by DAVID NORTH
This article is an edited version of a tweet that was initially posted on X.
Last year, Chris Hedges advocated self-immolation as a way to protest the Gaza genocide. In his latest demoralized screed, he transfers blame for the crimes of the Israeli-Zionist state and capitalist imperialism to the entire human race. Gaza, he proclaims, proves the futility of any belief in the possibility of human progress.
In support of his insistence of the hopeless state of humanity, he counterpoises what Hedges claims were the pessimistic views of Auguste Blanqui to those of Hegel and Marx.
Hedges writes: “The 19th century socialist Louis-Auguste Blanqui, unlike nearly all of his contemporaries, dismissed the belief central to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx, that human history is a linear progression toward equality and greater morality.”
As so often in his previous writings, Hedges demonstrates once again that he understands nothing of the philosophical foundations of Marxism and the materialist conception of history. Neither Hegel or Marx claimed that history is “a linear progression” toward paradise.
Hegel (1770-1831), who witnessed the complex and tragic fate of the French Revolution, famously described history as a “slaughter bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimized.” He explained, albeit in an idealist manner, that the historic development of humanity proceeds through contradiction and conflict.
As for Marx and Engels, they wrote in the Communist Manifesto (1847) that the class struggle leads to “the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.” They rejected any form of simplistic determinism. Marx and Engels explained that the contradictions of the capitalist system created the objective possibility of socialism. But its realization and the fate of humanity would be decided in struggle.
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