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Rightful Original Acquisition of Private Property?

If you’ve not seen it, please see the earlier post, “(private) property is theft,” before reading this one.

The first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, took it into his head to say, ‘This is mine,’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. The human race would have been spared endless crimes, wars, murders, and horrors if someone had pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men, ‘Do not listen to this impostor! You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to everyone, and the earth to no one!’ — Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality (1755)

“In ‘our’ [scare quotes added] philosophical tradition, arguments about the justification of property have often been presented as genealogies: as stories about the way in which private property might have emerged in a world that was hitherto unacquainted with the institution.” — Jeremy Waldron

Waldron’s Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) entry, “Property and Ownership,” from which this quote was taken, does not deal with these or comparable ideas outside of the Western philosophical tradition. Furthermore, he has a rather strange conclusion to the section on “Genealogies of Property:”

“Finally, we should not forget that not all genealogies set out to flatter the practices or institutions they purport to explain. Karl Marx’s account of primitive accumulation (1976 [1867]) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s non-normative description of the invention of property in the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (Rousseau 1994 [1755]) are genealogies written more in a Nietzschean spirit of pathology than as part of any quest for justification [‘pathology’ is here bettered rendered ‘ideology’ in a Marxist sense]. Such negative genealogies remind us of the importance of Mill’s observation that in approaching the justification of private property we must remember that, ‘we must leave out of consideration its actual origin in any of the existing nations of Europe’ (Mill 1994 [1848]: 7).” [But see Cohen below]

Cf.: “Libertarians, or, to name them more accurately, entitlement theorists, maintain that the market legitimates the distribution of goods it generates. But every market-generated distribution is only a redistribution of titles that buying and selling are themselves powerless to create, and the upshot of market activity is therefore no more legitimate than the titles with which it operates. How, then, to the titles that necessarily precede market activity acquire legitimacy in the first place?

On any characterization of private property, the question of what constitutes a rightful original acquisition of it enjoys a certain priority over the question of what constitutes a rightful subsequent transfer of it, since, unless private property can be formed, it cannot, a fortiori, be transferred. But, in virtues of the way entitlement theorists characterize private property, the priority of the question of how it may be appropriated is, for private property as they understand it, even more marked. For private property in entitlement discourse is property in what is sometimes called ‘the full liberal sense.’ It is decked out with all the rights that could conceivably attach to private property; and, once an original acquisition of such plenary private property is achieved, then no separate question about its transfer can arise, since the full complement of private property rights includes unfettered rights of transfer and bequest. [….]

Note that even now not everything around us is privately owned, and most people would agree that what remains privately unowned, such as the atmosphere we breathe and the pavements we tread [as well as public parks, sewer and water lines, libraries, etc.], should not be available for privatization [the privatization of public utilities and Right’s rhetoric against public education are but two examples where privatization is gaining ground in areas heretofore thought out of bounds]. But the better part of what we need to live is, by now, private property Why was its original privatization not a theft of what rightly should (have continued to) be held in common?

The question would not arise if a certain false thing that [Robert] Nozick [in Anarchy, State and Utopia, 1974] says were true, namely, that ‘things come into the world already attached to people having entitlements over them.’ That is relevantly false, since people create nothing ex nihilo, and all external private property, either in fact or morally (or is made of something that was made of something that was once not private property, or is made of something that was made of something that was made of something that was once not private property, and so on). If the history of anything that is now privately owned there was at least one moment at which something privately unowned was taken into private ownership. If, then, some claims a Nozick-like right to something he legally owns, we may ask, apart from how he in particular came to own it, with what right it came to be anyone’s private property at all.” — G.A. Cohen, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (Cambridge University Press, 1995): 72-73. 

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It is of considerable interest, I think, that Mohandas (‘Mahatma’) K. Gandhi criticized capitalism on two grounds similar in spirit to those of Marx, to wit: “First, the concept of private property lying at its base was logically incoherent and subversive of the social order. Second, it had profoundly inhuman consequences.

The concept of private property was logically incoherent for two reasons. First, there was no logical basis on which a man could claim exclusive ownership of the products of his labour. Born a debtor, he remained one all his life. His powers, capacities, character and energies were all socially derived, and hence not his private property, but a social trust to be responsibly used for the well-being of his fellow-men. Second, the efforts of countless men and women flowed into one another to produce even a simple object, rendering it impossible to demarcate the distinctive contribution of each. Their efforts further occurred within the context of the established social order whose silent and unnoticed but vital contribution could not be ignored either. Even as an event was caused by a number of factors operating against the background of a given set of conditions such that none of them could arbitrarily abstracted and called its cause, so no direct relationship could ever be established between the specific activity of an individual and a specific result [well, consider what occurs in criminal law!]. [….]

For Gandhi, private property was subversive of the social order because it conflicted with the fundamental principles underlying and sustaining it. The customs, values, traditions, ways of life and thought, habits, language, and educational, political and other institutions constituting a social order were created by the quiet co-operation and the anonymous sacrifices of countless men and women over several generations, none of whom asked for or could ever receive rewards for all their efforts. [….] The institution of private property rested on the opposite principles and breathed a very different spirit. It stressed selfishness, aggression, exclusive ownership, narrow individualism, a reward for every effort made, possessiveness and a right to do what one liked with one’s property.” — Bhikhu Parekh, Gandhi’s Political Philosophy: A Critical Examination (University of Notre Dame Press, 1989): 134-135. 

Incidentally, Gandhi also thought that modern civilization “involved an egregious amount of violence against nature, which was largely seen as man’s property to do with it what he liked. Its resources were ruthlessly exploited and its rhythm and balance [its ecological principles] disturbed, and the animals were freely killed or tortured for food, sport, fancy clothes and medical experiments.” This was but one aspect of his view that modern civilization itself “rested on and was sustained by massive violence,” such that it “’oozed from every pore’ of modern society and had so much become a way of life that modern man could not cope with his relations with himself or other men without translating them into the military language of conflict, struggle, mastery, subjugation, domination, victory and defeat.” Parekh: 25-26.

Further Reading

• Aoki, Keith. Seed Wars: Controversies and Cases on Plant Genetic Resources (Carolina Academic Press, 2008).
• Balick, Michael J. and Paul Alan Cox. Plants, People and Culture: The Science of Ethnobotany (CRC Press, 2021).
• Barlow, Maude and Tony Clarke. Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World’s Water (The New Press, 2004).
• Bhattacharya, Neeladri. The Great Agrarian Conquest: The Colonial Reshaping of a Rural World (Permanent Black, 2018).
• Brockway, Lucille H. Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Garden (Yale University Press, 2002).
• Charles, Daniel. Lords of the Harvest: Biotech, Big Money, and the Future of Food (Basic Books, 2002).
• Christman, John. The Myth of Property: Toward and Egalitarian Theory of Ownership (Oxford University Press, 1994).
• Cohen, G.A. History, Labour, and Freedom: Themes from Marx (Oxford University Press, 1988).
• Coombe, Rosemary J. The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties: Authorship, Appropriation, and the Law (Duke University Press, 1998).
• Dalrymple, William. The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019).
• Desai, Meghnad. Marx’s Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism (Verso, 2002).
• Drèze, Jean, Amartya Sen, and Athar Hussein, eds. The Political Economy of Hunger: Selected Essays (Oxford University Press, 1995).
• Frankel, Francine R. India’s Green Revolution: Economic Gains and Political Costs (Princeton University Press, 1971).
• Ghosh, B.N. Beyond Gandhian Economics: Towards a Creative Deconstruction (Sage Publications, 2012).
• Glaeser, Bernhard, ed. The Green Revolution Revisited: critique and alternatives (Routledge, 2011 [1987]).
• Gliessman, Stephen R. Agroecology: The Ecology of Sustainable Food Systems (CRC Press, 3rd ed., 2015).
• Godoy, Angelina Snodgrass. Of Medicines and Markets: Intellectual Property and Human Rights in the Free Trade Era (Stanford University Press, 2013).
• Gosseries, Axel, Alain Marciano and Alain Strowel. Intellectual Property and Theories of Justice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
• Griffin, Keith. The Political Economy of Agrarian Change: An Essay on the Green Revolution (Harvard University Press, 1974).
• Hsu, Elisabeth and Stephen Harris, eds. Plants, Health and Healing: On the Interface of Ethnobotany and Medical Anthropology (Berghahn Books, 2012).
• Iyer, Raghavan. The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi (Oxford University Press, 1st ed., 1973/Concord Grove Press, 2nd ed., 1983).
• Iyer, Raghavan. Gandhian Trusteeship in Theory and Practice (Concord Grove Press, 1985).
• Kenny, Martin. Bio-technology: The University-Industrial Complex (Yale University Press, 1986).
• Kleinman, Daniel Lee. Impure Cultures: University Biology and the World of Commerce (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003).
• Kloppenburg, Jack Ralph. First the Seed: The Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology (University of Wisconsin Press, 2nd ed., 2004).
• Kohli, Atul. Imperialism and the Developing World: How Britain and the United States Shaped the Global Periphery (Oxford University Press, 2020).
• Magdoff, Fred, John Bellamy Foster, and Frederick H. Buttel, eds. Hungry for Profit: The Agribusiness Threat to Farmers, Food, and the Environment (Monthly Review Press, 2000).
• Magdoff, Fred and Brian Tokar, eds. Agriculture and Food in Crisis: Conflict, Resistance, and Renewal (Monthly Review Press, 2010).
• Mgbeoji, Ikechi. Global Biopiracy: Patents, Plants, and Indigenous Knowledge (Cornell University Press, 2006).
• Mirowski, Philip. Science Mart: Privatizing American Science (Harvard University Press, 2011).
• Mooney, Pat R. Seeds of the Earth: A Private or Public Resource? (Inter Pares, 1979).
• Nazarea, Virginia D., Robert E. Rhoades, and Jenna Andrews-Swann, eds. Seeds of Resistance, Seeds of Hope: Place and Agency in the Conservation of Biodiversity (University of Arizona Press, 2013).
• Patel, Raj. Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System (Melville House Publishing, 2007).
• Pearse, Andrew. Seeds of Plenty, Seeds of Want (Oxford University Press, 1980).
• Penner, J.E. The Idea of Property in Law (Oxford University Press, 1997).
• Perelman, Michael. The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (Duke University Press, 2000).
• Posey, Darrell A. and Graham Dutfield. Beyond Intellectual Property: Toward Traditional Resource Rights for Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (International Development Research Centre, 1996).
• Purdy, Jedediah. The Meaning of Property: Freedom, Community, and the Legal Imagination (Yale University Press, 2010).
• Ross, Eric B. The Malthus Factor: Poverty, Politics, and Population in Capitalist Development (Zed Books, 1998).
• Ryan, Órla. Chocolate Nations: Living and Dying for Cocoa in West Africa (Zed Books, 2011).
• Sen, Amartya. Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford University Press, 1981).
• Shaikh, Anwar. Globalization and the Myths of Free Trade: History, Theory and Empirical Evidence (Routledge, 2013).
• Shiva, Vandana. The Violence of the Green Revolution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology and Politics (Zed Books, 1991).
• Simpson, Christopher, ed. Universities and Empires: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences during the Cold War (The New Press, 1998).
• Slaughter, Sheila and Larry L. Leslie. Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
• Solovey, Mark. The Politics-Patronage-Social Science Nexus in Cold War America (Rutgers University Press, 2013).
• Solovey, Mark and Hamilton Craven, eds. Cold War Social Science: Knowledge Production, Liberal Democracy, and Human Nature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
• Teitelman, Robert. Gene Dreams: Wall Street, Academia, and the Rise of Biotechnology (Basic Books, 1989).
• Thackray, Arnold, ed. Private Science: Biotechnology and the Rise of the Molecular Sciences (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998).
• Waldron, Jeremy. The Right to Private Property (Oxford University Press, 1988).
• Waldron, Jeremy, “Property and Ownership,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2020 Edition) Edward N. Zalta, ed. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2020/entries/property
• Warren, D. Michael, L. Jan Slikkerveer, and David Brokensha, eds. The Cultural Dimension of Development: Indigenous Knowledge Systems (Intermediate Technology Publications, 1999).
• Wong, Tzen and Graham Dutfield, eds. Intellectual Property and Human Development: Current Trends and Future Scenarios (Public Intellectual Property Advisors/Cambridge University Press, 2011).
• Wood, Ellen Meiksins. The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (Verso, 2017).
• Zimmer, Karl S. Changing Fortunes: Biodiversity and Peasant Livelihood in the Peruvian Andes (University of California Press, 1996).

Related Bibliographies (embedded links)

(i) Salvador Allende and the Quest for Socialism; (ii) Samir Amin; (iii) Anarchism; (iv) Beyond Capitalist Agribusiness: Toward Agroecology & Food Justice; (v) Beyond Capitalist-Attenuated Time: Freedom, Leisure, and Self-Realization; (vi) Beyond Inequality: Toward the Globalization of Welfare, Well-Being and Human Flourishing; (vii) Capitalist and Other Distortions of Democratic Education; (viii) Democratic Theory and Praxis; (ix) Global Distributive Justice; (x) Health: Law, Ethics & Social Justice; (xi) C.L.R. James: Marxist Humanist & Afro-Trinidadian Socialist; (xii) The History, Theory & Praxis of the Left in the 1960s; (xiii) Marxism; (xiv) Marxism and Freudian Psychology; (xv) Toward a Marxist Theory of International Law; (xvi) Otto Neurath & Red Vienna: Mutual Philosophical, Scientific and Socialist Fecundity; (xvii) Sullied (Natural & Social) Sciences; (xviii) Toward Green Socialist Democracy; (xix) Utopian Thought, Imagination, and Praxis; and (xx) Workers, the World of Work, and Labor Law.

The inordinate desire for many and varied experiences in a crucible of mental conflict that stymies our normative capacity for moral psychological and spiritual attention

“To be known well, things must be known in detail, but as detail is almost infinite, our knowledge is always superficial and imperfect.” — La Rochefoucauld (Leonard Tancock, trans.) Maxims (Penguin Books, 1959)

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour” — William Blake, from Auguries of Innocence, under “Songs and Ballads” in David V. Erdman, ed., The Poetry and Prose of William Blake (Doubleday & Co., with revisions, 1979)

“Diderot’s distinctive strength, a paradoxical strength as it depended on a disposition often criticized as detrimental to any kind of success, may have consisted in an openness to the world so radical that it constantly implied the risk of getting lost in details that fascinated him, together with a truly unusual intensity in his reactions to all kinds of experiences and perceptions (‘enthusiasm’ was the word for such intensity in the language of the eighteenth century).” It seems Diderot had an uncommon and perhaps endearing ability “to concentrate on the presence of persons, objects, perceptions, and feelings in their concreteness and singularity, without much direction or purpose.” — Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Prose of the World: Denis Diderot and the Periphery of the Enlightenment (Stanford University Press, 2012).

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While avarice, greed (or cupidity), and lust are associated with the inordinate if not insatiable desire for power, wealth or material things and sex, I wonder if we might imagine them with regard to our experiences generally in the sense that quantity (past some tipping point) may trump or crowd out the quality of our experiences, that is, our capacity or ability to have attentive and possibly “rich” experiences. (Of course one might have comparatively few experiences, as it were, which are qualitatively poor or dull or zombie-like.) I am not claiming there need be conflict between the quantity and quality of our experiences, only that an unquenchable “thirst” for novel experiences at some point becomes pointless, in which case it is better to have fewer but qualitatively richer experiences which fully engage our attention, a concept that, philosophically speaking, “is of fundamental importance in the philosophy of mind, in epistemology, in action, and in ethics [I would add moral psychology, a subject that overlaps with philosophy of mind and ethics.].” In other words, is it true that fewer and presumably richer experiences are more conducive to a person cultivating the requisite forms of attention (found, for example, in religious and philosophical ‘therapies of desire’) than can be attained among those exhibiting a greedy or “lustful” hankering after many and apparently varied experiences? I suspect that it is the case, although I’m not sure this is an argument that is philosophically dispositive or amenable to resolution by the sciences.  

Attention can be directed both outward and inward, the former concerning the world of our experience, our perceptions, thoughts and feelings of and about the material world, the latter, when disciplined and well-directed, entailing self-knowledge, self-examination, or introspection, perhaps even forms of mind-training and meditation found in worldviews from Stoicism to Buddhism and the spiritual exercises cultivated in monastic and mystical traditions. Jonardon Ganeri speaks to the inward dimension (which is intimately and indissolubly tied to the outward dimension):

“Attention … has an explanatory role in understanding the nature of mental action in general and of specific mental actions such as intending, remembering, introspecting, and empathizing. It has a central role in explaining the structure of the phenomenal and of cognitive access, the concept of the intentionality or directedness of the mental, the unity of consciousness, and the epistemology of perception. And attention is also key to an account of the nature of persons and their identity, to the distinction between oneself and others, and to the moral psychology that rests upon it.”

The Stoic concept of prosochē —the attitude and practice of attention—well captures the inextricable connection between the outward and inward dimensions (and psychoanalysis could be said to widen and deepen the inward dimension). It is “a state of continuous, vigilant, and unrelenting attentiveness to oneself—the present impressions, present desires, and present actions which shape one’s moral character (prohairesis).” The late philosopher and writer Iris Murdoch had an abiding appreciation of this sense of attention as an aptitude, attitude and practice as it relates to the ethical and spiritual life, for she believed that our states of consciousness and action presuppose cognitive and affective discrimination, and that any such discrimination is subject to moral appraisal, as evidenced this exquisite passage from her book, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992):

“The moral life is not intermittent or specialised, it is not a peculiar separate area of our existence. [….] Life is made up of details. We compartmentalise it for reasons of convenience, dividing the aesthetic from the moral, the public from the private, work from pleasure. [….] Yet we are all always deploying and directing our energy, refining or  blunting it, purifying or corrupting it, and it is always easier to do a thing a second time. ‘Sensibility’ is a word which may be in place here. [….] Happenings in the consciousness so vague as to be almost non-existent can have moral ‘colour.’ All sorts of momentary sensibilities to other people, too shadowy to come under the heading of manners of communication, are still parts of moral activity. [….] [M]uch of our self-awareness is other-awareness, and in this area we exercise ourselves as moral beings in our use of many various skills as we direct our modes of attention.”

One encounters the attitude and practice of “attention” once again in a moral-psychological and perhaps pedagogical sense in the Republic of Letters and the modes of sociability and conversational manners and etiquette that governed the salons of the (French) Enlightenment. Suzanne Necker (b. Suzanne Curchod, 1737 – 6 May 1794) was one of the remarkable salonnières of the Enlightenment’s Republic of Letters who deliberately practiced this art of attention. According to Dena Goodman, Madame Necker’s

“seriousness, and that of the salon whose discourse she shaped is revealed most clearly in the concern she displayed in all things for paying attention. The word attention dominates the five-volumes of her journals published after her death by her husband. One must pay attention, she reminded herself repeatedly, not get distracted. Her purpose in life was not to distract men from their serious business but rather to discipline herself and her guests so that that business might be carried out. Her concern was to concentrate her own attention and to focus that of the philosophes (her guests); her intent was to be a serious contributor to the social and intellectual project of Enlightenment through the shaping of its discourse in her salon.”

Goodman selects a handful of examples “drawn from the many instances in which attention occurs in Necker’s journals: (i) Attention allows one to find new ideas in the most common things: one cannot read aloud well without fixing one’s attention; in a word, distraction kills, negates all the intellectual faculties. (ii) One gets used to inattention in letting one’s mind wander when one is alone. (iii) As soon as the attention of men gathered together is distracted for a single moment, one cannot fix it again. (iv) The great secret of conversation is continual attention. (v) Virtue, health, talent, happiness, are the fruits of patience and attention.” All of these propositions about attention deserve further discussion and analysis which we will not here provide.

As Goodman points out, the notion of “attention” was not foreign to Enlightenment thought, being central to Condillac’s epistemology (which, apart from his conception of the mind, was radically empiricist and based on a ‘sensationalist’ psychology) and, as intimated in the passage from Prose of the Word, it served, at the very least, as an epistemic virtue for Diderot. The economist and philosophe, André Morellet, “identified attention as the first principle of conversation.” For Necker, “attention” was the centerpiece of what we might christen a secular spiritual praxis or askesis that decisively shaped the “art of living” in general and her governance of the salon in particular. In this instance, a secular spiritual praxis needs to be viewed in the light of an upbringing by her father, a Calvinist minister, for Necker was simultaneously devoted both to Catholic France and Enlightenment Paris.

According to Goodman, the “ideal woman” of this time and place “was characterized by a lack of [narcissistic?] ego which enabled her to direct her attention to coordinating the egos of the men around her.” The fact that these men required this kind of vigorous group coordination and conversational governance, in other words, enforcement of the rules of polite conversation, speaks volumes about their egos (and the aristocracy) and the corresponding lack of requisite self-discipline needed to properly engage in the type of sophisticated intellectual conversation that salons brought to prominence in the Republic of Letters during the French Enlightenment. It also speaks, at least indirectly, to the “agonistic” character of French pedagogical theory and practice. In the words of Goodman (drawing on the work of Walter Ong): “Since the days of Peter Abelard in the twelfth century, French schools had been steeped in the language of battle.” And this was not peculiar to France: “The primary form the agon took in education of boys and young men from the Middle Ages on was disputation, a form of ceremonial combat.” The salons, in effect, and under the gentle yet firm guidance of Necker and other salonnières, had to counter the deleterious effects of French education on male elites with their steadfast yet subtle enforcement of the informal social norms, manners, and etiquette of polite conversation.

Our capacity for attentiveness to our daily experiences, our ability to pay attention to not only “what matters,” but also little, everyday things that, at least on the surface, “don’t matter” (or don’t matter as much), is of course threatened by far more than a lust for novel experiences. More fundamentally, and perhaps relatedly (by way of causation, exacerbation or intensification), we are, by degree and on occasion or habitually, disposed to experiencing mental conflict, that is, “a mind divided against itself”* a psychological fact well appreciated by some classical Greek philosophers: Plato, Aristotle, and those associated with Hellenistic Stoicism, for example. These philosophers viewed us as more or less subject to three symptoms of such internal conflict which, after A.W. Price, we will term (i) oscillation, (ii) vacillation, and (iii), and lack of self-control (including akrasia). In Western philosophy and literature, we have filled out this portrait of the divided mind in a manner that speaks to our uncanny ability for mental compartmentalization while lending some support to the thesis, or at least something like it, of mental modularity. Thus the French moralists, novelists and playwrights, psychoanalytic psychology, cognitive psychology, and recent philosophical explorations of the emotions have enabled us to see, for example, how self-love or what La Rochefoucauld called amour-propre (which, as Jon Elster has explained, includes a desire for both esteem and self-esteem), cognitive biases (systematic deviation from norms of rationality and/or rational judgment and deliberative decision-making), denial, self-deception, wishful and magical thinking, phantasies, illusions, and delusions represent dispositional tendencies that at one time or another afflict all of us. This belies whatever facile optimism or flattering pictures of the reasoning mind and rationality we’ve inherited from the European Enlightenment and soon became ensconced within Liberal political philosophy. What is perhaps worse, this model of our psychological conflicts and mental complexity gravely interferes with our conceptions and pursuit of happiness and well-being. The result may be, as Daniel M. Haybron has argued, that not only are many of us on a “hedonic treadmill” (‘we adapt to many changes in our lives, so that we tend eventually to wind up no more or less happy than we were to begin with’), we may be, as foreshadowed above, “substantially on an attentional treadmill” as well. The latter, in this instance, largely in reference to discernment of our own affects or emotions (our capacity for emotional introspection), thus “insofar as one is relatively inattentive about one’s affective state, or an undiscerning observer of what one does attend to, one is liable to be comparatively ignorant about the quality of one’s affect.” Hebron has well-explained the nature of “affective ignorance” and several of its most pressing implications for our pursuit of happiness and we cannot here summarize this analysis but can share part of its conclusion: “the possibility of widespread affective ignorance [Haybron abbreviates this as ‘AI,’ but as that abbreviation is now commonly used for ‘artificial intelligence,’ I am avoiding it here] should be regarded as a live [and lively!] hypothesis. We cannot assume that people are reliable judges of their own affective states,” something we earlier learned from the theory and clinical praxis of Freudian psychoanalysis. Thus, while self-development or self-direction, self-realization, self-fulfillment, and human flourishing or eudaimonia or happiness are all worthy ends, recalcitrant mental conflict and myriad cognitive and psychological mechanisms and processes (from the unconscious to conscious kind) interfere with our ability—and speaking within a normative model of moral psychology—to move in the right direction, let alone to realize or attain these ends.

* “In mental conflict,” writes Price, “a mind is divided against itself, and becomes a battleground of opposing beliefs or desires. The conflicted mind is characterized by relations not just of difference and divergence, but of contention and confrontation. It feels itself not so much attracted from outside by incompatible alternatives between which it has to make a choice, as torn within itself by hostile forces between which it cannot make peace. It is aware not just of contrasting considerations that need to be brought together in an exercise of judgment, but of colliding tendencies that refuse to co-exist within a single perspective [cf. cognitive dissonance]. One may perceive an external figure ambivalently as a friend and as an enemy, with something like a gestalt switch between the two aspects a one’s attitude alternates between love and hate. Even if both responses are perceptive and not projective, one may fail to form or maintain a unified grasp of a complex reality, vacillating instead between simple views that resist reconciliation with a conspectus. What hinders the achievement of single viewpoint is not the complexity of the object but the ambivalence of the subject [Jain metaphysics and epistemology address the ‘complexity of the object’ with its notion of anekāntavāda and correlative doctrines of nayavāda (the ‘doctrine of perspectives’) and syādvāda (the ‘doctrine of predication,’ also aptly termed the ‘maybe’ or ‘perhaps’ doctrine)]: his attitudes are mutually antithetical, and hold out against one another instead of cooperating in a durable synthesis. At heart his enmity is self-directed, so that he feels partly alien to himself. The external object may be the occasions of his internal conflict, but he himself is its cause. [….]

It is inevitable that we should speak of mental conflict in social language. There is no easy demarcation between the metaphor and the reality: the mind constitutes itself according to a model in our language that is also its own, so that our ways of speaking are its ways of being. Its modes of differentiating itself from the world become modes of differentiation within itself. Interpersonal relations are reflected internally by intrapersonal ones, so that the mind becomes the scene of a quasi-social drama. It is no accident that already in antiquity the classic source for what I have been describing should have been a dramatic monologue [Euripides’ Medea] in which a single character engages in an argument with herself as strenuous as any that she conducts with others.”

References and Further Reading

• Brakel, Linda A.W. Unconscious Knowing and Other Essays in Psycho-Philosophical Analysis (Oxford University Press, 2010).
• Craveri, Benedetta (trans. Teresa Waugh) The Age of Conversation (The New York Review of Books, 2005).
• Goldgar, Anne. Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680-1750 (Yale University Press, 1995).
• Elster, Jon. Sour Grapes: Studies in the subversion of rationality (Cambridge University Press, 1983).
• Elster, Jon. Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 1999).
• Elster, Jon. Ulysses Unbound: Studies in Rationality, Precommitment, and Constraints (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
• Goodman, Dena. The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Cornell University Press, 1994).
• Gordon, Daniel. Citizens Without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociality in French Thought, 1670-1789 (Princeton University Press, 1994).
• Dilman, Ilham. Freud, Insight and Change (Basil Blackwell, 1988).
• Fiordalis, David V., ed. Buddhist Spiritual Practices: Thinking with Pierre Hadot on Buddhism, Philosophy, and the Path (Mangalam Press, 2018).
• Ganeri, Jonardon. Attention, Not Self (Oxford University Press, 2017).
• Hadot, Pierre. Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault (Blackwell, 1995).
• Hadot, Pierre. What is Ancient Philosophy? (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002).
• Haybron, Daniel M. The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being (Oxford University Press, 2008).
• Mulhall, Stephen. “Misplacing freedom, displacing the imagination: Cavell and Murdoch on the fact/value distinction,” in Anthony O’Hear, ed., Philosophy: the Good, the True, and the Beautiful (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
• Murdoch, Iris. Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (Chatto and Windus, 1992).
• Olberding, Amy. The Wrong of Rudeness: Learning Modern Civility from Ancient Chinese Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2019).
• Price, A.W. Mental Conflict (Routledge, 1995).
• Rorty, Amélie Oksenberg. Mind in Action: Essays in the Philosophy of Mind (Beacon Press, 1988).
• Turkle, Sherry. Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (Penguin Books, 2016).

George Padmore (né Malcolm Ivan Meredith Nurse, 28 June 1903 – 23 September 1959)

George Padmore (né Malcolm Ivan Meredith Nurse, 28 June 1903 – 23 September 1959): author, journalist, Left organizer and activist against colonialism, imperialism and Empire, one-time Communist Party member, socialist, and Pan-Africanist intellectual

This post is in memory and honor of the all-too-short life and groundbreaking works of George Padmore. In an earlier post I attempted to introduce the “Marxist spirituality” of C.L.R. James (a good friend of Padmore’s going back to the days of their youth in Trinidad) and in this case I want again to suggest we appreciate, in the broadest and deepest sense, a kindred “humanist spirituality” that suffused Padmore’s worldview while firmly grounded in the communism and Pan-Africanism he viewed as integral to the ends of Black self-determination and emancipation (Padmore’s ‘communist’ and socialist beliefs and commitments appear to have more or less survived his former formal identity as a Communist Party member). The following material, a kind of bricolage, is an attempt to give one a taste of the remarkable qualities Padmore possessed as an “organic intellectual” and political organizer on the (Black) Left. George Padmore is yet another exemplar of laudable communism.

[The Soviet Union] has done more to liquidate illiteracy and raise the cultural level of the former subject races of Central Asia within twenty-five years, than the British Government has accomplished in India or Africa in two centuries. — George Padmore, writing in The Crisis (November 1942): [One can appreciate this fact, cited by Padmore in spite of his formal withdrawal/expulsion from the Communist Party, without ignoring Soviet behavior at the time in—among other places—Poland and Finland.]

… I don’t know anybody else, except perhaps Dr. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey, who is worth more careful consideration…. Anyone who wants to know where the movement [i.e., Pan-Africanism] came from, what was its foundation, the people you have to look at are Marcus Garvey, who made it a mass movement, Du Bois, who gave it the historical and social background it needed, and George Padmore, who organized it…. Marcus Garvey was the great agitator who made black people and Black politics something in the world. Before Garvey there was none. After Garvey … the great theorist and historian was Dr. Du Bois, but the organizer, the man who took Du Bois’ theory and linked it in such a way to political movement, to the mass movement that Garvey created—that man was George Padmore. — C.L.R. James, At the Rendezvous of Victory (London: Allison and Busby, 1984): 253

Padmore’s writing and his organizing were never distinct spheres: his writing was a form of action. This writing was intended, quite literally, as ‘praxis;’ that is, the application of ideas into practice. The praxis was primarily pedagogical. He executed his primary aim of teaching and enabling through his writing but also, crucially, in his own home. His correspondence with [Richard] Wright and the testimony of many, including C.L.R. James and Ras Makonnen, described Padmore’s practice of taking in and advising anyone interested in imperialism and its relevance to contemporary politics. His home became a center for visitors from the colonies seeking advice and/or access to British sympathizers such that upon arrival in London, the first question on people’s lips was often ‘How can I get in touch with George Padmore?’ C.L.R. James admitted that his own political methodology in the 1960s, when he lived in Washington, D.C. was modelled on Padmore. [Padmore was a ‘political organizer’ and social movement builder who] … encourag[ed] others to take action …, provid[ing] them with the skills and knowledge to do so. [….] Padmore expressed a strong contempt for ‘café intellectuals’ who were unwilling to ‘get out and fight for freedom.’ [….] The vast majority of his work, which required a literate audience able to absorb sometimes vast amounts of information, was still distinct from many in his network like Richard Wright, C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, and W.E.B. Du Bois because it was much more forensic and report-based, rather than theoretical. Padmore labored to imprint the evidence that could serves as the basis for a sustained attack on the hypocrisy of benevolent empire. [….] Yet Padmore was also deeply engaged in political thought of his own, even if he derided the status of intellectualism. His books have been described as ‘empirically dense’ accounts that applied [history] to present problems, referencing authors who often stood on opposite side of the political spectrum from him. — Leslie James, in George Padmore and Decolonization from Below: Pan-Africanism, the Cold War, and the End of Empire (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015): 10-11

A George Padmore biography courtesy of the Marxist Internet Archive:

“George Padmore was the pseudonym of Malcolm Nurse, who was born in 1902 in Trinidad, then part of the British Empire. After leaving school, Nurse went into journalism before leaving Trinidad to study law at university in the United States. Yet instead of returning home to become a respected professional among the small black middle class of Trinidad, Nurse became a student radical and in 1927 joined the Communist Party of the USA, becoming ‘George Padmore’ in the process. Padmore’s talents as an organiser and writer meant he was soon appointed head of the Communist International’s ‘Negro Bureau,’ and from 1929 to 1933 he was a leading agitator for colonial revolution, travelling widely and residing for periods in Moscow, Hamburg, Vienna, London and Paris. As well as editing the Negro Worker, Padmore wrote prolifically, and his The Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers (1931) was particularly influential.

However, when the rise of Hitler’s Nazis in Germany led the Soviet Union to join the League of Nations and seek new diplomatic and military ties with Britain and France, anti-colonialism was no longer the central issue it once was for the Communist International. Resigning from his positions in disgust, the anti-imperialist Padmore survived a vicious Stalinist witch-hunt, and in 1935 returned to Britain. Meeting up again with his boyhood friend from Trinidad, the then Trotskyist C.L.R. James, Padmore from his base in London now steadily evolved into arguably one of the twentieth century’s most important Pan-African figures. Though close to the Independent Labour Party in Britain, and writing prolifically for its publications, Padmore never formally joined, but continued to devote his energies to the struggle to liberate Africa from colonial rule.

In 1937, Padmore formed the International African Service Bureau, later the Pan-African Federation and in 1945 was central to organising the legendary Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester. Besides writing several books from his London home, from How Britain Rules Africa (1936) to Pan-Africanism or Communism? (1956), Padmore’s greatest triumph undoubtedly came when one African disciple of his, Kwame Nkrumah, led the Gold Coast from British colonial rule to independence in 1957. Though Padmore’s experience working in Ghana as advisor to Nkrumah in the last years of his life was to be a rather disappointing one, that he lived to witness the birth of a black nation in Africa remains a vindication of, and a testament to, his life’s work.”

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“A forgotten fighter”

International Socialism, Issue: 124 (1st October 2009)

Christian Høgsbjerg (book review)

Fitzroy Baptiste and Rupert Lewis (eds.) George Padmore: Pan–African Revolutionary (Ian Randle Publishers, 2009).

This collection of essays on the Trinidadian Pan-Africanist George Padmore (1902-59), appearing on the fiftieth anniversary of his death, is a timely tribute to the life and work of a fascinating but forgotten anti-colonial activist and intellectual. The appearance of such a volume is to be welcomed, not simply because Padmore stands as a towering figure of the 20th century ‘black Atlantic’ who fully deserves more critical appreciation in his own right, but also because the question of why he has remained so overlooked for so long, despite the rise of postcolonial studies, is in itself illuminating.

George Padmore was the pseudonym of Malcolm Nurse, who was born in 1902 in Trinidad, then a British crown colony. After leaving school Nurse went into journalism before leaving the Caribbean to study law at university in the United States in 1924. Yet instead of returning home to become a respected professional among the small black middle class of Trinidad (indeed he never returned to the Caribbean), he became a student radical and soon joined the Communist Party of the USA, becoming George Padmore in the process.

Padmore’s talents as an organiser and writer meant he was soon appointed head of the Communist International’s ‘Negro Bureau,’ and from 1929 to 1933 he threw himself into agitating for black liberation and colonial revolution, residing for periods in Moscow, Hamburg, Vienna, London and Paris, and undertaking daring underground work in colonial Africa. As well as editing the Negro Worker, Padmore wrote prolifically, and his pamphlet The Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers (1931) became something of a classic.¹

However, when Russia’s Stalinist rulers, threatened by the rise of Nazi Germany, sought new diplomatic and military ties with the ‘democratic’ empires of Britain and France, anti-colonialism ceased to be the critical issue it once was for the Communist International. Padmore, a principled anti-imperialist, resigned from his position in disgust in 1933 and was vilified by the Stalinist bureaucracy. In 1935 he moved to London, the ‘dark heart’ of the British Empire, and joined forces with his boyhood friend from Trinidad, the Trotskyist CLR James.

For the next 20 years or so Padmore devoted all his energies to the struggle to liberate Africa and the Caribbean from colonial rule. In 1937 he formed the International African Service Bureau, later the Pan-African Federation, and in 1945 was central to organising the historic Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester. Matthew Quest offers a useful discussion of the ‘class struggle Pan-Africanism’ of the bureau’s journal International African Opinion, while Hakim Adi and the late Fitzroy Baptiste examine respectively how the fifth congress was built and how its potential impact was somewhat blunted by the realpolitik of British colonial officials.

Besides writing several books from his London home, from How Britain Rules Africa (1936) to Pan-Africanism or Communism? (1956), Padmore’s greatest triumph undoubtedly came when one of his African disciples, Kwame Nkrumah, led the Gold Coast to independence in 1957. Nkrumah had met CLR James in America during the Second World War and when Nkrumah moved to Britain in 1945 James referred him to Padmore as a matter of course.

Marika Sherwood discusses Padmore’s relationship as mentor to Nkrumah, quoting one of Padmore’s letters, from 1955, in which he notes that James ‘introduced [Nkrumah] to Trotskyism and I knocked that nonsense out of him before his return [to the Gold Coast]. And put in its place Pan-Africanism (black nationalism and socialism).’

The extent to which Padmore, who ended his life working as adviser to Nkrumah in Ghana, bears responsibility for the manifest failings of Nkrumah and Pan-Africanism generally is perhaps a moot question, but it is certainly one avoided in this volume due to the Pan-Africanist perspective and hagiographic tone of some of the contributors.

Fitzroy Baptiste’s fine contribution does, however, note important continuities between the Stalinist ‘two-stage theory’ of colonial liberation (first political independence then socialism) that formed part of Padmore’s training while in Moscow and his later strategic vision for achieving ‘Pan-African Socialism.’ Baptiste also quotes from a British Foreign Office document from December 1959 entitled ‘Africa: The Next Ten Years,’ which, with what Baptiste notes was the ‘typical smugness’ of those wielding imperial power, concluded that ‘Pan-Africanism, in itself, is not necessarily a force that we need regard with suspicion and fear.’ This statement stands as an epitaph to the limitations of the ‘Pan-African Socialism’ envisioned by Nkrumah and Padmore (and for that matter by James).

That said, George Padmore’s extraordinary lived experience as an ‘organic intellectual’ of anti-colonial movements in Africa and the Caribbean is well brought out in this volume and remains in many ways inspiring for anti-imperialists today. Moreover, his relentless work exposing and denouncing what Karl Marx called ‘the profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilisation’ is of course relevant today.

Indeed, as a new ‘Scramble for Africa’ centred around oil unfolds, the memory of anti-colonialists such as Padmore becomes particularly poignant. His fate was to be largely ignored by postcolonial studies, never forgiven by Stalinists, regarded as a ‘problem’ by the British Labour Party and, after his death, turned into a ‘harmless icon’ by the new Pan-Africanist rulers of post-colonial Africa. Anyone interested in the past, present and future of revolutionary socialist politics in Africa and the Caribbean can learn much from a critical engagement with his life, work and legacy.

Note

1. For this pamphlet and more of Padmore’s writing, go to marxists.org/archive/padmore

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George Padmore interviews Ho Chi Minh in Paris (1946)

I was delighted to learn that George Padmore interviewed Ho Chi Minh (Nguyen Sinh Cung, also known as Nguyen Tat Thanh and Nguyen Ai Quoc) while both were in Paris: Ho was there for the Paris Peace Conference (29 July to 15 October 1946), engaged in “confidential negotiations,” and Padmore was covering the conference for the Free India Press. According to James Hooker, one of the articles Padmore wrote “remains a good introduction to Vietnamese affairs,” the piece having been published by the Defender (28 September 1946, with an autographed photo of Ho!). In Black Revolutionary: George Padmore’s Path from Communism to Pan-Africanism (Praeger, 1967), Hooker further describes Padmore’s article as “a concise introduction to the Vietnam tangle, one which holds up surprisingly well after nearly two decades of persistent journalistic rediscovery of the situation in South East Asia” (in this instance, Indochina). We further learn that a portion of the article was reprinted in the December issue of (Dwight Macdonald’s) politics (sic) as “The Story of Vietnam.” It seems the journal’s readers took Padmore to task for “play[ing] down Ho’s communist associations.” Padmore defended his work, decrying the “preoccupation with anti-communism which seemed so tiresomely characteristic” of the American Left. 

Finally, Hooker mentions one consequence of Padmore’s exclusive interview at the private hotel provided Ho by the French government: “Padmore became the unofficial guardian of Viet-Minh interests in London, to which city Ho despatched a representative for English language training.”

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George Padmore: Pan-African “communist”

 “An anecdote suggests [George Padmore’s] power of persuasion. [Cyril C.] Ollivierre [a fellow West Indian student at Howard University and president of the campus Garvey Club] and Padmore met as dishwashers at Camp Kinderland, a resort for leftwing working-class Jewish New Yorkers which had opened in 1923 in Hopewell Junction. When washing up for a large party, the two fell behind. As the stacks of dirty dishes mounted in the steaming kitchen and the waiters’ voices became more and more abusive, Nurse [i.e., Padmore] grew indignant. Ollivierre, a more pliant man, commenced to scant his efforts, merely dipping plates for a cursory swish, a course of action which brought about his downfall, but in the meantime earned him a respite. Nurse refused to do so. Instead, he stopped, rolled down his sleeves (always one for proper dress) and marched to the dining room where he excoriated the startled diners for abetting the exploitation going on beneath their noses. Some of the men marched back through the swinging doors and helped catch up under Nurse’s supervision.”

According to James Hooker, “[George] Padmore’s strength was his indefatigable nature, remarkable memory and sense of organization. He was able to state his aims concisely, collected statistics avidly, read the capitalist press in detail and quoted from the generally accepted academic sources when he touched upon sensitive issues.” Several of these virtues are exemplified in Padmore’s Life and Struggle of Negro Toilers (London: Red International of Labour Unions, 1931), “the back cover of which showed a gigantic Negro hovering over the United States, West Indies and Africa, snapping the links in the slave chain which connected these distant places,” while its contents displayed “an amazing amount of information on the condition of black men in three continents, described their various organisations, showed statistical tables of the black man’s role in the various militaries of the great powers (including the United States), and explained the role of the new section of the RILU [Red International of Labour Unions]. The book, though on occasion lapsing into jargon, is in the main straightforward journalism which conveys a feeling that the black men of the world are at last awake, with the appropriate weapon of their deliverance at hand. Of his ten books or extended pamphlets, this and his last, Pan-Africanism or Communism? [London: Dennis Dobson, 1956], are probably the best known.” — from James R. Hooker’s Black Revolutionary: George Padmore’s Path from Communism to Pan-Africanism (Praeger Publishers, 1967).

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George Padmore Archive (at the Marxists Internet Archive Encyclopedia):

• The Negro Liberation Movement and the International Conference, 1930
• The Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers, 1931
• “Left” Imperialism and the Negro Toilers, May 1932
• Fascism in the Colonies, February 1938
• Hands off the Colonies!, February 1938
• An Outrageous Report, March 1938
• Why Moors help Franco, May 1938
• White Workers and Black, May 1938
• The Government’s Betrayal of the Protectorates, June 1938
• Labour Unrest in Jamaica, July 1938
• West Africans, Watch Your Land, September 1938
• Manifesto Against War, 25 September 1938
• Police Swoop On Workers’ Leaders In Colonies, 20 October 1939
• The British Empire Is Worst Racket Yet Invented By Man, 15 December 1939
• Hands Off the Soviet Union, February 1940
• Poverty, Disease Is Native’s Lot in West Indies, 17 June 1940
• West Indies Need Independence – Not Big Reports, 24 June 1940
• A Typical British Colony, December 1940
• British Imperialists Treat the Negro Masses Like Nazis Treat the Jews, 1941
• Empire “Gauleiters” Greet Each Other, January 1941
• West Indians Answer Anglo-U.S. Imperialism, 4 January 1941
• Whither the West Indies?, 21 July 1941
• Britain’s Black Record, September 1941
• The Socialist Attitude to the Invasion of the U.S.S.R., September 1941
• Answers to a Questionnaire on the War, November 1941
• Atlantic Charter Not Intended for Colonies, 24 January 1942
• Blue-Print of Post-War Anglo-American Imperialism, October 1943
• Imperialism: The Basis of Labour Party Crisis, June 1944
• Chris Jones: Fighter for the Oppressed, September 1944
• A Political Review of the Colonies, February 1945
• The Voice of Coloured Labour, World Trade Union Conference, 1945
• Colonial and Coloured Unity, History of the Pan-African Congress, 1947
• Madagascar Fights for Freedom, October 1947

Books by George Padmore

• Padmore, George. The Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers. London: Red International of Labour Unions Magazine for the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers, 1931.
• Padmore, George. How Britain Rules Africa. London: Wishart Books, 1936.
• Padmore, George. African and World Peace. London: Secker and Warburg, 1937.
• Padmore, George, with Nancy Cunard. White Man's Duty. London: W. H. Allen, 1942.
• Padmore, George (in collaboration with Dorothy Pizer). How Russia Transformed Her Colonial Empire: A Challenge to the Imperialist Powers. London: Dennis Dobson, 1946.
• Padmore, George. Africa: Britain's Third Empire. London: Dennis Dobson, 1949.
• Padmore, George. The Gold Coast Revolution: The Struggle of an African People from Slavery to Freedom. London: Dennis Dobson, 1953.
• Padmore, George. Pan-Africanism or Communism? The Coming Struggle for Africa. London: Dennis Dobson, 1956.
• Padmore, George, ed. The Voice of Coloured Labour. Manchester: Panaf Services, 1945.
• Padmore, George, ed. Colonial and Coloured Unity—A Programme of Action: History of the Pan-African Congress. Manchester: Pan-African Federation/Panaf Services, 1947.

Further Reading:

• Adi, Hakim. West Africans in Britain, 1900-1960: Nationalism, Pan-Africanism and Communism. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1998.
• Adi, Hakim. Pan-Africanism and Communism: The Communist International, Africa and the Diaspora, 1919-1939. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2013.
• Adi, Hakim and Sherwood, Marika. The 1945 Manchester Pan-African Congress Revisited. London: New Beacon Books, 1995.
• Baptiste, Fitzroy and Rupert Lewis, eds. George Padmore: Pan-African Revolutionary. Kingston and London: Ian Randle Publishers, 2009.
• Bolland, O. Nigel. On the March: Labour Rebellions in the British Caribbean, 1934-39. London: James Currey, 1995.
• Braithwaite, Lloyd. Colonial West Indian Students in Britain. Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2001.
• Bush, Barbara. Imperialism, Race and Resistance: Africa and Britain, 1919 –1945. London: Routledge, 1999.
• Cooper, Frederick. Decolonization and African Society: The Labour Question in French and British Africa. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
• Cooper, Frederick. Africa since 1940: The Past of the Present. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
• Cooper, Frederick. Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005.
• Cooper, Frederick. Africa in the World: Capitalism, Empire, Nation-State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.
• Cunard, Nancy (Maureen Moynagh, ed.) Essays on Race and Empire. Ontario: Broadview Press, 2002.
• Cunard, Nancy, ed. Negro Anthology made by Nancy Cunard, 1931-1933. London: Wishart and Co., 1934.
• Derrick, Jonathan. Africa’s “Agitators”: Militant Anti-Colonialism in in Africa and the West, 1918-1939. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.
• Fryer, Peter, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain. London: Pluto, 1984.
• Geiss, Imanuel. The Pan-African Movement. London: Methuen, 1974.
• Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
• Grimshaw, Anna, ed. The C. L. R. James Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.
• Hooker, James R. Black Revolutionary: George Padmore’s Path from Communism to Pan-Africanism. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1967.
• James, C.L.R. Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution. London: Allison and Busby, 1977.
• James, C.L.R. “George Padmore: Black Marxist Revolutionary,” in C. L. R. James, ed. At the Rendezvous of Victory: Selected Writings. London: Allison and Busby, 1984.
• James, Leslie. George Padmore and Decolonization from Below: Pan-Africanism, the Cold War, and the End of Empire. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
• Langley, Jabez Ayodele. Pan-Africanism and Nationalism in West Africa, 1900-1945: A Study in Ideology and Social Classes. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1973.
• Langley, Jabez Ayodele, ed. Ideologies of Liberation in Black Africa. London: Rex Collings, 1979.
• Lewis, Rupert and Baptiste, Fitzroy, eds. George Padmore: Pan-African Revolutionary. Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 2008.
• Makalani, Minkah. In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917-1939. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.
• Makonnen, Ras (Kenneth King, ed.) Pan-Africanism from Within. London: Oxford University Press, 1973.
• Matera, Marc. Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2015.
• Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000 (1983).
• Schwarz, Bill, ed. West Indian Intellectuals in Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003.
• Stephens, Michelle Ann. Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914-1962. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.
• Thompson, Dudley, with Margaret Cezair Thompson. From Kingston to Kenya: The Making of a Pan-African Lawyer. Dover, MA: Majority Press, 1993.
• Tilley, Helen, ed., with Robert J. Gordon. Ordering Africa: Anthropology, European Imperialism and the Politics of Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011.
• Von Eschen, Penny. Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997.
• Zachernuk, Philip S. Colonial Subjects: An African Intelligentsia and Atlantic Ideas. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 2000.

Relevant Bibliographies:

• Blacks on the (Radical) Left
• Marxism
• Toward a Marxist Theory of International Law
• Pan-Africanism, Black Internationalism, & Black Cosmopolitanism

(Private) property is theft

         

“… [C]apitalism is just if and only if capitalists have the right to own the means of production they do, for it is their ownership of the means of production which enables them to make profit out of labour, and if that ownership is legitimate, then so too is making profit out of labour. The key question, then, is whether capitalist private property is morally defensible.

Now all, or virtually all, capitalist property either is, or is made of, something which was once no one’s private property, since (virtually) all physical private property comes immediately or ultimately from the land, which was there before any people, hence before any private owners of it, were. Some of what was once no one’s remains substantially no one’s even now, therefore accessible to everyone: the air people breathe is still public property. The rest has been removed from the public domain and turned into private property. If, then someone claims a moral entitlement to something he legally owns, we may ask, apart from how he in particular came to have it, how the thing came to be (anyone’s) private property in the first place, and we may then examine the justice of that transformation. I believe we shall find that the original privatization was unjust, that … property is theft, theft of what morally speaking belongs to us all in common.

Some may think it strange that someone who is more or less a Marxist should propose to himself the project of demonstrating that the capitalist system is unjust. That does not seem a very Marxist thing to get involved in [the late Marxist philosopher R. (Rodney) G. Peffer being a notable exception: Marxism, Morality, and Social Justice (Princeton University Press, 1990)]. It sounds like moral philosophy, not Marxism [as Brian Leiter no doubt would be quick to inform us]. But whoever thinks that should ask himself why Karl Marx wrote the last part of volume I of Capital, the part on primitive accumulation, in which he contended that a propertyless proletariat was created in Great Britain as a result of violent expropriation of small-scale private property held in common. Part of his aim was to refute the idea that capitalists became monopoly owners of means of production as a result of their own industry and frugality, or that of their forebears. He was trying to show that British capitalism rests upon an unjust foundation.

       

To the extent that Marx’s historical allegations are true, they tell against the pretension to legitimacy of British capital. But however successful he is on that score, his success from a broader point of view is limited. For he does not say, and it is not true, that primitive accumulation is always a savage affair. Capital does not always ‘come into the world dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.’ Sometimes it emerges more discreetly. And anyway, Marxists do not believe merely that this or that capitalist society, or even every capitalist society, is unjust because of its particular origin. Marxists believe that capitalism as such is unjust, that, therefore, there could not be a just formation of capitalist private property, and that thesis requires moral rather than historical argument.” G.A. Cohen, History, Labour, and Freedom: Themes from Marx (Oxford University Press, 1988): 301-302.

Have physicists discovered (like members of the cult of Trump and QAnon) that there may be "no objective reality"?

In mass and social media, writing that comes under the heading of “popular science,” designed to be digestible for the “general public” (although the percentage of those capable of or willing to read such material is likely to be alarmingly and distressingly small), often wildly exaggerates or misleads its readers as to the latest scientific findings, research or experiments. One frequent if not always obvious reason for this has to do with the desire to attract investors (educational and other institutional forms as well as private investors) to fund research or to buy corporate stocks.* This state of affairs is common to biomedicine (e.g., stem cell ‘cures’) and especially one branch of same, the pharmaceutical industry (typically, but not only, with those drugs prescribed for mental illness or disorder), the neurosciences (which promise to unravel the mysteries or nature of consciousness, or ‘explain’ emotional states, even human behavior in general), the computer science field of artificial intelligence (AI) (which makes claims to the effect of replicating human intelligence and reasoning, including moral or ethical reasoning), industrialized (‘scientific’ in an attenuated sense) agriculture (hence the productive or output enhancement provided by herbicides, pesticides, fertilizers), and elsewhere across the sciences (see this compilation on ‘sullied sciences’). This form of science writing often presupposes or assumes science (of European provenance) represents the highest form of human knowledge, that it epitomizes human progress of one kind or another, indeed, that it is itself invariably progressive by nature. (One should not infer from anything said here that I am anti-science or skeptical about science in general: please see my Notes on the Sciences.)

Physics, once crowned “queen of the sciences,” is now christened “king of the sciences.” In keeping with this claim we are asked to, or it is insinuated that we should, subscribe to a hierarchy of the sciences, the physical or natural sciences superior to the social sciences, with those near the pinnacle of the hierarchy providing paradigms or models of scientific procedure and experimentation to be emulated by those below them in this scientific kingdom. This idealized and abstract picture makes mincemeat of the actual procedures and practices of the various sciences, as well as the role of technology as “science in application.” It also ignores the fact that the investigations, explorations, analyses, and explanations provided in the sciences resort to “techniques” that are “extraordinarily diverse, from counting sheep and watching birds to detecting quasars and creating quarks. The epistemic methodologies [what were once called ‘methods’] of research are equally varied, from mental introspection to electronic computation, from quantitative measurement to speculative inference.”

* In other words, utility and market imperatives fuel the ethos and practice of contemporary science to a degree unprecedented in the history of science. As Richard C. Lewontin notes in Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA (1991), science is “guided by and directed by those forces in the world that have control over money and time,” that is to say, capitalists.

*          *          *

This should suffice by way of an introduction to a recent article which I learned of from one of Brian Leiter’s blogs: “New Physics Experiment Indicates There’s No Objective Reality.” At first glance, a weary cyberspace veteran might reasonably believe this breathless headline comes from The Onion, but it does not. What follows is a lightly edited version of the article, but you are invited to read it in toto.

“Someone once said: ‘The world is all that is the case.’ But, is it? Researchers performing a long-awaited experiment created different realities that are irreconcilable, proving that objective facts can be made to exhibit properties that cannot cohere, according to a recent study shared on a preprint server. Sound confusing? You’re not alone in thinking so, as this all involves some pretty complicated physics. But in short, the takeaway is this: Reality is at odds with itself.

Nobel Prize-winner Eugene Wigner described a thought experiment in 1961 that highlighted an uncommon paradox of quantum mechanics. Specifically, it reveals the strangeness of the universe when two observers, like Wigner and his friend, observe two distinct realities. Since the thought experiment, physicists have used it to explore the very nature of measurement, in addition to the bizarre idea of whether objective facts actually exist or not. This is a pretty crucial feature of science, since empirical inquiry works to establish objective facts. [….]

In 2020, physicists realized that recent quantum technology advances had made it possible to create Wigner’s Friend test in a real-world experiment. In essence, we can create different realities, and compare them in a lab to see if they can be reconciled, or cohere, in one system. And researcher Massimiliano Proietti of Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, along with a handful of researchers, said they performed this long-awaited experiment for the first time: Creating distinct realities, compare-and-contrasting them, and discovering that they are, in fact, irreconcilable. [….]

In his thought experiment, Wigner imagined a friend measuring the state of a photon in a different lab and recording the result while Wigner watched from afar. He has no clue what his friend’s measurement is, and is thus forced to assume that the photon and its measurement are in a state of superposition of every possible outcome for the experiment.

Wigner can say, however, that the ‘fact’ of the superposition’s existence is real. And, strangely, this state of affairs suggests that the measurement can’t have taken place. Obviously, this stands in direct contradiction to Wigner’s friend’s point-of-view, who just measured and recorded the photon’s polarization. He can even call Wigner and tell him the measurement was taken, without revealing the results. This means there are two realities at odds with one another, and it ‘calls into question the objective status of the facts established by the two observers,’ [emphasis added] explained Proietti and colleagues, in an MIT Technology Review report. And the new research reproduced Wigner’s thought experiment by using entanglement techniques for many particles at the same time.

[This experiment] raised some baffling questions that have forced physicists to confront the nature of reality. There might be a loophole to some assumptions that made this unknowable reality conclusion necessary, but if everything holds up to future scrutiny, it turns out reality does not exist. [emphasis added] So the next time your friends think something is or isn’t the case, consider interjecting with an argument from quantum physics: they’re both wrong, and so are you, because even the simple fact of the disagreement itself is just another illusion.”

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While the claim in the headline is at the very least rhetorically provocative, the experiments described hardly indicate that for most of us, most of the time, there is not, in fact, an “objective reality,” or that, there is, in at least some senses of the phrase as we understand it, an “objective—and even ‘ultimate’—reality,” one of those senses having to do with our fundamental orientation toward or disposition to, truth, in accord with our belief that there is such a thing as truth. The article does not state a conclusion—“there is no objective reality”—warranted by the evidence. As Tim Maudlin states in the comments at Leiter Reports, “obviously no experiment can prove [or even provide evidence for the proposition that] there is no ‘objective reality.’”

The presupposed, assumed or presumptive claim in this article is that physics (a ‘natural’ science) is capable of answering what are in effect metaphysical questions with regard to the nature of reality (the answers to which of course widely vary), or that metaphysics or philosophy generally for that matter, should defer in such matters to the findings of physics, which are in any case always provisional (this has a ‘theoretical’ status and classification, like observation, is a ‘theory-laden’ activity), even if for some epistemic or scientific reasons and purposes, cumulative. Of course none of this rules out the possibility that for most of us, most of the time, what is seen or understood as “objective reality” is in fact our perspective on same, our subjective take, as it were, on this reality (in scientific language, Ronald N. Giere terms this ‘perspectival realism’). With regard to the philosophy of science and science studies, we make the same point by acknowledging, with Philip Kitcher in Science, Truth and Democracy (2001) and Giere earlier in Science without Laws (1999) that the nature of scientific representation intrinsic to theories is on the order of maps:

“Maps have many of the representational features we need for understanding how scientists represent the world. There is no such thing as a universal map [one reason why Kitcher says we cannot have a ‘Theory of Everything,’ for an ‘ideal atlas is a myth’]. Neither does it make sense to question whether a map is true or false. The representational virtues of maps are different. A map may, for example, be more or less accurate, more or less detailed, of smaller or larger scale. Maps require a large background of human convention for their production and use. Without such they are no more than lines on paper. Nevertheless, maps do manage to correspond in various ways with the real world. Their representational powers can be attested by anyone who has used a map when traveling in unfamiliar territory.”

 Both Giere’s “perspectival realism” and “modest realism” leave us with a (soft) concept of “objective reality,” one that is not wholly severed from that which is subjective, from subjectivity. Kitcher’s discussion of “mapping reality” on behalf of a “modest realism” wisely aims to retain the notion (in significant and sufficient measure or degree) of a “mind-independent” reality or robust conception of objectivity while acknowledging such things as the underdetermination of theory by evidence. In Kitcher’s words, “There is all the difference between organizing thought and speech, and making reality: ... we should not confuse the possibility of constructing representations with that of constructing the world.” Or, as Helen Longino aptly puts it, “one can be a realist in the sense of holding that there is a world independently of our thinking that there is one, without being a scientific realist in the sense of holding that the successes of our best theories consists in the world having exactly the features attributed to it by those theories.”

Our third and final illustration of this is from a vantage point from science that comes from the late physicist John Ziman:

“Almost every general statement one can make about scientific theories is equally applicable to maps. They are representations of a supposed ‘reality.’ They are social instruments. They abstract, classify and simplify numerous ‘facts.’ They are functional. They require skilled interpretation. And so on. The analogy is evidently much more than a vivid metaphor. [….] It is clear that scientific maps, models, metaphors, themata and other analogies are not just tools of thought, or figures of speech. They are of the very substance of scientific theory. As sources of meaning and understanding, they stand on an equal footing with explicit verbal and symbolic representations.”

To be sure, “perspectival” and “modest” realism are still species of realism, yet there is no longer the hard and fast metaphysical commitment to the idea of science as describing things “out there”—objects or not—as they really, definitively or truly are, as giving us the definitive account of how the world, simply and absolutely, in fact is. In other words, if our physicists conclude from their experiment(s) that “there is no objective reality,” this is merely a scientific theory characterizing “reality” as conceived by physicists, not a characterization of (objective) reality for the rest of us. This modest scientific realism is perfectly compatible with the complementary search for knowledge and truth (and the nature or meaning of ‘reality’) in the motley religious and non-religious worldviews around our planet: in short, we may discover that metaphysical pluralism and epistemic relativism or perspectivalism is perfectly consistent with generalizable and pragmatic or “soft” realism about truth and our regnant, everyday conception(s) of and reliance upon “objective reality.” With ample reason, Hilary Putnam warned us against confusing scientific realism with metaphysical realism.

With Hilary Putnam, consider one analogical lesson from the Copenhagen School in physics, specifically, Niels Bohr’s Copenhagen Interpretation, which enables us to appreciate the concept and possibility of complementarity, for “even ‘the empirical world,’ the world of our experience, cannot be adequately or completely described with just one picture, according to Bohr. Instead, we have to make a ‘complementary’ use of different classical pictures—wave pictures in some experimental situations, particle pictures in others—and give up the idea of a single picturable account to cover all situations.” The fact that we cannot adequately or completely describe our “objective” or empirical world with “just one concept,” does not rule out the regulative role played by the idea of an “objective reality” in everyday life, for it is not the case that the converse holds: anything goes!

Another way to make our point about the relative significance of the conclusion drawn by these physicists is to consider what counts as a scientific “fact:

“It is a philosophical fantasy to suppose that a scientific [or empirical] ‘fact’ can be freed from the context in which it was observed. That context always contains both ‘theoretical’ and ‘subjective’ features, usually closely intertwined. A sophisticated instrument embodies many theoretical concepts. But these are only elaborations and extensions of the theories needed by a trained observer to ‘see’ what is scientifically significant in her personal experience of the world. And thus it is the case that even the most empirical research findings are saturated with theoretical notions and targeted on specific theoretical issues.”

The scientific facts produced in physics and the natural sciences generally are not metaphysically, ontologically, or epistemically privileged vis-à-vis the knowledge provided by social scientists or even those working in the humanities. As Ziman reminds us, these fields of intellectual inquiry

“[no] doubt ... differ enormously in their subject matter, their intellectual objectives, their practical capabilities, and their social and psychic functions. Nevertheless, they belong to the same culture, and operate institutionally under the same ethos. As a consequence, the knowledge produced by the natural sciences is no more ‘objective,’ and no less ‘hermeneutic,’ than the knowledge produced by the social, behavioral and other human sciences. In the last analysis, they are all of equal epistemological weight.”

Philosophers too can appreciate differing perspectives on reality, relative truths, and metaphysical pluralism as perfectly compatible or consistent with a modest or soft notion of “objective reality,” as Michael Lynch exemplifies in Truth in Context: An Essay on Pluralism and Objectivity (1998) and Truth as One and Many (2009). For Lynch, metaphysical pluralism is in fact compatible with realism of a kind, for he argues that we need not be anti-realists in claiming that propositions and facts concerning the nature of reality are relative to conceptual schemes of worldviews. Consider the following snippets from the arguments that have led Lynch to this conclusion:

• “The content of an assertion is intrinsically related to a conceptual scheme. [….] In effect, propositions, true or false, are implicitly indexed to some conceptual scheme or schemes. [….] Facts are internal to conceptual schemes, or ways of dividing the world into objects, among which there can be equally acceptable alternatives. [….] [S]uch metaphysical pluralism is consistent with realism about truth.”

• [I]n taking concepts to be flexible and fluid-like, the pluralist is not saying that we are confused about our concepts. Rather, the point is that concepts are not absolutely determinate or closed; they do not have a fixed use in every possible situation. This does not imply, however, that no concepts have determinate uses in all actual situations. Some concepts may be perfectly determinate in actual situations, but not in all possible situations. [….] For the pluralist, concepts are … flexible; they are subject to possible extension in the face of unforeseen circumstances. Hence, there can be irresolvable disagreements over how to apply any concept. In a sense, concepts are therefore always possibly vague in a non-pejorative sense; they have what Waismann called ‘open texture.’

• Minimally speaking, a proposition is true in the realist sense when things are as that proposition says they are. Some aspect of objective reality must simply be a certain way. If it is, then the proposition is true; if not, the proposition is false. The truth of the proposition hinges on the world alone, not on our thought about the world. In short, realism about truth minimally implies two commitments: (a) truth is an authentic property that some propositions have and others lack, and (b) the concept of truth is, in Putnam’s words, ‘radically non-epistemic;’ that is, whether a proposition is true (in most cases) does not depend on what I or anyone else believes or knows. [….] According to correspondence accounts of truth, there are three metaphysical aspects to any true proposition: the proposition itself (the truth bearer), its correspondence (the truth relation), and the reality to which it corresponds (the truth marker). [….] In other words, propositions are true when they correspond to the facts.

• [T]here is no logical incoherence in supposing that facts and propositions are relative to conceptual schemes and that truth is the correspondence of (relative) propositions with (relative) facts.”

• “Thinking about why we should care about truth tells us two things about it: first, that truth is, in part, a deeply normative property—it is a value. And second, this is a fact that any adequate theory of truth must account for. In light of this fact, I suggest that truth, like other values, should be understood as depending on, but not reducible to, lower-level properties. Yet which properties truth depends on or supervenes on may change with the type of belief in question. This opens the door to a type of pluralism: truth in ethics may be realized differently than in physics.”

• “Truth is a property that is good for beliefs to have. Since propositions are the content of beliefs, and it is the content of a belief and not the act of believing that is true, we can also say that truth is the property that makes a proposition good to believe.”

• “All truths are relative, yes, but our concept of truth needn’t be a relative concept.”

• “Truth is immanent in distinct properties of beliefs; our ordinary concept of truth is univocal.”

Hilary Putnam taught us that there is no “unique and complete description of the world in some metaphysically privileged vocabulary,” and that includes the language of the natural sciences and physics in particular (which is most often thought to possess such a vocabulary), and so a pronouncement on the nature of reality from our physicists falls within the ambit of Putnam’s sound argument and compelling conclusion. And with the Jains, we might come to better appreciate that what we consider “objective reality” is many-sided and viewed from many different and often clashing perspectives that are thus not always consistent with each other or do not even provide some kind of minimal coherence, at least as far as we can ascertain … and there’s the rub: as far as we can ascertain suggests the intrinsic limits or constraints on our pursuit of knowledge, and thus there may be, practically (as a regulative idea or ideal) and metaphysically speaking, an “objective reality,” but one we cannot fully grasp (assuming we lack the power of omniscience). In any case, physics cannot provide us with definitive answers to our questions about the nature or existence of objective and ultimate reality. In the words of my late dear teacher and friend, Nandini Iyer,

“To affirm that there can be several different systems all giving us, at the same time, varying and yet legitimate “true” metaphysical descriptions of the world does not … necessarily entail that there are many realities, that nothing is absolutely real, or, put less dramatically, that there is no such thing as a single, context neutral description or account of the world, that is, as the world really is. It only means that no metaphysical description of it can be outside every possible conceptual framework, but Reality itself is. Nor does it follow that any assertions about this ‘real’ or ‘true’ world beyond all conceptual frameworks, are nonsense. [....] The conceptual frameworks we build in the realm of rational thought are not useless just because they cannot describe Ultimate Reality. Serious examination of, reflection on, these explanatory and interpretive schemes, their differences and overlaps, are crucial to expanding and deepening our understanding of reality, even if these conceptual frameworks (any or all possible combinations and collections of them) cannot bring us the Absolute Truth. If nothing else, they enable us to understand the relativity of conceptual truths and structures, and make us see what Pascal meant when he said that the highest function of reason is to show us the limitations of reason.”

Consider, too, in the spirit of Iyer’s passage, how a Jain philosopher in particular might deal with this subject matter, namely, within the metaphysical framework of the notion of anekāntavāda (literally, ‘non-one-sided,’ but we might helpfully translate it as ‘non-absolutism’), which deals with questions of epistemic and metaphysical pluralism and thus relative truths (while not denying absolute truth; this is not to be confused with that species of philosophical relativism which either denies the significance of what we commonly call truth, or believes that truth is purely conventional). This Jain (in the first instance) metaphysical and ontological doctrine has come to be elaborated in conjunction with two corollary doctrines: nayavāda (a theory of perspectives) and syāvāda (literally, the ‘maybe’ or ‘perhaps’ doctrine, understood as the practice of seven-fold or conditional predication). In effect, these three “doctrines of reality” are thought to be sufficiently sensitive to the undeniable fact that reality or existence is incredibly and irreducibly complex. The “objective reality” assumed by our physicists and thought to be in jeopardy is thus best approached from a variety of partial perspectives, all of which might be considered in one sense or another, more or less correct, but none of which can claim to be equally or fully correct or true.

We will have to leave aside the fact that the Jains also believe in the possibility of a special kind of mystical (or mystical-like) knowledge or awareness which is the prerogative of the kevalajñāna, that spiritually accomplished individual who attains the omniscience of a kevalin, or an enlightened being (hence one can realize, so to speak, absolute truth), such as Vardhamāna Mahāvīra (however, there is no creator deity in Jainism). It should be noted that a similar claim for “omniscience” of a kind is made for the Buddha (Sara McClintock notes that Jainism is ‘among the earliest systematic defenders of the notion, probably inspiring some later Buddhist arguments’), as well as for deities in several other Indic religio-philosophical schools (e.g., the Naiyāyikas hold that the creator God, Īśvara, is omniscient by nature, and the Sāmkhyas accorded omniscient status to Lord Īśvara, although he is not a creator deity in this system).

In Jain epistemology, there are two kinds of valid methods for gaining knowledge: pratyakṣa or “direct knowledge” and parokṣa or “indirect knowledge,” and only kevalajñāna is considered pratyakṣa, hence it is the merited privilege, to date, of only a very small class of human beings, although it “is believed to be an intrinsic quality of all souls,” and thus in principle at least, something attainable by any of us. For practical purposes, our pursuits of knowledge are on the order of parokṣa or “indirect knowledge.” Thus anekāntavāda represents, in one sense, the (provisional yet unavoidable) reality of parokṣa or indirect knowledge, which applies to all but the kevalin. In another sense, it could be said to be a by-product of pratyakṣa, for our doctrines might be said to originate from the vantage point or direct knowledge provided by omniscience, and thus our three doctrines are true insofar as they depend or are contingent upon the attainment of omniscience. Anekāntavāda is defined by Matilal as the “theory of non-onesidedness [of reality],” or, “to be more specific, ‘the theory of the many-sided nature of reality.’” Anekāntavāda is best understood as a (a) metaphysical doctrine or the Jain view of reality, and (b) a strategic method in philosophy, one that encourages or allows for reconciliation, integration, and synthesis of heretofore conflicting philosophical views (and in our case, conflicting views in physics). This method relies on nayavāda, the “doctrine of standpoints,” and saptibhangi-naya, the “doctrine of seven-fold predication.” We can bracket or set aside the claims for omniscience if need be and still appreciate the possible metaphysical and epistemic virtues outlined here and their possible relevance for a philosophy of science capable of making sense of the sort of thought- and real-world experiments conducted by the physicists in our article.

Further reading: Please see Scott R. Stroud’s article, “Anekāntavāda and Engaged Rhetorical Pluralism: Explicating Jain Views on Perspectivism, Violence, and Rhetoric,” available here, as well as the works by J. Ganeri, P. Jaini, J. Long, B.K. Matilal, and A. Sen in his list of References.

Attica Prison Uprising 50th Anniversary

The incident that has erupted here at Attica is not a result of the dastardly bushwacking [sic] of the two prisoners Sept. 8, 1971 but of the unmitigated oppression wrought by the racist administration network of the prison, throughout the year.

WE are MEN! We are not beasts and do not intend to be beaten or driven as such. The entire prison population has set forth to change forever the ruthless brutalization and disregard for the lives of the prisoners here and throughout the United State. What has happened here is but the sound before the fury of those who are oppressed. — “L.D.” (Elliot James) Barkley, reading aloud from the introductory paragraphs of The Five Demands in the prison’s D-Yard

Fifty years ago the prisoners of the Attica Correctional Facility began a revolt (to reduce it to a ‘riot’ is misleading and tendentious) to assert their intrinsic dignity as human beings. Thirty-nine individuals were killed by corrections officers and state troopers in the armed assault of the prison, nine of which were hostages, one, a civilian, and the remaining twenty-nine persons, inmates (several deaths occurred prior to re-taking control of the prison). As Heather Ann Thompson notes in her definitive book on the uprising (see below), numerous others were “wounded, maimed, tortured, and scarred” at the prison on September 13, 1971.

The New York Times has an archival page with helpful material covering the various historical, sociological, and political dimensions of the Uprising. See too this interview with Joseph “Jazz” Hayden at Jacobin (first published in the Socialist Worker).

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Timeline of the Attica Rebellion (compiled by Mariame Kaba from various sources)

• August 1970: The men in Auburn prison revolt. Forty of them are transferred at Attica. At the same time a struggle begins at Attica for higher wages and lower commissary prices. It includes petitioning and later a strike by hundreds of prisoners. The struggle initially results in the alleged leaders being shipped out to other prisons and all the men in cell block “B” being locked in their cells for two weeks. It also results in commissary prices being lowered and, a short while later, in a small increase in wages.
• October 1970: Rebellions occur at several New York City Jails. This includes the “Tombs” where Civil Rights activist Herbert Blyden was a leader of the uprising.
• May-June 1971: The Attica Liberation Faction is founded by five prisoners.
• July 2, 1971: The Attica Liberation Faction presents 27 demands to Commissioner Oswald and Governor Nelson Rockefeller.
• August 21, 1971: Black Panther leader George Jackson is killed by correctional officers at San Quentin Prison in California. They contend that they shot him as he was attempting to escape. No one believes this.
• August 22, 1971: A hunger strike is called at Attica in honor of George Jackson. Strikers march into the mess hall for breakfast single file, sit silently, and refuse to eat. The Commission put the number of prisoners participating in the protest at 700, out of a total population of 2,243.
• August 30, 197: Three hundred prisoners sign up for sick call and occupy the hospital area to dramatize the substandard health facilities. This was the second peaceful protest at Attica in two weeks. Frank Smith, who served on the negotiating committee during the September rebellion, describes the scene the morning after Jackson’s death: “I didn’t know anything about George Jackson. So, when we got to the mess hall that morning, everything was quiet. No one was saying nothing, and you’re talking about five, six, seven hundred people! Inmates! So, I said to my buddy, ‘What’s up, man?’ The McKay Commission described the correctional officers’ impression of the protest as follows: “For the young correction officers who found themselves in the mess hall with 700 silent, fasting inmates wearing black armbands, the very silence and the mood of unreserved hostility was the most threatening and frightening experience in their memory. ‘I was scared shitless,’ one young officer later recalled.”
• September 2, 1971: Commissioner Oswald visits Attica and meets briefly with Frank Lott, Chairman of the Attica Liberation Faction. Oswald asks for more time to implement demands. He leaves early due to his wife’s illness and leaves behind a recorded a message that is played three times over the prison public address system. Oswald’s message says: “I assure you that changes will be made.” He asks for more time to implement the requested changes.

• September 8, 1971: Early in the day, there is an altercation between correctional officers and two prisoners. Later that day, correctional officers lead two prisoners whom they believe to be responsible to Housing Block Z (HBZ), the disciplinary housing unit where inmates were locked down for twenty-three hours per day. Ray Lamorie, one of the two, had not been involved in the altercation. Observers saw officers strike Leroy Dewer, the other prisoner, while taking him to HBZ. Prisoners attest that HBZ was a site of routine, brutal beatings by correctional officers.

• September 9, 1971: The revolt begins. Prisoners subdue Lieutenant Robert Curtis in a tunnel that divides the prison yard into quarters. A group of fifteen to twenty-five prisoners eventually overpower four guards and lock them in cells. The uprising quickly spreads to the other cell blocks, with more than 1200 prisoners congregating in Cell Block D. Although members of the Attica Liberation Front did not participate in the initial rioting, they quickly joined in to move the prisoners toward more explicit demands for reform. The prisoners create a committee to negotiate with Commissioner Oswald and demand that outside observers be present.
• September 10, 1971: Uprising continues. 33 observers assemble at Attica and pay a brief visit to D yard.
• September 11, 1971: Rockefeller refuses to come to Attica to aid in the negotiations. He also refuses the prisoners demand for amnesty. William Quinn, a guard held hostage, dies of head injuries. The observer committee negotiates the 28 point package with Oswald. This plan is intended to convey what the state would offer in concessions to the prisoners. However the state did not agree to the key issue of criminal amnesty. The prisoners reject the 28 points package because they did not trust the state to meet even these promises. Black Panther leader and co-founder Bobby Seale arrives at Attica. Some hope he can convince the prisoners to accept the 28 point package. Seale tells Oswald and the observers that he could not tell the prisoners what to do but that he would let them know that he would support whatever decisions they made.
• September 12, 1971: Uprising continues. Rockefeller, again, refuses pleas of the hostages, the prisoners, Commissioner Oswald, and the Observers Committee, all asking him to come to Attica. A Time to Die by Tom Wicker (1975): 9.
• September 13, 1971: Bloody Monday. Rockefeller orders thousands of National Guardsmen, State Troopers and Corrections Guards to attack the prisoners. Hundreds of prisoners are shot. The State’s forces also shoot and kill nine of the hostage correctional workers. The prisoners have no guns. Many of the alleged leaders of the rebellion are selectively marked and assassinated by the State’s forces. 40 men (prisoners and hostages) die in the retaking of the prison. The Corrections Department says the hostages’ throats were slashed by the prisoners. Guards torture and beat prisoners
• September 14 and after: Coroner’s report shows that no hostages died of slashed throats. All died of police gunshot wounds. Demonstrations protesting the Attica Massacre begin in New York and around nation. Beatings and harassment of prisoners continues. Several hundred of the rebel prisoners are shipped out to other prisons. 80 of the alleged leaders are put in 24-hour segregation. On May 1, they also are shipped out. Wyoming County Grand Jury prepares to indict prisoners for the rebellion. 62 prisoners were charged in 42 indictments with 1,289 separate counts. Only one state trooper was charged. McKay Commission, created by Rockefeller, holds hearings about Attica revolt.

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Attica Prison Liberation Faction, Manifesto of Demands, 1971

“[I]nspired by events at Folsom … the demands were made following several thousand inmates seizing control of the prison in protest against the usual issues of, overcrowding, racism, and brutality from prison staff.”

We, the men of Attica Prison, have been committed to the New York State Department of Corrections by the people of society for the purpose of correcting what has been deemed as social errors in behavior. Errors which have classified us as socially unacceptable until reprogrammed with new values and more thorough understanding as to our values and responsibilities as members of the outside community. The Attica Prison program in its structure and conditions have been enslaved on the pages of this Manifesto of Demands with the blood, sweat, and tears of the inmates of this prison.

The program which we are submitted to under the façade of rehabilitation are relative to the ancient stupidity of pouring water on a drowning man, inasmuch as we are treated for our hostilities by our program administrators with their hostility as medication.

In our efforts to comprehend on a feeling level an existence contrary to violence, we are confronted by our captors with what is fair and just, we are victimized by the exploitation and the denial of the celebrated due process of law.

In our peaceful efforts to assemble in dissent as provided under this nation’s U.S. Constitution, we are in turn murdered, brutalized, and framed on various criminal charges because we seek the rights and privileges of all American People.

In our efforts to intellectually expand in keeping with the outside world, through all categories of news media, we are systematically restricted and punitively remanded to isolation status when we insist on our human rights to the wisdom of awareness.

MANIFESTO OF DEMANDS

1. We Demand the constitutional rights of legal representation at the time of all parole board hearings and the protection from the procedures of the parole authorities whereby they permit no procedural safeguards such as an attorney for cross-examination of witnesses, witnesses in behalf of the parolee, at parole revocation hearings.
2. We Demand a change in medical staff and medical policy and procedure. The Attica Prison hospital is totally inadequate, understaffed, and prejudiced in the treatment of inmates. There are numerous “mistakes” made many times; improper and erroneous medication is given by untrained personnel. We also demand periodical check-ups on all prisoners and sufficient licensed practitioners 24 hours a day instead of inmates’ help that is used now.
3. We Demand adequate visiting conditions and facilities for the inmate and families of Attica prisoners. The visiting facilities at the prison are such as to preclude adequate visiting for inmates and their families.
4. We Demand an end to the segregation of prisoners from the mainline population because of their political beliefs. Some of the men in segregation units are confined there solely for political reasons and their segregation from other inmates is indefinite.
5. We Demand an end to the persecution and punishment of prisoners who practice the Constitutional Right of peaceful dissent. Prisoners at Attica and other New York prisons cannot be compelled to work as these prisons were built for the purpose of housing prisoners and there is no mention as to the prisoners being required to work on prison jobs in order to remain in the mainline population and/or be considered for release. Many prisoners believe their labour power is being exploited in order for the state to increase its economic power and to continue to expand its correctional industries (which are million-dollar complexes), yet do not develop working skills acceptable for employment in the outside society, and which do not pay the prisoner more than an average of forty cents a day. Most prisoners never make more than fifty cents a day. Prisoners who refuse to work for the outrageous scale, or who strike, are punished and segregated without the access to the privileges shared by those who work; this is class legislation, class division, and creates hostilities within the prison.
6. We Demand an end to political persecution, racial persecution, and the denial of prisoner’s rights to subscribe to political papers, books, or any other educational and current media chronicles that are forwarded through the U.S. Mail.
7. We Demand that industries be allowed to enter the institutions and employ inmates to work eight hours a day and fit into the category of workers for scale wages. The working conditions in prisons do not develop working incentives parallel to the many jobs in the outside society, and a paroled prisoner faces many contradictions of the job that add to his difficulty in adjusting. Those industries outside who desire to enter prisons should be allowed to enter for the purpose of employment placement.
8. We Demand that inmates be granted the right to join or form labour unions.
9. We Demand that inmates be granted the right to support their own families; at present, thousands of welfare recipients have to divide their checks to support their imprisoned relatives, who without outside support, cannot even buy toilet articles or food. Men working on scale wages could support themselves and families while in prison.
10. We Demand that correctional officers be prosecuted as a matter of law for any act of cruel and unusual punishment where it is not a matter of life and death.
11. We Demand that all institutions using inmate labour be made to conform with the state and federal minimum wage laws.
12. We Demand an end to the escalating practice of physical brutality being perpetrated upon the inmates of New York State prisons.
13. We Demand the appointment of three lawyers from the New York State Bar Association to full-time positions for the provision of legal assistance to inmates seeking post-conviction relief, and to act as a liaison between the administration and inmates for bringing inmates’ complaints to the attention of the administration.
14. We Demand the updating of industry working conditions to the standards provided for under New York State law.
15. We Demand the establishment of inmate worker’s insurance plan to provide compensation for work-related accidents.
16. We Demand the establishment of unionized vocational training programs comparable to that of the Federal Prison System which provides for union instructions, union pay scales, and union membership upon completion of the vocational training course.
17. We Demand annual accounting of the inmates Recreational Fund and formulation of an inmate committee to give inmates a voice as to how such funds are used.
18. We Demand that the present Parole Board appointed by the Governor be eradicated and replaced by the parole board elected by popular vote of the people. In a world where many crimes are punished by indeterminate sentences and where authority acts within secrecy and within vast discretion and given heavy weight to accusations by prison employees against inmates, inmates feel trapped unless they are willing to abandon their desire to be independent men.
19. We Demand that the state legislature create a full-time salaried board of overseers for the State Prisons. The board would be responsible for evaluating allegations made by inmates, their families, friends and lawyers against employers charged with acting inhumanely, illegally or unreasonably. The board should include people nominated by a psychological or psychiatric association, by the State Bar Association or by the Civil Liberties Union and by groups of concerned involved laymen.
20. We Demand an immediate end to the agitation of race relations by the prison administration of this State.
21. We Demand that the Dept. of Corrections furnish all prisoners with the services of ethnic counsellors for the needed special services of the Brown and Black population of this prison.
22. We Demand an end to the discrimination in the judgment and quota of parole for Black and Brown people.
23. We Demand that all prisoners be present at the time their cells and property are being searched by the correctional officers of state prisons.
24. We Demand an end to the discrimination against prisoners when they appear before the Parole Board. Most prisoners are denied parole solely because of their prior records. Life sentences should not confine a man longer than 10 years as 7 years is the considered statute for a lifetime out of circulation, and if a man cannot be rehabilitated after a maximum of ten years of constructive programs, etc., then he belongs in a mental hygiene center, not a prison.
25. We Demand that better food be served to the inmates. The food is a gastronomical disaster. We also demand that drinking water be put on each table and that each inmate be allowed to take as much food as he wants and as much bread as he wants, instead of the severely limited portions and limited (4) slices of bread. Inmates wishing a pork-free diet should have one, since 85% of our diet is pork meat or pork-saturated food.
26. We Demand an end to the unsanitary conditions that exist in the mess hall: i.e., dirty trays, dirty utensils, stained drinking cups and an end to the practice of putting food on the table’s hours before eating time without any protective covering over it.
27. We Demand that there be one set of rules governing all prisons in this state instead of the present system where each warden makes rules for his institution as he sees fit.

IN CONCLUSION

We are firm in our resolve and we demand, as human beings, the dignity and justice that is due to us by our right of birth. We do not know how the present system of brutality and dehumanization and injustice has been allowed to be perpetrated in this day of enlightenment, but we are the living proof of its existence and we cannot allow it to continue.

The taxpayers who just happen to be our mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, daughters and sons should be made aware of how their tax dollars are being spent to deny their sons, brothers, fathers and uncles of justice, equality and dignity.

*          *          *

The Five Demands

To the People of America:

The incident that has erupted here at Attica is not a result of the dastardly bushwhacking of the two prisoners Sept. 8, 1971, but of the unmitigated oppression wrought by the racist administration network of the prison, throughout the year.

WE are MEN! We are not beasts and do not intend to be beaten or driven as such. The entire prison populace has set forth to change forever the ruthless brutalization and disregard for the lives of the prisoners here and throughout the United States. What has happened here is but the sound before the fury of those who are oppressed.

We will not compromise on any terms except those that are agreeable to us. We call upon all the conscientious citizens of America to assist us in putting an end to this situation that threatens not only our lives, but each and every citizen as well.

We have set forth demands that will bring closer to reality the demise of these prisons, institutions that serve no useful purpose to the People of America but to those who would enslave and exploit the People of America.

Our Demands Are Such:

1. We want complete amnesty, meaning freedom from any physical, mental, and legal reprisals.
2. We want now, speedy and safe transportation out of confinement, to a non-imperialistic country.
3. We demand that the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT intervene, so that we will be under direct FEDERAL JURISDICTION.
4. We demand the reconstruction of ATTICA PRISON to be done by inmates and/or inmate supervision.
5. We urgently demand immediate negotiation thru Wm. M. Kunstler, Attorney-at-Law, 588 Ninth Ave., NYC, Assemblyman Arthur O. Eve of Buffalo, the Solidarity Committee, Minister Farrakhan of MUHAMMAD SPEAKS, Palante, The Young Lords Party Paper, the Black Panther Party, Clarence Jones of the Amsterdam News, Tom Wicker of NY Times, Richard Roth of the Courier Express, the Fortune Society, David Anderson of the Urban League of Rochester, Blond-Eva Bond of NICAP, and Jim Ingram of Democrat Chronicle of Detroit, Michigan. We guarantee the safe passage of all people to and from this institution. We invite all the people to come here and witness this degradation, so that they can better know how to bring this degradation to an end. — THE INMATES OF ATTICA PRISON

*          *          *

THE 15 PRACTICAL PROPOSALS

Practical Proposals

1. Apply the New York State minimum wage law to all state institutions. STOP SLAVE LABOR.
2. Allow all New York State prisoners to be politically active, without intimidation or reprisals.
3. Give us true religious freedom.
4. End all censorship of newspapers, magazines, letters, and other publications coming from the publisher.
5. Allow all inmates, at their own expense, to communicate with anyone they please.
6. When an inmate reaches conditional release date, give him a full release without parole.
7. Cease administrative resentencing of inmates returned for parole violations.
8. Institute realistic rehabilitation programs for all inmates according to their offense and personal needs.
9. Educate all correctional officers to the needs of the inmates, i.e., understanding rather than punishment.
10. Give us a healthy diet, stop feeding us so much pork, and give us some fresh fruit daily.
11. Modernize the inmate education system.
12. Give us a doctor that will examine and treat all inmates that request treatment.
13. Have an institutional delegation comprised of one inmate from each company authorized to speak to the institution administration concerning grievances (QUARTERLY).
14. Give us less cell time and more recreation with better recreational equipment and facilities.
15. Remove inside walls, making one open yard, and no more segregation or punishment.

*          *          *

Comprehensive List of Observers Committee at Attica Correction Facility—September 9-13, 1971 (from Appendix Three of Wicker’s A Time to Die … )

• David Anderson, Rochester Urban League*
• U.S. Representative Herman Badillo of New York
• Alberto Cappas, Office of Minority Student Affairs, State University of New York at Buffalo
• Rev. Marvin Chandler, Rochester minister
• State Senator John Dunne of Nassau County, New York
• Assemblyman James L. Emery of 136^th District, New York
• Assemblyman Arthur O. Eve of 143^rd District, New York*
• Tony Fitch, Washington lawyer
• Minister Franklin Florence, former President, FIGHT, a Rochester community organization
• William Gaiter, BUILD, a Buffalo community organization
• State Senator Robert Garcia of the Bronx, New York
• James Ingram, reporter, The Michigan Chronicle, Detroit*
• Kenneth Jackson, officer of Fortune Society, New York*
• Clarence Jones, publisher of the Amsterdam News, New York*
• Jaybarr Kenyatta, Black Muslim, a former inmate at Attica
• William Kunstler, Center for Constitutional Rights, New York*
• State Senator Thomas McGowan of 58^th District, New York
• Alfredo Mathew, school superintendent, New York City
• Juan ‘Fi’ Ortiz, member of Young Lords party, New York*
• Jose ‘G.I.’ Paris, member of Young Lords party, New York*
• Al Poder, State University of New York at Buffalo
• Mel Rivers, office of Fortune Society, New York*
• Domingo Rodriguez, member of BUILD, a Buffalo community organization
• Richard Roth, reporter for Buffalo Courier-Express*
• David Rothenberg, founder of the Fortune Society, New York*
• Herman Schwartz, law faculty, State University of New York at Buffalo
• Minister Raymond Scott, director of FIGHT, a Rochester community
• Bobby Seale, chairman of the Black Panther Party*
• Dan Skoler, Washington lawyer
• Thomas Soto, member of the Prison Solidarity Committee, New York*
• Lewis Steel, vice president, National Lawyers Guild, New York
• Julian Tepper, Washington lawyer
• State Senator Sidney von Luther, New York County, New York
• Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker, Urban Affairs advisor to Governor Rockefeller, New York
• Assemblyman Frank Walkley of Castile, New York
• Assemblyman Clark Wemple of 107^th District, New York
• Tom Wicker, Associate Editor of The New York Times*

* These members of the Observers Committee were invited to Attica by the rebelling inmates, either personally or as representative of their organizations.

Essential Reading:

• Berger, Dan (2014) Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
• Berger, Dan (2014) The Struggle Within: Prisons, Political Prisoners, and Mass Movements in the United States. Oakland, CA: PM Press.
• Berkman, Ronald (1979) Opening the Gates: The Rise of the Prisoners’ Movement. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.
• Breitman, George (1967) The Last Year of Malcolm X: The Evolution of a Revolutionary. New York: Pathfinder Press.
• Cummins, Eric (1994) The Rise and Fall of California’s Radical Prison Movement. Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press. [After acknowledging this book as ‘[o]ne of the first scholarly histories of prison protest,’ Berger points out that its ‘valuable research ... remains troublesomely antagonistic to prison activism. He sees the prison movement as a violence-obsessed phenomenon premised on naive white fascination with dangerous black criminal men.’]
• Irwin, John (1980) Prisons in Turmoil. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co.
• Irwin, John (2004) The Warehouse Prison: Disposal of the New Dangerous Class. Los Angeles, CA: Roxbury Publ.
• Jackson, George L. (1970) Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson. New York: Coward-McCann.
• James, Joy, ed. (2003) Imprisoned Intellectuals: America’s Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and Rebellion. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
• James, Joy, ed. (2007) Warfare in the American Homeland: Policing and Prison in a Penal Democracy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
• Thompson, Heather Ann (2016) Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy. New York: Pantheon Books.
• Tibbs, Donald F. (2012) From Black Power to Prison Power: The Making of Jones v. North Carolina Prisons’ Union. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Wicker, Tom (2011) A Time to Die: The Attica Prison Revolt. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books (first published by Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co., 1975).

Most of the material from this post is found in my sixty page compilation, “Attica Prison Uprising (September 9, 1971 – September 13, 1971): Notes, Timeline, and Essential Reading.”

For further reading and research, please see my bibliographies for the Black Panther Party and Punishment and Prison.

Reading Žižek (update) … and still trying to understand Lacan’s psychoanalytic concepts

I have some tentative judgments and conclusions about Žižek as a Marxist or communist philosopher in comparison with analytical Marxists like the G.A. Cohen, Jon Elster and other members of the former “September Group” (Bardhan, Bowles, Brenner, Roemer, Wright, et al.; incidentally, there are a few Marxist philosophers or philosophers who are at the same time Marxists or socialists, for example, R.G. Peffer and Michael Luntley, who were not members of this group yet also display the value of analytic sensibility and methods). “Tentative,” because I need to read more Žižek before attaining sufficient confidence in my judgments and conclusions (and in fairness, given his many publications). What is more, my understanding of Lacan’s psychoanalytic ideas remains weak, and it may turn out that he simply is too difficult for me to understand (although I’m tempted to lay some of the blame on his style of writing). That said, my intuitions and inchoate feelings about Žižek’s work arising from its central reliance on ideas from Hegel and Lacan remain, for better and worse, in place, and my corresponding belief in the intellectual methods and virtues of analytical Marxism are thereby strengthened! Žižek is clearly very smart and often witty (and perhaps a bit vulgar, at least for my tastes), well-read if not erudite, and sometimes says things that are remarkably incisive or brilliant, even if it takes oodles of pages for the thoughts to shine.

With Žižek and contra Elster, however, I firmly believe psychoanalysis can make indispensable contributions to the theory of ideology or “ideology critique” (in one of the senses intended by Marx), although I’m not inclined to think Lacan’s concepts should or even can play the indispensable role Žižek accords them in such an enterprise. I hope to say a bit more about this at a later date in light of Elster’s belief in (i) the need for “micro-foundations” in the theory of ideology (for Elster, this includes the use of findings from cognitive psychology, but owing to his skepticism about the unconscious in Freud and his inability to make sense of the notion of unconscious beliefs, he rules out psychoanalytic psychology in this endeavor*), (ii) “Marxism and morality” (with regard to ideology), and (iii) Brian Leiter’s critique of “normative Marxism.”

* I think two books by Linda A.W. Brakel adequately address Elster’s concerns and proffer plausible counter-arguments to his skepticism in this regard: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and the A-rational Mind (Oxford University Press, 2009), and Unconscious Knowing and Other Essays in Psycho-Philosophical Analysis (Oxford University Press, 2010). These should be supplemented with several of the later essays in Simon Boag, Linda A. Brakel, and Vesa Talvitie, eds., Philosophy, Science, and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Meeting (Routledge, 2015).

Update within an update: A gracious and very bright FB friend sent me a link to this piece by Richard Wollheim that appeared in the New York Review of Books in 1979: “The Cabinet of Dr. Lacan,” which is, not surprisingly, quite good. It reinforces my views of Lacan’s work, and where I am not familiar with this or that topic, I defer to his judgment, which I have relied on in the past when it comes to reading and interpreting Freud.

When the US Lost Democratic Values Pt. 1

The most shocking political development of my lifetime has been the erosion of democratic values and the flagrant disregard of the rule of law. The Republican leaders have spat at inconvenient democratic truth (the clear loss of the election) and allowed a sexist, racist criminal to lead the party, a leader who would use the tools of power to jail his enemies.

It is hard to believe that Republican leaders really think they won the election; it is easier to believe that they think the Big Lie (coupled with racism and vote suppression) is the best path to victory in the next.

At the same time, the Democrats have played their own role in suppressing votes. For years the Democrats controlled most state legislatures and gerrymandered the Republicans. One exception was Indiana where the Republicans gerrymandered the Democrats. If the Court reversed that gerrymander, the political landscape outside Indiana would have changed enormously to the detriment of the Democrats. So, the California Democrats wrote a brief in favor of the Republicans. The story goes that Solicitor General Charles Fried refused to file a brief on behalf of the Democrats despite being asked by the RNC. He could not ask the Court to reorganize most legislatures in the same term he was asking them to overrule Roe v. Wade on states’ rights grounds. So, the RNC intervened on behalf of the Democrats. Meanwhile the NAACP had to decide whether it wanted maximum Democratic representation or Black representation at the expense of Democratic representation – at least quantitatively. So, for example, South Central Los Angeles (then virtually all Black) showed on the map as bicycle spokes going into predominantly White areas providing winning Democratic margins, but no Black representation. The NAACP went for Black representation.

I with a number of others helped represent the Democrats in California and in brief writing about Indiana's gerrymander. One of the many interested political leaders asked me and others if we had a chance to win. I told him/her we almost certainly would win. The Court would not want to get involved supervising legislative organization. The response was incredulity: “Don’t they know what’s at stake?” Of course, they did; but they also believed in the appropriate limits of the judicial process. I am not sure the Court is as principled now as it was then.

Were gerrymanders at the time moral? Another leader: “Well they have the money[no longer true]; we draw the lines. I have no problem with it.” Actually, the best argument for gerrymanders is that there is no non-political way to draw lines. In California, (despite a California provision prohibiting two drawing of lines in a decade – a provision discussed in a California AG opinion decades before – I was happy to find it in a dusty volume) legislator Sebastiani proposed an initiative calling for square boxes that would have produced a Republican gerrymander. So African-Americans in Los Angeles would have been packed into square boxes - minimizing the effect of their vote.  Jonathan Steinberg and Dan Lowenstein wrote an article showing that there is no good alternative to the gerrymander. Maybe. But I have to believe there was a lot of Democratic glee in using lines to assure the outcome of elections.

The Democrats have done much more to pave the way for the likes of Trump. Stay tuned.

from Taryn Mattice August 29, 2021 First Service John 15:9-11
On his last night with his disciples, this is what Jesus said.
As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. 10 If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. 11 I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.
On a fairly regular basis I need to remind myself that God’s intention for me is joy. Unburdened, true and boundless joy. I mean here is Jesus, two days before he was crucified, with Roman soldiers set to arrest him in a matter of hours, presiding over a last meal with his friends, and telling them that he means for them to know joy. Complete joy. That is why he said all the things he ever said to them. So that joy may be in them.
Its not just that we have so many other words we think of when we think of what God wants in us – duty, selflessness, obedience, responsibility, restraint --- and for some reason out of all of those words we use when we think of what God wants from us – joy seems the last one we name. And maybe the hardest one to accept.
Part of it is we think we know too much – for unbridled joy. I mean, we just came through almost 18 months of sickness and death and so much hardship for so many. Every one of us lost out on experiences we might have treasured. People lost their homes, their jobs, their loved ones --and its not over yet. As I speak a Category 4 hurricane is barreling towards New Orleans where hospitals are full of Covid patients. The decision was made not to evacuate them – because there is nowhere for them to go. Hospitals in nearby states are full too. It just doesn’t seem possible to know joy when you’re aware of so much anguish and pain.
Joy, we think, is that feeling you had when you were a small child in the ballpit at a McDonalds. Before you knew about germs. Before you knew about McDonalds.
Or maybe Joy, you think when you get older, is that fleeting sensation you have when you’re at a wedding, and the DJ has the good sense to play Donna Summer’s Last Dance, and gets the whole room up on its feet. Joy was opening that acceptance letter. A rare event.
I think I’ve finally figured out what all that is. That dancing-frenzy-ballpit-letter thing. Its what we might call uncomplicated joy. I’m from California and I get it in any large body of water. The ocean, preferably, but a big lake will do. Swimming in one gives me uncomplicated joy.
I forget about everything else. I just feel joy. My prayers of gratitude are never more keen than when I’m under water. I love it.
“Uncomplicated joy” was the term a black father used in an essay that was published in the New York Times this summer. He and his wife, he said, had been doing some careful thinking about how to raise their kids. What prompted a recent conversation, he said, was his 9 and 12 year old sons’ excitement about playing baseball this summer. But how to handle the conversations about masking and distancing. How much to tell them, and how to balance difficult decisions about safety and peril against a child’s longing to play. To be a kid, he said, to whom the experience of (pause) “uncomplicated joy” is supposed to be available.
As a black father and a religious man, it wasn’t an unfamiliar dilemma. How much and in what way to deliver “the talk,” which is both about the possibility of bad outcomes for young black men in police encounters, but also more generally, about the fact that the world will not always be a welcoming place.
“My wife and I have drifted to a bias toward joy,” he said. “Our children know much of the history of this country, but the focus is on Black triumph over suffering, not the suffering itself. I immerse them in the soul, hip-hop and gospel music that has lifted many a weary soul, when they would rather listen to Kidz Bop. I have told them of Moses and the Israelites, of Mary, Jesus’ mother and her dramatic yes to God. They know about Sojourner and her railroad and Martin and his dream. I remind them that God has looked upon their Black skin and bodies, and called it good. I am making deposit after deposit of Black joy and faith in the hope that it will be with them when the inevitable struggle comes. I do it because that is what my mother did for me.”
What his mother did for him, and what he is trying to do through his music playlist and in the stories he tells them, is introduce them to joy of a more “complicated” variety.
I don’t ever want to lose complete access to uncomplicated joy. Swimming in bodies of water, watching the Quidditch team skirmishes on the Arts Quad. I love a good wedding reception – and a cake that comes out of the oven just right. I’m not going to forgo that joy, and I’m not going to forget what to call it. Uncomplicated.
But I’m wrapping my head around this more nuanced thing because I believe Jesus wanted it for us. We can call it “complicated joy,” because yes, it is aware – but it is still Joy.
Please don’t ever forget, as I said to a student the other day, that God is not working against you. I mean, it is not God’s way to hide his will for you, and then be angry with you for not finding it. It is not God’s way to demand of you an overly cautious scrupulosity that robs you of spontaneity and freedom. That robs you of joy.
God’s will for you is joy, out of which you will be able to serve God’s purposes with a lighter touch, less need to protect your own ego, and oh yeah, more fun. Amen.