The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci was one of the unlikely heroes of twentieth century. Though I object to his overly Stalinistic activism, he never waivered in his own intellectual explorations which make his letters and notebooks a testament to innovative political analysis and thought. During eleven years of incarceration by the Italian government he developed interesting critiques of power and hierarchy that make him much more than a simple Marxist. And he held on through his years of prison writing and though I don’t always agree with him, his determination is a great inspiration. One of the things for which Gramsci is famous for is his often quoted dictum “I have pessimism of the intellect, but optimism of the will.” I would love to say that I live up to this important tenet but I confess that I almost always fall short. Though, in my early years, I was even blessed with an optimism of the intellect, that faded sometime in my twenties, and I have maintained an optimism of the will whenever I have been able, I feel that my life has been a gradual deterioration of optimism, and I am struck by Nietzsche’s words that honesty “leads to nausea and suicide.” (Honesty, that is, with oneself about the terrible realities of our condition) Sometimes I am not sure how much longer I can hold it together and when I laugh it is only diabolically in the face of a certain hopelessness. Unfortunately, (again quoting Nietzsche) “there are no experiences other than moral ones” and the more one knows this the more clear it is that the centre will not hold. I long to be a cartoon character like Bugs Bunny, adequately cynical but irreverently full of my own sense of pleasure. But if I am a cartoon character I can only be Ignatz the mouse in George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, senselessly throwing bricks in a surreal world that I cannot understand. 

Poor pale pitiable form 

That I follow in a storm

Iron tears & groans of lead 

Bind around my akeing head 

Mock on Mock on Voltaire Rousseau

Mock on Mock on! tis all in vain! 

You throw the sand against the wind 

And the wind blows it back again

                                -William Blake

I am no more than the Ghost of a Flea. Good luck to all.

Some Thoughts on Power

I recently became engaged in an internet argument with someone who had accused Emma Goldman of being an agent of British Imperialism. This struck me as a particularly odd accusation and I tried to get to the bottom of it through a discourse with the accuser, always a difficult thing to do through email. But I did this because the person who had made the accusation seemed like a normally cogent and rational person. Perhaps it is needless to say that I received no satisfaction. The person continually failed to make it clear if he really thought Goldman was an actual ‘agent’ of British Imperial forces or just a dupe of that system. I thought that perhaps he were really just claiming that the actions of the US anarchists somehow played into the hands of British interests, and I waited for some evidence for this claim but none was forthcoming, instead I just condescended to with the claim that I didn’t understand the subtleties of British Imperialism. Even in the face of no evidence, I proceeded to argue that even if anarchists like Goldman had somehow played into the hands of the British, it was an entirely unintended consequence of their actions. Similarly, I said, if Napoleon’s failed invasion of Russia had served to strengthen the position of the Russian aristocracy, this did not mean that the French Emperor was somehow an agent, or even dupe, of the Czar; it just means that the flow of power is a complex and tricky thing and any action, dissent in particular, can have deeply influential unintended consequences. After a number of emails and condemnations of British Imperialism, I finally realized that this person was just a disgruntled US citizen who saw red whenever he thought of Goldman because he thought she was involved in the assassination of President McKinley for whom he seemed to have a soft spot. Funny enough, this is another accusation for which there is no real evidence. Anyway, I thought it was funny that he would be upset about British Imperialism when one considers the role that McKinley played in US imperialism; it was under McKinley’s rule, after all, that the US annexed Puerto Rico and the Philippines. The sad fact is that many Americans, and I grew up as an American, simply cannot see that US policy has been a clear form of Imperialism for over a hundred years.

But even if my internet adversary does not, I understand mixed effects of actions, even Imperialism. I have opposed US actions in the Middle East since I first became politically involved. And the recent events are typical examples of US Imperial actions. Even right-wing commentators like Eric Margolis continue to point out that the US invasion of Afghanistan has largely been a front for their efforts to find a cheap and reliable way of drawing oil out of the former Soviet states to the north of Afghanistan. Recently the government of Tajikistan gave notice to the US that they have to close the Manas airbase on their territory. But even here one finds mixed results. For example large numbers of Tajik farmers have accused the US of destroying their crops through land grabs, pollution, and carelessness. On the other hand members of the US forces in the country have raised funds to build schools and give healthcare to poor children. Overall, I think one has to opposed Imperialism, whether it is of the British or US variety, because its goals and effects are overwhelmingly problematic. But it should be clear to everyone who is willing to look carefully at any geo-political event that the power flows in multiple directions at once, particularly in advanced Capitalist states, and conceptions of it should be oversimplified. This is the greatest lesson of Antonio Gramsci’s work on Cultural Hegemony which should be read and enjoyed by all.

The breakdown of Marxism

I made a fairly comprehensive study of Marxism for many years and there is much that I appreciated and took from that study. In fact, it seems to me that there is an important degree to which we are all Marxists in important ways. Certain aspects of Marx’s thought have crept into our basic background beliefs about individuals and society. The idea that people are, in essential ways, products of socio-economic conditions is an idea that doesn’t seem radical to us today but is, in large part, a result of Marx’s philosophical endeavours. Marx’s ideas of history also have been very influential and even a thinker like Francis Fukuyama, a professed non-Marxist, could not have written his book on the end of history if not for Marx. In the 90s Jacques Derrida, one the most interesting and important philosophers of the 20th century, and by no means a Marxist in any traditional sense, wrote The Spectre of Marx, which was a panegyric to the importance of Marx in his own thought and in philosophy in general.

In Search for a Method, Jean-Paul Sartre argued that there exists, in society at large, only one living philosophy at any given time, and he further contends that Marxism is that living philosophy. But Search for a Method was written a long time ago now and even if Sartre’s claim about one living philosophy is true, it would be difficult to contend today that that living philosophy is Marxism. Certain fatal blows were rendered against Marxism in the past generation, not the least of which were Farwell to the Working-class by Andre Gorz, The Mirror of Production by Baudrillard, and The Accursed Share by Georges Bataille. The attack on Marxism, in the final analysis, came from many directions and many of the critiques were analytically devastating for a philosophy that seemed to pride itself on its analytic power. Bataille and Baudrillard, for example, both made remarkable demonstrations of the problems with making production the primary defining element of human endeavour. While their arguments are far too complex to review here, whether you agree or disagree with what they said, their work had a shattering impact on traditional Marxist notions. However, in the end, it was not any one particular critique of Marxism that undermined its status; rather it was a fundamental change in our ideas toward traditional rational critique in general that changed how we look this important philosophy. With the influence of Continental philosophy, many thinkers have abandoned any idea of meta-theories that explain the world with huge overarching ideas that attempt to impose an order on the world and its history. It was as a theory of history that Marx had originally gained a great deal of its power and it is precisely as a theory of history that more and more people abandoned Marx’s work. This failure was, I believe, already showing its first signs back in the twenties, and Gramsci’s work on Capitalist Hegemony is a noble attempt to shore up the cracks that were beginning to show. In the final analysis, the idea that history is driven by a continual conflict between classes whose ideology is formed by their place in a system of production was simply not believable to most people. But more than this, most philosophers in general have abandoned the idea that history has any demonstrable order or that our ideological beliefs have any primary source, least of all the system of economic production.


The biggest problem with the breakdown of Marxism is that we now live in a vacuum in which there is no clear way forward for radicals. Unfortunately, the forces of capitalism have taken the breakdown of Marxism as an opportunity to discredit practical goals of socialism which have often been, but are not necessarily, connected to Marxism as a philosophy. The real challenge now becomes finding a way out of the Capitalist trap which will eventually turn the earth and the human soul into wastelands of lifeless solitude. Marxism has now formed part of the background of general ideas, but we need certain fundamental ideas that can live in the foreground and that are more than the pure relativism that forms the backbone of so much of what passes for ‘post-modernism.’