A Response to the Duginist Appropriation of Marxism (Full Article)

A Line-by-Line Critique of "Marxism is NOT Woke"

Haz Al-Din, self-described and formerly undefeated “Tankie warlord” and current chair of the newly founded ACP (an alleged “communist” party that rarely exists offline), wrote an essay—really a series of Twitter posts—claiming “Marxism is not woke.” He introduces the essay with the bold claim:

Marxist theory in the West is meaningless without the aid of Dugin and Heidegger’s thinking.

Yet does the Tankie Warlord’s Duginist ravings have anything to do with Marxist theory or do the “Stalin vibes” mask a fascist kernel? In this series of articles, we will be unmasking Haz’s sources, laughing at his logical errors, and exposing his Wikipedia-fueled readings of Lukacs, Spinoza, Marx, Heidegger, and others. I will also be drawing the reader’s attention to the correct Marxist position throughout the essay.

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Haz’s Opening Arguments

Let’s look at his first claim and take it apart.

Marxism has no reality at all in the West.

What would it mean for Marxism to have reality in the West? From a Marxist perspective, ideas only have “reality” when actualized through praxis. Since Marxism has not been actualized in the West, this statement would seem to be true. Yet Haz does not mean this statement in a Marxist way, since he writes:

Nearly all self-proclaimed Marxists are frauds who haven’t even read Marx, let alone understand him. They use the label Marxism, despite knowing nothing about it, as a pseudo-intellectual obfuscation for their liberal ideology.

Haz claims that the majority of Marxists are liberals in disguise. Haz thus presents his reactionary philosophy as the “true interpretation of Marx” and labels anyone who disagrees with him a fraud—a liberal imposter masquerading as a Marxist. Interestingly, Haz claims that these self-proclaimed Marxists “haven’t even read Marx,” yet as we shall see, very little Marxism can be found in Haz.

Haz claims that Marxism is neither a theory of justice nor a theory of equality, but “a method for acquiring knowledge about the laws governing the historical development of societies.” Here, Haz makes his first faulty inference, cleverly disguised behind abstractions.

Yes, Haz is right that Marxism is a method of analysis, not an ethical theory of justice, yet it does not follow from this that “Marxists,” people who draw upon the Marxist method of analysis, are unconcerned with matters of justice and equality. Here, Haz sneaks in a false binary opposition, disguised behind some truths.

Indeed, Marxism rejects liberal notions of equality and justice, not because they are unscientific, but because they are abstract. Marxism rejects “equality for all” in favor of “equality for the oppressed,” “justice for all” in favor of “justice for the exploited.” As Lenin writes:

Not freedom for all, not equality for all, but a fight against the oppressors and exploiters, the abolition of every possibility of oppression and exploitation-that is our slogan! Freedom and equality for the oppressed sex! Freedom and equality for the workers, for the toiling peasants! A fight against the oppressors, a fight against the capitalists, a fight against the profiteering kulaks!¹

In the same spirit, the slogan of Marxists would be “black lives matter,” rather than “all lives matter,” putting forth the particular struggle, rather than hiding this struggle behind universal notions of equality and opportunity.

What is the logical error in Haz’s reasoning? Simply put, Haz suggests that either Marxism is a theory of injustice/inequality or it’s a method for understanding the laws of society. Marxism, however, could be both. Yet Haz’s deceptive presentation suggests that Marxism is not concerned with injustice or inequality because it is scientific, when in fact Marxism is concerned with equality and justice for the oppressed and exploited.

Marxism and Science

[Edit: I have decided to discontinue this project, so the line-by-line commentary ends near the end of Haz’s essay.]

Haz goes on to call Marxism scientific, yet claims that Marxism is unlike other sciences because this science “did not just describe reality, but participated in its development.” While this statement seems true, it rests upon a false and undialectical disjunction between theory and practice. Modern theoretical science also participates in the development of reality. The criterion of truth, in Marxism, is practice. Scientific theories, accordingly, are confirmed through practice—i.e. through an experiment, through the application of theories through technology, etc.

Haz begins on a false premise (that natural sciences do not participate in the development of reality) and then draws a conclusion that does not even follow from his false premise, namely: “This makes Marxism totally contrary to modern science.” He then goes on to elaborate further on this claim, stating:

Modern science places knowledge above its object. To know, means to strip something naked to consciousness and turn it into a utility for the knowing subject. He who knows an object, can control, master, and alter an object.

Here, Haz draws upon both Heidegger’s critique of technology and the writings of the Frankfurt school. The statement, however, completely contradicts Haz’s earlier claim. Earlier, Haz claimed that “modern science” does not participate in reality, but is purely descriptive, yet Haz is now claiming that modern science transforms objects into objects that can be controlled, mastered, or otherwise manipulated. He is, however, now presenting an instrumental view of science and endorsing an anti-scientific position (for Heideggerian reasons). In fact, Marxism understands theory precisely in terms of utility, control, and mastery. The only test of theory is practice. Knowledge means knowing how to transform the world.

But the ‘object’ known by Marxism is none other than human society itself.

So now, apparently, both Marxism and modern science aim to alter/control their object, yet Marxism is “totally” contrary because the object of Marxism is human society, so let’s prepare for some pseudo-dialectics:

And the paradox lies in the obvious fact that society is not just an object, but also a subject.

“Society” is an abstraction, and while this might be trivial true at a very abstract level, the Marxist theorist who attempts to grasp society is a product of this society, but “society itself” is only a subject when conceived abstractly as a pseudo-Hegelian Weltgeist [world spirit] or Volkgeist [spirit of the people]. Haz recognizes his sloppiness and rephrases:

Marxists (subjects) are themselves part of the very object they make knowable.

Sure.

To complicate matters further, Marx does not claim knowledge of society alone can transform society.

Instead, he proves that society is already coming to know and transform itself materially in the form of the then growing proletarian class.

The term “society” is an abstraction, and this language downplays the role of agency and practice in the application of theory. Furthermore, Haz confuses the part with the whole—leaping from Marxist theorists who are parts of society understanding society to claiming that society itself is a self-knowing subject.

But the REAL reason was because he had the courage of declaring the return of knowledge back to being itself, and human beings in particular.

He created a science that ceased to be above its object.

Yet the application of ANY science through practice transforms the world. Marxism is not exceptional in this respect. Moreover, Haz claimed that modern science was “above its object” because it strips it naked into an object of utility, that is, into something that can be actualized in a practical way.

For Marx, the knowledge of historical laws arrived at by consciousness, was being reflected in history itself.

Haz slips from “knowledge of society” into “knowledge of humanity” and draws again on the Heideggerian/Foucaultian understanding of modern scientific knowledge as “domination.” In fact, knowledge of society shows us precisely how to change it, so in this sense, Marxism does teach strip society bare, allowing us to “alter” it.

Knowledge of humanity does not dominate humanity, but reveals that it was there, and part of it all along.

The word “it” presumably refers to “knowledge,” yet how can knowledge reveal that knowledge of humanity was there all along? Surely, the theory of Marxism was not “always there” within humanity! Marxist theory presupposes a specific stage of capitalist development, and Marx tells us that even scientific categories themselves, such as abstract labor, first appear objectively within capitalist social relations themselves.

Class Consciousness

Haz claims that “people misunderstand Leninism as an attempt to turn politics and state power into a tool for realizing some goal of the mind,” citing no references or texts. The statement is a half-truth. Yes, we are not utopians. Nevertheless, Lenin quite clearly says: “Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.” Haz draws a different conclusion:

In reality, the role of Marxists lies in spreading the ‘good news’ to the despairing proletariat.

Here we see another example of the faulty reasoning typical of Haz. Haz loves faulty disjunctive reasoning, stating “not this, but that” to imply a false dichotomy. In this instance, Haz is even more insidious. He says that Marxism spreads “the good news” to the proletariat. Good news of what? Haz does not specify, but simply moves on:

Class consciousness, the so-called ‘vanguard party,’ and the Communist state is the realization of the proletariat’s faith in itself.

Faith in itself with respect to what? And how do class-consciousness, the vanguard, and state “realize” this faith? These questions require an answer.

Communism is not realized ‘automatically’ without the participation of a Communist party because society is not just an object.

Of course communism cannot be realized without the participation of a communist party, but the reason Haz gives for this is “because society is not just an object.” His statement clarifies nothing, leaving everything vague and unspecified, clothing society and the role of the party in idealist distortions and mystifications.

Neither just a subject either. Communist parties do not create new societies, only guide the existing development of society.

In its current form, this statement is meaningless. The term “society” is an idealist abstraction. If we understand “society” in materialist terms, then this means the “relations of production” and the “development of society” means “the development of the mode of production.” Understood in materialist terms, the statement is false. Revolutions are qualitative changes in the relations of production. A revolution, indeed, brings about a new society by changing the relations of production.

This guidance is necessary because politics, Communist or otherwise is itself part of material reality.

When you tear through the various abstractions, Haz is essentially saying that the vanguard party should not aim to create a new society, that is, not aim at a socialist revolution.

Without the guidance of proletarian consciousness, the movement propelling society still continues.

But it leads to an economic, political, spiritual, moral and overall social crisis. Society eats away at itself as it cannot make sense of the contradictions driving it.

What is propelling society? If we tear through Haz’s various metaphysical abstractions, he must mean the development of the productive forces. Haz claims that this development continues. Yet we need the guidance of “proletarian consciousness,” he claims, otherwise we will have “an economic, political, spiritual, moral, and overall social crisis,” one that is driven primarily by idealist factors, namely, society being unable to “make sense” of its contradictions. In other words, proletarian consciousness provides salvation (somehow) from various forms of crisis. Why does it do this and what is proletarian consciousness? Haz provides no answer.

The crisis of Western Marxism lies in its inability to overcome the subject/object distinction when it comes to society.

The subject/object distinction, in Marxism, is resolved through practice, since practice makes a subjective conception into a reality. Haz adds the phrase “when it comes to society,” however, meaning that he is operating at the level of abstraction, postulating society as if it were a “world spirit.”

How can society both be a real (material) object, while also given the quality of subjective responsibility?

“Society” is not a subject. Marx is explicit on this point:

To regard society as one single subject is … to look at it wrongly, speculatively.²

Society is a real material object because human beings work together to reproduce the conditions of their own existence. We use nature and develop tools to do so, and these form the “means of production.” Because we divide labor between ourselves, the structure of society becomes organized around various relations of production, giving rise to class distinctions.

Society is given “the quality of subjective responsibility” when we view the individual members of society abstractly as part of a larger group. We then attribute agency (and thus responsibility) to the group, rather than to the individuals, by viewing things abstractly, rather than concretely (e.g. abstractly saying that everything that happens in China is “the Chinese,” rather than concretely looking at the structure of the decision-making process).

Haz than distinguishes between “economism” and what we might call “utopianism,” listing them as two examples where “Western Marxism” has failed because it failed to grasp the subject-object distinction. The analysis isn’t particularly helpful and no examples are cited, but I will move past it.

Haz essentially says the problem with economism is that it emphasizes being (i.e. material reality) over thought whereas in utopianism (my word, not Haz’s), knowledge leaps ahead of the material conditions. Haz makes a valid point, but obscures it through technical jargon.

Haz then turns to Lacan to psychoanalyze this point, although not in a very useful way. The distinction is essentially between “right opportunism” and “ultra leftism.” He claims that the right opportunists are the “subjects in the know,” who sit back content with the knowledge that capitalism will fix itself, whereas the “ultra leftists” are “psychotic subjects” who denounce those who appeal to reality as “reactionary.” Sure, sometimes people like this exist.

The ‘praxis’ uniting thought and practice then is only in the fractal movement of subjective self-consciousness - voluntary ‘action’ becomes the ‘object’ of the subject, who then acts on its basis: ‘object’ takes on the processual quality of yet-to-be fulfilled subjectivity

Praxis unites thought and being, not “thought and practice.” Moreover, being and thought are not united “only in the fractal movement of subjective self-consciousness.” This would imply that thought and being are only ideally united. Thought and being are united because practice gives reality to thought through action.

Similarly, the rest of this sentence is nonsense and mystifies Marx’s theory of practice. How can “action” be the object of the subject? The subject acts on the basis of action? This is nonsense, not Marxism.

For Marx, the subject simply forms a plan, acts to bring this idea about, and then recognizes their plan in the completed project. Marx is crystal clear:

The architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labor-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the laborer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realizes a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will.

The unity of thought and being occurs whenever we form an idea (say, the painter imagining the picture), take action, and then observe the manifestation of our idea in the real thing.

…Marxism in the Gnostic tradition

Neither helpful nor useful.

This is exactly why @conceptualjames places Marxism in the Gnostic tradition: This Western interpretation of Marxism is founded upon a metaphysical distrust for reality.

Because of that distrust, good, virtue, etc. lies only in knowledge as pure subjective self-consciousness.

Haz now clarifies that, when describing this “pure subjective self-consciousness,” he was talking about the Western interpretation of Marxism. The previous movement he was describing is idealistic because he rejects it. Western Marxism, allegedly, “is founded upon a metaphysical distrust for reality.” Notice that Haz has not demonstrated the failure of Western Marxism, but simply asserted it, and then psychoanalyzed it, a tactic Jordan Peterson also loves to use. “Western Marxism” is a boogeyman for Haz, defined not through theoretical differences, but through an alleged “distrust for reality.”

Lukacs and the Dialectics of Nature

This Western Marxism has its origins in the neo-Kantian György Lukács …

Lukacs was not a Neo-Kantian, but Haz is now going to turn him into a boogeyman figure.

In order to begin, Lukács engaged in an egregious form of revisionism; blaming for Marxism’s commitment to natural realism Fredrich Engels and his "dialectics of nature."

Complete misrepresentation of Lukacs’ position, which Haz has not studied, but read about on Wikipedia. Lukacs’ actual position is:

When the ideal of scientific knowledge is applied to nature it simply furthers the progress of science. But when it is applied to society it turns out to be an ideological weapon of the bourgeoisie.

Lukacs is distinguishing between the application of dialectics to science and its application to society. Lukacs does NOT reject “natural realism.” He rejects the attempt of Engels to develop a “dialectics of nature,” that is, to extend Marxist science outside of the human realm into the natural sciences themselves.

Here, Haz simply disguises the fact that he himself is taking up the same position as Lukacs. Earlier, he stated that “modern science” strips things bare, yet Marxist science is different because it studies society. Haz literally endorses the same position as Lukacs. For Lukacs, we cannot apply modern natural scientific methods to society because:

The ‘pure’ facts of the natural sciences arise when a phenomenon of the real world is placed (in thought or in reality) into an environment where its laws can be inspected without outside interference. This process is reinforced by reducing the phenomena to their purely quantitative essence. to their expression in numbers and numerical relations. Opportunists always fail to recognize that it is in the nature of capitalism to process phenomena in this way.

In other words, Lukacs is giving scientific empiricism credit for its discoveries, yet claiming that society must be studied dialectically, rather than merely empirically, because we must grasp everything in terms of an interconnected totality, rather than by isolating things and quantifying them.

Lukacs, however, is simply a straw man for Haz’s main argument:

The reason I mention Lukács is because Western Marxism was founded on the false view that he resolved the problem of ‘subject/object’ distinction for Marxism.

But he did nothing of that sort, he just changed the definition of objectivity to exclude objective reality itself.

Although I disagree with Lukacs’ rejection of the dialectics of nature, Haz’s argument does not follow. He claims that, for Lukacs:

Society was ‘objective,’ and consciousness was ‘subjective.’

Society IS objective if understood in materialist terms as the mode of production and the relations of production. Social relations, indeed, have an objective and subjective side. Objectivity is not simply equal to “nature.”

Haz makes a ridiculous straw person argument. “Western Marxism,” he claims, involves a “purely subjective self-consciousness.” Lukacs, he says, invented this “Western Marxism” because he rejected the dialectics of nature. Lukacs understands dialectics in terms of objective “society” and the subject, yet since Haz thinks society is a subject and neglects the objective, material basis of social relations, he takes the subject-society relation to be a merely subjective relationship.

Lukacs did not “change the definition of objectivity to exclude objective reality itself,” Haz has changed the definition of “society” to exclude the material basis of social relations.

This obviously contradicts Marx’s materialism, for which objectivity does include nature, not just society as some purely transcendental horizon.

Again, ridiculous straw person. Further, Heidegger’s phrase “transcendental horizon” makes no sense here, is confusing, and not helpful.

Without including nature in the definition of material reality, then class-consciousness consists in dissolving all society, in all its objectivity, into a pure subjective self-consciousness.

False premise, and the conclusion does not follow, since Marxism understands society to have a basis in the mode/relations of production. Haz is failing at the level of Marxism 101.

This is a gross perversion of Marxism …

Tell me about it. Also a gross perversion of Lukacs.

This is a gross perversion of Marxism, and it is easy to see the lineage of the Lukácsian view in the Frankfurt School, the New Left, ‘postmodern academia,’ gender studies in Wokeism as a whole.

Haz simply looked on Wikipedia and saw that Lukacs was influential on these disciplines, yet he completely ignores that Lukacs influenced these movements in different ways. The Frankfurt School was influenced by Lukacs’ ideas of reification and real abstraction, the New Left was influenced by Marcuse (one member of the Frankfurt School), gender studies was indeed influenced by Lukasian notions of standpoint epistemology, but “postmodern academia” is an abstraction (one that also has a separate, French lineage) and “Wokeism” is a boogeyman abstraction without content.

Haz basically thinks that Lukacs is Fichte. He certainly has not read Lukacs, but he uses his (mis)understanding of Lukacs to repackage the far-right conspiracy theory about “cultural Marxism.”

But is Lukácsian Western Marxism really to blame? In fact, when Lukács decided to reject Engels, he was just compromising with institutional modern realism.

wat

Engels ‘dialectics of nature’ was too ‘metaphysical’ because it saw something ‘human’ in reality. In other words, the opposite of a metaphysical distrust in reality!

Citation needed.

In other words, James Lindsay is a fucking moron when he blames wokeism’s metaphysical distrust in reality on Marxism.

Who gives a fuck what some reactionary thinks?

In actual fact, the distrust in reality is the very basis of bourgeois modernity. It can be thought as the entire premise of the Age of Enlightenment itself!

Now, Haz will give examples of what he means by the “metaphysical distrust in reality.” He distinguishes between two different types of metaphysical distrust in reality: science and politics. Let’s look at some of his examples:

In science: Metaphysical distrust in reality takes the form of distrust in our conventions, intuitions, religious beliefs, and sensibilities about the nature of reality … In the realm of politics: Metaphysical distrust in reality takes the form of distrust in traditional sovereign authority, regarding it as unjust, arbitrary, and tyrannical.

The Enlightenment, Haz argues, regards traditions and traditional institutions with suspicion. Instead of religious superstitions, he says: “Reality is a pure OUTSIDE only accessed by cold, indifferent, impersonal inquiry,” that is, a scientific investigation of the real material world. Similarly, traditional sovereignty is replaced by explicit contracts.

Haz is more or less repackaging the arguments of the Frankfurt School, who understand enlightenment as a project of demystification. He deploys them, however, from a right-wing, traditionalist perspective (no surprise—Adorno and Horkheimer frequently make arguments extremely close to those of right-wing figures like Heidegger).

Why does he call this a “metaphysical distrust in reality?” From a Marxist perspective, reality is the objective, material world that can be discovered through science. Since “conventions, intuitions, religious beliefs, and sensibilities” are subjective and belong to the superstructure, Marxism is inherently suspicious of them. The realm of politics, likewise, is superstructural, and since Marxism aims at seizing state power, obviously it would be suspicious of both traditional and bourgeois forms of authority.

Wokeness is just the applying it to the realm of culture, where the unwritten norms of civilization secretly disguise relationships of injustice, oppression, and marginalization - by virtue of not being premised by expressly consensual, rational, etc. consciousness.

If Haz accepts this definition of “wokeness,” then he has convinced me that Marxism is absolutely “woke.” The goal of Marxism is to transform society from capitalism into a rationally planned economy, one that abolishes all forms of oppression, eliminates the exploitation of workers, and makes possible a society based on a free association of labor.

Ideology (i.e. “unwritten norms of civilization”) DOES “secretly disguise relationships of injustice, oppression, and marginalization.” Marxism, explicitly, DISTRUSTS this ideological facade, digging into the material conditions of real exploitation and oppression beneath this society.

In bourgeois modernity, only what is in the sphere of explicit responsibility of conscious subjects can be ‘trusted.’

Your skepticism towards “consent” and “explicit responsibility” has me worried, Haz …

Any recognition of humanity in reality itself is no different than a superstition: Reality is arbitrary, meaningless, and malign. Only institutions are Good.

Yes, it’s 100% superstition. What do you think materialism is?

The madness of bourgeois capitalism, which alienates mankind from its material being, is the true culprit behind the Woke phenomena, NOT Marxism.

Haz is playing a game of smoke and mirrors. He shifts from the Marxist discussion of “material being” to a discussion of religious superstition, consciousness, intuition, etc, as if these constituted the “material being” of humanity. Yet ideas, conceptions, superstitions, intuitions, etc. are products of the physical human brain, a reflection of the real life process. Marx is unequivocal on this point:

The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behavior. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. – real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process.

Haz claims that Linsday is simply talking about liberalism and “wokeism,” which according to him have nothing to do with Marxism, yet the difference between progressive liberalism and Marxism has primarily to do with the fact that liberalism is an idealist philosophy, whereas Marxism is a materialist philosophy. Haz’s philosophy contains no materialism, so it certainly is not Marxism. We will wait to see when Haz reveals himself.

Haz claims that Lukacs revised Marxism. He writes:

the idea of communism as a pure subjective self-consciousness, is based on the notion that objectivity is just reified social relations. This naturally begs the question of what the content of these social relations consists in, as so far they are only pure form

Haz fundamentally misunderstands Lukacs’ and Marx’s concepts of reification. Reification has an objective side, in the real existing relationships within the mode of production, yet also has a subjective side, namely the inversion whereby the worker mistakes social relations for a feature of the commodity itself. Lukacs does not think objectivity “is just reified social relations.” Based on this mischaracterization of Lukacs, Haz claims:

It means society is an indescribable ‘totality’ of individual mental states, opinions, and beliefs, - the objectivity of social relationships, is merely a result of the subjective mind ‘reifying’ segments of the totality and treating them as external realities in themselves.

Haz presents a cartoonish picture of Lukacs. Putting it simply, Lukacs argues that reification produces a “fake objectivity,” which is subjective and false, yet the phenomenon of reification is grounded in the real objectivity of social relations of production, and both the objective and subjective sides have a reciprocal effect on each other. Society is NOT, for Lukacs, “an indescribable ‘totality’ of individual mental states, opinions, and beliefs.”

Thus here, society has no real determinate content - it is a pure ‘Kantian Thing-in-Itself,’ a mere totality of individual relations that only asserts its existence negatively, via the reification (‘objectivization’) of its constituent parts.

Haz thinks that Lukcas is a “neo-Kantian” because he fails to recognize that the phenomenon of reification has an objective basis in the real material relations of capitalist production. He conflates reification with real objectivity. Society would not dissolve, accordingly, simply through becoming conscious of them, and Lukacs certainly does not think that we can change the world just by thinking about it.

A totality cannot assume self-consciousness, since it cannot be confined to any one self. So that is simply the end of Scientific Socialism: The only thing that can really be known about society, is that nothing at all can be known. This is no more knowledge than Kant’s Thing.

Here, Haz makes the (absurd) argument that if we cannot know the totality of society within a single self-consciousness, we cannot know reality scientifically and scientific socialism would fail. Yet Engels is quite clear that knowledge remains incomplete and is gradual:

A system of natural and historical knowledge, embracing everything, and final for all time, is a contradiction to the fundamental law of dialectic reasoning. This law, indeed, by no means excludes, but, on the contrary, includes the idea that the systematic knowledge of the external universe can make giant strides from age to age.³

Haz then seems to think that this causes the “subject object distinction” to reemerge, which for some reason he assumes is a bad thing, probably because Heidegger and academic bourgeois philosophy told him so.

There is nothing inherently wrong with the subject-object distinction as long as these are understood as dialectically and reciprocally interconnected.

So we are back to square one, and none wiser in answering: 1. To what extent is society (including all relations of production) itself objective? 2. To what extent is Communism merely a subjective consciousness? These are the most fundamental questions of Western Marxism.

If Haz had read Marx or Engels, he would easily be able to answer these questions. He hasn’t, so he hasn’t.

Haz then claims that these questions were given obvious answers in Marxism-Leninism, which is true, but claims that these obvious answers occurred in … Soviet Avante-Guard and the Great Chinese Proletarian Cultural Revolution? No, Haz.

Both of these events ran upon the objective limits of their underlying aspirations, and the wisdom of Marxism-Leninism - whether in Socialism in One Country or in Deng Xiaopings Reform and Opening Up - defined itself in relation to that experience.

Haz is now plagiarizing Badiou.

Moreover, Marxism-Leninism is defined within the context of countries where the question of society and the individual is resolved in the concrete bonds of civilization, bonds which were never questioned even at the height of revolutionary experimentation.

The term “civilization” is not a scientific, and this is nonsense. Here, Haz is just injecting right-wing conservativism into Marxism, without evidence, because that’s his entire grift.

In the comparatively atomized West, it is not at all clear to people to what extent society is objective, or to what extent ideas are subjective, even outside Marxist theory.

Just because it isn’t clear to lots of people doesn’t mean we lack methods of distinguishing between the subjective and objective. Everyday people frequently distinguish between the real world and their own conceptions, make subjective plans and fail, etc. Haz also fails to show any link between “atomization” and objectivity.

Modern Western thinking doubts absolutely everything about society …

Marx’s personal motto was de omnibus dubidantum.

… even the definition of gender.

The struggle for women’s liberation was at the forefront of the projects of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Mihn, and Thomas Sankara. I will quote Sankara here:

Dialectical materialism defines human society not as a natural, unchangeable fact, but as something working on nature. Humankind does not submit passively to the power of nature. It takes control over this power. This process is not an internal or subjective one. It takes place objectively in practice, once women cease to be viewed as mere sexual beings and we look beyond their biological functions and become conscious of their weight as an active social force.

Marxism recognizes that sexual and gender roles are social constructions, and that sexual and gender identities fluctuate over time with changes in the material conditions of society.

Haz blames the subject-object distinction for the “modern” “Western” suspicion in relation to norms. He claims, without evidence, that this distinction ipso facto leads to the following condition:

When the thinking consciousness is entirely divided from reality, as pure spirit, soul, mind, or cogito - what remains of reality is completely meaningless, and devoid of any moral, historical, spiritual, or human significance.

True, yet if thinking consciousness is simply collapsed into reality, we cannot distinguish between objective truths and subjective fictions. For example, the sun might appear to be small—we can cover it up with our hand—yet we know through science that the sun is objectively large and far away. We therefore need to distinguish subjectivity and objectivity. Dialectical materialism recognizes that a movement occurs between subject and object: the objective determines the subjective, yet our subjective conceptions lead us to action, bringing about changes in the objective world.

Haz Pretends to Have Read Spinoza

Haz entertains the position of Spinozism, popular among certain Soviet Marxists, as a solution to the subject-object dilemma. Here is Haz’s argument against Spinoza:

The problem with Spinozism is not the view that mind and matter (‘subject and object’) share reality, but in the notion of reality as ‘Substance:’ a metaphysical view of the object already united with its subjective determinations. Substance thus has no stake in its attributes.

Spinoza does not claim that mind and matter “share reality.” He claims that they are the same mode under different attributes, consisting in the same order and connection. Moreover, the Spinozist distinction between the attributes of extension and thought are not identical to the relationship between the subject and the object. Haz says “substance has no stake in its attributes” yet does not clarify what this means, hoping the absence of an explanation suffices for a bluff. Given his audience’s presumed ignorance of Spinoza and Marxism, this vague handwaving away of a philosopher that Haz has certainly neither read nor understood suffices for the purposes of his grift. He thus resorts to bold assertions like this one:

Substance is mere objectivity given Form by the mind. Substance is treated as supreme, antecedent, and given, but it is the repository of a dogmatic subjective determination, not true objectivity.

Here, we can see how fundamentally confused Haz is about Spinoza. He does not even use Spinoza’s own terminology, but imports his own, without definition or explanation. Vague enough to impress his fans, yet confusing enough to save him from being called out on his bluff. The problem with Spinoza, according to Haz, is:

There never comes the decisive gesture of Marx of renouncing knowledge to suspend it back into Being

Haz fakes depth again. Nowhere does Marx “renounce knowledge to suspend it back into Being.” Yet Spinozism, Haz declares dogmatically:

In practice, it becomes a type of ideological hubris, asserting the unreality and meaninglessness of every actually substantive bond of civilization, in favor of a supreme ‘Substance’ that has neither any skin of its own in the game, nor any reality outside a calcified intellect.

In practice, Haz’s philosophy becomes a type of sophomoric hubris, asserting the unreality of material conditions and performatively demonstrating the meaningless of everything he says and his lack of substantive engagement with the texts he cites. Yet we can already see where Haz is headed. Haz wants to reify the “bond of civilization,” namely traditionalism and conservativism, and the objectivity and implicit materialism of Spinoza does not allow him to do so.

Haz further demonstrates his lack of erudition with the following comment:

No specificity of societal objectivity is possible - everything is just ‘capitalism’ permeating the whole of its ‘attributes.’

Haz thinks that “substance” would somehow be capitalism—based on his Wikipedia knowledge of Spinoza, I assume that he thinks that Spinoza’s concept of “substance” is somehow the “social substance” or substance of society in these Soviet readings of Spinoza? The payoff of Spinozism, for Marxism, is dual-aspect monism, a solution to the riddle of the unity and difference of being and thought.

It is obvious that if ‘everything’ is objective, then nothing in particular is, including society itself. The extent of society’s objectivity is the extent it is continuous with a dogma of the mind. It is no wonder Spinoza is the favorite thinker of pseudo-Marxist academia!

Haz thinks that Spinoza just thinks that everything is one big substance, and that subjectivity is somehow “objective” since it’s included within it. Another straw person argument, based on Haz’s Wikipedia knowledge of Spinoza. Haz perhaps makes this mistake because someone told him (he has not read Spinoza, that is certain) that Spinoza understands “false ideas” to be only relatively false, and not inherently so. Falsity, for Spinoza, is incomplete. Pseudo-Marxist Haz, however, does not need to actually read Spinoza, he only needs to convince his readers that he has.

Haz does say one correct thing about Spinoza, namely that Spinoza “cannot afford any recognition of the objectivity of contradictions (such as the class struggle).” Haz surely read this somewhere or was told this by someone else, since he opposes it to “a pure subjectivist ‘will to immanence,’ a notion of communism as antisocial as Lukácsian ‘self-consciousness.’”

Haz Talks about Marx?

Haz says remarkably little about Marx’s actual views. Throughout the discussion of Marx, he continually reminds us of the “incompleteness” of Marx’s philosophy. “Marxism succeeded in overcoming metaphysics, but only within a limited scope of practice.” Haz explains the history of Marxism in purely idealist terms, writing:

Marx and Engels failed to fully transmit their theoretical genius. Lenin alone inherited it, and gave it practical reality. The genius of Marxism survived as the genius of world-historical statesmen and civilizations, but its original spark of consciousness was lost.

Marxism is a set of ideas, not a scientific tool for practice, one that is “transmitted” through the great minds of history. Haz claims that these ideas only took root in the East, not because of the historical or material conditions—Haz says nothing of Lenin’s explanations for the success of the Bolshevik Revolution. Instead, he says:

Marx’s Promethean gesture acquired objective reality and history exclusively outside the West, where objectivity of society was not metaphysical question, but a given reality. And the problem of metaphysics permeated the whole of Western thinking, not just Western Marxism.

Marxism, Haz claims, appeared in the East because “the objectivity of society … was a given reality.” He links this to metaphysics, indicating that Heidegger will soon be arriving. The discussion of Marx and Lenin abruptly ends, and Martin Mother Fucking Heidegger enters the scene.

Heidegger

Did you know Heidegger was a Nazi? A follower of fascism? Haz says you’re just being paranoid:

The paranoiac spectre of ‘fascism’ reflects a consciousness always in retreat before its object. And hardly anything could affirm that paranoia more than the fact that the thinker who finally initiated the revolution that would emancipate the Western mind from bourgeois metaphysics once and for all, is nearly equally infamous for their affiliation to German Nazism.

Haz already doses his audience for the criticisms he will likely receive for drawing upon a national socialist theorist. The West, he claims, is just “paranoid” about fascism. Nothing to see here.

Haz then absurdly claims that Heidegger’s thinking will demolish “bourgeois metaphysics” and lead to a “rediscovery of Marxism” that puts it on a materialist foundation. Heidegger’s thought is inherently idealist, so this project is fundamentally flawed.

Haz then claims that Heidegger reorients us towards “being as such,” instead of the “res cognitans/res extensa” or the “subject/object.” Here, Haz is being sloppy, because it’s Dasein (the subject matter of Being and Time), not the larger project of “being as such” that reorients us in this manner.

Haz explains the “Being of beings” as follows:

It is the ‘Being of beings’ - the more fundamental ground by which particular beings are given to us - whether in experience, contemplation, or practice.

Haz makes a technical mistake here. Being is not the ground by which beings are given to us, but this givenness itself. Being is the manifestness of the manifest, not the ground of manifestation itself. While Haz misses this more nuanced point, he does accurately express the gist of Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics, namely:

Every relation to beings, is based on a fundamental horizon of Being as such. When a specific horizon acquires historical dominance, it is metaphysical - imposing upon Being a specific relation by thought.

Importantly, this Heideggerian framework is a form of idealism in the strict Marxist sense. How else can we make sense of the idea of thought imposing itself upon being? For Heidegger, history is determined by different interpretations of the meaning of being, not by class struggle.

Haz then says that the thinking being is put on the foundation of Dasein. Notice that for Marx, human beings are not simply reducible to their minds, but thought and mind are a product of matter itself. Heidegger’s concept of Dasein is incompatible with this Marxist framework, which in fact could be said to recognize the “res cognitans” as a product of the “res extensa,” since the latter term in Heidegger simply stands in the place of material reality.

Dasein embodies the very discontinuity of Being that justifies the Ontological Difference.

The language here is hardly Heideggerian, likely because Haz will be using Heidegger’s language as a vehicle to introduce the ideas of Aleksandr Dugin.

The problem with the subject-object distinction is that it can only regard beings as objects for a given subject. This makes for a notion of objectivity that is a priori idealist. The notion of Subject also implies a specific view of objects as mere utilities for its realization.

I fail to see how this is a problem with the subject/object distinction itself. Haz has everything backwards. In fact, an idealist notion of objectivity understands beings/truth/reality in terms of [possible] objects for a given subject, yet this doesn’t stem from the subject/object distinction itself, since one can deploy this distinction (as Marx himself frequently does, alongside other Marxists) while understanding subjectivity to be a product of objectivity. Similarly, Haz presents no argument for his position that the notion of subject implies a view of objects as utilities. Here, he is presupposing the results of Heidegger’s history of being.

Notice throughout, moreover, that Haz remains idealist. We view objects in a utilitarian way, he claims, because we have a notion of a subject, not because of specific historical and material conditions.

Subject, moreover, defined as res cogita, is thought itself taken as its own real object.

Plausible. Descartes arrives at the idea that he is a thinking thing based on the fact that if he were no longer thinking, he would no longer be existing.

This implies an alienation of thought from reality, foreclosing its scandalous incipience in Being.

Not necessarily, especially if we follow Hegel’s viewpoint that consciousness can only have itself as an object through the mediation of another self-consciousness.

This notion is the final conclusion of idealism; for Heidegger metaphysics as such.

“Metaphysics as such” for Heidegger is ontotheology: the attempt to explain the being of beings in general through some type of being and the ground of the totality of beings in some highest being. Idealism, for Heidegger, would be the attempt to explain all beings in terms of their presence to consciousness grounded in the subject as the highest being. It doesn’t have anything to do with the idea that “thought thinking itself” implies an alienation of thought from reality, and it’s not clear that it does. Marx will of course say that in order for thought to think itself, society must reach a certain stage in terms of its material conditions, but this is not Haz’s claim.

Marx already accomplished the rejection of the culmination of idealist philosophy, especially in his early writings. But the incipient materialist language he made use of (man, class, mode of production, etc.), later fell victim to inevitably metaphysical conceptualizations.

I suspect Haz will now use the excuse of “metaphysical conceptualizations” in order to redefine Marxist terms.

Some of these Concepts were involved in the first breakdown of European Marxism itself. The changing nature of capitalist production & role of the proletariat ceased to neatly conform to their Concept, and this was used by Social Democracy to justify its revisionism.

Which concepts? How were they involved in the breakdown of European Marxism? What time period are you referring to? What concepts were they using and how did capitalist production change? How were they used to justify revisionism? All these questions need to be answered or you haven’t said anything.

Western Marxism, with its conceptualist orthodoxy, became infiltrated by metaphysics, so it is natural that only a Western thinker entirely outside Marxism - and even entirely opposed to it politically - could initiate the emancipation of Western thought from metaphysics.

Haz will in fact endorse Heidegger’s conclusion that Marxism remains within metaphysics, a position that no Marxist should hold on account of Heidegger relying upon an idealist account of history as the history of different interpretations of the meaning of being.

According to Haz, the “primary significance” of Heidegger “lies in setting all thought on a basis which asserts its posteriority in the face of Being.” Since Haz is trying to sound profound, we have to figure out what he means here. I take it he is referring to the “always already” of Heidegger, a point that Zizek (who Haz was a fan of) marks as the important contribution of Heidegger that we can’t escape. The “always already” is the idea that we already start in the midst of things—in Marxist terms, in the midst of ideology—within a world that already makes sense and has a structure, and then we try to make sense of it while already within a context. For Heidegger, the “always already” is unavoidable, but for historical materialists, we can escape the “always already” by developing an objective material history of the past and present.

Haz will now claim that Dasein solves the problem he pointed out in Lukacs, namely the relationship between the subject and object and the “methodological individualism” (whatever that is) that he attributes to Marxism.

For the first time, society, classes, and civilizations can be acknowledged as real in a manner consistent with the materialist view.

So far, no materialism in Haz.

Dasein does not necessarily afford contemplation exclusive significance in its overall issue of Being, so it is not just another concept of the subject: Not simply cognition, but practically being-in-the-world, facing the constitutive disjuncture with Being in its very Being.

Some Dreyfus mixed in, but also this language of “constitutive disjuncture,” which is not featured in Heidegger.

This overall phenomenological orientation permits thought to acknowledge reality without preemptively attempting to assume the consequences or implications it has for the thinking being. Whatever consequences or implications there may be, they begin with being, not thought.

This section is unintelligible to me.

It is undoubtedly possible that Dasein can be conceived exclusively as an individual, but unlike the concept of the Subject, it is not necessarily so.

Haz claims that Dasein is better than the language of the subject because Dasein is not necessarily an individual. He likely takes this from Dreyfus and/or Haugeland. Yet it is contradicted by Heidegger himself early in Being and Time, where he writes:

The being of this being is always mine. (SZ, 41).

And

In accordance with the character of always-being-my-own-being [Jemeinigkeit], when we speak of Dasein, we must always use a personal pronoun along with whatever we say: “I am,” “you are.” (SZ, 42).

Haz hates using pronouns, of course, and likely ignored this passage. Nevertheless, Heidegger does tell us that Dasein is usually and for the most part (especially when inauthentic) lost in das Man, the “they self” or “anyone,” and only through confronting our own death can we find true subjectivity. Haz, however, offers a different explanation for his claim, namely:

Being as such is a common well-spring that cuts across individuated ‘subjects,’ and is the staging ground of any shared reality.

Haz wants to turn to the universality of “being as such,” claiming this cuts across individuals, yet it does not follow that the universality of being would undermine individuality. Moreover, Heidegger find the very idea of speaking of being in “universal” terms problematic, as he indicates on the third page of Being and Time, where he lists three prejudices against the question of being, the first of which is “being is the most ‘universal’ concept” SZ, 3).

Moreover, without acknowledging the incipience of thought from more fundamental Being, Marxist materialism becomes an absurdity: Materiality becomes identical to the thought of materiality (like Substance), and thus an idea! In this way, materialism easily becomes idealism.

Haz engages in a clever trick here. He claims that Marxist materialism cannot simply operate with “the idea of matter,” or it becomes idealism. Materialism must, accordingly, acknowledge the “incipience of thought from more fundamental Being.” Haz uses his own language here because he is trying to blur the lines between Marx and Heidegger, conflating Marx’s claim that “all consciousness is being conscious” with the “always already” of Heidegger. When Marx says “all consciousness is being conscious,” he explicitly understands “being” here to mean matter. Heidegger understands being as the revelation of the real itself. Yet Heidegger is quite clear that if Dasein does not exist, then there is no “being,” so Heidegger conception of being, insofar as being only occurs within a particular understanding or interpretation of being, is fundamentally idealist.

Haz then makes the “always already” and “thrownness” of Dasein more explicit. A consequence of this thrownness, according to Haz, is:

The real individual is thus set against a background within which their very individuated identity is subordinated to a more fundamental horizon of Being. Dasein, in its incipience, knows no distinction between individuals, or itself and others. It is not even a collective.

Haz is being inaccurate, conflating das Man with the horizon of being. Of course, Being itself is the horizon on the basis of which Dasein can know itself as an individual, but this is precisely because Heidegger is an idealist, one who thinks we cannot understand being outside of our understanding of being.

Typically, Marxists try to resolve antinomy of sociality (either the sum-total of individual subjects or a collective subject individuals are part of) by just grotesquely defining it as a ‘complex’ of relationships between individuals, too numerous to ground in anything definite.

Where do Marxists do this Haz? Cite your sources if you make claims! This is a gross misrepresentation of Marxism, which should not be surprising given that Haz is not well-versed in Marx’s writings or the Marxist tradition.

The concept of Dasein, properly speaking, does not necessarily even imply individuated identity, let alone a grouping of individuals - but a more fundamental and antecedent background from which individuals acquire distinction, place and identity within a world.

Wrong. Haz takes the first part from Haugland and Dugin, yet he then conflates Dasein with “being-in-the-world.” Being-in-the-world is an existential, a mode of Dasein’s being, not Dasein itself. Dasein is either das Man or an authentic self.

The simultaneous quality of being open to Being, while also itself Being, implies Dasein as an incipience of thought that goes from the question of a subject faced with its object, to a quality of the ‘object’ itself, as originally discontinuous with regard to itself.

Heidegger does not think that Dasein is “itself Being.” Then, Haz contradicts himself by saying that Dasein goes from “the question of a subject faced with its object” to “a quality of the ‘object’ itself.” How can that be the case if Being is prior to the subject? But Haz wants to just introduce the same pseudo-dialectics from earlier about society being a subject that’s an object for itself. He takes the idea of building a “discontinuity” within Dasein from Dugin’s “reading” of Husserl and from Zizek.

A Dasein is already immersed within a world, and is a grounded existence while simultaneously corresponding to an openness of Being at issue with, or at least discontinuous with that existence. Yet said Being is nothing more than the very Being of Dasein itself.

Horrible worded and ambiguous. The attempt at profundity here fails, because Haz is just repeating the same pseudo-dialectic the whole time. Dasein is always already in a world, it is open to being, yet since it is “in” being prior to being open to being, it’s open to itself, and Haz thinks this creates a discontinuity, yet it only creates a discontinuity if we collapse the subject into itself. If there is an external world that exists independently of Dasein/subjects (as every Marxist holds), then Dasein would be open to the being of this external world, too, and be able to understand itself as a product of the material conditions prior to its own existence.

This ontological difference (between a world of beings and Being as such) is not antagonistic, since Being merely discloses itself, implying not that it is at odds with the world, only given privileged significance in the way it reveals itself to Dasein, in contrast to beings.

How did Haz jump from this ambiguous concept of Dasein to talking about the ontological difference?

Particular beings acquire definition in their use, or general significance, but their real meaning is always metonymic, always referring to something more fundamental than themselves: Being as such is thus also the ultimate horizon of meaningfulness to which beings are referred.

Okay, so being makes beings meaningful. Got it.

The definition of a Dasein itself …

A Dasien? Didn’t you just say Dasein isn’t an individual?

… lies at the point in which it faces the threshold beyond which it cannot cross, simultaneously defining the whole of what it is. Typically understood as a person’s death, but more importantly that within which Dasein may recognize its finitude.

Yes, being-towards-death and all that. Continue. This essay is incredibly disorganized.

[Its finitude] is necessarily beyond any particular being; even individual ego.

How can finitude be beyond any particular being? What do you mean?

Being as such grounds the finitude of Dasein, and meaningfulness arises not simply in the physical death of a person, but in Being itself, so far as it sets upon the limits of its disclosure to a given Dasein.

This claim needs some explanation. Haz thinks that he can just say “being” without specifying anything as a catchall term. Furthermore, I have already pointed out how it is an error, for Heidegger, to speak of Being as such as “grounding” the finitude of Dasein. And Being more or less is meaningfulness.

Heidegger’s shortcoming lies in the ambiguity of Dasein. While Dasein is thrown into a given community, as an established horizon of being, it acquires an authentic relationship to Being only through the exercise of individual will, where it comes to acknowledge its finitude.

Not true … Heidegger is quite clear in Being and Time about how history plays the role of binding together the folk. I’m surprised Haz didn’t know this.

Yet at the same time, the community is the very ground of Dasein, since ones relation toward others constitutes a given conventionally established horizon of being.

Relationships towards the world which includes other Dasein who are encountered in terms of Mitsein.

What remains ambiguous is the antisocial status of the Being which discloses itself to Dasein.

So now we are talking about “THE Being?” Being cannot disclose itself to Dasein because Being is not a being. Being is this disclosure itself, the unconcealment of beings.

Experiencing finitude is necessarily individual, yet the status of the finitude of Being itself is not clear.

It might not be clear to Haz, but it’s quite clear to people who understand Heidegger. For Heidegger, Being is finite because it is grounded in ecstatic temporality, which in turn occurs in Dasein, and all “objectivity” is derivative of this more primordial ecstatic temporality.

This is heightened by the fact that for Heidegger, every determinacy of Being is metaphysical, closing the Ontological difference by reducing Being to a particular being.

Correct statement if examined out of context.

Though, Heidegger does not make clear how it is community acquires singularity of being, he grounds phenomenological Being the site of its conceivability, freeing it from the methodological individualism of intersubjectivity: and that is his principal achievement for Marxism.

Haz isn’t clear at all in his language. He uses the term “singularity,” which means the same thing as “individuality” (albeit with slightly different connotations), but he’s roughly asking how, for Heidegger, Being presences for the community, how it opens up a site for the worlding of the world, and how we escape the “methodological individualism” (whatever that means) that Haz accuses Marxism of having (without evidence, because he is unfamiliar with Marxism).

Haz says “he grounds phenomenological Being the site of its conceivability,” yet this sentence makes no sense and does not refer to any identifiable aspect of Heidegger’s thought.

For Heidegger, Being takes on a “community” or “folkish” character through what he calls the “destiny” of the Volk, which appears in the shared struggle, grounded in Heidegger’s understanding of history as taking up a historical tradition that has been handed down and “repeating” it in the present.

As shown, without the aid of Heidegger, Marxism inevitably regresses into metaphysics.

How has this been shown? Haz has not shown this because he fails to answer the following simple questions. What is metaphysics? How has Marxism regressed into metaphysics? (Allegedly “methodological individualism”) How does Dasein escape this individualism?

Not only has Haz failed to prove his claim, it’s not even clear that he has attempted to prove this claim.

Haz simply insinuates that Dasein escapes the subject/object distinction, yet fails to articulate Heidegger’s concept of the “worldhood of the world,” which would help explain this. He just gestures loosely at “Being as such.” He then suggests Heidegger remains unable to answer how we move from Dasein to a community (which suggests that Heidegger did not solve the problem Haz claims he solved), yet Haz ignores Heidegger’s actual account of “community Dasein,” of the Dasein of “a people” or "Volk.”

Haz’s Critique of Heidegger:

Haz will now make another bold claim:

But paradoxically, Heidegger’s understanding of metaphysics is the very chief defect of his outlook, not only condemning it to stagnation on his part, but placing it at risk of idealism.

Haz will now critique Heidegger’s outlook, which he claims to understand.

Heidegger makes no distinction, in his understanding of metaphysics, between Being in the specificity of its determination, and Being in the specificity of its understanding within the history of philosophy.

Haz is a horrible writer. “Being in the specificity of its understanding?” Being has an intellect? Do you think Being is God? Perhaps Haz is just unable to articulate himself but is trying to say that Heidegger conflates specific things that “are” with the specific ways we understand beings to be. If this is his claim, then Haz is correct in his criticism, but so sloppy with his vocabulary that I am only guessing and projecting a meaning onto his amateurish attempt to play philosopher.

He extends the label ‘metaphysics’ beyond the realm of thought.

Yet the next sentence suggests that Haz means something else entirely. Perhaps his minions are easily impressed by this and think my inability to comprehend Haz’s argument is a sign of his genius and my own lack of intelligence. If Haz were an intelligent person, he could communicate his ideas more effectively. He cannot.

For him, metaphysics is an actuality.

This statement is either untrue or nonsense.

Thus, industrial capitalist modernity is itself the result of metaphysics and it is implied: a consequence of the history of philosophy.

This statement is accurate, which tells me that Haz just doesn’t know what the word “actuality” means or how to use it in philosophy.

Obviously from an elementary Marxist, or even commonsense perspective, he gets the whole thing backwards.

Obviously.

To understand how Being itself acquires a specific determination, it suffices to return to the ontological difference between Being and particular beings. Heidegger situates this difference at the core of Dasein’s existential turmoil, for which Being is always at issue.

No he doesn’t. You can’t somehow derive the ontological difference from Dasein’s “mineness.”

This quandary, while not identical, at least parallels that of Kant, for whom the transcendental subject is likewise situated between the antinomies.

No, there’s no parallel, and show me where Kant says the transcendental subject is “situated between the antinomies.”

So it suffices to ‘in parallel’ look to Hegel for the solution, and transpose the difference as a difference of Being itself.

He must be drawing off some obscure Zizek passage for this.

That is to say, the ontological difference should change the operative notion of Being in the first place, from its one-sided conception mired in the stillness of thought, to an understanding of Being as itself contradiction, difference, etc. in sum, a dialectical union of contraries.

If you make this move, you are just repeating the beginning of Hegel’s Logic, but then the ontological difference shows itself to be a false abstraction. Furthermore, Haz is himself ignoring the ontological difference when making this claim, because he is thinking Being in terms of beings, namely contradictory, dialectical beings, and engaging in what Heidegger would call “ontotheology.”

Thus Being as such acquires determinacy as an absolute ontological union of opposites, transposing the difference at the core of Dasein to a feature of Being itself.

Haz has not shown that the ontological difference corresponds to a difference within Dasein. He feels like he is bluffing, as if he can just keep using words and pieces of things he has heard to confuse his readers.

Yet in contrast to Hegel, it is not necessary to draw the conclusion that thought comprises the essential element in the contradiction at the heart of Being. - The misstep of phenomenological Hegelians from Kojeve to Žižek, who regressed from Heidegger’s original achievement.

Hegel claims that the contradiction in Being is that it is Nothing, and this contradiction is realized in the concept of Becoming. Haz is shifting to talking about Being in a different sense, namely the opposition between “being and thought,” when earlier Haz was talking about “Being as such.” Haz name drops Kojeve and Zizek, but Haz’s thoughts are too cloudy to hit their targets. His reasoning is just word association.

The important conclusion is that ontology - taken not as a philosophical contemplation, but the real threshold by which mankind relates to Being as such - is itself actively suspended and itself reproduced within material reality, as the formative ground of all thought

Ontology = the study of being. Ontology is philosophical contemplation. Haz calls it “the real threshold by which mankind relates to being as such,” so he must mean the preontological understanding of being in Dasein. Yet he gives no argument for how this is “actively suspended and itself reproduced within material reality,” and is either saying something really obvious about ideological reproduction, or lost in too many confusions to follow.

This threshold lies not in the limits of philosophy, but in the limits of man’s existence itself, itself suspended in temporal history. Such a limit lies not in the threshold of man’s mastery over nature, but the limit by which man lives, relates to others and to things.

Haz lazily reduces the understanding of being to history and finitude.

Such a limit is not preempted by any philosophy, idea, or consciousness, but the genuine limit of man’s existence in relation to the whole of Being, conditioned not necessarily by physical limitation, but by the limit of the absolute contradiction which forms meaning itself.

So just Heidegger, but now we are calling the ontological difference the “absolute contradiction” because that sounds more Marxist?

This can be understood as the contradiction between the givenness of being and Being as such …

So this would just be Heidegger.

… or between the determinate norms of civilization and their unity in a state authority …

So Haz is using the relationship between givenness and “Being as such” as a model for the relationship between “cultural norms” and “state power.” Haz claims to have wanted to resort to Heidegger because of his critique of metaphysics, yet this structure shows that Haz has not even escaped ontotheology, but has reified Being into a “highest being,” the most rookie mistake a person can make while reading Heidegger.

… a specific frame of past and future, particular and universal, many and one, etc.

In these binaries, is the second term “Being as such?” So future determines past? (fascistic!) Universal determines particular? (Sounds too liberal for Haz) One determines many? (Neoplatonism?)

Heidegger (at least in his early years) could not see that Dasein is not just a being for whom there is a question of Being - but also a being for whom that question is already resolved in a specific way.

Is that true? Nope:

Understanding of being is itself a determination of being of Dasein. The ontic distinction of Dasein lies in the fact that it is ontological (SZ, 12).

Dasein always operates within an understanding of the meaning of Being, even if this understanding is not explicit.

Heidegger assumed that resolution was necessarily metaphysical.

Not necessarily.

While true for the history of philosophy, it is not true for living and real mankind, for whom the contradiction between the determinacy of Being and an appreciation for the ontological, is the very content of the latter. It is what gives Being itself meaning!

I assume Haz means to say that living and real mankind has “resolved” the question of being for itself in some way and Heidegger would agree.

The absolute contradiction is a contradiction of incipience, between determination and origins. The contingency of Dasein is not simply a matter of choice, as Heidegger thought, but in a determination whose ‘reason’ is only clear retroactively, like a wavefunction collapse.

Haz rips off Zizek’s notion of “retroactivity.” Where does Heidegger say that Dasein is contingent? Where does he say that this alleged contingency is “a matter of choice?” Does Haz even know what these words mean?

Haz’s National Bolshevism

Haz begins to develop his theory of “civilization.” He aims to ground what he calls “socialism” within a culturalist, ethnocentric framework.

A civilization is the way it is, not because it is physically impossible for it to be any other way, but precisely because it is physically possible. Only by assuming one determination against a background of many, can a higher reason participate in the development of a people.

Haz is trying to extend Heidegger’s idea of “authentic choice” the the notion of civilizations. So each civilization somehow “assumes” a determination that makes it what it is. Yet the term “civilization” is an abstraction, and it would be ludicrous to think that we can develop the notions of “civilization” and “a people” in a concrete manner, ascribing group agency to the Volk.

Western Marxism, before it engages in ‘historical materialist’ analysis, projects a vulgar metaphysical view (rejected by Marx & Engels) of humanity, according to which mankind dwells at the precipice of physical extinction. Thus, everything about society is reduced to survival.

Marx and Engels primarily understand humanity as first needing to survive before moving on to other needs. They also hold that the vast majority of humanity lives at the level of mere survival. Engels was also quite clear about the inevitability of human extinction, writing:

Inexorably the time will come when the declining warmth of the sun will no longer suffice to melt the ice thrusting itself forward from the poles; when the human race, crowding more and more about the equator, will finally no longer find even there enough heat for life; when gradually even the last trace of organic life will vanish; and the earth, an extinct frozen globe like the moon, will circle in deepest darkness and in an ever narrower orbit about the equally extinct sun, and at last fall into it.

Haz, of course, is sneaking his climate denialism into this text.

Hence, class struggle ultimately reduces to the Rational Choice Individual, and one group merely finds itself disadvantaged with regard to others, on account of being unable to fulfill the desires, or restricting the choices of individuals.

How does this follow from the claim that Western Marxism reduces everything to survival? Also, doesn’t this describe those who engage in class struggle pretty well? Oppressed groups band together on account of their shared interest based on their mutual antagonism to the ruling class?

What is problematic about this is clear

No, it’s not. Haz just doesn’t want to say what’s problematic about it because it would reveal that he is a fascist pretending to be a communist.

It clearly contrasts with the Marxist view of class struggle, which situates class antagonism within a single division of labor, as a contradiction at the core of being itself - giving it ontological significance, rather than a result of clashing individuals.

What does Haz think the word “ontological” means? Does he think nature doesn’t exist? Being only includes human beings? Didn’t he just criticize Lukacs for this claim? The Marxist view of class struggle, moreover, does not “situate class antagonism within a single division of labor.” Haz does not know what “division of labor” means! He thinks it refers to class distinctions, but it means the division of the workforce into different jobs.

Yet if he means to say “class struggles,” but is just too uneducated to know what “division of labor means,” then we should say: History is the history of class STRUGGLES, in the plural.

Understanding any given civilization, is simply a matter of understanding the mode of production.

Wrong. The mode of production and relations of production form the base, but a “civilization” (not a Marxist term by the way) is not reducible to the base. Yet this will contradict what Haz says later, when shifts into saying that civilizations are primarily defined in terms of traditional norms.

The problem is they never bother to ask exactly what is being produced in the first place. They begin and end with the individual, effectively arriving at no real knowledge at all.

Who is “they?”

The problem of course is that the individual is situated within a more fundamental horizon by which they relate to others, to things, etc. This jibber-jabber is well-known to ‘Marxists,’ but precisely what is meant by it, at the objective material level they never make clear.

The individual? What happened to Dasein? Are you talking about the worldhood of the world? And what does this have to do with the question about what is being produced in the first place? Has Haz made anything “clear” within this essay other than that he has horrible writing skills and poor reasoning ability, but a sophisticated, half-baked vocabulary?

A mode of production is the mode by which something is reproduced; that something can’t just be the individual. For a mode of production to be general, it must itself have a general object, otherwise the entire concept becomes completely useless.

This is pseudo-philosophical babble, and shows Haz’s ignorance of Marx’s Grundrisse:

If there is no production in general, then there is also no general production. Production is always a particular branch of production—e.g. agriculture, cattle-raising, manufacture, etc.

From here, Haz will claim:

To begin, this object - which is really the specific Being of Dasein - must be a specific logic of reproduction. You could call it a unit of civilization, or a division of labor. Marxoids have devoted an eternity of soliloquies to Capital as a logic of reproduction.

Haz draws a false equivalence between “logic of reproduction” and “division of labor.” Yet Haz is confusing production and reproduction, and the divisions of labor have nothing to do with this.

Capital, whose logic is standardization, abstraction, and utilitarianism is not a specific logic, but an empty universalism, which concludes with modern American ‘civilisation,’ and now a mere extension of Church of Cartesian metaphysics (govt, financial institutions etc).

Haz blends together Heidegger and the Frankfurt school, somehow blaming “Cartesian metaphysics” despite criticizing Heidegger for these kinds of idealist claims earlier. The logic of Capital is the logic of surplus value. When capitalism expands, there is standardization and abstraction, universalism, but this is a consequence of the “cosmopolitan character” of capitalist expansion, and is not the logic of capital itself. But Haz is wanting to replace the critique of capitalism with the far-right critique of “globalism.”

M-C-M’ is merely the form of reproduction of the modern European polity …

What does this even mean? M-C-M’ has nothing to do with the reproduction of the polity, that is, the superstructural form of government.

… the abstraction of the commodity form corresponding to the abstraction of the state.

M-C-M’ is not the “abstraction of the commodity form.” The commodity form is use-value and exchange-value. M-C-M’ is the formula for capital.

“Abstraction of …” is not a helpful construction, since this could refer to the fact that the commodity, as an abstraction, is the “cell” of Marx’s analysis or to the fact that commodity production brings about abstract labor. None of this corresponds to the “abstraction of the state,” nor does Haz explain why he thinks the state is an abstraction.

Capital is not an autonomous process, but a civilizational quandary. A deeper object has precedence over it.

I am guessing that Haz is going to put some form of “culture war” shit at the basis of capitalism, because he’s ultimately just a NazBol.

In a sense, Heidegger is right that ontology here possesses primacy. Before there was capitalism, there was a more fundamental way European civilization came to relate to Being as a whole. That is not to say the latter is arbitrary - on the contrary, it is world-historical. The point is that in contrast to the vulgar materialist view, all of mankind’s ‘metaphysical,’ spiritual, cultural, scientific, etc. questions, aspirations, fears and dreams were bound up with the development of capitalism, reflecting their highest relation to Being as such.

Capitalism is now a determination of the meaning of Being, thus we can place all of the “cultural” aspects into capitalism and transform the class war into a culture war.

To know a logic of reproduction, is to know what is most sacred, fundamental, and ontological for a given people.

No. The logic of reproduction has to do with the labor involved in reproducing the conditions for the accumulation of capital. Furthermore, who says that every “people” has something that is “most sacred?” What if there are several sacred things or differences between the people in this respect? What does Marxism have to do with fetishizing the sacred anyways?

No abstract, mechanical geometrical, or arithmetic conception of physical production suffices to produce knowledge of any given mode of production.

Just because it doesn’t suffice doesn’t mean Haz can simply skip over doing anything resembling a Marxist analysis. And how would you even give a “geometrical” conception of physical production? Haz is just using words that sound sciency.

Now, Haz will argue that we need to particularize Heidegger’s concept of Dasein, writing:

It was Aleksandr Dugin who accomplished the particularization of Heidegger’s concept of Dasein, thus allowing for it to be put to work in productive, even practical ways.

Haz wants to develop a form of “national socialism” akin to Heidegger, but he lacks the education or brainpower to study the Black Notebooks or Heidegger’s Hölderlin seminars, so he’s going to use Dugin instead, starting with Dugin’s concept of “logos.” I am going to skip the jargon and go to the main takeaway. “Logos,” for Dugin, is “the logic of a given civilization’s existence, defining its particular Dasein, or ontology.” In fact, this is just Heidegger, and Dugin is quite aware of this in his Heidegger book. Dugin is just talking about Sprache, language as the house of being and what gives the “Dasein of a Volk” its Volkish character.

Haz admits this looks idealist, but claims it’s in fact materialist:

Dugin claims to reject materialism as a whole. Yet only his language is metaphysical: what he describes is nothing other than the metaphysically-concealed communal being which is the premise of any application of Scientific Socialism. The kernel of his thinking is materialist.

Haz makes some leaps. How is the “metaphysically-concealed communal being” a materialist concept at all? This is Heidegger’s Mitsein. How is Mitsein “the premise of any application of Scientific Socialism?” How does a metaphysical communal being have anything to do with materialism? It doesn’t, and Haz is neither a Marxist nor a materialist.

Logos is the revealed form of Dasein, cleansing Heidegger of any traces of potential subjectivism and, in a properly Hegelian manner, transposing the ontological difference itself into a determinate object.

Logos doesn’t make anything determinate. If it removes “subjectivism” from Heidegger, it simply replaces the idealism of the subject with a “discourse theory” in the manner of Foucault or Derrida, creating an idealism rooted in language rather than in thinking or perception.

Active geopolitical analysis can then replace impotent contemplation.

How does that follow from this discussion of logos? What makes geopolitical analysis “active” as opposed to “impotent” contemplation?

I will skip over the uninteresting discussion of Dugin’s theory of space and turn to a much more interesting passage:

Dugin is necessary for Marxism, because without specifying the communal being which is the premise of Scientific Socialism, it not only regresses into metaphysics (and cannot draw any particular insights), it becomes a cheap extension of American unipolar liberalism.

In this passage, Haz unequivocally shows that his project is national socialism. The premise of “Marxism,” for Haz, is “communal being,” which is grounded in the Logos, that is, in Sprache, in the language of a people, in the customs of a people, etc. Haz claims that Dugin gives Marxism its particularity. He writes: “from a materialist perspective, going from the general to the particular is the opposite of metaphysical,” an absurd claim, but it shows that Haz’s goal is to particularize Marxism by infusing it with a national, culturist character. Of course, Haz has not said any position that is even remotely Marxist. He has not even mentioned the exploitation of the proletariat by the capitalist class.

When Marxism is not based in “communal being,” Haz claims that “it becomes a cheap extension of American unipolar liberalism.” In other words, it becomes “globalist” or “cosmopolitan.” Marxism becomes internationalist, which Haz equates with “Americanism” because he is a fascist and has a horseshoe theory of liberalism and Marxism.

Socialism in One Country reflected the precise logic that universal Communism can only be built up within a determinate communal being, not a vain pretension to the entire world, but a concrete, grounded relationship between a specific party and a specific country.

Haz is attempting to use the Stalinist idea of “socialism in one country” to give Stalinist vibes to his national socialism, which he wants to ground in a Heideggerian idea that the meaning of being is somehow culturally determined. Socialism in one country was a defensive position. It did not give up on the struggle for international struggle, but retreated into focusing on development because of imperialism.

Moreover, “Socialism in One Country” is not a culturalist or ethnocentric position in the manner of Dugin, but is a fundamentally economic position. Stalin explains the aims of “Socialism in One Country” as follows:

Can the working class of our country overcome the contradictions with our peasantry and establish an alliance, collaboration with them?

Can the working class of our country, in alliance - with our peasantry, smash the bourgeoisie of our country, deprive it of the land, factories, mines, etc., and by its own efforts build a new, classless society, complete Socialist society?

Dugin’s geopolitical orientation allows for an understanding of the objectivity of civilizations beyond the formalism of statehood - states only exist to the extent that they can reflect the underlying logos of a civilization, reflected in its geography.

Dugin’s appeals to geography are obviously kooky, but it’s important to notice that Dugin frames his “fourth political theory” explicitly in terms of “ethnocentrism.”

Conclusion

I have decided to end this project here. Haz Al-Din seeks attention, and I don’t wish to give him any more attention, especially when he will resort to violence or Doxxing whenever he is unable to resort to rational arguments.

MAGA Communism, Infrared, and the ACP are not serious organizations. They are social media content generation schemes. We should focus on real issues and articulating principled, correct theories, not on the distractions provided by groups like Infrared or the ACP.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/nov/06.htm

1.

2. Marx, Grundrisse https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm

3. Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ch02.htm