Wednesday, October 10, 2012

From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-Dialectical Materialism vs. Bourgeois Rationalism-A Marxist Critique of the “New Atheists”



Click on the headline to link to the “International Communist League” website.
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Markin comment:
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I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. <br />
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Workers Vanguard No. 1007
 
Dialectical Materialism vs. Bourgeois Rationalism
A Marxist Critique of the “New Atheists”
Part One
Correction Appended
In recent years, atheism has gained a certain currency among liberal-minded members of the American petty bourgeoisie. Atheist and secular humanist clubs have been formed not only on college campuses but also in small towns in the South. Atheist activism is also found in rather unlikely social milieus. At Fort Bragg, North Carolina, Sgt. Justin Griffith and a few cothinkers have established the Military Atheists and Secular Humanists and extended the organization to other military bases. Griffith and others objected when in the fall of 2010 the Ft. Bragg commanders sponsored an on-base event by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. In response, Griffith proposed to organize an atheist event featuring such speakers as Richard Dawkins, a British evolutionary biologist and author of The God Delusion (2006), the best-known exposition of what is called the “new atheism.”
Sgt. Griffith’s views and activities highlight a seemingly contradictory situation. Adherents of the self-styled Christian right regard proponents of atheism as an abomination, a dire and insidious threat to the supposedly unique greatness of the American nation. On the other side, most atheists and other freethinkers in the U.S. today view themselves as good citizens and upholders of the American way of life and traditional political system. A 20,000-strong “rally for reason” in Washington, D.C., earlier this year was heavily promoted by Dawkins as a means to further the acceptability of “freethinkers” in political life.
What we have here is a particular manifestation of the changed political-ideological contours of the post-Soviet world. Since the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, atheism is no longer so strongly identified in popular consciousness with communism or other forms of left-wing social radicalism. The intellectual promoters of the “new atheism,” which emerged in the mid 2000s, are and have always been hostile to Marxism. Dawkins as well as Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris, two other leading “new atheists,” are prominent exponents of “sociobiology,” a form of biological determinism used to justify reactionary garbage such as male dominance and black inferiority.
During the Cold War, a shared enmity toward the USSR and Communism muted the hostility of religious-minded rightists to irreligious liberal intellectuals. But especially over the last two decades, Christian fundamentalists, believing that international Communism was vanquished with the fall of the Soviet Union, have turned their fire against the secularist “enemy within” and the entire tradition of Enlightenment humanism and scientific rationality.
For evangelical preachers like Pat Robertson, it was no longer Karl Marx but rather Charles Darwin who was the main inspirer of the enemies of the “American Christian nation” (see “Hail Charles Darwin!” WV No. 854, 16 September 2005). In an essay explaining the origins of the “new atheism,” Victor Stenger, one of its leading figures, complained about “Christian attempts to force others to behave according to their beliefs; to set public policy based on faith rather [than] reason; and to transform America into a theocracy” (“What’s New About the New Atheism?” Philosophy Now, January/February 2011).
Then Came 9/11
The core canon, so to speak, of the “new atheism” consists of five works: Dawkins’ The God Delusion, Harris’ The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (2004), Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2007), Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007) and Stenger’s The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Science and Reason (2009). While the similarities among the five authors are more important than their differences, there are differences in emphasis, that is, in their main concerns and foils.
Dawkins, Dennett and Stenger were primarily responding to the political ascendancy of the Christian right under the Republican administration of George W. Bush. Reactionary religious forces received a major boost from the “faith-based” Bush regime, whose often demented policies flowed from America’s continued position, based on its overwhelming military strength, atop the world order even as its economy stagnated. Dawkins & Co. were reacting in particular to the campaign to make creationism (“intelligent design”) an officially recognized alternative to Darwinian evolution. Their books mainly polemicize against arguments that aspects of the natural world (the origin of the cosmos, the origin and diversity of living organisms, human consciousness) cannot be explained except by the existence of a transcendent supernatural power.
The main concerns of Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens were different. They were basically responding to the attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in September 2001 by Islamic fundamentalists. Their books would not have been written (at least in their main content) had that event not occurred. Hitchens also edited the 2007 The Portable Atheist, which for the most part consists of representative irreligious thinkers, beginning with the materialist philosophers of Greco-Roman antiquity. Four of the final six selections are specifically directed against Islam.
Harris and Hitchens represent that current of liberal intellectuals who supported the global “war on terror” on the grounds that Islamic jihadism had become a mortal threat to Western civilization. Harris was positively apocalyptic: “A future in which Islam and the West do not stand on the brink of mutual annihilation is a future in which most Muslims have learned to ignore most of their canon, just as most Christians have learned to do.” The British-born Hitchens, who died last year a U.S. citizen, was notorious for slinging mud on behalf of the Bush administration during the Iraq war, captured in his trashing of the antiwar country music band Dixie Chicks as “f---ing fat slags.” Having spent some of his youth in the International Socialists (now Socialist Workers Party), Hitchens went on to wave the Union Jack during Britain’s squalid war with Argentina over the Malvinas/Falkland Islands in 1982 on his way to becoming a full-bodied pro-imperialist pig.
As Jeff Sparrow aptly put it in “The Weaponization of Atheism” (CounterPunch, 9 April), “the New Atheism was turbocharged by 9/11.” That goes for Dawkins as well as Harris and Hitchens. Dawkins, who along with numerous bourgeois liberals opposed the invasion of Iraq, has been on his home turf a voice of the Islamophobia that has been whipped up by and helped drive the “war on terror.”
Dawkins outraged Muslim groups in Britain two years ago by insultingly likening the Muslim women’s burqa to a trash-bin liner. The burqa is indeed both a symbol and instrument of women’s oppression. But Dawkins’ fulminations against Islam are those of a British chauvinist and shot through with class bias. While correctly denouncing “faith schools” for propounding anti-scientific nonsense, Dawkins reserves his main fire for Muslim schools, where children are “having their minds stuffed with alien rubbish,” not those following Church of England precepts (Daily Telegraph, 8 October 2011). Nor is the Anglican state church on the receiving end of the ridicule that Dawkins likes to dish out against Catholic dogma. As any Irishman could tell you, such ridicule is mighty common fare in the land of the bloody butcher’s apron (Union Jack).
Reading Dennett, Harris and Hitchens, one is reminded of the old watchword of British colonialism: “the white man’s burden.” These intellectuals promote the notion that the U.S. and West European states could and should use military force to bring the benefits of “secular democracy” to the benighted peoples of the Islamic world. Thus do the “new atheists,” from different points on the bourgeois political spectrum, act as apostles for Western (Christian) imperialism.
A Historical Materialist Understanding of Religion
Despite his reputation as “Darwin’s Rottweiler,” Dawkins is remarkably tolerant toward the Church of England, which has been described as “the Tory party at prayer.” In a recent televised “debate,” he told the Archbishop of Canterbury that he preferred to call himself an agnostic rather than an atheist and that he was “6.9 out of seven” sure of there being no god, evoking gasps on Twitter. Writing in the 1920s about Henry Brailsford of the Independent Labour Party, a self-described agnostic, Marxist revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky observed:
“This word is sometimes used in Britain as a polite, emasculated, drawing-room term for an atheist. Even more often, it characterizes a diffident semi-atheism—i.e., that variety of idealism which on the question of God, to use parliamentary language, abstains from voting. And so we see here the force of cant, of conventionality, of the half-truth, the half-lie, of philosophical hypocrisy.”
Combating religious obscurantism is an integral part of the struggle by the Spartacist League, U.S. section of the International Communist League, to forge a revolutionary workers party that can provide political leadership of the working class, beginning with its most advanced elements. In the words of Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin:
“The philosophical basis of Marxism, as Marx and Engels repeatedly declared, is dialectical materialism, which has fully taken over the historical traditions of eighteenth-century materialism in France and of [philosopher Ludwig] Feuerbach (first half of the nineteenth century) in Germany—a materialism which is absolutely atheistic and positively hostile to all religion.”
At the same time, we oppose all forms of religious persecution and oppression and defend the separation of church and state—a fundamental gain of the American Revolution that is increasingly honored in the breach by the U.S. capitalist ruling class. Our comrades of the Spartacist League/Britain fight for the abolition of the state churches as well as the monarchy and the House of Lords as part of their struggle for a socialist federation of the British Isles.
Karl Marx’s attitude toward religion is popularly identified with the phrase “the opium of the people.” However, the passage in which this phrase is used is rarely quoted in its entirety. And when it is, it is usually interpreted in a sense contrary to Marx’s intent:
Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and also the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
“To abolish religion as the illusory happiness of the people is to demand their real happiness. The demand to give up illusions about the existing state of affairs is the demand to give up a state of affairs which needs illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of the vale of tears, the halo of which is religion.” [emphases in original]
— “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law: Introduction” (1843-44)
Marx’s aim here was not to convince the faithful to abandon their religious beliefs. He was addressing contemporary exponents of Enlightenment rationalism, in particular his fellow left Hegelians Bruno Bauer and Ludwig Feuerbach. The latter maintained that belief in Christianity, since it is based on the illusion of a benevolent and omnipotent supernatural being, could be dispelled by rational argumentation. Marx understood that religious beliefs—especially divine intervention in one’s earthly life and heavenly bliss in an afterlife—served as a solace for the exploited and oppressed masses. They are responding to the privation and injustice they suffer in class-based society while feeling powerless to change their objective condition.
Religion, therefore, will not disappear unless and until these conditions are overcome in a future communist society—an egalitarian and harmonious society in which economic scarcity has been eliminated through the further progressive development of scientific knowledge and its technological application in a world planned economy. As Marx explained in Capital, Volume I:
“The religious reflex of the real world can, in any case, only then finally vanish, when the practical relations of every-day life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations with regard to his fellowmen and to Nature.
“The life-process of society, which is based on the process of material production, does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan. This, however, demands for society a certain material ground-work or set of conditions of existence which in their turn are the spontaneous product of a long and painful process of development.”
For early man, religion was a response to a feeling of helplessness in the face of the often destructive forces of nature. Scientific studies of pre-class, pre-literate societies have shown a causal connection between religious beliefs and practices and the struggle to wrest a livelihood from the natural environment. One of the founding fathers of modern anthropology, Bronislaw Malinowski, observed that appeals to supernatural forces take place at the point where existing techniques cease to be reliably effective:
“In a maritime community depending on the products of the sea there is never magic connected with the collecting of shellfish or with fishing by poison, weirs, and fish traps, so long as these are completely reliable. On the other hand, any dangerous, hazardous, and uncertain type of fishing is surrounded by ritual. In hunting, the simple and reliable ways of trapping and killing are controlled by knowledge and skill alone; but let there be any danger or uncertainty connected with an important supply of game and magic immediately appears.”
— “Culture,” Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (1931)
With the emergence of class-based society, religion underwent a significant change in character and function. Religious doctrine was manipulated and enforced by the dominant (property-owning) class and its priestly agents to sanctify wealth and power, while offering solace to the exploited classes. Thus, Lenin wrote with respect to the Russian Orthodox state church:
“What a profitable faith it is indeed for the governing classes! In a society so organised that an insignificant minority enjoys wealth and power, while the masses constantly suffer ‘privations’ and bear ‘severe obligations,’ it is quite natural for the exploiters to sympathise with a religion that teaches people to bear ‘uncomplainingly’ the hell on earth for the sake of an alleged celestial paradise.”
— “Political Agitation and ‘the Class Point of View’” (February 1902)
On the History of Atheism
Between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance, all currents of thought in Europe, however antagonistic, were confined within the bounds of Christian doctrine (leaving aside the small Jewish communities and Muslim Spain). Those considered disdainful toward religious authority were condemned for “impiety,” a term that implied lack of reverence, not outright denial of a supreme being. It was in the 16th century that the term and concept of atheism (derived from ancient Greek philosophy) became a factor in the European intellectual universe. For example, in 1611 Cyril Tourneur, a playwright in Renaissance England, published a work titled The Atheist’s Tragedy, a subject that would have been inconceivable a century earlier.
The new intellectual challenge to traditional Christian belief coincided with and was conditioned by the birth of modern science. A liberal intellectual historian, Jonathan I. Israel, observed: “It was unquestionably the rise of powerful new philosophical systems, rooted in the scientific advances of the early seventeenth century and especially the mechanistic views of Galileo, which chiefly generated the vast Kulturkampf between traditional, theologically sanctioned ideas about Man, God, and the universe and secular, mechanistic conceptions which stood independently of any theological sanction” (Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 [2001]).
There has been a decades-long debate among intellectual historians as to the extent of actual atheism in the Renaissance and early Enlightenment. Underlying this debate are a number of factors. To openly profess atheism was to invite torture and execution by the state authorities that enforced Christian orthodoxy. As late as the 1690s in Scotland, a university student, Thomas Aikenhead, was hanged for the capital crime of “blasphemy.” Evidence of this “crime” was verbal discussions he reportedly had with fellow students. In some cases, the personal writings of those accused of atheism were burned at the stake along with their authors. Few clandestine or posthumous manuscripts explicitly arguing against the existence of god in any sense have been found.
The accusation of atheism was promiscuously applied to anyone who questioned or challenged the locally dominant Christian orthodoxy. In fact, Catholics and Calvinists engaged in mutual recriminations that the rival doctrine logically led to atheistic conclusions. In many (possibly most) cases, the ideas of those accused of atheism who did reject Christianity corresponded more closely to deism, pantheism, agnosticism or an eclectic amalgam thereof.
An additional complicating factor was that the term atheism was used in two different senses. “Practical” atheists, who were assumed to be very numerous, were those who lived as if there were no god. They therefore supposedly engaged in all manner of vice and crime to satisfy their worldly desires without fear of eternal damnation. “Speculative” atheists, who were assumed to be very rare, were those who denied the existence of a supreme being on intellectual grounds. When heterodox thinkers like Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza emphatically repudiated the charge of atheism, they were in part denying that they were morally depraved egoists indifferent to the needs of their fellow man.
Whether a particular heterodox thinker was a self-considered and consistent atheist is not a historically important question. What is significant is that the concept of atheism became an important and integral part of intellectual discourse in early modern Europe and in Britain’s American colonies. Moreover, almost all thinkers who rejected Christianity maintained that the betterment of mankind depended on the extension of scientific knowledge, not divine revelation.
The interrelationship between philosophical materialism and the new world of scientific discovery and experimentation was exemplified by Spinoza who, whatever the ambiguities of his actual thought, was viewed as the intellectual fountainhead of atheism in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. After he was expelled from the Jewish community in Amsterdam in the 1650s as a heretic, Spinoza earned his living by making high-quality lenses for microscopes and telescopes. In that capacity, he entered into a working relation with Christian Huygens, one of the greatest physicists of the era.
Spinoza maintained that there was no supernatural being or power separate from and transcending the material world. The material world was eternal (it had no beginning) and was governed by immutable laws. There was no spiritual component in human beings and therefore no immortal soul. Some scholars, such as Jonathan Israel, have argued that Spinoza was in effect an atheist. However, most intellectual historians and philosophers categorize him as a pantheist, that is, one who identifies god with nature. Why so? Spinoza believed that the natural world was imbued with a benevolent harmony that, if understood, would lead to harmonious relations among men. He was an early and outstanding representative of Enlightenment rationalism: the view that the well-being of humanity should be based on knowledge of and conformity with the laws of nature.
Significantly, the first published work (in 1770) openly expounding atheistic materialism was titled System of Nature, or, the Laws of the Moral and Physical World by its author Baron d’Holbach (Paul Henri Thiry) and his collaborator Jacques-André Naigeon. These French philosophes believed that underlying all phenomena, including human thought and action, was matter in motion. They maintained that this matter in motion was governed by immutable laws that were in principle knowable through scientific investigation and experimentation. A present-day scholar, Alan Charles Kors, commented on the social implications of Holbach and Naigeon’s atheistic materialism:
“They believed that whatever the purposes to which theism and immaterialism had been put historically, these views ultimately arose from the natural desires of mankind to allay and deflect the helplessness that was felt in the presence of the awesome powers of the whole—nature—relative to the part—man. The tragedy of mankind, for them, lay not in those desires, but in the dysfunctional mode of their expression.”
— Michael Hunter and David Wootton, eds., Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (1992)
Atheism and Bourgeois Society
For a century after Holbach and Naigeon’s seminal work, atheism remained the province of a small minority of the intellectual elite. Those bourgeois intellectuals who propagated atheism, such as Feuerbach in mid 19th-century Germany and Charles Bradlaugh in Victorian England, gained political notoriety precisely because of how exceptional their beliefs were.
Atheistic materialism could and did acquire a mass following among exploited workers only when industrial capitalism had developed to a point that overcoming economic scarcity became a realistic historic prospect. Although particularly in Britain religion would continue to play a significant role in the labor movement, in Europe the de-Christianization of the proletariat was an integral aspect of the development of progressive working-class consciousness and organization, at the trade-union and the political level. Beginning in the last decades of the 19th century, mass parties were formed expressing the aspiration of the most advanced elements of the working class for a socialist reconstruction of social and economic life based on material plenty for all.
In Germany, the Austro-Hungarian state and tsarist Russia, Marxism was the official doctrine of the workers movement. Not only leftist students but also politically advanced and thoughtful young workers acquired a materialist worldview by studying such works as Friedrich Engels’ Anti-Dühring and Georgi Plekhanov’s The Development of the Monist View of History. Even in countries such as France, where Marxism was not the official doctrine of the workers movement, its principal leaders (e.g., Jean Jaurès in the pre-1914 Socialist Party) were usually rational humanists who were hostile to the established churches. Conversely, right-wing bourgeois parties (e.g., the English Tories) appealed to the authority of traditional and often state-sponsored religion—and continue to do so.
The persistence and extent of religious belief and anti-materialist ideology ultimately reflect the condition of the class struggle, in particular the political consciousness of the working class. The late J.D. Bernal, a Marxist and prominent British biologist, commented in Science and History (1954):
“The very persistence of the struggle, despite the successive victories won by materialist science, shows that it is not essentially a philosophic or a scientific one, but a reflection of political struggles in scientific terms. At every stage idealist philosophy has been invoked to pretend that present discontents are illusory and to justify an existing state of affairs. At every stage materialist philosophy has relied on the practical test of reality and on the necessity of change.”
As a British intellectual, Dawkins recognizes that religiosity is much more important in American society and Christian fundamentalists are more politically influential than is the case in Europe. However, his attempts at explanation are in the main fatuous, claiming, for example, that rival denominations employ the “aggressive hard-sell techniques of the marketplace.” One of the “hypotheses” he provides in The God Delusion points in the right direction, but not for the reason he gives: “America is a nation of immigrants,” who, “uprooted from the stability and comfort of the extended family in Europe, could well have embraced a church as a kind of kin-substitute on alien soil.”
America’s capitalist rulers have long thrived by sowing ethnic, religious and racial animosities—“Anglo-Saxon” against Irish, Protestant against Catholic immigrant, and, above all, white against black—in order to divide workers, weaken their struggles and retard the understanding of their common class interest. This is a major reason why the U.S., uniquely among advanced capitalist countries, has never seen the development of a workers party, even of a reformist sort, such as the British Labour Party. The lack of independent class political organization has in turn served to reinforce religion’s hold among those exploited and oppressed by the capitalist system. Religious belief and affiliation are especially strong not only among immigrants but also in the black population, for whom the churches have been the only organizations with a continuous existence dating back to the days of slavery.
[TO BE CONTINUED]

Correction
In our articles “Hail Charles Darwin!” (WV No. 854, 16 September 2005) and “A Marxist Critique of the ‘New Atheists’” Part One (WV No. 1007, 31 August) we incorrectly cited J.D. Bernal’s 1954 four-volume work as Science and History. The correct title is Science in History.

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Workers Vanguard No. 1008
14 September 2012
Dialectical Materialism vs. Bourgeois Rationalism
A Marxist Critique of the “New Atheists”
Part Two
Part One of this article appeared in WV No. 1007 (31 August).
With the decline of religiosity and the authority of the Christian churches in the working class in late 19th-century Europe, a current of bourgeois intellectuals sought to justify the capitalist system on supposedly scientific (materialist) grounds. An influential expression of this current in Britain as well as the United States was “social Darwinism” as expounded by T.H. Huxley and Herbert Spencer. They held up the “survival of the fittest” as the primary engine not only of evolutionary “progress” but also of human society. The bankruptcy of small, family-owned businesses and farms was likened to the extinction of species of birds or mammals that had failed to adapt to a changing natural environment. For Huxley and Spencer, a worker who became a foreman was analogous to a strong male tiger besting a weaker rival in fighting to mate with a tigress.
In the present-day English-speaking world, a somewhat similar intellectual niche is occupied by sociobiology. It is, as they say, no accident that leading “new atheists”—Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris—are strong proponents of this doctrine and its offspring, evolutionary psychology. Adherents of sociobiology have made outrageous claims regarding supposedly innate racial and sexual differences. Steven Pinker, a member of the advisory board of Harris’ Project Reason Foundation, praised the “clear historical discussion” of IQ in Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein’s grotesque, pseudoscientific tract asserting black inferiority, The Bell Curve (1994). (For a debunking of this racist tract, see “The ‘Bell Curve’ and Genocide U.S.A.,” WV No. 611, 25 November 1994; reprinted in Black History and the Class Struggle No. 12, February 1995.) Similarly, when Larry Summers, then president of Harvard, infamously declared in January 2005 that women have less innate aptitude for the hard sciences, Pinker declared that there was “enough evidence for the hypothesis to be taken seriously.”
While Dawkins, Dennett and Harris steer clear of Pinker’s more outrageous claims, they all indulge in some variant of biological determinism, the view that genes dictate behavior. In The Selfish Gene (1976), the book that first brought him to prominence, Dawkins wrote that a society based simply on a genetic “law of universal ruthless selfishness would be a very nasty society in which to live. But unfortunately, however much we may deplore something, it does not stop it being true.” Such statements earned Dawkins sharp criticism in Not In Our Genes, a work of prominent scientists attacking the racist, pseudoscientific field of sociobiology, particularly its defense of bogus studies upholding the inheritability of IQ.
Even as he distanced himself from the racist arguments about IQ, Dawkins’ foam-flecked review of Not In Our Genes accused its authors of presenting a “bizarre conspiracy theory of science” simply for having argued that scientific research (like everything in class society) may be influenced and at times distorted by ideological biases. In The Mismeasure of Man (1981) and other works, the late, renowned paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould exposed in great depth how “scientific” racism based on consciously or unconsciously twisted data is used to justify the lording of one class, sex or race over another (see “Science and the Battle Against Racism and Obscurantism,” WV No. 797, 14 February 2003). Gould was also among those evolutionary biologists who refuted the fallacy that Darwinian evolution by natural selection can be applied to human social development.
Where Dawkins and Dennett really indulge their pseudo-materialist itch is in discussing the basis of religious belief. Asking in his book Breaking the Spell why religion “means so much to so many people, and why—and how—does it command allegiance and shape so many lives so strongly,” Dennett answers with a confused and confusing hodgepodge, jumping back and forth between the animism of primitive hunter-gatherer bands and the Christian churches in present-day America. He relates later religious doctrine to universal psychological behavior that supposedly originates with our early hominoid precursors, such as the need for young children to accept the authority of their parents. One could just as well argue that a child’s awareness of the relation between cause and effect (e.g., kicking a ball with the front of one’s foot makes it move forward) predisposes him to scientific rationality in later life.
In The God Delusion, Dawkins contends that religious behavior can be called “a human universal” demanding “a Darwinian explanation.” His “explanation” is the absurd notion of a religion “meme,” an obscurantist term defined as a unit of cultural inheritance. This concoction is presented as an analogue of the gene, supposedly replicating, mutating and responding to selective pressure. Dawkins asserts that “memetic natural selection” offers “a plausible account of the detailed evolution of particular religions” without indicating why one religious “meme” might be selected over another, or even the rules whereby such “memes” are transmitted. Here Dawkins has crossed over into the realm of vulgar pseudoscience. Unlike memes, genes actually exist—they can be sequenced, spliced, transplanted and traced. Memes are pure idealist sophistry.
Sociobiology purports to provide a materialist explanation for the inequalities, injustices, ideological currents and brutalities of modern society while rejecting the historical (dialectical) materialist understanding that these are fundamentally rooted in class divisions and class struggle. V.I. Lenin observed in “The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism” (March 1913) that “man’s social knowledge (i.e., his various views and doctrines—philosophical, religious, political and so forth) reflects the economic system of society” (emphasis in original). Protestantism, for example, arose as an adaptation of Catholicism in 16th- and 17th-century Europe along with the growing economic weight of the capitalist merchant class. This fact, which is accepted by far more than just Marxists, has no value in Dawkins’ realm of “memetic” fantasy.
Nationalism Trumps Religion in the Modern World
By focusing on the crimes perpetrated in the name of religion, the “new atheists” disregard and therefore implicitly deny that national chauvinism is the main source of popular ideological support for wars, oppression and social injustice. Racism, too, is given short shrift. In The End of Faith, Sam Harris argues:
“Religion is as much a living spring of violence today as it was at any time in the past. The recent conflicts in Palestine (Jews v. Muslims), the Balkans (Orthodox Serbians v. Catholic Croats; Orthodox Serbians v. Bosnian and Albanian Muslims), Northern Ireland (Protestants v. Catholics), Kashmir (Muslims v. Hindus), Sudan (Muslims v. Christians and animists), Nigeria (Muslims v. Christians), Ethiopia and Eritrea (Muslims v. Christians), Sri Lanka (Sinhalese Buddhists v. Tamil Hindus), Indonesia (Muslims v. Timorese Christians), and the Caucasus (Orthodox Russians v. Chechen Muslims; Muslim Azerbaijanis v. Catholic and Orthodox Armenians) are merely a few cases in point. In these places religion has been the explicit cause of literally millions of deaths in the last ten years.” (emphasis in original)
In fact, in the modern world religion is a subordinate aspect of nationalism, the predominant bourgeois ideology. A basic common bond linking all bourgeois politicians—from social democrats to fascists—and all bourgeois intellectuals—from secular humanists to religious fundamentalists—is elevating the interests of their nation-state above all other interests.
Since the 18th century, almost all major wars (excluding some civil wars) have been fought on the basis of national, not religious, divisions. Indeed, coreligionists have often been pitted against one another. In both the First and Second World Wars, young American men who were Protestants, Catholics and nonbelievers fought and sought to kill young German men who were Protestants, Catholics and nonbelievers. And vice versa. The primacy of national identity over religious affiliation is also evident in wars in the Islamic world. In the almost decade-long war between Iraq and Iran in the 1980s, Arab Shi’ite Muslims fought against Persian Shi’ite Muslims.
The “new atheists” ascribe a religious character to what are actually national conflicts. Like Harris, Dawkins contends that religious fanaticism is the main factor underlying the “Israeli/Palestinian wars” and the Northern Ireland “troubles.” The state of Israel was founded in 1948 by Jewish settlers from Europe who were perforce culturally European and in most cases physically distinguishable from the indigenous Arab population of Palestine. The Zionist rulers cohered a new nation in the Near East with its own distinct and unique language, modern Hebrew. A large fraction of the Israeli population does not believe in or practice Judaism as a religion. Such non-believing Israelis are for the most part just as virulently hostile to the dispossessed and oppressed Palestinian Arabs as are their religious-minded fellow nationals.
Superficially, the communalist conflict in Northern Ireland does appear to be based on religious divisions, since the antagonistic parties are conventionally called “Protestants” and “Catholics.” In this case, religious affiliation has been an important factor in defining divergent national identities. Nonetheless, there are atheist and other non-believing “Protestants” and “Catholics” in Northern Ireland. What then is the source of the conflict?
In the 17th century, successive English governments promoted settlement in northern Ireland by Protestants (Calvinists), mainly from Scotland, to strengthen their colonial rule over the native Irish inhabitants. The latter retained adherence to the Roman Catholic church. In that era, the language of the Irish people was still Gaelic, not English, a national (not religious) factor differentiating them from the Scottish-derived community in the northern part of the island. In the 18th century, many members of that community emigrated to Britain’s North American colonies, where they were conventionally called “Scots-Irish,” indicating their primary as well as secondary country of origin.
The British bourgeoisie’s rule over its Irish colony was based on its profit-accumulating, imperialistic interests, as the Spartacist League/Britain noted in writing about Queen Elizabeth’s visit to the Republic of Ireland last year (“Down With the Monarchy and the ‘United Kingdom’!” Workers Hammer No. 215, Summer 2011). The article stressed “intransigent opposition to all forms of nationalism—first and foremost the dominant English chauvinism” and concluded: “Our programme is for workers revolutions to overthrow all the capitalist regimes in Britain and in Ireland, North and South. The myriad forms of national oppression will be resolved when workers revolution has swept away capitalist rule on both sides of the Irish border and both sides of the Irish Sea.”
Oppenheimer, Heisenberg and the Bomb
Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Victor Stenger all cite with approval an aphorism by prominent American physicist Steven Weinberg: “Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.” As Marxists, we do not share in this moralistic framework. But even on its own terms the statement is wrong, implying that “good people” have never committed atrocities when motivated by nationalism but only when motivated by religious fanaticism.
An instructive counterexample was provided by two world-class physicists during the Second World War: J. Robert Oppenheimer in the U.S. and Werner Heisenberg in Germany. Oppenheimer, a left-leaning intellectual whose relatives, friends and colleagues included supporters and sympathizers of the Communist Party, was the chief scientific administrator for the development of the atomic bomb (the Manhattan Project). In leading the work, he was motivated by conventional national loyalty. Also, like many other scientists involved in the Manhattan Project, he was driven by hatred of fascism (falsely conflated with support to the Allied imperialists) and fear that Nazi Germany would first develop and use nuclear weapons to win the war.
Germany surrendered two months before the A-bomb was first successfully tested at Los Alamos, New Mexico, on 16 July 1945. The decision was then made to drop the two bombs the U.S. had available on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No one thought that Japan had the capability of building such a bomb, and a few top U.S. government officials and military men (e.g., General Dwight Eisenhower) expressed reservations about using atomic bombs against the Japanese civilian population. But Oppenheimer did not. He justified the mass murder of defenseless men, women and children in the name of liberal idealism. The very destructiveness of these weapons, he contended, would lead to a new, benign world order of peace and international cooperation. In a speech given when he resigned as head of the Manhattan Project in October 1945, Oppenheimer pontificated:
“If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima.
“The peoples of the world must unite, or they will perish. This war, that has ravaged so much of the earth, has written these words. The atomic bomb has spelled them out for all men to understand.... By our works we are committed, committed to a world united, before the common peril, in law and in humanity.”
— quoted in Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986)
This is the language of bourgeois secular humanism in the imperialist epoch. It should be noted that the U.S. dropped the bombs as a message of U.S. military superiority, intended not for Japan and its imperialist rulers, who by that time were all but defeated militarily, but for the Soviet Union, a degenerated workers state.
Werner Heisenberg was one of a small number of top-level German physicists who loyally served the Nazi regime through the war. He was not an adherent of fascist ideology and did not join the Nazi party. He was not an anti-Semite and had closely collaborated with Jewish physicists before Hitler came to power in 1933. During the Nazi regime, he defended the scientific validity of the theoretical work of Albert Einstein and other Jewish physicists against the demented advocates of “German physics.” Heisenberg served under the Third Reich out of conventional German patriotism. In her memoirs, his widow offered the following explanation of her husband’s mindset: “Heisenberg loved the country of his childhood and youth; he did not believe that the picture that was now looming so appallingly was the true countenance of Germany. Within himself he carried the picture of another Germany for which he thought he had to persevere” (Elisabeth Heisenberg, Inner Exile: Recollections of a Life with Werner Heisenberg [1984]).
In 1942, at a high-level conference on armaments attended by Albert Speer and other directors of the German war economy, Heisenberg explained the technical possibility of constructing an atomic bomb (“as large as a pineapple”) that could destroy a city. When Speer questioned him about the feasibility of producing such weapons, Heisenberg expressed uncertainty that it could be done in time to affect the outcome of the war. Speer decided not to pursue such a project. After the war, Heisenberg wrote that German physicists “were spared the decision as to whether or not they should aim at producing atomic bombs.” But he did not indicate that he and the others would have refused to do so out of moral scruples.
The bourgeois-rationalist “new atheists” do not acknowledge the pernicious role of national chauvinism in the world today because they are themselves loyal to protecting the power and position of their “own” capitalist nation-states. While religion has served as an ideological pillar for ruling classes since the advent of class society, bourgeois society cannot exist without basing itself on nation-states. Each of these states serves a nationally delineated capitalist class, which requires state power—i.e., armed bodies of men—to protect its rule and property against challenges from both the working class and capitalist rivals in other countries. Each bourgeoisie portrays itself as representing the entire people, holding that the workers and oppressed social groups share a common interest in preserving and bolstering the national economy and armed forces.
The aims of socialism are counterposed to all variants of nationalism. As Lenin stated:
“Marxism cannot be reconciled with nationalism, be it even of the ‘most just,’ ‘purest,’ most refined and civilised brand. In place of all forms of nationalism Marxism advances internationalism, the amalgamation of all nations in the higher unity....
“The proletariat cannot support any consecration of nationalism; on the contrary, it supports everything that helps to obliterate national distinctions and remove national barriers; it supports everything that makes the ties between nationalities closer and closer, or tends to merge nations.”
Critical Remarks on the National Question (October-December 1913)
Patriotic jingoism in the imperialist (advanced capitalist) states expresses the predatory appetites of the ruling bourgeoisies. Nationalism in the impoverished and oppressed semicolonial countries expresses both the aspirations of the weaker, dependent bourgeoisies to exploit their own working people and their manipulation of the masses’ legitimate hatred of imperialist subjugation. Marxists support the just struggles of oppressed countries against imperialist domination. But in doing so we oppose nationalist ideology, calling instead for the internationalist class unity of the workers in oppressed and oppressor countries against the ruling classes of both.
[TO BE CONTINUED]
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Workers Vanguard No. 1009

 

 
 28 September 2012

Dialectical Materialism vs. Bourgeois Rationalism

A Marxist Critique of the “New Atheists”

Part Three

This part concludes the article. Parts One and Two appeared in WV Nos. 1007 and 1008 (31 August and 14 September 2012).

The “new atheists” vehemently oppose the position of some left-liberal intellectuals, such as Noam Chomsky, that there was a causal connection between Al Qaeda’s terrorist attack on the U.S. in 2001 and Washington’s policies in the Arab/Islamic world. In “What’s New About The New Atheism?”, Victor Stenger asserts: “Some commentators have tried to explain this tragic event in terms of social causes, such as the perceived American oppression of Muslim nations.” The term “perceived” implies that U.S. imperialism is guiltless in the oppression of the peoples of the Arab/Islamic world. More generally, none of the main “new atheist” works make reference to, much less condemn, the atrocities committed by the American state, e.g., the A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II, the razing of Korean cities and villages in the 1950s, the carpet bombing of Vietnam in the 1960s and early ’70s, the lethal economic warfare against Iraq in the 1990s.

A major theme of both Sam Harris’ The End of Faith and Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great is the antagonistic relationship between Islamic fundamentalism and the West. Yet in neither book is there a discussion of European colonial rule over Islamic societies between the 17th and mid 20th centuries. Nor do they take up U.S. dominance and policies in the Near East during the Cold War era between the late 1940s and the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991-92. Harris and Hitchens go from excoriating the Koran, written (supposedly) by Muhammad in the 7th century, to fulminating against present-day anti-Western jihadism as if the intervening 14 centuries have no relevance whatsoever. Basically, the “new atheists” view Osama bin Laden and his cothinkers just as the fundamentalists present themselves, that is, as faithful followers of Muhammad carrying out the authentic message of the Koran in today’s world.

Almost all countries where Islam is the dominant religion, from North Africa to Southeast Asia, were subjected to colonial rule by West European states. In some cases (such as what are now Indonesia and Bangladesh), colonial rule lasted for centuries; in other cases (Iraq, Syria), for a few decades. In all cases, the European imperialists utilized Islamic clerics and the native ruling elite to reinforce their domination and exploitation of the mass of toilers. At the same time, they exploited and aggravated all manner of ethnic (tribal), national and religious divisions, for example between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs in British India. The state of Pakistan was deliberately created as an Islamic political entity in 1947 when the British partitioned the Indian subcontinent, over which they were no longer able to maintain colonial rule. The Partition resulted in horrific intercommunal slaughter, with an estimated one million dead.

The official ideology of French imperialism demonstrates that a lack of religious motivation is entirely compatible with imperialist subjugation and murderous repression on a mass scale. Because England had a state church, British colonialism had an official Christian sanction. By contrast, French colonial rule was carried out in the name of a secular, democratic republic claiming adherence to the liberal principles of the 1789 “Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen.”

Many of the military officers and civilian administrators who governed France’s colonies in Africa, the Levant and Southeast Asia were nonbelievers, and some were strongly anticlerical. The French ruling class, represented by both Catholics and anticlerical secularists, tortured and killed millions of Arabs, black Africans and Vietnamese in seeking to maintain its wealth and power. The fact that the French colonial army was that of a secular republic did not make it in the least a force for progress and enlightenment.

Contrary to both the “new atheists” and Chomsky as well as some leftist groups like the British Socialist Workers Party, there is no basic conflict between Western imperialism and Islamic fundamentalism. Notwithstanding both its recent bloody wars and occupations against the Muslim peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. imperialists, as well as their British junior partners, will support fundamentalist regimes and movements when they perceive it in their interest to do so. And, notwithstanding repeated outbursts of angry protest against Western governments (most recently over an Islamophobic film made in the U.S.), the Islamists are, in turn, just as opportunist in their relations with the Western imperialist powers.

For decades, Washington has supported and protected the Saudi monarchy, the mainstay of fundamentalism in the Sunni Arab world. Bin Laden’s outfit—the forerunner of Al Qaeda—was originally funded and armed by the CIA to combat Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Last year the U.S. and its West European allies conducted an air war against the Libyan regime of Muammar Qaddafi in support of tribally based insurgents, including a substantial jihadist component. In Egypt, political power following the ouster of Hosni Mubarak has for the most part been exercised by the military, which has long been heavily financed by the U.S. The military has at times collaborated with the Muslim Brotherhood—the main Islamist organization, which now holds the presidency—against Westernizing liberals. The generals would not have pursued such a policy without at least the tacit approval of the White House. In Afghanistan, the U.S. is negotiating with the Taliban to effect a “political settlement” that would allow a drawdown of military forces in a war that increasing sections of the U.S. ruling class recognize is unwinnable.

At a more fundamental level, the domination of capitalist imperialism has arrested the socio-economic and cultural development of North Africa, the Near East and South Asia. Pervasive poverty and social degradation form the material conditions that perpetuate Islamic traditionalism, including the barbaric treatment of women, among the downtrodden masses. The American state is the main external political and military enforcer of a social system from which the jihadist groups derive and on which they depend for their very existence.

Imperialism, Fundamentalism and Anti-Communism

By the late 1940s, the United States had become the dominant imperialist power in the Near East. But that dominance was challenged by the Soviet Union, supported by Communist parties that in some countries (e.g., Iraq and Iran) had attained a mass base of support, centrally in the working class. Despite their Stalinist leaderships and opportunist (class-collaborationist) policies, these parties embraced hundreds of thousands of politically advanced workers as well as leftist intellectuals who aspired to an egalitarian socialist society in which women would be liberated from the hideously oppressive conditions sanctioned by Islamic traditionalism. Almost all of the indigenous forces representing atheistic materialism and rational humanism were concentrated in and around the Communist movement.

In its Cold War against the Soviet Union and international Communism, U.S. imperialism utilized the forces of religious reaction in the Near East and elsewhere in the semicolonial world. This strategy was spelled out in 1950 by John Foster Dulles, soon to become Secretary of State: “The religions of the East are deeply rooted and have many precious values. Their spiritual beliefs cannot be reconciled with Communist atheism and materialism. That creates a common bond between us, and our task is to find it and develop it” (quoted in Paul Baran, The Political Economy of Growth [1957]). The policy outlined by Dulles would be put into effect with important historical consequences to this day.

In Iran in 1953, the CIA organized a coup that overthrew the bourgeois-nationalist regime of Mohammad Mossadeq and replaced it with the autocracy of the Shah. The imperialists’ main target was not Mossadeq but the Communist Tudeh (Masses) party, which they saw as posing an imminent threat of “red revolution.” A major social force actively involved in the CIA-orchestrated coup was the Shi’ite Muslim hierarchy led by Ayatollah Kashani, a predecessor of the Ayatollah Khomeini. In Indonesia in 1965, Washington encouraged a military coup in which the Communist Party—then the largest in the world not holding state power—was physically exterminated. Over a million workers, peasants, leftists and ethnic Chinese were killed, many of them by mobs led by Islamic clerics.

The purging of Communism in the Near East in the early Cold War period was not just the work of U.S. imperialism and indigenous reactionary forces backed by Washington. Just as important, if not more so, were Arab bourgeois-nationalist regimes that were supported by the Stalinist misleaders in the name of “anti-imperialism.” In the late 1950s, the Egyptian regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser—then viewed as the personification of Arab nationalism—crushed the Communist Party, imprisoning, torturing and killing its leaders. In the same period, the once powerful Iraqi Communist Party was broken by the murderous repression of successive bourgeois-nationalist regimes, the predecessors of Saddam Hussein (see “Near East, 1950s: Permanent Revolution vs. Bourgeois Nationalism,” WV Nos. 740 and 741, 25 August and 8 September 2000). The betrayals and ultimate destruction of the once-powerful Communist movement was an important historical factor underlying the present conditions in the Near East: the pervasiveness of Islamic traditionalism in society and the political strength of Islamist parties and movements.

In The New Atheism, Stenger argues that a large fraction of the population in the world today no longer believes in religion. He points in particular to China: “I have seen estimates that there are as many as a billion nonbelieving Chinese alone.” Stenger may well overstate the extent of irreligiosity among the Chinese populace. Given the closed political conditions in China, it’s not possible to gauge the extent to which traditional beliefs and practices, such as ancestor worship, remain current, especially among the peasantry. Additionally, in recent years there has been a proliferation of “underground” Christian churches, which act as a conduit to and from anti-Communist movements in the U.S. and elsewhere. Nonetheless, it is incontestable that not only organized religion but personal religious attitudes and practices are much less important in China than in the Near East or South Asia.

Stenger makes no effort at a historical-materialist explanation of this difference and, indeed, is incapable of doing so. The difference lies in the fact that in 1949 China experienced a social revolution that liberated the country from capitalist-imperialist domination. That revolution and the workers state it created were bureaucratically deformed from the beginning by the Stalinist leadership of Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communist Party. Nonetheless, over the past six decades China has undergone a level of progressive socio-economic development and cultural advancement that has eroded the material grounds for religious belief among the populace. This is despite reactionary values fostered by the Stalinist regime, from its inculcation of Chinese nationalism to its sanctioning of “official” Protestant and Catholic churches—a policy that the early Soviet workers state would have considered an abomination (see “The Bolshevik Revolution vs. the State Church” on page 2).

Understanding Jihadism

Why after having received U.S. aid in the war against “godless Communism” did a significant current of fundamentalists, self-described as jihadists, turn violently against the West and especially the United States in the post-Soviet period? With the demise of the Soviet Union, fear of Communism among Islamic traditionalists was replaced by fear of “Westernization.” Islamists took the “democratic” ideological posturing of U.S. imperialism—now the self-proclaimed “world’s only superpower”—at face value. In the early 1990s, the Egyptian Islamist Ayman al-Zawahiri, who would become a central leader of Al Qaeda, denounced “democracy” (Western-type parliamentary government) as a sacrilege:

“In Islam, legislation comes from God; in a democracy, this capacity is given to the people. Therefore, this is a new religion, based on making the people into gods and giving them God’s rights and attributes. This is tantamount to associating idols with God and falling into unbelief....

“In democracy, the people legislate through the majority of deputies in parliament.

“These deputies are men and women, Christians, communists and secularists.”

— Gilles Kepel and Jean-Pierre Milelli, eds., Al Qaeda in Its Own Words (2008)

The jihadists’ belief that the U.S. rulers aim to transform the Near East and other traditionally Islamic countries along the socio-cultural and political lines of present-day North America and West Europe is a delusion. There is, to be sure, a broad and influential section of bourgeois intellectuals, ranging from pro-Democratic Party liberals to right-wing Republicans, who think the U.S. government should do just that. Liberals like New York Times columnists Thomas Friedman and Nicholas Kristof have agitated for the U.S. government to actively promote “democracy” and “human rights” throughout the world, especially in the Near East. Feminists in academia and the media have also weighed in, pointing to the barbaric treatment of women, especially in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan under the Taliban. On the right, so-called neo-cons like William Kristol and Robert Kagan contended that Islamic fundamentalism had become a serious threat to America’s global interests.

The anti-Western jihadism of Osama bin Laden is the converse of the U.S. “human rights” imperialism expounded by the likes of Friedman, who supported the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 in the name of creating a “secular democratic society” in the Arab/Islamic world. Contrary to both the bin Ladens and Friedmans, the aim of the imperialists is not to create secular democracies in the Near East or elsewhere in the Third World. The shell of “democracy” by which the capitalists disguise their class dictatorship over the workers they exploit is reserved for the wealthier capitalist states. In plundering the neocolonial countries, imperialism perpetuates the backward social, economic and cultural conditions that sustain religion. At the same time, the penetration of these countries by imperialist capital creates elements of a modern infrastructure and a proletariat—the potential gravedigger of bourgeois rule.

In the 1848 Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels devoted a brief section to “feudal socialism,” a current of Christian intellectuals tied to the old aristocracies. These Christians denounced modern bourgeois society—its materialistic values and glorification of individual competitiveness—from a reactionary ideological outlook expressed in an idealized version of medieval European society. By analogy, one can describe Al Qaeda and the other jihadist groups as “feudal anti-imperialists,” opposing Western domination of the Arab/Islamic world in the name of an idealized version of medieval Islamic society and polity.

Resurrecting “Feudal Socialism”

“Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge.”

Communist Manifesto

A present-day version of “feudal socialism” has been propagated by Terry Eagleton, who, moreover, claims to be a Marxist. A professor of English literature in Britain, Eagleton published a polemical book against the “new atheists,” Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (2009), in which he derisively refers to Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens as “Ditchkins.” This work is a defense of religion, in particular a leftist current in the Roman Catholic church (mainly in Latin America) called “liberation theology.”

Eagleton condemns modern capitalist society as a spiritual wasteland given over to hedonistic individualism and the satisfaction of creature comforts on the cheap:

“The advanced capitalist system is inherently atheistic. It is godless in its actual material practices, and in the values and beliefs implicit in them, whatever some of its apologists might piously aver.... A society of packaged fulfillment, administered desire, managerialized politics, and consumerist economics is unlikely to cut to the kind of depth where theological questions can even be properly raised.”

This book came out at the very moment that the capitalist world plunged into the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s. In Britain, working people and the poor have been subjected to savage government-imposed austerity carried out in the interests of the financial moguls of the City of London. One would like to see Eagleton go into a working-class pub in London or the Midlands and spout off about the evils of “packaged fulfillment” and “consumer economics.” Barring divine intervention on his behalf, he would encounter a pretty ugly response.

While having a special fondness for Catholic “liberation theology,” Eagleton also has a good word for the moral rectitude and old-fashioned values of Christian fundamentalists: “In the teeth of what it decries as a hedonistic, relativistic culture, Christian fundamentalism seeks to reinstate order, chastity, thrift, hard work, self-discipline, and responsibility, all values that a godless consumerism threatens to rout.” Identifying “true” Christianity with sympathy for the poor and downtrodden, Eagleton willfully disregards “the wealthy are god’s chosen people” ethos of today’s Christian fundamentalism in the one country where its adherents wield real political influence: the United States. American evangelical Protestants have added two commandments to the ten handed down to Moses by Jehovah on Mount Sinai: “Thou shalt not tax the rich” and “Thou shalt not feed and give succor to the poor.”

For Eagleton, the socialist movement, like Christianity, is animated by altruism (love of one’s fellow man), not the material interests of the working class:

“For the liberal humanist legacy to which Ditchkins is indebted, love can really be understood only in personal terms. It is not an item in his political lexicon, and would sound merely embarrassing were it to turn up there.... The concept of political love, one imagines, would make little sense to Ditchkins. Yet something like this is the ethical basis for socialism.”

Yes, organizations claiming to be socialist have attracted idealistic intellectuals, some from very privileged social backgrounds, motivated by sympathy for the exploited and oppressed masses. However, the socialist movement has always been based on politically advanced workers, whose purpose is to qualitatively raise the material conditions (living standards) of their class and all those on the bottom, fighting for an egalitarian society. For Marxists, the ultimate goal is a society based on material superabundance, a necessary condition to fully realize the creative capacities of all its members. Consequently, underlying communism is a level of labor productivity far greater than in today’s advanced capitalist economies.

As Marx explained in Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy (1857-58), the development of a collectivized economy would see the “free development of individualities” and hence “in general the reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum, to which then corresponds the artistic, scientific, etc., development of individuals, made possible by the time thus set free and the means produced for all of them.”

In Defense of Marxism

The “new atheists” are hostile to Marxism. At the same time, they feel compelled to answer their theistic antagonists who raise the mass murder carried out by the regime of J.V. Stalin in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. That regime claimed atheistic materialism as an important component of its formal ideology. Dawkins and his cothinkers contend that the crimes of Stalin were not motivated by atheism as such but rather by a religious-like belief in Marxist doctrine. Dawkins links Stalin and Hitler, a lying amalgam often made by bourgeois ideologues (see “Black Book: Anti-Communist Big Lie,” WV No. 692, 5 June 1998). He wrote in The God Delusion:

“Stalin was an atheist and Hitler probably wasn’t; but even if he was, the bottom line of the Stalin/Hitler debating point is very simple. Individual atheists may do evil things but they don’t do evil things in the name of atheism. Stalin and Hitler did extremely evil things, in the name of, respectively, dogmatic and doctrinaire Marxism, and an insane and unscientific eugenics theory tinged with sub-Wagnerian ravings.”

In The End of Faith, Harris similarly argues, “Consider the millions of people who were killed by Stalin and Mao: although these tyrants paid lip service to rationality, communism was little more than a political religion. At the heart of its apparatus of repression and terror lurked a rigid ideology, to which generations of men and women were sacrificed.” Like almost all bourgeois intellectuals, the “new atheists” identify Stalinism with Marxism and Stalin’s Russia with the historical embodiment of Marxist doctrine.

V.I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky and the other leaders of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution understood that socialism could be achieved only on an international scale. They viewed the October Revolution in Russia as sparking a wave of proletarian socialist revolutions in Central and West Europe, ultimately extending to North America. However, under the conditions of imperialist encirclement and economic backwardness, in the 1920s the Soviet workers state underwent a bureaucratic degeneration, as analyzed by Trotsky in The Revolution Betrayed (1936). The rule of a parasitic bureaucratic caste was consolidated by Stalin’s murderous regime and expressed ideologically in the anti-Marxist doctrine of building “socialism in one country.”

As Trotsky explained in the 1938 Transitional Program, the founding document of the Fourth International:

“The Soviet Union emerged from the October Revolution as a workers’ state. State ownership of the means of production, a necessary prerequisite to socialist development, opened up the possibility of rapid growth of the productive forces. But the apparatus of the workers’ state underwent a complete degeneration at the same time: it was transformed from a weapon of the working class into a weapon of bureaucratic violence against the working class and more and more a weapon for the sabotage of the country’s economy. The bureaucratization of a backward and isolated workers’ state and the transformation of the bureaucracy into an all-powerful privileged caste constitute the most convincing refutation—not only theoretically but this time practically—of the theory of socialism in one country.

“The USSR thus embodies terrific contradictions. But it still remains a degenerated workers’ state. Such is the social diagnosis. The political prognosis has an alternative character: either the bureaucracy, becoming ever more the organ of the world bourgeoisie in the workers’ state, will overthrow the new forms of property and plunge the country back to capitalism; or the working class will crush the bureaucracy and open the way to socialism.”

In 1991-92, the negative of the two basic historical alternatives projected by Trotsky—capitalist counterrevolution—came to pass.

The “new atheists” not only falsely identify Marxism with Stalinism but also falsify Marxism as such. Daniel Dennett is particularly vulgar and contemptuous in his caricature of Marxism in Breaking the Spell:

“Remember Marxism? It used to be a sour sort of fun to tease Marxists about the contradictions in some of their pet ideas. The revolution of the proletariat was inevitable, good Marxists believed, but if so, why were they so eager to enlist us in their cause? If it was going to happen anyway, it was going to happen with or without our help. But of course the inevitability that Marxists believe in is one that depends on the growth of the movement and all its political action. There were Marxists working very hard to bring about the revolution, and it was comforting to them to believe that their success was guaranteed in the long run.”

As a matter of fact, the beginning of the first section of Marx’s most famous and widely read work, the Communist Manifesto, clearly states that while the class struggle is inevitable, the outcome is not:

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

“Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”

Half a century later, the revolutionary Marxist Rosa Luxemburg posed the historical alternatives facing mankind as “socialism or barbarism.” With the development and deployment of nuclear weapons, the profit-driven capitalist-imperialist system threatens to destroy civilization and even exterminate the human race.

It is common for bourgeois-liberal intellectuals, especially those who describe themselves as secular humanists, to argue that Marxism is a form of teleological idealism derived from the philosophy of Hegel. Attributed to Marx is the idea that the historical development of society will necessarily culminate in communism. Marxism is presented and condemned as a kind of secularized religion in which the promise of a future otherworldly heaven is replaced by the promise of a future earthly heaven.

In one of Marx’s first writings, he explicitly argued against a Hegelian-type teleological concept of history. The Holy Family, written in 1844 as Marx’s first collaborative work with Engels, states:

Hegel’s conception of history presupposes an Abstract or Absolute Spirit which develops in such a way that mankind is a mere mass that bears the Spirit with a varying degree of consciousness or unconsciousness. Within empirical, exoteric history, therefore, Hegel makes a speculative, esoteric history, develop. The history of mankind becomes the history of the Abstract Spirit of mankind, hence a spirit far removed from the real man....

History does nothing, it ‘possesses no immense wealth,’ it ‘wages no battles.’ It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; ‘history’ is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims.” (emphasis in original)

In the political realm, the bourgeois-rationalist “new atheists” offer at best a species of liberal reformism, proferring advice to the rulers of a capitalist order that, at home and abroad, inculcates the reactionary, anti-scientific religious beliefs against which Dawkins et al. rail. Marxists, in contrast, strive to change the political consciousness of the working class in order to effect a revolutionary change in social conditions—i.e., the overthrow of that capitalist order—leading to the erosion and final elimination of all backwardness and superstition. In Marx’s own words: “Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” 

From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-FBI Raids Target Northwest Activists-Defend the Northwest grand jury resisters! Free the imprisoned Occupy protesters! Down with police and FBI raids! 


Click on the headline to link to the “International Communist League” website.

Markin comment:

I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts.
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Workers Vanguard No. 1009
28 September 2012

FBI Raids Target Northwest Activists

(Young Spartacus pages)

At daybreak on July 25, FBI and Joint Terrorism Task Force agents armed with assault rifles raided the homes of three anarchists in Portland, Oregon. During this coordinated raid, Feds broke down doors and stormed in behind a volley of flash grenades while a helicopter circled overhead.

Dennison Williams was rousted out of bed while pleading for his life and then placed in a chair while handcuffed and half-naked. Over a dozen FBI agents ransacked his apartment and seized his cellphone, laptop and eleven items of black clothing as “evidence.” He was slapped with a subpoena to appear before a federal grand jury in Seattle. At least four others were subpoenaed, including Leah-Lynn Plante of Portland and Matt Duran of Olympia. Duran has since been imprisoned for refusing to testify. Free Duran now! Stop the grand jury inquisition and return all the belongings that were seized!

Revealing the real political motive behind the raids, the sealed search warrant shown to Williams stated that the FBI was to seize “anti-government or anarchist literature or material.” SWAT raids that targeted Occupy Seattle activists in Washington weeks earlier were also searching for “anarchist materials.” Williams’ warrant justified confiscating anarchist paraphernalia, supposedly used in the “Destruction of government property” and “Conspiracy to travel interstate with intent to riot.”

At an August 1 press conference held the day before the first hearing, Williams read aloud from a statement by Plante and himself, in which they courageously vowed not to testify before the grand jury. He said, “This grand jury is a tool of political repression. It is attempting to turn individuals against each other by coercing those subpoenaed to testify against their communities.”

On September 13, the court held Duran in contempt for refusing to testify and shipped him off to SeaTac federal prison in Seattle. According to a September 17 update on saynothing.info (a Web site run by supporters of the Northwest activists), Duran is being held in solitary confinement. Meanwhile, Plante was released and subpoenaed yet again. She and the other activists could face Duran’s fate if they continue to refuse to testify.

It is vitally necessary to defend these activists, who have been targeted for their political views. If the capitalist state can raid the homes of these young leftists, rifles in hand, and drag them before a witchhunting grand jury—simply for supposedly reading Bakunin and having a penchant for wearing black—they can do it to anyone. An injury to one is an injury to all!

An August 2012 “Grand Jury Resistance in the Pacific Northwest” statement signed by pugetsoundanarchists.org and saynothing.info notes, “The purpose of this Grand Jury seems to be an investigation of what occurred in downtown Seattle on May Day 2012.” At that march, police claim that 75 “Black Bloc” anarchists allegedly damaged branches of Wells Fargo, Bank of America, HSBC and Homestreet banks, a Nike store and the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Cops assaulted protesters and arrested at least eight activists. The next day, Seattle police chief John Diaz stated, “I am convinced there are a lot of people who will be spending some quality time in prison for what they did yesterday.” It was announced the same day that a task force was formed to review footage from the protest.

One of the Seattle PD’s first victims was Cody Ingram, who was arrested and charged with destruction of government property. Ingram spent a month in jail before pleading guilty to a misdemeanor and being sentenced to time served. At his hearing, an FBI special agent accused him of saying that the “government needs to be replaced.” (Last we knew, that was still a democratic right.) Activist Robert Ditrani was pressured to plead guilty on charges of disorderly conduct after allegedly spitting on a cop.

The May Day protest in Seattle was organized as part of a nationwide “general strike” initiated by the last holdouts of the populist Occupy movement, who issued flyers and posters calling for “no work, no school, no shopping, no banking, no chores.” In fact, this “general strike” was simply a protest that in no way shut down production. Notwithstanding the movement’s insistence on having no demands at all, the program embodied in the Occupy protests that began one year ago is simple liberal reform that is very much in line with the Democratic Party. Occupy’s slogan “We are the 99 percent” denies the fundamental class division in society between the capitalists and the proletariat.

While exposing its tepid reformism, we have defended and do defend Occupy against all attacks by the capitalist state. Similarly, while the political bankruptcy of anarchism has been evident particularly since the Russian Revolution of 1917, it is the duty of all opponents of capitalist state repression to come to their defense now.

Since the beginning of the Occupy movement, the protesters have been hit with vicious state repression. Brutal crackdowns swept cities across the U.S. last November, and Democratic Party mayors carried out most of them. So-called “progressive” Democrat Jean Quan, mayor of Oakland, admitted to participating in a conference call with officials from 18 cities nationwide to discuss how to disperse the encampments last year. The state continues to persecute the few remaining Occupy activists, as evidenced by the Northwest raids and the arrests of 185 protesters in New York on September 17 during the anniversary of Occupy Wall Street. Drop all the charges!

The FBI raids, the grand jury subpoenas and the arrests of political activists are of a piece with the vicious attacks on civil liberties that have been carried out under both Democratic and Republican administrations. The government’s prohibition of “material support to terrorism” originated with the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act under Clinton and was expanded by Bush’s “war on terror” Patriot Act following the September 11 attacks.

For his part, Obama renewed the Patriot Act and added to this arsenal of repression the indefinite military detention of U.S. civilians and legalized political assassination of citizens abroad (see “Obama Ramps Up ‘War on Terror’ at Home,” WV No. 993, 6 January). A 21 June 2010 Supreme Court ruling expanded the definition of “material support to terrorism” to include engaging in political advocacy of groups deemed enemies of the state.

The state began its “war on terror” by targeting Muslims, but the laws crafted to justify state terror are increasingly used against anyone advocating ideas contrary to the status quo (see “More Subpoenas Against Midwest Leftists: FBI Infiltration Exposed,” WV No. 973, 4 February 2011). Dissenters are deemed “enemies of the state” or “terrorists”—i.e., people with no rights the state is bound to respect and to whom the government can do anything.

The ultimate target of “anti-terror” and other measures of repression is the multiracial working class, which has the social power and objective historic interest to overthrow the capitalist order. The Spartacist League and its youth auxiliary, the Spartacus Youth Clubs, aim to build the vanguard workers party necessary to establish working-class rule and put the system of racism, poverty and war out of business once and for all.

Defend the Northwest grand jury resisters! Free the imprisoned Occupy protesters! Down with police and FBI raids!

FromThe Marxist Archives- The Bolshevik Revolution Vs. The State Church


From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-Abolish the Racist Death Penalty!-Vote Yes on California Prop 34!


Click on the headline to link to the “International Communist League” website.

Markin comment:

I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts.
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Workers Vanguard No. 1009 28 September 2012

Tough on Crime” Anti-Death Penalty Measure
Abolish the Racist Death Penalty!

Vote Yes on California Prop 34!

In a country that leads the world in the number of people behind bars, disproportionately black, the endurance of the death penalty is rooted in the foundation of American capitalism, which was built on the scarred backs of black slaves. Capital punishment is the supreme declaration of state authority and the monopoly of violence in the hands of this country’s racist capitalist rulers. The so-called “Golden State” of California leads the nation in death row inmates, with close to one-quarter of the more than 3,170 men and women condemned to die. Of the 729 death row prisoners, overwhelmingly concentrated at San Quentin, 14 have exhausted all appeals. The only thing standing between them and the death chamber are court-directed negotiations over which combination of deadly chemicals to inject in their veins to avoid the charge of “cruel and unusual punishment.”

Proposition 34 (the SAFE California Act), which is on the ballot in the November elections, calls to repeal the state’s death penalty and replace it with life without parole. As Marxists, we oppose the death penalty on principle—for the guilty as well as the innocent. We do not accord the state the right to determine who lives and who dies, and welcome any measure against the death penalty or curtailing the reach of the state’s killing machine. While the measure is couched as a means of making the system of capitalist repression more effective and efficient, including by redirecting money to police departments, what is primary for us in calling for a “yes” vote is that the SAFE Act is a referendum on state-sanctioned murder.

The very name ascribed to this ballot initiative by its sponsors, the “Savings, Accountability and Full Enforcement for California Act,” expresses the cruel calculus of capitalist “justice,” weighing the costs of legal murder against the expense of relegating prisoners to a living death on what class-war political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal so aptly calls “life row.” Arguing that “California’s death penalty is an empty promise,” the act appeals for a more efficient and effective punishment. Whipping up the spectre of depraved criminals on the loose, the SAFE Act declares: “Killers and rapists walk our streets free and threaten our safety, while we spend hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on a select few who are already behind bars forever on death row.... By replacing the death penalty with life in prison without the possibility of parole, we would save the state $1 billion in five years without releasing a single prisoner.” One hundred million dollars of these “savings” is pledged to the cops, courts and prosecutors.

Yet despite all of these sops to the forces of “law and order,” the California District Attorneys Association, the State Sheriffs’ Association and a number of other police agencies are literally screaming murder. Their “Vote No on Prop 34” Web site promotes speeding up the state’s killing machine. It proposes streamlining the appeals process to get rid of “delay tactics” and instituting a one-drug protocol of death, pointing to Ohio, where 14 death row prisoners have been killed by this method since 2009. Declaring that life without parole “will cost taxpayers more in healthcare costs” for aging inmates, these opponents of the SAFE Act argue that savings can be made by no longer housing death row prisoners in single cells. Reveling in barbarism, their “Mend It, Don’t End It” statement concludes with the bloodthirsty complaint that “cop killers, baby killers and serial killers who rightfully received the death penalty do not deserve the benefits they have at San Quentin.”

In our opposition to the death penalty, we are equally committed to the abolition of life without parole, the prisons and all the barbaric institutions of the capitalist state. Our purpose is to arm the working class with the understanding that the cops, courts, prisons and military make up the apparatus for the violent repression of the working class and the oppressed in defense of the power and profits of the capitalist rulers. It will take nothing short of proletarian socialist revolution to sweep this state away.

Voices from Death Row

Some of the condemned men on San Quentin’s death row have also raised their opposition to the SAFE Act. They have spoken out against being entombed for life in prison with their appeals cut off and forced to be unpaid slave laborers as restitution for their alleged crimes. Among these prisoners is Kevin Cooper, a black man framed up for the killing of a white family in 1983. In 2004, only hours before he was to be strapped to the death chamber gurney, Cooper was granted a stay of execution. Despite overwhelming evidence of his innocence and a more than 100-page opinion by Judge William Fletcher of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal arguing that the “State of California may be about to execute an innocent man,” in 2009 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Cooper’s appeal of his sentence.

Cooper argues that the SAFE Act’s repeal of all avenues of appeal for those now sentenced to death is “a step backwards in our ability to challenge our convictions,” condemning them to life behind bars in prisons “worse than death row.” It is a profoundly searing indictment of this country’s judicial system that some prisoners prefer a death sentence on the grounds that this provides some means to prove their innocence and avoids the worse day-to-day violence and torture in the maximum-security prison chambers. The accused and convicted should get the best representation possible and the benefit of all legal redress. Nonetheless, as Cooper’s case itself demonstrates, death penalty appeals provide little more than a facade of “due process.”

In California, the death sentence carries one automatic appeal to the state Supreme Court. According to a 2011 report by senior U.S. Appeals court judge Arthur L. Alarcón and Professor Paula M. Mitchell of the Loyola Law School Los Angeles, the average wait between the original conviction and a decision by the California Supreme Court is ten years, and the death sentence has been upheld in more than 90 percent of the cases. In state habeas petitions, inmates wait eight to ten years simply for appointment of counsel. Since 1978, new evidentiary hearings have been granted in just 31 of the 689 appeals filed. Only after all state appeals have been exhausted can death row prisoners file habeas petitions with the federal courts. Of the 970 people condemned to death in California since 1978, only 54 have obtained new trials from such appeals; 32 other death row prisoners died awaiting a decision.

A major obstacle in this Kafkaesque maze of appeals is finding a lawyer with the qualifications and resources to take on a habeas petition. As San Quentin death row prisoner Darrell Lomax wrote: “There are over 300 people on death row in California who have been here for over 10 years, myself included, who have not yet received appointment of counsel. I have been waiting over 15 years to clear my name” (Socialist Worker, 12 April).

We profoundly sympathize with Cooper and other death house inmates who oppose the SAFE Act. Confined to cages within cages, behind layer after layer of stone walls, iron gates and beset by sadistic screws, the measure appears to deprive them of the sole possibility of relief, no matter how remote, in the racist capitalist courts. They don’t see the possibility of working-class and other social struggle outside the prison walls that might change their fate. And little wonder, as there has been precious little struggle, thanks above all to the endless betrayals by the trade-union misleaders.

But the executed have no appeals. Any fight for their freedom is forever silenced by death. As another prisoner on San Quentin’s death row, Donald Ray Young, wrote: “We said ‘I am Troy Davis.’ Many of us said that we were Stanley Tookie Williams. Cameron Todd Dillingham was another innocent person on death row; the Texas criminal justice system executed him in our name. If we had abolished capital punishment, all three of these men would still be alive, able to prove their innocence to the world. No one enjoys a prison sentence of life without the possibility of parole (LWOP), but it definitely keeps Mumia Abu-Jamal speaking truth to power” (San Francisco Bayview, 5 June).

Does any fighter for Mumia’s freedom think that he would be better off staying on death row because he might have a chance to appeal his frame-up conviction—repeatedly upheld by court after court—before the U.S. Supreme Court? Now off death row, for the first time in more than 30 years, Mumia is able to embrace his wife, family and other visitors, and has access to sunlight and exercise. But we found no “justice” in the Philadelphia D.A.’s decision last December to stop seeking a death sentence. As the Partisan Defense Committee wrote: “While it is welcome that Mumia will no longer be under the threat of state execution, it is an abomination that this innocent man, who has already spent 30 years entombed, is condemned to a living death in prison.... Trade unionists, opponents of the racist death penalty and fighters for black rights must continue the fight to free Mumia” (see WV No. 993, 6 January).

Our fight for Mumia and to abolish the racist death penalty is rooted in the program of the class struggle, looking to mobilize the social power of the workers both in the U.S. and internationally. This faces many obstacles, not least the pro-capitalist labor bureaucrats who overwhelmingly refuse to call their members into action to defend their economic interests, much less in defense of a black political prisoner.

The Warden, the D.A. and “Law and Order” Liberals

In 1972, the California Supreme Court struck down the death penalty as a violation of the state’s constitution. Later that year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty was “wanton” and “freakish,” leading to a moratorium on its application. Those decisions reflected the tumultuous social struggles of the time, from the civil rights movement of the 1950s-60s to the mass protests against U.S. imperialism’s dirty war against the Vietnamese workers and peasants. The struggles on the streets and campuses reached into the prisons and even among U.S. troops in Vietnam, intersecting growing discontent in sections of the working class. After these struggles had subsided or were co-opted or smashed, the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.

Today, opposition among sections of the bourgeoisie to the death penalty and prison overcrowding is at bottom driven by considerations of expediency, as seen in arguments that the current system of mass incarceration and death costs too much money and is “broken.” On the other side are those who believe that only the most monstrous measures of repression can keep the working class and oppressed cowed in the face of intensifying exploitation and mounting misery.

The main spokesman for the SAFE Act is Jeanne Woodford, a former San Quentin warden who oversaw four executions and was appointed Director of the Department of Corrections under Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Another prominent supporter is former L.A. County District Attorney Gil Garcetti, a Democrat who was a key actor in the 27-year campaign of frame-up, cover-up and imprisonment of renowned Black Panther Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt). Now, Garcetti ghoulishly complains that California’s death penalty is “totally ineffective” because “most inmates are going to die of natural causes, not executions” (AP, 24 April).

Other endorsers include the two right-wing Republicans, Don Heller and Ron Briggs, who authored the 1978 California proposition called the “Death Penalty Act,” which expanded the categories and circumstances of crimes punishable by death or life without parole. For them, the state’s kill rate hasn’t been high enough. Briggs wrote in a Los Angeles Times (12 February) op-ed piece: “Never did we envision a multibillion-dollar industry that packs murderers onto death row for decades of extremely expensive incarceration. We thought we would empty death row, not triple its population.”

Joining this chorus are the liberal anti-death penalty advocates of the American Civil Liberties Union, whose Northern California chapter wrote:

“The facts prove that life in prison without the possibility of parole (LWOP) is swift, severe, and certain punishment. The reality is that people sentenced to LWOP have been condemned to die in prison and that’s what happens: They die in prison of natural causes, just like the majority of people sentenced to death. The differences: Sentencing people to death by execution is three times more expensive than sentencing them to die in prison.”

—“The Hidden Death Tax,” www.aclunc.org

Given the notorious overcrowding and denial of medical care that forced California prisons into federal court receivership, death by disease, aging and (not mentioned) suicide would clearly be a “bargain” by the calculus of these law-and-order liberals! Similarly, the “big savings” of $100-plus million a year that might be accrued from overturning the death penalty is a drop in the bucket compared to the $8.9 billion the state government spends to maintain its prison hellholes. But such doesn’t feature in the account books of those promoting life without parole as a thrifty alternative to death.

In its article “A Closer Look at SAFE California” (Socialist Worker, 24 May), the International Socialist Organization (ISO) points to the case of Stanley Tookie Williams, who was legally lynched at San Quentin in 2005 with the executioners digging into his arms for 20 minutes to inject their cocktail of death. Accepting the sick bourgeois lie that the prisons are meant for “rehabilitation,” the ISO points to Williams’ work behind bars for gang prevention as having “illustrated how people can change, undermining the claim that the death penalty is reserved for those beyond redemption”! They continue by complaining that “SAFE Act proponents unfortunately have chosen a strategy that negates this potential, instead highlighting life without the possibility of parole.” To promote the notion of “redemption” in prison is to buy into the entire notion of crime and punishment, a barbaric relic of ancient religious codes asserting that one can be “saved” through repentance.

An article titled “Sophie’s Choice 2012: Death Penalty vs. LWOP” by Chris Kinder, a leading spokesman for the Labor Action Committee to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal (LACMAJ), laments: “There’s nothing in the initiative about racism in the system, or why black death-row convicts outnumber whites way out of proportion to population.... Nor does it address why cops routinely get away with murdering people of color in this [sic] streets, or why cops and courts systematically frame up who they want to get without regard to the truth.” While Kinder ends by declaring that “the system itself needs to be overturned,” only someone with an abiding belief in the inherent justice of this system would expect that the cabal of former jailers and prosecutors who authored the SAFE Act would ever address the racial and class bias that is at the core of capitalist justice in this country.

For years, such touching faith in the capitalist state led the reformist left to demand a new trial for Mumia Abu-Jamal from the very courts that framed him up and sentenced him to death for his outspoken defiance of their racist injustice system. The reformists’ purpose was to “broaden the movement” by appealing to law-and-order liberals like the ACLU and others who promote “life” in prison without the possibility of parole.

As revolutionary Marxists, we do not seek to advise the bourgeoisie on the more “humane” or “just” administration of its increasingly decrepit and depraved rule. Whether it is the death penalty, life in prison without parole or imprisonment in general, we oppose the entire machinery of violence that is the capitalist state.

We will vote for Proposition 34. But we understand that ending the death penalty would not fundamentally change the violently racist and oppressive nature of capitalist class rule. It would not free the innocent, like Mumia, languishing in America’s dungeons or spare the victims of racist police executions on the streets. Nor would it alter the slower death of the growing ranks of the poor, jobless and homeless, or the agony of the sick who lack medical care. Our purpose is the fight to forge the nucleus of the revolutionary workers party that will lead the proletariat in overthrowing this system through socialist revolution. When those who labor rule, the death penalty will be abolished for good and the capitalists’ prisons smashed as initial steps in the emancipation of all the exploited and oppressed.