Anthony Flood

Langer speaks!

Delighted to stumble upon the 48-minute audio of “Susanne Langer on Man & Animal: The City & the Hive,” a 1957 lecture on YouTube—I had never heard her before—I scrambled to see whether there was a transcript of it anywhere.

UPDATE: Dr. Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin of The Langer Circle and author of The Philosophy of Susanne Langer: Embodied Meaning in Logic, Art and Feeling, a masterpiece of biography and research, sent me a better site on which the audio resides, namely, that of Cooper Union in Manhattan, where presidential candidate Lincoln delivered a key campaign speech in 1860 and where Langer delivered her lecture on October 28, 1957, and which was introduced by Jonathan E. Fairchild. There is also a link to the booklet for the 1957-1958 season’s events—a wonderful literary artifact— that attendees received, but here it is. Langer’s lecture is listed on page 4.

Well, there it was, right under my nose: I had forgotten not only that it was published the following year in The Antioch Review [TAR], but also that 17 years ago, that is, back in 2008, I had published its text on my old site by scanning the print version I had of that article and then correcting the scan. Here is TAR’s prefatory paragraph:

Susanne K. Langer, professor of philosophy at Connecticut College [New London, CT], is well known as the author of Philosophy in a New Key, Feeling and Form, and Problems of Art. This paper, read at the Cooper Union in New York as part of the centenary celebration of the Great Hall, offers a sketch of philosophical work in progress under a research grant received by Connecticut College from the Edgar J. Kaufmann Foundation [which underwrote her Mind trilogy].

So, you may read as you listen.

Susanne K. Langer (1895-1985) was raised in Manhattan, but her mother tongue was German, and it shows. Her command of literary English, however, which she began speaking at age four, was perfect and she deployed it gracefully to light up nearly everything human: science, art, logic, culture in many articles and books. Here’s a taste from that article:

Animals interpret signs, too, but only as pointers to actual things and events: cues to action or expectation, threats and promises, landmarks and earmarks in the world. Human beings use such signs, too; but above all they use symbols—especially words—to think and talk about things that are neither present nor expected. The words convey ideas, that may or may not have counterparts in actuality. This power of thinking about things expresses itself in language, imagination, and speculation—the chief products of human mentality that animals do not share.

Language, the most versatile and indispensable of all symbolisms, has put its stamp on all our mental functions, so that I think they always differ from even their closest analogues in animal life. Language has invaded our feeling and dreaming and action, as well as our reasoning, which is really a product of it. The greatest change wrought by language is the increased scope of awareness in speech-gifted beings. An animal’s awareness is always of things in its own place and life. In human awareness, the present, actual situation is often the least part. We have not only memories and expectations; we have a past in which we locate our memories, and a future that vastly over-reaches our own anticipations. Our past is a story, our future a piece of imagination. Likewise our ambient is a place in a wider, symbolically conceived place, the universe. We live in a world.

As I said, nearly everything. She was a deep-dyed, unabashed secularist whose focus on feeling (not emotion!) and how we variously and promiscuously symbolize it is, with a few important modifications, compatible with the biblical theism I favor. The fellow creatures in my worldview are in hers man’s biological “relatives.” Man is part of the “animal kingdom,” not subject to God’s. She proudly took her stand with the evolutionary hypothesis as the best explanation of the origin of species (not just variation within species).

I myself stand entirely in the scientific camp. I do not argue against any religious or even vitalistic doctrines; such things are not arguable. I speak not for, but from, a naturalist’s point of view, and anyone who does not share it can make his own reservations in judging what I say.

And I have, although not explicitly about her in my Philosophy after Christ. The foolishness of the latter gambit, including the conceit that it’s “not arguable”—would that be a case of “punching down”?—is what her stance commits her to. The brain that distinguishes man from the ape is, for her, an accident of a process that has no regard for her projects. We’re going to die, and the poignancy of her expression of that awareness does not bevel its sharp edges:

Probably the profoundest difference between human and animal needs is made by one piece of human awareness, one fact that is not present to animals, because it is never learned in any direct experience: that is our foreknowledge of Death. The fact that we ourselves must die is not a simple and isolated fact. It is built on a wide survey of facts, that discloses the structure of history as a succession of overlapping brief lives, the patterns of youth and age, growth and decline; and above all that, it is built on the logical insight that one’s own life is a case in point. Only a creature that can think symbolically about life can conceive of its own death. Our knowledge of death is part of our knowledge of life.

About ultimate origins, however, we know nothing and therefore should be silent. It’s not a good use of time to speculate about such things when there are so many empirical studies to be conducted! (Nobody ultimately knows anything, except we all “know” that biblical theism is nonsense.) She cannot but repair to an agnosticism that threatens the very foundations of her enterprise—but that’s a story for another day. Until then, enjoy the lecture. If you’re up to reading more by her, start with Philosophy in a New Key. Or visit my Langer portal on my old site.

Earlier posts on Susanne K. Langer

Susanne Langer’s thesis: stray notes from a new reading of “Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling”

I’m experiencing my re-reading of Langer as a rediscovery; this post builds on one from last month, “Making the aesthetic realm a little less mysterious (to me): what I got from Susanne Langer (1895-1985).” That is, I’m feeling both more enlightened and retrospectively more stupid in the light of her patient empirical enquiries guided by a promising insight via her master concept of feeling. My study is self-referentially illuminating: what she did in Mind and what I’m doing by re-reading it are illustrations and examples of, not exceptions to, the rule her insights suggest.

I’m a biblicist; she decidedly was not. Yet I in my way and two orthodox Jesuit philosophers (Lonergan and a student of his, i.e., classical theists) in theirs found her work not only compatible with theirs, but a source of fruitful development.[1] My transcendental critique of philosophy does not give her conceptual framework a pass but, my goodness, how I envision the articulation of the former to benefit from the latter! Langer’s philosophy can and must be translated into theistic “creationese,” if you will, to rescue it from the ultimate unintelligibility to which her “agnostic” posture dooms it, without forcing her insights into alien, dogmatic categories. I would aim for to be a mutually beneficial cross-pollination. Maybe that’s something I can do, Deo volente.

For now, however, no systematic development from me is forthcoming, only suggestive notes. Citations are from Gary Van Den Heuvel’s abridgement of Langer’s trilogy, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988.[2] Italics mine.

* * *

Langer’s thesis in nuce: “. . . the entire psychological field . . . is a vast and branching development of feeling.” 9

Langer’s “most important distinction within the realm of feeling” is between what is felt as impact and what is felt as autogenic action. 9 This flows from the “nature of vitality itself.” The pattern of stimulus and response . . . is a simplified schema derived from that natural division.” 9

The organism’s environment is not a system in the same sense as the organism is. There is an asymmetry between it and the surrounding world. 10.

“An organism is a continuous dynamism, a pattern of activity, basically electrochemical, but capable also of large, concerted forms if action with further principles of organization.” 10

Langer’s naturalistic presupposition on display: “There must have been several such turning points in the evolution of our world . . . the very first genuinely symbolic utterances, speech, which marked the advent of man.” 13

Feeling is the starting-point of her philosophy of mind. “The same concept that raises problems of natural science takes one just as surely into humanistic ones . . . .” 14

Autogenic action and sense of impact correspond to emotivity and sensibility, the subjective and the objective. 13

“By ‘subjective’ I mean whatever is felt as action, and by ‘objective’ whatever is felt as impact.” Those words denote functional properties, not classes of things. They are “two possible modes of feeling, i.e., of psychical phases of activity.” 13

To be continued

Notes

[1] “Insight in musical composition is described by S. K. Langer, Feeling and Form (New York 1953), pp. 121 ff”.” Lonergan, Insight, 1956, 184n; “Not only are words themselves sensible but also their initial meaning commonly is sensible.” Lonergan, Insight, 544; “An accurate statement on initial meanings would be much more complex.” See S. K. Langer, Feeling and Form (New York 1953), pp. 237 ff.” Lonergan, Insight, 544n.

[2] To repeat a note from the previous post on her: Susanne K. Langer, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, Johns Hopkins University Press, three volumes (1967, 1972, 1982). She believed that our intelligence and everything we do with it is biology-based, but [speculative] metaphysical questions [before the hard empirical work] is done like ‘What grounds biology?’ were not her cup of tea. A one-volume abridgement by Gary Van Den Heuvel (1948-2012) came out in 1988; when he contacted me in 2009 about my site’s ‘Langer portal,’ we began a correspondence that lasted until a year before his death. The Langer Circle plans to publish this correspondence online later this year. Stay tuned.”

Carter G. Woodson’s encouragement of Herbert Aptheker: a “postscript” that merits a post.

Carter G. Woodson (1875-1950) reviewing ASNLH Bulletins.

In the preceding post, I inexplicably, and severely, understated things when I wrote that Carter G. Woodson, the father of Negro History in the United States, “had in 1946 replied to a letter Aptheker had written to him.”[1]

That doesn’t tell the half of it, no, not even a tenth of it, but, oddly, nearly all of it locked itself inside my memory just when I needed access to it. You see, their correspondence and relationship went back much further, about a decade earlier, and deeper. So, rather than lengthening the “birthday” post with an overlong “postscript,” as I had thought of doing last night, let me make amends with a post dedicated to correcting my inadvertent distortion.

US Army Captain Herbert Aptheker, Brooklyn, 1946

In 1946, Aptheker was back home in the States after his World War 2 ETO service. His academic interest in history, particularly the history that Woodson pioneered and in the man himself, had begun to percolate in 1935, leaving his geological studies in the dust.

Biographer Murrell notes that Aptheker was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree from Columbia University at the age 21 in 1936, “only three years after matriculating” as a teenager and then Black history occluded all else, launching himself headlong into the work that would yield his study of Nat Turner’s Southampton revolt and a Master of Arts degree in February of 1937. At 17 going on 18 and 19, young Herbert had

. . . studied the writings of Carter G. Woodson . . . . They corresponded and met several times in Washington, D.C., where Woodson lived. Woodson evidently liked Aptheker, encouraged his study, and attempted to keep him on the right track. “You ask my opinion also about what Virginia would have done if the Civil War had not happened,” Woodson wrote in his first communication with Aptheker. “This would be invading the field of prophecy, which I do not care to do. My field is history. I have no desire to depart for this sphere.”[2]

Aptheker set down vignettes of his intellectual shift of focus:

In my late teens [1933-1935], I became deeply interested in what we then called Negro history. I was fortunate enough to discover Dr. Woodson and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History and its publications. I wrote to him with questions, and he responded. As a result, when I planned a trip to the Library of Congress, I told him of this; he arranged to meet me at the Penn Station.

We had lunch together; at that time, except for the ghetto, we could eat together only at a counter at the station. We did so, and Dr. Woodson inquired of my interest. I replied I was working toward understanding the Nat Turner revolt; that this was part of my studies at Columbia University. He encouraged me and said that when I planned another visit to the Library, I should let him know so that we might again meet.

We did meet. This time, Dr. Woodson took me to a restaurant in the ghetto. I remember it was below street level. When we were about to enter, he noticed some awkwardness or nervousness on my part. Dr. Woodson touched my elbow, helped me downstairs, and said, “Herbert, you may eat with us; here, there is no discrimination; we are civilized.” Continue reading “Carter G. Woodson’s encouragement of Herbert Aptheker: a “postscript” that merits a post.”

On the 110th anniversary of Herbert Aptheker’s birth

Herbert Aptheker, 57, W. E. B. Du Bois’s literary executor, signing over Du Bois papers to the University of Massachusetts, May 27, 1973. To Aptheker’s right is Du Bois’s widow, Shirley Graham Du Bois.

One hundred ten years ago today, the temperature in Brooklyn was as high as it was yesterday, that is, 93°F, an especially stressful, even dangerous, circumstance for a woman great with child. Yet that day, July 31, 1915, Rebecca Aptheker successfully birthed Herbert, her and husband Benjamin’s fifth and last child, the future scholar of African American history and apologist for communism of the Stalinist kind—and, for a few years in the early 1970s, my friend, comrade, and employer.

The year of Herbert’s nativity also saw the screening of the pro-Ku Klux Klan film, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, in Woodrow Wilson’s White House; the founding of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and Culture by Carter G. Woodson (the only Harvard Ph.D. whose parents had been slaves; in 1946 he replied to a letter Aptheker had written to him); and the passing of Booker T. Washington.

Aptheker’s papers (1842-2005, bulk 1934-1994) are stored and catalogued in the Manuscripts Division of Stanford University. The linked page’s biographical paragraphs, here reproduced and copyedited, provide a compact introduction to aspects of his life. Its bibliographical section is unfortunately incomplete, and the items that are listed are not chronologically ordered. By welcome contrast, that section in his Wikipedia article is both nearly complete and arranged chronologically; there is no need to reproduce it here. Those interested should visit that page and scroll down to “Works.”

Dr. Herbert Aptheker, historian and lecturer, was born in Brooklyn, New York, on July 31, 1915, to Benjamin and Rebecca (Komar) Aptheker. He married Fay Aptheker on Sept. 4, 1942; they had one daughter, Bettina Aptheker, an author and historian in her own right. Aptheker received his B.S. in 1936, an A.M. in 1937, and his Ph.D. in 1943, all from Columbia University. He also holds a Ph.D. (honorary) from Martin Luther University, Halle, Germany, 1966, and a DHL (honorary) from the University of Massachusetts, 1996.

He edited Masses and Mainstream from 1948 through 1952 and Political Affairs from 1952 through 1963. He was the director of the American Institute for Marxist Studies in New York City from 1964 to 1985 and a professor at Hostos Community College, CUNY, from 1971 to 1977. He lectured extensively throughout the United States and Europe since 1941.

He was a visiting lecturer in the Department of History at Bryn Mawr College, 1969-1971; visiting lecturer, University of Massachusetts from 1971-1972; Yale University, 1976; University of California at Berkeley Law School, 1978-1991; University of Santa Clara, 1982-1983; visiting professor, Afro-American Studies, University of California at Berkeley, 1984.

Aptheker ran for the U.S. Congress in 1966 as the Independent Peace candidate and for the U.S. Senate in 1976 as the Communist Party candidate. He served as Major in the Field Artillery of the Army of the United States, European Theater of Operations, 1942-1946.

He served as a Guggenheim Fellow from 1946 to 1947 and received grants from the Social Science Research Council, 1961, the Rabinowitz Foundation, 1965, and the American Council of Learned Studies, 1974. He holds memberships in the American Historical Association and the Association for the Study of Negro Life, which awarded him its History Award in 1939 and 1969. [End]

The Wikipedia entry on Herbert Aptheker is worth consulting, but only as a preliminary to reading Gary Murrell’s “The Most Dangerous Communist in the United States”: A Biography of Herbert Aptheker (UMass Press, August 2015), published exactly a century after Aptheker’s birth. I reviewed it in 2016 for American Communist History; a PDF of the review is freely available here, but also republished with other essays in my 2019 Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness.

Search <Herbert Aptheker> on this site for many posts on this historically interesting figure.

Ralph Ellison: another denizen of Herbert Aptheker’s memory hole

My 2013 essay on Herbert Aptheker’s ghosting of C. L. R. James which casts him as the former’s “invisible man” alludes, of course, to the title of Ralph Ellison’s great novel.[1] Today, as I was flipping through Arnold Rampersad’s life of Ellison, Aptheker’s name cropped up, although Ellison’s, like James’s or Richard Wright’s, never did in any of our many chats in his office. Culturally prominent African Americans whom Aptheker knew, once they were “on the outs” with his party, were to him personae non gratae, regardless of their achievements.

U.S. Army Major Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003) in 1946, his last year of active duty, seventh as member of the Communist Party USA. Earl Conrad, “A Historian Comes Home,” Chicago Defender, March 16, 1946, page 14.

Such were the choices [Rampersad writes] facing Ralph as he found himself fallen among radicals in New York [in the mid-1930s]. He probably became, at least for a while, a dues-paying [Communist] party member. Herbert Aptheker, a scholar and Communist who knew Ralph from these years and believed that he was a fellow member, recalled that “it was really easy to join the Party. You simply signed up. Ralph would not have had to submit to tests or special study or anything like that. He would have been welcomed right away.”[2]

[Ellison] received a note . . . asking him to contribute an essay to a new journal of African-American affairs, to be sponsored by the recently formed Negro Publication Society. The society, tightly linked to the radical left, included the young Communist historian Herbert Aptheker, the black intellectuals Arthur Huff Fauset and Alain Locke, the dramatist Marc Blitzstein, the novelist Theodore Dreiser, the artists Rockwell Kent, and Henrietta Buckmaster . . . . The most celebrated person involved was the proposed editor of the journal, Angelo Herndon . . . .

Now, in 1941, as secretary of the Negro Publication Society, he [Ellison] was the editor of The Negro Quarterly: A Review of Negro Life and History. . . . Ralph would insist later that Herndon published the magazine in defiance of the Party, which presumably saw it as a diversion from its goal of uniting blacks and whites in the war effort. [3]

In March 1942, then Herndon launched the journal . . . he invited Ralph. . . . He liked the look of the first number. Dominated by a long, heavily footnoted article on slavery[4] by Aptheker, it projected an image of seriousness, if not severity. Either at this party or shortly afterward, Ralph agreed to join the staff as managing editor at a salary of $35 a week.[5]

[Ellison] declined to attend a conference called by the leftist Harlem Writers Guild at the New School for Social Research. Partly as a result, he became its prize scapegoat, attacked by writers such as [John Oliver] Killens, John Henrik Clarke, and Herbert Aptheker.[6] 423

In other words, Aptheker gave Ellison the same treatment he gave ex-comrade Wright and for the same reason: there’s no lower form of life than a renegade from the cause of revolution.[7]

Notes

[1] Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, Random House, 1952. My essay is anthologized in Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness, self-published, 2019.

[2] Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography, Knopf, 2008, 93; from Rampersad’s interview of Aptheker, June 25, 2001.

[3] Rampersad, Ellison, 152.

[4] To the inaugural issue of The Negro Quarterly: A Review of Negro Life and History, Spring 1942, Aptheker contributed “The Negro in the Abolitionist Movement.” That is, it was about African American resistance to slavery. That year, International Publishers published that essay as a booklet; Aptheker anthologized it in his Essays in the History of the American Negro, International Publishers, 1945, 1964. Note that Doxey Wilkerson‘s “Negro Education and the War” is the first article in the first issue.

[5] Rampersad, Ellison, 153.

[6] Rampersad, Ellison, 423.

[7] Anthony Flood, “Did Richard Wright want to ‘kiss the hand of the man who wrote American Negro Slave Revolts”? Yes, according to that hand’s owner. Notes on a mutual suspension of hostilities,’ June 1, 2025.

Making the aesthetic realm a little less mysterious (to me): what I got from Susanne Langer (1895-1985)

Susanne Katherina Knauth Langer, 1895-1985

During my freshman year at New York University in 1971, I had as my first professor of philosophy Bob Gurland (b. 1933), voted many times Teacher of the Year (by many of his 25 thousand students). One fascinating thing I had learned about him was that he played trumpet in several big bands in the Fifties. (Charlie Barnet’s was one, as I recall.) One day after class, I chatted with him on Waverly Place, half a block east of Washington Square North, about jazz music, which we both love, and I remember interjecting, “That’s not something I want to theorize about.” Neither did he. He added a few words that underscored his head-nodding agreement.[1] I went about my philosophical education knowing both that there was such a thing as aesthetics and that I wasn’t much interested in it.

But as that lack of interest didn’t sit well with me, I was delighted when my reading led me to Susanne K. Langer, who lifted the veil a bit for me. On this site five years ago, I shared my discovery of her writings, which came into my world by way of my long and deep interest in Bernard Lonergan (1904-1984).

Lonergan [I wrote] was impressed with Susanne K. Langer’s Feeling and Form enough to cite it a couple of times in Insight. That’s how I learned of her work, and around 2008 I finally got around to marking up her Philosophy in a New Key: a Study in the Symbolism of Reason Rite and Art. For the first time, the arts were for me not just enjoyable, but also intelligible. First published in 1942, a mass market paperback edition hit the stands in 1949.

What could Langer, a materialist (or naturalist) in all but name, offer Lonergan a Transcendental Thomist? Monsignor Richard M. Liddy, who wrote his dissertation on Langer after studying under Lonergan in Rome, supplied an answer in “What Bernard Lonergan Learned from Susanne K. Langer.”[2]

Now, just how did she make intelligible to my prosaic mind the arts that express, enrich, and delight us as souls, that is, as beings capable of enjoyment and suffering?[3] Well, she had an insight into the different “primary illusions” that inform the “great orders of art.” These illusions are “semblances of experienced events,” with music (where she, a trained cellist, started) creating the illusion of time; painting, space; ballet, forces; literature, a virtual past; drama, a virtual present. The primary illusion of film, I reread the other day, is the dream.

I cannot compress her insights into a blogpost without doing violence to their nuance—I know . . . too late—but several key essays (which Langer scholars have told me they’ve found useful in this form) may be read on my old site. But let me give you a taste of how she understands the unity of the diversity of arts. Continue reading “Making the aesthetic realm a little less mysterious (to me): what I got from Susanne Langer (1895-1985)”

The good of order, currently under increasingly violent attack, explained.

In light of the cold civil war that is slowly but surely hotting up, I thought it apt to excerpt the following theoretical (thus the “natural law” lingo) passages from Chapter 20 of Christ, Capital and Liberty: A Polemic, “What Is ‘The Free Market’?”

* * *

By “real” we mean the logical contrast of the illusory, the delusional, the fictional, the artificial, etc. When we know or suspect that we are in the presence of the latter, we appeal to some notion of the real to negotiate our encounter with it. A good analogy is found in the contrast between the true and the false: the notion of truth emerges only through the experience of falsehood. (If we could never experience being in error, or being deceived or lied to, we’d have no use for a notion of truth.)

Whatever is a function of real entities is also real. A market is a network of exchanges that persons, according to their human nature, spontaneously form. (That is, they do not engage in exchange because they read in some book that that’s what they must do.) Markets are functions of persons, and persons are real. (Persons are entities with causal efficacy, however, markets are not.)

The market is an order—specifically, a network of exchanges—that persons naturally create in pursuit of their flourishing (which exceeds in value their mere biological sustenance and continuance).

Since persons generate that order by acting in accordance with their nature, it is a natural order, one level, aspect, or dimension of several that make up the universal natural order. Violations of that order, which tend toward human self-destruction, is not to be put on the same ontological level as that which contributes to human flourishing. Continue reading “The good of order, currently under increasingly violent attack, explained.”

Herbert Aptheker’s academic ghosting didn’t end with C. L. R. James: the case of Doxey Wilkerson.

Apart from Shirley Graham Du Bois (1896-1977), no one knew more about her husband W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) than his literary executor, Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003). Not far behind, if this were a competition, would be Black labor activist, scholar, and fellow Communist theoretician Doxey A. Wilkerson (1905-1993).[1]

From 1948 to 1957, Wilkerson was the Director of Curriculum of the Communist Party-run Jefferson School of Social Science (northwest corner of Sixth Avenue and 16th Street in Manhattan) where Aptheker and Du Bois taught classes. This period saw Du Bois’s marked shift to Marxism-Leninism, culminating in his formally applying for Party membership in 1961.[2]

Since Wilkerson wrote the introduction to Aptheker’s The Negro People in America: A Critique of Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1946) and reviewed it six years later in a party periodical that Aptheker edited, it was odd that Aptheker omitted mention of Comrade Wilkerson’s review when preparing for publication the first critical scholarly edition of Du Bois’s 1952 In Battle for Peace.[3] Philip Luke Sinitiere, an empathetic Du Bois and Aptheker scholar,[4] writes:

. . . the absence of an expansive review of In Battle for Peace published in the October 1952 issue of Masses & Mainstream is a more curious omission [in the 1976 edition], both in Aptheker’s archives and in the Kraus Thomson edition. CPUSA [Communist Party United States of America] member and Black radical Doxey Wilkerson praised In Battle for Peace as a “moving story” of “practical freedom struggles” and a “profoundly perceptive critique of our decadent imperialist society” that Du Bois penned with “masterful prose, wit and scathing satire.”

. . . Unlike other reviewers, however, Wilkerson’s incisive Marxist analysis registered important critiques of the book. First, he held that Du Bois’s use of the term socialism captured all forms of “public ownership” instead of focusing on “collective ownership” with “working class control of the state.” In other words, for Wilkerson’s tastes, Du Bois’s radical discourse lacked theoretical precision and the finer points of communist doctrine over which Party members sparred.[5]

Continue reading “Herbert Aptheker’s academic ghosting didn’t end with C. L. R. James: the case of Doxey Wilkerson.”

“Affordability”: Communism’s latest economically illiterate lure

Zohran Mamdani speaks during the 'Zohran For NYC Election Night Party' in New York City, USA. — Marxist Muslim Zohran Mamdani, candidate for New York Mayor running as a Democrat, June 25, 2025

At what rate should scarce resources—in land, labor, or capital—exchange? In plainer English, how much “should” I be paid for the services I render, and how little “should” I have to pay for the things I need? The answer will expose the economic astuteness, or ignorance, of the respondent. If the answer is a function of the pseudo-concept of “affordability,” about which the Democrats, especially their frankly communist faction, cannot stop yapping, then we know it’s ignorance when not also wrapped in mendacity.

**June 24, 2025:** Guests attending the wedding of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez observed Amazon’s packaging standards by placing each gift in a box at least four sizes larger than the item.

Maybe Joe Blow can’t spend even a hundred bucks on his wedding, while another JB, Jeff Bezos, can afford to spend $50 million on his. But how did Bezos amass such purchasing power, and whence the ingredients of everything he ever bought and consumed either for business or pleasure? The answer: privately owned scarce goods traded on more or less free markets.

Without respect for property rights in the aforementioned resources, there’s no way to calculate how much of any good or service (and therefore all of them) should be produced and offered for sale. (Keep in mind that we implicitly impute the value of consumption goods back to the ingredients of their production. For example, we value rare earth minerals not because we consume them directly, but because they’re essential ingredients of the goods we do consume.)

Therefore, if you’re an enemy of said rights, then you invite chaos into every economic calculation, yours and mine, Bezos’s and Blow’s, chaos that will inexorably degenerate into a living hell. For that is how shortages and gluts, two cold analytical terms, cash out experientially. And that makes you my enemy: you’re not someone I debate, but someone against whom I arm myself should the state’s monopolized police, courts, and armed forces break down and no free-market alternatives to such socially necessary services are available. Continue reading ““Affordability”: Communism’s latest economically illiterate lure”

Trotskyist power didn’t “degenerate” into slavery, but began with it. The irony of C. L. R. James’s support for compulsory labor.

(The series continues)

The essence of War Communism [1918-1921] was that we actually took from the peasant all his surpluses, and sometimes not only the surpluses, but part of the grain the peasant needed for food. We took this in order to meet the requirements of the army and to sustain the worker.—Vladimir Lenin [1]

Kronstadt sailors, 1921, posing with a flag vowing “Death to the bourgeoisie.”

Every communist intellectual, no matter how humanistically educated, has an ethical Achilles’ Heel. C. L. R. James was no exception. For years, I’ve been fascinated by his story and ideas. (Feel free to search his name on this site.) Every so often, however, I splash my face with cold water to remind myself of the horrors that James shut out of view (when he didn’t rationalize them outright). If I’ve created the impression that I’m starry-eyed over an intellectual’s literary achievement at the expense of flesh-and-blood victims of the policies he owned, then I must counter that impression.

In the mid-1930s, James was an apologist for Lenin and Trotsky’s “War Communism,”[2] i.e., bloody totalitarian dictatorship, including their suppression of the revolutionary sailors at the Kronstadt naval base in March 1921.[3] That is, the Pan Africanist James sided with a social system as evil as the one that had enslaved Robert Alexander James, his grandfather, in the New World.

After creating the Red Army, Trotsky introduced into factories and fields an army’s characteristic regimentation of labor, thereby helping to install new slave masters to replace Russian serfdom’s. Some socialists noticed. As Paul Avrich, cited in the first note above, wrote:

Menshevik leaders compared the new regimentation to Egyptian slavery, when the Pharaohs used forced labor to build the pyramids. Compulsion, they insisted, would achieve no more success in industry than in agriculture.[4] Continue reading “Trotskyist power didn’t “degenerate” into slavery, but began with it. The irony of C. L. R. James’s support for compulsory labor.”