Historical materialism for understanding the madness of late capitalism
This is the inaugural post of "Marx & friends." I’ll introduce the newsletter as well as the first series to come, which will be a critique of Yuval Noah Harari’s 2015 book "Sapiens."
[Drawing by April Burke.]
Marx & friends is a newsletter devoted to helping us understand contemporary psychosocial issues from the context of capitalism.
Offering interdisciplinary essays concerning historiography, metaphysics, and psychoanalysis, the newsletter is inspired by friends like Spinoza, Kant, Marx, and especially Deleuze & Guattari. Though to a lesser degree, other influences include: Engels, Luxemburg, Gramsci, Benjamin, Fanon, Breton, Althusser & Balibar, and Jameson.
Since the Great Recession, we’ve seen a resurgence of interest in Marx’s analysis of capitalism and Freud’s analysis of the unconscious, the synthesis of which has been a project of anti-fascist theorists since the fascists’ rise to power in Europe between the First and Second World Wars. From the Surrealist movement and the Frankfurt School to the Althusserian current of historical materialism, syntheses of Marx and Freud have proven fruitful on the topic of fascism.
My academic work has mostly consisted of intellectual history and philosophy of some of these Freudo-Marxian syntheses. This includes a forthcoming 2024 essay in Deleuze and Guattari Studies on the role of Spinoza and Marx in Deleuze and Guattari’s 1972 Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia, as well as my 2019 M.A. thesis on the reconciliation of Marxism and Freudianism in Mad Love (1937) by André Breton, progenitor of the Surrealist movement.
In the coming months, I’ll launch a series of posts on the topic of fascism, as well as another series focused on how I read Marx—including in relation to many of the other philosophers listed above—and how I understand psychoanalysis in the light of historical materialism.
However, I’ll be starting this newsletter with a focused, critical look at what might be our current ruling class’s first choice for ideological representation, Yuval Noah Harari’s 2015 Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
I’ll launch that series next week, but here’s a look at why I’ve chosen to critique the book.
Why critique Harari’s Sapiens?
Not only is Sapiens a major bestseller—over 21 million copies sold in 65 languages—but also it’s endorsed by many of the most wealthy and powerful people in the world, including Obama, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates. In other words, it’s not only mainstream but hegemonic, and when you take a closer look at the way Harari tells history, it’s easy to see why.
For example, in Sapiens, rulers and capitalists seem to return to their place, not just as Great Men of history but the greatest and most important of Great Men. Sapiens also absolves ruling classes from the bad things commonly associated with them and the systems they rule over. Indeed, in the wake of the Great Recession, Sapiens was there to tell us, under the weight of Big History, that our problems have nothing to do with the way society is structured.
We can’t afford to let such ideology float around unchallenged, but here we are, 10 years and 21 million copies later. I’m not alone, thankfully, in finding the book problematic and in taking up the cause of publishing criticism of it. However, most critical reviews have been article length, whereas I’ll use this platform to delve more deeply in my critique of Sapiens, in which I’ll also focus more on Harari’s historiography than others have.
Critics of Harari tend to point out reductionism, sensationalism, and scientific populism in Sapiens, as well as a more forthright elitism in his more recent 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018). In this series, I'll look more at the nature of the historical logic in Sapiens—the cornerstone of his subsequent works—and why it lends itself so well as an apologia for contemporary capitalism.
But for a newsletter devoted not just to an understanding of capitalism but, in particular, psychosocial conditions of late capitalism, why focus so much on a book like Sapiens, a book that is seemingly about everything except neoliberalism and the psychological states of this era’s inhabitants?
Here are a few reasons why I’ve committed to taking the text head on with close readings and careful critique across a series of essays to serve as the “bread & butter” for the first year of this newsletter:
1) Elitist history
Any history, from the perspective of historiography, especially one with an expansive view at the scale of Sapiens, involves a worldview that pertains to and is concerned with an understanding of the present. One indication of this in the case of Sapiens is that the book’s telling of history is one that interests prominent members of the ruling class. As evolutionary biologist Darshana Narayanan writes in her 2022 Current Affairs article about Sapiens, “The Dangerous Populist Science of Yuval Noah Harari:” “among Harari’s flock are some of the most powerful people in the world, and they come to him much like the ancient kings to their oracles.” She explains what’s at stake:
“Harari is often not just describing our past; he is prognosticating on the very future of humanity itself. Everyone is, of course, entitled to speculate on our future. But it is important to find out if these speculations hold water, especially if a person has the ear of our decision-making elites—as Harari does.[1]”
Others have commented on the political implications of Sapiens. In a 2018 article in Haaretz, Danny Gutwein writes that the reason Harari is “the pet ideologist of the liberal elites” is because of the way he depicts their rule:
“as the realization of a utopian vision, of a global empire ruled by an international elite that ensures peace within its borders – world peace, in other words. It’s no wonder, then, that the liberal elites hastened to embrace Harari. … Why did Obama, Zuckerberg, Gates and Silicon Valley as a whole adopt Harari as their pet historian? One possible explanation for their efforts to spread his gospel could be the political benefit they hoped to extract from the close connection between Harari’s view that there is currently no serious alternative to the neoliberal package and the metanarrative he’s been weaving since ‘Sapiens.’”[2]
In this series, I’ll assess ways in which Harari’s elitism runs through the core of his telling of history, bringing all sorts of historiographical problems.
2) Evolutionary psychology and the caveman brain
At the heart of what I’ll be describing as the historical logic of late capitalism is a particular mode of psychology, evolutionary psychology, which aims to draw upon insights from evolutionary biology. However, as biologists like Narayanan argue, Harari’s representations of evolutionary biology are reductive.
And in the context of a story about humankind, such biological reductivism—what Narayanan describes as “a gene-centric view of evolution”—serves to naturalize the status quo. Harari’s representations of evolutionary biology are not only reductive, they’re also indicative of what is throughout the book a lack of any operative concept of social or historical contingency.
Through its prehistorical lens, evolutionary psychology offers an ahistorical, non-contingent, largely uncontextualized account of the human psyche. Harari thinks of desire as wholly determined by biochemistry, that revolutionaries are people with a “gloomy biochemistry” in need of Prozac.[3] In other words, one’s sense of well-being, for Harari, is in no way contingent upon any social or economic conditions. For comparison, historical materialist psychoanalysts Deleuze and Guattari think of desire as primarily socially determined and potentially revolutionary.
3) The role of historical materialism
In Sapiens, Harari makes cases against Marx, materialism, egalitarianism, and the humanities and social sciences, championing instead memetics, the idea that culture is essentially a randomly evolving mind virus. As Harari’s elitist endorsements suggest, there is a lot at stake in the writing of history.
Hence, from a historical materialist perspective, there’s also a lot at stake in the critique of elitist historiography. And on that note, I’ll end this essay in the words of Walter Benjamin, from his famous 1940 essay “On the Concept of History.” Benjamin describes historical materialism as having the aim, inspired by moments of danger, of rescuing the tradition of history from “becoming a tool of the ruling classes,” where even the dead are exploited in the service of a conformism:
“Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. … Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.”[4]
Notes
[1]. Narayanan, “The Dangerous Populist Science of Yuval Noah Harari,” Current Affairs. https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/07/the-dangerous-populist-science-of-yuval-noah-harari
[2]. Gutwein, “How Yuval Noah Harari Became the Pet Ideologist of the Liberal Elites,” https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/2018-11-20/ty-article-magazine/how-yuval-noah-harari-became-the-pet-ideologist-of-the-liberal-elites/0000017f-dc13-d856-a37f-fdd3511f0000
[3]. Harari, Sapiens (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), 389.
[4]. Benjamin, “On the Concept of History” (1940), quoted in Michael Lowy, Fire Alarm (London: Verso, 2005), 42.