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Welcome to new books and historical materialism. I'm your host, Stephen Doseman. Marxism is having a moment right now. Higher workloads, stagnating wages, rising costs of living, a new economic crisis every few years, a warming climate and now almost two years of a worldwide pandemic have all led to a number of people across the world, especially younger people, to self-identify with ideas once thought to be in the dustbin of history.
But while people may find Marx's theories helpful for understanding what's happening, turning these interpretations into sustained commitments is another thing. What's more, Marx's works often turn out to be less definitive than is often imagined, giving us rigorous methods of inquiry that we need then to develop and adapt to other fields. Being a Marxist then is not simply about adopting a particular series of propositions, but a way of interpreting and engaging with the world. This is one of the animating ideas for my guest today, Ted Stoles.
Here to discuss his essay collection Becoming Marxist, Studies in Philosophy, Struggle, and Endurance. While Marx occupies a central place throughout the essays, readers will find engagements with a variety of figures, going back as far as Aristotle and the Apostle Paul, all the way up to the present with essays on Shizhek and Deleuze. In between these polls are studies of Hobbes, Spinoza, and Hegel, and many other early modern thinkers. Throughout the essays, Stoles puts Marxist practice in dialogue with philosophy and vice versa, showing us how political struggle demands philosophical inquiry, not simply for the purpose of political and tactical clarity, but for the same reasons people have turned to philosophy for several millennia now.
Socrates famously said the unexamined life is not worth living, kicking off an entire tradition of self-examination. It's this tradition Stoles believes activists and organizers ought to draw on today to better understand what it might mean to become Marxist. Ted Stoles holds an MA in Religion and a PhD in Philosophy. He is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Cerritos College.
He is the Co-Editor of the New Spinoza and has published numerous articles on philosophy, politics, and religion. Ted Stoles, welcome to the new book's network. Great, nice to meet you, Stephen. And this is the first time for me to meet you, so have a look at it.
Doing well. Yeah, really looking forward to talking about this. But first question I always like to ask guests, could you maybe introduce yourself to listeners and tell us a little bit about what your work and research tends to focus on, what your main areas of interest are? Yeah.
I presently teach at Cerritos College, which is a small figure school east of Los Angeles, and most of my students there in the philosophy classes are first generation college students, so largely Latinx. And probably over half are women, in fact. So I have a lot of diverse experience teaching. I went to Claremont Graduate School where I met Warren Montag.
And many years ago in the 1980s, we developed a lifelong relationship and that led to a translation of the book called the New Spinoza, which is an anthology that I think may be one of the first efforts to publish French philosophy, which was available in the English language. We did an anthology on Pierre Macheray called In A Materialist Way shortly thereafter. And Warren also introduced me to politics, so I became very engaged in an organization at the time called Workers Power, Later Solidarity, which was very influenced by the experience of the 1960s. And then I was a very engaged in the WorldCat labor movement, Teamsters for Democratic Union.
We had many people came out of the free speech movement at Berkeley in the mid 60s, and that was a wonderful experience. I'm presently in the member of BSA, which I'm a paper member, that active politically other than in my labor union, which is American Federation of Teachers, nationally, California Federation of Teachers. And then a few years ago, I was the union president of my local and lead negotiator and grievance officer at one time. As I'm getting closer to retirement, my activism has lessened a little bit, but my current projects are still in Spinoza, Marxist theory.
But I'm increasingly interested in looking at the New Testament from a philosophical and especially Marxist standpoint. Yet another interest of mine is in American transcendentalism and its fusion overlapped with the abolitionist movement. Not many Marxists have looked at Emerson and Thoreau and abolitionism. So that's the latest direction I'm moving at.
Yeah, you've got a lot of really interesting angles to work at. To kick things off with discussing this book, in the first essay, you write that Marxism is not, nor should be, a systematic theory of everything, but instead see Marxism as quoting pure machere, a series of simple and concrete problems. So to kick things off, can you explain what you mean by this? The starting point would be how we think of Marxism.
And Marxism for me is going back to an essay that Robin Blackburn published 50 years ago. Marxism is the theory of working class where he called it proletarian self-emancipation. So if the focus is on working class self-emancipation, then this isn't always unfinished and complete project because there will be new crises within capitalism, new movements arise. There are new scientific discoveries, new technological problems that occur.
A lot of the interesting work by John Bellamy Foster, Andres Mom, and others on Marx and eco-socialism are ones I'm interested in. And that has opened up a whole new area of discussion among Marxists, the centrality of the environmental crises that we face. So if Marxism were understood as it has been as a closed system, it would be very close to what you find in St. Daniel Dennett or Richard Dawkins as Darwinians.
The British neuroscientist Stephen Rose is called this ultra-Darwinism. In other words, there's a kind of a totalizing perspective that all interesting problems that arise in human existence when the natural world can be explained from this overarching standpoint. I don't think that's true of Darwin. I certainly don't think it's true of Marx.
But there have been temptations to what we would say are proof texting. What would Marx's position be on some issue like economic crises or there's a passage in capital that just has to be cashed out in terms of 20th century. Issues, angles, work, anti-doring was used in that way at one time. Lenin's state and revolution, which is a conjunctural text has been used in that way.
The Proskis Transitional Program has been used in that way. And I know that because I've known many activists on the left who have appealed to texts. Now for somebody like me who grew up in a very devout religious family, it's almost comparable to using classical Marxist texts as people turn to the Bible. Certainly you can turn to the Bible for inspiration.
I don't have any doubt about that. But whether that means you can find answers to life's problems without very carefully noting the difference between the original context and the contemporary concern of the Bible can't be used in that way neither should capital state and revolution transitional program any particular Marxist text. So the basic point I guess for me is that we have to be very modest as Marxists and not try to find answers to every question. If Marxism is the Ethereum practice of working class self-emancipation, there is some overlap with other types of self-emancipation, whether it's of women, people of color, movements of national liberation.
And so there's a need to be modest and somewhat limited in the scope of what Marxism tries to address. One of the philosophical questions you address in the first essay is the materialism and idealism distinction, although you refrain from immediately taking one side and denouncing the other and instead solely work towards an understanding of this debate where the two are less opposing camps and instead parts of a larger whole. Can you unpack this approach you have? Yeah, let me step back to how I understand the nature of philosophy.
Philosophy is often characterized as consisting of four different aspects of or concerns metaphysics, which is the study of the nature of reality epistemology, which concerns the nature of knowledge, axiology, the understanding of value and ethics, politics, art and logic, the study of correct reasoning. And Marxist engage all these four different aspects when they do philosophy. My approach is not to talk about Marxist philosophy per se, but Marxist who are intervening within philosophy as a history of texts and traditions and figures from the ancient world of through early modern philosophy to the contemporary world. Now there's a tendency you find this and especially in angles, it's somewhat true in Lenin's notebooks, philosophical notebooks, even until we get up to Louis Altusar within French Marxism.
There was a tendency to lump certain figures as materialists, so you say Epicurus, democratists were ancient atomists and therefore materialists, whereas Plato was an idealist. Aristotle is perhaps as a flitting each side of each camp. When you study Spinoza or Hegel or Kant, there's an attempt to classify a philosopher as either a materialist or idealist. This seems to be not a particularly fruitful approach.
Materialism in the metaphysical sense, you can best understood as a commitment to the existence of an external world that's prior to our knowledge of it. And in that sense, you can say Plato was a realist, not a realist in the way that I was identified with, or Spinoza was a realist. To call somebody a realist is just at a metaphysical level, it's just a way of getting the discussion going. A epistemologically speaking, obviously there's room for ideas, concepts, and mediation of the real world in thought and theory.
And in a way that's an could be construed an idealist moment within philosophical reflection. In the theory of value or astrology, when we're talking about in moral philosophy, what a good life is. We're really addressing the real world, we hope, and not some imaginary world, but there was the disagreement over what Kant says, say, a human right or social justice. And there are idealizing moments to anticipate another way of organizing life for society.
So I think in practice, my point is that materialism and idealism aren't simply rival camps. You can't say this philosopher is clearly a materialist or idealist, or this text is materialist or idealist. And so I think that there's always an interlinking and overlapping of the two. Marxists take the material aside in texts and traditions, take the Bible, for example.
You might find most Marxists regarding the Bible as hopelessly idealist as not particularly relevant to understanding real world issues. I will get into this maybe a little bit later with my approach to the Apostle Paul. But the Bible talks about economics, the Bible talks about social justice. The Bible is a highly polemical work that's concerned with real world issues.
So there are materialist ways of reading the Bible, or other sacred texts that are drawn by the vaguita, vu disutras. So materialism is way of approaching a text or tradition. It's not as though Marxists can adopt, again, a complete materialist worldview and categorize those texts or traditions or philosophers were more on the materialist side or the idealist side. Or the idealist side is an ongoing dynamic or antagonism that runs through the history of philosophy.
Kind of echoing back to you, the first question I asked you, in one of your essays near the middle of this book, An Interlude Called An Ethics for Marxism, you started by noting that Marxism, for all its rigor and usefulness, has certain limitations from a philosophical perspective, in that it doesn't offer much in terms of a philosophical ethic in the way that many philosophers have wrestled with throughout history. Do you speak to this limitation and what it means to say that Marxism needs philosophical supplements in certain places? Right. Well, in my political experience, maybe less so today than in the 80s or 90s when I was first getting involved in left-wing politics, the claim was always, not always, but often made, that Marxism is a kind of hard-headed empirical, even value-free science, namely historical materialism or Marxist economics.
And there's really no room for fuzzy normative language or perspectives. And yet this doesn't really correspond to Marx's own writing. It's not just the early Marx. You find this in Marx's manuscripts or the German ideology.
In capital, you find Marx talking about the moral degradation of workers, but it's not just even at the level of language. If we want to live in a more just society, if we are proposing some alternative to the present, we have structuring society. Simply an analysis or description of what's going on or what is taken to be problematic is not enough. You have to motivate people.
How you persuade people to join a union, to join a movement is not just a description of the problem. People typically know what the problem is. What is required is finding ways to give people hope, to encourage them, to think beyond their own narrow concerns, to broader concerns. Why should we struggle for a better world if we're not going to be able to motivate people using normative language and concepts that enable us to see the world differently and act accordingly?
How do we endure the ups and downs of a political life? There is this problem on the left of burnout, of over commitment. And I take ethics to main a concern with sustaining one's commitments, one's loyalty is to causes, justifying those causes, continually doing outreach and in low times or down times of political life, finding forms of continuing to reimagine how things can be different, learning, drawing lessons from the past. That all is within the broad category of what I call it, ethics for Marxism.
It's not a set of views and don't so much as it is a regular reflection on what one's commitments are, how to strengthen those commitments, how to sustain them over the period of one's life, or pass them on to the next generation. Continuing with your approach to a Marxist ethics, you put Marx in dialogue with one of his contemporaries, the French physiologist Claude Bernard. Quoting lengthy passages from Capitol U, argue that there are resources within Marx to think about the physiological implications of capitalism that you were just alluding to on workers and their bodies, pointing towards what you call the homeostatic disruption of living labor. Can you give us a sense of what a Marxist theory of homeostasis might look like?
Right. Well, Claude Bernard is an interesting figure because to my knowledge, my research Marx and Engels never referred to him, although he was a prominent scientist of the mid-19th century. He distinguished between what he called the external and internal milieu's or environments. And the internum milieu is one that he was fascinated by how given stressors from the external environment, organisms could maintain a kind of self-regulation.
He didn't use the term homeostasis. That was a term coined by a very prominent American physiologist in the early 20th century, Walter Cannon, who also happened to be a socialist, interestingly, at least at one time he was a non-communist socialist, and happened to be a friend of the Russian behavioral behaviorist, Pavlov, interestingly. But Cannon thought of homeostasis as a dynamic self-regulating of the organism. And interestingly, too, in a new book by, it just came out by Rupa Marja and Raj Batalka called Inflamed, the medicine and the anatomy of injustice.
They make a very detailed and expansive use of this idea of homeostasis. They give the analogy of a tightrope walker, losing and then regaining balance. So as the human body or this is true of other organisms, as they deal with stressors from the external world, there are ways of adjusting, adapting, or not, because there can be such serious disruption that it leads to the death of the organism. Or for human beings, at least, there can be medical interventions or social ways of reducing stress.
Obviously, a lot of the forms of stress are not purely from the natural world, and mediated through social factors such as poverty, unemployment, stresses within the workplace, which is what Marx and capitalism especially concerned about. Racism, police brutality, all these stressors can disrupt one's self-regulation at the level of the body. Now, Marx also gives us the language of alienation, which is pointing in the same direction, but what Marx didn't do, not that he could have done everything, obviously, but what he didn't do was ground his view of moral degradation in an account of human basic needs, or what would be required for the flourishing of our species individually and collectively. So that's sort of what I'm trying to do in that article.
I would say that the Marjian Patel book did a superb job in flames and trying to apply the study of homeostasis and disruption of homeostasis at the individual, social, and global levels. So I would highly recommend people take a look at that new book. Moving right along and turning to the Apostle Paul, who you spent a number of articles on, you follow a number of commentators most notably Alain Badu, in seeing Paul as a sort of political radical, critical of empire and large-scale destitution that it brings with it. But you also note how Paul's anti-imperialism brings with it its own imperial orientation, that it's not quite as much a step forward as a step sideways.
Can you explain the difficulty here? Sure, and an approach in New Testament studies that may come as a surprise to Marxists who are not conversant with New Testament scholarship is, there's a great interest in trying to root what scholars call the Jesus movement within its Roman imperial and also for century Jewish environment. The Jesus movement when looked at from that standpoint, whether we're talking about Jesus himself or Paul, it's a movement that's inclusive, it's egalitarian, that uses language that runs up against Roman imperial values of hierarchy, of peace with the threat of violence, implicit within that sort of imposed order. If you look at, for example, the titles attributed to Jesus, many of them are titles that would have been associated with Roman emperor.
So, ones like Son of God, Savior of the world, bringer of the peace, Messiah, which is a term that has a political connotation of one who is anointed for rule. You can get a sense in these titles that early followers of Jesus attributed to him that there was going to be a collision between such a movement and Rome. Jesus is crucified as a threat to the Roman order. Paul winds up probably executed during the reign of Nero.
Most of the early Christian leaders faced varying degrees of social exclusion. The people who were attracted to the Jesus movement tended to be marginal figures. It was a movement that crossed borders. Paul himself, for example, in his letter to the Galatians, third chapter of the letter to the Galatians talks about followers of Jesus being neither Greek nor Roman slave or free male or female.
So, there's a kind of transgressive quality to the early Jesus movement, at least within the first generation or two. By the second century, third century, certainly by the time of Constantine and the fourth century, much of that radicalism was reabsorbed into the Roman hierarchy. There's a Christianizing of Rome, and there's a Romanizing of an anti-imperial movement. So, for all of the radicalism of the early movement, there's not much that actually survives that Romanization process.
Another dramatic example of this is in the early movement, women were very much involved in the movement. We have names of some figures who were co-workers of Paul, people like Chloe and Phoebe, Lydia and Junia. These are individuals we don't know much about except Paul refers to them in his letters. They had leadership positions, but by the second century, there is a kind of conservative backlash in which early leaders of the movement, by the second centuries, are sort of toning down the danger of the threat to peace and there's a kind of struggle for leadership within the second century.
Now, the Jesus movement was not Spartacus, it was not a slave rebellion, and it was not nor was it which happened 73 to 71 before the common era, and it wasn't the Jewish revolt of 66 to 73, which failed, and Jerusalem was destroyed, and aftermath is going in separate ways of what the Christian and Jewish traditions would become Christian and Jewish traditions. So, when Marxists think of Christianity, they have to distinguish the earliest stages. People like Engels and Luxembourg try to take seriously the early radical phases of Christianity, and have to distinguish that from what becomes Christianity, which has undoubtedly largely become hierarchical. There are exceptions, liberation, theologies, and based Christian communities around the world retain that sort of radicalism leading biblical scholars, I think of Richard Horstley and Shed Myers, do very important work on radical discipleship and its present application to social problems today.
But Paul was not able to overcome the limits of the Roman imperial system, and he also had apocalyptic expectations that God would decisively intervene, which didn't happen. Christians who have been waiting for that divine intervention for 2000 years, it hasn't happened. It doesn't stop more conservative Christians from wishing it were so, but here we are with Christianity as it presently exists, and from my standpoint, it's interesting for Marxists then to go back and try to recover and to re-engage with the original impulse of the movement around Jesus in the first century. Yeah, in that kind of Marxist materialist spirit, you again note a problem with the radical appropriations of Paul, namely that many will often try to extract a theoretical doctrine out of Paul without attentiveness through his practice, and to this end, you pay attention not just to the fact that he traveled around spreading the gospel, but the ways he tried to engage with various communities, tried to establish particular sorts of structures to help maintain the movement, recruited and cultivated a particular sort of cadre, all well self-financing by working as a tentmaker.
So can you tell us a bit about the day-to-day work of Paul that he was engaged in, and what commentators miss when they ignore the on-the-ground practice? Right, well, Paul is an interesting figure because he had evidently initially been a Hellenistic Jew, possibly born in Tarsus, which is in modern day on the coast of modern day Turkey, or at least grew up there. It's not clear whether he had Roman citizenship, some scholars think yes, some not. He doesn't refer to citizenship in his letters, seven which are undisputed, as associated with him in other six, probably or inspired by, but not directly written by Paul.
But Paul was a Jew of the mid-first century. He was initially antagonistic to the movement around Jesus, the Messianic movement around Jesus, and it seems so strongly opposed that he observed a stoning of an early Christian leader, Stephen, in Jerusalem, but at some point becomes persuaded that Jesus' teachings mark a new departure beyond Judaism to non-Jews. So there's a universalizing dimension to Paul, not to say that for centuries Judaism was not universalizing, but the barrier to bringing people into a movement that Paul experienced was did they have to maintain specifically Jewish practices? Paul's conclusion after his conversion, or however we describe his experience, is that no one can become part of a movement through open table fellowship, through baptism as an act of initiation.
So a movement that began with Judaism for social justice, for the renewal of the Jewish covenant was then by Paul opened up to non-Jews, and Christianity as it presently existed, and it presently exists, would not exist in the way that it is probably without Paul having that insight. Obviously there have been people who say that's where Christianity goes wrong, and Paul watered down or misunderstood Jesus' teachings. But what did Paul do? Paul went to synagogues.
He tried to persuade non-Jews at the who attended synagogue services, which we have a record of occurring, and persuade them to become part of this movement. He presumably discussed his perspective in his work activities with clients and associates, people just ran into the context of his work as a tent maker. He was clearly not just going out on the street corners, you would find Street Evangelist today, Heringian Passers by. Even his letters are typically, we're not written as doctrinal statements.
They're very provisional interventions to solve problems that were rising within these communities that he was beginning to set up. The Greek term for these communities, Ecclesia, is the word that is typically translated into modern English as church, but these were not church structures, Christianity was a marginal movement, and these are assemblies, gatherings of like-minded individuals that represent a broad spectrum of Greco-Roman society. It's an expanding without rejection of Judaism, in my view. Paul remained until his death of Jew, but he's forming new expanded communities, which are egalitarian, which are concerned with redistribution of wealth, and envisioning a different kind of world that would be decisively different than the Roman Empire.
Less violent, more peaceful, and just. Paul is genuinely a cosmopolitan who used the empire in a way to shred his message. If it weren't for Roman roads, for example, he would not have been able to travel as broadly as he did from modern day Syria to Turkey to Greece to eventually to Rome, use the system of roads to have these letters sent to various communities. And so it's those very complicated practices.
Even the letters themselves are co-productions. They're not typically dictated by Paul to a secretary, and we have the name of one of those secretaries, churchiers, who transcribed politics in what becomes the letters to the Romans. So Paul is part of a movement. It's an egalitarian anti-empirial movement.
He dies in the mid 60s when Nero blames messianic Christians for the fire and Rome, and that's what is often missing, I think, in philosophical engagements with Paul. He is a book on Paul. It's very stimulating. But again, he doesn't stress the very interesting, complicated day practices of Paul, or even the co-production of letters.
It's not as if Paul is just sitting down and formulating a theoretical work. He's engaging in spirited polemics with other teachers with trying to solve problems that arise within a community is over sharing of resources and just rating in common meals or other sort of issues that arise on a daily basis. Yeah, it's a really interesting way of looking at him. Continuing with your engagement with Paul, you turn to his thoughts on debt.
So continuing with the earlier ideas you put forward with Paul as a radical critic of empire, you also find debt to be part of a larger critique of economic injustice. And what's more, when Paul speaks of that, it's not meant as a sort of spiritual metaphor to alleviate guilt or cleanse of our sin as it's often thought of today, but is instead, like the Old Testament's Jubilee, a much more grounded critique of the material conditions he inhabited and was working against. Can you unpack how debt functions in his thought? Sure.
Again, again, New Testament scholarship is pretty clear on Jesus and the movement that he helped organize. It's a movement of radical redistribution of wealth. It's a movement in which debt cancellation is central because the audience that Jesus is addressing our peasants, artisans, fishermen, see a Galilee who are suffering from crushing taxes. And this is not unique to Jesus.
You see this in John, who is a precursor to Jesus as a figure who has a vision of debt cancellation, even the idea of debt cancellation in the Hebrew Scriptures is associated with the year of Jubilee, every 50 years, debt is to be forgiven and slaves are to be free. Now, this is an ideal that scholars disagree how consistently it was carried out in practice, but it's an ideal that poverty is not a fate or punishment for wrongdoing. It is something which can be overcome. It can be challenged, but a movement is required to engage in this challenge of Paul and Herritt's, this orientation.
And after Paul's calling or conversion, however we understand it, he met with the early Christian leaders, the so called pillars in Jerusalem. And when he asked for permission to spread the Messianic movement to Nanjus, he was asked to remember the poor and to gather a collection to return for those suffering from poverty and Galilee and Judea. And this actually is a central function of what Paul is trying to do. He's trying to gather revenue to return for poverty relief.
It's a redistributive campaign. Now, it's not as though Paul is urging debt cancellation in the sense of refusing to pay taxes or armed resistance. Again, he's not advocating and uprising against Rome. And so, you know, I can understand why a critic of Paul would say this is inadequate.
It's not going to solve the problem of poverty. In a way that's quite true. Paul expected a kind of cosmic jubilee of debt forgiveness, a divine intervention, which did materialize. And personally, I don't think that will materialize it.
And that's really even a relevant concern. The question is more, is poverty something which can be eliminated? Jesus and Paul, early Christians think so. Can wealthy redistributed in a more egalitarian way?
Paul, like Jesus, think so. And so there is at least, potentially a common ground for Marxists, socialists, communist, and scientists, and Christians who want to look carefully and critically at their own foundational texts. Moving forward and turning to the question of self-emancipation, you look briefly at an argument by Richard Rorty, where he said that the most important thing progressives can do today is not try and build power from below, but instead transform the sentiments of the leisure class so as to make the world a little less cruel. So on its face, this seems like an odd idea to have even among non-Marxists, but that a better world is only possible if we convince those in power to be a little nicer.
That seems odd when phrased so concisely and bluntly, but I think it's worth unpacking this idea a bit, if only because it seems to be the implicit view many people hold today, even if they wouldn't phrase it quite that way. Can you give us a sense of Rorty's view here in the challenge that he raises? Sure. I don't want to be too harsh about Richard Rorty, who was an extremely important philosopher, and what I would regard as an egalitarian liberal.
He was trying to find in his 1993 Amnesty International Lecture an alternative way to ground a commitment to human rights, then focusing as Marxist, a word socialist in general, most people on the left would focus on movements from below making demands. So he, in this lecture, favors a kind of a sentimental education of desires from above. He talks about how patriotism and other writings as well can be reconstrued to encourage support for one's compatriots. I think he's wrong to think of internationalism as a watering down a commitment to one's compatriots.
I certainly think you can both care about a more just United States as well as a more just Western Hemisphere or world. So in a sense, I want to appreciate Rorty as a philosopher who has a good heart, a good liberal. If I'm not mistaken, his father was farther on the left if I believe he was a member of the Communist Party. So it could be there's a personal dimension to why Rorty thinks that Marxist approach is not going to be successful because it pitches success too high.
And Rorty is a typical reformer who thinks don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. He's also in this particular amnesty lecture. He's a product of a particular conjuncture, which is this is beginning of the Bill Clinton years and trying to find the third way with with Clinton and Tony Blair in Britain. I think when I wrote this piece, I think people were seeing perhaps Barack Obama in much the same way to say, Bill Clinton, let's give him a chance.
And if you have a Democratic president, that things can get a little bit better and you have to have trust that they have our interests working class people's interests at heart. So I think my own interest in Rorty, when I read that amnesty lecture was to say that this is a recurrent problem on the liberal left that change can and even should come from experts in the labor movement from the labor bureaucracy. And in my experience that it is rarely, progressive change has really occurred in that way, despite Rorty's claims that good things can come from above. For example, for me, at a small faculty union local, but this is relevant, I think to other labor struggles, you could have the best crafted arguments at the bargaining table and labor negotiations.
And they're probably going to fall on deaf errors, unless you have pressure away from the table through a contract campaign. And so I think it's really important that we need to use on a regular basis, even when you do have a collective bargaining agreement, the threat of grievances and pressure for contract enforcement. The idea that just well trained leaders are somehow going to solve your problems without mobilizing the ranks is simply doesn't correspond to any reality that I've experienced. So I was interested in Rorty, partly because I also think though that there is no firm foundation in human nature for social change.
But what he's wrong is to think that changes can be trickled down from above. And he's saying this from the left, from the liberal left. My experience at least has been even somewhat limited changes required from endless pressure, mass participation. And so it's, I say it's a friendly disagreement.
I would regard Rorty or liberals as wrong headed or somewhat utopian. And in fact, you know, not able to achieve the very sentimental education that they think they can accomplish that has never been my experience, at least in labor negotiations or contract enforcement. You need as many people as possible to be involved in the decision making process. There is a role for leadership, but the change in the sentiments comes from people experiencing real struggles.
And for Rorty, the idea that education comes from struggles from below is simply missing from his account. Yeah, so against that idea of how social change should come about, you've been articulating this idea of power from below. Now, many are happy to pull maybe a couple quotes from Marx, Lenin or Trotsky to justify their views and move on. But you try and develop a philosophical argument that true emancipation means self emancipation.
Can you unpack that argument for us? Sure. The political tradition that I became involved in, I didn't realize it as much at the time as I do in retrospect, always remains very much at the center of my thinking about philosophy. Philosophy as Marxists engage in it.
That tradition was framed by hell draper, especially the two souls of socialism is a pamphlet that he wrote, believe in the mid 60s, if I'm not mistaken. And the organizations that I belong to, workers power and then solidarity were very deeply influenced that we had at that time. The historian Bob Renner was reactive in my branch in Los Angeles. Other figures like him, Moody was based in Detroit and the labor notes project and this rest on self emancipation was seen as a strictly seen as a strategic matter.
It was very successful to win victories. The path to a socialist society is through involving as many people as possible from below leadership has to be accountable, not trusting the labor bureaucracy and so forth. So I've inherited that kind of tradition in that way of seeing the world from a strategic standpoint. I remain committed to that.
What's rarely discussed is why should we care? Why should we value this tradition from a moral perspective? And I think it is worth arguing from a moral perspective. And so the article that you're referring to in the book on self emancipation is trying to understand self emancipation or movements in a more general sense than just working class self emancipation.
Any movement of the oppressed towards its own liberation, its own freedom has to come from below to preserve the dignity of the individuals to avoid the idea of saviors from above. It is a more reliable path. So I think again, strategically, that's an approach that I would politically endorse, but it also preserves the dignity of the individual. You're not dependent on the good races of someone else.
Women have to free themselves, even if men are allies of women in struggle. People of color have to free themselves from oppression, although they need allies as well. The working class needs allies, any oppressed group needs allies, but the dynamic, the initiative is self emancipatory at a very deep ethical level. This is my position.
And I give a series of analytical Marxist arguments towards that end. One of the arguments which I've already referred to is the idea that in emancipatory movements, participants educate themselves. They're not told what to do. They learn how to organize in the process of struggle itself.
And that is a more lasting, significant influence on their lives and if some experts, some professional organizer, no matter how devoted, no matter how talented, just dispose it upon them, it has to come from below. So there are exceptions, I suppose. There might be emergency situations. I'll offer that in this chapter of my book.
Obviously a situation of grave harm or violence might require some sort of intervention, not at the level of the state presumably, but through some sort of solidarity movement. I think of, for example, in the Spanish Civil War, the brigades, Abraham Lincoln brigade from the United States, but other brigades from around Europe who went to fought on the side of the loyalists. So that is not their contribution is not self emancipatory, but it is supportive of self emancipation. So there would be exceptions to this, but again, my point would be the general rule is that no savior, and this even applies, I would stress to religious conceptions.
Martin Luther King Jr. in his letter from Birmingham jail, was very clear that God or Jesus is not going to intervene to save you from racism and racial oppression. One needs to be a co-worker, a partner of participant in that cause. So whether it's a secular or religious perspective on social change, it's not just a matter of what the correct strategy is, it's a normative argument that self emancipation is the only morally defensible way of bringing about freedom for an oppressed group.
So for a lot of people, the point you've brought us up to is where philosophical inquiry will often end, and the only real questions left are seen as logistical ones of how the working class should organize itself and work towards an emancipated, classless society. But you still see a role for philosophers and intellectuals, albeit one much more marginal than someone like Richard Rorty might believe in, and one where intellectuals need to make their contributions, albeit with deep care and humility. And recognize that their work is not above the struggle, but intertwined with it. Can you explain the role intellectuals ought to play in emancipatory movements here?
Well, here's again coming back to Paul. Paul functions as a kind of organic intellectual to use Gromshis and 20 of Gromshis terminology. He tries to bring people together within an inclusive egalitarian movement. He reformulates concepts in an urban context that arose in the earliest stage of the Jesus movement in a rural context, so he's a kind of a mediator of Judaism to non-Jews.
He intervenes in conflicts that arise within communities. He's a generalizer of concepts of Jewish purity law. He brackets out, but introduces, say, an open meal, table fellowship, baptism as new kinds of rituals. I see philosophers from Paul to the present as mediators, interveners, generalizers, creators of new concepts, taking concepts from one domain or a domain outside of Marxism, let's say, and revitalizing Marxism in light of that concept.
A lot of the equal Marxists work by people like John Bellamy Foster, Andreas Moll, Ian Angus are taking scientific research into ecological crises and seeing how they overlap with economic crises. So there's a lot for philosophers to do, but not to stand outside of or above the struggle, but to be participators within the struggle. Paul, for me as an exemplary, although again that would strike most of my comrades as maybe counterintuitive, but you can see in the 19th century United States, this sort of process of engaged intellectuals not stepping outside or standing outside of the struggle, whether it's the transcendentalism movement or abolitionist movement, the Black Frederick Douglass or Sojourner Truth, John Brown, Ralph Otto Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, George Ripley, and the utopian community experiment to book farm, really feminist like Margaret Fuller, and you've got a wide range of intellectuals in that early to mid 19th century that I think this is the same they overlap with with Marx and Engels who functioned in that way in the first international and then Engels in the second international. I don't think Marx and Engels stood outside of the struggle, Lenin, Trotsky didn't stand outside of the struggle, Brown, she didn't stand outside of the struggle, the struggle, Rosa Luxembourg didn't, so we have a whole history of Marxist intellectuals.
If academics in their own work want to function in play a role in emancipatory movements, they can certainly do so in terms of their own union work. Unfortunately, a lot of academics who poo poo faculty union organizing because it's not as significant as large scale struggles, but it's extremely important and valuable experience. It's a very humbling experience for someone like me coming out of philosophy, having confidence and good arguments and reasoning, and then you're at a collective bargaining negotiating situation at the table. Those arguments fall on deaf ears, which needed his pressure away from the table, as I mentioned a few minutes ago.
So it's not just what intellectuals contribute to struggles, it's what intellectuals can learn in the process of participating in these struggles, and they can be very modest struggles. And obviously you do what you're able to do within limits and people have a variety of commitments, but philosophers need to get out of the classroom and not necessarily directly into the streets, but they have to understand their work environment and unions. For most philosophers are very important laboratories of the development of their own philosophical ideas and concepts. Turning to the issue of climate change, you look at some of the challenges to organizing around the issue, pointing at arguments that a major difficulty lies in how we are wired to deal with issues that are being done intentionally and in our immediate acidity, meaning that climate change may be too abstract for us to really deal with.
And you argue that, however, that these arguments, while seeming sympathetic to the cause of curbing climate change, they're really part of a large tradition of doubt-ungering and subtly but surely make change seem so difficult as to seem impossible. Can you explain how these arguments about some vague allusion to human nature can be misleading and how they get us to think about the issue? Well, the philosophers who probably has had the biggest influence on me in terms of how we understand human nature is Norman Garris, who was a political scientist, a British political scientist who among some of my comrades is known for his strenuous criticisms of Louis Altisser, and I'll leave that sort of question. Those obstacles that I am, how people can reflect on what their desires, commitments, hopes are, how they can harness anger in a productive way.
These are philosophical tasks that I'm personally interested in more than the economics of a viable Green New Deal or the political problem of how you organize effective climate movements. I have students who are very involved in the climate justice movement and sunrise movement. I find that very inspiring, but there is, in any movement I've been involved in, the problem of burnout, the problem of how to have very passionate engagement but willingness to see the ups and downs of the struggle don't lead necessarily to permanent defeat. In the case of the climate emergency and urgency, that we have a decade to get a act together globally.
And so how do we find the moral resources to take that on to put capitalism front and center is the overriding problem? I don't pretend to have the answer to this, but it's not in our nature that we are going to be successful or defeated. It's an open question. It really depends on building a movement, building a mass movement, linking the climate emergency to other associated problems with capitalism, poverty, inequality, and expression exploitation.
In that sense, for me philosophically, there is not a solution that is going to come about just through the expertise coming from the intergovernmental, I don't know, climate change, the United Nations or heads of state. It really is a way of seriously reflecting on the nature of a good life, the willingness to share, to build new communities, these transformations that have to come from below, even though we need, obviously, treaties that are global in scope, and we need good leaders, not to name any particular names, but people like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria, President Trump, or Rashida Tlaib, you need good leadership, but even good leaders, if we're going to find a way out of this problem, are going to have to be pressured relentlessly over the next decade. Moving further along, you argue that climate change requires large-scale collective action, which you've been alluding to, but this is easier said than done for a number of reasons. So, logistically, it obviously is harder to get more people working together, but there are also certain ideological barriers and dead ends many people get stuck on where they struggle to even think about collective action, instead opting for the familiarity of things like individual habits, eco-friendly consumerism, or just abstention from consumption, all of which might help but are nowhere near enough to tackle the problem.
Can you explain how these dead ends function? Well, I identify in the chapter of the book, we're talking about a number of obstacles to building a climate justice movement. I won't elaborate on all of them, but one basic problem is moving from an identification of one's own concerns, within a household, within a neighborhood, to a broader collective understanding, so that the issue of moving from an eye identification to a we identification. I don't think there's any magic solution to that.
These are not just abstractions, these are building new kinds of communities. Back again to Paul, Paul wasn't particularly worried about climate change, obviously, in the first century, although the Romans did, through their mining practices, devastate whole regions of modern-day Spain and of modern-day Jordan, you see sites of Roman mining that are polluted since the first century to the present. But Paul, and I think any Marxist should be trying to find a language, trying to find a means to express not just that we ought to identify with other people, but how we are problems overlap or intersect. So the perspective of intersectionality with respect to gender, sexual orientation, race, class, ability, disability, this is a political sociological perspective that I find very fruitful.
But from a normative standpoint, this takes us into the terrain of what my good friend and comrade Jason Reed and Etienne Vallebar, who's this inspiration, talk about his trans-individuality. How do I think of myself? Not just as an isolated individual, but it's already linked to other individuals. And that's not easily done.
If you've been to a demonstration, you somewhat have this experience, or some rally, there's a kind of broadening of moral horizon when you look amongst yourselves and see the diversity of people, or sometimes a lack of diversity in the crowd. So how do I move from this eye identification to a wee identification? That was even Bernie Sanders slogan. I supported Bernie Sanders during his campaign.
I have ambivalence about his role in leadership as I would for any leader. But how do we see ourselves as something larger than who we are? That's one problem to building a successful movement, whether it's on the scale of an individual workplace, how do I think of myself as part of a union, as union brothers and sisters, rather than just my own separate problem as an employee? That's a very important obstacle to overcome.
There's also an important obstacle, which is what philosophers call moral weakness. Moral weakness arises when you make a commitment and then fail to act upon or in accordance with that commitment. Obviously, this happens all the time at an individual level. But it also happens when promises are broken by leadership, when leadership don't remain accountable to the ranks within a union, when leaders are elected, and don't try at least to deliver on the platform that they've pledged to uphold.
How do we solve the problem or weakness? It's not easily solved. It's a dynamic that Aristotle was worried about. Paul was worried about.
Paul actually talks about moral weakness using the term, which is interestingly translated to sin, but it means something like missing the mark, falling short of what one intended to do. It's not that Paul is talking about sinfulness as a irreversible fault or flaw, but the tendency we all have to fall short of goals that we set for ourselves promises we make to others platforms we pledge to uphold. We begin to know the answer to how we move from moral weakness to moral strength, other than in building movements that do really include as many people as possible that address the real needs and concerns that give them voice. In the demonstrations in Egypt in 2011, there was a phrase that really registered with me, which I think speaks to this.
We gave each other courage. You do see this in social movements that take great risks that run the risk of burning people out, of having people betray the cause, or of just slowly drifting away from a cause. How do we give each other courage? On fortitude, this would be spinoes, the way of talking about moral strength.
I think it's an important issue that has been largely overlooked, traditionally the working class, once it realizes its interests will act upon them and propose the ruling class, and you hope be successful, rather than defeated. But that's too quick a move. It's much more complicated matter of saying, even if you can realize your class interests, how do you sustain those interests over the course of a life, over the course of an historical moment? I think it's a very important issue that we have to pass on that commitment or series of commitments to the next generation.
None of this is easy. In the context of the climate justice movement, what really impressed me was Greta Tunberg's discussion of what she calls her superpower. She has Asperdus syndrome, but she sees that not as a fault, but a superpower that enables her, she says, to focus on an issue for a very long time. You can focus on an issue for a very long time, and you hope be successful through good strategy and tactics, but there's no guarantee that you will be successful.
There's a modesty even in the face of this emphasis on dedication to a cause. That cause may not be successful. We may not be able to stop the reversible climate change. We do know that if we don't struggle with everything that we have at our disposal, we do know if we don't do that, we will not be successful.
You've been eluding and stepping into my final question. I wanted to ask, and you've alluded to this throughout this episode, so I want to hone in on a little bit. A personal issue, many people will no doubt encounter when engaged in political activism of any sort is the challenge of sustaining one's engagement over a long period of time, even a lifetime for a lot of people. Some might cultivate a hope.
Others might have to depend on some sort of anger, which interestingly you don't try and dismiss wholeheartedly. You're open to certain elements or aspects of that, but still others will find other ways and reasons. But I want to ask what philosophy has to offer here, particularly regarding some of its oldest questions regarding who we are and how we ought to live. What can organizers in the struggle expect to gain from engaging with philosophy that will help them sustain their work and commitments?
Well, this is a good question to end on. I would see anger as an important element, not an anger that's all consuming rage, but a righteous indignation. Spinoza uses the language of indignation to express opposition to social oppression. But for Spinoza, anger remains a somewhat passive expression of opposition.
Hope is a more positive expression, but hope can be betrayed, hope can be false and manipulated. And I think that was the experience of many people who look to whether it was Bill Clinton or Barack Obama or Bernie Sanders. You might be filled with hope that they can bring about changes, but that is to misrecognize the concrete nature of hope as Aaron Spolk, the great German Marxist philosopher, stressed, we need to distinguish between abstract or false hopes on the one hand, illusory hopes, and a savior who's going to intervene at the last minute to rescue us from our bad behavior. Concrete hope is something that we fashion ourselves in community with others.
We need good practical reasoning and strategic elements. But the real question is you pointed out is how do we sustain this over a long period of time, a lifetime? How do we sustain this intergenerationally? I have a teenage son.
He's a socialist, at least at this point in his life. I would like to think that has some connection to our discussions. But I don't really know that philosophy can give the answers. Philosophy poses these questions and the posing of the questions themselves, I think, point in a direction that is an important one for the left.
The left has to retain a spirit of openness, of questioning, even questioning of one's own privileged texts and traditions. There's a recent book by Martin Hagenland, who's a philosopher who published a book called This Life, which is a very impressive work. And he argues that we need, in part, to rediscover secular commitments and to call into question religious, otherworldly loyalties. I'm not sure I agree with that, however.
He thinks religious faith is a flight into transcendence. It's otherworldly. It is not able to address the crises that we face within the world at present. But I guess for me, in my interest in all the New Testament, but I think he would find this within Buddhist texts, within other sacred texts and traditions around the world.
The concern is not about life after death. The concern is life before death. What do we make of our life, given that we are finite, given that we each of us will die? How can we play a part in bringing about a better world into the next generation?
Samuel Schaffler is a contemporary American philosopher who wrote a very interesting book called Death and the After Life, which suggests the reason that we engage in these commitments that we pursue these loyalties to the next generation into the future. It's not so much even for their sake. They don't yet exist. We do it for our own sake.
If we, through an interesting thought experiment, knew that the next generations would not survive, the humanity itself would disappear, that our species would become extinct. That would pose a problem not just to them and to future generations. That would pose a problem for our own projects under here and now. So we have to be committed to future generations to deepen our own projects, our own concerns.
It's not that we worry about future generations for their sake. We worry about future generations for our own sake and we have to be able to, on the left, not just talk about a struggle to replace capitalism with socialism or eco-socialism. We have to talk about why doing that. It's at the very heart of what it means to be a human being today.
It's an existential question that we pose. That's what, from my standpoint, philosophy has to offer, it's not giving answers. It's posing the question, what it means to lead the human life in the here and now. That's a big topic.
So as a final question, what, if anything, are you working on now? Well, as I said, I'm continuing to do work on the New Testament. I'm interested in another dimension of the New Testament theology, which is how spirit is understood. And I think for most materialist philosophers or Marxists, a spirit would be a non-starter.
But if you look at how spirit is understood in the Gospel John and the book of Luke and Acts, you see, and in Paul's letters, it has a kind of dynamic of inspiring, unifying movement building. So I'm working on something called the Spirit of the Movement, which is a way of trying to stress, again, some features of the early Jesus movement that might be useful from the standpoint of building contemporary social justice movements. The other thing I'm interested in and doing some research on is the overlap between Mark and transcendentalism, especially the writings of Henry David Thoreau and the 19th century abolitionist movement and how Marxists can benefit from that study. There have been very few of Marxist philosophers who've looked at transcendentalism.
It's seen as not as interesting as Tehagel or Kant or Marx himself, but it's the theory that was drawn upon by many abolitionists. And it has a lot of these common features that you would find in Marxism, commitment to organic intellectuals and movement building. So that's another project that I'll be working on for a few years to come. Yeah, that all sounds fascinating.
So looking forward to it. So in the meantime, Ted Stoles, thank you so much for being with us. Thank you very much, Steve, and I appreciate this opportunity to talk with you. And I really enjoyed the probing questions that you raised.