Communism/Marxism/Maoism

Gilad Atzmon has a new book just out titled Being in Time: A Post-Political Manifesto. The title probably is influenced from a book, Being and Time, written by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger.

The essential kernel of Karl Marx’s labor theory of value is the fact that “labor power is measured by the clock”1, namely, how many hours of labor an individual worker is required to work for capital in order to replenish the labor power he or she expends working for this very same capital.

In the twenty-first century, as capitalism enters an epoch of unprecedented crisis, it is time to reconsider the Marxist theory of proletarian revolution. More precisely, it is time to critically reconsider it, to determine if it has to be revised in order to speak more directly to our own time and our own struggles. It was, after all, conceived in the mid-nineteenth century, in a political and social context very different from the present. Given the 160-year span from then to now, one might expect it to require a bit of updating.

Continuing from the first part of this series, one critique that is missed in the talk about the March on Science is the fact that science has often failed the proletariat, used in their oppression, and as a form of destruction. Of course, this may be too much to expect of a bourgeois progressive and liberal crowd in Washington and across the world who are myopically focused on Trump but not on the bigger picture.

It was a deary day in Washington, D.C. The rain was pouring down and thousands of people were gathered in a huddled mass, listening to speakers tell about their scientific work or scientific innovations. Others uttered platitudes or nationalistic sayings, declaring the US should be “number one” in science above the rest of the world. This was the March for Science in D.C. this past Earth Day, one of the many actions across the world.

One of the toughest things I’ve been facing is the bald-faced collective delusion of fellow Americans. From the rank and file social worker, to even the people I serve – homeless, street people, addicted, just out of prison – to the creeps at the top, like my own Oregon’s Phil Knight, Nike guy, all the way through to the politicians, bureaucrats, and those vaunted intellectuals. These delusions center around capitalism, the buy-sell world of service economies, deep into the transnational crap that is the under girder of America’s engines of the rich.

Mural at the Communist Party headquarters in Lisbon

Mural at the Communist Party headquarters in Lisbon

In a world becoming more atomized and misanthropic by the day, where it seems sometimes that you have only to be a raving degenerate in order to achieve fame and power—witness Donald Trump and Steve Bannon, or, in a different way, Milo Yiannopoulos (whose degeneracy, though, has partly caught up with him)—it is useful to be reminded of the other side of human nature. The institutions of modern capitalism happen to reward depravity, first and foremost in the economic sphere, but since the maturation of mass society generations ago, in the cultural sphere as well.

With all its emphasis on materiality, physicality and corporeality, as the prime origin of all conceptualities, historical materialism is, first and foremost, a concept, that is, a philosophy. No matter how much it claims otherwise and continuously stresses the importance and objectivity of materiality as: