By Kamran Nayeri, May 1, 2022
The following essay was penned at the invitation of Naghd-e Eghtesadeh Siassi (Critique of Political Economy) website in Iran. KN
Introduction
Hollywood cashed in on the simmering concerns with existential crises facing humanity with “Don’t Look Up” (2021). In bare outline, the plot of the movie is as follows. Two scientists discover that a comet is on course to hit Earth in six months. The impact could cause planetary mass extinction. When they reach out to the government and mass media they find apathy from officials and ordinary people. The effort to destroy the comet in time with a nuclear missile fails and the comet hits the Earth causing mass extinction. However, the U.S. president and a select group of 2,000 people succeed to escape in a rocket launched into space before the comet's impact. After a journey of 22,740 years, they land on a lush planet ending their cryogenic sleep. They exit their spacecraft admiring their new habitable world. But, the president is suddenly killed by a bird-like predator, and others are surrounded by a pack of them.
The movie was welcomed by many liberal and left-leaning audiences in the U.S. as a way to draw attention to the current existential crises facing humanity—catastrophic climate change, the Sixth Extinction, recurring pandemics, and nuclear holocaust— and a critique of seeming indifference by the public and the inaction by governments.
However, the plot of the movie is a poor analogy for the current existential crises. It revolves around a natural disaster but all current existential crises are anthropogenic, rooted in our social system, the anthropocentric industrial capitalist civilization. Unlike the movie in which the comet could be hit with a nuclear missile to destroy it, a technological fix managed by the military and scientific personnel and the capitalist state, the actual existential threats humanity faces can only be addressed by transcendence to some form of ecological socialism through self-organization and self-activity of billions of working people.
In this essay, I will critically outline the salient features of socialisms of the 19th and 20th centuries to outline in the concluding section what I consider would be the salient features of ecological socialism of the 21st century. I will conclude with the need to develop new materialism in which all beings have agency, a new theory of history with a new set of historical actors, and a new vision of the post-capitalist society.
Part 1. Socialism of the nineteenth century
Modern socialism was founded by Karl Marx and Frederick Engles. Grounded in historical materialism and its application to the critique capitalist mode of production, Marxian socialism is a theory of human emancipation from alienation. While it is commonly misunderstood that Marxian theory is centered on exploitation, in particular, exploitation of the working class in the capitalist society, ontologically and historically, alienation is prior and more fundamental than exploitation. To exploit another, she (human or nonhuman) has to become alienated first, to become “the other,” an object instead of a subject. As Marx argues, “human’s “feelings, passions, etc., are not merely anthropological phenomena in the [narrower] sense, but truly ontological affirmation of being (of nature) (Marx, 1844, emphasis in original) …” Istaván Mészáros (1970; p. 39) puts it this way: “The interrelationship between awareness of alienation and the historicity of the philosopher’s conception is a necessary one because of a fundamental question: the ‘nature of man’ (‘human essence’ etc.) is the point of reference of both.”
But once the problem of emancipation from alienation became Marx’s philosophical and theoretical starting point, it demanded a historical response. As Mészáros explains it:
“If man is ‘alienated’, he must be alienated from something, as a result of certain causes—the interplay of events and circumstances in relation to man as the subject of this alienation—which manifest themselves as in a historical framework. Similarly, the ‘transcendence of alienation’ is an inherently historical concept which envisages the successful accomplishment of a process leading to a qualitatively different state of affairs. “ (Mészáros, 1970, p. 36, emphases in original)
The vision of socialism in Marx is the freely associated direct producers, as a society of plenty that does away with material needs, where freedom of each is freedom for all. Marx’s socialism is conceived as a completely de-alienated society with no commodity, no money, no waged or salaried labor, and no state, all of which are considered forms of alienation, exploitation, and repression.
For the purpose of outlining the salient feature of the Marxian theory of socialism, I will follow Mandel's (1971; Chapter 11) and Mészáros's (1970) suggestions and begin with Marx’s turn away from philosophy to the critique of political economy in Economic and Philosophic Manuscript of 1844. This resulted in Marx’s definitive break with Young Hegelians and the sensuous materialism of Feuerbach as registered in the “Theses on Feuerbach” (1845) and The German Ideology (1845-46), which was co-authored with Engels and outlined their theory of history, historical materialism. Subsequently, Marx applied historical materialist methodology to the analysis of the capitalist mode of production. The first volume of Capital appeared in print in 1867 and after his death, Engels edited volume two (1885) and volume three (1894), and Karl Kautsky edited the three-volume Theories of Surplus Value (written in 1863 and edited and published in 1905-10). Engels (1883) considered historical materialism and the theory of surplus value as Marx’s key intellectual contributions while stressing that he was first and foremost a revolutionary socialist. Marx himself recounts part of this intellectual journey in his “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859). I take this standard account as the basis for discussing the Marxian theory in this essay.
Historical materialism
Both the idea of class struggle in historiography and the idea of progressive stages in the historical development of society were present in the intellectual history and theory in Europe before Marx and Engels. The notion of class struggle dates back at least to Giovanni Battista Vico (1668–1744). The idea of stages of development in history dates back to at least the eighteenth century. Ronald Meek in his Social Science and the Noble Savage (1976/2010) quotes Efimovich Desnistky, a former student of Adam Smith in 1761, who describes four stages of historical development in a lecture at Moscow University in 1781: hunting and gathering, pastoral, agricultural, and commercial. (Meek, 1976/2010, p. 5).
Desnistky then goes on to suggest: “Such an origin and rising of human society is common to all primitive people, and in accordance with these four conditions of peoples we must deduce their history, government, laws, and customs and measure their various successes in sciences and arts” (quoted in Meek, ibid.)
Meek attributes the earliest written discussions of the four-stage theory to Montesquieu (1689-1755), Smith (1723-1790), and Turgot (1727-1781).
Graeber and Wengrow (2021, pp. 60-61) have argued that Turgot initiated the stages of social development theory in response to the impact of indigenous Americans. In particular, they detail the impact of the Wendat nation of the Canadian portion of New France had on the French colonists in the seventeenth and through them and directly by indigenous travellers to Europe on the European culture and society at the time, in particular the development of European Enlightenment. In fact, they argue that Smith adopted the stages theory of history from Turgot.
Thus, the basic ideas for Marx’s and Engels’s historical materialism were in place in previous decades in the writing of authors they closely studied. Their genius lies in the synthesis of these ideas into a superior theory of history. This is similar to how Charles Darwin forged his theory of evolution by natural selection.
In the construction of historical materialist theory Marx and Engels relied on a materialist ontology of human nature which distinguished them from the prevailing bourgeois liberal idealist notion of human essence: “[T]he human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations” (Marx, 1845, The sixth thesis). They also defined their materialism by privileging “social humanity” as they focused on collective class actors as opposed to individual actors in history: “The standpoint of the old materialism is civil society; the standpoint of the new is human society, or social humanity.” (ibid., The tenth thesis). As Mészáros (1970, p. 39) puts it”[t]he point of central importance is…whether or not the question of ‘human nature’ is assessed within an implicitly or explicitly ‘egalitarian’ framework of explanation.”
It must be recalled that Marx’s and Engels’s knowledge of history was limited to the then available published historiography, covering about 3,000 years. (see endnote 1)
On such basis, in The German Ideology (1845-46), Marx and Engels expand on these ideas:
“This mode of production must not be considered simply as being the production of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production.” (Marx and Engels, 1945-46, emphasis added)
Thus, historical materialism is by design anthropocentric because its focus is on the development of human society abstracted from nature and based on what Marx and Engels knew about history that was at most 3,000 years old. Today, we know that modern humans (Homo sapiens) are at least 300,000 years old. It can be argued that, in fact, our history is rooted in the Homo genus, which is over 2.8 million years old (fire was controlled and used by Homo Erectus about a million years ago).
The theory of the proletariat as the universal class
It was also not Marx and Engels who first discovered the revolutionary potential of the proletariat. As Hal Draper (1971) notes: “When Marx and Engels were crystallizing their views on this subject, the revolutionary potentialities of the proletariat were already being recognized here and there.” Robert Own and Saint-Simon recognized the revolutionary potential of the proletariat. What was new in the Marxian theory of the proletariat was the notion that in the course of its struggle with the bourgeoisie, the proletariat will cease to be a “class in itself” and becomes a “class for itself.” Once in power, the proletariat as the universal class will do away with the rule of capital and all vestiges of class society (all based on alienation) in a transition period that would lead to a not-alienated classless society, socialism. Thus, the concept of self-organization and self-mobilization of the working class is central to the Marxian theory of socialism.
The most concise version of this view is expressed by Marx in 1864 as the first premise of the Rules of the First International: “Considering, that the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves; …” Thus, in the Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx and Engels stressed that Communists “do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mold the proletarian movement.” They added: that Communists are
“on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement. (See, Endnote 2)
The idea of the proletariat as the universal class whose struggle for self-emancipation will pave the way for the emancipation of humanity appears in Marx’s “Introduction” to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843) in a philosophical context. Marx himself acknowledges this: “The proletariat is beginning to appear in Germany as a result of the rising industrial movement.” Still, he goes on:
“In Germany, no form of bondage can be broken without breaking all forms of bondage. Germany, which is renowned for its thoroughness, cannot make a revolution unless it is a thorough one. The emancipation of the German is the emancipation of man. The head of this emancipation is philosophy, its heart the proletariat. Philosophy cannot realize itself without the transcendence [Aufhebung] of the proletariat, and the proletariat cannot transcend itself without the realization [Verwirklichung] of philosophy. (Marx, 1843; emphases in original) (See, Endnote 4)
It took decades before the proletariat became a social force in Germany. German unification came 28 years later in 1871, and industrialization sufficient for creating an industrial working class was still decades away.
There are theoretical and empirical tensions in the Marxian theory of the proletariat. On the theoretical level, the principle of self-determination implies the ability to generalize from the practical struggles, that is, to develop a revolutionary theory for transcending capitalism and transitioning to socialism by the self-organized and self-mobilized proletariat. Engels points to this problem in his July 1, 1874 “Addendum to the Preface” to The Peasant War in Germany (1850) He argued that the German workers have two important advantages compared with the rest of Europe.
“First, they belong to the most theoretical people of Europe; second, they have retained that sense of theory which the so-called ‘educated’ people of Germany have totally lost. Without German philosophy, particularly that of Hegel, German scientific Socialism (the only scientific Socialism extant) would never have come into existence. Without a sense for theory, scientific Socialism would have never become blood and tissue of the workers.
“The second advantage is that chronologically speaking, the Germans were the last to appear in the labour movement. In the same manner, as German theoretical Socialism will never forget that it rests on the shoulders of Saint Simon, Fourier and Owen, the three who, in spite of their fantastic notions and Utopianism, belonged to the most significant heads of all time and whose genius anticipated numerous things the correctness of which can now be proved in a scientific way, so the practical German labour movement must never forget that it has developed on the shoulders of the English and French movements, that it had utilised their experience, acquired at a heavy price, and that for this reason it was in a position to avoid their mistakes which in their time were unavoidable. Without the English trade unions and the French political workers’ struggles preceding the German labour movement, without the mighty impulse given by the Paris Commune, where would we now be?” (Engels, 1874)
In sum, Engels here argues for a well-developed “scientific” theory of socialism which combines philosophy, socialist theory, and labor and socialist history. However, Engels leaves out how this “scientific socialist theory” would be developed, preserved, and shared over time across the generations and across the world's working classes.
I will return to this question when I discuss Lenin’s theory of the vanguard party.
The second tension in the Marxian theory of the proletariat is the rise of the aristocracy of labor. Marx and Engels, who lived the latter part of their lives in England, wrote about the rise of the English labor aristocracy, which complicated their theory of the proletariat and socialist revolution (See, Nayeri, 2005; Draper, 1978, pp. 105-110). In a letter to Karl Liebneckt, Marx wrote:
“The English working class had been gradually more and more deeply demoralised by the period of corruption since 1848 and had, at last, got to the point when they were nothing more than the tail of the great Liberal Party, i.e., henchmen of the capitalists. Their direction had gone completely over into the hands of the corrupt trade union leaders and professional agitators.” (Marx, February 11, 1878)
Engels, who lived longer, wrote more extensively. In the 1892 preface to the German edition of the Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), Engels wrote about “[t]he engineers, the carpenters, and joiners, the bricklayers” whose conditions have improved remarkably in the intervening four decades.
“They form an aristocracy among the working class; they have succeeded in enforcing for themselves a relatively comfortable position, and they accept it as final. They are the model working men….and they are very nice people nowadays to deal with, for any sensible capitalist in particular and for the whole capitalist class in general.
“The truth is this: during the period of England’s industrial monopoly the English working-class have, to a certain extent, shared in the benefits of the monopoly. These benefits were very unequally parceled out amongst them; the privileged minority pocketed most, but even the great mass had, at least, a temporary share now and then. And that is the reason why, since the dying-out of Owenism, there has been no Socialism in England.”(Engels, 1892)
Clearly, the Marxian theory of the proletariat as the revolutionary universal class was in need of further development, and this complicated the Marxian theory of socialism.
Part 2. Socialisms of the 20th century
In the 20th century, socialisms of the 20th century were developed in ignorance or neglect of the Marxian theory of socialism. One contributing factor was the lack of key early writings of Marx, especially those dealing with alienation and his Grundrisse, which was first published in 1939-41. (See, Endnote 5) But several other developments contributed to theories of socialism that departed significantly from Marx’s theory of socialism.
The teachings of Marx and Engels were turned into a “scientific” doctrine, the rise of a large aristocracy of labor in the early capitalist industrializing nations formed the basis for the rise of social democratic reformism, Marx’s theory of the capitalist mode of production (labor theory of value or “law of value”) was displaced with theories of monopoly capitalism, Lenin revised Marx’s theory of the proletariat with his theory of the vanguard party, and degeneration of the 1917 socialist revolution in Russia in the 1920s resulted in the rise of Stalinism. As the result, the world revolution took a detour from the industrialized capitalist centers to the largely agrarian countries in the periphery of capitalism where the peasantry, not the proletariat, became the major social class, and in all but one case, Cuba, led by a Stalinist leadership resulted in a national-democratic revolution.”
The rise of Marxism as a “scientific” doctrine
In his dispute with Bernstein’s reformism, Karl Kautsky, the leading theorist of the German Social Democratic Party, accused him of violating the principles of “Marxism.” In 1882, Engels had criticized the use of the term “Marxism” by noting that Marx himself opposed it when discussing the self-proclaimed “Marxist,” Paul Lafargue, saying that if Lafargue's views were considered Marxist, then "one thing is certain and that is that I am not a Marxist.” (Haupt, et al., 2010)
Still, Marxism became the hallmark of key trends in socialism in the twentieth century: social democracy, Stalinism, and Trotskyism. The claim that the teachings of Marx and Engels were scientific originated with Engels, in particular, his popular pamphlet Socialism: Scientific and Utopian. Engels initially used the “scientific” designation because their vision of socialism was arrived at by using their historical materialism, not as a Utopia (although, as I will argue it too is a utopian view). I have suggested (Nayeri, 2021) that historical materialism could be considered scientific in light of Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) because it brought about a fundamental change in the basic concepts and experimental practices of historiography. Roy Bhaskar (1979; 1994) has argued that Marx’s Capital may be considered scientific according to the precepts of scientific realism. Still, Engels's claim was not based on such arguments in science or the philosophy of social sciences. It was merely ideological as it has been to this day. (See, Endnote 6) Once the teachings of Marx and Engels were turned into a “scientific” doctrine, a fundamental change in the agency of the proletariat in the theory of socialist revolution and the relationship between the socialist movement and the labor movement occurred. The proletariat became the mass to be led by such vanguard parties, led by the leadership who knew and developed the received doctrine. A similar division of labor occurred within these parties between the leadership and the ranks as the leadership was assumed to be the holders and interpreters of the doctrine and authorities who dealt with the “big questions” and the rank-and-file who were to carry the day-to-day activities of the party.
The reformism of the Second International
The German SDP was the largest in the Second International with the most influence in the labor movement. Alas, it also turned out to be the party of the German labor aristocracy as the Bolshevik leader Gregory Zinoviev documented in “Social Roots of Opportunism” (1916). Examining official SDP statistics, he wrote:
“According to our calculation, 4,000 functionaries occupy at least 12,000 – if not more – important party and trade union functions. Every more or less efficient functionary takes care simultaneously of two to three and often even more offices. He is at the same time a Reichstag deputy and an editor, a member of the Landtag and a party secretary, the president of a trade union, an editor, a cooperative functionary, a city councilman, etc. Thus all power in the party and trade unions accumulates in the hands of this upper 4,000. (The salaries accumulate, too. Many of the officials of the labor movement receive 10,000 marks and over per year.) The whole business depends on them. They hold in their hands the whole powerful apparatus of the press, of the organization of the mutual aid societies, the entire electoral apparatus, etc.” (Zinoviev, 1916)
The changing social composition of the leadership of the German SPD coincided with a fundamental revision of Marx’s theory of the capitalist mode of production. In his highly influential book, Finance Capital (1910), Rudolf Hilferding argued that Marx’s labor theory of value (“law of value”) has been superseded by the rise of finance capital (or monopoly capitalism). He offered a systematic analysis of the changing character of nineteenth-century capitalist development, in particular in Germany. The competition analysis is the chief aim of part three, entitled “Finance Capital and Restrictions to Free Competition.” Taking his criticism to its logical conclusion, Hilferding concluded that Marx’s labor theory of value would cease to operate:
“Classical economics conceives price as the expression of the anarchic character of social production, and the price level as depending upon the social productivity of labour. But the objective law of price can operate only through competition. If monopolistic combinations abolish competition, they eliminate at the same time the only means through which an objective law of price can actually prevail. Price ceases to be an objectively determined magnitude and becomes an accounting exercise for those who decide what it shall be by fiat, a presupposition instead of a result, subjective rather than objective, something arbitrary and accidental rather than a necessity which is independent of the will and consciousness of the parties concerned. It seems that the monopolistic combine, while it confirms Marx's theory of concentration, at the same time tends to undermine his theory of value.” (ibid., p. 228; my emphasis)
What would replace Marx’s laws of motion of the capitalist system in finance capital? Hilferding believed a fusion of the general cartel with the capitalist state would result in “organized capitalism” and argued for a reformist course for Social Democracy:
“Organized capitalism means replacing free competition with the social principle of planned production. The task of the present Social Democratic generation is to invoke state aid in translating this economy, organized and directed by the capitalists, into an economy directed by the democratic state. (Hilferding quoted in Green, 1990, p. 203)
That is, socialism was redefined as state socialism, and the class character of the state was defined by which party came to use it. If socialists, through elections, came to power, it was argued, that they could wield the state apparatus to achieve “socialist” goals. Social democratic policies eventually contributed to the development of capitalist welfare states in Western Europe.
The history of socialist theorizing of capitalism after Hilferding has been characterized by a divide between a tiny minority who have maintained that Marx’s theory of competition remains operative and his labor theory of value valid, and an influential majority that included parties of the Second International, Third International, and Fourth International, who argued for some variety of monopoly capitalism. Some in the latter category have openly argued that Marx’s law of value is no longer operative. (See, Endnote 7) Most have sidestepped this crucial conclusion of their theory.
In the 1970s, Marxist economists rediscovered that Marx’s theory of free competition is fundamentally different from the Neoclassical theory of Perfect Competition, which a long line of Marxist theorists, starting with Hilferding to Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy (1966), have assumed to be the same. Anwar Shaikh, who is a pioneer of this rediscovery, spent four decades transforming U.S. National Accounts categories to Marxian categories to provide an empirical Marxian study of U.S. capitalism operating based on the law of value (Shaikh and Tonak, 2010; Shaikh, 2016) From a Marxian point of view, theories of finance capitalism and monopoly capitalism that followed, including those by Bukharin and Lenin, were based on a serious misunderstanding of Marx’s theory of the capitalist mode production and led to important theoretical and political errors, including dependency theories and support for “national bourgeoisie” of the latecomers to the world capitalist market. (Nayeri, 1991; August 2018).
Lenin's theory of the vanguard party
In “What Is to Be Done?” (1902), Lenin cites Engels’s July 1, 1874 “Addendum to the Preface” to The Peasant War in Germany (1850) noted above to argue for a democratic centralist proletarian party. Asserting that without a revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement, Lenin goes on to argue:
“We have said that there could not have been Social-Democratic consciousness among the workers. It would have to be brought to them from without. The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation, etc. The theory of socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical, and economic theories elaborated by educated representatives of the propertied classes, by intellectuals. By their social status the founders of modern scientific socialism, Marx and Engels, themselves belonged to the bourgeois intelligentsia. In the very same way, in Russia, the theoretical doctrine of Social-Democracy arose altogether independently of the spontaneous growth of the working-class movement; it arose as a natural and inevitable outcome of the development of thought among the revolutionary socialist intelligentsia. In the period under discussion, the middle nineties, this doctrine not only represented the completely formulated programme of the Emancipation of Labour group but had already won over to its side the majority of the revolutionary youth in Russia.” (Lenin, 1902, emphases in original)
There are three key observations about Lenin’s theory of the vanguard party. First, it is a clear break with Marx’s own theory of the proletariat as discussed earlier (with the caveat that Marx and Engels did not have the opportunity to update their own theory of the proletariat as the universal class in light of the rise of the aristocracy of labor in Britain and elsewhere). Second, the Bolshevik Party played a crucial role in the Russian revolutions of 1917, in particular, the October socialist revolution. Although, as China Miéville (2017; for a review, see, Nayeri, December 2017) brilliantly recounts the events from February to October, focusing on the role played by the soviets, it was the mutually reinforcing interplay of the self-organized and self-mobilized working peoples’ movement and the Bolshevik Party that brought about the first workers’ state in history. The centrality of the role played by the self-organized and self-mobilized soviets was recognized in Lenin’s April Theses (April 1917) and the adoption of the slogan of “all power to the soviets” by the Bolsheviks in May (Lih, July 2017). In his The State and Revolution (August-September 1917), Lenin argued the soviets formed the backbone of the workers’ state to come to power. Still, the tension in Lenin’s own mind was manifested in the full title of the pamphlet, which is The State and Revolution and the task of the proletariat in the revolution. It is clear that in Lenin’s mind it is the party that decides the task for the class even as he argues following the teachings of Marx and Engels that the soviets should form the future workers’ state!
Third, Lenin's theory of the vanguard party has a poor empirical record. As a revolutionary organization, it lasted only about two decades, and ever since, no effort to emulate it has proved successful. By the mid-1920s, the Bolshevik Party of Lenin was turned into its opposite, becoming a tool of the rising counter-revolutionary bureaucracy headed by Stalin. As the self-organized and self-mobilized organs of working peoples’ power declined and disbanded after the onset of the civil war in 1918 and the much hoped for revolutions in Europe were defeated, and the young Soviet republic faced the destruction of much of its productive capacity, bureaucracy began to spread in society, state, and the party. In 1922-23, Lenin (2010), burdened by a stroke waged a political struggle against the policies of the rising bureaucracy headed by Joseph Stalin.
Trotsky who was a central leader of the October 1917 revolution and became the most insightful and determined leader of the revolutionary socialist opposition to Stalinism, explains the reasons for the degeneration of the socialist revolution as follows.
“[P]roletariat still backward in many respects achieved in the space of a few months the unprecedented leap from a semi-feudal monarchy to a socialist dictatorship, that the reaction in its ranks was inevitable. This reaction has developed in a series of consecutive waves. External conditions and events have vied with each other in nourishing it. Intervention followed intervention. The revolution got no direct help from the west. Instead of the expected prosperity of the country an ominous destitution reigned for long. Moreover, the outstanding representatives of the working class either died in the civil war, or rose a few steps higher and broke away from the masses. And thus after an unexampled tension of forces, hopes and illusions, there came a long period of weariness, decline and sheer disappointment in the results of the revolution. The ebb of the ‘plebian pride’ made room for a flood of pusillanimity and careerism. The new commanding caste rose to its place upon this wave.
“The demobilization of the Red Army of five million played no small role in the formation of the bureaucracy. The victorious commanders assumed leading posts in the local Soviets, in economy, in education, and they persistently introduced everywhere that regime which had ensured success in the civil war. Thus on all sides the masses were pushed away gradually from actual participation in the leadership of the country.
“The reaction within the proletariat caused an extraordinary flush of hope and confidence in the petty-bourgeois strata of town and country, aroused as they were to new life by the NEP, and growing bolder and bolder. The young bureaucracy, which had arisen at first as an agent of the proletariat, began to feel itself a court of arbitration between classes. Its independence increased from mouth to mouth.
“The international situation was pushing with mighty forces in the same direction. The Soviet bureaucracy became more self-confident, the heavier blows dealt to the working class. Between these two facts, there was not only a chronological, but a causal connection, and one which worked in two directions. The leaders of the bureaucracy promoted the proletarian defeats; the defeats promoted the rise of the bureaucracy. The crushing of the Bulgarian insurrection in 1924, the treacherous liquidation of the General Strike in England and the unworthy conduct of the Polish workers’ party at the installation of Pilsudski in 1926, the terrible massacre of the Chinese revolution in 1927, and, finally, the still more ominous recent defeats in Germany and Austria – these are the historic catastrophes which killed the faith of the Soviet masses in world revolution, and permitted the bureaucracy to rise higher and higher as the sole light of salvation.”(Trotsky, 1936, my emphasis).
Trotsky also holds anti-democratic decisions to ban tendencies and factions in the party as the reasons why the bureaucracy took over the party relatively easily.
“At the moment of completion of the civil war, this struggle took such sharp forms as to threaten to unsettle the state power. In March 1921, in the days of the Kronstadt revolt, which attracted into its ranks no small number of Bolsheviks, the 10th Congress of the party thought it necessary to resort to a prohibition of factions – that is, to transfer the political regime prevailing in the state to the inner life of the ruling party. This forbidding of factions was again regarded as an exceptional measure to be abandoned at the first serious improvement in the situation. At the same time, the Central Committee was extremely cautious in applying the new law, concerning itself most of all lest it leads to a strangling of the inner life of the party.
“However, what was in its original design merely a necessary concession to a difficult situation, proved perfectly suited to the taste of the bureaucracy, which had then begun to approach the inner life of the party exclusively from the viewpoint of convenience in administration. Already in 1922, during a brief improvement in his health, Lenin, horrified at the threatening growth of bureaucratism, was preparing a struggle against the faction of Stalin, which had made itself the axis of the party machine as a first step toward capturing the machinery of state. A second stroke and then death prevented him from measuring forces with this internal reaction.
“The entire effort of Stalin, with whom at that time Zinoviev and Kamenev were working hand in hand, was thenceforth directed to freeing the party machine from the control of the rank-and-file members of the party. In this struggle for “stability” of the Central Committee, Stalin proved the most consistent and reliable among his colleagues.” (Trotsky, 1936)
The degeneration of the Russian socialist revolution through the defeat of the working masses by the rising bureaucracy and destruction of the Bolshevik Party and its program and norms and its replacement by the Stalinist Communist Party was followed by the purging of the communist leadership and ranks of the Communist International turning it into a foreign policy instrument of Moscow.
Historically then, Lenin’s vanguard party lasted almost two decades before it was turned into its opposite. There has never been another workers’ party like it in the hundred years since its demise.
The bulk of the Communist parties was Stalinist in their program, outlook, and norms. The parties of the Fourth International, which Trotsky helped found in 1938, and in some instances contributed significantly to the labor and social movements, never became more than propaganda organizations, and they inherited all the theoretical ambiguities and tensions in Lenin’s and Trotsky’s own writings and added new ones (Nayeri, October 2020).
In particular, Trotsky's designation of the Soviet Union was a theoretical and political error of vast proportion. While he admitted that “[w]ith the utmost stretch of fancy, it would be difficult to imagine a contrast more striking than that which exists between the scheme of the workers' state according to Marx, Engels, and Lenin, and the actual state now headed by Stalin,” he still insisted that the Soviet Union remains a workers’ state, though degenerated.
“The state assumes directly and from the very beginning a dual character: socialistic, insofar as it defends social property in the means of production; bourgeois, insofar as the distribution of life's goods is carried out with a capitalistic measure of value and all the consequences ensuing therefrom. Such a contradictory characterization may horrify the dogmatists and scholastics; we can only offer them our condolences.” (Trotsky, 1936)
Trotsky’s last sentence is a smokescreen. A state can only be considered a workers’ state if and only if it is under direct workers' management and control, not in the hands of the counter-revolutionary bureaucracy!
Thus, Trotsky reduced the Marxian theory of a workers’ state to the state ownership of the means of production, nationalization of international trade, and planned economy even though all these levers were firmly in the hands of the Stalinist bureaucracy, who in Trotsky’s own telling was “counter-revolutionary through and through.”
This theoretical muddling led the Fourth International to misidentify a host of other states led by Stalinist parties after World War II as workers’ states, albeit deformed.
In Eastern Europe, at the end of World War II, in countries that the Red Army had occupied, the economy and society were reorganized along the lines similar to the Stalinist Soviet Union. In North Korea, China, and Vietnam, political parties in the Stalinist mold came to power after a nationalist struggle against internal reaction and imperialism.
In Cuba, Fidel Castro’s July 26th Movement, which drew its aspirations from Latin American anti-imperialist and national democratic movements came to power in 1959. In carrying out land reform and in standing up to U.S. imperialism, the Castro leadership turned to the Soviet bloc for new economic and diplomatic relations. On April 16, 1961, the day before the Bay of Pigs invasion, in a speech, Fidel Castro declared socialism as the goal of the Cuban revolution.
The national democratic revolutionary wars in Yugoslavia, China, Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba drew their support largely from the peasantry. All these new regimes described themselves as socialist. But none followed the socialism of Marx and Engels, built parties after Lenin’s model, or have/had states run by the self-organized and self-mobilized working people. In fact, they have all been one-party states where the state is an instrument of the party.
Thus, the socialist history of the 20th century was largely written by mass Social Democratic and Stalinist parties. Together, they forestalled all revolutionary and pre-revolutionary situations in Western Europe and failed to join forces to stop the rise of fascism in Germany. On the theoretical level, Marx's theory of the proletariat and socialism was set aside in favor of some form (revolutionary or reformist) vanguard party that would either foster economic development and industrialization as in the case of revolution in the periphery of world capitalism or income redistribution as in the case of welfare states fostered by social democracy.
Socialism of the 21st century
Before outlining the key salient features of socialism for the 21st century, allow me to return to the explosion of anthropogenic ecological crises in the opening decades this essay began. If these ecological crises, including those that are existential threats to humanity, are rooted in the anthropocentric industrial capitalist civilization, as I have argued (Nayeri, May 2017; Nayeri, October 2018; Nayeri, March 2020; Nayeri, March 2022), humanity needs to transcend it in the direction of an ecocentric ecological socialist future.
The Anthropocene
Two hundred sixty-two years since the start of the Industrial Revolution in England in 1760, the spread of capitalist industrialization, especially since World War II has brought us the Anthropocene (The Age of Humans). Scientists have increasingly argued, and now earth system scientists agree, that Holocene, the geological epoch that began 11,700 years ago, has given way to the Anthropocene. Even the stratigraphers who study the precise demarcation and time-tabling of the deposition of rock layers also agree. While the Holocene was marked by a climate supporting the rise and spread of agricultural-based civilizations, the Anthropocene has brought us the planetary crises that, if left unchecked, will undermine much of life on Earth, including humanity.
Let me cite just one source about the explosion of ecological crises. The Stockholm Resilience Center published a study of the planetary crisis (Rockström et al., 2009) and an extensive update (Steffen et al., 2015) that has identified nine planetary boundaries ("thresholds for safe operating space for human societies"). Climate change and "biosphere integrity" (the Sixth Extinction) are designated as core boundaries “because they both are affected by and drive changes in all the others.” The nine boundaries are:
1. Climate change
2. Change in biosphere integrity (i.,e., the Sixth Extinction)
3. Stratospheric ozone depletion
4. Ocean acidification
5. Biogeochemical flows (phosphorus and nitrogen cycles)
6. Land-system change (for example deforestation)
7. Freshwater use
8. Atmospheric aerosol loading (microscopic particles in the atmosphere that affect climate and living organisms)
9. Introduction of novel entities (e.g. organic pollutants, radioactive materials, nanomaterials, and micro-plastics).
The International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme’s research paper, Great Acceleration (2015) concludes with the following:
“The effects of the accelerating human changes are now clearly discernible at the Earth system level. Many key indicators of the functioning of the Earth system are now showing responses that are, at least in part, driven by the changing human imprint on the planet. The human imprint influences all components of the global environment - oceans, coastal zone, atmosphere, and land.”
The paper cites data that show exponential growth of human population, urbanization, real GDP growth, foreign direct investment, primary energy use, large dams, air travel and tourism, water use, paper production, fertilizer consumption, transportation, telecommunications, emission of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen dioxide, surface temperature, stratospheric ozone, marine fish capture, ocean acidification, coastal nitrogen, shrimp aquaculture, tropical forest loss, domesticated land, terrestrial biosphere degradation since 1750 or since data was first collected. Clearly, left unchecked, these trends point to ecological collapse sometimes in the future (for the graphs of these see here).
Ecocentric Socialism
These existential threats immediately suggest that the socialism of the 21st century must be ecological. As I have discussed above, Marx and Engels consciously set aside humanity’s interaction with and dependence on nature in the construction of historical materialism to focus attention on class struggle and the role of the proletariat in the socialist revolution. Thus, they wrote in The German Ideology
“Of course, we cannot here go either into the actual physical nature of man or into the natural conditions in which man finds himself – geological, hydrographical, climatic, and so on. The writing of history must always set out from these natural bases and their modification in the course of history through the action of men.” (Marx and Engels, 1845, emphasis added, 1845)
As the environmentalist movement developed in response to these crises, some socialist thinkers and currents began to consider a response. Some have added environmentalist planks to their political platform. Some have renamed themselves “ecological socialists” to designate their interest in and attention to ecological issues facing human society. A smaller fraction has gone further to develop ecological socialist theories to address and explicitly incorporate nature into socialist theorizing, often using some interpretation of the work of Marx (e.g., O’Connor, 1998; Kovel, 2002; Bellamy Foster, Clark, and York, 2010; Löwy, 2015; Moore, 2015).
Broadly speaking, socialist and ecological socialist theories by design focus on “capitalism,” and in the case of the latter, they focus on tendencies in “capitalism” that degrade the environment leading to ecological crises. Most have argued that Marx’s theory needs modifications to address ecological crises. Foster et al., citing Marx’s ecological insights (Burkett, 1999, Foster 2000) in his discussions of the “metabolic rift,” have argued that Marx’s theory is essentially ecological. Still, despite their theoretical differences and their varying assessments of Marx, all generally argue that capitalist accumulation (growth) is responsible for ecological crises, and some explicitly embrace a form of natural limits to growth as the immediate cause of ecological crises.
What remains outside their purview is any theoretical and analytical consideration of the anti-ecological tendencies of all human civilizations, many of which succumbed to ecological crises beginning with the Sumerian civilization(4500 –1900 Before Current Era-BCE). They also ignore how Marx and Engels intentionally developed historical materialism as the theory of society abstracted from nature and that their own expressed point of view is that to adequately discuss human history, one must develop a theory that consciously incorporates the interaction of society and nature and human’s utter dependence on nature.
Thus, the socialist theories of the 19th and 20th centuries I have examined above and the bulk of ecosocialist theories of the 21st century are essentially theories of society as nature remains outside of their theoretical framework. When nature is considered, it is usually objectified and passive. Humans remain the sole agency in history. Moreover, the problem of anthropocentrism, key to environmental ethics, which I have argued is the manifestation of alienation from nature, is entirely ignored (Nayeri, July 2021). A recent exception is Jason W. Moore’s theorizing, who unsuccessfully attempted to revise Marx’s theory of history and "capitalism" to give agency to nonhuman nature. (Moore, 2015, for a critical review, see, Nayeri, 2016)
Since 2009, I have developed what I have called Ecocentric Socialism (Nayeri, 2021), a theory of socialism that builds on Marx’s and Engels’s own suggestion that human history cannot be understood in isolation from nature of which we are a part and we depend on it for our existence and wellbeing. What follows are its salient features in contrast to the Marxian theory of socialism. Needless to say, this is a work in progress and would benefit from critical contributions. Socialism of the 21st century, if it ever comes to be, would be imagined and built by billions of working people themselves.
Theory of history: It is necessary to develop a new theory of history that would be based, not on nineteenth-century materialism but on materialism that gives agency to all beings, in my own view it would be a theory of animistic ecological materialism. (See, Endnote 8) From an ontological point of view, human nature will no longer be limited to the sum total of social relations shaped by the dominant mode of production but will encompass the sum total of eco-social relations shaped by the dynamic interrelation of four trends: (1) The transhistorical trend in which organic matter arose from inorganic matter, and the simplest forms of life out of the organic matter 3.7 billion years ago; (2) it recognizes and celebrates our continuity with the evolution of life on Earth and in particular our kinship with other animals; (3) the development of our species, Homo sapiens that emerged 300,000 years ago from the lineage that began with the Homo genus that first appeared over 2.8 million years ago; and, (4) the trend specific to the mode of production influences (as in Marx’s own theory).
Theory of alienation: While there is no explicit explanation of alienation in Marxian theory outside of Marx’s writings on capitalist forms of alienation, in Ecocentric Socialism it emerges with alienation from nature rooted in the systematic domestication and farming beginning about 12,000 years ago, resulting in systematic economic surplus which made for social differentiation and social alienation.
Theory of historical change: Instead of class struggle in Marxian socialism, Ecocentric Socialism starts with the agency for all beings in their ecological interconnectedness, including the ecological interaction of animate and inanimate nature that have formed ecosystems and Earth a living planet since the emergence of life. In class societies, while it admits the struggle of social classes, it also pays attention to non-class struggles inside and outside civilization, including the struggle for the rights of Mother Earth and nonhuman beings in the shaping of human history. Thus, class relations and class struggle that Marx and Engels placed at the center of their theoretical and practical concerns are supplemented with non-class struggles against the subordination of nature and various strata of people. Some of these struggles, like the struggle for equal consideration regardless of gender, race, sexual orientation, and national origin, must be seen as essential for fostering the unity of the working people. Others like the fight to stop and reverse the climate crisis, the ongoing Sixth Extinction, and the sharpening threat of nuclear war involve existential struggles. Still, others, like the fight for animal liberation or the rights of nature and its constituent elements, contribute not only to their well-being but also to the process of human de-alienation and eventual emancipation. In brief, Ecocentric Socialism will aim for dismantling all power relations. As such, the tension between the base and superstructure in Marxian theory is resolved by elevating the superstructure to the same level as the base and their constant interaction as the prime movers of societal change.
Analytical categories: Key analytical categories include ecological, social forces of production and ecological social forces of destruction, eco-social relations of production, and dialectically interacting base and superstructure conceived as complex interdependent relations that give agency to all beings. Most importantly, it is explicitly recognized that forces of production are often also forces of destruction. Thus, the development of forces of production which in the dominant interpretations of historical materialism, is entirely avoided as is the Enlightenment idea of progress which ties the good life with ever-expanding technologies and a culture of having.
Emancipatory promise: Like Marxian socialism, the fundamental goal of Ecocentric Socialism is human emancipation from alienation and its consequences, e.g. oppression and exploitation. However, unlike the Marxian theory, which identifies human emancipation with freedom from laws of nature (e.g., Engels, 1880) and a technologically advanced society of plenty based on ever more division (Nayeri, June 2018), Ecocentric Socialism will require a process of humanity pulling back from the existing culture of having based ever more material possession to reduce to negligible the humanity’s ecological footprint while producing differently a different matrix of necessities for human wellbeing and development compatible with contentment based on voluntary simplicity. This process is urgently needed in the Global North but for the people whose basic needs are not met mostly in the Global South and in certain groups in the Global North, a redistribution of the existing wealth to them will be necessary. At the same time, through the empowerment of women and democratic family planning, the human population would have to be drastically reduced in several generations to make our collective ecological footprint negligible in all ecosystems. The emancipated humanity will not produce waste. The Ecocentric Socialist Societies would be based on a democratically-run stationary state with low-production, low-technology localized economies.
Worldview and environmental ethics: While Marxian socialism and socialisms of the 20th century and ecosicoailisms of the 21st century are all anthropocentric and have no built-in environmental ethics, Ecocentric Socialism is based on the realization that anthropocentrism is a pillar of the civilization built on alienation from nature, hence, social alienation. To transcend the anthropocentric industrial capitalist civilization, it is necessary to work for ecocentrism and against anthropocentrism. Thus, Ecocentric Socialism will be a combined social and cultural revolution by billions of humanity. But ecocentrism is not just an intellectual point of view but a genuine love for nature and for life on Earth: To Save the World, We Must Love the World.
Program and strategy: The programmatic platform of Ecocentric Socialism may be different in detail from one country to another. But the overall framework would be the same across the world in line with its worldview, ethics, and emancipatory goal. I have provided an outline of such a program for the United States elsewhere (See, Nayeri, October 2018, the section on “Ecocentric Socialism”). Ecocentric Socialism also draws on a century and a half of experiences of the world revolution, especially in Russia and Cuba. For example, the experience of the Bolshevik Party in contributing to the development of mass consciousness in an anti-capitalist and socialist direction is codified in Trotsky’s Transition Program (1938), the founding document of the Fourth International. Similarly, the Cuban revolution has contributed invaluable lessons (Nayeri, July 2017, the section entitled “Lessons from the Cuban revolution”). Most important are the theoretical and political contributions of Ernesto Che Guevara. The 1962-65 public debate in Cuba on the transition to socialism is documented in Man and Socialism: The Great Debate (Silverman, ed., 1972). The debate was occasioned by the process of formation of the Communist Party (not to be mistaken by the pro-Moscow Communist Parties) on the initiative of Fidel Castro and his close associates to form the Communist Party of Cuba through the unification of the July 26th Movement, the pro-Moscow Popular Socialist Party, and the Revolutionary Directorate, a revolutionary student group. There were two opposing views, not just in theory but also in daily practice, that were aired publicly in what was later called The Great Debate which took a somewhat international dimension with contributions from Ernest Mandel and Charles Bettelheim. Carlos Rafael Rodriguez, a leader of the former Popular Socialist Party, who was also a leader of the new Communist Party of Cuba essentially put forward a market socialist position which was favored in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe at the time that viewed material incentives as key to the transition to socialism (for a critique of market socialism see, Nayeri, 2004). Guevara disagreed. While he did not dispute the need for material incentives in the transition period as the law of value (the market) continued to exert its influence on the consciousness of the working people, he strongly argued that the key to the transition to socialism is to advance moral incentives to help build socialist consciousness. Unsurprisingly, the very concept of socialism was also in dispute. Guevara’s view of socialism was expressed in Socialism and Man in Cuba (1965). Socialism, he wrote,
“is not a matter of how many kilograms of meat one has to eat, how many times a year someone can go to the beach, or how many pretty things from abroad you might be able to buy with present-day wages. It is a matter of making the individual feel more complete, with much more inner wealth and much more responsibility.” (ibid.)
Guevara’s theory and practice of transition to socialism while not continued in Cuba for any sustained period of time has been the subject of research and is essential reading for anyone interested in the socialist transition (Tablada, 1987; Yaffe, 2009; for a review of Yaffe's book, see, Nayeri, 2010; for a brief discussion of the relevance of Guevara’s view for Cuba today, see, Nayeri, 2014 ).
Feasibility: It is prudent to end this essay with the question of the feasibility of socialism in general and Ecocentric Socialism in particular in the 21st century. As I have shown, socialism as a theory has always had internal and empirical contradictions.
The only short-lived actualization of the Marxian vision in its preliminary stage emerged in the Russian revolutions of 1917 with the formation of self-organized and self-mobilized soviets, which is mutually reinforcing interactions with the Bolshevik Party that created the first workers’ state in history opening the road to the world socialist revolution. We also know that the Russian socialist revolution degenerated in less than a decade as the soviets and other self-organized and self-mobilized organizations of the working people declined and disbanded due to the backwardness of Russian society and economy and the corruption of a significant layer of the working classes in the industrial capitalist economies due to the rise of the aristocracy of labor.
In a comprehensive study, Filmer (1995; for a discussion, see Harman, 2002) estimated that 2.474 billion people participated in the global non-domestic labor force in the mid-1990s. Of these, around a fifth, 379 million people worked in industry, 800 million in services, and 1,074 million in agriculture. Thus, a much larger proletariat exists worldwide to strive for and sustain socialism. Of course, as I have argued, the agencies for Ecocentric Socialism would differ markedly, including other strata of the population such as women, youth, aboriginal people, lovers of nature, and so on. However, while these classes and groups are now quite sizable, they are still to use the Marxian terminology, the “class-in-itself.” What is required is a worldwide mass radicalization to challenge the key aspects of the anthropocentric industrial capitalist civilization. No one knows how and when such radicalizations emerge. And if it does, how synchronic it would be across various strata of social agencies to enable the spread of the Ecocentric Socialist revolution. We still need to develop a theory of how the vanguard of such a movement would be organized not to become an elite force but to enable the further development of the revolution. Finally, the world political situation is characterized by inter-imperialist rivalry, as can be seen in the war in Ukraine that threatens humanity with a Third World War and a nuclear holocaust. It is also characterized by the extreme marginalization of socialist and ecological socialist, labor, and Green organizations, as seen splintering in the face of this war. There is no anti-war movement to speak of. The ecological/Green movement is also co-opted into the framework of capitalist electoral politics. Meanwhile, ecological existential crises have narrowed the window of opportunity for humanity to act as one to resolve these crises, all of which require a rapid transition to a post-anthropocentric industrial capitalist way of life (Nayeri, March 2022). Humanity’s future and much of life on Earth are at stake.
Endnotes:
1. In a footnote to the 1888 English edition and 1890 German edition of the Communist Manifesto, Engels commented on the sentence that read “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” wrote: “In 1847, the pre-history of society, the social organization existing previous to recorded history, all but unknown. Since then, August von Haxthausen (1792-1866) discovered common ownership of land in Russia, Georg Ludwig von Maurer proved it to be the social foundation from which all Teutonic races started in history, and, by and by, village communities were found to be or to have been, the primitive form of society everywhere from India to Ireland. The inner organization of this primitive communistic society was laid bare, in its typical form, by Lewis Henry Morgan's (1818-1861) crowning discovery of the true nature of the gens and its relation to the tribe. With the dissolution of the primeval communities, society begins to be differentiated into separate and, finally antagonistic classes. I have attempted to retrace this dissolution in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, second edition, Stuttgart, 1886. [Engels, 1888 English Edition and 1890 German Edition (with the last sentence omitted)].
2. At the time, the term “party” implied more of a current within the labor movement rather than an organization. The idea of a party in the modern sense in the Second International especially with Lenin’s theory of the vanguard party.
3. It must be noted that over time, the socialist movement has forgotten that Marx’s project was the emancipation of humanity, not just the proletariat. The proletariat for Marx was the social agency to facilitate this emancipation for itself and for the rest of humanity. Similarly, over time, the vanguard party or other such mediation was substituted for the proletariat.
4. It must be noted that over time, the socialist movement has forgotten that Marx’s project was the emancipation of humanity, not just the proletariat. The proletariat, for Marx, was the social agency to facilitate this emancipation for itself and for the rest of humanity. Similarly, over time, the vanguard party or other such mediation was substituted for the proletariat.
5. “It is true that Mehring reprinted some of Marx’s early published work in 1902.… But the more important writings remained unknown. And in any case by that time the whole first generation of Marxian interpreters and disciples - including Kautsky, Plekhanov, Bernstein and Labriola - had already formed their ideas. So the Marxism of the Second International was constituted in almost total ignorance of the difficult and intricate process through which Marx had passed in the years from 1843 to 1845, as he formulated historical materialism for the first time.” “Introduction” by Lucio Colletti in “Karl Marx, Early Writings,” Penguin Book, 1972.
6. By ”ideological” in this context, I mean an assertion based on or relating to a system of ideas and ideals.
7. Baran and Sweezy developed a consistent theory of monopolism by replace Marx’s labor theory of value with the neoclassical theory of price: “[T]he appropriate general price theory for an economy dominated by such [oligopolistic] corporations is the traditional monopoly price theory of classical and neoclassical economics.” (Baran and Sweezy, 1966, p. 59). For a complete discussion and empirical evidence of the relevance of Marx’s law of value to U.S. economy, see, Anwar Shaikh, 2016.
8. Foster and Burkett (2017, p. 79) following Maurice Mandelbaum, define nineteenth-century materialism “of which Marx and Engles were among the greatest representatives” by the following propositions: “that there is an independently existing world; that human mind does not exist as an entity distinct from the human body; and that there is no God (nor any other nonhuman being) whose mode of existence is not of material entities.”
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Dedication: I would like to dedicate this essay to Fred Murphy for his generous editing and commenting on many of my essays in the past. While Fred's contributions have improved these essays in terms of presentation and content, he bears no responsibility for my arguments and my errors of omission or commission. A deep bow of gratitude to Fred, friend, and comrade for over 30 years.
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