Forensic Socialism

1. Introduction: The Crisis of the Visible

The contemporary political Left finds itself in a crisis of legitimacy that is not merely electoral, but ontological. It is a 'crisis of the visible'. For the better part of the twentieth century, the progressive project was anchored in the tangible bedrock of material reality: the factory floor, the breadline, the tenement, the physical body of the worker, and the measurable extraction of value from labour. These were 'public objects', visible in the light of day, quantifiable in their misery, and remediable through the material redistribution of resources. They constituted a res publica - a 'public thing' - that could be debated, audited, and transformed in the open forum.

However, a 'great substitution' has occurred. The bedrock of material reality - governed by the metabolic necessities of the human organism and the thermodynamic constraints of production - has been exchanged for a fluid, subjective terrain dominated by 'idealist abstractions'. This retreat marks a catastrophic convergence where the Left’s embrace of 'critical social justice' (focused on language, identity, and invisible power structures - a sharp deviation from the liberal social justice of the 20th century that prioritized universal rights and verifiable material redistribution) mirrors the Right’s reliance on 'neoliberal theology' (focused on the invisible hand and the unknowable market). Both ideologies have retreated from the 'forum' - the Roman concept of the public square where evidence must be placed on the table - into the 'realm of the unverifiable', a shadowy domain where reality is determined by belief, feeling, and unfalsifiable narratives.

While the Right's reliance on the 'invisible hand' is an expected artifact of its theological origins - a secularized providentialism designed to naturalise inequality - the Left's adoption of linguistic constructivism represents a catastrophic betrayal of its historic mission. By rejecting universalism for particularism, and material redistribution for linguistic recognition, the Left has fractured the solidarity of labour and distracted itself from the central conflict between capital and the working class. The cost of this betrayal is measured in the resurgence of populist nationalism. Into the vacuum created by a Left that refuses to defend the domestic material interests of the national proletariat - specifically wages, healthcare, housing security, and public services - a reactionary Right has stepped, offering a twisted form of protectionism to a working class abandoned by the 'progressive' elite.

This paper serves as the theoretical substantiation of Forensic Socialism. It rigorously excavates the philosophical lineages that define this position, separating the 'forensic' tradition (which demands traceability, physiological realism, and public evidence) from the 'obscurantist' tradition (which relies on hidden gods, invisible structures, and linguistic idealism). By tracing the history of the public object from Thales to Marx, and contrasting it with the 'retreat into the mind' from Descartes to Butler, I establish that the only viable future for the Left lies in a radical return to the material. This is not a call for a crude empiricism, but for a forensic accounting of reality - an approach that treats justice not as a metaphysical virtue, but as a mechanical correction to the specific, traceable mechanisms of extraction that damage the collective physiology of the citizenry.

The Argument Structure

The paper advances this proposition through five distinct stages of excavation and reconstruction:

• Section 2 uncovers the archaeology of the public object, tracing how the ancient invention of the forum created the first space for material verification against the power of priests and kings.
• Section 3 exposes the theological roots of modern Right-wing economics, demonstrating that the 'invisible hand' is a literal descendant of divine providence designed to demand faith rather than proof.
• Section 4 critiques the Left's disastrous 'idealist turn', arguing that the shift from material economics to linguistic constructivism has disarmed the proletariat.
• Section 5 reassembles the 'forensic lineage', recovering the tools of Marx, Timpanaro, and contemporary forensic science to provide a sturdy ontological foundation.
• Finally, Section 6 defines the application of Forensic Socialism, distinguishing it from past failures ('Soviet teleology' and 'technocratic opacity') and outlining a new politics of 'traceability', physiological realism, and the 'universalist imperative'.

2. The Archaeology of the Public Object

To understand the necessity of a forensic approach, we must first understand the discovery of the 'real world'. The concept of a shared, objective reality that exists independently of human belief is not a default setting of the human mind; it was a specific intellectual invention, forged in the polemics of the ancient Mediterranean. This section traces the birth of the public object - the entity that can be placed in the centre of the forum for all to see.

Thales and the Unverifiable

The history of Western materialist thought begins with a rejection of theocratic explanation. In the 6th century BCE, Thales of Miletus stood on the Ionian coast and made a proposition that, while scientifically primitive, was philosophically revolutionary: "All things are water" [1]. Prior to Thales, the explanation for natural phenomena - earthquakes, droughts, the movement of stars - lay in the caprice of 'hidden gods'. If the ground shook, it was Poseidon in a rage; if the crops failed, it was Demeter in mourning. These explanations were cryptic; they relied on invisible agents whose motives were private and accessible only to a priestly caste through ritual or revelation [3].

Thales’s assertion that the arché (the originating principle) was water constituted the first forensic act in history. By claiming the world was made of a physical substance that followed consistent rules, rules that could be observed by anyone with eyes, he secularized nature. Water is visible, tangible, and public. It evaporates, condenses, and freezes in ways that are predictable and measurable. By anchoring reality in a material substance, Thales transformed the world from a theater of divine mystery into a public object subject to empirical scrutiny [4].

The Atomists and the Swerve

The materialist project was deepened by the Atomists - Leucippus, Democritus, and later Epicurus - who provided the first forensic accounting of the universe. Their fundamental maxim was a direct challenge to all forms of idealism: "Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion" [5]. Democritus distinguished between 'bastard knowledge' (derived from subjective sensation and convention) and 'legitimate knowledge' (derived from the understanding of atomic reality). When he stated, "By convention sweet is sweet, bitter is bitter... but in reality there are atoms and the void" [6], he was identifying the difference between social constructs (what I term idealist abstractions) and material reality.

Epicurus refined this materialism to include the concept of the clinamen or 'swerve'. He posited that atoms do not merely fall in deterministic, parallel lines (which would imply a fatalistic universe), but occasionally swerve from their course [7]. This swerve was not a mystical intervention but a material capability inherent in matter itself, introducing indeterminacy and free will without appealing to a soul. Crucially, Epicurus used this physics to dismantle the 'terror of the heavens'. He argued that the gods, if they existed, were made of atoms like everything else and lived in the intermundia (the spaces between worlds), entirely indifferent to human affairs [8]. This was a political liberation. If the gods are indifferent material beings, then they do not punish us, they do not demand sacrifices, and they do not ordain kings.

Lucretius

The Roman poet Lucretius, in his epic De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), codified this lineage into a treatise against religio (superstition/binding). Lucretius vividly depicted religion as a monster "lowering its head from the regions of the sky" to crush mankind [9]. He celebrated Epicurus as the man who "dared to lift up his mortal eyes" against this terror. Perhaps most radically, Lucretius argued that the mind and soul (animus and anima) are biological, composed of "very minute, fine, and tiny particles" [10]. This physiological realism anticipates my insistence on the citizen as an organism. If the soul is material, it is mortal; it dies with the body. This seemingly bleak conclusion is actually the ground of materialist solidarity. Since there is no afterlife, this life - the material conditions of our biological existence - is the only terrain that matters. Justice must be achieved here, in the metabolic reality of the present, not deferred to a heavenly future [11].

The Roman Forum

The term 'forensic' derives from the Latin forensis, meaning "pertaining to the forum" [12]. The Roman forum was not merely a marketplace; it was the site of public verification. In the Roman legal tradition, championed by figures like Cicero, a claim could not stand on authority alone; it required probatio (proof) and evidentia (clarity).

In his prosecution of Gaius Verres, the corrupt governor of Sicily (70 BCE), Cicero demonstrated the power of the forensic method against elite impunity. Verres had looted the province, confident that his aristocratic status and bribery would protect him. Cicero did not rely on abstract appeals to 'justice' or 'morality' in the vacuum; he conducted a forensic audit. He traveled to Sicily for 110 days, collected ledgers, interviewed witnesses, measured the grain that was stolen, and gathered physical evidence of the theft of artworks [13]. When he presented this mountain of material evidence in the forum, Verres’s defence collapsed. This episode illustrates the core pillar of Forensic Socialism: the 'standard of traceability'. Corruption and exploitation are not vague 'vibes' or 'structures'; they are specific material acts - the movement of grain, art, and coin from one set of hands to another.

While Cicero represented the legalistic side of the forum, the Gracchus brothers (Tiberius and Gaius, active 133-121 BCE) represented its materialist imperative. They recognized that the Roman Republic’s legitimacy was crumbling because the biological basis of the citizenry was being destroyed. The enclosure of ager publicus (public land) by wealthy oligarchs had displaced the free peasantry, replacing them with slave labour and creating a mass of landless urban poor [15]. The Gracchi’s response was not to preach about 'dignity' in the abstract, but to pass the Lex Sempronia Agraria - a forensic redistribution of specific plots of land.

3. The Theological Turn of Capital

I argue that the Right relies on the 'invisible hand', a concept that functions as a secular theology. Research confirms that this is not a metaphor but a literal genealogy. The architecture of modern capitalism is built on a displaced providentialism, where the 'hidden god' of the theology is renamed 'the market'.

Adam Smith

Adam Smith is often secularized by modern economists as a rationalist, but his work is deeply rooted in Stoic and Calvinist theology. The 'invisible hand' appears only three times in his work, but its function is consistent: it is the agency of divine providence [17]. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith explicitly links the invisible hand to the distribution of necessaries. He argues that the rich, despite their selfishness, are led by an invisible hand to make "nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions" [19]. This is a theological justification for inequality. It asserts that a hidden, benevolent force ensures survival regardless of human greed. Scholars have noted that Smith’s invisible hand corresponds to the Stoic concept of pronoia (providence) and the Calvinist idea of God's secret governance of the world [20].

Hayek and Ignorance

Friedrich Hayek radicalized this theology into an epistemology of ignorance. His concept of 'spontaneous order' (catallaxy) rests on the assertion that the economy is too complex for any human mind to comprehend or plan [21]. Hayek argued that economic information is dispersed and tacit, known only to individuals in specific times and places. Therefore, any attempt to forensically audit or plan the economy (socialism) is an act of "fatal conceit" [22]. Crucially, Hayek demands submission to this unknowable force. He argues that we must accept the outcomes of the market - even if they cause suffering - because the 'spontaneous order' is superior to any designed order. This is a demand for faith. As research indicates, "Hayek's own account of spontaneous order relies on faith in the workings of the market, and submission to unintelligible market forces" [23].

Agamben and Economic Theology

Giorgio Agamben’s research into 'economic theology' provides the capstone to this critique. He argues that modern power has two poles: the 'kingdom' (sovereignty/law) and the 'glory' (economy/management). Modernity is the triumph of the economy - a management of life that operates through a 'mystery' [24]. Agamben traces the genealogy of the term oikonomia from the management of the household to the theological management of the world by God. He argues that the 'invisible hand' is simply the secularized form of this providential management [25].

4. The Idealist Turn of the Left

The tragedy of the modern Left is that it did not challenge this neoliberal theology with forensic materialism. Instead, it retreated into its own form of idealism. Influenced by the 'retreat into the mind' and the 'linguistic turn', the Left substituted structures of feeling for modes of production, effectively mirroring the Right's obfuscation.

Descartes to Kant

The 'exile of reality' began with the abandonment of the forum for the private theater of the mind. By doubting the external world and retreating to the cogito ("I think, therefore I am"), Descartes severed the subject from the material world. He established a dualism where the 'mind' (res cogitans) is distinct from and superior to the 'body' (res extensa) [26]. This created the intellectual habit of prioritizing internal states over external conditions. Kant sealed the exit by distinguishing between phenomena (things as they appear to us) and noumena (things-in-themselves). Kant argued we can never know the ding an sich (thing-in-itself); we only know our perception of it, filtered through the categories of the mind [27]. This doctrine is the ancestor of the modern claim that reality is 'socially constructed'.

Hegel and Stirner

Hegel totalized this idealism, viewing history not as the struggle of biological organisms for survival, but as the unfolding of 'spirit' (geist). For Hegel, the state was "the march of God on earth" [28]. Max Stirner, a Young Hegelian, launched a radical critique of this in The Ego and Its Own. He argued that concepts like 'God', 'state', and 'morality' were 'spooks' (spuk) or 'fixed ideas' that possessed individuals [29]. In The German Ideology, Marx devotes hundreds of pages to mocking Stirner as "Saint Max". Marx’s critique is crucial: Stirner thought he could banish the spooks just by changing his consciousness (an idealist error). Marx argued that these 'ghosts' arise from material social relations. You cannot exorcise the state by thinking it away; you must destroy the material base (capitalist production) that necessitates the state [30].

Post-Structuralism

The modern 'critical' turn represents a reversion to a pre-Marxian idealism, where language and culture replace the material base. Jacques Derrida’s assertion il n'y a pas de hors-texte (there is no outside-text) [31] functioned politically as a trap door. It allowed the Left to stop looking at the referent (the starving body) and obsess over the sign (the discourse). Michel Foucault argued that 'truth' is not a correspondence to reality but a production of power regimes [32]. While effective for analyzing prisons, this epistemology dissolves the public object. If truth is just an effect of power, then the worker cannot claim their exploitation is an objective fact; it is merely a competing narrative.

The Professional-Managerial Stratum

This idealist turn toward language and discourse is not politically neutral; it serves the specific class interests of the professional-managerial class (PMC). This class, defined by its possession of credentials and cultural capital, derives its power from the management of language, symbols, and social norms [33]. By centering politics on 'discourse', 'privilege', and 'implicit bias' - concepts that require endless interpretation and training by experts - the PMC secures its own role as the arbiter of justice.

This approach ontologically fractures the citizenry. As Adolph Reed Jr. and Walter Benn Michaels argue, the current focus on 'disparity' rather than 'exploitation' essentially accepts the neoliberal economic order, merely demanding that the 1% be demographically representative of the population [34]. Identity politics functions as a mechanism of division, fracturing the proletariat into non-overlapping silos of subjective experience.

This reliance on 'identity' necessitates the creation of theoretical abstractions to maintain class cohesion. Concepts such as 'patriarchy' function within this strata not as precise descriptors of legal impediments, but as theological ether—an invisible, all-pervasive sin that requires constant confession but allows for no material redemption. Like the invisible hand, patriarchy explains everything and therefore audits nothing. It serves to obscure specific, traceable mechanisms of economic disadvantage (such as the lack of paid parental leave) behind a veil of metaphysical guilt. This theological mechanism is perfectly replicated in the discourse on race. The imposition of collective 'white guilt' functions not as a tool of justice, but as an evasion of forensic accountability. As Hannah Arendt warned, "confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits" [50]. By diffusing responsibility onto an entire demographic category, the specific mechanisms of exploitation—and the specific individuals who profit from them—remain hidden and unpunished.

5. The Forensic Lineage

Forensic Socialism claims its lineage from thinkers who refused to enter the domain of the unverifiable. They asserted the primacy of the material, the biological, and the traceable.

Marx as Forensic Accountant

Karl Marx is often taught as a philosopher, but Capital is primarily a work of forensic accounting. Marx did not deduce capitalism from abstract principles; he excavated it from the Blue Books - the reports of the British Factory Inspectors [37]. He relied on empirical data regarding hours worked, accidents, and wages to construct his theory of surplus value [38]. Marx described capital as "dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour" [39], a precise forensic description of the transfer of life energy into dead capital.

Timpanaro and Biology

The Italian Marxist Sebastiano Timpanaro, in On Materialism, argued that Western Marxism had forgotten the 'passive element' of experience: the fact that humans are biological entities subject to gravity, disease, age, and death [40]. Timpanaro asserted that biology is a limit, not a construct. "Communism does not imply... a decisive triumph over the biological frailty of man" [41].

Bhaskar and Critical Realism

Roy Bhaskar provided the ontological armor for this return. His critical realism distinguishes between the 'empirical' (what we experience), the 'actual' (events that happen), and the 'real' (the generative mechanisms that cause events) [42]. This 'stratified reality' allows us to claim that structures of exploitation are real mechanisms, not just 'ideas'.

Forensic Architecture

The research group Forensic Architecture, led by Eyal Weizman, operationalizes the Roman concept of forensis: "The Roman forum was a multidimensional space of negotiation and truth-finding in which humans and objects participated together" [43]. By making dead objects (rubble, pixels) "speak" in the forum, they reverse the forensic gaze - turning it from the state policing the citizen to the citizen auditing the state.

Zucman and Forensic Economics

Gabriel Zucman represents the economic wing of this lineage. His work on tax havens relies on matching trade datasets to find 'missing wealth' [44]. His finding - that significant portions of global wealth are held offshore - is a forensic fact that converts the abstract feeling of inequality into a traceable mechanism of theft.

6. Forensic Socialism

A New Synthesis

The historical moment demands that the Left transcend the fragmented trenches of the 'culture war' and unify around a new, updated form of socialism. We can no longer afford to rely on the exhausted models of the 20th century, nor the divisive identity paradigms of the recent past. We require a politics that is effective for the current time - an era defined by surveillance capitalism, ecological collapse, and extreme wealth concentration. This effectiveness cannot come from moralizing (which is subjective) but only from verifying (which is objective). Forensic Socialism is not a new dogma, but a new methodology. It unifies the working class not by asking them to share the same feelings, but by demonstrating they are subject to the same material laws. By moving from 'identity' to 'evidence', we build a coalition that is immune to the distractions of the cultural elite and grounded in the undeniable reality of the physical world.

Physiological Realism

The starting point of materialist politics must be the citizen defined not by their fluctuating identity, but by their absolute biology.

The principle: The citizen is a biological organism with metabolic needs and limits. The body is not a 'text' to be read but a thermodynamic engine to be fueled. This realism necessitates an acknowledgement of sex as a material, biological category, distinct from the linguistic performance of gender. Just as we cannot deconstruct the metabolic need for calories, we cannot deconstruct the biological reality of sexual dimorphism. To deny this material base is to abandon the very ground upon which the protection of women and the rights of mothers—as physiological entities—are built.

Allostatic load: To measure injustice, I propose utilizing allostatic load - the cumulative physiological wear and tear on the body due to chronic stress [45]. Poverty is not just a lack of money; it is a biological scar, a measurable degradation of the immune and cardiovascular systems. This is the 'social exposome' [46]. By anchoring politics in the body, we create a universal baseline for justice that cannot be deconstructed.

The Standard of Traceability

With the biological baseline established, we apply the forensic method to economic causality.

The principle: Every social outcome must be traceable to a specific material mechanism or actor. We reject 'action at a distance' or vague 'structural' complaints.

The audit: Policy is not 'moralizing'; it is 'auditing'. As Marx engaged with the Blue Books, the forensic socialist engages with the budget, the tax code, and the supply chain. If a company claims poverty while paying dividends, we do not critique their 'greed' (a moral abstraction); we audit their transfer pricing schemes (a material mechanism). This method strips power of its mystery and forces it to leave a paper trail.

The Public Forum

Evidence requires a medium for verification. This is the res publica.

The principle: Reality is a public object. Truth is that which can be placed on the table in the forum and verified by others.

The space of appearance: Following Hannah Arendt, I recognize the forum as the 'space of appearance' where citizens interact through a 'common world' of durable objects [48]. Without a common material world (infrastructure, public institutions), the political community dissolves into isolated private individuals. We must reclaim the public sphere as a place of shared, verifiable fact, rejecting the privatization of truth.

The Universalist Imperative (The Judt Doctrine)

The fragmentation of society can only be repaired through material solidarity.

The principle: The late social historian Tony Judt diagnosed the central pathology of our age as the loss of a 'public language'. In Ill Fares the Land, he argued that the privatization of the public sphere has stripped us of the ability to speak of the 'common good' [49].

The forensic application: Universalist social democracy is the forensic restoration of the 'public thing'. Public services - trains, parks, libraries, universal healthcare - are not merely 'services'; they are the material infrastructure of citizenship. They are the only spaces where we are treated as equal biological units rather than segregated consumers.

Historical Distinctions: Contra Teleology and Technocracy

To ensure this framework is not mistaken for nostalgia, Forensic Socialism must be sharply distinguished from the failures of previous socialist iterations.

Contra teleological socialism (the 'Soviet error'): Traditional 'scientific socialism' often lapsed into prophecy, justifying present tyranny for a future utopia (communism). Forensic Socialism rejects the future tense. It is purely 'metabolic'. It asks: Is the citizen fed today? Is the stress load reduced today? It is anti-teleological; the audit is instantaneous, and the debt is metabolic.

Contra managerial social democracy (the 'technocratic error'): Post-war social democracy often degenerated into a paternalistic technocracy, where experts managed the poor from behind closed doors. Forensic Socialism demands radical visibility. The public object implies that the budget, the algorithm, and the supply chain are visible to the worker. We do not ask for 'trust' in the state; we ask for the ability to verify the state.

Operationalizing Class Unity

This framework offers the only viable path to class unity.

From recognition to redistribution: The current PMC-led paradigm fractures the working class by creating a competition for recognition, a zero-sum game of status. Forensic Socialism dissolves this by focusing on the extraction of value. The forensic fact is that value is extracted from all workers by capital. By tracing this extraction forensically, we reveal the common antagonist.

The universal physiological subject: While our identities may differ, our physiological requirements for survival - caloric intake, shelter, relief from allostatic load - are universal. Lead in the water, stagnating wages, and lack of healthcare are forensic facts that assault the physiological body regardless of identity categories. This focus creates a 'material floor' for solidarity that is objective rather than subjective, disempowering the PMC's role as cultural gatekeepers and re-empowering the working class through tangible, verifiable demands.

7. Conclusion

The history of materialist thought - from Thales to Marx - has been a struggle to reclaim reality from the obscurantism of hidden forces. Today, that struggle requires a new, radical methodology to counter the dual theologies of the age. On the Right, the invisible hand obfuscates the specific mechanisms of oligarchic extraction. On the Left, feminism and 'critical theory' have erected their own 'invisible structures'—chiefly the concept of 'patriarchy'—which function as theological entities that demand faith rather than verification, obscuring the material realities of the sexed body and the specific economic policies that harm it.

Forensic Socialism rejects these invisible structures as categorically as it rejects the invisible hand. By adopting the forensic standard, we replace the endless litigation of identity with the verifiable audit of extraction. We replace the linguistic performance of gender with the physiological realism of biological sex. This approach restores the forum as the site of political contest, where evidence, not belief, dictates the verdict. The task of the Left is no longer to re-enchant the world with new theories, but to document it with cold, hard facts. The forum is open.