I was active in the CUNY adjunct struggle in 2008. Back then, we were faced with a rotten contract, insensitive to our needs. And when we demanded a contract discussion bulletin, to voice our objections, like we are doing today, we ran into the same brick wall of bureaucratic paternalism (maternalism?).

So I’m having this strange feeling of déjà vu, all over again.

I was also active in the Part Timers United movement decades ago, when we faced, not the “progressive” New Caucus, but the Shankerite CUNY Unity Caucus. Asked to contrast the two, I would say there’s really only a comparison to be made. Sort of like Trump vs. Clinton and Obama—as experienced by the immigrants they both deport. And both have left immigrant families to die in the desert.

The New Caucus knows how to be make more sympathetic noises about how they “feel our pain.” They know how to bleat about the fact that they wish so much that CUNY would hire more of us as full timers. And they brag about the historically astonishing pay raise they earned for us (by schmoozing with CUNY management). How that pay raise, which will only kick in a few years from now, is going to get us adjuncts through the winter, much less the summer, of 2020, unless we a) get a Winter term course, and b) once again borrow money from friends and family—that they don’t explain.

In their heart of hearts, both of these movements only serve the full timers, all the while staying carefully within the parameters set by the Taylor law, their cozy relationship with CUNY management, and their pals, the Democratic Party pols. Neither of these outfits really gave nor give a good god damn about us.

But what really beats all is the New Caucus’ refusal, one decade after another, to permit us to democratically and freely voice our objections to yet another rotten deal: in an online Contract Discussion Bulletin, which we of CCU have been calling for, for decades.

Have these “progressives,” so eager to defend small Third World countries from imperialism, never heard of Kant’s essay, “What is Enlightenment?”

There, the great bourgeois philosopher argued that it is our responsibility as adults to think for ourselves: rather than lean upon others to do our thinking for us. We should stay away, as the 20^th century social critic David Riesman argued, from the “Lonely Crowd,” and instead, be “inner directed.”

Even if you see your role as a loyal camp follower of the New Caucus, with its ties to CUNY management, and the profit hungry, austerity-pushing plutocrats standing behind them, everyone must realize that this is a rotten contract. And that, despite their empty promises, the NC has done virtually nothing to get the $7K per course that we have been demanding.

But an “enlightened,” genuinely “progressive” union officialdom would at least offer to us, the respect owed to us, as fellow adults, to permit us to raise such objections in a public space created by our union.

Instead, we have been given the usual excuses:

• “We need unity now.”
• “7K is just not possible: give it a merciful death.”
• “It’s just not done! We’ve never done it in the past. So we can’t do it now!”
• Our contract bargaining team worked so hard. You don’t know how hard we worked, what we suffered for you. And now you’re complaining?! Buck it up!
• Be grateful for the successes we’ve achieved!
• You don’t really want to go on strike, do you?!
• [This is a variant of the old “Clean your plate! People are starving in China!”] People are starving right now! We need to sign this [piece of crap] so we can send them their checks of [paltry] back pay, so they won’t starve!”

What these geniuses don’t seem to realize, is that being our union “representative” means they have to represent the interests of the majority—which is comprised of us adjuncts.

We can think for ourselves, we know when we’re getting ripped off, and we demand the right to voice our complaints that you have not done your job, and this rotten deal doesn’t work for us!

We’re the adjuncts. And we’re not going to take this from you anymore.

I would like to present a critique of CUNY Struggle’s 10/24/19 document analyzing the present, CUNY-PSC contract proposal, and its justification by the New Caucus leadership, and offering a strategy for challenging it. It is presented here: https://cunystruggle.org/2019/10/24/far-short-of-7k-the-moa-explained/

Fine and insightful is indeed CUNY Struggle’s analysis of how and why this proposal and the New Caucus’s defense of it is insulting, duplicitous, and insensitive. Hats off to them for this! I’m glad to see that all their K-to-postgraduate education has paid off. I accept and agree with their critique.

What I find problematic is their strategy for dealing with this proposal. In its own way, I charge that this too is a cop-out.

On the morning of Thursday, October 24^th, in the local NYC news report, the PSC execs get to pose as saviors of the adjuncts, who are now, by the seeming benevolence of theirs and CUNY’s negotiation teams, permitted to rise out of poverty.

How did this pronouncement affect the working people of New York City—the only “community” that can possibly save us from poverty, by supporting a strong bargaining process, backed up by the real threat of a strike?

This is the first time they’ve probably heard there’s such people as adjuncts at CUNY, let alone that we’ve been paid poverty wages. So, they might very well be telling themselves, “Oh, that’s great. Thank God for the PSC bureaucrats! They’re giving my kids’ professors a fair shake!”

So, as a very sleep-deprived Hawkeye Pierce said in his telegram to Harry S. Truman, “Who’s responsible?”

CUNY Struggle justly criticizes the New Caucus for this disinformation, this sheer, self-serving propaganda. But that was to be expected. What has prevented us from building a bridge to the NYC working class, so that such lies could be effectively refuted?

Since last spring, we CUNY Contingents United activists have been proposing a march and rally, to outreach to the NYC working class.

While CUNY Struggle supported this proposal at CAP meetings, this support was pretty much perfunctory (with some members of theirs actually voting no!). After it passed (twice), they did nothing about it. And oftentimes, on the sly, behind the scenes, they actively discouraged any effort to build a movement to support our proposal. Instead, they counterpoised to it, a proposal for a “strike authorization,” before we even got the details of the contract proposal. In the eyes of PSC members who had any common sense, let alone the majority of full timers, who tend to support the New Caucus leadership, this proposal was completely out of touch with reality. (It may certainly be a realistic proposal in a few weeks. But not over the summer! First, CUNY and the New Caucus had to show us they were willing to betray us! That’s what’s happened—but only now.)

Months and months of valuable time, when we could have built momentum for such a march and rally, were thus squandered. CS’ stonewalling gave the New Caucus leadership, never fond of upsetting their cozy, “organic” relationship with the CUNY bosses with any militant mobilization of the largely contingent labor rank-and-file, the edge they needed to vote our proposal down at the last DA.

After defeating our proposal, so hypocritically, the New Caucus now claims they fought hard, they “organized,” to get to the unbelievably great achievements represented by this contract proposal. Organized WHAT? I’d like to know?! And so would CUNY Struggle, like to know. What the hell have these union leaders actually done, except schmoozed with the bosses behind closed doors, and lobbied the Democrats?!

On the other hand, however, isn’t it time CS looks at the mote in its own eye? Or are they going to engage yet again in the very same “bad faith” with which they are so fond of labeling others–merely because and whenever we disagree with them?

Now, instead of outreaching to the NYC working class, CUNY Struggle says we should talk to each other. The most outreach they want to do, is to have us talk to our “communities.”

This is a 21^st century, identity-politics version of the old-timey, 19^th century middle-class evangelism. It reminds me of a story I heard about the last days of United for Peace and Justice, a reformist group tied into the Democratic Party. That event was a “river-to-river” hand-holding festival for peace, held in Manhattan. Silently. Some of the participants started calling upon the leaders: “could you lead us in a march, now? Could we get a little bit more militant?”

The leaders replied, “No, no, no. That’s too violent! We don’t want to be like the warmongers (besides, it might embarrass the Democrats and lose them the election!)  Go home and talk to your neighbors!”

The leaders of CUNY Struggle may respond angrily that they only have disdain for such obsession with Democratic Party politics, on the part of such outfits as the New Caucus as well as UFPJ. But the fact is that CS leaders are just as much members of the middle class, with a particular, delusional “ivory tower” conception of the world. In the back of their woke, SJW minds, they are just as intent upon securing lucrative positions within the present, corporate capitalist System–rather than toppling and reconstructing it in order to build a truly egalitarian, socialist society.

In such a society, the masses of workers would call the shots and control and become the center of its culture—not the full time professors, the fake “progressive” or “socialist” journalists and politicians, or the university-diversity bureaucrats whom these grad students so much want to emulate and become someday.

So time and time again, the leaders of CS have revealed an even greater disdain, as well as downright aversion and fear, which they share with such Democrat-oriented groups, for our proposals to outreach to the most potentially powerful community in capitalist society for social change: the working class. Another example, as the journal Revolution has pointed out (See “How They Rammed Through Anti-Red Ban,” April 2019, at http://www.internationalist.org/cuny-struggle-anti-red-ban-1905.html), was their sabotage, in January, of the organizing conference that we proposed, so that instead of drawing upon, and in, labor and immigrant activists, this conference became an “anti-communist enclave” where “liberal happy talk” (about how a strike, purely among us adjuncts, would be like “turning on the light”) could predominate.    

During and after this upcoming struggle to vote down this insulting contract proposal, I hope PSC members will grow to recognize whose proposals, whose strategies, they really ought to support.

Our leadership, or theirs?

I wish it wasn’t like this. These young people have a lot of energy and spirit, and obvious intelligence. Unfortunately, they also have quite a bit of vicious, un-principled anti-communism, and anti-working class snobbery.

It wasn’t us CCU activists who broke with the Campaign for 7K. They kicked us out. Time after time, they have sabotaged the efforts we have made to actually fight for 7K.

We need to build up CCU. Please support us, not them: unless and until they abandon their obstructionism and clean up their act, for a change.

In the Jewish faith, lashon hara is malicious gossip. It is one of the worst sins imaginable. It is a gift to “Satan,” bent on dividing people against each other and destroying their souls. It “kills” the reputation of the victim, and it poisons the souls of both those who speak it, and those who listen to it.

In recent years, I’ve discovered that an old (former) best friend of mine has been trash-talking me behind my back. He is what Jewish people call a ba’al lashon hara: someone who has let malicious gossip become a central part of his personality.

According to him, my old friend has a legitimate grievance against me. He holds me responsible for his utter lack of a love life, these days.

But is it I, or is it he, who left his figure and his health go to hell? Though I was his housemate decades ago, I don’t remember, even at that time, ever force-feeding him any of the junk “comfort” food which has made him this way. (Ironically, his was one of the first voices, for holistic nutrition, that got my own health on track, back when we were housemates. Unfortunately, he failed to take his own advice.)

Nor did I prevent him from exercising. Nor did I ever dissuade any potential romantic partners from going out with him.

Actually, no, he’s not claiming that. It’s even nuttier. The problem, according to him, is my politics. On account of my lack of respect for his newfound affinity for neo-liberal identity politics, he has branded me a “racist, sexist, homophobe.” This is the reason, or so he claims, why he hasn’t scored.

He seems tragicomically unaware of the fact that women who get their income from other professions than the oldest one, will judge his sexual attractiveness—or lack thereof—on his own merits: not on his friend’s politically incorrect sensibilities. In fact, I distinctly remember that when he did have a girlfriend, many years ago, she thought I was “funny.” She didn’t seem to have a problem with me. She liked me. And the girlfriend he had later—well, I’m still friends with her. So I have to plead “not guilty” on this one.

By this point, Gentle Reader, you may be wondering why I am wasting my time writing about this schnook.

Yet what I want to do here is to use this ex-friendship to illuminate a larger dynamic involved with the Liberal-Left, which my ex-friend now so stolidly occupies: tied into the Democratic Party, the trade union bureaucracy, reformist delusions in the bourgeois State…and anti-communism.

At one time, when we were both young, I too, though never as plumply, supported such politics. We were both around the DSA at the CUNY Grad Center, where we were going to school: seemed like everybody was. It had a lot of clout back there and then: almost as much as it has today over the Left in general, now that the ISO, as the result of a #Metoo operation, has folded into it. My friend may have been in the CUNY GC auditorium that night when I heard Irving Howe say “the enemy is Bolshevism.” If he did, he probably agreed with Howe, as much as I did. We both agreed with Rosa Luxemburg’s early critique of Leninism: that it centralized power too greatly, that it was too disciplinary, and Lenin had not given enough credit to the role of working class spontaneity and the need for party democracy.

What began to wake me up, and to push me to the Left (to the point where I consider myself a Trotskyist Bolshevik-Leninist) were Mike Davis’ articles in the New Left Review, which later became his first book, Prisoners of the American Dream. In it, he critiqued the willingness of such orgs as DSA to support the Democratic Party.

At the same time, my friend and I were also involved in an effort to form a new “Part Timers Union,” just for adjunct professors, breaking away from PSC. This put us into opposition to the PSC bureaucrats, and the full time professors. Thus we were both more open to a more radical message.

There were divisions between us, even at this time, however. I remember, when we were housemates, my friend gushing over a Nation article, gushing about how wonderful Jesse Jackson was a Democratic Party presidential candidate. “What a wonderful candidate for the presidency,” or something like that, my friend said. Under Davis’ influence, I told him this seemed to me a “fairy tale.”  He didn’t want to hear this.

At this time, however, we shared a great skepticism toward the identity politics and political correctness of that era—the 80s and 90s. It destroyed whatever possibility for further growth, that might have come out of the campus occupations of 1991, or the “Shut the City Down” movement of 1995.

For us, this wasn’t radicalism. It had nothing to do with Marxism. It was petty moralism, like the kind that Keith Richards branded the judge when he and the rest of the Stones were up for a marijuana charge. We saw students who promoted this stuff as egotistic, self-righteous, stupid, divisive, and arrogant. I remember at a rally for rights for people of color with my friend. The Garveyites there were raising the slogan, “Africa for the Africans.” Which didn’t make a heck of a lot of sense, in Brooklyn, NY. My friend muttered under his breath to me, “Yea, and Bozo-land for the Bozos!”

That part-timer breakaway effort, thankfully, failed (such decertification efforts serve management, not the workforce, because they are divisive). That’s when the Part Timers Union morphed into a rank and file caucus within the PSC, “Part Timers United.” And when another dissident caucus among the full timers, the New Caucus (some of whose leaders were militant-sounding Maoists, but all of them were reformists) took over the union, PTU, and my friend, got sucked right in with them. When the New Caucus proceeded to be just as insensitive to the plight of adjuncts as the old rascals had been, my friend and other PTU’ers loyally joined in the efforts by the NC to gently suppress and coopt such dissent. Or just did nothing, and looked the other way.

The New Caucus is just as much in bed with the Democratic Party as any other union bureaucracy, just as much as were their predecessors, the Shankerite “CUNY Unity Caucus.” One example may suffice. In 2008, there was a contract proposal that was terrible for adjuncts, once again selling out demands that the two tier system be challenged. This is when outraged adjuncts formed and built the CUNY Contingents United. To get us to vote for the contract, some NC members held out the possibility that after it was signed, they would launch a major mobilization to educate and organize the adjuncts for a better contract, next time. Well there was a mobilization alright, that fall, the fall of 2008. Can you guess what it was? Right! It was a phone bank the NC set up to get out the vote for Obama in Pennsylvania!

My friend, true to form, supported this terrible contract. He never lifts a finger to help out dissident adjuncts oppose the NC’s do-nothingness, or run against them at union election time.

What has he gotten out of this slavishness? From what I can see, absolutely nothing. It has not landed him a full time job.

He did have, by my count, two opportunities to land a full time job: but not because he carried water for the NC bureaucrats. Inexplicably, he turned them both down. It would appear he corresponds to Merton’s “ritualistic” lifestyle: he really doesn’t want the goal of a good life. He just goes through the motions—and knifes his friends in the back, blaming them for his failures. One of the ways he goes through the motions, is by accepting now wholeheartedly, identity politics.

The New Caucus differentiates itself from its predecessors, the CUC, because of its politically “progressive” stance on international issues—and its identity politics. Getting absorbed into the New Caucus, meant, for my friend, getting absorbed into IP, as well.

The root of identity politics is post-structuralism. This doctrine, supremely cynical about the possibility of working class solidarity and revolution, became popular, paradoxically, at the height of the May 1968 General Strike in France. According to David North of the SEP, this was not such a paradox. For you see, the students had only expected that their cries of alienation would be fulfilled by such things as the creation of co-ed dorms. But when the workers threatened to take over the society, their middle class privileges and aspirations were threatened. So they flocked, away from Sartre’s Marxism, to Foucault’s cynicism. It was in the throes of this anti-communist terror, on the part of these petit bourgeois students, that gave birth to contemporary identity politics.

Anti-communism has two basic tropes. One of them was evinced by Irving Howe and other social democrats: the idea that Bolsheviks is inherently totalitarian. Democratic centralism, and the dictatorship of the proletariat, is one step away from the Gulag Archipelago. They will mine Rosa Luxemburg’s—and even Trotsky’s—early criticisms of Lenin’s centralism, and Rosa’s critique of the Russian Revolution, for their condemnation of Bolshevism: conveniently forgetting that Trotsky became a Bolshevik himself, that Rosa wholeheartedly supported the Russian Revolution, and that Rosa might have survived January 1919, and built a powerful and autonomous Communist Party that might have withstood the ravages of Stalinist authoritarianism, keeping hacks like Ruth Fisher out of the leadership, and keeping great leaders like Paul Levi, in: if she and her Left comrades had adopted democratic centralism when Lenin did!

The Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson has revived such nonsense recently. He and others blame Marx and Lenin for Stalinism: forgetting such factors as the seventeen invading imperialist armies into Russian territory, as a brutal Civil War engulfed the country, and the betrayal by the European Social Democrats (much like in their thinking Howe, Harrington, and the DSA!) of the possibility to spread the revolution westward: into the advanced industrial societies that might have lent the Russian Revolution a powerful helping hand. The anti-communists of the CUNY Struggle woke cult have used the allegedly unprincipled, sectarian, domineering tendencies of Trotskyists like myself—to kick us out of the Campaign for 7K or Strike—in incredibly unprincipled, sectarian, domineering fashion!

The second standby for anti-communists within the labor movement and the Left, is identity politics.

Post-structuralism and identity politics creates a simulacrum of radicalism. But instead of going after the real enemy—the capitalist class—it creates a new ‘racist,” “sexist,” “homophobic” bogeyman: “straight white males.” The “symbolic interactions” of this group, and of those they have allegedly hoodwinked into accepting their “cultural centrality,” must be enlightened by a “woke” elite of middle class academics and professionals—not so oddly enough, full time social science and humanities professors at CUNY—into greater tolerance for their racial and sexual “others”—within present-day capitalist society, with the help of the Democrats and the bourgeois State.

Such divisive politics, though it has had other victims/targets in the past, is very old. It has been the tool of the capitalist class, and their middle class dupes and bureaucratic, ideological henchmen, ever since the modern era began. Divide and conquer is the old capitalist game.

Much of the same language of racial and sexual essence of identity politics was once, and still is, employed by racists and fascists. Racism, and woke racialism, are just two peas in a pod, from what I can see. Where Albert Shanker was fond of using racism to maintain power for himself and his fellow bureaucrats (even during the legitimate Ocean-Brownsville strike, which was, after all, against the bosses!), “progressive” bureaucrats are fond of using identity politics to legitimate their own do-nothing practices and slavishness toward the Democrats.

The old racists, including bureaucrats like Shanker, used to fight against communists in the ranks, threatening their positions, by identifying us with people of color.

The new racialists/identity politicians use racialism and sexualism to brand us “racist, sexist, homophobes,” because we don’t accept their reformism and their identity politics. We don’t agree that voting for Barak Obama or other Black Democrats will usher in a new golden age of egalitarian race relations. We don’t agree with #Metoo that an allegedly all pervasive “rape culture” justifies the abandonment of due process, so that the lives of innocent people may be destroyed. We don’t believe that someone who formerly worked for the CIA, but has come out as a lesbian, should on the latter account be given our political support. And we don’t jump to attention and support totalitarian campaigns for mandatory vaccinations, when these vaccines have NOT been proven to be safe and effective to our satisfaction, nor for bans on reparative therapy (because we don’t believe such therapy, often humanistic, has been proven either unsafe or ineffective!). So therefore what we do with our bodies and our therapy sessions is our business—not the State’s. Nor do we accept the idea that anyone who has problems with giving children puberty blockers and sex-change surgery, should be automatically branded “transphobic.”  

But this is what my former friend has done to me, and this is what the neo-liberal Left is doing on a far grander scale. Instead of actually engaging us on these issues, they merely call us names. Identity politics is just lashon hara, writ large. The ruling class—the Great “Satan”—is perfectly willing to use it, to divide and to conquer us.

There is no way the truth can come out of such childishness and intolerance. But at least, these trade union bureaucrats and their Democratic Party “leaders” can continue to illegitimately legitimate themselves in the eyes of the gullible. And their loyal, pathetic followers, like my friend, will continue in their delusion that they can get more out of all of this than just a lousy t-shirt.

Against Scientistic Credulity: A Marxist Philosophy of Science, on the Basis of an Ideal Balance of Aristotle’s Three Rhetorical Appeals, upon which, Science was Historically Rooted

By Thomas Smith

August, 2019

Science is supposed by many people to be a realm that hangs from the clouds, a realm of pure truth, unencumbered by backward, medieval prejudices, vested interests, tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorists, or touchy feely spiritualism. Those who dissent, are automatically branded, as a few of the latter.

Dissenters, however, point out that often as not, what was yesterday’s technique, “proven” by science to safe, effective, and beyond reproach—is a source today for tens of thousands of fatalities. The faith in science promoted by voices from the Left to the non-loony Conservative Right, would seem to have some problems.

An article as recently as late 2015, in the liberal Atlantic Monthly by Paul Bloom, was titled “Scientific Faith Is Different From Religious Faith: Not all beliefs are equal.” There is little to object to in this article. I agree completely with Bloom that the scientific method is vastly superior in its capacity for the discovery of the truth, than is the Bible, or the Koran. But then we get onto shakier ground. Bloom comes to the difficulty that non-scientists do not have the time to check out the results of this method for themselves.  That is when Bloom slips from a rational discourse, into a conformist, authoritarian one: “I believe that … vaccines do not cause autism, but this is not because I have studied these issues myself.” What is his reply? “It is because I trust the scientists.”

The question he begs is, which scientists. He means, of course, the scientists connected to the (pharmaceutical industrial profit driven) Scientific Establishment, even though a careful survey of the literature actually reveals that these affirmations of the safety and effectivity of vaccines, have not been “based upon a gold standard of clinical research: long-term, double-blind, placebo-controlled studies.” He obviously does not mean the dissident scientists, who have actually conducted the scientific method dispassionately, producing hundreds of studies to show that there is such a probable link of vaccines to autism and other such disease.[1] 

This begged question points to the essential problem with “Science” today. The public certainly should trust in the scientific method. But it is by no means clear the Establishment, on the issue of vaccines, or many others, is carrying out the scientific method, or permitting dissident scientists who have done the research, to fairly pronounce their views before the Establishment pronounces various industrial products “safe” and “effective.”  Blithely, maddeningly, but all too typically, Bloom paints a rose-tinted view, obscuring all these pesky little doubts. Somehow, in a way Bloom neither explores nor explains, “Science” has become all that the founder of American pragmatism, Charles Sanders Peirce, envisioned it to be when he labeled it, in Transcendentalist fashion, “The Beloved Community”: 

Science establishes conditions where rational argument is able to flourish, where ideas can be tested against the world, and where individuals can work together to surpass their individual limitations. Science is not just one “faith community” among many. It has earned its epistemological stripes. And when the stakes are high, as they are with climate change and vaccines, we should appreciate its special status.[2]

I am reminded of Colonel Cathcart’s instruction to Yossarian in Catch-22: “Like us.” To which might be added, “Trust us!”

Notice that the only “limitations,” the possible obstacles, to a studious adherence to the scientific process, here are purely the potential “individualism” of the individual scientists. This and this alone, Bloom implies, could block the process; but thankfully, the “collectivity” of the process can take care of that. If he is actually aware of the potential sources for such corruption in the profit-seeking, corporate capitalist system in which this “collectivity” is bound up, he keeps such awareness close to the chest.

It is not difficult to understand why a member of the liberal, bourgeois Establishment should counsel such (blind) faith. It is harder for me to understand why my Marxist friends especially should uphold this touching faith in the contemporary cult of “science,” even though science, like anything else, is involved in (capitalist, profit-seeking) social relationships. Might not therefore the results of science be skewed, the tests rigged, or just not conducted, so that the corporations manufacturing the product in question can continue to make profits without consumer awareness encouraged as to its toxicity?[3]

Bloom tells us to have faith in Science. But that is an oxymoron. He is correct to argue that the scientific process is a collective process. But as with Peirce, Bloom’s collective, in which free discussion, argumentation, and proof occur, takes place almost exclusively in the empyrean realm of the scientists themselves. Everybody else, must have faith. This is worlds apart from the vision of socialist, democratic planning put forward by Lewis Mumford in The Culture of Cities (1938) or of Ernest Mandel (“In Defense of Socialist Planning,” New Left Review, 10/1/1986) and Roy Medvedev (On Socialist Democracy, 1975)’s visions: which rely upon scientific experts, but involve the masses democratically in every step of the planning process, to keep the experts accountable. But how can the masses hold the experts accountable within the socialist planning process, if they are not encouraged or even permitted to evaluate the science, and technology presented to them: if faith in the experts alone, in this field, is to be their lot?

The contemporary cult of science is not balanced properly. Truth seeking is a collective, intersubjective, rhetorical process, involving, most fundamentally, the three appeals defined by Aristotle: logos and pathos, as well as faith, or ethos. It is my view that, just like a three legged stool, truth comes out of a balance of these three appeals. Purely faith-based science shuts off discussion, short changes the rhetorical, collective critical thought process. It thus becomes indistinguishable from authoritarian religion, a prop for , rather than a challenge to, the abuse of power by vested interests. Because among lay people it promotes faith, way too much, and logic and experience, way too little, instead of a seeker and finder of truth, science has become almost purely a religion. Logic and experience are reserved for the scientific elite, a priesthood. There is no need to share this logic or experience with the demos. That is none of their business. They are deemed incapable of understanding these aspects of science. Thus, if they are presented at all, they serve for the most part merely as a fig leaf for the promotion of faith in techniques that serves vested corporate interests and profits instead of the public.

We need to go back to the origins of science—in the ancient world. Ancient Greek Rhetoric, according to Aristotle, was comprised of three “appeals.” Presented in this way, they are only ways to persuade others of a truth one has already discovered—or not discovered. One might use such an appeal to divert attention, in Sophist fashion, from the Truth. But in addition, however, Aristotle presented these appeals as “artistic proofs.” Thus they approach simultaneously, for Aristotle, the status of means of verification. 

Let’s define them now.

Logos is better known as logic.

Pathos involves the sharing of emotions, and the sharing of experience;

 Ethos, involves faith in authority.[4]

As a Marxist, I do not believe we have yet attained a truly democratic society. That is my political goal—to create a state in which ordinary people, the working class, has the power. What relationship should the people have to science, and how should science be constituted, in such an ideal, “workers’ state”? What should the role of each of these three appeals be within such a democratic, scientifically minded society?

Let us first examine the worth, and the pitfalls, of emphasizing each. The enemy of democracy is autocracy, the manipulation of science, which has been with us ever since the birth of class society, by vested interests. Rather than see our opponent as some reified bogeyman, such as “ignorance,” or “superstition,” we need to see it in terms of class hegemony. How can science be so manipulated by an exploitative ruling class, and how can it be freed from such manipulation, as a part of what Gramsci called counterhegemonic praxis?

Logic is both a process of science, and it is the goal: to discover the laws by which we can understand the processes of natural and social reality better, and develop technique which makes our lives easier, and even longer. In an authoritarian society, such as a civilization bound by the Asian mode of production, it is only the priesthood that understand the logic of nature. But this is the way the Asiatic priests not only comprehend the science of irrigation. It is also the basis for the religion that keeps them in power. Under feudalism, Scholastic logic was divorced from the experience of ordinary people. It was there to mystify them, keep them in awe of the clergy, the nobility, and the absolute monarchs.

Greek philosophy grows out of the class struggles within the later, Ancient mode of production. Faith in the old Asian religion dogma, or doxa, supported the hegemony of the old aristocratic class. Against this, the rising merchant class of Athens fought for democracy. Instead of basing their conceptions on the old religious dogma, the free citizens of Athens were now to make their own decisions, based upon their own reason and their experience.

Democratic politicians, often the lesser sons of the upper class aristocracy who sought to make up for their relative lack of inheritance possibilities, appealed to the experience and emotions of the free citizenry. They employed sophistry, techniques of persuasion, which relied primarily upon pathos, to promote that class’s expansionist, imperialist agenda. For a time, the leader of the democratic movement, Pericles, promoted a simple form of logos, as the wisdom derived from experience, what he called “mind,” for the sake of creating an ethos of collective self-control. Thus he secured support for wise policies that reined in the merchants’ adventurism, and for a time, ensured Athens’ survival. But his death effectively unleashed the ambitious, precipitating a crisis—the war with Sparta—which led to the fall of Athens as an empire.[5]

Philosophy arose from theorists of the aristocratic party: Socrates and his student, Plato. They developed brilliantly the science of dialectical logic, as an alternative to the democratic cult of demagoguery and pathos. But with their logic, they naturally sought to uphold their own hierarchical rule, positing a realm of pure Being, transcendent of earthly passions and motion. The utopian, aristocratic Republic he wished to create, a dystopia for the vast majority, not so strangely resembled the Persian and Egyptian Asian-bureaucratic civilizations Plato so admired. The difference was only that in the Republic he envisioned, his Guardian class, and its philosopher king, as opposed to the old Asian priestly castes and their God King, would be ruled by, and rule through, dialectical logic.[6]

Aristotle was Plato’s student, and the great conqueror, Alexander the Great, was Aristotle’s. Aristotle’s background was of the merchant class, reflected in his philosophy, which critiqued Plato’s realm of pure Being. Instead, he saw the dialectic operating as a telos, or final cause, or each element within a hierarchical world of Becoming, where each level served the purposes of those higher. Alexander’s empire reflected this—it was certainly not a democracy, it was a hierarchy, but one which furthered the fortunes of the Greek merchant class. This was, in effect, a class compromise between the merchant Democracy and Aristocracy, brokered by Alexander’s imperialist State, which gave to that compromise all the semi-divine aura of military glory and statist authority.[7] It sets an historical precedent for similar ruling class compromises we will discuss shortly: the German feudal state’s support by the bourgeoisie, championed by Hegel, and then American Progressivism, around which, a similar semi-diving aura shines, fooling even my hard Left friends, unbeknownst even to themselves, into thinking we should all place our faith in what is called “Science”—but is really, often as not, not.

Centuries later, Aristotle’s telos became Hegel’s idealist, and then Marx’s materialist, objective dialectics.  In the meantime, his enlisting of both logic, and a primitive form of empiricism, made him the greatest scientist of the Ancient era.

Pathos can be seen as emotion, but also, a way of persuading people of something based upon their subjective experience. Among these three appeals, therefore, pathos was the doorway to modern empiricism: the idea that all tenets must be proven through the objective evidence present to the senses, whose powers were tremendously refined by the invention of scientific instruments such as the telescope, the microscope, etc.

Each of these three appeals are employed by characters in Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar. Cassius uses ethos–patriarchal authority–to lure his fellow aristocrat and Senator, Marcus Brutus, into the Conspiracy to assassinate Caesar. He attempts to shame Brutus for his inaction about Caesar’s rise to power, threatening to destroy the Republic, when Brutus’ ancestor, Lucius Junius Brutus, was the man who established it by overthrowing the Tarquins. Cassius implies that Brutus dishonors his ancestor thereby:

O, you and I have heard our fathers say,

There was a Brutus once that would have brookt

Th’eternal devil to keep his state in Rome

As easily as a king

After the assassination attempt is successful, Brutus temporarily succeeds in swaying the Roman crowd to support the Conspiracy, through a carefully measured, poetic (and thus, a sign of his aristocratic bearing), logical appeal. Stating that he loved Caesar, Brutus accuses him of ambition, and thus justifies his murder. 

Unfortunately for Brutus, however, he makes the mistake of giving the floor to Marc Antony, who uses far more successfully, and at first underhandedly, the appeal of pathos, in plebian, experiential, empirical prose: the language they can understand. With it, he draws them out of the support they had just lent to the Conspiracy, and against it. He does so by reminding them of Caesar’s humility and service to Rome, by reading Caesar’s will, appealing to their self-interest, relating via the gifts Caesar wanted to give them. Then he shows the corpse, with the bloody wounds that Caesar received at the Conspiracy’s hands. He appeals to their emotions, not directly, but instead, through experience.

Empiricism was used by the rising bourgeoisie during the 17^th and 18^th centuries as a weapon, of what Max Weber called “disenchantment,” against the metaphysical dogmatism of the ancien regime. As Marx and Engels write in The Manifesto of the Communist Party, in order to replace a web of feudal obligation and privilege with the “cash nexus,” the new empirical science, along with the expansion of the World Market, drowns “the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.” Shakespeare’s character Glendower, in Henry IV Part I, insists that he can “call spirits from the vasty deep,” but Hotspur replies, “well, so can I; or so can any man. But will they come when you call?”

Such skepticism was a weapon to be employed by the bourgeoisie against the old feudal “spooks that go bump in the night” Scholastic dogma, as much as this class’s newfound emphasis on empiricism. Skepticism could also be employed against two other classes. First, against the bourgeoisie itself; or rather, its personal propensity for luxury, and compassion for others, both of which militated against the intensification of capitalist exploitation. Skepticism served this ascetic psychological goal in tandem with, or as a replacement for, Protestantism, as Max Weber discusses in his landmark work. Second, against the cries and wails of its newly created potential gravedigger, that Frankensteinian monster, the proletariat. If nothing could be known for certain, then the sense-certainty of the lower classes that they were being unfairly oppressed, could certainly be discounted.

To this day, in the form of analytic philosophy, as Herbert Marcuse wrote in One Dimensional Man, skepticism is used by bourgeois philosophers to strip ordinary language of its rebellious, “metaphysical” elements—the better to avert the consciousness of the working class away from contradictions of capitalism and its historical task of socialist revolution. So, too, the contemporary “sceptic” movement, so selflessly and disinterestedly furthering the profit-seeking agenda of the medical-industrial complex, marginalizes the cries of working and middle class parents, for example, after a mercury- and aluminum-laden megadose of vaccine robs their infants of their health, and even their lives.

How ironic is it, then, not to mention alienating, when ‘Marxists’ jump on this bourgeois skepticist bandwagon, joining in this insensitive, profit-driven browbeating of ordinary working people who have been the victims of the medical-industrial complex!

So both skepticism and empiricism have been valuable, throughout the bourgeois era, to the bourgeoisie. However, there naturally arose a potential contradiction between the two perspectives. For if nothing could be known for certain, then what good was empiricism? How could the bourgeoisie grow to mastery over natural, social, and political reality, if nothing really could be known?

Thus the great bourgeois philosopher of Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant, attempted to challenge the skepticism of Berkeley and Hume, with his theories, in the Critique of Pure Reason, of transcendental apperception, of God given capacities of human beings to understand categories of time and space, transcendent of immediate sense perceptions, and his morality of the categorical imperative in his Critique of Practical Reason. Nevertheless, Kant still placed severe, sceptical limits on the ultimate perspicacity of empirical knowledge. This knowledge could never grasp the noumena—the essence—of reality, only its phenomenal aspect: what a given thing was for us, how it could serve our (i.e., the capitalist class’s exploitative, profit-seeking) purposes. Kant’s skepticism was in the spirit of the rising bourgeoisie, which saw all reality only as a means to its own instrumental ends of exploitation and profit seeking. While he promotes the Enlightenment ideal that each man should learn to think for himself, and that each should be treated as an “end in themselves.” But the categorical imperative, and the practical morality, he developed to ensure such treatment, was based upon a Platonic abstraction, and an alienation, from all self-interest, conceived of as leading inevitably to selfishness and exploitation. Only through art, Kant argues in his Third Critique, on Judgment, is there any possibility of transcending this split between passion and disembodied reason. But this, for Kant, is simply a world of illusion.  

A little later came the Classicist movement, of Schiller and Goethe, which was akin to the Romantics in England—Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, Wordsworth–and the Transcendentalists—Emerson, Thoreau–in the United States. They took more seriously than did Kant himself, the possibility that art could transcend the ontological divisions Kant posited.

The thinkers from all three countries were motivated to their aesthetic-philosophical quest, by their critique of alienation. As the intellectual representatives of the bourgeoisie, and as supporters, at least initially, of the Great French Revolution of 1789, they opposed the unfreedoms of the feudal absolutist ancien regime. But their plebian background, like their great mentor, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, also led to their deep concerns over the rise of industrialism and its intense repression and exploitation of the rising working class, which they saw as the result of the selfishness and brutality of the modern era. Hegel, Holderlin, and Schelling (who later became an irrationalist reactionary) were followers of the Classicism, which took for its alternative model the Classical Golden Age of ancient Athenian democracy, the vertu—or the placing of the good of the community and the State over oneself–of Sparta: and of the French Jacobins.

The young Hegel found that the Christian, feudal world of Germany that he inhabited, was fundamentally alienated. He harked back to what he considered the unalienated community, what he called the schone demokratie, of ancient Athens.

In idealist fashion, Hegel thus sought to burst the skeptical—alienating–limits placed upon knowledge and morality by Kant, by seeing the entire world of Becoming as engulfed in an objective dialectic, sponsored by the Absolute Spirit, which unfolded through contradiction, so that Absolute Spirit could attain its, and humanity’s freedom. Each thing within the objective world, could be understood now its dialectical tension and contradiction with all other things, including ourselves. The noumena of each thing, we could now understand as existing for itself—and for us, for our purposes. Within the realm of morality, Hegel promoted an ideal which smacked of the Athenian democracy of which he was fond: each citizen promoted his own interests, yet simultaneously, the good of his fellows, the good of the community. Thus Hegel, just as he transcends Kant’s skepticism and ascetic view of morality, also transcends Aristotle’s teleological philosophy.

But later in his life, Hegel became reconciled to the modern Prussian absolute State: and actually became its Court Philosopher. This was representative of the class in German society which he represented: the bourgeoisie. In its march toward both economic as well as political power, this class in the Middle Ages, in the words of the Manifesto, had served “either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, cornerstone of the great monarchies in general,” until, as in England in the 1640s, and in France in the 1790s, they could sweep those monarchies aside and assume power themselves in the “modern representative state.” But in hopelessly backward Germany, the bourgeoisie, fearing the rise of the proletariat, grew to permanently support, alongside the Junker aristocracy, the absolutist State, from which it drew purely economic concessions. They agreed, under Bismark in the 1870s, to a class compromise for what Gramsci called a “passive” revolution from above, which resulted ultimately in the rise of the Nazis to power in the 1930s, itself leading to the final destruction of the Prussian landowning class by the Soviets during World War II.

So, too, in his philosophy, Hegel idealized this State, with its King and its bureaucracy as the realization of both morality and freedom. Absolute Spirit guaranteed the goodness of its policies.[8] This idealism about the State, faith in its expertise, its goodness, and its honesty, would later be promoted by the founder of sociology, the French, post-revolutionary status quo, pro-industrial capitalist conservative, August Comte, and his followers among the American Progressives (see below).[9] It was rejected by Marx and Engels. But has such faith been smuggled into the Marxist movement through the backdoor, via the Progressive movement?

Karl Marx was a student of Bruno Bauer, who himself was a student of Old Man Hegel. Marx had been a Hegelian at University. Since Bauer was an atheist, his student could not get a full time professorship after he got his doctorate, and so, he became a reporter. The story he wrote for the newspaper about the enclosure of the land once shared by peasants and aristocrats, so that the peasants were kicked off the land, in the province of Mozel, gave him the epiphany that led ultimately to the Marxist materialist dialectic. As a good Hegelian, he expected the Prussian state to intervene on the side of good—the side of the peasants. Instead, it supported that of the gentry, and their enclosure of the land. For Marx, then, the State was no longer the embodiment of all that is goodness and light. It was, like everything else in society, controlled by vested, exploitative interests.

My hard Left friends accept the later Progressive, neo-Hegelian faith in the State as the guarantor of “Science’s” honesty. But this view certainly would not have been shared by the founders of Marxism, and runs completely counter to Marx’s initial, materialist insight. The genuinely Marxian view on Science, the view that stems from the Masters themselves, is that it is both capable of finding the truth, and corruptible by capitalist material interests, gives us the best basis for understanding and employing science. But to understand this, we must differentiate it from, and throw it in sharp relief against, Statist Progressive idealism.  

The Marxist Masters thought on science was never completely worked out, systematized, freed of all contradictions. A faith in the honesty of natural scientists coexists uneasily with an awareness that this honesty can be compromised by the interest in domination of the ruling class. Take for example, Kautsky’s notions about natural science, in his 1903 article, “The Intellectuals and the Workers.” Kautsky acknowledges the fallacy of Lassale, for whom “science, like the state, stands above the class struggle.” He accepts that “Today we know [part of this–TS] this to be false. For the state is the instrument of the ruling class.” Yet he provides a loophole for such “classless” status, for natural science: “Moreover, science itself rises above the classes only insofar as it does not deal with classes, that is, only insofar as it is a natural and not a social science.”[10] So for Kautsky, natural science avoids capitalist class distortions, merely because it doesn’t explicitly deal with classes?! For those of us who have the advantage over Kautsky of benefitting from the thought of Gramsci and Lukacs, this is not very convincing. Both of these twentieth century thinkers argued that bourgeois ideology, which props up the hegemony of the capitalist class, is all pervasive. Kautsky’s naïve view in fact represents a backward step from Engels’ warning that natural science, under the profit-seeking regime of capitalism, misses the truth because it examines phenomena in Kantian, isolated fashion, without connecting these phenomena dialectically. As Stanley Aronowitz points out, Lukacs and the Frankfurt School further developed Engels’ critique. Kautsky most certainly did not.[11]

Leon Trotsky provides a somewhat more convincing rationale to Marxists who want to provide a blank check of credulity to the natural sciences: if not immediately, then by and by, as “practical experience” provides a check. Ultimately, however, his rationale falls just as flat.  He seems in fact to hark back to the C.S. Peirce’s pragmatic-idealist “Beloved Community” vision of Establishment Science, to which the liberal Atlantic Monthly writer Paul Bloom also subscribes. In Trotsky’s discussion of Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleyev. he writes that

Science as a whole has been directed toward acquiring knowledge of reality, research into the laws of evolution, and discovery of the properties and qualities of matter, in order to gain greater mastery over it. But knowledge did not develop within the four walls of a laboratory or a lecture hall. No, it remained a function of human society and reflected the structure of human society. For its needs, society requires knowledge of nature. But at the same time, society demands an affirmation of its right to be what it is; a justification of its particular institutions; first and foremost, the institutions of class domination, just as in the past it demanded the justification of serfdom, class privileges, monarchical prerogatives, national exceptionalism, etc.

Trotsky argues that the check upon this distortion of science by this demand for affirmation of the present exploitative class structure, is ultimately checked by “practical experience,” especially in the realm of the natural sciences:

The need to know nature is imposed upon men by their need to subordinate nature to themselves. Any digressions in this sphere from objective relationships, which are determined by the properties of matter itself, are corrected by practical experience. This alone seriously guarantees natural sciences, chemical research, in particular, from intentional, unintentional, semi-deliberate distortions, misinterpretations and falsifications.[12]

Yet this opens the question of whether the ruling class, even in the natural sciences, will permit an adequate response to the “practical” results experienced by ordinary citizens as well as scientists, from techniques developed on the basis of those natural sciences: distorted by the profit motive. Will they encourage, or rather actively and militantly discourage, on pain of dismissal, corrections and critiques, by these very same scientists who work for corporations, or government agencies controlled by the bourgeoisie?

When it comes to their power, and their pocketbooks, the ruling capitalist class, like previous ruling classes, are noteworthy, even during the crises created by the modes of production they control, only for their gift for denial, and for willful blindness. Trotsky’s assertion that practical experience, all by itself, is an adequate check upon such corruption and blindness, is of very dubious comfort. 

Trotsky writes somewhat vaguely about the process of “practical experience” by which these distortions will be checked. Just who exactly will conclude from this “practical experience” that there needs to be a correction, and who exactly is powerful enough, within the capitalist system, to make these corrections? He seems to assume this agency is either the capitalist class-as-a-whole, and/or the natural scientists themselves. But both hypotheses are naive, at best, and fail to consider the actual class motives and relationships surrounding each group. Can we really rely, as Trotsky implies here, upon:

• The capitalist class, which must by the nature of its rule, understand accurately how to master nature? But this is in defiance of the common sense most of us, I think by now, share, due to our own “practical experience.” Trotsky imparts to this class, a rationality they simply do not enjoy, either collectively by the class-as-a-whole, or as individuals. 

While the motive for accurate science is operative among the ruling class, in general, what Trotsky fails to consider here is what Marx, following Hegel, described as the system of [creating false] needs. In the section of his Economic and Philosophic Mss. Of 1844 entitled “The Meaning of Human Requirements,” Marx follows Hegel’s view that capitalism creates such a”system” for the purpose of selling its products to hapless consumers. There is no concern on the part of the capitalist for the welfare, safety, or health, of the consumer in this transaction. There is only his concern to make a profit. 

Is the rational general interest of the capitalist class strong enough within its own collective social relationships and collective decision-making process, sufficient to counter this natural mendaciousness and indifference when it comes to the general welfare of society and its consumers? No. The rationality and collectivity of the capitalist class, is simply too weak, due to the basic anarchic profit seeking of this class and of capitalist social relations, to effect this.

• The natural scientists? But then we are thinking of them as an independent force in capitalist society. Is that really so? The stories are legion, of how the natural scientists within the EPA, up in arms about such toxic, carcinogenic products as Malathion and Roundup, both produced by Monsanto, a corporation with which the top officials of EPA, and the oversight committees in Congress, are in bed with–the stories are legion of how these scientists, alarmed as they are about the dangers of these products, are routinely gagged by Monsanto, through its influence over these leading officials.[13]

The lacuna between official optimism about natural science, and the actual “practical experience” we the public suddenly, repeatedly, and shockingly encounter in terms of premature death, morbidity, environmental pollution, etc., is profoundly unsettling to all of us. We live today in an environment that is bound up intensely with the products of capitalist science and technology, including the food we eat, the air we breathe, the vaccines we took when we were kids, etc. The very idea that these are unsafe, is profoundly troubling, personally speaking. Despite their brilliance, therefore, in understanding social relations, many of my Marxists fall into the same trap as ordinary people. 

For their refuge from such cognitive dissonance, they unconsciously fall back upon, not practical experience–pathos–but ethos: the blind faith of Lassalle that science is classless because the State is. They place their faith in the allegedly scientific, regulatory Progressive–bourgeois–State. In this realm of the collective Imaginary, as Althusser might say, the Progressive State reins in the anarchic impulses and natural mendacity of the capitalist class; to grant to the natural scientists an independence of mind that in reality, if they actually every try to exercise it, will get them fired. 

This accounts for the contradictions in even the hard Left’s response to toxic product scandals: which can only be described as a policy that shadows, rather than confronts, the capitalist “scientific” Establishment: first, denial, and then, quarantine and damage control, but never, critical thought about the broader implications for other industrial products. I refer to the inevitable response among these True Believers when a given toxic industrial product is exposed for being so, and the Progressive regulatory agencies are exposed for looking the other way, for decades, due to their corruption. Time and time again, the public has encountered these scandals: tobacco, or opioids, for example, and even the vaccine for swine flu. The mainstreamers, including the hard Left, will admit these facts, grudgingly (though in the case of the Spartacist League, vis-a-vis the dangers of passive smoke inhalation, not even then. They are still in denial, because their leader, Jim Robertson, is a smoker!). But then when dissidents like me point out the possibility that other industrial products could have the same stench of toxicity and official, “Progressive”-regulatory corruption about them–vaccines in general, for example, or psychotropic drugs–we are indignantly denounced as batshit crazy tinfoil  hat wearers who have no faith in the scientific process! Enlightenment philosophes conceived the enemy of science only as the feudal vested interests that thrived on dogma and superstition. But what of the new vested interests that now thrived under capitalism? Has not faith in science replaced the old religious faith? That might sound good. But the question is has “science,” as a result, become a new religion, manipulated by the new, corporate capitalist, vested interests?

As we have seen, while such Marxists as Trotsky are aware of the problem here, they seem a bit naive in asserting that as far as the natural sciences are concerned, the problem is pretty much self-corrective. They too, fall back on their faith–faith in the Progressive, scientific State–rather than critical Reason.

Faith is necessary for any society. Each and every individual cannot investigate every scientific question by themselves. So not only must the majority have faith in the process of scientific investigation. But also, the results of scientific investigation must at some level be accepted on faith. But how much faith in the latter, should be required? And what happens when faith is not checked and supplemented by a democratic understanding of logic, and evaluation of empirical results? Are not the new vested interests of capitalism—the corporations—free to get away with murder, to skew those results in their own interest, under the guise of “science”?

The central fallacy of the mainstream, and even the hard Left, champions of “Science,” is that they confuse doubts about whether or not the scientific process has actually been respected by “scientists,” and faith in the veracity of that very same process. There is, however, a difference, between the two sets of doubts. The latter may indeed be embraced by spiritual crystal-channelers, post-structuralists, and other irrationalists. But the former might just have a legitimate concern. They don’t question Science. They question whether it is Science that is really be employed to sell us vaccines, GMOs, hydrofracking, psychotropic drugs, nuclear energy production, etc. Where are the checks and balances here, and have they actually been operative, before the scientists of today pronounce a given technique, “safe and effective?” Is the scientific establishment, rather than science itself—none of us are questioning that– worthy of our faith?

The checks and balances that are supposed to keep the scientists scientific, and honest, are the educational institutions and regulatory agencies and oversight legislative committees, etc., that were created by and/or during the Progressive movement. It is these institutions, agencies, committees, etc.—and not some metaphysical entity hanging from the clouds called Science—that allegedly ensure this. My hard Left friends have a touching faith that this complex will produce scientific, safe, and effective outcomes. They seem to forget that all of this is engulfed and enmeshed in capitalist social relations!

At the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth, a new movement of middle class reformers developed: the Progressive movement. Taking its cue largely from August Comte’s Statist, Positivist sociology, and aligned with Walter Rauschenberg’s Social Gospel movement, the Progressives saw their school as a weapon against all corruption: the economic corruption of the robber baron capitalists, as well as the machine boss politics of Tammany Hall. Yet it had still another opponent: the working class socialist movement. The Progressives saw their reforms as a way to stave off this threat to their middle class privileges under capitalism. They believed that they could offer a “third way” between robber baron capitalism and working class socialism. Capitalist business had become Big Business, extremely powerful, extremely corrupt. But capitalism, as opposed to socialism—or so the Progressives maintained—made for efficiency, and individual rights. The Progressives’ solution, therefore, lay in expanding the State staffing it, not coincidentally, with upper middle class, university educated experts like themselves, and thus reining in capitalism’s natural economic and political Corruption.

The reforms championed by the middle class professionals of the Progressive movement, were at different points similar, and in others, diametrically opposed, to the spirit of the political representatives of the old middle class. This class, instead of being the mainstay of Progressivism, was the backbone of the Social Darwinists, and of the Populists. Their demands were pilloried by Marx and Engels in their Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League.

The agenda of these two middle classes were similar in that both, “far from wanting to transform the whole society in the interests of the revolutionary proletarians, only aspire to a change in social conditions which will make the existing society as tolerable and comfortable for themselves as possible.” As far as the working class was concerned, both middle classes favored reforms which amounted only to “alms… to break their revolutionary strength by temporarily rendering their situation tolerable.” These two classes also shared a desire for “the transference of the major tax burden into the large landowners and bourgeoisie.” But the professional middle class differed, of course, differed with the old independent middle class’s “demand above all else [for] a reduction in government spending through a restriction of the bureaucracy.”

If we look at the reforms instituted by the Progressive movement, we see the truth of Marx and Engels’ insight into the phony compassion evinced by the middle class, new as well as old. While the poor were supposed to be the targets of Progressive reforms, it was the upper middle and the corporate capitalist class who ultimately benefited, at the poor’s expense.

One example is the “Lung Block,” a whole block of Little Italy whose residents were displaced by “reformers” because of the alleged threat of tuberculosis. This was a threat, however, that was actually subsiding. It was a threat which the reformers, in xenophobic, racist fashion—so prevalent among the Progressives, confused with the alleged filthiness inherent in being an Italian immigrant. Thus the displacement of poor working class Italian immigrants, created the space upon which to build the Knickerbocker building complex, which served new middle class residents.[14]

 Far more extensive was the havoc wrought by Progressive “planner” Robert Moses. As Robert Caro relates in his biography, The Power Broker, originally, Moses was a wealthy Progressive idealist, who genuinely wanted to stand up to the power of the rich, and the machine bosses. Gradually however, as he worked with Belle Moscowitz and Al Smith, he came to shed his ideals, and seek power for its own sake. And he could do that, creating a far more powerful political machine than Boss Tweed ever did, through the newly expanded Progressive bureaucracy created by the New Deal. The results, at first relatively benign in the form of public beaches and freeways out in Long Island, became tremendously destructive when they took the form of bulldozing working class neighborhoods to make way for the Cross-Bronx expressway.

Yet as James Weinstein and Gabriel Kolko pointed out, the Progressives’ solution was delusional. Instead of reining in the power of the fatcats, they got played. The anti-trust reforms they championed, for example, with the the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, were actually designed to get the public to think that something was being done about the problem of monopoly. But in actual fact, Monopoly used the new law to even more greatly secure its power over the market, displacing the small fry who could not meet the new industrial standards. This slavish service to the corporate elite was exemplified by Moses himself. He was, in the words of Marshall Berman, Detroit’s man in New York. His building of expressways served the auto corporations’ agenda, and his “slum” clearance and ghettoization of public housing, served the City’s private real estate interests.

The educational institutions—universities, med schools, etc.—that grew up during the Progressive era, were financed and controlled by their corporate sponsors. The Rockefeller family, which made its fortune through petroleum mining and distribution, heavily sponsored the new medical schools, and made as its requirement for this sponsorship, the exclusion and marginalization of homeopathic treatment, in favor of the sale of drugs whose principal component was—petroleum. Those medical schools are now heavily financed by the pharmaceutical industry.[15]

The regulatory agencies created by the Progressive movement and the New Deal administration of FDR, admittedly reined in the worst abuses—poisoned meat sold to the U.S. Army during WWI, for example. Yet in the main, because of an “iron triangle” of corruption, they have largely become shills for industry. The regulators are corrupted by those they purport to regulate. The industry purportedly regulated, due with its vast economic resources, can buy off regulatory bureaucrats with the promise of a lucrative job once they leave the government. They can buy Congressional oversight committee members, with campaign funds.[16]

Yet it is upon this extremely flimsy basis that ‘Marxists’ urge us to have faith, not just in the scientific process, but in the alleged results of that process, presented to us “Science.” By doing so, such Marxists forswear what should be their intellectual as well as political independence from the upper middle class and the corporate capitalist class “Progressives.” They fall into the same trap as the Progressives, whether they know it or not: the trap of reformism. This is the belief, as Engels and Lenin pointed out, that the State can reconcile the interests of the exploiters and the exploited. As Karl Marx revealed in his On the Jewish Question, this has powerful roots in the structure of capitalist society. The “political revolution” of the bourgeoisie separates the old feudal sense of political and moral obligation from the harshly exploitative capitalist civil society, lodging these in the State: or so it appears. The miseries and insecurities of civil society prompt everyone, whether they have read and even memorized Das Kapital, or not, to place their faith in the State, for salvation.

Thus my ‘Marxist’ friends on the hard Left recuse themselves from the struggle of working class people to protect themselves and their children from the toxic products of capitalist industry, accepting as good coin that these products have been tested and found safe and effective, even though the profit motive for saying so, for lying that this is so, looms large over the “scientific” process today. 

I am not for a moment claiming that every single result we get from “Science,” because it is profit driven, should be rejected. But nor do I believe they should be so childishly accepted, as many on even the hard Left do today. Above all, it should not be our role to attempt to bludgeon ordinary people into such childish acceptance—especially, those people who have been victimized by vaccines, hydro-fracking, psychotropic drugs, etc. That is enormously insensitive, and it’s going to continue to alienate people from us. It provides a very good excuse for ordinary people to join the Right, and lump us in with the corporate liberals.

Rather, we should cultivate, and call for, a healthy, compassionate skepticism about these results. How exactly were they produced? Were they the result of dispassionate scientific inquiry–or a skewed, “sexed up” process guaranteeing the positive results sought by the industry sponsoring the research?

And we should demand what John Dewey in the 1930s—he had become at least a Social Democrat by that point—demanded: that science and technology cease to be presented as an article of pure faith, but instead, that its workings be made “transparent” to ordinary people, so they can learn how to do it themselves: and evaluate whether or not the scientific process that “proves” industrial products are safe and effective, has actually been conducted. Instead of browbeating ordinary people, we should get out in front of movements that challenge products whose safety and effectiveness have in fact not been tested, and especially movements, such as among nurses, teachers and students, against compulsory mass vaccination. It’s an insult to people to talk about the “herd effect,” of such programs. First of all, people, except among reactionaries like Nietzsche, are not herds. They have the right to choose whether or not they wish to be vaccinated. Second, it has been established by dissident scientists that many of the current outbreaks of disease, were among people already vaccinated.[17]

Instead of insisting upon a quasi-religious faith in Science, or rather, in the current, pseudo-scientific Establishment, our transitional demand for a democratic, socialist form of science will create the balance, the three-legged stool of which I spoke earlier. Working people, through access in their own experience of a now transparent science and technology, can understand for themselves their logic. And if their own experience—a dead child, for example, or a child suddenly autistic—tells them the product of industry is toxic: we should take that seriously. What they don’t understand, for lack of training, they can have faith that others, not impelled by the capitalist profit motive, are not pulling the wool over their eyes—and will explain to them.

In his landmark work, What is to be Done, V.I. Lenin called upon the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party to establish an all-Russian newspaper, by which the party would serve as a “tribune of the people,” by exposing outrages upon any person by the Tsarist autocracy and the ruling classes. This teaches the proletariat about politics, educates them about capitalism and the welfare of its own members and all other members of society, and prepares them for rule. While my hard Left friends would acknowledge this instruction as their own legacy, it is not so in the case of medical outrages, especially, for these comrades, unless, as in the case of opioids, the scandal surrounding these has become so blatant that even the mass media and Congress can no longer ignore it. But until then? How do our latter-day “Spartacists” respond when the children of workers become autistic in record numbers and to alarming levels, right after they receive their MMR vaccine cocktail? Instead of exposure, they join with the Establishment to say to the workers, “Shut up, it’s all in your head, and while we’re on the subject, have you taken your flu shot yet?”

Such attitudes have nothing to do with a Marxist approach to science, or anything else. This is about the tone deaf, leading the willfully blind.

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[1] Dr. Gary Null, “Uncovering the Coverup: Scientific Analysis of the Vaccine-Autism Connection, Deeply Flawed US Vaccine Policies. Global Research, November 29, 2015 (four days after Bloom had his article published in the Atlantic Monthly), at https://www.globalresearch.ca/uncovering-the-cover-up-scientific-analysis-of-the-vaccine-autism-connection-deeply-flawed-vaccine-policies/5491987

[2] Paul Bloom, Why Scientific Faith is Different from Religious Faith: Not all beliefs are equal. Atlantic Monthly,  (November 24, 2015), at https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/11/why-scientific-faith-isnt-the-same-as-religious-faith/417357/

[3] See, for just one example of this, “Anti-Vaxxers: A Rash of Irrationality,” Workers Vanguard, February 20, 2015, at https://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/1062/anti-vaxxers.html Besides accepting the notion that doubts about the dubious results produced by the Establishment are tantamount to an attack upon the scientific method itself, the authors of this “pathetic” (irony intended–see below about “pathos”) screed buy wholesale the myth that vaccines have saved millions of lives. They ignore the fact revealed by Dr. Miguel Faria: that almost all of these lives were saved, and chronic diseases substantially diminished, due to increased levels of sanitation and hygiene, not by mandatory vaccination. The pharmaceutical medical complex has pulled the wool over the public’s eyes, by cropping their charts, so that only the precipitous drop in such diseases as measles, diptheria, etc. are shown after the introduction of mandatory vaccination. Gone missing is the precipitous drop in these diseases that was ongoing decades earlier. They don’t show you that part of the chart! See Dr. Miguel a. Faria, Jr., “Vaccines (Part II): Hygiene, Sanitation, Immunization, and Pestilential Diseases,” at https://www.jpands.org/hacienda/article36.htm

[4]See Ethos, Logos, and Pathos: Definitions and Examples, at https://pathosethoslogos.com/

[5] See Robert Greene, The Laws of Human Nature, Chapter 1, “Master Your Emotional Self”: 1^st section, “The Inner Athena,” 2018, Viking Press.

[6] See Alban Winspear, The Genesis of Plato’s Thought, Harvest House, 1942.

[7] See Christopher Caudwell, Illusion and Reality, 1937, at https://www.marxists.org/archive/caudwell/1937/illusion-reality/index.htm

[8] For many of the ideas of the preceding section, see Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, 1941.

[9] See Gillis J. Harp, Positivist Republic: August Comte and the Reconstruction of American Liberalism: 1865-1920. Pennsylvania State University, 1995.

[10] Karl Kautsky, The Intellectuals and the Workers,” Die Neue Zeit (Vol.XXII, no.4, 1903), at https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backiss/vol1/no1/kautsky.html

[11] Stanley Aronowitz, Science as Power, University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Engels, Dialectic of Nature, 1883,at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/EngelsDialectics_of_Nature_part.pdf

[12] Leon Trotsky, “Dialectical Materialism and Science,” http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1925/09/science.htm

[13] See Tessa Stuart, “Monsanto’s EPA-Manipulating Tactics Revealed in $289 Million Case,” Rolling Stone, August 14, 2018, at https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/monsanto-cancer-710902/ 

[14] See the Center for Humanities “Lung Block” exhibit, at https://www.centerforthehumanities.org/james-gallery/exhibitions/the-lung-block-a-new-york-city-slum-its-forgotten-italian-immigrant-community

[15] See James Corbett, The Corbett Report, Episode 286: Rockefeller Medicine, at https://www.corbettreport.com/episode-286-rockefeller-medicine/

[16] See Edward Goldsmith, “Our Broken Healthcare System,” The Ecologist, July 1980.

[17]  See Drs. Gary Null and Martin Feldman, Vaccination: An Analysis of the Health Risk, at http://prn.fm/vaccination-analysis-health-risks-gary-null-ph-d-martin-feldman-m-d/

Against Scientistic Credulity: A Marxist Philosophy of Science, on the Basis of an Ideal Balance of Aristotle’s Three Rhetorical Appeals, upon which, Science was Historically Rooted

By Thomas Smith

August, 2019

Science is supposed by many people to be a realm that hangs from the clouds, a realm of pure truth, unencumbered by backward, medieval prejudices, vested interests, tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorists, or touchy feely spiritualism. Those who dissent, are automatically branded, as a few of the latter. 

Dissenters, however, point out that often as not, what was yesterday’s technique, “proven” by science to safe, effective, and beyond reproach—is a source today for tens of thousands of fatalities. The faith in science promoted by voices from the Left to the non-loony Conservative Right, would seem to have some problems.

An article as recently as late 2015,  in the liberal Atlantic Monthly by Paul Bloom was titled “Scientific Faith Is Different From Religious Faith: Not all beliefs are equal.” There is little to object to in this article. I agree completely with Bloom that the scientific method is vastly superior in its capacity for the discovery of the truth, than is the Bible, or the Koran. But then we get onto shakier ground. Bloom comes to the difficulty that non-scientists do not have the time to check out the results of this method for themselves.  That is when Bloom slips from a rational discourse, into a conformist, authoritarian one: “I believe that … vaccines do not cause autism, but this is not because I have studied these issues myself.” What is his reply? “It is because I trust the scientists.”

The question he begs is, which scientists. He means, of course, the scientists connected to the (pharmaceutical industrial profit driven) Scientific Establishment, even though a careful survey of the literature actually reveals that these affirmations of the safety and effectivity of vaccines, have not been “based upon a gold standard of clinical research: long-term, double-blind, placebo-controlled studies.” He obviously does not mean the dissident scientists, who have actually conducted the scientific method dispassionately, producing hundreds of studies to show that there is such a probable link. 

This begged question points to the essential problem with “Science” today. The public certainly should trust in the scientific method. But it is by no means clear the Establishment, on the issue of vaccines, or many others, is carrying out the scientific method, or permitting dissident scientists who have done the research, to fairly pronounce their views before the Establishment pronounces various industrial products “safe” and “effective.”  Blithely, maddeningly, but all too typically, Bloom paints a rose-tinted view, obscuring all these pesky little doubts. Somehow, in a way Bloom neither explores nor explainst, “Science” has become all that the founder of American pragmatism, Charles Sanders Peirce, envisioned it to be when he labeled it, in Transcendentalist fashion, “The Beloved Community”: 

Science establishes conditions where rational argument is able to flourish, where ideas can be tested against the world, and where individuals can work together to surpass their individual limitations. Science is not just one “faith community” among many. It has earned its epistemological stripes. And when the stakes are high, as they are with climate change and vaccines, we should appreciate its special status.

I am reminded of Colonel Cathcart’s instruction to Yossarian in Catch-22: “Like us.” To which might be added, “Trust us!”

Notice that the only “limitations,” the possible obstacles, to a studious adherence to the scientific process, here are purely the potential “individualism” of the individual scientists. This and this alone, Bloom implies, could block the process; but thankfully, the “collectivity” of the process can take care of that. If he is actually aware of the potential sources for such corruption in the profit-seeking, corporate capitalist system in which this “collectivity” is bound up, he keeps such awareness close to the chest.

 It is not difficult to understand why a member of the liberal, bourgeois Establishment should counsel such (blind) faith. It is harder for me to understand why my Marxist friends especially should uphold this touching faith in the contemporary cult of “science,” even though science, like anything else, is involved in (capitalist, profit-seeking) social relationships. Might not therefore the results of science be skewed, the tests rigged, or just not conducted, so that the corporations manufacturing the product in question can continue to make profits without consumer awareness encouraged as to its toxicity?

Bloom tells us to have faith in Science. But that is an oxymoron. The contemporary cult of science is not balanced properly. Truth seeking is a rhetorical process, involving, most fundamentally, the three appeals defined by Aristotle: logos, pathos, and ethos. It is my view that, just like a three legged stool, truth comes out of a balance of these three appeals. Because, among lay people it promotes faith, way too much, and logic and experience, way too little, instead of a seeker and finder of truth, science has become almost purely a religion. Logic and experience are reserved for the scientific elite, a priesthood. There is no need to share this logic or experience with the demos. That is none of their business. They are deemed incapable of understanding these aspects of science. Thus, if they are presented at all, they serve for the most part merely as a fig leaf for the promotion of faith in techniques that serves vested corporate interests and profits instead of the public.

We need to go back to the origins of science—in the ancient world. Ancient Greek Rhetoric, according to Aristotle, was comprised of three “appeals.” Presented in this way, they are only ways to persuade others of a truth one has already discovered—or not discovered. One might use such an appeal to divert attention, in Sophist fashion, from the Truth. But in addition, however, Aristotle presented these appeals as “artistic proofs.” Thus they approach simultaneously, for Aristotle, the status of means of verification. 

Let’s define them now.

Logos is better known as logic. 

Pathos involves the sharing of emotions, and the sharing of experience; 

 Ethos, involves faith in authority. 

As a Marxist, I do not believe we have yet attained a truly democratic society. That is my political goal—to create a state in which ordinary people, the working class, has the power. What relationship should the people have to science, and how should science be constituted, in such an ideal, “workers’ state”? What should the role of each of these three appeals be within such a democratic, scientifically minded society? 

Let us first examine the worth, and the pitfalls, of emphasizing each. The enemy of democracy is autocracy, the manipulation of science, which has been with us ever since the birth of class society, by vested interests. Rather than see our opponent as some reified bogeyman, such as “ignorance,” or “superstition,” we need to see it in terms of class hegemony. How can science be so manipulated by an exploitative ruling class, and how can it be freed from such manipulation, as a part of what Gramsci called counterhegemonic praxis?

Logic is both a process of science, and it is the goal: to discover the laws by which we can understand the processes of natural and social reality better, and develop technique which makes our lives easier, and even longer. In an authoritarian society, such as a civilization bound by the Asian mode of production, it is only the priesthood that understand the logic of nature. But this is the way the Asiatic priests not only comprehend the science of irrigation. It is also the basis for the religion that keeps them in power. Under feudalism, Scholastic logic was divorced from the experience of ordinary people. It was there to mystify them, keep them in awe of the clergy, the nobility, and the absolute monarchs. 

Greek philosophy grows out of the class struggles within the later, Ancient mode of production. Faith in the old Asian religion dogma, or doxa, supported the hegemony of the old aristocratic class. Against this, the rising merchant class of Athens fought for democracy. Instead of basing their conceptions on the old religious dogma, the free citizens of Athens were now to make their own decisions, based upon their own reason and their experience. 

Democratic politicians, often the lesser sons of the upper class aristocracy who sought to make up for their relative lack of inheritance possibilities, appealed to the experience and emotions of the free citizenry. They employed sophistry, techniques of persuasion, which relied primarily upon pathos, to promote that class’s expansionist, imperialist agenda. For a time, the leader of the democratic movement, Pericles, promoted a simple form of logos, as the wisdom derived from experience, what he called “mind,” for the sake of creating an ethos of collective self-control. Thus he secured support for wise policies that reined in the merchants’ adventurism, and for a time, ensured Athens’ survival. But his death effectively unleashed the ambitious, precipitating a crisis—the war with Sparta—which led to the fall of Athens as an empire.

Philosophy arose from theorists of the aristocratic party: Socrates and his student, Plato. They developed brilliantly the science of dialectical logic, as an alternative to the democratic cult of demagoguery and pathos. But with their logic, they naturally sought to uphold their own hierarchical rule, positing a realm of pure Being, transcendent of earthly passions and motion. The utopian, aristocratic Republic he wished to create, a dystopia for the vast majority, not so strangely resembled the Persian and Egyptian Asian-bureaucratic civilizations Plato so admired. The difference was only that in the Republic he envisioned, his Guardian class, and its philosopher king, as opposed to the old Asian priestly castes and their God King, would be ruled by, and rule through, dialectical logic. 

Aristotle was Plato’s student, and the great conqueror, Alexander the Great, was Aristotle’s. Aristotle’s background was of the merchant class, reflected in his philosophy, which critiqued Plato’s realm of pure Being. Instead, he saw the dialectic operating as a telos, or final cause, or each element within a hierarchical world of Becoming, where each level served the purposes of those higher. Alexander’s empire reflected this—it was certainly not a democracy, it was a hierarchy, but one which furthered the fortunes of the Greek merchant class. This was, in effect, a class compromise between the merchant Democracy and Aristocracy, brokered by Alexander’s imperialist State, which gave to that compromise all the semi-divine aura of military glory and statist authority. It sets an historical precedent for similar ruling class compromises we will discuss shortly: the German feudal state’s support by the bourgeoisie, championed by Hegel, and then American Progressivism, around which, a similar semi-diving aura shines, fooling even my hard Left friends, unbeknownst even to themselves, into thinking we should all place our faith in what is called “Science”—but is really, often as not, not. 

Centuries later, Aristotle’s telos became Hegel’s idealist, and then Marx’s materialist, objective dialectics.  In the meantime, his enlisting of both logic, and a primitive form of empiricism, made him the greatest scientist of the Ancient era.

Pathos can be seen as emotion, but also, a way of persuading people of something based upon their subjective experience. Among these three appeals, therefore, pathos was the doorway to modern empiricism: the idea that all tenets must be proven through the objective evidence present to the senses, whose powers were tremendously refined by the invention of scientific instruments such as the telescope, the microscope, etc.

Each of these three appeals are employed by characters in Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar. Cassius uses ethos–patriarchal authority–to lure his fellow aristocrat and Senator, Marcus Brutus, into the Conspiracy to assassinate Caesar. He attempts to shame Brutus for his inaction about Caesar’s rise to power, threatening to destroy the Republic, when Brutus’ ancestor, Lucius Junius Brutus, was the man who established it by overthrowing the Tarquins. Cassius implies that Brutus dishonors his ancestor thereby:

O, you and I have heard our fathers say,

There was a Brutus once that would have brookt

Th’eternal devil to keep his state in Rome

As easily as a king

After the assassination attempt is successful, Brutus temporarily succeeds in swaying the Roman crowd to support the Conspiracy, through a carefully measured, poetic (and thus, a sign of his aristocratic bearing), logical appeal. Stating that he loved Caesar, Brutus accuses him of ambition, and thus justifies his murder. 

Unfortunately for Brutus, however, he makes the mistake of giving the floor to Marc Antony, who uses far more successfully, and at first underhandedly, the appeal of pathos, in plebian, experiential, empirical prose: the language they can understand. With it, he draws them out of the support they had just lent to the Conspiracy, and against it. He does so by reminding them of Caesar’s humility and service to Rome, by reading Caesar’s will, appealing to their self-interest, relating  via the gifts Caesar wanted to give them. Then he shows the corpse, with the bloody wounds that Caesar received at the Conspiracy’s hands. He appeals to their emotions, not directly, but instead, through experience.

Empiricism was used by the rising bourgeoisie during the 17^th and 18^th centuries as a weapon, of what Max Weber called “disenchantment,” against the metaphysical dogmatism of the ancien regime. As Marx and Engels write in The Manifesto of the Communist Party, in order to replace a web of feudal obligation and privilege with the “cash nexus,” the new empirical science, along with the expansion of the World Market, drowns “the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.” Shakespeare’s character Glendower, in Henry IV Part I, insists that he can “call spirits from the vasty deep,” but Hotspur replies, “well, so can I; or so can any man. But will they come when you call?” 

Such skepticism was a weapon to be employed by the bourgeoisie against the old feudal “spooks that go bump in the night” Scholastic dogma, as much as this class’s newfound emphasis on empiricism. Skepticism could also be employed against two other classes. First, against the bourgeoisie itself; or rather, its personal propensity for luxury, and compassion for others, both of which militated against the intensification of capitalist exploitation. Skepticism served this ascetic psychological goal in tandem with, or as a replacement for, Protestantism, as Max Weber discusses in his landmark work. Second, against the cries and wails of its newly created potential gravedigger, that Frankensteinian monster, the proletariat. If nothing could be known for certain, then the sense-certainty of the lower classes that they were being unfairly oppressed, could certainly be discounted. 

To this day, in the form of analytic philosophy, as Herbert Marcuse wrote in One Dimensional Man, skepticism is used by bourgeois philosophers to strip ordinary language of its rebellious, “metaphysical” elements—the better to avert the consciousness of the working class away from contradictions of capitalism and its historical task of socialist revolution. So, too, the contemporary “sceptic” movement, so selflessly and disinterestedly furthering the profit-seeking agenda of the medical-industrial complex, marginalizes the cries of working and middle class parents, for example, after a mercury- and aluminum-laden megadose of vaccine robs their infants of their health, and even their lives. How ironic is it, then, not to mention alienating, when ‘Marxists’ jump on this bourgeois skepticist bandwagon, joining in this insensitive, profit-driven browbeating of ordinary working people who have been the victims of the medical-industrial complex!

So both skepticism and empiricism have been valuable, throughout the bourgeois era, to the bourgeoisie. However, there naturally arose a potential contradiction between the two perspectives. For if nothing could be known for certain, then what good was empiricism? How could the bourgeoisie grow to mastery over natural, social, and political reality, if nothing really could be known?

Thus the great bourgeois philosopher of Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant, attempted to challenge the skepticism of Berkeley and Hume, with his theories, in the Critique of Pure Reason, of transcendental apperception, of God given capacities of human beings to understand categories of time and space, transcendent of immediate sense perceptions, and his morality of the categorical imperative in his Critique of Practical Reason. Nevertheless, Kant still placed severe, sceptical limits on the ultimate perspicacity of empirical knowledge. This knowledge could never grasp the noumena—the essence—of reality, only its phenomenal aspect: what a given thing was for us, how it could serve our (i.e., the capitalist class’s exploitative, profit-seeking) purposes. Kant’s skepticism was in the spirit of the rising bourgeoisie, which saw all reality only as a means to its own instrumental ends of exploitation and profit seeking. While he promotes the Enlightenment ideal that each man should learn to think for himself, and that each should be treated as an “end in themselves.” But the categorical imperative, and the practical morality, he developed to ensure such treatment, was based upon a Platonic abstraction, and an alienation, from all self-interest, conceived of as leading inevitably to selfishness and exploitation. Only through art, Kant argues in his Third Critique, on Judgment, is there any possibility of transcending this split between passion and disembodied reason. But this, for Kant, is simply a world of illusion.   

A little later came the Classicist movement, of Schiller and Goethe, which was akin to the Romantics in England—Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, Wordsworth–and the Transcendentalists—Emerson, Thoreau–in the United States. They took more seriously than did Kant himself, the possibility that art could transcend the ontological divisions Kant posited. 

The thinkers from all three countries were motivated to this aesthetic question, by their critique of alienation. As the intellectual representatives of the bourgeoisie, and as supporters, at least initially, of the Great French Revolution of 1789, they opposed the unfreedoms of the feudal absolutist ancien regime. But their plebian background, like their great mentor, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, also led to their deep concerns over the rise of industrialism and its intense repression and exploitation of the rising working class, which they saw as the result of the selfishness and brutality of the modern era. Hegel, Holderlin, and Schelling (who later became an irrationalist reactionary) were followers of the Classicists, which took for its alternative model the Classical Golden Age of ancient Athenian democracy, the vertu—or the placing of the good of the community and the State over oneself–of Sparta: and of the French Jacobins.

The young Hegel found that the Christian, feudal world of Germany that he inhabited, was fundamentally alienated. He harked back to what he considered the unalienated community, what he called the schone demokratie, of ancient Athens. 

In idealist fashion, Hegel thus sought to burst the skeptical—alienating–limits placed upon knowledge and morality by Kant, by seeing the entire world of Becoming as engulfed in an objective dialectic, sponsored by the Absolute Spirit, which unfolded through contradiction, so that Absolute Spirit could attain its, and humanity’s freedom. Each thing within the objective world, could be understood now its dialectical tension and contradiction with all other things, including ourselves. The noumena of each thing, we could now understand as existing for itself—and for us, for our purposes. Within the realm of morality, Hegel promoted an ideal which smacked of the Athenian democracy of which he was fond: each citizen promoted his own interests, yet simultaneously, the good of his fellows, the good of the community. Thus Hegel, just as he transcends Kant’s skepticism and ascetic view of morality, also transcends Aristotle’s teleological philosophy.

But later in his life, Hegel became reconciled to the modern Prussian absolute State: and actually became its Court Philosopher. This was representative of the class in German society which he represented: the bourgeoisie. In its march toward both economic as well as political power, this class in the Middle Ages, in the words of the Manifesto, had served “either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, cornerstone of the great monarchies in general,” until, as in England in the 1640s, and in France in the 1790s, they could sweep those monarchies aside and assume power themselves in the “modern representative state.” But in hopelessly backward Germany, the bourgeoisie, fearing the rise of the proletariat, grew to permanently support, alongside the Junker aristocracy, the absolutist State, from which it drew purely economic concessions. They agreed, under Bismark in the 1870s, to a class compromise for what Gramsci called a “passive” revolution from above, which resulted ultimately in the rise of the Nazis to power in the 1930s, itself leading to the final destruction of the Prussian landowning class by the Soviets during World War II. 

So, too, in his philosophy, Hegel idealized this State, with its King and its bureaucracy as the realization of both morality and freedom. Absolute Spirit guaranteed the goodness of its policies. This idealism about the State, faith in its expertise, its goodness, and its honesty, would later be promoted by the founder of sociology, the French, post-revolutionary status quo, pro-industrial capitalist conservative, August Comte, and his followers among the American Progressives (see below). It was rejected by Marx and Engels. But has such faith been smuggled into the Marxist movement through the backdoor, via the Progressive movement? 

Karl Marx was a student of Bruno Bauer, who himself was a student of Old Man Hegel. Marx had been a Hegelian at University. Since Bauer was an atheist, his student could not get a full time professorship after he got his doctorate, and so, he became a reporter. The story he wrote for the newspaper about the enclosure of the land once shared by peasants and aristocrats, so that the peasants were kicked off the land, in the province of Mozel, gave him the epiphany that led ultimately to the Marxist materialist dialectic. As a good Hegelian, he expected the Prussian state to intervene on the side of good—the side of the peasants. Instead, it supported that of the gentry, and their enclosure of the land. For Marx, then, the State was no longer the embodiment of all that is goodness and light. It was, like everything else in society, controlled by vested, exploitative interests. 

My hard Left friends accept the later Progressive, neo-Hegelian faith in the State as the guarantor of “Science’s” honesty. But this view certainly would not have been shared by the founders of Marxism, and runs completely counter to Marx’s initial, materialist insight. The genuinely Marxian view on Science, the view that stems from the Masters themselves, is that it is both capable of finding the truth, and corruptible by capitalist material interests, gives us the best basis for understanding and employing science. But to understand this, we must differentiate it from, and throw it in sharp relief against, Statist Progressive idealism.  

The Marxist Masters thought on science was never completely worked out, systematized, freed of all contradictions. A faith in the honesty of natural scientists coexists uneasily with an awareness that this honesty can be compromised by the interest in domination of the ruling class. Take for example, Kautsky’s notions about natural science, in his 1903 article, “The Intellectuals and the Workers.” Kautsky acknowledges the fallacy of Lassale, for whom “science, like the state, stands above the class struggle.” He accepts that “Today we know this to be false. For the state is the instrument of the ruling class.” Yet he provides a loophole for such “classless” status, for natural science: “Moreover, science itself rises above the classes only insofar as it does not deal with classes, that is, only insofar as it is a natural and not a social science.” So for Kautsky, natural science avoids capitalist class distortions, merely because it doesn’t deal explicitly with classes?! That is not very convincing. It in fact represents a backward step from Engels’ warning that natural science, under the profit-seeking regime of capitalism, misses the truth because it examines phenomena in Kantian, isolated fashion, without connecting these phenomena dialectically.

Leon Trotsky provides a somewhat more convincing rationale to Marxists who want to provide a blank check of credulity to the natural sciences: if not immediately, then by and by, as “practical experience” provides a check. Ultimately, however, his rationale falls just as flat.He seems in fact to hark back to the C.S. Peirce’s pragmatic-idealist “Beloved Community” vision of Establishment Science, to which the liberal Atlantic Monthly writer Paul Bloom also subscribes. In Trotsky’s discussion of Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleyev. he writes that

Science as a whole has been directed toward acquiring knowledge of reality, research into the laws of evolution, and discovery of the properties and qualities of matter, in order to gain greater mastery over it. But knowledge did not develop within the four walls of a laboratory or a lecture hall. No, it remained a function of human society and reflected the structure of human society. For its needs, society requires knowledge of nature. But at the same time, society demands an affirmation of its right to be what it is; a justification of its particular institutions; first and foremost, the institutions of class domination, just as in the past it demanded the justification of serfdom, class privileges, monarchical prerogatives, national exceptionalism, etc.

Trotsky argues that the check upon this distortion of science by this demand for affirmation of the present exploitative class structure, is ultimately checked by “practical experience,” especially in the realm of the natural sciences:

The need to know nature is imposed upon men by their need to subordinate nature to themselves. Any digressions in this sphere from objective relationships, which are determined by the properties of matter itself, are corrected by practical experience. This alone seriously guarantees natural sciences, chemical research, in particular, from intentional, unintentional, semi-deliberate distortions, misinterpretations and falsifications.

Yet this opens the question of whether the ruling class, even in the natural sciences, will permit an adequate response to the “practical” results experienced by ordinary citizens as well as scientists, from techniques developed on the basis of those natural sciences: distorted by the profit motive. Will they encourage, or rather actively and militantly discourage, on pain of dismissal, corrections and critiques, by these very same scientists who work for corporations, or government agencies controlled by the bourgeoisie?

When it comes to their power, and their pocketbooks, the ruling capitalist class, like previous ruling classes, are noteworthy, even during the crises created by the modes of production they control, only for their gift for denial, and for willful blindness. Trotsky’s assertion that practical experience, all by itself, is an adequate check upon such corruption and blindness, is of very dubious comfort. 

Trotsky writes somewhat vaguely about the process of “practical experience” by which these distortions will be checked. Just who exactly will conclude from this “practical experience” that there needs to be a correction, and who exactly is powerful enough, within the capitalist system, to make these corrections? He seems to assume this agency is either the capitalist class-as-a-whole, and/or the natural scientists themselves. But both hypotheses are naive, at best, and fail to consider the actual class motives and relationships surrounding each group. Can we really rely, as Trotsky implies here, upon:

• The capitalist class, which must by the nature of its rule, understand accurately how to master nature? But this is in defiance of the common sense most of us, I think by now, share, due to our own “practical experience.” Trotsky imparts to this class, a rationality they simply do not enjoy,either collectively by the class-as-a-whole, or as individuals. 

While the motive for accurate science is operative among the ruling class, in general, what Trotsky fails to consider here is what Marx, following Hegel, described as the system of [creating false] needs. In the section of his Economic and Philosophic Mss. Of 1844 entitled “The Meaning of Human Requirements,” Marx follows Hegel’s view that capitalism creates such a”system” for the purpose of selling its products to hapless consumers. There is no concern on the part of the capitalist for the welfare, safety, or health, of the consumer in this transaction. There is only his concern to make a profit. 

Is the rational general interest of the capitalist class strong enough within its own collective social relationships and collective decision-making process, sufficient to counter this natural mendaciousness and indifference when it comes to the general welfare of society and its consumers? No. The rationality and collectivity of the capitalist class, is simply too weak, due to the basic anarchic profit seeking of this class and of capitalist social relations, to effect this.

• The natural scientists? But then we are thinking of them as an independent force in capitalist society. Is that really so? The stories are legion,  of how the natural scientists within the EPA, up in arms about such toxic, carcinogenic products as Malathion and Roundup, both produced by Monsanto, a corporation with which the top officials of EPA, and the oversight committees in Congress, are in bed with–the stories are legion of how these scientists, alarmed as they are about the dangers of these products, are routinely gagged by Monsanto, through its influence over these leading officials.

The lacuna between official optimism about natural science, and the actual “practical experience” we the public suddenly, repeatedly, and shockingly encounter in terms of premature death, morbidity, environmental pollution, etc., is profoundly unsettling to all of us. We live today in an environment that is bound up intensely with the products of capitalist science and technology, including the food we eat, the air we breathe, the vaccines we took when we were kids, etc. The very idea that these are unsafe, is profoundly troubling, personally speaking. Despite their brilliance, therefore, in understanding social relations, many of my Marxists fall into the same trap as ordinary people. 

For their refuge from such cognitive dissonance, they unconsciously fall back upon, not practical experience–pathos–but ethos: the  blind faith of Lassalle that science is classless because the State is. They place their faith in the allegedly scientific, regulatory Progressive–bourgeois–State. In this realm of the collective Imaginary, as Althusser might say, the Progressive State reins in the anarchic impulses and natural mendacity of the capitalist class; to grant to the natural scientists an independence of mind that in reality, if they actually every try to exercise it, will get them fired. 

This accounts for the contradictions in even the hard Left’s response to toxic product scandals: which can only be described as a policy that shadows, rather than confronts, the capitalist “scientific” Establishment: first, denial, and then, quarantine and damage control, but never, critical thought about the broader implications for other industrial products. I refer to the inevitable response among these True Believers when a given toxic industrial product is exposed for being so, and the Progressive regulatory agencies are exposed for looking the other way, for decades, due to their corruption. Time and time again, the public has encountered these scandals: tobacco, or opioids, for example, and even the vaccine for swine flu. The mainstreamers, including the hard Left, will admit these facts, grudgingly (though in the case of the Spartacist League, vis-a-vis the dangers of passive smoke inhalation, not even then. They are still in denial, because their leader, Jim Robertson, is a smoker!). But then when dissidents like me point out the possibility that other industrial products could have the same stench of toxicity and official, “Progressive”-regulatory corruption about them–vaccines in general, for example, or psychotropic drugs–we are indignantly denounced as batshit crazy tinfoil  hat wearers who have no faith in the scientific process! 

Enlightenment philosophes conceived the enemy of science only as the feudal vested interests that thrived on dogma and superstition. But what of the new vested interests that now thrived under capitalism? Has not faith in science replaced the old religious faith? That might sound good. But the question is has “science,” as a result, become a new religion, manipulated by the new, corporate capitalist, vested interests? 

As we have seen, while such Marxists as Trotsky are aware of the problem here, they seem a bit naive in asserting that as far as the natural sciences are concerned, the problem is pretty much self-corrective. They too, fall back on their faith–faith in the Progressive, scientific State–rather than critical Reason.

Faith is necessary for any society. Each and every individual cannot investigate every scientific question by themselves. So not only must the majority have faith in the process of scientific investigation. But also, the results of scientific investigation must at some level be accepted on faith. But how much faith in the latter, should be required? And what happens when faith is not checked and supplemented by a democratic understanding of logic, and evaluation of empirical results? Are not the new vested interests of capitalism—the corporations—free to get away with murder, to skew those results in their own interest, under the guise of “science”?

The central fallacy of the mainstream, and even the hard Left, champions of “Science,” is that they confuse doubts about whether or not the scientific process has actually been respected by “scientists,” and faith in the veracity of that very same process. There is, however, a difference, between the two sets of doubts. The latter may indeed be embraced by spiritual crystal-channelers, post-structuralists, and other irrationalists. But the former might just have a legitimate concern. They don’t question Science. They question whether it is Science that is really be employed to sell us vaccines, GMOs, hydrofracking, psychotropic drugs, nuclear energy production, etc. Where are the checks and balances here, and have they actually been operative, before the scientists of today pronounce a given technique, “safe and effective?” Is the scientific establishment, rather than science itself—none of us are questioning that– worthy of our faith?

The checks and balances that are supposed to keep the scientists scientific, and honest, are the educational institutions and regulatory agencies and oversight legislative committees, etc., that were created by and/or during the Progressive movement. It is these institutions, agencies, committees, etc.—and not some metaphysical entity hanging from the clouds called Science—that allegedly ensure this. My hard Left friends have a touching faith that this complex will produce scientific, safe, and effective outcomes. They seem to forget that all of this is engulfed and enmeshed in capitalist social relations!

At the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth, a new movement of middle class reformers developed: the Progressive movement. Taking its cue largely from August Comte’s Statist, Positivist sociology, and aligned with Walter Rauschenberg’s Social Gospel movement, the Progressives saw their school as a weapon against all corruption: the economic corruption of the robber baron capitalists, as well as the machine boss politics of Tammany Hall. Yet it had still another opponent: the working class socialist movement. The Progressives saw their reforms as a way to stave off this threat to their middle class privileges under capitalism. They believed that they could offer a “third way” between robber baron capitalism and working class socialism. Capitalist business had become Big Business, extremely powerful, extremely corrupt. But capitalism, as opposed to socialism—or so the Progressives maintained—made for efficiency, and individual rights. The Progressives’ solution, therefore, lay in expanding the State staffing it, not coincidentally, with upper middle class, university educated experts like themselves, and thus reining in capitalism’s natural economic and political Corruption. 

The reforms championed by the middle class professionals of the Progressive movement, were at different points similar, and in others, diametrically opposed, to the spirit of the political representatives of the old middle class. This class, instead of being the mainstay of Progressivism, was the backbone of the Social Darwinists, and of the Populists. Their demands were pilloried by Marx and Engels in their Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League. 

The agenda of these two middle classes were similar in that both, “far from wanting to transform the whole society in the interests of the revolutionary proletarians, only aspire to a change in social conditions which will make the existing society as tolerable and comfortable for themselves as possible.” As far as the working class was concerned, both middle classes favored reforms which amounted only to “alms… to break their revolutionary strength by temporarily rendering their situation tolerable.” These two classes also shared a desire for “the transference of the major tax burden into the large landowners and bourgeoisie.” But the professional middle class differed, of course, differed with the old independent middle class’s “demand above all else [for] a reduction in government spending through a restriction of the bureaucracy.”

If we look at the reforms instituted by the Progressive movement, we see the truth of Marx and Engels’ insight into the phony compassion evinced by the middle class, new as well as old. While the poor were supposed to be the targets of Progressive reforms, it was the upper middle and the corporate capitalist class who ultimately benefited, at the poor’s expense. 

One example is the “Lung Block,” a whole block of Little Italy whose residents were displaced by “reformers” because of the alleged threat of tuberculosis. This was a threat, however, that was actually subsiding. It was a threat which the reformers, in xenophobic, racist fashion—so prevalent among the Progressives, confused with the alleged filthiness inherent in being an Italian immigrant. Thus the displacement of poor working class Italian immigrants, created the space upon which to build the Knickerbocker building complex, which served new middle class residents.

 Far more extensive was the havoc wrought by Progressive “planner” Robert Moses. As Robert Caro relates in his biography, The Power Broker, originally, Moses was a wealthy Progressive idealist, who genuinely wanted to stand up to the power of the rich, and the machine bosses. Gradually however, as he worked with Belle Moscowitz and Al Smith, he came to shed his ideals, and seek power for its own sake. And he could do that, creating a far more powerful political machine than Boss Tweed ever did, through the newly expanded Progressive bureaucracy created by the New Deal. The results, at first relatively benign in the form of public beaches and freeways out in Long Island, became tremendously destructive when they took the form of bulldozing working class neighborhoods to make way for the Cross-Bronx expressway. 

Yet as James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, and Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism, pointed out, the Progressives’ solution was delusional. Instead of reining in the power of the fatcats, they got played. The anti-trust reforms they championed, for example, with the the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, were actually designed to get the public to think that something was being done about the problem of monopoly. But in actual fact, Monopoly used the new law to even more greatly secure its power over the market, displacing the small fry who could not meet the new industrial standards. This slavish service to the corporate elite was exemplified by Moses himself. He was, in the words of Marshall Berman, in his gloss on Caro’s biography in All That is Solid Melt’s into Air, Detroit’s man in New York. His building of expressways served the auto corporations’ agenda, and his “slum” clearance and ghettoization of public housing, served the City’s private real estate interests. 

The educational institutions—universities, med schools, etc.—that grew up during the Progressive era, were financed and controlled by their corporate sponsors. The Rockefeller family, which made its fortune through petroleum mining and distribution, heavily sponsored the new medical schools, and made as its requirement for this sponsorship, the exclusion and marginalization of homeopathic treatment, in favor of the sale of drugs whose principal component was—petroleum. Those medical schools are now heavily financed by the pharmaceutical industry.

The regulatory agencies created by the Progressive movement and the New Deal administration of FDR, admittedly reined in the worst abuses—poisoned meat sold to the U.S. Army during WWI, for example. Yet in the main, because of an “iron triangle” of corruption, they have largely become shills for industry. The regulators are corrupted by those they purport to regulate. The industry purportedly regulated, due with its vast economic resources, can buy off regulatory bureaucrats with the promise of a lucrative job once they leave the government. They can buy Congressional oversight committee members, with campaign funds. 

Yet it is upon this extremely flimsy basis that ‘Marxists’ urge us to have faith, not just in the scientific process, but in the alleged results of that process, presented to us “Science.” By doing so, such Marxists forswear what should be their intellectual as well as political independence from the upper middle class and the corporate capitalist class “Progressives.” They fall into the same trap as the Progressives, whether they know it or not: the trap of reformism. This is the belief, as Engels and Lenin pointed out, that the State can reconcile the interests of the exploiters and the exploited. As Karl Marx revealed in his On the Jewish Question, this has powerful roots in the structure of capitalist society. The “political revolution” of the bourgeoisie separates the old feudal sense of political and moral obligation from the harshly exploitative capitalist civil society, lodging these in the State: or so it appears. The miseries and insecurities of civil society prompt everyone, whether they have read and even memorized Das Kapital, or not, to place their faith in the State, for salvation.

Thus my ‘Marxist’ friends on the hard Left recuse themselves from the struggle of working class people to protect themselves and their children from the toxic products of capitalist industry, accepting as good coin that these products have been tested and found safe and effective, even though the profit motive for saying so, for lying that this is so, looms large over the “scientific” process today.  

I am not for a moment claiming that every single result we get from “Science,” because it is profit driven, should be rejected. But nor do I believe they should be so childishly accepted, as many on even the hard Left do today. Above all, it should not be our role to attempt to ordinary people into such childish acceptance—especially, those people who have been victimized by vaccines, hydro-fracking, psychotropic drugs, etc. That is enormously insensitive, and it’s going to continue to alienate people from us. It provides a very good excuse for ordinary people to join the Right, and lump us in with the corporate liberals.

Rather, we should cultivate, and call for, a healthy, compassionate skepticism about these results. How exactly were they produced? Were they the result of dispassionate scientific inquiry–or a skewed, “sexed up” process guaranteeing the positive results sought by the industry sponsoring the research? 

 And we should demand what John Dewey in the 1930s—he had become at least a Social Democrat by that point—demanded: that science and technology cease to be presented as an article of pure faith, but instead, that its workings be made “transparent” to ordinary people, so they can learn how to do it themselves: and evaluate whether or not the scientific process that “proves” industrial products are safe and effective, has actually been conducted. Instead of browbeating ordinary people, we should get out in front of movements that challenge products whose safety and effectiveness have in fact not been tested, and especially movements, such as among nurses, teachers and students, against compulsory mass vaccination. It’s an insult to people to talk about the “herd effect,” of such programs. First of all, people, except among reactionaries like Nietzsche, are not herds. They have the right to choose whether or not they wish to be vaccinated. Second, it has been established by dissident scientists that many of the current outbreaks of disease, were among people already vaccinated.

Instead of a quasi-religious faith in Science, or rather, in the current pseudo-scientific Establishment, our insistence upon the transitional demand for a democratic, socialist science will create the balance, the three-legged stool of which I spoke earlier. Working people, through access in their own experience of a now transparent science and technology, can understand for themselves their logic. And if their own experience—a dead child, for example, or a child suddenly autistic—tells them the product of industry is toxic: we should take that seriously. What they can’t understand, for lack of training, they can have faith that others, not impelled by the capitalist profit motive, are not pulling the wool over their eyes–and will explain to them.

vs. Support for Rank and File Insurgencies

By Thomas Smith

–Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus.

The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor

In the light of Einstein’s definition, my Duty to Warn impels me to speculate publicly that several old friends and teachers of mine–Pabloite-Breitmanists^[1] who once inhabited the once-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party-U.S., must be out of their minds. For they are supporting “several factions within the DSA [who] are urging a so-called ‘rank-and-file strategy’, long associated with Labor Notes,…”^[2]

“[Insanity is] doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”–Albert Einstein.

Traveling Ever Rightward…into the DSA?!

Wandering in to the DSA from the (#Metoo-induced) wreck of the ISO, the last “socialist” life-raft to which they so recently and desperately clung, in their watery sojourn from the SWP, through the FIC or the FIT, through Solidarity, these old friends of mine (whom I met when I was traveling leftward through some of these very same organizations) have come to what they think is a courageous decision. Whatever they feel about the Bern, (supporting him, as does Comrade Le Blanc, or questioning the whole strategy of the DSA supporting Democrats in general–as does Comrade Post), they are not about to give up that sacred old Labor Notes principle of supporting rank and file trade union movements in order to “democratize the unions.” As I have often heard them say (taking their cue from Lenin’s Economist opponent, Martynov), “we can’t impose our socialist political ideology upon the workers! That’s dogmatic! All we should do, all we need to do, is to support workers in their already ongoing struggles.” So they are rallying around this position, as expressed by their newfound friend and longtime DSA member, Eric Blanc: a self-declared Kautskyan, anti-Leninist.

As Nancy Hanover, who reviewed Blanc’s book Red State Revolt recently in the wsws.org, (The DSA Shows Its Hostility to Socialism, 8/10/2019) quotes and paraphrases Blanc’s (opportunist) approach to union-organizing:

Blanc’s lengthy chapter “The Militant Minority” is touted as providing the key to the red state victories. In pitching the DSA’s services to the union apparatus, Red State Revolt notes, “[C]ontrary to red-baiting stereotypes about nefarious radical infiltrators …they [DSA members] had no intention of secretly manipulating public employees to impose a ‘socialist agenda.’ … Socialists in West Virginia and across the country were not aiming to divert the working-class struggle; they were just trying to help it win. In fact, Comer and O’Neal both bent over backward to make sure that the movement ‘stayed organic,’ as they like to say.”

Old Wine in New Bottles

The only trouble with this putatively courageous tenacity, is that it has nothing to do with Leninism. And aside from that, it just doesn’t work.

The “progressive,” rank and file union movements these people have been supporting for decades, just so happen to be tied in to support for the Democratic Party. Once in control of the union bureaucratic apparatus, they have collaborated with the U.S. government’s efforts to weaken the unions (Ron Carey’s collaboration with the government, supported by the Teamsters for a Democratic Union: TDU^[3]) and imposed austerity (The Caucus of Rank and File Educators, CORE). The ulterior motive, and in the past, the inevitable result, is something like Kishore describes it (once we substitute, as we always must when reading anything from the anti-union wsws.org site/SEP, “these ‘progressive’ trade union bureaucrats’…organizational domination”: “The aim of this strategy is to build “left” factions within the trade unions to bolster their organizational domination over the working class while also opening up lucrative positions within the union apparatus.”^[4]

A Case in Point: the “Progressive” PSC-New Caucus

My own union, the Professional Staff Congress, suffered just such a regime change, decades ago: from the conservative Shankerite CUNY Unity Caucus, to the “progressive,” New-Left-oriented New Caucus. In fact, the only significant gain for the majority of faculty–adjunct faculty like me–has been the providence of health insurance for those consistently teaching at least two courses per semester during the school year. But this was instituted, not by the NC, but by the CUC, under the pressure of a (failed) breakaway attempt by adjuncts, The Part-Timers Union, in the 1980s. The two Caucuses have had pretty much the same problems: Both have been bureaucratic, and neither have paid much more than lip service to the needs of the majority of the workforce they claimed to represent: the adjunct professors.

To sum up the problems with the NC, we have the words of GC-DSC Adjunct Project leader Sean M. Kennedy,

in my view, [NC] is the single biggest problem with the PSC: its leadership maintains a vise grip on all decision-making, and they deploy a potent brew of fear-mongering, bullying, divide and rule, disenfranchisement, procedural obstacles, and a twisted form of self-centered bourgeois “solidarity” to tamp down any threat to their hegemony, while their supporters, who are legion, get to pat themselves on the back for being progressive or, dare I say it, radical.

The Latest “Progressive” Slate at PSC-CUNY: the Academic Diversity Bureaucrats-in-Embryo of CUNY “Struggle”

At the Graduate Center at CUNY, a group calling itself “CUNY Struggle” formed among grad student adjuncts, dedicated pretty much to the same goal: to challenge the New Caucus’s bureaucratism and insensitivity to the plight of adjuncts, that the New Caucus had once championed against the Shankerites of the CUNY Unity Caucus (CUC).

However, as Kennedy, who became chair of the Grad Center slate during PSC elections, until he dropped out in protest, Struggle came to commit themselves to a realpolitik policy of just winning the PSC-elections, and not really exposing and challenging the dirty tricks of the NC. Thus, in Kennedy’s eyes, they became indistinguishable, ethically and organizationally (i.e., bureaucratically) from the New Caucus:

It seemed to me that winning became paramount, no matter the cost: the exact same force constraining the New Caucus slate.

Because winning the election was an uphill battle and, if it happened, a small, albeit significant, crack in the New Caucus’s power. But that crack, if achieved, would’ve had to expand through rigorous horizontal organizing with members of the bargaining unit at the GC and across CUNY. If we’d won, we wouldn’t de facto have the power to effect broad change.

And this realpolitik led, according to Kennedy, quite naturally

to the second major compromise of the principal decision-makers of the CUNY Struggle slate: there was no horizontal organizing or decentralized decision-making in the internal campaign process. Decisions—especially the week the proverbial shit hit the fan—were being determined by how many people voiced assent over email to a given idea quickly enough, what struck me as rapid-fire majority rule: the opposite of collectivity, in which everyone has a chance to participate in decision-making and co-direct a multifarious strategy representative of everyone’s skills and viewpoints.

Kennedy notes that

Moreover, the top-down, no-discussion decision-making style of the principal decision-makers of the CUNY Struggle slate is exactly the decision-making style of both the current New Caucus GC chapter leadership, running for another term in office, and the union-wide New Caucus leadership. When I realized that, I realized that it didn’t make a difference who won the GC chapter election, because the status quo would remain.^[5]

Kennedy is not committed to a transitional, but rather, an anti-Leninist, “horizontal” approach. He doesn’t seem to see the contradictions here. Horizontalism rejects all leaders or structure, but this is exactly the disastrous, anarchist attitude that Jo Freeman critiques as “tyrannical” in her classic essay (“The Tyranny of Structurelessness”^[6]). Freeman would understand perfectly how the “horizontal” structurelessness of CUNY Struggle has permitted CS’s ‘principal decision-makers”–its founding patriarch, and his cronies–to call all the shots, because there is no formal hierarchy or structure, democratically elected, by which to check their authoritarian power, or even to discuss these decisions critically and democratically.

In his academic writing, just like my Pabloite friends, Kennedy has promoted “underdog political insurgencies.” That there might be another causal connection between this approach, and the failures of such insurgencies to really end up changing anything, he seems, like the other, Pabloite, Leftists I’ve previously mentioned, also, never to grasp.

But his statement that somewhere along the line, CUNY “Struggle” stopped struggling, and started being top down in their decision-making process, rings true, and is typical of so many such “rank and file” efforts. Those who oppose union bureaucrats, in this manner, end up becoming bureaucrats, or at least, bureaucrats-in-training.

In his essay, Kennedy refers eight times mysteriously to the “principal decision-makers” of CS. He does not explain why he himself, though he was the chair of the slate, was not included among these “decision-makers.” Given our recent, traumatic, McCarthyite experience with CS, discussed in Revolution, April 2019, in the editorial, “How They Rammed Through Anti-Red Ban,”^[7] it is not difficult to figure out about whom he is writing, and how and why they marginalized him, as they do all dissenters.

#Metoo Witchhunts, and Ritual P-C Insults

One similarity of CS to the NC not discussed by Kennedy, is their own “bad faith” penchant for using ostensibly “progressive,” identity politics positions to legitimate their bureaucratism. This omission is not surprising, since Kennedy himself seems to be invested in IP (for example, he writes that in joining the CS slate, he overrode one of his most cherished political principals: because the slate was mostly white!). Since CS is part of the “woke” generation, their IP self-sanctimonious groupthink is even more extreme than is the case for the NC. CS’s support for the unfounded #Metoo campaign against WBAI show producer Leonard Lopate is a case in point.

I procured an interview for the $7KOS on WBAI’s Leonard Lopate at Large show. At first, CS members were all in favor, patting me on the proverbial back for getting the radio spot–until one of them discovered to the others that Lopate had been the victim of a #Metoo witchhunt at both his former place of employment, WNYC–from which he was fired without due process–and now from fellow WBAI producers. For me, the issue was simple. This was an employee who had been fired by a boss, without due process.Of course, I reviewed the charges and realized they were baseless, and said so on the 7KOS list. According to Lopate, he was fired from WNYC for the sin of being “too old.”: WNYC management used unsubstantiated charges to effect this age-ist dismissal. He deserved our defense, therefore, and support–not the blacklist that some, “feminist” WBAI producers were promoting. But after that, I could get only one member of CS, a Marxist, to go along with me (I had originally not planned to go myself). And the attitude expressed to me via email by one of the CS leaders–ironically enough, the same CS leader who first accused us dissidents of “bad faith” merely for opposing CS–was that (this is admittedly a subjective paraphrase, reading between her extremely patronizing lines, despite the quotation marks) “we have decided that Leonard Lopate is a #Metoo non-person–therefore you are not going either. Find another media venue.” I of course informed her, gently, politely, but quite firmly, that I don’t respect blacklists nor take orders from her or anybody else from the #Metoo movement.

I also experienced the ill effects of identity politics at $7KOS Campaign meetings, where CS members engaged in  ritual, boorish, half-serious denunciations of “straight white males” as the source of all social problems,and otherwise let it be known that we were not welcome, in large numbers, anyway,and that we should feel guilty for being born this way (or for being born, at all).^[8] Such expressions clearly,are not really designed to expand the movement for adjunct rights–their expression likely as not will turn off and alienate anyone, whatever their gender or skin-color, who has any sort of rational thinking process or desire for workers solidarity. The mindless, authoritarian, “bad faith” nature of these insults becomes apparent when one considers that the same people who make them, or laugh supportively at them, uncritically support two (straight, white male, btw) CS leaders (one of whom is the founding patriarch) who, as the Revolution article relates, are vociferous fans of British nationalist skinhead band, “Cock-Sparrer,” whose fans have beaten up immigrants. These CS leaders themselves have employed the anti-communist lyrics of one of Cock Sparrer’s songs against the protests of immigrant students and workers, aligned with the internationalist group, against their anti-red ban. But of course, being “woke” means you never have to say you’re sorry, think for yourself, strive for moral consistency, or confront your contradictions: particularly when you take out your aggressions against those annoying reds and immigrants!

CS’s practice of routine red baiting is part and parcel of this identity politics, which arose historically on the basis of post-structuralism. At its heart, P-S had as its goal the dispelling of any hope in the prospect of working class socialist revolution. It was sponsored by the CIA,^[9] and it was embraced by petit bourgeois “Left” intellectuals, paradoxically, at the height of the May 1968 events in France, when it seemed likely that such a revolution could actually happen. This greatly puzzled, as well as disturbed, my late doctoral advisor, Marshall Berman, in his introduction to his All that is Solid Melts into Air. But it’s not that hard to figure out, provided one employs class analysis (not one of my beloved advisor’s strong suits, sadly). Support for PS by these intellectuals came out of the natural fear of the petty bourgeois Left that working class revolution might actually happen, and thus, within the new socialist workers state that they might have created, socially demote the middle class. As David North relates,^[10]

When the working class went on strike, its intervention overwhelmed the petty-bourgeois movement, which faded into insignificance. Overnight, the revolutionary potential of the working class was demonstrated. However, it remained [safely] under the leadership of the

[petit-bourgeois-led]

Communist Party. But the experience had a traumatic effect on broad sections of French intellectuals. They recoiled in fear. They asked themselves, “What are we, for God’s sakes, playing at? A few protests here and there… okay. But the overthrow of capitalism? The dictatorship of the proletariat? Mon Dieu, heaven forbid!” In May-June 1968, the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia looked over the abyss, and they were terrified. Their brush with revolution set into motion a sharp movement to the right.

The same, albeit largely unconscious, fears probably motivate the snobbish, petit-bourgeois, ivory tower-oriented leaders of CS, as they have attempted to sabotage one working class-struggle-oriented proposal of ours (the conference, and now, our proposal for a march and rally embracing the NYC working class), after another

It’s not mere coincidence that Kennedy notes a similarity in discourse between the CS’s “principal decision-makers”’ defense to Kennedy of their decision not to rock the boat during the elections, and the 2016 identity-politics-based presidential campaign of Hilary Clinton,which blamed any and all social problems on “deplorable” working class whites, in order to divert attention from the culpability for these problems of the ruling class, to whom Clinton, it was revealed by Wikileaks, was utterly devoted.

Rather than being genuinely “progressive,” identity politics is a new form of the old Protestant religion. Where the old form, as Weber, Tawney, and Fromm opined, was the ideological and social-psychological basis for the rise of the industrial bourgeoisie and its expanded, and more intensely exploitative, scheme of industrial production, this new form is the basis, upon which the professional petit-bourgeoisie, from which CS members emerged, or hope to attain status within, hope to competitively claim new privileges and higher income for themselves, against their fellows, within their own “15%” upper middle class socio-economic strata, Thus, and more basically, it is the glue that binds together the hegemonic bloc made by the more neo-liberal, military-intelligence wing of the ruling class (including Democratic Party politicians like Clinton), with this professional upper middle class.^[11]

As Laura Kipnis (Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus, 2017) has noted, more specific to academia, IP has become the basis for quite a cottage industry: the development of a very well heeled “diversity” bureaucracy on the campus, specializing in the #Metoo-style erosion of the elementary right of due process, and the destruction of the academic careers of students and faculty, as they rake in enormous salaries. Is it far-fetched to consider, in the light of their consistently undemocratic behavior and IP ideology, the possibility that CUNY Struggle’s “principal decision-makers” have their sights set on such lucrative bureaucratic positions? Failing that, how about a juicy full time professorship, “investigating scientifically” what’s wrong with the discourse of straight white (working class) males? Clearly, these people know which side of the bread will eventually be buttered, as long as they tow the #Metoo/IP line. That’s their future cash cow!

Why Not Assert Our Position Boldly? For Fear of Being Perceived as the Angry Socialist People?

What has gotten us nowhere in the U.S. socialist labor movement, is the usual approach, of Pabloites, Shachmanites, Cliffites, Social Democrats, etc. They sanctimoniously enshrine their pessimism as humility, calling upon us all merely to tail-end the reformist movements that already exist. Their approach merely adapts to the present backwardness of the working class, Instead of getting out in front to lead, they cheerlead from the sidelines. Squandering our opportunities, they say to those workers who are open to further development, “way to go, we’re right behind your more ‘progressive’ perspective, your support for existing “progressive” trade union bureaucrats (to whom we ourselves will chum-up, at Labor Notes conferences, or even join as trade union officials as well as caucus members, a la some ex-ISO leaders). But without our contribution, our leadership, this is easily channeled by the capitalist state apparatus into harmless electoral diversions such as “feel the Bern.” Just so, sooner or later, to varying degrees, groups like the ISO, SAlt, Solidarity, etc. as well as, of course, DSA (Paul Le Blanc is only the latest in a long line of such renegades) fall into the same snares.

This approach is often portrayed as democratic, and respectful. In fact it is just the opposite. It is patronizing, manipulative, demagogic, and irresponsible (and deep down, workers know this about these soft-pedalers!) to merely pander to what already exists in the minds of even the most advanced workers, when much more is required of them as well as of us. We should not merely throw up our hands at the present low, pro-capitalist, pro-Democratic Party level of consciousness, even among some of the most militant workers, and use those hands merely to wave our “support” during the present, ongoing crisis. While such an approach might appear to be one of humility and selflessness, it is actually an adaptation to the eternal, selfish hunger of bureaucrats for a compliant, docile workforce whose present intellectual backwardness and/or stagnation they can always count on for passive support come election time. This is the quintessence of what Lenin called “objectivism,” and what Jean-Paul Sartre called “bad faith”: using the present-day “facticity” of the low level of working class consciousness, as an excuse to abrogate our duty to act upon and further our collective “transcendence”: our critical intellect, and our freedom. 

This approach is touted by neo-Kautskyans like Blanc, and the neo-Luxemburgists like Le Blanc, as an antidote to the “tyrannical” approach toward labor organizing of V.I. Lenin. “Socialist consciousness,” we here, “is the result of a dialectical process, in which the masses must participate.”

“Yes,” we reply, “but are not intellectuals and leaders, also involved in this process: especially in that part of the process which creates the necessary organization and tactics for victory?” The central fallacy of Luxemburg and Liebknecht, according to Walter Held, in his review of Paul Froelich’s biography of Rosa for the Fourth International (“Once Again Lenin and Luxemburg,” June 1940), was to forget this not so insignificant factor in the process.

The organization and the tactics are created not by the process but by those people who achieve an understanding of the process by means of Marxist theory and who subordinate themselves to the process through the elaboration of a plan based upon their understanding.

Held shows that it was their failure to understand this that led to the demise of Luxemburg and Liebknecht; while his correct understanding, let to the success of Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

The unofficial religion of the capitalist world, America especially–anti-communism–(with which “CUNY Struggle” is thoroughly imbued) is responsible for this approach. In the mind of anyone who situates himself on the Left, it creates, I believe, the sort of “double consciousness” discussed by W.E.B. Dubois with reference to African Americans. In terms of fellow social psychologist G.H. Mead, our “I’ sees our socialist views as perfectly legitimate, indeed, the salvation of humanity and the planet. But the stereotype we receive from anti-communism, poisons our “me,” portraying, even to ourselves, as hell bent on shoving our newspapers and our dogmatic views down other, more “normal” people’s throats. Thus the shying away, the bashfulness, so prevalent on the putative Left, from merely asserting ourselves and our views to the workers.

What is required of us instead is that we attempt to democratically lead and educate workers toward a further development of revolutionary socialist consciousness and commitment.  As intellectuals and activists, our task is not to shirk such responsibilities, out of false humility. To paraphrase Hillel the Elder: If not by us, then by whom? If not now, when? If not here, where?

If we, as members of the middle class, as the “traditional–bourgeois–intellectuals,” as Kautsky, Lenin, and Gramsci would refer to us, have knowledge, organizational skills, and privileges that workers right now do not enjoy, how can it be any of our business not to share this knowledge and use these skills and privileges, not for ourselves selfishly, as so many of our confreres do, but instead to help“organic” intellectuals among the workers themselves, develop, alongside us, their own revolutionary socialist consciousness, power, and agency? To do otherwise, is to deny to the workers their inheritance: our obligation to them to lead and educate them. What is wrong with Marx and Engels’ classic instruction to intellectuals such as ourselves, in the Communist Manifesto, to “supply the proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress”?!

This is not, as the anti-communists of the es-ISO, Solidarity, DSA, Jacobin, CUNY Struggle, et alia, charge, some diabolical imposition of dogma, but instead, a dialogical, egalitarian and responsible approach, sharing our knowledge and our experience with workers, teaching them and learning from them, absolutely necessary to the task put before all of us by history.

We do so by embracing the concepts, formulated by Lenin and Trotsky of a transitional approach, with their transitional program, put forward by transitional organizations,

The Transitional Approach

The transitional approach takes seriously, rather than ignores, the fundamental insight, first developed, ironically enough, by Blanc’s idol Karl Kautsky and Lenin,^[12] and then Antonio Gramsci, and a host of others, that the working class tends by itself to accept a bourgeois, economistic (or in Gramsci’s terms, “economo-corporate,” in Jean-Paul Sartre’s, “serial”), reformist, trade-union mentality. As Lenin argued in What is to be Done, the bourgeoisie have had centuries to perfect their ideological hegemony, (as Gramsci might say) and impose it upon the working class, through what Gramsci called the State and Civil Society, and what Althusser, and Poulantzas called its “ideological” (schools, bourgeois parties and electoral system, religious institutions, mass media) and “coercive” (police, the army) apparati, both staffed and supported by the “Progressive” corporate-professional as well as the old-”shopkeeper” petit-bourgeoisie.

The very anarchic, market-competitive structure of capitalist society encourages a mindset that says “I/we don’t need solidarity with our fellow workers to fight for socialism. We need to compete with other workers (especially if they happen to have a different skin color than us) to get what we want, as we “pressure” the bosses and their government for reforms, which benefit us, and to hell with the rest of the working class.”

This mentality divides and paralyzes workers. It makes us eminently co-optable by trade union bureaucrats and the bosses themselves. Thus we Leninists understand the need to reject the ideology of broad-based, lowest common denominator ideological “unity,” and the strategy of so many “rank and file” union movements, to water down their program to the point it becomes mere opposition to the existing bureaucratic leadership–a “throw the rascals out” mentality, creating a scenario where one set of reformist, collaborationist union bureaucrats is merely replaced by another–rather than a principled socialist revolutionary program.

In place of this reformist bourgeois approach, Leninists argue for organizations and programs that build up, preserve, and promote socialist consciousness. We must see these organizations and programs in the way that Gramsci, and Trotsky, saw them: as “bulwarks” that have tremendous value for both defense against the cultural and ideological hegemony of the bourgeoisie, and as points from which offensive drives of revolutionary socialist education and mobilization, of counterhegemony, within and without the trade unions may be launched against this bourgeois hegemony.^[13] But when we let just anybody into our rank and file caucus, with any vaguely anti-boss, anti-bureaucratic mentality–before educating them and getting their commitment to a revolutionary socialist program: then we surrender our positions, within what Gramsci called the “war of position,” to the bourgeoisie and their petit  bourgeois bureaucratic allies.

The transitional program, presented by Trotsky in 1938, is in opposition to both a reformist approach, and a doctrinaire approach, to raising the level of working class consciousness to become revolutionary. The reformists will encourage workers in their current belief that, with a little tinkering, the capitalist system can be reformed to meet their needs. The doctrinaire will demand that the workers make the revolution, or, in the case of the SEP, “form rank and file strike committees,” immediately–without much reference to their needs, or why a revolution is needed to meet their needs, or how they are going to form these committees “independently” of not just the trade union bureaucrats, but the unions themselves..

But the revolutionary, armed with a transitional program, bases her call for revolution on the needs felt by the workers, and shows the workers that the only way to meet their needs is through revolutionary work, centered on the trade unions. While the capitalist state may attempt to meet these needs via reforms–all to the good: temporarily!–this cannot last long. As with the WPA’s full employment program in the New Deal during the 1930s Great Depression, for example, these reforms will be half-hearted, and the capitalists will take back their reforms as soon as they can, or at the latest, as in the last several decades, when a renewed economic crisis, and workers complacency, encourages them to take old reforms back and subject the workers to renewed austerity.

The “rank and file” movements in the unions are solidly reformist, and usually tied to the Demcratic Party. Ultra-left groups, such as the SEP, will have nothing to do with the unions. But the transitional organization is opposed to both. Like its Leninist vanguard party parent, the TO must preserve its revolutionary principles, if it is to serve as both a defensive and offensive “bulwark” in the war of position against the hegemony of the bourgeoisie. It is usually initiated by a communist party, yet does not insist that members join that party. And the party must not control, but merely and democratically guide, the TO.^[14] The basic membership requirement, however, is that members be communists, and subscribe to a communist,anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist program, committed to the time honored principle of working class independence. Thus, instead of becoming an appendage of the bosses, the bosses’ party(ies), or the bosses’ government, the TO will act as a pole of attraction AWAY from bourgeois ideology for other workers, who have not yet come over to communism, but become interested due to the fighting propaganda of the TO.

This transitional approach was pioneered in the U.S. by the Communist Party, when it was still Leninist, by the creation, by William Z. Foster (who later became a Stalinist) of the Trade Union Education League. While it began, according to Charles Walker, with only “a few dozen activists,” and yet the movement mushroomed overnight, and formed a powerful force for union organizing against the bosses’ repression.

Walker, of the Pabloite-Breitmanist group Socialist Action, even as he praises the TUEL as a model for communist organizing, effectively writes it off as obsolete, and argues instead for a “united front of militant trade unionists”–which sounds like the loose coalition of “rank and file” movements endorsed by DSA’s Blanc, Labor Notes, etc.. His reasoning? Vague, at best, “The events that shaped the 1920’s and led to the organization of TUEL are not the events that unionists face today.”^[15]

In other words, because the trade union movement today is not facing the violent repression it did in the 1920s, we can’t use Leninism for our approach, because it won’t appeal to workers, who are not desperate enough yet to sign up for socialist consciousness just yet! Instead, somehow, we should indulge them and chum up to them. Yea, like that’s going to work! This is not a rational argument: it is a rationalization for opportunism, which has given rise only to one “New” layer of “progressive” bureaucrats, with their “New,” but just as “organic” relationship to the bosses and the Democratic Party, after another.

The transitional approach was also the basis for Trotskyists, particularly in the Midwest, building the unions and the general strikes that brought them into being. In large part, parties who call themselves socialist have forgotten this legacy, or if they remember it, excuse themselves from promoting this approach on the basis of a pessimism, like that of Walker, about the working class which justifies soft pedaling a revolutionary program. But we need to revive it.

Further reading

See the internationalist organization’s Trotskyism and the Trade Union Struggle, at https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/internationalist/pamphlets/Trot-&-Tade-Union-Strug-OptV5.pdf

---

^[1] Michel Pablo became the nominal head of the nominal Fourth International after Leon Trotsky died. He proposed to liquidate the FI into the Stalinist movement, which he claimed (ridiculous now in hindsight) would last for centuries. His position was for a time rejected by James Cannon, leader of the SWP, but after Cannon became demoralized, it was adopted by the SWP.

George Breitman was a member of the SWP who led a successful fight to transform the SWP into a romanticizing cheerleading squad for black nationalism. He was opposed by a minority led by Richard Fraser, who fought for what they called “revolutionary integrationism.”   Cannon’s initial, and Fraser’s permanent, resistance to Pablo and Breitman’s positions were the basis for the emergence of the Revolutionary Tendency within the SWP in the early 1960s, which then became the Spartacus League.

^[2] Joseph Kishore, “The Democratic Party politics of the ‘Democratic Socialists of America’,” wsws.org, August 2nd, 2019, at https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/08/02/dsac-a02.html.

^[3] Tom Mackaman, “What is the Teamsters for a Democratic Union,” September 8, 2018, wsws.org, at https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/09/08/team-s08.html

^[4] Kishore, ibid. Contrary to Kishore and the SEP, led by non-union printing-press-owner millionaire David North, while union bureaucrats are often in conspiracy against their own worker-members, unions per se are not. They belong to us: not the bureaucrats. Instead of rejecting unions, we need to adopt an approach by which we can wield them.

^[5] Sean M. Kennedy, “Dirty Tricks: The GC Chapter Election” April 4, 2017, at https://seanmkennedy.commons.gc.cuny.edu/tag/cuny-struggle/.

^[6] See her essay here at https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

^[7] See “How They Rammed Through Anti-Red Ban,” Revolution, April 2019, at http://www.internationalist.org/cuny-struggle-anti-red-ban-1905.html

^[8] What might be puzzling about this is that many of the leaders of CS, as Kennedy points out, are themselves straight white males (Kennedy sees this, in “woke” fashion, as a detritment that he nevertheless originally ignored).. But as Brendan O’Neill of sp!ked argues, “woke” is an elitist, snobbish identity embraced by middle class straights/whites/ males whose essence is an “enlightened” guilt about being so. Thus they differentiate themselves from the majority of straights/whites/male, (who just so happen to be working class) who are of course deemed by the “woke,” essentially racist, sexist, and homophobic.

^[9] See Gabriel Rockhill, “The CIA Reads French Theory: ON the Dismantling of the Cultural Left,” at http://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-cia-reads-french-theory-on-the-intellectual-labor-of-dismantling-the-cultural-left/

^[10] David North’s, The Theoretical and Historical Origins of the Pseudo-Left, http://www.srwolf.com/reports/OriginsofPseudoLeft.pdf.

^[11] See “The #Metoo campaign versus the presumption of innocence,” by Eric London, October 5, 2018, wsws, at https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/10/05/inno-o05.html

^[12] But while, despite this insight, Kautskyand the SPD leaders stuck with the old dead end of a loose, come-one-come-all approach to party, and trade union organization–eventually handing over significant decision making prerogatives to the German trade union bureaucrats–Lenin and the Bolsheviks were able, because of their unique experience under the autocratic repression under the Tsar, were able to develop the organizational implications of Kautsky’s concept, into the concepts of vanguardism, democratic centralism, and the transitional approach to workers organization by the vanguard party.

^[13] See the left voice pamphlet, Gramsci and Trotsky: Strategy for the Revolution in the West by Emilio Albamonte and Matías Maiello, 2016. Information about the pamphlet can be found at https://www.leftvoice.org/trotsky-and-gramsci-on-revolutionary-strategy.

^[14] Under the hammer blows of bourgeois, trade union ideology, if a majority of the TO’s members wander significantly from the initial, communist program, and attempt to revise it significantly, the party members have the option of leaving and forming a new TO with whatever members of the old TO still subscribe to the old, communist program.

^[15] Charles Walker, “Lessons from the Trade Union Education League,” Socialist Action, July 24, 2011. https://socialistaction.org/2011/07/24/lessons-from-the-trade-union-educational-league/

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