Was George Orwell a Marxist?

In short, George Orwell was a socialist but not a Marxist. One does not always follow the other. Here is an account from Isaac Deutscher on the specific gap between the Anglo-Saxon Left and Marxism:

Like most British socialists, Orwell had never been a Marxist. The dialectical-materialist philosophy had always been too abstruse for him. From instinct rather than consciousness he had been a staunch rationalist. The distinction between the Marxist and the rationalist is of some importance. Contrary to an opinion widespread in Anglo-Saxon countries, Marxism is not at all rationalist in its philosophy: it does not assume that human beings are, as a rule, guided by rational motives and that they can be argued into socialism by reason. Marx himself begins Das Kapital with the elaborate philosophical and historical inquiry into the ‘fetishistic’ modes of thought and behaviour rooted in ‘commodity production’ – that is, in man’s work for, and dependence on, a market. The class struggle, as Marx describes it, is anything but a rational process. This does not prevent the rationalists of socialism describing themselves sometimes as Marxists. But the authentic Marxist may claim to be mentally better prepared than the rationalist is for the manifestations of irrationality in human affairs, even for such manifestations as Stalin’s Great Purges. He may feel upset or mortified by them, but he need not feel shaken in his Weltanschauung, while the rationalist is lost and helpless when the irrationality of the human existence suddenly stares him in the face. If he clings to his rationalism, reality eludes him. If he pursues reality and tries to grasp it, he must part with his rationalism.

Source: Marxist Internet Archive

New Atheism at Home and Abroad.

 

Here we find the confluence of scientism, rationalism and liberalism in its fetishism for progress, reason and freedom. Things can only get better and better, so long as we don’t let barbarous myths like religion get in the way. If we cast down the religions of the world, at the side of the road of history, we can look forward to greater freedom, pluralism and democracy. New Atheism is not exactly new. As Eagleton points out, it draws upon once vanquished grand narratives of Reason and Progress just as Western liberalism needs to rearm after the strike against it by anti-political Islamic purism.[1] By that time the world had supposedly been in a post-ideological, post-political and even post-historical age. All grand narratives could be sealed and forgotten, yet with the actions of nineteen murderers another narrative – of terror – had to be pulled open.[2] With the interventions in the Middle East came the old rhetoric of mission civilisatrice.

It was then that Christopher Hitchens decided to abandon socialism and commit himself to an aggressive secularism and an even more aggressive foreign policy. He soon found allies in biologist Richard Dawkins and, later, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris. It is to their credit that neither Dawkins nor Dennett supported the invasion of Iraq. Whereas, Sam Harris argues in the event of an imminent nuclear strike by Iran the best recourse would be to compound a Holocaust. And this man has the nerve to write a book claiming that science can solve our moral dilemmas! Terry Eagleton is not wrong to view the New Atheists as the ideologists of the ‘War on Terror’. Eagleton argues that the very act of trying to close history down in 1989 is what sprung it back open in 2001.[3] On the one hand the arrogance of Western imperialism and, on the other, the ‘new enemy’ of radical Islam. The paucity of advanced capitalism was exposed to violence with no such metaphysical anaemia. All of sudden ideology was needed and with that the Bush administration reached for neoconservatism.[4]

There was a debate on the invasion of Iraq held in 2005 where Michael Parenti was called in to challenge Christopher Hitchens on his loyally pro-war position. In his opening comments, Christopher Hitchens conceded that the fall of the Berlin Wall had opened up a period of peace and prosperity, which seemed to look forward only to widening the scope of pluralism and democracy.[5] He calculates that this illusion lasted for six and a half months from New Year’s 1990. For then came the annexation of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milošević had declared war on Bosnia. These events signalled that the authoritarian state-ideology was not a distant memory of a barbarous past. Then came the slaughter in Rwanda a few years later, the continuation of the Kim dynasty in North Korea, and the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan. All of these events made it clear, in the mind of one Hitchens, that there are still forms of totalitarianism which we must fight.

Later in God is Not Great Hitchens makes it clear that he views religious belief as inherently totalitarian in potentia to conjoin his anti-theism with his commitment to American foreign policy. The Ba’ath regime in Iraq was not a secular one precisely because it vested total authority and power in one man demanding faith from all its subjects. It then follows that the only alternative is liberal capitalism. This is why Hitchens took the view that neoliberal globalisation is a revolutionary force in the world. At one point Hitchens writes “When I was a Marxist, I did not hold my opinions as a matter of faith but I did have the conviction that a sort of unified field theory might have been discovered.”[6] He goes onto note that there is no supernatural or absolutist element in dialectical materialism, but it did have a ‘messianic’ aspect in its faith in the coming revolution, martyrs, saints, prophets, and mutually excluding papacies.

Yet the New Atheists maintain their own faith in history as Progress, that the capitalist system will inevitably bring to fruition a liberal democratic state. In Hitchens and Dawkins in particular you find this converges with a rigorous scientism. As Eagleton points out, Western liberalism is anaemic and requires more than itself to fend-off belief. This is where the need to resurrect grand narratives that had been discarded. And so Christopher Hitchens joined forces with Richard Dawkins in a bid to wage a war for reason against faith. The religions of the world are the last obstacle for Progress to circumvent. Of course, Hitchens accepted as a man who had read Freud that the religious sentiment may well be ineradicable. And what could be better than that? It’s an enemy that will always be there to justify the place of imperial America in the world. Just as the Soviet Union justified American imperialism in the Cold War.

This post was originally written for A Bigger Society.

---

[1] Eagleton, T; Culture and Barbarism (2008):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UN6FcBXlIcA

[2] Eagleton, T; Reason, Faith and Revolution (Yale University Press, 2008) pg.142-144

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Hitchens, C; Parenti, M; Iraq and Future US Foreign Policy (2005): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MufGs0MQrPg

[6] Hitchens, C; God is Not Great (Atlantic Books Ltd, 2007) pg.151-152

Yell "Dasein!"

The account of being-in-the-world is significant in the part it played in the Heideggerian break from the project of Edmund Husserl and the development of phenomenology thereafter. The break itself is also a vital underpinning of existentialism, as Terry Eagleton notes “To move from Husserl to Heidegger is to move from the terrain of pure intellect to a philosophy which meditates on what it feels like to be alive.” This particular form of phenomenology might be referred to as hermeneutical in contrast to the transcendental phenomenology which Husserl promulgated.[1] In fact it has been said that Heidegger seized on the conception of phenomenology for his own ends, to the extent that the definition of “phenomenology” came to mean almost the exact opposite of the Husserlian proposal. Rather than emptying out the intentional contents of our belief system, to uncover datum, we let the things which are shared but cannot be articulated to reveal themselves.[2]

If we accept the notion of intentionality put forth by Husserl then we take consciousness as always consciousness of something.[3] So there is an internal relation between the act of thinking and the object of thought, a mutual dependence. Thought points towards some object. The mind does not passively acknowledge the world, it actively ‘intends’ the world. This is where the idealism of Husserl is quite overt, he thought it was absurd to see the world as external to thought and experience.[4] Husserl goes on to claim that the way to establish certainty is to do away with – to ‘bracket’ – everything which is beyond our consciousness. All realities must be treated as appearances in our minds, pure phenomena and this is the universal data from which we can proceed. It is universal in the sense that it has universal implications, so that the examination of what we perceive, through the phenomenological reduction, is a way to get at the universal essence of the things we perceive as well as the act of perceiving.[5]

Martin Heidegger breaks with Husserlian phenomenology with the ‘transcendent subject’ as its beginning. This is rejected as a suitable beginning by Heidegger and with it he rejected the ‘bracketing’ method. For Heidegger the subject-object distinction is an unwelcome bi-product of Cartesianism, for it is not only artificial but unsustainable.[6] We can refer to the relation between the self and the world, insofar as we must refer to that relation as a distinction in order to move beyond it. Being-in-the-world captures the involved nature of the human subject, it is not dominant as the Enlightenment thinkers had thought, but is engaged in dialogue with the world. The point is to return to a pre-Socratic position, before the dualist distinction and wherein both of which can plausibly be encompassed by Being. We inhabit a reality which we are incapable of subjecting to objectification, for we are as much constituted by reality as we constitute it.[7] So we should listen rather than speak in this dialogue. Whether or not we can charge Heidegger with idealism over this is complicated.

We could run with the view that Heidegger is an extreme idealist going by what he tells us about Reality, which is composite of: the Being of beings and Being as the pure presence-at-hand of Things. Robert Solomon argues that the dichotomy of idealism versus realism is insufficient for the bold moves Heidegger made. The problem is with the labels themselves as Heidegger should not be seen as a philosophical opponent of realism.[8] By realism here we designate the view that there is a reality which can be known, which Heidegger does not deny, whereas idealism is the view that we can only know the products of our own minds. This is the reason that it has often been said that Edmund Husserl is an idealist.

There is a sense in which the world refers to being-in-the-world for Heidegger, at the same time being-in-the-world refers to Dasein and care is its primordial structural foundation.[9] For Heidegger it is not that the concept being-in-the-world can be simply sliced into easily digestible components. Heidegger goes as far as to claim that care encapsulates Dasein in its’ entirety. It is not meant in the usual sense of caring for something, even indifference to something counts as a part of care.[10] Dasein must deal with the world as it is being-in-the-world, without the world there is no subject and without the subject there is no world. Sartre would say Dasein is “condemned to be free”, but it is important to add that it is ‘condemned’ as it is ‘thrown’ into a world which has already set the ready-at-hand equipment and the paths we can take. For this reason Heidegger is closer to Nietzsche than Sartre on the question of free-will. We are not totally free individuals in a leveled world from which we are only floating through, but we are embedded and engaged without a choice in the matter. When we talk about being-in-the-world we are talking about a future-directed agent in its aware of possibilities in the situations it is involved in. It can encounter objects when lost in activities and this may be the way that we ‘flee from being’ which we might think of as ‘bad faith’ since Sartre.

For Heidegger we are ‘thrown’ into the world, so we take hold of ourselves locked in a particular cultural and historical context. We cannot choose the circumstances under which we have to care and act.[11] The self is definitively in time and we never live in the moment.[12]This is where authenticity enters as the manner of the relation of beings to Being, it can be authentic or inauthentic. Robert Solomon specifies Heideggerian authenticity as about lifting yourself up by your bootstraps, which captures the definitive path provided by death accurately. For Heidegger when we face the inevitably of our impending death it can provide the force necessary to extricate ourselves from the ‘dictatorship of They’.[13] Authenticity is self-directed rather than a moral ideal, though it is given preference by the existentialist tradition. The way that we can relate our being to Being is where freedom comes in and the strong focus of the existentialists on freedom may be pinpointed in exactly this relation.

At this point we should go back to the Heideggerian break, as it is important to stress, as Hubert Dreyfus does, that the break with transcendental phenomenology to establish hermeneutical phenomenology is not simply attributing a primary status to practical activity. Rather it is Heidegger’s position that the relation between a self-sufficient mind and an external world cannot be understood as detached contemplation or practical activity – as we have already seen, the separation itself is a problematic assertion. Nor should we take practical activity or contemplation to be specific to such a relation. The Heideggerian strategy is a reversal of priorities, now it’s doing over knowing and not knowing over doing. The point of this is to clear the ground for the question of the way of being of intentionality. It is not a dichotomy between practical and theoretical forms of intentionality. Heidegger wanted to burst out of the tradition. He aimed to overcome the subject-object distinction in all domains and move on from the old account of intentionality altogether.[14]

Heidegger accepted that there is an intentional directedness to human activity, but rejected the Husserlian view that the mind is directed towards an object which mirrors an object in the external world. Practical engagement is important, though we have to go above and beyond practical activity to raise the question of Being. The problem is the gap which is allowed to open up between the subject and object, the directedness which Husserl puts forth is meant to resolve this problem. But it just exacerbates the problem as it maintains intentionality as a feature of mental states. Intentionality is not mental, as it is for Husserl, it should not be attributed to consciousness but Dasein – which is being-in-the-world – and in that sense refers to human activity at a more general level in that the practical intention goes through the thing we use towards the purpose of the activity.[15] The directedness is in the embedded nature of being-in-the-world, it is a part of the human existence and undoubtedly an aspect of the dialogue between the human subject and the world (if we must refer back to that troublesome distinction).

In the attempt to overcome the old notion of intentionality Heidegger opens up a new kind of intentionality. Similarly with Heidegger’s ‘confrontation’ with Friedrich Nietzsche – who he deemed responsible for the ‘end of metaphysics’ – could only be conducted within the framework of another metaphysical system just as Nietzsche had opened up a metaphysics of becoming in the attempt to overcome metaphysics.[16] Even the conscious attempt to overcome a philosophical tradition fails to do so insofar as it may succeed, but in doing so reconstitute the system that was meant to be overcome. It may even be that the move Heidegger made to critique Cartesianism and ultimately transcend the subject-object distinction might have only perpetuating, or more accurately, recreated the old distinction in the act of trying to sweep it away. The account Heidegger provided of being-in-the-world is important as it is part of the philosophical project through which he attempted to radically reorder philosophy as it has been since Socrates. This is the greater importance to which the significance the concept has in relation to existentialism and phenomenology is just an addition.

---

[1] Eagleton, Terry: Literary Theory: An Introduction (Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1983 | Second Edition, 1983) pg.47-57

[2] Dreyfus, Hubert: Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division 1 (MIT Press, 1991) pg.30-39

[3]  Becker, Oskar: The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl, Elveton, RO: The Phenomenology of Husserl (Chicago Quadrangle Books, 1970) pg.60-71

[4] Ludwig Wittgenstein (who had a great deal in common with Heidegger in his later philosophy) was perplexed by the very notion of an external world and what it is supposed to be external to specifically. Heidegger had this in common with Wittgenstein as he conceived of being-in-the-world to signify the human existence as bound up with reality, both as constitutive and constituted by it. So the suggestion that there is a world ‘out there’ which can be analysed is quite strange from this perspective. Whereas Husserl concedes that there is a world external to thought and experience insofar as objects can transcend our consciousness.

[5] We might be drawn to Hume’s sceptical view that there could be more than just the experiential, but we cannot know if there is. The difference is that for Husserl it is not that these things are beyond our knowledge; rather we should exclude them in order to get back to the things themselves. But it should be noted that this kind of phenomenology is not another form of empiricism.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume/#UniIma

[6] In a way Descartes held that we can step outside of being-in-the-world where an object can be placed before a subject. For Heidegger it is important to reject the Cartesian tradition because it seemed utterly hopeless to him. This might explain why he avoided talk of subjectivity as well as consciousness and the mind without the use of his own meta-language. Note that Heidegger saw our basic experiences as a holistic and unified experience of our being-in-the-world. Descartes propagated dualism, which posited a mind-body separation which can both be encompassed by Being for Heidegger. Cartesianism is a road with a dead-end for Heidegger, the separation between being-in-the-world and something else (e.g. consciousness and the external world) leads us to paradoxical ways of thinking. To understand Dasein is to understand the world and it works both ways, Dasein and the world are a unified phenomenon according to Heidegger. So the self cannot exist independently of the physical world, there can be no Dasein without the world and no world without Dasein.

Solomon, Robert: Lecture Fifteen; Husserl, Heidegger and Phenomenology.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4MAYguC1Mc

[7] Eagleton, Terry: Literary Theory: An Introduction (Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1983 | Second Edition, 1983) pg.47-78

[8] Solomon, Robert: Lecture Fifteen; Husserl, Heidegger and Phenomenology.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4MAYguC1Mc

[9] Dreyfus, Hubert: Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division 1 (MIT Press, 1991) pg.238-246

[10] In Goethe’s Faust the role of care is important as it refers to the burdens of worry and the world explicitly. Heidegger uses care in a much more radical way, it is not only about ends and purposes but about the world as equipment where we engage in tasks. The world is not a field of objects and subjects which might interact. To see the hammer and the plank as ‘things’ means that we would have to stop hammering, the hammer is no longer just something used for a purpose along with the nail and the plank serves as a material to work with.

Incidentally, for Nietzsche Goethe was an example of the Übermensch and the Will to Power who exercised all of his talents, ‘created’ himself as a unified being through his art and he experimented in life – taking jobs as a civil servant and a lawyer, as well as a playwright and a poet. As a writer he flirted with many styles and his works are voluminous. In Nietzsche’s terms the passion for life is the greatest of passions and Goethe was passionate at a creative and spiritual level. Nietzsche describes Goethe as “not a German event but a European one: a grand attempt to overcome the eighteenth century through a return to nature, through a going-up to the naturalness of the Renaissance, a kind of self-overcoming on the part of that century.”

Nietzsche, Friedrich; Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ (Hollingdale, RJ; Introduction and commentary | Penguin Books, 1968) pg.102-104

Solomon, Robert: Lecture Sixteen; Heidegger on the World and the Self.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPlZCkh0AE0

[11] Heidegger seems to take a very similar response to the question of free-will as that of Karl Marx (someone he no doubt detested for political as well as philosophical reasons). We might think in particular of Marx’s words “Men make their own history, but not of their own free will; not under circumstances they themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted.” This is where Heidegger is actually closer to Marx than he is to Sartre.

Marx, Karl: The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Surveys from Exile: Political Writings vol.2 (Edited and introduced by David Fernbach, Verso, 2010) pg.143-150

[12] Solomon, Robert: Lecture Sixteen; Heidegger on the World and the Self.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPlZCkh0AE0

[13] Wartenberg, Thomas: Existentialism (Oneworld Publications, 2008) pg.125-145

[14] Dreyfus, Hubert: Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division 1 (MIT Press, 1991) pg.40-54

[15] As Harrison Hall points out, using the most famous example, the hammer has perceivable properties which go unrecognised when the hammer is being skilfully employed and only arise when we take a timeout from the task to think about the hammer. The attention is aimed at the work and the ultimate end, but not the equipment which enables us to do so. The function of the hammer is in the practical activity to which it is used and that is definitive of their being. We can spot this network of relations essential to their instrumental nature whenever the task breaks down. We find that the ready-to-hand tools are always pointing towards an end, which we assign in the task.

The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger: Hall, Harrison: Intentionality and World pg.123-139

[16] Sluga, Hans: Heidegger’s Nietzsche pg.110-113

No Society, No Alternatives.

The Iron Lady.

 

In the General Election of 1979 the Conservative Party came out on top with Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister. For Thatcher any attempt to manage the economy would lead to disaster and the catastrophic crash of 1973 was caused by Heath's attempt to control the economy. Instead Thatcher decided the state should be "rolled back" and power be handed over to the markets, a wave of deregulation and privatisation followed. The idea was that the unhindered power of the free-market would reconstruct industry. Heath removed exchange controls and opened up the UK economy to the international financial markets, money could now be moved in and out of the country at will. The banks could now raise huge amounts of capital from anywhere in the world in order to finance the purchase and sale of a vast number of companies. The banks could now target a company, finance entrepreneurs to buy that company and then strip the company of its' assets. The point was to increase profits and maximise return to the shareholders.

Private Vices for Public Benefits.

We might understand Thatcherism as a combination of monetarism and rational expectations, which suggested that the changes in policy could only be managed if the public were convinced that the government would stick to it regardless of what happens. Of course, the cuts in public spending required a determination to confront and smash the labour movement. This went as far as sicking the right-wing elements inside MI5 on Arthur Scargill and the NUM. Thatcher provoked a strike with the announcement that there would be a wave of pit closures and redundancies on the grounds that it was cheaper to import coal. The Thatcher government went after one union after another in a bid to sweep away the remnants of the post-war settlement which had empowered working-class people. The country was opened up to foreign investment and competition, which further undermined the trade unions and destroyed industries like steel, cars and shipbuilding.

After the fall of the Heath administration in 1974 it was clear to the elites that the labour movement had to be broken. It was the only way to turn back the tide as the working-class made significant gains in the standards of pay and working-conditions. One of Thatcher's economic advisers Alan Budd has since conceded that in his most pessimistic moments he suspects that his ideas had been ruthlessly used. Furthermore that the ideas of monetarism served as a theoretical cover for the Thatcherite policies, which could not have been implemented otherwise. The capitalist class had simply seen in the ideas a way to instigate a crisis of capitalism which would smash the trade unions and leave the country immersed in unemployment. It would be easy to hold down wages from then on and profits could skyrocket once again. The rise of Thatcherism might then be attributed to the structural needs of the system for a much more timid working-class that could easily succumb to exploitation and domination.

The Road is Clear.

In the 1980s there was a decline in wages for working-class people and unemployment increased rapidly as the benefits system came under fire from the government. To supplement the loss in demand the need for a fast-track line of credit emerged, the debt economy was pushed to its limits as households across the country fell back on credit cards, loans and mortgages. The privatisation of social housing in Britain at first appeared as a gift to the working-class as it made it possible for them to buy an asset, at a relatively low cost, which might make them rich one day. The housing market was seized upon by speculators, eventually pushing low-income earners out to the outskirts of cities as house prices skyrocketed. The old industries were swept aside to make way for the new era, in which money would be made from money and not much else in Britain. After 11 years of Thatcherism manufacturing in the UK had been virtually destroyed, employment in manufacturing plummeted by 30%.

The deregulation of the financial colossus in London led to the currency crisis of 1984 - speculators had begun to sell pounds and buy dollars because of high exchange rates in the US - and the government just had to stand back and watch. It was the early signs of what would come in later years. In 1987 the Thatcher government retained power for a third election just as the country was hit with an economic crisis, as a wave of panic swept the stock market, as it turned out that shares which had risen in value for 4 years were over-valued. The global markets were soon infected by the contagion of fear and the governments were powerless in the face of such chaos. The rise of a rapacious financial sector had been the works for a long time, now it surfaced and went on to stumble into a devastating crash in 1992 and an even more destructive crash in 2008. As the political class had unleashed the forces of finance they had bound themselves as slaves to the financial colossus in the City of London.

The Long March, to Where?

The fall of Thatcher in 1990 came after the Poll Tax demonstrations descended into riots in Trafalgar Square converged with internal tensions in the Conservative Party. By then unemployment had reached around 7%, working-people had been by some of the biggest wage cuts in the world as inflation began to rise into double figures once again. John Major looked to reassert control over the market for the purpose of setting limits to the fluctuations of the exchange rate. Of course, it was too late for the Grey Man as the old forms of political control and planning had been obliterated as options. So under Major, Britain became a part of the Exchange Rate Mechanism and the pound was fixed to the Deutschmark in order to liberate the currency from the speculators. The currency markets then took on the British government, to force Major to devalue the currency and to abandon the Exchange Rate Mechanism. It began with the sale of billions of pounds on the foreign exchanges.

The marketisation and systematic privatisation has brought destruction to major industries and has significantly undermined the welfare state as it was in the post-war era. The workers' share of GDP in wages reached its highest points in the 70s, Thatcherism succeeded in the reversal of this trend and the policies which she first implemented in the 80s have become the orthodox for British governments. Between 1997 and 2009 wages for working-class people increased by 45% while the wages of high-earners increased by over 300%. Today we live in a society which is more unequal than it was 40 years ago, the top 10% get 31% of income, while the bottom 10% get 1.3% of income, this is the same 10% of the British population who sit on £4 trillion in wealth. On top of this, the end of the Cold War signaled the beginning of a supposedly post-political era in which only managerial politics remain and Thatcherism has taken the place of the social order it aimed to dissolve. We live in an era without ideas, where no alternatives are imaginable and where even the suggestion of 'society' is suspect. It was the collapse of the post-war settlement under the weight of its own contradictions which has left us in this state of affairs, now we need a new settlement.

A Crisis of Ideology.

Apart from the dire socio-economic consequences of the ongoing crisis the endemic contradictions of capitalism has led to a crisis of the prevailing ideology and the dust has yet to settle. As Terry Eagleton notes the tendency of market rationality runs towards the rationalist and materialist, as well as secular plurality, relativism and pragmatism. Naturally the forces of the market exert a subversive force on the metaphysical and ideological superstructure. Rather than question whether or not what we're saying meshes with what we're doing we might have to invoke the Virgin Mary at the World Bank. In the same way that Alan Greenspan took refuge as the crisis hit in the claim that it all down to human frailty, predatory instincts and so on. It is true that it was human behaviour which led to the crisis, but Greenspan resorted to this explanation only to protect the immaculate conception of free-market capitalism. The irony being that Alan Greenspan is an Objectivist dinosaur - a devotee of Ayn Rand - who buys into the virtues of selfishness.

The criminal assault on Vietnam and Indochina was a case in which there was an enormous gulf between the political justifications of the war and the grotesque details of the actions undertaken to devastate a country. It was claimed that the war was to combat and contain the spread of Communism, as the red flag was flying in North Vietnam and so the US embarked on a noble mission to fend off the tentacles of Communism - it then began bombing South Vietnam. The US had blocked every attempt at a peaceful settlement in the 1950s and installed the Diem regime in South Vietnam. As the Diem regime aroused resistance to it as it slaughtered around 70,000 people and in reaction to the resistance the Kennedy administration invaded South Vietnam. Even though he knew better Lyndon B Johnson continued with the line that "We have to stop the Communists over there [Vietnam] or we'll soon be fighting them in California." This was not enough after so many years spent bombing the country the ideological fissure was torn open with the wave of student activism.


A ideological crisis can emerge in the midst of a performative contradiction between what you're doing and how you explain those actions to yourself. To account for the gap there is a need for a new discourse complete with a theoretical understanding of the situation and the potential to establish a new orthodoxy. As the system requires new theories to justify itself and strengthen the ideological apparatus it seems to be struggling in it's desperate search for any such means of defence. The media has yet to find a narrative which could fill the void which has been opened up as political power came to the rescue of the financial colossus to which David Cameron and Barack Obama are bound almost as slaves. It was unthinkable that the banks should be allowed to collapse, it was a forced decision which no one can rightly oppose. But it seems that the system has lost it's sheath of market fundamentalism out of its own pragmatism. The utopia of the market has been stripped down for all to see, it is difficult to see how the system could ever double back on itself.

Today it is still rare to hear of the horrific details of the Vietnam War in spite of the memory of the demonstrations against it lives on. The objectives of the war will never be acknowledged in the media. The virus of independence and development in Vietnam had to be killed, and the region had to be inoculated, in order to preserve the accomplishments of the US in the Second World War. The virus might have spread to Thailand and Indonesia, then Japan might have to accommodate to an independent East Asian bloc and would no doubt become it's industrial heartland. The US aimed to maintain the Japanese empire under American control, the rise of Communism in China and Korea undermined these aims. The wars in Vietnam and Korea were fought for the same reason that the US installed Suharto in Indonesia. There are no apologies for the crimes, certainly no reparations and not even any recognition of the barbarism unleashed upon Indochina. Rather it has been swept under the rug as a noble quest which went awry and possibly an atrocity necessary in the Cold War which we will not repeat in this post-political world.

The system has lost the automatic claim to legitimacy, as Slavoj Žižek points out, the field is open in this time of crisis as the prevailing ideology has been disturbed. The limitations and perversions of the system can be seen publicly, we can see the desperate need for an alternative and we know not of an alternative. But this is not the basis for the system's legitimacy as the Thatcherites claimed. The greatest utopian belief is that the system of capitalism can go on indefinitely. Infinite growth in a world of finite resources is a fantasy even if you believe global warming is a liberal hoax cooked up to sell carbon credits to corporations and make you pay the congestion charge. There is a need for another kind of utopianism, not in the sense of the ideal society which ca never be realised but as a new space created out of the innermost urgency for survival. It is the way out we are forced to imagine by the impossibility of circumstances, which cannot be resolved within the coordinates of the possible. As Lenin said "There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen." Right now, we need to make decades to happen!

Martin Lewis on Student Debt.

This is a talk given by Martin Lewis on the increase of tuition fees to £9,000, the changes to the student loan system and what he sees as the popular "misunderstandings" in the debate over student debt and the fee rise. The expert on personal debts is keen to point out that the individual will pay back a greater debt at a lower rate over a longer period of time, so it would not impact on the ability of the individual to take out a mortgage. The function of the greater debt instills passivity, at best, as people who will be paying-off a debt over a long period of time are unlikely to go on strike or demonstrate. If you're in debt you've got to get a job to pay it off, you can put aside your dreams as any job will do and serious political change is not necessarily in your interest. So a bigger student loan adds to the pressure of the debt accrued in the form of a mortgage, credit cards etc.

It is not that the debt incurred by a student loan is the same as a credit card or a mortgage, but it contributes to the amount of debt which one may accrue over the years and spend one's life paying-off. The additional £30,000+ debt will contribute to the overall debt of someone who takes out a mortgage, credit cards etc. As a great number of people do in this debt-driven economy. It might not make that much difference every month, but it's something that's going to be hanging over you (along with your mortgage, credit cards etc) for most of your life. According to the kind of argument Martin Lewis puts forward a person could have a £500,000 student debt and it not affect the way they live, because "rationally" they pay less a month and no one will ever repossess their property. To suggest that the amount of student debt does not in any sense "burden" an individual, even if it just a psychological burden, is ludicrous.


It is important to keep in mind that government debt amounts to around 70% of GDP whilst the public funding for higher education is 0.7% of GDP. So even if universities were completely privatised and tuition fees were adjusted to cover all the costs, the most it would achieve is lower government debt by 0.7%. The implication being the Coalition's claim of 'necessity' is spurious, as a rise in tuition fees and cuts to funding for universities would have little impact on the debt. Though it will contribute to the debt per household, which is estimated to rise by £245 billion as a result of the cuts. If there is no reason for tuition fees to be raised, then there is no reason that the loan at £3k could not be adjusted to include the benefits which the "saving money" expert described. I think we may have to re-assess our faith in experts who have 'real issues' with the interest rates and the early redemption penalties.

The points Martin Lewis made are largely irrelevant as the presupposition of the talk is that the Coalition has a legitimate case to raise tuition fees and cut funding for higher education. The only reason there was even a space for such a discussion is because the points being made are within these safe conventions. The fact that there is no real justification for higher tuition fees will not be raised and has been completely submerged in the media coverage around the cuts. Instead Lewis informs the "mistaken" rabble that they are wrong about the tuition fees and that the rational option is to support the reforms for there positive attributes. If the government wants to alter student loans so that we pay less each month over a longer period of time there is no reason why it can't be done with less debt or even the same amount that we'll have. Though there weren't even any economic reasons for tuition fees to begin with.

The Post-Politics of the Selfish Gene.

 

You may have read of the New College of the Humanities which AC Grayling is eager to set up, which will charge £18,000 a year for a course and has £10 million in private capital to back up the scheme. The major selling point being the staff of money-grubbing dons which includes Richard Dawkins, Peter Singer, Steven Pinker and Niall Ferguson among others. These are the intellectuals whom Grayling designates as "pink around the gills and a little bit left of centre", which might just be a sign of delirium on his part. Grayling argues that the decision came in response to the slashing of public subsidies to the humanities and the hike in tuition fees. It looks more like brash opportunism to me, but that would not contradict Grayling's claim. Appropriately, Richard Dawkins will be teaching evolutionary biology and science literacy at the New College as he is the prominent author of several books on the subject including The Selfish Gene.

For those who have been following the latest documentary by Adam Curtis you will know that Richard Dawkins was a student of Bill Hamilton and George Price, he had also been a computer programmer before he studied science. The work of these biologists had led to the conclusion that the human race are basically automata capable of self-reproduction, the actions of human beings are guided by the genetic codes which adhere to a rational strategy of which the aim is to pass on copies of themselves. The individual is only the temporary host to such genes, which calculate our behaviour even in a way which Price understood as the workings of a computer. Hamilton argued that the calculations went as far as to produce altruism as a survival strategy. The radical conclusions of Hamilton and Price brought down the Enlightenment view of humanity as distinct from animals and nature. It also undermined the role of religion in society and thus Dawkins has played a leading role in the rise of New Atheism in the 21st Century.

George Price and Bill Hamilton were each affected by the revelations in different ways. Price was an obsessive rationalist at first and yet he attributed the equations to God and had a religious awakening, which led him to devote his life to helping the homeless and then killed himself in 1975. Hamilton went on to become one of the most famous scientists in the world and was given the highest honours from the scientific establishment. He later traveled to the Congo where he looked for evidence that AIDS was the result of experiments by American scientists on chimpanzees. The chimpanzee version of HIV was then transmitted to humans through vaccinations for polio, Hamilton died of a gastrointestinal hemorrhage in 2000. Importantly, Hamilton always held that Price's religious awakening was superstitious and he would have been better off to continue his work in genetics than helping the homeless.

Years before his awakening George Price had worked for IBM and helped construct the first mainframes of computers, for him the equations of Hamilton could be understood in computing terms. Price was a free-lance science journalist dedicated to smash superstitious myths in order to promote rationality. For him computers and mathematics were the key to saving the world, we can measure happiness and contain Communism with mathematical equations and computer technology. When Price discovered the work of Bill Hamilton he concluded that the human being was simply a soft machine controlled by an on-board computer. The mathematical conclusions of Price explained murder, warfare and genocide as strategies undertaken by the genetic codes which control human behaviour. Some people may even be wired to be murderers, we might kill distant relatives in order to secure close relatives for the sake of our genes.

By the time of his death Bill Hamilton had written a series of books which took the logic of Darwinian ideas like natural selection to an extreme conclusion. He argued that Western scientific innovations should not be utilised to prolong the lives of the genetically inferior. Nothing should be allowed to interfere with the strategies of the genes. We should take a stand against the slide into degeneration and against the scientific establishment, which he thought had covered up its own part in the creation of AIDS. He believed that the desperate struggle of everything to pass on its genes explained everything. For him there was no room for altruism and the weak should be left to die. Hamilton died after he contracted malaria, refused to take the proper medication and instead took aspirin which caused his gut to hemorrhage. As he died Hamilton knew he would live forever as a genetic code which he had transmitted in his life time.

With the particular brand of evolutionary biology, promulgated by these men, Richard Dawkins went on to dismiss the exaggerated notion of free-will and in much more vivid language which the scientific establishment could not marginalise as easily. As a result these ideas were able to seize the public imagination. Dawkins argued that the behaviour of human beings is guided by genetic codes, which are almost like an on-board computer. We are simply machines which are interconnected and constitutive of a higher order. Each of us play tiny roles in a vast strategic game in which different genetic codes compete with one another and have done for centuries. For Dawkins the individual is a machine for passing on genes, he would emphasise it is the selfish gene but not the selfish individual. For it is the selfish gene is the immortal replicator, not the selfish individual and so there is room for plans to do what is conducive to the happiness of the largest number of people.

In spite of the strenuous rationalism of George Price, Bill Hamilton and Richard Dawkins, the three of them had recreated the idea of the soul as the genetic codes of human beings. These codes are immortal and will survive us into eternity with no distinction between good and evil. The existence of the individual is lesser than the genetic code which will surpass us and ultimately carries greater significance than us. At his most un-Christian moment Dawkins declared that we are descendent of a "tiny elite of successful ancestors", we carry the ancient "wisdom" of that elite with us in the form of DNA which is a lot like a computer code which has archived all that was good about the past. For Dawkins our ancestors were "winners" which might explain why he oozes complacency and smugness when he claims that the people alive in the 21st Century are more moral than the people who were alive in the 1920s. It would seem he is devoid of a sense of tragedy or even the most elementary form of moral realism.

It should also be noted that Richard Dawkins adheres to the Enlightenment conception of history as Progress, which Christopher Hitchens and numerous other New Atheists are also ensnared. The Progressive view (in the Herbert Spencer sense) of history was also shared by Bill Hamilton, which would be why he thought there is no need for radical change and we should just leave the "losers" to rot. The obvious moral outlook for Dawkins is utilitarian as he seems to have a bit more compassion than Bill Hamilton, but not enough to see that the New College of Humanities is a thoroughly disgusting proposal. Though it is the bourgeois self-interest proposed by Hamilton which is much more in line with the trajectory of their Darwinian outlook. It is clear that the bio-reductionism of Dawkins' work comes with the Thatcherite project interwoven into it, in a manner which is a lot like a genetic code funnily enough. It would seem that it is not coincidental that the liberals have become obsessed with matters of secularism whilst the radicals have started to look into theology more and more.

We should take note that the Fascist promise of an alternate modernity has changed a lot over the decades and the liberals have managed to shape it along the way. Though not in specific relation to Dawkins, but in relation to the post-political theories of genetics and technocratic liberal ideas favoured by the New Atheists. There is the permissive quality in postmodern nationalism today that claims it wants to restore free-speech by giving you the right to call coffee black which also allows us to call black men niggers. There is also a new affinity for technocracy and evolutionary economics among the radical Right. This would explain the alliance between the EDL and the Tea Party against Islam, let alone the support of the EDL for the spending cuts in Britain. It is clear that these crypto-fascists do not offer a 'social revolution' to buy-off socialism just before it could be killed off with the untermenschen.

In the last twenty-0dd years political struggles have been castrated as politics has been transformed into nothing more than management of society. The end of the Cold War supposedly marked the End of History as liberal capitalism went global. The old politics of grand narratives were then tossed aside, the world was beyond 'big ideas' now and the new politics would be managerial and pragmatic. But the evolutionary ideas of Hamilton and Price remain influential in our society to this day, above all the idea that human beings are automata controlled by genetic codes and we may have embraced that idea because we live in a world in which everything we do either good or bad seems to lead to terrible consequences. We have no idea what to do about the problems in the world in order to provide a comforting answer, a fatalistic philosophy, to excuse our failure to change the world no matter what we do. It also fits in neatly with the ideological constellation of our times.

Memento Mori.

A Tabula Rasa.

Christopher Nolan's film Memento (2001) explores the dull archetypal story of revenge combined with aspects of traditional detective stories, which have been recycled and churned out repeatedly by Hollywood over the years, through the cliche of a amnesiac narrator. Perhaps, what is so original, compelling and truly brilliant aspect of Memento is the structure that the story takes and the way in which Nolan combined old ideas in the piece. The protagonist, Leonard Shelby, suffered a head injury whilst trying to save his wife from intruders who had broken into their house. Since then Lenny has suffered from anterograde amnesia, amnesia in which he retains his old memories and knowledge but is incapable of maintaining new memories. The film is structured, to fit the unsettling subjectivity of the protagonist's view of reality, in reverse chronological order. As Nolan explains, Memento does not have a non-linear structure, at least not in the conventional sense, because each scene is directly dependent on the one before just as in a linear structure.


Though the film is enthralling on many levels, it introduces an age-old area of philosophy to popular culture and its audience. In the opening scene, we are confronted with a polaroid photograph of a man who has been shot dead. In reverse of the process taken in photographing the corpse, the polaroid slowly fades as it gradually returns to it's initial blank state before retreating back into the camera. The polaroid itself is passive to the camera and it's owner to determine the image of which it will ultimately convey. This is almost a metaphor for the blank slate, or tabula rasa, description of the mind, favoured by empiricists like John Locke. Empiricism is a philosophical school of thought focusing on the nature of knowledge, empiricists argued that all our ideas and knowledge are derived from experience via senses. For instance, our ideas of ‘white’ and ‘cold’ come from the first time we encountered snow. Our experiences shape our knowledge of reality and all the ideas we’ll ever have are taken from our experiences. There are parallels to this in Memento. The polaroids, notes and tattoos are the only ways in which Leonard Shelby can collect knowledge - which is derived from his daily experiences in his search for John G.

The way that a camera can serve as a model for the empirical view of the mind. Images are received and after a flash imprinted onto a polaroid, the tabula rasa, as the human mind is blank upon birth and develops an understanding of the world from sense impressions, according to the empiricists. The opening shot of the polaroid is a metaphor for the inner-workings of Leonard's damaged psyche - a truly empirical mind perhaps is one in which memories cannot be made. The distorting effect amnesia has had on Shelby's consciousness is why a priori knowledge is absent in his life after the incident. We do not live like Shelby because we can make new memories, we don't need all those notes and tattoos to get by. The reason: because Lenny is lacking something we are not. We can hold onto knowledge, probably because the mind isn't a blank slate normally. Rationalists would argue that we have a priori knowledge, which is independent of experience and sense impressions (if anything) "unlock" such knowledge. There has to be something in the camera to hold images, it can't just be a void.

Reason and Experience.

Immanuel Kant proposed a synthesis, a compromise in the epistemological argument between philosophers of the rational and empirical traditions. Most animals receive information through sense impressions, a dog can hear us speak but will not understand our language. It takes reason to understand the received information, which is what may separate us from the animals. The reason interacts with the experience and is not passive, if anything, reason dominates experience shaping it into concepts that we can understand. The concepts of ‘white’ and ‘cold’ exist to us, not because they exist objectively. But because we have imposed these concepts onto our subjective experience of reality, snow can appear to us as both ‘white’ and ‘cold’. This is not because the world is inside our minds. This is because our minds only have the capability to perceive the world in such a way. For instance, the unified notions of time and space that we hold are not entirely independent of our minds. We just cannot perceive the world without applying the concepts of time and space, otherwise nothing would be comprehensible.

This is a point enforced by the reverse linear structure of Memento. If we could perceive the world without applying the concept of time, as we understand it, the reversed structure of the film would be insignificant. Though, we can follow the storyline because we put things together as we're watching, the structure has a major impact upon how we interpret the story. When we first come across Natalie we see her as a possible love interest. This is due to the traditional depiction of female main characters as a love interest or play-thing for the leading man. In Memento, this assumption of Natalie is further played on when Leonard awakens after sharing a bed with Natalie. It is only as the story progresses, that it becomes apparent that Natalie is not a love interest at all and appears to be a manipulative character with her own goal of avenging her boyfriend's death. All of this is predicated on the fact that the audience would be caught off guard by the structure of the film. Though it's possible that the film could not even have been made if the concept of time was totally objective and unconnected to the human experience.

During the conclusion of Memento, which is actually the beginning of the story, Leonard acknowledges that there is such a thing as a priori knowledge when he says "Yeah, we don't need mirrors to remind ourselves who we are. I'm no different." In doing so, he rejects the notion that knowledge is derived only through sense impressions. We do not need to sense ourselves to know ourselves, we simply are ourselves and therefore know ourselves a priori - it is not acquired through experience but known. So this would mean that the metaphor of a camera for Shelby's mind is only partially accurate of his "condition" - a state of near passivity to knowledge, to others etc. Leonard has anterograde amnesia and the way he has been led along by Teddy shows the depth of his passivity. It is in the film that we see the transition Leonard Shelby makes from "bad faith" - acting as if one is a object passive to the forces around them - to authenticity and all the responsibility that comes with it.

The New Man.

Leonard Shelby is a highly original character, standing out against scenery in his cream suit and even standing incongruous to the banal revenge story he is part of. Shelby is remarkably independent, resourceful and determined for an individual suffering from such a "condition" - in contrast with the story of Sammy Jenkis who ends up in a home. But at the same time, because of his "condition", he vulnerable to the power of others. We can only watch as Leonard is manipulated by those around him. Teddy, Natalie and even Burt use his "condition" to further their own ends, whether it be for financial gain or revenge. Though the trust Leonard places in his notes keeps him from being easily manipulated by Teddy. On several occasions Leonard looks at the picture of Teddy and his comment "Never believe his lies" which stops him from following his guidance blindly. Partly this is the way that Leonard continues on his own independent path to find the killer-rapist John G. Of course, John G is already dead and Shelby is already free but trapped in "bad faith", allowing others to determine his actions.


Though it could be that this element of Memento cannot be understood fully without exploring the ideas of existentialism. Existentialism is a radically subjective philosophy that places the individual, autonomy, authenticity and the self, at the centre of importance. Fanon believed that the only way individuals could achieve true freedom, as opposed to the spurious bourgeois freedom of the West, is through violence. The very experience of violence would be cathartic and can awaken individuals from the West's insidious form of control. At the heart of existentialism rests a view of human beings not too dissimilar from empiricism. The way in which empiricists view the mind as a tabula rasa at the beginning of life is similar to the way in which existentialist philosophers viewed the attaining of essence after existence. But for the likes of Sartre, the individual is not a passive and blank slate waiting to experience the world. Sartre would have argued that the individual must not act in "bad faith" in order to attain authenticity and experience true freedom. "Bad faith" being to act as if one is passive and conform to the pressures that surround you.

The story of Memento relates closely to the existentialist philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon. This is also appropriate as Sartre was heavily influenced by Kant and pursued merging the duty-based ethics of Kant with existentialism. The act of killing Teddy may be the emancipation in itself, as it is Shelby's action that destroys the powerful force that he has been passive to for so long. After which Leonard emerges as a "new man" who has taken charge of his life and has purged himself of the "bad faith". The paradox of this relationship being the comfort and security of it, but also the turmoil and horror that is innate to the relationship. However, it could be argued that the emancipation Leonard achieved by killing Teddy was set in motion when he first wrote down Teddy's license plate, in the film's conclusion and the story's beginning, and in that sense it was that action, not killing John G, which was truly authentic.