Intro Philosophy: Heidegger, Sartre & Foucault

Martin Heidegger (1889 - 1976)

For a period of seven years, from 1931 to 1938, Martin Heidegger, one of the most celebrated German philosophers today, was a member and supporter of the fascist Nazi party as it rose to power and took authoritarian control of Germany and Austria.  Though he eventually came to doubt the party, spoke critically of its development and was put under surveillance by the Gestapo (the Nazi secret police), he enthusiastically embraced their rise and seizure of power, spoke at propaganda rallies in several cities, and openly spoke of the Nazis as a rebirth of Western civilization, a return to the revolutionary times of ancient Greece.

Because I myself am influenced by Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, as well as Marcuse and Foucault who have both been influenced by these three, and because Heidegger took the worst of Hegel (eurocentrism, the birth of self-conscious individualism in ancient Greece and the destiny and realization of ancient Greek thought in Germany) and the best of Nietzsche (existentialism, the idea of absolute truth as denial of death, perspective, interpretation and transformation), for me Heidegger’s support of the Nazis is the question we would often prefer to ask our opponent rather than ourselves: how is it that our systems aim for the greatest human fulfillment yet support the worst practices of humankind, including genocide, slavery, and censorship?

Heidegger wrote in his major work Sein und Zeit, ‘Being and Time’ (1927), that authentic being is questioning, that categorical and absolute truth are ignorance of one’s own human nature, and every revealing is a concealing.  How is it that he believed the Nazis, a fascist regime enthusiastic about racism, censorship, and brutality were a magnificent chance for questioning, renewal and transformation?  Just as Heidegger argues that being is authentic as questioning or inauthentic as a denial of questioning, this is a question that philosophers should ask rather than avoid, particularly as all varieties of philosophy, including the religious and anti-religious, the analytical and existential, joined the Nazi cause.

Let us examine Heidegger’s thought, with a particular focus on his use of Nietzsche.  For Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger the beginning of self-conscious questioning that is philosophy began in glorious ancient Greece with Heraclitus, Plato and Aristotle.  This set the European West apart from other cultures as philosophical.  For Hegel and Heidegger, Germany was the natural culmination and destiny of Greek thought and philosophy, while for Nietzsche the Germans were fooling themselves through science, religion, nationalism and antisemitism into thinking they were the great race, and he moved to Switzerland, renounced his German citizenship and declared himself to be a citizen of no country.  I myself would have preferred Nietzsche to be as critical of ancient Greek superiority as he was of German nationalism and antisemitism.  In the opening paragraphs of Being and Time, Heidegger looks to the birth of philosophy in ancient Greece in the hopes that he can reclaim this glorious past and rebirth of thought.  Heidegger believed, like Hitler and Nietzsche (though Nietzsche was far more critical and cynical) that one should look to the Greeks to be German, as the Greeks were the rebellion that gave birth to authentic thinking and learning.  Heidegger, as countless other professors and academics, confuses his own self easily with the identity of the ancient Greeks and the Western mind.

The Great Depression, the 1920s and 30s, was the time when Heidegger did his critical writing and gained fame and position, a time when many feared the fall of the West and the death of Christian European civilization.  Heidegger, like Rousseau and Nietzsche, was an anti-modernist anti-technology romantic who spoke of Greece as a more glorious and meaningful time.  These thinkers in turn influenced Marcuse, Adorno and the Frankfurt School.  Later Adorno, Jewish like Marcuse, both having fled the Nazis for Switzerland and then New York, wrote a 1964 pamphlet, The Jargon of Authenticity, criticizing Heidegger for supporting the Nazis while calling for self-questioning, which is ironic given Adorno hated jazz and argued that music was over after Beethoven.

Heidegger originally studied to be a Catholic theologian, but after studying Neo-Platonism he switched his study to philosophy and wrote his thesis on Duns Scotus.  Husserl, the phenomenologist, took him under his wing as his star pupil, and as phenomenology (the school of studying the mind by focusing on how we experience the phenomena or things around us) rose to fame and gathered followers Heidegger began to gather fame and followers of his own.  Husserl wanted a science of the mind, a radical criticism of all philosophy and psychology up through Kant and Hegel.  Husserl is famous for the idea of intentionality, that consciousness is always directed toward something or away from something by intention.  Nietzsche similarly believes that thought is always instinct and drive.  Wanting, fearing, loving, and assessing objects is never neutral, nor is our own philosophical grasping of our grasping cold or objective.  

Husserl studied the various and often subtle ways we are intentional in our world under the banner of phenomenology, a term invented by Hegel but intended as an open speculative psychology by Husserl.  The world and subject co-develop together in an evolving symbiotic relationship.  Husserl kept writing and expanding his work, but rather than develop a new alphabet for thought as he had originally intended his work snowballed out of control and continued to amass until his death.  Heidegger picked up Husserl’s work, but merged this with Nietzsche and took it in an anti-scientific existential direction.  Heidegger forms his own insights based on the work of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Husserl.  Husserl’s scientific Freudian ego becomes Hegel’s ‘dasein’, or being-there.  Heidegger emphasizes the open-ended multiplicity of being and interpretation romantically like Nietzsche.

What is existentialism?  Sartre, who we will study next, coined the term to describe the skeptical school of thought, the deep questioning of human understanding and knowledge, that was initiated by Kierkegaard, a student of Hegel’s, and Nietzsche.  Sartre read Heidegger, and applied the label ‘existentialism’ to their own work as well, both quite influenced by Nietzsche.  Thus, in some ways Sartre was the first official ‘existentialist’, thought this is often said of Nietzsche with others contending that the first was in fact Kierkegaard.  Soren Kierkegaard (1813 - 1855) was an enthusiastically Christian Dutch thinker who found Hegel’s claim to absolute knowledge and system of thought out of touch with the experience of the individual.  Kierkegaard was the Dionysus to Hegel’s Apollo, arguing that the individual was thrown into the world without a chance at reason reaching an absolute understanding, much like Schopenhauer saw things.  For Kierkegaard, any human undertaking or belief is a leap of faith, a risk that one individually takes.  Nietzsche, as we saw last week, was of a similar mind, arguing that we must have the courage to be individuals in a world that defies reason.  Heidegger and Sartre both read Nietzsche and agreed that modern times show us that the human experience, in spite of the rising tide of science and technology, is a dramatic and risky quest for meaning and purpose.  One can pair essentialism, that there are given essential meanings and purposes for human life and our world, with existentialism, that we must create meaning and purpose for human life and the world.  As Nietzsche warns last week, to be skeptical this way, which Sartre calls ‘existentialism’, one risks nihilism, staring into the void and finding nothing, but only this sort of courage can bring greater meaning and truth to one’s life.

Heidegger argues in Being and Time that philosophy means being a beginning, the way one weighs anchor while setting sail out into the vast ocean.  Remember Nietzsche has Zarathustra say to the crowd in the marketplace, “What is great in man is that he is a bridge, and not a goal”.  We are thrown into the world, which Heidegger calls “thrownness”, as a being-there, or there-being, in German, “dasein”, a term Heidegger borrows from Hegel.  Heidegger is famous, some would say infamous, for inventing his own vocabulary and Heideggerians follow this jargon to an equally infamous extent.  Welcome to Heidegger-speak 101.  What Heidegger is doing is trying to merge Hegel with Nietzsche, to identify Hegel’s becoming with Nietzsche’s rejection of both dogmatic morals and nihilism.  For Heidegger, the goal is not the system of absolute knowledge as it was for Hegel, but attaining an authentic transparency of one’s own self and giving life one’s own purposes, as sought by Nietzsche.

Heidegger asks, how do we experience reality before and as we arrange it?  What is the ground of being that supports our views and values?  The world is “worlding” around us and as us, and thus we are “being-in-the-world”.  We approach the world, each other, and objects either as closed and identified or as mysterious, uncanny and miraculous.  Industrialization and technology have disenchanted the world, and so we must question the world and re-enchant it.  Mystery and truth appear only in the cracks of our industrialized reality when things break or go missing.  My good friend who got me interested in philosophy, who was at the time a Heideggerian, used the example of dropping the soap as you take your morning shower.  Objects and persons disappear until they are out of place or misused, and then we become conscious of them.  Consider a poster on a wall that we stop seeing after time, which then becomes new again and leaps out if we call attention to it again.  Consider Nazis, and times of crisis, which Heidegger unfortunately saw as an opportunity to re-enchant the technological world.

This tendency to box and categorize the world is imperfect, and cracks can become ruptures.  This is remarkably similar to ideas in anarchism and among artists such as the Dada who believe we can reanimate and enchant the world to break beyond its boxes.  Nietzsche, an existentialist like Heidegger, similarly romanticized ruptures and struggle with the categorical and the dead in thought.  We build meaning as individuals, as groups and as cultures in the face of the infinite.  While Nietzsche would implore us to strike out on our own here as an individual, and only individuality could give our meaning and perspective authenticity, Heidegger parts ways with Nietzsche and declares that our being-there is always a ‘they’ as much as it is an ‘I’.  As with Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, the individual comes into the world already populated by a “they”, and one is a part of this “them” as much as one is thrown against it.  Remember that Hegel speaks of the evolution of stages in history, which is driven by individuals but is always a social expression of the mind and its formation.  While I am in favor of this view, balancing the Hegelian group with the Nietzschean individual, Heidegger’s identification with Germany and the Nazis is in stark contrast to Nietzsche’s renunciation of German citizenship and denunciation of German nationalism.

Heidegger argues that every revealing is a concealing, that history both gives us our meanings as it removes others from our sight.  This is similar to Nietzsche arguing that every philosophy is a self confession of its author.  Consider the statement, “Science is true”, what this reveals as well as what it conceals.  We have made great leaps and bounds through technology, but does this always help humanity?  To stand for something, one takes a risk.  To believe in something, one focuses on what one wants to be true.  For both Nietzsche and Heidegger, it is good to stand for things, to create and live, but to do this well is to understand that we must take responsibility for this ourselves and not place its truth on another being such as religion or science.  When we say that a system is true, we are individuals taking a gamble.  To lose sight of this is to lose one’s freedom and a great deal of one’s power, even though it can be frightening, indeed the most frightening thing, to admit.

For Heidegger, Being and beings withdraw from our grasp as we grasp them.  Time continuously gives us the present as it takes the present from us.  Meaning is always historical, always has “historicity”.  Remember that one of Hegel’s great contributions to philosophy was to understand all thought as historical process.  For Heidegger, being is always bound up with time, and thus the title, “Being and Time”.  Time is the horizon of being.  In this way, time gives us our meanings as it stretches beyond, taking from us any clear view of how long our meanings can be as they are for us.  As time and being are seen and unseen, so there can be no absolute judgment, interpretation or meaning.  Nietzsche argues for a multiplicity of interpretation and meaning that cannot be reduced to a single objective truth.  Care and life are always as much for oneself as much as for something else that never fully arrives, just as we never reach the horizon as we walk.

For Freud, all thought is denial of sex.  For Heidegger, all thought is denial of death.  Understanding oneself as a simple and singular being, the conception of closed scientific facts and categorical, eternal, absolute truths, is the way we cope with the fear of death.  We are in a basic state of anxiety towards our world that extends over the horizon just as we are afraid of particular people and objects.  The things in front of our faces distract us from our more basic and fundamental fear of the world.  Nietzsche gives Heidegger this picture, arguing that we can inauthentically ignore the void by turning to absolute immutable truths, or we can give up and find no meaning in life, but rather we should authentically give and create our own meaning as life itself, though again Nietzsche sees this as an individual activity that is corrupted by participation in social movements.  

Heidegger agrees that we must make our way from absolute being to nihilism and beyond to understand ourselves as essentially becoming and transformation.  We imagine we and our truths simply exist as a denial of death and meaninglessness which have just as central a role to play in our questioning, discovery, and living.  Out of the basic state of anxiety spring love, fear, rejoicing, suspicion, and a variety of ways we interact with our world.  True freedom is realizing this and gaining self-conscious transparency.  We must resist reducing ourselves, our truths and even objects as “ready-to-hand” if we wish to truly live.  We kill the world and ourselves continuously in the attempt to avoid death, but if we accept death and meaninglessness, we are free to live and give our lives meaning.  If we realize we are running off into the woods to avoid being lost, we can learn to dwell comfortably at home.

For Hegel, to recognize being is non-being together as one is to understand becoming.  For Nietzsche, all truths are idols to be smashed, such that new truths can freely grow in their place.  For Heidegger, to recognize we, our world, and everything and everyone in it both has meaning and is meaningless, is enclosed but remains open and alive, is to live authentically rather than kill to avoid death.  To get what one truly wants, one has to accept its opposite.


Jean Paul Sartre (1905 - 1980)

Sartre (pronounced, ‘Sart’, though the British pronounce it ‘Sar-truh’), who coined the term ‘existentialism’, is often known better as an author of novels and plays than as a philosopher in Britain and America, where Nietzsche and Heidegger are not always taught but are much more than Sartre.  This is in part political.  With Stalin’s brutal dictatorship in Russia, many European intellectuals had to choose whether to continue to be Marxists or to abandon Communism all together (often remaining socialists, but identifying as ‘post-Marxists’ who no longer have faith in the entirely planned economy of Communism).  Albert Camus (1913 - 1960), a friend of Sartre, author of The Stranger and The Rebel, chose to abandon Marxism, while Sartre decided to continue to identify with Marxism and Communism, continuing to believe that violent revolution was unfortunately in the interests of the common people.  Camus was often called an existentialist, but he rejected the label and called himself an absurdist, like the Dada and Surrealist artists we will look at near the end of the course.

Sartre saw his own philosophy as an extension of the work of Heidegger.  In response to Heidegger’s Being and Time, Sartre wrote his Being and Nothingness.  In it, he argues like Heidegger that the basic condition of humanity is anxiety, fear in the face of the unknown, and that most of the time we avoid this deeper fear by becoming involved with the world, trying to keep what we like and avoid what we hate.  In the process, we become ignorant of ourselves, of the world, and of our relationships with our fellow human beings.

Nietzsche wondered aloud in many of his writings why philosophers, who claim to seek the meaning of life, spend so little time contemplating friendship, laughter, and romance, things which give us great meaning but which are hard to define or understand.  He argues that it is just because these things are so meaningful and so alive that makes them hard to pin down, hard to understand consistently.  Nietzsche approaches the problem by giving up on consistency and writing his philosophy as a dynamic and contradictory flow.  This fits much with the absurdism of Camus and modern artists.  Sartre, as a Heideggerian, argues that there is a consistent way that we inauthentically try to avoid the dynamic life of our relationships with others, both those who are intimate (family, friends, partners) and those we pass on the street or encounter in a shop.  

Sartre uses his famous example of a waiter in a cafe to illustrate.  Sartre did much of his writing in the cafes of Paris, and he describes the scene as if he is witnessing it firsthand.  The waiter in a cafe plays his role, overemphasising the rigidity and seriousness of the gestures, the bows, the distribution and collecting of menus, the seriousness with which orders are taken, to define himself as a waiter, as filling his role, his work.  We and he come to inauthentically see him as a waiter, and not as a human being.  The waiter becomes a robot, and his individuality disappears, both for our and his comfort.  We find it easier to interact with a role than with the actor as a person, and the actor finds it easier to lose himself in the role than to try to retain individuality while serving in his position.  For Sartre, it becomes easy for us to lose sight of the situation as a whole, that this is not a waiter in essence but a human being playing the role of a waiter.  While it would be tiresome to say, “Excuse me, authentic human individual playing the temporary role of a waiter, can I have another espresso?”, our substitution of the word ‘waiter’ for the individual does violence to our awareness of the situation.

Sartre wrote Antisemitism and Jew in 1944, as Paris was liberated from the Nazis.  Like Nietzsche, Sartre argues that racism, that the Nazis had for Jews as well as that which the French had for North Africans (Arabs and native Africans), is a similar violent inauthentic effort to box up the other rather than deal with the complexity of dealing with our fellow human beings face to face.  In one of his plays, Sartre’s main character famously says, “Hell is other people”.  We are constantly faced with others who do and do not know themselves as we do and do not know ourselves.  Like the horizon of time for Heidegger, the ‘other’ threatens to give us new meanings while simultaneously take all meaning away.  To face this authentically is to have a good and positive faith in life and the generation of meaning.  To have what Sartre calls  “bad faith” is to trust that meanings are closed and dead, that the waiter is nothing more to oneself than a waiter, that the Jew or African is nothing more to oneself or one’s nation than another who is simply other with no relation.

Sartre, like Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, believed that art can liberate us from the common human condition, however, most art for Sartre is inauthentic.  Much literature reinforces our prejudices and ideas, giving us a shallow and false substitute for meaning in an increasingly mechanized and commodified world.  Sartre sought to write and entertain in ways that opened up audiences to examine themselves, their world, and each other with new possibilities of meaning and activity.  This is as true of the individual, who could come to identify with the waiter as a friend, as it is of society, which could come to identify with the marginalized and oppressed.  Rather than try to hold up the barriers between self and other, we must, as Hegel argues, seek resolution of contradictions not merely to gain the powers of reason, but to truly be alive.


Michel Foucault (1926 – 1984)

Foucault is now a very celebrated and well studied thinker not only in philosophy but also in history, sociology and political science.  He also taught briefly at Berkeley.  His books are critical historical studies of social institutions and practices such as prisons, psychiatric hospitals, science and sexuality.  Foucault called himself a Nietzschean and his critical philosophy centers on the idea of the human tendency to privilege what is labeled as good while marginalizing and dominating what is labeled as evil.  Foucault went on vacation to the French Riviera and brought Nietzsche, who he had not yet read, with him, and then stayed in his hotel room the entire time reading Nietzsche, overcome with his criticism of all institutions.  Foucault, already a psychiatrist, became fascinated with the complexity of good and evil Nietzsche unearthed, not merely as morality but as ‘sane’ and ‘insane’ in the history of psychiatry, of ‘normal’ and ‘perverse’ in the history of sexuality, of ‘law-abiding’ and ‘criminal’ in the history of prisons.

As a Nietzschean, Foucault is deeply critical of any claim to absolute or objective knowledge, distrusts binary dichotomies such as good/bad, true/false, opinion/knowledge or sane/insane, and understands truth as a struggle between competing forces, institutions and interpretations.  Institutions must support binary divisions to maintain power and pronounce themselves objective holders of genuine knowledge and truth.  This bends our view of reality such that the dominant system (religion, science, politics, etc) is simply identified with truth and the messy historical process and evolution of systems of thought is obscured.  On one side, giving an institution the right to distinguish the sane from the insane is quite sane and sober.  On the other, when one looks at the complex history of uses and abuses of these categories, one can find much that is outright insanity.  Are the institutions sane or insane?  How can we know so simply, when these are the complexes that determine their own sanity, their own ability to be good or embody justice and truth?

For Foucault knowledge is always involved with serving power, just as for Nietzsche truth is always involved with serving desire.  We have all heard ‘Knowledge is Power!’ as a good thing, but for Foucault knowledge is not only enabling power, it is repressive domination.  Truth is not outside power, but is a thing of this world.  Just as for Nietzsche, institutions and their systems of thought (Foucault famously held a chair in ‘History of Systems of Thought’) grow and thrive on opposition and problems.  

Foucault studies the complicated historical situations when one form of power, knowledge and dominance shifts to become another form as circumstances change.  A dominant theme of his work is that with industrialization people have to learn to police and dominate themselves and the authorities have to convince them that it is their own idea and independence.  Marcuse describes something similar in One-Dimensional Man.  The famous metaphor Foucault uses is the Panopticon, a prison designed by the philosopher Bentham, teacher and friend of the utilitarian John Stuart Mill.  The Panopticon is a prison designed so that everyone can see that they are possibly being watched, but they can see little other than this.  Never knowing when they are being watched, never seeing their observers, they learn to behave as if they are always being watched, and thus even without any guards they learn to police themselves and be constantly in self-conscious anxiety.

Thus, science such as psychiatry serves powerful interests while baptizing itself as disinterested objective truth, and the average person believes that they are smart and free for believing what they are told in a magazine rather than understanding the complicated and brutal process of various forms of truth that compete with each other.  Foucault believes that we should push for what we want and strive for greater understanding while knowing that we are naturally greedy, abusive, marginalizing, and ignorant.  

Power is not just a negative thing, but everything, so the form of the bad is the form of the good.  One can see the influence of Nietzsche and a philosopher who is “beyond good and evil”.  Thus, communists who declare themselves to be liberators are also oppressors, and people who feel oppressed by society are also helping to oppress themselves through their own individual fear and desires.  Human nature is neither good nor evil, but the two together.  While not openly calling himself an anarchist, Foucault distrusted all forms of authority and became disenchanted with communism and other forms of left wing thought.

Just as we had rationalists and empiricists, and now positivists and existentialists, Foucault was at first understood as a structuralist, but later as a post-structuralist or post-modernist.  He is concerned with showing the structures of power as they grow from what he calls the capillary level, the tips of the branches, the experiences of individuals, up through the dominant institutions, cultures and identities.  While this is quite structuralist, very much a description of history and sociology that presents itself as the record and truth, Foucault seeks in a Nietzschean fashion to constantly subvert our perspectives and the institutions, to show that what we try to marginalize consequentially becomes quite dominant.  The insanity, brutality and evil that we seek to overcome, that we try to lock away in the asylums and prisons, that we try to barricade against through walls and warfare, becomes the new manifestation of contradiction and chaos, the new complex that continuously strives to overcome itself while simultaneously remaining blind to its own actions.  

In a debate with Noam Chomsky, Foucault argues that the very idea that we will achieve a good and just society as opposed to this now or another outside is the domination, oppression and ignorance that characterizes human history.  While we should always strive for the best, we should always remain aware that we are always capable of the worst, and that it is the very striving to separate ourselves from the worst that often brings the worst itself about.  To truly be aware of our lives and our possibilities, to live responsibly and with greater awareness, means recognizing that there is always risk, that nothing is ever absolutely safe.  All we can do is strive as best we can, and this constant becoming.  While Foucault focuses on the history of institutions, we can easily see the resemblance of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre and Foucault in striving for acceptance of change and the need to continuously question and perfect the individual and society.

Social & Political Philosophy: Fascism

Fascism is a word that many say but fewer understand and explain.  The word Fascist comes from fasces, a tied bundle of rods or sticks.  One stick can be easily broken, but many bound together cannot.  The ancient Romans used a bunch of rods and an ax tied together as a symbol of Rome, and rulers would often have such a bundle carried in front of them and symbolically present in halls and during speeches.  The Italian fascists identified with and glorified Roman power and empire, and they named themselves after the bundle and put it on their flag.  These were the first “fascists”, followed soon by German Nazis under Hitler and Spanish fascists under Franco.

The definition and philosophy of fascism is highly debated.  Industrialization is typically identified as a necessary condition for fascism, and as we have seen political philosophy in Europe is profoundly concerned with industry, technology, and capitalism rising along with these two.  Right wing authoritarianism and nationalism, with patriotic support of war and empire and conservative taste in culture, tends to be the weak consensus among theorists, but does that make all conservatives or nationalists fascists?  The tempting answer from the left is a simple yes, but there were a great variety of philosophies and policies that supported fascism before WWII and still today, and fascists want to transform society even if they often celebrate traditional culture, masculinity, discipline and patriotism.  There were left wing and right wing factions among Italian fascists, and fascists were influenced by ideas from both wings.

Consider that Mussolini supported Jewish rights before adopting Hitler’s antisemitism.  Consider that the Nazis said many anti-capitalist pronouncements that sound identical to those made by communism, calling themselves national socialists before accepting corporate backing soon after they started to become successful and dropped all anti-capitalist rhetoric and policies long before Hitler gained power (Nazis believed that Jews controlled the world economy and were ruining Europe during the great depression, so they were angry at capitalism as a Jewish device before they allied themselves with corporate interests in Germany, Britain and America).  Consider that there were Christian Nazis and anti-Christian Nazis.  Consider that there were Neo-Kantians as well as existentialists like Heidegger who joined the Nazi cause on both sides of the dogmatism/skepticism spectrum in philosophy.

We could try the opposite approach, and say what fascism ISN’T by looking at its triadic hate relationship with communism (or international socialism) and anarchism.  Fascists do not like anarchist ideas like getting rid of war, the police state, national borders, or free love.  They do not like communism because even if communists believe in imposing an authoritarian structure in the name of revolution they argue, in theory, for a dismantling of authoritarianism by process.  Anarchists, as we have seen, argue that communism is authoritarianism in the name of anarcho-syndicalism, so an anarchist might say that there is no difference between the two.  Fascists would argue that anarchism, communism and libertarian capitalism are all the same, as they lack the strength and discipline of authoritarianism.  Like communism, fascists argue that the time of crisis requires authority and order, but unlike communists they do not argue for a more bottom-up democratic future.  One could say that Stalin’s “socialism in one country” approaches fascism, but even still evolution is expected.


Italy Under Mussolini

Mussolini was the first fascist dictator, as the Italians coined the term fascism from the Roman symbol.  His glorification of violence inspired Hitler, who imitated Mussolini and then surpassed him with the superior power and technology of Germany.  World leaders praised both Mussolini and Hitler for standing up and viciously smashing communists, but then when Italy and Germany expanded their empires, Italy first in Africa and then Germany in Eastern Europe, the British, French and Americans amongst others declared war for cutting in on their action (since they themselves wished to maintain control and exploitation of Africa as well as everywhere else).  The Pope said that Mussolini was sent by divine providence.  Churchill said Mussolini was the Roman genius whose triumphant struggle against communism had rendered a service to the entire world.  Italy hoped for an empire in Africa and thus a seat at the table with other powerful European nations, but they banded together to eventually defeat both Italian and German ambitions.

With the Great Depression of the 1920s, despair was everywhere and one had to ask how to rebuild and thrive.  Communism offered a way forward, and their numbers exploded.  In reaction against communism’s anti-religious, anti-elite, anti-authoritarian internationalism, many on the right but some on the left joined the fascist cause.  After Russia, and then again after WWII with China, many national leaders were deeply afraid of communism and were willing to give full support to right wing brutality.  After WWII, when communism again threatened to take Italy by storm, the OSS (precursor of the CIA) worked with Italian fascists and the Italian mafia to crush the movement, just as America supported right wing dictatorships (some of whom called themselves fascist by name) in Central America to prevent communism there.  The upper and middle class feared that their property would be seized, so many celebrated Mussolini and Hitler’s rise to power.  Both Mussolini and Hitler had socialist views in their early years, but through intense nationalism at a time of crisis abandoned socialism for capitalism as the strength of their nations was bound up with corporations, industry and technology, particularly military technology.

In Italy in the 1920s, fascists fought against peasant, worker and Catholic unions that rallied under the red flag and set up co-ops.  Mussolini’s fascist black shirts, that later inspired Hitler’s brown shirts, set out to destroy the communist threat through open violence often with the full support of the police, the military, the king, and the pope.  The fascists, in military style black uniforms, were thus a paramilitary group that had the full support of the authorities without official office.

In both Italy and Germany, first fascists started getting elected to office, then they began gaining seats but remained in the minority, and finally Mussolini and Hitler, who were made the heads of parliament, declared wartime emergency powers and dissolved parliament such that their minority became the totality.  The population of both countries accepted the emergency dictatorial decrees in the name of protecting family, faith and nation.

Mussolini was careful to give the king and Pope whatever they wanted.  The Catholic Church was given the Vatican as an independent country and it remains so today.  The communists and socialists wanted the Church removed from Italian politics, but Mussolini strengthened the Church’s presence.  In return, the Church invested heavily in government bonds and continued to do so in wartime.

Those who spoke out in Italy against Mussolini’s dictatorship, either in conversation or in print, were beaten by black shirts, often to death.  Schools were ordered to teach fascist conservative values.  Little boys were given black shirts and toy wooden rifles.  The salute, the raised palm open towards the saluted, became common in greeting (the Nazi salute, with open palm and arm straight and at a sharp angle, is more notorious).  The military adopted the Roman salute of raising swords vertically in the air as the leader passed, but for a modern army this meant military issued knives raised instead.

When Libya, in North Africa, revolted against Italian control, Italy under Mussolini viciously pacified it.  It is important to consider that fascist brutal and glorified warfare, including the first fascist concentration camps, started in Africa and were influenced not only by economic but also racist tyranny.  Italy used torture, camps, chemical weapons, targeting civilians and refugees with bombs, and destroyed mosques.  At first, Mussolini ridiculed Hitler’s racial theories while remaining quite racist himself, as he did not believe that Germany was a racially pure nation.  Then, when Hitler seized Jewish property and bank accounts and used them to finance the party and warfare, Mussolini followed, arguing that the Italians had to learn to become hard and brutal like the Germans to become masters.  Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, bombing civilians and using chemical weapons.  The wars were popular in Italy, but the British and French began to feel that their hold on much of Africa was threatened.  As Franco rose in Spain, Mussolini and Hitler welcomed and supported his fascist regime as they believed Spain would be a powerful ally should war break out.  Mussolini seized Albania, Hitler seized Poland, and Britain, France, America and others declared war.

As the Italians and Germans began losing to the allied powers, both Mussolini and Hitler blamed their troops and nation for being weak and not strong enough to overcome the challenge of crisis.  Fascism does stand for unity, but it seems that in times of failure they blame each other as much as they blame foreign nations and religions for their problems in times of success.  If the rods start breaking, it seems the axe gets angry at the arrangement.  In the same way, with repeated failures in the war including a failed invasion of Greece, the Italian king imprisoned Mussolini and changed sides in the war.  Hitler invaded Italy, dividing the country, and Mussolini was given puppet control of Northern Italy before Germany eventually lost the war.


Germany Under Hitler

Since everybody likes calling each other Hitler in America today, including the religious and the anti-religious (“Nazi’s were essentially religious” vs. “Nazi’s essentially anti-religious”) and the progressives and conservatives (“Bush is Hitler” vs. “Obama is Hitler”), let us be clear:

Nazi Germany was art and artists, health and doctors, truth and philosophy, science and scientists, religion and religious, technology and engineers, poetry and poets, environment and volunteers, exercise and instructors, order and peacemakers, business and investors, pest control and exterminators, the group and helping your neighbor, life and the living, and, at the same time, death and the killers.

Doctors opened the gas caps to euthanize the mentally ill to give it scientific legitimacy.  Athens, Sparta and Rome, the origin of the supposed West, were Hitler’s Mecca, the source and model of legitimate culture.  Hitler wrote that the European and German forefathers were the Greeks, and if the Nazis could create a synthesis of these three cultures that the Nazi German state would never perish.  Like the ancient Greeks and Romans, Nazis glorified the human body, nature, and warfare through art and literature.  Other cultures were diseases, the Jews microbes that had to be eradicated or made servile.  The gas Zyclon B was first developed to kill insects and rodents before being used in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and elsewhere.  Antisemitism, racism and murder were called hygiene, medical and scientific.  The gas chambers were considered a humane alternative to firing squads, more effective and efficient.

In Germany during the Great Depression communists, many of the leaders Jewish, gained many members and for a brief period took over the city of Munich.  The right wing, including the military, corporate leaders of industry, and traditional authority leaders, organized the Freicorps as a paramilitary group for fighting communists, many to join the Nazis as they rose to power.  Hitler and the Nazi party began mobilizing, marching, demonstrating, and street fighting against communists in this period.  As in Italy, in the hard times communism and fascism were the radical options and sources of hope and renewal.

Adolf Hitler, a failed painter and architect, found that he had a talent for giving impassioned speeches, and he rose quickly to leadership of the group and attracted many new members.  After he and other Nazis were given extremely light sentences after beating a communist, they attempted the Beer Hall Putsch (or coup) in 1923.  Marching into a traditional beer hall where many right sided drinkers were socializing, Hitler announced that the revolution had come and they were taking the city.  Hitler hoped that the police would join them or at least look the other way as the police did often for fascists in Italy and Germany, but in the ensuing fight 4 cops and 16 Nazis were killed.  Hitler was given, by the same judge who sentenced him to one month in prison before, the lightest sentence possible, 9 months in prison, during which time he wrote Mein Kampf, or My Struggle, a political autobiography and polemic.

Disturbingly, Hitler writes that as a boy he saw nothing in antisemitism and that there was a Jewish boy in his class (who may or may not have been the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein) who was strange but not frightening, and that it was only in the Depression and reading anti-semetic works that Hitler began to see that the Jews controlled both capitalism and communism to control Germany and the world.  In this work, he argues that Jews should be removed from German society, stripped of citizenship and public positions (including professorships), and expelled from the country for the Treaty of Versailles and the communist takeover of Munich.  Hitler argued for Darwinism, survival of the fittest and the law of nature.  He believed that leaders, including those within the Nazi party, should take over by force and charisma, not by being appointed or elected.

While the Nazis were a fringe party in 1929 with 3% of the vote, the worsening depression brought them members and power.  Banks were crashing, and the middle and upper class were beginning to suffer like the poor who could be sufficiently ignored.  The Nazi message stayed the same, but the audience began to grow, such that in 1930 they had 25% of the vote.  The communists were also picking up voters and members as the people polarized.  Hitler began making plane trips to various cities to make speeches that were enthusiastically embraced by many.  In 1932, the Nazis had 37% of the vote, the largest party but still a minority (the “majority minority” as some have said of white Americans living in diverse areas such as the Bay).  Businessmen wrote to Hindenburg, the chancellor of Germany, arguing Hitler should be made chancellor to stop communism.  By this time, the Nazis had received full corporate backing and had ceased to speak out against capitalism and support socialist policies that benefited workers such as union rights.  The army was worried it would not be able to hold the borders if both clashed in a time of crisis.  In 1933, Hindenburg resigned and Hitler went from vice-chancellor to chancellor.  The communists waited, thinking Hitler would fail miserably and they would have a chance to take control.

After setting the Reichstag Fire and blaming the communists, Hitler declared a state of emergency and rounded up communists and other opposition leaders.  A boycott of Jewish businesses and book burnings were organized.  Storm troopers, the brown shirts who followed the Freicorps and the Italian black shirts of Mussolini, engaged in random beatings and killings.  Concentration camps were established, but since the average German believed such things were inevitable under communists it was all seen as unfortunate but inevitable evil.  At first, the concentration camps were temporary prisons where dissidents and communists would be sent for a year or two.  It was only as Germany began to lose WWII in 1941 that the slave labor camps became extermination camps for the Jews, communists, gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals and counter-culturals imprisoned.

Hitler was terrible as a political leader, preferring to not interfere with the work and projects of his highly disorganized underlings.  Hitler would have visions, often architectural monuments to Nazi power.  If an officer had enough power, they would approach Hitler with an idea for a project and Hitler would either approve and the officer would gain favor and try to stay close to Hitler and the top brass or Hitler would ignore the suggestion.  The decision to make the concentration camps death camps came in just this fashion.  This is strangely similar to bottom-up yet top-down arrangements of capitalism communism, anarcho-syndicalism, and other systems and thinkers we have studied.

Under Hitler’s regime, many Germans did much better than they had during the depression, as did many French, Polish and others under Nazi occupation.  Through military industrialization, slave labor and seizure of Jewish businesses, jobs were created, consumerism supported and property maintained.  This created many job opportunities, as it did for Heidegger in universities cleansed of numerous Jewish professors including Heidegger’s old master Husserl.  There were new opportunities for doctors, lawyers, scientists, and even actors.  If one was the wrong sort of person, one faced imprisonment and death, but because this was kept out of sight it was easy for those with money in their pockets to ignore.  Synagogues were destroyed to make parking lots, marriage to Jews and foreigners outlawed, citizenship revoked and Jim Crow style laws imposed.  Having Jewish or communist friends was enough to be sent to the camps.

Hitler was a great admirer of Britain and American power.  He wrote in Mein Kampf, that Germany had lost WWI because they did not have the propaganda of Britain and America that demonized Germany such that the harsh Treaty of Versailles was imposed.  Next time, he wrote, would be different.  It was the British who invented the modern concentration camp fighting the Dutch.  Hitler admired how Britain, a small island, maintained a world-wide empire, and believed that this was proof positive that the Aryan race, though a fraction of the world population, could truly become the master race.  He wrote, “What India was for England, Russia will be for us”.  Hitler hoped for an alliance with Britain and America that would dominate the globe, and many anti-communist authorities and corporations in the UK and US supported this.

Hitler, as he did in all areas, allowed economic experts and business leaders to do whatever they wanted as long as they were successful and supported his own visionary projects.  Hitler liked radical ideas, and German and foreign economists were astonished at how well Nazi control was for business and industry.  Authoritarianism and totalitarianism are vast freedom for the powerful and successful, all the while slavery and death for the oppressed.  Looking at British success, Hitler believed that Germany needed colonies and expansion to create an empire.  As the Nazis had victory after victory in war, and the UK and US said nothing, Hitler told his generals to “Germanize” the new regions and no questions would be asked.  In Poland, one general used a campaign of horror to break the spirits of Polish slave labor, while another general simply declared 80% of the population to be German.  When rival factions complained about each other’s methods, Hitler often did nothing.

This would be remarkably existentialist, if it happily supported transparent self-questioning rather than brutally suppressing all questioning and dissent.  Heidegger is strikingly like Trotsky.  Both believed that they supported a regime that would lead to a new era of continuous revolution and questioning, but both came to see that even as power is renewed by new ideas and perspectives it learns to silence opposition and stifle transparency like the overthrown regime it replaces.  In front of the Denazification Committee in 1945, Heidegger said that he truly believed Hitler would evolve beyond his views and policies, but by 1938 his dream had become a nightmare.  Heidegger, like many in Germany, Britain and America, believed that communism was the death of Western civilization and individual thought, and it took him seven years to realize that fascism, like communism, fails to evolve toward freedom.


Heidegger, his Use of Nietzsche and Support of the Nazis

For a period of seven years, from 1931 to 1938, Martin Heidegger, one of the most celebrated German philosophers today, was a member and supporter of the fascist Nazi party as it rose to power and took authoritarian control.  Though he eventually came to doubt the party, spoke critically of its development and was for this under surveillance by the Gestapo (the Nazi secret police), he enthusiastically embraced their rise and seizure of power, spoke at propaganda rallies in several cities, and openly spoke of the Nazis as a rebirth of Western civilization, a return to the revolutionary times of ancient Greece.

Because I myself am into and influenced by Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, as well as Marcuse and Foucault who have both been influenced by these three, and because Heidegger took the worst of Hegel (Eurocentrism, the birth of self-conscious individualism in ancient Greece and the destiny and realization of ancient Greek thought in Germany) and the best of Nietzsche (existentialism, the idea of absolute truth as denial of death, perspective, interpretation and transformation), for me Heidegger’s support of the Nazis is the question we would often prefer to ask our opponent rather than ourselves: how is it that our systems aim for the greatest human fulfillment yet support the worst practices of humankind, including genocide, slavery, and censorship?

Heidegger wrote in his major work Sein und Zeit, Being and Time (1927), that authentic being is questioning, that categorical and absolute truth are ignorance of one’s own human nature, and every revealing is a concealing.  How is it that he believed the Nazis, a fascist regime enthusiastic about racism, censorship, and brutality were a magnificent chance for questioning, renewal and transformation?  Just as Heidegger argues that being is authentic as questioning or inauthentic as a denial of questioning, this is a question that philosophers should ask rather than avoid, particularly as all varieties of philosophy, including the religious and anti-religious, joined the Nazi cause.

Let us examine Heidegger’s thought, with a particular focus on his use of Nietzsche.  For Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger the beginning of self-conscious questioning that is philosophy began in glorious ancient Greece with Heraclitus, Plato and Aristotle.  This set the European West apart from other cultures as philosophical.  For Hegel and Heidegger, Germany was the natural culmination and destiny of Greek thought and philosophy, while for Nietzsche the Germans were fooling themselves through science, religion, nationalism and antisemitism into thinking they were the great race, and he moved to Switzerland, renounced his German citizenship and declared himself to be a citizen of no country.  I myself would have preferred Nietzsche to be as critical of ancient Greek superiority as he was of German nationalism and antisemitism.  In the opening paragraphs of Being and Time, Heidegger looks to the birth of philosophy in ancient Greece in the hopes that he can reclaim this glorious past and rebirth of thought.  Heidegger believed, like Hitler and Nietzsche though he was far more critical and cynical, that one should look to the Greeks to be German, as the Greeks were the rebellion that gave birth to authentic thinking and learning.  Heidegger, as countless other professors and academics, confuses his own self easily with the identity of the ancient Greeks and the Western mind.

The Great Depression, the 1920s and 30s, was the time when Heidegger did his critical writing and gained fame and position, a time when many feared the fall of the West and the death of Christian European civilization.  Heidegger, like Rousseau and Nietzsche, was an anti-modernist anti-technology romantic who spoke of Greece as a more glorious and meaningful time.  These thinkers in turn influenced Marcuse, Adorno and the Frankfurt School.  Later Adorno, Jewish like Marcuse, both having fled the Nazis for Switzerland and then New York, wrote a 1964 pamphlet, The Jargon of Authenticity, criticizing Heidegger for supporting the Nazis while calling for self-questioning, which is ironic given Adorno hated jazz and argued that music is over after Beethoven.

Heidegger originally studied to be a Catholic theologian, but in studying Neoplatonism he switched his study to philosophy and wrote his thesis on Duns Scotus.  Husserl, the phenomenologist, took him under his wing as his star pupil, and as phenomenology (the school of studying the mind by focusing on how we experience the phenomena or things around us) rose to fame and gathered followers Heidegger began to gather fame and followers of his own.  Husserl wanted a science of the mind, a radical criticism of all philosophy and psychology up through Kant and Hegel.  Husserl is famous for the idea of intentionality, that consciousness is always directed toward something or away from something by intention.  Nietzsche similarly believes that thought is always instinct and drive.  Wanting, fearing, loving, and assessing objects is never neutral, nor is our own philosophical grasping of our grasping cold or objective.  Husserl studied the various and often subtle ways we are intentional in our world under the banner of phenomenology, a term invented by Hegel but intended as an open speculative psychology by Husserl.  The world and subject co-develop together in an evolving symbiotic relationship.  Husserl kept writing and expanding his work, but rather than develop a new alphabet for thought as he had originally intended his work snowballed out of control and continued to amass until his death.  Heidegger picked up Husserl’s work, but merged this with Nietzsche and took it in an anti-scientific existential direction.  Heidegger forms his own insights based on the work of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Husserl.  Husserl’s scientific Freudian ego becomes Hegel’s dasein, or being-there.  Heidegger emphasizes the open-ended multiplicity of being and interpretation romantically like Nietzsche.

Heidegger argues in Being and Time that philosophy means being a beginning, the way one weighs anchor while setting sail out into the vast ocean.  We are thrown into the world, called “thrownness”, as a being-there, or there-being, in German, “dasein”.  Heidegger is famous, some would say infamous, for inventing his own vocabulary and Heideggerians follow this jargon to an equally infamous extent.  Welcome to Heidegger-speak 101.  Heidegger asks, how do we experience reality before and as we arrange it?  What is the ground of being that supports our views and values?  The world is “worlding” around us and as us, and thus we are “being-in-the-world”.  We approach the world, each other, and objects either as closed and identified or as mysterious, uncanny and miraculous.  Industrialization and technology have disenchanted the world, and so we must question the world and re-enchant it.  Mystery and truth appear only in the cracks of our industrialized reality when things break or go missing.  My good friend who got me interested in philosophy, who was at the time a Heideggerian, used the example of dropping the soap as you take your morning shower.  Objects and persons disappear until they are out of place or misused, and then we become conscious of them.  Consider a poster on a wall that we stop seeing after time, which then becomes new again and leaps out if we call attention to it again.  Consider Nazis, and times of crisis.

This tendency to box and categorize the world is imperfect, and cracks can become ruptures.  This is remarkably similar to ideas in communism and anarchism (especially among artists such as the Dada who believe we can reanimate and enchant the world to break beyond its boxes).  Nietzsche, an existentialist like Heidegger, similarly romanticized ruptures and struggle with the categorical and the dead in thought.  We build meaning as individuals, as groups and as cultures in the face of the infinite.  While Nietzsche would implore us to strike out on our own here as an individual, and only individuality could give our meaning and perspective authenticity, Heidegger parts ways with Nietzsche and declares that our being-there is always a they as much as it is an “I”.  As with Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, the individual comes into the world already populated by a “they”, and one is a part of this “them” as much as one is thrown against it.  While I am in favor of this view, we must note that Heidegger’s identification with Germany and the Nazis is in stark contrast to Nietzsche’s renunciation of German citizenship and denunciation of German nationalism.

Heidegger famously argues that every revealing is a concealing, that history both gives us our meanings as it removes others from our sight.  Being and beings withdraw from our grasp as we grasp them.  Time continuously gives us the present as it takes the present from us.  Meaning is always historical, always has “historicity”.  Remember that one of Hegel’s great contributions to philosophy was to understand all thought as historical process.  For Heidegger, being is always bound up with time, and thus the title, “Being and Time”.  Time is the horizon of being.  As time and being are seen and unseen, so there can be no absolute judgment, interpretation or meaning.  Nietzsche argues for a multiplicity of interpretation and meaning that cannot be reduced to a single objective truth.  Care and life are always as much for oneself as much as for another who never fully arrives, just as we never reach the horizon as we walk.

For Freud, all thought is denial of sex.  For Heidegger, all thought is denial of death.  Understanding oneself as a simple and singular being, the conception of closed scientific facts and categorical eternal truths, is the way we cope with the fear of death.  We are in a basic state of anxiety towards our world that extends over the horizon just as we are afraid of particular people and objects.  Nietzsche gives Heidegger this picture, arguing that we can inauthentically ignore the void by turning to absolute immutable truths, or we can give up and find no meaning in life, but rather we should authentically give and create our own meaning as life itself, though again Nietzsche sees this as an individual activity that is corrupted by participation in social movements.  Heidegger agrees that we must make our way from absolute being to nihilism and beyond to understand ourselves as essentially becoming and transformation.  We imagine we and our truths simply exist as a denial of death and meaninglessness which have just as central a role to play in our questioning, discovery, and living.  Out of the basic state of anxiety spring love, fear, rejoicing, suspicion, and a variety of ways we interact with our world.  True freedom is realizing this and gaining self-conscious transparency.  We must resist reducing ourselves, our truths and even objects as “ready-to-hand” if we wish to truly live.  We kill the world and ourselves continuously in the attempt to avoid death, but if we accept death and meaninglessness, we are free to live and give our lives meaning.  If we realize we are running off into the woods to avoid being lost, we can learn to dwell comfortably at home.  As for Nietzsche, all truths are idols to be smashed, such that new truths can freely grow in their place.

Ethics: Social Class

Power dynamics exist in earliest societies between the ruler(s) and the common people.  Hierarchies exist in ape societies and the earliest human societies.  We saw the divide in Grossman of the officers from the soldiers, of those who make the call and those who carry out the orders.  We have seen how in the Egyptian wisdom the earliest societies created systems of class and ability as they gathered cultures and technologies and developed them.

Class is a very important issue for Americans today. From propaganda week, we know that A, we are systematically taught that ‘there is no class in America because it is a freedom place’, and B, ‘class is something that OTHER cultures are brutal with, but we are free of that problem’.  This was what we said about the Soviets, and they said about us.  We amplified our accusation of them in our media (including both news and fiction), and muffled anything that could help their accusation of us.  The same messages go on today with Islam and China.  In truth, class and power have been a very familiar problem since we were apes.  Power and authority are a two edged sword.  On the one hand, one wants leaders and followers to organize and coordinate human society.  On the other hand, one also wants equality and sympathy which power tends to distort and ignore.

America is caught in this bind still today (as is all of humanity).  According to some statistics, the powerful today own more than ever before in history, both in amount and in percentage, in spite of the equal and opposite truth that the middle class and class mobility are also larger today than ever before.  With modernity and life saturated with devices, humans are more enabled than ever before.  This means that the common people are more enabled than ever before AND the gap between common people and the powerful is greater than ever before, which is counter-intuitive.  Consider that in the year 1000 in Europe, the average nobleman owned one horse, one sword and shield, and often could not write their own name.  The gap today between rich and poor is far greater than the gap between the toiling serf and the noble lord of the middle ages.  This is very similar to Grossman remarking that Alexander only lost 700 soldiers in his entire quest for empire in 300 BCE, an absurdly low body count for a modern conflict.

What is Class?
Class is any division of people into recognizable groups.  If any group is recognizable to themselves and other groups, this is enough to claim the group is a self-conscious social class.  When talking about social class, we often concentrate on the differences of power and ability that people have in a society.  There are two types of class status, ascribed (born with it) and achieved (gained in time).  The common indicators of ascribed class status are ethnicity (race and tribe), family (royal lineage), gender (male, female or other), and culture (religion, language).  The common indicators of achieved class status are position (job or role in society), wealth (property which includes money), ability (skills, education and experience), and fame (honor, success, celebrity).

There is plenty of evidence that apes know the difference between a privileged position on top and a marginalized position on the bottom.  In Metaphors We Live By and Philosophy In the Flesh, Lakoff (a Berkeley professor of ability and fame) says that the human mind is ‘hardwired’ to think up as powerful and down and weakness.  Thus we can draw a simple chart of upper and lower class.  While the extremes have always been there, as society has developed we have developed and complexified the arrangement.  The growth of the middle class is an age old process, but with modernity and devices the middle classes have become quite complicated.

On top in society are those who have enough that if they hold on to it they do not need to work.  On the bottom are those who have so little that if they do not work then they have nothing at all.  In the middle are those who are using all sorts of strategies to get employed and gain property.
The middle thus includes everyone from field workers and janitors to doctors and attorneys.

In ancient societies, often the leaders were from privileged families that had it made in the shade owning everything, and beneath them would be warriors, merchants, artists, farmers and workers.  What we have seen over time through the common history of cultures is that as the devices increased different groups gained power and could raise their status.  This leads all the way to the complex middle class of today.  We saw in ancient Egypt how the classes of scribes flourished, and specialized classes of scribes leads us to academia today.  Both Mahavira of Jainism and the Buddha both came from the warrior 2nd caste in India between 800 and 500, which scholars have said indicates that the second class was making power grabs from the highest priest Brahman class at this time.  Consider that artists were not rich or famous among the population until modern art made the painter a celebrity.

The complex of the middle class today shows us many types of people who have condensed cultures and strategies for maintaining their position and authority.  Consider that a doctor’s opinion is worth something to the patient or the toothpaste company advertising agent, but the doctor has to be backed by the state.  Doctors have great power, and thus the ability to acquire greater status individually through money, ability, fame, marrying into the right family, but the doctor who has to earn money is still not upper class.  A true upper class member does either management or no work at all and simply owns property.  A doctor who sees patients is thus upper middle class, or professional class.

The one to bring all of this out into public discussion was Karl Marx, who we already heard from in objection to utilitarianism (though Marx could be called a utilitarian himself).  Marx was disillusioned by the German failed revolutions of 1849.  Moving to England, Marx saw the growing classes of factory workers and others in harsh conditions, and began writing books.  The French Revolution had shown everyone that the leaders can be removed (the French noble families).  Marx was convinced that just as the French had removed the noble families, there was a new upper class that was settling into modernity that would have to be removed.  The old upper class in all societies were the noble families.  Now, just as warriors had risen up against the Brahmins in the time of Buddha, the merchants and traders had come in modernity to raise themselves with wealth to be equal to or even above the nobles.  This means that modernity has seen wealth rise to trump family as the biggest class indicator.  This is not to say that family or ethnicity no longer matter (consider the Walton family who founded Wal-Mart, three of whom are in the top 10 wealthiest individuals in the world), but now an owner of a wealthy company is as upper class as one can get in America.  This is in part due to American culture which ditched the British nobility system in its breaking off from the Empire.

In America today, in spite of ditching the British noble heraldry, the top 1% are ‘super-rich’ upper class (who earn over $350,000 a year or get that in returns on investments), the next 5% are ‘rich’ upper class (over $100,000 a year), the 44% are middle class (over $40,000), and the remaining 50% are ‘working-class’ and lower class (under $40,000).  This means that the lowest upper class members earn just under 9 times what the lowest middle class members earn.

How in America is such power and privilege maintained?  Don’t we have a democracy in which everyone can be heard?  Didn’t we ditch the British nobility?  How is it that the rich and powerful seem to be able to do whatever they want without much attention, but when the common people need schools or medical coverage there is always too much resistance?

In the first short article I gave you from the Race, Class & Gender reader, Class & Inequality, Sklar puts together interesting statistics on wealth and poverty in America.  All gains in household income since 1975 essentially went to the top 20%.  Since 2000, the US has gained 76 billionaires (putting the number at 374) and 5 million additional people below the poverty line (to make 37 million, the population of the East Coast).  Our infant mortality rates, especially for inner city impoverished people, rival rates in Malaysia and India.

In the second article, Media Magic, Mantsios argues that the media (TV and movies in particular) make class disappear from America.  In propaganda week, we talked about the messages that the Soviets and US sent back and forth.  In American media, not only are black people as tokens doing just great (often as cops and soldiers), but no one is starving or living in their car with their family, picket fenced houses have plenty to eat and a large shopping budget, and class difference rarely makes a difference.  In the 80s there were many evil rich guy villains, but the fantastic plot always thwarts the evil guy with too much money and a moustache (great example is Goonies, where the families were going to loose their houses to a golf course run by evil rich father and son, up to the father’s final line ‘No one will ever loose their house again!’ while throwing pirate treasure up into the air).

Poverty is increasing at twice the population growth rate, yet less than 1 in 500 articles in the NY Times is on poverty (and ask Chomsky, they set the nations news).  Welfare cheats and aggressive pan handlers take up a sizable portion of the space given to the impoverished in print.  Visually, they are never given a face with photographs or clips (a particularly important factor – tell people to go look up the whistle tips clip, compare the tipsters to the middle class white woman complaining ‘I have to get up for work’).  Whenever the poor are covered, it is ALWAYS from a middle class white perspective, never from the perspective of the poor.  This is lined up next to Democrats unabashedly supporting the middle class but never the poor with words and programs.  Obama as other Democrats support “middle class families”, and no one mentions needed programs to help the impoverished get out of poverty.  They have to speak as if there IS no poverty, that America’s way of life does not have harmful and increasing side effects.

It is estimated that 2/3rds of the Senate is composed of millionaires.  This is quite disproportionate to the population.  The media never point this out or indicate it is a problem.

Walter Karp’s Indispensable Enemies
Walter Karp (1934-1989) was a writer and journalist largely for Harper’s magazine.  His favorite subjects are the crooked nature of America getting into wars, which he argues are power grabs for the upper class, and the shallow and deceptive two party system of American politics, the subject of Indispensable Enemies, which he argued is a device to keep power in the hands of the upper class and out of the hands of the common people.

Some great Karp quotes:
“The left and right wings of the party establishment- two claws of an ancient bird of prey.”
“The public school system…a 12 year sentence of mind control…destroying the exerxise of intellectual inquiry, twisting it instead into meek subservience to authority.”
“The most esteemed journalists are the most servile.  For it is by making themselves useful to the powerful that they gain access to the ‘best’ sources.”
And, my favorite: America has one party with two wings.
(Note similarity to spectrum within one communist party system, left and right leaning)

In Indispensable Enemies Karp starts by noting that in American politics there is always a powerful ‘other’ to blame for not getting what one’s group wants, but no group seems to be able to get what it wants for itself.  Karp gives as example country and city folk (farms vs. roads and schools), where both seem to stop the other from getting what they want but neither can get what they want.  Karp will spend much of the book examining the two party system in this light.

Karp argues that we are being given the run-around.  We are being told that this is the unfortunate bi-product of living in a diverse land of freedom, but the powerful get what they want and the powerless are being told that they get nothing because they and the other groups of powerless are free and opposed to each other.  We live in the most powerful nation thus far in history, but we can’t get anything done for the common people and are told this is BECAUSE of the common people and how free they are to oppose one another in their opinions.  Karp says: this does nothing to explain how the things that get done do get done, and how they do benefit particular (and powerful) interests.

Karp argues that the basic assumption that parties are trying to win elections needs to be questioned.  We need to rather ask what the two parties have done in the last 150 years (the time in which America has risen to be the wealthiest nation).  When you look at it this way, we see that the two parties have controlled 50% of the country split down the middle since the civil war polarized the country.  A landslide in American elections is 60-40, and neither party seems to push lasting popular legislation.  Most states stay blue or red for decades, if they ever change at all.  This means that, through all of the changes that Zinn, Grossman, Chomsky, Carson and the Corporation have been talking about, the two political parties have remained exactly the same.

Karp argues that, when we realize that the two parties are trying to maintain control over their 50%, we can see many things.  This is the thesis of the book.  We can see that anyone too left or right of center is sabotaged by the party.  A party would rather see the other side win a district for a while then see someone who is intent on pushing forward real change.  You must prove your loyalty and centrality to be big and get elected.  If you show any independence or disloyalty the party will kill your campaign with the help of the other party and wait for the next election, concentrating on keeping a tight and simple lock on the 50%, not on pushing forward a program.  Thus Karp charges that we have one party, with two wings, not two parties at all.

Remember that Karp started writing as a college student during the Vietnam War.  He saw how the Democrats weakly criticized the way the war was run but helped kill the peace movement by “keeping the war out of politics”.  This is what we have seen since Karp’s death in the middle east conflicts.  We can say in light of the Corporation that both parties also keep corporations and their ability to pay both sides to play ‘out of politics’.

In addition, both parties collude to keep third parties out.  If either gets significantly over 60% of the vote, one party could break into two.  It serves the simple interests of both to keep just about 50%.  That way, both can bank half the population without fear of a third party taking part, and the two can drive the people against each other with empty ideology and there is no competition either for the liberal or conservative establishment such that they would have to do something.

In political science classes, you can learn that most Americans do not vote because they do not believe that they can get anything done.  Karp is arguing that the parties are in fact trying for this, to involve one with a polarized party such that one votes merely for right or left and nothing else concrete.  You also learn that most powerful corporations and figures straddle both sides of American politics, contributing to both Democrat and Republican campaigns.  This is the way that the device works.  The upper class pay and play for both sides and further the interests of American power (which is held in particular American hands).  The common people are set against each other and told that because the other side is as free as they are nothing can get done.  

The parties are not in fact trying to please the public at all, but merely polarize liberals against conservatives while getting next to nothing done any direction for the common people.  The parties want your allegiance but no enthusiasm or interest.  The decisions that are real, that affect power dynamics and class relations, are to be made by the powerful and not put into the awareness of the people at large.  This is how the powerful maintain their ability and the common people are kept from doing anything meaningful or lasting.  For example, if a war is on the table, all of congress votes for it and then the Democrats start hemming and hawing to the public about how this war could be better managed.  What Karp describes of the Vietnam war, we see again post September 11th.  Obama shifts the war back to Afghanistan, yet does not say the war should never have happened.  BUT: conservatives can’t lobby congress to get complete freedom for gun ownership for the common people.

Karp argues that the real issues that deal with power in America are never put on the ballot.  Consider gun ownership and gay marriage.   These two issues will likely be kicked back and forth between liberals and conservatives without much concession.  No matter which way either goes, opposite pressure can be mounted easily, and the upper class is not affected in the slightest.  However, whether medical coverage should be free rather than owned by powerful people is an issue that changes class relations, and thus it is not a decision that should be given to the common people.  It is clear that both liberals and conservatives would vote for free medical coverage even with conservative spin against government spending.  Karp argues this is the reason you do not see anything like this on the ballot.  In other words, it is all a game of good cop, bad cop, similar also to Operation Margarine.