ReligiousLeftLaw.com

Mary Oliver and Judaism

For a wonderful discussion of Mary Oliver's poetry and its relationship to Judaism by Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin, see https://religionnews.com/2019/01/17/mary-oliver/

Acts of Cultural Genocide in China?

James Millward’s article, “‘Reeducating’ Xinjiang’s Muslims” in the New York Review of Books (February 7, 2019) is essential, indeed urgent reading. It is bone-chilling ... and a reminder why international criminal law needs to outlaw cultural genocide. See, for example, Lawrence Davidson, Cultural Genocide (Rutgers University Press, 2012), and the brief but compelling argument by Larry May that “acts of cultural genocide should be included as punishable acts in international law” in his invaluable study, Genocide: A Normative Account (Cambridge University Press, 2010). Here is the opening paragraph of the piece:

“In a courtroom in Zharkent, Kazakhstan, in July 2018, a former kindergarten principal named Sayragul Sauytbay calmly described what Chinese officials continue to deny: a vast new gulag of ‘de-extremification training centers’ has been created for Turkic Muslim inhabitants of Xinjiang, the Alaska-sized region in western China. Sauytbay, an ethnic Kazakh, had fled Xinjiang and was seeking asylum in Kazakhstan, where her husband and son are citizens. She told the court how she had been transferred the previous November from her school to a new job teaching Kazakh detainees in a supposed ‘training center.’ ‘They call it a “political camp”… but in reality it’s a prison in the mountains,’ she said. There were 2,500 inmates in the facility where she had worked for four months, and she knew of others. There may now be as many as 1,200 such camps in Xinjiang, imprisoning up to a million people, including Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and especially Uighurs, who make up around 46 percent of Xinjiang’s population.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

The remainder of the article is here.

Hindutva (BJP) inspired mobs are killing Muslims and Dalits in India

(While the snippet from the article below is about acts of violence against Muslims, Dalits in India have also been routinely targeted by these Hindu nationalists.)

“In India, killing cows and the consumption of beef is banned in most states. Since Modi and his party assumed power in 2014, this beef ban has been used by Hindu nationalists to justify their attacks on innocent Muslims in public. [….] [Prime Minister] Modi’s government … routinely disseminates fake news, targeting and demonising Indian Muslims.” The full article from The Guardian by Rana Ayyub is here.

*          *          *

“The Member States of the United Nations have acknowledged that they have the primary responsibility to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. This responsibility entails the prevention of these crimes, including their incitement, through appropriate and necessary means, and is consistent with existing obligations under international human rights, humanitarian and refugee law. The international community has a parallel responsibility to encourage and assist States to fulfil their responsibilities towards their populations. The policy options presented here are aimed specifically at preventing incitement to violence that could lead to atrocity crimes. They should be placed in the broader context of the structural and operational measures that States and the international community can take to protect populations from these crimes, which are set out in the reports of the Secretary-General on the responsibility to protect.” 

*          *          *

It is awfully clear that the government of India is ignoring its “responsibility to protect” obligations under international human rights instruments and international law. At some point we have sufficient evidence for the crime of “incitement to genocide,” keeping in mind that acts of genocide do not have to occur for this to be a crime in international criminal law (‘incitement’ is classed as an ‘inchoate’ crime, meaning that it does not require completion of a harmful act for the assignment of criminal liability). Incitement is defined as “encouraging or persuading another to commit an offence,” and under both the Genocide Convention and the more recent Rwanda Tribunal Statute, “direct and public incitement is expressly defined as a specific crime, punishable as such.” [I hope to write more about this in the near future.]

Elizabeth Anderson’s moral and democratic reformulation of equality

First, please read this article, “The Philosopher Redefining Equality,” by Nathan Heller in The New Yorker, from which the following snippet is taken:

“To be truly free, in Anderson’s assessment, members of a society had to be able to function as human beings (requiring food, shelter, medical care), to participate in production (education, fair-value pay, entrepreneurial opportunity), to execute their role as citizens (freedom to speak and to vote), and to move through civil society (parks, restaurants, workplaces, markets, and all the rest). Egalitarians should focus policy attention on areas where that order had broken down. Being homeless was an unfree condition by all counts; thus, it was incumbent on a free society to remedy that problem. A quadriplegic adult was blocked from civil society if buildings weren’t required to have ramps. Anderson’s democratic model shifted the remit of egalitarianism from the idea of equalizing wealth to the idea that people should be equally free, regardless of their differences. A society in which everyone had the same material benefits could still be unequal, in this crucial sense; democratic equality, being predicated on equal respect, wasn’t something you could simply tax into existence [one might note the means of equalizing wealth have not of course been limited to progressive taxation schemes]. ‘People, not nature, are responsible for turning the natural diversity of human beings into oppressive hierarchies,’ Anderson wrote.”

 

Comment:

The idea of being “equally free” as a democratic principle (which is intrinsic to the tripartite motto, or perhaps better, triune ideal, liberté, égalité, fraternité) need not and should not involve “shifting from the remit of egalitarianism” insofar as that entails a move to toward equalizing wealth, as long as that is not understood in an absolute sense (and I don’t think most political theorists of this persuasion have viewed it that way). The problem today is the societal distribution of wealth around the globe has been moving dramatically in an inegalitarian direction for some time now, such that many of the conditions of being “equally free” in Anderson’s salutary democratic sense are undermined. In other words, a more egalitarian distribution of wealth (which involves, at the same time, an ecological or environmental constraint of the nature or character of such wealth) is a necessary yet not sufficient condition of being “equally free” in truly robust democratic terms.* And those moral and political philosophers with egalitarian sensibilities, however different their precise philosophical views, from John Rawls to Amartya Sen, from G.A. Cohen to Martha Nussbaum, for example, all appear to appreciate this, although one might wish they had devoted more attention to notions of solidarity and, especially fraternity (as realized in motley reference groups and communities); the latter, I suspect, is indispensable to the widespread incarnation and cherishing of the notion of being “equally free” in a would-be democratic society.

 

Here is where Jerry Cohen’s critique of “classical Marxists” is spot-on: “It was partly because they believed that equality was historically inevitable that classical Marxists did not spend so much time thinking about why equality was morally right, about exactly what made it morally binding” [which is what, I think, Anderson is in effect attempting to do]. Hence the demise of “scientific socialism” brings us back to normative political philosophy, ideals, and even the utopian socialists of yesteryear or utopian thought more generally. And this is one reason Cohen later came to believe that there is some truth in the proposition (or ‘nostrum’) that “for inequality to be overcome, there needs to a revolution in feeling or motivation, as opposed to (just) in economic structure” [what Rudolf Bahro meant in part by the need for a ‘cultural revolution’]. Put in simpler if not more stark terms: “how selfish people are affects the prospects for equality and justice” (keeping in mind that whatever selfishness exists, may be conditioned by capitalism, or more broadly, the Rawlsian ‘basic structure,’ as Cohen appreciates, thus the disappearance of capitalism or change in the basic structure may alter the frequency or intensity of selfishness in the general population, but we should hardly expect it to be thereby eliminated). Cohen also came to realize the significance of an ethos of justice “that informs individual choices,” an ethos that is intrinsically related in various ways to the “basic structure” of society, which is close in spirit at least, to Anderson’s point about the democratic nature of equal freedom, this ethos being the requisite democratic sentiment in social or moral psychological terms for motivating the struggle for democratic equality, i.e., being equally free. Cohen came to this conclusion in his critique of Rawls’s “difference principle” (which we can’t go into here):

 

“A society that is just within the terms of the difference principle … requires not simply just coercive rules, but also an ethos of justice that informs individual choices. In the absence of such an ethos, inequalities will obtain that are not necessary to enhance the condition of the worst off: the required ethos promotes a distribution more just than what the rules of the economic game by themselves can secure. And what is required is indeed an ethos, a structure of response lodged in the motivations that inform everyday life ….”

 

We can thus begin here to speak of democratic distributive justice, which is not “economistic,” but which retains, as a necessary but not sufficient condition, economic egalitarianism. Perhaps one lesson from Anderson’s Sen (or Nussbaum)-like focus on functionings (an ugly word insofar as it applies to persons, but now common in the literature) and capabilities is to accord far more consideration to the public rhetoric we choose in making our arguments and policy recommendations in pursuit of more equalized wealth distribution within the overarching value of being equally free. In any case, being equally free is indeed the foremost desideratum of the (reconstructed Liberal) democrat, and thus this democrat is, at the same time, a socialist.

 

* As to what the phrase “robust democratic terms” means or implies please see, for example, Robert E. Goodin’s Reflective Democracy (2003) and Innovating Democracy: Democratic Theory and Practice After the Deliberative Turn (2008); the works of Nadia Urbinati; and, finally, for how this might be understood in terms of a eudaimonistic individualism (or, if you will, the democratic ideal of ‘self-rule’) which accords essential formative or developmental roles to tradition(s), worldview(s), and community(ies), see David Norton’s Democracy and Moral Development: A Politics of Virtue (1991).

 

Relevant Bibliographies:

• Anarchist Thought and Praxis
• Beyond Capitalist-Attenuated Time: Freedom, Leisure, and Self-Realization
• Beyond Inequality: Toward the Globalization of Welfare, Well-Being and Human Flourishing
• Beyond Punitive Capitalist and Liberal Society
• Democratic Theory
• Global Distributive Justice
• Human Nature and Personal Identity
• Human Rights
• Liberalism
• Marxism
• Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory
• Toward a Realist Social and Political Psychology
• Social Security and the Welfare State
• Utopian Thought, Imagination, and Praxis

Beyond Punitive Capitalist and Liberal Society: Toward a Syllabus

While still working for the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany, Erich Fromm penned two articles on the criminal justice system, “The State as Educator” (1930) and “On the Psychology of the Criminal” (see the volume edited by Kevin Anderson and Richard Quinney, Erich Fromm and Critical Criminology: Beyond the Punitive Society, 2000). In The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet (2013), Lawrence J. Freidman summarizes several of the principal arguments:

“On a … basic and psychological level … the state was referring to crime and deterrence in order to present itself on a subconscious level as a father image. The child knew that he was defenseless against the power of the father, particularly the capacity of the father to castrate the child. By drawing upon unconscious fear of paternal punishment, Fromm noted, the state sought to promote obedience to its dictates.

The state also used the criminal justice system to enhance itself, Freud claimed, by treating the criminal as a scapegoat instead of confronting society’s deep social problems. In dwelling on crime and punishment, the state manipulated society into becoming less attentive to the social and economic inadequacies and oppressions in daily life. That is, a punitive criminal justice system was employed to divert the anger of the masses from the oppressive social conditions that required government remedies. In brief, the criminal rather than state policy became the scapegoat for social ills, economic inequality, and governmental corruption and callousness.

Did the criminal justice at least deter crime? Fromm answered in the negative. Reliable evidence consistently demonstrated that imprisonment, harsh sanctions, and even capital punishment had no salutary effect on crime and thus did not protect the public.

Fromm’s final point linked to the others—that the criminal justice system had a decidedly class bias. Whereas the propertied classes had opportunities to sublimate their aggressive propensities into socially acceptable channels, the disadvantaged lacked these channels and were consequently more likely to commit crimes. Therefore, the reform of social inequities through the redistribution of wealth constituted a more effective plan for combating crime than a harsh system of incarceration and punishment that offered little protection to the public. In essence, these papers reflected Fromm’s own rather eclectic fusion of psychoanalytic commentary and Marxian analysis to promote a view of criminal justice that was ahead of his time.”

• Aertsen, Ivo and Brunilda Pali, eds. Critical Restorative Justice. Portland, OR: Hart Publishing, 2017.
• Anderson, Kevin and Richard Quinney, eds. Erich Fromm and Critical Criminology: Beyond the Punitive Society. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000.
• Beirne, Piers and Richard Quinney, eds. Marxism and Law. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1982.
• Bissonette, Jamie. When the Prisoners Ran Walpole: A True Story in the Movement for Prison Abolition. Boston, MA: South End Press, 2008.
• Braithwaite and Philip Pettit. Not Just Deserts: A Republican Theory of Criminal Justice. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1990.
• Brottman, Mikita. The Maximum Security Book Club: Reading Literature in a Men’s Prison. New York: Harper Collins, 2016.
• Cohen, Stanley. Against Criminology. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1988.
• Davis, Angela Y. Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003.
• Gorringe, Timothy. God’s Just Vengeance: Crime, Violence and the Rhetoric of Salvation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
• Greenberg, David F., ed. Crime and Capitalism: Readings in Marxist Criminology. Palo Alto, CA: Mayfield Publishing Co., 1981.                   
• Harring, Sydney L. Policing a Class Society. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2nd ed., 2017.
• Honderich, Ted. Punishment: The Supposed Justifications Revisited. London: Pluto Press, revised 4th ed., 2006.
• Karpowitz, Daniel. College in Prison: Reading in an Age of Mass Incarceration. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017.
• Lagemann, Ellen Condliffe. Liberating Minds: The Case for College in Prison. New York: New Press, 2016.
• Murphy, Jeffrie G. and Jean Hampton. Forgiveness and Mercy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
• Nussbaum, Martha C. Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.
• O’Mahony, David and Jonathan Doak. Reimagining Restorative Justice: Agency and Accountability in the Criminal Process. Portland, OR: Hart Publishing, 2017.
• Sarat, Austin and Nasser Hussain, eds. Forgiveness, Mercy, and Clemency. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007.
• Sweeney, Megan. Reading Is My Window: Books and the Art of Reading in Women’s Prisons. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.
• Tigar, Michael E. Law and the Rise of Capitalism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2nd ed., 2000.
• Van Ness, Daniel W. and Karen Heetderks Strong. Restoring Justice: An Introduction to Restorative Justice. New York: Routledge, 5th ed., 2015.
• Wang, Jackie. Carceral Capitalism. South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2018.
• Zimmerman, Michael J. The Immorality of Punishment. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2011.

 

 

 

 

 

Basic Bibliographies:

• Criminal Law: Municipal and International
• International Criminal Law
• Marxism
• Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory
• Punishment & Prison

Bibliographies with family resemblance to this topic:

• Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Addiction
• The Emotions
• Human Nature and Personal Identity
• Marxism and Freudian Psychoanalytic Psychology

Routine prevarication, extravagant hyperbole, and blatant, shameless lies by pundits and ideologues on the Right (or, let’s play ‘follow the Leader’)

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is profoundly unsettling to many on the Right (and perhaps some Democrats as well). Today’s column by Michael Hiltzik in the Los Angeles Times is symptomatic of the Right’s fear and loathing of her democratic politics and political policy views in particular:

“Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shocked the political establishment by defeating a machine politician in a New York Democratic primary for Congress last June. Ever since then, Republicans and conservatives have been trying to smear her as a know-nothing socialist ditz unfit to sit in the House chamber with all those gray-bearded sages who have made the House such a model of reasoned and informed debate.

The latest such campaign erupted this weekend. I’m not talking about the unearthing of a dance video from her college years, which backfired spectacularly by making Ocasio-Cortez seem youthful and joyous, but an interview with the newly minted member of Congress broadcast Sunday on ‘60 Minutes’ but released by CBS on Friday. In the interview, Ocasio-Cortez argues for raising the top federal income tax rate on the richest Americans to as much as 70% from the current 37% and using the money to convert the country to renewable energy.

Conservative heads exploded. House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) accused her on Twitter of wanting to ‘take away 70% of your income and give it to leftist fantasy programs.’ Right-wing anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist implied that the ‘expropriation’ of 70% of ‘your production’ was coming uncomfortably close to ‘slavery.’ Pro-Trump commentator Ryan Fournier declared that he was ‘not going to work my ass off for the rest of my life for 70% of my income to go to the government.’

All three, and anyone else speaking out in this vein, displayed their rank ignorance of how the federal income tax works. That’s the charitable explanation of their reaction. The only other explanation is that they know how it works, and they were lying about her proposal. (Ignoramuses or liars? You make the call.)” The entire article is here.  

Toward Red-Green Socialism: Recommended Reading

“In Marx’s analysis, the growing destruction of nature under capitalism is not simply a function of nature having become an object for humanity; rather, it is primarily a result of the sort of object that nature has become. Raw materials and products, according to Marx, are bearers of value in capitalism, in addition to being constituent elements of material wealth. Capital produces material wealth as a means of creating value. Hence, it consumes material wealth not only as the stuff of material wealth but also as a means of fueling its own self-expansion—that is, as a means of effecting the extraction and absorption of as much surplus labor time from the working population as possible. Ever increasing amounts of raw materials must be consumed even though the result is not a corresponding increase in the social form of surplus wealth (surplus value). The relation of humans and nature mediated by the labor process becomes a one-way process of consumption, rather than a cyclical interaction.” — Moishe Postone

 

“The problem with capital accumulation, then, is not only that it is unbalanced and crisis-ridden, but also that its underlying form of growth [emphasis added] as marked by runaway productivity that neither is controlled by the producers nor functions directly to their benefit. This particular sort of growth is intrinsic to a society based on value; it cannot be explained in terms of misdirected views and false priorities alone. Although the productivist critiques of capitalism have focused only on the possible barriers to economic growth inherent in capital accumulation, it is clear that Marx criticized both the accelerating boundlessness of ‘growth’ under capitalism as well as its crisis-ridden character. Indeed, he demonstrates that these two characteristics should be analyzed as intrinsically related.” — Moishe Postone

 

“… [A]ny attempt to respond fundamentally, within the framework of capitalist society, to growing environmental destruction by restraining this society’s mode of expansion would probably be ineffective on a long-term basis—not only because of the interests of capitalists or state managers, but because failure to expand surplus value would indeed result in severe economic difficulties with great social costs. In Marx’s analysis, the necessary accumulation of capital and the creation of capitalist society’s wealth are intrinsically related. Moreover, …because labor is determined as a necessary means of individual reproduction in capitalist society, wage laborers remain dependent on capital’s ‘growth,’ even when the consequences of their labor, ecological and otherwise, are detrimental to themselves and others. The tension between the exigencies of the commodity form and ecological requirements becomes more severe as productivity increases and, particularly during economic crises and periods of high unemployment, poses a sever dilemma. The dilemma and the tension in which it is rooted are immanent to capitalism; their ultimate resolution will be hindered so long as value remains the determining form of social wealth. [….] The particular relation between increases in productivity and the expansion of surplus value shapes the underlying trajectory of growth in capitalism. This trajectory cannot be explained adequately in terms of the market and private property, which suggests that, even in their absence, economic growth would necessarily assume the form marked by increases in productivity much greater than the increases in social wealth they effect—as long as social wealth ultimately remains a function of labor time expenditure. Planning in such a situation, however successful or unsuccessful, would signify a conscious response to the compulsions exerted by the alienated form of social relations expressed by value and capital; it would not, however, overcome them.” — Moishe Postone

 

“There has to be a change in our whole system of production, for technology in the present-day world carries the capitalist mode of production within itself.” — Rudolph Bahro

 

“More important than the quality or quantity of consumer goods, in my view, is the need for a new consumption pattern geared to the qualitative development of the individual, so that the length of young people’s education, for example, becomes a higher priority than the addition of one more piece of clothing to my wardrobe. [….] [W]e have not yet succeeded in breaking through the horizon of capitalist civilization to reach the vision of a world-wide alternative. It is true that the peoples of the world are at different levels of development, but one has to make use of the concrete possibilities where the civilization is not so overdetermined. [….] The point of the concept of a cultural revolution is that man has to rise above the level of capitalist reproduction process for the satisfaction of life’s necessities. We cannot wait until we are sated with material goods. A level of basic needs has to be defined, and a standard of living may be achieved in underdeveloped countries that may be more rational than our own.” — Rudolph Bahro

 

 

Recommended Reading:

• Angus, Ian. Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016.
• Bahro, Rudolf. Socialism and Survival. London: Heretic Books, 1982.
• Bahro, Rudolf. From Red to Green: Interviews with New Left Review. London: Verso, 1984.
• Bahro, Rodolf. Building the Green Movement. Philadelphia, PA: New Society Publishers, 1986.
• Benton, Ted. Natural Relations: Ecology, Animal Rights and Social Justice. London: Verso, 1993.
• Benton, Ted, ed. The Greening of Marxism. New York: Guilford Press, 1996.
• Bernstein, Henry. Class Dynamics of Agrarian Change. West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press, 2010.
• Bernstein, Henry, et al., eds. The Food Question: Profits Versus People. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990.
• Borgnäs, Kajsa, et al., eds. The Politics of Ecosocialism: Transforming Welfare. New York: Routledge, 2017.
• Burkett, Paul. Marxism and Ecological Economics: Toward a Red and Green Political Economy. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2009.
• Burkett, Paul. Marx and Nature: A Red and Green Perspective. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2014.
• Carter, Alan. A Radical Green Political Theory. London: Routledge, 1999.
• Foster, John Bellamy. Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000.
• Foster, John Bellamy. Ecology against Capitalism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002.
• Foster, John Bellamy. The Ecological Revolution. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009.
• Foster, John Bellamy. “Marxism and Ecology: Common Fonts of a Great Transition,” Monthly Review, 2015 (Vol. 67, No. 7).
• Foster, John Bellamy, Brett Clark, and Richard York. The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010.
• Ghosh, B.N. Beyond Gandhian Economics: Towards a Creative Deconstruction. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2012. [I have included this title because I think both Marxists and environmentalists (and by implication, ecologists), can benefit from examining Gandhi’s principles of moral and spiritual political economy.]
• Gorz, André. Ecology as Politics. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1980.
• Gorz, André. Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology. London: Verso, 1994.
• Klein, Naomi. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014.
• Kovel, Joel. The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? London: Zed Books, 2nd ed., 2007.
• Löwy, Michael. Ecosocialism: A Radical Alternative to Capitalist Catastrophe. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2015.
• Magdoff, Fred. “A Rational Agriculture is Incompatible with Capitalism,” Monthly Review, March 15, 2015 (Vol. 66, No. 10).
• Magdoff, Fred and Chris Williams. Creating an Ecological Society: Toward a Revolutionary Transformation. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017.
• Magdoff, Fred, John Bellamy Foster, and Frederick H. Buttel, eds. Hungry for Profit: The Agribusiness Threat to Farmers, Food, and the Environment. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000.
• Magdoff, Fred and Brian Tokar, eds. Agriculture and Food in Crisis: Conflict, Resistance, and Renewal. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010.
• Moore, Jason W. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London: Verso, 2015.
• O’Connor, James. Natural Causes: Essays in Ecological Marxism. New York: Guilford, 1998.
• Patel, Raj. Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House Publishing, 2007.
• Pepper, David. Eco-Socialism: From Deep Ecology to Social Justice. London: Routledge, 1993.
• Postone, Moishe. Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
• Ross, Eric B. The Malthus Factor: Poverty, Politics and Population in Capitalist Development. London: Zed Books, 1998.
• Ryle, Martin. Ecology and Socialism. London: Radius/Century Hutchinson, 1988.
• Saito, Kohei. Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017.
• Smith, Neil. Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 3rd ed., 2008.
• Tokar, Brian. Toward Climate Justice: Perspectives on the Climate Crisis and Social Change. Porsgrunn, Norway: New Compass Press, 2nd ed., 2014.
• Williams, Chris. Ecology and Socialism: Solutions to Capitalist Ecological Crisis. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2010.

See too the many works of the Marxist geographer, David Harvey, especially the earlier stuff. I also think it’s important to carefully and dispassionately examine “conflicts on the ground”* between and among Left and Green movement politics and parties (e.g., consider early conflicts between the ‘Realos’ and ‘Fundis’ in West Germany and the ‘deep ecologists’ and largely Bookchin-led or inspired ‘social ecologists’ in the US). On the Left, André Gorz (1923 – 2007), the pen name of Gérard Horst (born Gerhart Hirsch, also known by his pen name Michel Bosquet), was a New Left theorist who early on developed an “ecological politics. Rudolf Bahro (in)famously moved from Red to Green, eventually developing something like a “deep ecology” or apocalyptic-like (some would say messianic) spiritual environmentalism that largely left Marx behind (at least rhetorically and strategically), but his writings, beginning with The Alternative in Eastern Europe (NLB, 1978), remain worthy of study.

 

* Alas, these conflicts all too often degenerate into stultifying because dogmatic and sectarian infighting that serve to distract us from the purposes and urgency of, thereby canalizing energy away from, our emancipatory struggles, calling to mind—among other things moral psychological—Freud’s poignant and pregnant idea of the “narcissism of small differences.”

 

Should you want to venture beyond the literature above, please see the bibliographies with strong family resemblance on (i) Marxism, (ii) environmental and ecological politics, philosophies, and worldviews, and (iii) beyond capitalist agribusiness: toward agroecology and food justice, at my Academia page.

C.L.R. James, the “cricketing Marxist” and “urbane revolutionary” (4 January 1901 – 31 May 1989)

Today is the birthday of C.L.R. James (4 January 1901 – 19 May 1989), the remarkable Marxist humanist and Afro-Trinidadian socialist, historian, journalist, and essayist. 

Here are two of my posts from the archives on James: From “Cricketing in Compton” to the “Cricketing Marxist,” and The Marxist Spirituality of C.L.R. James. The following works help illuminate the life and writings of C.L.R. James, the “cricketing Marxist” and “urbane revolutionary:”

• Buhle, Paul. C.L.R. James: The Artist as Revolutionary. London: Verso, 1988.
• Buhle, Paul, ed. C.L.R. James: His Life and Work. London: Allison & Busby, 1986.
• Høgsbjerg, Christian and Charles Forsdick, eds. The Black Jacobins Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.
• Renton, Dave. C.L.R. James: Cricket’s Philosopher King. London: Haus, 2007.
• Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. London: Zed Books, 1983.
• Rosengarten, Frank. Urbane Revolutionary: C.L.R. James and the Struggle for a New Society. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2008.
• Worcester, Kent. C.L.R. James: A Political Biography. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996.

One might also read two other books that are not about James or Black Marxism as such: first, Tommie Shelby’s We Who are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005) which makes a compelling argument for aiming to “achieve a robust form of black solidarity without a commitment to black identity,” a view I think has much in common with James’ Marxist humanism. And then Michael C. Dawson’s Blacks In and Out of the Left (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), which is a brief history of black radicalism in the United States toward outlining the elements of a progressive black radicalism for our own time and place. In the words of Shelby, “in the spirit of hope and possibility, it calls for utopian yet pragmatic political thinking that regards independent black political organizing not as a balkanizing force or distraction from the ‘universal’ fight for a democratic society, but as an indispensable element of any viable Left-wing politics.”

Most of the major works (books only) of C.L.R. James (for a comprehensive list, see the bibliography for ‘published primary sources’ in the Høgsbjerg and Forsdick volume above):

• James, C.L.R. Minty Alley [a novel]. London: Secker and Warburg, 1936.
• James, C.L.R. World Revolution, 1917-1936: The Rise and Fall of the Communist International. London: Secker & Warburg, 1937/ New York: Prism Key Press, 2011.
• James, C.L.R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Random House/Vintage Books, 2^nd, 1963/1989 (1938).
• James, C.L.R. A History of the Pan-African Revolt. Oakland, CA: PM Press, in conjunction with Charles H. Kerr Publishing Co. (Chicago), 2012 (1938).
• James, C.L.R. (Noel Ignatiev, ed.) A New Notion: Two Works by C.L.R. James (The Invading Socialist Society and ‘Every Cook Can Govern’). Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2010 (1947 and 1956, respectively).
• James, C.L.R. Beyond a Boundary. London: Stanley Paul & Co., 1963/Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 50th anniversary edition, 2013.
• James, C.L.R. The Future in the Present. London: Allison & Busby, 1977.
• James, C.L.R. Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution. London: Allison & Busby, 1977.
• James, C.L.R. Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In. Detroit, MI: Beswick, 2^nd, 1978/London: Allison & Busby, 1985.
• James, C.L.R. Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin. London: Allison & Busby, 1980.
• James, C.L.R. Spheres of Existence. London: Allison & Busby, 1980.
• James, C.L.R. At the Rendezvous of Victory. London: Allison & Busby, 1984.
• James, C.L.R. (in collaboration with Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee) State Capitalism and World Revolution. Chicago, IL: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Co., 1986.
• James, C.L.R. (Anna Grimshaw and Keith Hart, eds.) American Civilization. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1993.

The pathology of normalcy—or the shared mental pathologies of millions—and the arduous quest for a sane society

Some years ago, after one of the many and more horrific mass shootings in the U.S., a reader responded to a Crooked Timber blogger’s argument about the possible and probable underlying socio-cultural (and I would add ‘psychological’ and spiritual) conditions that appear to be responsible for making such shootings all too commonplace in this country (and, in this respect, atypical of similar affluent welfare state capitalist democracies):

“…I am always a bit suspicious of claims that the modern world or modern America is unusually prone to psychosis, or is somehow generally schizotypal in ways that other places and times are not. It’s entirely possible, but how would one even begin to measure that, with changes in diagnostic criteria and changes in the way people deal with mental illness?”

Herewith my reply to the original post and subsequent response to the reader above, more or less, as it is now edited (I have both subtracted and added material):

I think my country, the United States, is a rather militaristic and violent society generally, from its military industrial complex, national security state, and criminal justice system, to its popular films, video games, television shows, and other forms of “entertainment.” Now of course not everyone who votes supports the “pentagon of power” and mass incarceration, nor does everyone ritually or habitually indulge in such forms of (escapist) entertainment. And more notably, not everyone is likely to be affected, in a moral psychological sense, in just the same way by such things, and there’s the rub. The variety of personalities or temperaments and character types, combined with genetic inheritance and socialization processes across a spectrum of socio-economic conditions, leaves some individuals more liable to being affected by such phenomena than others: they’re intrinsically vulnerable we might say (and that vulnerability is likely to be expressed in symptoms of mental illness). Of course it is hard to precisely identify beforehand just who such individuals are or might be by way of lessening any potential harm or violence they may do to themselves or others, although not infrequently, those who have intimately interacted with such individuals have hunches, suspicions or concerns, have seen “warning signs,” and so forth (although when these are verbalized ex post facto, they may not be genuine), which they may or may not act upon owing to any number of reasons: not wanting to get involved, uncertainty, or fear, for example. To make matters worse, the mental health system in this country is a mess, one egregious example of which is the number of people with serious mental illness who are incarcerated, be it in the short-term or serving prison sentences. Some of our mental health problems arose as a direct result of “de-institutionalization” of the mental health care system, which has had some well-known perverse effects not anticipated by those who may have earlier summoned humane and principled reasons on its behalf.

More than a few of the rhetorical characterizations of those guilty of mass shootings exemplify a more generalizable tendency to avoid examining how the larger society and regnant cultural ethos bear some measure of responsibility for the kinds of individuals (and communities) that compose it. Moral responsibility is not simply individual but collective and shared, and many forms of violence have identifiable background conditions and variables that can be changed or eliminated by way of dramatically reducing the risk of the worst kinds of interpersonal violence. Individual lives are not lived in vacuums, and there are myriad effects on these lives, some of them identifiable and even predictable, others hidden or mysterious. If only in the beginning as an heuristic exercise or thought experiment, however painful or inchoate, I think it behooves us to see ourselves as sharing in some degree, however small and indirectly, in the enabling or complicity of such acts, or the creation of mental illness itself, at least insofar as we’ve done nothing to change a society which is incredibly punitive, aggressive, and violent, and in which an astonishingly large number of people display symptoms of mental illness.

Erich Fromm memorably spoke of the “pathology of normalcy” (while the particular locution was his, the idea has ancient pedigree). Setting aside for the moment the conspicuous forms of violence (be it random, drug- or gang-based, the domestic kind, mass shootings, drone strikes, or aerial bombing), Fromm argued that much of our cultural and political life evidences the expression of low-grade, chronic schizoid tendencies. In brief, our society is in many respects “sick.”

As for the question of why and how entire societies or even civilizations might be “sick” in more than a metaphorical sense (although I would think even a descriptive metaphorical reference is damning), I have the audacity—or is it temerity—to recommend (this is not a complete inventory) works from the philosophical traditions of Daoism, Buddhism, and Stoicism; writings penned by Rousseau, Tolstoy and Simone Weil; the young Gandhi’s scathing tract (‘written [in Gujurati] with terse directness and solemn fervor’), Hind Swaraj; lastly, and more succinctly in a contemporary theoretical idiom, Arno Gruen’s The Insanity of Normality—Realism as Sickness: Toward Understanding Human Destructiveness (Grove Weidenfeld, 1992), and the chapter, “Consensus, Conformity, and False Consciousness: ‘The Pathology of Normalcy,’” in Daniel Burston, The Legacy of Erich Fromm (Harvard University Press, 1991).

With regard to the question(s) of “measurement,” I strongly doubt such claims are amenable to decisive or convincing measurement, at least not in a way that would satisfy biomedically derived epidemiological assumptions and standards (which themselves are contestable*), although I do believe we can assemble evidence and construct reasons of various kinds on behalf of such a claim. At least one reason for this epidemiological skepticism is provided by Burston: “When it comes to questions of fundamental sanity, laypeople and clinicians alike are accustomed to gauging the sanity of thought processes in terms of the degree of consensual validation that attaches to their content, and in terms of the adequacy or intelligibility of their underlying process (so far as we can apprehend it). Many of the diagnostic instruments and protocols used by mental health professionals are merely refined and systematic extensions of these commonsense assumptions.” And we are well served by remembering, again with Burston, that the very idea of Erich Fromm’s locution, the “pathology of normalcy,” is found in ancient Greece before, during, and after the time of Plato (e.g., Hellenistic ethical philosophies like Epicureanism and Stoicism), as well as among Hindu and Buddhist philosophers, Daoist sages, and some (Judaic) rabbinical traditions.

Nonetheless, assessed largely within the strictures of and standards provided by the aforementioned biomedical criteria and thus conceding the increasing psychological “medicalization” of certain otherwise normal mental attitudes, moods, dispositions, or emotional states like depression, sadness or shyness (see works, for example, by Allan Horowitz and Jermoe Wakefield, and Christopher Lane), it does appear to be the case that

“… Americans are in the midst of a raging epidemic of mental illness, at least as judged by the increase in the numbers treated for it. The tally of those who are so disabled by mental disorders that they qualify for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) increased nearly two and a half times between 1987 and 2007—from one in 184 Americans to one in seventy-six. For children, the rise is even more startling—a thirty-five-fold increase in the same two decades. Mental illness is now the leading cause of disability in children, well ahead of physical disabilities like cerebral palsy or Down syndrome, for which the federal programs were created.

A large survey of randomly selected adults, sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and conducted between 2001 and 2003, found that an astonishing 46 percent met criteria established by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) for having had at least one mental illness within four broad categories at some time in their lives. The categories were ‘anxiety disorders,’ including, among other subcategories, phobias and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); ‘mood disorders,’ including major depression and bipolar disorders; ‘impulse-control disorders,’ including various behavioral problems and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD); and ‘substance use disorders,’ including alcohol and drug abuse. Most met criteria for more than one diagnosis. Of a subgroup affected within the previous year, a third were under treatment—up from a fifth in a similar survey ten years earlier.” (Marcia Angell in the New York Review of Books)

Of course this raises all sorts of questions, the most important of which Angell herself asks:

“What is going on here? Is the prevalence of mental illness really that high and still climbing? Particularly if these disorders are biologically determined and not a result of environmental influences, is it plausible to suppose that such an increase is real? Or are we learning to recognize and diagnose mental disorders that were always there? On the other hand, are we simply expanding the criteria for mental illness so that nearly everyone has one? And what about the drugs that are now the mainstay of treatment? Do they work? If they do, shouldn’t we expect the prevalence of mental illness to be declining, not rising?”

Well short of here answering (or even beginning to answer) the necessary and urgent questions posed by Angell, and relying largely upon mental health and well-being criteria found within the above philosophical traditions, writers (be they political philosophers, activist intellectuals, or karma-yogins defying ready-made classification, like Gandhi), as well as the Freudian (and post-Freudian) psychoanalytic tradition,  I think one can, if only reluctantly or uneasily, correctly conclude that American society (and perhaps more than a few elements essential to modern civilization) is (are), generally speaking, “sick” (this was of course originally written a number of years before Donald Trump’s presidency). I am inclined to believe that there are in fact a lot of people who are, routinely, quite unhappy (to the point of episodic or even chronic depression), miserable, anxious, fearful, insecure, and prone to an unusual degree in their structural susceptibility to living daily with self-deception, (debilitating forms of) wishful thinking, and states of denial, in addition to a welter of illusions and, in the worst cases, delusional thinking. The extent of such symptomatic and often pathological behavior is such that we might safely claim there are an alarming number of people in this society that lack a reliable disposition to truth, have a tenuous grip on reality and a corresponding untenable notion of what constitutes a fact, and a stubbornly elusive moral compass.

Insofar as this is indeed the case, existing capacities for individuation have been thwarted or stunted and the quest for generalized (in a Marxist sense or otherwise) self-realization (or what Rudolf Bahro termed ‘general emancipation’) becomes purely utopian or but a mere dream. Can we assert, with confidence, or make an unambiguous judgment to the effect that this adds up to widespread mental illness as defined by contemporary psychiatrists and psychologists? Perhaps … or sometimes (if only because of the different kinds of psychiatry and psychology: from the ostensibly ‘scientific’ to the humanely psychotherapeutic). To be sure, the boundaries between ordinary unhappiness, everyday depression and generalized anxiety and the exhibition of pathological symptoms are not always hard and fast. But it is all too clear that there is precious little evidence, so to speak, of eudaimonia or flourishing among the masses, and thus a widespread dearth of meaningful or true self-fulfillment, suggesting the absence of basic mental health, if not the presence of mental illness of various kinds and degrees of severity. The main problem with the former is that it is liable to be a breeding ground for the latter. People in this country are in fact, at least in the first instance and as a manner of speaking, self-diagnosing (which becomes self-fulfilling or -confirming in the clinic) and self-treating or self-medicating (again, often or later in collusion with a biomedically disposed health care system and health insurance agencies), and the disturbing results and nefarious consequences are all around us, in both the daily round and public realms.

* See the formidable critique in Sridhar Venkatapuram’s “crucial and impressive work,” Health Justice: An Argument from the Capabilities Approach (Polity Press, 2011).

Relevant Bibliographies:

• Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Addiction
• Beyond Capitalist-Attenuated Time: Freedom, Leisure, and Self-Realization
• Beyond Inequality: Toward the Globalization of Welfare, Well-Being and Human Flourishing
• Buddhism & Psychoanalysis
• The Emotions
• Freudian Psychoanalytic Psychology
• Health: Law, Ethics & Social Justice
• Human Nature and Personal Identity
• Individual and Shared Responsibility
• Marxism
• Marxism and Freudian Psychology

The “Pentagon Papers”

On this date in 1971, Daniel Ellsberg and his colleague, Anthony J. ‘Tony’ Russo Jr., were indicted by a federal grand jury for releasing the “Pentagon Papers” to the news media. The papers were part of a 7,000-page, top secret history of the U.S. political and military involvement in the Vietnam War from 1945-71.

[The Pentagon Papers] energized the press and endowed it with a new confidence and sense of legitimacy, given its clear triumph over governmental secrecy. Claiming almost a co-equal status with governmental institutions, the media managed to identify themselves collectively as the people’s paladin against the impersonal, devious forces of government. [….] Thus, the Pentagon Papers incident intensified the adversarial relationship between the Administration and the media, a relationship that was to deteriorate still more sharply. These developments, together with a failure of the courts to provide the desired protection and relief demanded by the Administration, led directly to one of the most fateful decisions of the Nixon presidency: the creation of the Plumbers. – Stanley I. Kutler, The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Alfred A. Knopf, 1990)

Nixon administration officials initially regarded the documents as embarrassing only to previous administrations. President Richard Nixon himself thought that the ‘opposition’ had an in interest in forgetting the papers, but ‘ours is to play it up.’ But with National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, Nixon also realized that publication imperiled his own policies, his patterns of secrecy, and his credibility. Most important, Nixon feared that future presidents would lose control over classified documents and thus potentially embarrass their predecessors. From Stanley I. Kutler’s entry on New York Times Co. v. United States in Kermit L. Hall, ed. The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States (Oxford University Press, 1992): 588.

In the past, I had instinctively accepted the ethos of my profession, the idea that leaking was inherently bad, treacherous, or at best an unhelpful thing to do. I had been wrong. Obviously, leaking could be a patriotic and constructive act. – Daniel Ellsberg

*          *          *

“New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971), was a landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court on the First Amendment [Concurrences: Black, Douglas, Brennan, Stewart, White, Marshall. Dissents: Burger, Harlan, Blackmun]. The ruling made it possible for The New York Times and The Washington Post newspapers to publish the then-classified Pentagon Papers without risk of government censorship or punishment.” – Wikipedia

Case Summary:

“In June 1971 the New York Times and the Washington Post began to publish excerpts from a classified Defense Department study, officially titled ‘History of U.S. Decision-Making Process on Viet Nam Policy’ but popularly known as the Pentagon Papers [This seven thousand page document had been commissioned by President Lyndon Johnson’s secretary of defense, Robert McNamara. ‘It revealed that secrecy had been the handmaiden of deception.’] The newspapers obtained the documents from a former Defense Department official, Daniel Ellsberg. A day after publication began, Attorney General John N. Mitchell ordered government lawyers to take the newspapers to court to restrain [publication of] further articles, claiming grave national harm. By undermining peace negotiations, the government asserted, publication of the excerpts would prolong the war and risk the death of many soldiers [the government also argued that publication would endanger the release of prisoners of war]. Federal district courts decided against the government, but two U.S. courts of appeals issued temporary restraining orders against further publication pending appeal.

The Supreme Court agreed to hear the cases less than two week after the first article appeared, heard arguments the next day, and decided against the government four days after that. In a 6-3 per curiam decision [Latin for ‘by the court;’ an opinion from an appellate court that does not identify any specific judge who may have written the opinion.] in New York Times Co. v. United States, the Court held that the government had not met its ‘heavy burden of showing justification for the enforcement of a ‘prior restraint’¹ against the press.

Each of the justices wrote separate concurring or dissenting opinions. Justice Hugo L. Black said that ‘every moment’s continuance of the injunctions’ amounted to ‘a flagrant, indefensible, and continuing violation of the First Amendment.’ Justice William O. Douglas agreed, adding that no law prohibited the papers from publishing the articles and that the government has not implied or inherent power to obtain injunctions against the press. Justice William J. Brennan, also concurring, said that the only exceptions to the rule against prior restraint occur when the disclosure would immediately imperil the security of troops engaged in or about to be engaged in battle. Justice Potter Stewart said that the responsibility for maintaining secrecy ‘must be where the power is;’ the president, not the courts, must keep classified information secret. If it leaks out, the courts may not stop the presses. Justice Byron R. White agreed with Brennan and Douglas that no law authorized injunction and that the government had not met its burden, and he added that the government had gone down the wrong route. Instead of seeking injunctions, it should have sought indictments against those who leaked the information. Justice Thurgood Marshall espied a ‘separation of powers’² problem ‘for this Court to use its power of contempt to prevent behavior that Congress has specifically declined to prohibit.’

Dissenting, Justice John Marshall Harlan, pointing to the ‘almost irresponsibly feverish’ attitude of the Court in deciding the cases so hurriedly, said that the president is entitled to much greater leeway in seeking to block matters with foreign affairs. The Court may independently review whether the material against which an injunction is sought deals with foreign affairs and whether the secretary of defense had personally assessed the risks; if so, the courts should refrain from redetermining ‘the probable impact of disclosure on the national security.’ Also dissenting, Justice Harry Blackmun wanted the Court to remand the cases to the lower courts to develop standards through a ‘balancing’ that would say when the press could be enjoined, because the ‘First Amendment, after all, is only one part of an entire Constitution.’ Chief Justice Warren E. Burger dissented solely because ‘we literally do not know what we are acting on;’ he contended that the Court should have extended the temporary restraining orders until the lower courts could conduct a full trial on the merits.” – From Jethro K. Lieberman, A Practical Companion to the Constitution (University of California Press, 1999): 344-45.

Notes

1. Please see §11.2.3 Prior Restraints, especially pp. 918-929, in Erwin Chemerinsky, Constitutional Law: Principles and Policies (Aspen Law & Business, 2^nd ed., 2002). As Chemerinsky writes, “the Court has said [in Bantam Books, Inc., v. Sullivan, 372, 327 U.S. 58, 70 (1963) and Organization for a Better Austin v. Keefe, 402 U.S. 415, 419 (1971) respectively; the latter decision was a little more than a month before New York Times Co. v. United States] that ‘[a]ny system of prior restraint of comes to this Court bearing a heavy presumption against its constitutional validity’ and the government ‘thus carries a heavy burden of showing justification for the imposition of such a restraint.’”
2. Please see IV, “The Distribution of National Powers,” in Geoffrey R. Stone, et al., Constitutional Law (Aspen Law & Business, 4^th ed., 2001): 331-419.

See too: From Professor Douglas O. Linder’s Famous Trials website, his page on The Pentagon Papers, which includes, among other things, a link to a copy of the original indictment of Ellsberg and Russo, a page on the trial, and Judge Matthew Byrne’s ruling dismissing the case on May 11, 1973.

Further Reading

• Ellsberg, Daniel. Papers on the War. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972.
• Ellsberg, Daniel. Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. New York: Viking Penguin, 2002.
• Herring, George C., ed. The Secret Diplomacy of the Vietnam War: The Negotiating Volumes of the Pentagon Papers. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1983.
• Hersh, Seymour. The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House. New York: Summit Books, 1983.
• Kutler, Stanley I. The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon.  New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990.
• The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of United States Decision Making on Vietnam. 4 Vols. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. “Senator Gravel Edition” (includes documents not included in government version), 1971.
  
• Prados, John and Margaret Pratt Porter, eds. Inside the Pentagon Papers. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2004.
• Rudenstine, David. The Day the Presses Stopped: A History of the Pentagon Papers Case. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996.
• Ungar, Sanford J. The Papers and the Papers: An Account of the Legal and Political Battle over the Pentagon Papers. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.

Relevant Bibliographies

• The History, Theory & Praxis of the Left in the 1960s
• International Criminal Law
• The U.S. War in Vietnam (or Indochina)
• The Moral, Legal, and Political Dimensions of Violent Conflict & The Laws of War

Toward a Philosophically Sensitive Definition of Public Health Law

 

I recently revised a piece on public health law that I wrote over ten years ago and am hoping to receive some critiques and comments from those interested in the topic. You can send them to me by way of e-mail (one address for which is on my Academia page) or leave them at this blog. Here is the paper with its latest title: Toward a Philosophically Sensitive Definition of Public Health Law.

 

Second Thoughts about "Merry Christmas" even for Christians

University of Hawaii Law Professor Mari Matsuda remarked on twitter, “As a non-Christian I have always loved carols and the spirit of Christmas, of the posada, remembering a poor family turned away from shelter, the hope that we can become better...” Most Christian preachers see Christmas as the day that God became man, that Christ’s life (rejecting worldly power and celebrating the poor) is the life of God, and that God is in us all as well.

At least for Christians and, for some others, one would hope this, at least in part, would be a day of spiritual deliberation, reflection, introspection and insight. I regret that some Christians indiscriminately wish everyone a merry Christmas. Christian imperialism has no place in our society. Even to Christians, the wish of a merry Christmas can but need not have overtones of materialism. Wishing a blessed or holy Christmas rings of evangelicalism and sanctimony. With all that in mind, we should wish Christians more than a merry Christmas. We should be wishing them a serious Christmas, but we need not preach our hopes in our daily greetings.

Marxist existentialism, humanism or spirituality: a preliminary apologia

“We cannot go beyond it [i.e. Marxism] because we have not gone beyond the circumstances which engendered it.” — Jean Paul Sartre

I would argue that our time calls for a prominent role to be played by an existential, humanist, or spiritual Marxism (these can, but need not be, synonymous; at the very least, they have strong family resemblance to each other). In my own case, Marxist beliefs exist alongside (perhaps uneasily, sometimes in tension or even contradiction with) elements from other therapeutic worldviews and philosophies, including those of Buddhism and psychoanalytic psychology, as well as one political philosophy: Liberalism!* Because of my perhaps peculiar or at least uncommon metaphysical or ontological beliefs about the nature of truth, which are genetically inspired by several Jain doctrines (anekāntavāda, nayavāda, and syādvāda), I’m inclined to believe most systematic or coherent philosophies and worldviews enable us to perceive truths of one kind or another, in varying degrees, even though it may be beyond us, both now and in the near future, to systematically integrate or reconcile those truths in an analytically or philosophically satisfactory manner. The determinations made in this regard are highly personal and thus idiosyncratic, although one must suspect similar if not identical determinations can, in principle at least, be made by others, given the requisite experiences and circumstances.

What is more important, and thus more urgent, is that we daily endeavor to live by such truths as we understand them (to have, as we say, the courage of our convictions), sharpening, polishing, abandoning or modifying our beliefs as a result of the tests and trials of praxis in both our daily and public lives (including the sort of knowledge that is a by-product of individuation and self-realization), which should suggest to us, in one way or another, when such beliefs may be mistaken, wrong-headed, unreliable, or even somehow deceptive or illusory. Whatever the current makeup of our worldview or lifeworld (the latter might contain bits and pieces of several traditions and worldviews which one struggles to render coherent and thus is not ‘captured’ by any one historical, official, or public religion, philosophy, or worldview), it should not preclude us from engaging in collective action with those of different worldview orientations who nonetheless share our commitment to the values and principles enshrined in the French revolutionary motto liberté, égalité, fraternité (the last in reference to our shared humanity by way of human nature, including our vulnerabilities or suffering and perfectibility, and the ever-present possibility of communities emerging from the fundamental premises of human dignity and eudaimonistic individualism).

* This part of my lifeworld arises from the fact that I passionately believe any emancipatory politics on the Left will assume (and thus should articulate) (i) a normative conception of human nature (see, for example, P.M.S. Hacker’s three recent books on same, with one more forthcoming) and development (individuation and self-realization), (ii) a robust concept of human dignity (on which there is a growing body of respectable philosophical literature), as well as (iii) a principle of eudaimonistic individualism (on which see, for example, the late David Norton’s 1991 book, Democracy and Moral Development).

Image: Wassily Kandinsky, “Delicate Tension,” No. 85 (1923)

1968-2018: The 50th anniversary of a year of global revolt and revolutionary spirit

The year that marks the 50^th anniversary of the political upheavals around the globe in 1968 is quickly coming to a close, so I want to share something from the Verso Radical Diary on that year, as well as my bibliography on the Left in the 1960s:

“1968 was a year of global revolt. Vietnamese communist began with their infamous Tet Offensive against US troops, which ended with guerillas hoisting their Vietcong flag on the roof of the US embassy in Saigon [today: Ho Chi Minh City]. [….] In France, student strikes and occupations broke out in May, quickly ballooning to become the largest general strike to have ever halted the economy of an industrialized country—10 million workers occupied factories for weeks—and prompting President Charles de Gaulle to flee the country.

The revolutionary spirit spread. Popular rebellions broke out against military dictatorships in Brazil, Spain, Argentina and Pakistan, and against communist elites [i.e., Party-State Communism] in Poland and Czechoslovakia. Left and progressive movements blossomed in Italy, Japan, Germany and other war-mongering capitalist countries of the West: SDS [Students for a Democratic Society], the Black Panther Party and the Civil Rights movement in the US, and the New Left in the UK….

Some were met with fierce repression. Soviet-led Warsaw Pact armies deployed 2,000 tanks and 20,000 troops against the Prague Spring, while police and military crushed Mexico City’s burgeoning student strikes and occupations, shooting into a crowd at Tlatelolco Square. [….] Martin Luther King, Jr. was also assassinated in Tennessee. ‘Be concerned about your brother,’ he had sermonized the day before. ‘You may not be on strike [like the black Memphis sanitation workers]. But either we go up together, or we go down together.’”

The bibliography on the history, theory, and praxis of the Left in the 1960s is here.

Selecting a Presidential Candidate in 2020

Democracy may be the best form of government, but there is reason to have doubts about the average citizen. It is not just that the typical citizen is woefully ignorant about the Constitution and the workings of government. An even stronger concern is that the voters tend to favor the charismatic figure over the competent, experienced candidate.

Let’s face it. Donald Trump almost won the popular vote in the last election despite being grossly unqualified in terms of experience, understanding, and character. He is still favored by 43% of the electorate. I am convinced that the strongest reason his supporters back him is that they feel he connects with them.

Democrats gambled and elected Barack Obama because of his charisma and intellect despite his lack of experience. He had his flaws, but Democrats won that gamble. In her Saturday column, Peggy Noonan suggests that citizens have voted for Donald Trump and Barack Obama as if they were magic ponies. She suggests that Beto O’Rourke may be the next magic pony.

Being President is a complicated, taxing, intellectually demanding job; it requires maturity, moral fortitude, and spiritual toughness; it demands interpersonal skills of the highest order and a commitment to human flourishing with a sense of what will further that flourishing; and it requires a deep understanding of the ways that government works together with the politics of Washington. Surely, one important qualification for the position is past political accomplishment. Unfortunately, the candidate who will entertain us the most or even inspire us the most may not make the best President or even a good one.    

Meaning, Value, and Ethics in Art

Jacob Lawrence, Struggle 1 (1965) brush and ink, and gouache on paper

“The news media report events. It’s left to the artists to ascribe meaning.”

By Mary Gabriel for the Los Angeles Times, December 16, 2018

[….] “How does one write, paint, compose or perform works that describe this age without being consumed by it, without producing mere propaganda? How does one convey the simultaneous confusion and conviction, the anger and concomitant longing for calm — in short, the irrationality — with any degree of certainty? And how does one project through art a better path when the route is constantly shifting?

Faced with such a difficult task, many artists wonder if they are obliged to be chroniclers of their times. During periods of war, social strife, economic upheaval, massive industrial or technological change, is it the duty of the artist to record and reflect that chaos? Yes it is, in part because it is impossible for a true artist to do otherwise. Artists may work in isolation, but they are intrinsically messengers, their works communications. They also exist in a state of hyper-receptivity because every encounter and experience might produce material for the next sentence, song, photograph or canvas. Short of living in a soundproof windowless box, especially in an age such as ours, it is impossible for an artist to blot out the world.

But another, more important reason an artist must confront his or her time is that historically art and artists have explained and challenged, and that combination has produced greater understanding.

In the 1930s and 1940s, newspaper headlines, cinema newsreels, radio broadcasts and public service posters disseminated information around the clock. But those reports chronicled events. It was left to artists to ascribe meaning. A young James Jones wrote his first novel, From Here to Eternity,  describing the wreckage of lives upended by war. Oscar Hammerstein’s 1940 lyrics for ‘The Last Time I Saw Paris’ evoked for generations the melancholy felt by those forced to flee Nazi advances in France. And two painters bookended the traumas of the 1930s and 1940s in their works: Picasso, with ‘Guernica,’ which depicted the 1937 Nazi attack on the Basque capital of that name and the first ‘total’ air raid in history, and Jackson Pollock, with his ‘drip’ paintings 10 years later. In the wake of World War II’s atrocities, from Auschwitz to Hiroshima, Pollock painted the world as it was, a world destroyed but not irrevocably so.

Today, in our own world of blogs, bots and perpetual ‘breaking news,’ it is left to artists to cut through the deafening noise as their forebears did in the middle of the last century — in a search for meaning and, most particularly in our case, in the service of truth.” [….] The entire article is here.

Comment [The following is largely in reference to art which happens to be non-religious (which is not here synonymous with ‘non-spiritual’), in other words, art which is in the first instance deeply and broadly humanist.]:

The moral duties and obligations of artists exist not only in “troubled times,” for they play a vital role for artists in any society engraved with eliminable suffering or conspicuous for the ongoing endeavor (or struggle) to realize the common good in the light of liberté, égalité, fraternité (the last is not gender specific but refers to those sorts of human community in which individuals have ample opportunities for personal fulfillment and eudaimonia, that is, the necessary conditions for individuation or self-determination and the pursuit of activities conducive to ’self-realization’).  Perhaps the most compelling argument for weaving tightly together ethical ideas and values with aesthetic values and purposes (so, for instance, we may speak of ‘moral beauty’)—which doesn’t imply art should teach us only about ethical matters—is found in Berys Gaut’s “impressive, sustained defense of ethicism,” Art, Emotion and Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2007). As Gaut explains, works of art typically prescribe certain emotional responses (which may or may not occur in us), and whether or not these are in fact merited is a question “sensitive to moral considerations.” In short, assuming the pivotal grounds on which art is valued refers fundamentally to concern with its beauty, its cognitive role, and its affective dimension, analytically distinct properties or features that are aesthetically intertwined in the work of art, the “ethical evaluation of art is inescapable.”

Related Bibliography: Marxism, Art and Aesthetics

Affordable Care Act Still in Effect: Last Day for Sign Ups

The judge who declared the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional did not issue an injunction against its enforcement. The law is still in effect and today is the last day for signups. California, among others, will appeal.

Arno Gruen—psychologist and psychoanalyst—on the struggle for individuation and personal autonomy

Whereas Sigmund Freud and Erich Fromm locate human destructiveness either in an a priori death instinct or in necrophilic tendencies stemming from stunted development at the anal or oedipal stage, I believe I have found many indications that destructiveness and murderous behavior is rooted in the betrayal human beings commit against themselves in order to share in a hallucinated sense of power. Since there is no ‘higher fate’ involved here but rather individuals who have cooperated more or less consciously in their own submission, a lifelong self-hatred ensues. The sad result is that only destructiveness imparts the feeling of aliveness. — From the Preface to Arno Gruen’s The Insanity of Normality—Realism as Sickness: Toward Understanding Human Destructiveness (1992; first published in German, 1987)

After the brief biography below, I have pasted a snippet from a brilliant and clearly composed talk by Arno Gruen (May 26, 1923 – October 20, 2015) titled “War or Peace? We cannot survive with Real-Politik.” It’s an enlarged version of his acceptance speech for the Finnish “Loviisa Peace Prize 2010.” (Translated from the German by Hildegarde Hannum and Hunter Hannum) The full text is here.

“[Arno] Gruen was born in Berlin in 1923, and emigrated [from Germany] to the United States as a child in 1936 when his parents, James and Rosa Gruen, fled Germany to save their lives. During the journey, Gruen celebrated his Bar Mitzvah in the Great Synagogue of Warsaw, on June 6, 1936.

He studied at the City College of New York. Then, after completing his graduate studies in psychology at New York University, he trained in psychoanalysis under Theodor Reik at one of the first psychoanalytic training centers for psychologists, the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis in New York City. Gruen held many teaching posts, including seventeen years as professor of psychology at Rutgers University. From 1979 on, he lived and practiced in Switzerland. Widely published in German, his groundbreaking first book to be released in English, The Betrayal of the Self, was published by Grove Press in 1988.

[….] Gruen [argued] … that at the root of evil lies self-hatred, a rage originating in a self-betrayal that begins in childhood, when autonomy is surrendered in exchange for the ‘love’ of those who wield power over us. To share in that subjugating power, people create a false self, a pleasing-to-others image of themselves that springs from a powerful, deep-seated fear of being hurt, humiliated or abandoned. Gruen traced this pattern of over-adaptation, and the fate of those who resist the pressure to conform, through a number of case studies, sociological phenomena … and literary works. The insanity of rage and numbness that this hyper-conformity produces, unfortunately, goes widely unrecognized precisely because it has become the cold, tough ‘realism’ that modern society inculcates into its members and even admires.

Gruen warned, however, that escape from these patterns lies not simply in rebellion, for rebels often remain emotionally tied to the objects of their rebellion, but in the development of a personal autonomy and a relinquishing of all forms of self-numbing and self-deception. His elegant and far-reaching conclusion … is that while autonomy and authenticity are not easily attained, their absence proves catastrophic to both the individual and society as embittered conformists seek new victims on whom to wreak violence and avenge their psychic wounds.”

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“We live in cultures that are characterized by competition and insecurity and that make it difficult for people to develop the self-esteem that comes from a sense of one’s inner worth, which can evolve only if people learn to accept and share their suffering, pain, and adversity. This is what enables an inner strength to emerge—informed by an attitude of equanimity in spite of insecurity and of self-confidence in spite of helplessness. Only such a development forms a person’s genuine substance. In cultures that mistake strength for invulnerability, this kind of development is hardly possible because suffering, pain, and helplessness are stigmatized as weakness. This is why parents need their child in order to maintain a self-image of competence and self-assurance without self-doubt. In a culture in which one is constantly faced with the threat of failure, children are needed to enable their parents to maintain a fictitious sense of worth, with the result that parents do not see their children as they are but only in relation to themselves. In spite of their love and hopes for their children, they do not see what their children are really like but view them only in terms of providing approbation of the parental role. The child becomes the means to the end of sustaining the pose of mother and father as authority figures who are decisive and assured in their relationship with their child. What are children to do who experience weakness, helplessness, pain, and rage? Apathetic and exhausted, they will, with time, submit to the expectations of their parents. But their submission distorts reality, and thus a rational solution later in life to crucial problems such as the question of war and peace is made impossible, for if we have learned from an early age to experience the pose of strength and self-assurance as reality, then ‘realistic’ behavior is not based on reality at all but on our need to cling to this pose as a remedy for our fears and insecurity. [….]

 … Proust recognized something of fundamental significance, namely, the longing in our obedience-oriented cultures to be saved by those who have caused our suffering, together with the inability to recognize them as responsible for this suffering. Being forced to be obedient while growing up leads to the inability to perceive our own empathic potential because of our anxiety and fear, which must not be acknowledged, since fear and uncertainty are labeled as weakness. Although we are driven by our fear, it must be denied and repressed. Here we can see the vicious circle of our development, which is influenced by a culture that causes parents to experience their infants’ aliveness and high spirits as disturbing or even threatening. As they get older, these children will soon be filled with anxiety and worry and will learn at an early age that their original, authentic self imperils their relationship with their parents and for this reason is bad. As a result, their innermost nature turns into something strange and foreign. And it is this alienated part of one’s self that must be fought against from now on. The accompanying anxieties grow stronger in times of existential stress—caused, for example, by unemployment, loss of status and personal importance, insecurity inherent in a society based on competition that humiliates and isolates people. These ever-present anxieties are held in check in economic good times owing to the fact that people feel they are part of society. Nowadays people feel secure in their identity, thanks to all the possibilities offered by a consumer society. Possessing things gives them a sense of well-being and thus a kind of identity and the feeling of belonging. But as soon as possessions and consumption are threatened, this false identity breaks down and the ever-menacing anxieties again come to the fore.” [….]

Two books by Gruen:

• The Betrayal of the Self: The Fear of Autonomy in Men and Women (Grove Press, 1988)
• The Insanity of Normality—Realism as Sickness: Toward Understanding Human Destructiveness (Grove Weidenfeld, 1992)

Related Bibliographies:

• Biological Psychiatry, Sullied Psychology and Pharmaceutical Reason
• Buddhism and Psychoanalysis
• Emotions
• Freudian Psychology
• Human Nature and Personal Identity
• Marxism and Freudian Psychology
• Toward a Realist Social and Political Psychology

The elusive task of “getting Gandhi right:” on religion and spirituality

I recently have come across several comments about Gandhi’s ideas, spirituality and politics in various fora that I find tendentious, distorted (e.g., a caricature), or simply wrong (alas, one finds Leftists often shamelessly indulging in ‘Gandhi-bashing,’ which of course is something quite different from intelligent and informed criticism). One characterization in particular was spectacularly off-target, so I’ll spend some time here addressing it: Gandhi is described, without qualification, as being among the class of “conservative Hindus.” Gandhi’s identification with Hinduism was in fact utterly idiosyncratic and defined by him in such universalist terms as to be almost unrecognizable as “Hinduism,” despite the plethora of ideas he adopted from the tradition, ideas invariably subject to his unique and well-considered interpretations (Gandhi’s allegorical reading—in toto—of the Gita is highly unusual and perhaps utterly unique, at least within Hinduism proper). Gandhi would not accept conventional or orthodox renderings of concepts from Hinduism if he found them repugnant to either “reason” or “moral sense.” I suppose it should not be surprising how hard it is to “get Gandhi right” as it were, for he was not a systematic intellectual or philosopher and was open to altering or correcting his views in light of self-examination and reflections on his experiences (be they intimate or public: Gandhi himself as not fond of such distinctions as we commonly make between the ‘private’ and ‘public’ realms). Hence Gandhi did not place a premium on the “consistency” of his views over time because he felt perfectly free to change his mind (and so he reminds me of the great pragmatist philosopher, Hilary Putnam) for any number of legitimate reasons that arose out of his experience, reflection, reading, dialogue, or even conflict with others. I will not name names with regard to the authors of the comments I’ve found troubling (in one case I’ve written a letter to a professor from whom I’ve yet to hear back). After attempting to set the record straight as we say, I’ve added a short list of secondary sources that might have saved the individuals in question from writing such nonsense. I hope it also proves helpful to those still learning or curious about Gandhi’s life and thought.

One should always bear in mind, with Akeel Bilgrami, that Gandhi’s “religiosity was eclectic and individual, a product partly of what was given to him, but partly too a matter of his [moral and spiritual] instincts, which were then consolidated over the years by his haphazard reading [yet this reading was wide ranging, in terms of both topics and geographic origin] and his highly personal and searching reflection.” Whatever the species of Vaishnavism of his family and native Gujarat, Gandhi freely borrowed, adopted, and attempted assiduously to integrate into his worldview and social and political activism a medley of religious ideas and spiritual practices, a fine sample of which is provided by Bilgrami:

“… Advaita-Vedantin ideas; Bhakti ideals of devotion* (ideals through which he read his beloved Bhagavad Gita and made it, as he himself would say, his constant moral guide [or his ‘spiritual dictionary’]); the Jainism of his mentor [insofar as it could be said he had a ‘guru’] Raychandbhai; Buddhism and an admiration for the person of the Buddha [like B.R. Ambedkar!] that he acquired after being moved by Edwin Arnold’s The Light of Asia; [T]heosophical notions (shorn of their occultism) that he got from exposure in England to Annie Besant [among others; indeed, it was Theosophists who more or less introduced Gandhi to the Gita, as they were reading a Sanskrit version alongside Arnold’s book, and Gandhi was embarrassed by his ignorance of the material; in Johannesburg, he came to know a ‘a group of young predominantly Jewish intellectuals’ who were influenced by Theosophy and its active group of members in the city ‘became friends or supporters of Gandhi’], and Christianity—particularly the New Testament … which he filtered through his admiring, though selective, reading of Tolstoy’s writings, as well as what he took from his frequent encounter with missionaries both in South African and India. He even made something religious out of what he learnt from his study of Ruskin and Thoreau who, like all the other influences on him, contributed to the shaping of a life of spiritual dedication and service and conscience.”

It is thus no surprise that Gandhi’s “Hinduism” was frequently and often vociferously criticized and attacked by “orthodox” Hindus. Bilgrami refreshingly and importantly reminds us that Gandhi’s religion was, in the Mahatma’s own words, a “humanistic” creed, for his personal convictions, however creative and subjective their genesis, were relentlessly subject to “universalization,” a process which Bilgrami carefully analyzes and explains (e.g., as an ‘intense dialectic’ between the experiential or individual and universal aspects of religion) as to make Gandhi’s spirituality intellectually if not philosophically coherent and perhaps more than plausible.

* I spoke to the question of how Advaita Vedantin philosophy and bhakti devotionalism might be integrated or reconciled in this blog post several years ago at the Indian Philosophy Blog: “What is the relation between Advaita Vedanta and bhakti?” (There are some interesting and delightful comments, which are far longer and perhaps more enlightening than the post itself!)

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Essential reading by way of endeavoring to make sense of Gandhi’s religiosity or spiritual worldview:

• Bilgrami, Akeel. “Gandhi, the Philosopher,” and “Gandhi (and Marx),” in Bilgrami’s Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014: 101-121 and 122-174 respectively.
• Brown, Judith M. and Anthony Parel, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Gandhi. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011. See especially Akeel Bilgrami’s chapter, “Gandhi’s religion and its relation to his politics.” This book also has an indispensable essay by Anthony Parel that speaks to Gandhi’s views on and politics regarding caste and “untouchability.” Gandhi’s positions and activism on this score are also often incorrectly portrayed, misinterpreted or ill-understood. See the second of two chapters by Parel: “Gandhi in independent India.”
• Chatterjee, Margaret. Gandhi’s Religious Thought. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983.
• Ghosh, B.N. Beyond Gandhian Economics: Towards a Creative Deconstruction. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2012.
• Iyer, Raghavan. The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi. Santa Barbara, CA: Concord Grove Press, 1983 ed. (1st ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). Absolutely essential reading as it remains a nonpareil examination of Gandhi’s moral and political views, as well as much of his religious and spiritual outlook.
• Parekh, Bhikhu. Colonialism, Tradition and Reform: An Analysis of Gandhi’s Political Discourse. New Delhi: Sage, 1989.
• Parekh, Bhikhu. Gandhi’s Political Philosophy: A Critical Examination. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989. See in particular (but not only) chapter 4, “Spirituality, Politics and the Reinterpretation of Hinduism.”

For further research, please see “The Life, Work, & Legacy of Mohandas K. Gandhi: A Basic Bibliography.”

The following might also be useful:

• Advaita Vedanta philosophy: a short introduction
• Buddhism: a select bibliography
• Hinduism bibliography
• Indian/Indic Philosophies: a basic bibliography
• Jainism: a basic bibliography

 

Beyond Ideology: the participatory praxis of movements of democratic resistance and socialist construction in India … and elsewhere

Half of India’s 1.3 billion live in conditions of deprivation. Government policy over the past three decades—inspired by the neoliberal policy state—has produced a hostile environment for survival. A quarter of a million farmers and peasants have committed suicide, a direct consequence of capitalist agriculture and an adverse global trade order. The current government of the Hindu Right is not only the complete inheritor of such harsh economic policies, but it has the added disadvantage of being culturally suffocating. Attacks on freedom of expression and speech as well as a spectrum of threats against cultural and religious difference have begun to mark the social landscape. [….] Slowly, surely, the politics of the Shiv Sena and the BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party: both fueled by an Hindutva ideology which is, I think, along with a significant number of social scientists inside and outside India, fundamentally fascist], as well as its allied organizations [e.g., Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh], wore down the forms of secular culture that had been in formation for a century.

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The slow decline of the trade unions and of members in the mass fronts of the socialist and communist world leaves very many millions of Indians outside the studied influence of the Left. [….] No more the values of the anti-colonial movement or of the Nehruvian period of national development. Nor more the traditions of Indian socialism, as authored by Periyar and Ram Manohar Lohia [embedded links added here, above and below], anchored by the Dravidian parties and the Samajwadi parties. The core values of the present are personal consumption and career advancement. Such a cultural universe is detrimental to the kind of political project promoted by the Left.

* * *

From the 1900s to the 1940s, the communists in Calcutta and Bombay lived in communes—not dissimilar to the Gandhian ashram, but now not in rural outposts but in the midst of bustling urban cities. Cross-class housing, disregard for caste restrictions, men and women mingling freely—all this was a direct challenge to staid bourgeois ideas of respectability that had moved out of the middle-class into the working-class areas as well. The Calcutta commune at 37 Harrison Road would have people like Soumendranath Tagore –who would later become a Trotskyite—come ‘without shoes [wearing] shaggy hair, and dressed only in khadi,’ as Kazin Nazrul Islam in one sitting would translate the Internationale into Bengali so they could sing it with their loudest voices. Manikuntala Sen remembered that people would think of the communists as ‘followers of an irreligious, unsociable lifestyle.’ Basavapunniah recalled how middle-class intellectual of the fledgling party would stroll into working-class areas of Madras—agricultural labourers’ colony and untouchables’ colony’—to introduce their understanding of Marxism and Leninism. They were looked at strangely, and then welcomed warmly.’—Vijay Prashad, No Free Left: The Future of Indian Communism (New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2015)

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The following is from an article, “Legacies Crucial for the Commons,” by Ashish Kothar in The Hindu, arguing that “Gandhi and Marx are more relevant now than ever before:”

[….] “And so we must turn for hope to the many movements of sangharsh (resistance) and nirman (construction) throughout the world. These movements realise that the injustices they are facing, and the choices they must make, are not bound by the divides that ideologues play games with.

Let’s take sangharsh. At any given time in India, there are dozens of sites where Adivasis [a term for indigenous peoples in South Asia], farmers, fisherpersons, pastoralists and others are refusing to part with their land or forest or water to make way for so-called development projects. One thousand farmers have filed objections to their lands being taken up by the Prime Minister’s pet project, the bullet train. News that is both inspiring and depressing keeps coming from Latin America, of indigenous people standing up for their territorial rights against mining and oil extraction, and all too frequently paying the price when state or corporate forces kill their leaders. Nationwide rallies were organised by the National Alliance of People’s Movements and the Ekta Parishad in October. They involved movements for land and forest rights, communal harmony, workers’ security and other causes that are not so easy to place in any ideological camp.

The same goes for nirman, or the construction of alternatives. Across the world there are incredible examples of sustainable and holistic agriculture, community-led water/energy/food sovereignty, worker takeover of production facilities, resource/knowledge commons, local governance, community health and alternative learning, inter-community peace-building, reassertion of cultural diversity, gender and sexual pluralism, and much else.

It is in many of these alternative movements that I find inspiration for building on the legacies of Gandhi and Marx (and Ambedkar, Rabindranath Tagore, Rosa Luxemburg and various luminaries) and, equally important, on the many indigenous and Adivasi, Dalit, peasant and other ‘folk’ revolutionaries through history. There are many examples that dot the Indian landscape: the few thousand Dalit women farmers who have achieved anna swaraj (food sovereignty) in Telangana while also transforming their gender and caste status; the several dozen Gond Adivasi villages in Gadchiroli that have formed a Maha Gram Sabha to stop mining, and work on their own vision of governance and livelihood security; a Dalit sarpanch near Chennai who combines both Marxist and Gandhian principles in his attempt to transform the village he lives in. Similarly, there are others across the world: a thousand people have experimented with anarchic community life in the ‘freetown’ of Christiania in Copenhagen for four decades; indigenous peoples in Peru, Canada and Australia have gained territorial autonomy; small peasants in Africa and Latin America have sustained or gone back to organic farming; fisherpersons in the South Pacific have their own network of sustainably managed marine sites.

What I find of significance in many resistance and alternative movements is the exploration of autonomy, self-reliance, people’s governance of politics and the economy, freedom with responsibility for the freedom of others, and respect for the rest of nature. While these movements do often call for policy interventions from a more accountable state, there is also an underlying antipathy to the centralised state, as there is in both Gandhian swaraj and in Marxist communism and in many versions of anarchy. Private property is also challenged. In 2013, the Gond village Mendha-Lekha in Maharashtra converted all its agricultural land into the commons. Note that commons here does not mean state-owned, a distorted form of ‘communism’ that has prevailed in orthodox Leftist state regimes.

And while Gandhi was weak on challenging capital, and Marx on stressing the fundamental spiritual or ethical connections amongst humans, these movements often tend to bridge these gaps. Insofar as many of them integrate the need to re-establish ecological resilience and wisdom, some even arguing for extending equal respect to other species, they also encompass Marx’s vision of a society that bridges humanity’s ‘metabolic rift’ with nature, and Gandhi’s repeated emphasis on living lightly on earth. With this they also challenge the very fundamentals of ‘development,’ especially its mad fixation on economic growth, reliance on ever-increasing production and consumption, and its utter disregard for inequality.” [….]

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One quibble: while it may be a distinction some won’t find palatable or even plausible, I think Gandhi may be justly described as “weak” when it came to challenging capitalists, most likely because he saw them as individuals amenable to persuasion on a personal level, and some of them provided significant funds for several of his campaigns (it helps to trace the statements and behavior of these capitalists after Indian independence). As far as “capital” (or capitalism) as such is concerned, I don’t find Gandhi at all very “weak.” For an excellent discussion  regarding Gandhi’s views directly bearing upon this judgement see, for example, Bhikhu Parekh’s treatment in Gandhi’s Political Philosophy: A Critical Examination (University of Notre Dame Press, 1989) and—on Gandhi's conception, as it were, of moral and political economy—B.N. Ghosh’s Beyond Gandhian Economics: Towards a Creative Deconstruction (Sage Publications, 2012).

In any case, and along with more than a few of the “communists” in India (of yesteryear and today), I think both Marx and Gandhi are indeed “more relevant now than ever before.” And, we might add, among others, B.R. (‘Babasaheb’) Ambedkar to the mix (Kothari writes of ‘building on the legacies of .... Ambedkar, Rabindranath Tagore, Rosa Luxemburg and various luminaries’), for several reasons I will not go into here (incidentally, Ambedkar died on this date in 1956).

Relevant Bibliographies

• Bhimrao Ramji—‘Babasaheb’—Ambedkar
• Beyond Capitalist Agribusiness: Toward Agroecology and Food Justice
• Communism in India
• Democratic Theory
• The Life, Work, and Legacy of Mohandas K. Gandhi
• Global Distributive Justice
• Human Rights
• Liberalism
• Marxism
• Toward a Marxist Theory of International Law
• Utopian Imagination, Thought, and Praxis
• Varna and Caste System in India

See too this short list I posted as a Note on my Facebook page: Toward an Understanding of Society and Politics (including political economy) in Contemporary India.