John Bellamy Foster on Late Imperial Bourgeois Irrationalism

Discussion

John Bellamy Foster:

"Lukács identified the growth of irrationalism with the imperialist stage of capitalism. This was conceived in the first place economically, along the lines of Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, as a system of monopoly capitalism characterized in terms of inter-imperialist rivalry and war in the struggle over colonies and spheres of influence. But it was Lenin, above all, according to Lukács, who translated the economic conception of imperialism into “the theory of the concrete world situation created by imperialism,” focusing on class politics and alignments between nations.61 Moreover, Lenin recognized that peace agreements in the imperialist stage were “inevitably nothing more than a ‘truce’ in periods between wars,” within a larger geopolitical struggle inherent to monopoly capitalism.62 The political aspects of imperialism thus permeated the culture of whole nations, generating what Raymond Williams in another context was to call “structures of feeling.” It was this that led to the interface of imperialism and irrationalism in the history of Europe from 1870–1945.

Late imperialism, beginning in 1945, can be seen as divided thus far into three periods:

(1) The immediate Cold War from 1945 to 1991, in which the United States as the hegemonic power of the capitalist world economy sought to gain dominance over a Global South engaged in anticolonial revolts, while at the same time waging a global struggle against the Soviet Union and China.

(2) The period from 1991 to 2008, in which Washington attempted to consolidate a permanent unipolar world in the vacuum left by the removal of the Soviet Union from the world stage and the opening up of China to the world economy.

(3) From 2008 (the Great Financial Crisis) to the present, marked by the reemergence of China and Russia as great powers and Washington’s official designation of these two countries as its chief enemies, leading to a New Cold War, marked by conflict between the U.S.-centered unipolar world and an emerging multipolar world order.

During all of this time, the Western left has occupied a weakened position within monopoly capitalism at home while having an ambiguous approach to imperialism abroad, with the related submergence of the class struggle. It also suffered a major defeat in 1968. With the advent of the New Cold War, the hybrid war of the collective imperialism of the triad on the Global South, including the major emerging economies, has come fully to light.

Under these circumstances, bourgeois irrationalism has come to define the dominant intellectual climate of late imperialism, reflecting the continuing destruction of reason. Today it is widely recognized that German reactionary thought, associated with “the Nietzsche-Heidegger-Carl Schmitt connection,” along with the revival of Bergsonism, is present in the works of post-Marxists, postmodernists, and posthumanists from Derrida to Deleuze to Latour.64 In the words of Keti Chukhrov, a “fascination with negativity and nihilism,” characteristic of the irrationalist philosophies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, can be seen in the work of Deleuze “and Guatarri or the accelerationist dystopia and post-humanist theories of the present.”

In Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy, we are told that the “resolutely anti-dialectic” character of Nietzsche’s thought, his concepts of the “will to power,” the “eternal return,” and the dream of the Overman, represented a triumph over Hegel’s dialectic, leading to “the creative identity of power and willing” as the consummation of the will to power.66 There is a “secret link” connecting various thinkers opposed to the state philosophy. This secret link, Deleuze tells us, includes Spinoza (reinterpreted as a vitalist), Nietzsche, and Bergson, all of whom are to be seen as philosophers of immanence, representing a “nomadic” tradition opposed not only to European rationalism in general, but standing in direct opposition to Hegel and Marx. Bergson’s position in his debate with Einstein is championed by Deleuze in his 1966 book Bergsonism in an effort to privilege once again the subjective, intuitive notion of time separated from physics and also from historical time.

The irrationalist and reactionary reversals that we are seeing within what still remains a putatively left analysis are many. As Chukhrov observes:

- In Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari find capital monstrous, but at the same time a desirable terrain from which subversion and its emancipatory potential might stem. [Nevertheless,] the acceptance of vicious capitalist contemporaneity is inevitable given the condition of the impossibility of its sublation.… A very important aspect of such an aberration lies in the following: the capitalist undercurrent of these emancipatory and critical theories functions not as a program to exit from capitalism, but rather as the radicalization of the impossibility of this exit.

This reveling in the impossibility of exit can be seen in Deleuze and Guattari’s main confrontation with Marx. At the beginning of their influential 1972 work, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, they posit an “industry-nature” relation resulting in “relatively autonomous spheres that are called production, distribution, and consumption.” These separate spheres, they claim, were demonstrated by Marx to be only a product of the capitalist division of labor and the false consciousness that it produced. But from there, they leaped to the transhistorical proposition:

We make no distinction between man and nature: the human essence of nature and the natural essence of man [Marx’s phrase] become one within nature in the form of production or industry, just as they do within the life of man as a species.… Industry is then no longer considered from the extrinsic point of view of utility, but rather from the point of view of its fundamental identity with nature as production of man and by man.… Man and nature are not like two opposite terms confronting each other…rather they are one and the same essential reality, the producer product.

On this basis, nature and humanity are seen as an inescapable ideal unity—what Marx, who is being quoted here, called “the human essence of nature and the natural essence of man.” This is the inevitable result of industry, as an abstract, transhistorical phenomenon, which, rather than being conceived as alienated under capitalism, as in Marx, is the direct, immediate means of the unification of nature and humanity. The entire concept of alienation, or the self-estrangement of humanity, as the central material reality of capitalism (which Marx had presented as a tragic “flaw” to be superseded), is thus removed at the outset.71 Nature and humanity, for Deleuze and Guattari, are “one essential reality,” generated by industry in the abstract.

Having effectively eliminated the historic phenomenon of alienation, Deleuze and Guattari move immediately to the characterization of production as an “immanent principle” of desiring-machines, leading to a universal schizophrenia. “Schizophrenia” in this sense is defined as “the universe of productive and reproductive desiring-machines, [representing] universal primary production as ‘the essential reality of man and nature.'” Marx’s alienation, resulting from estranged social relations, is thus replaced by a universal system of desiring-machines or a “machinic unconscious” producing a larger schizophrenic reality of which capitalism is a mere manifestation. This schizophrenic-desiring reality lies on the plane of immanence, superseding humanity itself.73 We are thus confronted with a universe of libidinal energy, vital life forces, and desiring-machinic drives from which there is no escape.74 Nietzsche’s reactionary irrationalism triumphs over Marx’s revolutionary praxis.

A similar reversal can be seen in Derrida, again revealed in relation to Marx, in Derrida’s famous Specters of Marx. In this and other works, Derrida advanced a left-Heideggerian poststructuralist perspective. The immediate, public response to Specters of Marx, written shortly after the demise of the Soviet Union, was that it had reaffirmed Marx. Yet this occurred in the form of an indirect apologetics that stressed “Marx’s spectrology.” Here, Derrida focused on the famous opening line of The Communist Manifesto in which Marx and Engels had written: “A specter is haunting Europe, the specter of Communism.”75 Marxism, he argued, still continued to haunt Europe, if only in a ghostly sense, in which it played an indispensable role in continuing to challenge the capitalist monolith. Yet, Derrida’s Marx—or the Marx he wished to retain—was, in the words of Richard Wolin, a “Heideggerianized Marx,” one impoverished by the notion that the main enemy is now simply techno-scientific modernity. Here the “ontological prejudices of philosophical antihumanism, a Heideggerian inheritance” rule out all of the substance of Marx’s theory, including the social forces behind revolutionary praxis. Indeed, “Marx’s spectrology,” Derrida explained, was not limited to Marx himself “but blinks and sparkles behind the proper names of Marx, Freud, and Heidegger.” Hence, Marx continues to haunt capitalism but not simply as the apparition of himself, but as the ghost of Heidegger as well, whose “epochal thinking…cancels historicity.”

The new philosophies of immanence have thus produced all sorts of seemingly radical but in fact reactionary theories. This is evident in posthumanist treatments of ecological crisis, particularly in the form of what is called a “new materialism.” Much of this is informed by Deleuze’s questionable reappropriation of Spinoza as a vitalistic theorist, primarily through the latter’s concept of conatus, which is interpreted as imputing motive, mind, even joy to objects themselves, for example a stone.77 This has opened the way to a vast outpouring of new vitalistic (so-called “new materialist”) works by figures such as Bennett and Morton, often in the name of ecology, in which a universal animism is the outcome. In this view, a lump of coal, a microbe, Adorno’s set of plastic dinosaurs, a stone, etc., all are treated as having “vital powers,” placing them on a flat ontological plane with humanity.78 Like Schopenhauer (in his response to Spinoza), Bennett argues that a falling stone, if it were conscious, would be right to think that it had will and moved of its own volition.79 The result is the demolition of any meaningful distinctions between human and nonhuman nature.

A common strategy to be found in Latour, Bennett, and Morton is to negate Marx’s famous critique of commodity fetishism by simply standing it on its head, presenting all things/objects as vital agents or actors. This amounts to a universalization of commodity fetishism and reification (the thingification of the world), and the diminishing thereby of any notion of the human subject. It constitutes the elimination of the classic conception of critique.

Latour’s well-known rejection of “the modern” sought to deny, in left-Heideggerian fashion, all validity to the concepts of nature and humanity, presenting them as a false duality introduced by Enlightenment modernity. He made this rejection of the nature-society dualism the heart of his “political ecology,” which replaced human actors with assemblages of “actants.”81 But once he belatedly felt the need to consider the actual planetary ecological emergency represented by the new Anthropocene Epoch in geological history, Latour found himself devoid of all reference points—since even ecology had been thrown into question in his philosophy—and he reverted to mystifying concepts like Gaia and what he called the Earthbound (a reworking and personification of the notion of terrestrial). More importantly, given the nature of the planetary destruction, he was confronted with the question to how to conceive of this from the standpoint of the political order. He thus turned to Schmitt’s The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, written in Nazi Germany. Schmitt’s works sought to root law in the earth (not in the sense of ecology, but rather territorialization), conceiving this as the basis of the permanent state of war that grounded international law.

Lukács’s evaluation of the Schmitt of this period is naturally much harsher than that of Latour. The Nazi legal theorist Schmitt, Lukács argued, had quickly shifted to the new imperial climate following the fall of the Third Reich. “It does not matter to him—Carl Schmitt—whether it is Hitler, Eisenhower or a newly arisen German imperialism that sets up the absolute dictatorship of monopoly capitalism.”83

Still, basing his analysis on Schmitt, Latour tells us that the answer lies in “a new state of war” on behalf of the Earthbound. He ends his 2015 Facing Gaia by praising the spirit of Christopher Columbus. Despite his criticism of “the moderns,” Latour allied himself, at least for a time, with the capitalist ultra-ecomodernists of the Breakthrough Institute, asking people to “Love Your [Frankenstein] Monsters.”

Irrationalism is now thoroughly in fashion again. A further “radicalization of the impossibility of…exit” is evident as the world in late imperialism faces two forms of exterminism: nuclear war and the planetary ecological emergency. In a conference and book addressing the antisemitism and Nazism in Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, representing a desperate effort to salvage Heidegger’s philosophy in some way despite the revelations that Nazism was integral to his entire outlook, it was Lacanian-Hegelian philosopher Žižek who was given the final word, no doubt due to his reputation as a left thinker. Žižek sought to defend the importance of Heidegger for philosophy, despite his Nazism, on the grounds of the significance of his fundamental ontology of “ontological difference,” or the relation of beings to Being, out of which Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein and his deconstruction of the conscious ego had arisen. This, then, is seen as separable from the specifics of Heidegger’s political path. Even if he did not move away from his far-right views, failing to repudiate his Nazi past, Heidegger, we are told, is still to be commended for the fundamental ontology of his Being and Time and his criticisms of scientific-technological civilization, viewed as distinguishable from his complicity with the Third Reich.

In Žižek’s work Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, Heidegger is praised even more strongly. Not only is Heidegger presented here as a figure operating “against the grain” within a practice that is “strangely close to communism,” but we are also told that Heidegger “of the mid-1930s,” when he was a member of the Nazi Party, can be seen as “a future communist”—even if he himself never arrived at that destination. Heidegger’s Nazism, Žižek apologetically declares, “was not a simple mistake, but rather a ‘right step in the wrong direction.'” Thus, “Heidegger cannot be simply dismissed as a German volkisch-reaction.” In his Nazi period, Heidegger, Žižek postulates, was opening up “possibilities which point…toward a radical emancipatory politics.” To be sure, this was written before the publication of the Black Notebooks—although well after many of Heidegger’s Nazi writings had appeared. But as we have seen, the Black Notebooks, with their virulent antisemitism, did little to alter Žižek’s overall defense of Heidegger’s philosophy.

Žižek’s loyalty to Heidegger’s antihumanist project is evident in his current posthumanist stance in which he argues (while commending Bennett) that nature and ecology, along with humanity, are no longer meaningful categories. Even the Indigenous defense of the earth is, in this perspective, to be belittled. In an article focused on a discussion of Marx’s concept of metabolic rift, Žižek responded to the socialist and Indigenous Bolivian president Evo Morales’s call for a defense of Mother Earth with the quip that, “To this one is tempted to add, that if there is one good thing about capitalism it is that under it, Mother Earth no longer exists.” What was meant by this, as in much of Žižek’s writing, was not immediately clear, but it fits with his other statements, reflecting a similar disdain for ecological problems, and an indirect apologetics for the system, such as his declaration that “ecology is a new opium for the masses.”

Indeed, both the denaturalization of nature and the dehumanization of humanity are built into Žižek’s general antihumanist outlook, which conforms to the principle of the radicalization of the impossibility of exit. Thus, he declares in a nihilistic way: “The power of human culture is not only to build an autonomous symbolic universe beyond what we experience as nature, to produce new ‘unnatural’ natural objects which materialize human knowledge. We not only ‘symbolize nature’; we [also], as it were, denaturalize it from within.… The only way to confront ecological challenges is to accept fully the radical denaturalization of nature.” But this also implies the radical dehumanization of humanity, since, as he also states: “There are human beings only insofar as there is an impenetrable inhuman nature (Heidegger’s ‘earth’).” The problem for all discussions of humanity’s “embeddedness in nature” and analyses of the metabolic rift, he claims, is that they tend to regress into “dialectical-materialist general ontology,” referring to the dialectical naturalism of Engels and Lenin.

In accordance with Žižek’s own idiosyncratic, idealist, and irrationalist approach to “dialectical materialism,” which purports to “return from Marx to Hegel and enact a ‘materialist reversal’ of Marx himself” via pure idealism, both naturalism-materialism and critical humanism must be rejected, in general conformity with left-Heideggerianism.89 Material reality thus gives way to the abstract Real. Such views lead to a withdrawal from any meaningful praxis, a deep pessimism, and a dialectic of irrationalism. Without ever seriously addressing the global ecological crisis or the class-based struggle against capitalism necessary to avoid crossing planetary tipping points, Žižek blithely declares that “We must assume the catastrophe as our destiny.”

Such irrationalism in relation to the environmental crisis of capitalism is also evident in Žižek’s response to the current growing threat of a nuclear conflict between NATO and Russia in the context of the Ukraine War. Indeed, today we see a further destruction of reason, the product of a confused antihumanism mixed with nationalist fervor. This is evident in Žižek’s insistence that NATO should continue to support the war in Ukraine and walk away from peace talks, despite the growing dangers of a global thermonuclear exchange that would almost certainly annihilate all of humanity, simply in order to “save face.” Others like Noam Chomsky, who have raised the issue of the relation of the growing global exterminist threat, are wrongly dismissed by Žižek as supporters of Putin’s Russia. Instead, he calls for a stronger, global NATO able to fight both Russia and China. We are told that the same “logic” as that governing Russia’s insistence that Ukraine not be brought into NATO and that nuclear weapons not be stationed on Ukraine’s soil, which would present an “existential crisis to the Russian state…dictates that Ukraine, too, should have arms [supplied in its case by the West]—and even nuclear weapons—to achieve military parity” with Russia.

Here we see Hartmann’s “cosmic suicide” as the supreme manifestation of the intellect and the will suddenly reemerging in our time. Once again, the irrationalism, cultivated at the highest intellectual levels, that dominated the outlook of the West at the beginning of the First World War, is choking off all rational alternatives. To offer uncritical support for the goals of the imperial triad of the United States/Canada, Europe, and Japan, or to support a global NATO in the late imperialist context, is to identify with the irrational will to power at the imperial center of the world economy, leading either to the eternal return of exploitation/expropriation, or else Hartmann’s cosmic suicide.

Today, Reason demands that both exploitation and expropriation, and the related exterminist tendencies of our time, be overcome. That can only be accomplished, as Baran noted in the 1960s, on the basis of “the identity of the material interests of a class [or class-based social forces] with…Reason’s criticism of the existing irrationality.” The source of such an identity of “material interests with a class” currently lies primarily in the Global South, and with those revolutionary-scale movements everywhere seeking to overturn the entire capitalist-colonial-imperialist system for the sake of humanity and the earth."

(https://monthlyreview.org/2023/02/01/the-new-irrationalism/)

More information

• Book: Georg Lukács. The Destruction of Reason. London: Merlin Press, 1980.