one of the focal points of this essay because they represent the furthest point in the right, a sort of finis terrae politicae and thematic North Star for that reason. I am, however, trying to avoid turning this endeavor into a study of salacious neo-nazis, so enough about the Commander. Enough rudimentary genealogy of his movement. Let’s look at the case of a different demonic youth.

I - Collateral Social Murder

Who is Big Balls? Nineteen year old Edward Cortistine enjoyed a career as an online scammer, computer science freelancer, and founder of a handful of rather stupid seeming tech startups before stumbling into the opportunity of a lifetime: a post in Washington, DC at Elon Musk’s Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE).⁷ It seems that he was associated in some way with a group known as The Com, an online community of cybercriminals distributed across messaging platforms like Discord and Telegram that is closely linked to 764, a different online cult/criminal organization inspired by the Order of Nine Angles and similarly dedicated to pedophilia, sexual blackmail, grooming children, and so on.⁸

(A brief aside: Everyone on the right, from Big Balls to Trump himself, takes pleasure in playing the pig killing game in all its sundry forms. “Bears make money; bulls make money; pigs get slaughtered,” as the saying goes. Take, for example, the case of ‘Remilia Corp,’ the group behind the Milady NFT. On the surface, it is a scummy online cult-turned-crypto firm run by one Rohit (AKA “Krishna”) Ohkandiar—himself the scion of a wealthy family and formerly employed by Palantir—with connections to several other image-obsessed right wing firms funded by Peter Thiel and co (e.g. ‘Praxis’). There are credible allegations, however, that the leadership of Remilia has engaged in acts of grooming and sexual blackmail with a strikingly similar MO to that of 764. Last I heard, Ohkandiar himself was being sued by his co-founders for stealing 1.7 million dollars from them after they were forced to sideline him for his racism, pedophilia, and cult-like activities. So it goes.)

On August 5, it was reported that Big Balls was jumped by some teenagers in Washington DC the previous Sunday. Right wing media initially claimed that the youths shouted, “This is Kamala country!” while clobbering him. By Monday the 11th, Trump had taken federal control of the DC police force and ordered the national guard deployed to the city. The attack on Big Balls, who was now being considered for a Presidential Medal of Freedom, was transparently the justification for this move. Comparisons with Horst Wessel, the SA member who became the most important martyr of the Nazi party, began immediately.⁹

But Horst Wessel was a small-time crook only elevated to fame after his idiotic death in a petty squabble. Big Balls is part of a team who will be responsible for millions of deaths in the Third World. The goal of DOGE was never simply austerity, as Musk’s ouster over a row about deficit spending demonstrated. The destruction of USAID is, in its consequences for human life, an act that recalls the Nazi Hunger Plan, yet it was seemingly devised as part of some crude political game—one notably designed by a ketamine-addled Afrikaner megalomaniac. This is an act of social murder on a planetary scale that is being executed to prove some oblique point in Babylon’s political contest, extermination as a form of trolling. At time of writing, one estimate puts the additional deaths resulting from the cuts at over 520,000 so far, with over 355,000 of those being children.¹⁰ An article in The Lancet estimates that over 14 million people will die by 2030 if the cuts are not reversed or made up for by some other source.¹¹

Of course, all the people responsible hate Black people and all Africans—African countries being many of the main recipients of aid from USAID with regard to disease prevention and treatment—but this act seems just as defined by callousness and the rules of the political game as by negrophobic spleen. Few who die as a result of the DOGE boys’ wanton cruelty will know the names, faces, or motives of their murderers: They will just run out of medicine. Furthermore, the abandonment of the goal of biopolitical stability foreshadows a brutal reinforcement of the existing cordon sanitaire around the mother continent. The world-historical meaning of the Mediterranean for the human race will be overshadowed by its role as a moat for keeping the darker races out of Europe.

Another reason to doubt that this is a purely racist or economic act is that the same party is doing the same things in their own country with similarly disastrous results expected. Legalistic shake-ups of the CDC and its vaccine recommendations and the recent declaration that the State of Florida will suspend all vaccine mandates will have a similar effect: denying medicine to the poor, to the workers, and undermining the herd immunity effect that vaccination and other preventative public health measures establish. It is hard to see any possible economic benefits to these measures beyond a ludicrous gamble on (1) the possibilities unleashed by creative destruction and (2) the extent to which force can serve as an economical alternative for welfare institutions. The campaign of social murder therefore appears to be a kind of gigantic, planet-wide biopolitical experiment.

II - I Want to Try and Get to Heaven

The six year old daughter of a Texas Mennonite family died from measles earlier this year. She was, of course, unvaccinated. “The measles wasn’t that bad,”¹² the girl’s mother claimed in an interview with the anti-vaccine organization Children’s Health Defense (formerly chaired by RFK Jr.). The quack doctor who ‘treated’ their daughter as she died was “amazing” and “great,” the father maintained. Answering a question about their opinion on measles and whether or not they would vaccinate their children after what they had experienced, they gradually lapsed into Low German dialect. “Es was nich so bad,” the mother reiterated in Platt-Denglisch. “The measles are good for the body, for the people,” the father added in English. I cannot follow what exactly they said in Low German after this. The translator present at the interview glossed it as “It was her time on Earth […] she’s better off where she is now.”

“If I can save seven thousand people a week from being killed, I think that’s a pre—I want to try and get to heaven if possible. I’m hearing I’m not doing well.” Thus spoke the President of the United States of America.¹³ He was clearly being somewhat facetious, but the statement reflects the paralyzing fear of death that characterizes everyone in the present, but especially the right. The Mennonite parents (who were presumably vaccinated against measles as children) showed recklessness, not bravery, in sacrificing their child on the altar of alternative medicine. They themselves were never in any danger. They did not look death in the eye.

“Natural immunity” is a biopolitical critique of biopolitics. The outrage over RFK Jr.’s “miasma theory” is misplaced: it presupposes the reality of germ theory, but offers something like a ‘spatial fix.’ True, proponents of alternative medicine never worked a maternity ward before Semmelweis and Pasteur, but they don’t have to. They know the figures of maternal or infant mortality are moral blackmail, the revenge of the sick on the healthy. For the enlightened anti-vaxxer, the real immunity of the vaccine is the death of freedom. The measles are ‘nich so bad.’ The survival of autistic children, a holocaust.

Preventative medicine is poison; nothing good can come from alien biota. Be sure that thou eat not the blood: for the blood is the life; and thou mayest not eat the life with the flesh.¹⁴ Only dead things may enter the body, and in continuously bracing itself for the worst, the body itself ceases to live and becomes an inanimate suit of muscular armor fueled by exogenous testosterone. The obsession with ‘mewing’ and other boutique mandibular exercises reveals itself as a sublimation of the same drive-derivative behind teeth grinding and the wish to bite: revenges of the angry infant that doesn’t want to eat.

Health and wellness is, we are told, an inherent property of the people (for whom the measles are good). “The Amish,” whom white Americans see as forefathers out of time rather than contemporaries, “have no autism” whatsoever!¹⁵ If nos ancêtres les Amish have no autism, and we proud Americans do, then this can only be the result of corruption, what one right wing author has called the “Medical Assault on the American Brain.” Look around: factory farms, hormone-loaded beef, genetically altered spuds, questionable medicaments, poisonous painkillers, high fructose corn slurry—how can any of this be good for us? Make no mistake: much of it is bad, quick fixes that cause problems (and profits) at the same rate that they solve them, but diagnosing the counter-revolution in healthcare as a distorted, symptomatic reaction to the hurt that has accompanied the real medical advances of the past two hundred years has its limits. On one hand it runs the risk of reducing politics to pathology, and on the other it fails to inquire why social symptom formation has taken such a reactionary course.

Here, then, is a hypothesis: All this pathological fear of disease and contamination, of “mind viruses” and “social contagions,” is at some level a functional response by the immune system of hegemony, so to speak. This hatred is grounded, to some extent, in an awareness (conscious or otherwise) that the ideologies, institutions, and psychological structures that keep this machine running are vulnerable to subversion.

All that is Black, foreign, queer, communist, liberal, anarchist, whatever—it’s all the same dirty, revolting substance. This is the explicit argument of a recent piece of American right wing, Nietzsche 4 Dummies pablum, the book Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (And How to Stop Them) by Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec:

History does not repeat, but it rhymes. For as long as there have been beauty and truth, love and life, there have also been the ugly liars who hate and kill. This is the way of things in all things. There is light and there is dark. Always has been. Always will be. Civilization is the superstructure built on law and order that keeps the petty, the resentful, and the cruel away from the rest of us. Some societies have been better at this than others. Those who fail at repelling the repulsive fall to unhumanity—to a state of affairs in which human thriving is impossible and surviving improbable.¹⁶

Similar sentiments are expressed in so many words by much of the conservative establishment, whether publicly or privately. The threat is formed e pluribus unum. The adversary uniformly possesses the same generic being, little more than social vermin. She is legion, for they/them are many.

But do we not tell a very similar story? At least since the New Left it has been accepted—rightly, I might add—that the so-called ‘new social movements’ (feminism, gay/queer liberation, ecology, anti-racism, immigrants’ rights, etc.) are crucial parts of the socialist (I would even say communist) package. And we have been (re-) discovering since then that many of these factors were even acknowledged by Marx, Engels, and the like in rudimentary ways. Not every ‘new social movement’ has genuine revolutionary implications in and of itself, but a genuine revolution implies the resolution of the conflicts which made these social movements necessary.

III - The Ku Klux Klan Is Back, But Now It Is the Most Powerful Agency in Human History

Only a few days after the Utøya massacre, Mario Borghezio, a representative of the Italian Northern League and member of the European Parliament, lauded Anders Breivik’s manifesto. Live on Italian state radio, Borghezio claimed that he shared Breivik’s ‘opposition to Islam’, including his call for a ‘crusade’ by Christians against Europe’s ‘drift toward Islam’. He then added that positions like Breivik’s ‘account for 20 per cent of votes in Europe’, and that ‘100 million people think this way’. In a separate interview with Il Sole-24 radio station, Mr Borghezio declared that the ideas expressed by Breivik are generally ‘good barring the violence – and some of them are great’. I don’t think that Borghezio is far from the truth when he asserts that 100 million Europeans would agree with Breivik’s thought, as espoused in his Declaration. The text of the murderer perfectly expresses the feelings and opinions of a large portion of the European people, not to mention Americans. These opinions are not the product of madness or of a crazy delirium, but the rational neo-conservative elaborations of a right-wing idiot who thinks that European identity is based on the Christian faith and that Islam is the worst enemy of Europe, which has to be confronted and rejected by any means necessary. What Breivik writes might be signed in full and almost without correction by the neo-conservative intellectuals and the Tea Party militants of the United States.¹⁷

Bifo was writing in 2015 about an event that occurred in 2011. In a 2025 article on the subject of mass shootings, he correctly notes that such massacres “have become a common fact of life.”¹⁸ It’s not just for white men (although they continue to predominate): People of any race and gender can commit these acts of violence. For Bifo, this is a sign that we are living in “the age of extermination.” Agreement with the opinions of the killers has also grown: Keir Starmer has lately decided to try domesticating the racist demon that holds dominion over so many of his countrymen for the purposes of the Labour Party instead of fighting it. Berardi summarizes the state of the world succinctly: “The Ku Klux Klan is back, but now it is the most powerful agency in human history.”

A number of Bifo’s recent essays have touched on a sort of leftist appropriation of Spengler’s organicist conception of history. Instead of searching for a spiritual angle from which to specify and analyze the decline of the West—Bifo actually calls it a “mutation,” not a decline—and its causes, however, he points to a more directly biological (or biopolitical) factor: the aging of the population in Western countries due to the prolongation of lifespans and decrease in birthrates.¹⁹ A laundry list of symptoms is brought forth: There is “loss of memory, mental confusion, marasmus, and finally, furious aggressiveness for the humiliation and impotence that the fall of energy has provoked,” but also a “post-alphabetical” mentality among the young, who are permeated by an air of all-encompassing dysphoria that manifests as “anxiety, depression, and panic syndrome.”²⁰ This biopolitical condition manifests as a “cyclone” of racism, nationalism, and “senescent despair and furious revenge against the senile humiliation.”²¹ The automata of 21st century capitalist material culture (inclusive of digital infrastructure) exist in a “violent symbiotic relationship” with these forces of chaos simultaneously puerile and senile, holding them back and emboldening them at the same time.

Delirious acts of hatred and rage will continue to proliferate, Bifo tells us, but with an important caveat: “American society will not be destroyed by this proliferation, however, because American society has always been based on violence, fear, and dementia.” I think he is right about that. A preponderance of great American authors—Hawthorne, Melville, Faulkner, Burroughs, etc—have thematized this world-historical delirium (to paraphrase Deleuze). Hawthorne’s dialogue between Goodman Brown and the Devil, in which the adversary tells the young Salemite of how he assisted his Puritan ancestors in abusing Quakers and burning Native American villages, is characteristic, as is the climax of Absalom, Absalom! where Henry Sutpen murders his half-brother Charles before he has the chance to marry their (half-) sister Judith not because of the consanguineous nature of the union, for he has already made peace with incest, but because he has learned that Charles has African ancestry.

Even though we have all been living in a world defined by violence and fear since the invention of private property, it seems that something new is happening. The late Mike Davis diagnosed a “ruling class brain tumour” back in 2022 when Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine.²² He saw the ‘Special Military Operation’ as a characteristic sign of the “growing inability” in the ruling class “to achieve any coherent understanding of global change as a basis for defining common interests and formulating large-scale strategies.” Davis’s assessment therefore went beyond the opinions of the sociologists (Michael Mann, Immanuel Wallerstein, Giovanni Arrighi, etc.) who saw George W. Bush’s presidency as the ascendance of ill-advised militarist strategy correlated with the decadence of the American empire following the untimely demise of its Soviet nemesis. The cancer had apparently metastasized since 2008, no doubt partly because of the chaos wrought by the Global War on Terror, and bad strategy has given way to no strategy.

What Davis’s brief article failed to mention—probably because he took it for granted—is the openly right-wing character of this cancerous, chaotic politics. It may lack strategic foresight, but it has been accompanied by ideological justification (and in some cases democratic approval) all the way. Bloodshed is seen as the only way out of the crisis of class civilization. The exhaustion of extensive socio-economic expansion in the face of climate apocalypse transfigures the ver sacrum to which capitalism has always devoted its youth into a neverending season in hell.²³

IV - To Serve Two Masters

Satanist and nihilist terrorists are part of the same lineage and milieu as Christian ones. Catholicism and Orthodoxy are just as much a part of this culture of murder as Klan-style protestantism and appeals to cultural Christendom. The objective collusion between Opus Dei and the Order of Nine Angles is—to my knowledge, at least—not a premeditated conspiracy, although one might be shocked at how easily connections can be drawn. I want to emphasize that all these organizations, groups, and individuals are part of the same global social movement and, in a broad sense, the same tradition and culture. If, as the erstwhile Waffen-SS volunteer Armin Mohler argued, the European right could be described as a continental “conservative revolution” originally born in reaction to the French Revolution,²⁴ the events of the twentieth century transformed this European current into a truly global one. Being a Nazi, a Satanist, a Christian, a pagan, an atheist, or, indeed, even a Jew, does not disqualify one for membership in this movement, which in past decades was more inclined to create formal international bodies like the World Anti-Communist League and New European Order.²⁵

The culture of the right is a religion of death. This is the great and profound thesis of Furio Jesi.²⁶ All reactionaries pray to the same god—death—but they employ different rites. Here is an example from a document circulated by the Ukrainian neo-nazi organization Misanthropic Division: “Misanthropic Division Chapters should struggle by all means necessary and whatever it takes to rebuild a common european society, based on Family, Folk and Tradition; protecting our European Culture and Identity.”²⁷ The Misanthropic Division’s defense of Family (note the capitalization) is clearly of a kind with that of Alternative für Deutschland, Reform (UK), the Republican Party, and so on. There is human sacrifice by means of terrorism and human sacrifice by means of legally sanctioned capital punishment (something that the parties of the European right desperately want to bring back), but at base they are the same thing. The nazi esotericism of O9A follows Francis Bacon in seeing knowledge (and all human activity) as a form of domination, only now afflicted by a mutation born from the definitive exhaustion of enlightenment in the 20th century. Through a chiasmic reversal, domination is posited as a form of knowledge before the violence of ‘order’ itself degenerates into stochastic atrocities.

At the linguistic level, the right’s speech is empty and devoid of trust. Ideas without words, words without ideas, bad faith, and floating mythological signifiers abound. Mein Kampf is one product of this fundamental attunement with the false; ironic-but-not-really videos from the United States’ Department of Homeland Security glorifying the willful cruelty of its slipshod ethnic cleansing campaign by means of tongue-in-cheek references to pedophilic memes are another. (An expanded frame is therefore necessary to understand—dare I say, to grok—the real meanings and purposes beneath their utterances, purposes which sometimes operate behind their own backs, and the way these utterances work; this is Jesi’s idea of a “science of non-knowledge.”²⁸) Communication thus dies and is replaced by the voluptuous circulation of ideologemes (Jameson) or mythological materials (Jesi) on one hand and merely strategic use of language on the other.²⁹ The affective world of the right is that of fear and shadow, sad passions and man’s baser instincts. It is a world where camaraderie only comes uneasily and on the basis of either hierarchy or a collective plan for revenge.

Beneath the jargon and facades, however, the right confesses to another master besides the god of death: Mammon. Perhaps we could say, using the jargon of religious studies, that the culture of the right is henotheistic: there is one supreme god (death), but worship of other deities (Mammon) is permissible. Or is it a polytheistic religious ecosystem in which the Mammonites have their own temples separate from the Mortuators? Or maybe Mammon is like Brahman, the unseen and impersonal master god, and Death is like Kali as seen by the Shaktas, the active essence of Brahman in personal form? I jest, but the reality of conflicts on the right is sometimes inscrutable to us on the left. We try to argue that so-and-so politically represents this faction of capital and what’s-his-name represents the opposing one. Appealing to things like contingency, tactical flexibility, genuine disagreements, and interpersonal friction can seem like a cop out, but it’s the best answer. They fight for a variety of reasons, but they always seem to make up in the end. When exterminatory fascism is ascendant, capitalists fall in line and look for a way to make some money from the situation. When economically liberal forms of reaction reign, the fascists enjoy a role in their coalition whether formally or otherwise. Capitalism is the unsurpassable political horizon of reaction.

Read Part II

Notes

“There is no other possibility than either the order governed by the impersonal discipline of the market or that directed by the will of a few individuals; and those who are out to destroy the first are wittingly or unwittingly helping to create the second.”¹

In “The Economic Limits of Racketology,” Mac Parker argues that racket theory is limited by its reliance on a periodization of capitalism that assumes a transition from competition to monopoly, in which the direct political rule of large capitalists replaces market competition as the defining feature of contemporary capitalism.² Mac is right to be skeptical of this narrative as it appears in Adorno’s “Reflections on Class Theory.” However, contra Mac, I do not regard Adorno’s position as the final word on monopolization in racket theory. I argue that Horkheimer’s contribution to racket theory provides a stronger theorization that is less vulnerable to the critique of monopoly capital theory by Milios and Sotiropoulos that Mac invokes. Rather than viewing monopolies as displacing competition, Horkheimer sees monopolies as operating within, mediating, and intensifying competition. By both maintaining and downplaying the importance of competition, Horkheimer appears contradictory here, but I claim that what emerges from this tension is an expanded concept of competition rather than a story about its elimination.

Before dealing with Horkheimer’s contributions to racket theory on the topic of the transformation of competition, I want to provide some background on the developments in economic theory that Horkheimer is responding to. I claim that by attacking Baran and Sweezy’s predecessors, Horkheimer’s writings here contain a preemptive critique of the Monthly Review School, for whom starting with the absence of competition is necessary for an analysis of contemporary capitalism based in reality.³ Because the theorists of the MR School recognize this as the only possible way forward for economic theory, we find Bellamy Foster asserting the following: “the choice is a stark one: between dealing seriously with the problem of monopoly as a growing factor in the modern economy and thus undermining neoclassical theory, or denying the essential reality of monopoly and therefore preserving the theory.”⁴ Of course, dealing with the problem of monopoly means accepting that capital has managed to stabilize itself by banning competition between capitals.

Horkheimer denies the existence of neither monopoly nor competition. Instead, Horkheimer understands racketization as a process of expansion of the economic and continuous integration of subjects into the realm of competition accompanied by an expanded set of methods used in the struggle to capture surplus value such that the distinction between the economic and the extra-economic vanishes. To the extent that Horkheimer is a theorist of the decline of competition, this is the decline of the bourgeois concept of competition and the decline of the restriction of capitalist competition to the economic. And unlike in the Monthly Review School, Horkheimer’s theory does not demand a fundamental revision of Marx’s analysis of capitalism because Marx is read as an early critic of the bourgeois concept of competition.

Horkheimer’s theory of monopolization in “On the Sociology of Class Relations” is premised on the falsity of free competition. Far from reproducing the myth of the decline of competition, Horkheimer warns against overstating the differences between the present and earlier periods, complaining that economists now rely too heavily on non-economic factors to explain the current state of things. Here, he seems to be responding to the shift in thinking about competition in the ‘30s and ‘40s within economics, the devolution from a simple account of the absence of feudal institutions in Adam Smith to a rigid model of perfectly knowledgeable and rational agents in marginalism and finally to a fixation on institutional and cultural factors in imperfect competition theory.

The standard theory of competition in economic theory today is captured by what John Weeks termed the ‘quantity theory of competition,’ describing the tendency to associate competition and monopoly such that they are opposed poles on a spectrum, wherein monopoly is defined as a market with one firm and competition as a market with infinite firms.⁵ In this view, a decrease in the number and an increase in the size of firms within a market directly produces a decrease in the intensity of competition. The centralization of capital then becomes synonymous with a decline in overall competition, and subsequently firm competitiveness. It is accepted that competition generates optimal economic outcomes: increasing productivity, declining prices, and rising wages. These tendencies are thought to be dependent on the operation of competition, built on the assumption that firm behavior is determined by the degree of market concentration. As such, a rise in market concentration is seen to produce the inverse: stagnation, inflation, and inequality.

The understanding of competition as the antithesis of monopoly has its roots in classical political economy, especially in the work of Smith. But there is no systematic theory of competition and its relationship to monopoly until Cournot, and his theory was not particularly influential until it was rediscovered by the marginalists. Smith’s understanding of competition was one formed within the relatively small sphere of economic activity in eighteenth-century England, where trade was still conducted by independent artisans, merchants, and small-scale manufacturers.⁶ The monopolies he criticized—guilds, chartered companies, exclusive trading rights, and land privileges—were upheld by legal protections rather than purely economic forces. Rather than offering a theory of monopolistic behavior within a mature capitalist system, Smith was concerned with analyzing the barriers to capitalism’s expansion, examining the way in which it struggled against older forms of economic organization.⁷ As such, Smith’s theory of competition was largely negative, defined simply as not feudalism.⁸

With the marginalist revolution, the understanding of competition changed, redefined as a static market condition characterized by a lack of any monopoly power.⁹ Smith’s description of an immature capitalism is taken by neoclassical thinkers to be the ideal market condition.¹⁰ The competitive market becomes a perfect state wherein prices are determined entirely through supply and demand interactions, with each individual agent acting as a price-taker.¹¹ Competition tends to be narrowly understood as price competition, with price-setting behavior taken as evidence of a lack of competition, typically due to the presence of barriers to the entry of new firms.¹² The term ‘marginalist’ comes from the notion that in the ideal market, a marginal change leaves an individual actor no better off.¹³ In this formulation, then, any price-setting activity by firms is seen as evidence of a decline in competition.

Soon after the theory of perfect competition was introduced, it fell into crisis. Confronted with the reality that their science of autonomous and automatic market forces was incapable of grasping the reality of contemporary capitalism, and it thus became undeniable that firms were not mere price-takers, economists were compelled to refine their theory. None of the assumptions of what defined a competitive market—perfect knowledge, utility maximizing behavior by consumers and firms, perfect mobility of labor and capital, and a sufficiently large number of firms to justify the theory of price-taking—could be located in any real market.¹⁴ But rather than question these foundations, economists concluded that capitalism had simply become less competitive, as the neoclassical concept of competition was too closely bound with the actual process of competition.

While the marginalist revolution transformed Smith’s analysis of the decline of feudal institutions into an abstract model of infinitely many competing firms, the Keynesian revolution reconfigured the neoclassical theory of perfect competition into a theory of imperfect competition by piling on complexities. Influential economists like Sraffa, Chamberlin, Robinson, and Sweezy developed the concept of ‘imperfect competition’ in the ‘30s to capture the state between perfect competition and pure monopoly by beginning with the assumption of monopoly rather than competition.¹⁵ In imperfect competition theory, monopoly is foregrounded alongside factors such as asymmetric information, uncertainty, barriers to entry and exit, and state power in the quest to produce a more empirically true theory of competition.¹⁶ But in the Austrian backlash to imperfect competition theory, the ‘perfectionists’ were easily able to integrate the factors laid out by the ‘imperfectionists,’ particularly asymmetric information and fundamental uncertainty, which were later deployed to critique socialism. The doctrine of perfect competition came out stronger after the heterodox intervention.

Moreover, recalling Mill’s assertion that “only through the principle of competition has political economy any pretension to the character of a science,”¹⁷ the assumption of the decline of competition and the endless inclusion of complexities into the theory of imperfect competition actively undermines the possibility of actually theorizing capitalism. It tends to be accepted that there are simply too many factors within price competition to produce any sort of general theory, leading to a turn to econometrics to escape the incoherencies at the core of microeconomics.¹⁸ Economists today constantly refer to institutional, historical, and cultural particularities to excuse their inability to analyze economic phenomena: “But just as ‘national economy’ once veiled economic reality by hypostasizing market processes, now the increase of concentration on politics—or, at best, on technology—effectively prevents cognition of the facts of the matter.”¹⁹

Bourgeois economists are incapable of confronting the falsity of their understanding of competition: For the bourgeoisie, the fall of serfdom and mercantilism seemed to have abolished class distinctions, producing what they understand as the natural order of competition among free individuals. This order is supposed to be the correct way for human society to be organized, the realization of our innate propensity to truck and barter. In this vision of bourgeois society, every subject is both producer and consumer; there is no class. Anything that disrupts this picture is an intrusion of the non-economic into the sphere of the economic. To the extent that they are willing to acknowledge it, monopolization compels the bourgeoisie to admit that the unequal distribution of power continues to exist under their rule. Rather than accepting the falsity of their understanding of competition, however, the bourgeoisie understands monopolization solely as a regression to a prior mode of direct class rule. They admit that competition, as they understand it, no longer exists, but they believe that it once did, and that what exists today is no longer genuine competition.

Against this, Horkheimer understands pre-monopoly capitalism as characterized both by competition that reached all members of the population and by the unresolved problem of power. Whether by “birth or deceit, brutality or shrewdness, expertness in engineering machinery or human relations, by marriage or adulation,”²⁰ there have always been groups that have managed the competitive processes within capitalism. Racketization is a reversion to more direct forms of domination, but these forms were always present, hidden behind the apparently rational market system, and this “was already clear to everyone except for the professors in the times of so-called liberalism.”²¹

The structure of every ruling class consists of competing rackets. This was more evident in earlier modes of production, visible in the struggles between the church and the nobility or the urban and rural gentries. In these forms of competition, laymen and commoners play no significant role and are excluded from the game. What seems to be the most dramatic change within contemporary capitalism, then, is the way in which the ruled are forced to racketize and enter competition alongside the ruling.

Here, the conflict between the different concepts of competition that Horkheimer is working with is most obvious. There is the strictly economic concept of competition, which can be divided into its imagined form as free competition and its actual form as intra-class competition. The latter consists of two distinct spheres of competition, one among workers and another among capitalists, neither of which are captured by the bourgeois notion of competition as the universal struggle of all against all. These spheres are defined by a struggle over wages by workers and over the distribution of surplus value by capitalists. With the development of the racketized workers’ movement, organized labor enters into the capitalists’ intra-class competition, producing a state wherein “[the working class’s] relationships to the different capitalistic groups are no longer radically different from those prevailing among the capitalistic groups themselves.”²² The result of this integration—a unified, single sphere of competition—ironically resembles the bourgeois notion of competition more closely than the competition of early capitalism did (thus Horkheimer: “The regression, however, is not the repetition but the distortion of the original state of affairs.”²³)

* * *

Throughout “On the Sociology of Class Relations,” Horkheimer appears to deliberately maintain two contradictory theses: first, that competition has undermined itself and been replaced by monopoly; and second, that the bourgeois concept of competition was invalid from the start and was always undermined by the existence of monopoly. It is this tension between what is a break with early bourgeois society and what is essential to all class societies that makes Horkheimer’s understanding of the racket distinct from other Marxist theories of the monopoly. I argue that what emerges from this tension, both materially and theoretically, is not the elimination of competition but rather an expansion of competition through the integration of the working class. Racketization is the movement from purely economic competition, wherein workers and capitalists are placed within distinct spheres of competition, to total competition: the competition between rackets. The reach and intensity of competition are greater than before, but strictly formal competition is just one among several methods, alongside robbery and swindling, employed in the “never ending fight over booty.”²⁴ This is the true universal struggle of all against all, fought not by individuals but by their rackets. While not present in Horkheimer’s analysis, we can say today that financialization plays a crucial role here by transforming workers into small investors, thereby further binding their reproduction to the fluctuations of the stock market.

Regarding the implications of racket theory’s understanding of competition for Marx’s analysis of capital, it is first necessary to recall the role that competition plays in Marx’s system and challenge the pervasive belief that the labor theory of value holds only under conditions of perfect competition.²⁵ The interpretation of Marx fails because it erroneously assumes that competition has the same status for him as it does for neoclassical theorists. Marx’s theory does not rely on the conditions of perfect competition; rather, he assumes the existence of multiple competing firms that set their own prices, though not wholly under conditions of their choosing, since they face competition both within and outside their sectors.²⁶ While changes in competition may affect distribution and widen the gap between particular values and their prices, this is a flaw internal to capital rather than a flaw in its theorization.

Marx does not begin with the concept of competition and does not ascribe it the same duties as bourgeois economists do; this has resulted in much confusion from monopoly capital theorists who wish to explain stagnation through declining competition. In bourgeois economics, competition is foregrounded such that it is thought to be responsible for all economic phenomena.²⁷ Marx is explicitly hostile to this theorizing of competition: “Competition executes the inner laws of capital; makes them into compulsory laws towards the individual capital, but it does not invent them. It realizes them.”²⁸ As such, the concept of competition is largely absent in the first two volumes of Capital and is only introduced after the inner laws of capital are analyzed.²⁹ Bourgeois economics grounds its theory of profit in circulation, whereas Marx locates it in production.³⁰ Competition punishes less efficient capitals and establishes a uniform rate of profit, but it itself is not the source of growth. Total profits result from total social capital and competition mediates their distribution.³¹ As such, locating stagnation in changes to competition, as monopoly capital theorists tend to do, depends on the adoption of a non-Marxian theory of surplus. The confusion is due to the fact that individual firms often achieve profit through circulation and distribution, but total profit is only the result of exploitation within production.

Within distribution, while monopolization may allow large capitals to insulate themselves from competitive pressures, enabling them to escape price competition, the centralization of capital can also facilitate the equalization of profit rates. Unlike a Smithian monopoly, which maintains its position typically due to privileges granted by states, Marxian monopolies hold because of the competitiveness of the firms involved. Monopolists tend to maintain their market share because they retain their high levels of productivity, and in their effort to constrain competition, monopolists are forced to behave competitively to prevent new entrants.³² Far from being solely parasitic, the investment of trusts, cartels, and especially financial rackets in multiple sectors, and their ability to quickly enter new sectors, provides them with the ability to rapidly move capital from low-profit to high-profit areas, aiding the equalization of profit rates while expanding the gap between those who are able to compete effectively and those who cannot.³³ This capacity only increases under globalization.

I do not believe that Horkheimer contests any of this. What racketization has produced is not a fundamental change in the nature of competition nor a decline in its prevalence, but rather a lifting of the veil of free competition to reveal the continued existence of direct rule in daily life, a continuous expansion of the realm of competition through the inclusion of non-capitalist participants, and a declining commitment to the old rules of competition, marked by the growing set of methods employed in the struggle to capture value.

This is perhaps the most prescient aspect of Horkheimer’s theory of racketization. Whether through fake job listings, crypto scams, phishing texts, or other schemes made possible by our dependence on the internet, swindling has become an increasingly common method for the capture of surplus value, especially amid an ever-growing reserve army of labor. What this contributes to is the state of general resentment in the “unsuccessful competitors” and “vanquished opponents,”³⁴ with the mass shooting as its primary expression. This is the logical endpoint of total competition: the elimination of as many competitors as possible in the “chaotic war of all against all.”³⁵

Notes