The Quantum Mechanics of Imminent Revolution

by Atlee McFellin · Published November 14, 2022 · Updated March 3, 2023

This article concludes a three-part series meant to explore a more sensuous, suffering, and passionate materialism rooted in quantum mechanics. The three articles are a continuation of a longer series that has attempted to articulate a revolutionary communist politics, one that learns from the failures of the German left against the Nazis, while paying particular attention to the voices of Marxists who were also Jewish and experienced the rise and rule of fascism first-hand. All this is meant to provide strategic direction in hopes of defeating a possible quasi constitutional fascist coup around the November 2024 elections, then on to our own path towards revolution thereafter.

These three more philosophically-oriented articles began with “The Revolutionary Passion of Those Who Suffer Most.” This started by looking to the theoretical framework contained in two of Jenny Marx’s summer 1844 letters to her husband Karl. It then briefly explored the extent to which Friedrich Engels, Karl Kautsky, and Georgi Plekhanov rejected the last decade of Karl Marx’s research on Indigenous societies and communes in Russia, instead centering “dialectical materialism” around reductionistic notions of “base” and “superstructure.” This was then used to further inform what Wilhelm Reich and Walter Benjamin described as the failures of “vulgar Marxism” against Nazi fascism, in hopes that we stop repeating those mistakes today before it’s too late.

Instead of base and superstructure, the article looked to Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on intersectionality as based on lived experience through “categories of suffering.” This was then used to re-frame Marxism around how Karl and Jenny Marx both articulated it in 1844, which was on the felt experience of suffering. This included Karl’s argument that suffering is at the core of our sensuousness and that feeling what we suffer gives rise to passion as our “essential force.” The article then ended by outlining a dialectic of suffering and communal revolution based upon the works of three additional Marxists who all experienced Nazi fascism first-hand: Clara Zetkin, Agnes Heller, and Abram Leon.

The second article, “Toward a Sensuous, Suffering, and Passionate Materialism,” began with Erich Fromm on the felt experience of suffering. It then examined Ernst Bloch on Marxism and suffering, using this to re-interpret his own analysis of Marx’s 1841 dissertation. Bloch briefly considered the dissertation through the lens of quantum mechanics, which the article expands upon based on his own advice to remain committed to one’s “friends.” Bloch himself had a complicated friendship with Walter Benjamin, who killed himself to avoid capture by the Nazis when all hope was lost. So, Marx’s dissertation is re-interpreted by examining sensuousness and the felt experience of suffering through the lens of quantum entanglement, or what Albert Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.” This was used to advance a materialist approach to “quantum consciousness.”

Overall, our sensuous experience of another being’s suffering, relating it to what we have experienced ourselves, may catalyze a form of sensuous quantum entanglement at the core of our shared passion for revolution. This current article will take the argument further, making the case that sensuousness, suffering, and the striving for revolution may be more fundamental to the universe than four-dimensional spacetime itself. As such, the passionate striving of suffering beings who are sensuously entangled at the quantum level may actually make revolution imminent, like Marx on the tendency of the rate of profit to decline and what he regarded as the imminence of revolution overthrowing capitalism—but much more.

Sensuousness Entanglement, Intersectionality, and Revolutionary Rehearsals

We can start with the title of an April 2019 article in Scientific American: “‘Hyperscans’ Show How Brains Sync as People Interact.” This is within the field of social neuroscience and their studies utilized EEG (electroencephalogram, a type of test that measures electrical activity in the brain), what Mashour and colleagues referred to in the previous article as a “correlate of consciousness.” This was used to examine how people “share intention and emotion,” what the author otherwise referred to as “the social glue that binds” or “brain coupling” or how “our brain waves become synchronized.” Our human senses are the means by which this occurs, while the degree seems to depend on the extent of our engagement with one another as well as the associated affinity we feel. Given that human senses operate through quantum entanglement of one sort or another, that “affinity we feel” through “engagement” would be sensuous entanglement through and through.

Turning to a study published in a journal called Scientific Reports in May 2018, researchers used EEG to map “the ability of individuals to share the affective states of others through empathy.” More specifically, they examined this by designing a study of “empathic reaction to harm that befalls others and is accompanied by a desire to alleviate their suffering.” Similar research in less social settings have examined “ingroup” and “outgroup” differences affecting the extent to which a person will feel empathy and/or attempt to alleviat e the suffering another person is experiencing. This includes when action may result in similar suffering for the person who helps someone in an “outgroup,” but a willingness to endur e that threat and vulnerability is less probable.

Unfortunately, though the technology and associated mathematics can identify the general parts of the brain involved, proving specific ionic entanglement is still unattainable. Given the preponderance of evidence from different fields, it hardly seems necessary to prove the specific entanglement of ion particles traveling through Piezo1 and Piezo2 channels, for example, as was outlined in the previous article. Mathematical physicist Henry Strapp’s broader conception of quantum consciousness would seem to hold true regardless, while the science itself may take time to definitively and conclusively catch up. Besides, it’s unclear the extent to which science itself could actually conclude this without going beyond the bounds of “settler LIFE” itself, and thus be capable of truly establishing objective controls for its associated experimentation.

We therefore begin again Princeton University Professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, who examined the thought and experiences of the Combahee River Collective (CRC), a radical collective of Black feminists in the 1970s. “The Combahee women did not coin the phrase ‘intersectionality,’” but they “did articulate the analysis that animates the meaning of intersectionality, the idea that multiple oppressions reinforce each other to create new categories of suffering.”[1] As for their relatedness to Marxism in general: “They were not acting or writing against Marxism, but, in their own words, they looked to ‘extend’ Marxist analysis to incorporate an understanding of the oppression of Black women.”[2] Given that the CRC itself began as “an emotional support group,” sensuous entanglement would be at the core of what “animates the meaning…” in the first place.

Intersectionality, one “animated” by “categories of suffering,” may exist beyond our usual understanding of space and time. Looking back to Jenny Marx, even a surface level analysis exposes the depths. Let’s take just the title of Minna Salami’s 2020 book as an example, Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone.[3] Being a Black mother in the decaying settler colony known as the United States of America today, for example, inherently entails being a “trauma surgeon,” otherwise described in a June 2020 article in Reuters as conditions resulting in “constant mental anguish.”

If it is through the felt experience of suffering that we become sensuously entangled, then a change anywhere throughout that interwoven quantum state would potentially be shared throughout. This would entail what NASA referred to as “quantum teleportation” and may inform contemporary notions of the conception of “Black Girl Magic.” That particular Reuters article came out twenty-three days after the murder of George Floyd. If there is a single sentence that can perhaps best signify the power inherent in our sensuous entanglement across vast distances in space toward revolution today, it is: “I Can’t Breath!”

The passionate uprising that erupted in the wake of George Floyd’s murder built an abolitionist reality from the streets, grounded in the felt experience of suffering and solidarity. The Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement (RAM) summarized its tipping point. “The burning of the 3rd precinct was the ember that lit this flame of rebellion, as looting, burning cop cars, attacking precincts spread from city to city.” This was not simply the act of burning down a police precinct. It deconstructed the cognitively-bound white supremacist, settler colonial reality and may have connected us through sensuous entanglement, which would be, in the words of Ernst Bloch, to a “real dimension of hope.”

To RAM, what “marked a significant change” was a “palpable feeling that the people have lost their fear, that people have far more to gain than to lose with the destruction of the current system.” That “palpable feeling” was hope born from within the uprising and, as sensuous entanglement, may actually have woven together a quantum state that exists beyond what we commonly experience as spacetime itself. This system of quantum sensuousness would remain interwoven today, despite the uprising having subsided and as “Middle Class Joe” attempts to increasingly militarize the settler colony by growing police budgets and increasing the threat of global war.

As Clara Zetkin put it from the Reichstag in August 1932, months before Hitler’s coup: “The strikes and revolts in various countries are flaming signs which tell the fighters in Germany that they do not stand alone.”[4] Whether or not one is advocating for a united front as a “Soviet Congress for a Soviet Germany” against Nazi fascism or the neighborhood council-based “Revolutionary Abolitionist Front” RAM called for at the beginning of 2021, these similar political expressions cannot be understood without feeling, suffering, and passion weaving together a fabric of intersectional solidarity. The same could be said of Marx on what was both a “proletarian commune” and “workers’ state” constituted by the socialist clubs as both “constituent assemblies” and “military detachments of revolt” as the second French republic declined to dictatorship.

The sensuous entanglement of ion particles in our brain would mean that their synchronized spins, polarization, or vibrations could thus be the causal origin of the revolutionary passion and hope he wrote about, connecting us to a quantum state or dimension(s). This would hold true for workers forming a union based on what Marx also referred to as the “universal suffering” of their experiences as proletariat. It would also hold true for those who took to the streets during the George Floyd Rebellion, fostering open mic rallies that turned into democratic assemblies in neighborhoods across the country and from which, in places like Detroit, revolutionary fighting organizations emerged. Similar to the open mic rallies, in the wake of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that made abortion illegal, speak-outs have offered participants the chance to talk about their abortion experiences and fears of what’s to come. This roots their collective organizing in the concrete sensuous knowledge of what exactly they’re fighting against and why, while connecting back through to a long history of socialist feminist struggle.

Our entanglement may be what truly sustains our passions and must ultimately be socially reproduced through communal care beyond settler LIFE and on the path of revolution.

As we will explore later on, this dialectic of intersectional suffering may give rise to quantum gravity; drawing us out, bringing us together, and uniting us in struggle. In fact, without an intersectional lens for our sensuous inquiry, we will likely remain unable to sufficiently feel the dimensionality of suffering and resultant solidarity across race, class, gender, and beyond. We thus risk insufficiently strengthening our bonds amidst increasingly intensifying conditions rife with potential instability and danger. Our entanglement may be what truly sustains our passions and must ultimately be socially reproduced through communal care beyond settler LIFE and on the path of revolution.

All this informs how we should prepare for the next uprising, that is, through our own “revolutionary rehearsals” in an incipient united front of “soviets,” one that acts as kernel of future potential dual power grounded in that felt solidarity of intersectional suffering. By doing so, we can offer up ways for how the next uprising can sustain itself at the local level and beyond, while simultaneously best ensuring that a unified, interwoven quantum state can help us endure against the forces that threaten our annihilation.

Feeling Sensuous Entanglement Beyond Space and Time

Quantum entanglement operates not only across what we perceive as distances in space, but “over time” as well. Therefore, to more fully grasp the dimensionality of our sensuous entanglement, we have to consider it throughout all of spacetime and beyond. To begin, our commonplace notion of this four-dimensional universe may amount to nothing more than a useful fiction created by the brain, as spacetime may actually result from quantum entanglement itself.

Albert Einstein once wrote a letter meant to comfort the family of a close friend who had recently died. In it, he said that “people like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” He also famously said: “time and space are modes in which we think and not conditions in which we live.”

Leonard Mlodinow and Stephan Hawking elaborated on this concept in The Grand Design. “Quantum physics tells us that no matter how thorough our observation of the present, the (unobserved) past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities,” which “means that observations you make on a system in the present affect its past.”[5] That “affect” may result from the quantum entanglement of particles beyond our experience of time. Pages later, they argued that “once we add the effects of quantum theory to the theory of relativity, in extreme cases warpage can occur to such a great extent that time behaves like another dimension of space;” as in, for instance, what happens with a black hole.[6]

Going further, in the same journal that originally published Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity, Dmitriy Podolskiy and Robert Lanza argued in 2016 that the “arrow of time” is fundamentally flawed. Lanza expanded upon this in his co-authored 2020 book, The Grand Biocentric Design: How Life Creates Reality, writing of four-dimensional spacetime that “it is our awareness that passes along the time coordinate,” not the other way around.[7] Much closer to the end of the book, the authors asked: “What if time travel is found not to require a displacement to somewhere ‘over there,’ but rather the mere experience of another aspect of ‘right here?’”[8]

The idea of an “arrow of time” itself is most often related to the second law of thermodynamics, which says that entropy (chaos, disorder, uncertainty) in the universe only increases, that “coffee cools, buildings crumble, eggs break, and stars fizzle out.” The laws of physics, on the other hand, “work the same going forward in time as in reverse.” It turns out that entropy results from the way particles become increasingly entangled with what’s around them, like a cup of coffee and the surrounding environment, what’s known as “entanglement entropy.”

Theoretical physicist and Johns Hopkins University professor of natural philosophy Sean Carroll addressed this in his 2019 book, Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime. He argued that neither space nor time are fundamental building blocks of the universe. Instead, they are “emergent,” which is “a way of describing the world that isn’t completely comprehensive, but divides up reality into more manageable chunks.”[9] In this case, what’s fundamental to the universe could be quantum entanglement and that what we perceive as spacetime is “emergent” from that.[10]

As theoretical physicist Lee Smolin put it in the 2017 edition of his book, Three Roads to Quantum Gravity, “we must put our minds completely into the relational way of thinking, and really try to see and feel the world around us as nothing but a network of evolving relationships.” Rather than relationships “among things situated in space,” he argued, “they are among the events that make up the history of the world. The relationships define the space, not the other way around.” This is, as he put it, a “relational picture of spacetime” and quantum gravity.[11] As we will explore later on through the work of Kim TallBear, when it comes to the role of sensuousness in causing an inherently probabilistic universe to collapse into one of definite particles, the quantum entanglement of inter-personal relationships may be just as fundamental as those individual particles that constitute us in the first place.

L earning and memory similarly operates according to the second law of thermodynamics, that of entropy increasing “over time.” Like a cup of coffee cooling to equal the temperature of its surrounding environment, our neural networks result from the transformation of energy into connectivity, sensuous entanglement with each other and the surrounding environment. When it comes to the “arrow of time,” there’s simply no other way we could actually experience and remember it. That’s just how the brain forms neural networks, flowing in the direction of our “correlates of consciousness.” In this case though, what we experience as a “flowing” is, as Einstein put it, “modes in which we think and not conditions in which we live.”

Our sensuous entanglement with another person or being would include the ions in our brains, what Henry Strapp referred to as “a source of dynamical uncertainty.” Therefore, sensuous entanglement would result in an increasing number of ions entangled in that quantum state or dimension(s) of “dynamical uncertainty.” The increase of this entanglement would mean an increase to uncertainty and, therefore, entropy as well. As such, we would still experience the “arrow of time” of “going to the past” and that past running “forward.”

But that’s not what would actually be taking place. It would be more like we are experiencing the past simultaneously to the present because spacetime emerges from entanglement entropy, yet we will always remain fundamentally more entangled within the “present.” Similarly, we cannot “remember the future” because its statistical likelihood of occurring is similarly contingent upon our entanglement with it in what would be the narrowing probability of potential “futures” as it emerges from the “here” and “now.”

Furthermore, going back to Mlodinow’s 2022 book; “emotion shapes virtually every thought we have.” Therefore, our relationship with spacetime’s “emergence,” i.e., its relativity, would be fundamentally emotional and fundamentally rooted in the felt experience of suffering. This then allows us to return to Marx’s dissertation yet again.

“Human sensuousness,” he wrote, “is therefore embodied time, the existing reflection of the sensuous world in itself.”[12] We are a part of nature-rendered sensuous where the felt experience of our suffering and subsequent recognition of threat potentially unites us across “distances” in space and time because both may actually emerge from within. But in order for that to be the case, our solidarity with one another must be passionately felt, for it is only in that feeling where our sensuous entanglement definitely exists, collapsing from probabilistic wave function to a particle-based reality that may include the very ions in our brain.

Degrees of Unfreedom, Sensuous Entanglement, and the Emergence of Spacetime

In physics, the phrase “degrees of freedom” refers to the number of variables needed to represent or “specify the state of a system.” Importantly, each of these variables must be “independent,” meaning that they don’t “depend on anything else.”[13] When it comes to intersectional suffering through, if each of the possible “categories of suffering” are thought of as variables, they would be “inter-dependent,” a term referring to what is simultaneously both independent and dependent.

For example, hetero-patriarchy could be thought of as an independent variable sufficient to specify the state of that system, but it is also inter-related to further systems of oppression and numerous “categories of suffering” resulting therefrom. To put it another way, for instance, hetero-patriarchy must be socially reproduced, which occurs within the realm, “category” or “degree” of capitalism and class.

As such, each one of these possible “categories” could be considered as degrees of unfreedom at the intersection of objective systems and subjective experience. In quantum mechanics, the more degrees of freedom in a system, the greater its entanglement entropy. If intersectional suffering as degrees of unfreedom referred to every one of those possible “categories of suffering” and the systems of oppression at their root, this could also specify the state of a quantum system with the highest potential sensuous entanglement, and thus revolutionary passion.

Given the sensuousness of intersectional suffering as a quantum system, spacetime itself may be emergent from this relational entanglement. Experiencing spacetime’s relativity would, therefore, potentially increase the more degrees of unfreedom used to “specify the state of the system.” To further explain, let us consider what Angela Davis referred to in a 2014 interview as the “unbroken line of police violence in the US that takes us all the way back to the days of slavery.” What Minna Salami referred to as “sensuous knowledge” would be central to how that “unbroken line” is experienced. It may also be the very means by which past and present are bound together relationally, becoming the past, present, and, ultimately, our future beyond mere probabilities.

To reiterate, spacetime itself may emerge from the sensuousness of intersectional suffering. This sensuousness may be what “takes us all the way back” and would entail a form of what NASA referred to as “quantum teleportation” beyond so-called “time.” Rather than anywhere “over there,” our past, present, and future may all probabilistically exist “right here” with sensuousness acting as time’s glue through the entanglement entropy of our brains’ connection to a unified quantum state or dimension(s). This quantum state would be like what Susskind and Maldadena first proposed in 2015 with entanglement functioning like wormholes beyond four-dimensional reality.

As psychiatrist Judith Herman argued, “Reliving a traumatic experience, whether in the form of intrusive memories, dreams, or actions, carries with it the emotional intensity of the original event.”[14] But it may be more accurate to say that the “emotional intensity” of the trauma exists beyond what we experience as spacetime. To Herman, recovery “requires immersion in a past experience of frozen time,” one where “the descent into mourning feels like a surrender to tears that are endless.”[15] Time may be “frozen” because the sensuous experience may bind us to a quantum state or dimension(s) that exists beyond our experience of a four-dimensional reality.

Those tears may be endless because the feeling of “descent” may entail connection through a wormhole of its own, one to an interwoven quantum state or dimension(s) that exists throughout all of spacetime and beyond. This state or dimension(s) would be inherently endless. Technically, it would exist everywhere, at every time, nowhere, and at no time simultaneously. It’s only definite existence beyond probabilities, similar to particles in four-dimensional spacetime, would be within our sensuous experiences themselves.

Therefore, sensuous entanglement beyond spacetime would function similar to what Ernst Bloch referred to as a door to “the real dimension of hope.” The quantum state or dimension(s) would be “full of propensity towards something, tendency towards something, latency of something” with an imminent “fulfillment of the intending” in so far as the probability that feelings of solidarity and revolutionary passion grew with the felt experience of “categories of suffering” as degrees of unfreedom. Bloch said this takes us to “a world which is more adequate for us, without degrading suffering, anxiety, self-alienation, nothingness” and it may be the case that our sensuous entanglement with this quantum state or dimension(s) is what actually powers our revolutionary passions.[16]

Degrees of unfreedom as the “categories” of intersectional suffering inform the state of the system that must be abolished, that which must take its place, as well as weave together the fabric of revolutionary passion we need to get “there.” One of the most powerful recent examples of this sensuous entanglement beyond spacetime comes from the May 2021 US Congressional Testimony of Viola Fletcher, a 107 year old survivor of the Tulsa Massacre of 1921. In her words: “I hear the screams. I have lived through the massacre every day.”

Given the emergence or relativity of spacetime, Fletcher’s words may be accurate in a literal sense. She may really still “hear the screams” and not, rather, be recalling the screams she heard in 1921, as the sensuous entanglement of intersectional suffering may exist in a quantum state or dimension(s) beyond spacetime. Similarly, she may really be living through those experiences every day, and have been for the last 100 years. She may have “lived through the massacre every day” because what we experience as the “here” and “now” results from entanglement entropy. Thus, she remains more entangled with “here” and “now” than Tulsa in 1921, but intersectional suffering simultaneously entangles a “past” to the “present,” which is no less a form of lived experience.

From the standpoint of our sensuous entanglement through an interconnected quantum state or dimension(s), all felt experiences of suffering would exist there in one form or another. As such, this means that we would therefore potentially feel others’ suffering when we feel our own, as it’s all simultaneously connected probabilistically every-where and every-time. It would also even mean that those who suffer in what we perceive as the past may similarly feel what we do in the present, including solidarity and revolutionary passion, as well as vice versa. If spacetime itself is fundamentally relational, the felt experience of suffering and subsequent sensuous entanglement may relationally imbue time with its “arrow” in the first place.

Settler LIFE is pathological and the American Dream is a genocidal nightmare precariously upheld by violence alongside an ongoing, subtle threat. However, this is not a sign of strength, but weakness. The society that settler LIFE built is a house of cards that would unravel without that ongoing violence and threat. Against our sensuous entanglement, violence and threat are intentionally meant to foster “cognitive unbinding” and traumatic “disorders.”

That’s because the suffering we experience in the “present” actually goes back centuries, even millennia, and potentially connects us to a power beyond that of bullets and bombs. Indeed, suffering is universal, sensuous entanglement may be fundamental to the universe, and in passionately fighting for revolution, we will increasingly find ourselves at the intersection of “messianic time” and “universal moral significance.”

On Messianic Time and Universal Moral Significance

Living underground in Nazi-occupied France, Walter Benjamin was forced to flee in September of 1940, a few short months after Abram Leon fled Belgium. It wasn’t the first time Walter was forced to pack up and move on short notice, as he’d been on the run now for roughly six years. Notably, he had also just completed his short Theses on the Philosophy of History. In order to assist in the escape, a woman by the name of Lisa Fittko guided he and others through the mountains. In her 2000 book, Escape Through the Pyrenees, she recalled that “apocalyptic atmosphere.”

They’d often hear stories of supposed routes of escape, but most turned out to be fiction. Those days, feeling hopeful was a luxury few could afford. Writing of their journey, she noted Walter’s heart trouble and that he always had to walk slowly. For some reason though, he bothered to bring a cumbersome briefcase with him. In a chapter titled “Old Benjamin,” she recalled a conversation about it. “‘Do you know, this briefcase is most important to me,’ he said. ‘I dare not lose it. The manuscript must be saved. It is more important than I am, more important than myself.’”

But after making it to Spain with hopes of sea voyage to the US, the Spanish government issued a new order that everyone without a French exit visa had to be sent back. Fittko wrote that “he’d prepared for that eventuality in advance: he had had enough morphine with him to take his own life with a deadly overdose.” And with his suicide, the manuscript supposedly disappeared.[17] So let us examine those Theses to better grasp how he may have understood revolution and the relativity of spacetime in his final months on this suffering Earth.

“Not man or men but the struggling, oppressed class itself is the depository of historical knowledge”

“Not man or men but the struggling, oppressed class itself is the depository of historical knowledge,” he wrote. Suffering was a path to knowledge and its historical imprint. Those who suffered could thus potentially become an “avenger that completes the task of liberation in the name of generations of the downtrodden.”

With their social democratic delusions of “progress,” the SPD “thought fit to assign to the working class the role of the redeemer of future generations, in this way cutting the sinews of its greatest strength.” These strivings for universal middle classes built atop settler colonialism was what “made the working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.”[18] After this thesis on the delusion of progress, he wrote of revolution and time.

“The awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action,” like Einstein on time as an illusion. It was bound up with the felt experience of suffering itself. Benjamin understood the role of time in revolution, referring to the important establishment of “a new calendar” as “monuments of a historical consciousness.”

The revolutionary who, in this case, he referred to as “a historical materialist,” is someone who “cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop.” To put it another way, revolution overthrows time as well. In this sense, time thus only “defines the present in which he himself is writing history.” We now know that this may result from sensuous entanglement.

To Benjamin, revolution would “blast open the continuum of history,” which is itself a “chance in the fight for the oppressed past.” What he regarded as a “cognizance” of historical suffering could be used “to blast a specific era out of the homogeneous course of history” because our reality only “contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.” In other words, time emerges from “the struggling, oppressed class itself,” especially in the act of revolution as stubbornly persistent illusions melt away.

Benjamin refers to this as “Messianic time,” what “comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment.” Its shortening “coincides exactly with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe.”[19] Benjamin was referring to humanity as but a momentary blip in the history of the universe. That said, “Messianic time” through revolution imparted meaning and significance beyond what is otherwise our insignificant “stature.”

Did Benjamin grasp the relativity of time during those months because he was, ultimately, so close to his own death? Living under Nazi occupation, death was a constant possibility. It was on his mind to such an extent that he thought to bring enough morphine with him in order to take his own life if, with his ill health, he couldn’t make it to freedom. Unfortunately, as Benjamin himself was constantly faced with the possibility of a torture-ridden demise, he seemed to lack the hope found in many a quantum theorist at the time, who were all afforded relative privilege by comparison.

Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrodinger, and Niels Bohr, for example, all regarded human consciousness as central to the universe itself, a position of much higher “stature” than Benjamin’s views before his long journey to eventual suicide. Be that as it may, when the “stature” of humanity is considered via the necessary role of sensuousness to cause an inherently probabilistic universe to become one of definite particles in the first place, that “abridgment” takes on a far more universal significance.

The late Ernest Becker, who, as a young man born to Jewish immigrant parents joined the US Army and fought to liberate a Nazi extermination camp, wrote a tract in the summer of 1968 titled “Paranoia: The Poetics of the Human Condition.” By this he meant delusional thinking that results from a “mind alone, trying to make sense out of experience for an impoverished, weak, and frightened organism, for an organism that can’t allow itself to relax, laugh, and be careless.”[20] He was thinking like Agnes Heller on feelings or affect, Fromm on affective crippling, as well as Bloch on the potentially “degrading” conditions of suffering and anxiety.

Some people, Becker noted, were more susceptible than others, particularly those who experience “the lopsidedness of the world, the miscarriages of events, the undercurrent of hopelessness of the human condition,” someone who “feels generally insignificant, helpless, overwhelmed by events.” This is in contrast to someone who feels “solidarity and meaningfulness of his own life.”[21] We are probably all experiencing this to one extent or another these days. Benjamin, however, held onto the meaningfulness of his life up to the end.

Paranoid delusions, Becker continued, are a way to “make sense of his precarious position” by attributing “definite motives to definite people” when such connections don’t actually exist.[22] On a large scale, think of the fascist framework advanced under the banner of QAnon and The Great Replacement Theory as fueling these such delusions. In this case though, they are meant to establish a “warrant for genocide.”

Overall, Becker believed that “no person is strong enough to support the meaning of his life unaided by something outside him,” like Fromm on the need for autonomous communal institutions as a “practice of life.” Becker also argued that “this is the last thing the individual will admit to himself, because to admit it means to break away the armored mask of righteous self-assurance that surrounds his whole life-striving,” which would threaten “to push him to the brink of desperation and disintegration.”[23] But the fetish for all that is settler LIFE is based on a foundation of sand in a sandbox draining away on a train racing toward global holocaust.

To help us along the path he believed was necessary, though he used the phrase “primitive and archaic man,” he was speaking affirmatively of Indigenous people who “lived in a universe that was alive, moral, and personal,” in contradistinction to a lifeless and mechanical materialism. This universe is “a ‘Thou’ world” of living related beings and “not an ‘It’ world” of humans as alienated commodities. This is “not a Thou set off over and against man, but a Thou in which he was literally immersed.”[24]

In terms of the mechanical materialism, Becker believed it originated with Democritus, whose “famous atomic theory was a major blow aimed at the universe of personal spirits.” Of course, this was the same atomic theory Marx argued against in his 1841 dissertation, but would later become the basis of so-called “scientific socialism,” which has still yet to emerge from the realm of vulgarity and “classical physics.”

To Becker, Democritus “wanted to show that all is matter and the void, and thereby quiet the terrible anxiousness of his contemporaries.” Much later, “Newton finished the job.” This approach was meant to be affective in terms of providing comfort, yet “gave us a completely material, mechanized world, utterly abstracted, utterly devoid of personal significance to us, emptied of spiritual qualities.” Instead, it’s affect, according to Becker, took a “toll” on us, one which now “illuminates our understanding of paranoia.”

“The simple fact is that we live in an impersonal world, but the more sensitive among us do not like it.” Ultimately, as isolated and alone beings, our sensitivity can be a path to madness, which is why being “maladjusted,” like MLK advocated, is so difficult. It threatens to engulf us at every turn. It could be that this “sensitivity” entails our sensuous entanglement to felt suffering throughout a quantum state or dimension(s) and the relatively of spacetime.

“After all,” Becker continued, “what bothers us most about our strange career on this planet is that our lives are subject to complete catastrophe by the simplest accident, the merest chance occurrence.”[25] Therefore, people tend to believe “there must be a multitude of conniving and evil people” because “we simply cannot allow ourselves to believe in and to live with disinterested, bureaucratic evil.”[26] That said, there are many who seem highly interested in evil. As many now say about the tactics of the far-right: “cruelty is the point.”

Today we find ourselves in an “apocalyptic atmosphere” of climate catastrophes and resurgent fascism leading us down a path of potential extinction. As Agnes Heller put it, “never has danger been so great.” In order to face reality for what it is, we must recognize that we are living through the beginning of what is a potentially accelerating new Dark Age that could very well be fundamentally worse than the last. We could be witnessing the beginning of a global climate holocaust that may kill off over a hundred times more than those who were murdered at the monstrous hands of the Nazis. It could bring an end to life itself. This is why Yale historian Timothy Snyder titled the book, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning.

Therefore, as Becker put it, we are similarly “at the point where Judeo-Christianity picked it up at the demise of the Ancient world: namely, how to give back to each individual life the deep sense that it had universal moral significance.”[27] We must therefore recognize the possibility that the universe is more than “matter and the void,” that it may be striving for communal life. Our “stature” in the quantum universe may be one of Gods, as our suffering and sensuous entanglement may be more fundamental to the universe than spacetime itself.

The Commune as Covenant Beyond the Cult of Settler LIFE

We turn again to Ernst Bloch, who began his brief chapter on Marx’s dissertation with Epicurus on the concept of friendship.[28] Marx wrote that Epicurus believed in “the political domain there is the covenant, in the social domain friendship, which is praised as the highest good.”[29] This notion of friendship was like what Marx referred to here as an interpersonal material relation avoiding “pain and confusion” on the path of “atarxia.” As for the covenant in the “political domain,” Marx included a footnote with a passage from the ancient biographer Diogenes Laertius who is most known for his ten-book work, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers.

Laertius makes it appear that Epicurus viewed covenants much like an ancient or pre-modern constitution or social contract. As we know from Marx’s subsequent writings, he himself believed the constitutions of bourgeois republics were “deceptive masks.”[30] But this quote from Laertius also provides a basis for re-conceptualizing a covenant as a communal constitution, “an agreement made in reciprocal intercourse” for the purpose of “providing against the infliction or suffering of harm.”[31]

Thus, the commune acts against the “catastrophes,” as Becker put it, that could otherwise befall each of us on the path to revolution. To put it in Bloch’s words, we are thus “fortified with our suffering” against that which stands alien and threateningly opposed.[32] As such, we must rapidly shift our primary covenant away from settler LIFE, which is an ongoing cult of Lebensraum leading down the path of extinction, and toward communal revolution, which brings us back to Kim TallBear.

“I stand in alliance with relatives—both human and other-than-human—who suffer across the planet from the violence that is the American Dream.” TallBear argued that a central part of this “alliance” is to “undercut settler (property) relations.”[33] To TallBear, this “alliance” is about “making kin as an alternative to liberal multi-culturalism.” It is meant to help transform “people into familiars in order to relate,” what is otherwise presented as “a creative alternative to nationalist assertions.”[34]

However, this must not entail assertions of “ownership claims,” as though any of this is a supposed path to Indigeneity. In TallBear’s words, this would amount to “non-Indigenous claims to our representations, histories and ancestors,” which would thus “affect a relationship of ownership or possession with our biologicals (i.e., blood, DNA, and lineal biological descent narratives) and with place.” This alliance requires “active relating” for land repatriation and the abolition “of private property, co-produced with nuclear family forms” or, in other words, by us pursuing a path of “settler ontocide.”[35]

At the core of “settler mythology” is an “animacy hierarchy” of “greater or less aliveness attributed to humans over other-than-humans, to animals over plants, etc.” This “also de-animates many humans, including Indigenous and Black people, by placing them below the Western and often male subject.” TallBear also rejected “binaries of life versus not life and humans versus nature,” which are central to “the grand narrative of American exceptionalism.” Instead, they advocate:

Thinking in terms of being in relation, I propose an explicitly spatial narrative of caretaking relations—both human and other-than-human—as an alternative to the temporally progressive settler-colonial American Dreaming that is ever co-constituted with deadly hierarchies of life.

Rather than “hierarchies of life,” TallBear encourages us to view this relatedness spatially, as “a relational web” that is inherently communal. This spatial relation is meant to help settlers focus on our “obligations here and now,” while TallBear also believes in “obligations across the generations, or over time if one is attached to that idea.” When it comes to spacetime as a stubbornly persistent illusion, TallBear argues that it exists as “material connectedness among many generations” defined as such:

…those whose bodies may now/still exist within organismically defined understandings of life, those entities that do not meet that definition, and other bodies whose materiality has been transferred back to the earth and out into that web of relation, or whose bodies are not yet formed of already existing matter.[36]

To put it another way, the universe is fundamentally relational and spacetime is emergent. With TallBear’s arguments on a oneness of matter striving toward sensuous, interrelated life, we are able to reinterpret Hawking and Mlodinow on quantum mechanics. As they put it in 2010, human theories emerged as a way to understand and even attempt to have some control over “violent acts of nature” and other “calamities.”[37] Yet, as powerful as we think we have become as humans supposedly independent from the rest of nature, our theories are still struggling to catch up to what is now an “apocalyptic atmosphere” unfolding around us.

Revolution in the Multiverse

In The Grand Design, Hawking and Mlodinow argued that it “is not only the peculiar characteristics of our solar system that seem oddly conducive to the development of human life but also the characteristics of our entire universe.” If the laws of physics like Planck’s constant or Einstein’s cosmological constant, for instance, “were altered by only modest amounts, the universe would be qualitatively different, and in many cases unsuitable for the development of life.” They actually go still further in their assertions of what many would view as bordering on the fundamentally religious.

“Our universe and its laws appear to have a design that both is tailor-made to support us and, if we are to exist, leaves little room for alteration.” Thankfully, they reject the idea of so-called “intelligent design, with the unstated but implied understanding that the designer is God.” Instead, they argue “that in the same way that the environmental coincidences of our solar system were rendered unremarkable by the realization that billions of such systems exist, the fine-tunings in the laws of nature can be explained by the existence of multiple universes.”[38] But it is here where they contradict themselves from earlier because it isn’t entirely “in the same way” and certainly none of this seems “unremarkable.”

They had already argued in favor of what’s called “Feynman sum over histories,” which would mean that the multiverse does not necessarily entail infinite universes existing in the same way as the one we inhabit with each other. The multiverse only exists probabilistically. The universe we inhabit exists as the “collapsed” form of a wave function that encompasses all the possibilities inherent in all possible universes at once. The decoherence of a wave function, according to Feynman, ultimately “collapses” into the most probable reality where the “present” meets the “future.”

We thus exist in the “collapsed” form of the universal wave function, the most all-encompassing wave function possible. This is the most probable universe in terms of resulting in life capable of sensuously interacting with the rest of the universe itself, which requires these particular laws of nature to be as they are. As outlined earlier, sensuousness is required for an objective particle-based reality in the first place. All other universes in the multiverse would still therefore exist, but only in probabilistic form.

Feynman’s “view of quantum reality,” as Hawking and Mlodinow put it, “is crucial in understanding the theories we will soon present,” but they didn’t seem to always actually follow their own advice.[39] Unlike solar systems, different universes within the infinite multiverse exist only probabilistically. These probabilistic universes collapse into the universe we experience as our shared objective reality.

Other solar systems exist in this universe in similar probabilistic fashion, but only until sensuousness coverts them into particles within this four-dimensional spacetime. To this point, as Hawking and Mlodinow themselves put it, “the number of space dimensions is also fixed by our existence. That is because, according to the laws of gravity, it is only in three dimensions that stable elliptical orbits are possible.”[40]

In terms of the overall “string theory” they advanced in this book, reality is composed of a total of ten dimensions. But these six “extra dimensions are curled up into what is called the internal space, as opposed to the three-dimensional space that we experience in everyday life.”[41] Strings are really just patterns of vibration constituting the building blocks of sub-atomic particles, of all matter, and every force. As Carroll put it in Something Deeply Hidden, “In quantum mechanics, the world is fundamentally wavy” and what was perceive actually “comes from the particular way those waves are able to vibrate.”[42]

As for string theory more broadly, there are five different approaches. Then it turned out that each of these approaches, all looking at aspects of vibrating strings in a universe of ten dimensions, were actually related to one another via something referred to as an inherent “duality” or “symmetry.” This then led to their unification under the label of “m-theory,” which then added one more to the six dimensions of “internal space,” now for a total of seven.

These seven dimensions are, of course, in addition to the usual three dimensions for space and one dimension for time, now for a total of eleven. With the advancement of m-theory came a new way of conceptualizing strings in multi-dimensional form, signified with the word “brane” or “d-brane” where the letter “d” refers to the number of dimensions. These multi-dimensional strings or branes thus potentially vibrate through all dimensions. Put simply, “dimensions are how we experience the world,” but most think the dimensions of “internal space” are too small for us to actually experience.[43] That may prove fundamentally incorrect though.

As Lanza and Podolskiy’s argued in their 2016 article “On decoherence in quantum gravity,” published in the same journal that published Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity, the so-called arrow of time masks the fundamental relativity of spacetime itself. They expanded this argument in their May 2021 article in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.

Following Parisi and Sourlas on “supersymmetry,” they showed that the only way to maintain the requirement of four-dimensional spacetime, which is the realm of classical physics, including gravity and Einstein’s theories of relativity, with Hawking et al on the broader dimensional requirements of quantum mechanics, was with the presence of observers. To put this another way, in order to arrive at what Hawking referred to as a “theory of everything,” we need to add sensuous beings with memory who are repeatedly observing the system.

Again, Mlodinow argued in his 2022 book that consciousness is inherently Emotional. Therefore, those so-called “observers” required for the theory of everything are not lifeless, mechanical, scientific robots devoid of feeling. Without sensuousness, they still cannot explain how the realm of quantum physics meets the realm of classical physics. But this hasn’t exactly made its way throughout the inter-related fields of science. Perhaps it’s because white heterosexual men still remain dominant across STEM fields.

In theoretical physicist Henry Strapp’s terminology, our sensuous entanglement would be the “causal origins” maintaining the “rate” of quantum consciousness necessary for a shared objective reality to collapse from its probabilistic wave or cloud-like existence in the first place. And in the words of Kim TallBear, this would be a universal “web of relation” beyond space, time, and the “animacy hierarchy” inherent to “the grand narrative of American exceptionalism.”

The capacity for sensuous experience exists through the five interrelated senses of touch, sight, hearing, smell, and taste. This also potentially includes two more senses, that of external spatial awareness or proprioception and the sense of the internal state of our body, or interoception. What’s more, as was briefly explored above, these seven senses operate at the quantum level.

It would thus seem as though we do not simply cause the universe to decohere from its quantum wave function to definite particles through our sensuous experience of spacetime alone. Our sensuous experience of the universe is emotional and not mechanical, so this same decoherence would conceivably occur throughout those “internal space” dimensions as well. These dimensions may be “curled up” and very small but that does not mean we are unable to experience them. On the contrary, given that our sensuousness is not simply of the senses, but in the broader sense that Marx (both Jenny and Karl) meant it, this may provide further answers.

On the Hopeful Imminence of Revolution

As sensuous beings, we feel what we suffer and, as a result, are passionate where this passion acts as our “essential force.” This emotionality is something we always experience as being in our own “internal spaces” even if we also simultaneously express it outwardly. The felt experience of suffering may catalyze a form of quantum entanglement beyond relative spacetime. But, fundamentally speaking, how is it that this entanglement can exist without interfering with laws of classical physics, like gravity? It would only be possible if “quantum teleportation,” as NASA calls it, doesn’t actually “travel” through spacetime at all. It would have to occur beyond spacetime through the quantum dimensions of “internal space.”

Moreover, this suffering and passionate sensuousness could be what causes the inherently wavy universe to “collapse” into objective reality through strings or “d-branes” in the first place. This is not to assume only human beings exist in this manner, as non-human or other than human animals share this sensuousness with us, in one form or another, as do plants. Even inorganic matter is part of this “relational web” of “material interconnectedness,” as TallBear put it. That said, the felt experience of suffering and subsequent perception of threats to life itself would then impart purpose to the universe as that which ultimately holds everything together. We are now going beyond matter and the void to feel ourselves “engaged in the ontological and historical vocation,” as Brazilian theorist Paolo Freire put it back in 1970.[44]

Looking back again to NASA, “it is better to think of the Big Bang as the simultaneous appearance of space everywhere in the universe,” which is how we make sense of the fact that it would have had to “travel” faster than the speed of light to exist as it does today. This is, as Hawking and Mlodinow put it, the origin of the universe as “spontaneous creation.”[45] We must also remember that just like the fact that we are made of stardust, in their words, “we are the product of quantum fluctuations in the very early universe.”[46] Ultimately, this is because the entire universe remains entangled, spacetime is emergent, and everything is also probabilistically “here” and “now.”

It is within the inherently intersectional felt experience of suffering that we are most able to shatter the persistent illusion of spacetime. This is because, when “I hear the screams,” as Viola Fletcher does, life itself is most powerfully reaching throughout all dimensions, passionately attempting to unify everything so that life may persevere. It is a yearning within life that exposes this material interconnectedness everywhere, yet it is only possible to grasp this oneness through the infinitely diverse experiences of beings who sensuously suffer, subsequently recognize threat, and feel the passionate striving to overcome.

Thus, while the interconnected crises of resurgent fascism, climate catastrophe, and capitalist collapse escalate around us, we return to Marx’s analysis of French society during its decline and fall from republic to dictatorship in December 1851. He wrote that “in this vortex of the movement, in this torment of historical unrest, in this dramatic ebb and flow of revolutionary passions, hopes, and disappointments, the different classes of French society had to count their epochs of development in weeks when they had previously counted them in half-centuries.”[47]

In our passionate upheavals, our figurative hearts align, including at the quantum level, and as a suffering Earth.

This is to say that no matter how dark the future may seem, we are united in the suffering of our human and non-human relatives through a relational web we weave ourselves by remaining open and vulnerable to the potentially infinite power of a quantum state that exists beyond space and time. In our passionate upheavals, our figurative hearts align, including at the quantum level, and as a suffering Earth.

We may have the capacity to unite all the patterns of vibration that make up this universe, throughout every probabilistic multiverse, everywhere in spacetime, and can harness that as our passionate power for revolution. The supposed superiority of civilization is, like spacetime itself, nothing more than a stubbornly persistent illusion. Life itself may be inherently messianic and, with enough hope, revolution is imminent because sensuous suffering may be fundamental to a universe itself striving for a communal future.

NOTES

[1] Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, “Introduction” in How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017). P. 4.

[2] Ibid, 7.

[3] Minna Salami, Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone, (London: Zed Books, 2020).

[4] Zetkin, “Fascism Must Be Defeated,” in Clara Zetkin Selected Writings, 174.

[5] Hawkings and Mlodinow, “Alternative Histories” in The Grand Design, Ebook Edition.

[6] Ibid, “Choosing Our Universe” in The Grand Design, Ebook Edition.

[7] Robert Lanza, Matej Pavsic, and Bob Berman, “Traveling in a Timeless Universe” in The Grand Biocentric Design: How Life Creates Reality, (Dallas: BenBella Books Inc, 2020). Ebook Edition.

[8] Ibid, “Traveling in a Timeless Universe” in The Grand Biocentric Design, Ebook Edition.

[9] Sean Carroll, Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime, (London: Oneworld Publications, 2019). P. 250.

[10] Ibid, 297-304.

[11] Lee Smolin, “Area and Information” in Three Roads to Quantum Gravity, (New York: Basic Books, 2017). Ebook Edition,

[12] Schafer, The First Writings of Karl Marx, 134.

[13] Carroll, Something Deeply Hidden, 82 and 277.

[14] Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 42.

[15] Ibid, 195.

[16] Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope: Volume 1, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995). P. 18.

[17] Lisa Fittko, “Old Benjamin” in Escape Through the Pyrenees, (Massachusetts: Plunkett Lake Press, 2020). Ebook Edition.

[18] Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, 260.

[19] Ibid, 261-263.

[20] Ernest Becker, “Paranoia: The Poetics of the Human Condition” in Angels in Armor, 123-124.

[21] Ibid, 125.

[22] Ibid, 126.

[23] Ibid, 130.

[24] Ibid, 136-137.

[25] Ibid, 138.

[26] Ibid, 139-140.

[27] Ibid, 141.

[28] Bloch, On Karl Marx, 153.

[29] Schafer, The First Writings of Karl Marx, 118.

[30] Karl Marx, Class Struggles in France 1848-1850, 54.

[31] Schafer, The First Writings of Karl Marx, 118 & 173, Footnote 93.

[32] Bloch, On Karl Marx, 38.

[33] Kim TallBear, Caretaking Relations, Not American Dreaming, Kalfou, Volume 6, Issue 1 (Spring 2019). P. 38.

[34] Ibid, 37.

[35] Ibid, 32-33.

[36] Ibid, 25-26.

[37] Hawking and Mlodinow, “The Rule of Law” in The Grand Design, Ebook Edition.

[38] Ibid, “The Apparent Miracle” in The Grand Design, Ebook Edition.

[39] Ibid, “Alternative Histories” in The Grand Design, Ebook Edition.

[40] Ibid, “The Apparent Miracle” in The Grand Design, Ebook Edition.

[41] Ibid, “The Theory of Everything” in The Grand Design, Ebook Edition.

[42] Carroll, Something Deeply Hidden, 72-73.

[43] Complicating matters further, “two-time physics” postulates two dimensions for time, “a curved plane interwoven into the fabric of the ‘normal’ dimensions,” which would fundamentally eliminate any linearity. More recently still, the theory of “spacekime” postulates five dimensions for time. Philip Perry, “There are 2 dimensions of time, theoretical physicist states,” Big Think, May 9^th, 2017. https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/there-are-in-fact-2-dimensions-of-time-one-theoretical-physicist-states/; Ibid, “‘Spacekime theory’ could speed up research and heal the rift in physics,” Big Think, March 30^th, 2021. https://bigthink.com/hard-science/spacekime-theory/

[44] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2005). P. 65-66.

[45] Hawking and Mlodinov, “The Grand Design” in The Grand Design, Ebook Edition.

[46] Ibid, “Choosing Our Universe” in The Grand Design, Ebook Edition.

[47] Marx, Class Struggles in France, 91.

Atlee McFellin is a former restaurant worker living in Cleveland, Ohio and originally from Battle Creek, Michigan. He was raised in no small part by his late maternal grandmother who was born into a middle-class Catholic family and grew up in Hitler’s Germany. Atlee’s writings can be found online at rupture.capital.

He is a member of the Cleveland chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), DSA’s national Mutual Aid Working Group, and CounterPower, an organization dedicated to, among other things, building a revolutionary commune of communes. Over a decade ago, before becoming disgusted by the non-profit industrial complex, he worked for the Democracy Collaborative on the Evergreen Cooperatives, the American Sustainable Business Council, and Green for All. He was also board co-chair of the New Economy Network and a founding board member of the New Economy Coalition.