I am not sure just what Marx had in mind when he wrote that "philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it." Did he mean that philosophy could change the world, or that philosophers should turn to the higher priority of changing the world? If the former, then he presumably meant philosophy in a broad sense of the term, including analysis of the social order and ideas about why it should be changed, and how. In that broad sense, philosophy can play a role, indeed an essential role, in changing the world.

Noam Chomsky

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The Point is to Change the World

By Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò

“The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways,” he [Marx] famously said. “The point, however, is to change it.”

Karl Marx penned these words as a set of notes for a later work with co-author Friedrich Engels. Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach” may have focused on the work of Ludwig Feuerbach, but it reflected a broader dissatisfaction with intellectual trends common to the other Young Hegelians of their day. The meat of Marx’s notes on this work are the second, third, and eighth theses, in which he reveals a thoroughly practical perspective on social life and thought on which the role of thought, and thus of philosophy, is to inform and transform activity. These theses, and the perspective they abbreviate, are why the above quote (the 11th and final thesis) serves as a mic drop.

Over a century later and an ocean away: “Old foundations are crumbling, and new ones are not yet being imagined.” To me, these words spoken by Afro-Guyanaese activist and intellectual Andaiye in a speech called “The Contemporary Caribbean Struggle”, sound a similar warning as Marx’s. I would guess that I am not alone in thinking so: Alissa Trotz named the collection of Andaiye’s essays in which I discovered this quote “The Point is to Change the World”, and Marx’s 11th thesis on Feuerbach serves as the book’s epigraph. But while Marx’s comment encapsulates the age-old struggle over the place of philosophy in any age, is Andaiye’s intellectual contribution that provokes us to ask its relevance in this one.

Andaiye was born on September 11th, 1941 in Georgetown, the capital of what was then British Guiana. She came of age while her country was marked with conflict: with the approval of President John F. Kennedy, the CIA conspired to rig the soon to be independent country’s elections, ousting the outspokenly Communist Indo-Guyanese Cheddi Jagan in favor of the perceived moderate Forbes Burnham. In a forward to “The Point is to Change the World”, Guyanese historian Clem Seecharan characterizes the Burnham administration as a dictatorship. He remained in power for sixteen years.

While her country descended into racial violence between what Seecharan described as a “virtual racial war between Africans and Indians”, a young Andaiye was hard at work studying and deepening her radical politics. She studied at the University of West Indies with fellow student and eventual comrade Walter Rodney, and later lectured in a program for “disadvantaged students” in the United States. She returned home with a staunch feminist and Marxist politics rooted in solidarity: among her many organizational affiliations are the Red Thread Women’s Organization in Guyana and the Working People’s Alliance. By 2009, when she was invited to give the speech at her alma mater, she was a seasoned, veteran activist, deeply attuned to the stakes of political analysis.

When Andaiye said that “old foundations are crumbling, and new ones are not yet being imagined”, she was not talking about the structure of philosophical analysis, or of patterns of political discourse. She was talking about the weather.

Andaiye went on to explain: “old assumptions about weather patterns and how these shape major economic occupations are no longer valid.” Climate crises in the Caribbean were mounting. Climate change might seem like a drop in the bucket in larger countries with advanced economies, but for the small island states of the Caribbean, it was an existential crisis. In 2005, her home country lost the equivalent of 60% of its GDP in a single flood that covered a mere 25 miles of its over 200-mile coastline. 

Such ecological crises exacerbated longstanding forms of injustice and new developments in the world economy. After the flooding in Guyana, women caregivers and subsistence farmers shouldered massively increased burdens. But NAFTA likewise contributed to gender injustices: women were shuffled out of sectors like manufacturing at rates more than double the rates of male job loss – increasing their representation in the precarious informal sector, already disproportionately inhabited by women. Massive majorities of farming populations in Dominica were shunted out of the relatively secure formal sector and into the informal sector. Race violence increased in Guyana, police violence spiked in Jamaica, and domestic and sexual violence surged throughout the region.

Confronted by these crises, Andaiye said, such countries turned where they had to: to the IMF, despite the fact that little had changed since the “structural adjustment policies” of the 70s (which Andaiye describes as having a destructive impact on the region). In this context, I see Andaiye as calling for imagination: to overcome the lack of new solutions that forced the region back to familiar non-solutions.

Not all kinds of imagination are up to the challenge of confronting crumbling structures. One kind of imagination is artistic: the kind that science fiction writers and poets employ. We use our imagination creatively, often as part of the construction of an aesthetic product. This allows us to be comparatively unfettered by convention – or considerations of practical efficacy. There is an important role for this kind of imagination: it breaks us out of self-imposed constraints on what kinds of worlds are possible, and as such is indispensable in the fight for justice, in the final analysis. And there is plenty of this kind of thinking in the academy, particularly in the humanities, where we build fancy descriptions of justice and injustice alike, judging our successes and failures on largely aesthetic terms. 

The question is one of balance: the more of our resources, time, and energy go to ignoring, wishing away, or bracketing our problems, the less goes to tackling them. We need the imagination to set targets, but we also need the imagination to find out how to reach them.

Thus, this is the wrong sense of imagination to do what Andaiye calls us to do. To build things, we need an architectural imagination aimed at building a political product. This kind of imagination plays an ineliminably practical role. The blueprints are just another step in the constructive process of building a house, and building its rooms: that is, the social structures where moral principles are given practical and concrete expression: the places where fights for justice are won and lost.

There is nothing inherently good about this perspective: the colonizer, too, is an imaginer and a planner, one who sees possibilities that diverge from what is happening now – ways to reorganize society around their own aggrandizement. Our evaluation of constructive projects has to be keyed to what is imagined, who is imagining, and what relations of accountability exist in and between the rooms that we build. 

Philosophy and wider history are full of examples about how we can get going, but get going we must: now, more than ever, the retreat into the ivory tower and its very local problems is a massive failure: a failure of responsibility, a failure of care, and also a failure of imagination. There are other ways to be here, other ways of pursuing philosophical questions, other questions to pursue.

Climate crisis asks us a number of questions: how will we secure ourselves and each other in an increasingly precarious world, and what are the implications for justice of different approaches?  How will knowledge networks respond to our changing political environment –the actual ones that we have, not (just) the idealized ones we use to answer questions we find fascinating? What political structures relate universities and researchers to the communities within and around them, and how should they operate?

Philosophers could do more – and could do the many helpful things they are doing much differently. First and foremost, we could follow our colleagues at Rutgers’ lead and organize ourselves in solidarity with all of the colleagues who make our campuses work: faculty and graduate workers, administrative staff, health care professionals, dining and student services, and building maintenance and operations, and the broader community our campuses are located in. Senior colleagues could develop serious research programs supporting the incredible complexities of climate crisis and actions, and support junior colleagues doing the like by explicitly building such social contributions into how their work is evaluated. Philosophers who work on psychology and moral emotions likely have much to contribute to discussions of climate governance and cross-institutional collaboration. Philosophers working with or adjacent to natural and social sciences could add to systems dynamic modelling in the climate world, which practitioners claim demands a large scale,  multinational collaboration with the “urgency of the space race”. Regardless of what we study, we can all contribute an environment in which we encourage each other to ask how we can contribute constructively to this work, and value such contributions.

The number of climate questions, their scale, and their complexity are daunting. But in times like these, it is always helpful that we are not starting from scratch – we would simply be making an institutional effort to join colleagues who have been doing this work for decades. Philosophy and wider history are full of examples about how we can get going in contributing to society’s practical use of the particular questions we ask: from the network of collaboration established by the dedicated organizers of Philosophers for Sustainability (who put together this very blog section!); to the applied (and translational) sections of our own field, to the storied history of intellectual contributions to movements that Andaiye and her comrades exemplify. 

Now, more than ever, imagining and building new foundations should be more than an acceptable section of philosophy: it should be the point.

https://blog.apaonline.org/2021/04/29/the-point-is-to-change-the-world/

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