THE CASE OF LUDWIG FEUERBACH, PART I

by Lyn Marcus

[The original text is found in the December, 1973, issue of The Campaigner. Only those occasional spelling "errors," which were obviously unintentional, were corrected. Any spelling "error" which was potentially intentional was left alone. For reference purposes, page numbers, breaking at the first paragraph appearing on even numbered pages from the original text, are in brackets.]

THE INTELLECTUAL RENAISSANCE

According to the admirable thesis of Shelley's "In Defence of Poetry," a great social revolution ought to be presaged and accompanied by a general increase in popular intelligence and a proliferation of extraordinary productions in art and science. Yet, for the case of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, we have quite the contrary picture.

The Great French Revolution was preceded and followed by the greatest intellectual ferment in history — a powerful upsweep of the mind especially from the beginnings of the sixteenth century through approximately the middle of the nineteenth. The Bolshevik Revolution was preceded by approximately a quarter century of erosion of European intellectual life, and was followed by the past half century of deepening moral imbecility in art, and apart from applied science, stagnation (on balance) of truly fundamental advances in basic scientific knowledge.[1] Considering Shelley's cited thesis, one may be prompted to consider the proposition that the absence of a contextual intellectual renaissance may be a major consideration in the failure of revolutionary socialist movements in Western Europe and North America during the recent fifty years.

On careful reflection, we cannot doubt that this is the case. The failure of the socialist movement to initiate just such a renaissance both embodies and otherwise reflects all the essential reasons for its failures. It is an old philistine asses' saw that "socialism couldn't work unless human nature" were changed. Out of the braying of fools! The statement is perversely true: without an intellectual revolution which initiates an effective general change in apparent "human nature" under capitalism, it is improbable that a socialist transformation could occur in the advanced capitalist sector during the period ahead.

This is no "mere opinion," no arbitrary assertion. The following summary argument locates the connection between socialism and the prerequisite, particular kind of intellectual renaissance required at this time.

As we outlined the case in "Beyond Psychoanalysis,"[2] and elsewhere, socialist transformation is based on the self-
organization of a majority of the political working class in agreement with a specific notion of world-wide economy, "expanded socialist reproduction." As we indicated the nature of the case in our "In Defense of Rosa Luxemburg"[3] none of the formerly hegemonic socialist organized tendencies — e.g., social-democratic, "Stalinist," "Trotskyist," "Maoist" had or even sought a conceptual grasp of actual "expanded reproduction." The mere toleration of the "economic" writings of such incompetents as Rudolf Hilferding, Otto Bauer, Nikolai Bukharin, Ernest Mandel, Paul Sweezy, et al. as even moot within the bounds of actual Marxian economic theory, is itself indicative of the intellectual bankruptcy of the socialist organizations and of academic circles which treat such constipated literature as serious theorizing.

[8]

Since "expanded socialist reproduction" is the fundamental, absolutely distinguishing premise of socialist society, the self-styled socialist tendencies which shared Left-domination of the workers' movement prior to 1968 do indeed represent leaders without a conception of a goal, lacking even the ability to select the direction in what the undefined goal might be encountered.

It is not sufficient merely to prescribe that the socialist movement must now master the notion of "expanded reproduction." The concept to be communicated cannot be understood in terms agreeable to heretofore ordinary forms of mental behavior. To demand clarity on "expanded reproduction" from the old varieties of "socialist" organization is like buying a mule for stud-service.

Here we intersect the issue of an urgent general renaissance.

The Problem of Knowledge Versus Learning

There are two ways in which a student may ordinarily secure the reputation of knowing a subject. He may, on the one hand, merely "learn about" the matter in question, memorizing jargon and prescribed glosses and exegeses, rehearsing himself generally in the production of plausible paraphrases of lecture materials and assigned texts. In mathematics, too often he learns procedures through repetitive drill. Such learning and drill represents no actual knowledge of the ostensible subject-matter itself; it is no more than a plausible, credulous simulation of the bare, dead form of living knowledge. On such premises, it is unfortunately necessary to point out, most Ph.D.'s in general and professors in particular are merely learned and hence obsessively ignorant of the indicated real subjects of their learning.

At best, learning represents something analogous to drawing a boundary around a subject, a differentiation which states in effect: "Within this circumference lies the subject I am naming, as distinct from another subject which is located within this other closed line boundary." Learning does not go into the enclosed "area," does not directly seize the subject itself. "Bad infinite" enumeration and circumscriptions, however flawlessly consistent each step of such differentiation, however "infinite" its progression toward "complete distinction" of differentia (predicates), never approaches the immediate perception ("True infinity") of the subject in this method.

"Seizing the subject-matter" conceptually demands creating or locating within one's mental process a practical "image" of the external subject. For a simple example: knowledge of an automobile is not a canonical description of the auto and its parts. It must be the kind of Gestalt which appropriately guides one to operate, otherwise use, repair the vehicle, etc. Even that sort of qualification is insufficient to identify the higher kind of difficulty presented by the prospect of actually knowing the concept "expanded reproduction." Explicitly dialectical concepts require reference to a special aspect of mental life, an aspect which is twofoldly blocked from wilful access to direct consciousness in almost all members of capitalist society.

The problem of conceptualizing "expanded reproduction" (or any other dialectical notion) is not a formal difficulty within the realm of learning, but is essentially a neurosis-based blockage, a product of the grandmother of neuroses, bourgeois ideology.

In that connection we now underline a point which we have repeatedly presented in our preceding writings of this series.[4]

Learning and even ordinary knowledge is limited either to object-images or to notions susceptible of being made conscious in the form of object-images. The persuasion that no other form of knowledge is possible is so pervasive that nearly everyone accepts as "axiomatic" the obsessive assertion of mechanistic thinkers to the effect that the physical universe must be primitively based on elementary "discrete particles" (or, the agnostic versions of the same mechanistic world-outlook, that the phenomena of the physical universe are entirely limited to sense-date of self- evident discreteness). Although there have been recurring efforts to conceptualize a "non-particularate" form of temporal-spatial continuity, in all but the rarest instances of this the accomplished definitions of such "lines," "sheets," etc. are ultimately intuitions which have been degraded to poorly disguised "bad infinity" constructs within a "logical system" which is itself premised on the axioms of discrete relationships (e.g., illustrated crudely by the widespread paralogical assumption that a straight line is defined by two points). Ordinarily, the constipated logician is therefore about to woo the credulous to his conceit that an infinite continuum cannot be "logically" primitive: there are no true, existent universals.

Our Spinozan treatment of Descartes' "Perfection" theorem[5] has introduced the general type of conception of a primitive infinite continuity, within which class of mental phenomena the notion of "expanded reproduction" is to be located. The notion of a special kind of "transfinite invariance" for a nested array of historically-ordered Riemannian spaces is the more appropriate paradigm to be considered.[6] In such a derivation from Riemannian conceptions, the physical universe is no longer regarded as defined for finite ("conservation of a fixed quantum of") energy per se. Instead, the ordinary sort of ''entropic" energy phenomena are treated as necessary special cases (predicated cases) of a certain quality (true infinite within the finite) of "negentropy." The simplest paradigm for the order of conception required by such a definition of transfinite invariance is developed in our treatments of Value for Marxian economic theory[7], in which negentropy is expressed by a tendency for exponential increases in that ratio, S'/(C+V).

The notion for any of such a class of conceptions cannot be located as an "object-image;" there is no way in which this sort of notion can be known on the basis of a logic agreeable to axioms of primitive discreteness. There is only one feature of mental life which corresponds to such universalizing notions. That referent is the true infinity expressed by the fundamental emotion. This emotion is that which is imperfectly encountered in reports of the "oceanic" surge of either the "religious" or "love-death" feeling.[8] To conceptualize the Cartesian "Perfection" theorem, the form of negentropy to which we referred, or "expanded reproduction" in particular, it is essential that the person supersede his experience of the "oceanic" fundamental emotion to such pathological and absolutely terrifying forms as the "religious" or "love-death" expressions. It is essential that this emotion be wilfully and familiarly experienced as the primary "tool" of a self- conscious sense of identity, a kind of identity opposite to that associated with the infantile relic of bourgeois culture with the infantile "greedy," banal Ego.[9]

In sum, the possibility of actual knowledge of "expanded socialist reproduction," and hence the possibility of an actual, wilful straggle for socialism, demands a specific and fundamental transformation in the mental life of a vanguard of the working class. The implications of this are subsumed by a fundamental change in the affected persons' world-outlook respecting every aspect of life.

By contract, the socialist tendencies which formerly shared total collective hegemony over the movement were not only obsessively ignorant of such an ABC of socialism, but predicated socialist struggle as they saw it on an appeal to what they interpreted as the "special greed" of the workers, as those workers remain wholly subject to the prevailing bourgeois ideology expressed by ordinary "militant rank-and-file" trade-unionism. Consequently, these socialist tendencies capitulated to the very pluralist disorganization of the working class which prevents that class from either acting as a unified class or even recognizing a general class interest. By situating socialism within the domain of that infantile relic, the bourgeois Ego, i.e., postulating pseudo-socialism in practice, those tendencies degraded the goal of a unified, world-wide working-class society to an ineffable, hence chiliastic dream, a mere blurred, sentimental vision of "socialism" irrelevant as its efficient result to those same parties' daily practice. Pandering to "nationalism," to the chauvinism of either trade-unionists generally, or the more vicious craft-life parochialism of mere sections of organized labor, these tendencies have made a hideous travesty of the very name of "working-class struggle," and, coherent with this, eschewed real, creative mental life on the Proletcultist premise of thereby adapting to and propitiating the existing, infantile prejudices of the bourgeoisified workers.

The Psychoanalytic Remedy

From the two preceding articles in this present series on the "new psychoanalysis," it should be clear enough that we have already demonstrated our case to the degree that our thesis could not be competently regarded as merely moot or speculative. As we emphasized within "The Sexual Impotence of the PSP," clinical experience within the Labor Committees has repeatedly located clear emotional (and often enough even psychosomatic) blocking phenomena at the precise point individuals attempt to make the conceptual leap into the "middle of the circle" containing such notions as Cartesian "Perfection" or "negentropy" as we define-it.[10] That same work has established that identity of the blocked emotion with an impending surge of "oceanic" feeling. Moreover, the etiology of the blockage respecting "Perfection" (for example) confirms both the identity of the fundamental emotion as the blocked quality, and the fact that the blockage to conceptualizing such notions is entirely neurotic in origin and form. The blocking of such concepts is always fundamentally the outcome of the characteristic neuroses of bourgeois ideology.

Hence, what we are chiefly reflecting in the present series of papers is a fundamental discovery which implies the launching of a world-wide socialist intellectual renaissance.

As we have reported earlier, the immediate short-term objective of this program within the Labor Committees is principally twofold. Firstly, to launch a program of interdependent task-orientation and psychoanalysis through which a plurality of the Labor Committee members proceed toward developing wilful powers of creative mentation — what the layman would be obliged to term the deliberate development of "geniuses." Secondly, to immediately use the progress in the Labor Committee program as a lever for quickly developing black and Hispanic ghetto teenagers often high-school "drop-outs" — into their potential as a working-class intelligentsia. Although the benefits realized so far are merely preliminary, what has been accomplished already suffices to demonstrate what we have now begun the rapid spread of exactly that intellectual renaissance essential to socialist transformation during the period immediately ahead. This series of reports has thus begun to account for the origin of those secondary features of the Labor Committees which have already inspired terror among certain North American and European Communist Party leaderships, and have evoked awed reaction from such other circles as the AFL-CIO bureaucracy, the Urban Coalition, and the New York Times.

[10]

[picture of P.B. Shelley] P.B. Shelley[:] His "In Defence of Poetry" properly implies that socialist revolution would be unlikely today without an accompanying intellectual renaissance of the kind being initiated by the Labor Committees.

A new force is now unloosed in the world, a force imminently more terrifying to the philistines than any opponent on which they have speculated before this time.

Immediate Pedagogical Tasks

There will be prolonged resistance to such a "renaissance" thesis. Even so, within months it will begin to be broadly conceded that, at least, the Labor Committees have originated a fundamental discovery. It will be a grudging admission in most instances; the observer will say impotently, in effect: "I want to make clear that I don't like the Labor Committees' actions, but ... " This sort of reaction will develop within such academic fields as history, sociology, anthropology, to which we have made and are continuing to effect important contributions, frequently bearing on the most important issues of those specializations. It will also occur among even our bitterest opponents in political science, the CIA and KGB specialists and their employers, who are already studying our writings and activities as epidemiologists must regard a "diabolically clever" new sort of virus for which they have not yet produced an efficient specific immunizing agent.

In particular, fascination with our work will develop and spread within a stratum of more advanced psychoanalysts. Respecting specific areas of our more original insights into the etiology and treatment of certain stubborn problems of psychopathology, there have been admittedly some partial explorations in the same direction by a minority of professionals outside our work — notably among the factions directly or indirectly associated with the viewpoint of the late Harry Sullivan. However, even those more advanced psychoanalysts have been limited both theoretically and practically by their want of a fundamental grounding of psychoanalysis to replace the crippling old Freudian metapsychology and its parodies. Our qualitative contribution to psychoanalysis as such is essentially located in our establishment of a fundamental theory of mind, through which necessary reification and coherence can be secured for a variety of otherwise ambiguous and abortive advances in methods and etiological tools of clinical work.

Examples bearing on the point are provided by our treatment of the "Id" problem, our deletion of the "Electra" complex from the clinical lexicon (both men and women have an "Oedipus" syndrome), our elimination of the "Eros/Thanatos" dualism (in connection with the analysis of the way in which the fundamental emotion confronts the infantile Ego as either a "Love-Death" feeling or a "Love- Insanity-Death" feeling), more generally our placing of the "father" question in proper secondary position with respect to the fundamental "mother-image" problems of Ego- psychodynamics, and our consequent contributions to a method for more rapid and profound progress in clinical work toward that "depth analysis" which is the essential precondition of all substantial progress in therapeutic efforts.

Corollary to this, our demonstration of the roots of this "new psychoanalysis" in the work of Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx, our treatments — like that in the present paper — which make such philosophical writings familiar ground for the study of the professional psychoanalysts, generally enlarges the scope of the professions in several respects. As we have thus made psychoanalysis a branch of scientific anthropology, we have not only located it more efficiently within scientific knowledge in general, but have equipped psychoanalysis to become a self-conscious reflection of its own proper anthropological roots, to quality it as a general epistemological tool of all scientific work rather than a limited therapeutic practice.

[picture of Sigmund Freud] Sigmund Freud[:] The influence of his "metapsychology" has remained an obstacle to the development of a scientific theory of mind by psychoanalysts.

The positive relationship to mathematical physics is so far less direct. The mere premise of necessary hylozoic coherence[12] throughout the universe is already sufficient to establish our analysis of the concept of "expanded reproduction" (i.e., universal labor=creative mentation=negentropy in our usage of that term) as equivalent in form and ultimate origins to a fundamental law of the universe as a whole.[13] Otherwise, the Labor Committees are contributing two interconnected approaches to the end of indirectly facilitating the realization of these conceptual advances within mathematical physics. Formally, we have located in the body of mathematical developments per se — in the viewpoint and work of Riemann, Cantor, Klein, Einstein, et al. — those starting-points for approaches which bear on actualization of the Cartesian notion of self-perfection as the fundamental (primitive) feature of a primitive continuum.[14] Empirically, as exemplified by our applied programmatic efforts respecting the food and energy crises, we are exploiting the analysis of the fallacy of the Physiocratic outlook to demonstrate the actual existence of continuous process (per se) as the primitive feature of human "economic" existence.[15] Such development and application serves as a case-history approach in applied epistemology, directed to the conceptual problems of those empirical studies in which the self-evidence of primitive discreteness not only is destroyed by the fundamental features of the process investigated, but in which the existence of discreteness as predicates is a necessary feature of a primitive continuity of negentropy as the subject of the investigation.[16] Otherwise, returning to the general issue, the hylozoic principle leads to certain results for mathematical physics in general through the initial crisis created for empiricism by the effort to locate a physiological basis in mental processes for the phenomenon of negentropy in human creative mentation itself.[17] This latter point, immediately situated in biology, leaves the mathematical physicist no choice but to become a practicing dialectician in mathematical physics, otherwise to join the Jesuits respecting the more sophisticated modern (entropic) arguments for the ontological proofs of the existence of a deus ex machina.

The most important immediate results — and the most obsessive, hysterical opposition — are located within applied political science. Any of the psychoanalysts who adduce the validity of our criticisms of the infantile Ego-state from their own clinical knowledge will immediately agree with us respecting our above-cited criticisms of the previously-existing socialist organizations: rather than concentrating on "changing human nature" (addressing and educating the workers' self-conscious selves), these groups and tendencies have pandered to the infantile, heteronomic impulses of the workers' bourgeois Ego, to those forms of "militancy" which are entirely within the bounds of bourgeois ideology.

The Case of the "Old Left"

It should be underlined that the pose of "objectivity" of previously-dominant socialist tendencies incorporates the most vicious subjectivity; the subjectivity of the militant bourgeoisified worker is taken as axiomatic. Hence, since all such bourgeois ideological rubbish in the militant workers' heads is accepted, the subjective question is settled for them; hence, politics is degraded to merely the "objective" questions so-called. Consequently, any discussion of the suppressed subjective issues is feared as a threat which they must hysterically oppose.

This psychopathetic element is embodied as the fundamental principal of no less revolutionary a variety of those tendencies than the advocates of the "Leninist theory of organization."

[12]

[picture of L.D. Trotsky] L.D. Trotsky[:] His self-defeating flaw, his recurring neurotic tendency to submit himself to the "organization discipline" [of such centrist "swamps" as the 1903-1917 Mensheviks, the 1923-28 Stalinized "Bolshevik" party, and the "Zinovievism" of the Cannonite SWP faction] is a model for left political impotence in the name of "Leninist Organizational Principles."

This theory of organization has in fact very little to do with the actual V.I. Lenin's notable propensity for splitting from reformist and centrist organizations, almost at the mere appearance of a principled difference of practice. The recipe generally followed could be more precisely identified as the "Trotskyist theory of organization." It was Trotsky who abandoned Lenin (with whom he agreed theoretically) in 1903 in order to be with the Menshevik majority of the RSDLP.[10] [18-?] It was Trotsky who remained in the Menshevik "swamp" for most of the period from 1903 to 1917, Trotsky whom Lenin rightly denounced as a "slimy creature" for blocking organizationally with those with whom he had no principled theoretical conceptions in common! It was Trotsky who, in 1923, betrayed his agreement with Lenin's firm instruction to make no compromise in booting Stalin out of the Soviet leadership.[19] It was the same Ego-trait in Trotsky which caused him to publicly lie in repudiating his own "Real Situation in Russia;" thus he obliterated the last real possibility of building a viable communist international for that entire ensuing period; his Ego defeated his self- consciousness, on the premise of "working within" the Menshevik centrist swamp of the Stalinized CPSU — as he had adapted to the Menshevik swamp of the 1903-1917 period.[20] The "Leninist theory of organization" is not actually a product of splitter-Lenin's example, but of such examples as Trotsky's schlimihl episodes; it is the cult of impotence exemplified by Trotsky's "tactical" capitulations to the Menshevik, Zinoviev-Stalin, and Cannonite (e.g., Zinovievite) centrist majorities of the organizations in which he was situated at those respective points of his life.[21]

The relevant exemplification of this "Leninist principle" is seen in those old working-class "Trotskyists" who refused to break with the SWP leadership, this on the pretext that the leadership had not made formal literary denunciation of the "old party doctrine," although nothing but such a break was occurring in the constant everyday practice of those same leaders. There are even a handful of such impotent wretches remaining within the SWP today. They cling to it on the pretext that the organization still ("fundamentally") is salvageable by virtue of its continued circulation of the writings of L. Trotsky, despite the fact that the entire leadership and the overwhelming majority of members are now streetwalkers for the CIA's domestic counterinsurgency operations (e.g., the New York City Lower East Side Fuentes CIA-type operations).[22]

More generally, among those who do not profess to be "Trotskyists," such as CPUSA members, the same miserable impotence is expressed by the umbrella policy of attempting to build a "militant" left faction within the terms of the prevailing bourgeoisified outlooks of trade unionists, "black nationalists," etc. — i.e., the general principle of political prostitution by which such socialist groups become a pimple on the left buttock of whatever "relevant" organized force they choose to attach themselves.

Still, illustrating this point from the case of the old SWP, any voice which attacked the leadership in terms of its day-to-day conduct was denounced even by most professed "oppositionists" as being "personal," "subjective," as abandoning the course of "objective politics." "Objective politics" for them consisted in debating the literary productions in which the leadership either ignored or falsely characterized the content and purpose of its significant activities. The high point of "oppositionist" "objective politics" was the winning of an amendment to a codicil in a convention resolution, or the securing of nomination of a token representative on the National Committee — or, even to a local branch executive committee. There was, of course, much shouting about "theory and practice," while always precluding any effort to attribute a political world- outlook from the clinical evidence of actual day-to-day practice. As long as the old party leadership did not make open literary attack on what the members considered "party traditions," the "oppositionists" were content to limit their criticisms to momentary (impotent) self-purgative outbursts, and otherwise an irrelevant few weeks' bi-annual ceremonies.

Such jackass-politicking in the old SWP is broadly exemplary of the internal life of all the old organized socialist groups of the capitalist world, ranging from the mass Communist Party of Italy, or the CPChile, down to the most miserable telephone-booth cults of the Atlanta (Georgia, U.S.A.) or Paris streets. This impotence is of course more extreme among the self-styled "independent socialists," whose uppermost goal for political life is to gather around a handful of slightly-left academic and kindred celebrities at some swamp-like large confabulation, during which little of substance is said and absolutely nothing settled.

That miserable lot of "Stalinists," "Trotskyists," "Maoists," and "independents" will of course be the last to concede that the Labor Committees have made any contribution, and will be howling their decorticated obscenities to such effect even after significant numbers of academic and other professionals are made their cautious acknowledgments of our "special assistances" to their respective fields.

Our Pedagogical Tasks

The exact nature of our contributions is not exaggerated. As we emphasized in "Beyond Psychoanalysis," with respect to Hegel's Phenomenology, what we have accomplished is essentially to supply that last, decisive ingredient through which the long-outstanding achievements of a variety of predecessors are finally brought to a state for widespread fruitful application. We have taken the real Descartes, the real Spinoza, the real Kant, the real Hegel, the real Feuerbach, the real Marx off the dusty shelves of a century's suspended animation and brought them to life; we have realized the life that was already if incompletely situated in their work. The impression of broad and profound originality in our present work is principally the consequence of our suddenly reviving so much from the greatest minds of the past centuries, rather than even considerably the effect of our own new discoveries in themselves. We must also consider the related consequences of the prevailing scholarship so-called respecting the same figures from which we have drawn. The case of the two cited theorems of Descartes exemplifies the point. Although the internal evidence of Descartes' writings is sufficient to totally discredit any assessment but that we have made, the fact is that the bulk of extant scholarship does give institutionalized authority to a fictitious Descartes. Similarly, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx. The sense that what we have contributed is "totally new" arises not only from a prevailing ignorance of the actual content of the enormous literary work on which we have drawn, but, worse, from the proliferation of "authoritative" but essentially incompetent representations of those same original sources.

The case of Karl Marx's four-volume Capital is exemplary. The bulk of the present writer's literary productions and lectures on economic theory and economic analysis is essentially a replication of the Marxian point of view as summed up in Volumes III and sections of Volume IV of Capital. To this we have added only two things.

Fundamentally, we have resolved the problem of elaborating the historical-materialist notion of expanded reproduction, especially as that was re-identified and summed up by Marx in the famous "Freedom-Necessity" passage from the "Trinitarian Formula" Chapter of Volume III.[23] On this point, we have made a fundamental contribution to Marxian economics by resolving only one specific problem which Marx himself failed to master. By applying that contribution of Volume III, Section VII retrospectively to the preceding sections of Capital, we have given the entirety of Marxian economic theory an applicability as scientific economics to an extent not previously feasible.

Secondly, we have employed our unique competence to fill our certain critical sections of Capital which Marx's death left in sketch form. This accomplishment of ours is most notable in those chapters from Section IV of Capital, Volume III to which Marx assigned the treatment of fictitious capital, where he did not supply much more than identification of several of the major citations he selected for incorporation in those chapters.[24] The indicated analysis of the phenomena in question is missing in Marx's text, an omission which has devastating consequences for the effort to reconcile the rest of Marxian economics with the actualities of the monetary side of the capitalist realization process.

At the same time, excepting such readily-isolable critical additions to the whole, the overwhelming bulk of our representation of Marxian economic theory, although in total opposition to generally accepted versions is entirely the contribution of Marx himself, without the slightest premise for competent dispute.[25]

Our general contribution to Marxian economic theory is entirely cognate with all other points on which we have made any important contributions. Respecting Marx's conceptions of dialectical method and all other subsumed issues, we have located our correction of Marx in connection with the flaw in his outlook which is reflected in the second of his "Theses On Feuerbach." He properly avoided the fundamental immediate blunder of Feuerbach, the key to all his original accomplishments, but he also evaded the still-deeped issue.[26] Marx's specific flaw of omission, which becomes a pervasive blunder for Engels, is his failure to consider positively and explicitly the fundamental ontological issue of dialectical method. If the fundamental principle of Hegel's dialectic is the self-subsisting positive principle, "self-perfection," "negentropy," as we have defined this[27], and if this principle is the essence of human revolutionary practice, then the fundamental law of the material universe itself must be of the same form (and, ultimately, also essence) as Hegel's self subsisting Logos principle. Once we made the necessary correction, interpolating the necessary additional specification to the second of the "Theses," we implicitly eliminated that error from all Marx's work — as we have largely done in fact. We emphasize: this correction of the "Theses On Feuerbach" is essentially identical with our enlarged development of the thesis of Section VII, Volume III of Capital, and with every other principled correction we have introduced to Marx's work as a whole.

[14]

In respect to the growing number of students of our work, among academic specialists as well as developing cadres in Western Europe and North America, it becomes our responsibility to recognize and treat the pedagogical problems arising from our initiative in reviving so the Marxian revolution in human knowledge. Although, as we have previously noted, the realization of these contributions is more exactly the outcome of the progress and collaborations within the Labor Committee tendency than the independent work of this writer himself[28], the largest part of the burden of authorship and pedagogical responsibility for this development remains momentarily with him.

Presently, the pedagogical problem confronting the scholar and instructor is still in the general form of distinguishing: "Here is the systematic point in-the work of [Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, et al.] at which Marcus introduces his original contribution." The effective assimilation of knowledge demands for this, as for all parallel advances, that those principally responsible for such upheavals deliver a special quality of representation of the history of development of the conceptions involved.

Response to this challenge imposes two interrelated tasks.

Firstly, although this is not the function of the present paper, it is time that there appear something resembling autobiographical account of the way in which the fundamental contribution was developed. There were definite influences, circumstances, problems, and significant assistance from collaborators from several fields — the latter notably during the recent five years. Important discoveries have a history; their original form does not erupt suddenly "from nowhere;" and usually years of testing and elaborating are required — as was the case with us — to put the new bare initial conceptions into a verified and applicable form of practice for public notice. Approximately two decades were consumed in that way in bringing that writer's initial germinal insights into matured, elaborated form. Aspects of that history have considerable bearing on a precise understanding of the conceptions themselves, and even greater utility, for purposes of demystification, respecting pedagogy.

The second type of chore is reflected in the present paper.

In the first of the complementary chores, the writer takes his predecessors' work into account as something which has affected the evolution of his conceptions. In that chore, his own contribution is the subject of the presentation, which the relevant features of others' work intersect as predicates.

In the second case, this relationship of subject .and predicates is exactly reversed. The work of a predecessor becomes the subject, within which our own critical intervention is located as the leading predicate of the account. In one manner of viewing the latter it appears that we have thus distinguished those parts of the criticized work of a predecessor which we still regard as authoritative from that part which is to be superseded by our contribution.

That states a preliminary descriptive overview of what must be accomplished. A more important, principled problem of scientific pedagogy must now be considered.

The pedagogical prerequisite satisfied by such critical efforts is that of establishing conceptual coherence in the study and practice of an altered branch of scientific inquiry. The problem to be solved is illustrated by our foregoing discussion of Marxian economic theory. The student who does not know where and how Marcus has put together certain loose ends in Capital must be perplexed in the attempt to account for certain of our key conceptions from the standpoint of the textual authority of Capital itself.

A proper sort of textbook (and classroom pedagogy) ought to compel the student to replicate in himself some of that agony of cognition which preceded and accompanied each principal discovery in the field. The object of education ought to be that nothing must be merely "learned" by the student, but should become known to him through his experiencing that surge of elation (the light of a new idea being turned on his mind) which occurs when problem-solving tension is superseded by the realization of the new idea (Gestalt sense of the solution-concept) which the student has experienced "for himself." When knowledge is enlarged in step-by-step conceptual breakthroughs of this sort (in place of mere learning), the student has more or less replicated within the evolution of his own increased cognitive powers the relevant conceptual development which occurred in that field.

We are not therefore recommending that education ought to be based on a "great book" program. Comment on the case of two great theorems is exemplary for the point at issue.[29]

Descartes' conceptions of Cogito ergo sum and "Perfection" are so central to the history of evolution of all modern scientific knowledge that it would be impossible to make sense of modern knowledge without some concentrated attention to those theorems and to the circumstances of their original elaboration. Yet, although reference to Descartes' writings is an essential complement to a presentation of the theorems, his writings do not offer the appropriate pedagogy for imparting those conceptions to our students. The work of such later thinkers as Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, Riemann, Cantor, Klein et al. provides a more exact conceptual solution where Descartes leaves the result in imprecise form. What is wanted is a retrospective view of Descartes' effective discovery from the standpoint of what modern knowledge knows to be lasting and historically essential in that work. It is within that pedagogical context, and only that context, that access to Descartes' writings becomes both essential and pedagogically appropriate. Otherwise, we plunge the student back into the world-outlook of a student from the early seventeenth century, thence to claw his way upward, decade by decade to his actual present starting-point. We require a replication of the achievements of the past in the terms of reference corresponding to that advanced viewpoint which the student ought to bring to the beginning of each step of his efforts.

In general, the point is to accomplish what we have already specified: an historical presentation of the development of knowledge within the conceptual standpoint of the most advanced knowledge. Within that setting, the student must develop all the essential conceptual apparatus for himself, and so arrive at the internal conceptual authority and developed conceptual powers for knowing the field. He must become able to replicate, through his own developed conceptual powers, anything from past accomplishments. He must become the living embodiment of what mankind has achieved in that respect up to his time. In contradistinction to mere learning of procedures, the student will develop conceptual habits for creative work in that field, a qualification which naive opinion might identify as an acquired "instinct" for such creative activity. Instead of making the blunder of learning formal procedures for "composing like Beethoven"[30], the student's electrifying encounters one after the other with the concept-creating experiences of his principal predecessors "teaches" him the special creative habit of conceptual "intuition" appropriate to that field.

In contrast to such rigor, the preponderance of text is designed to impart mere learning, not knowledge. Formulations are assimilated by students for regurgitation. These are swallowed on the authority of mere plausible edification for the credulous, or, more generally, the student's sycophantish awe of the institutions which have the power to certify his success or failure to his future employers.

Respecting the second sort of pedagogical chore, it should not be suspected that this writer is about to launch a series of monographs merely to settle accounts with his predecessors one by one. Given the perilous state of humanity and the corresponding special duties of the writer and his organization, there is neither the time nor disposable energy available for purely academic forms of activity.[31] Just so, we criticize Ludwig Feuerbach here, not to settle accounts with him in an academic fashion, not to establish our academic authority at his expense, but as our criticism of his work is a remarkably effective choice of prerequisite to the next step of progress in the politically-urgent "new psychoanalysis" series. In this way, we shall incidentally meet academic responsibilities of the account of the history of ideas, but we shall accomplish that as a by-product of our principal task, as a subsumed feature of undertakings which have a more obviously and urgently practical political purpose.

1. THE CASE OF LUDWIG FEUERBACH

The principal object of our present paper is a further development of our argument to the effect that the principal types of formal epistemological errors proliferating in every field of knowledge today are entirely neurotogenic in both form and content. Our concern is not especially for the academic expression as such of this psychopathology. The ontological psychopatheticism, otherwise known as "reductionism" or the belief in primitive discreteness, is the central feature of every expression of reactionary moods within the working class itself, the central feature of all obsessive psychopathologies characteristic of bourgeois ideology among members of the working class today.

Feuerbach's principal work, The Essence of Christianity[32], is the most efficient selection of a clinical case through which to demonstrate such connections. The book includes the most concentrated and irrefutable evidence of the exact form of Feuerbach's crippling neurotic problems, and the basis for connecting these problems directly to the crippling flaw for which Marx identified in "Theses On Feuerbach."[33]

Yet, equally important for the selection of this case study, that book is also one of the most important scientific works in all modern history, combining certain of the most advanced conceptions and original discoveries existing up to the time of its writing with devastating flaws which are entirely neurotogenic.[34] Since Feuerbach both embodies a significant part of the advances of Hegel and other principal predecessors in portions of that book, and yet regresses to a relatively banality (by contrast with Hegel) on other matters, his errors are set into the most useful systematic juxtaposition to the main body of the man's conceptual advances up to that point. It is this powerful contradiction in his book which renders a criticism of it so correspondingly powerful a tool for subsequent attacks on the more general problem as encountered in other contexts.

[16]

There is a collateral, although emphatically secondary importance for such published criticism of Feuerbach at this time. As Helmut Boettiger emphasized in his paper delivered in opposition to Alfred Schmidt's presentation at the Bielefeld Feuerbach Referat[35], the Social-Democracy has recently resurrected the name of Feuerbach as an auxiliary level through which to propagate its slave-labor policy's slogan, the "Quality of Life." This hideous bit of preciosity echoing the old "Work Makes Free" situated above the entry to the Nazi concentration camps, is not accidentally derived from the modern followers of such Nazi philosophers as the existentialist Martin Heidegger. Nor is it therefore accidental that such efforts to make Feuerbach almost a proto-fascist, by Schmidt and others, should be derived from the tradition of epistemological imbecility associated with the middled Karl Loewith, witch-hunting Sidney Hook, and the Frankfurt School itself, by whom Feuerbach is idiotically associated with his bitterest factional opponents, Kierkegaard, Stirner, Heidegger, et al., as another "anti-Hegelian existentialist. "[36]

Of such scholars as Hook, Schmidt and their type, Feuerbach himself wrote aptly:

[blockquote]

These days, the necessary qualifications for a genuine, commendable, and "kosher" scholar — at least for a scholar whose science brings him in contact with the delicate questions of the age — are a confused head, inactive heart, unconcern for truth, and a spiritlessness — in short, a lack of character. However, a scholar who possesses an incorruptible sense for truth and a firm character, who with one stroke hits the nail on the head and gets straight to the root of an evil, who irresistably pushes things to the point of crisis; that is, decision such a person no longer passes for a scholar. God forbid! He is a "Herostratus"! Quick, to the gallows with him ... [37]

[end blockquote]

When he was confronted with serious, systematic criticism of his pornographic existentialist maunderings, in the September 7 session of the Bielefeld Referat, Schmidt abandoned the premises in the midst of his own assigned section of the proceedings, shouting as he left that he would not be subjected to such "Herostratic" criticism.[38] Hence, also, the build-up of the Referat in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung[39], the organ of the Christian Democratic Union in the German Federal Republic ... without account of the only incident which awoke the sixty participants and their chairman (from the slumbers which prevailed through most of the proceedings): the crushing refutation of Schmidt during the Sept. 7 session.

Since the Labor Committee tendency has established the degree of influence through which it can introduce panic into such hideous academic activities as Schmidt's abuse of Feuerbach, it is our important if secondary obligation to exploit every otherwise useful treatment of philosophical questions to expose the charlatanry of such quacks as Schmidt, Althusser, Hook, Quine, Ayer, et al., whether respecting the issue of Feuerbach himself or any other important topic which such "kosher" scholars attempt to degrade to the minuscule dimensions and banality of their own petty intellects.

Of more lasting importance than the necessary exposure of contemporary academic frauds, is the rescuing of the positive accomplishments of Feuerbach's major writings from its neurotic flaws. In general, despite the special value of The Principles of the Philosophy of the Future[40], The Essence ... retains the superseding importance which Feuerbach's own Second Preface to that work implies. It is his major production, which contains, at least by implication, all of his important advances beyond Hegel; it represents the kernel of everything later assimilated in Karl Marx's works, is both the founding work of scientific anthropology, and is the actual initiating work of scientific psychoanalysis.

The central feature of Feuerbach's accomplishment is his original insight into the importance of religious belief as the absolutely indispensable subject of special inquiry prerequisite to any further significant advances in the self- conscious conception of scientific knowledge in general. Since Feuerbach's writings, prior to those of the present author, the only notable explicit appreciation of Feuerbach's point in important literature is the appearance of the same essential argument in Emile Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life.[41]

Even so close a collaborator of Karl Marx as Engels veered toward the bankrupt tendency to regard extant physical science as a body of objective (i.e., supra-historical) knowledge, abandoning the principle of historical specificity which prevails in Marx's writings and in even Engels' own treatments of most other branches of knowledge.[42]

We summarize the argument which we have developed more extensively in other locations. The question of the "objectivity" of the judgments of so-called physical science is a question bearing upon the "objectivity" of the mental processes of the scientists, whose world-outlook is subsumed by the same ideology which governs their activities of mate- selection and social habits generally. "Objective" scientific knowledge in any field therefore first demands superseding the historical specificity of membership in a form of society of characteristic (historically-specific) qualities of world-outlook.

This achievement is not entirely impossible!

In general, it is possible to demonstrate the appropriateness of scientifically-governed practice to the expanded reproduction of a society, and so to distinguish certain abstractions from this body of practice as being pragmatically "scientific," so distinct from superstition. This testing does not suffice to establish the supra-historic "objectivity" of abstract science, but only the quality of appropriateness of a certain body of practice to an historically-specific state of human development. Truly 'scientific knowledge demands something quite superior to pragmatic authority. If one becomes self-conscious of the prevailing ideology which subsumes the mental behavior of physical scientists, one can thus uniquely abstract the essential features of scientific inquiry from the ideological corruption.

"Consistency," the obsessive conceit of logicians, affords no solution to such a problem. The essential feature of an ideology is located in the axiomatic premises of its construction; consistency per se is only a measure of the "hereditary fitness" of each predicate of a system to its determining ideology. No scientist could possible know, from arguments based merely on a consistent interpretation of the evidence, that his knowledge was anything more than an ideologically-distorted interpretation of reality. To escape from such a vicious situation there is only one remedy. If we have identified a ruling world-outlook as an ideology, and have, further, distinguished the invariant distortion of reality characteristic of it, such self-consciousness provides the epistemological basis for positively superseding the mystical fallacies of extant ideological knowledge.

The analysis of religious belief is therefore prerequisite to any such achievement under capitalism. It is the Christian doctrine (and its Judaic off-shoot)[43] which overtly, consciously displays those ideological premises otherwise generally hidden (in unconscious processes) respecting their expression within scientific knowledge. It is the thrust of criticism of Christianity from the anthropological standpoint pioneered by Feuerbach, which uniquely makes self-conscious that source of mystical reifications of scientific knowledge otherwise obsessively self-concealed within the axiomatic premises of so-called "objective scientific knowledge."

Feuerbach's Neurotic Obsession

For connected reasons, the isolation of a vicious flaw in Feuerbach's critique of religious belief is the identification of the systematic error necessarily pervading his epistemology. Similarly, to the extent that that variety of flaw we encounter in Feuerbach also occurs generally in the premises of the various factional world-outlooks in science and everyday life, expressing religious ideology, our analysis of this same error for the case of Feuerbach has decisive application to the corresponding extent.

Our criticism of the book is organized along the following broad analytical lines.

His principal contributions to epistemology, to anthropology, and to psychoanalysis are either summarily stated or sufficiently implicit in the first four chapters of that text. Despite certain aspects of these chapters which already threaten to lead to erroneous conclusions, threats which are indeed later developed as explicit blunders, the thrust of his presentation is broadly correct, and even brilliantly so, both as it summarizes certain relevant accomplishments of Hegel and as it adds to that author's fundamental contributions. Only after we have analyzed-explicit errors in later chapters, and have returned to the opening chapters from that vantage-point, can we competently attribute systematical importance to the occasional jarring notes of mis-formulation and ellipsis speckled among the initial four chapters.

We encounter the first important explicit blunder in the fifth chapter[44], but even here the mistake has not become formally irrevocable. Then, we reach the sixth chapter, in which the psychopathological kernel of his fundamental epistemological error is exposed in what we might justly describe as a lurid shamelessness.

At casual first reading, the error of the sixth chapter might mistakenly be discounted as the author's ignorance of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. In itself, the form of the blunder would ordinarily reflect such ignorance. Yet, in theological matters his scholarship is too thorough and longstanding to tolerate such an explanation. The reason for the blunder cannot be ordinary ignorance; he could not have committed such a crude factual error unless his mind were under the control of an obsession strong enough to shatter his reason. This is exactly the case.

Before proceeding to the development of the point, we now summarily describe the doctrinal blunder and indicate its deeper psychological and epistemological significance.

For the most compelling psychological reasons, as we shall indicate, Christian doctrine, evolving through numerous prolonged and hard-won struggles, prescribes a liturgical Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit, or Logos, is the essential form and substance of the deity (its "infinite" form)[45], in respect to which God the Law-Giver[46] and Christ[47] are its two principal (alienated) predicates. The New Testament also specifies the brief existence of another sort of "trinity" for the period from the birth of Jesus until the crucifixion and resurrection: God the Father, Jesus the Messiah, and Mary. Christ's connection to Mary ends with the crucifixion, after which the New Testament firmly insists that she must not touch him; the other, minor "trinity" has therewith ceased to exist.[48]

[18]

Feuerbach makes two interconnected errors, the second of these a bald, hysterical act intended to bury the evidence leading directly to exposure of the first. In a work which purports to expose the anthropological-psychological essence of Christian belief, he absolutely ignores the liturgical Trinity, and insists on the alternate of God, Son, and Mary! In the effort to dispense with the embarrassing Holy Spirit, Feuerbach desperately buries the Logos in Christ![49]

There is nothing arbitrary or minor in the liturgical Trinity which Feuerbach ignores. As his own general thesis respecting religious belief properly demands[50], any conception which appears as an essential feature of Christian doctrine thereby establishes a prima facie case for its significance as a reflection of a fundamental feature of the unconscious mind of the members of earthly Christian society.

The absolute exclusion of Mary from the company of the liturgical Trinity properly corresponds to the essential features of alienated mental life. Most notable is the absolute opposition of the "soul," the self-conscious self, to the other "I" within the person, to the infantile, "dirty" Ego. The fundamental emotion, apotheosized as the Logos or Holy Spirit in Christian doctrine, is the quality which finds agreement with the "soul," and which simultaneously demands the "denial" of the infantile Ego. It is the infantile Ego of the alienated individual which is directly affiliated to the internalized mother-image. The New Testament is riddled with evidence to this same effect. There, the body of the resurrected Christ is no phantasm, no apparition, but a material body, from which the infantile Ego has been extirpated to give over the "I" entirely to the rule of the self-conscious self. Hence, Mary, a predicate of Christ's discarded infantile Ego, must not touch his body; he is no longer affiliated to her.[51]

The mystery of religion is dispelled once a few facts of mental life of alienated man are understood. We have developed the outline respecting psychology itself in preceding articles, especially in. the course of our "The Sexual Impotence of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party;" so, we may merely, again summarize the matter at this juncture.

The mental processes of alienated man are principally distinguished not only by the interplay of conscious and unconscious processes, but by the fact that this mind includes two entities each normally capable of being the "I" of the person. The first of these, in the usual order of encounter, is the infantile Ego, associated with the infantile emotions of fear, rage, and elation of object-possession. The second of these two, the self that "comes up behind the back of the Ego," is the self-conscious self, associated with self-conscious reasoning and (by "cathexis") with various degrees of intensity of the fundamental emotion.[52]

In a sane society, the infantile Ego would disappear in early childhood. Relative to the self-conscious "I," the Ego is representative of the "bestial" quality of man; yet, in most of the conscious (and sleeping) life of the members of capitalist society, it is the "dirty," infantile Ego which normally seizes the quality of the "I," and controls the individual's behavior accordingly. Correspondingly, the human qualities of the individual are stultified; the power of self-conscious reasoning is largely atrophied, and the fundamental emotion surges up only in occasional eruptions as an "oceanic" "love-death" feeling, either as the "irrational moment" of actual loving (distinct from ordinary "sexual feelings") or as the "religious feeling." The exceptional love of a Tristan and Isolde and religious experience are exemplary of the pathological form in which alienated man occasionally encounters those stultified human qualities usually repressed within him.

In one, important sense, the religious experience is a relatively human quality of individual existence, relative to the bestiality of the same individual's life and conduct when he or she is ordinarily under control of the infantile Ego. This same pathetic expression of actual humanity, this religious feeling, is therefore perversely expressive of alienated man's most profound human needs and is relatively a necessary check on the more rampant bestialization of alienated society which would prevail without religious beliefs and practices.[53] The religious man is a stultified, unstable, alienated, and hence pathetic surrogate for what man ought to become.

The essential features of Christian doctrine, especially the doctrine of Christ's passion, crucifixion, and resurrection, are reflective of the most profound psychological truth respecting the mental life of alienated man.[54]

As Feuerbach properly emphasizes, the doctrine of Christ is the doctrine of a personal God, God become man so that man might know God in the likeness of man's own image and suffering, a God who is therefore a suitable mediator to the God of Universal Law.[55] Yet, since the idea of God is only the apotheosis of the essential human quality of man[56], the doctrine of reconciliation with God through Christ could only be a doctrine of imitation of Christ in the process of freeing oneself from the infantile Ego, and thus obtaining, a "perfect body" for oneself, a body free of the Ego, and under the exclusive control of the self-conscious "I."[57] Such a "perfect body" is a material being expressing nothing but the human essence. Since God

is nothing but the apotheosis of that human essence, to become entirely a self-conscious "I," one's body freed of the infantile Ego, is to achieve the quality of agreement with God's nature within oneself.

Contrary to Feuerbach's hysterical assertion, Jesus becomes sinful by being born of woman. He acquires an infantile Ego, whose characteristic emotions are infantile fear, rage, and elation of object-possession. The Life of Jesus, its agony concentrated in the Passion of Gethsemane, is a struggle to free the soul of God-become-man, the self-conscious "I," from the tyranny of the infantile Ego and that Ego's desires. The self-conscious "I" conquers the Ego, and rejects the Mother during the crucifixion (crying out: "Father, why hast thou forsaken me?"). Through the death of the Ego, through the crucifixion of his body from the corruption of the Ego, his body becomes the perfect material extension of his self-conscious "I," he has become one with God.

The Passion, extending from Gethsemane through the crucifixion, is a stylized version of the terror which the infantile Ego experiences during every onset of the "oceanic" feeling of "love-death." If the feeling is not successfully blocked, the result is the temporary "death" of the Ego, which is submerged (disappears) for the duration of that experience. Religious doctrine, which knows virtually nothing of actual self-consciousness, does not realize the quality of this fundamental emotion as the quality of creative mentation. Religious doctrine knows the fundamental emotion only ignorantly, in two alternative stultified forms of expression. The first expression is the most profound terror the Ego-dominated person can experience, the feeling of a plunge into the pit of death (which some have reified as the specious appearance of an autonomous "Thanatos" quality encountered in depth analysis).[58] The second expression is encountered when the naive, imbecilic self-conscious "I" is positively cathexized to this same emotion, under which circumstances the terror gives way to the most intense "oceanic" elation: this is the so-called religious experience, identical with the emotion of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde love-death (Liebestod) duet.

The essential feature of the actual religious experience is a temporary absolute break with "mother-love."

In the mind of the alienated individual, there are various identities present in addition to the two entities of Ego and self-conscious self. Normally, except in certain types of autistic and schizophrenic psychosis, the quality of "I" cannot be assumed by these other entities. Usually; the figures are what the painters, Breughel, Bosch, and Goya have represented them to be, hideous chimeras torturing the Ego in the pit of the unconscious processes. Chief among these evil chimeras is the mother-image. She is not a replication of the mind of the existing mother, but a construct reflecting the infantile relationship of the child to the mother and mother-surrogates combined.[59] In every instance the mother-image is wilfully brought to consciousness in an individual in clinical experience, the image is hideous and viciously destructive, exploiting the Ego's sense of infantile dependency to control the same Ego which invariably hates the mother-image, usually hating her only less strongly than the feeling of dependency.

The Ego, in primary association with this mother- image, does not know actually human social relationships, but only "goods and services": relationships between humanoid objects. Exemplary of the arrangement is the fact that Freud was guilty of superficiality and (probably) rationalization in projecting the existence of the daughter's "Electra complex" as complementary to the son's "Oedipus complex." There is only the "Oedipus" pattern in both sons and daughters. It is rather ordinary psychoanalytical knowledge that in most instances of coitus in and out of marriage, the performance of the male is associated with a fantasy, conscious or unconscious, in which the face of the "mother-image" is never then distant from the surface of consciousness as the superimposed identification of the object of his lust. It is often supposed that the father's image is the frequent fantasy-object of the female under the same circumstances. Not essentially: in each case in which some male-labeled image does seem to occur to the female unconscious during coitus (and related circumstances), a small additional analytical effort strips the male mask from that image to reveal the mother-image's face beneath.

It is the "mother-image," constructed from the infantile quality of the alienated, bourgeois relationship between child and mother (and mother-surrogates), which provides the "ego-ideals" of bestiality in man. "Mother-love" is accordingly the association for the individual's general sense of the most degraded varieties of sexual feelings, otherwise the emotion of "elation of object-possession," the warm, homely glow of gluttony epitomized by an overdose of "mother's home-made chicken soup."

The "mother-image" is also associated with mother's fears, partially a reflection of her superstitious fears of the world outside the home, imposed upon the oppressed women who become mothers, but also the superstitious, heteronomic outlook implicit in the family's alienated relationship to that outside world on which its existence depends. All that is narrow, chauvinistic, anti-humanistic, heteronomic in ordinary man, reflected in such reactionary notions as "mother country," "mother tongue," "local control," "hostility to `outsiders,' " etc., is immediately linked to the infantile Ego through the ego-ideals associated with the mother-image. It is this same connection which governs virtually all fantasy.

To become truly human — as distinct from "religious" — is to relocate one's identity in a Spinozan way, away from the sense of identity associated with dependency upon an internalized mother-image. Instead of saying, explicitly or (more significant) implicitly, "I am defined as a child of my parents who have predetermined my nature," the sane, adult individual defines his identity in a Spinozan way in the real world as a whole. His existing relationships to existing persons in general are the entirety of his identity. He has "grown up;" he is no longer an appendage of the internalized mother-image; his childhood has ended. He has given up the infantile "l," the Ego associated with the mother-image.

[20]

[picture by Bosch-?] The companions of the infantile Ego, occasionally erupting to view from the "pit" of unconscious processes.

From that psychoanalytical standpoint, the significance of all the principal features and importance of the doctrine of Christ's incarnation, Passion, and resurrection become clear. Christ is the paradigm of religious man's pathway to reconciliation with the essential human quality in himself which he externalizes in the apotheosized form of an alienated God. To become human is to become freed from the thrill of the infantile Ego and mother-image, and to locate one's "I" entirely in the self-conscious self.[60] In that attempted shift of identity from the Ego to self-consciousness by religious man, the bestial sensual emotions are relatively abandoned in moments of religious experience for cathexis of the "I" with the fundamental emotion, with hence the Logos. Universal Law (God), the Holy Spirit, and Man-become-God are reconciled in such a Trinity.

Hence, the enormity and profound clinical significance of Feuerbach's falsifications of Trinity and Logos. In the absolutely lurid, extended passage to which we referred, he presents the case for "mother" as follows:

[blockquote]

It was therefore quite in order that, to complete the divine family, the bond of love between Father and Son, a third and that a feminine person, was received into heaven; for the personality of the Holy Spirit is too vague and precarious, a too obviously poetic personification of the mutual love between the Father and Son, to serve as the third complementary being. It is true that the Virgin Mary was not so placed between the Father and Son as to imply that the Father had begotten the Son through her, because the sexual relation was regarded by the Christians as something unholy and sinful; but it is enough that the maternal principle was associated with the Father and Son.[emphasis ours]

It is, in fact, difficult to perceive why the Mother should be something unholy, i.e., unworthy of God, when once God is Father and Son. Though it is held that the Father is not a father in the natural sense — that, on the contrary, the divine generation is quite different from the natural and human — still lie remains a Father, and a real, not a nominal or symbolical Father in relation to the Son. And the idea of the Mother of God, which now appears so strange to us, is therefore not really more strange or paradoxical, than the idea of the Son of God, is not more in contradiction with the general, abstract definition of God than the Sonship. On the contrary, the Virgin Mary fits in perfectly with the relations of the Trinity. Since she conceives without man the Son whom the Father begets without woman; so that thus the Holy Virgin is a necessary, inherently requisite antithesis to the Father in the bosom of the Trinity. Moreover we have, if not in contreto and explicitly, yet in abstracto and implicitly, the feminine principle already in the Son. The Son is the mild, gentle, forgiving, conciliating being the womanly sentiment of God. God, as the Father, is the generator, the active, the principle of masculine spontaneity; but the Son is begotten without himself begetting. Deus genitus, the passive, suffering, receptive being; he receives his existence from the Father. The Son, as a son, of course not as God, is dependent on the Father, subject to his authority. The son is thus the feminine feeling of dependence in the Godhead; the Son implicitly urges upon us the need of a real feminine being.[61]

[end blockquote]

What involuted self-contradictory argument, what pathetic sentimentality! Feuerbach is obviously not himself here; his self-conscious "I" has vanished for a while, the pen appropriated by his infantile Ego contemplating its childhood, earthly family. Here, Feuerbach says more about his parents, and himself, than about the Trinity.

[blockquote]

The son — I mean the natural, human son — considered as such, is an intermediate being between the masculine nature of the father and the feminine nature of the mother; he is, as it were, still half a man, half a woman, inasmuch as he has not the full, rigorous consciousness of independence which characterizes the man, and feels himself drawn rather to the mother than to the father.[61]

[end blockquote]

Exactly the psychopathology underlying the homosexual fears of the mother's "little man," the Macho or Papagallo.

[blockquote]

The love of the son to the mother is the first love of the masculine being for the feminine. The love of man to woman, the love of the youth for the maiden, receives its religious — its sole truly religious consecration in the love of the son to the mother; the son's love for his mother is the first yearning of man towards woman his first humbling of himself before her.[61]

[end blockquote]

How luridly clear he is. Here we have the "Oedipus complex" and the worship of female sadism apotheosized. Feuerbach makes the most pathological form of bourgeois sexual impotence the "sole truly religious consecration" of love, and such hideous self-degradation of man and woman in banalized forms of "love" the essential principle of religious belief and humanity! Yet, this is not his argument respecting self-conscious feeling and reason in earlier chapters![62] He continues, then:

[blockquote]

Necessarily, therefore, the idea of the Mother of God is associated with the idea of the Son of God — the same heart that needed the one needed the other also. Where the Son is, the Mother cannot be absent; the Son is the only-begotten of the Father, but the Mother is the concomitant of the Son. The Son is a substitute for the Mother to the Father, but not to the Father to the Son. To the Son the Mother is indispensable; the heart of the Son is the heart of the Mother. Why did God become man only through woman?[61]

[end blockquote]

Feuerbach himself solved that riddle earlier, before his "I" was appropriated by his infantile, mother-image dominated Ego![63]

[blockquote]

Could not the Almighty have appeared as a man amongst man in another manner — immediately?[61]

[end blockquote]

As Feuerbach's self-conscious self earlier argued on this very point, only if God became incarnate in the sinful form of man born of woman, in the dual form of a soul opposed to the infantile, sinful mother-dominated Ego, could Christ be a mediator for man, and become through his transfiguration and reconciliation with God, a personal God for man in God.[64]

[blockquote]

Why did the Son betake himself to the bosom of the Mother? For what other reason than because the Son is the yearning after the Mother, because his womanly, tender heart found a corresponding expression only in a feminine body? It is true that the Son, as a natural man, dwells only temporarily in the shrine of his body, but the impressions which he receives are inextinguishable; the Mother is never out of the mind and heart of the Son.[61]

[end blockquote]

From a subject in an analytical sessions, the latter sort of assertion is sufficient to demonstrate that the "I" is at that moment entirely located in the Ego. Such mawkish sentimentality is itself sufficient evidence that the subject is momentarily under total control of a most obsessive expression of his neurosis.

[blockquote]

If then the worship of the Son of God is not idolatry, the worship of the Mother of God is no idolatry. If herein we perceive the love of God to us, that he gave us his only- begotten Son, i.e., that which was dearest to him, for our salvation — we can perceive this love still better when we find in God the beating of a mother's heart. The highest and deepest love is the mother's love.[emphasis added][61]

[end blockquote]

Again, indelible clinical evidence of Feuerbach's mental state at this point in his work.

[blockquote]

The father consoles himself for the loss of his son; he has a stoical principle within him.[61]

[end blockquote]

This suggests more Feuerbach's early nineteenth century German father than the image of the God from the second chapter.

[blockquote]

The mother, on the contrary, is inconsolable; she is the sorrowing element, that which cannot be indemnified the true in love.

Where faith in the Mother of God sinks, there also sinks faith in the Son of God, and in God as the Father. The Father is a truth only where the Mother is a truth. Love is in and by itself essentially feminine in its nature. The belief in the love of God is the belief in the feminine principle as divine. Love apart from living nature is an anomaly, a phantom. Behold in love the holy necessity and depth of Nature![61]

[end blockquote]

[22]

Feuerbach brings himself thus to a shrieking state of sentimental hysteria on the issue of his own mother and his Ego's morbid fascination with her sadistic love.

2. "THE MOTHER CHURCH"

So long as our attention is focused on rigorous psychoanalytical study of the essential doctrine of the principal Christian apostles and mystics, Feuerbach's blundering must tend to appear not only as a case of hysteria, but a strikingly egregious obsession at that. If we then call up the phrase, "The Mother Church," our point of view is immediately shifted. The phrase itself is sufficient to imply, if for no more than a moment, that we have perhaps exaggerated our case against him; certainly, the image of the mother figures enormously in later Christianity, not only on premise of the more recently instituted form of Catholic doctrine of Mariolatry.

Contrary to any misleading first impressions, on account of the "Mother Church," we are not obliged to withdraw anything we have said respecting fundamental Christian doctrine or our criticisms of Feuerbach. There is admittedly a Mother figure in Christianity possessing the attributed qualities and significance which Feuerbach mis-situates in his substitute for liturgical Trinity. Feuerbach's error, we reemphasize, is his effort to substitute the temporal "trinity" of the Holy Family for the other, liturgical Trinity he purports to examine.

Feuerbach's obsession has compelled him to conceal from himself the doubleness of Church doctrine in this matter. Church doctrine, on the one hand, incorporates the essential doctrine of the principal apostles and mystics as its profound mysteries, mysteries bound up with the doctrine of the liturgical Trinity. At the same time, it holds out the model of the Holy Family, and in some versions also the Saints, as a second, more banal doctrine, suitable for the edification of those both ignorant and benumbed souls denied an ongoing actual religious experience.

The secret of this doubleness can be directly exposed from the standpoint we have already established.

In the life of the ordinary communicant, the state of mind corresponding to a profound actual religious experience occurs only a few times, if at all, and is thereafter usually called up only in a much-diluted form by carefully-evolved rituals, notably the various forms of the Catholic mass, and by the hypnotic rituals of prayer. In much Protestant practice, this goal of Catholic rituals is sought more directly by the associative methods of evangelism, baptism, etc. It is this aspect of religious ceremonies which most attracted the attention of the greatest eighteenth and early nineteenth century composers, not by mere propitiatory impulses toward the Church, but because those ceremonies, through their evolution, verged most closely on the methods by which the composer's own creative emotion, the fundamental emotion, could be evoked.[65]

Despite the Church's appropriate preoccupation with ceremonies directed to evoking the religious experience in at least a diluted form, the daily religious life of the communicant, as well as his or her daily life in general, corresponds to the state of relative impotence otherwise characteristic of alienated society. To maintain itself as an hegemonic institution, the Church was obliged to make a sweeping compromise with what its essential doctrine must otherwise regard strictly as evil.[66] To function as a "mass organization," to appeal to the numbed state of mind overwhelmingly characteristic of most of the life of its communicants, thus to hold them to its secular organization, the Church incorporated a second body of doctrine essentially opposed to the first, which latter we may style as the perineum of its body of doctrine, the "dirty" part of the Church.

The doctrines of the "Mother Church" and of the "Holy Family" and Saints represent the set of correlatives for the "dirty" doctrine. Correspondingly, exactly as the passage we cited from the sixth chapter of The Essence of Christianity was written from the standpoint of Feuerbach's infantile Ego, his doctrine of the Trinity is faithful to the "Mr. Hyde" part of the Catholic doctrine (in particular). It approximates that contradictory facet of Christian doctrine appropriate to the ordinary impotent state of the communicant. Since this soiled feature of religious belief corresponds to the Ego-state, and to the ignorant, superstitious view of the world associated with the internalized mother-image which controls the Ego's sense of identity, the "Mother Church" and its "Holy Family"/ "Virgin Mary" doctrines become the conspicuous features of the "worldly" side of the Catholic Church and of the private religious superstitions of its communicants.

This idolatrous side of Church doctrine has frequently been rightly identified with pagan vestiges. Unfortunately, the arguments to this effect, usually abstracting certain rituals and practices which have ostensibly pre-Christian origins, are more specious than correct. Although the Catholic Church, in particular, has in fact adapted its internal life to a certain sort of "heathenism" in building up its dirty side, it had not done this in the ordinary sense of the theological term syncretism. Rather, this aspect of Church doctrine is a direct on-going accommodation to "witches" and to contemporary womanly forms of "sorcery."

The form of past such influence is luridly continued even in present-day Italy, for one example. More notorious in the brutalized, peasant Mezzogiorno, but spreading even into the Italian communities of Switzerland, there is a sizeable profession of "witches" and "magicians," by many held in higher esteem than physicians for treating a wide range of disorders ranging onward in a long list from the notorious "malocchio." The examples from Eastern European cultures need not be developed here. The proliferation of identical forms of insane superstition among Spanish-speaking peoples is encountered among the most backward strata of Puerto Ricans even in New York City. Outside of those more backward forms of capitalist culture identified by the hegemony of Catholicism[67], one does not have to dig deeply into Protestant or Jewish strata (even without considering the flagrant example of the Hassidic cult), to locate the same essential belief in witches in only a more shame-faced guise. Digging beneath the surface of the innocent-appearing cult of "(mother's) home cooking," we find next "Mother's remedies," and the generic code-word for the widespread plague of superstition, "Mother always told me ... " The relatively-greater credulousness of frigid, lonely women for certain kinds of buncombe, ranging from astrology to outright necrology, is an aspect of the same mental disorder. It is also of most concentrated, if lurid clinical significance that one of the most demented of the groups which briefly proliferated during the "radical feminist" hysteria adopted the acronym "WITCH."

Witches

[print, by Francisco Goya from his work, Los Caprichos, Madrid, 1799, plate 68: Linda maestra! (Pretty teacher!). The broom is one of the most necessary implements for witches; for besides being great sweepers, as the stories tell, they may be able to change the broom into a fast mule and go with it where the Devil cannot reach them.]

Witches[:] They really exist: they are what most children (and later adults) unconsciously believe their own and other mothers to be.

From the psychoanalytical standpoint, there is nothing mysterious about witches or Poltergeists. In a sense, they exist. The image of the "witch" is the most common form in which a son or daughter evokes an image of the mother from the unconscious processes. The most banal and self- destructive behavior of any individual so inhabited by a witch-image is nearly always the result of the witch's direct control of the Ego. Under circumstances appropriate to mass-hysteria, or which produce widespread schizophrenic and related psychotic episodes within a population, the image of the witch must inevitably not only pop out spontaneously from the unconscious processes, even in the extreme form of hallucinations, and the belief in the appearance of such witches — as associated with one's own identity or projected upon another, especially an older woman or a young girl with a characteristic "Mona Lisa" smile — must be frequent.

The witch image is not a learned chimera. It is not Grimm's fairy-tales, etc., which cause people to believe in witches. The popular notion of a witch is like any other social conception, an evolved means for communicating a commonplace experience which would be original to the individual even without the existence of such a term. The terror which fairy-tales evoke in children — the mixed terror and fascination — is a symptom of the prior existence of a witch-image in the child's mind, an image which unconscious processes already directly associate with either the child's mother or with a combination of mother and mother-surrogates. Frequently enough, the adult young woman recognizes this face in one or both of two ways: "My mother was a witch," or "I'm constantly afraid that I'm really a witch." She had adopted the idea of the witch as an appropriate representation of some quality which she has located within her mother or herself without need of fairy- tales.[68]

The witch image is the associated quality of the female Ego otherwise identified with female sexual impotence and its correlated forms of social impotence generally. Hence, the clinical significance of the acronym, WITCH, for the cited radical feminist group. Such variety of "radical feminism," as distinct from its sane bitter factional opponent, Women's Liberation efforts, is essentially an outbreak of the most pathetic, most sadistic form of lesbianism. The method of indoctrination used by groups such as WITCH, so-called "consciousness-raising" sessions, were undoubtedly a modern replication of ancient "Witch meetings," and represented the accidentally-discovered but not otherwise accidental most efficient means for turning a merely intensely neurotic young woman into a virtual psychotic.

Through social "reenforcement" in the group, the new victim is induced to call up the witch within her, and then to relinquish defenses against a more direct take-over by that image. The result of this, where it were successfully accomplished, would be a form of disassociation identical in key respects to a schizophrenic episode. Even the ordinary Ego "I" is weakened and the "I" of the outwardly-acting person is placed under intensified, more direct control of the witch called forth from the (Breughel's Bosch's Goya's) pit of unconscious processes. A woman reduced to this psychotic state, must tend to become a prostitute, a lesbian, or both. Although there is generally a necessary connection between the control of the Ego by a witch and lesbianism, and although prostitutes are generally lesbians who depend upon calling up witch qualities as the prerequisites of their professional practice. The special kind of lesbianism developed in radical-feminist "conscious-raising" forcing sessions is not to be simply equated with the ordinary case of lesbian behavior. The radical-feminism-produced lesbian is a special category of virtual psychotic, a synthetic product of a "brain-washing" technique which essentially reverses the psychoanalytical method.

[24]

The son of a witch is, suitably enough, a "Prospero," a "magician." The most commonplace reflection of this is that class of superstitions among males identified with the form of "If! ... then, I will become ..." or, "Step on a crack, break your mother's back" sort of superstitious utterances and behavior. Otherwise, the male pattern has been sufficiently implied by our outline of the female pattern.

It is with this "mother's religion," the superstitious cult of witches and such, that the Catholic Church compromised to become the "Mother Church." In this is located with secret of idolatry, headed by the cult of the Virgin Mary. The Virgin Mary is the archetypical witch, the mother of witches — the Madonna whose secret self is "The Whore of Babylon."

"Mona Lisa"

A significant reflection of this can be readily obtained in the report, with an accompanying momentary shudder, from the majority of young adults who have afresh, horrified recollection of their experience in Roman or Greek Catholic parochial schools. The most hideous recollections are usually associated with the constant emulation of a "Mona Lisa" smile on the faces of so many viciously sadistic teaching nuns. Look quickly back and forth to the face of the smiling, vicious nun and the face of the image of the Virgin Mary! Look then at the face of any woman raised in Catholic household in the moments she is either being most sadistic or is hysterically lying: the psychotic "Mona Lisa" smile of the arch-witch, the Virgin Mary.

Most women can readily recall their "two-faced" mothers. There was generally the smiling "company face," complementary to the mother's well-kept "living room" of the old "lace-curtain" household cultures of working-class and petit-bourgeois North America. Hidden away from "company" and "the neighbors," there was mother's other self, her other face, and the accompanying cult of "family secrets" to be hidden from "strangers" and "outsiders" generally. "Local control" ideology and "patriotism" (respecting the mother country!) are extensions of this same witch pattern of the childhood household. Most of these women could find the same, acquired "two-facedness" in themselves, and hence discover how they learned such manifestations of sexual impotence. They can locate the origin of similar pathologies in their lovers and husbands (among other males), a perception on whose reflection the woman fosters deeper enmity toward the marriage's principal enemies, the mothers-in-law.

There were usually other most troubling aspects to mother's "two-facedness." In one moment, she is the "loving, understanding" mother. In another moment, she is a raging maenad. And, what duplicity she is capable of! She mercilessly provokes the father into a punitive orgy against her children, and then comforts them as they run to her in terror from his blows. Her children consciously, or at least unconsciously, learn to distinguish her as a tricky, calculating person, nearly always speaking and posing for effect, all the while secretly scheming behind her mask.

Probing deeper, most children discover that their mother is usually the immediate agent most responsible for crippling both their intellectual powers and their capacity to love. Only in later childhood did her children begin to imagine themselves to "really believe" that mother-love is love. Somewhere, early in their childhood, they could recall, there was the devastating experience of her repeated rejections of their attempting expression of the deepest (i.e., "oceanic") feelings, and her constant, stultifying emphasis on their cultivating the artificial outward facial and other behavioral appearances she demanded of them. "There," the child recalls her voice, as it finally effected the outward dissimulation of its underlying feeling which she had demanded, "Now, that's mother's little ... " boy or girl "again."

From such an unfortunately commonplace mothering, the child also recalls her treatment of her husband. She was generally a sadistic witch, deprecating everything of importance to him, frustrating his interests and preferred activities, aborting his close relationships to his children, except for those measures doses of approved associations she permitted him. She used her children's dependency upon her to "turn them against their father" in one fashion or another, one degree or another. The child recalls this with horror and anger, especially his (or her) horror at his own childhood complicity in this vicious household game, especially as the adult is later able to recognize that the mother did the same sort of sadistic thing to him (or her).

The Feminine Image

Obviously, the class struggle is not against mothers! As we have repeatedly emphasized, two points must be recognized at the same time that one uncovers the evils of the mother-image. Firstly, as we have emphasized above, that the person' smother-image is not a replication of the existent mother, but a construct based on the child's pathetic infantile relationship to both the mother and mother-surrogates. In most instances, the establishment of an adult human relationship to the existent mother can be a fruitful auxiliary aspect of the process of liberation from the internalized false representation of her as the mother-image. One of the most embittering aspects of an aging mother's existence is that her children, in later life, are showing no regard for her as the human being she is, but instead are reflecting their relationship to an internalized mother-image as the control of their conduct toward her. Secondly, more fundamental to the context of this paper's topics, the sadism of the mother in capitalist culture (in particular) is entirely a product of capitalism and of the banalization of women by capitalism.

Restricting our attention to capitalist culture for con venience (in other, pre-capitalist cultures, the mother problem is more hideous than under capitalism), the reason the mother is the fundamental figure in her children's neurotic and psychotic problems is that the relationship of mother to infant and post-infancy child is the central feature of the process of maturation. Hence, the fundamental problems of mental life are inevitably mediated through the relationship to the mother. To the extent that mother accepts and thus transmits capitalist culture to her children, she must be a hideous oppressor of those children.

The rest of the mother-problem, the greater sexual impotence and sadism of women relative to men, is entirely a product of the oppression of women. The problems of sexual discrimination are significant, and removing all forms of such sexual discrimination against women is absolutely imperative to the mental health of both men and woman, but these hideous oppressions of discrimination are relatively secondary, or merely subsumed features of the most essential oppression to which women are generally subjected.

The essential oppression is apotheosized in the "femi nine image," the image of the woman as relatively a person of "feeling," "free" from "male" qualities of "aggressive," "intellect-dominated" life. It is characteristic of capitalist society, in particular, that any group singled out for oppression is distinguished from the favored strata as a special kind of people more given to "feeling" than intellect. In this way, the sort of "black cultural nationalist" who associates black people with their "genius for musical rhythm," "soul," etc., is the most degraded of "Uncle Toms." His black nationalism consists essentially of making a virtue of the inferior status imposed upon black people by their oppressors. The black cultural nationalist, like the radical feminists who crudely parodied black nationalism in the late 1960's, has located the quality of "national independence" in internalizing the ideology of the oppressor as the internal chains of self-oppression upon his own mind. The essence of all oppression of women, including the vicious self-oppression women have been induced to internalize, is the belief in the "feminine principle." The fundamental expression of the capitalist oppression of women is that quality which is worshiped by all radical feminists: the self-oppression of women as "creatures of feeling." Nothing is more exemplary of a self-degrading woman than a radical feminist ranting loudly against the preferability of "feminine" qualities to "male intellectual aggressiveness."

Hence, the clinical significance of the "feminine principle" in Feuerbach's treatment of the Trinity. Hence, the latent blunder in Feuerbach's treatment of God the Lawgiver.[69]

The identification of the "feminine image" with feeling, with the absence of aggressive (i.e., hubristic) intellectual life, coincides with the oppressed role of the woman as mother in the capitalist alienated form of the family household.

In reality, the material existence of the working-class family is effected through the distribution to those households of a part of the wealth created through a world- wide network of cooperative labor performed by the working members of that same world-wide totality of interdependent households. The increase in the magnitude of this wealth per capita is secured in part through increased productive employment of the unemployed, but more generally through technological advances which have the effect of increasing the per capita output of world-wide labor. Not only is this technological development essential to making possible a general increase in per capita output (and, hence, consumption), but without such qualitative advances in technology the level of production and consumption would decline in consequence of convergence of production upon the relatively-finite extent of the existing resources as defined by a particular, previously- established technology.

Consequently, the essence of continued human ex istence is that creative "aggressive intellectuality" through which qualitative advancement of the essential technology is initiated and then actualized as general productive practice.

[26]

Actually human self-consciousness, a rational, con
scious knowledge of the world-wide processes determining one's own individual existence, therefore cannot be located apart from a world-wide overview of this process of development and realization of new technologies. The question of determining the conditions of life is first of all a question of what one must do, as an individual, to effect the creation of new technologies, secondly, to effect the application of those technologies to the world-wide productive process, and thirdly, to effect the appropriate distribution of that wealth. Any mental outlook which locates determination of the household's conditions of life in parochial terms of "local community," "region," "nation," or the family itself, are irrational, hence relatively bestial, hence insane.

To the extent that sanity is approximated under capi talism, it is epitomized by the predicates of science, engineering, etc. To put the same point in other terms, capitalism (in particular) identifies the permitted degree of sanity (e.g., science) as the quality of male aggressive intellectuality. The denial of this quality of "aggressive intellectuality" for the "feminine image" is the self-
imposition of insanity upon women in their acceptance of that "feminine image."

Contrary to reality, the capitalist form of the working- class household alienates and mystifies the process of the working-class's self-reproduction of the material conditions of its own existence and development. The alienated relationship of the household to production is institutionalized in the normative form of the employed "male head of household," who alienates his labor-power, which is degraded for him into the empiricist form of mere wage-labor. The alienated worker does not essentially associate his production with his self-reflexive, self-conscious contribution to the world's wealth. He rather sees the essential form of his productive employment as the sale of a section of his living-time to the command of a capricious employer in return for wages: the rigorous definition of the term, "wage-slavery."

The worker may indeed speak sometimes of what he produces, and pridefully regard this as expressing something of social importance about himself. He may, furthermore, devoutly wish he could locate his moral right to a "decent life" in just such real accomplishments, or — if unemployed or employed in a job below his potential — he may locate these potential moral rights in what he would be capable of accomplishing to that same effect. This secondary aspect of the worker's potentially self-conscious outlook implicitly expresses his subjective revolutionary potential, but it is not the active basis for his belief in capitalist rights to the wages on which his existence depends. His capitalist right to existence is located in his alienated identification of himself as a wage-laborer.

His wife, usually, is constantly hounding him into psychological conformity with that alienated sense of himself.

It is the alienated aspect of this worker's existence which is emphasized by his wife and most other members of his household. The wife, normatively, selects and marries a "good provider," locating his social importance in both "what he brings home" and in the status he enjoys by virtue of his capitalist employment title and other alienated "qualities" of his social standing.

The alienation of the wife is symptomized by her typical reaction to such "men's talk" as her husband's discussion of his actual productive work or other "technical questions." She is "bored," and withdraws to the company of women to occupy herself usually principally with gossip. She smiles (sadistically) over his technically-oriented "hobbies," and, when this applies, assumes the most hideous perfection of a Mona Lisa smile of "tolerant understanding" for his or her children's socialist political activities if she does not outrightly throw a fit at his "endangering the security of the household" by such involvements.*

[footnote]

* Not accidentally, one of the most exciting contributions a parent can make to the psychological health of a child is the experience of the father's communicating to the son or daughter some empirical acquaintance with the internal details and social purpose of what the father does in the "outside world." Correspondingly, the classical case of the most emotionally-disturbed type of adult male is given by the "mother's boy" who has kept distance from the 'outside world" life of a productive worker father; the kind of mother who develops such "feminine" obsessions in her son is the prototype of the Virgin Mary, the most extremely sadistic sort of mother.

[end footnote]

The woman subjected, to capitalist norms of household life, unless she breaks through such bourgeois working-class household norms, is unfortunately the norm for the sadistic bourgeois working-class mother, among others. A great number representing still a minority of mothers, especially the majority of mothers of future revolutionary cadres, do break through the norms in a variety of at least tentative ways. As distinct from the normal sadistic Roman Catholic, "American Gothic" sort of Protestant, or Jewish mother, the mother who is able to express some actual love for her children corrects for the oppressive side of her posses sive child-rearing, by pushing her sons a daughters into some degree of regular human relationship to the father. She avoids the totally impotent woman's habit of "tearing down the father" in front of the children, refuses to fall into the traditional wifely custom of portraying the father as variously impotent, a clown or a social failure to her children, or as merely "a good provider."

As a mode, a tendency, although there are innumerable involutions and exceptions, the tendency for sons and daughters to become scientists or technologically-advanced workers is a father-oriented image. "Muscle" labor, such as construction work, tends to coincide with the "bull" image of the sexually-impotent mother-dominated male. The profession of literature or the acting profession are almost overwhelmingly a direct reflection of a son's (or daughter's) domination by a sadistic mother, correlating with both a total domination of the mind by fantasy and a corresponding estrangement from the realities of the "outside world."

There are two fundamental features to the "feminine" norm of motherhood. On the one side, the mother is estranged from conception of "technical questions" generally, frequently even from simple mechanical competence — although simple mechanical competence (as opposed to scientific competence) is not intrinsically alien to the "feminine self-image." More emotion is usually shown for the complementary side of this alienation: "mother's fears." She has a horror of the "outside world," of "strangers," etc. For her, bringing an "outsider" into the house must be circumscribed by elaborate rituals of "having company." Her women friends from among the neighbors may be casually admitted for kitchen entertainment and gossip almost at a mere knock — but let her husband try to bring home one of his friends in the same casual fashion! Her women friends from the neighborhood are one thing, but her husband's friends and acquaintances are, by virtue of association with him, "strangers" from the "outside world."

To her, the "outside world" is a realm of mysterious potencies, the subject of her irrational fears. All the important forms of possible disaster she fears involve the possible intrusion of the "outside world" into her home. The essential thing she imposes upon all members of her family is their "respect for" her irrational fears of this sort.

To her, the material conditions of life on which the household depends are determined by magic. She refuses to believe that wealth is determined by universal and cooperative labor. Wealth, to her, is a magical outgrowth of money and social status. She insists that the survival of her family, her husband's income-producing, etc., are all variously determined either by their conforming to certain potency-propitiating rituals she prescribes for them or by her prayers.

The essence of this magic is her belief that the outside world is governed not by rational cause and effect, but by mysterious potencies — typified by government, employers, and other special "important people," the generic "they" of "they have brought a new ... " or "they have changed the" old home town, etc. She regards her wisdom, her "woman's intuition," as embodying insight into those recipes which effectively propitiate such magical potencies. Her advice to her husband on how he should comfort himself in the outside world, her concern for the appearance and conduct of her children, and her oppressive general superstitious concern with an entire array of related "do's and don't's," may often have the specious appearance of a thought-out overview of reality; it is actually, in the form of inner mental life through which such behavior is controlled within her, pure magic, the predicates of her superstitious fantasy-life.

Her Children's Neuroses

The constant bombardment of her children with such fantastic belief in magic, especially her making her expressions of "mother-love" contingent upon the father's and children's "respect for" her superstitious fears, produces that bourgeois ideology, that obsessive irrationality which is characteristic of most of the adult members of capitalist society.

In effect, the dependency-relationship to a sadistic, fantasy-ridden mother by her children creates a false map of reality in their minds, so long as those minds, even in later adult life, are being regulated by the association of the individual's identity with the mother-image-dominated infantile Ego.

Contrary to the usually voiced assertion that people arrive at judgments for action on the basis of rational consideration of the merits of the case as such, all judgments are effected under control of the "I" of identity. In effect, the individual anticipates the imminent increase or diminishing of the "sense of personal worth," of "identity," which will ensue from the social expression of alternative judgments. When the "I" is located in the infantile Ego, this anticipation is effected by turning a usually unconscious "inner ear" to the babble of voices arising from the "pit," a babble in which the voice of the "mother-image" predomi nates.[70] In main effect, more emphatically so the more mother-image-dominated (the more neurotic) the individual is, the more his or her anticipation of the consequences of the judgment is usually determined by what the internalized "mother" advises that will be. In the extreme case, that of the obsessive neurotic or psychotic, the internalized "mother's voice" is more immediately the invariant of the individual's map of all matters of the "outside world."

Even in the ordinary milder cases of neurosis, or simply the general neurosis which bourgeois ideology is, the Ego's view of the world is a parody of the relationships peculiar to the mother-dominated capitalist family household. The center of the neurotic's universe is the internalized family household of childhood superimposed upon the family of adult life. In partly-overlapping but generally succeeding order, the universe as a whole is reached by discrete steps. The inner layer is family; a broader area, the neighborhood; or, the region, or, the nation, or, the language or ethnic group, or, the commonality of a religious affiliation, etc. Similarly, the "logic" of events within each distinguished "area" and among "areas" are determined by the "rules" (axioms) implicit in the mother-dominated fantasy acquired in childhood.

[28]

We need merely mention the case of father's super stitions and their effects in this patters. For reasons we have repeatedly given in this series, father is usually of secondary, if usually reenforcing, importance to the child's maturation. Secondly, the father's superstitions are primarily derived from his mother, and those aspects he acquired from his father are primarily transmitted from the paternal grandmother. Etc., etc. Capitalist ideology within the individual is primarily matrilocal and matrilineal.

Witches' Fear of Theory

[print]

Peter Breughel's The Witch of Malleghem.

The politically reactionary aspect of this is most viciously concentrated in the effect of "mother's fears" of her children's attitudes toward "law and order" in the "outside world." Mother's belief in magic emphasizes "traditionalism," which is to say the semi-permanence of the potencies in the "outside world" and the absolute permanence ("things will always be basically the same," "human nature can't be changed") of the fundamental set of rules of propitiation by which the outside world is ordered. The essential feature of her belief in magic is that the body of magic is fixed, hence — implicitly — that the "outside world" is governed by a fixed set of laws corresponding essentially to those she deems in force in the "outside world" today.

This outlook, which is the root of her obsessive hostility to scientific and often even technical subjects, is antagonistic to even the development of the conditions of material life of the household, is firmly set against those most drastic changes which even significant technological change demands, and is, most emphatically, determined to preserve the hysterical illusion and practice which treats the real world as subject to change only in terms of aggregations of virtually autonomous individual households and local communities. It is only an exaggeration to imagine a mother thus victimized by fantasy, told that the entire town is about to be flooded, either blame the flood on the "Democrats" or "put her foot down," to declare, "We just won't allow it to affect us."

This is the basis for the militant but still pro-capitalist workers' hostility to revolutionary change. To make a revolution is to express the potency of the working class, to act against the potencies of the "established order" — to eradicate the basis for mother's witchcraft!

Mother's magic, perpetuated as fantasy through the dependency of Ego-identity on the internalized voice of the superstitious mother-image, is the basis for the hostility to "theory" among workers, the bitter invective against Marxist "elitism" among anarchosyndicalist cults, and the general hostility to real creative scientific work and revolutionary socialism generally. "Who do you think you are to imagine you can go against the system?" mother's voice warns, "Stop acting silly; be yourself. What is it you people say nowadays, 'Stick to doing your own thing!' "

The Virgin Satan

The second "trinity," the "Holy Family," is a reflection of organized Christianity's covenant with the witch-devil, the Virgin Mary, its sly broadening of the Christian doctrine to canonize and "render harmless" the cult of witchcraft, undoubtedly the precedent for the later less portentous accommodation, the assimilation of Bingo into the parish calendar of mother's superstitious activities.

To bring the question of the Holy Family to its con clusion here, we begin by restating the distinction between the two contradictory aspects of Christian doctrine, between the essential doctrine, which we emphasized in the preceding section of this paper, and the adaptation to popular superstition, which we have emphasized in the preceding parts of this present section. The practical object is to show that the specifically capitalist ideological content of modern Christianity is located mainly in the superstitious or "Mr. Hyde" aspect of the doctrine.

The essential feature of Christian doctrine, as we have previously identified this, treats the subject of the "religious experience" and its psychoanalytical implications. The "religious experience" itself is simply a naive, ignorant self- consciousness's joyful encounter with an upsurge of the fundamental emotion, an elation occasioned by an outpouring of the "oceanic" feeling. In general, this experience is identical to the experiencing of the actual emotion of "non-erotic" loving in its intense form — a point we have illustrated by repeated references to the famous Liebestod duet from Tristan and Isolde.

The elaboration of Christian doctrine on the religious experience begins with the recognition that individual man is divided against himself, that he has two alternate "I"s within his mind. One of these "I"s, the self-conscious self, is agreeable to the outpouring of the fundamental emotion. However, in the normal state of man outside that experience, the self-conscious self is generally condemned to watch in passive, impotent horror as the person is compelled to think and act according to the control of the person by the infantile Ego.[71] The essential object of the fundamental aspect of Christian doctrine is to enable man to purge himself of control of the infantile Ego and to thus live permanently as an alienated form of self-conscious "I" acting through the force of the fundamental emotion.

Thus far, essential Christian doctrine and revolutionary- socialist outlooks might not appear to differ significantly. A distinction emerges most clearly the moment we emphasize that the morality appropriate to self-consciousness is Spinozan[72], and locate the objective requirements of the self-conscious individual's thought and action in the context of the world-wide development of today's productive forces created through previous capitalist development. The distinction between the religious man and the socialist is this. The religious man is a naive individual, who conceives of morality as Feuerbach does, in terms of a mass of autonomous individuals. He does not know the Necessity of Freedom, that the only action properly giving self- conscious identity to the individual is a universal act for the positive development (and realization) of universal labor.[73] To the religious man, the laws of the "outside world" are fixed by God, and hence he must not aspire to be more than an Apollonian "explorer of nature."[74] Socialist man is fundamentally distinguishable from religious man; socialist man's location of his identity in universal labor, in the wilful changing of law, in taking upon himself the potent responsibility for positive reordering of nature, defines his world-outlook as Promethean.

This distinction is not strained. Essential religious doctrine proscribes the Promethean outlook itself as the most heinous of all offenses against Jehovah; it is the crime for which Lucifer was condemned, the crime of (Promethean) hubris. The Promethean Lucifer (there are two distinct and opposite Satans) is a potency, with the power to struggle for hegemony against God, a Prometheus who schemes to win men to his cause by offering to change the laws of nature in conformity with mortal man's material needs. This Promethean Lucifer is a God more powerful than Zeus-Jehovah, who partakes of the essence of the Deity (the fundamental emotion).

Lucifer is the Christian doctrine's horror-stricken prescience of the ultimate appearance of Karl Marx.

Since the Christian doctrine proscribes man's use of the creative potential of the fundamental emotion to reorder the laws of nature, the doctrine thus alienates religious man from the essential human power over the universe. It sets the lawful ordering of nature apart from man, as something opposed to him. Hence, as Feuerbach properly observes to that point, God the Law-Giver is estranged from man's direct knowledge; God the Law-Giver is made to have a nature which is in significant part denied to man. Since man is therefore denied the act of finding such hubristic qualities in himself, he is denied the act of seeking within himself the quality which compares with that attributed to God the Law-Giver; man therefore cannot directly know God the Law-Giver of his own personal knowledge. (Moses cannot see the face of God.)

This alienation of the Law-Giver from the personal religious experience immediately divides the essential Deity into two parts. The essential Deity is the Logos, which religious man directly experiences (knows) as the "oceanic" feeling of elated self-consciousness, God the Law-Giver has been to that degree alienated from this essential Deity in respect to man, although he remains connected to it as the subject of his own essential nature. Hence, "In the beginning, was the Word," and the Word was God and was also with God.

The estrangement of God the Law-Giver from man requires that religion provide man-become-God, a man- become-a-God who experiences all the qualities of the self- conscious "I" in its religious experience ("In a state of Pentecost"), and who is also defined as God lacking the distinctive qualities of the Law-Giver. Since this man-
become-God is directly connected to God the Law-Giver through the shared essence, the Logos, we have the Trinity, in which Christ (man-become-God) acts as mediator between man and God.[75] Christ is a personal God for alienated man, for the reasons previously identified.

In this essential doctrine, Christianity retains the root-
form of an ideology-in-general for a universalizing form of society, e.g., the Papal feudal system of Charlemagne, the semi-feudal mercantile-capitalist system of the 13th through 16th centuries of Western Europe, and capitalism proper. It has the essential quality of an ideology because it has alienated man in the most fundamental way, as Apollonian man: it defines the religious experience as the joyful encounter with the "oceanic" feeling by an ignorant, alienated self-conscious "I," and alienates man by denying him the discovery of his essential human, i.e., Promethean self-consciousness.*

[footnote]

* Judaism, which developed as a by-product of the emergence of early Christianity, and was molded in its further evolution as an appendage of Christianity, is also in its general form a truncated reflection of the Christian type of ideology in general. It has also been transformed through specifically feudal, semi-feudal mercantile-capitalist, and capitalist forms. It is not necessary to give special treatment to Judaism here, since it never existed except in myth, but as a by-product of Christianity, and could not exist except as a special predicate of a Christian or Muslim culture, principally Christian. There is no autonomous "Jewish culture," but only a special variety of (especially) Christian culture.[76]

[end footnote]

[30]

The essential Christian doctrine is therefore besieged by two opponents. Its dangerous opponent, the anathema of the first of the Ten Commandments, is Karl Marx, the Promethean Lucifer. Its second opponent, the identity of the ordinary Satan, is the Virgin Mary, the Arch-Witch, the dark power over the infantile Ego, reaching out from the demon-infested pit of Bosch's and Goya's Hell to drag man into his characteristic gluttony ("chicken soup"), sensual self-degradation ("Oedipus"-governed, banal sexual lusting), and general Dionysiacal heteronomy.**

[footnote]

** The experience of the socialist movement, from which we are accustomed to such centrist butchers as Stalin's amalgamating "left" and "right" opponent factions into a single enemy, facilitates one's understanding of the way in which the Church perpetrates the fraud of equating Prometheus and Dionysus. It might be speculated that Stalin after all learned at least this much of the art of factional lying from his period of passionate devotion to study of the priesthood.

[end footnote]

As we noted before, organized Christianity, Catholic or Protestant, shamefacedly but nonetheless effectively distinguishes two categories of communicants, each characterized by a different emphasis in doctrine. On the one side, there is the smaller community of "apostles and mystics," those whose relationship to the church is principally identified by a cultivation of the "religious experience." The larger numbers of communicants is made up in its smaller portion by those church officials who are occupied with the practical and administrative side of church life, and in the larger portion by the mass of communicants whose minimal or virtually non-existent adult "religious experience" is overwhelmingly outweighed by superstition.

To the latter, but for extraordinary occasions and cir cumstances, the "religious experience" of the adult is not only limited to a few occasions in their lives, but generally it is tolerantly assumed by both church and laity that such special feeling-knowledge, such "imitation of Christ" is more or less beyond the reach of the ordinary mortal religious person. Small, extremely-diluted, occasional senses of the "religious feeling" serve as a mere hint of spice for a religious life predominantly characterized by witch-ridden superstition.

The superstitious side of religious doctrine and activ ities, centered in Catholic doctrines on the cult of the Arch- Witch, the Virgin Mary, and other idolatries, is based on a substitute for the "religious experience" in the banal passion of mother-love. The moral side of this part of doctrine is based on a kind of churchly jiu-jitsu. The very mechanisms of the Devil herself, are employed to regulate the conduct of the communicant through mother's superstitious fears. Negation of the negation! The church makes a compact with the Devil, in respect of which the Satan delivers the credulous to the morality of the church through the medium of the superstitious fears transmitted through the mother, and also delivers to the church the right to act to exert further control of those believers through appeals to the sentiment of mother-love.

In this way, the Church incorporates into its doctrine the lusts of gluttony and Oedipal sexual orgies, the way of the infantile Ego. It makes a sacrament of each lust, thereby subverting the lustful activity (and its celebration through ritual intervals of "negation") to the church's benefit. (Like waiting for Christmas morning, the previous day's prohibitions make the opening of the gifts more exciting. The object of fasting is gluttonous feasting.)

By incorporating the witches and their superstitions into the body of churchly doctrine and practices, Christianity assimilates and strengthens the essential qualities of the specific ideology of that society's witches. The church becomes the Universal Mother-Church, the official institution of the collectivity of superstitious mothers, and the most agreeable habitat for the pathetic woman left with little but her superstition to console her.

Having incorporated the Madonna-Whore of Babylon into its liturgy as the religious doctrine for the common credulous man and woman, how does the Church conceal the ugly fact of this compact? How does it dispose of the canonical preoccupation with the archenemy, with the doctrine it has inherited from its own essential beliefs? It solves this problem in a certain sense, by delegating solution of this thorny theological problem to the Devil herself. It permits a disguised, smiling Satan, the Virgin Mary to determine who shall be the "enemy." Characteristically, being such a sort of witch, the Virgin Mother locates the enemy in the category of "outsider," in the essence of the person from the other country, the other neighborhood, the other religion, the person who speaks a different language, etc. Hence, Catholicism makes a travesty of itself, and becomes entirely a mere herd of antagonistic parochialisms. Universality becomes an empty word delivered to the entertainment of pervasive heteronomy!

Feuerbach exemplifies the point in a certain fashion. Nowhere in his The Essence of Christianity do we find an account for the name of Satan. Imagine, Christianity without Satan! Luther would wallop his ears soundly! Yet, Satan reveals herself in that book despite the author's whim; only Satan's name is changed, to that of the Virgin Mary. More exactly, Satan is portrayed by her real name, her Arch- Witch's canonical name of "Holy Mother."

Protestantism

The general coincidence of the development of the Protestant heresy in those regions of 15th, 16th and 17th century Europe in which progress was then predominant is implicitly exemplary of the point that Protestantism reflects a profound cultural advance over Catholicism. To the present day, the persistence of Catholicism is generally characteristic of those regions and cultures which are relatively most backward, either by virtue of relative economic development or special hideousness of family relations preserved in the midst of a more advanced culture.

The correlation between the emergence of Protes tantism and cultural advancement is readily located, and that location not accidentally touching the most essential aspect of Christian doctrine: the Logos. The Protestant revolution, reflecting an upsurge in the degree, extent, and realized importance of innovation in technological, social, and political institutions, corresponds to what the religions man must account as an intensification of the "religious experience."[77] This is the case because of the direct connection between increased creative mental activities and the increased ferment of the fundamental emotion. Protestantism is thus fundamentally distinguished as a broad movement from Catholicism by its humanistic bias, its emphasis on what the Society of Friends — the ultimate of the long-standing forms of Protestantism — regarded as the power of the "inner Light" (The Holy Spirit immanent in the individual) to guide him or her in the proper insight into the Word of God. In broad terms, Protestantism represents especially in its general evangelical form and bias, a large step toward a pure Logos-doctrine. Hence, Protestantism ejects the idiolatry of "saints" for the "imitation of Christ."

It is not accidental that Hegel's insight into religion is strongest in just this connection. It is also not accidental that Feuerbach ebbs toward a pre-Hegelian backwardness in just those aspects of his epistemology which coincide with a regression toward the superstitious, "dirty-judaical" side of Mariolatry.[78]

In general, today, Catholicism not-accidentally prevails in those parts of capitalist society in which sexual impotence is must acute. A few cases suffice to qualify the point.

Limiting our attention for a moment to Western European culture (e.g., to include North and South America, in particular), those language cultures (Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, notably) in which Catholicism predominates as virtually the state religion, are relatively the most backward in economic and cultural development and are those sections of capitalist culture characterized by a deep and depressing feeling of "Southern inferiority" in the individual.

The case of Italy is most efficient for identifying the essential features of this problem. Even without taking the wretchedness of the Mezzogiorno into account, not only is the social productivity of the Italian forced down by capitalism to a significantly lower level than that of the English-speaking or German, but, worse, the Italian (excepting a handful of rich) sees virtually no gain in general wealth to himself or his country as a result of even his most intensive labor at the maximum levels of productive activity in that nation.

This is exemplified by the inhuman irony of the recent Italian "housing boom," proliferating and eroding empty structures for which there would be few prospective occupants at present prices: a mere pork-barrel, a mere boon-doggle for the construction industry and financiers involved, of no notable benefit for the wretchedly-housed, miserably-paid Italian worker. The Italian worker, brought late into the mainstream of capitalist development, permitted to rise no further as a nation than to being a reservoir of cheap labor for the more prosperous North American and Northern European capitalists, has found little beneficial correlation between even his maximum productive labor and his material conditions of family life. Under such circumstances, the more intensively and productively he labors, the more frustrated and impotent he must consequently sense himself to be.

So his working-class son and daughter are denied generally the image of a father of relative productive potency in the outside world. Looking for the answer in superstitious comparison of his nation to other advanced nations, the Italian worker is misled to see that nation itself as somehow "culturally" inferior in potency, and hence to the extent that he sees Italians in such superstitious, alienated — i.e., "nationalistic" — fashion, he is overwhelmed by the seeming evidence of his "Southern inferiority."

[32]

The potentially revolutionary Italian worker, denied his rightful sense of potency for universal as well as cooperative labor, clings heroically and fearfully to his hold on serious music, great literature, and serious art generally. He rightly clings to these cultural achievements but usually with a sense of desperation. If, he fears, Italians should slide into the imminent moral degradation of American Rock and otherwise lose their precious connection to serious art, the whole nation would slip into the lumpenized state of a burgeoning mass of demoralized beggars and hustlers.

Although it is the norm of the possessive Italian mother who is immediately responsible for the pathetic "mother's little man," the pathetic strutting Pappagallo (a feathered Macho), it is the capitalist degradation of Italian working- class men which strips the Italian child of the image of a potent father. Hence, the possessive mother appears a creature of awesome relative potency by contrast with the abused and derided long-suffering father.

Catholicism thrives in such miserable capitalist double- oppression of the working-class of an entire nation. It may be objected that the Italian Catholic is rabidly anti-clerical by comparison with the Irish or Polish Catholics, for example. Such observation is misleading. Priests are mere men; the Church of the Arch-Witch is, after all, essentially mother's business. (A proper Pope for such a Mother Church should be elected from the ranks of homosexual bishops, since Golda Meir is unfortunately not an available candidate for that office.)

The day on which Italian working-class men secure their rightful self-estimation as potent producers capable of genuine love for a woman, they will certify this instantly by turning all the churches and whorehouses into harmless and useful museums, putting all images of the Virgin Mary — with that goddamned smile! — well out of sight for a generation or so, until men have had time to forget and women to free themselves from that degrading witches' mockery of love.

[print of the Virgin Mary with child, by-?] The Virgin Mary[:] Behind the sadistic, psychotic smile, she knows the truth: she is the "Whore of Babylon," Satan herself.

The case of the U.S. Irish professing Catholic of the second or third generation involves a minor complication. Until the aftermath of the Second World War, Italian- Americans were an oppressed minority, generally hideously slandered and subjected to corresponding discriminatory practices. The Irish-American began his climb out of the extreme of "Paddy" status after the Civil War, and consequently it was many decades ago that he was actually subjected to the degree of abuse more recently poured — with his help — upon Italian-Americans. However, although the actual discrimination against Irish-Americans was slight over recent decades, the Irish-descent community in the U.S.A. had already developed as a militant in-group around the Catholic Church and, in image if not entirely in fact, the police and fire departments as well as a number of Irish-dominated big-city political machines. This repre sented a ghettoized sort of existence, inhibiting the free blending of the Irish-Americans into the general culture of the most advanced capitalist sub-sector.

This must be qualified with the observation that even prior to the present renewed emphasis on "ethnics" by CIA U.S. domestic counterinsurgency programs, the U.S. capitalist ruling circles for over a century have exploited the fragmentation of the working-class through encouraging ethnic parochialism. In all, despite the cultural advantages of the U.S.A., a large section of Irish-Americans, through combined defensive militancy, parochialist ethnic piggishness, and nurture of such arrangements from above, had maintained Catholic traditions in the household, thus perpetuating a large part of that special heritage of cultural backwardness in the family despite the contrary favorable circumstances available to those working-class families.

The kernel of the oppression of the U.S.-Irish-American family through the mediation of the Church is locatable in the prohibition against birth control, subjugating the Irish- American Catholic family to a hideous mind-and-body- eroding orgy of fertility, driving the mothers to the most fanatical extremes of female sadism and otherwise creating the most oppressive conditions of home life for the hapless children. Such an oppression demoralized the next generation into a preference for Catholic superstitiousness. (A generation of birth control and the Irish Catholic parishes in the U.S.A. would disappear.)

It is, of course, true that humanism transformed Catholicism over the same period that it gave birth to Protestantism. The emergence of the Jesuit order itself expresses the insurgence of the rationalist tendency within Catholicism. The case of the gifted, wretched Erasmus epitomizes that transformation of Western European languages during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, employing the medium of the printed word to realize the explosive revolution in languages being initiated through imposition of Latin and Greek to enrich the syntax and vocabularies. Cervantes (possible of Jewish or partially- Jewish parentage) almost creates modern Spanish, Rabelais brings French to the height of its potential for expressing important conceptions (since which, the Immortals have been bringing death to the medium of French intellectual life)[79], etc., typifying an explosive creative ferment in which Catholicism shared as much in certain leading respects as Protestantism. In such features, although the history of that period is rational, it is more wonderfully involuted than would permit systematic untangling in this immediate context.

It is the essentials of the matter which concern us here. Feuerbach, continuing his self-revealing obsession with Mariolatry, makes a forceful correlated assertion against Protestant theology:

[blockquote]

Protestantism has set aside the Mother of God but this deposition of women has been severally avenged. The arms which it has used against the Mother of God have turned against itself, against the Son of God, against the whole Trinity. He who has once offered up the Mother of God to the understanding, is not far from sacrificing the mystery of the Son of God as an anthropomorphism.[80]

[end blockquote]

It should be clear that Feuerbach is not defending religion. Quite the contrary:

[blockquote]

The triune God has a substantial meaning only where there is an abstraction from the substance of real life. The more empty life is, the fuller, the more concrete is God. ... Only a poor man has a rich God ... Here we have the true explanation of the fact that the Trinity has in modern times lost first its practical, and ultimately its theoretical significance.[81]

[end blockquote]

Indeed, Feuerbach's thesis is that man's discovery of that quality of love identified with a self-consciousness of species- being stands in opposition to Faith, and is to be sought with the consequence of the end of religious belief — as man secures to practical life that universal which as former want was set opposite to man, as the reflection of such a want, in the Heavens.

The significant issue against Feuerbach is located in his identification of those earthly wants he accounts as reflected in alienated religious apotheoses. The significance of his obsession with the Virgin Mary is not a theological issue as such, but an issue of determining which qualities of human relationships are actually human, and which alienated and hence relatively bestial. Feuerbach sees Protestantism as progressive over Catholicism only in respect to the immanent waning of Faith under human progress, which is of course half the truth of the matter in a certain, restricted sense. However, the actual insurgence of Protestantism was, ironically, a fierce epidemic of nothing but Faith. Protestantism self-consciously distinguished itself from Catholicism by making Faith the cornerstone of salvation. Feuerbach's faulty view of the matter coincides with a defect in his epistemology.

The principal real reason for the de-emphasis on the Virgin Mary in Protestantism is, as already stated, the shift of Protestant doctrine toward a pure Logos-doctrine, moving in that direction up to, the absolute stopping-place of, the doctrine of the "imitation of Christ." Hence, the Protestant weakening of that principle of idolatry which is the continuing principle distinction of the Catholic doctrine. With that, the decrease in the importance of the Mother of Idolatry.

As we have also noted above, the Reformation was charactered by evangelism, by virtual epidemics of the religious experience, in which events reason in the form of interpretation of the words of the Bible immediately intersected the overflowing of the "oceanic" feeling, and with an accompanying outpouring of Pentecostalist tendencies which the Fathers of the Reformation perpetually attempted to suppress, and not without considerable difficulty. It is reported by Macaulay, among others, that Cromwell's Roundheads during their continental depredations did far more severe and permanent damage to the cathedrals they came across than to the military forces they dispersed before them.[82] The method of evangelism, which supplied those warriors with the political aspect of their martial regimen, undoubtedly had more to do with such anti-idolatrous fervor of the Logos than any body of formal Protestant doctrine. The proper metaphor to be adduced from psychoanalytical insights is that the "oceanic" feeling topples and subsumes whatever banal objects stands in its way. The Logos, as Feuerbach refuses to acknowledge its existence is the kernel of the matter; the Logos is the unity of reason with the "oceanic" feeling, combined a force that sweeps the infantile Ego and its witch-like mother- images before it.

It is of somewhat secondary but substantial importance that the social conditions accompanying the emergence of Protestantism fractured the fixedness of family life. The long reign of monotonous hereditary predestination through the family is broken by the swarms of displaced peasantry, and the accompanying erosion of the fixed Papal order in the emergence of semi-bourgeoisified nation-states and nation-languages. There remains a strong distinction for the individual between locality and strange places, between the inner reality of family life and the "outside world," more strong than we know it today. Yet, relative to the old order, the hideously oppressive monotony and changelessness — idiocy — of the old family life was qualitatively undermined.

[34]

The emergence of Protestantism does not, in itself, represent the weakening of religious belief which it indirectly forebodes. It is the progress of science, leading toward the supersession of the capitalist development which brings Protestantism into being, and the emergence of the hubristic working-class political movement, which will end the religious life. Protestantism is in itself, at its origins, a fanatical intensification of religious belief. It is that fanatical energy, not a diminution of the quality of religious faith, which swept Mariolatry aside.

Indeed, relative to the decaying Catholicism around it, Protestantism represented at its inception virtually a return to religious faith, and embodies at that juncture a truer reflection of man's innermost religious needs than that which it supersedes. It is then, as it hazily perceives itself to be, a return in one sense to the Church of the apostles from the post-apostolic church of the bishops. This does not occur as an actual return to the Christian religion of the Roman Empire, but only a getting down to the contemporary psychological roots of a Christianity in the course of putting a new superstructure upon it.

The emphasis on adult baptism underscores this. The idea of immersion in water, as a psychoanalytical phe nomenon, does not occur because of "birth traumas" or such wild edifications[83], nor does its explanation require any involuted explanations of other sorts. The unconscious mind identifies the fundamental emotion with "oceanic" qualities, not because someone has seen an ocean, etc. The same notion, perhaps with a different word attached, would occur if the individual had never met even a sizeable pool of water. The word, "oceanic," is the only sort of term which describes the feeling. The feeling also coincides with the fear of drowning, and perhaps also causes a special kind of terror to be attached to that fear. To the individual stub bornly holding to his infantile Ego-identity at the onset of this feeling, the experiencing of that emotion does occur as a kind of death, the death of the Ego. The importance of adult baptism in religion ought therefore to be obvious enough, once we have identified the Logos-feeling aspect of the religious experience, and the correlation of the outbursts of the religious experience with evangelism. At the point of conversion (the onset of the religious feeling) immersion in water, or the very idea of submitting to Immersion in water, is an abandonment of resistance to the forthcoming of the "oceanic" emotion. Any psychoanalyst who had encountered the phenomena of the "Love-Death" feeling in depth analysis should recognize and correlate that point immediately.

It is merely collateral that the material conditions of life of the French peasantry (for example) significantly deteriorated with the rise of mercantile capitalism (e.g., the house of Bardi, Medici, et al.). It might appear to lend support to Feuerbach's thesis that the period of the most hideous deterioration in the material conditions of life in Europe generally coincide with the success of the Catholic counter-reformation; in the broader view of such matters, there is no direct correlation of that sort. The correlation is located in something that would usually correspond to a general increase in wealth, an increased intellectual ferment, associated with the realization of political, social, and technological innovations in part in the direct development of the productive forces. The already-cited point, respecting the increase in religious fervor accompanying the rise of Protestantism is perhaps sufficient observation for the purposes of this paper.

The essential systematic flaw in Feuerbach's doctrine of the Trinity remains. His total misconception of the decline of Mariolatry in Protestantism is entirely rooted in his own neurotic need to throw out the Logos (Holy Spirit) in the interests of apotheosizing mother-love not merely as a religious but a human principle.

The significance of this for epistemology is that in that obsession, we have not only the kernel of all his blunders respecting Hegel's notion of the Logos[84], but we have located the neurotogenic premises which lead into his failure to recognize any of the essential qualities of the actual Logos, the actual qualities of the unity of reason and the fundamental emotion in the matured self-conscious self.

In adhering to "mother-love," Feuerbach adopts the world-outlook of not only Satan herself, but, more im portant, reflects in his criticism of religion, his neurotic need and compulsion to apotheosize the universal witch, the Virgin Mary, his corresponding real need to worship the mundane witch, the witch in his own unconscious processes. In making his case for mother-love, Feuerbach identifies himself firmly with the infantile Ego, against giving potency (the feeling of "I") to the self-conscious self. Thus, as he plants himself in defense of the Satanic doctrine of super stition in religious belief, he merely reflects his adherence to the corresponding superstition in the real world, his "dirty- Judaical" fetishism for the fixed object of infantile Ego elation, "reductionism."[85]

Footnotes

1.	What currently passes for "fundamental advances in physical science" is at best a qualitative step below that species of genuinely fundamental breakthroughs in world- outlook typified by Kepler, Descartes, Leibniz-Newton, Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, Riemann, Cantor, Klein, Einstein. Not overlooking the relative explosion in biology of recent decades, the celebrated accomplishments of the past forty-five years are essentially an elaboration of basic achievements effected over the preceding seventy- five years. The tendency toward contemptuous or indifferent treatment of Einstein's further investigations from 1926 onwards, reflects and exemplifies the stagnation of actually fundamental investigations. As John Dewey and his "scientism" reflect, from the end of the first world war, and the shock of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, "educated man" not only lost interest in "universal truth," but came to regard the very question of such fundamental investigations as downright insolent. The modern view is viciously antagonistic to the hubristic attitude, and has more recently swung to the extreme tendency to break with the idea of necessary interdependency between human and scientific progress. (E.g., the fascist tendency immanent in the "Zero Growth" ideology.)

2.	Campaigner, Vol. 6, Nos. 3-4, Sept.-Oct. 1973, pp. 71-
74.

3.	Campaigner, Vol. 6, No. 2, Spring, 1973, N.B., pp. 22-
25.

4.	"Beyond Psychoanalysis," pp. 44-49, 80; "The Sexual Impotence of the PSP," Campaigner, Vol. 7, No. 1, Nov. 1973, pp. 38-41.

5.	Ibid.

6.	Ibid.

7.	Lyn Marcus, Dialectical Economics, Lexington, 1973 (in publication).

8.	"The Sexual Impotence of the PSP," pp. 62-64.

9.	Ibid., pp. 38-41.

10.	"Beyond Psychoanalysis," pp. 71-74.

11.	See New Solidarity, Vol. IV (1973-74), passim, for documentation.

12.	Hylozoic: the notion that living and "inorganic" processes are subject to a common set of fundamental law, such that the invariant features of living processes are regarded as reflecting more faithfully the immanent primitive principles of the universe as a whole.

13.	Hence, the invariant quality of human creative mentation is necessarily equivalent to a fundamental law of the universe.

14.	"The Sexual Impotence of the PSP," pp. 40-41.

15.	New Solidarity, Vol. IV, passim.

16.	See Section 4 below (In Part H: Vol. 7, No. 3, Jan. 1974); Dialectical Economics, Chaps. V-VIII.

17.	"Beyond Psychoanalysis," pp. 66-69.

18.	Cf. L.D. Trotsky, My Life; I. Deutscher, The Prophet Armed; (Trotsky's "conciliator" role).

19.	Moshe Levin, Lenin's Last Struggle, New York, 1968.

20.	I. Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed, N.B., Trotsky's denial of his own authorship of "The Real Situation in Russia."

21.	Transcript of conversations between Trotsky and SWP leaders on the 1940 "Browder Presidential Campaign" policy for the SWP; also, P. Valenti, "Towards A Myth- Free History of American Trotskyism," Campaigner, Vol. 6, No. 2, Spring 1973.

22.	New Solidarity, Vol. IV, passim on "SWP," "Fuentes," and "Lower East Side."

23.	Cf. L. Marcus, "The United States of Europe: Their Program and Ours," Campaigner, Vol. 5, No. 4, Fall 1972, pp. 18-20.

24.	Chap. XIX, "Financial Capital;" Chap. XXV, "Credit and Fictitious Capital;" Chaps. XXX-XXXII, "Money-Capital and Actual Capital;" Chap. XXXIII, "Currency Under The Credit-System."

25.	E.g., Dialectical Economics; "In Defense of Rosa Luxemburg," in The Campaigner, Vol. 6, No. 2.

26.	"The Sexual Impotence of the PSP," pp. 41, 47-48.

27.	"Beyond Psychoanalysis," pp. 46-49; "Sexual Impotence," pp. 38-41.

28.	"Beyond Psychoanalysis," pp. 76-77.

29.	Ibid., pp. 46-49.

30.	Ibid., pp. 49-54.

31.	Socialism or Fascism? NCLC, New York, 1971.

32.	Except for a reference to the opening paragraphs of his preface to the second edition (omitted in the George Eliot translation), we refer to the Harper, New York, 1957 edition of this book.

33.	The nuances of difference between the original mss. and Engels' published edition of it are of no importance for our purposes here.

34.	For Feuerbach's contributions, see Sections 4, 5, below (Part II).

35.	See the next issue on the case of Alfred Schmidt for an account.

36.	Cf. Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution; Sidney Hook, From Hegel To Marx.

37.	The Fiery Brook, New York, 1972, p. 250.

38.	Cf. "The Case of Alfred Schmidt," this issue.

39.	Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Sunday, Dec. 9, 1972; also Neue Zuercher Zeitung, Sunday, Oct. 7, 1973.

40.	In which Feuerbach attempts a self-conscious overview of his position in the course of development of epistemology.

41.	That the laws of "physical scientific" belief are themselves in the same general category of ideology as religious belief.

42.	Cf. Dialectical Economics on Engels, passim.

43.	See our extended footnote on Judaism, below.

44.	On "womanish nature;" Essence ... , p. 64.

45.	Ibid., Chap. I, passim. However, Feuerbach does not admit the Logos-concept itself in this way.

46.	Ibid., Chap. II.

47.	Ibid., Chaps. IV, VII, XV.

48.	Compare New Testament account of Christ's altered relationship to the Holy Family with footnote, Essence ... , P. 202. Note also text, pp. 202-203. Note, pp. 209- 212, on Holy Ghost.

49.	Essence ... , Chap. XV, pp. 142-144.

50.	Ibid., Chap. I; also, "Introduction" to 2nd edition and Chap. XVIII.

51.	New Testament, both on Christ's relationship to Mary after his resurrection and Paul repeatedly on sexual relationships, women, etc.

52.	"Sexual Impotence," passim.

53.	Essence ... , Chap. XIX.

54.	Ibid., Chaps. IV-V.

55.	Ibid.

56.	Ibid., Chaps. I, II, XVIII.

57.	E.g., Thomas a Kempis, a precursor of Protestantism.

58.	A wretched reification of Freud's own blunder has been popularized through Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization.

59.	"Sexual Impotence," pp. 43-44, 60-61.

60.	G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology ... , "Lordship and Bondage."

61.	Essence ... , pp. 70-72.

62.	Ibid., Chaps. I, II.

63.	Ibid., Chaps. IV, V.

64.	Ibid.

65.	Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven are notable examples. The opening sections of the Mozart Requiem are exemplary of the cited principle. (As Beethoven observed vigorously on the issue of that score's authenticity, no musician could fail to directly recognize Mozart's distinctive genius.) It is not uncommon among cultured persons who otherwise report never experiencing the specific emotion of self- conscious loving, that their direct knowledge of that emotion is limited to certain musical experiences.

66.	For observations respecting the general loss of this faculty during childhood, note especially Shelley's essay, "On Life."

67.	Essence ...

68.	Ibid.

69.	Essence ... , p. 37: "The understanding is thus the original, primitive being" (i.e. the Logos!), and also p. 39: "The understanding is further the self-subsistent and independent being" (again, the Logos!). P. 40: "Lastly, the understanding or reason is the necessary being" (again, the Logos!). However, p. 45: "A God, therefore, who expresses only the nature of the understanding does not satisfy religion, is not the God of religion." Feuerbach, by introducing the infantile, superstitious principle of "mother-love" in place of the Logos loses all sense of the relationship between a "God the Creator" (Logos or "Holy Spirit") and the alienated, determinate "God of Unchanging Law and Order," the latter the alienated patria potestas of the liturgical Trinity. Cf. "Beyond Psychoanalysis," pp. 74-76.

70.	"Sexual Impotence," pp. 38-39.

71.	Ibid., pp. 37-38.

72.	"Beyond Psychoanalysis," pp. 48-49, 71-74.

73.	Ibid. (pp. 71-74).

74.	Essence ... , p. XXXIV.

75.	Ibid., Chap. IV.

76.	Cf. Karl Kautsky, The Foundations of Christianity; Abraham Leon, The Jewish Question. Kautsky's one truly important contribution, reminding us of Rosa Luxemburg's penetrating observation, that his perception improves in direct proportion to number of past centuries intervening between him and his subject-matter of the moment. Despite some jarring notes of orthodox mechanistic "Marxist-Leninist" economic theory, the work of 26-year old Leon is a remarkable masterpiece, which no defender of "Jewish cultural nationalism" has even attempted to rebut by any other means than invective. This writer's own analysis of the evolution from Egyptian- Mesopotamian "hydraulic" into Hellenic cultures, and Hellenic cultures' supersession by feudalism and then capitalism provide the "political economic" context in which Leon's situation of the "Jewish Question" becomes the only rational view.

Although A.D. Judaism is an outgrowth of the development of Christianity (e.g., the first such rabbi, Philo of Alexandria), there was a preceding Hebrew faith of sorts, elements of which were syncretically assimilated in the successive phases of manufacture of post-Philo Judaism. The earlier, Hebrew doctrine is itself a syncretic hodge-podge of chiefly Mesopotamian legends. Rabbi Ezra, the author of the fictional personality of Moses, is exemplary of the circumstances and content of Hebrew doctrine — a creation of Achaemenid protection and edict. Ezra's Persian version of Hebrewism was, in turn, significantly influenced by an earlier, pre-Pentateuch version created in conformity with Babylonian edicts. In general, as Leon adequately develops the case, the doctrine of secular Zionism is entirely a Twentieth Century fabrication, owing more to the Russian Czar and (later) Hitler and to U.S.S.R. and U.S.A. political support than Ezra, Philo, et al. From Ezra onwards, and even before, Hebrewism was an assimilationist doctrine developed to provide special juridical status (and ideological self-image) for a caste of merchant-usurers within a pre-capitalist society.

However, despite the hysterical imbecility of the Zionist "pihpul" claim to an historic, pre 20th century, God-given title to Palestine, there is a 20th century Jewish Palestinian state, whose formal real estate title dates (with Soviet "title insurance" included) from the immediate post-war period. (Juridically, the Jews had a far more substantial claim to Poland and Lithuania, which puts an ironical aspect on Stalin's endorsement of their title to Palestine!) The existence of a Jewish population in Palestine is not justified by anything but the 20th century actual origins of that fact.

Such considerations are only necessary context for our working point here: Since Christianity and Judaism are, phenomenally, the characteristic religious expressions of capitalist ideology, do the differentia of Judaism therefore invalidate the comprehensiveness of a Christianity-based clinical study of capitalist ideology? Although a systematic anthropological study of specifically Jewish delusions has unquestioned merit and even some urgency — for other reasons, it is unnecessary to regard such a study as essential to the theses of this paper. For reasons already implicit in Leon's book, Judaism is not a true religion, but only a half-religion, a curious appendage and sub-species of Christianity. In this sense, as Charlemagne keeps his herd of protected Jews as "slaves of the treasury," Christianity has regarded the Jewish religion as the imperfect, special form of Christianity — e.g., a kind of theological "cultural relativism" for one's slaves — and secular Christianity has always regarded the Jew as "our Jews," a principle continued in U.S.A. and Israeli policy respecting the fief- State of Israel! This relationship does more than express Christian prejudice; it is the secret of Judaism itself. Judaism is ideological abstraction of the secular life of Christianity's Jew, the Roman merchant-usurer who had not yet evolved to the state of Papal enlightenment, a half-Christian, who had not developed a Christian conscience, etc. Judaism is the religion of a caste of subjects of Christianity, entirely molded by ingenious rabbis to fit into the ideological and secular life of Christianity. In short, a self-subsisting Judaism never existed and never could exist. As for "Jewish culture" otherwise, it is merely the residue left to the Jewish home after everything saleable has been marketed to the Goyim.

[Contrary systematic views on this special subject will be entertained for review by the editors.]

77.	"Beyond Psychoanalysis," pp. 87-89.

78.	Marx's "dirty-Judaical" is emphasized here both to underline the characterization of Feuerbach's lapse in the "Theses," and to emphasize the epistemological significance of the infantile object-elation of the devoutly- alienated religious Jew. The significance of the brutally- sadistic moral castration of the Jewish boy by the domineering "Jewish mother" is the basis for one of the most horrifying models of male sexual impotence, which expresses itself obsessively in the "business Jew." He suffers a hideous sense of secret worthlessness which would be revealed without power over the fixed object in its (fetishistic) commodity-form.

79.	In the course of translating theoretical works from English and German (especially) into Greek, French, Italian, and Spanish, the Labor Committees have been sharply confronted by the intrinsic conceptual of (especially) Greek, French, and Spanish. Study of these problems emphasize the content as well as the historic importance of Renaissance humanist writers from Petrarch to Rabelais. Not only is sixteenth century French a Gargantuan advance over that of a century earlier, but it is also an advance, in syntactical modes, over modem French. A similar case has been made for the Spanish of Cervantes.

To express rigorous epistemological notions and their derivatives in modern Greek, it is necessary to import the means for this from ancient Greek! Unless one returns to the sixteenth century modes, it is either impossible or awkwardly bulky to express rigorous epistemological conceptions in French. Spanish, revealingly enough, has no built-in notion of actual "self- consciousness," and in general, the language's relatively enormous basic vocabulary of educated speech reflects a loss of the capacity to express categorical conceptions of the kind readily formulated in English or German.

In the case of French, the degeneration of the language, to the imbecility of philosophical "structuralism," has been correlated with that national cult of linguistic death called "The Immortals," but is obviously more deeply connected to the peasant/urban petit-bourgeois ideology of stagnating French culture generally, a decay which accelerated following the overthrow of the Paris Commune. In the case of Spanish, peasant/petit- bourgeois backwardness and cultural stagnation are key to the emphasis on sense-certainty "literality."

Although English has been constantly threatened with similar degeneration, both from the pathetic grammarian admirers of the French "Immortals" and from "slang," the vigor of the material culture has been the basis for an unconscious humanism, a constant source of enlargement of the language's conceptual potentialities. The case of German has been well-studied. It is only during the past half-century that German has tended to decay, under the influence of existentialist (e.g., proto-fascist and fascist) movements and the accelerating hegemony of empiricism. The English language has finally — in the past two decades — succumbed to the corrosive influence of endemic "anti-intellectualism," exhibited in the most extreme form by the spread of jargon from the syphilitic pustules of the Rock-counterculture illiterates.

The remedy for the French and Spanish problem is to emulate the Renaissance, using important scientific writings as the activity of making necessary revolutions in the vocabulary and "syntactical modes." The Labor Committees are already engaged in furthering such self- conscious efforts as correlative of our general educational work.

80.	Essence ... , pp. 72-73.

81.	Ibid.

82.	T.B. Macaulay, History of England, Vol. I.

83.	E.G., the wild speculation of Ranke, in part credulously adopted by Freud (Moses and Monotheism).

84.	Cf. Section 5, Part II, The Case of Ludwig Feuerbach by L. Marcus in the January 1974 Campaigner.

85.	Same as above.