CÓMO COLAPSARON CUATRO BANCOS EN
ONCE DÍAS First Citizens BancShares Inc., uno de los mayores
Por
Steve Dickson
20 de marzo de 2023, 14:35 GMT-5
La rapidez con la que colapsaron cuatro bancos, y uno
sigue luchando, ha dejado atónitos a los inversionistas.
Aunque las quiebras se produjeron en el lapso de solo
11 días, las circunstancias que las provocaron fueron
únicas.
A continuación, mostramos cómo se desarrollaron las
turbulencias en las empresas y cómo respondieron los
reguladores, en medio de la preocupación de que la
crisis siga extendiéndose:
Silvergate
Silvergate Capital Corp. fue el primer banco
estadounidense en hundirse, debido a su exposición al
colapso del sector de los criptoactivos. Con la
autorización de la Reserva Federal, la Corporación
Federal de Seguros de Depósitos (FDIC, por sus siglas
en inglés) había intentado intervenir, discutiendo con la
dirección formas de evitar un cierre.
Pero la empresa con sede en La Jolla, California, no
pudo recuperarse en medio del escrutinio de los
reguladores y de una investigación penal de la unidad
de fraude del Departamento de Justicia sobre los tratos
con los gigantes cripto FTX y Alameda Research, de
Sam Bankman-Fried.
Aunque no se alegó ningún delito, los problemas de
Silvergate se agravaron cuando el banco vendió activos
con pérdidas para cubrir los retiros de sus asustados
clientes. El 8 de marzo anunció planes de cerrar sus
operaciones y liquidar su banco.
Silicon Valley Bank
Con el obituario de Silvergate prácticamente escrito, los
inversionistas y depositantes de Silicon Valley Bank
de SVB Financial Group ya estaban nerviosos cuando
la empresa anunció el 8 de marzo un plan para vender
US$2.250 millones en acciones, así como importantes
pérdidas en su cartera de inversiones.
Las acciones de la empresa se hundieron un 60% al día
siguiente de conocerse la noticia, y un día después la
FDIC tomó el control de la entidad. Los reguladores
estadounidenses procedieron a disolver el banco al no
encontrar un comprador adecuado. Pero el lunes
surgieron noticias más esperanzadoras, cuando la FDIC
amplió el proceso de licitación tras recibir un “interés
sustancial” de múltiples compradores potenciales.
compradores de entidades crediticias estadounidenses
en quiebra, aún espera llegar a un acuerdo por la
totalidad de Silicon Valley Bank,
según informó Bloomberg News el lunes, citando a
personas familiarizadas con el asunto.
Signature Bank
Signature Bank se convirtió en la tercera mayor quiebra
bancaria de la historia de Estados Unidos el 12 de
marzo, tras una ola de retiros de clientes que totalizaron
alrededor del 20% de los depósitos de la empresa.
La implosión de Silvergate cuatro días antes había
hecho que los clientes se mostraran reticentes a
mantener sus depósitos en Signature Bank, a pesar de
que su exposición a las criptomonedas era mucho
menor. Los reguladores federales dijeron que
habían perdido la confianza en la dirección de la
empresa y pusieron al banco bajo administración
judicial. Tanto a los clientes asegurados como a los no
asegurados se les dio acceso a todos sus depósitos, en
virtud de una disposición a la que los reguladores
recurrieron conocida como la “exención de riesgo
sistémico”.
Los depósitos de Signature Bank y algunos de sus
préstamos fueron adquiridos por Flagstar Bank de New
York Community Bancorp a última hora del domingo.
El adquirente acordó comprar a la FDIC US$38.000
millones en activos, que incluían US$25.000 millones
en efectivo y unos US$13.000 millones en préstamos.
También asumió pasivos por unos US$36.000 millones,
incluidos US$34.000 millones en depósitos. Las
sucursales de Signature pasarán a operar como locales
de Flagstar.
Credit Suisse
Credit Suisse Group AG cayó el domingo cuando las
autoridades suizas negociaron un acuerdo con UBS
Group AG para una adquisición de 3.000 millones de
francos (US$3.200 millones) destinada a evitar una
crisis financiera más amplia. La única otra opción que
se barajaba era la nacionalización total o parcial.
El fin de la institución suiza, de 166 años de
antigüedad, se produjo después de que el presidente
ejecutivo, Ulrich Koerner, intentara salvar el banco con
un acercamiento masivo a los clientes, que el año
pasado habían retirado del banco una cantidad de
fondos sin precedentes. En última instancia, el intento
no fue suficiente para contrarrestar los múltiples
escándalos y las pérdidas multimillonarias derivadas de
las operaciones de Credit Suisse con el financiero caído
en desgracia Lex Greensill y la fallida empresa de
inversión Archegos Capital Management.
El 9 de marzo, la Comisión de Bolsa y Valores de
EE.UU. cuestionó el informe anual del banco,
obligándolo a retrasar su publicación. El pánico cundió
tras la quiebra de los bancos regionales estadounidenses
y el presidente del mayor accionista del banco, el Saudi
National Bank, descartó seguir invirtiendo en la
empresa.
First Republic
Firtst Republic Bank ha sido víctima de la misma fuga
de clientes que acabó hundiendo a tres de sus rivales
estadounidenses, con una estimación de las posibles
salidas de depósitos que las sitúa en US$89.000
millones.
Once bancos estadounidenses intentaron apuntalar
al First Republic Bank con una inyección de liquidez de
US$30.000 millones la semana pasada. Sin embargo, la
empresa con sede en San Francisco, que atiende las
necesidades de banca personal de la élite tecnológica y
otras personas adineradas, ha caído a mínimos
históricos en medio de múltiples rebajas de la
calificación crediticia.
El director ejecutivo de JPMorgan Chase & Co., Jamie
Dimon, ideó un nuevo plan para ayudar al First
Republic que convertiría parte o la totalidad de la
inyección de depósitos de US$30.000 millones de los
11 bancos en una inyección de capital,
según informó Bloomberg el lunes, citando a personas
familiarizadas con la situación.
 https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-03-
20/ubs-got-credit-suisse-for-almost-nothing#xj4y7vzkg
CHOMSKY: A STRONGER NATO IS
THE LAST THING WE NEED AS
RUSSIA-UKRAINE WAR TURNS
It is becoming increasingly obvious that this is now a
U.S./NATO-Russia war via Ukraine, Noam Chomsky
argues.
By
 C.J. Polychroniou , 
TRUTHOUT
Published
February 23, 2023
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The war in Ukraine is almost a year old, with no end in
sight to the fighting, suffering and destruction. In fact,
the war’s next phase could turn into a bloodbath and
last for years, as the U.S. and Germany agree to supply
Ukraine with battle tanks and as Volodymyr Zelenskyy
urges the West to send long-range missiles and fighter
jets.
It is becoming increasingly obvious that this is now a
U.S./NATO-Russia war, Noam Chomsky argues in the
exclusive interview for Truthout that follows,
excoriating the idea that, in light of Russia’s invasion of
Ukraine, there needs to be a stronger NATO rather than
a negotiated settlement to the conflict. “Those calling
for a stronger NATO might want to think about what
NATO is doing right now, and also about how NATO
depicts itself,” Chomsky says, warning of “the growing
threat of steps up the escalation ladder to nuclear war.”
Chomsky is institute professor emeritus in the
Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT and
laureate professor of linguistics and Agnese Nelms
Haury Chair in the Program in Environment and Social
Justice at the University of Arizona. One of the world’s
most-cited scholars and a public intellectual regarded
by millions of people as a national and international
treasure, Chomsky has published more than 150 books
in linguistics, political and social thought, political
economy, media studies, U.S. foreign policy and world
affairs. His latest books are Illegitimate Authority:
Facing the Challenges of Our Time (with C.J.
Polychroniou; Haymarket Books, forthcoming); The
Secrets of Words (with Andrea Moro; MIT Press,
2022); The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and
the Fragility of U.S. Power (with Vijay Prashad; The
New Press, 2022); The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the
Pandemic and the Urgent Need for Social
Change (with C.J. Polychroniou; Haymarket Books,
2021); and Climate Crisis and the Global Green New
Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet (with
Robert Pollin and C. J. Polychroniou; Verso 2020).
C. J. Polychroniou: The war in Ukraine is
approaching its one-year anniversary and not only is
there no end in sight to the fighting, but the flow of
weaponry from the U.S. and Germany to Ukraine is
increasing. What’s next on the NATO/U.S. agenda,
one wonders? Urging the Ukrainian military to
retaliate by striking Moscow and other Russian
cities? So, what’s your assessment, Noam, of the
latest developments in the Russia-Ukraine conflict?
Noam Chomsky: We can usefully begin by asking
what is not on the NATO/U.S. agenda. The answer to
that is easy: efforts to bring the horrors to an end before
they become much worse. “Much worse” begins with
the increasing devastation of Ukraine, awful enough,
even though nowhere near the scale of the U.S.-U.K.
invasion of Iraq or, of course, the U.S. destruction of
Indochina, in a class by itself in the post-WWII era.
That does not come close to exhausting the highly
relevant list. To take a few minor examples, as of
February 2023, the UN estimates civilian deaths in
Ukraine at about 7,000. That’s surely a severe
underestimate. If we triple it, we reach the probable
death toll of the U.S.-backed Israeli invasion of
Lebanon in 1982. If we multiply it by 30, we reach the
toll of Ronald Reagan’s slaughter in Central America,
one of Washington’s minor escapades. And so it
continues.
RELATED STORY
But this is a pointless exercise, in fact a contemptible
one in Western doctrine. How dare one bring up
Western crimes when the official task is to denounce
Russia as uniquely horrendous! Furthermore, for each
of our crimes, elaborate apologetics are readily
available. They quickly collapse on investigation, as has
been demonstrated in painstaking detail. But that is all
irrelevant within a well-functioning doctrinal system in
which “unpopular ideas can be silenced, and
inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any
official ban,” to borrow George Orwell’s description of
free England in his (unpublished) introduction
to Animal Farm.
But “much worse” goes far beyond the grim toll in
Ukraine. It includes those facing starvation from the
curtailing of grain and fertilizer from the rich Black Sea
region; the growing threat of steps up the escalation
ladder to nuclear war (which means terminal war); and
arguably worst of all, the sharp reversal of the limited
efforts to avert the impending catastrophe of global
heating, which there should be no need to review.
Unfortunately, there is a need. We cannot ignore the
euphoria in the fossil fuel industry over the
skyrocketing profits and the tantalizing prospects for
decades more of destruction of human life on Earth as
they abandon their marginal commitment to sustainable
energy as profitability of fossil fuels soars.
And we cannot ignore the success of the propaganda
system in driving such concerns from the minds of the
victims, the general population. The latest Pew poll of
popular attitudes on urgent issues did not even ask
about nuclear war. Climate change was at the bottom of
the list; among Republicans, 13 percent.
It is, after all, only the most important issue to have
arisen in human history, another unpopular idea that has
been effectively suppressed.
The poll happened to coincide with the latest setting of
the Doomsday Clock, moved forward to 90 seconds to
midnight, another record, driven by the usual concerns:
nuclear war and environmental destruction. We can add
a third concern: the silencing of awareness that our
institutions are driving us to catastrophe.
Let’s return to the current topic: how policy is being
designed to bring about “much worse” by escalating the
conflict. The official reason remains as before: to
severely weaken Russia. The liberal commentariat,
however, offers more humane reasons: We must ensure
that Ukraine is in a stronger position for eventual
negotiations. Or in a weaker position, an alternative that
does not enter into consideration, though it is hardly
unrealistic.
In the face of such powerful arguments as these, we
must concentrate on sending U.S. and German tanks,
probably soon jet planes, and more direct U.S.-NATO
participation in the war.
What’s probably coming next is not concealed. The
press has just reported that the Pentagon is calling for a
top-secret program to insert “control teams” in Ukraine
to monitor troop movements. It has also revealed that
the U.S. has been providing targeting information for
all advanced weapon strikes, “a previously undisclosed
practice that reveals a deeper and more operationally
active role for the Pentagon in the war.” At some point
there might be Russian retaliation, another step up the
escalation ladder.
Persisting on its present course, the war will come to
vindicate the view of much of the world outside the
West that this is a U.S.-Russian war with Ukrainian
bodies — increasingly corpses. The view, to quote
Ambassador Chas Freeman, that the U.S. seems to be
fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian, reiterating the
conclusion of Diego Cordovez and Selig Harrison that
in the 1980s the U.S. was fighting Russia to the last
Afghan.
There have been real successes for the official policy of
severely weakening Russia. As many commentators
have discussed, for a fraction of its colossal military
budget, the U.S., via Ukraine, is significantly degrading
the military capacity of its sole adversary in this arena,
not a small achievement. It’s a bonanza for major
sectors of the U.S. economy, including fossil fuel and
military industries. In the geopolitical domain, it
resolves — at least temporarily — what has been a
major concern throughout the post-WWII era: ensuring
that Europe remains under U.S. control within the
NATO system instead of adopting an independent
course and becoming more closely integrated with its
natural resource-rich trading partner to the East.
Temporarily. It is not clear how long the complex
German-based industrial system in Europe will be
willing to face decline, even a measure of
deindustrialization, by subordinating itself to the U.S.
and its British lackey.
Is there any hope for diplomatic efforts to escape the
steady drift to disaster for Ukraine and beyond? Given
Washington’s lack of interest, there is little media
inquiry, but enough has leaked out from Ukrainian,
U.S., and other sources to make it reasonably clear that
there have been possibilities, even as recently as last
March. We’ve discussed them in the past and more bits
of evidence of varying quality keep trickling through.
Do opportunities for diplomacy still remain? As
fighting continues, positions predictably harden. Right
now, Ukrainian and Russian stands appear
irreconcilable. That is not a novel situation in world
affairs. It has often turned out that “Peace talks are
possible if there is a political will to engage in them,”
the situation right now, two Finnish analysts suggest.
They proceed to outline steps that can be taken to ease
the way toward further accommodation. They rightly
point out that the political will is there in some circles:
among them the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
and senior figures in the Council of Foreign Relations.
So far, however, vilification and demonization are the
preferred method to deflect such deviation from the
commitment to “much worse,” often accompanied by
lofty rhetoric about the cosmic struggle between the
forces of light and darkness.
The rhetoric is all too familiar to those who have paid
any attention to U.S. exploits throughout the world. We
might, for example, recall Richard Nixon’s call to the
American people to join him in pulverizing Cambodia:
“If, when the chips are down, the world’s most
powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like
a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and
anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions
throughout the world.”
A constant refrain.
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has clearly hit the
buffers, but as is the case with any war, there is
dishonesty, propaganda and lies flying left and right
from all sides involved. On some occasions, there is
also outright madness in the thinking of some
commentators which, unfortunately enough, passes
itself off as analytical discourse worth publishing in
so-called world leading opinion pages. “Russia must
lose this war and demilitarize” argued the authors of
a recent piece that appeared in Project Syndicate. In
addition, they claim that the West does not want to
see Russia defeated. And they cite you as one of
those who is somehow naïve enough to believe in the
idea that the West bears responsibility for creating
the conditions provoking Russia’s attack on
Ukraine. Your comments and reaction to this piece
of “analysis” on the ongoing war in Ukraine, which I
presume may in fact be widely shared not only by
Ukrainians but also by many others in Eastern
Europe and the Baltic states, not to mention the
United States?
There’s not much point wasting time on “outright
madness” — which, in this case, also calls for
devastation of Ukraine and great damage far beyond.
But it’s not complete madness. They’re right about me,
though they might add that I share the company
of almost all historians and a wide range of prominent
policy intellectuals since the ‘90s, among them leading
hawks, as well as the top echelon of the diplomatic
corps who know anything about Russia, from George
Kennan and Reagan’s Ambassador to Russia Jack
Matlock, to Bush II’s hawkish defense secretary Robert
Gates, to the current head of the CIA, and an impressive
list of others. The list in fact includes any literate person
capable of reviewing the very clear historical and
diplomatic record with an open mind.
It is, surely, worthwhile to think seriously about the
history of the past 30 years since Bill Clinton launched
a new Cold War by violating the firm and unambiguous
U.S. promise to Mikhail Gorbachev that “We
understand the need for assurances to the countries in
the East. If we maintain a presence in a Germany that is
a part of NATO, there would be no extension of
NATO’s jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to
the east.”
Those who want to ignore the history are free to do so,
at the cost of failure to understand what is happening
now, and what the prospects are for preventing “much
worse.”
Another unfortunate chapter in human mentality in
connection with the Russian-Ukraine conflict is the
degree of racism manifested by many commentators
and policy makers in the Western world. Yes,
fortunately enough, Ukrainians fleeing their country
have been welcomed with open arms by European
countries, which is not of course the treatment
accorded to those fleeing parts of Africa and Asia
(or from Central America in the case of the United
States) because of persecution, political instability
and conflict, and desire to escape poverty. In fact,
it’s hard to miss the racism hidden behind the
thinking of many who claim that one should not
compare U.S.’s invasion of Iraq with Russia’s
invasion of Ukraine because the two events are on a
different level. This is, for instance, the position
taken by the neoliberal Polish intellectual Adam
Michnik, who, incidentally, also cites you as one of
those who commits the cardinal sin of failing to
draw distinctions between the two invasions! Your
reaction to this type of “intellectual analysis?”
Outside the self-protective Western bubble, the racism
is perceived in even starker terms, for example, by the
distinguished Indian writer and political activist/essayist
Arundhati Roy: “Ukraine is certainly not seen here as
something with a clear moral tale to tell. When brown
or black people get bombed or shocked-and-awed, it
does not matter, but with white people it is supposed to
be different.”
I’ll return directly to the “cardinal sin,” a most
revealing aspect of contemporary high culture in the
West, mimicked by loyalists elsewhere.
We should recognize however that Eastern Europe is a
somewhat special case. For familiar and obvious
reasons, Eastern European elites tend to be more
susceptible to U.S. propaganda than the norm. That’s
the basis for Donald Rumsfeld’s distinction between
Old and New Europe. Old Europe are the bad guys,
who refused to join in the U.S. invasion of Iraq,
encumbered by antiquated ideas about international law
and elementary morality. New Europe, mostly the
former Russians satellites, are the good guys, free from
such baggage.
Finally, there are even some “leftist” intellectuals
out there who have taken the position that the world
now, in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, needs a
stronger NATO and that there shouldn’t be any
negotiated settlements to the conflict. I find it hard
to digest the notion that anyone who claims to be
part of the left-radical tradition would be advocating
the expansion of NATO and be in favor of the
continuation of the war, so what’s your take on this
particularly strange “leftist” position?
I somehow missed the calls from the left for a revival of
the Warsaw Pact when the U.S. invaded Iraq and
Afghanistan while also attacking Serbia and Libya —
always with pretexts, to be sure.
Those calling for a stronger NATO might want to think
about what NATO is doing right now, and also about
how NATO depicts itself. The latest NATO summit
extended the North Atlantic to the Indo-Pacific, that is,
all the world. NATO’s role is to participate in the U.S.
project of planning for a war with China, already an
economic war as the U.S. dedicates itself (and by
compulsion, its allies) to preventing Chinese economic
development, with steps toward possible military
confrontation lurking not far in the distance. Again,
terminal war.
We’ve discussed all of this before. There are new
developments as Europe, South Korea and Japan
ponder ways to avoid severe economic decline by
following Washington’s orders to withhold technology
from China, their major market.
It’s also of no slight interest to see the self-image that
NATO is proudly constructing. One instructive example
is the U.S. Navy’s latest acquisition, the amphibious
assault ship USS Fallujah, named to commemorate the
two Marine attacks on Fallujah in 2004, among the
more atrocious crimes of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. It’s
normal for imperial states to ignore or seek to explain
away their crimes. It’s a shade more unusual to see
them celebrated.
Outsiders don’t always find this amusing, including
Iraqis. Reflecting on the commissioning of the USS
Fallujah, Iraqi journalist Nabil Salih describes a
football field “known as the Martyrs’ Cemetery. It is
where residents of the once besieged city [of Fallujah]
buried the women and children massacred in repeated
United States assaults to repress a raging rebellion in
the early years of occupation. In Iraq, even playgrounds
are now sites for mourning. The war entailed showering
Fallujah in depleted uranium and white phosphorus.”
“But US savagery didn’t end there,” Salih continues:
Twenty years and incalculable birth defects later, the
US navy is naming one of its warships the USS
Fallujah.… This is how the US Empire continues its
war against Iraqis. Fallujah’s name, bleached in white
phosphorus implanted in mothers’ wombs for
generations, is a spoil of war, too. “Under extraordinary
odds,” reads a US Empire statement explaining the
decision to name a warship after Fallujah, “the Marines
prevailed against a determined enemy who enjoyed all
the advantages of defending in an urban area.”… What
is left is the haunting absence of family members,
homes bombed into nonexistence and photographs
incinerated along with the smiling faces. Instead, a
lethally corrupt system of cross-sectarian camaraderie-
in-theft was bequeathed to us by the unpunished war
criminals of Downing Street and the Beltway.
Salih quotes Walter Benjamin in his Theses on the
Philosophy of History: “Whoever has emerged
victorious participates to this day in the triumphal
procession in which the present rulers step over those
who are lying prostrate.”
“Through this historical revisionism,” Salih concludes,
“the US has launched another assault on our dead.
Benjamin had warned us: ‘Even the dead will not be
safe from the enemy if he wins.’ The enemy has won.”
That’s the true image of NATO, as many victims can
testify.
But what do Iraqis know, or other Brown and Black
people like them? For “The Truth” one can turn to a
Polish writer who obediently repeats the most vulgar
American propaganda, echoing many of his
counterparts among the commissars at home.
Let’s be fair, however. At the time of the massacre, the
U.S. media did report what was going on. I can do no
better than to quote at length from the damning
compilation of much of that reporting that Australian
journalist John Menadue published in 2018:
On October 16, 2004, the Washington
Post reported that “electricity and water were cut off to
the city just as a fresh wave of [bombing] strikes began
Thursday night, an action that US forces also took at
the start of assaults on Najaf and Samarra.” The Red
Cross and other aid agencies were also denied access to
deliver the most basic of humanitarian aid — water,
food, and emergency medical supplies to the civilian
population.
On November 7, a New York Times front page
story detailed how the Coalition’s ground campaign
was launched by seizing Fallujah’s only hospital:
“Patients and hospital employees were rushed out of
the rooms by armed soldiers and ordered to sit or lie on
the floor while troops tied their hands behind their
backs.” The story also revealed the motive for attacking
the hospital: “The offensive also shut down what
officers said was a propaganda weapon for the
militants: Fallujah General Hospital with its stream of
reports of civilian casualties.” The city’s two medical
clinics were also bombed and destroyed.
In a November 2005 editorial denouncing its use,
the New York Times described white phosphorous,
“Packed into an artillery shell, it explodes over a
battlefield in a white glare that can illuminate an
enemy’s positions. It also rains balls of flaming
chemicals, which cling to anything they touch and burn
until their oxygen supply is cut off. They can burn for
hours inside a human body.”
In early November 2004, alongside the New York
Times reports that Fallujah’s main hospital had been
attacked, the Nation magazine referred to “reports that
US armed forces killed scores of patients in an attack
on a Fallujah health centre and have deprived civilians
of medical care, food and water.”
The BBC reported on 11 November 2004 “Without
water and electricity, we feel completely cut off from
every one else … there are dead women and children
lying on the streets. People are getting weaker from
hunger. Many are dying from their injuries because
there is no medical help left in the city whatsoever.”
On 14 November 2004, the Guardian reported “The
horrific conditions for those who remained in the city
have begun to emerge in the last 24 hours as it becomes
clear that US military claims of ‘precision’ targeting of
insurgent positions were false.… The city has been
without power or water for days.”
That’s NATO, for those willing to learn about the
world.
But enough of this deplorable whataboutism. Orders
from on high are that it is outrageous to compare the
new Hitler’s assault on Ukraine with the misguided but
benign U.S.-U.K. mercy mission to help Iraqis by
ousting an evil dictator — whom the U.S.
enthusiastically supported right through his worst
crimes, but that’s not proper fare for the intellectual
class.
Again, however, we should be fair. Not all agree that
it’s improper to raise questions about the U.S. mission
in Iraq. Recently, there was much ado about Harvard’s
rejection of Human Rights Watch Director Kenneth
Roth for a position at the Kennedy School, quickly
rescinded under protest. Roth’s credentials were lauded.
He even took the negative position in a debate,
moderated by noted human rights advocate Samantha
Power, on whether the Iraq invasion qualifies as
humanitarian intervention. (Michael Ignatieff, director
of the Carr Center for Human Rights, argued it did
qualify.)
How lucky we are that at the peak of the intellectual
world, our culture is so free and open that we even can
have a debate on whether the enterprise was an exercise
in humanitarianism.
The undisciplined might ask how we would react to an
analogous event at Moscow University.
REVIEW OF THE MONTH
THE NEW IRRATIONALISM
by John Bellamy Foster
(Feb 01, 2023)
. dominant force near the end of the century—to the rise
More than a century after the commencement of the
Great Crisis of 1914–1945, represented by the First
World War, the Great Depression, and Second World
War, we are seeing a sudden resurgence of war and
fascism across the globe. The capitalist world economy
as a whole is now characterized by deepening
stagnation, financialization, and soaring inequality. All
of this is accompanied by the prospect of planetary
omnicide in the dual forms of nuclear holocaust and
climate destabilization. In this dangerous context, the
very notion of human reason is frequently being called
into question. It is therefore necessary to address once
again the question of the relation of imperialism or
monopoly capitalism to the destruction of reason and
the ramifications of this for contemporary class and
anti-imperialist struggles.
In 1953, Georg Lukács, whose 1923 History and Class
Consciousness had inspired the Western Marxist
philosophical tradition, published his magisterial
work, The Destruction of Reason, on the close relation
of philosophical irrationalism to capitalism,
imperialism, and fascism.1 Lukács’s work set off a
firestorm among Western left theorists seeking to
accommodate themselves to the new American
imperium. In 1963, George Lichtheim, a self-styled
socialist operating within the general tradition of
Western Marxism while virulently opposed to Soviet
Marxism, wrote an article for Encounter Magazine,
then covertly funded by the Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA), in which he vehemently attacked The
Destruction of Reason and other works by Lukács.
Lichtheim accused Lukács of generating an “intellectual
disaster” with his analysis of the historical shift from
reason to unreason within European philosophy and
literature, and the relation of this to the rise of fascism
and the new imperialism under U.S. global hegemony.2
This was not the first time, of course, that Lukács had
been subjected to such strong condemnations by figures
associated with Western Marxism. Theodor Adorno,
one of the dominant theorists of the Frankfurt School,
attacked Lukács in 1958 when the latter was still under
house arrest for supporting the 1956 revolution in
Hungary. Writing in Der Monat, a journal created by
the occupying U.S. Army and funded by the CIA,
Adorno charged Lukács with being “reductive” and
“undialectical,” writing like a “Cultural Commissar,”
and with being “paralysed from the outset by the
consciousness of his own impotence.”3
However, the 1963 attack on Lukács by Lichtheim
in Encounter took on an added significance due to its
absolute condemnation of Lukács’s The Destruction of
Reason. In this work, Lukács had charted the relation of
philosophical irrationalism—which first emerged on the
European Continent, particularly in Germany, with the
defeat of the 1848 revolutions, and that became a
of the imperialist stage of capitalism. For Lukács,
irrationalism, including its ultimate coalescence with
Nazism, was no fortuitous development, but rather a
product of capitalism itself. Lichtheim responded by
charging Lukács with having committed an “intellectual
crime” in illegitimately drawing a connection between
philosophical irrationalism (associated with such
thinkers as Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche,
Henri Bergson, Georges Sorel, Oswald Spengler,
Martin Heidegger, and Carl Schmitt) and the rise of
Adolf Hitler.4
Lukács provocatively started his book by saying “the
subject matter which presents itself to us is Germany’s
path to Hitler in the sphere of philosophy.” But his
critique was in fact much broader, seeing irrationalism
as related to the imperialist stage of capitalism more
generally. Hence, what most outraged Lukács’s critics
in the West in the early 1960s was his suggestion that
the problem of the destruction of reason had not
vanished with the historic defeat of fascism, but that it
was continuing to nurture reactionary tendencies, if
more covertly, in the new Cold War era dominated by
the U.S. imperium. “Franz Kafka’s nightmares,”
Lichtheim charged, were treated by Lukács as evidence
of “‘the diabolical character of the world of modern
capitalism,'” now represented by the United
States.5 Yet, Lukács’s argument in this respect was
impossible to refute. Thus, he wrote, in terms still
meaningful today:
In contrast to Germany, the U.S.A. had a constitution
which was democratic from the start. And its ruling
class managed, particularly during the imperialist era, to
have the democratic forms so effectively preserved that
by democratically legal means, it achieved a
dictatorship of monopoly capitalism at least as firm as
that which Hitler set up with tyrannic procedures. This
smoothly functioning democracy, so-called, was created
by the Presidential prerogative, the Supreme Court’s
authority in constitutional questions, the finance
monopoly over the Press, radio, etc., electioneering
costs, which successfully prevented really democratic
parties from springing up beside the two parties of
monopoly capitalism, and lastly the use of terroristic
devices (the lynching system). And this democracy
could, in substance, realize everything sought by Hitler
without needing to break with democracy formally. In
addition, there was the incomparably broader and more
solid economic basis of monopoly capitalism.6
In these circumstances, irrationalism and the “piling up
of cynical contempt for humanity,” Lukács insisted,
was “the necessary ideological consequence of the
structure and potential influence of American
imperialism.”7 This shocking claim that there was a
continuity in the relation of imperialism and
irrationalism extending over the course of an entire
century, from late nineteenth-century Europe, through
fascism, and continuing in the new NATO imperium
dominated by the United States, was strongly rejected at
the time by many of those associated with the Western
Marxist philosophical tradition. It was this, then, more
than anything else, that led to the almost complete
disavowal of Lukács’s later work (after his
1923 History and Class Consciousness) by left thinkers
working in conjunction with the new post-Second
World War liberalism.
Nevertheless, The Destruction of Reason was not
subject to a systematic critique by those who opposed
it, which would have meant confronting the crucial
issues it raised. Instead, it was dismissed vituperatively
out of hand by the Western left as constituting a
“deliberate perversion of the truth,” a “700-page
diatribe,” and a “Stalinist tract.”8 As one commentator
has recently noted, “its reception could be summarized
by a few death sentences” issued against it by leading
Western Marxists.9
Still, there was no denying the scale of the undertaking
represented by The Destruction of Reason as a critique
of the main traditions of Western irrationalism by the
world’s then most esteemed Marxist philosopher.
Rather than treating the various irrationalist systems of
thought of the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth
centuries as if they had simply fallen from the sky,
Lukács related them to the historical and material
developments from which they emerged. Here, his
argument relied ultimately on V. I.
Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of
Capitalism.10 Irrationalism was, therefore, identified, as
in Lenin, principally with historical-material conditions
of the age of monopoly capitalism, the dividing up of
the entire world between the great powers, and the
geopolitical struggles over hegemony and spheres of
influence. This was manifested in an economic-colonial
rivalry between various capitalist states, coloring the
entire historical context in which the new imperialist
stage of capitalism emerged.
Today this fundamental material reality in many ways
persists, but it has been so modified under the U.S.
global imperium that a new phase of late
imperialism can be said to have arisen, dating back to
the end of the Second World War, merging immediately
into the Cold War, and perpetuated, following a brief
interregnum, in the New Cold War of today. Late
imperialism in this sense corresponds chronologically
with the end of the Second World War, the emergence
of the nuclear age, and the beginning of the
Anthropocene Epoch in geological history, which
marked the advent of the planetary ecological crisis.
The consolidation of global monopoly capital (more
recently monopoly-finance capital), and the struggle by
the United States—backed by the collective
imperialism of the triad of the United States/Canada,
Europe, and Japan—for global supremacy in a unipolar
world all correspond to this phase of late imperialism. 11
For the Western left itself, the history of late
imperialism has been primarily marked by the defeat of
the revolts of 1968, followed by the demise of Soviet-
type societies after 1989, which had as one of its
primary consequences the collapse of Western social
democracy. These events placed the Western left as a
whole in a weakened position, ultimately defined by its
general subordination to broad parameters of the
imperialist project centered in the United States and its
refusal to align with the anti-imperialist struggle, thus
guaranteeing its revolutionary irrelevance. 12
Here it is essential to recognize that the main
battleground of the U.S. imperium over the entire
period, dating back to the end of the Second World
War, has been the Global South. Wars and military
interventions—primarily instigated by Washington—
have been almost unceasing in response to revolutions
and national-liberation struggles, most of them inspired
by Marxism, occurring throughout the
neocolonial/postcolonial period. Although economic
development has emerged in recent decades in parts of rational critique, while substituting instinct, myth, and
the Third World, the intensity of the continual vomiting up of reason, as in Fyodor
exploitation/expropriation of economies in the Dostoevsky’s Underground Man (in Notes from
periphery of the system, taken as a whole, has increased Underground). All of this was linked materially and
under globalized monopoly-finance capital by means of ideologically to imperialism, barbarism, and fascism. 15
the global labor arbitrage and debt peonage, with the
result that the polarization of the world system between In Baran’s conception, analyses that pursued reason
rich and poor countries has also increased. The current divorced from a connection to material reality and class
imperial struggle or New Cold War initiated by took a purely “ideational” form. It followed that the
Washington, aimed at securing the U.S.-led unipolar defense of reason—not in a purely ideational sense, but
world, remains centered on control of the Global South, connected to the real material forces below—was an
which today also requires the fatal weakening of the indispensable part of the socialist struggle; one that was
Eurasian great powers of Russia and China that threaten more important than ever in the irrational age of
a rival multipolar order, contesting the U.S. unipolar monopoly capitalism and imperialism. Hence, exposing
system. the dialectic of irrationalism and imperialism playing
out in our time—an era when the development of the
In this dangerous and destructive climate of late productive forces no longer serves to disguise the
imperialism, irrationalism has come to play a growing destructiveness of the global capitalist system now
role in the constellation of thought. This initially took threatening all of humanity—needs to be a primary goal
the relatively mild form of a deconstructive of the left.
postmodernism and poststructuralism, which, in the
work of thinkers like Jean-François Lyotard and Unreason in History
Jacques Derrida, cast aside all grand historical
Irrationalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
narratives while embracing a philosophical
century was a well-known current of European
antihumanism emanating principally from Heidegger.
philosophy, drawing inspiration from an emphasis on
In contrast, today’s new philosophies of immanence—
the will-to-life/will-to-power, instincts, intuition, myths,
associated with posthumanism, vitalistic new
and vitalistic life principles, as well as a deep social
materialism, actor-network theory, and object-oriented
pessimism—in opposition to the earlier Enlightenment
ontology—constitute a deeper irrationalism, represented
emphasis on materialism, reason, science, and progress.
by such putatively left figures as Gilles Deleuze, Félix
It took the form of a deeply reactionary movement that
Guattari, Bruno Latour, Jane Bennett, and Timothy
was virulently antihumanistic, antidemocratic,
Morton. These thinkers draw directly upon an
antiscientific, antisocialist, and antidialectical, as well
irrationalist, antimodernist intellectual lineage going
as frequently racist and misogynist. Some of the leading
back to the reactionary antimodernism of Nietzsche,
figures of the irrationalist turn in the period 1848–1932,
Bergson, and Heidegger. Lacanian-Hegelian
included Schopenhauer, Eduard von Hartmann,
philosopher Slavoj Žižek has ultimately taken sides
Nietzsche, Sorel, Spengler, Bergson, Heidegger, and
with the antihumanist tradition stemming from left-
Schmitt.16
Heideggerianism, generating in his work a carnival of
irrationalism. All of these various tendencies are
Such philosophical irrationalism was the intellectual
coupled with skepticism, nihilism, and a pessimistic,
generalization of larger historical influences occurring
end-of-the-world outlook.
within the dominant society. Hence, direct causal links
with reactionary movements are often lacking.
Writing on “The Irrational System” in the final chapter
However, the broad connection between these
of Monopoly Capital (1966), Paul A. Baran and Paul
ideational tendencies and the eventual emergence of
M. Sweezy explored the destruction of reason that had
fascism, and particularly Nazism, in Europe, is
come to pervade every aspect of monopoly capitalism,
undeniable. Sorel professed his admiration for Benito
from the irrationality of the economic system to its
Mussolini.17 Heidegger and Schmitt were Nazi
elemental destructiveness of social life. They thus
ideologues and functionaries. None other than Hitler
pointed to “the ever-sharpening conflict between the
captured the spirit of unreason present at the time when
rapidly advancing rationalization of the actual processes
he declared: “We stand at the end of the Age of Reason.
of production and the undiminished elementality [and
… A new era of the magical explanation of the world is
irrationality] of the system as a whole.” 13 “‘The crux of
rising, an explanation based on will rather than
the cruxes'” of the “Marxian insight,” Baran wrote in a
knowledge. There is no truth, in either the moral or
letter to Sweezy, was that the driving force of class-
scientific sense.”18
based revolution was always “the identity of
the material interests and needs of a class with…
Approaching the problem of irrationalism from a
REASON’s criticism of the existing
Marxist perspective, Lukács in The Destruction of
irrationality.”14 Irrationalism in bourgeois culture
Reason traced its historical roots to the defeat of the
therefore had as its main object separating any
bourgeois revolutions of 1848, followed by the
potentially revolutionary class from the realm of
emergence of the imperialist stage of capitalism
beginning in the last quarter of the nineteenth century,
leading to the First and Second World Wars. “Reason
itself,” he argued, “can never be something politically
neutral, suspended above social developments. It
always mirrors the concrete rationality—or irrationality
—of a social situation and evolving trend, sums it up
conceptually and thereby promotes or inhibits it.” 19 It is
immanent critique, based on the scrutiny of changing
historical conditions, that constitutes the essence of the
Marxian dialectical method in the analysis of the
development of thought.
For Lukács, Schopenhauer was the originator of “the
purely bourgeois version of
irrationalism.”20 His magnum opus, The World as Will
and Idea, published in 1819, was directed against
Hegelian philosophy. Schopenhauer attempted to
oppose his subjective idealism of the will to G. W. F.
Hegel’s objectivist idealism of reason. In doing so, he
went so far as to schedule his lectures in Berlin in the
1820s opposite to those of Hegel’s own, but to no avail,
since he was unable to attract an audience. It was only
with the defeat of the 1848 revolutions in Germany that
the overall climate shifted in his direction. At that point,
the German bourgeoisie shifted their allegiance from
Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach to Schopenhauer, who in
the last decade of his life achieved widespread
acclaim.21
Schopenhauer’s genius, according to Lukács, was to
pioneer the method of “indirect apologetics,” later
perfected by Nietzsche. Earlier apologetics for the
bourgeois order had sought to defend it directly, despite
its manifold contradictions. In Schopenhauer’s new
method of indirect apologetics, the bad side of
capitalism (and even its contradictions) could be
brought into the open. This was never attributed to the
capitalist system but to egoism, instincts, and will,
perceiving human existence in deeply pessimistic terms
as a vice-ridden process of self-
dissolution.22 Schopenhauer’s concept of the will, or the
will-to-life, which he attributed to all of existence, thus
took the form of a cosmic egoism. By reducing
everything in the end to pure will, Schopenhauer’s
philosophy, Lukács wrote, “anthropomorphizes the
whole of nature.” The will, for Schopenhauer, embraced
Immanuel Kant’s things-in-themselves (noumena),
beyond human perception. “I must recognize,”
Schopenhauer declared, “the inscrutable forces which
manifest themselves in all natural bodies as identical
with that which in me is the will, and as differing from
it only in degree.”23
Schopenhauer’s notion of the will was perhaps best
revealed by his response to Baruch Spinoza’s famous
statement that a falling stone, if it were conscious,
would think it had free will and that its momentum was
a product of its own volition—an argument designed to
refute the notion of free will. Schopenhauer inverted
Spinoza’s meaning and declared: “The stone would be
right. The path is the same for the stone as the motive
for me, and what is manifested in the stone’s case as
cohesion, gravity, persistence in the assumed state is, in
esoteric essence, the same as that which I recognize in
myself as will.”24 For Schopenhauer, “crude
materialism” simply denied the immanence of those
“vital forces” which were identical with the will to life,
beyond which there was “nothing.”25
The late nineteenth century was a period associated in
part with the growth of neo-Kantianism in philosophy,
beginning with Friedrich Lange’s The History of
Materialism and Critique of Its Present
Importance (1866), which sought to overthrow all
materialist tendencies—notably, Karl Marx’s historical
materialism.26 But even more influential and geared to
the new imperialist age was irrationalism as a general
philosophical tendency. Schopenhauer’s leading
follower (outside of Nietzsche, on whom he exercised a
considerable influence), and a dominant figure in
philosophical irrationalism in the late nineteenth
century, was Hartmann, with his massive tome, The
Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869). A more eclectic
thinker than Schopenhauer, Hartmann professed to be
bringing together Hegel’s optimism with
Schopenhauer’s pessimism. But it was the deep
pessimism and irrationalism of Hartmann’s work that
most impressed readers at the time, marked especially
by his notion of cosmic suicide.
In Hartmann’s view, this was the best of all possible
worlds, but nonexistence was superior to existence.
Hence, he believed that at some point the will, or
“Unconscious Spirit,” would become so wrapped in the
human species “at the height of its development” that it
would lead to a cosmic suicide, bringing to a “temporal
end” the entire world process, resulting in the “last
day.” At that point, “the human negation of will” would
“annihilate the whole actual volition of the world
without residuum and cause the whole kosmos to
disappear at a stroke by withdrawal of the volition,
which alone gives it existence.” Humanity’s end would
not take the form of a traditional “apocalypse,” coming
from without, but would emanate from the suicide of
the will, extending to the universe as a whole.27
Nietzsche died in 1900. The date was significant, since
in Lukács’s view, Nietzsche was the “founder of
irrationalism in the imperialist period,” which was then
only commencing. The imperialist or monopoly stage
of capitalism in Marxist theory began in the last quarter
of the nineteenth century, but, in terms of Nietzsche’s
life and work, only “the first shoots and buds of what
was to come” in that respect were visible. Nietzsche’s
genius was instinctively to capture a sense of what was
to come and to develop the method of irrationalism for
the new age of empire as a “mythicizing form” of
analysis, made more obscure by the frequent use of
aphorisms. It is this that accounts for the mesmerizing
nature of Nietzsche’s literary style, which was at the
same time a means of perfecting indirect
apologetics.28 Everything in Nietzsche is presented in a
haze so that, while the whole political-social thrust of
his philosophy is not in doubt, it also gives rise to
endless discussions arising from its mythic character,
inviting imitators, and establishing the dominant form
in which philosophical irrationalism is pursued to this
day.
Summarizing the main character of Nietzsche’s
philosophy, Lukács wrote:
The more fictive a concept is and the more purely
subjectivist its origins, the higher it stands and the
“truer” it is in the mythical scale of values. Being, so
long as its concept contains even the slightest vestiges
of a relationship to a reality independent of our
consciousness, must be displaced by Becoming (equals
idea). Being, however, when freed from these shackles
and viewed purely as fiction, as a product of the will-to-
power, may then, for Nietzsche, be a still higher
category than Becoming: an expression of the intuitive
pseudo-objectivity of myth. With Nietzsche, the special
function of such a definition of Becoming and Being
lies in supporting the pseudo-historicity vital to his
indirect apologetics and in simultaneously dismissing it,
confirming philosophically that historical Becoming
can produce nothing that is new and outruns
capitalism.29
Yet, for the all the brilliance—and even attraction—of
Nietzsche’s philosophy, its systematic reactionary and
irrationalist character cannot be denied. At the end of
his The World as Will and Idea, Schopenhauer had
declared that the will-to-life was everything, beyond
which there was nothing. Nietzsche, in a play on
Schopenhauer, famously pronounced: “This world is
the will to power—and nothing besides! And you
yourself are this will to power—and nothing besides!”30
In Beyond Good and Evil (1886), Nietzsche, in
opposition to Marxism, wrote:
Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury,
overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression,
hardness, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation
and at least, at its mildest, exploitation.… If it is a
living and not a dying body…it will have to be an
incarnate will to power, it will strive to grow, spread,
seize, become predominant—not from any morality or
immorality but because it is living and because life
simply is will to power. But there is no point on which
the ordinary consciousness of Europeans resists
instruction as on this: everywhere people are now
raving, even under scientific disguises, about coming
conditions of society in which “the exploitative aspect”
will be removed—which sounds to me as if they
promised to invent a way of life that would dispense
with all organic functions. “Exploitation” does not
belong to a corrupt or imperfect and primitive society: it
belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic
function; it is a consequence of the will to power, which
is after all the will of life.31
Here Nietzsche conflates appropriation—which, in
classical political theory and in the work of thinkers as
diverse as John Locke, Hegel, and Marx meant the
process of acquiring property (and which, for Marx,
ultimately involved production)—with
actual exploitation. Moreover, in Nietzsche’s usage,
exploitation was no different than expropriation (that is,
appropriation without equivalent or reciprocity). Thus,
in a sleight of hand, appropriation, which is the basis of
life, becomes equated with exploitation/expropriation,
which is not essential to existence, thereby shutting off
any notion of an egalitarian or humane future.
Moreover, Nietzsche ultimately grounds his view here
in a biological determinism, which, he tells us,
constitutes the “essence” of the “will to power.” In this
way, his essentialism with respect to human nature
differs from that of Thomas Hobbes only insofar as the
latter, in the historical context of the seventeenth
century, was a progressive rather than regressive
thinker.32
Nietzsche’s writings exhibit endless attacks on
socialism and even democracy. “Socialism,” he wrote,
was “the logical conclusion of the tyranny of the least
and dumbest.”33 In a twist on Darwinism, which he
appropriated in the form of a mere cliché along the lines
of social Darwinism, he argued that rather than the
survival of the fittest, European society was
characterized by the survival of the unfittest. In this
view, the mediocre masses or “herd animals” were
taking over society by force of numbers from the more
“noble” elements, so that it was the noble spirits that
needed to be protected by means of force. 34 “We shall
perish,” he wrote, “because of the absence of slavery.”
Detesting bourgeois society, but detesting democracy
and socialism even more, Nietzsche declared: “Such
phantoms of the dignity of man, the dignity of labour,
are the shabby products of a slave mentality hiding
from its own nature.”35
Modern society, for Nietzsche, interfered with the
natural hierarchy of races, constituting “an age” that
“mixes races indiscriminately.”36 This called for the
reassertion of the “master-race,” which he depicted in
“Aryan” terms, as connected to the “blond Germanic
beast” to be found “at the center of every noble race.”
In contrast, “the descendants of all European and non-
European slavery, in particular of all pre-Aryan
population—represent the decline of mankind.”37
Glorying in the defeat of the Paris Commune, Nietzsche
referred to it as the “most primitive form of social
structure,” since it represented the interests of the herd.
He worried about the tragic fate awaiting “the
conquering master race, that of the Aryans” in the
democratic and socialist age. Such conquering “Aryan
humanity” was characterized as originally blond and
“completely pure and primordial,” as opposed to the
previous “dark-skinned, dark-haired native inhabitants”
of Europe and elsewhere.38 In The Will to Power, he
openly declared: “The great majority of men have no
right to life, and serve only to disconcert the elect of our
race. I do not yet grant the unfit that right. There are
even unfit peoples”—lacking the right to exist.39
In Nietzsche’s notion of “eternal recurrence,” “noble”
spirits and the master race would again experience the
triumph of the will in the cyclical swings of history.
Yet, eternal recurrence, meant a lack of overall
progress, so that the cumulative result was
“Nothingness (the ‘meaninglessness’) for ever more!”
Although Nietzsche wished to supersede nihilism
through the Overman as the personification of the will-
to-power, it was to nihilism that everything always
eternally returned, as genuine forward progress was
foreclosed.40
Vitalism, or Lebensphilosophie, was, in Lukács’s
conception, the dominant philosophy of the whole
imperialist period in Germany. However, vitalism had
its foremost representative in this period in the work of
Bergson in France. Bergson’s philosophy rested on two
forms of consciousness: intellect and intuition. The
intellect related to the mechanical world of natural
science, intuition to metaphysics and thus the realm of
philosophy. He believed that, by looking inward into
the intuitive realm, it was possible to solve problems
like the character of time and evolution in ways that
complemented—but went beyond—science and reason.
Thus, he challenged, as Lukács put it, “the scientific
character of normal scientific knowledge,” creating a
“stark confrontation of rationality and irrationalist
intuition.”41
Bergson’s two most important concepts were those of
time as subjective duration, and the élan vital, or vital
impulse. On the basis of these concepts, he proposed a
kind of third way in philosophy existing outside of
mechanistic materialism and idealism/teleology.
“Time,” he stated, “is invention or it is nothing at all.”
The moment we confront “duration, we see that it
means creation.” Our own lives gave us the clues to
unlocking the secret of time, or the ability to endure,
since duration was not an attribute “of matter itself, but
that of life which reascends the course of
matter.”42 The élan vital was the creative impulse of
life, lighting up matter, which explained evolution. On
these essentially mystical bases, Bergson went on to
challenge Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution as
natural selection and Albert Einstein’s conception of
spacetime for failing to capture the subjective, intuitive,
and creative bases of existence.
Bergson was born in 1859, the year of the publication
of Darwin’s The Origin of Species, but he could never
accept Darwin’s theory of natural selection, arguing
that natural science was inadequate in this area, and that
there must be some vital, creative impulse, a
cosmic élan vital underlying all evolution. Utilizing
arguments that are now employed by advocates of
Intelligent Design—for example, that the evolution of
the eye could not be explained by natural selection—he
attributed “creative evolution” to a vital power
independent of matter and organization.43
Bergson’s attacks on the Darwinian theory of natural
selection, and on reason in general, caused E. Ray
Lankester, the protégé of Darwin and Thomas Huxley,
a close friend of Marx, and the leading British biologist
of his day, to rebel at Bergson’s presentation of
“intuition as a true guide and the intellect as an
erroneous guide.” In assessing Bergson’s contribution,
Lankester, a strict materialist, wrote: “To the student of
the aberrations and monstrosities of the mind of man,
M[onsieur] Bergson’s works will always be documents
of value,” akin to the interest that “a collector may take
in a curious species of beetle.”44 (Socialist biologists
subsequently transcended the debate between
mechanists and vitalists via materialist dialectics, in
what constituted a major contribution to science.)45
Bergson was incensed by Einstein’s theory of relativity,
which interpreted time (or spacetime) in terms of
physics and was gradually receiving general
recognition. In a famous face-off in April 1922,
Bergson argued in opposition to Einstein that a physical
notion of time professed by the intellect was inadequate
and that time could only fully be understood when also
approached subjectively and intuitively in terms of
duration. Einstein responded that, “The time of the
philosophers [conflating both psychical time and
physical time] does not exist, there remains only a
psychological time that differs from that of the
physicists.” For Einstein, neither Bergson’s élan
vital nor his duration had any meaning in terms of
physical science. 46
In Lukács’s view, there was no such thing as an
“‘innocent’ philosophy.” This was clearly the case
where Heidegger was concerned, despite its rarefied
aspect.47 In Heidegger’s 1927 masterpiece Being and
Time, the consideration of individual beings is
downplayed in the search for the “fundamental
ontology” of metaphysical Being. He proposed that
Being can be approached on the basis of an existential
analytic focused on Dasein, or human existence, which,
as he later explained, can be conceived as dwelling
in and performing the role of “the shepherd of Being.”
Hence, although Being, for Heidegger, cannot be
apprehended directly, it can be disclosed in part
phenomenologically and existentially by the scrutiny
of Dasein in the context of its “becoming-with” the
world.48 All previous philosophies, from Plato to the
modern era, were deemed by Heidegger to be
superficial and narrowly metaphysical insofar as they
did not focus on the fundamental ontological problem
of Being.49 One consequence of Heidegger’s philosophy
was to decenter the conscious (transcendental) ego, and
to shift philosophy from questions of subject-object
relations to authenticity and inauthenticity.50
Given that the pursuit of Being as such is the main
thrust of Heidegger’s existential analytic, one might
think that it would not have much relation to politics
and ethics. Yet, the reactionary, irrational, and vitalistic
elements in Heidegger’s philosophy, while not present
on the surface, seeped out in various ways, exhibiting
the true nature of his irrationalist logic. This occurred
not simply in his official Nazi period, but also in his
later work after the war, and was arguably implicit in
his whole philosophical position from the beginning.
Thus, in his published lectures on Being and
Truth, presented at the University of Freiburg in the
winter of 1933–1934, shortly after he joined the Nazi
Party and only a few years after the publication
of Being and Time, Heidegger declared:
An enemy is each and every person who poses an
essential threat to the Dasein [existence] of the people
and its individual members. The enemy does not have
to be external, and the external enemy is not even
always the most dangerous one. And it can seem as if
there were no enemy. Then it is a fundamental
requirement to find the enemy, to expose the enemy to
the light, or even first to make the enemy, so that this
standing against the enemy may happen and so that
Dasein may not lose its edge.… [The challenge is] to
bring the enemy into the open, to harbor no illusions
about the enemy, to keep oneself ready for attack, to
cultivate and intensify a constant readiness and to
prepare the attack looking far ahead with the goal of
total annihilation.51
Heidegger’s roles as a Nazi Party functionary,
ideologue, and, during his years as rector at the
University of Freiburg, the most prominent academic
supporter of Hitler are now well known. He helped
institute Gleichschaltung, or the bringing-into-line
within the German academy, playing a leading role in
purging the university of colleagues and students who
failed to conform to the dictates of the Nazi regime. He
also worked closely with the legal theorist Schmitt, the
main author of the notorious Führer principle,
promoting Nazi ideology and presiding over symbolic
book burnings.52 His 1935 Introduction to
Metaphysics not only provided a tribute to Nazism but
also advanced an argument for the triumph of the
“historical Volk [people]…and thereby the history of
the West,” activating “new spiritual energies.” In a
conversation with Karl Löwith in Heidelberg in 1936,
Heidegger agreed “without reservation” to the
suggestion that his “partisanship for National Socialism
lay in the essence of his philosophy.”53
Heidegger frequently lauded Mussolini and Hitler,
presenting Nietzsche as a forerunner of both fascist
leaders. In Heidegger’s book on Friedrich Schelling, a
long sentence from the original lecture was omitted in
the 1971 edition but was later reinserted at Heidegger’s
own request. It said: “As is well known, both of the two
men in Europe who have, in the political-national
fashioning of their respective Volks, inaugurated
countermovements [Gegenbewegungen] to nihilism,
namely Mussolini and Hitler, were in turn, each in their
own way, essentially determined by Nietzsche; still this
was so without Nietzsche’s authentic metaphysical
domain having come into its own.” Nietzsche,
Heidegger explained in his lectures, had shown that
“democracy” led to a “degenerate form of nihilism” and
thus demanded a more authentic Volk movement. In a
course on logic in 1934, Heidegger declared that
“Negroes are men but they have no history.… Nature
has no history.… When an airplane’s propeller turns,
then nothing actually ‘occurs.’ Conversely, when the
same airplane takes Hitler to Mussolini, then history
occurs.”54 “The sham culture” of Western civilization,
he explained, will be superseded only by the “spiritual
world” of the Volk based on “the deepest preservation
of the forces of the soil and blood.”55
In his infamous Black Notebooks (a philosophical diary
that Heidegger asked to be included at the end of
his Collected Works), he gave repeated evidence of his
deep antisemitism. Thus, he attributed the faults of
modernity and Western rationalism to “World
Judaism,” a term used in Hitler’s Mein Kampf referring
to a Jewish conspiracy of world domination. “World
Judaism,” Heidegger wrote in the Black Notebooks, “is
ungraspable everywhere [because of its dominance of
rationalist thought] and doesn’t need to get involved in
military action while continuing to unfurl its influence,
whereas we [Nazi Germany in the Second World War]
are left to sacrifice the best blood of the best of our
people.”56 Following the publication of the Black
Notebooks, as Heidegger scholar Tom Rockmore has
noted, “it seems increasingly clear that Heidegger’s
philosophy, his turning to National Socialism, and his
anti-Semitism are neither separate nor separable but
rather inseparably linked.”57
It is clear that Heidegger never moved away, or even
intended to distance himself, from his extreme
reactionary views, which underpinned his whole
philosophical effort. In his famous Letter on Humanism,
published in 1947, he provided a systematic attack on
humanism, disparaging German Enlightenment thinkers
such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich
Schiller. Unlike today’s posthumanism, however,
Heidegger was chiefly concerned with negating the
notion of human beings as primarily material or
corporeal beings, having an “animal rationale.” For
Heidegger, the truth lay in the existential analytic
of Dasein, conceiving real human existence as
approaching Being. In his usual veiled language,
Heidegger heralded a “destiny” still to come, based on a
historicity “more primordial”—closer to Dasein—”than
humanism.” Humanism, which he identified with
rationalism, was at all times to be opposed, “because it
does not set humanitas high enough” in promoting
the empiricist ontic of mere individual, material beings,
as opposed to the fundamental ontology of Being, in
which the conscious ego is decentered. 58 Heidegger
intimated that, due to language, which he saw as at the
center of Dasein, there was a close relationship between
ancient Greek and German cultures (along what was
generally conceived to be the Aryan line) that made
Germany unique in furthering the authentic historicity
of the West.59
In his Letter on Humanism, Heidegger acknowledged
the power of Marx’s critique of alienation before
proceeding to criticize naïve materialism and reducing
Marx’s theory of alienation to the issue of technology.
As Lukács stated, there was no doubt what Heidegger
was saying here, namely that he saw “Marxism as the
chief antagonist.”60
The Return of Irrationalism
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 interimperialist
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.” 63 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.”65
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.67 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.68
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.69
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. 70
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.'”72 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.”76
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.80
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.82
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.84 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.”85
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.86
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.87
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.”88
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.”90
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.91
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.
Notes
1. ↩ Georg Lukács, Die Zerstörung der
Vernunft (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlang, 1953), English
translation, The Destruction of Reason (London:
Merlin Press, 1980).
2. ↩ George Lichtheim, “An Intellectual
Disaster,” Encounter (May 1963): 74–79. Lichtheim
was ostensibly reviewing George Lukács’s The
Meaning of Contemporary Realism (London: Merlin
Press, 1963).
3. ↩ Rodney Livingston, Perry Anderson, and Francis
Mulhern, “Presentation IV,” in Theodor Adorno,
 Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, and Georg
Lukács, Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso,
1977), 142–50; Theodor Adorno, “Reconciliation
Under Duress,” in Adorno, Benjamin, Brecht, and
Lukács, Aesthetics and Politics, 152–54; István
Mészáros, The Power of Ideology (New York: New
York University Press, 1989), 118–19. Adorno
claimed that “The Destruction of Reason…revealed
most clearly the destruction of Lukács’s own”
reason. He falsely claimed that in the book
“Nietzsche and Freud are simply labeled Fascists”—
despite the fact that Nietzsche is approached by
Lukács in terms of philosophical irrationalism, which
does not of itself constitute fascism, while Freud is
barely mentioned in the book at all, and then not
negatively. Adorno, “Reconciliation Under Duress,”
152.
4. ↩ Lichtheim, “An Intellectual Disaster,” 78–79;
Lichtheim quoted in Árápad Kadarkay,
“Introduction: Philosophy and Politics,” in Georg
Lukács, The Lukács Reader, ed. Árápad Kadarkay
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 215. It should be noted
that while Kadarkay quotes Lichtheim here and also
in his biography of Lukács as referring to The
Destruction of Reason as an “intellectual crime,” this
statement is not actually to be found on the page of
the issue of Encounter that Kadarkay on both
occasions cites, and that others cite via Kadarkay.
However, since Lichtheim clearly refers, in another
issue of Encounter, to Lukács’s work at this stage as
an “intellectual disaster” and an “intellectual
catastrophe,” the “intellectual crime” statement has a
certain ring of truth.
5. ↩ Lichtheim, “An Intellectual Disaster,” 76. Despite
the impression that Lichtheim leaves, Lukács made
no allusion to “Kafka’s nightmares” in his book. The
scare quotes around the quoted phrase are
Lichtheim’s own, as Lukács made no such statement.
6. ↩ Lukács, The Destruction of Reason, 770.
7. ↩ Lukács, The Destruction of Reason, 792–93.
8. ↩ Árápad Kadarkay, Georg Lukács: Life, Thought
and Politics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 421–23;
Lichtheim, “An Intellectual Disaster,” 76.
9. ↩ Enzo Traverso, “Dialectic of Irrationalism,”
introduction in Georg Lukács, The Destruction of
Reason (London: Verso, 2021), 10. Traverso’s
introduction to the recently reprinted Verso edition
of The Destruction of Reason carries forward, rather
than distancing itself from, these earlier Western
Marxist attacks on the book, making his introduction
largely an anti-introduction, more characteristic of
the early Cold War era.
10. ↩ I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of
Capitalism (New York: International Publishers,
1939). Lenin’s argument was not directly analyzed in
Lukács’s book, but nonetheless constituted the
material background for the entire argument, as
imperialism in Lenin’s terms was a constant
reference point.
11. ↩ On late imperialism, see John Bellamy Foster,
“Late Imperialism,” Monthly Review 71, no. 3 (July–
August 2019): 1–19; Zhun Xu, “The Ideology of
Late Imperialism,” Monthly Review 72, no. 10
(March 2021): 1–20. On the collective imperialism
of the triad, see Samir Amin, “Contemporary
Imperialism,” Monthly Review 67, no. 3 (July–
August 2015): 23–36.
12. ↩ See Xu, “The Ideology of Late Imperialism“;
Paweł Wargan, “NATO and the Long War on the
Third World,” Monthly Review 74, no. 8 (January
2023): 16–32.
13. ↩ Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly
Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966),
338, 341.
14. ↩ Paul A. Baran to Paul M. Sweezy, February 3,
1957, in Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, The
Age of Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 2017), 154.
15. ↩ Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from
Underground (New York: Vintage, 1993), 13; Paul
A. Baran, The Longer View (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1969), 104. The phrase “vomiting up
of reason” is taken from Baran’s interpretation of the
Underground Man’s rejection of the “laws of nature”
and “two times two is four,” whereby the protagonist
of Dostoevsky’s novel, according to Baran, “vomits
up reason.”
16. ↩ On irrationalism see Lukács, The Destruction of
Reason; Herbert Aptheker, “Imperialism and
Irrationalism,” Telos 4 (1969): 168–75; Étienne
Balibar, “Irrationalism and Marxism,” New Left
Review I:107 (January–February 1978): 3–18;
Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy, vol. 7,
Part II, Modern Philosophy: Schopenhauer to
Nietzsche (Garden City, New York: Doubleday,
1963); “Irrationalism,” [Encyclopedia] Britannica, no
date, britannica.com.
17. ↩ James H. Meisel, “A Premature Fascist? Sorel and
Mussolini,” The Western Political Quarterly 3, no. 1
(March 1950): 26; H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness
and Society (New York: Vintage, 1958), 162.
18. ↩ Hitler quoted by Herman Raushning, Gespräche
mit Hitler (New York: Europa Verlag, 1940), 210,
translated in Gerald Holton, “Can Science Be at the
Centre of Modern Culture?,” Public Understanding
of Science 2 (1993): 302. For a slightly different
translation, see Herman Raushning, Voice of
Destruction (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1940),
222–23.
19. ↩ Lukács, The Destruction of Reason, 5.
20. ↩ Lukács, The Destruction of Reason, 192.
21. ↩ Copleston, Schopenhauer to Nietzsche, 27;
Lukács, The Destruction of Reason, 193–98.
22. ↩ Lukács, The Destruction of Reason, 204–8.
23. ↩ Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and
Idea, vol. 3 (London: Trübner, 1883), 164;
Lukács, The Destruction of Reason, 225.
Schopenhauer’s attribution of the will to all of
existence would have seemed less fantastic to his
readers in his day than is the case today. As the great
geologist Georges Curvier critically noted in his
famous “Preliminary Discourse” to his Researches
on Fossil Bones in 1812, some early nineteenth-
century scientists, including the mineralogist Eugène
Patron, attributed to “the most elementary
molecule…an instinct, a will.” Georges Curvier,
Fossil Bones, and Geological Catastrophes, ed.
Martin J. S. Rudwick (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1997), 201.
24. ↩ “From Baruch Spinoza’s ‘Letter to G. H. Schuller’
(1674),” Explanitia (blog), October 3, 2018,
explanatia.wordpress.com; Schopenhauer, The
World as Will and Idea, vol. 3, 164. Lukács, The
Destruction of Reason, 225–27.
25. ↩ Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, vol. 3,
159, 165–66, 531–32; Lukács, The Destruction of
Reason, 225.
26. ↩ Friedrich Lange, The History of Materialism (New
York: Humanities Press, 1950).
27. ↩ Eduard von Hartmann, Philosophy of the
Unconscious, vol. 3 (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench,
and Trübner, 1893) 131–36;
Copleston, Schopenhauer to Nietzsche, 57–59;
Thomas Moynihan, X-Risk: How Humanity
Discovered Its Own Extinction (Falmouth, UK:
Urbanomic Media, 2020), 273–78; Lukács, The
Destruction of Reason, 409; Frederick C.
Beiser, After Hegel: German Philosophy, 1840–
1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Pres, 2016),
158–216.
28. ↩ Lukács, The Destruction of Reason, 309, 319–21.
29. ↩ Lukács, The Destruction of Reason, 388–89.
30. ↩ Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (New
York: Vintage, 1967), 550.
31. ↩ Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (New
York: Vintage, 1966), 203.
32. ↩ Lukács, The Destruction of Reason, 361. On
Hobbes, see István Mészáros, Beyond
Leviathan (New York: Monthly Review Press,
2022), 42–44.
33. ↩ Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 25, 77;
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 118.
34. ↩ Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 33, 78, 364–65,
397–98; Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 110–11,
115; Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the
Idols (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1997),
41.
35. ↩ Nietzsche quoted in Lukács, The Destruction of
Reason, 327.
36. ↩ Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 111.
37. ↩ Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of
Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007), 23–24, 33. Deleuze oddly sees Nietzsche’s
concept of the Overman as his final triumph over
Hegel’s dialectics. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and
Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press,
1983), 147–94.
38. ↩ Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, 14–15;
Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 41.
39. ↩ The translation here follows that of Michael
Scarpitti, “The Perils of Translation, or Doing Justice
 to the Text,” 38, academia.edu. The Kaufman 50. ↩ Richard Wolin, Labyrinths (Amherst,
translation of The Will to Power leaves out the last Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press,
two sentences. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 467. 1995), 184; Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary
See also Ronald Beiner, Dangerous Minds: Realism, 20–21, 26–27.
Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Far
Right (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2018), 4, 137. 51. ↩ Martin Heidegger, Being and
Truth (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2010), 73 (italics added); Beiner, Dangerous Minds,
40. ↩ Lukács, The Destruction of Reason, 392; 4–5, 137.
Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 198.
52. ↩ Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger: The Introduction of
41. ↩ Lukács, The Destruction of Reason, 25, 403. Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished
Seminars of 1933–1935 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2009), 39–58; Richard Wolin,
42. ↩ Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (New York: ed., The Heidegger Controversy (Cambridge,
Henry Holt, 1911), 340–42. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1993); Richard
Wolin, Labyrinths,103–22.
43. ↩ Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy, vol.
9, Maine de Biran to Sartre; Part I: The Revolution 53. ↩ Heidegger quotes from Wolin, Labyrinths, 126,
to Henri Bergson (New York: Doubleday, 1974), 138. See also Wolin, The Heidegger Controversy,
216–23. On the relation of Bergson’s argument on 30.
the eye to that of current intelligence design
theorists, see John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and
Richard York, Critique of Intelligent Design (New 54. ↩ Briner, Dangerous Minds, 105–8;
York: Monthly Review Press), 14–15, 158–61. Wolin, Labyrinths, 134–35.

44. ↩ Ray Lankester, Preface in Hugh S. R.
Elliot, Modern Science and the Illusions of Professor
Bergson (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co.,
1912), vii–xvii.
45. ↩ See B. Sadoski, “The ‘Physical’ and ‘Biological’
in the Process of Organic Evolution,” in Nikolai
Bukharin et. al., Science at the Crossroads (London:
Frank Cass and Co., 1971), 69–80; Joseph
Needham, Time: The Refreshing River (London:
Georg Allen and Unwin, 1943), 241–46.
55. ↩ Heidegger quoted in Wolin, Labyrinths, 131.
56. ↩ Philip Oltermann, “Heidegger’s ‘Black
Notebooks’ Reveal Antisemitism at the Core of His
Philosophy,” Guardian, March 12, 2014.
57. ↩ Tom Rockmore, “Heidegger After Trawny,”
in Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, ed. Andrew J.
Mitchell and Peter Trawny (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2017), 152.

46. ↩ Bergson, Creative Evolution, 342; Jimena 58. ↩ Heidegger, Basic Writings, 225, 234, 241–47;
Canales, The Physicist and the Lukács, The Destruction of Reason, 833–36.
Philosopher (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2015), 46–47; “Einstein vs. Bergson: The Struggle 59. ↩ Wheeler, “Martin Heidegger.”
for Time,” Faena Aleph, faena.com.

60. ↩ Heidegger, Basic Writings, 243–44; Lukács, The

47. ↩ Lukács, The Destruction of Reason, 5, 496. Destruction of Reason, 836–37.

48. ↩ Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings (New York: 61. ↩ Georg Lukács, Lenin (Cambridge, Massachusetts:

HarperCollins, 1993), 53–57, 234; Michael Wheeler, MIT Press, 1971), 41–43.
“Martin Heidegger,” Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, October 12, 2011, plato.stanford.edu.
62. ↩ Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of
Capitalism,119.
49. ↩ Heidegger made an exception for some of the pre-
Socratic philosophers, particularly Heraclitus.
63. ↩ Raymond Williams, The Long
Revolution (Cardigan, UK: Parthian, 2012), 69.

64. ↩ Wolin, Labyrinths, 1.
65. ↩ Keti Chukhrov, Practicing the
Good (Minneapolis: e-flux/University of Minnesota
Press, 2020), 20.
66. ↩ Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 8–10, 198.
67. ↩ Gilles Deleuze, “I Have Nothing to
Admit,” Semiotexte 2, no. 3 (1977), 112; Brian
Massumi, introduction in Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1983), x.
68. ↩ Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism (New York: Zone
Books, 1991), 79–85.
69. ↩ Chukhrov, Practicing the Good, 20.
70. ↩ Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 3–5.
71. ↩ Karl Marx, Early Writings (London: Penguin,
1974), 349–50 (quoted in accordance with Deleuze
and Guattari, op. cit.), 398–99.
72. ↩ Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 5.
73. ↩ Félix Guattari, The Machinic Unconscious (Los
Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011); Karl Marx and
Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New
York: Monthly Review Press, 1964), 1.
74. ↩ In Deleuze’s vitalistic philosophy, essences are
immanent in mobile, material things, and thus seen
as distinguished from essentialism in the sense of
fixed, transcendent ideas.
75. ↩ Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (London:
Routledge, 1994), 219–20. If Derrida’s Specters of
Marx seeks to deconstruct Marxian praxis, other
works have used Marx’s figure of the specter to
reconstruct revolutionary praxis. See especially
China Miéville, A Spectre Haunting: On the
Communist Manifesto (Bloomsbury: Head of Zeus,
2022).
76. ↩ Derrida, Specters of Marx, 93, 219;
Wolin, Labyrinths, 238–39.
77. ↩ Baruch Spinoza, Ethics (London: Penguin,1996),
75 (III, prop. 6); “From Baruch Spinoza’s ‘Letter to
G. H. Schuller’ (1674)”; Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza:
Practical Philosophy (San Francisco: City Lights,
1988), 97–104.
78. ↩ Jane Bennet, Vibrant Matter (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2010), xiv–xv, 1–4; Timothy
Morton, Humankind (London: Verso, 2019), 33, 55,
61–63, 71, 97, 166–71. See John Bellamy Foster,
“Marx’s Critique of Enlightenment
Humanism,” Monthly Review 74, no. 8 (January
2023): 1–15.
79. ↩ Bennet, Vibrant Matter, 1–4.
80. ↩ Foster, “Marx’s Critique of Enlightenment
Humanism,” 10–12.
81. ↩ Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2004), 75–
80; Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2007), 54–55; Bruno
Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press,1993).
82. ↩ Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia (Cambridge: Polity,
2017), 220–54, 285–92; Bruno Latour, Down to
Earth (Cambridge: Polity, 2018).
83. ↩ Lukács, The Destruction of Reason, 839–40.
84. ↩ Latour, Facing Gaia, 285–92.
85. ↩ Bruno Latour, “Love Your Monsters,”
Breakthrough Institute, February 14, 2012, org.
Latour took a more progressive and less irrationalist
step in his final, posthumous book, but it is not a
radical one. See Bruno Latour and Nikolaj
Schultz, On the Emergence of an Ecological
Class (London: Polity, 2022).
86. ↩ Slavoj Žižek, “The Persistence of Ontological
Difference,” in Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, ed.
Mitchell and Trawny, 186–200.
87. ↩ Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the
Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso,
2013), 6, 878–79.
88. ↩ Slavoj Žižek, “Ecology Against Mother Nature,”
Verso Blog, May 26, 2015; Slavoj Žižek,
“Censorship Today: Violence, or Ecology as a New
 Opium for the Masses,” 2007, lacan.com; Slavoj and Deborah Veneziale, Washington’s New Cold
Žižek, Absolute Recoil: Toward a New Foundation War (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2022).
of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2016),
7–12. Although critical of new materialism, Žižek
sympathizes with its virulently antihumanist, 2023, Volume 74, Issue 09 (February)
antirealist perspective.

89. ↩ Slavoj Žižek, “Where Is the Rift?: Marx, Lacan,

Capitalism, and Ecology,” Los Angeles Review of
Books 20 (January 2020); Žižek, Less than Nothing,
207. Žižek claims that there are four relevant forms
of materialism today: (1) reductionist vulgar
materialism (cognitive psychology, neo-Darwinism),
(2) atheism (Christopher Hitchens), (3) discursive
materialism (Michel Foucault), and (4) “new
materialism” (Deleuze). Marxism is deliberately
excluded from his list. The only route to a viable
“dialectical materialism,” he claims, contra Engels
and Lenin, is through a “materialism without
materialism” via Hegelian idealism taken to its limits
and reinterpreted by means of Jacques Lacan and
Heidegger. His “new foundation of dialectical
materialism” as a nihilistic philosophy of “less than
nothing” finds its final justification not in Hegel or
Marx, but in Heidegger. Slavoj Žižek, Absolute
Recoil, 5–7, 413–14.

90. ↩ Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 983–84, 207;

Žižek, Absolute Recoil, 31, 107. Žižek presents the
projection of catastrophe as destiny as a “radical
solution,” in terms of a philosophical move. Yet, it
cannot be seen as either “radical” or a “solution,” but
simply a projection of cosmic suicide as fate, given
that no attempt is made, in his analysis, to point to a
way of countering this “destiny.” For a critique of
Žižek’s idiosyncratic and idealist approach to
dialectics, see Adrian Johnston, A New Dialectical
Idealism: Hegel, Žižek, and Dialectical
Materialism (New York: Columbia University Press,
2018); see also Adrian Johnston, “Materialism
without Materialism: Slavoj Žižek and the
Disappearance of Matter,” in Slavoj Žižek and
Dialectical Materialism, ed. Agon Hamza and Frank
Ruda (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 3–22. As
Johnston says, Žižek’s work constitutes a “betrayal,
rather than reinvention, of dialectical materialism.”
Johnston, “Materialism without Materialism,” 11.

91. ↩ Slavoj Žižek, “The Ukraine Safari,” Project

Syndicate, October 13, 2022; Slavoj Žižek,
“Pacifism Is the Wrong Response to the War in
Ukraine,” Guardian, June 21, 2022; “Ukraine and the
Third World,” Kurtay Academics, March 4, 2022,
kurtayacademics.com; Jonathan Cook, “A Lemming
Leading the Lemmings: Slavoj Žižek and the
Terminal Crisis of the Anti-War Left,” MintPress
News, June 23, 2022. On the nuclear dangers of the
New Cold War, see John Bellamy Foster, John Ross,