I consider Loren to be a father to me. And this I mean in more ways than one, and in ways even more important than my biological father.
My biological father—an otherwise greedy and selfish drug-addicted criminal who tried to steal my name and identity—gave me some intellectual and historical perspective that I needed when I was a very little boy.
Loren helped me fill in that perspective.
Not that he just poured knowledge into me, although I did spend many an hour just listening to him talk about the history of the workers movement and of the New Left. It was more that he guided me with questions, book recommendations, and encouragements to write on particular subjects at particular times.
I have never met anyone with as broad and deep a Weltanschauung as Loren Goldner, and this is why he is special. The interconnectedness that Steve Hubbell noted. This is his gift to us, and the legacy I hope we can preserve and honor.
Let me be specific. I think Loren’s work has circled the entire time around the importance of what one might call spirituality to the working class movement of self-liberation.
I think we all know what spirituality is: a basic striving and longing for ultimate unity and sensuous praxis with the universe. To make sense of existence, of the cosmos, in a way in which the individual can participate. This is the basis of all religious and philosophical traditions.
Look, not even the art world speaks of spirituality with a straight face anymore. Let alone philosophy or politics. But it’s still there. I think Loren’s work on Melville is the lynchpin of his whole theoretical project, and cosmic concerns are pretty close to the surface. The Pequod is peopled with cannibals and savages from both the backward and the advanced countries of the world; out of their worlds, they each find a reason to come aboard. There is some element of freedom they seek, even in backbreaking labor aboard the whaling vessel, that brings them aboard the Pequod. This is everything. What in their own lives and traditions brings them to collective endeavor as a labor of freedom? All of them together, and only all of them together, can defeat Leviathan, the Behemoth, the state. How and why?
We know from Kolakowski and others about the neo-Platonic philosophical heritage of Marxism. But what about the other inherited currents flowing into our actions?
I believe that some among us must keep this work going; at least some of us must serve as anthropologists of liberation. Like Marx, in the last quarter century of his life, during his Russian detour. I believe Marx was looking for a bit of magic, so to speak, something like Thor’s Hammer, among the Russian peasantry, a weapon that would enable the European working class to smash the state. This particular research into pre-capitalistic social organization was not fruitful, but it is noteworthy that Marx devoted so much time to it.
Now that capitalism has well and truly swallowed the world, we are now all aboard an aluminum and carbon-fiber Pequod, sailing a spectacular sea of lies, word salad, and AI generated content. Though it is now helmed by blinkered technocratic billionaires, they still believe their own lies, and are hoist on their own petard of arrogance and ignorance. Who else is aboard? What fires their passion for freedom? What do they want?
Some of you may be familiar with such phenomena as the Malaysian ghost strikes; this has been going on for decades. A factory will be haunted and no one can go to work. A supernatural labor action. Obviously there’s the civil rights movement, calling upon activists to be actually Christ-like in their long-suffering forgiveness to topple Jim Crow nationwide. But there’s also the Tonton Macoute in Haiti, who used black magic to create zombie assassins.
Things like this show the depth and resourcefulness of our movement for freedom and also the depth and resourcefulness of counterrevolution. This is important stuff.
I believe that humanity’s dream of freedom is real, true, and a material possibility instantly. I believe the spiritual traditions of the world are battlegrounds, just like factory floors and gentrifying urban geographies. My conviction that we will win is not just the result of an analysis of class forces in this pathetic conjuncture, but a full-fledged religious faith, rooted, notably, in Marx’s Promethean atheism.
That is to say, Marx’s atheism is a challenge to rise to the occasion of divinity, much like the civil rights movement challenged its activists. To sublate the old Feuerbachian projection of the collective anthropos into the divinity means ultimately, and yet simply, to take responsibility. For what? For everything. For the cosmos.
And that is why we need the wisdom of the traditions. To see and know how people have conceived literally the cosmos. Not how contemporary science conceives it, but how people have conceived and lived it in their prehistoric community, in their Stone Age fragmentation, and in their contemporary alienation. And of course the history of that change. I endeavor to be such a cartographer of the anthropocosmos. Deep cosmopolitanism. Because of the fundamentality of the concepts, reinvestigation will probably have implications for hard science, too, especially mathematics.
Am I saying we need our own little “Russian detour”? Not really. I just think we need to remember and appreciate that the Promethean atheism of the Marxist tradition is the only means by which human spirituality can actually be understood and fulfilled, abolished, sublated, etc., because we are “explorers of the future,” as Bordiga put it. We speak from beyond the realm of necessity, having passed through the eye of the needle, the only way out of this mess: responsibility for everything, tolerating neither gods nor masters. We therefore see the future in the present and in the past. That’s the only way that Marx can be right in the 1844 manuscripts when he writes, from the future, that “man returns to himself not as he began at the origin of his long history, but finally having at his disposal all the perfections of an immense development, acquired in the form of all the successive techniques, customs, religions, philosophies whose useful sides were – if we can be permitted to express ourselves in this way – imprisoned in the zone of alienation.”