I was not surprised, exactly, when a communique from the University of Windsor’s PR department arrived in my inbox informing the ‘community” that the administration had decided– without prior, public discussion or deliberation– that University Players (the student theatre group associated with the School of Dramatic Art) was closing and the EPICentre (a small business incubator) will “be reimagined to integrate and enhance our innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem.” The Dean of my faculty telegraphed that cuts were coming, but she phrased it somewhat more eloquently than the biz-speak spoken by the Office of Public Affairs and Communication [emphasis added]. Communication involves a back and forth, an exchange of ideas and arguments that moves dialogue partners towards mutual understanding and agreement. There was no communication, no debate, no opportunity for the units and the staff affected by the decision (10 staff positions will be lost), to make their case and propose alternatives. Instead, a communique was issued, informing everyone of this latest fait accompli.

The more that faculty unions and their provincial and national organizations insist on collegial self-governance, the more university administrations become autocratic. At Windsor, the Bookstore has been privatised, unionised housekeeping and food services staff gradually being phased out in favour of private sector contractors, and our off-campus access to some campus computing services made contingent upon allowing the university to install corporate spyware on our home computers, all without even the pretext of democratic debate.

The tactic of making decisions behind closed doors has a certain tactical brilliance. Reversing decisions is much more difficult than pro-active organization to prevent a bad decision from being taken. One cannot oppose that which one does not know is coming. Once the decision has been made, reactive opposition is difficult to build. A certain number of people who could potentially be enlisted in a constructive project centred around finding creative alternatives to cuts will conclude that the die has been cast and nothing can be done to change the new reality. That already limits the pool from which an opposition could be recruited. A certain number of others will support the changes, and another subset– always the largest– will not care. Only a minority of a minority will publicly oppose the moves but– being on the back foot right from the beginning– anything that they might organize will be small and ineffective.

This weakness is a function of the very low level of political engagement on Canadian campuses. I read colleagues for whom I have immense respect (having worked with them more closely in an earlier era where I was more actively involved in political struggle) and cannot understand why they think that the student encampments against the Gaza War portend the re-birth of a vital student movement to rival the 1960’s youth rebellion. While the students are right to mobilise and the encampments should be defended on grounds of academic freedom, the actual numbers of students involved are vanishingly small. In Windsor, the numbers actively camped out in the quad number in the dozens, out of a student population of about 16 000. Even the biggest encampments have attracted no more than a couple of hundred protestors. The only resemblance to the 1960’s is a revolutionary rhetoric vastly at odds with the students’ power to effectively counter the political economic structures of contemporary capitalism.

Calls to divest from arms industries are all well and good, but the university has been integrated with the capitalist economy since the birth of its modern form in mid-nineteenth century Germany. Demands for more Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion that are banal components of every campus movement just echo the lingua franca of corporate leadership. The bosses are as committed to “diversity” as they are to the doublespeak that portrays cuts that weakening of the academic mission of the university as “ensuring continuity and innovating new approaches to enrich the student experience and strengthen community partnerships.” If Laurentian University could be gutted by a bankruptcy court with virtually no provincial mobilisation in support of our Sudbury colleagues, one can be certain that this round of cuts– and they will not be the last– will be implemented with no more resistance than tree leaves pose to a howling thunderstorm wind. That is not the fault of individuals grown indifferent and inured to cuts; individual indifference is a function of the low level of political mobilisation on campuses and in the wider society, which is in turn a function of decades of mostly defeat for the labour movement and other progressive forces. Corrosive and backward identity politics dominates the left, making the construction of the solidarity that would be required to rebuild effective political movements more difficult.

But there is another side to the particular issue of budget cuts that needs to be addressed. The political economic dimension of the problem is well-understood. The administration pointed to the need to solve a 5.6 million dollar budget deficit as the cause of the elimination of University Players and the EPICentre. They argued, correctly, that provincial funding policies are the root cause of that deficit. However, that is also a feint to distract attention from matters that they do control: how they allocate revenues. Across the last two administrations those priorities have been new building construction, expanding the size of the administration and support bureaucracy, and paying outside service providers. My own Faculty, (Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences) has been under a virtual hiring freeze for years because the budget model that the university has adopted puts FAHSS in a structural deficit impossible to cut our way out from under. This model makes absurd assumptions (for example, it ‘charges’ the faculty 10 000 dollars per office, as if we were renting space from a commercial landlord) and forces faculties and departments to compete for resources. While FAHSS departments in particular have been constrained by lack of hiring, the administration has continued to hire more administrators and ship money out the door by contracting out campus services. Only a few weeks ago, I received another email informing me that the university was spending something like 9 million dollars on new photocopiers and their accompanying software suite.

Photocopiers! Nine million dollars! What happened to the paperless office?

I hope whomever occupies the Philosophy Department’s offices after we are amalgamated with another department (as I fear is almost inevitable in the near future) enjoys it. Having lost 5 colleagues to retirements, resignations, and death over the past few years my department seems destined, in a best case scenario, to be forced into some sort federal arrangement with a larger unit.

Is this now the purpose of the university in the twenty-first century, to provide a home for photocopiers but not philosophers? Perhaps. But if philosophers want to prevail, we must ask ourselves some hard questions which– despite our vocation as gadflies– we are often loath to ask.

That question, the other side of the problem of cuts that philosophers and humanists are less inclined to want to consider is: if we are so important, why do our numbers continue to decline relative to the sciences and professional schools? Philosophers (and other humanists) know, or think they know, why philosophy and the humanities are important. But do students know or care? The numbers suggest that more and more that they do not.

The typical explanation of the decline of humanities and arts enrollments focuses on parents’ and students’ perceptions about post-graduation job prospects and the typical solution involves pointing out that statistics do not support the prevailing pessimistic assumption. But that solution has not arrested the decline. Could there not be, in addition to these practical concerns, a deeper crisis affecting humanities education, one that forces us to re-think what the purpose of a university in 2024 ought to be?

Academic departments are organized by academics who have devoted their working life to their chosen field of inquiry. Humanists love texts, we love to read, we love to write, argue, and reflect; we have organized our departments to impart that love of texts to new generations of students, and we tend to focus our attention on those who remind us of younger versions of ourselves, whom we nurture by mentoring them through their undergraduate degree and then sending them off– like proud parents– to graduate study elsewhere, hopefully to see them once again on the conference circuit as a newly minted PhDs. The problem is obvious: the vast majority of students will not become PhDs, not because they lack the intellectual chops, but because they are not interested in the life of the mind.

As I noted above, today’s university took on its contemporary structure in the 19th century, but its division into faculties and departments is literally medieval. Why do academics– especially academics who fancy themselves radical social critics– rise in defence of a 1000 year-old institutional structure? Relative to what pressing social problem: war, environmental crisis, poverty, the re-birth of the far-right– is growing the faculty complement of an academic department important? If–as all of us are quick to maintain– we play some sort of vital role in helping people understand those problems- what is it about any particular discipline that cultivates that understanding? What if what helps people understand problems is not anything specific about the historical content of different disciplines, but practices of thinking that would be better cultivated outside of existing departmental structures?

When we look out at half empty classrooms four weeks into the year we tend to blame students. They are lazy, distracted, immature. But we rarely ask if there is a problem with the way in which our programs and classes are organized. Maybe sitting in a classroom listening to someone talk at them from the front of the room about an historical era or a set of disembodied theories no longer speaks to them in the world that they inhabit, relative to the problems that they face.

The problems that the world faces are practical, but they cannot be solved unless they are understood in their complete reality. The university has always been a contradictory institution, devoted, on the one hand, to the production of people who will occupy positions of authority, but, on the other hand, to educating those same people. Thus, the university is part of the process by which societies reproduce themselves but also, in so far as it must educate, also a space in which critical perspectives on social institutions and value systems necessarily emerge. Even the medieval university in which faculty members always ran the risk of being charged with heresy, allowed a wider latitude than is sometimes thought for debate. Education demands a turning of the mind against the givenness of reality; a questioning attitude vis-a-vis the world as it present itself. Education begins when one asks how the world came to be the way the world is.

No discipline can answer this question on its own and recognizing that fact is perhaps the starting point for much needed thinking about how the educational purpose of the university can guide what I think is an increasingly urgent need to reform its structure and pedagogy. Let us reflect on that most basic question for a moment: how did the world come to be the way it is? What discipline does not make a contribution to the answer to that question? Cosmologists, chemists, evolutionary biologists explain how the universe has developed from a superhot plasma after the Big Bang to human societies in which intelligent people continue to work on refining those explanations. But people do not only work out empirical explanations, they also wonder. And so philosophers, theologians, and artists, those who, in different ways focus on the meaning of life in properly human experience, have as central a role to play in answering the question of how the world became the world that it is, because it has not simply evolved according to natural laws, it has been shaped by human wonder and creative activity. But it has not simply been shaped by wonder and activity: the existence of human beings presupposes their ability to satisfy their life-needs. People satisfy those needs through different forms of social organization. Hence historians, sociologists, political scientists, and economists all have something essential to say about how societies have been organized to satisfy those needs, but so too health care professionals and psychologists about the scope and content of those needs. Moreover, since any historical inquiry into the institutions of any society will reveal inequalities in access to the resources, critical perspectives that look into the ways in which inequalities have been justified and how people have organized to overcome them are required.

The throughline connecting this way of seeing disciplinary diversity is the contribution each makes to understanding human society as it is at present. Each of those disciplines has its own history and everyone will situate themselves differently within that discipline, but that is of lesser importance when it comes to organizing the teaching mission of the university. What matters for the student– the person who is becoming educated (as opposed to becoming a philosopher, a psychologist, etc.,) — is what the way of thinking that distinguishes these different approaches contributes to the answer to the question as a whole. Instead of organizing education under the implicit assumption that its function is to produce philosophers, psychologists etc., the guiding principle might become the education of people capable of understanding, in a unified way, the different perspectives necessary to comprehend the full scope of pressing problems. Classes could then be organized around problems, not disciplinary histories, and taught by teams organizing students into active working groups, not individuals talking at them from the front of a classroom.

Let me take just one example: climate change. In order to understand climate change one must understand atmospheric chemistry, mathematical modelling, and probabilistic reasoning. But one must also understand the origins of the crisis, which means that one must understand economics. In order to understand economics, own must understand the forces that operate in a capitalist society, but also the value system that legitimates those forces. One must be able to trace the cumulative effects of those economic forces over time, and thus also the political institutions and events that have allowed those forces to grow (and get them under control). That is a very rough sketch, but one can see how it might inform course design. Students would work with atmospheric chemists, mathematicians, historians, economists, political scientists, and philosophers to grasp the different dimensions of the problem. The focus would be on developing the cognitive and practical skills. Students and professors alike would have to learn to work collaboratively in teams and master and apply forms of thinking, not assimilate abstract discipline-specific content, in order to succeed. Professors would continue to pursue their own interests as researchers, but as educators they would have to invent new ways of working together to teach what their discipline can contribute to the synthetic understanding of the complex problems that life in 2024 poses.

This sketch is far from a plan and any attempt to institutionalise this approach would face significant hurdles. Inertial forces are very powerful in institutions, and the daunting problems of how workload would be calculated, how many teams a professors would expect to be part of , etc., are probably sufficient to prevent concrete steps towards making these sorts of changes being taken– until there is a system-wide crisis. At least in the humanities, I fear that the system-wide crisis is at the door. Will we solve it by being bold and creative or continue to lament program closures after the fact?

William Anders died on June 7th. On Christmas Eve, 1968 he was orbiting the moon as part of the Apollo 8 mission when he became the first human being to see the Earth rise. He snapped the photo that soon became an iconic symbol for the peace and environmental movements of the the unity and fragility of the only planet that we know of that can support life on its own. The pilot of the mission, James Lovell, stated with profound simplicity: “The vast loneliness is awe inspiring.” The half earth hangs in an empty field of perfect blackness. If we traveled along any vector from our planet out into that vast loneliness, it is probable that we would not encounter another living thing, even if we traveled forever.

Decades later an even more poetically evocative photo was taken by the Cassini spacecraft as it was orbiting Saturn. Looking back from 550 million miles away it captured earth, a “pale blue dot,” as Carl Sagan was moved to say. The picture enabled us to see ourselves as we typically see the other stars and planets: static, motionless, without structure or topography, just there.

Neither photo captured the face of God, just our home as it really is. A century before such pictures became possible, Marx wrote in The Communist Manifesto that progress begins when we are confronted by and understand our real conditions of life. Here are the real conditions of life: We live on a spinning ball of iron that generates a magnetic field that protects us from cosmic radiation. A just-right mix of atmospheric gases allows plant and animal life to flourish. Liquid water was available as a solvent in which life evolved and provides to this day the means of hydration that complex life-forms require.

A few years ago, my partner bought me a telescope for my birthday. It immediately rekindled my childhood love of astronomy. I can still feel the overwhelming excitement of seeing the rings of Saturn– the same rings from which Cassini would look back almost a half century later– through the eye piece of my uncle Joe’s telescope. I compiled vast notebooks of astronomical terms and facts, but I realise now that it was not the facts that compelled my interest, not even the marvels that I saw, but an idea. I would never have been able to express it when I was 8 or 9 years old, but I understand now, thinking back, that what seized me on those cold nights in the little Northern Ontario mining town where I grew up was the idea that human existence is a paradox: we are, at the same time, and for the same reason, utterly insignificant and infinitely valuable and precious. We are alone in an entropic system of energy winding itself back to nothing. At some point in the future will we cease to exist and all records of our ever having existed will have been erased. So every value in the universe depends upon our existing right now. If there is such a thing as sin it is not violating the laws of the god that does not exist, it is failure to cherish every second of our lives that do.

Out of all the billions or trillions of solar systems, ours seems to be the only one in which life arose and lasted long enough to discover what it really is: a mathematical improbability so extreme that it forces even highly educated people to imagine that there must be some divine cause. But to fully feel the terrifying beauty of human existence we must resist the temptation to posit external causes. I don’t think that I ever, even as a kid going to Catholic school, seriously believed in God. My atheism has never been dogmatic but rather aesthetic: the absurd contingency of human life makes it ours alone, to fashion into a beautiful, open-ended creation, if only we make the right collective decisions.

But rather than create the social conditions for universal cooperation, we have spent millennia inventing distinctions that have no ultimate value but which function as justifications for depriving some groups of what they need and killing them if they are too insistent on resisting that deprivation. Looking back from Saturn we do not see any borders, nations, or people. We do not see any distinctions between “mine and not-yours.” We need to look at things from up high and far out in order to understand the proper value of those social distinctions that we create. As we spread out from our original home in the rift valley of East Africa our ancestors found themselves living in different material conditions. With the same brains and hands they worked to survive, and in the process developed different tools, different languages, different traditions, different forms of art and expression, different spiritual systems and mythologies, different types of architecture, structures of rule, and different philosophical explanations of what this all means and why it matters. We should celebrate the Tower of Babel which is the Earth.

But for different reasons in different historical epochs some groups want to silence the magnificent cacophony and make everyone speak the same language and sing the same song. But all cultures are variations on a theme of creative activity under survival pressure. One can do philosophy in any language. Science and philosophy are cross cultural and transhistorical efforts to understand the basic forces that shape our universe. Everyone has contributed in different ways. It is absurd to call natural science and philosophy “Western” or “Eastern” or whatever other qualifying adjective one wants to impose. There is no master race or one chosen people; no one is special, no way of life the only way. We have all been chosen– and not only us, but the millions of other life forms with whom we share the planet have been chosen too.

When we look at ourselves from space we can see that the only meaningful whole is the earth. The stillness and silence of the black ether in which our world orbits the sun should inspire stillness in ourselves: stop trying to force the future, stop lamenting the past, just stare into the sky, into the hopeful bright blue or the meditative dark of night, and be glad that you are here. And not only be glad that you are here, but be glad that you are here with plants and animals and others, all of us different, but all earth creatures who need to eat and breath and drink and be cared for and enjoy their brief moment under the sun and stars.

Years ago, I saw Laurie Anderson perform in Ann Arbor. She created a character who spoke in an unsettling, metallic, synthesised male voice. I cannot remember the main thrust of that part of the show, but I have never forgotten one thing that the persona said: “I love the stars, because we cannot harm them.” The phrase testifies to the magnificent untouchability of the stars, but also the cruel violence of human history: anything we can get our hands on, we can destroy.

For the past two years a plurality of my posts have focused on the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. When I started this site thirteen years ago I did not see it primarily as a vehicle for commentary on international relations but as a free space in which I could develop my philosophical work more creatively and accessibly than in academic publications. I continue to try to do that, but I also find myself pulled by some inner necessity to shed what little light I can on the defining conflicts of our age. I wish I could let my thoughts meander freely, but since there is no other world to go to, we have to learn to care for this one, and those of us with the privilege to be able to think for a living have a duty to turn our thoughts to the hot zones where life is being needlessly destroyed. No thinker should elevate their thoughts so high above the bloody realities that they can no longer see the people who suffer within them. They should think as clearly as they can about the causes of those problems.

It has been along time since I was a part of any political movement and it will be an eternity before I ever join one again. My philosophical side has always won out over my political sympathies. As a philosopher, I value the independence of my own mind above everything else. I try to learn from everyone I read or listen to and every sound and sight that my senses take in, but I refuse to toe anyone’s line and have become allergic as I get older to the mindless chanting of simplifying slogans. If problems were simple, they would have been solved by now. Nothing that I write here is the final word; everything that I post is an honest thinking through and an invitation to you to think those same things through in your own way.

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As with previous years I have collected last year’s posts and published them here. I hope that you will continue to read and think along with me as year fourteen of the site begins.

Alex Callinicos is one of the most important Marxist philosophers and social critics of his age. I have long felt that he does not get enough attention in North America. While the shelves of academic departments groan under graduate theses devoted to prolix obscurantists like Zizek, Badiou, and Hardt and Negri, who have for some reason claimed the mantle of leading radical philosophers, Callinicos’s much more incisive and concretely radical historical materialist analyses of the dynamics of the contemporary world is ignored. He is much better known in England where he lives and works, but he should be a central part of the conversation in North America. He perhaps suffers from the academic vice of writing too clearly and worrying about such trivial matters as empirical-historical evidence. Callinicos is more concerned with the substance of social analysis than with pseudo-profundity and anachronistic system-building that shed little concrete light on the social and political-economic dynamics of contemporary capitalism.

Thus, it was with some disappointment that I worked through the arguments of his most recent (2023) book, The New Age of Catastrophe. It had a perfunctory air to it, almost like he wrote it because an editor at Polity Press asked him to write it and not because he had something novel to contribute to solving the problems the book examines. Perhaps I am wrong, but the whole exercise struck me as the work of a writer going through the motions, rehearsing/re-hashing the “socialism or barbarism” threat. By the end of the book I was wondering whether or not its formulaic mantra that only revolutionary socialism can solve the fundamental conflicts and challenges of our age speaks more deeply to the exhaustion of revolutionary Marxist politics. I have been thinking along those lines for a few years, and Callinicos’ book did little to dissuade me from my worries. Rather than engage with alternative perspectives on the multi-dimensional crises the globe faces and demonstrate, patiently and in detail, why the Marxist approach is superior, Callinicos avoids the crucial question: if revolutionary socialism is the answer, why has no one been able to make it work? And if the last 107 years of socialist revolutions have failed, what concrete, historically grounded reasons are there to believe that another attempt will succeed?

Callinicos would be well-situated to answer this question, having been a leading figure in the Socialist Workers Party for decades. He has thus not only interpreted the world, he has tried to change it. Unfortunately, there is little here to inform readers about what lessons he has drawn that could help revive mass working class struggle for socialism. There are excellent analyses of Trump, the European far right, and tips of the political hat to identity based-movements for trans inclusion and Black Lives Matter, but nothing concrete about how workers can be mobilised en masse. Moreover, he fails to confront the hard questions about the impact of the structural fragmentation of the working class will have on the sort of mobilizing that Callinicos’ understanding of revolutionary socialism would demand. The book provides a clear and systematic explanation of how environmental, economic, and geo-political crises are interlinked with capitalist growth dynamics and competitive forces, bur offers no structural account of why these interlinked crises have not generated the sort of class consciousness that Marx and early twentieth century revolutionaries expected it to generate. Could it be that Callinicos’ silence speaks loudly in favour of the conclusion that the classical Marxist conception of consciousness formation is wrong?

What I mean by the “classical Marxist conception of consciousness formation” is that escalating social crisis will produce social pressures that push workers, on a global scale, towards a clear understanding of their interests in a socialist alternative to capitalism. I think that the premise from which Callinicos proceeds- that we are in the midst of a unified civilizational crisis– an age of catastrophe- with ecological, economic, and geo-political dimensions. But I see no evidence that this unfolding catastrophe is producing globally unified expressions of working class consciousness. it produces a wide variety of fightbacks that are shaped by the immediate structure of the problem faced: Black Lives Matter protests erupted against shocking acts of police violence, environmental campaigners mobilize in support of an immediate transition away from fossil fuels. Some within these movements argue that the particular problem cannot be understood in isolation from the underlying dynamics and values of capitalist society– precisely Callinicos’ approach– but these voices are: a) always in the minority, and b) have not successfully connected their theoretical argument to a revitalized revolutionary socialist practice led by the working class. If it is true that we are living through an age of catastrophe but the looming disaster has not produced a class conscious revolutionary subject, it is fair to ask: “what will?” And it is fair to worry that the answer might be: “nothing.”

Callinicos could respond that pessimism is unwarranted because the future is open and cannot be predicted. True enough. But what then is the value of the totalizing method that he argues one needs to adopt from Marx in order to fully understand the causes of the crisis? “Conceptualizing capitalism as a developing totalization is therefore intimately connected with insisting that the world doesn’t have to be the way that it is, that there are other possible worlds.”(11) Well, in the abstract, of course there are other possible worlds, but Marxism did not rest its arguments about the future on vague hopes, but on a purportedly dispassionate and objective analysis of dominant global trends that were leading to confrontations in which workers would lead the struggle for socialism. Call it what one will, dialectical, totalizing, what have you, it has repeatedly failed in its global predictions. Those failures should not be surprising, because no social scientific method, totalizing or not, can make predictions because history is not a mechanical system. Astronomers can predict with absolute certainty and to the minute the date, time, and path of the next solar eclipse, because the orbital planes and periods of the sun moon and earth are known quantities. While we can know the value of an arbitrary number of socially relevant variables– the poll numbers of different political parties, the changing structure of the working class, the inflation rate and the level of government indebtedness, the amount of carbon pumped into the atmosphere last year, the number of people killed in on-going conflicts, and so on, there is no way to synthesize all of these variables and predict what the state of class struggle will be one year from now. There is simply no theory– Marxism included– that can determine beforehand what effect the interaction of these variables will have in different countries and regions and on different classes and groups. What Callinicos calls totalization is really on going ex post facto integration of knowledge of whatever happens into a theoretical core of claims about how the accumulation of capital is the underlying driver of the relationships between human and nature, economic development, and geo-political conflict. There is much evidence to support that core claim, but on-going integration of new material is not at all the same as practical information about how to build and win a global class struggle.

To be fair, Callinicos does not argue that the totalizing method has predictive power. He admits that its totalizations are always after the fact connections between particular events (say, the war in Ukraine) and systemic forces (the geo-political drive of major powers to control spheres of influence, which in turn derive from the competitive drive of capital to expand). However, even if those connections are real, theoretical explanation of their operation is far to abstract to generate motivating political energy. To say that to end the war in Ukraine or Gaza we need a revolutionary socialist alternative is not a program of action. And if it should turn out that these local problems can be solved through local efforts short of revolution– and save lives and improve living conditions– then does not revolutionary socialism become like a mantra that gurus teach their disciples to chant but which changes nothing of importance in people’s day to day lives?

Callinicos’ political arguments suffer from a failure to attend to what I am increasingly coming to believe is the central practical contradiction that radical critiques of capitalism face. The demand for radical change is a demand about the future, but human decisions must be made in the present. The pressures of the immediate moment force vulnerable populations to opt for the choice that provides as much security as possible in the present, even if they understand: a) that the security it provides is tenuous, and b) might well perpetuate long term trends that will eventually undermine what little security the immediate choice provides. For example, workers in fossil fuel industries are not trying to destroy the world– they are just trying to make a living. But since the pressure to pay bills never goes away under capitalism, they are hardly going to be persuaded to become revolutionaries because they contribute (in a very small way, as individuals) to the climate crisis. Workers are not going to drop tools because Callinicos states that “the real solution” to climate change “is to get rid of fossil capitalism.” (60) Since bills must be paid tomorrow, workers will choose work under capitalist conditions over the mere promise of the benefits of workers’ control of production under socialism. Since life is typically more enjoyable with more money, workers will typically choose higher rather than lower paying work. On a global scale, workers in the Global South can hardly be expected to forego the benefits of higher standards of living today for the sake of an environmentally healthy world tomorrow.

Slogans do not pay the pills, and workers are unlikely to be persuaded to leave high paying (often unionized) work in the fossil fuel industry for promises of a socialist future. What might move them are serious just transition programs that allow workers to leave environmentally harmful industries to retrain and find equally well-paying work in a new field. Perhaps Callinicos would respond: but the capitalist state and the fossil fuel industry will never adequately fund just transition programs, because capitalism is not about just transitions but the exploitation of labour in industries where it is profitable to do so, under conditions of labour determined by the competitive dynamics operating at a global scale. Theoretically, he would be correct. But look at how that just throws workers back onto the first horn of the dilemma: unable to afford to leave the environmentally destructive industry they will almost certainly choose to stay if the only other alternative that socialists offer is a promissory note about how good the socialist future will be. And if governments offer something more concrete than a promissory note– an actual reform that can improve their lives right now– then what concrete role does the demand for revolution play?

An analogous concern can be raised with regard to his analysis of and solution to the economic crisis of capitalism. Callinicos’s argument proceeds from the premise that “the twenty-first century is exposing what Chris harman calles “the new limits of capital.”(61) Drawing on Marxist economist Michael Roberts’ argument that the financial crisis of 2007-2008 has never really ended, Callinicos shows that growth in the real economy continued to sputter despite the massive amounts of money pumped into the economy to save the banks and the historically low interest rates designed to foster investment and motivate consumer spending. The 2007-2008 crisis spelled the end of the fiscal policies associated with neo-liberal policy. They were supplanted by what Callinicos calls, following Klooster,” “technocratic Keynesianism:” top-down, central bank led fiscal stimulus directed to corporations and private banks, not ordinary people or social programs. (71-2) This trend was amplified by government’s economic response to the shut down of large sectors of the global economy during Covid. On the one hand, that governments could step in to save the global economy and working class living standards from total collapse puts paid to the myth that there is no alternative to the market.(80) On the other hand, given the fact that capitalism (as opposed to production, distribution, and appropriate of resources– the ‘economy’ as such) depends upon competitive market relationships, meant that the wholesale government intervention in the economy that Covid made necessary could only ever be a stop gap measure.

Massive government expenditures did allow capitalism to weather the Covid storm, but it did not re-start the engine of growth in the real economy. Instead, it set the stage for inflation and the tighter fiscal policies (higher interest rates) still hammering workers. Callinicos’s solution parallels his solution to the climate crisis: neither neo-liberalism, nor technocratic Keynsianism, nor any other policy of managing capitalism can solve its structural contradictions nor free it from its dependence on the exploitation of labour. Only “an upsurge from below” he argues, ‘will be needed to to break the back of neoliberalism and open the way to a different future.” (85). Once again, I agree, in the abstract, but note that Callinicos i silent about the structural impediments to a globally unified “upsurge from below.”

He does provide a sketch of what an alternative economic system would look like, referencing the pioneering work Pat Devine I agree that Devine’s model of a negotiated coordination economy (see Democracy and Economic Planning) is promising, but Callinicos (perhaps hamstrung by space constraints) simply asserts that it is a workable alternative to capitalist market relations.(165) Of course, there is no way to demonstrate on the pages of a book that an alternative economic reality can work, but I thought that the case for Devine’s model could have been strengthened had Callinicos compared it to better known alternatives (such as the model of democratic socialism that Thomas Piketty presents in his most recent book A Short History of Equality, or the position of egalitarian liberal American economists like Paul Krugman, Robert Reich, or Joseph Stieglitz) and provided concrete arguments in support of the superiority of Devine’s model. Without such a comparison, Callinicos’ s economic arguments run the risk of falling victim to the same problem as his solution to climate change: however attractive a negotiated coordination economy might be in theory, it is not yet a reality, and therefore does not address the immediate, day to day dependence of workers’ lives on the existing economy. If Piketty’s revived social democracy, or the egalitarian Keynesianism of the Americans, produce policies that can be implemented right now, how does one motivate workers to struggle for a systematic alternative which would take years or decades to develop and which might not work in practice?

A third aspect of this underlying problem arises in regard to his analysis of the geo-political crisis of the post-war capitalist states system. Callinocs divided the geo-political history of the states system since the later 19th century into three phases: the age of classical imperialism and colonialism (1870-1945), the Cold War struggle for hegemony between the US and the Soviet Union (1945-1989) and the contemporary world, shaped by the struggle of the US to defend its status as global hegemon (1989-present). (88-89) As anyone can tell from even the most cursory glance at the news, our period is one of extreme instability and volatility. Callinicos maintains, correctly, I would argue, that the structure of geo-political conflict must be understood in terms of the structural dynamics of capitalism, but the way in which particular conflicts are handled (his main example is the Ukraine war and the rising tensions between the US and China) is not determined in any mechanical way by economic imperatives but allow for better or worse means of solving the conflicts. Once again, Callinicos is correct in the abstract to argue that until capitalist competition over resources, labour, and markets is overcome there will be no solution to military conflicts. At the same time, those being killed in wars, whether in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, or Ethiopia, need the killing to stop right now.

Both the Ukraine and Gaza wars offer abundant evidence that international law, at least as it is currently institutionalized, cannot stop states from resorting to war when they determine that it is in their interests to do so. First, international law is ambiguous on crucial questions of what constitutes aggression, what the scope of the right to self-defence allows, what the precise weight of “proportional response” means, and so on. Both Russia and Israel have exploited these ambiguities to continue their wars against intense international pressure to stop them. More deeply, the structure of the international states system as a network of sovereign entities arrayed in competition with each other for resources and markets ensures that conflicts will regularly arise. That these states are also organized into trade, political, and military blocs in no way prevents competition from becoming conflict. Callinicos’s analyses of the main fault lines of the international system are astute and free from the shocking naivete one finds in some quarters amongst the anti-imperialist left about Putin’s war in Ukraine, but he once again leaves unanswered what to my mind is the critical question: what is to be done today about the suffering that warfare causes, in Ukraine, in Gaza, but also in forgotten conflicts like Ethiopia, Sudan, or anywhere people are being exterminated by political forces pursuing their agenda by military means.

The contradiction between today and tomorrow, abstract and concrete, returns in its most exigent and heart-rending form. The people being incinerated by bombs cannot wait for the revolution, so what do Marxists say? “Ukrainians, Russians, you are brothers and comrades, throw down your arms, or better yet, turn them against your oppressors!” That was Lenin’s argument in World War One, and the Bolsheviks put it into practice by withdrawing Russia from the war. Today, there is no political party or movement that can organize classes across nationalist lines. And in Gaza: do Marxists content themselves with slogans (From the River to the Sea) or demand a ceasefire, the return of hostages, and support for whatever political pressure there is for negotiations towards a two state solution? At whatever point in history one wants to date the start of the conflict the reality of mass life-destruction, right now, for everyone on the ground in Gaza, makes a cessation of fighting the only imperative. The revolution, the one state solution, the two state solution, whatever the ultimate solution of the conflict is, it seems to me, that if Marxists are going to have anything at all meaningful to say, it has to be said not from the standpoint of the dialectics of class struggle, not form the imperious heights with which the global struggle against imperialism is waged, but from the standpoint of suffering humanity. Roberto Duran said it best: “No mas” No more! and he stopped punching and being punched by Sugar Ray Leonard and walked out of the ring.

The book was published before the Gaza conflict and, as I said, Callinicos’s reading of international relations is rooted in a structural critique of imperialism but is mercifully free from cheerleading and sloganeering about how Putin’s Russia is a bulwark against (rather than an element of) an imperialist system. However, while he argues that there are political as well as economic drivers of imperialism (states define their national interest in historical and cultural and not just economic turns, those interest exert inertial force such that conflicts continue even after the initial historical conditions that caused them change, military power operates according to its own logic, etc), he ignores the positive side of international politics. War is a reality, but so too is diplomacy, negotiations, and arbitrated settlement of disputes. As with climate change and the economy, Marxists have to do better than assert that until the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism humanity will face no end of trouble. That might be true, but the revolution is not going to save the babies of Gaza. War has to stop, negotiations not class struggle are the only way to stop it today, and that principle- weak-kneed and humanistic as it might be– has to be the starting point.

No more!

Callinicos undoubtedly understands these arguments. As I noted, he has been a leading member of the SWP for decades, deeply involved in the unsuccessful attempt to build a revolutionary party in Britain. I admire his fortitude and commitment– I left the Canadian section of the SWP after about a decade. I believe in a socialist future but have no idea how to concretely build a movement to realize that goal, and Callinicos’ final chapter did not convince me that he knows either. He provides an excellent analysis of the growth of right wing populist forces across the world, but especially in the United States. He considers, and does not dismiss, the possibility that the US, still the world’s leading economic and military power, however much its status as global hegemon has been weakened, is heading towards a low-intensity civil war.(144-148) That likelihood was increased, perhaps dramatically, by Trump’s felony conviction in New York. The Republican party is openly de-legitimating the American justice system as a tool of the Democratic party. Think about the implications of that attack: it is in effect to claim that elections are not about the peaceful transition of power between equally legitimate parties within a just democratic structure, but that legitimacy resides only in one party (the Republicans) who must use power the next time that they acquire it to permanently entrench themselves. They Republicans are not the Nazi’s that they are sometimes rhetorically portrayed to be, but they are certainly manifesting totalitarian tendencies.

The New York case was widely regarded as the weakest of the cases against him. If– as now seems almost certain– he is convicted in the election tampering, January 6th insurrection, and classified records cases, then jail time seems inevitable. Will the chaos surrounding Trump might help re-unify the Democratic Party behind Biden? Probably. But will it help turn the Democratic Socialists of America into a mass party? Probably not. Interestingly, Callinicos does not even mention the DSA, even though they contain the remnants of the International Socialist Organization, (ISO), the US member of the SWP tendency. Perhaps more importantly, it also counts sitting members of Congress amongst its members. If that fact is regarded as irrelevant, that tells us a great deal about what Callinicos thinks about the prospects of the US socialist movement.

Instead of the prospects of actual socialists, Callinicos chooses as his examples of mass fightbacks trans and queer resistence ot right wing attacks and the massive protests organzied by Black Lives Matter following the police murder of George Floyd. While the right has successfully exploited anxieties around gender identity to mobilize its forces (especially at the local and state level in the US), Callinicos’s response takes a detour through a supportive reading of Judith Butler’s influential critique of gender as a natural kind.(152-153) As Callinicos notes, the relationship between biology and social construction in human history is complex, and Butler’s work has the merit of bringing out the historical fluidity of gender identity. At the same time, I would argue that, from an historical materialist standpoint, Butler errs too much on the side of social construction. Human beings are playful and capable of identifying with and as anything at all: but identification alone does not transform material reality. Thus, while rigid and mechanical linkages between biological sex and gender identity are untenable (and a target of feminist criticism going back to Mary Wollstonecraft and Olympe de Gouges at the time of the French Revolution), the mere expression of an identity is not sufficient to change politically and medically salient biological facts. Callincos understands this point– he spends pages defending lockdowns against Covid on the grounds that they were necessary to save lives, thus proving that mere psychological disposition is not sufficient to transform material reality. One had to get vaccinated, not just identify as a vaccinated person. I thought his treatment of the biology-social construction relation in the final chapter far too breezy (not to mention politically dismissive of the concerns of some feminists, lesbians, and just ordinary women about the implications of some versions of trans ideology on their interests in maintaining hard fought gains of the women’s movement). Are women no longer oppressed in Callincos’ view? Doubtful. But if they are, then the full range of voices needs to be heard and political differences respectfully worked through.

The explosion of quite massive street protests following the George Floyd murder are a much clearer cut case of the power– but also the limits– of mass mobilization outside the workplace. Callinicos cites figures that suggest that as many as 26 million Americans (and millions more around the world) came into the streets to protest police violence and structural racism. Huge numbers. But then think (as analysts must): that still means that approximately 326 million Americans did not protest. While these demonstrations, protests and occupations prove that mass mobilization from a very low level of political consciousness are always possible, the BLM demonstrations also remind attentive social critics of the weakness- (remember how Occupy fizzled) — of a tactic that centres on demonstrations. Here we come back to the problem of the temporal contradictions of struggle again– most people cannot protest day after day after day, because they have to work. Even if the boss supports the movement, they still need workers to show up for work. The silent compulsion of having to pay the bills once again appears as the enemy of radicalizing and generalizing the struggle. Callinicos wisely warns against, on the one hand, coalitions with centrist parties and, on the other, the fetishization of violent struggle, but what he does not offer— perhaps no one can– is a concrete means of dealing with the immediate structural forces that keep workers tied to capitalist employment day after day.

The book thus concludes with unsatisfying generalities. The fault here lies not with Callinicos, but, I think, first with the social forces that have fragmented the working class, and second, with the temporal contradiction between the immediacy of material needs and the idealism (in the colloquial sense) of the future. if the situation is as dire on all fronts as Callinicos maintains, then what real alternative do people have other than to struggle for what they can get today in ways that hopefully open space for more structurally transformative demands tomorrow. If this is the age of catastrophe then the world does not need prophets invoking the name of a future universal revolutionary subject. It needs boring problems solvers, today, right now.