(Section 8 of Ideology and Practice)
Many of the conventional approaches to theorising politics relate it to the acquisition of power. An orientation that flows from the common tendency of “protagonistic” ideologies[1] to reduce social power to the single dimension of already-existing “constituted” power. Radical critics of mainstream liberal constitutional theory, like Antonio Negri, register that republican thought distinguishes between constituent power and constituted power, but always assumes the former to be subsumed by the latter. The constituted power of the nation state subsumes the constituent power of the “people” in whose name it rules. While Negri and others challenge this subsumption of constituent power in order to re-assert its ever-present autonomous potential at a theoretical level, an analogous position is taken on a pragmatic level by community and workplace organising movements that talk about “building power”.
We will side-step a fuller discussion on the differences between “acquisition” and “building” models of social power until a later section and focus on sketching a schema for politics that is not immediately dependent on a single model of power but relates to the practicalities of decision-making and processes of establishing common purposes and pragmatic solutions to collective action problems.
By way of an alternative — the “cameral” model of politics
To find an entry into a conceptualisation of politics that doesn’t defer definition to notions of either “power” or “governance”, I propose we start with “the art of winning the room”, and its corollary “art of reading the room”, as a jumping-off point.
The “room” here is a metaphor for the space within which politics is practiced or enacted, in real time, by real people. It may not be an actual room. The citizens of the democracy of ancient Athens were driven up from the Agora by slaves to the raised stone outcrop of the Pnyx for the assembly (ekklesia). In the Syrian civil war (2011 to present), the diverse militias of a given faction would form “Operations Rooms” to coordinate military operations. During the pandemic, the meeting rooms of most decision-making bodies moved to the online virtual meeting rooms of Zoom or Teams.
But the notion of room that most crystallizes our “cameral model” of politics, is the one outlined in Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s 2020 article “Being-in-the-Room Privilege: Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference”. Taiwo’s piece deals with problematic aspects of the practices of deference as a means of trying to recognise and adapt to the challenges of standpoint epistemology. Standpoint epistemology is something we are going to come back to at a later stage in this text, so we’ll side-step that for now, also. But the aspect of the process that gives Táíwò his “Being-in-the-room Privilege” title is the question of who gets to decide who gets to be in “The Room Where it Happens” (to steal a song title from the musical “Hamilton”) and how this undermines the well-meaning intent of deference within elite spaces.
Some rooms have outsize power and influence: the Situation Room, the newsroom, the bargaining table, the conference room. Being in these rooms means being in a position to affect institutions and broader social dynamics by way of deciding what one is to say and do. Access to these rooms is itself a kind of social advantage, and one often gained through some prior social advantage. From a societal standpoint, the “most affected” by the social injustices we associate with politically important identities like gender, class, race, and nationality are disproportionately likely to be incarcerated, underemployed, or part of the 44 percent of the world’s population without internet access — and thus both left out of the rooms of power and largely ignored by the people in the rooms of power. Individuals who make it past the various social selection pressures that filter out those social identities associated with these negative outcomes are most likely to be in the room. That is, they are most likely to be in the room precisely because of ways in which they are systematically different from (and thus potentially unrepresentative of) the very people they are then asked to represent in the room.[2]
Táíwò calls the doomed attempt to use deference practices based on standpoint epistemology within elite spaces for the benefit of marginalised communities, “deference epistemology”. His text goes into some detail about the problems and blockages of such an approach within the walls of the “rooms of power” leading to their inevitable inadequacy to challenge the rule of constituted power (in Negri’s terms). In search of an alternative, more promising approach, he posits the possibility of a “constructive epistemology” that would allow for the composition of an effected-led collective counterpower (again, not Táíwò’s terminology) for marginalized communities.
How would a constructive approach to putting standpoint epistemology into practice differ from a deferential approach? A constructive approach would focus on the pursuit of specific goals or end results rather than avoiding “complicity” in injustice or adhering to moral principles. It would be concerned primarily with building institutions and cultivating practices of information-gathering rather than helping. It would focus on accountability rather than conformity. It would calibrate itself directly to the task of redistributing social resources and power rather than to intermediary goals cashed out in terms of pedestals or symbolism. It would focus on building and rebuilding rooms, not regulating traffic within and between them — it would be a world-making project: aimed at building and rebuilding actual structures of social connection and movement, rather than mere critique of the ones we already have.
Addressing the threats to such a project, Táíwò concludes “Confronting these threats requires leaving some rooms — and building new ones.”
Adding dimensions — insider/outsider vs instrumental/prefigurative
From our perspective, whether the room where it happens is a “room of [constituted] power” or a “new-build room [of counterpower]”, politics is the process of how the people in them make decisions and how those decisions are either sold to, or imposed upon, the people who weren’t in the room, but are going to be affected by that decision. However, there are clearly very significant differences between the two situations. This then is the first dimension for distinguishing types or categories of politics — insider and outsider politics, corresponding to rooms of constituted and constituent power, respectively. The problem of insider politics is often about who is allowed to enter the room, whereas that of outsider politics is more about who can be persuaded not to walk out of it.
The second dimension required to map out our minimalist two dimensional schema, relates to the means used to “win the room”, distinguishing between instrumental and prefigurative strategies. This distinction is unavoidably more subjective and open to challenge than the more objective situational one of insider versus outsider. We should also signal the danger of making premature value judgements between the two. While there are many, many different possible tactics in “the art of winning the room”. Which ones are “fair” and which ones not, is not merely a matter of pragmatics, but also a normative question. That is, dividing “acceptable” from “unacceptable” political tactics is an unavoidably ideological judgement. But for the purposes of schematising politics, we should refrain as far as possible from letting such judgments cloud the analysis.
By instrumental tactics and strategies we mean those that rely on the “gamification” of the situation of those in the room, in order to win the room in a competitive sense. Especially in insider politics, where the situation of the people in the room is constrained by relative power differentials instituted by the structure of the constituted body that created the room, instrumental politics can be the quickest and most effective route to carrying the decision.
By prefigurative tactics and strategies we mean those that rely on appealing to the desired future outcomes that brought people into the room in the first place. These can vary from naked self-interest in the most materialist and venal forms, right up to the loftiest ambitions of cherished ideological goals, and everything in between. Especially in outsider or voluntary politics, addressing the aspirations and concerns for the future of the people in the room is generally key to stopping them walking out never to return.
But even in the most hierarchically constituted rooms of insider power, up to the cabinet offices of government, it would be an unskilled political operator who purely used the force of office to win the room without paying attention to the hopes and desires of other members present. Similarly even in the most open, voluntary organising settings, there comes a time when the bluff of individuals present, claiming to represent multiple workplace or community constituents, but really only representing their own interests, needs to be politely but firmly faced down over obstructing the will of the collective.
In what way can we best model the motives that move people in political rooms? To the cynic or the psychopath in politics, the answer is simply the twin motives of fear and greed. Without discounting either entirely, from the organising perspective, particularly in outsider or counterpower politics, the motives of trust and concern are more powerful. When organisers map out a workplace or neighbourhood in their initial one-to-one conversations with workers or residents, one of the questions we ask is “if you had a problem (in your workplace/area), who would you go to for advice?”. In the lingo this is called “finding the leaders”. In reality this is not so much a search for some secret hidden officer corps or command-and-control structure, but networks of trust. Making decisions on what to do in the face of problems requires knowledge of potential risks and available resources that many people recognise they have an incomplete grasp of. Therefore people naturally look for others around them that inspire them with the belief that that person seems to know what’s what, so they can seek out their advice. Trust and its converse, distrust, is a very powerful force in collective political dynamics. A factor that is often subsumed and to that extent hidden or mystified by notions of leadership and loyalty.
To the cynic or psychopath, trust is an incomprehensible motive that impels only fools and the weak. One to be exploited perhaps, when seen in others and presenting an opportunity. But not one to be relied on systematically, compared to the more reliable levers of fear and greed, the more “genuine” motives, from their jaded perspective. To the extent that such a truncated perspective not only blocks the appreciation of some of the more powerful forces in collective cohesion in bodies ranging from church fete committees to military fighting units, but is also often the poisoned legacy of early life trauma, one can only ultimately feel pity for it, regardless of the position of its adherents.
Having sketched a minimal two dimensional schema for our “cameral model” of politics, as well as some of the motives at play in the actors within it, let’s look at certain initial observations that flow from it.
Observation 1 — Against pure verticalism — politics is not despotism
The first observation is that this is an entirely separate dynamic from despotism. The despot does not need to win the room. The despot IS the room. The despot does not do politics, she or he simply states their will and issues orders. The subjects of despotic domination are compelled to obey or, as the Queen of Hearts’ would say, it’s “Off with their heads!”.
This arrangement of despotic domination and social organisation has been around for a much longer period of human history than politics, as we are defining it here. Which is not to say that it wasn’t preceded in prehistory by an even longer period before socially structured despotic domination originally emerged. Simply that politics, as we know it today, emerged much later in historical times.
The conventional Western view, reflected in the etymology of “politics” from the Greek Πολιτικά (politika — affairs of the polis), is that politics emerged with the reforms of Cleisthenes in ancient Athens, circa 508 BC. As a necessary caution, an obvious big “Eurocentrism” red flag needs to be waved here, in that “as we know it today”, “historical times” and “conventional view” all refer to the Western canon of historical texts — which doesn’t guarantee, by any means, that this is necessarily the actual first occurrence in human history.
Prior to the reforms of Solon and later, Cleisthenes, the ancient Athenian polity was a fairly unoriginal aristocratic despotic class society. Historians and political theorists and philosophers of all stripes have speculated on the motives for and purpose of these reforms. I’m not going to do a literature review here, but pick two writers of interest, Michel Foucault and Ellen Meiksins Wood.
In his lectures to the College de France from 1970–71[3] Foucault makes the point that the reforms of Cleisthenes were impelled by the imminent collapse of the existing despotic class regime, but had the intention of preserving the class structure, rather than liquidating it (e.g. by radical land redistribution, debt cancellation, etc). Although, from quite distinct political and philosophical commitments to Foucault, Wood’s account[4] makes a similar argument. Both concur that the Athenian democracy is not a return to a pre-aristocratic classless egalitarian society. That is, it does not respond to the crisis of despotic power in an economically striated society by flattening economic hierarchy. But the reforms attempt to mitigate the economic effects of the crisis by not only by short-term relief measures to prevent the ruination of the poor and thus stave off the threat of revolution or societal collapse. But further, to give the poor a long-term stake in a society where the military power was shifting from land-based hoplite warfare, to the naval power of bireme and trireme ships dependent on the rowing power of poor but free citizens.
We need to recall that the majority of Athenian society, women, children, foreigners and slaves, were not part of the free citizenry and thus not included in the new dispensation. But also, that in the old aristocratic class social order, poor citizens who couldn’t pay their creditors were forced to surrender their land and become serfs (hektemoroi), and if their debts increased beyond their remaining assets or earning power, they would fall into slavery. Solon’s reforms — mainly debt relief — were motivated by the fear of the pool of poor free citizens being drained into serfdom and slavery to the extent of rendering the polis militarily unsustainable. Cleisthenes’ later reforms were prompted by the same problem, looking for a more sustainable solution than the merely temporary respite afforded by debt relief.
The crucial point here, is that the relationship between democracy and slavery is not just the negative one of the exclusion of the latter, which could be mistaken as merely contingent, a contradictory “exception” or hypocrisy. The positive relation between democracy and slavery is the necessity of creating a cast-iron guarantee to even the poorest of the citizens, that they will never fall into slavery. Democracy is the protection from slavery for those near enough to witness its depredations up close.
Observation 2 — Against pure horizontalism — politics is not egalitarianism
This combination of a formally egalitarian legal system and decision-making process, with the continuation of an economically inegalitarian class system, is what distinguishes politics in the Athenian sense, from the large range of human human history that has occurred prior to, or outside of, structurally inegalitarian, class or state societies. It is an unsafe assumption that the practices and principles of long-established classless, relatively[5] egalitarian societies, have anything to do with the ones that have evolved within the limited democratic politics of class societies from antiquity to present. Western supporters of the Zapatistas who had the opportunity to travel and spend time with the Zapatista indigenous communities in the 90s and 00s and witness some of the large, multi-day deliberative popular mass assemblies, confess that they were unable to understand how the process worked at all. And that this was not just a problem of the language barrier (of not knowing the indigenous languages) but of lacking the entire cultural framework of reference points that made the process intelligible to the participants.
That’s not to say that politics is incompatible with egalitarian ideologies or aspirations, or egalitarian principles of organisation. But that in our modernist, capitalist context, we are always organising against a background of inequality — indeed this is often the motive for organising in the first place. More significantly, social inequalities also exist within the body of the collective being formed in the political organising process. There are only two possible responses to this reality. Either ignore it or pretend that it’s insignificant in context (which amounts to the same thing), or incorporate some means of mitigating the effects of internal inequality within the core political processes of the collective. Discussing how to do the latter will have to wait until the later section of this text dealing with standpoint theory and transversality. What we can say, empirically, is that the record of antagonist collectives with the tactic of trying to ignore the problem of internal inequalities is very poor, to say the least.
From common purpose to collective action — territorialism
So far we have only talked about the deliberative moment of politics. At the deliberative level, the commonalities between insider and outsider politics are most apparent. From the televised chambers of elected government representatives to the hidden back rooms of covert conspirators, the differences between what happens inside the rooms is not nearly as marked as what follows outside of them. The establishment of common purpose only has meaning in relation to the results of common action. However, how the former is translated into the latter is radically different between insider and outsider politics. Because the ideologically dominant form of politics is that of constituted power, the conventional conceptualisation of the link is that of policy. However, the contrasting examples drawn from outsider politics show that the more general category is territory.
When the day of the church fete arrives, the volunteers recruited by the organising committee arrive to the site in the morning, to erect marquees, string out bunting, lay out trestle tables and generally reterritorialise the appointed space to create the site for the planned event. As well as physical objects (marquees, tables, chairs, decorations, portaloos, etc) the temporary reterritorialisation of the site will involved the deployment of volunteers as parking attendants, registration admin, welcomers, site security and so on. As in any event, a pre-existing space will be temporarily reorganised and repurposed.
The same process of reterritorialisation also takes place in more antagonistic political events and actions. Whether occupations of public squares, vacant buildings, workplaces, demonstrations, pickets and so on, all of these actions are territorial. Unlike consensual, voluntary but usually (but not always!) “insider” events like village fetes or neighbourhood festivals, antagonistic events are where reterritorialisations are simultaneously also deterritorialisations of the antagonist’s control of the space taken or reclaimed.
Given that constituted power has already-defined territories, by definition, the territorial aspect of the collective actions taken as a result of the deliberations within its rooms of political decision-making is less immediately obvious. Adding to this is the normal separation between the decision-makers inside the room and the waged agents and functionaries of their attached apparatus that implement and enforce the changes within the defined territory. A university administration can make decisions on what types of student posters and events are allowed on campus. But it will be the campus security, porters and admin staff that actually enforce that decision. As the territory of the campus itself is unchanged, before and after, the idea that this process is a form of reterritorialisation is counter-intuitive, especially given that we already have the concept of “policy” to think of the whole process. And yet, every policy change — “you can’t do that in here anymore” — is a reterritorialisation, whether the space is a commercial or public building, a local municipality or a national state.
So territoriality is a necessary complement to the cameral model of politics. Indeed in some cases, like general assemblies and forms that combine occupations and assemblies, like the “movement of squares” of 2011, the two aspects are merged into one. The apparent separation between politics and practice that the ideologically dominant forms of constituted power present to us spectacularly, dissolve on a fuller examination of the complete range of human sociality and the production of common purposes and collective actions.
Parapolitics or the cultic perversion of forming collectives
In our previous discussion of doctrinal ideology we touched on the potential pitfalls or deformations that doctrine can fall into, especially in conditions where it becomes increasingly separated from practice. A similar discussion is worth having with the limit cases of politics, specifically the problem of cults. At first sight, cults are defined by their peculiar ideologies or theologies. But the findings of cult researchers over the years, is that in practice the ostensible ideological or theological “content” of cults is almost like a pretext, irrelevant to the actual dynamics of the groups in focus[6].
An alternative is to look at cults as primarily politically-defined groups, rather than ideological ones. Given that many such “high-demand” groups often eschew engagement with “politics” this proposition seems counter-intuitive. Even more so, given that the cameral-territorial model of politics we’re proposing here is in contrast to despotic politics, whereas one of the characteristic features of “traditional” cults is the despotism of the cult leader.
Nonetheless, the fact that a number of originally political groups of various Marxist tendencies have developed into cults (LaRouchites, “The O.”, Comrade Bala’s Brixton Maoist cult, Japanese Red Army etc) and other leftist groups have displayed distinct signs of sustained cultic behaviour (WRP, RCP/Spiked, etc) the proposition shouldn’t simply be dismissed out of hand.
Political collectivities are formed to bring people together for the purposes of building power to effect social change in the wider society. Cults on the other hand recruit people in order to separate them from wider society to increase the wealth and power of the cult leader. The most effective political groups empower their members by equipping them with organising skills and experience. The most effective cults radically disempower their members through processes of behavioural manipulation, trauma-bonding and breaking down psychological autonomy. This “same-but-opposite” pattern relating political groups and cults is the basis for the proposition that cultic dynamics are a perverse form of anti-politics or “parapolitics”.
The parapolitics of cults is perhaps also a good entry point for talking about the role of concern in political dynamics. Earlier we contrasted the cynical drivers of greed and fear with those of trust and concern. While we covered some of the importance of trust as a factor in politics, we didn’t really touch on concern directly. If trust is the more considered alternative to greed as a positive incentive, concern plays the analogous role to fear. In a nutshell, concern is caring about whether the needs of others in the room or wider political association, are being met. This can be in terms of their ideological and material goals, especially where there is diversity amongst coalition of collective partners, in this regard. It can be concern about the basic welfare of other participants (too much stress, work, or exceeding capabilities and capacities), or whether their developmental needs are being met.
It has to be said that on the concern front, the track record of political collectives, even ones centrally committed to foregrounding solidarity as a virtue, is patchy at best. And occasionally truly appalling. But even at their worst, whether criminally negligent or cruelly indifferent, conventional political groups’ failures on concern are contrasted by the radically different approach of parapolitical cultic groups. Cults are all too concerned about the needs, welfare and empowerment of their members. Only in the worst possible way of actively working to impact them as negatively as possible. A repressive concern to reinforce the dependency and subjugation of the devotee. Above all to alienate devotees from their own desires so that they dare not confide in other members about their anxieties or sufferings, thus destroying any possibility of horizontal solidarity and mutual support between the grassroots, which would threaten the absolute despotism of the cult leader.
The parapolitics of cults serve as a useful negative example, then, a reminder of what not to do for collectives dedicated to effecting positive social change. And if reminding us of the need to re-centre concern and care as collective values in our organising, so much the better.
Factions and loyalty
Cults invert the normal relation between politics and ideology, that politics is the means by which ideological goals are to be achieved. In the “through the looking glass” mirror world of cults, the ideology or theology is simply a means to justify the parapolitics where trust is replaced by total submission. There is however a third form of inter-group bonding relations that exists in an ambiguous position between both trust and submission, which is loyalty. Whereas trust is mediated and constrained by ideology — such that a clear violation of shared ideological norms by the trusted person normally results in a breakdown of trust — and submission proves its strength through devotees acceptance of 180 degree ideological somersaults at the will of the guru, loyalty to leader and faction lies in a grey zone between the two. While the loyal follower is originally attracted and tied to their chosen faction by some notion of a shared ideological mission, there is a counter-balancing norm that loyalty to the crew comes first — at the limit tending towards the amoralism of a factional version of the patriot’s “my country, right or wrong”.
The tendency for loyalty to faction and leader overtaking relations of trust built on shared values, tends to be promoted by situations of sustained violence and existential risk. Contestational politics in regions or neighbourhoods that have a historical violent relationship with state forces and police, whether through recent periods of dictatorship or military occupation, inevitably raise the problems of paramilitary organisation, if only for defence. Under such conditions many originally political formations in regions ranging from South and Central America, to Northern Ireland, to South Asia and Africa, have degenerated into simple gangsterism with politics reduced to symbols and a mythologised self-history.
But if the extreme pressures of officially-sanctioned state murder, narco-trafficker competition and paramilitarism create the ideal conditions for gang loyalty to overtake political ideals, the phenomena of factionalism and the associated role of loyalty between leaders and followers is far more widespread throughout the political field than just in those particular situations.
Partly this is the effect of protagonistic ideology, which normalises the instrumental, competitive insider politics of constituted power, which is always inevitably factional in form — to the extent that many people assume factional competition to be the essence of politics itself. But more generally, it is an inescapable fact that in a political field with actors with varying material interests and cultural and ideological backgrounds, there is always a necessity to form alliances and reach understandings in order to advocate for particular common purposes and win the room. There is a difference between recognising the dangers of factionalism and its potentials for political degeneration, and that it is not to be confused with the whole or even most important part of politics, contrasted with the utopian belief that it can ever be entirely banished from human social interactions.
Separating the chalk from the cheese
One of the principal motives for making the effort to distinguish the different processes and dynamics of ideology and politics is the belief that a great deal of confusion results from the very common practice of confounding the two. Before we draw a close to this section and move on to applying our analytical schema to the challenges of fascism, it is worth taking a moment to look at a couple of examples of how confounding ideology and politics into an undifferentiated politico-ideological amalgam, results in misdirection and error.
Having just touched on the dynamics of factionalism, it’s worth contrasting it with another political phenomenon that’s often associated or conflated with it, namely sectarianism.
The similarity of outward form often leads to people conflating factional rivalry with sectarianism. Both phenomena appear to be the problematic behaviours of mutually suspicious or hostile groups competing for dominance in an instrumental, competitive way, based on rationales that appear contrived or obscure, at the expense of any sober assessment of what is appropriate or productive in the overall scheme of things.
Beneath the surface similarities, the underlying causes have different origins. While factionalism is rooted in politics, sectarianism, even though playing out in political struggles, is rooted in ideology.
In its religious origins sectarianism was a dispute between co-religionists over who had the correct interpretation of the one true faith and its dogmas. By extension, in secular politics, sectarianism has the same character — the competing, rival sects are internally united by a common doctrine, already ossified into dogma. While the resulting problematic behaviour between rival sects may appear similar in form to factional struggles, there are certain characteristic distortions that are peculiar to sectarianism that stem from this origin in shared dogma.
In the first instance, the distorted priorities of sectarian strife leads to a switch in the respective status and roles between the schematic antagonist of the core dogma (the class enemy for leftists generally, the boss or landlord in work or housing campaigns, etc) and the rival sects, with the latter replacing the former in the position of “principal enemy”. However, this perverse inversion of rivalry and antagonism is occasionally also seen in out of control faction fighting.
A further distortion, more unique to sectarianism, is where there is a loss of perspective relative to an objective power map of the actual social forces in the conjuncture. A distorted perception that elevates rival sects far above their real situational or contextual importance, and as a consequence downplays or even ignores genuinely powerful opposing forces that are “outside” the shared dogma. This delusional vision that vastly inflates the stature of relatively minor players, due to their status as rivals in the struggle to represent “the one true faith”, while shrinking the size of existential threats, can be fatal for real-world struggles. Generally this is not a dynamic the more “undogmatic” factions fall prey to, as their priority is generally to show that they dominate their rivals in terms of power — especially in demonstrating willingness and ability to “take the fight to the enemy” — rather than fidelity to dogma.
It should be emphasised that this dogmatic-driven sectarian dynamic can play out on any ideological terrain, it is by no means unique to the left, or secular politics for that matter.
That said, our second example is firmly from the world of secular left politics, which is the role of Lenin’s written legacy in that sphere. It should be noted that this is a slightly light-hearted example, given the disproportionate offense some people seem to take on this particular topic.
It is a peculiar effect of the common confusion of the ideological and the political in leftist thinking, that it is not commonly noted that Lenin’s written works are nearly all entirely political rather than ideological in aim and content. Particularly when contrasted to other Bolshevik writers of the same era, like Bukharin for example, who is more commonly writing ideology and theory. Commentators sometimes note the presence of a “polemical style”, but this is almost a deflection from the fact that in order to understand the context of any Lenin text you first of all need to understand which factional enemy he is targeting at the time, and why.
One of the more amusing examples of this is the creation of “Materialism and Empirio-criticism” in 1908. The relevant context is that Lenin has decided that he needs to get Alexander Bogdanov expelled from the Bolshevik Centre — the clandestine central committee of the Bolshevik faction of the RSDLP which was supposed to be dissolved by the re-unification Congress of the party in the 1907 5th Congress. Contrary to the resolutions passed at the party Congress against further “expropriations”, the Bolshevik Centre, including Lenin, Stalin and Bogdanov had already planned a major bank heist in Tiflis, which went ahead mere days after the completion of the conference. Unsurprisingly this caused a bit of a stink within the party and furious accusations of gangsterism against the “illegal” Bolshevik Centre.
Despite Bogdanov having been involved, Lenin considered some of the signals his erstwhile comrade was sending out to the rest of the enraged party during the ensuing furore, to cast doubt over his future reliability. Hence Lenin made the decision to depose the other man from the Centre, probably helped by the fact that Bogdanov was also worryingly popular within the party. Looking for a pretext, Lenin picked up on Bogdanov’s dalliances with then-fashionable Machist philosophy and wrote “Materialism and Empirio-criticism” as an attack on Machist philosophy in general and Bogdanov in particular. Having completed his political screed in Geneva, Lenin displaced to London for a month to visit the British Library Reading room to retrospectively compile a list of references — for a text he’d already written, N.B. — to give it scholarly cred. The completed text was published in 1909 and circulated before a Bolshevik mini-conference in June of that year where Lenin duly denounced Bogdanov as a reactionary and successfully won his expulsion. Its job done, “Materialism and Empirio-criticism” was tossed on the scrapheap while Lenin moved ahead onto his next target. Until, that is, the 1930s when Stalin decided to enshrine it as the classical work of dialectical materialist philosophy and make it a set text for every USSR secondary school student. Whether Stalin, who was of course involved in the original manoeuvre to target and expel Bogdanov, genuinely considered it a worthwhile philosophical text or had just reached the point in his rule that malicious trolling of the intelligentsia was something he found amusing, we — and generations of long-suffering Soviet school kids — will never know.
Yet, to this day, there are “true believer” self-identifying Leninists who will swear blind, with a straight face, that “Materialism and Empirio-criticism” is a serious work of philosophy and evidence of Lenin’s genius and grasp of Marx’s core philosophy. Most self-regarding Marxist theorists will either change the subject or, if pressed, conceded that this particular text was “maybe not his best work”.
The point for our purposes here, is that it is an illustration of some of the more absurd results that can follow for failing to distinguish between works written for ideological or theoretical purposes, and ones like this, for merely contingent political imperatives of the hour.
Notes:
[1] This is a neologism here, an unfortunately necessary evil in this overall text. Section 6 goes into further detail.
[2] Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference — Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò
[3] Collected as Michel Foucault, “Lectures on the Will to Know”, Picador 2014.
[4] Ellen Meiksins Woods, “Citizens to Lords”, Verso 2008
[5] This is a dangerous weasel word, in context, given the patriarchal and other complex kin-related structures in most “traditional” classless societies, but this is by necessity not an anthropological text
[6] I’m indebted to the work of Matthew Remski and his fellow hosts on the Conspirituality podcast for background on cults and cultic dynamics