Tag: Marxism

  • The MAGA Ideology and the Trump Regime

    The MAGA Ideology and the Trump Regime

    The MAGA Ideology and the Trump Regime,” Monthly Review 77, no. 11 (May 2025), pp. 1-24.

    “The Bosses of the Senate” by Joseph Keppler, originally published in Puck magazine, January 1889. Image via Library of Congress.
    “The Bosses of the Senate” by Joseph Keppler, originally published in Puck magazine, January 1889. Image via Library of Congress.

     

    One week after the January 20, 2025, inauguration of Donald Trump in his second stint as U.S. president, Matthew J. Vaeth, acting director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), issued a memorandum to federal departments and agencies ordering a temporary pause of agency, grant and loan, and financial assistance spending throughout the federal government. This was the opening shot in what the right has called the “Cold Civil War.”1 The order for a general freeze on federal civilian spending was most likely written by the incoming 2025 OMB director, Russell Vought, then awaiting confirmation by Congress. For Vought “the stark reality in America is that we are in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country” and that these enemies “already hold the weapons of the government apparatus,” which “they have aimed…at us.”2 Vought headed the OMB during the first Trump administration and was a key architect of Project 2025, the plan for the transition to a new absolutist executive, issued in 2022 by the right-wing Heritage Foundation.3 He wrote the chapter on the “Executive Office of the President of the United States” for Project 2025 and founded the Center for Renewing America, an active branch of Project 2025, which was charged with writing hundreds of executive orders in advance to be implemented immediately on the re-ascendance of Trump to the White House. Project 2025 included plans to close down whole federal departments, massively cut the federal work force, and drastically reduce federal expenditures, forcing states, local governments, universities, and the media to fall in line with the Trump regime’s dictates.4The OMB’s order to freeze federal civilian government expenditures affected spending that in fiscal year 2024 amounted to some $3 trillion, thus sending shock waves across the nation. On January 31, 2025, Chief Judge John J. McConnell Jr. of the United States District of Rhode Island issued a temporary restraining order on the OMB actions. In response, the OMB rescinded their memo. However, the Trump administration, adhering to the “impoundment theory” that claimed the executive branch had the power to zero-out funds allocated by Congress, refused to comply fully with McConnell’s court order. The subsequent decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, which supported McConnell’s decision, pointed to a looming Constitutional crisis. Major figures in the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement have strategized in advance that the president can close down departments and impound congressionally authorized spending, while ignoring the courts, based on the sheer power of the executive office and the proposition that whatever the president does is lawful. If necessary, a state of emergency can be declared, suspending constitutional rights.5 Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has run roughshod over the federal government, seemingly empowered to take over and close whole agencies at will. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is claiming to have full power over the independent regulatory agencies within the federal government, such as the Federal Trade Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the Federal Communications Commission, and even the Federal Reserve Board, under what is called the “unitary executive authority,” a controversial constitutional theory.6If the OMB order and the actions of Musk’s DOGE created a legal morass, the ideological intent of the Trump administration’s actions was nevertheless abundantly clear. According to the Vaeth/Vought memo, the purpose of the administration freeze on federal spending was to end “woke” and the weaponization of government, opposing “the use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies.” The initial freeze or “pause” on spending was designed to allow the administration to identify spending devoted to “DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion programs], woke gender ideology, and the green new deal,” together with expenditures on foreign aid, that were considered fraudulent uses of federal funding.7 In right-wing ideology, the overarching category is “Cultural Marxism,” which is seen as including the advocacy of critical race theory (CRT); environmental, social, and governance (ESG) initiatives; DEI; LGBTQ+ rights; climate change actions; open borders; universal health care; and green energy.8 This attack on so-called Cultural Marxism was in line with Agenda 47 of the Trump/J.D. Vance campaign, which was aimed at “removing all Marxist diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucrats” and going after the “Marxist Maniacs Infecting Educational Institutions.”9

    The overall rationale behind these moves was provided by another Heritage Foundation document, also published in 2022, titled How Cultural Marxism Threatens the United States—And How Americans Can Fight It by Mike Gonzalez and Katharine C. Gorka, who went on to write NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It (2024).10 Cultural Marxism, which is seen on the MAGA right as pervading the universities and government, as well as penetrating into corporations, is viewed as having its genesis in Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, which broke with the economism of classical Marxism. In this distorted view, the new “Cultural Marxism” was carried forward by Frankfurt School Marxists like Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Erich Fromm. It was to be given a more expansive form by postmodernists like Michel Foucault, ultimately leading to radical feminist theory and CRT. The work of Gonzalez and Gorka does not demonstrate the slightest attention to genuine scholarly research. Its purpose is not to promote intellectual inquiry, but rather a New McCarthyism. In their book, they claim that Joseph McCarthy in the anti-Communist witch hunt of the 1950s had carried out “important work,” but made the mistake of leveling charges that he “could not substantiate.” In today’s Cold Civil War, it is suggested, the McCarthyism needs to be resurrected on more solid foundations so as not to make the mistakes of the past—though in fact, the New McCarthyism is as devoid of substance as its 1950s predecessor.11

    The MAGA ideology that is now ensconced in the White House, and which has also spread to a considerable extent into the courts and Congress, has little to do with Trump himself, for whom it has served as a convenient weapon in his rise to power. Rather, its material basis is to be found in the growth of a larger neofascist movement, which, like all movements within the fascist genus, is rooted in a tenuous alliance between sections of the monopoly-capitalist ruling class at the top of society and a mobilized army of lower-middle class adherents far below. The latter see as their chief enemies, not the upper echelons of the capitalist class, but the upper-middle class professionals immediately above them and the working class below.12The primarily white lower-middle class overlaps with rural populations and adherents of religious fundamentalism or evangelicalism, forming a right-wing, revanchist historic bloc.

    The current mobilization of the lower-middle class by the right wing of monopoly capital, particularly, the tech, finance, and oil interests, is initially aimed at dismantling the present “administrative state,” replacing it with one more conducive to a neofascist project. Nevertheless, in the process, a widening political gap is already opening up between the billionaire rulers above and their MAGA army below, between different elements within the evangelical movement, and among those supporting a political dictatorship and those wishing to retain liberal-democratic constitutional forms.13

    In line with all movements in the fascist genus, the current regime will inevitably betray its mass MAGA supporters on the radical right, seeking to relegate them to a more and more subservient and regimented role and negating any policies in fundamental conflict with its capitalist-imperial ends. Nevertheless, a mass of think tanks and influencers has arisen that seek to rationalize the irrational, building on those ideological elements that appeal to a white lower-middle class, but ultimately serving the needs of the billionaire capitalist class. Understanding the basis of this new irrationalism and the forms of class rule associated with it is crucial in the counter-hegemonic struggle for a democratic, egalitarian, and sustainable—and thus socialist—future for humanity as a whole.

    MAGA’s Neofascist Ideology

    “The antonym of fascism,” Marxist economist Paul M. Sweezy wrote in 1952, “is bourgeois democracy, not feudalism or socialism. Fascism is one of the political forms that capitalism may assume in the monopoly-imperialist phase.”14 In the classical definition originating with Marxist theorists—and employed, as in the case of Franz Neumann’s Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, in the Nuremberg trials—those movements and regimes belonging to the fascist genus have their material foundations in a tenuous alliance between monopoly capital and a mobilized petty bourgeoisie or lower-middle class. The latter were referred to by C. Wright Mills as the “rearguarders” of the capitalist system due to their generally regressive ideology, a product of their contradictory class location.15

    Such mobilization of the lower-middle class/stratum at the instigation of sections of monopoly capital occurs when the upper echelons of society see themselves as threatened by a variety of internal and external factors that jeopardize their hegemony. This leads to attacks on the liberal democratic state and the seizure of state power by a section of the ruling class, backed by an army of adherents from below—often initially by legal means, but soon crossing constitutional boundaries. Power is concentrated in the hands of a leader, a duce or Führer, behind whom lies giant capitalist interests. Key to fascist rule, once it gains its ascendancy over the state, is the privatization of large parts of government on behalf of monopolistic capital, a concept first articulated in relation to Adolf Hitler’s Germany.16 This is accompanied by extreme repression of segments of the underlying population, often as scapegoats. Such movements inevitably seek to secure their rule ideologically by gaining control of the entire cultural apparatus of society in a process that the Nazis called Gleichschalthung, or bringing into line.

    This general understanding of fascism was dominant in the 1930s and ’40s, extending into the late twentieth century. However, fascism, as a political formation, was eventually reinterpreted in liberal discourse in idealist terms as a pure ideology, conceptually decoupled from its class and materialist foundations and reduced to its outward form as extreme racism, nationalism, revanchism, and the growth of authoritarian personalities, all of which were seen as disconnected from capitalism itself. Much of this was in fact implicit in the criticism of “totalitarianism” developed by Cold War figures like Hannah Arendt, which presented fascism as an extreme system on the right conceptually divorced from capitalism, and the antonym of communism on the left.17 Fascism thus was reinterpreted in the hegemonic ideology as a form of violent authoritarianism/totalitarianism and a departure from capitalism, which was then identified exclusively with liberal democracy. Lacking any real historical-material foundations and ignoring class realities, such reformulations were mere means of shoring up the notion of capitalism itself and have proven useless in attempts to understand the reemergence of fascist and neofascist forces in our time.

    In addressing the current neofascism, it is crucial to see it as a product of material/class/imperial relations of late capitalism, which is not to be understood simply in terms of its “populist,” hyper-racist, hyper-misogynist, or hyper-nationalist outer forms but rather in terms of a substantive class-based critique.18 Fascism is at all times an attack on liberal democracy and the substitution of an iron-heel political order under the reign of monopoly-finance capital. Its revanchist ideology does not arise primarily from monopoly capital itself, but rather is chiefly a mechanism for the mobilization of right-wing forces drawn predominantly from the lower-middle class, enlisting an army of actual or would-be stormtroopers (whether wearing black shirts, brown shirts, or MAGA hats), and providing the justification for the dismantling of the liberal-democratic state.

    Although it is the real material-class forces rather than disembodied ideology that have to be kept primarily in mind, it is nonetheless true that ideas, once they emerge, can themselves become material forces. “Ideology,” Georg Lukács wrote, is “the highest form of [class] consciousness.”19 If we want to understand the nature of the emerging MAGA regime, we therefore have to explore its governing ideology and its forms of political organization. Very little of this, it should be underscored, emanates from Trump himself, who is often described within the MAGA movement as a somewhat defective, if useful, instrument of the new order.20

    Despite its importance in publishing Project 2025, the leading think tank for the Trump movement is not the Heritage Foundation, but rather the Claremont Institute, founded in 1979 in Upland, California. The Claremont Institute was originally a base for Straussian thought (derived from the ultraconservative political theorist Leo Strauss) but has evolved into the nerve center of MAGA. Its funding comes from megadonors, including the Thomas D. Klingenstein Fund (a multibillion dollar fund managed by investment banker Thomas D. Klingenstein, chairman of the board of the Claremont Institute), the Dick and Betsy DeVos Foundation (managed by billionaire former Trump education secretary Betsy DeVos), the ultraconservative Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and the Sarah Scaife Foundation.21 Its two main publications are The American Mind and the Claremont Review of Books. The Institute also has an additional branch, the Claremont Institute Center for the American Way of Life, located in Washington, DC, across from the Capitol. Academics and pundits associated with the Claremont Institute dominate Hillsdale College in Michigan. Hillsdale publishes Imprimis, essentially a Claremont Institute MAGA publication. The Institute offers a number of fellowships, including the Lincoln Fellowship. Its website tracks so-called “BLM funding” (referring to the Black Lives Matter, or BLM movement) by corporations, claiming, on extremely questionable grounds, that $82.9 billion has been directed to the CRT/Woke/Cultural Marxist cause by corporations. As in MAGA ideology in general, corporations are condemned as morally corrupt for giving way to Cultural Marxism but are seldom criticized economically. This is consistent with the entire history of petty-bourgeois ideology as reflected in the nineteenth-century writings of such celebrated figures as Thomas Carlyle and Friedrich Nietzsche, whose ideological outpourings, as Lukács noted, reflected “a contradictory twofold tendency” of a “critique of capitalist lack of culture,” while nonetheless supporting an order “located in capitalism.”22

    In 2019, Trump awarded the Claremont Institute the National Humanities Medal. On January 6, 2021, lawyer John Eastman, a member of the board of the Claremont Institute (where he remains to this day), supported by other Claremont Institute associates, played the leading role in organizing the MAGA assault on the Capitol Building in Washington, DC. He also wrote the key memos directed at pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to invalidate the 2020 election in an attempt to reverse Trump’s loss to Joe Biden. All of this earned Claremont the reputation as the January 6 attempted coup’s “brain trust.”23

    The Claremont Institute was to become the main intellectual incubus of Trump II. More than a dozen Claremont associated pundits and former Claremont fellows regularly appear on Fox News. This includes, in addition to Eastman, such luminaries as Michael Anton, Claremont senior fellow and a high-level Trump State Department appointee; Christopher Caldwell, contributing editor to the Claremont Review of Books and white supremacist commentator; Brian T. Kennedy, Claremont former president and current board member, and chairman of the Committee on the Present Danger, which advances a new McCarthyism; Charles R. Kesler, Claremont Review of Books editor and leading proponent of a “Cold Civil War”; Charlie Kirk, former Claremont Lincoln Fellow and founder/CEO of Turning Point USA (TPUSA), with its “Professor Watch List” and its evangelical branch, TPUSA Faith; John Marini, Claremont senior fellow and leading right-wing intellectual critic of the “administrative state”; and Christopher F. Rufo, former Claremont Lincoln Fellow and notorious anti-CRT pundit.

    Anton, a former managing director of investment at BlackRock and currently a senior researcher at the Claremont Institute, served as deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security advisor for strategic communication on the National Security Council in Trump’s first administration.24 He is now director of policy planning in the U.S. State Department under Marco Rubio. It was Anton more than any other single figure who connected the Claremont Institute to MAGA and the alt-right. His 2016 Claremont Review of Books article “The Flight 93 Election”—using the metaphor of the passengers who rushed the cockpit on the terrorist flight on September 11, 2001—was to go viral and played a major role in mobilizing militant support for the Trump campaign. Here Anton declared that the 2016 election was a “charge the cockpit or die election,” in which “you may die anyway” in the attempt, but if Hillary Clinton were to be elected, “death is certain.” Although the piece was disjointed, rambling, and illogical, the metaphor nonetheless caught on, catapulting Anton to right-wing celebrity status, and led to his appointment to Trump’s National Security Council with the support of the right-wing tech billionaire Peter Thiel.25

    In 2019, Anton published After the Flight 93 Election… And What We Still Have to Lose, which emphasized the need for a war on the entire left, earning the praise of Trump. This was followed in 2020 by his book, The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return, in which he proposed that immigration should ideally be stopped altogether, while birthright citizenship (citizenship by virtue of simply being born in the United States, even if not to U.S. citizens) should cease immediately. China was the primary enemy, while peace should be made with Russia. The latter, Anton explained, belonged to the same “civilizational ‘sect’” as the United States and Europe, “in ways that China would never be.” Anton’s The Stakes, however, is best known for his explicit advocacy of a “red [that is, Republican or right-wing] Caesarism,” in which the presidency would become a “form of absolute monarchy” or “one-man rule” exhibiting widespread popular support—a position that was followed immediately after in his book with the exhortation to “reelect Trump!” Only when elected would Trump declare himself Caesar.26

    In a review on “Draining the Swamp” in the Claremont Review of Books, Anton popularized Marini’s Unmasking the Administrative State. Marini’s analysis is seen as a validation of Alexandre Kojève’s conservative rendition of G. W. F. Hegel’s German idealist philosophy, which in the right-wing view is seen as forming a justification for autocratic bourgeois rule as the end of history. Applied to contemporary institutions, the bureaucratic overlords of the administrative state are to be viewed as the “ruling class.” Marini and Anton thus argue that there is a need for Trump to smash the administrative state and replace it with more centralized rule. These same views led U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who in an earlier stage of his career had employed Marini as a special assistant, to exclaim “We must read Marini!!”27

    Anton has declared that in order to win “we need bloggers, meme-makers, Twitter trolls, street artists, comedians, propagandists, theologians, playwrights, essayists, novelists, hacks, flacks, and intellectuals”—as well as Trump and right-thinking capitalists.28 His most iconoclastic act within the Claremont Institute itself was to write an article about the alt-right Nietzschean-fascist propagandist Bronze Age Pervert (known as BAP, now revealed as Romanian-American Costin Vlad Alamariu, who received a PhD from Yale), the author of Bronze Age Mindset. Anton’s role, in a 2019 Claremont Review of Books article titled “Are the Kids Al(t) Right?,” was to bring BAP/Alamariu into the MAGA mainstream in an effort to draw disenchanted white youth into the neofascist movement. Noting that BAP provided in his self-published Bronze Age Mindset a “simplified pastiche of Friedrich Nietzsche,” which had “cracked the top 150 on Amazon—not, mind you, in some category within Amazon but on the site as a whole,” Anton argued that it represented an opportunity for the MAGA right to dominate the underground youth discourse. BAP characterized the liberal elites, intellectuals, left thinkers, and the general population as “bugmen,” without heroism, similar to Nietzsche’s “Last Man.” Human beings in general were portrayed as belonging to mere “yeast” life. The solution lay in male bodybuilding through weightlifting, and the cultivation of the image of Greek Bronze Age heroes. BAP is a white supremacist, emphasizing Aryan purity and vile attacks on diverse populations everywhere. As Anton himself admitted, “the strongest and easiest objections to make to Bronze Age Mindset is that it is ‘racist,’ ‘anti-Semitic,’ ‘anti-democratic,’ ‘misogynistic,’ and ‘homophobic,’” making it more “outrageous” than Nietzsche. Yet, he pretends that BAP is “gentler” than thinkers like Karl “Marx, [V. I.] Lenin, Mao [Zedong]…[Che] Guevara, [Saul] Alinsky and Foucault, or any number of fanatics whose screeds are taught in the elite universities.” In the end, Anton underscored the importance of BAP’s attacks on “bugmen” and “bugtimes,” incorporating his views within MAGA.29

    A study of Bronze Age Mindset itself reveals venomous references to “the shantytowns of the Turd World,” and attacks, citing Nietzsche, on “pre-Aryan modes of life, the return of socialism, of the longhouse, feminism,” and “Satanic Marxist sects.” Athenian general Alcibiades, conquistadors Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro, Napoleon Bonaparte, Theodore Roosevelt, Alfredo Stroessner (former dictator of Paraguay), and especially Bob Denard (a brutal twentieth-century French mercenary active in the Congo and the Comoros Islands) are BAP’s models of the return in modern times of Bronze Age Aryan humans. BAP’s favorite president, prior to Trump, is James K. Polk, who launched the Mexican-American War. The “white population” in the United States, he writes, seized Mexico “by their valor.” Feminism is seen as an abomination. “Nothing so ridiculous as the liberation of women,” BAP/Alamariu declares, “has ever been attempted in the history of mankind,” which he describes as an attempt to “return to pre-Aryan matriarchy.” He adds, “Social justice is a disgusting parasitism.” Today’s cities, subject to waves of immigrants, are “populated by hordes of dwarf-like zombies that are imported for slave labor and political agitation from the fly-swept latrines of the world.” He openly claims: “I believe in Fascism or something worse.” For all these reasons, according to BAP, Trump is to be supported in his conquest of government. “The Leviathan” of the administrative state dominated by the “bugmen,” he insists, must be smashed in order to create a new “primal order.” With the support of Anton and others, BAP was recognized as a kind of underworld Nietzschean influencer behind the MAGA movement, attractive to young, regressive white males. He was to become virtually required reading for young white staffers in the first Trump administration.30

    Anton was himself encouraged to read BAP by self-styled “Dark Enlightenment” thinker Curtis Yarvin, a neofascist close to both Anton and Vance (the MAGA heir apparent). Like Vance and Anton, Yarvin is heavily supported by Silicon Valley billionaire Thiel. Yarvin is also openly admired by Trump adviser and Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen for his antidemocratic views. Vance calls Yarvin, whom he has also referred to in friendly banter as a “fascist,” “my number one political influence.” In the MAGA world, Yarvin remains something of a shadowy figure, despite the fact that he has articulated the more reactionary strategies of the Trump regime. He is an ex-computer programmer and right-wing blogger, writing under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug and advocate of a “Dark Enlightenment” or neoreactionary movement (“NRx”). Tucker Carlson devoted an entire show to interviewing Yarvin in 2021. He is best known for his anti-democracy arguments and insistence that the president can establish himself as a “national CEO” or even “dictator,” concentrating all power in the executive branch and superseding the legal system and the courts while shifting from an “oligarchical Congress” to a “monarchical president.” Americans, he insists, are “going to have to get over their dictator-phobia.”31

    Yarvin has weaponized J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, seeing the leftist elite or professional-managerial class as an “elf aristocracy,” the “lower-middle class” as “hobbits,” and “dark elves” like himself as defenders of the hobbits. Like Steve Bannon, Trump’s former White House chief of staff, with whom he identifies, Yarvin sees himself as a proponent of MAGA; but, unlike Bannon, he deemphasizes the contradiction between the lower-middle class MAGA forces and the monopoly-capitalist billionaires at the top. Yarvin’s real allegiances are to the billionaires, rather than the lower-middle class. Indeed, he denies that he is a real fascist, despite the fact that he has applied the fascist label to himself, characterizing himself rather as a more straightforward supporter of dictatorship (or monarchy), since he has absolute contempt for the masses. Nevertheless, Yarvin sardonically states, “frankly, Hitler reads a lot like me”—if, he acknowledges, more talented and more evil.32

    Widely seen as a largely underground figure who has helped game the system for Trump, Yarvin has provided the general plan for an imperial presidency. He argues that real power is held “oligarchically” (distinguished from the classical notion of oligarchy as based on wealth) by people who control the media and the universities, constituting the “Cathedral.” The Cathedral can only be toppled by a monarch or dictator, acting as a CEO. Once Trump was elected, Yarvin contended, he could purge the federal bureaucracy (what Yarvin calls “RAGE,” or retire all government employees) by claiming he had an electoral mandate allowing him to transgress the law and bring both the courts and Congress to heel. All court orders requiring the president to desist should be ignored. The mainstream media corporations and the universities should be closed down. In a podcast, Anton said to Yarvin, “You’re essentially advocating for someone to—age-old move—gain power lawfully through an election, and then exercise it unlawfully.” Yarvin responded, “It wouldn’t be unlawful. You’d simply declare a state of emergency in your inaugural address.” The president could apply this to every state and take “over all law enforcement authorities.” Like Anton, Yarvin declared of the president, “you’re going to be Caesar.”33

    Anton has stated that the universities are “evil,” a position strongly supported by Rufo, a former director at the intelligent design (creationist) Discovery Institute and a Claremont Lincoln Fellow.34 Rufo is widely celebrated in MAGA circles for his grand propagandistic exploits in turning CRT and DEI into toxic conceptions in the public mind. He is currently a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a contributing editor to its City Journal. In “Critical Race Theory: What It Is and How to Fight It” for Hillsdale’s Imprimis, Rufo argued that CRT was the product of Cultural Marxism and “identity-based Marxism.” In what has become a fundamental element of MAGA ideology, he contends that today’s Marxists are all identity-theorists and are opposed to “equality,” replacing it with “equity,” which is “little more than reformulated Marxism.” CRT, he pronounces, promotes “neo-segregation.” It violates the principle of civil rights and is discriminatory through its anti-white policies. In this way, civil rights law is to be redirected against racial minorities. Rufo associates CRT and BLM with anticapitalism and reverse racism. His assaults on CRT influenced Trump’s attacks on it in his first administration.35

    More recently, Rufo has argued for “laying siege to the institutions.” This includes attacking any corporations that instituted DEI policies, seen as the product of Cultural Marxism, CRT, and BLM—a neo-McCarthyite view shared by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Major targets are “radical gender theory” and what Rufo calls “the transgender empire.” He contends that “we must fight to put the transgender empire out of business forever.” Rufo and the MAGA right fulminate against the “college cartel” and argue that K–12 reeducation should start with the promotion of “Western Civilization.”36

    One of the most adamant critics of diversity on the MAGA right is Caldwell, who in his article “The Browning of America” argues that “‘Diversity’ has [always] been an attribute of subject populations.” Hence, recognizing it as a basis of social policy flies in the face of the principles of the founders of the U.S. Constitution. In an article on Robert E. Lee, Caldwell argued that left criticisms of the commander of the Confederate forces as a defender of the slaveholding South, and thus of slavery, were aimed at eliminating Lee as “the moral force of half the nation.”37

    Claremont Review of Books editor Kesler, a member of Trump’s 1776 Commission on U.S. History, intended to counter the 1619 Project on the history of U.S. slavery, has been a leading figure in promoting the MAGA notion of a Cold Civil War between the right and the so-called dominant forces on the left. The term “woke,” which arose first in the civil rights movement, has been massively turned around by the right since 2019, relying on conservative command of the media, to refer in a derogatory way to all contemporary progressive political and cultural causes. It is employed as a means of belittling social justice struggles against racism and gender inequality, while its most common usage is as a racist dog whistle.38

    The MAGA ideology’s Cold Civil War is closely attached to attacks on China. As chairman of the Committee on the Present Danger (which includes Bannon as a member), Claremont Institute board member Brian Kennedy is part of a movement to generate a new McCarthyism focused on Beijing. Claiming that Chinese Communism has infiltrated U.S. society in BLM clothing, he writes: “We are at risk of losing a war today because too few of us know that we are engaged with an enemy, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) [sic], that means to destroy us.”39

    Christian nationalists are also being enlisted in the Cold Civil War/New McCarthyism. Kirk’s Turning Point USA became notorious in 2016 for its Professor Watch List, singling out mostly left academics across the country to be targeted by the right in a McCarthyite manner. Kirk, who also served on Trump’s 1776 Commission, has now become known as a mega “whisperer” to youth, in which he bullet points the “war on white people” and encourages white nationalism. His organization, working with the Claremont Institute, bussed MAGA supporters to the January 6, 2021, protest and assault on the Capitol. Yarvin, who has described slavery “as a natural human relationship” and promoted biological determinism and monarchy, was effusively praised by Kirk on his radio show and podcast, along with white supremacist Steve Sailer. Kirk is the author of Right Wing Revolution: How to Beat the Woke and Save the West, published in 2024. According to the publisher’s blurb, “America…is under threat from a lethal ideology that seeks to humiliate and erase anyone that does not bow at its altar…. Kirk drags wokeism out of the shadows and details the exact steps needed to stop its toxic spread,” which “has already seeped into every aspect of American society.”40

    More recently, Kirk has transformed himself into the leading promoter of evangelical Christian nationalism within the MAGA movement, establishing a division of Turning Point USA called TPUSA Faith aimed at white evangelicals. He argues that the U.S. founders created a Christian nation and advocates the Seven Mountain mandate of extreme evangelical Christian nationalism, in which believers are required to seek to dominate all of reality, including family, religion, education, media, arts, business, and government. This is tied to endism and religious apocalypticism (Second Coming) views. Kirk has sought to promote hatred of LGBTQ+ and transgender people in order to motivate the evangelical movement to take on a more direct political role.41

    OMB director Vought is undoubtedly the most powerful Christian nationalist within the Trump administration itself. Writing in 2022 for the Claremont Institute’s The American Mind, Vought claimed that the Center for Renewing America, which he founded in 2021, had demonstrated on so-called legal grounds that “illegal aliens coming across” the U.S.-Mexico border constituted “an invasion,” thus allowing state governors, who, according to Article 1, Section 10, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution, are not allowed to “engage in War unless actually invaded,” to act forcibly against these “invaders,” independent of the federal government.42 As a Christian Nationalist organization, the Center for Renewing America is adamantly anti-Palestinian, opposing any attempt to allow Palestinians to immigrate to the United States, arguing that “One would be hard-pressed to identify a people or culture more fundamentally at odds with the foundations of American self-government than Palestinians,” who have “a culture poisonous to the health of and integrity of American communities,” and whose ideology, despite the counter-claims of “intersectional Marxists,” has as its aim the total annihilation of Israel. Vought’s Center for Renewing America is strongly in favor of the removal of the Palestinian population from Gaza and their resettlement in the lands of the Arab League.43

    Movements in the fascist genus have often relied on opportunistic shifts from left to right. A classic example of this is the Italian leftist thinker Enrico Ferri, a reactionary pseudo-socialist who was strongly attacked by Frederick Engels, and later became a follower of Benito Mussolini.44 The main intellectual vehicle for so-called “leftist” cooperation with MAGA ideology, operating in what is presented as a common anti-liberal vein, is Compact magazine, cofounded by Iranian-American rightist and former Trotskyist Sohrab Ahmari, a close associate of Vance and now the U.S. editor of UnHerd, and by national-populist Edwin Aponte, editor of Bellows, a MAGA-style publication. Compact magazine was once described in Jacobin as a “syncretic” magazine of both left and right.45 However, rather than representing some sort of meeting point of left and right, it is strongly supportive of Trump and Vance while successfully drawing in erstwhile leftist contributors, such as Christian Parenti and Slavoj Žižek (a contributing editor) into a publication in which pro-MAGA views are hegemonic.46 Yarvin, Anton, Caldwell, and Rufo have all written multiple articles for Compact on such topics as the nihilism of the left-wing ruling class, Cultural Marxism, CRT, dismantling the administrative state, and support for Viktor Orbán’s ultra-conservative government in Hungary and the neofascist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany.47

    Parenti, once a well-known leftist journalist, writes regularly for Compact. His columns have supported Trump’s nomination of Kash Patel as FBI director and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health. He has also written columns claiming that Trump is an anti-imperialist and that “‘Diversity’ Is a Ruling Class Ideology.” Since Trump’s reelection, Parenti has presented Trump and some of his department heads (Kennedy, Patel, and Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s Director of National Intelligence) as potential opponents of the “deep state” or surveillance-intelligence state, and thus in line with the left in this respect. However, this is a gross misperception of the nature of the Trump/MAGA regime itself, which has nothing to do with openness or democratic control, but which is establishing the basis for its own direct rule.48

    Žižek has used Compact as a venue in which to engage in the most reactionary themes. Thus, in an article titled “Wokeness Is Here to Stay,” he presented a transphobic argument in which he declared that “the use of puberty blockers is yet another case of woke capitalism.” In this same anti-woke article, Žižek generalized from the experience of a Black professor who was strongly criticized by students from an Afro-pessimist standpoint (as detailed in a different Compact article). From there, Žižek went on to make the extraordinary racially charged statement, directed at a mainly white reactionary readership, that, “The black woke elite is fully aware that it won’t achieve its declared goal of diminishing black oppression—and it doesn’t even want that. What they really want is what they are achieving: a position of moral authority from which to terrorize all others.”49

    Compact magazine managing editor Geoff Shullenberger has specialized in bringing the ideas of BAP into the MAGA mainstream, both within Compact and elsewhere. Shullenberger also is the coeditor of COVID-19 and the Left: The Tyranny of Fear, opposing lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and masking in response to COVID-19 as due to the extremism of the left. Meanwhile, Compact columnist and MAGA “populist” supporter Batya Ungar-Sargon, author of Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy (2021), was appointed in 2025 deputy opinion editor of Newsweek.50

    The MAGA think tanks are a product of funding by big capital interests, often promoting, in this respect, a libertarian ideology, but melding this with the need to reach the white lower-middle class with its reactionary, nationalist-populist, revanchist, racist, misogynist, and anti-socialist perspective, as a way of developing a mass constituency. The resulting MAGA ideology is disseminated through wider media such as Fox News, talk radio, social media, YouTube videos, blogs, and podcasts. The influential infotainment site Breitbart, once headed by Bannon, has published numerous articles attacking Cultural Marxism, and specializes in sensationalized shock attacks on the left. Breitbart’s senior technology editor, Allum Bokhari, a former Claremont Lincoln Fellow, has written for Hillsdale’s Imprimis on the need for the right to control big tech, along the lines subsequently implemented by Musk at X.51

    Claremont Lincoln Fellow Raheem J. Kassam, a former chief of staff to Brexit leader Nigel Farage and a Bannon ally, is the former editor-in-chief of Breitbart London. More recently Kassam had cohosted Bannon’s MAGA radio show/podcast “War Room.” In 2018, Kassam became editor-in-chief of the Trumpist news website National Pulse, and appears frequently as an “expert” commentator on Fox News, where he has discussed “How Did America Fall to Marxism?”52

    MAGA analyses are also disseminated by way of conservative book publishing. Rufo’s best-selling America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything (2023) and Kirk’s The MAGA Doctrine (2020) were both published by Broadside Books, HarperCollins’s imprint for ultra-conservative nonfiction, which absorbed the Fox News book brand. The big five English-language book publishers all have distinct imprints devoted entirely to ultra-conservative books aimed at white supremacist Republicans/MAGA.53 Anton’s After the Flight 93 Election, Kesler’s Crisis of the Two Constitutions: The Rise, Decline, and Recovery of America’s Greatness(2021), Kennedy’s Communist China’s War Inside America (2020), and Ungar-Sargon’s Bad Newswere all published by Encounter Books, established by the right-wing Bradley Foundation, a funder of the Claremont Institute. Established in 1998, Encounter Books deliberately took its name from the pseudo-left-liberal journal Encounter, which was exposed in the 1970s by Ramparts as a CIA-funded publication. Kirk’s Right Wing Revolution: How to Beat the Woke and Save the West (2024) was published with Winning Team Publishing, cofounded in 2021 by Donald Trump Jr.54

    All the new right concepts and talking points end up on social media. As Fox News host Jesse Watters stated, “We are waging a 21st-century information warfare campaign against the left. It’s like grassroots guerrilla warfare. Someone says something on social media, Musk retweets it, [Joe] Rogan podcasts it, Fox broadcasts it and by the time it reaches everybody, millions of people have seen it.”55

    Division in the Ranks

    The most extreme MAGA ideologues such as Bannon, Yarvin, and Anton are distinctly aware that the nationalist-populist MAGA movement is rooted in lower-middle class whites (whom the neofascist movement in both Europe and the United States is accustomed to referring to as “hobbits”), and only secondarily in privileged elements of the working class. MAGA think tanks often present a barely disguised contempt for the “lumpen,” “pitchfork-bearing proletariat,” or “proles,” namely the working class.56 Almost no positive references to the working class or attempts to approach the underprivileged are present in the mainline MAGA literature, which is understood as rooted in a fragile national-populist alliance between the billionaire class and the lower-middle class, both of which see the working class as their most dangerous enemy (exceeding their hatred even for the upper-middle class professional-managerial stratum). Funded by the mega-rich and dedicated to the idea, as Anton says, that “race trumps class,” the MAGA pundits and influencers are unable to address directly the question of the working-class majority without undermining their claim to a broad populism. The result is that they appeal primarily to whiteness and “middle America.”57 Occasional references are made to MAGA hat-wearing truck drivers and other workers, but this only constitutes a vain attempt to elude the reality of a political bloc that consists largely of the lower-middle class and a relatively small number of privileged workers. Although Bannon, representing MAGA’s radical right, refers to workers, it is always in a context where the lower-middle class looms larger.58

    This fundamental class division will remain. Although Trump made some gains with blue-collar workers in the 2024 elections, particularly in rural areas, his political base remains the lower-middle class, which is in large part hostile towards the working class below. The Trump program is destined to hit the working class hardest economically.59 It was Anton who was to make the most serious ideological attempt to escape this trap in an article in Compact titled “Why the Great Reset Is Not ‘Socialism,’” in which he sought to examine Marxist theory and turn it on its head. Thus, he characterized Silicon Valley billionaire oligarchs in alt-right fashion as the “left,” the enemy of right-wing populism. Moreover, while the MAGA movement, he recognized, was fundamentally based in the lower-middle/middle class/the poor, its “natural” basis ultimately was to be sought in the majority that he sardonically referred to as the “proles.”60 His whole endeavor in this respect, however, was to fall flat in the face of the inescapable reality of a neofascist alliance between the billionaires and the lower-middle class—both of whom see the diverse working class as the ultimate enemy. Moreover, Anton’s contradictory attempt to create a right-wing populism that incorporated the working class and targeted billionaire oligarchs was at odds with his own role as a member of the national security establishment, dominated by the mega-capitalist class, which had him hobnobbing with some of its biggest players. He therefore quickly mended his ways. Although he persisted in criticizing “oligarchs,” they were refashioned in conformity with the hegemonic MAGA ideology as the members of the administrative state, no longer big money interests.

    Yet, if the mass MAGA movement with its racism and its small-property-based outlook is inherently anti-working class, even if it has attracted significant numbers of working-class voters, it also finds itself in conflict with the ultra-wealthy interests that have funded and mobilized it, making it a dangerous movement from the standpoint of monopoly capitalism itself. Once political power is achieved in regimes in the fascist genus, divisions quickly emerge between the top echelons of monopoly capital and its army of lower-middle class adherents. Having obtained control of the state and of the military and police powers, the ultra-wealthy ruling class has every reason to discard the more militant nationalist—often partially anticapitalist—elements of its “radical right” base. The classic historical instance of this was the Night of the Long Knives in Hitler’s Germany, from June 30 to July 2, 1934, in which the Nazi party’s paramilitary brownshirt wing, the Sturmabteilung, or “Assault Division,” known as its stormtroopers, were subjected to a bloody purge. The purge was aimed specifically at the Strasserism (named after Otto and Gregor Strasser), deeply embedded in the brownshirts within the Nazi movement, which was both antisemitic and, to a considerable extent anticapitalist, and belonged to a milieu of militant mass action or “revolutionary” nationalism. Elimination of Strasserism allowed the consolidation of fascism as a reactionary monopoly-capitalist state, repressing and regimenting its mass petty-bourgeois base.61

    In the very different conditions of the neofascist MAGA movement in the United States today, these same general contradictions appear, though minus the extreme violence. Many among the MAGA faithful were startled to see their lack of representation in the Trump cabinet following the 2024 election, a sharp contrast from the 2016 election. The Trump regime today has a cabinet of billionaires, surrounded by still further billionaires. Although there are extreme rightist operatives whose views are similar to those of the MAGA masses in the second Trump White House—such as Stephen Miller, who, despite being Jewish, appears to support white Christian nationalism, and is currently deputy chief of staff for policy—they are overshadowed by the mega-capitalists. Right from the start, it was clear that high-tech financial capital rather than the MAGA hat-wearing base was to be in charge. As Gary Stout, a Washington attorney, wrote in Pennsylvania’s Observer-Reporter, Trump “is now creating a new political elite of oligarchs that has no accountability to Congress or loyalty to his own MAGA movement.”62

    This contradiction, splitting the MAGA movement/Trump regime, was immediately apparent in the conflict over H-1B visas for foreign workers. These visas are widely used by multinational corporations to hire foreign technical workers in specialty occupations, especially high-tech, bringing in relatively low-paid skilled workers from India, China, and elsewhere. H-1B visas have been heavily criticized within the MAGA movement, since they undercut relatively high-paid U.S. jobs. Voicing the outrage of the MAGA faithful, Bannon declared prior to Trump’s inauguration that Musk, who came out strongly for the H-1B visas, was “evil” and that he would have him driven out of the White House. Bannon raged in national-populist terms against wealthy “oligarchs,” not only “the lords of easy money,” but more importantly the tech overlords of Silicon Valley, representatives of “technological feudalism,” who were now dominating the MAGA movement, and were opposing “the populist, nationalist revolution.” MAGA militant Laura Loomer presented racist arguments in which she declared: “Our country was built by white Europeans…. Not by third world invaders from India.” Openly attacking Musk on X, Loomer suddenly found herself demonetized on the platform.63 The fact that this represented a fundamental division between billionaire monopoly-finance capitalists and high-tech oligarchs at the top and the lower-middle class MAGA base was evident in an article by Kevin Porteus of Hillsdale College titled “Putting Americans First,” published in The American Mind. He advanced the argument that “America First” should mean “Americans…first.”64Breitbart likewise ran story after story against H-1B visas. The rebellion over this issue, however, was soon put down by Trump, who, himself a billionaire, sided with Musk, indicating that his own companies employed foreign workers on H-1B visas. Faced with a division between monopoly-finance capital and his own militant MAGA movement, Trump chose the former.

    The fissure between a capitalist ruling class of billionaires and the neofascist movement on the ground will only widen. The MAGA movement expects lower taxes under Trump, which will no doubt be partially forthcoming, but paid for to a significant extent by drastic cuts in social services. Expectations of lower prices, especially with new tariffs being instituted, will be dashed. Moreover, like all tax reductions under monopoly capitalism, the new Trump tax cuts will be highly regressive, benefiting the rich most of all and further widening the gap between the top and the bottom of U.S. society. The cutbacks on civilian government will hurt the vast majority of the population, including the lower-middle class. With nearly all social spending that benefits the bottom 60 percent of the population, including Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security now in the crosshairs of Musk’s DOGE, the carnage is likely to be severe. Although the MAGA movement is characterized by extreme nationalism, monopoly-finance capital and its high-tech overlords are geared to accumulation on a world scale and global financial expropriation. They rely on the exploitation not only of the global proletariat, but also the increased exploitation and expropriation of U.S. workers. Implementation of ruling-class policies on globalization, financialization, imperialism, war, and hyperexploitation under the new regime will inevitably push much of the U.S. lower-middle class back into the working class, polarizing and destabilizing the society still further.

    Trump’s neofascist regime is a desperate act of a declining empire. It has supplanted neoliberalism only in the sense that the right wing of the ruling class itself is now in direct and open command of the state, seeking to restructure it as a vehicle of resurgent hegemony. The conflict between neofascism as a more regressive global capitalist project designed to preserve and enhance the power of the ruling capitalists with their global interests, on the one hand, and the national-populist movement of the MAGA radical right focused primarily on the conquest of the administrative state, on the other, means that the mega-capitalist interests will continually betray the MAGA “populist” base, viewed as mere cannon fodder in the Cold Civil War.

    Trump appointed billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy as the codirector of DOGE along with Musk. Ramaswamy is the founder of the giant pharmaceutical company Roivant Sciences and author of the bestselling 2023 book Woke Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam. He resigned from his DOGE position to run for governor of Ohio. With Ramaswamy departing, Musk was left as the sole power at DOGE. Ramaswamy has played a leading role in attacking corporate ESG and DEI. Recognizing that corporations had increasingly introduced limited ESG and DEI programs in response to environmental and social issues, pundits on the MAGA right, including the opportunistic plutocrat Ramaswamy, were able to make the existence of such programs a popular “anti-corporate” moral issue. The result is that many corporations now have, not unwillingly, reversed themselves in line with Trump. Some have dropped the “diversity” and “equity” from DEI while hypocritically retaining “inclusion.”65

    The sheer arrogance of the capitalist oligarchs and their managers can be seen in the rise of Thiel as a dominant figure in the Trump orbit, undoubtedly the most powerful figure connected to the regime with the exception of Musk (and the president himself). In 2022, Thiel characterized himself as leader of a “Rebel Alliance,” as in Star Wars, fighting the “imperial stormtroopers” of the U.S. establishment and engaged in a struggle aimed ultimately at China.66 In 2009, he declared “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” causing him openly to reject the latter.67 He is currently tied to six members of the National Security Council who are beholden to him financially and politically and are part of his industrial network: Vance (whose political campaigns were financed by Thiel), Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth (who is associated with Thiel’s military-tech network), Secretary of Energy Chris Wright (who sits on a board of the energy startup Oklo, in which Thiel is a major investor), National Security Advisor Mike Waltz (whose 2022 Florida campaign was funded by Thiel), Rubio (whose 2022 reelection bid was financed by Thiel), and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles (who is on the payroll of the Thiel-funded Saving Arizona PAC).68

    Thiel, like Musk, Ramaswamy, and Trump himself, stands for the interests of the “masters of the universe.”69 Despite libertarian ideology and a neofascist ethos, there is little to connect the financial plutocrats materially with the lower-middle class. Given that the so-called destruction of the administrative state is leading to more centralized monopoly-capitalist control of the state in the interests of the plutocrats, the selling out of the MAGA movement on the ground is palpably obvious.

    A further contradiction in the MAGA movement lies in its promotion of its Christian white nationalism, splitting the evangelical movement. Exit polls indicate that some 80 percent of white evangelical voters support Trump. Yet, the freezing of USAID by Trump and Musk generated strong opposition from Christian affiliated aid groups. The resulting deep division in conservative circles undoubtedly affected the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the stoppage on foreign aid. Trump’s establishment of a White House Faith Office headed by the controversial televangelist Paula White-Cain, known for her promotion of the capitalist-oriented “prosperity gospel,” together with his creation of a task force headed by Attorney General Pam Bondi, aimed at ending “anti-Christian bias,” have upset the traditional separation of church and state. This weaponization of evangelicalism to reinforce a Christian nationalism directed at supporting the MAGA state has led to widening criticisms within the evangelical and wider Christian communities.70 Trump’s redoubled support for Israel’s extermination of Palestinians is unpopular with younger evangelicals, who are increasingly rejecting Christian Zionism.

    The most potent attack from within evangelicalism has emerged from preachers such as Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, assistant director for partnerships and fellowships in Yale University’s Century of Public Theology and Public Policy, in his 2018 book Reconstructing the Gospel: Finding Freedom from the Slaveholder Religion. Working closely with Protestant minister Reverend William Barber II, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, Wilson-Hartgrove was motivated by his opposition to the Trump movement to address the “original sin” of the dominant white evangelicalism in the United States, which, rather than simply an evangelical movement as such, was from the first a “slaveholder’s religion.” Emerging within the evangelical community itself and receiving considerable acclaim, Wilson-Hartgrove’s critique of the slaveholder’s religion has served to bring into the open the most acute contradictions of the Christian nationalist ideology.71 As he wrote,

    The sad reality is that we [evangelicals] chose a side in the 19th century and our movement is still infected by the slaveholder religion that was funded by plantation owners. That faith did not go away after the Civil War; it doubled down and prayed for “redemption” from Reconstruction. And it rejoiced when white supremacy campaigns across the South regained power and established Jim Crow segregation. Mid-20th century, when the balance of power was again challenged by America’s civil rights movement, slaveholder religion reasserted itself, criticizing Dr. King for “politicizing” the gospel and favoring “law and order” systems that perpetuated inequality. The Southern Strategy aimed to harness slaveholder religion by creating a Moral Majority that would feel righteous for their support of the status quo.

    Donald Trump did not create the crisis we now face, but his presidency is exposing the truth about who we are as evangelicals—not a movement divided between left and right, but a people of faith who must now choose between slaveholder religion and the Christianity of Christ.72

    For “400 years,” slaveholder religion, Wilson-Hartgrove argued, has taught people to fear people of color. “Because slaveholder religion’s god ordained white supremacy, white people learned to fear equality and the black political power that challenged the social order they were taught to value.” It is not a return to the politics of “redemption” that is the answer, he argues, but completing the politics of Reconstruction.73

    Betrayal and Revolt

    The Trump regime is a regime of betrayal. It is already leading to the abandonment of the lower-middle class, which through the MAGA movement brought it into power, as well as the working-class majority.74 What it offers to its core lower-middle class constituency is a kind of nationalist culturalism, which is a mere veil for a system of far more centralized capitalist control of the state in a White House now filled with billionaires, ultimately leading to the increased economic exploitation and expropriation of the underlying population. The material betrayal of the working class will be absolute, economically and politically. For such a regime of capitalist overlords to continue, it will have to increase its repression of the body politic at every step. Its greatest fear is that the enraged masses, especially the working-class majority, would mobilize and rise up in resistance, bringing with it all of those in the society as a whole who are committed to democratic rule and to the survival of humanity in the face of growing environmental perils.

    The political and ideological successes of the MAGA movement were made possible in part by a liberal-left that abandoned the working class economically and politically under the mantle of postmodernism and identity politics, severed off from questions of exploitation, poverty, and economic and social decline. This requires a return to what Marx called the “hierarchy of…needs,” emphasizing within this real material needs, including jobs, health care, housing, free human development, community, the environment, and the right to control one’s own body—needs vital to the population as a whole, and ultimately inseparable from democratic control of the society.75 Viewed in this way, the only way to combat the current reactionary trend is based on socialist principles of substantive equality and ecological sustainability, putting the needs of the population as a whole, and those most oppressed, first. This struggle will have to emanate in the main from a resurgent, reunited working class, historically the most diverse, democratic, and revolutionary section of society, the guarantors of humanity’s future.

    Notes

    1. Matthew J. Vaeth, “Memorandum for Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies/Subject: Temporary Pause of Agency, Grant, Loan, and Other Financial Assistance Programs,” Office of Management and Budget, Executive Office of the President, January 27, 2025; Travis Gettys, “‘Reads Like a Hostage Note’: Trump Order Flagged as ‘Mass Fraud’ by Ex-Official,” Raw Story, January 28, 2025; Charles R. Kesler, “America’s Cold Civil War,” Imprimis47, no. 10 (October 2018).
    2. Vought quoted in Thomas B. Edsall, “‘Trump’s Thomas Cromwell’ Is Waiting in the Wings,” New York Times, February 4, 2025.
    3. For a leading MAGA proponent of “Caesarism” as constituting the inner telos of the Trump regime, see Michael Anton, The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return (Washington DC: Regnery Publishing, 2020), 303–18.
    4. Max Matsa, “Senate Confirms Project 2025 Co-Author as Trump Budget Chief,” BBC, February 6, 2025; Curt Devine, Casey Tolan, Audrey Ash, and Kyung Lah, “Hidden Camera Video Shows Project 2025 Co-Author Discussing His Secret Work Preparing for a Second Trump Term,” CNN, August 15, 2024; Michael Sozan and Ben Olinsky, “Project 2025 Would Destroy the U.S. System of Checks and Balances and Create an Imperial Presidency,” Center for American Progress, October 1, 2024.
    5. Vaeth, Memorandum, “Temporary Pause of Agency Grant, Loan, and Other Financial Assistance Programs”; Melissa Quinn, Richard Escobedo, and Kristin Brown, “Trump Administration Rescinds Federal Funding Freeze Memo After Chaos,” CBS News, January 29, 2025; Daniel Barnes, Chloe Atkins, and Dareh Gregorian, “Appeals Court Rejects Trump Administration Bid to Immediately Reinstate Funding Freeze,” NBC News, February 11, 2025; Bill Barrow, “How Donald Trump and Project 2025 Previewed the Federal Grant Freeze,” Associated Press, January 28, 2025.
    6. Cass R. Sunstein, “This Theory Is Behind Trump’s Power Grab,” New York Times, February 26, 2025.
    7. Vaeth, Memorandum, “Temporary Pause of Agency Grant, Loan, and Other Financial Assistance Programs.”
    8. Lance Cashion, “How to Recognize Cultural Marxism and Critical Theories,” Revolution of Man (blog), August 31, 2023; Mike Gonzalez and Katharine Cornell Gorka, NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It (New York: Encounter Books, 2025), 15, 238, 265–69. The current right-wing attack on “Cultural Marxism” is derived from attacks on “Cultural Bolshevism” in Nazi Germany. Ari Paul, “‘Cultural Marxism’: The Mainstreaming of a Nazi Trope,” Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, June 4, 2019, fair.org.
    9. Trump/Vance Campaign, “Agenda 47: Protecting Students from the Radical Left and Marxist Maniacs Infecting Educational Institutions,” July 17, 2023.
    10. Mike Gonzalez and Katharine C. Gorka, How Cultural Marxism Threatens the United States—and How Americans Can Fight It, Special Report No. 262, Heritage Foundation, November 14, 2022; Gonzalez and Gorka, NextGen Marxism; Tanner Mirrlees, “The Alt-Right’s Discourse of ‘Cultural Marxism’: A Political Instrument of Intersectional Hate,” Atlantis Journal 39, no. 1 (August 2018); Cashion, “How to Recognize Cultural Marxism and Critical Theories.” All of these works are poorly researched, poorly documented, unscholarly, and shallow, not conforming to academic standards in any way. As Baruch Spinoza said, “Ignorance is no argument.”
    11. Gonzalez and Gorka, NextGen Marxism, 17–18, 148–99, 242.
    12. See John Bellamy Foster, Trump in the White House (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017), 20–22, 121.
    13. For criticism of how white evangelical Christians in the United States have embraced a “slaveholder religion,” capitulating to the religious views propounded in the Antebellum South and in the Jim Crow period, see Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Reconstructing the Gospel: Finding Freedom from Slaveholder Religion (Lisle, Illinois Inter-Varsity Press, 2020); Darrell Hamilton II, “It’s Time to Break the Chains of Slaveholder Religion,” Baptist News, September 17, 2020.
    14. Paul M. Sweezy to Paul A. Baran, October 18, 1952, in Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, The Age of Monopoly Capital, eds. Nicholas Baran and John Bellamy Foster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017), 86–87.
    15. Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1942); Doreen Lustig, “The Nature of the Nazi State and the Question of International Criminal Responsibility of Corporate Officials at Nuremberg: Franz Neuman’s Behemoth at the Industrial Trials,” Working Paper 2011/2, History and Theory of International Law Series, Institute for International Law and Justice, 2012; C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951), 350–54. On the lower-middle class/monopoly capitalist alliance in societies belonging to the fascist genus, see also Leon Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany (New York: Pathfinder, 1971), 455; Ernst Bloch, Heritage of Our Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 54; Nicos Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship (London: Verso, 1974); Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man (New York: Doubleday, 1960), 134–76; Paul A. Baran (Historicus), “Fascism in America,” Monthly Review 4, no. 6 (October 1952): 181–89.
    16. Maxine Y. Sweezy (see also Maxine Y. Woolston), The Structure of the Nazi Economy(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1941), 27–35; Gustave Strolper, German Economy, 1870–1940 (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1940), 207; Germá Bel, “The Coining of ‘Privatization’ and Germany’s National Socialist Party,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 20, no. 3 (2006): 187–94; Foster, Trump in the White House, 27–43, 65–66.
    17. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: Penguin, 2017); Reuven Kaminer, “On the Concept of ‘Totalitarianism’ and Its Role in Current Political Discourse,” MR Online, August 15, 2007; Slavoj Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? (London: Verso, 2001), 2–3.
    18. Baran, “Fascism in America,” 182.
    19. Georg Lukács, Writer and Critic (London: Merlin Press, 1978), 151.
    20. Christopher Caldwell, “Speaking Trumpian,” Claremont Review of Books 24, no. 19 (Fall 2024): 19–22.
    21. Andy Kroll, “Revealed: The Billionaires Funding the Coup’s Brain Trust,” Rolling Stone, January 12, 2022; Influence Watch, “Thomas D. Kligenstein Fund,” influencewatch.org (n.d.).
    22. Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason (London: Merlin Press, 1980), 730. Lukács’s reference to Carlyle here is directly relevant to the present. Leading MAGA ideologue Curtis Yarvin writes: “I will always be a Carlylean, just the way a Marxist will always be a Marxist.” Matt McManus, “Yarvin’s Case against Democracy: Curtis Yarvin Is too Elitist for Fascism,” Commonweal, January 27, 2023.
    23. Marc Fisher and Isaac Stanley-Becker, “The Claremont Institute Triumphed in the Trump Years. Then Came Jan. 6,” Washington Post, July 30, 2022; Elisabeth Zerofsky, “How the Claremont Institute Became a Nerve Center of the American Right,” New York Times, August 3, 2022; Kroll, “Revealed.”
    24. Kate Brannen and Luke Hartig, “Disrupting the White House: Peter Thiel’s Influence is Shaping the National Security Council,” Just Security, February 8, 2017.
    25. Michael Anton, “The Flight 93 Election,” Claremont Review of Books (online), September 5, 2016.
    26. Michael Anton, After the Flight 93 Election: The Vote that Saved America and What We Still Have to Lose (New York: Encounter Books, 2019); Anton, The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return (see especially section on “Caesarism” in chapter 7 and the sections on “Immigration,” “Reelect Trump!” and on “Foreign and Defense Policy” in chapter 8.
    27. Michael Anton, “Draining the Swamp,” Claremont Review of Books, 19, no. 1 (Winter 2018/19).
    28. Anton, “Draining the Swamp.”
    29. Michael Anton, “Are the Kids Al(t) Right?,” Claremont Review of Books 19, no. 3 (Summer 2019). On Nietzsche’s “last man” see Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra (New York: Modern Library, 1917), 10–13 (prologue, section 5).
    30. Bronze Age Pervert (Costin Vlad Alamariu), Bronze Age Mindset (self-published, 2018), 12, 14, 40, 44, 52, 56, 72, 76, 80, 84, 92, 104, 110, 112–14, 118, 120–22, 126, 132–36; Ben Schreckinger, “The Alt-Right Manifesto that has Trumpworld Talking,” Politico, August 23, 2019; BAP quoted on fascism in Ali Breland, “Is the Bronze Age Pervert Going Mainstream?,” Mother Jones, October 2, 2023; Sophie Nicolson, “Bob Denard: French Mercenary Behind Several Post-Colonial Coups,” Guardian, October 15, 2007.
    31. Jason Wilson, “He’s Anti-Democracy and Pro-Trump: The Obscure ‘Dark Enlightenment’ Blogger Influencing the Next US Administration,” Guardian, December 21, 2024; Ian Ward, “Curtis Yarvin’s Ideas Were Fringe. Now They’re Coursing through Trump’s Washington,” Politico, January 30, 2025; Ian Ward, “The Seven Thinkers and Groups that Have Shaped JD Vance’s Unusual Worldview,” Politico, July 18, 2024; Jacob Siegel, “The Red-Pill Prince: How Computer Programmer Curtis Yarvin Became America’s Most Controversial Political Theorist,” The Tablet, March 30, 2022; Curtis Yarvin interviewed by David Marchese, “Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening,” New York Times, January 18, 2025; “Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug) on Tucker Carlson Today,” YouTube video, 1:15:35, September 8, 2021,
    32. Jeremy Carl, “Beyond Elves and Hobbits,” The American Mind, July 22, 2022; McManus, “Yarvin’s Case against Democracy.”
    33. Wilson, “He’s Anti-Democracy and Pro-Trump”; Ward, “Curtis Yarvin’s Ideas Were Fringe”; Ward, “The Seven Thinkers and Groups that Have Shaped JD Vance’s Unusual World View”; Curtis Yarvin, “The Cathedral or the Bizarre,” The Tablet, March 30, 2022; Curtis Yarvin, “The Nihilism of the Ruling Class,” Compact, December 16, 2022. On the classical notion of oligarchy, see Jeffrey A. Winters, Oligarchy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
    34. Michael Anton, “The Pessimistic Case for the Future,” Compact, July 21, 2023.
    35. Christopher F. Rufo, “Critical Race Theory: What It Is and How to Fight It,” Imprimis 50, no. 3 (March 2021).
    36. Christopher F. Rufo, “Laying Siege to the Institutions,” Imprimis 51, no. 4/5 (April/May 2022); Christopher F. Rufo, “Inside the Transgender Empire,” Imprimis 52, no. 9 (September 2023); Scott Yenor, “Repeal and Replace Today’s Education Cartel,” Law & Liberty, March 28, 2024, lawliberty.org; Frederick M. Hess, “Challenge the College Cartel,” The American Mind, July 2, 2019; Giancarlo Sopo, “Trump Must Break Up the College Cartel,” The American Mind, December 6, 2024.
    37. Christopher Caldwell, “The Browning of America,” Claremont Review of Books 15, no. 1 (Winter 2014/15); Christopher Caldwell, “There Goes Robert E. Lee,” Claremont Review of Books21, no. 2 (Spring 2021).
    38. Kesler, “America’s Cold Civil War.”
    39. Brian T. Kennedy, “Facing Up to the China Treat,” Imprimis 49, no. 9 (September 2020).
    40. Ali Breland, “Charlie Kirk Doesn’t Really Seem to Mind White Nationalism,” Mother Jones, February 13, 2024; Robert Draper, “How Charlie Kirk Became the Youth Whisperer of the American Right,” New York Times, February 10, 2025; Charlie Kirk, Right-Wing Revolution: How to Beat the Woke and Save the West (Lewes, Delaware: Winning Team Publishing, 2024); Foster, Trump in the White House, 40.
    41. Mike Hixenbaugh and Allan Smith, “Charlie Kirk Once Pushed a ‘Secular Worldview.’ Now He’s Fighting to Make America Christian Again,” NBC News, June 12, 2024.
    42. Russell Vought, “Renewing American Purpose,” The American Mind, September 29, 2022; U.S. Constitution, Art. 1, Sect. 10, Cl. 3.
    43. Center for Renewing America Staff, “Primer: Palestinian Culture is Prohibitive for Assimilation,” Center for Renewing America, December 1, 2023; Miles Bryan, “The Christian Nationalist Legal Scholar Behind Trump’s Purges: Russell Vought and His Racial Philosophy Explained,” Vox, February 20, 2025.
    44. John Bellamy Foster, The Return of Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020), 263–64.
    45. Matt McManus, “Social Democracy and Social Conservatism Aren’t Compatible,” Jacobin, August 22, 2023.
    46. On Žižek, see Gabriel Rockhill, “Capitalism’s Court Jester: Slavoj Žižek,” Counterpunch, January 2, 2023.
    47. See Michael Anton, “America Against the Deep State,” Compact, September 16, 2022; Christopher Rufo, “What Conservatives See in Hungary,” Compact, July 28, 2023; Christopher Caldwell, “Germany Considers the Alternative,” Compact, February 10, 2025. In a curious statement, Žižek wrote: “I love Compact for a simple reason: because it’s precisely not compact—it is a battlefield of ideas in conflict with each other. Only in this way can something new emerge today.” In fact, Compact is a publication where the MAGA philosophy is hegemonic, and which includes some former leftists moving right.
    48. Christian Parenti, “The Left Case for Kash Patel,” Compact, December 31, 2024; Christian Parenti, “Why RFK Must Take on the CIA,” Compact, December 11, 2024; Christian Parenti, “Diversity is a Ruling-Class Ideology,” Compact, January 19, 2023; Christian Parenti, “Trump’s Real Crime is Opposing Empire,” Compact, April 7, 2023; Christian Parenti, “The Left-Wing Origins of the ‘Deep State’ Theory,” Compact, February 28, 2025. Aside from the contradictory nature of an argument that sees Trump as the enemy of the deep state, this concept, which played so centrally in the Trump I administration, has been largely dropped in MAGA ideology as self-defeating, while Trump II has focused on slashing the administrative state.
    49. Slavoj Žižek, “Wokeness Is Here to Stay,” Compact, February 22, 2023; Vincent Lloyd, “A Black Professor Trapped in an Anti-Racist Hell,” Compact, February 10, 2023; Melanie Zelle, “Žižek Has Lost the Plot,” The Phoenix (Swarthmore College), March 2, 2023.
    50. Geoff Shullenberger, “What BAP Learned from Feminism,” Compact, September 22, 2023; Geoff Schullenberger, “The Philosophy of Bronze Age Pervert,” Mother Maiden Matriarch with Louise Perry, Episode 35, October 15, 2023; Elena Louisa Lange and Geoff Shullenberger, COVID-19 and the Left: The Tyranny of Fear (London: Routledge, 2024).
    51. Allum Bokhari, “Who Is in Control?: The Need to Rein in Big Tech,” Imprimis 50, no. 1 (January 2021).
    52. Rosie Gray, “Breitbart’s Raheem Kassam Is Out: The Editor of Site’s London Bureau Was One of the Last Steve Bannon Allies Left within the Organization,” The Atlantic, May 23, 2018; “The National Pulse’s Kassam: How Did America Fall to Marxism?,” Grabien, June 6, 2020; Batya Ungar-Sargon, Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy (New York: Encounter Books, 2021).
    53. Amanda Crocker, “F*ck Big Book,” Canadian Dimension, February 20, 2025.
    54. Anton, After the Flight 93 Election; Charles R. Kesler, Crisis of the Two Constitutions: The Rise, Decline, and Recovery of America’s Greatness (New York: Encounter Books, 2021); Brian T. Kennedy, Communist China’s War Inside America (New York: Encounter Books, 2020); Kirk, Right Wing Revolution. Peter Collier, the founder of Encounter Books, was a former leftist and coeditor of Ramparts magazine along with David Horowitz, when they uncovered Encountermagazine’s CIA funding. He afterward moved to the far (together with Horowitz).
    55. Jesse Watters quoted in David Siroto, “How to Combat the Information War,” The Lever, February 24, 2025, levernews.com.
    56. Steve Bannon, “America’s Great Divide: Interview with Steve Bannon,” PBS Frontline, March 17, 2019; Michael Anton, “Why the Great Reset Is Not ‘Socialism,’” Compact, November 30, 2022; Foster, Trump in the White House, 32–33, 72; Steve Inskeep, “Steve Bannon Says MAGA Populism Will Win—as Trump Is Surrounded by Billionaires,” NPR, January 19, 2025; Jeremy Carl, “Beyond Elves and Hobbits,” The American Mind, July 22, 2022.
    57. Anton, “Why the Great Reset Is Not ‘Socialism.’”
    58. On the lower-middle class basis of the MAGA movement, see Foster, Trump in the White House, 19–21, 63; Les Leopold, “The Myth of MAGA’s Working Class Roots,” UnHerd, February 16, 2024; Dennis Gilbert, The American Class Structure in an Age of Growing Inequality (Los Angeles: Sage, 2011), 14, 243–47; David Doonan “Alienated, Not Apathetic: Why Workers Don’t Vote,” Green Party US, August 5, 2019, gp.org; Phil A. Neel, Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Class Conflict (London: Reaction Books, 2018), 36–37. There are of course no hard lines between the working class and the lower-middle class or petty bourgeoisie. Not income and property alone, but also urban/rural divisions and education play a role in the determination of classes in the political sense. The lower-middle class is far more significant politically than it is demographically because of its higher voter turnout when compared to the working class.
    59. Taylor Popielarz, “An Old Steel Town Highlights How West Virginia Went from Deeply Blue to Trump Country,” Spectrum News NY1, May 24, 2024.
    60. Anton, “Why the Great Reset Is Not ‘Socialism.’”
    61. Karl Dietrich Bracher, “Stages of Totalitarian ‘Integration’ (Gleichschaltung): The Consolidation of National Socialist Rule in 1933 and 1934,” in Republic to Reich, ed. Hajo Holborn (New York: Vintage, 1972), 124–28; Foster, Trump in the White House, 25–29.
    62. Gary Stout, “The Marriage of MAGA and Billionaires Is Already Rocky,” Observer-Reporter, January 25, 2025.
    63. Steve Inskeep, “Steve Bannon Says MAGA Populism Will Win—as Trump Is Surrounded by Billionaires”; Rana Foroohar, “MAGA vs. the Billionaires,” Financial Times, January 5, 2005; Nia-Malika Henderson, “Trump Inauguration: Old MAGA vs. New MAGA’s Cage Match Begins,” Bloomberg, January 20, 2025; Thomas D. Williams, “Steve Bannon: I Will Do Anything’ to Keep Elon Musk Out of the White House,” Breitbart, January 11, 2025.
    64. Kevin Porteus, “Putting Americans First,” The American Mind, January 8, 2025.
    65. Vivek Ramaswamy, Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam (New York: Center Street, 2023); Steve Rattner, “What Big-Business Leaders, Including Democrats, Say Privately About Trump,” New York Times, March 3, 2025.
    66. Peter Thiel interviewed by Peter Robinson, “Peter Thiel, Leader of the Rebel Alliance,” Uncommon Knowledge Podcast, Hoover Institution, November 9, 2022.
    67. Peter Thiel, “The Education of a Libertarian,” Cato Unbound, April 13, 2009.
    68. Max Chafkin interviewed by Belinda Luscombe, “Who’s Afraid of Peter Thiel?: A New Biography Suggests We All Should Be,” Time, September 21, 2021; Deborah Veneziale, “Trump’s Nationalist Conservative White Christian Agenda,” MR Online, February 28, 2025; Jessica Matthews, “How Peter Thiel’s Network of Right-Wing Techies Is Infiltrating Donald Trump’s White House,” Fortune, January 17, 2025; Brannen and Hartig, “Disrupting the White House.”
    69. Rob Larson, Mastering the Universe (Chicago: Haymarket, 2024), xi.
    70. Ed Kilgore, “”Trump is Dividing Evangelicals Now, Too,” New York Magazine, February 13, 2025; Sam R. Schmitt, “‘Give Cheerfully, Give Abundantly’: White American Prosperity Evangelism, Financial Obedience, and Religious Corruption in the Trump Era,” Activist History Review, May 11, 2018; James Bohland, “The Truth About MAGA: Plutocrats in Populist Clothing,” Fair Observer, October 29, 2024; Jessica Washington, “How Trump Twisted DEI to Only Benefit White Christians,” The Intercept, February 22, 2023.
    71. Wilson-Hartgrove, Reconstructing the Gospel, 33–35; Hamilton, “It’s Time to Break the Chains of Slaveholder Religion.”
    72. Jonathan Wilson-Hargrove, “In the Age of Trump, a Moment of Decision for Evangelicals,” Durham Herald Sun, April 26, 2018.
    73. Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, “Fear Is the Slaveholder Religion’s Tool of Control,” Sojourners, April 22, 2019.
    74. Sharon Parrott, “Well, That Was Quick: Trump’s Total Betrayal of Working People Is Now Complete,” Common Dreams, February 26, 2025.
    75. Karl Marx, Texts on Methods (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975), 195.

    2025, Volume 77, Number 01 (May 2025)

  • Western Marxism and Imperialism: A Dialogue

    Western Marxism and Imperialism: A Dialogue

    Western Marxism and Imperialism: A Dialogue” (coauthored with Gabriel Rockhill, Foster listed first), Monthly Review 76, no. 10 (March 2025), p[p 1-25.

    Western Marxism

    Gabriel Rockhill: I would like to begin this discussion by addressing, first and foremost, a misconception regarding Western Marxism, which I know is of mutual concern. Western Marxism is not equivalent to Marxism in the West. Instead, it is a particular version of Marxism that, for very material reasons, developed in the imperial core, where there is significant ideological pressure to conform to its dictates. As a dominant ideology regarding Marxism, it conditions the lives of those working in the imperial core and, by extension, capitalist states around the world, but it does not rigorously determine Marxist scholarship and organizing in these regions. The simplest proof thereof is the fact that we do not identify as Western Marxists even though we are Marxists working in the West, very much like the Italian philosopher Domenico Losurdo, whose Western Marxism was recently published by Monthly Review Press. What are your thoughts on the relationship between “Western Marxism” and “Marxism in the West”?

    John Bellamy Foster: I am not fond of the term “Western Marxism,” partly because it was adopted as a form of self-identification by thinkers rejecting not only Soviet Marxism, but also much of the classical Marxism of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, as well as the Marxism of the Global South. At the same time, very large parts of Marxism in the West, including the more materialist, political-economic, and historical analyses, have tended to be excluded from this kind of self-identified Western Marxism, which nonetheless posed as the arbiter of Marxist thought and has dominated Marxology. Usually, in addressing the question of Western Marxism theoretically, I indicate that what we are dealing with is a specific philosophical tradition. This began with Maurice Merleau-Ponty (not Georg Lukács, as commonly supposed), and was characterized by the abandonment of the concept of the dialectics of nature associated with Engels (but also with Marx). This meant that the notion of Western Marxism was systematically removed from an ontological materialism in Marxist terms, and gravitated toward idealism, which fit well with the retreat from the dialectics of nature.

    Moreover, while not part of the self-definition of Western Marxism, but rightly stressed by Losurdo, was a retreat from the critique of imperialism and the whole problem of revolutionary struggle in the third world or the Global South. In this respect, self-identified Western Marxists tended toward a Eurocentric perspective, often denying the significance of imperialism, and thus we can speak of a Western Eurocentric Marxism.

    So in dealing with these issues, I tend to stress these two aspects, that is (1) a Western Marxist philosophical tradition that rejected the dialectics of nature and ontological materialism, thereby separating itself off from both the classical Marxism of Marx and of Engels; and (2) a Western Eurocentric Marxism, that rejected the notion of the imperialist stage of capitalism (and monopoly capitalism) and downplayed the significance of revolutionary third world struggles and the new revolutionary ideas they generated. Marxism, in this narrow Western Marxist incarnation, thus became a mere academic field concerned with the circle of reification, or structures without a subject: the very negation of a philosophy of praxis.

    GR: Indeed, these are significant features of so-called Western Marxism, which I agree is an expression that can easily lend itself to misunderstandings. This is why, in my opinion, a dialectical approach is so important: it allows us to be attentive to the discrepancies between simplifying concepts and the complexities of material reality, while striving to account for the latter by nuancing and refining our conceptual categories and analysis as much as possible. In addition to the two features you highlighted, I would also add, at least for the theoretically oriented core of Western Marxism—such as in the work of the leading luminaries of the Frankfurt School and much of postwar French and British theoretical Marxism—the tendency to withdraw from political economy in favor of cultural analysis, as well as the critical dismissal of many, if not all, real-world socialist state-building projects (which, of course, overlaps with your second point).

    In trying to identify as precisely as possible Western Marxism’s contours and the driving forces behind it, I think it is important to situate its unique form of intellectual production within the overall relations of theoretical production, which themselves are nested within the social relations of production more generally. In other words, a Marxist analysis of Western Marxism requires, at some level, an engagement with the political economy of knowledge production, circulation, and consumption. This is what allows us to identify the socioeconomic forces at work behind this particular ideological orientation, while nonetheless recognizing, of course, the semi-autonomy of ideology.

    Drawing on the work of Marx and Engels, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin incisively diagnosed how the material existence of a “labor aristocracy” in the imperial core, meaning a privileged sector of the global working class, was the driving force behind the Western left’s tendency to align more on the interests of its bourgeoisie than on the side of the proletariat in the colonial and semicolonial periphery. It strikes me that if we want to go to the root of matters, then we need to apply this same basic framework to an understanding of Western Marxism’s fundamental revisions of Marxism and its tendency to ignore, downplay, or even denigrate and reject the revolutionary Marxism of the Global South, which has not simply interpreted the world, but has fundamentally altered it by breaking the chains of imperialism. Are Western Marxists not, in general, members of what we might call the intellectual labor aristocracy in the sense that they benefit from some of the best material conditions of theoretical production in the world, which is easy to see when compared, for instance, to the Marxism developed by Mao Zedong in the Chinese countryside, Ho Chi Minh in besieged Vietnam, Ernesto “Che” Guevara in the Sierra Maestra, or other such examples? Do they not benefit, like the labor aristocracy more generally, from the crumbs that fall from the table of the ruling class’s imperialist feast, and does this material reality not condition—without rigorously determining—their outlook?

    JBF: The point on the withdrawal from political economy that characterized much of Western Marxism is important. I started graduate studies at York University in Toronto in the mid-1970s. I previously had a background in economics, including both received neoclassical economics and Marxist political economy. These were the years in which the Union for Radical Political Economics in the United States had been leading a revolt in economics. But I was also interested in critical theory and Hegelian studies. In the philosophical domain I had studied, in addition to Marx, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, most of Herbert Marcuse’s work, István Mészáros’s Marx’s Theory of Alienation, and many other texts in critical philosophy. So, I entered graduate school with the anticipation of pursuing studies in both Marxian political economy and critical theory. I had visited York in 1975, but when I arrived there a year later to commence my graduate studies, I was surprised to discover that the Social Political Thought program at York (and, to some extent, the left in the Political Science department there) had gone through a fractious split dividing off those who were called the “political economists” from the “critical theorists.” This was at time in which some of the main Frankfurt School writings of thinkers such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer were first being made available in English translations. For example, Alfred Schmidt’s The Concept of Nature in Marx was translated into English in 1971, Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of the Enlightenment in 1972, and Adorno’s Negative Dialectics in 1973. This not only meant a kind of enhancement of discussions within Marxism but also constituted in many ways a break with classical Marxism, which was often criticized in such works. Thus, the first thing I heard when I entered a critical theory class was that the dialectics of nature was inadmissible. Marx’s early “anthropological” discussions on the interactions of humanity and nature were summarily dismissed. The only Hegel course being taught was on Alexandre Kojève’s Hegel, which was the rage both for the French left, and, paradoxically, for some conservative thinkers. I came to focus in these years more on Marxist political economy. Mészáros, who was a big draw for me in deciding to go to York, left the same year as I arrived, in his disgust with both sides of the split.

    In that first year at York, I was working with a liberal professor who was an authority on China. He indicated that he was confused about the development of Marxism, and he put in my hand Perry Anderson’s Considerations on Western Marxism and asked me to read it and explain to him what it was all about. I sat down and read Anderson’s book and was quite shocked at the time, since he used various techniques to emphasize a shift in Marxist theory toward philosophy and culture and away from political economy and history—which was not actually the case, but fit with the thinkers he chose to lionize. Thus, “Western Marxism,” in Anderson’s terms, mainly excluded political economists and historians. Along with that, it was seen as separated from “Classical Marxism,” including the main emphases of Marx and Engels themselves. Naturally, Anderson could not altogether deny the existence of Marxist political economists and historians in his discussion of “Western Marxism,” but their exclusion was quite evident.

    Setting aside the specific ways in which political and economic thinkers were dismissed, one can just look at the index to see the nature of Anderson’s demarcations. Philosophers and cultural theorists are prominent in his characterization of the Western Marxists. Thus, Louis Althusser is mentioned on thirty-four pages, Lukács on thirty-one, Jean-Paul Sartre on twenty-eight, Marcuse on twenty-five, Adorno on twenty-four, Galvano Della Volpe on nineteen, Lucio Colletti on eighteen, Horkheimer on twelve, Henri Lefebvre on twelve, Walter Benjamin on eleven, Lucien Goldmann on eight, Merleau-Ponty on three, Bertolt Brecht on two, and Fredric Jameson on one. However, when we turn to Marxist political economists and historians (including cultural historians) of roughly the same period, we get quite a different picture: Isaac Deutscher is mentioned on four pages, Paul M. Sweezy on four, Ernest Mandel on two, Paul A. Baran on one, Michał Kalecki on one, Nicos Poulantzas on one, Piero Sraffa on one, and Raymond Williams on one.

    Marxist scientists are not mentioned at all, as if they were all nonexistent. While some Marxists, who were central to the discussions in the West, were considered by Anderson to be more Eastern than Western since choosing to live on the other side of the so-called iron curtain, namely Brecht, who is referred to on two pages, and Ernst Bloch, whose name appears on none.

    To me, then, Anderson’s characterization of “Western Marxism” was peculiar from the start. Although Anderson, like any thinker, is entitled to emphasize those closest to his analysis, his approach to the classification of “Western Marxists,” emphasizing primarily those in the realms of philosophy and culture, broke decisively with classical Marxism, political economy, class struggle, and the critique of imperialism. “Western Marxism,” in Anderson’s characterization, was then a kind of negation of core aspects of classical Marxism together with Soviet Marxism. Anderson should not be entirely faulted for this. He was dealing with something real. But the reality here was the enormous distance from classical Marxism, even if major theoretical advances were made in some areas.

    There is no doubt, then, that Western Marxism, according to Anderson’s definition, or even in accordance with the more theoretical demarcation determined by the abandonment of the dialectics of nature, was stripped of much of the original Marxist critique, even if it explored more fully some issues such as the dialectics of reification. By excluding Marxist political economists, historians, and scientists, and thus materialism, Western Marxism in these terms also became removed from class and imperialism, and thus the very idea of struggle. The result was to create an exclusive club, or what Lukács critically referred to as a set of thinkers who sat in the “Grand Hotel Abyss,” increasingly removed from even the thought of revolutionary practice. I do not think it makes much sense to attach this directly to the labor aristocracy (though that analysis is itself important). Rather, these thinkers emerged as some of the most elite members of the bourgeois academy, hardly conceived as Marxists at all, much less workers, often occupying chairs and covered with honors. They certainly were better off on the whole than those who remained steadfastly within the classical Marxist tradition.

    GR: In his two books on the subject, Anderson provides a Western Marxist account of Western Marxism. This is, in my opinion, precisely what constitutes the strengths and the ineluctable weaknesses of his approach. On the one hand, he offers an insightful diagnosis of select aspects of its fundamental ideological orientation, including its withdrawal from practical politics in favor of theory and its embrace of political defeatism. On the other hand, he never goes to the heart of the matter by situating Western Marxism, as he understands it, within the global social relations of production (including theoretical production) and international class struggle. He ultimately provides us with an account that is not rigorously materialist because it does not seriously engage in the political economy of knowledge production, circulation, and consumption, nor does it place imperialism at the center of its analysis.

    From a Marxist vantage point, above and beyond its Western travesty, it is not ideas that drive history but material forces. Intellectual history, including the history of Marxism as a theoretical enterprise, therefore needs to be clearly situated in relationship to these forces, while of course recognizing that ideology functions semi-autonomously from the socioeconomic base. Marxist intellectuals in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century often worked outside of the academy, sometimes as political organizers or journalists, and they tended to be much more organically linked to practical class struggle in various ways. When the split occurred in the socialist movement during the First World War, some of these intellectuals turned their backs on the international proletariat and aligned themselves, wittingly or not, with the interests of their national bourgeoisies. Others, however, agreed with Lenin that the only war worth supporting was an international class war, clearly manifest in the Russian Revolution, not the interimperialist rivalry of the capitalist ruling class. This is why Losurdo uses this split to frame his book on Western Marxism, and it is one of the reasons that it is vastly superior to Anderson’s account: Western Marxism is the tradition that emerged out of the social chauvinism of the European Marxist tradition, which turned up its nose at the extra-European anticolonial revolutions. As Lenin decisively demonstrated, this was not simply because the Western Marxist intellectuals made theoretical errors. It was because there were material forces conditioning their ideological orientation: as members of the labor aristocracy in the capitalist core, they had a vested interest in preserving the imperialist world order.

    This original split grew into a great divide as the interimperialist rivalry of the First World War continued through the Second World War and eventually led to a global stalemate of sorts, opposing the victor of the imperialist camp (the United States) to the growing socialist camp led by the country that played a decisive role in defeating fascism and supporting many anticolonial revolutions around the world (the Soviet Union). In the context of the Cold War, Western Marxists were increasingly university professors in the West who tended to be skeptical of the practical developments of Marxism in the Global South and engaged in significant theoretical revisions of the classical Marxism of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. For very material reasons, their anticommunist revisionism tended to bolster their standing within Western institutions and the theory industry. This did not occur all at once, and objective social forces and subjective orientations did not march in lockstep, as there were a number of contradictions that characterized these developments.

    The leading figures of the Frankfurt School, namely Adorno and Horkheimer, were dogmatic anticommunist critics of actually existing socialism, and they were funded and supported by the capitalist ruling class and the leading imperialist states for proffering these views. In France, Sartre discovered his subjectivist version of Marxism during the Second World War, supported some aspects of the global communist movement in its wake, but also increasingly evinced skepticism as the Cold War dragged on. Althusser aligned himself with the postwar French Communist Party, but he also embraced the anti-dialectical theoretical fad of structuralism, and particularly Lacanianism.

    These contradictions have to be taken seriously, while also recognizing that the general arc of history has led, for instance, to a Sartrean Althusserian like Alain Badiou being the most famous Western Marxist in France today. Waving a theoretical red flag and claiming to be one of the only living communists, he maintains that “neither the socialist states nor the national liberation struggles nor, finally, the workers’ movement constitute historical referents anymore, which might be capable of guaranteeing the concrete universality of Marxism.” Thus, “Marxism today… is historically destroyed,” and all that remains is the new “idea of communism” that Badiou proffers from one of the leading academic institutions in the imperial West.1 If Marxism as a theory embodied in practice is dead, we are nonetheless encouraged to rejoice in its spiritual rebirth via a Marxian version of French theory. Brazenly merging his messianism with opportunistic self-promotion, Badiou’s implicit marketing slogan for his work reads like a Christological perversion of Marx’s famous statement on revolution: “Marxism is dead. Long live my idea of communism!” In his enthusiasm for theoretical resurrection, however, Badiou fails to mention that his purportedly new idea, in its practical essence, is in fact a very old one, which was already soundly criticized by Engels. It is the idea of utopian socialism.

    This is one of the reasons why a dialectical assessment of Western Marxism is so important. It allows us to engage in a variegated analysis of individual thinkers and movements, highlighting where and when they align on the dominant ideology of Western Marxism, but also how they might part ways with it in certain regards or at specific points in time (like Sartre and Althusser). Moreover, this dialectical approach needs to be thoroughly materialist by grounding itself in an analysis of the social relations of intellectual production. The most well-known contemporary Western Marxists are university professors in the imperial core, some of whom are global superstars in the imperial theory industry, and this has most definitely had an impact on the type of work they do.

    Moreover, the integration of Marxism into the bourgeois academy has subjected it to a number of significant changes. In the capitalist core, there are not academies of Marxism where one can be trained, and then educate others, in Marxism as a total science embracing the natural and social worlds. Instead, there is a system of intellectual Taylorism founded on the disciplinary division of labor between the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. This system, as part of the superstructure, is ultimately driven by capitalist interests. In this regard, Marxism has, to a large extent, been sidelined or rejected as a framework for the bourgeois natural sciences, and it has often been reduced to an—incorrect or insufficient—interpretive paradigm in much of the bourgeois social sciences. Many of the most well-known Western Marxists teach in the humanities, or humanities-adjacent social science departments, and they traffic in theoretical eclecticism, intentionally combining Marxist theory with bourgeois theoretical fads.

    Given this material context, it is not surprising that Western Marxists tend to reject materialist science, abandon rigorous engagements with political economy and materialist history, and indulge in theory and bourgeois cultural analysis for their own sake. The point of Marxist theory, for the crassest Western Marxists like Slavoj Žižek, is not to change the world that promotes them as leading luminaries, but rather to interpret it in such a way that their careers are advanced within the imperial academy and culture industries. The objective, material system of knowledge production conditions their subjective contributions to it. What they tend to lack is a self-critical, dialectical-materialist assessment of their own conditions of intellectual production, which is due, in part, to the way that they have been ideologically trained by the very system that promotes them. They are ideologues of imperial Marxism.

    JBF: What you present here is a classic historical-materialist critique focusing on the class foundations of ideology, in relation to the Western Marxist tradition. It was from Marx, as Karl Mannheim famously explained in his Ideology and Utopia, that the critique of ideology first arose. Nevertheless, Marxism, Mannheim charged, had failed at the self-critique necessary for a developed sociology of knowledge due to its inability to disassociate itself from its revolutionary proletarian standpoint (a failing he attributed to Lukács in particular). Yet, contrary to this, it is such self-critique, namely, radical changes in revolutionary theory and practice in response to changing material-class conditions, as Mészáros contended, that helps explain the continuing theoretical vitality of Marxian theory, in addition to the actual revolutions in the Global South.

    For Western Marxism as a distinct tradition, such self-critique was of course impossible, without giving the whole game away. It is no accident that the bitterest polemics of the Western Marxists were directed at Lukács when he extended his critique of irrationalism by implication to the Western left and its enthrallment with Martin Heidegger’s anti-humanism. In the Western Marxist philosophical tradition, all positive ontologies, even those of Marx and Hegel, were rejected, along with historical analysis. What remained was a circumscribed dialectic, reduced to a logic of signs and signifiers, divorced from materialist ontology, the class struggle, and even historical change. Humanism, even Marxist humanism, became the enemy. Having abandoned all real content, self-identified Western Marxists helped introduce the discursive turn. This led to its merging into post-Marxism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, posthumanism, postcolonialism, and postcapitalism. Here the “post” often meant a crawling backward, rather than a forward advance.

    We can sum up much of our discussion so far by saying that the Western Marxist tradition, although providing a wealth of critical insights, was caught up in a fourfold retreat: (1) the retreat from class; (2) the retreat from the critique of imperialism; (3) the retreat from nature/materialism/science; and (4) the retreat from reason. With no positive ontology remaining all that was retained, in the postmodernist and post-Marxist left, was the Word or a world of empty discourse, providing a basis for deconstructing reality but empty of any emancipatory project.

    The present task, then, is the recovery and reconstitution of historical materialism as a revolutionary theory and practice, in the context of the planetary crisis of our time. Max Weber famously said that historical materialism is not a car that can be driven anywhere. One might respond that Marxism, in its classical sense, is not meant to convey humanity everywhere. Rather the destination is a realm of substantive equality and ecological sustainability: complete socialism.

    GR: This fourfold retreat constitutes a withdrawal from material reality into the realm of discourse and ideas. It is therefore an ideological inversion of classical Marxism that turns the world upside down. The principal political consequence of such an orientation is an abandonment of the complicated and often contradictory task of building socialism in the real world. The Four Retreats, which eliminate what Lenin called the revolutionary core of Marxism, thereby feed into a withdrawal from the primary practical task of Marxism, namely, to change the world, not simply interpret it.

    In order to maintain a thoroughly dialectical analysis, it is important to insist on the fact that the Four Retreats and the overall abandonment of real-world socialism do not function as mechanical principles that reductively determine all aspects of every Western Marxist discourse. It is rather that they are features of a broad ideological field that could be mapped out in terms of a Venn diagram. Each specific discourse can occupy rather different positions within this ideological field. At one extreme, there are superstitious idealist discourses that have taken flight from all forms of materialist analysis in favor of various “post” orientations—post-Marxism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, and so on—that are profoundly regressive. At the other extreme, there are discourses that lay claim to being solidly Marxist and do engage, to some extent, with a rationalist version of class analysis. However, they misapprehend the fundamental class dynamics at work in imperialism, and they tend to reject real-world socialism as an anti-imperialist state-building project in favor of utopian, populist, or rebellious anarchist-inflected versions of socialism (Losurdo insightfully diagnosed all three of these tendencies in his book on Western Marxism).

    While the various “post” orientations are relatively easy to contend with from a rigorous materialist vantage point, Western Marxist analysis can be more difficult to contest because of their institutional power and their ostensible dedication to historical materialism. It is therefore crucially important, in taking up the task of revitalizing dialectical and historical materialism as a revolutionary theory and practice, to combat the self-declared Marxists who misrepresent imperialism and the world-historical struggle against it. Your recent essays on this topic in Monthly Review are essential reading because you go to the heart of one of the most important issues of contemporary class struggle in theory, namely how to understand imperialism.2 As you pursue your critical analysis, I hope that you will continue to shed light on one of the most perverse Western Marxist ideological inversions: the depiction of those countries involved in anti-imperialist struggle—from China to Russia, Iran, and beyond—as being fundamentally imperialist, mirroring the collective West in their deeds and ambitions, or even engaging in a more authoritarian and repressive form of imperialism than the bourgeois democracies of the West.

    JBF: The relation of Western Marxism to imperialism is enormously complex. Part of the problem is that what we need to analyze first is the Eurocentrism intrinsic to Western culture (including, of course, not just Europe, but settler colonial states: the United States and Canada in North America and Australia and New Zealand in Australasia, plus, in a somewhat different context, Israel). Martin Bernal argued in Black Athena that the Aryan myth with respect to ancient Greece that constituted the real beginning of Eurocentrism arose at the time of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt at the end of the eighteenth century—though traces of it certainly existed before that. Eurocentrism got a further boost with the rise of what Lenin called the imperialist stage of capitalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, which was symbolized by the mutual carving up of Africa by the great powers.

    Eurocentrism should not be seen as simply a type of ethnocentrism. Rather, Eurocentrism is the view, most acutely expressed by Weber in his introduction to his Sociology of Religions(published as the “author’s introduction” in the main English translation by Talcott Parsons of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism). There Weber took the position that European culture was the only universal culture. To be sure, there were other particular cultures around the world, in his view, some of them very advanced, but they all were forced to conform to the universal culture of Europe if they were to modernize, which meant developing in European rationalist and capitalist terms. Other countries, in this view, could develop, but only by embracing the universal culture, which was seen as the basis of modernity, a particular product of Europe. It is Eurocentrism in precisely this sense that Joseph Needham critically took on in his Within the Four Seas (1969) and that Samir Amin historically deconstructed in his Eurocentrism (1988).

    Nineteenth-century European thought had developed in a context of an emerging Eurocentrism in this sense. One can think of the colonialist and racist model of the world presented in Hegel’s Philosophy of History. Yet, the work of Marx and Engels was remarkably untouched by such Eurocentrism. Moreover, by the late 1850s, while still in their thirties, and from that point on, they strongly supported anticolonial struggles and revolutions in China, India, Algeria, and South Africa. They also expressed their deep admiration for the nations of the Iroquois Confederacy in North America. No other major nineteenth-century thinker, when compared to Marx, so strongly condemned what he called “the extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in mines, of the indigenous population of the Americas,” nor so strongly opposed capitalist slavery. Marx was the fiercest European opponent of the British and French Opium Wars on China and the famines that British imperial policy generated in India. He argued that the survival of the Russian commune or mir meant that the Russian Revolution could develop in other terms than in Europe, even possibly bypassing the path of capitalist development. Engels introduced the concept of the labor aristocracy (later developed further by Lenin) to explain the quiescence of British workers and the poor prospects for socialism there. The last paragraph, apart from a few letters, that Engels wrote, two months before his death in 1895, was a reference—in the closing lines of his edition of volume 3 of Marx’s Capital—to how finance capital (or the stock exchange) of the leading European powers had carved up Africa. This was the very reality that was to underlie Lenin’s conception of the imperialist stage of capitalism.

    But the position of Marxists in the next generation can hardly be said to have been closely attuned to the problems of imperialism or strongly sympathetic with colonized peoples. In the First World War, nearly all of the socialist parties in Europe supported their own imperial nation-states in what was primarily, as Lenin explained, a dispute over which nation(s) would exploit the colonies and semicolonies. Only Lenin’s Bolshevik Party and the small Spartacus League of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht fought against this.

    Following the First World War, Lenin’s analysis of imperialism in Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism was adopted and developed upon, with Lenin’s backing, in the Comintern. It was in the Comintern documents that we see the first appearance of what was to be called dependency theory, which was then developed further in Latin America and elsewhere and later expanded into unequal exchange analysis and world-system theory. This was a period of revolutions and decolonization throughout the Global South. In response to these developments Marxism was to split radically. Some Marxist theorists in the West took the position, most clearly enunciated by Sweezy in the 1960s, that revolution, and with it, the revolutionary proletariat and the proper focus of Marxist theory, had shifted to the third world or the Global South. In contrast, most of those who belonged to the self-defined Western Marxist tradition thought of Marxism as the peculiar property of the West, where it had originated, even though the main revolutionary struggles around the globe were taking place elsewhere. Naturally, this went hand in hand with a sidelining at best and at worst a complete rejection of the phenomenon of imperialism.

    This dynamic was interrupted by some of the main third world revolutions, which were impossible to ignore, such as the Algerian and Vietnamese Revolutions. Thus, a figure like Marcuse, who generally belonged to the Western Marxist philosophical tradition, was deeply affected by the Vietnam Revolution. But still, that was quite removed from his theoretical work. For the most part, the Western Marxist tradition in its more abstract academic form acted as if Europe remained the center of things, ignoring the deep effects of imperialism on the social structure of the West and having relatively little respect for Marxist theorists outside of Europe.

    John S. Saul, whose work focused on liberation struggles in Africa, drilled into me the notion of the “primary contradiction.” Lenin had seen the primary contradiction of monopoly capitalism to be imperialism, and in fact revolution after revolution in the Global South (and the counterrevolutionary responses in the Global North) confirmed that. But not only was that frequently ignored by the Western left, but we saw more and more desperate moves to deny that the North economically exploited the South and to reject the idea that this was at the heart of Lenin’s theory. This went along with frequent attacks on the theories of dependency, unequal exchange, and world-system theory. One thinks of the work of Bill Warren, who tried to argue that Marx saw imperialism as the “pioneer of capitalism,” that is, playing a progressive role (even if Lenin did not); and of Robert Brenner’s attempt in New Left Review to designate Sweezy, Andre Gunder Frank, and Immanuel Wallerstein as “neo-Smithian Marxists” on the basis that they, like Adam Smith (and supposedly in opposition to Marx), criticized the exploitation of the countries on the outskirts or periphery of capitalism. (Smith’s own criticisms were directed at mercantilism and in favor of free trade.)

    In the United States, Marxist political economy was very prominent in the 1960s. Most of those who came to Marxism at that time did not do so as a result of left parties, which were practically nonexistent, as was a radical labor movement. Hence, leftists were drawn to historical materialism in the 1960s and ’70s largely by the critique of imperialism and rage over the Vietnam War. In addition, Marxism in the United States was always deeply affected by the Black radical movement that had always centered on the relation of capitalism, imperialism, and race, playing a leadership role in the understanding of these relations.

    Nevertheless, in North America as well as Europe, the critique of imperialism waned in the late 1970s and ’80s due to a prevailing Eurocentrism. There was also the problem, in more opportunistic terms, of being shut out of the academy and of left movements if one put too much emphasis on imperialism. Obviously, the left made certain choices here. In the United States, all attempts to create a left-liberal or social-democratic movement come up against the fact that one must not actively oppose U.S. militarism or imperialism or support revolutionary movements abroad if one wants a foot in the door of the “democratic” political system. Even in the academy, there are unspoken controls in this respect.

    Today we see a growing movement among intellectuals who profess to be Marxists, who are openly rejecting the theory of imperialism in Lenin’s sense, and in the sense of Marxist theory over the last century or more. Various arguments are used, including narrowing imperialism simply to the conflicts between the great powers (that is, seeing it primarily in horizontal terms); replacing imperialism with an amorphous concept of globalization or transnationalization; denying that one country can exploit another; reducing imperialism to a moral category such that it is associated with authoritarian states and not “democracies”; or making the concept of imperialism so ubiquitous that it becomes useless, forgetting the fact that today’s G7 countries (with the addition of Canada) are exactly the same great imperial powers of monopoly capitalism that Lenin designated over a century ago. This represents a sea change that is dividing the left, in which the New Cold War against China—also a war against the Global South—is leading much of the left to side with the Western powers, viewed as somehow “democratically” superior and therefore less imperialist.

    All of this takes us back to the question of Eurocentrism. Postcolonial theorists lately have condemned Marxism as pro-imperialist or Eurocentric. Attempts to attribute such views to Marx, Engels, and Lenin are easy to refute on a factual basis. As Baruch Spinoza said, “ignorance is no argument.” But it becomes a deeper problem insofar as many postcolonial theorists take as their measure of Marxism the main Western Marxist cultural and philosophical conceptions from which postcolonial theory itself is in large part descended. There is no question that Western Marxist theorists, with their eyes only on Europe or the United States, were often prone to Eurocentrism. Moreover, Western Marxism projected a view of classical Marxism as economic determinism, and thus insensitive to national and cultural questions. All of this led to distortions of the historical and theoretical record.

    There is in fact a whole world of Marxist analysis, most of it arising out of material struggles. I have been reading an interesting book by Simin Fadaee titled Global Marxism: Decolonization and Revolutionary Politics, published by Manchester University Press in 2024. She argues that Marxism is global and provides separate chapters on Mao, Ho, Amilcar Cabral, Frantz Fanon, Che, and others. She writes at the end of the introduction to her book: “It is in fact Eurocentric to claim that Marxism is Eurocentric, because this entails dismissing the cornerstone of some of the most transformative movements and revolutionary projects of recent human history. Instead of making such sweeping claims, a more fruitful engagement with history would instead urge us to learn from the experience of the Global South with Marxism and ask what we can learn from Marxism’s global relevance.”

    GR: Western Marxism is an ideological product of imperialism, the principal function of which is to obscure or conceal imperialism, while misconstruing the struggle against it. I mean “imperialism” in the most expansive sense, as a process of establishing and enforcing systematic value transfers from certain regions of the world, namely the Global South, to others (the Global North), through the extraction of natural resources, the use of free or cheap labor, the creation of markets for offloading commodities, and more. This socioeconomic process has been the driving force behind the underdevelopment of the majority of the planet and the hyper-development of the imperial core, including its industries of knowledge production. Within the leading imperialist countries, this has given rise to an imperial superstructure, which is comprised of the politico-legal apparatus of the state and a material system of cultural production, circulation, and consumption that we can call, following Brecht, “the cultural apparatus.” The dominant industries of knowledge production in the imperial core are part of the cultural apparatus of the leading imperialist states.

    In claiming that Western Marxism is an ideological product of imperialism, I mean, then, that it is a specific version of Marxism that has arisen within the superstructure—and more specifically the cultural apparatus—of the foremost imperialist states. It is a particular form of Marxism that loses touch with Marxism’s universal ambition to scientifically elucidate and practically transform the capitalist world order. In my forthcoming book with Monthly Review Press, Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?, I situate this version of Marxism within the imperial superstructure and examine the political-economic forces that have been driving it. One remarkable feature is the extent to which the capitalist ruling class and imperialist states have directly funded and supported it.

    To take but one telling example, the Rockefellers—who are among the most notorious robber barons in the history of U.S. capitalism—invested the equivalent today of millions of dollars in an international “Marxism-Leninism Project.” Its principal objective was to promote Western Marxism as an ideological weapon of war against the form of Marxism invested in developing socialism in the real world as a bulwark against imperialism. Marcuse was at the center of this project, as was his close friend and academic supporter Philip Mosely, who was a high-level, long-term CIA advisor deeply involved in doctrinal warfare. In addition to being one of the most well-known Western Marxists, Marcuse had worked for years as a leading authority on communism for the U.S. State Department. This is significant because it brings into relief the extent to which elements of the bourgeois state have worked hand in glove with factions of the bourgeoisie to promote Western Marxism. They share the same fundamental goal, namely that of cultivating a version of Marxism that could be widely disseminated, because it ultimately serves their interests. There is no doubt that this is a class compromise, since the imperialists would much rather eliminate Marxism across the board. However, since they have been unable to do so, they have instead engaged in a soft-sell approach by endeavoring to promote Western Marxism as the only acceptable and reputable form of Marxism.

    The core issue, in many ways, is that Western Marxism does not grasp the primary contradiction of the capitalist world order, which is imperialism. It also does not scientifically understand the dialectical emergence of socialism within the imperialist world, and it does not recognize that socialist state-building projects across the Global South have been the primary impediment to imperialism. Its lack of understanding of imperialism and the fight against it means that it is ultimately devoid of scientific rigor. By obfuscating the principal contradiction and its material overcoming via real-world socialism, it ideologically inverts material reality in various and sundry ways. Although there are different degrees of Western Marxism, as we discussed above, it always has a dose of a-scientificity. Its rejection of materialist ontology is an extension of its overall retreat from materialist science. This hopefully goes without saying, but “science” is not understood here in terms of the positivist version often vilified by Western Marxists. Science, or what Marx and Engels called Wissenschaft, which has a much more expansive meaning in German, refers to the ongoing, fallibilistic process of collectively establishing the best possible explanatory framework by constantly testing it in material reality and modifying it based on practical experience.

    Coming full circle, then, we might say that Western Marxism would be better described as “imperial Marxism” in the precise sense that it is an ideological product of the imperial superstructure that ultimately obscures imperialism—in order to advance it—while combating actually existing socialism. The universal project of Marxism, by contrast, is resolutely anti-imperialist in the world in which we live and rigorously scientific: it recognizes the material reality that makes socialist state-building projects into the principal manner of fighting imperialism and moving toward socialism. This does not imply, of course, that universal Marxists uncritically embrace any project that waves the flag of socialism or claims to be anti-imperialist. In its dedication to scientific rigor, universal Marxism is invested in critical scrutiny and precise materialist evaluation.

    To be clear, this does not mean that all of the work done in the tradition of imperial Marxism is to be jettisoned. We should, instead, approach it dialectically, recognizing when it has made contributions, for instance, to the analysis of capitalism and Marxist theory in various ways. This makes perfect sense given the high level of material development of the imperial superstructure supporting it. However, it is of the utmost importance to point out that a Marxism that does not grasp the principal contradiction of the socioeconomic world order cannot be considered scientific or emancipatory. It is equally crucial to recognize why it is that this version has become the dominant form of Marxism within the imperial theory industry. Rather than combating imperialism and contributing to the practical struggle to build socialism, it is ideologically compatible with imperialist interests.

    JBF: From a Marxist perspective, to say that imperialism is the primary contradiction of capitalism in our time is to say that it is the reality of revolutionary struggles against imperialismthat constitutes the primary contradiction of capitalism. For more than a century, revolutions have been occurring in the Global South against imperialism, rooted in the actions of oppressed classes and carried out in the name of or inspired by Marxism. The struggles against the structure of monopoly capitalism by workers in the Global North can be seen as objectively part of this same dialectic.

    The Western Marxist tradition was defined initially by its extreme opposition to Soviet Marxism in its entirety, not simply in its Stalinist form. Western Marxists thus often supported the Cold War efforts of the West with its imperialistic structure. Ideologically, Western Marxists condemned Engels and all that came after him in the Second and Third Internationals, along with materialist dialectics. Revolutions against imperialism in the Global South were treated as largely irrelevant to Marxist theory and practice, which were seen as the sole product of the West. Although European Eurocommunist movements for a time presented more radical alternatives, these movements were largely disowned even at their height by the Western Marxist tradition, before they succumbed completely to social democratic politics.

    All that remained of classical Marxism, then, within Western Marxism, despite its grand intellectual claims, was a limited sphere of philosophical arabesques inspired by Marx’s critique of capital. Western Marxism was divorced from the working class in the West and globally from third world revolution, from the opposition to imperialism, and, ultimately, from reason. Here it is worth remembering that Marx and Engels pointedly gave to their early work The Holy Family the subtitle A Critique of Critical Critique. They strongly opposed an analysis that had descended into nothing but “critical criticism,” a pure “speculative idealism” that had nothing to do with “real humanism,” real history, and real materialism. Not only did such critical criticism, unmoored from materialism and praxis, fail to identify with the struggles of workers, it fell short of the struggle of the revolutionary bourgeoisie itself. It was to vanish altogether after the 1848 revolution.

    A Western left that disavows or closes its eyes to the main revolutionary struggles occurring in the world, and that ignores or downplays the role of imperialist exploitation, which for centuries now has been promoted by the West, has, as a result of such withdrawals from reality, severed all practical as opposed to merely philosophical relations to Marxism. In this sense, Western Marxism, as a particular paradigm, needs to give way to a more global dialectical perspective, represented by classical Marxism, and today by what we might call global Marxism or universal Marxism. The Four Retreats can be reversed as today’s global system of accumulation reunites the struggles of workers around the world on materialist grounds.

    Your references to Marcuse, though, highlight for me the issue that what we are engaged in here is a critique rather than an absolute condemnation of the post-Second World War Western Marxist tradition (excluding the question of postmodernist French Theory and the turn to irrationalism). Marcuse was definitely a Western Marxist, rather than simply a Marxist in the West. But he was far more radical than Adorno or Horkheimer, and in fact was very critical of both of them for their increasingly rightward course.

    I was heavily influenced by Marcuse when I was young, during my first two years of college. I always had deep reservations about One-Dimensional Man because of the dialectic of retreat built into it. Marcuse made it clear there and elsewhere that he had abandoned materialist dialectics. He also retreated from any belief in the working class as such. Nor was imperialism integral to his overall analysis. The Great Refusal, in the face of one-dimensional mass society, was too weak a conception to constitute critical reason and praxis, as in Marx. His statement in his conclusion to One-Dimensional Man, where he wrote that “on theoretical as well as empirical grounds the dialectical concept pronounces its own hopelessness,” went against the spirit of his earlier Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory. Marcuse was heavily influenced by Sigmund Freud and Martin Heidegger. His Eros and Civilization, though a major work of the Freudian left, represented a move toward psychologism that tended to deconstruct the subject in the name of greater concreteness while placing less emphasis on history, material conditions, and structure. From Heidegger, Marcuse took a view of technology, that, while critical, was largely divorced from the question of social relations, embodying a negative, anti-Enlightenment view that was discordant with much of the rest of his thought. It was these influences from Freud and Heidegger, the latter going back to his earliest years, plus the lack of genuine historical analysis, that resulted in a view of the 1950s United States as something more solid and set in place than it really was, which gave rise to a notion of crisis-free capitalism and the hopeless dialectic of One-Dimensional Man.

    Still, Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution, published in 1941 (thus preceding the Cold War Era), was an entirely different and more revolutionary kind of work. I can still remember my excitement when I encountered it in my late teens. This led me and many others to an intensive study of Hegel’s Phenomenology. Then, in the midst of the economic and energy crises of 1973–1975, he wrote his Counterrevolution and Revolt. His chapter “The Left Under Counterrevolution” was clear on imperialism, even if a larger theoretical integration of this was missing in his analysis overall. One cannot easily forget the opening lines where he stated: “Wholesale massacres in Indochina, Indonesia, the Congo, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Sudan are unleashed against everything which is called ‘communist’ or which is in revolt against governments subservient to the imperialist countries.” In his chapter on “Nature and Revolution,” he sought to bring an environmental Marxist perspective to bear on an emerging ecological movement, going so far as to break at one point with the Western Marxist proscription against dialectical naturalism. The chapter on “Art and Revolution” that was to point to his work The Aesthetic Dimension was his last attempt at a critique of capitalism.

    But there was another aspect to Marcuse’s biography that seems incongruous with this. How do we explain his direct involvement for a period in the anticommunist, Marxist-Leninist project to which you refer? It was not until later, in graduate school, that I read his 1950s book Soviet Marxism, which seemed to be a mixture of realism and propaganda, unfortunately with more of the latter than the former. It was very much a work that represented an iron curtain divide within Marxism itself. Marcuse, like other leading Marxist thinkers who joined the military in the Anti-Nazi War, including Sweezy and Franz Neumann, was assigned to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA. Marcuse’s research at the OSS, as revealed by his reports, was directed at providing an analysis of the German Reich under Adolf Hitler. However, he continued to work for the intelligence services into the early years of the Cold War, and in 1949 wrote a report on “The Potentials of World Communism” for the Office of Intelligence Research, which was to be the basis of his Soviet Marxism. This puts an entirely different color on things.

    However, there was an enduring radical quality to Marcuse’s work within the self-imposed limits of Western Marxism. He remained committed to the critique of capitalism and to revolutionary liberation, and the great works that he is best known for from Eros and Civilization (1952) to One-Dimensional Man (1964) are perhaps less important than his more scrambled attempts to support the radical movements of the 1960s. This is something for which he was hardly prepared, as it meant turning his own assessment of the one-dimensionality of mass society on its head. Nevertheless, from An Essay on Liberation (1969) to perhaps The Aesthetic Dimension (1978) we see a Marcuse, no longer the supreme lecturer, but the intellectual in the trenches who was beloved in the student movement in the 1960s and ’70s.

    Marcuse thus represents perhaps the full tragedy of Western Marxism, or at least the Frankfurt School part of it. Although Adorno and Horkheimer became increasingly regressive in their endless pursuit of reifications, Marcuse retained a radical perspective. His final position combined a pessimism of the intellect with an aestheticism of the will. Art became the ultimate basis of resistance, and while he tended to see this in a rather elitist way, it has the potential of being incorporated into a genuinely materialist perspective.

    This suggests that critique, incorporating the positive element rather than absolute condemnation, is the appropriate approach to what can be genuinely referred to as Western Marxism, in those cases where, as in Marcuse, one finds a fourfold retreat but not a complete capitulation. The problem with the Western Marxist tradition, in the sense in which Anderson addressed it and in the way that Losurdo criticized it, is that it represented a dialectic of defeat, even during the decades when revolution was expanding throughout the globe.

    There has always been a Marxism, from Marx and Engels’s day to the present, in which there can be no room for a fundamental retreat or lasting compromise with the system, and which is unreservedly anticapitalist and anti-imperialist, because it finds its basis in genuine revolutionary struggles around the globe. In any critique of Western Marxism, the simultaneous existence of a more global or universal Marxism, even in the West, must eventually be taken into account. But this is something that we cannot address here. Still, it is important to recognize that the reason a critique of Western Eurocentric Marxism is so important today is because of the current New Cold War division between a Eurocentric left and global Marxism. The Eurocentric left downplays, denies, or—in extreme cases—even embraces the core imperialist powers. Global Marxism is no less determined in its total opposition. Western Eurocentric Marxism is on its last leg, undermined, as Jameson pointed out, by globalization. Seeing itself as the authentic basis of all Marxology, Western Marxism is being replaced by universal or global Marxism, in the tradition of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and the main theorists of monopoly capitalism and imperialism. Here the analysis is not confined to that small corner of the world in the northwest of Europe in which industrial capitalism and colonialism/imperialism first emerged, but finds its material basis in the struggles of the world proletariat.

    GR: I could not agree more regarding the importance of eschewing non-dialectical approaches to Western Marxism, which foster either uncritical celebration or complete condemnation. Dialectical critique avoids this reductive binary by elucidating Western Marxism’s contributions, as well as its limitations, while providing a materialist account of both. The overall objective of such a critique is to advance the positive project of universal, international Marxism, which can be brought more clearly into relief and further developed by overcoming the perversions of Marxism that are, at a certain level, a byproduct of the history of imperialism. The principal reason for identifying the problems with this tradition, then, is not at all to indulge in thoroughgoing denunciation or theoretical grandstanding. It is to learn from its limitations and surpass them by moving to a higher level of scientific elucidation and practical relevance. This is precisely what Marx and Engels did in their criticisms of dialectical philosophy, bourgeois political economy, and utopian socialism (to cite the three components of Marxism astutely diagnosed by Lenin). Dialectical critique engages in a theoretical and practical Aufhebung, in the sense of an overcoming that integrates any useful elements from that which is overcome.

    The dialectical assessment of Western Marxism includes, as mentioned above, an analysis of the breadth of its ideological field and the variations across it, which can be mapped out in various ways, such as in terms of a Venn diagram of the Four Retreats. This charting of the objective ideological field needs to be combined with a nuanced account of the subjective positions within it and their variations over time. It is precisely the joint analysis of the complexities of the ideological field and the specificities of subjective positions within it that provides us with a more thorough and refined account of Western Marxism as an ideology that differentially manifests itself in subjective projects with their own specific morphologies. This is the mirror opposite of a reductivist approach that attempts to boil the totality of subject positions down to a single, monolithic ideology that mechanically determines them.

    The case of Marcuse is highly revealing in this regard, and much time could be spent detailing the subjective changes in his work and situating them within the broader ideological field of Western Marxism. Highlighting only his most extreme positions, we might say that he went from being a major anticommunist State Department operative during the early Cold War to a radical theorist who expressed his strong support for certain aspects of the student, antiwar, feminist, antiracist, and ecological movements. His work for the State Department and the OSS was not as benign as he would later claim, and the archival record clearly demonstrates that he collaborated closely with the CIA for years and was even involved in the preparation of at least two National Intelligence Estimates (the highest form of intelligence in the world’s leading empire). Moreover, this work seamlessly segued with the role he played at the center of ideological warfare projects run by the capitalist ruling class against Soviet—and more generally Eastern—Marxism. Nevertheless, in the late 1960s and early ’70s, he was radicalized by the New Left movements of the time, and this brought him into sharp conflict with imperial Marxists of the Frankfurt School like Adorno. Although the man promoted by the bourgeois press as the godfather of the New Left never seriously broke with anticommunism or Western Marxism, his extensive FBI file demonstrates that certain elements of the bourgeois state considered him a potential threat.

    Another aspect of Marcuse’s work that is worth mentioning is its eclecticism and, more specifically, his attempt—like so many other Western Marxists—to merge Marxism with non-Marxist discourses, often those that are subjectivist, such as phenomenology and existentialism, as well as psychoanalysis. One of the guiding assumptions of certain Western Marxists is that classical Marxism overemphasizes objective social forces at the expense of subjective experience, and that more subjectivist discourses are therefore necessary as a corrective to it. This is one of the principal reasons why Freudo-Marxism has been so integral to Western Marxism, a tendency that has persisted in the Lacanian-Althusserianism of contemporary figures like Badiou and Žižek. It would take a long time to unpack the multiple problems with this orientation. This would need to begin with the mischaracterization of the dialectical account of subjectivity and objectivity within classical Marxism as not being sufficiently attentive to subjective experience or psychology, which clearly misrepresents its account of ideology. It would also have to include a critical assessment of what it means to advance the foundational claim that dialectical and historical materialism needs to be merged with liberal ideology (the guiding framework of Freudianism), rather than, for instance, engaging in a dialectical critique of psychoanalysis from a Marxist vantage point (a project to which figures like Lev Vygotsky and Valentin Voloshinov contributed).

    There is not space here to analyze this aspect of the persistence of liberal ideology within Western Marxism, but it is important to note that the subjectivism of much of this tradition is often bound up with its tendency to embrace culturalism and psychologism over and against class analysis. Todd Cronan has argued, in this regard, that Adorno and Horkheimer posited superstructural elements like racial, ethnic, or religious identities as primary, allowing the economic infrastructure to recede into the background, while tending to reinterpret class as primarily a question of power. Adorno, not unlike Marcuse, also openly engaged in psychologism by endeavoring, for instance, to interpret fascism—as well as communism!—in terms of the so-called authoritarian personality. Culturalism, as Amin explained, is one of the longest-standing enemies of Marxism, and the same is true of psychologism and other subjectivist modalities of explanation.

    What we have here, in a nutshell, is an inversion of the Marxist understanding of the relationship between the superstructure and the infrastructure. Much of Western Marxism engages in elevating the cultural and the subjective over the objective forces of the socioeconomic base. This is one of the reasons why I find the Western Marxist approach to art and culture so fundamentally problematic. The idea that art—and much more specifically the bourgeois concept and practice of art, since that is the primary focal point of Western Marxists—could be a major site of resistance tends to bracket the material social relations of cultural production, or only really consider them critically in the case of mass art and entertainment, not high art and theory. This approach also traffics in the bourgeois ideology of art by treating the latter as if it operated in a unique sphere of production that escapes, or at least aspires to escape, the general social relations of production in society.

    It is true that Adorno wrote on the impacts of industrialization on popular forms of culture, and some of his most insightful work analyzes the effects of recording technologies on music. However, his account of the autonomy of art, which is the direct inspiration for Marcuse’s The Aesthetic Dimension, is imbued with a significant dose of cultural commodity fetishism. Thus, instead of providing a materialist analysis of the socioeconomic forces at work in the production, distribution, and consumption of bourgeois art, Marcuse celebrates isolated works of art as being magical repositories for resistance, without ever clearly elucidating how they affect meaningful social change. Moreover, Western Marxists like Marcuse and Adorno tend to ignore or denigrate socialist art (unless it has been integrated into the bourgeois canon). Instead of identifying, as Brecht and others have done, how art can provide an adequate picture of reality and tools for collectively transforming it, the bourgeois art theorists of the Western Marxist persuasion misdirect people’s political energies into a superstitious belief in the magical powers of bourgeois art. Since they have never been able to explain how reading Charles Baudelaire or listening to atonal music could lead to a revolutionary social transformation, it should be clear that their defeatist aestheticism is a class project that ultimately preserves the status quo. It consolidates the bourgeois cultural order and shores up the petty-bourgeois class stratum as the theoretical guardian of bourgeois ideology, while generally denigrating or ignoring the popular arts of the working class and socialist efforts to democratize culture. If the only political solution these Western intellectuals have to offer is to recruit people into investing in high theoretical interpretations of bourgeois art, then this amounts, practically speaking, to further developing the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia as the custodian of bourgeois culture. Such a class project does not serve the interests of the working and oppressed masses of the world. Instead, it encourages people to withdraw from class struggle and invest in bourgeois art—meaning bourgeois ideology—as the true site of resistance. This defeatist aestheticism thereby complements Western Marxism’s political defeatism, and both contribute to an abandonment of class struggle from below in favor of an ideological belief in the magical powers of high theory and bourgeois culture (which ultimately contribute to class struggle from above).

    I would like to conclude by clarifying the primary reason why this dialectical critique of imperial Marxism is important. Theory only really becomes a force in the world when it ceases to exist in the restricted domain of the intelligentsia and comes to grip the masses. The main reason why an ideological struggle against Western Marxism is necessary is because of its broader effects on the disorientation of the left. With the sharpening of global contradictions, the New Cold War, and the rise of fascism across the imperialist world, we have a situation in the imperial core and some of the capitalist periphery where the left, including elements of the self-declared socialist or communist left, are explicitly or implicitly pro-imperialist and anticommunist (some of which is due to the influence of Western Marxism). If overcoming the Four Retreats and rejuvenating anti-imperialist Marxism is one of the most pressing tasks of class struggle in theory today, this is not simply due to the need for theoretical correction. It is rather that, if we want to successfully confront the most urgent problems of our day—including ecocide, the risks of nuclear apocalypse, incessant capitalist social murder, rising fascism, and so on—we need to rebuild and rejuvenate a powerful anti-imperialist, socialist front of struggle grounded in the tradition of dialectical and historical materialism. This is the ultimate goal of the dialectical critique of Western Marxism.

    JBF: What strikes me in our discussion of Marcuse and the other Western Marxists is the degree to which they succumbed to the ideology of the system, particularly the view of the United States as an all-encompassing mass society and the rationalist result of the Enlightenment. Here they lost sight of class analysis, while adopting culturalist and idealist frames and forms of psychologism removed from materialism (including cultural materialism) that would have undermined their analysis. This was an approach that had more in common with Weber—with his culturalism, neo-Kantian idealism, and conception of capitalism as simply the triumph of rationalistic technocratic society—than with Marx. Marcuse was caught in Weber’s iron cage, as thoroughly as Weber himself. Heidegger’s one-dimensional critique of technology so impressed Marcuse that he made Weber’s iron cage into his own. Western Marxism, and particularly the Frankfurt School, in this sense was a product of its time, of what C. Wright Mills, sardonically called the “American Celebration.” French theory just took this a step further, conceding entirely to U.S. ideology in a process of deconstruction that resembled nothing so much as postmodern marketing.

    For Western Marxism, including the major representatives of the Frankfurt School, the extent of the retreat is alarming. Real choices were made to join the West in its struggle, and to attack Marxists in the East. Marcuse’s Great Refusal did not keep him from working for U.S. national intelligence during the early Cold War. Nor did Adorno’s version of Western Marxism prevent him, along with Horkheimer, from accepting the backing of the U.S. authorities in occupied West Germany after the Second World War or viciously attacking Lukács in a U.S. Army-created and CIA-funded publication (Die Monat), while seated on the veranda of the “Grand Hotel Abyss.” It is significant that the most acid condemnations of Lukács’s writings to the present day, such as those of Jameson and Enzo Traverso, have been directed at the epilogue to The Destruction of Reason. There Lukács, writing at the time of the Korean War, pointed out that the United States was the heir to the whole tradition of irrationalism, with the implication that the Western left in continuing to embrace Friedrich Nietzsche, along with Heidegger and Carl Schmitt—both of whom were major Nazi ideologues—was seeding irrationalism within itself; something that Lukács seemed to be aware of before anyone else.

    The main part of the Western Left thus was caught up in a fourfold retreat that at times looked like a total rout, evincing a sense of defeat and panic, in which they tended to reproduce the present order again and again as insurmountable. In all the analysis of the contradictions of the capitalist system, its real fragility and horrors were seldom highlighted, and the death inflicted on millions by the West was essentially ignored. But not all Marxists, it should be emphasized, fell into this same trap. Here I would like to end by quoting a letter from Baran, who was a lifelong friend of Marcuse, going back to when they both were at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt (where Baran was an economic researcher for Friedrich Pollock). Baran went on, quite unlike the main representatives of what has been identified as the Western Marxist tradition, to write The Political Economy of Growth in 1957, the greatest Marxist work on imperialism in his day, and to write Monopoly Capital with Sweezy. On October 10, 1963, Baran wrote, in a letter to Sweezy, what I think sums up a great deal of what we have been saying:

    What is at the present time at issue and indeed most urgently so is the question whether the Marxian dialectic has broken down, i.e. whether it is possible for Scheisse[shit] to accumulate, to coagulate, to cover all of society (and a goodly part of the related world) without producing the dialectical counter-force which would break through it and blow it into the air. Hic Rhodus, hic salta! If the answer is affirmative then Marxism in it its traditional form has become superannuated. It has predicted the misery, it has explained full well the causes of it becoming as comprehensive as it is; it was in error, however, in its central thesis that the misery generates itself the forces of its abolition.

    I have just finished reading Marcuse’s new book (MS) [One-Dimensional Man], which in a laborious kind of way advances the very position which is called the Great Refusal or the Absolute Negation. Everything is Dreck [muck]: monopoly capitalism and the Soviet Union, capitalism and socialism as we know it; the negative part of the Marx story has come True—its positive part remained a figment of the imagination. We are back at the state of the Utopians pure and simple; a better world there should be but there ain’t no social force in sight to bring it about. Not only is Socialism no answer, but there isn’t anyone to give that answer anyway. From the Great Refusal and the Absolute Negation to the Great Withdrawal and the Absolute Betrayal is only a very short step. I have a very strong feeling that this is at the moment in the center of the intellectuals’ thought (and sentiment)—not only here but also in Latin America and elsewhere, and that it would be very much our commitment sich damit Auseinander zu setzen [to confront and come to terms with this sentiment]. There is hardly anyone else around. The official left simply yells [you have been victimized] a la Political Affairs, others are bewildered.

    What is required is a cool analysis of the whole situation, the restoration of a historical perspective, a reminder of the relevant time dimensions, and much more. If we could do a good job on that [in Monopoly Capital]…we would make a major contribution and perform with regard to many a truly “liberating” act.3

    What Baran was talking about here was what he elsewhere called “the confrontation of reality with reason.” This required the reestablishment of a historical approach, encompassing a longer view, while reconnecting Marxian dialectics to materialism. This would clarify the necessity and therefore possibility of a “dialectical counterforce,” in the present as history, envisioning paths toward liberation throughout the world. This view, which is the outlook of an unqualified, universal, unhyphenated Marxism, remains the task of our time—not just in theory, but conceived as a philosophy of praxis. It requires a break with Western Marxism, which led to a historical cul-de-sac.

    The red mole is reemerging once again in our times, but in new and more global ways, no longer confined to the West.

    Notes

    1. Alain Badiou, Can Politics Be Thought?, trans. Bruno Bosteels (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2018), 57, 60.
    2. See John Bellamy Foster, “The New Denial of Imperialism on the Left,” Monthly Review 76, no. 6 (November 2024), as well as John Bellamy Foster, “The New Irrationalism,” Monthly Review 76, no. 9 (February 2023).
    3. Paul A. Baran to Paul M. Sweezy, October 10, 1963, in Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, The Age of Monopoly Capital: Selected Correspondence, 1949–1964, eds. Nicholas Baran and John Bellamy Foster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017), 429–30.

    2025, Volume 76, Number 10 (March 2025)

  • Imperiralism and White Settler Colonialism in Marxist Theory

    By National Trails Office (US National Park Service) - NPGallery, Public Domain, Link.
    By National Trails Office (US National Park Service) – NPGallery, Public Domain, Link.

    The concept of settler colonialism has always been a key element in the Marxist theory of imperialism, the meaning of which has gradually evolved over a century and a half. Today the reemergence of powerful Indigenous movements in the struggles over cultural survival, the earth, sovereignty, and recognition, plus the resistance to the genocide inflicted by the Israeli state on the Palestinian people in the occupied territories, have brought the notion of settler colonialism to the fore of the global debate. In these circumstances, a recovery and reconstruction of the Marxist understanding of the relation between imperialism and settler colonialism is a crucial step in aiding Indigenous movements and the world revolt against imperialism.

    Such a recovery and reconstruction of Marxist analyses in this area is all the more important since a new paradigm of settler colonial studies, pioneered in Australia by such distinguished intellectual figures as Patrick Wolfe and Lorenzo Veracini, has emerged over the last quarter-century. This now constitutes a distinct field globally—one that, in its current dominant form in the academy, is focused on a pure “logic of elimination.” In this way, settler colonialism as an analytical category based on autonomous collectives of settlers is divorced from colonialism more generally, and from imperialism, exploitation, and class.1 Settler colonialism, in this sense, is often said to be an overriding planetary force in and of itself. In Veracini’s words, “It was a settler colonial power that became a global hegemon.… The many American occupations” around the world are “settler colonial” occupations. We are now told that not just the “pure” or ideal-typical settler colonies of the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel can be seen as such, as originally conceived by Wolfe, but also the “whole of Africa,” plus much of Asia and Latin America, have been “shaped” to a considerable extent by the “logic of elimination,” as opposed to exploitation. Rather than seeing settler colonialism as an integral part of the development of the imperialist world system, it has become, in some accounts, its own complete explanation.2

    It would be wrong to deny the importance of the work of figures like Wolfe and Veracini, and the new settler colonial paradigm. As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz states in Not “A Nation of Immigrants”: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion, Wolfe carried out “groundbreaking research” demonstrating that “settler colonialism was a structure not an event.” He did a great service in bringing the notion of settler colonialism and the entire Indigenous struggle into the center of things. Nevertheless, in the case of the United States, she adds, in a corrective to Wolfe’s account, the founders were not simply settler colonists, they were “imperialists who visualized the conquest of the continent and gaining access to the Pacific and China.” The projection of U.S. imperialist expansion from the first had no territorial boundaries and was geared to unlimited empire. Settler colonialism reinforced, rather than defined, this global imperialist trajectory, which had roots in capitalism itself. This suggests that there is a historical-materialist approach to settler colonialism that sees it as dialectically connected to capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism, rather than as an isolated category.3

    Marx and Settler Colonialism

    It is now widely recognized in the research on settler colonialism that Karl Marx was the foundational thinker in this area in his discussion of “so-called primitive accumulation”; his references to colonialism proper, or settler colonialism; and his analysis of Edward Gibbon Wakefield and the “The Modern Theory of Colonization,” with which he ended the first volume of Capital.4 However, such recognition of Marx’s numerous references to settler colonialism seldom goes on to uncover the full depth of his analysis in this regard.

    As an authority on ancient Greek philosophy who wrote his dissertation on the ancient materialist philosopher Epicurus, Marx was very familiar with the ancient Greek cleruchy, or settler colony established as an extension of its founding city state. In many ways, the most notable Athenian cleruchy was the island/polis of Samos, the birthplace of Epicurus, whose parents were cleruchs or settler colonialists. The cleruchy in Samos was established in 365 BCE, when the Athenians forcibly removed the inhabitants of the island and replaced them with Athenian citizens drawn from the indigent population of an overcrowded Athens, turning Samos not only into a settler colony, but also a garrison state within the Athenian Empire. The dispute in the Greek world over the cleruchy in Samos was subsequently at the center of two major wars fought by Athens, resulting in the final downfall of Athens as a major power with its defeat by Macedonia in 322 BCE. This led to the dismantling of the cleruchy in Samos (in compliance with a decree issued by Alexander the Great shortly before his death), the removal of the Athenian settlers, and the return of the original population to the island.5

    For Marx and other classically educated thinkers in the nineteenth century, the Athenian cleruchy in Samos represented a pure model of colonialism. Although settler colonialism was to take new and more vicious forms under capitalism, reinforced by religion and racism, the underlying phenomenon was thus well known in antiquity and familiar to nineteenth-century scholars. In his analysis of colonialism in Capital and elsewhere, Marx referred to what is now called “settler colonialism” as “colonialism properly so-called”—a usage that was later adopted by Frederick Engels and V. I. Lenin.6 The concept of colonialism proper clearly reflected the classical viewpoint centered on Greek antiquity. Moreover, any use of “settler” to modify “colonialism” would have been regarded as redundant in the nineteenth century, as the etymological root of “colonialism,” derived from Latin and the Romance languages, was colonus/colona, signifying “farmer” or “settler.”7 Hence, the original meaning of the word colonialism was literally settlerism. But by the twentieth century, the meaning of colonialism had so broadened that it was no longer associated with its classical historical origins or its linguistic roots, making the use of the term “settler colonialism” more acceptable.

    Colonialism proper, in Marx’s conception, took two forms, both having as their precondition a logic of extermination, in the nineteenth century sense of exterminate, meaning both forcible eradication and expulsion.8 The “first type” was represented by “the United States, Australia, etc.”, associated with a form of production based on “the mass of the farming colonists” who set out “to produce their own livelihood,” and whose mode of production was thus not immediately capitalist in character. The “second type” consisted of “plantations—where commercial speculations figure from the start and production is intended for the world market.” This type was part of “the capitalist mode of production, although only in the formal sense, since the slavery of Negroes [on New World plantations] precludes free wage labor, which is the basis of capitalist production. But the business in which slaves are used is conducted by capitalists.”9

    Settler colonialism of the first type, that of farming colonists, was dominant in the northern United States, while the second type of settler colony, founded on slave plantations, dominated the U.S. South. The second type, or what Marx also referred to as a “second colonialism,” was rooted in slave labor and plantation economies that were run by capitalists who were also large landowners, with capitalist relations “grafted on” slavery. The settler colonies in the antebellum South, while based in the main on plantation slavery, also included fairly large numbers of subsistence “farming colonists,” or poor whites who existed on a marginal, subsistence basis, since slave plantation owners had seized the most fertile land.10

    In this way, Marx’s approach to settler colonialism encompassed not only the exterminist logic directed at Indigenous nations, but also the dual forms of production (free farmers and plantation slavery) that emerged within the resulting settler colonial structure. Nevertheless, the overall dialectic of settler colonialism had as its precondition the extermination (including removal) of Indigenous populations. As Marx expressed it in the first volume of Capital:

    The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation.…

    The treatment of the indigenous population was, of course, at its most frightful in plantation-colonies set up exclusively for the export trade, such as the West Indies, and in rich and well-populated countries, such as Mexico and India, that were given over to plunder. But even in the colonies properly so called, the Christian character of primitive accumulation was not belied. In 1703 those sober exponents of Protestantism, the Puritans of New England, by decrees of their assembly set a premium of £40 on every Indian scalp and every captured redskin; in 1720, a premium of £100 was set on every scalp; in 1744, after Massachusetts Bay had proclaimed a certain tribe as rebels, the following prices were laid down: for a male scalp of 12 years and upwards, £100 in new currency, for a male prisoner £105, for women and children prisoners £50, for the scalps of women and children £50.11

    The real significance of this barbaric price structure, as Marx intimated here, was one of extermination, since male prisoners were valued only marginally more than their scalps, which were tokens of their death; while the lives of women and children simply equaled the value of their scalps.

    Marx’s primary source on colonization and the treatment of the Indigenous throughout the world, at the time he wrote Capital, was William Howitt’s Colonization and Christianity: A Popular History of the Treatment of the Natives by the Europeans in All Their Colonies (1838). Howitt’s theme with respect to the British colonies in North America was the extermination (extinction and expulsion) of the Indigenous population. Writing at the time of the Trail of Tears in the United States, he described “the exterminating campaigns of General Jackson.” In this respect, he quoted Andrew Jackson’s declaration on March 27, 1814, that he was “determined to exterminate them” all. The Native American peoples, Howitt observed, “were driven into waste [uncultivatable hinterlands], or to annihilation.”12 Writing of the conditions facing the Indigenous nations of the Southeast faced with the advance of white settlers, he explained,

    Nothing will be able to prevent the final expatriation of these southern tribes: they must pass the Mississippi till the white population is swelled sufficiently to require them to cross the Missouri; there will then remain but two barriers between them and annihilation—the rocky mountains and the Pacific Ocean. Wherever we hear now of those tribes, it is of some fresh act of aggression against them—some fresh expulsion of a portion of them—and of melancholy Indians moving off towards the western wilds.13

    For Marx, the logic of extermination introduced by English settler colonialism in the Americas was historically tied to the earlier and ongoing conquest and plundering of Ireland, the natural wealth of which was being drained continually by England. He argued that the same “plan to exterminate” that had been employed with the utmost ferocity by the English and Scots against the Irish was later applied in the British colonies in North America “against the Red Indians.”14 In Ireland, what was frequently called a policy of extermination, occurring alongside the enclosures in England, created a massive relative surplus population that could not be absorbed by the early Industrial Revolution in England, leading to a constant flow of English, Irish, and Scots Irish settler colonists to North America, where they sought to extinguish the Native Americans to make room for their own advance. A similar process occurred in New South Wales (originally a penal colony in Australia) with respect to the settler colonial treatment of Aboriginal peoples, as described by Howitt.15

    Marx and Engels were also deeply concerned with the French settler colonialism in Algeria occurring in their time, and sided with the Indigenous Algerian resistance.16 The Indigenous population of Algeria was nearly 6 million in 1830. By 1852, following the French all-out war of annihilation, including a scorched earth policy and subsequent famine, this had been reduced to 2.5 million.17 Meanwhile, “legalistic” means were also used to seize the communal lands, which were to be turned into the private property of colonists. In his excerpts in the 1870s from the work of the Russian ethnologist M. M. Kovalevsky, Marx compiled a detailed analysis of “the planting of European colonists” in Algeria and “the expropriation of the soil of the native population by European colonists and speculators.” After a brief sojourn in Algiers near the end of his life, meant as part of a rest cure ordered by his doctor, Marx argued that there was no hope for the Indigenous Algerians “WITHOUT A REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT.”18

    In 1882, Engels took up the subject of the English settler colonies in a letter to Karl Kautsky, writing:

    As I see it, the colonies proper, i.e., the countries occupied by European settlers, such as Canada, the Cape [South Africa], Australia, will all become independent; on the other hand, countries that are merely ruled [by colonial powers] and are inhabited by natives, such as India, Algeria and the Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish possessions, will have to be temporarily taken over by the proletariat and guided as rapidly as possible towards independence. How this process will develop is difficult to say. India may, indeed very probably will, start a revolution…. The same thing could also happen elsewhere, say in Algeria and Egypt, and would certainly suit us [that is, the socialist struggle in Europe] best.19

    Imperialism and Settler Colonialism

    Lenin quoted in 1916 from Engels’s 1882 letter to Kautsky, including the reference to “colonies proper,” and clearly agreed with Engels’s analysis.20 But the Comintern was slow to take up the question of settler colonialism. This was only to occur at the Second Congress on the National and Colonial Questions in 1928, in the “Theses on the Revolutionary Movement in the Colonies and Semi-Colonies,” which was meant to provide a critique of the entire “imperialist world system,” of which settler colonialism was considered to be a key part. A sharp distinction was drawn between settler colonies and other colonies. As the Comintern document stated:

    In regard to the colonial countries it is necessary to distinguish between those colonies of the capitalist countries which have served them as colonising regions for their surplus population, and which in this way have become a continuation of their capitalist system (Australia, Canada, etc.), and those colonies which are exploited by the imperialists primarily as markets for their commodities, as sources of raw material and as spheres for the export of capital. This distinction has not only a historic but also a great economic and political significance.

    The colonies of the first type on the basis of their general development become “Dominions,” that is, members of the given imperialist system, with equal, or nearly equal, rights. In them, capitalist development reproduces among the immigrant white population the class structure of the metropolis, at the same time that the native population, was for the most part, exterminated. There cannot be there any talk of the [externally based] colonial regime in the form that it shows itself in the colonies of the second type.

    Between these two types is to be found a transitional type (in various forms) where, alongside the numerous native population, there exists a very considerable population of white colonists (South Africa, New Zealand, Algiers, etc.). The bourgeoisie, which has come from the metropolis, in essence represents in these countries (emigrant colonies) nothing else than a colonial “prolongation” of the bourgeoisie of the metropolis.21

    The Comintern went on to conclude that,

    The metropolis is interested to a certain extent in the strengthening of its capitalist subsidiary in the colonies, in particular when this subsidiary of imperialism is successful in enslaving the original native population or even in completely destroying it. On the other hand, the competition between various imperialist systems for influence in the semi-independent countries [with large settler populations] can lead also to their breaking off from the metropolis.22

    What emerged in the analysis of the Comintern by 1928, therefore, building on the earlier work of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, was a conception of settler colonialism as an integral part of a general theory of the imperialist world system. In the view of the Comintern, race, which was now no longer seen primarily in biological terms, but was increasingly viewed through the lens of cultural resistance—as in the work of W. E. B. Du Bois—was brought into the argument more explicitly with the concept of “whiteness,” emphasizing that these were “white” settler colonies.23 The Comintern declaration on settler colonialism was concurrent with the first Palestinian treatments of the subject in the 1920s and ’30s.24

    Also in the 1920s, Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui wrote of the Spanish “practice of exterminating the Indigenous population and the destruction of their institutions.… The Spanish colonizers,” he noted, “introduced to Peru a depopulation scheme.” This was, however, followed by the “enslavement” and then “assimilation of the Indians,” moving away from the exterminism of pure settler colonialism as the demand for labor became the dominant consideration. Here the primary objective of colonization, as Mariátegui recognized, had shifted from the expropriation of the land of Indigenous populations, and thus their erasure, to an emphasis on the exploitation of their labor power.25

    The Comintern was dissolved by the Soviet Union in 1943 at a critical moment in the Second World War as a way of demonstrating that the defeat of Nazi Germany came before all else. The notion of settler colonialism, however, was carried over into dependency theory after the Second World War by the Marxist economist Paul A. Baran, then a professor at Stanford University. Baran had been born in Tsarist Russia and received his economics training in the Soviet Union, Germany, and the United States. He linked the Comintern doctrine on settler colonialism to the question of development and underdevelopment.

    Writing in 1957, in The Political Economy of Growth, Baran distinguished “between the impact of Western Europe’s entrance into North America (and Australia and New Zealand) on one side, and the ‘opening up’ by Western capitalism of Asia, Africa, or Eastern Europe,” on the other. In the former case, Western Europeans “settled” as permanent residents, after eliminating the original inhabitants, arriving with “capitalism in their bones,” and establishing a society that was “from the outset capitalist in structure.”26

    However, the situation was different with respect to Asia and Africa:

    Where climate and the natural environment were such as possibly to invite Western European settlers, they were faced with established societies with rich and ancient cultures, still pre-capitalist or in the embryonic state of capitalist development. Where the existing social organizations were primitive and tribal, the general conditions and in particular the climate were such as to preclude any mass settlement of Western European arrivals. Consequently, in both cases the Western European visitors rapidly determined to extract the largest possible gains from the host countries and to take their loot home.27

    In this way, Baran clearly contrasted the two types of colonialism, linking each to the regime of capitalist accumulation. While European white settler colonies in North America and Australasia extirpated the original inhabitants and expropriated the land, laying the ground for internal accumulation, the wider European colonial plundering of ancient and rich societies, as in the cases of India, Java, and Egypt, fed the Industrial Revolution in England (and elsewhere in Western Europe), providing it with much of the original capital for development. In the process, preexisting civilizations and cultures were disarticulated. Their communal and collective social relations, as Rosa Luxemburg emphasized, were necessarily “annihilated” by capitalism.28

    In dependency theory from the start, white settler colonies thus stood as an exception within colonialism as a whole. Baran noted but did not analyze the role of slavery in “the primary accumulation of capital” and the development of settler colonialism. For Marx, the transatlantic slave trade was the “pedestal” on which both the accumulation of capital in the plantation South of the United States and the British cotton industry at the heart of the Industrial Revolution were to rest.29

    In the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, settler colonialism theory became a major focus within Marxism due to struggles then occurring in Africa and Palestine. A key figure in the analysis of settler colonialism was Frantz Fanon. Originally from the French colony of Martinique, Fanon fought with the French Free Forces in the Second World War, studied psychiatry in France, and eventually joined the National Liberation Front of the Algerian Revolution. He was the author most notably of Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961). Influenced by both G. W. F. Hegel and Marx, Fanon applied Hegel’s master-slave dialectic to the colonizer-colonized relation in the Algerian context, accounting for the logic of violence characterizing settler colonialism and exploring the continuing search for recognition on the part of the Indigenous Algerians.30 Critical considerations of settler colonialism were also inspired by the revolt of the Land and Freedom Army in Kenya against white settlers and plantation owners between 1952 and 1960, which led to the death in combat or execution of upwards of ten thousand Africans.31

    In 1965, the Palestinian-Syrian scholar Fayez A. Sayegh wrote a pamphlet, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, published by the Palestine Liberation Organization, arguing that “Zionist colonialism” was “essentially incompatible with the continued existence of the ‘native population’ in the coveted country,” and had as its goal the creation of a “settler community.”32 Two years later, in the midst of the Arab-Israeli War, French Marxist Maxime Rodinson, whose parents had both perished in Auschwitz, published his landmark work, Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? Rodinson commenced by stating that “The accusation that Israel is a colonialist phenomenon is advanced by an almost unanimous Arab intelligentsia, whether on the right or the left. It is one case where Marxist theorizing has come forward with the clearest response to the requirements of ‘implicit ideology’ of the Third World and has been widely adopted.” He saw settler colonialism as linked to “the worldwide system of imperialism” and opposed to “indigenous liberation movements.” For Rodinson, Zionism thus represented “colonialism in the [classical] Greek sense,” that is, in the sense of the Athenian cleruchy, which eliminated/removed the native populations and replaced them with settlers. Settler colonialism directed at the extermination and displacement of the Indigenous peoples/nations, he indicated, had also occurred in colonial Ireland and Tasmania. Given this underlying logic, “It is possible that war is the only way out of the situation created by Zionism. I leave it to others to find cause for rejoicing in this.” Israel, Rodinson added, was not simply a settler-colonial country, but participated in imperialist exploitation and expansion abroad.33

    Arghiri Emmanuel, the pioneering Greek Marxist economist and theorist of unequal exchange, had worked in commerce in the Belgian Congo in what seems to have been his family textile firm in the late 1930s and again in the late ’40s before relocating to France in 1958. In his time in Congo, he had encountered the white settler community there, part of which was Greek.34 In 1969, he published his classic work Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Trade. In that work, Emmanuel addressed the issue of settler colonialism or “colonialism of settlement.” Here he made a distinction between, on the one hand, England’s four main “colonies of settlement”—the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, which had introduced a policy of exterminism against the Indigenous population—and, on the other, the fifth such settlement, namely South Africa, where the native population had not been subjected to exterminism to the same extent. In South Africa, the Indigenous Africans were “relegated to the ghettos of apartheid,” allowing for the superexploitation of their labor by a substantial white minority.35

    In Emmanuel’s theory of unequal exchange, wages were treated as an independent variable, based on Marx’s notion of their historically determined character. Viewed from this standpoint, Emmanuel argued that in the first four colonies of settlement, the high wages of the white workers who constituted the majority of the population had promoted rapid capital accumulation. However, in South Africa, the fifth settler colony, the wages of the majority-Black population were abysmally low, with the result being a “semideveloped” condition. Emmanuel criticized dependency theorist Andre Gunder Frank for explaining the development of the British white settler colonies primarily in culturalist terms. Rather, it was the high wages of the white settlers that promoted development.36

    This argument was developed further in Emmanuel’s “White-Settler Colonialism and the Myth of Investment Imperialism,” published in New Left Review in 1972. Here he dealt with the frequent conflict that arose between settler colonists and the imperial powers that had given rise to them, since white settler states emerged as rivals of European colonial states, no longer subjected as easily to colonial exploitation. This dialectic led to struggles with the metropoles, most of them unsuccessful, by settlers attempting to create independent white colonial states. Here Emmanuel drew on his own experiences in the Belgian Congo. However, he put this whole dynamic in the context of the history of settler colonialism more broadly, as in Ireland and Israel/Palestine.37

    Other Marxist theorists were to enter into the analysis of settler colonialism at this time, particularly with respect to Africa, relating it to dependency theory. In 1972, shortly after the publication of Emmanuel’s “White Settler Colonialism” article, Egyptian French Marxist economist Samir Amin discussed “settler colonization” in his article on “Underdevelopment and Dependence of Black Africa—Origins and Contemporary Forms,” mainly with respect to the failed attempts at settler colonialism in sub-Saharan Africa. Amin distinguished settler colonialism from what he called “Africa of the colonial trade economy,” relying on monopolies of trade, the colonial import-export house, and the mobilization of workers through labor reserves. Later, Amin was to write about settler colonialism in Israel, which he saw as similar to the way in which the “Red Indians” in North America were “hunted and exterminated,” but which was to be viewed in Israel’s case as intrinsically related to a wider monopoly capitalist/imperialist trajectory led by the United States aimed at global domination.38

    For Marxist theory throughout this period, the concept of settler colonialism was viewed as crucial in defining the development of colonialism and imperialism as a whole. In 1974, writing for the Encyclopedia Britannica, Harry Magdoff underscored that colonialism took

    two forms, or some combination of the two: (1) the removal of the indigenous peoples by killing them off or forcing them into specially reserved areas, thus providing room for settlers from Western Europe who then developed the agriculture and industry of these lands under the social system imported from the mother countries; or (2) the conquest of the indigenous peoples and the transformation of their existing societies to suit the changing needs of the more powerful militarily and technically advanced nations.39

    A breakthrough in the Marxian analysis of settler colonialism occurred with the publication of the Australian historian Kenneth Good’s “Settler Colonialism: Economic Development and Class Formation” in The Journal of Modern African Studies in 1976. Good drew on Marx’s notion of “so-called primitive accumulation” and on dependency theory to provide a broader, more integrated perspective on settler colonialism in its various forms. Looking at Africa, he discussed “settler states” and what he termed “colon societies,” where exterminism and settlement were “particularly heavy.” Such colon societies included “Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the Cape Colony in South Africa” Much of his focus was on the colonies of settlement in Africa that, for one reason or another, did not conform to the full logic of exterminism/elimination, but which were ruled by dominant minorities of white settlers, as in Algeria, Kenya, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and South Africa. In these colonies, the object was the control of African labor as well as land, leading to apartheid-style states. Like Emmanuel, Good was primarily concerned with the complex, contradictory relation of the reactionary colons to the external colonial metropole.40

    In 1983, J. Sakai, associated with the Black Liberation Army in the United States, wrote Settlers: The Myth of the White Proletariat.41 Sakai’s work has often been dismissed as ultraleft in its interpretation, given its extreme position that there is effectively no such thing as a progressive white working class in the context of settler colonialism in the United States, thereby extending Lenin’s labor aristocracy notion to the entire “white proletariat.” Nevertheless, some of the insights provided in Sakai’s work connecting settler colonialism and racial capitalism were significant, and Settlers was referenced by such important Marxists thinkers on capitalism and race as David Roediger in his Wages of Whiteness and David Gilbert in No Surrender.42

    Settler Colonialism as an Academic Paradigm

    Dunbar-Ortiz’s landmark 1992 article on “Aboriginal People and Imperialism in the Western Hemisphere” explored the massive die-down in the early centuries following the European arrival. She described the historical connections between “colonialism and exterminism,” focusing on the U.S. context.43 However, in the 1980s and ’90s, Marxist investigations into settler colonialism were less evident, due to the general retreat from imperialism theory on the part of much of the Western Left in the period.44 There was also the problem of how to integrate settler colonialism’s effects on Indigenous populations into the understanding of imperialism in general, since the latter was directed much more at the Global North’s exploitation of the Global South than at settler colonial relations internalized in parts of the Global North.

    This changed with the introduction of a definite settler colonialism paradigm in the universities internationally, evolving out of postcolonial studies. Settler colonialism as an academic field had its genesis in 1999 with Wolfe’s Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology. Its formal structure was derived from two premises introduced by Wolfe: (1) settler colonialism represented a “logic of elimination,” encompassing at one and the same time annihilation, removal, and assimilation; and (2) settler colonialism was a “structure rather than an event.”45The first premise recognized that settler colonialism was directed at the expropriation of the land, while Indigenous peoples who were attached to the land were seen as entirely expendable. The second premise underscored that settler colonialism was a realized structure in the present, not simply confined to the past, and had taken on a logic rooted in a permanent settler occupation.

    Methodologically, Wolfe’s treatment was Weberian rather than Marxist. Settler colonialism was presented as an ideal type that excluded all but a few cases.46 The logic of elimination was seen as only really viable when it was historically realized in an inviolable structure. In countries where the logic of settler colonialism had been introduced, but had not been fully realized, this was not characterized as settler colonialism by Wolfe. Indeed, any move toward the exploitation of the labor of the Indigenous population, rather than their elimination from the land, disqualified a country from being considered settler colonialist. According to this definition, Algeria was not a settler colonial society any more than Kenya, South Africa, or Rhodesia. As Wolfe put it, “in contradiction to the kind of colonial formation that [Amilcar] Cabral or Fanon confronted, settler colonies were not primarily established to extract surplus value from indigenous labour.”47 Likewise, Latin America, due to the sheer complexity of its “hybrid” ethnic composition, along with its employment of Indigenous labor, was seen by Wolfe as outside the logic of settler colonialism.48

    Wolfe’s reliance on a Weberian methodological individualism resulted in his tracing of settler colonialism to the type of the settler. While there was such a thing as a settler colonial state, this was secondary to the ideal type of the settler.49 Settler colonialism became its own abstract logic, entirely separated from other forms of colonialism and from imperialism. This one-sided, idealist methodology has been central to the development of settler colonialism as an academic study, removing it from the Marxist tradition (and from Indigenous traditions) from which the concept had arisen.50

    Wolfe, by the time that he introduced his settler colonial model, had already established himself as a distinguished figure on the non-Marxist/anti-Marxist left. In 1997, two years before the publication of his seminal text on settler colonialism, he published an article entitled “History and Imperialism: A Century of Theory” for the American Historical Review, which was remarkable in the sheer number of misconceptions it promoted and in the depth of its polemic against Marxism. According to Wolfe, “the definitional space of imperialism [in left discourse] becomes a vague, consensual gestalt.” Marx was a pro-colonialist/pro-imperialist and Eurocentric thinker who saw colonialism as a “Malthusian” struggle of existence; Lenin, was part of the “post-Marxian” debate on imperialism” that began with social liberal John Hobson and that led to positions diametrically opposite to those of Marx; dependency theory turned Marxism “on its head”; world-systems theory was opposed to orthodox Marxism on imperialism, as was Emmanuel’s unequal exchange theory. Finally, “a notorious color blindness” suffused Marxism as a whole, which was principally characterized by economic determinism. In writing a history of imperialism theory, Wolfe remarkably neglected to discuss Lenin’s analysis at all, beyond a few offhand negative comments. He ended his article with a reference to settler colonialism, which he failed to relate to its theoretical origins, but approached in terms of postcolonial theory, claiming that it offered “discursive distinctions which survive the de-territorialization of imperialism.” It therefore could be seen as constituting the place to “start” if imperialism were to be resisted in the present.51

    In contrast to Marx, with his two types of settler colonialism, and distinct from most subsequent Marxist theorists, Wolfe promoted a notion of settler colonialism that was so dependent on a pure “logic of elimination,” emanating from settler farmers, that he approached plantation slavery in the southern part of the antebellum United States as simply the negative proof of the existence of settler colonialism in the northern part. “Black people in the plantation South were racialized as slaves,” whose purpose in racial capitalism was to carry out plantation labor, thus distinguishing them from Native Americans due to the purely eliminatory logic imposed on the latter. The distinction, although a sharp one in some ways, relied on a notion of settler colonialism as constituting an ideal type associated with a specific form of social action carried out by settlers. As a result, the real complexity of colonialism/imperialism, of which settler colonialism is simply a part, was lost. Wolfe saw the removal of Indigenous labor from the antebellum South as a precondition for the mixing of “the Red man’s land…with Black labor.” But after that event, settler colonialism as a structure no longer applied directly to the U.S. South. Native Americans, Wolfe argued, were subject to genocide, and Black people to slavery. With respect to African-Americans, he wrote, “the genocidal tribunal is the wrong court.”52

    Wolfe’s approach also tended to leave Africa out of the picture. According to Robin D. G. Kelley, Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at the University of California, Los Angeles, whose research focuses on critical thought and movements associated with the African Diaspora, “By not incorporating more of the globe in his study, Wolfe’s particular formulation of settler colonialism delimits more than it reveals.” By excluding Africa, which did not fit into his pure eliminatory logic, Wolfe “presumes that indigenous people exist only in the Americas and Australasia…. Consequently, settler colonialism on the African continent falls out of Wolfe’s purview…. The exclusion of southern Africa and similar social formations from the definition of settler colonialism…obscures its global and transnational character.” In Africa, according to Kelley’s cogent formulation, “the European colonists wanted land and the labor, but not the people—that is to say, they sought to eliminate stable communities and their cultures of resistance.”53

    As Sai Englert, author of Settler Colonialism: An Introduction, observed in a critique of Wolfe, the “sharp distinction between settler colonialism” and other forms of colonialism “is difficult to square with reality. On the one hand, elimination and genocide are a reality across the colonial world by means of war, famine, forced or enslaved labour, and mass murder. On the other hand, many settler colonial regimes were based primarily on the exploitation of the Indigenous populations.”54

    Wolfe’s academic paradigm of settler colonialism following his death in 2016 was most influentially carried forward by Veracini, author of a wide array of works on the subject and the founding editor of the journal Settler Colonial Studies. Veracini, in a contradictory fashion, sought to adhere to Wolfe’s restrictive definition of settler colonialism, while at the same time giving it a more global and all-encompassing significance. He did this by separating “settler colonialism” entirely from “colonialism” and in effect subsuming the latter in the former. Thus, settler colonialism became the measuring stick for judging colonialism generally. As Veracini wrote in his Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview, “This book is a reflection on settler colonialism as distinct from colonialism…. I propose to see…as analytically distinct, colonialism with settlers and settler colonialism.” Key to Veracini’s method was the postulate that settler colonialism was not a subtype of colonialism, but a separate entity, “antithetical” to colonialism. The notion of imperialism, as opposed to mere references to “imperial expansion,” disappeared almost altogether in his analysis. Figures like Emmanuel received dismissive treatment.55

    In a confused and contradictory series of transpositions, the concept of settler colonialism metamorphosed in the work of Veracini into an all-encompassing eliminatory logic. Wolfe had seen the classical-liberal notion of primitive accumulation—a concept that, in its bourgeois “nursery tale” form, was subjected to a harsh critique by Marx—as being “inseparable from the inception of settler colonialism,” essentially equating the two concepts.56 Prior to this, Marxist geographer David Harvey had transposed the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century historical concept of original or primitive accumulation into a suprahistorical spatial notion of “accumulation by dispossession.” Going beyond both Wolfe and Harvey, Veracini proceeded to transpose Harvey’s neologism into the cognate “accumulation without reproduction,” standing for the “eliminatory logic” of settler colonialism. Accumulation without reproduction was then seen as applying to all forms of eliminatory and predatory logic, with the result that all instances of world oppression, wherever direct economic exploitation was not concerned, including issues such as climate change, could be “most productively approached within a settler-colonial studies paradigm.”57

    In this way, not only colonialism, imperial expansion, and racial capitalism, but also the global ecological crisis, ecological debt, and the financialization of the globe, in Veracini’s expanded conception, all fell under the settler colonial paradigm, representing a dominant logic of globalized elimination. Veracini has laid great emphasis on the fact that the United States as the hegemonic power in the world today is to be seen primarily as a settler colonialist, rather than as an imperialist, power. Not surprisingly, the concept of “imperialism” was absent from his Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview.58

    The theoretical distinction between a Marxist analysis of imperialism/colonialism with settler colonialism as one of its forms, and the new academic paradigm in which settler colonialism is seen as its own discrete, self-determining phenomenon rooted in the type of the settler, could not be more different. This can be perceived in the way thinkers like Wolfe and Veracini approached the Israeli state’s violent occupation of Palestine. Wolfe went so far as to criticize Rodinson’s classic interpretation of Israeli settler colonialism on the basis that, for the latter, this was a European (and North American) imperialist project, while, for Wolfe himself, settler colonialism was defined at all times by the role of autonomous settlers disconnected from the metropole. Rodinson’s argument, Wolfe claimed, did not explain why the Israeli project is specifically “a settler-colonial one.” But such a view relied once again on the abstraction of the settler as a distinct ideal type, giving rise to settler colonialism separated off from other social categories, thereby running counter to a holistic historical inquiry. In this view, the imperial metropoles, whatever role they had in the beginning—and, in Wolfe’s argument, Israel was unique in that it was constituted by “diffuse metropoles”—are, by definition, no longer directly implicated in what the autonomous settler colonies choose to do. Indeed, in some non-Marxist analyses, the metropoles are now seen as the helpless victims of the settler colonies, simply locked into a common cultural history from which there is no escape. Lost here is the reality that Israel is, for Washington, a garrison colony within the larger U.S./NATO-based strategy of global imperialist domination.59

    For Veracini, as for Wolfe, in writing on Palestine, the emphasis is on the absolute autonomy of settler colonies, which are then seen as completely self-determining. Israel’s occupation of Palestine is a case in point. This meant that the whole question of the imperialist world system’s role in the Israeli-Palestine conflict is largely denied. To be sure, Veracini has indicated that the potential remained for a reestablishment of a settler colony’s dependence on the core imperial powers (a point specifically directed at Israel) that could lead to its external “recolonization.” But this is seen as unlikely.60

    Within what has become in the mainstream settler colonial paradigm, therefore, the approach to Israel’s occupation of Palestine is worlds away from that of historical materialism. Rather than relying on a very restrictive logic, Marxist analysis seeks to place the reality of Israeli settler colonialism in a wider and more dynamic historical perspective that grasps the complex and changing dialectical relations of capitalism, class, and imperialism/militarism.

    Here it is important to note Israel/Palestine is demographically unique in the history of settler colonialism, since rather than either a definite majority or a powerful minority of colonizers emerging, there is a rough equality in numbers overall. Over seven million Israelis live in present-day Israel and the West Bank in 2022, and some seven million Palestinians live in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Israel, and East Jerusalem. Given the significantly higher birth rates of Palestinians, this is viewed by Israel as a demographic threat to its logic as a Zionist settler colonial state. Tel Aviv therefore has enhanced its efforts to seize complete control of the entire region of Israel/Palestine (referred to by the Israeli right as “Greater Israel”), adopting an ever more aggressive strategy of exterminism and imperialism.61 This strategy is fully supported, even urged on, by Washington, in its goal of absolute imperial domination of the Middle East, Central Asia, and parts of South Asia—the region of the United States Central Command.

    Israel’s average annual military spending as a share of GDP from 1960 to 2022 is 12 percent. After shrinking officially to around 4–5 percent in recent years, it is now again on the rise. It has the second-highest military spending per capita in the world (after Qatar) and possesses not only military superiority in the Middle East region but also an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, chemical, and biological).62 Its war machine is supported by massive aid from the United States, which provides it with the most advanced weapons in existence. NATO has given Israel the designation of a “major non-NATO ally,” recognizing its position as a key part of the U.S.-European imperialist bloc.63 In the United Nations, it is a member of the Western European and Other Group (WEOG) within the official regional groupings. The “Other” stands for the main settler colonial nations: the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, and formerly apartheid South Africa.64

    For Max Ajl, a senior researcher at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, Israel, while a “settler society” and tied into a logic of exterminism, has to be seen in a larger context of the imperialism/militarism of the Global North. “The question of Palestine,” he writes, “is not merely a question of national [or settler] oppression, but poses Israel’s uniqueness: a condensation of Western colonial and imperial power, a world-wide symbol of Western perfidy, a state which physically cleaves Africa and Asia, a merchant and mercenary of global counter-insurgence, all melded in a manticore of death and destruction.”65 If Israel can be viewed as a pure settler-exterminist state, it is also a global garrison state, tied to the entire system of world domination rooted in monopoly capitalism/imperialism in which the United States is the hegemonic power.

    Wasi’chu

    The rise of the American Indian Movement in the United States in the 1960s and ’70s led to strong critiques of the reality of settler colonialism. An extraordinary work in this context was Wasi’chu: The Continuing Indian Wars by Bruce Johansen and Roberto Maestas. Wasi’chu is a Lakota word that refers not to white man or settler but to a logic, a state of mind, and a system. Literally, it means “takes the fat” or “greedy person,” appropriating not just what is needed for life, but also what properly belongs to the whole community. “Within the modern Indian movement,” it “has come to mean those corporations and their individuals, with their government accomplices, which continue to covet Indian lives, land, and resources for public profit.” The term was famously used by Black Elk in Black Elk Speaks, based on interviews in the early 1930s, in which he emphasized the Wasi’chu’s unrelenting desire for gold. As Johansen and Maestas explained, Wasi’chu is “a human condition based on inhumanity, racism, and exploitation. It is a sickness, a seemingly incurable and contagious disease which begot the ever-advancing society of the West.” This observation became, in the work of these authors, the basis of a searing account of settler colonialism in North America, not simply geared to the past but to the present.66

    “Wasichu,” Pulitzer-Prize-winning novelist Alice Walker elaborates in her Living by the Word,

    was a term used by the Oglala Sioux to designate the white man, but it had no reference to the color of skin. It means: He who takes the fat. It is possible to be white and not a Wasichu and a Wasichu and not white…. The Wasichu speaks, in all his U.S. history books, of “opening up virgin lands.” Yet there were people living here on “Turtle Island,” as the Indians called it, for thousands of years….

    We must absolutely reject the way of the Wasichu that we are so disastrously traveling, the way that respects most (above nature, obviously above life itself, above even the spirit of the universe) the “metal that makes men crazy”.… Many of us are afraid to abandon the way of the Wasichu because we have become addicted to his way of death. The Wasichu has promised us so many good things, and has actually delivered several. But “progress,” once claimed by the present chief of the Wasichus to be their “most important product,” has meant hunger, misery, enslavement, unemployment, and worse to millions of people on the globe.67

    Wasi’chu, as the Indigenous understood it, was the personification of what we know as capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism, a system of greed, exploitation, and expropriation of human beings and the land.68 The Lakota people clearly understood this system of greed as one that had no limits and that was the enemy of communal existence and reverence for the earth. It is this more profound critique of capitalism/imperialism as a system dominated by the Wasi’chu that seizes “the fat,” (the surplus that is the inheritance of humanity as a whole) that we most need today. As The Red Nation’s The Red Deal states, the choice today is “decolonization or extinction,” that is, “ending the occupation” and destruction of the earth by imperialist “accumulation-based societies,” so as to “build what sustains us.”69

    Notes

    1. Key foundational works in this paradigm include Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology (London: Cassell, 1999); Patrick Wolfe, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (London: Verso, 2016); Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (December 2006): 387–409; Patrick Wolfe, “Land, Labor and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race,” American Historical Review 106, no. 3 (June 2001): 866–905; David Lloyd and Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonial Logics and the Neoliberal Regime,” Settler Colonial Studies 6, no. 2 (May 2015): 109–18; Lorenzo Veracini, The Settler Colonial Present (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024); Lorenzo Veracini, “Containment, Elimination, Endogeneity: Settler Colonialism in the Global Present,” Rethinking Marxism 31, no. 1 (April 2019): 118–40. Marxian-oriented critical perspectives can be found in Jack Davies, “The World Turned Outside In: Settler Colonial Studies and Political Economy,” Historical Materialism 31, no. 2 (June 2023): 197–235; and Sai Englert, Settler Colonialism: An Introduction (London: Pluto, 2022).
    2. Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” 387–88; Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, 2; Veracini, The Settler Colonial Present, 51, 54–56; Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview, 4–11; Veracini, “Containment, Elimination, Endogeneity,” 121; Davies, “The World Turned Outside In,” 207.
    3. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Not “A Nation of Immigrants”: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion (Boston: Beacon, 2021), 18; R. W. Van Alstyne, The Rising American Empire (New York: W. W. Norton, 1960).
    4. Veracini, The Settler Colonial Present, 39–40; Lorenzo Veracini, “Introduction: Settler Colonialism as a Distinct Mode of Domination” in The Routledge Handbook of the History of Settler Colonialism, Edward Cavanaugh and Lorenzo Veracini, eds. (London: Routledge, 2017), 3; Englert, Settler Colonialism: An Introduction, 29–30; John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Hannah Holleman, “Marx and the Indigenous,” Monthly Review 71, no. 9 (February 2020): 3.
    5. John Bellamy Foster, Breaking the Bonds of Fate: Epicurus and Marx (New York: Monthly Review Press, forthcoming 2025).
    6. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 917; Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1975), vol. 46, 322; V. I. Lenin, “The Discussion on Social-Determination Summed Up,” July 1916, section 8, Marxists Internet Archive, marxists.org.
    7. “Colony (n.),” Online Etymology Dictionary, etymonline.com. As G. E. M. de Ste. Croix states, “The Latin word coloni…had originally been used in the sense of ‘farmer’ or ‘settler.’” G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (London: Duckworth, 1981), 159.
    8. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “exterminate” comes from the Latin for “to drive beyond boundaries.” From the sixteenth century onward, it meant “to drive forth (a person or thing), from, of, out of, the boundaries or limits of a (place, community, region, state, etc.); to drive away, banish, put to flight.” However, by the seventeenth century it had also taken on the additional meaning of “to destroy utterly, put an end to (persons or animals); not only to root out, extirpate (species, races, populations).” Oxford English Dictionary, compact edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 938.
    9. Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value: Part II (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1968), 301–3; Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 917.
    10. Marx, Theories of Surplus Value: Part II, 301–3; John Bellamy Foster, Hannah Holleman, and Brett Clark, “Marx and Slavery,” Monthly Review 72, no. 3 (July–August 2020): 98.
    11. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 915–17, emphasis added; William Howitt, Colonization and Christianity: A Popular History of the Treatment of the Natives by the Europeans in All Their Colonies (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1838), 348.
    12. Howitt, Colonization and Christianity, 346–49, 378–79, 403–5.
    13. Howitt, Colonization and Christianity, 414.
    14. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 266.
    15. Marx and Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question, 66, 193, 216, 283, 303, 366, 372; John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, The Robbery of Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020), 72–75; Dunbar-Ortiz, Not A Nation of Immigrants,” 36–46, 126.
    16. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 18, 60–70, 212–13.
    17. Kenneth Good, “Settler Colonialism: Economic Development and Class Formation,” Journal of Modern African Studies 14, no. 4 (December 1976): 599.
    18. Karl Marx, “Excerpts from M. M. Kovalevsky,” appendix to Lawrence Krader, ed., The Asiatic Mode of Production (Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum and Co., 1974), 400, 406–7, 411–12; Foster, Clark, and Holleman, “Marx and the Indigenous,” 11–12.
    19. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 46, 322. Translation altered slightly to change “actual colonies” to “colonies proper,” in accordance with the translation of Engels’s letter in V. I. Lenin, Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, n.d.), vol. 22, 352.
    20. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 22, 352.
    21. Communist International (Comintern), Theses on the Revolutionary Movement in the Colonies and Semi-Colonies (1928), in Theses and Resolutions of the VI. World Congress of the Communist Internationalvol. 8, no. 88, International Press Correspondence, no. 84, sections 10, 12 (extra paragraph indent created beginning with “Between”); Oleksa Drachewych, “Settler Colonialism and the Communist International,” in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism, Immanuel Ness and Zak Cope, eds. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021): 2418–28. Lenin’s recognition of Engels’s position on “colonialism proper” and the Comintern’s detailed treatment of settler colonialism demonstrate that Veracini’s uninformed claim that “Lenin and twentieth century Marxism…conflated colonialism and settler colonial forms” was simply false. It is further falsified, as we shall see, by numerous explicit twentieth-century Marxist treatments of settler colonialism. Veracini, The Settler Colonial Present, 39.
    22. Comintern, Theses on the Revolutionary Movement in the Colonies and Semi-Colonies, 12–13.
    23. W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (New York: Harcourt Brace and Howe, 1920), 29–42.
    24. Jennifer Schuessler, “What Is Settler Colonialism?,” New York Times, January 22, 2024.
    25. José Carlos Mariátegui, José Carlos Mariátegui: An Anthology, Harry E. Vanden and Marc Becker, eds. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011), 74–76.
    26. Paul Baran, The Political Economy of Growth (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1957), 141.
    27. Baran, The Political Economy of Growth, 142.
    28. Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1951), 370.
    29. Baran, The Political Economy of Growth, 139–42, 153; Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 925.
    30. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 93; Simin Fadee, Global Marxism: Decolonization and Revolutionary Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2024), 132–52. In the work of Glen Sean Coulthard, Fanon’s emphasis on the colonial dialectic of recognition is combined with Marx’s critique of “so-called primitive accumulation” to generate one of the most powerful theoretical analyses of settler colonialism and Indigenous resistance up to the present. See Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
    31. Donald L. Barnett and Karari Njama, Mau Mau from Within (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966).
    32. Fayez A. Sayegh, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine (Beirut: Palestine Liberation Organization, 1965), 1–5.
    33. Maxime Rodinson, Israel: A Colonial Settler State (New York: Monad Press, 1973), 27–33, 89–96. Rodinson’s monograph was first published during the 1967 Israeli-Arab War in Jean-Paul Sartre’s journal, Le Temps Modernes.
    34. Jairus Banaji, “Arghiri Emmanuel (1911–2001),” Historical Materialism (blog), n.d.
    35. Arghiri Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Trade (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 37–71, 124–25, 370–71.
    36. Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange, 363–64.
    37. Arghiri Emmanuel, “White-Settler Colonialism and the Myth of Investment Imperialism,” New Left Review 1/73 (May–June 1972), 39–40, 43–44, 47; Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange 124–25, 337, 363, 370–71.
    38. Samir Amin, “Underdevelopment and Dependence in Black Africa—Origins and Contemporary Forms,” Journal of Modern African Studies 10, no. 4 (December 1972): 519–22; Samir Amin, The Reawakening of the Arab World (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016), 182–89.
    39. Harry Magdoff, Imperialism: From the Colonial Age to the Present (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), 19–20.
    40. Good, “Settler Colonialism: Economic Development and Class Formation.”
    41. J. Sakai, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat (Chicago: Morningstar Press, 1989).
    42. David Gilbert, No Surrender: Writings from an Anti-Imperialist Political Prisoner (Montreal: Abraham Gullen Press, 2004), 5–59; David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991), 184.
    43. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, “Aboriginal People and Imperialism in the Western Hemisphere,” Monthly Review 44, no. 4 (September 1992): 9.
    44. On the retreat from imperialism theory on much of the left, see John Bellamy Foster, “The New Denial of Imperialism on the Left,” Monthly Review 76, no. 6 (November 2024): 15–19.
    45. Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, 2, 27, 40–43; Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” 387, 402.
    46. Wolfe, “Land, Labor and Difference,” 868; Englert, Settler Colonialism: An Introduction, 16.
    47. Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, 1, 167.
    48. Veracini, The Settler Colonial Present, 54. On the relation of Latin America to settler colonialism, see Richard Gott, “Latin America as a White Settler Society,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 26, no. 2 (April 2007): 269–89.
    49. Wolfe, Traces of History, 28.
    50. David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 137–82. The concept of accumulation by dispossession is contradictory in Marx’s terms, since accumulation by definition is not dispossession or expropriation, but rather is rooted in exploitation. Marx was strongly critical of the notion of “primitive accumulation” or “original accumulation,” as presented by classical-liberal economists like Adam Smith, and preferred the term “original expropriation,” or simply expropriation. See Ian Angus, The War Against the Commons (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2023), 204–9.
    51. Wolfe, “History and Imperialism,” 389–93, 397, 403–7, 418–20.
    52. Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” 388, 392, 403–4; Wolfe, “Land, Labor and Difference,” 868.
    53. Robin D. G. Kelley, “The Rest of Us: Rethinking Settler and Native,” American Quarterly 69, no. 2 (June 2017): 268–69.
    54. Englert, Settler Colonialism: An Introduction, 15. For an indication of this complexity see Gerald Horne, The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020).
    55. Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview, 4–12; Lorenzo Veracini, “Israel-Palestine through a Settler-Colonial Studies Lens,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 21, no. 4 (2019): 572.
    56. Lloyd and Wolfe, “Settler Colonial Logics and the Neoliberal Regime,” 8; Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 874; Davies, “The World Turned Outside In,” 217. On the history of the classical-liberal conception of original, or primitive, accumulation prior to Marx, see Michael Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).
    57. Veracini, “Containment, Elimination, Endogeneity,” 119, 122–28; Veracini, “Israel-Palestine Through a Settler-Colonial Studies Lens,” 579–80; Nicholas A. Brown, “The Logic of Settler Accumulation in a Landscape of Perpetual Vanishing,” Settler Colonial Studies 4, no. 1 (2014): 3–5; Davies, “The World Turned Outside In,” 214; Harvey, The New Imperialism, 137–82.
    58. Veracini, “Containment, Elimination, Endogeneity,” 122–8; Davies, “The World Turned Outside In,” 214.
    59. Wolfe, Traces of History, 234–37; Veracini, “Israel-Palestine through a Settler-Colonial Studies Lens,” 570; Joseph Massad, “Israel and the West: ‘Shared Values’ of Racism and Settler Colonialism,” Middle East Eye, June 13, 2019; Jordan Humphreys, “Palestine and the Classless Politics of Settler Colonial Theory,” Marxist Left Review, June 13, 2024.
    60. Lorenzo Veracini, Israel and Settler Society (London: Pluto, 2006), 97. It is notable that Veracini, like Wolfe, fails to recognize the significance of Rodinson’s Israel: A Colonial Settler State, stating that it was published in “the 1970s” (the time when the English edition came out), even though it appeared in French in the midst of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, and had an enormous influence at the time, instilling throughout the world increased awareness of Israeli settler colonialism.
    61. Claudia de Martino and Ruth Hanau Santini, “Israel: A Demographic Ticking Bomb in Today’s One-State Reality,” Aspenia Online, July 10, 2023.
    62. Varun Jain, “Interactive: Comparing Military Spend around the World,” Visual Capitalist, June 4, 2023; “Israel: Military Spending, Percent of GDP,” Global Economy, theglobaleconomy.com; U.S. Congressional Research Service, Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Weapons and Missiles: Status and Trends (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, February 20, 2008), 16.
    63. Thomas Trask and Jacob Olidort, “The Case for Upgrading Israel’s ‘Major Non-NATO Ally’ Status,” Jewish Institute for National Security of America, November 6, 2023.
    64. Craig Mokhiber, “WEOG: The UN’s Settler-Colonial Bloc,” Foreign Policy in Focus, September 4, 2024, fpif.org.
    65. Max Ajl, “Palestine’s Great Flood, Part I,” Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy 13, no. 1 (March 2024): 62–88; Esther Farmer, Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, and Sarah Sills, A Land with a People: Palestinians and Jews Confront Zionism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2021).
    66. Bruce Johansen and Roberto Maestas, Wasi’chu: The Continuing Indian Wars (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979), 5, 11, 16, 18; Black Elk and John G. Neihard, Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux (New York: William Morrow, 1932), 7–9.
    67. Alice Walker, Living by the Word: Selected Writings 1973–1987 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), 144–49.
    68. Wasi’chu, as understood here, is essentially a materialist perspective, where a generalized human nature characteristic of certain groups of social actors is seen as a reflection of an underlying logic or system. In Marx’s terms, the capitalist is presented as a personification of capital. This is in contrast to a Weberian style ideal type, rooted in methodological individualism, where social structures are interpreted in terms of a type of social action with subjective meaning traceable to a type of methodological individual. Thus, from that perspective, it is the methodological individual of the settler who is at the root of settler type meanings/actions and is the basis of colonialism/settlerism. The ideal type of the settler constitutes, rather than is constituted, and is not itself the product of an ensemble of social relations. Marx, Capital, vol. 1 ,92.
    69. The Red Nation, The Red Deal (New York: Common Notions, 2021), 7, 13, 135–37; Veracini, “Israel-Palestine Through a Settler-Colonial Studies Lens,” 570–71.

    2025, Volume 76, Number 09 (February 2025)

  • Preface to the German Edition of Marx’s Ecology

    Preface to the German Edition of Marx’s Ecology

    Preface to the German Edition of Marx’s Ecology,” Monthly Review, vol. 76, no. 7 (December 2024), pp. 41-43.

    Marx' Ökologie: Materialismus und Natur
    Marx’ Ökologie: Materialismus und Natur

    The research leading to the writing of Marx’s Ecologybegan in the mid-1990s in response to a request for an article on “Erde” (Earth) for volume 3 (Ebene-Extremisis) of the Historisch-Kritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus, edited by Wolfgang Fritz Haug at the Free University of Berlin.1 I was asked at that time to provide an account of how the classical political economists up through Karl Marx had approached the question of the earth or soil. My original background was in political economy. But in the late 1980s and ’90s I had turned to the study of the global ecological crisis, leading to the publication of my book The Vulnerable Planet in 1994, along with a number of articles on Marx and ecology.2 Yet, while I was familiar at the time with the classical rent theory in the work of Adam Smith, Thomas Robert Malthus, David Ricardo, and Marx, and knew of Justus von Liebig’s influence on Marx with respect to the analysis of the nineteenth-century soil crisis, I had never systematically examined the underlying ecological assumptions of classical political economy with respect to the earth/soil. Nor to my knowledge had anyone else. I therefore set out to explore the question in depth. The result of this investigation was the recovery of Marx’s far-reaching ecological argument. Thus, it was in the Historisch-Kritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus that I was to offer the first systematic elaboration of Marx’s conception of the rift in the metabolism between humanity and the soil. From there, I went on to write my article “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift” in the American Journal of Sociology in 1999, which laid out the wider implications of Marx’s theory of ecological crisis, followed by the publication of Marx’s Ecology in 2000.3

    The recovery of Marx’s metabolic rift theory raised entirely new questions. How was it that Marx had developed such an incisive ecological crisis theory based in the natural science of his day, surpassing that of all others in the understanding of what he termed the “social metabolism” connecting humanity and the earth as a whole? The obvious answer was that this could be traced to his overall materialist outlook. But what exactly did that materialism entail? In Western Marxism it was commonly contended that materialism in Marx’s thought had primarily to do with the means of production and could be understood exclusively in terms of economic relations, divorced from both natural-scientific conceptions and philosophical materialism. Yet, Marx’s ecological analysis was clearly materialist in the much broader sense of adhering to a materialist conception of nature, underpinning his materialist conception of history. Hence, the only way to understand the development of Marx’s ecological thought, I concluded, was to examine the origins and development of his materialism, starting with his doctoral thesis on Epicurus’s philosophy of nature. Moreover, such an inquiry could not be carried out by simply exploring his work in isolation, but also had to be seen in terms of the historical evolution of materialism in general as it had developed up through the nineteenth century. It was this argument, then, that formed the basis of Marx’s Ecology as a whole.

    However, it was not the overall analysis of Marx’s Ecology with respect to materialism and nature, but rather Chapter 5 on the metabolic rift theory, that first caught people’s imaginations and dominated in the initial reception of the book, leading almost immediately to new, far-reaching theoretical developments. The real breakthrough here occurred in 2005 with the publication by Brett Clark and Richard York of “Carbon Metabolism: Global Capitalism, Climate Change, and the Biospheric Rift” in Theory and Society.4 They demonstrated that Marx’s theory of the metabolic rift provided the basis for understanding capitalism’s disruption of the Earth System’s carbon metabolism, generating the climate-change emergency. In 2010, a decade after the publication of Marx’s Ecology, I wrote The Ecological Rift, together with Clark and York, linking metabolic rift theory to the emergence of the Anthropocene and the Earth System crisis. A decade still further on, in 2020, I completed, along with Clark, The Robbery of Nature, connecting the metabolic rift to capitalism’s expropriation of humanity and the earth.5

    Although metabolic rift theory was to occupy a central place in the contemporary ecosocialist critique, the broader questions with respect to materialism and nature raised in Marx’s Ecologywere to engender still further investigations into the ecological bases of historical materialism, expanding the overall range of analysis. A common criticism leveled at Marx’s Ecology was that Marx’s environmental critique had no discernible influence on subsequent socialist and ecological thinkers, making it of little historical significance. In the epilogue to Marx’s Ecology, it was explained why any such criticism would be incorrect, based on what was already then known of the work of later socialist ecological thinkers. But it took twenty years of research before I was able in 2020 to address this question fully in The Return of Nature. There I demonstrated the ways in which socialist ecological analyses focusing on the metabolism of humanity and nature and the dialectics of nature, and rooted in the work of Marx and Frederick Engels, had been central to the development of both ecological science and the modern ecological critique. The wider implications of this for environmental theory and practice are brought out in my 2024 book The Dialectics of Ecology.6

    Although many critical issues remain to be explored, and crucial debates naturally persist within ecosocialism, there is no longer any question about the depth of Marx’s metabolic critique, its influence on the development of ecology, or its centrality in terms of the philosophy of praxis in our day.

    —John Bellamy Foster
    Eugene, Oregon
    September 25, 2023

    Notes

    1. John Bellamy Foster, “Erde,” in Historisch-Kritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus, Band 3 (Ebene-Extremismus) (Berlin: Argument-Verlag, 1997), 669–710. English translation in Historical Materialism 15, no. 3 (January 2007): 255–62.
    2. John Bellamy Foster, The Vulnerable Planet (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1994).
    3. John Bellamy Foster, “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift,” American Journal of Sociology 105, no. 2 (September 1999): 366–405.
    4. Brett Clark and Richard York, “Carbon Metabolism: Global Capitalism, Climate Change, and the Biospheric Rift,” Theory and Society 34, no. 4 (2005): 391–428.
    5. John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, The Ecological Rift (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010); John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, The Robbery of Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020).
    6. John Bellamy Foster, The Return of Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020); The Dialectics of Ecology (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2024).

    2024, Volume 76, Number 07 (December 2024)

  • The Return of the Dialectics of Nature: The Struggle for Freedom as Necessity

    The Return of the Dialectics of Nature: The Struggle for Freedom as Necessity

    The Return of the Dialectics of Nature: The Struggle for Freedom as Necessity,” vol. 74, no. 7 (December 2022), pp. 1-20 (revised version of Isaac and Tamarra Deutscher Lecture published in Historical Materialism in 2022).

    Frederick Engels. Drawing by N. Zhukov, 1930s, Museum of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Moscow.
    Frederick Engels. Drawing by N. Zhukov, 1930s, Museum of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Moscow.

    This article is the 2020 Deutscher Memorial Lecture, delivered each year by the recipient of the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize, and which was awarded in 2020 to John Bellamy Foster for The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology (Monthly Review Press, 2020). The lecture was first published in Historical Materialism 30, no. 2 (2022): 3–28. It has been revised for publication in Monthly Review, with the consent of Historical Materialism and their publisher, Brill.

    It is a fundamental premise of Marxism that as material conditions change, so do our ideas about the world in which we live. Today we are seeing a vast transformation in the relations of human society to the natural-physical world of which it is a part, evident in the emergence of what is now referred to as the Anthropocene Epoch in geological history, during which humanity has become the major force in Earth System change. An “anthropogenic rift” in the biogeochemical cycles of the earth, arising from the capitalist system, is now threatening to destroy the earth as a safe home for humanity and for innumerable species that live on it on a timeline not of centuries, but of decades.1 This necessarily demands a more dialectical conception of the relation of humanity to what Karl Marx called the “universal metabolism of nature.”2 The point today is not simply to understand the world, but to change it before it is too late.

    Given that Marxism has been, since its conception in the mid-nineteenth century, the primary basis of the critique of capitalist society, it naturally could be expected to lead the way in the ecological critique of capitalism. But while historical materialists and socialists more broadly can be said to have played the leading, formative role in the development of the ecological critique—particularly within the sciences—the key contributions of socialist ecology, principally in Britain, took place outside the main tendencies that were to define twentieth-century Marxism as a whole. Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, a deep chasm emerged within Marxian theory, impeding the development of a coherent ecological view within the left. The dogmatism with which, on one side of this chasm, official Soviet thought by the mid-1930s approached the issue of the dialectics of nature and dialectical materialism more generally, had its counterpart, on the other side, in Western Marxism’s categorical rejection of the dialectics of nature and the materialist conception of nature. To speak of “The Return of the Dialectics of Nature: The Struggle for Freedom as Necessity” is thus to refer to the transcendence in our time, based on classical historical materialism and the dialectical naturalism that arose in Britain in the interwar period, of the principal contradictions hindering the development of a unified Marxian ecological critique.

    I. Post-Lukácsian Marxism and the Critique of the Dialectics of Nature

    A major shift occurred in Marxian thought nearly a century ago following the publication in 1923 of Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, giving birth to what is now known as the Western Marxist philosophical tradition, but which could more accurately be referred to as “post-Lukácsian Marxism.”3 Lukács employed Hegelian dialectics to argue that the proletariat was the identical subject-object of history, giving a new philosophical coherence to Marxism and at the same time redefining dialectical thought in terms of totality and mediation.

    Yet, in what was to become a defining trait of Western Marxism, Lukács, in conformity with the neo-Kantian tradition, rejected Frederick Engels’s own notion of a dialectics of nature, on the alleged grounds that Engels had followed “Hegel’s mistaken lead” in seeing the dialectic as fully operative in external nature.4 Lukács applied Giambattista Vico’s principle that we can understand history (the transitive realm) because we have “made it,” and thus dialectical reflexivity can be said to apply in all such situations. Conversely, by the same logic, we cannot understand nature (the intransitive realm) dialectically, in the same sense, since it is devoid of a subject.5

    At the same time, Lukács, it should be noted, did not categorically reject the dialectics of nature in History and Class Consciousness, subscribing rather to the notion, as Engels himself did, that there exists a “merely objective dialectics” of nature, capable of being perceived by the “detached observer.”6 This could then be seen as underlying the higher historical subject-object dialectics of human social practice. In this way, Lukács, following Engels in this respect, conceived of a hierarchy of dialectics, extending from merely objective dialectics, all the way up to the dialectics of the identical subject-object of history. Moreover, in his later works, beginning with his Tailism manuscript written within just a few years of History and Class Consciousness, Lukács was to become a strong advocate of a dialectics of nature and societyrooted in Marx’s theory of social metabolism.7

    Yet post-Lukácsian Marxists took the categorical rejection of the dialectics of nature as a defining principle of Western Marxism and even of Marx’s own thought. Engels was in this way separated from Marx. As Jean-Paul Sartre wrote: “In the historical and social world…there reallyis dialectical reason; by transferring it to the ‘natural’ world, and forcibly inscribing it there, Engels stripped it of rationality: there was no longer a dialectic which man produced by producing himself, and which, in turn produced man; there was only a contingent law, of which nothing could be said except it is so and not otherwise.”8 This criticism went hand-in-hand with a hostility toward materialism and scientific realism, in the sense of the rejection of the materialist conception of nature, and a distancing from the achievements of science.9 Serious ecological analysis was therefore missing from the Western Marxist philosophical tradition.

    Although there was the famous criticism of “the domination of nature” in the work of Frankfurt School theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, it never got past the criticism of Enlightenment science—only to accede pessimistically in the end to its unavoidable necessity.10Herbert Marcuse’s treatment of “The Revolt of Nature” in Counter-Revolution and Revolt did not go beyond the notion of the domination (and pollution) of nature’s “sensuous aesthetic qualities” as a means for the domination of humanity and the need for an environmental rebellion in response.11 There could, in fact, be no meaningful analysis of nature-society where both the materialist conception of nature and the dialectics of nature were denied, leaving Marxist theory with no dialectical critical-realist analysis on which to base an ecological critique. At most, within Western Marxist philosophical discourse, the relation of human beings to nature was reduced to technology, which was then subject to critique as the positivistic fetishism of technique, divorced from the wider question of the natural world and the human-social relation within it.

    What was missing in such a one-dimensional approach was any notion of nature itself as an active power. As Roy Bhaskar wrote in criticism of these tendencies of Western Marxism: “Marxists [meaning Western Marxist philosophers] have…for the most part considered only one part of the nature-social relation, that is, technology, describing the way human beings appropriate nature, effectively ignoring the ways (putatively studied in ecology, social biology, and so on) in which, so to speak, nature reappropriates human beings.”12

    Yet, a powerful strain of ecological dialectics and critical, non-mechanistic materialism persisted in the natural sciences in the British Isles, evolving out of a tradition that drew on both Marx and Charles Darwin, and that later became the heir of the early revolutionary Soviet ecology of the 1920s and early 1930s. It was this “second foundation” of Marxist thought within the natural sciences which survived in the West, particularly in Britain, and that stretched back to Marx and Engels themselves, that was to play the formative role in the development of an ecological critique, and which was to constitute the main story told in The Return of Nature.13

    II. From Marx’s Ecology to The Return of Nature

    The Return of Nature has as its central area of inquiry the question of the organic interconnections between socialism and ecology that emerged in the century following the deaths of Darwin and Marx in 1882 and 1883, respectively, focusing in particular on developments in Britain and the United States. It follows a thread that was established in my book Marx’s Ecology twenty years earlier. That work is best known for its explanation of Marx’s theory of metabolic rift. But the real intent of the book was to explain how Marx’s materialism had developed, going back to his confrontation in his doctoral thesis with Epicurus’s ancient materialist philosophy. Marx’s ecological perspective, it was argued, had developed as a counterpart to his understanding of the materialist conception of nature underlying the materialist conception of history.

    A full materialist outlook, such as that developed by Marx, has three aspects: (1) ontological materialism, focusing on the physical basis of reality independent of human thought and existence, and out of which the human species itself emerged; (2) epistemological materialism, which is best understood as dialectical critical-realist; and (3) practical materialism, focusing on human praxis and its basis in labor. Since Marx and Engels rejected mechanical or metaphysical materialism, their materialism was necessarily dialectical in all three aspects: ontology, epistemology, and practice.14 In Marx, materialism was closely related to mortality (“death the immortal”) applicable to all of existence, defining the material world.15 In this perspective derived from ancient Greek materialism, nothing comes from nothing, and nothing being destroyed is reduced to nothing. The human social world, in Marx’s conception, was, in the sense of Epicurean materialism, an emergent form or level of organization within the natural-material universe. Energy (matter and motion), change, contingency, the emergence of new assemblages or organizational forms, all characterize the natural-physical world, which could be explained in terms of itself, as a process of natural history.16 Marx’s analysis was from the outset rooted in the evolutionary theory of which Darwin’s theory of natural selection was the nineteenth-century culmination.

    Marx in his critique of political economy added to this overall materialist view the threefold ecological conception of: (1) the universal metabolism of nature; (2) the social metabolism (or the specifically human relation to nature through the labor and production process); and (3) the metabolic rift (representing the ecological destruction that ensues when the social metabolism comes into conflict with the universal metabolism of nature).17 The labor and production process was thus the key not only to the mode of production in a given historical form of society, but also represented the human relation to nature, and thus social-ecological relations. Marx’s theory of metabolic rift, which was first developed in the context of the rift in the soil nutrient cycle caused by the shipment of food and fiber to the new urban centers—where the essential nutrients, such as nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium, ended up as pollution rather than returning to the soil—constituted the most advanced attempt in his day to capture the human-ecological relation. All subsequent ecological thought, up to ecosystem theory and Earth System analysis, was to be rooted in this same essential approach, focusing on metabolism.

    Nevertheless, the argument of Marx’s Ecology left the story of the formative role played by socialist thinkers after Marx in the emergence of ecology largely unaddressed. Moreover, there remained the contentious issue of the dialectics of nature, associated with Engels in particular. These issues were to be taken up in The Return of Nature. Although Marx’s Ecology was a straightforward attempt to capture Marx’s materialist and ecological views, the story told in The Return of Nature was much more complex, not least of all because it had to transgress certain divisions within Marxism itself.

    Here we have to understand that the simultaneous rejection of both the materialist conception of nature and the dialectics of nature within Western Marxism was an inheritance of the neo-Kantian tradition, which had its origin within German philosophy with Friedrich Lange’s 1865 work, The History of Materialism. Lange attempted to use Kant’s notion of the noumenon, or the unknowable thing-in-itself, as the basis for demolishing materialism, a viewpoint that was carried forward in more sophisticated ways by later neo-Kantians. It was with the rise of neo-Kantianism that epistemology came to occupy its dominant place within philosophy, pushing aside ontology, and also displacing the dialectical logic associated with G. W. F. Hegel. Materialist ideas and natural science were seen as inherently positivistic. Room was made again for religion and idealist philosophy via the Kantian noumena or things-in-themselves.18 Closely related to this, as Marx and Engels noted, were the agnostic, dualistic views of British scientists such as Thomas Huxley and John Tyndall.19

    In opposition to the neo-Kantian dualism of Lange, which rejected both materialism and Hegelian dialectics, Marx responded by boldly stating: “Lange is naive enough to say that I ‘move with rare freedom’ in empirical matter. He hasn’t the least idea that this ‘free movement in matter’ is nothing but a paraphrase for the method of dealing with matter—that is the dialectic method.”20 Likewise, in Capital, Marx wrote: “My dialectical method is, in its foundations, not only different from the Hegelian, but exactly opposite to it.… With me…the ideal is nothing but the material world reflected in the mind of man, and translated into the forms of thought.”21

    In referring to the reflection of the “material world in the mind of man,” Marx had no simplistic notion of mirroring in mind, but rather a dialectical conception of reflection (and reflexivity) and a situated conception of knowledge, in which reason and both objective and subjective agency play central roles within an ever-changing historical reality. Marx’s position, while realist, was therefore a form of “dialectical critical realism.” As Bhaskar has explained, Marx’s dialectical “method, though naturalist and empirical is not positivist, but rather realist.… His epistemological dialectics [his critical realism] commits him to a specific [materialist] ontological dialectics and a conditional [historical] relational dialectics as well.”22

    From a classical historical-materialist standpoint, the dialectics of nature can be seen as part of a dialectical hierarchy. Thus, in terms of what Marx in Capital called “its foundations,” it stands for the material world characterized by motion, contingency, change, and evolution: the dialectic as material process. Central here is the notion that nature (apart from human beings) in the contingent, emergent effects of its manifold processes can be said to have a kind of agency, even if this is unconscious agency. At a social level, the dialectic can be seen in terms of human consciousness and practice, the realm of the identical subject-object of the human-historical realm, standing for human society as an emergent form of nature. In its alienated form under capitalism, the human-social realm often appears to be independent of the material world of nature, or even as completely dominant over nature—though this is a fallacy. In between these two abstract realms, of the merely objective and the merely subjective dialectics, lies the mediating realm of human labor and production, the dialectics of nature and society (what Lukács was to call the “ontology of social being”), arising from practice, which is, for Marx, the key to materialist dialectics.23

    Marx gives us two basic ways of looking at this mediation of nature and society through production (which, for him, in its broadest sense accounts for all human appropriation of nature and thus all material activity). In one of these pathways (most evident in his early writings but also apparent in his later works, such as his Notes on Adolph Wagner, written in 1879–80) the human relation to the universal metabolism of nature is seen in terms of human sensuous interaction with nature, which in classical German philosophy was closely tied to aesthetics, but which Marx linked to production as well. The second is in his theory of the labor and production process as the social metabolism between human beings and nature, representing the active relation of human beings to the earth. For Marx, we can know the world, including, to a considerable extent, the intransitive realm beyond the human subject, because we are part of it through our production and our sensuous existence, and we live in the context conditioned by nature’s laws, albeit in an emergent form in which historical laws, via specific modes of production, also condition human existence, mediating between nature and humanity.24 Engels later adds to this, in line with Marx, the role of mathematics and scientific experiments as ways in which humanity connects dialectically to the wider, “merely objective” realm, employing methods of scientific inference arising originally from the human material relation to nature.25

    In essence, while neo-Kantianism was rooted within a categorical division between the human subject and the objective natural world—between phenomena and noumena—that could not be transcended, Marxian materialist dialectics was grounded in human corporeal existence within the physical world, in a context of emergence, or integrated levels. Here the dualism between humanity and nature was not a fundamental assumption but rather was seen as a result of an alienated consciousness rooted in an alienated system. We can know nature, as Engels was to write in The Dialectics of Nature, because “we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst.”26

    III. The Dialectics of Nature and the Creation of Ecology

    The Return of Nature, moving on from where Marx’s Ecology left off, had a double burden. The historical narrative was concerned with explaining the various ways in which a tradition of socialist ecological analysis had arisen within art and science, in many ways dominating the ecological critique of contemporary capitalist society in the century from the deaths of Darwin and Marx up to the rise of the modern environmentalist movement. But at a deeper, more theoretical level, The Return of Nature was concerned as well with the ways in which a materialist dialectics of nature, often combined with other traditions, such as radical Romanticism and Darwinian evolutionary theory, guided the development of modern ecology, based on the insights of socialist thinkers. Here the conception of the dialectics of nature, in its various forms—despite its categorical rejection by post-Lukácsian Marxists—could be perceived as playing the crucial role in a process of ecological discovery and critique.

    A dialectical aesthetic as well as a dialectical conception of labor could be seen as underlying William Morris’s understanding of nature-society relations. Dialectical conceptions also informed E. Ray Lankester’s evolutionary and ecological materialism. But the thread of the dialectics of nature only fully enters the narrative of The Return of Nature once the work of Engels is considered. In many ways, Engels’s famous claim that “Nature is the proof of dialectics” is the key, provided we understand what he meant by this in more contemporary terms by saying, “Ecology is the proof of dialectics.”27

    Although Engels has been heavily criticized by numerous thinkers for adopting a crude “reflectionist” view of knowledge, a close inspection of his work shows such claims are clearly false when placed in the context of his actual arguments.28 Almost invariably, when Engels refers to “reflection,” he immediately turns around and indicates that what we perceive as objectively conditioned by the material world around us (of which we are part) is a result not simply of conditions external to ourselves, but also a product of our active role in changing the world around us, and our understanding of it through our self-conscious reason. Our rules of scientific interference, our logic, our mathematics, our scientific experiments, our modeling, all have their roots in principles derived from human labor and production; that is, our metabolic relation to the world at large. “Reflection,” as Marx and Engels use it—which invariably implies reflexivity, and which is employed by them in the Hegelian, dialectical sense—is anything but positivist in character.29

    Similarly, in attributing agency and thus dialectical relations of a “merely objective” kind to nature itself, Engels does this in a manner that emphasizes reciprocal relations, reflexivity, change, contingency, development, attraction-and-repulsion (contradiction), and emergence (or integrative levels) within nature itself, relying on Hegel’s complex notion of “reflection determinations” from the “Doctrine of Essence” in his Logic.30 The purpose is to capture the active, systemic, non-mechanistic relations that constitute the natural world, from which evolution (in the broadest sense) arises, and out of which humanity itself emerges. For Engels, as for Marx, it is our understanding of our own position within nature and our metabolism with the universal metabolism of nature that gives us the essential clues to those physical properties and principles that extend beyond ourselves. In this regard, Engels does not hesitate to attribute a kind of agency to nature, the material world itself, understood in its broadest terms as in motion and constituted by the “transformation of energy.”31

    Engels’s well-known three “laws” of the dialectics of nature, better understood today as underlying ontological principles, perfectly manifested this outlook.32 The first law, or the transformation of quantity into quality and vice-versa, is now known in natural science as “phase transition” (or as a “threshold effect”) and was explained in precisely that way by the Marxist mathematician Hyman Levy.33 It can be seen as referring to the general phenomenon of integrative levels or the emergence of new organizational forms and assemblages within the material world, a view directly opposed to reductionist approaches to nature, and leading to a hierarchy of natural laws, the product of evolution, transformation, and change. Such an analysis is essential to all science today.

    The notion of the unity/identity of opposites, or what Lukács, following Hegel, called “the identity of identity and non-identity,” which has played such a large role in Marxian dialectics, was aimed at overthrowing notions of fixity, dualism, reductionism, and mechanism, focusing on the contradictions and feedback loops that induce transformative change.34

    This then points to the third ontological principle, in which emergence now can be seen as the result of contradictions (“the incompatible development of different elements within the same relation”) arising from material-historical changes, and leading to the “negation of the negation,” an expression common to Hegel, Marx, and Engels. In the Marxian version, this phrase stands for the way in which the past mediates between the present and the future in material-historical development, producing a dialectic of continuity and change.35 Engels himself referred to the “spiral form of development,” which occurs when the residuals of the past and the active elements of the present coalesce to generate what Ernst Bloch was to call the “not-yet,” or an altogether new reality. For Bhaskar, this takes the form of the “absenting of absence,” or the transformative action directed at what has been inherited from the past in order to create a future existence.36

    In a sense, the negation of the negation is a historical, evolutionary conception of emergence. Although emergence of new levels of organization was articulated in Engels’s first “law,” in terms of the transformation of quantity to quality and vice-versa, now, following the generative principle of the unity of opposites (of contradiction), it takes on a developmental character: the emergence of a new form as a result of a historical process of reciprocal action or contradiction. This is what Bloch meant when he wrote that the “essential distinction between Hegel’s dialectic and all previous candidates” was that “it is not stilled in the unity of contraries or contradictions.”37 In Marxian terms, the past is never simply past but rather mediates between the present (the moment of praxis) and the future.

    In this way, Engels, in line with Marx, provided a dialectics of nature that was also a dialectics of emergence.38 His analysis recognized the unity and complexity of nature, as well as the “alienated mediation” of nature and society represented by capitalism’s irreversible rifts in nature’s own metabolism.39 This led to his powerful condemnation of capitalism’s conquest of nature, as if of a foreign people, undermining ecological conditions. What Engels referred to metaphorically as the “revenge” of nature was evident in deforestation, desertification, species extinctions, floods, destruction of the soil, pollution, and the spread of disease.40 Few other thinkers (outside of Marx and Justus von Liebig) in the nineteenth century captured so powerfully and succinctly the dialectic of ecological destruction under capitalism.

    Contrary to those who have argued (but without any substantive warrant) that Engels sought to subsume the dialectic of human society in the dialectic of nature, his work The Dialectics of Nature, although incomplete, was structured so as to move from the analysis of the “merely objective dialectics” of nature via natural science, to an anthropological basis in “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man.” Here the analysis was grounded in the dialectics of nature and society, evolving out of human labor and production and the human social metabolism with nature.41 This conformed to the structure adopted in Anti-Dühring in which the argument proceeded logically from natural philosophy to political economy and socialism, with political economy and the mode of production seen as relatively autonomous from the dialectics of nature as such, since conditioned by the dialectics of human history. What in fact mediated between the two, for Engels as for Marx, was human labor and production, that is, the social metabolism. Herein lay the actual material realm of human beings constituting the dialectic of nature and society, or what the later Lukács was to call the “ontology of social being.”

    Indeed, all critical-dialectical thought, encompassing both the “merely objective dialectics of nature,” and what could be called its polar opposite, the “merely subjective dialectics of society,” began for Engels, as for Marx, with the human social metabolism via labor and production, constituting the objective ground of all human existence: the dialectic of nature and society. Human self-consciousness required that the objective world become its own, but this could only be achieved on the basis of ontological principles expressing the specifically human relation to the universal metabolism of nature.

    All of our most fundamental scientific concepts regarding extra-human nature had their historical origins in human interactions with nature and the inferences that were drawn from them. To picture how this works, we can turn to the ancient Greeks. Empedocles in the middle of the fifth century BCE developed an experiment proving the corporeal nature of invisible and motionless air by demonstrating its resistance. This influenced Greek notions of flight. Thus, in Aeschylus’s play Agamemnon, written shortly after, in which two eagles in flight (representing the two heads of the house of Atreus) are said to be rowing with “winged oars beating the waves of the wind,” like the ships below, what is being presented is something more than simply a loose poetic metaphor. Rather it was a direct application of the physical principle (the corporeal nature of air) derived from Empedocles’s experiment.42 In order to describe poetically the resistance that a bird’s wings would experience in flight, Aeschylus drew on experience derived from human labor, referring to the oars of ships and the resistance that propelled the ships forward as they rowed. While such an example may seem quaint, and although we have infinitely more sophisticated explanations of a bird’s flight today, what is significant is that basic scientific principles with regard to external nature arose from the earliest times through inferences from human interactions (primarily human production) with the natural world; inferences that then, in Epicurus’s famous phrase, had to “await confirmation.”43 Although the scope of our experiments, our instruments, and our interactions with the universe have expanded, the fact that the basic concepts with which we approach extra-human natural phenomena arise first and foremost from our own material experience in interacting with nature remains the same.

    Engels’s analysis of the dialectics of nature was developed mainly in his Anti-Dühring, which he read to Marx as it was written in draft form (and to which Marx contributed a chapter as well as notes on the Greek atomists), along with his unfinished Dialectics of Nature.44 It was all clearly provisional, a work in progress, and incomplete. The British socialist scientists who were to be strongly influenced by Engels’s materialist dialectics viewed it as a great, unfinished, and open-ended work of scientific inquiry; one far exceeding, as J. D. Bernal noted, the works in the philosophy of science in Engels’s own time, represented by Herbert Spencer and William Whewell in England and Lange in Germany.45

    For many of the leading British socialist thinkers of the early twentieth century—figures as varied as Lankester, Arthur G. Tansley, Benjamin Farrington, George Thomson, Bernal, Joseph Needham, Lancelot Hogben, and Christopher Caudwell—a key point of reference was Epicurean materialism, which was seen as offering not only a deep “materialist conception of nature,” but also, via the swerve (clinamen, declension), the concept of contingency, understood as a movement away from a purely mechanical worldview. The Epicurean swerve was a notion stressed by Marx in his doctoral dissertation, which became available in the 1920s.46 This was viewed by the British socialist scientists as connecting to a dialectical world view and to Engels’s dialectics of nature. Epicurus, as Needham emphasized, conceived nature as arising of itself, while swerving away from all rigid determinism.47

    The result of this historical-materialist Wissenschaft (a term often translated as science, but also referring to knowledge more generally when approached systematically on any topic) was a great renaissance of dialectical naturalism.48 This included, to point to just a few of the many pioneering developments:

    1. Lankester’s thesis that all major epidemics in animals and humans in the present age are the result of human production, and capitalism in particular;49
    2. Haldane’s theory (in parallel with that of the Soviet biologist A. I. Oparin) of the material origins of life—a discovery which was tied to a recognition of how life had created the earth’s atmosphere, linked to the Russian biochemist V. I. Vernadsky’s analysis of the biosphere;50
    3. Haldane’s role in the neo-Darwinian evolutionary synthesis and his integration of this with the dialectics of nature based on Engels’s writings;51
    4. Bernal’s operationalization of the dialectics of nature and the negation of the negation in terms of a theory of the role of residuals in effecting the emergence of new forms of inorganic/organic organization;52
    5. Needham’s theory of integrative levels or emergence, encompassing both natural and social history;53
    6. Tansley’s introduction of the concept of ecosystem, in which he was influenced by Lankester’s earlier ecological analysis and Marxist mathematician Levy’s dialectical systems theory;54
    7. Hogben’s and Haldane’s devastating scientific refutation of the genetic basis of race;55
    8. Haldane’s early empirical analysis, based on his father’s research, of the build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere;56
    9. Bernal’s leading role in the critique of the social relations of science;57
    10. Caudwell’s attempt to explore the interconnections in the dialectics of art and science;58
    11. Farrington’s and Thomson’s pioneering research into Epicurean materialism and its relation to the development of Marxist thought;
    12. Bernal’s critique of nuclear-weapons development and treatment of how this threatened the end of life in its present form.59

    And collectively, this manifested itself as the detailed critique of ecological degradation and destruction integrated into the work of all of these thinkers.

    Not only were the scientific and cultural achievements associated with these leading figures in materialist dialectics within realms of science and art of great importance in their time (though later effaced by the Cold War), they were also connected fairly directly with the battles that occurred beginning in the 1950s, with the advent of the Anthropocene, around the sustainability of the natural environment and the rise of the environmental movement. These developments helped inspire the work of leftist scientists like Barry Commoner, Rachel Carson, and, later on, figures such as Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Levins, Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose, Hilary Rose, and Helena Sheehan, and still more recent analysts such as Howard Waitzkin, Nancy Krieger, and Rob Wallace. The reality is that there is a powerful tradition of historical-materialist analysis within and related to natural science that has often fallen outside the purview of Western Marxism.60

    The problem here is well-illustrated by a couple of statements by Perry Anderson, one of the premier Marxist cultural theorists and historians in Britain from the 1960s to the present day. Writing in the New Left Review in 1968, Anderson referred to the “false science…and the fantasies of Bernal.”61 The undeniable fact that Bernal was one of the leading scientific figures in Britain in the 1930s through the 1960s, famous for his major discoveries, and a Marxist, recognized as one of the great intellectual luminaries of his time—even if sometimes deviating into a kind of Soviet positivism—gets short shrift here. More significantly, Anderson felt compelled to declare in 1983 that “problems of the interaction of the human species with its terrestrial environment [were] essentially absent from classical Marxism,” thereby excluding Marx and Engels’s contributions in this respect, suggesting that the whole tradition of explorations of the dialectics of nature (and of nature and society) by Marxist theorists was outside the sphere of historical materialism properly speaking.62 Similar positions were adopted by a host of other thinkers, such as George Lichtheim, Leszek Kołakowski, Shlomo Avineri, David McLellan, and Terrell Carver, all of whom sought to separate Engels from Marx and the dialectics of nature from Marxism.63

    Insofar as this tendency of post-Lukácsian Marxism had a common basis, it had to do with postulations, inherited from neo-Kantianism and deeply embedded in the dominant traditions of philosophy, that rejected realism (critical or otherwise), and with it any possibility of a dialectics of nature. How is it, then, that a dialectics of nature has been so powerful in unlocking the secrets of the universe? The reason is that nature and society are not different realities, but are co-evolving existences, in which society is asymmetrically dependent upon the larger natural world of which it is a part. Our knowledge of nature, of ourselves, and of our place in the world, derives from this fact, spurred on in part by the very alienation of nature and the resulting self-consciousness that the capitalist system has generated. As Needham wrote:

    Marx and Engels were bold enough to assert that it [the dialectical process] happens actually in evolving nature itself, and that the undoubted fact that it happens in our thought about nature is because we and our thought are part of nature. We cannot consider nature otherwise than as a series of levels of organization, a series of dialectical syntheses. From the ultimate particle to atom, from atom to molecule, from molecule to colloidal aggregate, from aggregate to living cell, from cell to organ, from organ to body, from animal body to social association, the series of organizational levels is complete. Nothing but energy (as we now call matter and motion) and levels of organization (or the stabilised dialectical syntheses) at different levels have been required for the building of our world.64

    For Caudwell, “the external world does not impose dialectic on thought, nor does thought impose it on the external world. The relation between subject and object, ego and Universe, is itself dialectic. Man, when he attempts to think metaphysically, contradicts himself, and meanwhile continues to live and experience reality dialectically.”65

    The French Marxist Roger Garaudy put this in more straightforwardly epistemological terms:

    To say that there is a dialectic of nature, is to say that the structure and movement of reality are such that only a dialectical thought can make phenomena intelligible and allow us to handle them.

    That is no more than an inference: but it is an inference founded on the totality of human practice—an inference that is constantly subject to revision as a function of the progress of that practice.…

    At the current stage of the development of the sciences, the representation of the real which emerges from the sum total of confirmed knowledge, is that of an organic whole in a constant process not only of development but also of auto-creation. It is this structure that we call “dialectical.”66

    Kant argued in his Critique of Judgment that, in dealing with the intransitive world of nature beyond our perceptions, it is necessary to conceive of it teleologically in order to say anything about it at all.67 Science, however, has progressed far beyond this point, and while sometimes still presenting nature in teleological terms, it is more likely to resort to mechanical, systemic (systems theory), or dialectical terms.68 The last of these most fully captures the universal metabolism of nature, encompassing its different integrative levels—including the inorganic and organic, the extra-human and human—connected with the results of human praxis.

    IV. The Dialectic of the Anthropocene

    Why are these issues so important today, and why is there now a return to the dialectics of nature? This has to do with our own material conditions, which are increasingly dominated by the planetary emergency and the emergence of the Anthropocene, commencing around 1945 with the first nuclear detonation (followed by the bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki), which represented a fundamental change in the human relation to the earth. As a result, the dialectic of nature in the twenty-first century is in many ways a dialectic of the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene Epoch is designated by science, though not yet officially, as a new epoch in the geological time scale, following the Holocene Epoch of the last 11,700 years. In the Anthropocene, humanity has arisen as the primary driver effecting changes in the Earth System. The dialectic of nature and society has thus evolved to the point that human production is generating an “anthropogenic rift” in the biogeochemical cycles of the planet, resulting in the crossing of various planetary boundaries and representing the transgressing of critical thresholds in the Earth System that define a livable climate for humanity.

    Climate change is one such threshold or planetary boundary. In essence, the quantitative build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has resulted in a qualitative change in the climate sufficient to threaten human existence, and even that of most life on Earth. Other planetary boundaries that have been crossed or are in the process of being crossed are represented by ocean acidification, loss of biological diversity (and species extinction), the disruption of nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, loss of ground cover (including forests), loss of fresh water sources (including desertification), and chemical and radioactive pollution of the environment.69

    The sources of these changes are not simply anthropogenic (something that will not be reversed so long as industrial civilization continues to exist), but are due more concretely to the worldwide expansion of capitalism as an accumulative system geared to its own internal growth ad infinitum and embodying in that respect the most destructive relation to the earth conceivable. This was captured by Marx’s theory of metabolic rift, now raised to the level of an anthropogenic rift in the Earth System.70

    Although we have a widely accepted name for the new geological epoch, characterized by the human economy’s current role as the primary geological force on the level of the Earth System itself, we still have no name for the new geological age, nested within the Anthropocene Epoch that underlies the current Anthropocene crisis. Officially, in terms of geological ages, we are still in the Meghalayan Age of the last 4,200 years, dating from a period of climate change that was thought to have brought down some of the early civilizations (though this is currently a matter of dispute among scientists). But how are we to conceive of the new geological ageassociated with the inception of the Anthropocene Epoch?

    My Monthly Review colleague Brett Clark and I, as professional environmental sociologists, have proposed the name Capitalinian (also referred to by geologist Carles Soriano as the Capitalian) for this first geological age of the Anthropocene, standing for the fact that it is the capitalist world-system that has created the present planetary emergency.71 The only solution—indeed, the only way of preventing the present mode of production from bringing about an Anthropocene extinction (or Quaternary Period extinction) event—is for human society to move beyond capitalism and the Capitalinian towards a future, more sustainable geological age within the Anthropocene, which we have labeled the Communian, after community, commune, and communal.

    What is called the practical, relational dialectic, the dialectic of history is now therefore caught up with the dialectic of nature and society reflected in Marx’s theory of metabolic rift. This has now been given a wider field of operation, only truly apparent in our time, in which the metabolism of the entire planet, or the dialectic of nature, is being affected by an anthropogenic rift in the Earth System and in ways that threaten our own existence, calling to mind Engels’s “revenge” of nature and Lankester’s “Nature’s revenges.”72

    It is important to understand that this Earth System crisis in the Capitalinian is tied to the long history of expropriation and exploitation that together constitute the foundation of capitalism’s relation to the earth and humanity. Expropriation, in Marx’s terms, meant appropriation without equivalent or reciprocity, that is, robbery. Marx thus spoke of the robbery of nature underlying the metabolic rift.73 But he also wrote about the expropriation of the land from the population, removing the workers from the most basic means of production and thus control over their own lives. The age that Marx critically referred to as “so-called original accumulation” (so-called, because it was defined not so much by accumulation as by robbery) was an age of expropriation.74 Expropriation went beyond the theft of land to the theft of human bodies themselves. This is associated with what Clark and I have designated as the “corporeal rift,” marked by genocide, enslavement, and colonization of much the world’s population, underlying the relations of class exploitation.75

    It is this wider logic of the expropriation of lands and bodies behind the capitalist system of exploitation that gave rise to the history of racial capitalism. This process of expropriation can also be seen in the robbing of women’s household labor (which led Marx in his day to refer critically to women in capitalism as the slaves in the household) and in the continuing agribusiness expropriation of the land of subsistence workers, primarily peasants. Even people’s leisure time away from work throughout the world is being expropriated in various ways in the accelerated accumulative society of digital capitalism. Today capitalism is thus involved in myriad ways in the expropriation of the entire earth and its population: a system of robbery so extensive that the human relation to the earth, the very basis of human existence, is now in danger of being severed. The alienation of nature and the alienation of labor that characterize capitalism point, in the end, only to destruction.

    Our practical dialectics today thus require a knowledge of the dialectics of nature and society. The merely objective dialectics of nature, excluding the human subject, and the merely subjective dialectics of society, excluding natural-physical existence, are not enough. A greater critical unity of thought and action is being forced upon us. Dialectics, as Lewontin and Levins explained, focuses on “wholeness and interpenetration, the structure of process more than things, integrated levels, historicity and contradiction.”76

    In ancient Greece, the Ionian philosophers, such as Heraclitus, focused on material processes as dialectical. For Heraclitus, describing the basic metabolic process underlying life:

    As things change to fire,
    and fire exhausted
    falls back into things,
    the crops are sold
    for money spent on food.77

    In contrast to the Ionians, the Eleatics, such as Parmenides (followed by Plato and much later, by Plotinus) conceived of a dialectic of the idea, or reason. Hegel can be seen as wedding these two vital streams together, building on all of modern philosophy and the Enlightenment in his idealist philosophy, but giving precedence to dialectics as idea or reason.78 Marx’s materialist dialectics returned to material processes as underlying all reality, leading to an objective dialectic of change and emergence, of the metabolism of nature and society, and ending in a dialectics of human history and practice.

    This materialist dialectical synthesis, the dialectic of nature and society, remains of great importance today. We live in a time, as Marx and Engels noted in The German Ideology, in which humanity must struggle in revolutionary ways not simply for the advancement of human freedom, but also in order to avoid destruction due to what can be called “capitalism’s deadly threat” to the world and life in general. For Epicurus, Marx wrote, “the world [the earth] is our friend.”79 Materialist dialectics tells us that our goal in the present moment must be one of creating a world of ecological sustainability and substantive equality, one which promotes sustainable human development. But this starts in our time with an ecological and social revolution that is forced upon us. Today, the struggle for freedom and the struggle for necessity coincide everywhere on the planet for the first time in human history, creating a prospect of ruin or revolution: either a fall into the depths to which the Capitalinian has brought us, or the creation of a new Communian Age.80

    Notes

    1. Clive Hamilton and Jacques Grinevald, “Was the Anthropocene Anticipated?,” Anthropocene Review, 2, no. 1 (2015): 59–72.
    2. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 30, (New York: International Publishers, 1975–2004), 54–66.
    3. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone, (London: The Merlin Press, 1971); Roy Bhaskar, Reclaiming Reality (London: Routledge, 2011), 131.
    4. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 24; Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 115–18.
    5. Giambattista Vico, The New Science, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976), 493; John Bellamy Foster, The Return of Nature(New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020), 17.
    6. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 207; Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 492.
    7. Georg Lukács, In Defense of History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic, trans. Esther Leslie (London: Verso, 2000), 102–7; Georg Lukács, The Ontology of Social Being, vol. 3, trans. David Fernbach (London: The Merlin Press, 1980).
    8. Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (London: Verso, 2004), 32.
    9. Sebastiano Timpanaro, On Materialism, trans. Lawrence Garner (London: Verso, 1975), Karl Jacoby, “Western Marxism” in A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, ed. Tom Bottomore (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 523–26; Lucio Colletti, Marxism and Hegel, trans. Lawrence Garner (London: Verso, 1973), 191–92.
    10. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1998), 224, 254; Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: New Left, 1971), 156; Max Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason (New York: Continuum, 2004), 123–27.
    11. Herbert Marcuse, Counter-Revolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon, 1972), 59–78.
    12. Bhaskar, Reclaiming Reality, 132.
    13. Foster, The Return of Nature, 7.
    14. Bhaskar, Reclaiming Reality, 115.
    15. Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, ed. Ronald Melville, Don Fowler and Peta Fowler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 93 (III: 869).
    16. Anthony Arthur Long, “Evolution vs. Intelligent Design in Classical Antiquity,” Townsend Center for the Humanities, 2006, available at berkeley.edu; Anthony Arthur Long, From Epicurus to Epictetus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, Critique of Intelligent Design (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2008), 155–77.
    17. John Bellamy Foster, “Marx and the Rift in the Universal Metabolism of Nature,” Monthly Review 65, no. 7 (December 2013): 1–19.
    18. On neo-Kantianism and its consequences for dialectical and materialist philosophy, see Evald Vassilievich Ilyenkov, Dialectical Logic, trans. H. Campbell Creighton (Delhi: Aakar Books, 2008), 289–319; Frederick C. Beiser, After Hegel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014); Foster, The Return of Nature, 264–69. In the words of Lukács, who started out as a neo-Kantian, “according to Kant’s theory the world given to us is only appearance, with a transcendental unknowable thing-in-itself behind it.” (Georg Lukács, Conversations with Lukács, ed. Theo Pinkus [London: The Merlin Press, 1974], 76.)
    19. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 45, 50, 462.
    20. Karl Marx, Letters to Kugelmann (New York: International Publishers, 1934), 112. Marx was replying to the second edition of Friedrich Albert Lange’s On the Workers’ Question (1870).
    21. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), 102.
    22. Bhaskar, Reclaiming Reality, 120. Kai Heron, writing from a Lacano-Hegelian perspective, has recently stated that Marxian ecology based on Marx’s theory of metabolic rift is unable “to account for the contingent emergence of ourselves” as “subjects, from nature.” This, however, is exactly what the theory of contingent emergence developed in classical historical materialism, which is carried forward by today’s dialectical critical realism (including Marxian ecology) is, in the final analysis, all about. To call this “contemplative materialism” thus misses the point: today the issue is the formation of a revolutionary ecological subject, conceived in terms of the “transformative model of social activity,” viewed as a contemporary expression of historical materialism. Kai Heron, “Dialectical Materialisms, Metabolic Rifts and the Climate Crisis,” Science and Society 85, no. 4 (2021): 501–26; Roy Bhaskar, Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom (London: Verso, 1993), 2, 152–73.
    23. Georg Lukács, The Ontology of Social Being, vol. 2, trans. David Fernbach (London: The Merlin Press, 1978), 6–7, 103. Writing of “the hidden nature speculation in Marx” and Marx’s concept of metabolism, Alfred Schmidt observed: “Only in this way”—that is, through the mediation of human activity—”can we speak of a ‘dialectic of nature.’” Schmidt’s intention was to reduce the notion of the “merely objective dialectic of nature,” referred to by Lukács in History and Class Consciousness, to the dialectics of nature and society. (Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx, trans. Ben Fowkes [London: New Left, 1971], 79.)
    24. See John Bellamy Foster, “The Dialectics of Nature and Marxist Ecology,” in Dialectics for the New Century, ed. Bertell Ollman and Tony Smith (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 50–82; Andrew Feenberg, Lukács, Marx, and the Sources of Critical Theory (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1981); John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett, Marx and the Earth (Chicago: Haymarket, 2016), 50–66.
    25. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 13–14, 503; Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, xix.
    26. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 461.
    27. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 23; Foster, The Return of Nature, 254.
    28. Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents in Marxism, trans. Paul Stephen Falla (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 324–25; Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 67, 86; Norman Levine, Dialogue with the Dialectic (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1984), 10–12.
    29. On Hegel’s complex, dialectical concept of reflection (and its relation to reflexivity and refraction), see Michael Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 247–50. For the distinction between the mechanistic and Marxian conceptions of reflection, see Roger Garaudy, Marxism in the Twentieth Century, trans. René Hague (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970) 53–54. Lukács was to relate the origins of dialectical reflection, in the Marxian sense, directly to praxis and production (the metabolism with nature), stating: “The most primitive kind of work, such as quarrying of stones by primeval man, implies a correct reflection of the reality he is concerned with. For no purposive activity can be carried out in the absence of an image, however crude, of the practical reality involved.” (Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, xxv.) This complex, dialectical view of the concept of “reflection” had roots that went back to Immanuel Kant, who wrote of the “Amphiboly of the Conceptions of Reflection.” See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (London: J. M. Dent, 1934), 191–208.
    30. See Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 43, 493–94; G. W. F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Humanities, 1969), 399, 405–12, 490–91, 536; Foster, The Return of Nature, 244–51; George Lukács, The Young Hegel, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1975) 280; Georg Lukács, The Ontology of Social Being, vol. 1, trans. David Fernbach (London: The Merlin Press, 1978), 74–82.
    31. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 13.
    32. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 110–32, 356–61; Craig Dilworth, “Principles, Laws, Theories, and the Metaphysics of Science,” Synthese 101, no. 2 (1994): 223–47.
    33. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 115–19, 356–61; Hyman Levy, The Universe of Science (London: Watts and Co., 1932), 30–32, 117, 227–28.
    34. Lukács, Conversations with Lukács, 73–75.
    35. Bertel Ollman, The Dance of the Dialectic (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 17; Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 120–32; Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 929. The notion of the negation of the negation arises out of Hegel’s attempts to explain determinate negations that express continuity and change. See G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University, 1977), 51.
    36. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 313; J. D. Bernal, “Dialectical Materialism,” in Aspects of Dialectical Materialism, ed. Hyman Levy (London: Watts and Co., 1934), 103–4; Bhaskar, Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom, 150–52, 377–78; Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 1, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 9–18, 306–13; Jay, Marxism and Totality, 183–86. An account of the dialectic as a spiral form of development was developed by William Morris and E. Belfort Bax, probably in conjunction with Engels, in The Manifesto of the Socialist League. See William Morris and E. Belfort Bax, The Manifesto of the Socialist League (London: Socialist League Office, 1885), 11. The characterization of the dialectic as a spiral also appears in E. Belfort Bax, The Religion of Socialism (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries, 1972), 2–5.
    37. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 1, 71.
    38. Kaan Kangal, “Engels’s Emergentist Dialectics,” Monthly Review 72, no. 6 (November 2020): 18–27, John Bellamy Foster, “Engels’s Dialectics of Nature in the Anthropocene,” Monthly Review 72, no. 6 (November 2020): 1–17.
    39. Karl Marx, Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (London: Penguin, 1974), 260–61.
    40. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 459–64; Foster, The Return of Nature, 177–215, 273–87.
    41. For a standard criticism of Engels in this respect, see Levine, Dialogue with the Dialectic, 8–12. For a response, see John L. Stanley, Mainlining Marx (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2002).
    42. Benjamin Farrington, Head and Hand in Ancient Greece (London: Watts and Co., 1947) 11–15; Aeschylus, The Oresteia, trans. George Thomson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004).
    43. Epicurus, The Epicurus Reader, trans. Brad Inwood and Lloyd P. Gerson (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 42. Epicurus was known for his method of scientific inference as well as his epistemology. A few fragments of his writings have been preserved in the form of letters or collections of maxims. However, all of his 300 books are lost, except for parts of his On Nature, which have been recovered from the Herculaneum papyri. Nevertheless, we have a brief summary from Diogenes Laertius of his Canon, which was the first distinct epistemological work in the ancient Greek tradition. The most intact Epicurean treatment of the method of scientific inference (retrieved from the Herculaneum papyri) was Philodemus’s work on method and signs. See Epicurus, The Epicurus Reader, 41–42; Gisela Striker, “Epistemology,” in The Oxford Handbook of Epicurus and Epicureanism, ed. Philip Mitsis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 43–58; Philodemus, Philodemus: On Methods of Inference, ed. Philip Howard De Lacey and Estelle Allen De Lacey (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Association, 1941).
    44. Foster, The Return of Nature, 253.
    45. D. Bernal, World Without War (New York: Prometheus, 1936), 1–2.
    46. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 1, 34–107, 403–514. As the Epicurean scholar Cyril Bailey pointed out, Marx was the first figure in modern times to recognize the significance of Epicurus’s swerve. Cyril Bailey, “Karl Marx on Greek Atomism,” Classical Quarterly 22, no. 3–4 (1928): 205–6. Marx drew on a wide body of fragments in writing his dissertation (and his seven Epicurean Notebooks) at a time when these had not previously been collected, including one fragment recovered from the charred papyri in the Herculaneum library. Michael Heinrich, Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2019), 296. On the influence of Epicurus on the British Marxists of the 1930s and ’40s, see Foster, The Return of Nature, 369–70. Benjamin Farrington, in particular, played a major role in introducing the British Marxian scientists to Epicurus, not only through his own works, but also in facilitating the reading of Marx’s doctoral dissertation by thinkers in this tradition. See Lancelot Hogben, Lancelot Hogben, Scientific Humanist (London: The Merlin Press, 1998), 105; Benjamin Farrington, Science and Politics in the Ancient World (London, George Allen and Unwin, 1939); Benjamin Farrington, The Faith of Epicurus (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967); George Thomson, The First Philosophers (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1955), 311–14.
    47. Joseph Needham, Time: The Refreshing River (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1948), 55, 124, 191.
    48. See Joseph Fracchia, “Dialectical Itineraries,” History and Theory 38, no. 2 (1991): 169–97.
    49. Ray E. Lankester, The Kingdom of Man (New York: Henry Holt, 1911), 159–91; John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Hannah Holleman, “Capital and the Ecology of Disease,” Monthly Review 73, no. 2 (June 2021): 1–23.
    50. B. S. Haldane, The Science of Life (London: Pemberton, 1968), 6–11; J. D. Bernal, The Origin of Life (New York: World Publishing, 1967), 24–35; Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 277; Vladimir I. Vernadsky, The Biosphere, trans. David B. Langmuir (New York: Springer Verlag, 1998).
    51. B. S. Haldane, The Marxist Philosophy and the Sciences (New York: Random House, 1939); Foster, The Return of Nature, 383–98.
    52. D. Bernal, “Dialectical Materialism,” 103–4; Henri Lefebvre, Metaphilosophy, trans. David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2016) 301–2.
    53. Needham, Time: The Refreshing River, 233–72.
    54. G. Tansley, “The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts and Terms,” Ecology 16, no. 3 (1935): 284–307; Levy, The Universe of Science.
    55. Foster, The Return of Nature, 337–39.
    56. B. S. Haldane, “Carbon Dioxide Content of Atmospheric Air,” Nature 137 (1936): 575; Foster, The Return of Nature, 397, 612–13.
    57. D. Bernal, The Social Function of Science (New York: Macmillan, 1939).
    58. Christopher Caudwell, Studies and Further Studies in a Dying Culture (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971); Foster, The Return of Nature, 417–56.
    59. Foster, The Return of Nature, 489–96; Bernal, World Without War; Bernal, The Origin of Life, xvi, 176–82.
    60. Foster, The Return of Nature, 502–26; Foster, Clark, and Holleman, “Capital and the Ecology of Disease”; Helena Sheehan, Marxism and the Philosophy of Science (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1985).
    61. Perry Anderson, “Components of the National Culture,” New Left Review I, no. 50 (1968): 3–57. Compare Eric Hobsbawm, Fractured Times (London: Little, Brown, 2013), 169–83.
    62. Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (London: Verso, 1983), 83.
    63. McLellan’s Marxism After Marx reflected the tendency not only to condemn but also to exclude from the Marxist canon those who were seen as falling outside the narrowly defined Western Marxist tradition. Thus, of the British Marxists up through the 1930s considered in The Return of Nature, including Morris, Hogben, Haldane, Bernal, Levy, Needham, Farrington, Thomson, and Caudwell, only the last is mentioned in the chapter on “British Marxism” in McLellan’s work, and this was confined to a mere two sentences. We are told that “Christopher Caudwell was the only really original pre-war British Marxist”—and then only for his treatment of “literature,” not his theory of art in general or his analysis of science. See David McLellan, Marxism After Marx (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), 30.
    64. Needham, Time: The Refreshing River, 14–15.
    65. Caudwell, Studies and Further Studies in a Dying Culture, 227 (Further Studies).
    66. Garaudy, Marxism in the Twentieth Century, 61.
    67. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952) 50–54, 67–74, 77–86.
    68. Systems theory often overlaps with dialectics. See Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins, Biology Under the Influence (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2007), 101–24.
    69. Johan Rockstrom et al., “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Nature 461 (2009): 472–75; Will Steffen et al., “Planetary Boundaries,” Science 347, no. 6223 (2015): 736–46; Richard E. Leakey and Roger Lewin, The Sixth Extinction (New York: Anchor, 1996).
    70. Hamilton and Grinevald, “Was the Anthropocene Anticipated?,” 67.
    71. John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, “The Capitalinian: The First Geological Age of the Anthropocene,” Monthly Review 73, no. 4 (September 2021): 1–16; Carles Soriano, “On the Anthropocene Formalization and the Proposal by the Anthropocene Working Group,” Geologica Acta 18, no. 6 (2020): 1–10.
    72. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 461; Lankester, The Kingdom of Man, 159–91.
    73. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 637–38.
    74. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 871; John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, The Robbery of Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020), 43–61. Marx strongly preferred the concept of “original expropriation” to “original accumulation,” since what was at issue was expropriation, not accumulation. See Karl Marx, Value, Price, and Profit, in Karl Marx, Wage-Labour and Capital/Value, Price and Profit (New York: International Publishers, 1935), 38
    75. Foster and Clark, The Robbery of Nature, 78–103.
    76. Lewontin and Levins, Biology Under the Influence, 103.
    77. Heraclitus, Fragments, trans. Brooks Haxton (London: Penguin, 2001), 15.
    78. Bhaskar, Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom, 115–16; Thomson, The First Philosophers, 271–95.
    79. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 5, 141. See also Walter Baier, Eric Canepa, and Haris Golemis, eds., Capitalism’s Deadly Threat (London: The Merlin Press, 2021).
    80. “The real ‘Golden Age’ of historical anthropology cannot be conceived of without the just as real ‘Golden Age’ of a new humanist cosmology.” (Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 138.)
  • Capitalism in the Anthropocene: Ecological Ruin or Ecological Revolution

    Capitalism in the Anthropocene: Ecological Ruin or Ecological Revolution

    Capitalism in the Anthropocene: Ecological Ruin or Ecological RevolutionCapitalism in the Anthropocene: Ecological Ruin or Ecological Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, forthcoming 2022), 693 pp.

    Over the last 11,700 years, during which human civilization developed, the earth has existed within what geologists refer to as the Holocene Epoch. Now science is telling us that the Holocene Epoch in the geological time scale ended, replaced by the onset of a new, more dangerous Anthropocene Epoch, which began around 1950. The Anthropocene Epoch is characterized by an “anthropogenic rift” in the biological cycles of the Earth System, marking a changed reality in which human activities are now the main geological force impacting the earth as a whole, generating at the same time an existential crisis for the world’s population.

    What caused this massive shift in the history of the earth? In this comprehensive study, John Bellamy Foster tells us that a globalized system of capital accumulation has induced humanity to foul its own nest. The result is a planetary emergency that threatens all present and future generations, throwing into question the continuation of civilization and ultimately the very survival of humanity itself. Only by addressing the social aspects of the current planetary emergency, exploring the theoretical, historical, and practical dimensions of the capitalism’s alteration of the planetary environment, is it possible to develop the ecological and social resources for a new journey of hope.

    What people are saying about Capitalism in the Anthropocene

    John Bellamy Foster has returned Socialism to a serious and sincere engagement with nature. He is as adept at navigating the latest scientific literature as he is comfortable with the immense body of Marxist theory. JBF is a key reference for the elaboration of our political struggles and for the expansion of our political imagination.

    Vijay Prashad, Director, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research

  • Antinomies of Space and Nature or an Open Totality?: Neil Smith and Henri Lefebvre on Nature and Society

    Antinomies of Space and Nature or an Open Totality?: Neil Smith and Henri Lefebvre on Nature and Society” (coauthored with Brian M. Napoletano and Brett Clark, Foster listed second), Human Geography (published Online First, November 2022), 14 pp.

    The work of Henri Lefebvre has played a pivotal role in human geography in recent decades. At the same time, it has frequently been subject to partial and fragmented appropriations that isolate his insights on the production of space from his broader corpus, leading to confusion and misunderstanding regarding his handling of the dialectical relationships between space, time, society, and nature. In particular, Neil Smith’s claim that Lefebvre’s conceptualization of nature was both deficient and inconsistent with his dynamic conceptualization of space has tended to dominate geographical engagements with Lefebvre in this area. Following Smith, researchers generally reconstruct the production of space as an epiphenomenon of the production of nature. We critically assess and respond to Smith’s criticisms of Lefebvre. Specifically, we contrast Lefebvre’s material–dialectical approach to Smith’s production-of-nature thesis. While Smith’s thesis is helpful in understanding how capital attempts to subsume all of nature under commodity production, Lefebvre’s dialectical conceptualization of nature–society as an oppositional unity points both to the impossibility of capital subsuming all of nature and the dangers that its attempts to do so pose to human civilization (even survival). Lefebvre’s observations, regarding the growing rupture between natural processes and spatial dynamics, which he incorporates into his own elaboration of Karl Marx’s theory of metabolic rift, make his work indispensable to the development of an ecospatial critique within geography and the social sciences more generally.